Introduction
When Fr Bleses of the Roman Catholic Church wrote his account in 1936, the ‘salient facts’ concerning the ‘Aborigines of Bihar and Orissa’ were, he believed, well established: they were scattered in irregular patches all over the Province; they inhabited those areas where hills and jungles predominated; they differed widely from their Hindu and Mahometan neighbours in features, language, customs, religion, and general character.Footnote 1 There is little scope for any sort of ambiguity in Bleses's statements. His account effaces other kinds of evidence, concerns, and experiences that the missionaries, or the ‘soldiers of Christ’, had grappled with, and dispensed, before they could arrive at a definitive conclusion about the ‘aboriginal tribes’ of Chhotanagpur. It obliterates too the often hesitant voices of the missionaries as they dealt with two kinds of imperatives: one, their everyday uncertainties and experiences in the mission field as they encountered, interacted with, and sought to understand the ‘heathen’ Kols of ChhotanagpurFootnote 2 in order to spread amongst them the Word of God; and two, their need to relate to the assertive voice of colonial ethnographers who, by the end of the nineteenth century, armed with the tools and conclusions of the newly emerging discipline of anthropology, had identified ‘tribes’ in Chhotanagpur.
This article seeks to examine representations of the Oraons in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century missionary writings on Chhotanagpur. I describe the interactions of the missionaries of the Gossner Evangelical Lutheran Mission, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the Dublin Mission, and the Roman Catholic Mission, with the subjects of their conversion, the Oraons, to illustrate the different ways in which the missionaries grappled with and restructured their notions of the ‘tribe’Footnote 3 and the ‘Oraon’ across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote 4 The Oraon, I argue, was initially recognized in terms of his heathen practices, his so-called compact with Satan or the Devil, and his world of idolatry and demonology. But, by the end of the nineteenth century, he increasingly became, in missionary language, an animistic aboriginal tribe, a ‘primitive’ within an evolutionary schema.
On the production of colonial knowledge and on the creation of social categories, much has already been written in recent years. The dominant strand of post-colonial historiography (Cohn, Dirks, and Inden)Footnote 5 talks about the obsessive need of the colonial state, an ‘ethnographic state’ as Dirks terms it, to collect information for purposes of governance;Footnote 6 it focuses upon the production of colonial knowledge through the onslaught and imposition of new, imported epistemic regimes of Western/European knowledge systems that swamped the colonized in the process. The revisionist critique (Irschick, C. A. Bayly, S. Bayly, Trautmann, Peabody, Wagoner, and Guha),Footnote 7 on the other hand, while agreeing that colonial knowledge played a fundamental role in the consolidation of colonial rule, views indigenous intellectuals as active, although unequal, partners who contributed towards a dialogue between the colonizer and the colonized. While caste has emerged as the ‘key discursive category’ for historians who have analysed ‘discourses of colonial social knowledge and administrative policies’,Footnote 8 tribe, as a category, remains comparatively unexplored. In recent times, Devalle, Bates, Skaria, Guha, and Damodaran,Footnote 9 through an analysis of colonial forms of knowledge, have questioned the paradigms of anthropology and critically engaged with the concept of tribe. However, such writings have predominantly analysed the texts of colonial officials, ethnographers and anthropologists, and have, at best, scrutinized missionary narratives as yet another strand within colonial discourse. The point that I seek to make in this article is somewhat different. I would like to argue that administrators and ethnographers drew upon the writings of missionaries working in their distant mission fields in order to learn from their everyday experiences; they consulted them for information on the basis of their recognized contact with the ‘natives’ amongst whom they lived. And thus they contributed to the making of the ethnographic and anthropological understandings of the tribe. Yet, paradoxically, within their texts, references to missionaries were fleeting, marginalized or absent, as disciplinary interventions coupled with scientific concerns, particularly from the second half of the nineteenth century, gave new meanings to race, tribe and aboriginality. This article, then, is also an attempt to recover the lost voice of the missionary that lies embedded in colonial ethnographic texts.
