Theology and politics in Northeast India: Interpreters in an evolving intellectual terrain

Abstract

Theology from the northeast of India draws heavily from the cultural capital of its constituents. As an unintended consequence, tribal theology invokes a past that renders its theological discourse as rather distant from the evolving political economy of faith communities in the northeast of India. A turn from legislating what tribal theology is to interpreting the politics of tribal communities provides an important intervention. Interpreting politics as significations and management inevitably necessitates self-reflexivity to render an honest reading of theology in the northeast of India.

Theology from the northeast of India could do well with a makeover. I will argue that the need for this makeover in orientation arises because the general intellectual trend has been framed by ‘tribal theology’. In effect, intellectual work has thus had to genuflect to the question: ‘What is tribal about tribal theology?’ As an unintended consequence, an over-determined category of ‘tribal’ engendered analyses of traditional ways/modes of being, and tortured histories as they intersected with theological traditions drawn primarily from beyond the northeast of India. While the analyses themselves have been much needed, the over-determination in turn creates an intellectual bubble that hovers in air much rarefied than that of the ground where theologies intersect with faith communities.

As attention-grabbing and interest-generating as paradigmatic shifts may be, the shifts argued for in this essay are more modest. For theology to remain rooted in the faith community while inquisitively prophetic about its raison d’être, this shift reconsiders one's intellectual orientation. Theology from and about the northeast has been keenly attuned to how we think about the subject matter; or to paraphrase, scholarship that legislates on ‘this is what makes tribal theology “tribal”’. Shifting from this legislative orientation, I will argue, requires a self-reflective recalibration towards an interpretive and critical orientation; or to paraphrase, scholarship that interrogates what events, developments and phenomena make tribal theology ‘tribal’. To rephrase this larger argument, rather than legislate on how to think about tribal theology, the shift is towards an interpretive exercise of what constitutes or enables us to think about tribal theology. This binary of orientation – the legislative and the interpretive – will be argued against the background of ‘politics’ read through the lens of significations and management.

Politics, theology and the interpreter

When Aristotle articulated his ideas in ΠΟΛΙΤΙΚΩΝ (1944), he had in mind a political naturalism based on the idea that humans are political beings (I.1.1252a–1252b). For the student and reader of this πολιτείας (III.1.1274b2), politics refers to the organization (τάχις) of the inhabitants of the city (τὴν πόλιν οἰκούντων). In the broadest sense of the term, politics, for Aristotle, had to do with the affairs of the city. Changes in the constitution of the πολις through the centuries accelerated especially by the Industrial Revolution gave us referential and paradigmatic alterations such as the ‘state’ and its cognate, the ‘nation-state’. Exported beyond the European realm through centuries of colonial expansion and the extension of imperial structural logics, nation-states provide the predominant referent for πολις. Periodic exercises that reconfigure the πολις/πολιτείας of a democratic form – elections – rehearse and reify the default reference for ‘politics’. In other words, when we talk about politics, in the most general sense we refer to ‘electoral politics’ along with its associated notions including party politics, electoral campaigns, and so on. This essay locates the theological task in the midst of a perpetually evolving political terrain to ask a very basic question: what then is the task?

Themes dealing with changing political scenarios will, I wager, engender broad-ranging issues that could be rattled off effortlessly if one were attuned to recent developments in the region. We would most certainly have much to say about the stakes political parties have invested in upcoming elections and how these investments affect us. However, if we were to back up a bit and invoke Aristotle's notion of ‘affairs of the city’ – without hedging Aristotle's notion as the one and only valid notion – it opens our inquiry beyond the almost knee-jerk reactions we have when confronted with the idea of ‘changing political scenarios’. Most importantly, backing away from the popular registrations of ‘politics’ will provide moments for self-reflection in our theological enterprise.

