Morung Express news
Kohima | September 14
A book titled, ‘Christianity and Politics in Tribal India: Baptist Missionaries and Naga Nationalism’ authored by Dr G Kanato Chophy has been recently published by Permanent Black, one of the leading academic publishers and distributed across Asia by Orient Blackswan. The book was written as part of the New India Foundation fellowship 2017.
Dr Chophy while speaking to The Morung Express said that a unique experience from the three-year journey into the book was the encounters and visits to all the Naga Inhabited Areas spread across different neighbouring states and Myanmar.
The book tells the story of the mountain state of Nagaland in north-east India which has, within a century of missionary contact, become the most Baptist state in the world outstripping Southern US states like Mississippi and Arkansas.
“Nearly 80 per cent of the Nagaland’s two million people are devout Christian adherents of this sect. This makes Nagaland the religious outlier of India- a country in which about 80 per cent of the population is Hindu.”
Dr Chophy chronicles the historical and sociocultural processes by which Naga tribals- known a century ago as “primitive headhunters”- were transformed into a vibrant and politically assertive community of Christian faith in colonial and post-Independence India.
He outlines the role of British colonialists and developments in Victorian religious policy while analyzing the remarkable success of American Baptist missions of the nineteenth century in a backwater of the British Raj. The book shows that even as the power of Christianity has declined in the secular West, the culture and politics of Nagaland continue to be strengthened by Baptist ideas of Jesus within a country which is increasingly majoritarian and suspicious of “alien” faiths.
It also speculates on the future of Protestant missions and the American evangelical movement in this ardently anomalous state of India.
“Christianity and politics in Tribal India” is remarkable work presenting a fresh look on the peculiarly unapologetic and assertive strain of the Baptist faith in Nagaland.
In the words of the renowned historian Ramachandra Guha, “Richly researched and stylishly written, Kanato Chophy’s social history of Naga Christianity is a major contribution to the literature on a vital, fascinating, yet massively under-studied part of South Asia. This book will be read, and its arguments debated, for years to come.”
Beginning with the Naga Hills, it widened the horizon to other states and across borders, the author hopes the book will be a tribute to 150 years of Naga Baptist Christianity that the state will celebrate soon.
The European and US edition will be co-published by the State University of New York (SUNY) Press and distributed internationally in November this year.
The book is available on Amazon and Orient Blackswan online outlet and will be available in local stores soon.