If the emphasis of historical research on social categories has been primarily on caste, mission historiography too has engaged mostly with the issue of caste, and the ‘meaning of conversion’Footnote 10 for ‘disadvantaged groups’ or ‘low-caste rural peoples’, to borrow the language of Forrester and Harding,Footnote 11 or for Dalits, to use the term employed by Webster.Footnote 12 Conversion is seen as a protest against caste hierarchies by those who challenged the prevailing social structure, often as a strategy for reworking the system or moving up the social ladder.Footnote 13 In contrast, on the conversion of tribal communities, there is relatively little work in the Indian context, and on the category of the tribe in missionary discourse, almost none. Historians/anthropologists have accepted the term as a given, even as they have discussed the missionary encounter with such communitiesFootnote 14 and the ambivalent relationship of the missionaries with the colonial state.Footnote 15 However, over the last few decades, anthropologists have been increasingly examining missionary contributions to ethnography in the European colonial context;Footnote 16 it has been observed that explorers, administrators, the military, and missionaries constituted, in practical terms, the first Western ethnographers.Footnote 17 Patrick Harries, for example, talks in the African context about monographs on tribes, written by missionaries, which lined the shelves of the university departments of social anthropology in Britain; the differences between missionary and academic anthropology, he posits, were ‘more imagined than real and were often concerned with marking out territory rather than defining exclusive approaches’.Footnote 18 David Maxwell argues that missionaries ‘had helped pioneer subjects such as botany, cartography, photography, zoology and were especially involved in anthropology, medicine and linguistics’.Footnote 19
Yet, providing an ethnographic account of the Oraons or an interest in the ‘science’ of ethnology, I argue, was not the missionary concern in Chhotanagpur.Footnote 20 As men in the field for whom the apostolic mission was of principal importance, the missionaries were, as Jean Michaud aptly puts it, at best the most ‘incidental ethnographers’.Footnote 21 Indeed in a day marked by ‘too much variety in fact for any satisfactory work’, where was the time to write an ethnographic account?Footnote 22 Thus, although the missionaries of Chhotanagpur had produced a huge amount of written materialFootnote 23—which was ‘censored through complex systems of patronage and control’Footnote 24—this material was usually hastily inscribed random jottings often lacking a coherent structure. As they came to be acquainted with an unfamiliar terrain and its inhabitants, the missionaries initially introduced their readers to Chhotanagpur, its people, and the twists and turns of their long journeys. Thereafter, they talked about other matters,Footnote 25 though they were sometimes asked to revisit their story of the mission for a wider audience,Footnote 26 or produce ‘a story, an anecdote or a description of the people and country’ for ‘The Children's Corner’ in the hope that it would foster a ‘Missionary spirit’ in the ‘future generation’.Footnote 27 But there were others among them—a relatively miniscule number—who had mastered the ‘native’ languages and who believed that for effective conversion, it was important to be acquainted with the culture of the heathen and the converted. They were men who wanted to provide more than ‘only fragmentary information . . . given in reports from time to time’, and conduct ‘systematic enquiry’, a ‘special study of the superstitious beliefs and customs of this part’, in Chhotanagpur.Footnote 28 Thus, recording the local history, religion, culture, and practices was an integral part of their evangelical project. It is this range of texts, written by forgotten individuals who toiled in remote missionary stations, which I draw upon in this article.
These voices, few as they were, had, however, shaped the colonial official's understanding of the Oraons of Chhotanagpur, and the tribe in colonial ethnography. Yet, the hesitation in the voice of the missionary, in comparison to that of his colonial counterpart, was stark.Footnote 29 If E. T. Dalton, the commissioner of Chhotanagpur, asserted that it was his experience of governance that gave him the right to compile the Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal,Footnote 30 and H. H. Risley, later census commissioner in 1901, affirmed the scientificity of his state-sponsored ethnographic project of compiling The Tribes and Castes of Bengal,Footnote 31 the missionaries in Chhotanagpur rarely made such tall statements. Their stated concerns were different. What made them claim a moral authority to speak on behalf of the Oraons was their belief that it was their divinely ordained Christian duty to look after the well-being of the aboriginals.Footnote 32 While they did not always distance themselves from the imperial project, it was this emphasis on their ethical and humanistic concerns that made the missionaries adopt the stance of the moral bearers of the empire's conscience.Footnote 33 But in the ethnographic text composed by the colonial officer, to the making of which missionaries had contributed, their voices were becoming epistemically marginalized, subsumed within the impressive amount of ethnographic observations and ethnological surveys conducted by the colonial state since the last quarter of the nineteenth century. And all too often, we fail to disentangle the missionary voice from the bureaucratic one.
The missionary voice was part of a larger circulation of ideas across the colony and the metropolis, structured by other accounts, other enquiries. Orientalist scholarship had impacted upon the missionaries, though from the late nineteenth century an actual contact with the natives was a part of the new ethnographer's creed. The early evangelical missionaries had predominantly believed in the oneness of human beings; the 1850s, however, was a pivotal decade for a change in the intellectual climate in Europe.Footnote 34 As science became increasingly important in the world of ideas, emerging disciplinary formations began to influence frames of thought. With the search for universally applicable categories, ethnology emerged as the most ‘scientific’ framework for the study of the linguistic, physical, and cultural characteristics of dark-skinned, non-European, uncivilized peoples. Race, in this phase, was increasingly seen as the defining category of mankind, as the key to civilization, though perceptions differed as to whether race was philologically or physiologically determined. By the late nineteenth century, anthropology, zoology, and biology had given new meanings to race, and argued for evolutionary stages in the development of humanity. There was, at the same time, a romantic urge and an Arcadian impulse to celebrate and understand the ‘unchanging primitive’. However, the missionaries drew upon their everyday experiences in Chhotanagpur, their mission field, as they sporadically responded to the changing flow of ideas and knowledge systems and drew upon category formations and comparative theories of religion that had emerged at the colonial and missionary frontiers.Footnote 35
The first section of this article seeks to locate the early encounters of the missionaries with the Kol/Oraon inhabitants of Chhotanagpur. Confronted with the uncertainties of conversion, they were compelled to search for the ‘authentic’ Kol/Oraon, untainted by ‘Hindu’ influences. The second section unravels this process whereby the missionaries searched for a language, for myths, traditions, and histories; it shows how colonial ethnography had drawn upon and yet eventually marginalized missionary representations. The third section explores the responses of the converted and the unconverted to missionary interventions and the issue of conversion in colonial times and in independent India. It refers to a case in the 1960s that was filed by Kartik Oraon against the Protestant convert David Munzni before the Election Tribunal at Ranchi, and which was ultimately resolved in the Supreme Court, that raised the question whether race or religion determined tribal identity.
