Christianity and Politics in Tribal India; Baptist Missionaries and Naga Nationalism by G Kanato Chophy

• G Kanato Chophy disputes the conventional understanding that missionaries who came to India’s northeast highlands worked in tandem with the colonial powers to convert gullible tribal people with an exotic belief-system and the white man’s halo. The truth was far more complicated with the relationship between the American Baptist missionaries and the British administrators being more confrontational than cordial
• In the conventional historiography of the colonial period in India, the Christian missionaries were hardly accorded a place of pride. They were portrayed as handmaidens of the colonial masters who did their “soul-saving” works riding on the coat tails of the colonial power. Not surprisingly, the average Indian perceives missionaries as duplicitous zealots who preyed on and ensnared gullible tribal folk with an exotic belief system and the white man’s halo. That missionaries tricked, induced and bribed is what we have heard ad nauseam.

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