As a student of Indian history and society, I find peoples’ stories fascinating. Stories are the building blocks of communities and cultures. Social life to a great extent is governed by stories. An important lesson learnt in writing this book Christianity and Politics in India: Baptist Missionaries and Naga Nationalism as a Fellow of the New India Foundation is that denying people their right to tell stories, no matter how contentious or subversive, is a disavowal of human freedom. This book is about the social history of Naga Christianity, but it primarily tell the stories of Naga tribes.      

The Nagas comprise a tiny part of the Indian social fabric, but their story has been distinctive in modern India. Stories lent cacophony to the Indian democracy, since every community wants their voices to be heard. Stories are contentious, polemical and employed as rhetorical device; the social life of the Nagas is anchored in storytelling tradition, and as adept storytellers they have not remained mute spectators in the making of modern India. Arguably, of all the minority groups in India, the Naga story has been the most contentious: the Naga story is testament to the fact that India is ebullient but difficult to govern. A great deal of ethnohistorical research has gone into this book, but underneath the scholarship is an attempt to creatively and rigorously tell the Naga story.    

I argue that ethnic minorities like the Nagas were far removed from the Indian civilization, but the making of modern India brought them closer to this ancient civilization. India is an old civilization, but a young democracy. This unique characteristic entails both merits and pitfalls. Indic civilization is one of the most impressive civilizations, but this does not erase a fact that many disenfranchised communities have been at the receiving end of this “timeless” tradition. Since the beginning, Naga tribes had challenged the overpowering Indian civilization: “Our language is quite different from those of the plains and we have no affinities with Hindus or Muslims. We are looked down upon by one for our ‘Beef’ and the other for our ‘Pork’”: thus wrote the signatories of the Naga Club in a memorandum to Simon Commission in 1929. The imagery of Nagas as nonconformist in post-independent India has roots in their adoption of a different story system – Christianity – that notably coincided with British colonialism.    

Stories are powerful and have a timeless quality that form the bedrock of civilizations and religious orders. The ruling elites and priestly order have exerted control over the masses through the institutionalization of myths and legends; It is interesting to note that religious renegades (individuals or community of faith) in Indian history have told subversive stories challenging the established narratives. These religious innovators had been cognizant to a timeless truth - “He who controls the narrative controls the society”. Underneath the layers of caste, creed and ethnicity are stories that give legitimacy and meaning to these often-contested identities in Indian social life. India is one vast ocean of peoples’ stories with innumerable tributaries. In fact these tributaries have staved off this monumental modern state from becoming a monopoly of a lone narrative or ideology that India is faced with recently. I have described the Naga Baptists as an unusual community of faith in Indian society, narrating their story developed according to their own genius.      

Suppressing the rights of communities and cultures, no matter how big or small, to tell their own stories is tantamount to cultural decimation. The most arduous task in modern India is nurturing these multiple stories and not losing sight of what it means to be an “Indian” as the Ambedkar-inspired Constitution had envisioned. In the whole of India (as I have argued in my book), the Nagas, starting from the colonial period, were the first tribal community to challenge this precariously maintained Indian identity. The Naga political movement was a first spoke in the wheel of the Greater India project that preceded the movements of “recalcitrant” communities like the Kashmiris, Mizos and Sikhs. Ethnic nationalism forms an important dimension of this book of mine, but the point of departure from other works on Naga political movements is an attempt to provide a distinct vantage point of Baptist Christianity as shaping the Naga history and destiny.             

The Nagas’ demand for an independent homeland came close on the heels of a thriving American Baptist mission in the Naga Hills District of Assam. Aside from the complexities of missionary-native interaction, the Baptist missionaries found success among the Naga tribes because the former came telling a compelling story about a Palestinian-Jewish prophet from two thousand years ago. Other world religions like Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam also have enticing stories that could have easily swayed the Nagas, but the hardy Protestant missionaries beat them to it. The Baptist missionaries possessed an unparalleled distinct evangelical fervour that rubbed off on the Naga converts, which even in the twenty-first century remains a distinct feature of the Naga Baptist brand of Protestant faith.

The zealous evangelical faith of the Nagas is not without controversy in a multi-religious country like India, in which 80 per cent of the population is Hindu. In a way an unapologetic community of faith like the Naga Baptists remains a litmus test for India’s constitutional secularism. Nagaland, a small state in north-east India, has the distinction of being the most Baptist state in the world. This Baptist faith is an important identity of the Nagas in shaping their culture and politics that often is at loggerheads with the majoritarian ideology.   

I have consistently but critically argued throughout this book that religion has shaped the modern Naga mind. Just as any tribes of mongoloid stock in the north-east, the Nagas have a vibrant culture and an intriguing past, but the peculiarity of modern Naga history owes to their American Baptist mission encounter. As citizens within a multicultural nation, the Nagas share many things in common with fellow Indians, but their Baptist Christian identity plays a vital role in their negotiation with the modern Indian state. The negotiation process is what this book delineates by chronicling the social history of Naga Christianity.