Table Of ContentPROGRESS AND ITS IMPACT ON THE NAGAS
VITALITY OF INDIGENOUS RELIGIONS
Series Editors
Graham Harvey, Open University, UK,
Afeosemime Adogame, The University of Edinburgh, UK
Ines Talamantez, University of California, USA
Ashgate’s Vitality of Indigenous Religions series offers an exciting new cluster
of research monographs, drawing together volumes from leading international
scholars across a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. Indigenous religions
are vital and empowering for many thousands of indigenous peoples globally, and
dialogue with, and consideration of, these diverse religious life-ways promises
to challenge and refine the methodologies of a number of academic disciplines,
whilst greatly enhancing understandings of the world.
This series explores the development of contemporary indigenous religions from
traditional, ancestral precursors, but the characteristic contribution of the series is
its focus on their living and current manifestations. Devoted to the contemporary
expression, experience and understanding of particular indigenous peoples and
their religions, books address key issues which include: the sacredness of land,
exile from lands, diasporic survival and diversification, the indigenization of
Christianity and other missionary religions, sacred language, and re-vitalization
movements. Proving of particular value to academics, graduates, postgraduates
and higher level undergraduate readers worldwide, this series holds obvious
attraction to scholars of Native American studies, Maori studies, African studies
and offers invaluable contributions to religious studies, sociology, anthropology,
geography and other related subject areas.
OTHER TITLES IN THE SERIES
Religious Change and Indigenous Peoples
The Making of Religious Identities
Helena Onnudottir, Adam Possamai and Bryan S. Turner
ISBN 978 1 4724 0297 4
Shamanism and Violence
Power, Repression and Suffering in Indigenous Religious Conflicts
Edited by Diana Riboli and Davide Torri
ISBN 978 1 4094 4386 5
Critical Reflections on Indigenous Religions
Edited by James L. Cox
ISBN 978 1 4094 4500 5
Progress and Its Impact
on the Nagas
A Clash of Worldviews
TEZENLO THONG
First published 2014 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © Tezenlo Thong 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in
any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Tezenlo Thong has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as the author of this work.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Thong, Tezenlo.
Progress and its impact on the Nagas : a clash of worldviews / by Tezenlo Thong.
pages cm. -- (Vitality of indigenous religions)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-6820-2 (hardcover) -- ISBN 978-1-4094-6821-9 (ebook) – ISBN 978-
1-4094-6822-6 (epub) 1. Naga (South Asian people) – Ethnic identity. 2. Naga (South
Asian people) – Cultural assimilation. 3. Naga (South Asian people) – Government rela-
tions. 4. Progress – Philosophy. 5. Progress – Historiography. I. Title.
DS432.N3T48 2014
303.440954'165--dc23
2013015409
ISBN 9781409468202 (hbk)
ISBN 9781315602349 (ebk)
Contents
Foreword vii
Preface xiii
Introduction 1
1 The Notion of Progress in Perspective 15
2 The Notion of Progress – Its Application and Ramifications 35
3 The British Colonization of the Nagas 57
4 The American Missionization of the Nagas 83
5 Colonial Portrait and the Colonizing of the Mind 107
6 The Notion of Progress and Contemporary Nagas 133
Conclusion: The Future Lies in the Past 163
Bibliography 171
Index 193
To My Parents –
Witole and Cheni
Foreword
Progress! Who can possibly be opposed to progress? Progress is one of those
shibboleths of Euro-Christian cultures. It is so deeply embedded in the Euro-
Christian worldview of temporality that most people do not even give the notion
a second thought, merely presuming that progress is an unmitigated good; that it
must be a universal virtue affirmed by all people everywhere. That is, unless one
happens to be one of the world’s indigenous communities that have been conquered
and colonized by the Euro-Christian bulldozers of progress and temporality. As I
write this foreword, the same bulldozers of progress are literally scraping off the
top ten metres of prime boreal forest over several hundred square miles of Cree
lands in northern Alberta, Canada, in order to generate new colonial wealth from
Native natural resources buried in the oil-rich tar sands. As for the Cree Peoples who
have lived there for centuries, their Native economy is now in shambles, their water
supply wickedly spoiled, their subsistence fish and game either gone for good or too
poisoned to eat.
This book is about progress and one Indigenous People. It is a careful post-
colonial demonstration of the utter destruction wrought when progress is disruptively
imposed on any Indigenous Nation, in this case demonstrated in terms of the
colonization of Naga Peoples situated in the borderlands between India and Burma.
Tezenlo Thong has written a post-colonial history describing the displacement of
the ancient traditional culture and value system of his people by the rude and vulgar
imposition of the Euro-Christian worldview of temporality and progress.
The Naga Hills is one of those territories – along with the Naga Peoples that
inhabit the resource-rich hills – that was conquered, governed and controlled by
one of the Euro-Christian expansionist powers in the Christian nineteenth century.
History books almost universally denigrate Naga Peoples for daring to resist this
brutal invasion and military subjugation of their homelands by the genuinely warlike
Anglo-Christian invaders. Like all the nations under Euro-Christian colonization,
Nagas were vilified by those who conquered them in order to justify the violence
of their conquest. Missionaries, colonial military and government functionaries and
colonial scholars all created a persistent profile of Nagas that demonized them as
monstrously less-than the Euro-Christian civilized ideal. Caricaturized as beastly
tribal savages, they are persistently described in Anglo-Christian writings as warlike
(think here of a psychology of projection) and even as ‘head-hunters’ – as if that were
a discrete natural category of cognition that somehow functions normatively when it
derives more directly from the Euro-Christian (colonial/anthropological) imagination.