Why self-reflection? It has been over half a century since the publication of the groundbreaking collection Tribal Awakening (CISRS, Bangalore, 1965) edited by M. M. Thomas and Richard Taylor. Since then, we have seen a couple of generations of scholars from the northeast add to and recalibrate the contours of Indian theology. Bringing their tribal subjectivities to bear on their theological projects, these tribal and Adivasi scholars have enriched Indian Christian Theology. These interventions broaden the range of subjectivities and subjects or research fields for such a theological project (Basumatary, 2014, esp. chapter IV). Continuing interventions invoke traditional symbolic capital to wax theological on the Christian faith as grounded in the soil of the northeast – cultural symbols (thangchhuah, pasaltha, lijaba/lizaba and so on) articulating finer points about Christology are a case in point. While these interventions are commendable arrogations of a theological standpoint, even a cursory scan beyond the academy, seminary or theological college impels one to conjecture whether we over-determine the idealized projections of the intellectual world. In other words: Have we resisted ‘changing scenarios’ rather quixotically? Do our social worlds resemble the projections of our intellectual work? Or, is our intellectual work too far out on the idealism spectrum so much so that it skews conceptions of, if not totally out of step with, our social worlds?

These questions bring up the role and place of intellectual activities as part of our faith practices. If one were to crystallize these issues, it would be something like this: as theological academics, why do we do what we do and to what end do we do it? What is our end game? Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman offers an instructive, though not without problems, critique of intellectual projects. Foregrounded against an assessment of varying knowledge protocols or regimes, which he place-holds as ‘modern’ and ‘post-modern’, he argues that each regime engendered a particular form of intellectual work.

Rationalism-propelled modernity aspired for an ordered totality. Positivism underscored this totality as knowable and understandable. Intellectual anchors for such a positivism included: control, exactitude of knowledge, classification and comparison, universal over the local. Modernist intellectual work is represented by the metaphor of the legislator, ‘making authoritative statements which arbitrate in controversies’ and where such statements are legitimized by superior (objective) knowledge to which intellectuals have better access than the non-intellectual part of society (Bauman, 1987: 4). For instance, one need not step too far away from the genealogy of biblical studies as an academic discipline around the 18th and 19th centuries Europe to identify the ‘legislator’ type of intellectual work.

Contrary to, though not totally disjointed from, modernity, post-modern knowledge protocols and regimes espouse multiple models of order. Each model makes sense by the practices that validate it; a validation mechanism that is, in turn, validated by habits and practices of a community of meanings. In this sense, knowledge is not about one universal metanarrative of legislated order but each circle of significations making sense within their respective traditions. Intellectual work is represented by the metaphor of the ‘interpreter’. Because meaning emerges from within the community of meanings, the interpreter translates ‘statements, made within one communally based tradition, so that they can be understood within the system of knowledge based on another tradition’ (5). The focus of the intellectual work is thus maintaining communication between the multiple models of order or community of meanings. Along these lines, one could identify the tribal scholar articulating with thick descriptions of the finer points of her culture's symbolic capital to communicate, for instance, ‘Jesus as pasaltha’, to a larger academic body focused on Christology.

Though not without problems, Bauman's legislator–interpreter binary provides a self-critical frame of reference. Bauman himself provides caveats; most notably that the binaries are neither mutually exclusive nor acutely bounded. Rather, because the poles are historically contingent, the binary indicates a procession (without negation) of the latter from its precedent. For instance, while the ‘universal’ motif of the legislator mode is lost in the interpreter mode, the interpreter retains her meta-professional authority to legislate her opinion (5). Caveats aside, the legislator–interpreter binary underscores an acute critical edge. Drawing on Foucault's notion of discursive power alongside anthropologist Paul Radin's meditations on religious formulators among so-called ‘primitive societies’, Bauman places the legislator-interpreter binary against the backdrop of the power/knowledge matrix, the ‘self-perpetuating mechanism, which at a relatively early stage stops being dependent on the original impetus’ (11). Careful readers of Europe's colonial period will notice the imbrications of national consciousness and state power in the generation of knowledge about the colonies (Asad, 1993; Balagangadharan, 1994; Chidester, 1996; Foucault, 1991; Green, 1979; Masuzawa, 2005). In other words, this matrix – or ‘episteme’ in Foucauldian vocabulary – is self-generating and obfuscated beyond recognition in its operation so much so that it would be an immense struggle to articulate why our intellectual work is credible and authoritative. Power/knowledge, if earnestly considered and pursued, engenders self-reflective moments for our intellectual work.

