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October Layout Church-Mission Dynamics in Northeast India Lalsangkima Pachuau he story of the churches and missions in Northeast India Christians, the number of Christians among the nontribal people Tis complex. Diverse ethnocultural groups inhabit the in the plains of Assam, Manipur, and Tripura is relatively small region, and a variety of ecclesiastical traditions have come there and insignificant. The accompanying table, tabulated from the to establish churches. To comprehend the life and activities of the 1991 census report, shows the religious composition of the seven churches, one must have a sense of the rich ethnic background states of Northeast India.6 and the manifold religious characteristics of the region. Because From the table, we can notice several things. With the my aim is to portray the missionary efforts and accomplishments exception of Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura, the tribal people of Christian churches in the region, I emphasize the contributions are largely Christian, and the nontribals are largely non-Chris- of the indigenous Christians. This is not in any way to discount the valuable contribution of Religious Composition of the States of Northeast India Western missionaries but to highlight the role of the churches as they exist today.1 (by percentage) State Hindus Muslims Christians Sikhs Buddhists Jains Others The Region, the People, and the Religions Arunachal Pradesh 37.04 1.38 10.29 0.14 12.88 0.01 38.26 Bordered in the north by Bhutan, Tibet, and Meghalaya 14.67 3.46 64.58 0.15 0.16 0.02 16.96 China, in the south and southwest by Mizoram 5.05 0.66 85.73 0.04 7.83 N 0.69 Bangladesh, and in the east and southeast by Nagaland 10.12 1.71 87.47 0.06 0.05 0.10 0.49 Myanmar, the region known as Northeast India Assam 67.13 28.43 3.32 0.07 0.29 0.09 0.67 lies in the far eastern corner of the country. Manipur 57.67 7.27 34.11 0.07 0.04 0.07 0.77 Linked to the rest of India by a small strip of Tripura 86.50 7.13 1.68 0.03 4.65 0.01 N Total NE India 60.95 21.56 13.64 0.07 1.15 0.08 2.55 land, the region has seven states: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Source: Census of India 1991, Series-1 India, Paper 1 of 1995, Religion (New Delhi: M. 2 Mizoram, Nagaland, and Tripura. At the time Vijayanunni, Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India, 1995), pp. xii–xxi. of India’s independence in 1947, all but the Note: “N” stands for “Negligible.” princely states of Manipur and Tripura were part of Assam. The states of Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Nagaland were carved out of Assam tian. Among the hill-states, Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya in the 1960s and 1970s. have a good number of “other” religious persuasions. The census Northeast India displays a distinctive geoethnic character.3 report identifies these as indigenous religions, often referred to About three-quarters of the region is covered by hilly terrain, and as animism, found mostly in the rural areas. In terms of religious one-quarter consists of plains. So-called tribals live in the hill composition, Arunachal Pradesh can be said to be the most areas, and Sanskritized or Hinduized nontribals reside in the mixed in the region. According to Chander Sheikhar Panchani, plains. According to the 1991 census, more than 71 percent of the three religions are harmoniously coexisting in Arunachal Pradesh: region’s population lives in the plains of Assam, and about 14.5 Hinduism in the foothills, animism in the central stretch of the percent in the four tribal hill-states of Arunachal Pradesh, hills, and Buddhism in the higher Himalayan frontiers.7 Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Nagaland.4 The nontribal communi- ties consist mainly of the Hinduized (or Sanskritized) indigenous Christian Churches in Northeast India communities and of Hindu and Muslim immigrants from other parts of India and Bangladesh. Linguistic and cultural composi- The total Christian population of Northeast India, which is tions of the region are extremely diverse; “no one even knows roughly 4.3 million, accounts for 22.7 percent of Indian Chris- precisely how many languages are spoken.”5 From the matrilin- tians. With roughly 1.2 million, Meghalaya has the most Chris- eal societies of Garo and Khasi-Jaintia to the warring tribes of the tians; Tripura, with 47,000, has the fewest. Although Roman Nagas and Kukis, from the varying Sino-Tibetan cultural fea- Catholic missionaries had made a few visits at an earlier date, the tures to the great Indic cultural system, the societies of Northeast Protestant mission bodies first established mission work in the India display a staggering cultural variety. region in the mid-nineteenth century. Until the independence of The religious composition of the region roughly parallels its India, mission agencies respected a comity arrangement. Al- geoethnic character. With the exception of Arunachal Pradesh, though the continuation of comity became impossible, with the the vast majority of the people identify