In other words, Naga Peoples were backwards, atavistic monsters who fully deserved
to be attacked and conquered by their moral and civilized Christian betters – the
viii Progress and Its Impact on the Nagas
heavily armed English military and their compatriot Christian missionaries. As the
colonialist texts describe them, the Nagas were culturally degenerate and deeply
in need of the superior Euro-Christian governing structures provided to them by
colonialism with its two-pronged military and religious intervention.
For better or for worse, these militaristic conquerors had the benefit of
written text which gave them the advantage of being able to signify those they
conquered. Like other Indigenous Peoples around the world, Naga Peoples had a
sophisticated oral culture with little need for written text until the time of conquest.
As a result today, long after the fact of the invasion, the only nineteenth-century
written records (that is, so-called primary documents) about Naga Peoples are
those devised by the conquerors: the English governmental functionaries and
their religious counterparts, the missionaries. Both had self-serving interests for
inventing derogatory misrepresentations of Nagas to validate their own conquest
story as legitimate and godlike.
One lingering result of colonialism and its aftermath is that the colonized become
so numbed over a couple of centuries of oppression that they internalize the narrative
created by their colonial conquerors as their own narrative once the oral traditions
begin to fade under the light of printed (colonizer) text. Too many American Indians,
for instance, have now fully embraced the notion that we really were ‘warlike
peoples’. Hence, American Indian communities have come to glorify ‘warriors’
even though there are no words in north American Indian languages that mean or
translate as warrior – until the colonizer picked one and informs that community of
their choice, then often re-emphasized in some Hollywood movie. The colonizer
histories persistently miscast Nagas and other Indigenous Peoples through a device
that Seneca scholar Barbara Mann calls ‘euro-forming’. So Caribbean Natives
were quickly euro-formed demonically as cannibals by the first European invaders
(Colon, et al.), an imaginary that came straight out of medieval Euro-Christian fears
and tales of the unknown Other with no actual basis in fact. In the same way, there
is very little authentic written evidence of how ancient Nagas actually lived. So,
castigating them with the highly charged image of head-hunters functioned well to
summon disgust, revulsion and fear among self-righteous Euro-Christian usurpers
needing some moral excuse to steal other peoples’ lands and resources.
By the 1930s, European colonialism had spread to a shocking domination
of the world. Colonies and ex-colonies covered 84.6 per cent of the earth’s
land surface. Throughout the history of this colonization process, the religious
missionaries were full participants, either preceding or closely following the
colonizer’s military apparatus and fully participating in what each Euro-Christian
colonial power called its civilizing mission. A century earlier, in 1828, imperialist
England presumed to include Naga territories under their colonial hegemony
when they formally proclaimed their annexation of the territory of Assam. This
opened the doors for Euro-Christian missionaries who soon followed. Although
it took the English the better part of the rest of that century to militarily subdue
their new wards, the missionaries did their part to bring Naga Peoples under
the governing influences of both religious and cultural conversion to the Euro-
Foreword ix
Christian worldview of temporality and progress and colonial political rule. In
the case of the Nagas, it was American baptist missionaries who followed upon
the intrusion of English governmental structures, rushing in to wean the people
from their ancient pagan and savage life, to civilize them, and to convert them
into the disruptive ambiguities of their own Christian religion and the temporal
contingencies of the Euro-Christian worldview.
To help our understanding of this eruption of disruption in colonizing the
Naga world, Thong walks us through the chasm of difference that separates the
Euro-Christian worldview from that of traditional Naga Peoples. Drawing on the
writings of Vine Deloria, Jr, and myself, Thong describes the traditional worldview
of Indigenous Peoples, including Nagas, as fundamentally spatial and in sharp
contrast with the foundational and over-determining notions of temporality in the
Euro-Christian west that give rise to Euro-Christian modernity and its characteristic
concepts of development, progress, teleology and notions of redemption.
In contrast to these linear notions of progress, Indigenous spirituality and
ceremonial life was (and is in traditional settings) spatial where, for instance, the
spatial layout of a ceremony is always of primary concern. Attention to the four
directions, to the east as the place where the sun arises each day, is always important
to any ceremony among American Indian Peoples. Time then becomes a cyclical
part of the spatial. In this sort of spatial worldview, progress can have no particular
role; the sun will arise tomorrow just as it did yesterday; the cyclical fullness of the
moon will provide the appropriate setting for particular (and regular) ceremonies.
Much more importantly, Indigenous Peoples traditionally have sought not some
new future of spiritual redemption or improved material life. Rather the goal of
every ceremony and of the social mores that structure the social whole is always
the restoration of balance (personal, communal and world). The spatial notion of
balance functions for these traditional societies in the way that time and progress,
teleology and redemption function in Euro-Christian modernity. Thus, Indigenous
Peoples look to ceremonies of restoring balance and harmony as the social ideal
of civilized society. Indigenous Peoples, like American Indians and like Nagas,
were ‘traditional’ societies who functioned quite apart from this modern Euro-
Christian concept of progress. As a result, the sort of rapid change that comes with
Euro-Christian modernity was also not our history until the disruption of European
colonialism. Thus the colonial imposition of ‘progress’ (as is historically evident)
became wholly degenerative to every colonized indigenous community. The
tropes of progress and development in Euro-Christian modernity led the World
Bank, in one of its more liberal moments back in the late 1980s, to create the new
idea of ‘sustainable development’. Yet from a Native point of view sustainable
development is still development and still portends the disruption of a Native
community’s ideal of balance and harmony of the world around them. Progress and
modernity necessarily destroys what is, in favor of what the colonizer thinks might
become. In an essay I wrote at the time I countered sustainable development using
language of dynamic stasis as a spatial foundation for maintaining and recreating
balance. These spatial versus temporal differences are worldview differences.