Tying together these meditative instances, I bring to fore our intellectual work of a particular kind (theological) from a particular location (the ‘northeast’ as a discursive πολις) to ask the self-critical question: why do we do what we do and with what consequences? What follows below is not a reaction to but rather, critical self-reflections on locating the theological in the changing political scenario in India. Mindful of our own inextricability from the power/knowledge matrix, how might we think more broadly about ‘politics’ in our proximate context? How might πολιτείας with its focus on organization (τάχις), or the affairs of the city, call for an intervention? How might Bauman's legislator–interpreter help frame our responses to the theme?

Politics as significations

Taking Aristotle's musings on πολιτείας along with the contemporary add-ons that come with the nation-state as the default reference, politics intersects with mobilizing symbolic capital around an idiosyncratic reading of the nation-state. Mobilizing here underscores an intellectual exercise to signify – or the exercise of meaning-making – such that the resulting narrative or story about the nation-state is definitive for those who narrate it. This is not to ignore or minimize the horrific travesty of physical violence meted out on those who defer or resist the dominant narrative, or even have their own narratives contrary to the dominant one. Rather the focus is on the legislators of political changes and our roles as interpreters of these changing scenarios.

On August 17, 2016, the two most prominent student bodies in Mizoram – the Mizo Students Union (MSU) and the Mizo Zirlai Pawl (MZP) – staged a traffic-choking blockade in Aizawl. Their blockade targeted Minister of State (Railways) Rajen Gohain, who was scheduled to honour Khuangchera's memorial and recognize him as an ‘Indian freedom fighter’ (Chatterjee, 2016). The MSU and MZP contended that Khuangchera fought the British occupiers not for the idea of an Indian state but for ‘the Mizo people’. The Minister was compelled to return tail between legs without ever reaching Ailawng, Khuangchera's hometown.

How might one piece together the various strands of this reportage? Widening the interrogative lens beyond Khuangchera registers Prime Minister Modi's announcement of a ‘70 Saal Azadi, Zara Yaad Karo Kurbani’ (‘70 years of independence, Do remember the sacrifices’) campaign to remember personal sacrifice for India's independence (Katju, 2016). It was a campaign that, on the surface, fit the build-up to the 70th anniversary of India's independence. However, reminiscent of what Anthony D. Smith had theorized as enthnosymbolisms of nation and nationalism, cultural narratives about collective identity invoke ‘shared memories of earlier events and periods in the history of that unit and to notions entertained by each generation about the collective destiny of that unit and its culture’ (Smith, 1991: 25). Martyrs, freedom fighters and nationalistic heroes are especially powerful symbolic anchors for collective memory and hence, collective identity and destiny. Ironically, the BJP's pre-independence avatar – the Hindu Maha Sabha – lacked a pantheon of freedom fighters. Vinayak Damodar Sarvarkar, along with the various constituents of the Maha Sabha, recused themselves from active participation in the Quit India Movement (Ram-Prasad, 2003: 528–30). If one were to read Modi's call: Zara yaad karo kurbani (‘remember the sacrifices’), there were very few freedom fighters to dredge up from their idiosyncratic readings of history. Hence the call to recognize sacrifice turned to so-called forgotten individuals, such as Khuangchera. An alternate interpretation of this move could be more mutually complementing: that a national memory finally acknowledges people it had forgotten and sidelined to the margins for all these past decades. As some among those marginalized might opine, ‘It's about time!’

