The Lion’s Perspective

I begin this article with a story1 borrowed from another continent, reflecting a shared colonial experience: There was a little boy in an African village. Everyday, he came home from the mission school excited about what he had learnt on that day. But, on one particular day, he came home with a look of puzzlement on his face. His father inquired as to what happened. The little boy said, “Father, I don’t understand this, I go to school everyday and the teacher often tells us the story about this lion who they say is the king of the jungle. However, this ferocious and strong beast always seems to get killed by the hunter in the story. I don’t understand it. If the lion is so strong, why does the hunter always kill the lion?” The father responded, “Well, son, until lions learn how to write books, that’s the way the story will always end.”
The Gutenberg Revolution, which replaced the oral tradition, entered the North Eastern region through the initiative of the early missionaries. Colonisers and Missionaries were among the first outsiders to make sustained contact with the indigenous peoples, and their writings frequently contain accounts of local culture and society, oral tradition etc., which, whatever their deficiencies, have an indispensable documentary value precisely for standing right at the beginning of modern cultural change. Keeping in mind the magnitude of their influence on the present generation’s understanding of their historical past, this write up will critically reassess the missionary writings in North-East India.
As Bickers have rightly put in a different context, uncritically viewing the world through the mission prism can be profoundly misleading.2 The missionaries were foreigners, on the outside, looking in. Even in their most scholarly work, when dispassionate objectivity was a primary goal, factors in their background, education and European perspective would determine not only what they noticed or looked at, but also the way they interpreted or explained what they saw. Questions need to be raised as to why the missionaries were drawn to writing in the first place and how their aims and objectives affected what they reported and how they wrote. Most colonial ethnographies are beset with accounts and descriptions of the missionaries’ encounter with a hostile tribe; the oppositions they faced initially; but how despite the odds, they were eventually able to triumph over them. Likewise, many of their letters were written with the objective of appeasing the home board or the mission that had sponsored them.
One significant limitation of the missionary writings in the case of North East India is the lack of acknowledgement of the local agencies’ contribution in the missionary’s project. Unlike other areas in both Asian and African countries, where the style of proselytisation was one of enforcement of missionary understanding upon the natives’ world-view and life world, we find that in the North-East India, from the very beginning, the expansion of Christianity was indeed a ‘shared enterprise.’ The ‘planting’ of churches in various parts during the nineteenth century could never have been accomplished without the active initiatives of local people, who freely appropriated the Christian message for themselves, and spread that message both within their own societies and beyond. The lack, or almost absence, of any address to native agency in the construction of colonial writings cannot be simply taken as an indication of non-involvement of the native informant. The significant role played by the native interpreter is not difficult to imagine in a region like North East India which is characterised by linguistic and cultural diversity. Besides the early converts and the Lambus (interpreters) who helped in translation works, the native clerks and village chiefs were also involved, as informants, at various points in the codification of customary laws and textualisation of ethnographic works. In fact they were active participants in the process and acted as an indispensable aide to the missionaries. The local people were as much missionaries as those who were officially recognized as missionaries by the missionary societies. They were often the driving force in the work of evangelisation, Bible translation, printing, creating education and health facilities, and building up and providing pastoral care for the community.
Christianity is framed in universal terms, which ideally should override ethnicity, nationality, class, and income. Theoretically, missionary activities might be expected to reflect similarities, regardless of these variables. Yet missionaries often encouraged certain stereotypes about themselves and their work in order to secure recruits. Missionaries demanded that converts reject cultural forms in no way opposed to Christian tenets: traditional dress, grooming, music, diet, and naming.3 Throughout the readings of colonial ethnographies, we find that the discourse on colonialism is populated with stereotypes on the natives as ‘savages’, ‘wild’, ‘untameable’, and ‘heathen tribe’. Were the tribes of these regions ‘nothing’ but marauders and headhunters? Lloyd writes about the capture of Mary Winchester who wrote a full account of her life among the Mizos.4 Mary Winchester was taken captive by the Mizos and lived among them for a year. She was made to live with an old woman whom she grew very fond of. Lloyd writes, ‘It is said that she soon adjusted herself to her new life in the villages, shared in work and play with the other small girls and smoked a pipe as they did.’ Tradition also says that Mary wept bitterly when she was released and taken from the village a year after her capture, and she wrote “...Then I was fetched with grief, I left my friends, and felt far from happy or settled till I had been six months in Elgin.”5 The colonisers description reflects only a one sided view of reality.
As the local people gradually conformed to the proselytising influence of the missionaries, we find the negative opinion about them changing. Sir Herbert Lewis wrote in a letter: “Today these wild raiders are soul winners, no longer the messengers of death; they are messengers of life and peace.”6 These comments were directed at the Mizos who were employed in the task of evangelization. It can be assumed that the commonality shared by the missionaries and the natives through a common belief system, lifestyle in terms of dressing and eating habits, world view and culture could have resulted changing the earlier stereotype given to the native by the former.
The colonial spectre continues to haunt the present day intellectual consciousness even though the colonisers and missionaries departed the region many years ago. In the North East India context, this form of colonisation is still evident in the literatures that are written by the local thinkers. These literatures continue to reproduce the derogatory description that was assigned to them while narrating their history. These writings directly draw from colonial ethnographies or make an interpretative analytical version of their own based on earlier writings. Ashis Nandy’s definition of ‘colonialism’ as a psychological state rooted in earlier forms of social consciousness in both the coloniser and colonised is relevant in understanding this situation. Today, we have a situation in which the lions have started writing, but what is defined as the local or the lion’s perspective is still a virtual or a sense of reality seen through the lens of the colonisers. A new kind of consciousness is needed to free this mindset and change it for a more unrestrained worldview.