with one of the “six major result that no one denomination now has exclusive “rights” to religions of India”: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, any particular territory, the heritage of comity has remained Jainism, and Sikhism. While almost all the tribal people in the so- among Protestants, with most major denominations strongest in called tribal states of Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Nagaland are the territories where their mission forebears operated. The three largest Christian groups are the Baptists, the Lalsangkima Pachuau, an ordained minister of the Mizoram Presbyterian Roman Catholics, and the Presbyterians. The Baptists, who arose Church Synod in Northeast India, teaches in the Department of Mission and from the work of Baptists from the United States, are now Ecumenics at the United Theological College, Bangalore, India. organized under the Council of Baptist Churches in Northeast 154 INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH, Vol. 27, No. 4 India (CBCNEI) and dominate Nagaland, the Garo Hill district of After they completed their studies, two Garo boys, Omed Watre Meghalaya, the larger part of the Manipur hills, and pockets of Momin and Ramkhe Watre Momin, converted to Christianity. Christian communities in Assam. Until the middle of the twen- This decision was the result of reading a tract, probably prepared tieth century, the Catholic presence was more or less confined to by the Serampore Mission, that one of them found in a dustbin. Assam and Meghalaya. Since then, the Catholic Church has been They were baptized in 1863 at Guwahati. When the American rapidly spreading in other parts of the region. The Presbyterians, Baptist Mission was unable to find missionaries for Garo Hills, stemming from the Welsh Presbyterian (formerly Calvinistic the two resigned their jobs, proceeded to Garo Hills, and began Methodist) Church mission, have organized themselves as the evangelistic work among their people amid severe opposition. Presbyterian Church of India (PCI) and dominate the Khasi- When American Baptist missionary Miles Bronson finally visited Jaintia district of Meghalaya, the relatively thickly populated them in April 1867, he found thirty-seven Garos ready for bap- northern Mizoram region, the Cachar district of Assam, and part tism and, after baptizing them, formed the first Garo church and of the Manipur hills. According to F. S. Downs, 43 percent of ordained Omed to be the minister of the church.13 The organiza- Christians in the region in 1990 belonged to CBCNEI, 26 percent tion of a Garo Baptist Church was followed by the adoption of to the Roman Catholic Church, and 23 percent to PCI.8 Garo Hills as the mission field of the American Baptist Mission. The British Baptist Missionary Society established the Bap- The earliest Khasi converts were introduced to Christianity tist Church of Mizoram in southern Mizoram. Historically and by Krishna Pal of the Serampore Mission. They were from the denominationally related to the Mizoram Baptist Church are a foothills of Khasi-land (now part of Bangladesh) and were bap- few independent churches in the southernmost district of tized in 1813. After the abandonment of the Serampore Mission’s Mizoram. In Tripura the evangelization process begun by the station in Cherrapunji, the Khasi and Jaintia hills (now part of Mizo Christian community was later joined and continued by the Meghalaya) came to be adopted by the Welsh Missionary Soci- New Zealand Baptist Mission under the name Tripura Baptist ety,14 which sent its first missionary, Thomas Jones, in 1841. As in Christian Union. In the Brahmaputra valley of Assam, other other places of Northeast India, reduction of the language to Baptist mission agencies, namely the Australian Baptist Mission written form and formal education at the primary level became and the Baptist General Conference of America, have also been the preliminary and basic means of evangelism. The growth of working, and from them the North-Bank Baptist Association has Christianity was slow in the early years, and opposition was come into being. Following their immigrant-members from south- often violent.15 There were only twenty Christians at the end of ern Bihar (now Jharkhand), the Gossner Evangelical Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Santal Mission also established churches and were involved in evangelistic work among tea garden labor- ers in Assam. Perhaps surprisingly, the Anglican presence in Northeast India is meager; indeed, there has been no significant mission effort by any of the Anglican mission agencies. Evangelization of Northeast India Notable evangelization took place in the nineteenth century only in the area of present-day Meghalaya. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Meghalaya (divided into the districts of Garo Hills and Khasi-Jaintia) had the only significant Christian pres- ence.9 Although quite a few Assamese had converted to Chris- tianity, their number was insignificant in relation to the overall population.
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