Either way, the yaad karo kurbani narrative is interpreted, a reading attuned to the power/knowledge matrix opens up more intervening questions: What ‘India’ was Khuangchera claimed to have fought for; What about his own particularities that brought him in conflict with the British India at the turn of the 20th century? The Kalyan Ashram – more on this below – put out an assemblage of ‘forgotten’ freedom fighters (Longkumer, 2017: 216) that included, among others, Birsa Munda, Rani Gaidinliu, U Tirot Singh and a Mizo Rani (possibly Ropuiliani). MSU and MZP actions centred on Khuangchera must be analysed against this narrative of ‘Zara Yaad karo Kurbani’. A critical analysis of the invention of ‘freedom fighter’ necessarily asks the question: freedom for whom, and for whose India?

Significations are basic to such narratives. The absence of Maha Sabha affiliates as freedom fighters does not undercut or destabilize the narrative of freedom fighters. Invoking ‘forgotten’ sacrifices fills the gap where Maha Sabha affiliates are absent from national memory. Rather, juxtaposing the ‘forgotten’ alongside remembered sacrifices of the likes of Bhagat Singh and Lala Rajpat Rai is an exercise in meaning-making, of layering disparate and random data into a tenuous but persuasive story about what India – as a collective imaginaire – represents. And this is not a new development as will be seen with reference to one of the ‘forgotten freedom fighters’, Rani Gaidinliu.

In what might be a case of innocuous curiosity, the American missionary Edward Clark suggested a link or affinity between the Ao deity Tsüngrem and the Hindu deity Ram (Ao, 1994: 26). Clark's linkage over a century ago could be read against the current cultural politics in the northeast as an unintended precursor to the Kalyan Ashram's narrative with regard to the Heraka movement. Longkumer's fascinating study of the Heraka movement among the Zeliangrong etches out this narrative with insightful details and analysis. Briefly, the Heraka galvanizes the resistance activities of the Rongmei leader Jadonang and his successor Gaidinliu. Their resistance targeted the British government but by drawing symbolic capital for their struggles through a recovery of their ‘indigenous faith’, they also resisted Christianity prominent in the region (Longkumer, 2017: 213; Dangmei, 2012: 254). The Kalyan Ashram's platform in Nagaland is the narrative of sanatana dharma (eternal dharma). In this narrative, traditional pre-Christian practices centred on natural forces – the sun, moon, ancestral spirits and so on – reflect traces of this eternal dharma. Holding together this narrative is an important binary of worship and culture so that the sanatana dharma is a way of life or culture rather than worship (Longkumer, 2017: 219–20). This Manichean worldview cuts through the missionary legacy in Nagaland so that Christianity (worship) separated from local beliefs (culture). The cultural aspect is a tributary to the eternal sanatan dharma; and the worship aspect is an external imposition.

The argument of an eternal referent means that variant expressions through time are merely corruptions or external impositions. Variations such as Heraka, Zo Sakhua and Donyi Polo bring parity – or non-duality – to the culture-worship binary imposed by Christianity. More importantly, reinstating the coeval nature of traditional religion and culture implies that the ancestors – Naga, Mizo or Arunachal – are Hindus (cited in Longkumer, 2017: 220). Perennialistic arguments invoked by the Kalyan Ashram are not new; the Ashram's particular strain of perennialism can be traced back to renascent Hindu thought leaders around the turn of the twentieth century such as Swami Vivekananda and S. Radhakrishnan. Pitted against the nineteenth-century Western Christian rhetoric of the inferior Hindu, resurgent neo-Vedantic polemic focused on the non-dualism and inclusivism of Hinduism (King, 1999: 135–42). By this definition, Hinduism acknowledged diversity – including Christianity – and tolerance. Implicitly, Hinduism, by virtue of its expansive inclusivism, was a superior religion to Christianity.

