The Irony of Hindutva in Nagaland

“But we hear you take heads up there.”

“Oh, yes, we do,” he replied, and seizing a boy by the head, gave us in a quite harmless way an object-lesson how they did it.”

The above conversation took place between Mary Mead Clark, an American missionary in British India, and a Naga tribesman, and is quoted in Clark’s book, A Corner in India (1907).

Nagaland is a tiny state in the Northeast of India: just twice the size of the Lakhimpur Kheri district in Uttar Pradesh. In that little corner of India live people belonging to 16 (if not more) distinct tribes who speak more than 30 dialects. These tribes “defy a common nomenclature,” writes Hokishe Sema, former chief minister of the state, in his book, Emergence of Nagaland. Each tribe is quite unique as far as culture and social setups are concerned. Even in physique and appearance, they vary significantly. The Nagas don’t like the common label given to them by outsiders, according to Sema.

Nagaland is only 0.5% of India in area. This little state has such diversity that can be quite baffling to a visitor. The hills were quite intractable when the Christian missionaries arrived there during the British Raj, and the tribesmen weren’t quite hospitable. Your head could become a piece of decoration in one of those huts there: a symbol of the head-hunter’s bravery, honour, and status.

It is to such a land that Mary Clark and her husband took their religion of ‘love-your-enemy.’ Today Nagaland is a Christian state with 90% of the population identifying as Christian, predominantly Baptist. The Clarks were Baptists.

Christianity transformed the tribespeople radically. It was a change for the better whichever way you look at it. It is quite amusing that the BJP is the second largest party in the present Nagaland Legislative Assembly. The culture that the BJP has been trying to promote has nothing to do with the culture of the people of Nagaland – neither the pre-Christian nor the present.

I’m taking Nagaland just as an example, merely because the state has so much diversity in spite of the superficial homogenisation brought upon it by Christianity. The BJP’s professed objective is to “decolonise” Indian collective psyche by bringing back the original, ancient Hindu culture and civilisation. Is that objective any different from what Macaulay, whom Narendra Modi seems to hate the most, aimed for? Macaulay imposed British culture and civilisation on India; Modi imposes the Hindutva culture which is as alien to large communities of people in India as was Macaulay’s package. Nagaland is a glaring example.

My cousin, Jacob Matheikal, drew my attention last night to an article by Anirudh Kanisetti in The Print. It is that article which prompted me to write this post. Titled Not just Nehru, even Hindutva stems from Macaulay legacy, the article argues that the Modi legacy is no different from the Macaulay legacy and concludes with these pertinent questions:

When will we be able to create a sense of the past that doesn’t buy into colonial binaries, which acknowledges that no age, except the present, can be Golden for us all? When will all regional languages and cultures be spoken of with the reverence once reserved for English, and now for Sanskrit? And when will the voices of marginalised peoples, ignored and spoken over century after century, stop being jailed, persecuted, appropriated? Then, and only then, will we no longer be enslaved.

PS. The tribal people of the Northeast India are exceptionally gifted in music. Their music, in my dilettante understanding, is a unique blend of the tribal with the Western rhythms. Let me bring you the musical concert presented by one Naga choir at the Rashtrapati Bhavan in Christmas 2012.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFKxc3Siwtk