I observed earlier that a significant development in our intellectual tradition had to do with dredging cultural capital to articulate theological minutiae. As students, we were drilled on the ‘sources for doing tribal theology’ to continue the exploration of localized particularities. However, the religious formations noted above – Heraka, Zo/Hnam sakhua, Donyi Polo, Sengkhasi, Songsarek and so on – engage in the same signifying exercise. They claim to recover what had been lost, forgotten, or submerged under the spread and growth of Christianity. That their significations intersect conveniently with the dominant cultural nationalist narrative may be circumstantial, or even strategic. Either way, they provide a mirror to our intellectual work calling for reflexivity if one were to engage with these religious formations.

Politics concerns significations. Significations, in turn, are strategic in that they postulate ‘a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats can be managed’ (de Certeau and Hovde, 1980: 36). Key to significations is neither about rectitude nor facticity; rather it is about management. According to Bauman's assessment of modernist intellectual protocols, it is about control. Applied to the overall theme of this essay, politics is about management and control.

Politics as management

Aizawl city is most segregated on Sunday morning around 10 am. Commerce comes to a standstill; the traffic flow follows suit and streets empty out as the devout in their Sunday bests file into their denominational pews. If one were to think of Aristotle's idea of πολιτειας without the paradigmatic changes through history, a Sunday morning in Aizawl provides a stark commentary on the ‘affairs of the city’. While this may be a rather myopic generalization, denominations concretize the strategies that manage populations in many of the areas we represent. I single out denominations as an example only because they are the most-yet-not recognizable symptomatic expressions of the strategies of management. Like denominations, academic disciplines can also be identified as strategic structures of control with regard to the production of knowledge. This last section will dwell briefly on these two areas of inquiry – denominations and academic disciplines.

Denominations skirting the boundaries between church and state seem to take a default position that is apolitical. For instance, the Baptist Church of Mizoram articulates this position in its Constitution (Appendix I, 1–2). The many caveats in the statement indicate: that the ‘politics’ referred to is in the restrictive sense, and that the binary is rather tenuous. However, if one were to take ‘politics’ in a broader sense, the denominations themselves become subjects of inquiry. While all denominations will inevitably pick a date when they were instituted, the choice of date is instructive about the story it lays out for the identity of that particular denomination. Moreover, this founding memory, which in its preceding period did not exist, undergoes an extended period of negotiations, alignments and adjustments to become default institutional centres to manage and organize large sections of the population. Denominations are institutional bodies that oversee resources, both human and structural. Each denomination will narrate a story of its character, place and role in the larger society inflected by a particular reading of its Christian character. This story in turn is in conversation with the concrete expressions of denominationalism – the everyday stuff that happens in the name of the denominations. Church histories narrate the story of these politics; present-day denominations in turn reify these politics.

Holding this preliminary notion about politics qua management through the lens of denominations, I will briefly extend the inquiry to bring in politics with regard to intellectual work. If you have made the effort to follow this essay so far, my guess is that we are affiliated with a denomination; most of us also work in an institutional setup that is characteristically denominational. Even the federated institutions retain some visibility of their constitutive parts. Consider how each of us might respond if we were asked to introduce ourselves. While the details might vary, I am guessing that our self-introductions would most probably include: an ethnic identifier; an institutional affiliation; our denominational affiliation; some title that further describes the two affiliations and a disciplinary specialization that qualifies the title we go by. While there could be other descriptors, each of these aspects is a placeholder for the politics that engender our identities. Each aspect names a discursive domain of power-knowledge relations. Participation in these domains in turn lends credibility and authority to the intellectual work that we do. Consider this: why are the things that we say or write credible or authoritative? If our claim to authority is metaphysical – divine ordination or intervention, at times mediated by a divinely inspired book – there are equally persuasive but opposing claims made on similar grounds; more on this later. On the other hand, if we keep the metaphysical aside, our authority derives from one or a combination of epistemes in our self-introductions. The location of our intellectual work is unmistakably the denomination and institution, which in turn endow the resulting work with traction to a larger audience.

Each episteme identified above draws on an underlying layer of mechanics of legitimation. For example, if we consider the Senate of Serampore College as a theological episteme in India, institutionally, the Serampore strand of intellectual work will invoke a Charter and/or Act that endorses the work carried out under its name. Degrees awarded also draw legitimacy from these same sources. Denominations draw on some nation-state epistemic regime – Societies Registration Act, and the like – to claim legitimacy for the management work they conduct covering vast resources including: human, infrastructural, financial and so on. Titular regimes function on a broad-based network of consent. Hence, flashing titles such as ‘Reverend’ or ‘Professor/Doctor’ elicit varying responses depending on the level of consent and recognition at play. Academic specializations have an inherently complex genealogy. Nevertheless, what we say or write draws much credibility depending on how far we have been disciplined in that particular academic discourse. Our degrees mark the extent of disciplining we have undergone. Cumulatively, these mechanisms of legitimation endow privilege, the access to resources beyond the reach of those outside the operating power-knowledge relations.

Intellectual work from within this matrix is, in this sense, of the episteme. Once it is set in motion, the mechanisms are self-perpetuating and its original impetus obfuscated in its subsequent operations. Or as we are wont to say, ‘It's only natural!’ Effectively, so interwoven are the power-knowledge relations that intellectual work, often unwittingly, perpetuates its own discursive relations and dynamics. Many of our students have and will go into service with their denominational institutions. While that in itself may not be at issue, the nature and content of our intellectual input could: Is our role as legislators training future legislators to perpetuate the same epistemes or is there validity in being interpreters training future interpreters? The practical problem with the legislator metaphor is that it invokes a self-limiting and highly myopic form of specialization to wax theological about one truth that controls and manages all deviations from that one truth. And that takes a whole lot of politicking enough to last generations! Truth – institutional, denominational, titular, disciplinary and otherwise – must engage with the wider field of competing truths to avoid mere navel-gazing. To take on the mantle of interpreters frees us from our own disciplinary and denominational myopia. Our academic specializations empower, rather than restrict, us to juxtapose and analyse a wider range of data in order to see the interconnectedness and disjunctions in life under constantly evolving scenarios.

Some closing thoughts

Rather than name specifics about the theme of ‘changing political scenario’, this essay is a self-reflective meditation on the terms, logic and interventions that enable us to conceptualize the problems hinted at. This has meant unpacking some basic frames of thought regarding politics by way of readings of Aristotle and Bauman peppered in with a few other critical theorists. What I was aiming for was an orientation that is free-flowing yet focused, localized yet broad-ranging. A localized protest in Mizoram by student bodies thus instantiates thinking about the narrative networks that can be identified as an evolving political scenario. This orientation is then turned reflexively onto our intellectual work.

In the summer of 2017, I was part of a collective that was looking into breakaway sectarian groups in Mizoram. An initial reflective moment came with regard to the terms of our inquiry. By naming these groups ‘sectarian’ we were arrogating a centre of authority from where these groups had deviated. But as we got talking to people, we realized that they were equally, if not more, devout in their religious practices. Some of them were more fluent with their Bible better than us. Our preliminary discussions centred on exegesis-based arguments as counterpoints. Reflexivity alerted us to the shifting semiotic field such that exegetical arguments would just end up in an ad nauseam battle of whose reading of the Bible was sounder. We ended up deferring our disciplinary restrictions to listen to the narratives of why they behaved in a ‘sectarian’ manner: Why did leaving their church make sense/meaning to them? Despite the variations in narrative elements, there was an across-the-board agreement that denominations had overstepped their jurisdiction. In retrospect, they aspired to changes in their immediate political scenario. We recalibrated our investigative role from legislator to interpreter to relay the narratives from the margins of denominational authority. The so-called ‘sectarians’ have made their move; it remains to be seen how the denominational centres respond – as legislators or as interpreters. In a similar manner, political scenarios change and will continue to change; it remains to be seen how our intellectual work will respond to these changes.