An unknown land and its people
In the summer of 1844, four missionaries of the G.E.L. Mission arrived in Calcutta from Berlin, without any definite instruction as to where they should start their work.Footnote 36 When their project of conversion failed among the ‘Hindus’, they noticed in Calcutta the Kols or dhangars, different from the ‘Hindoos and Mussalmans’, engaged in the most menial of occupations, and yet ‘always happy and light-hearted in their work’.Footnote 37 ‘These were men who swept the streets, cleaned the canals, and performed the meanest offices’;Footnote 38 their wild look, dark skin, and semi-nudity formed a strong contrast with that of ‘the better clad Hindus’, looking down with lofty contempt on these ‘poor outcastes’.Footnote 39 Both terms—Kol and dhangar—were used by ‘Hindus’, often ‘upper-castes’ from Bengal, whose vocabulary the missionaries had borrowed to characterize these men. ‘Kol’, as Dalton pointed out, was originally ‘a Sanskrit word meaning pig or outcast’ that was used by the Hindus of the region to denigrate the aboriginal/tribal people;Footnote 40dhangars were the ‘more industrious and energetic’ Oraons who were ‘employed on great works in all parts of India and in the colonies’.Footnote 41 The subjects for mission work were finally located. These ‘poor and neglected mountain inhabitants’Footnote 42 would be focused upon for conversion. Chhotanagpur, ‘40–50 German miles west from Calcutta’,Footnote 43 where Pastors Schatz, Brandt, Batsch, and Janke arrived in 1845, was chosen as the centre for missionary activity.Footnote 44 In 1869, the Anglican Bishop from Calcutta inaugurated the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel at Ranchi.Footnote 45 Also, in Chhotanagpur was the Roman Catholic Mission, which had expanded its base after Fr Lievens arrived in 1885 at Ranchi, and the Dublin University Mission from Ireland that had begun its evangelical work from 1890.
As one moved away from Bengal towards Chhotanagpur, it was a movement from civilization to wilderness, from the familiar to the unfamiliar, or if expressed in missionary metaphor, a shift from light to darkness. The ‘sun of righteousness’ would eventually rise in Chhotanagpur, even if ‘The full clear day’ were ‘yet very far off’.Footnote 46 It was the idea of contrast—that between Chhotanagpur and Bengal, between the Kols and the ‘Hindus’ of Calcutta—that had determined the choice of the mission field, and their hopes for success in conversion. Lievens wrote in 1885 about his travel ‘lasting 10 hours’ from Calcutta to Giridih by train that ‘carried him a distance of 200 miles, up to Giridih, where the line stopped’. Thereafter began his sojourn across a remote Chhotanagpur in a primitive ‘push-push’—‘a cart drawn by eight men’—as he ‘moved soon far from the station’, the last symbol of modernity, progress, and contact with the metropolitan world, into a zone of danger, unpredictability, and adventure:
The road turned and twisted through extensive forests where tigers, bears, leopards and other wild animals have their lair. The lonely traveller would have run great danger here; but the noise made by the coolies, and the torch which at night they swung in front kept the wild animals away . . . At 8 o’ clock I took a horse standing ready for me, and rode nine miles to the place where I am now . . .The country is nothing but mountains, forests, rivers, and valleys, with some patches of cultivation, no roads except the big military road crossing the country. All the rest are small paths just big enough to break one's legs when going on foot, and to glide off one's horse, when riding.Footnote 47
Connections were drawn between landscape, climate, civilization, and people. The relatively unknown province of Chhotanagpur was depicted as a land of the scorching sun: ‘the ground is baked hard and brown by the sun, the fields are bare and dry, the rivers empty’.Footnote 48 Two-thirds of the inhabitants of the land were the familiar Hindus, but the rest, the people to be redeemed, were different ‘in language and appearance’.Footnote 49 Ranked at the bottom end of the scale of civilization, their dark beliefs and customs were curious but evil. The missionary narratives dwelt on practices that were putatively abhorrent: sacrifices to devils and ghosts of the dead, propitiation of bloodthirsty and malignant spirits. In one of the earliest evangelical representations, the Oraons, or Kols as they were then called, appear to have ‘. . . almost no religion, only ghosts of the dead to whom they sacrifice once a year. The best is that they have no caste . . . What we see here everyday is indescribable, how the Satan has tied himself to the weak hearts of the heathens.’Footnote 50 In a similar vein, Schatz of the G.E.L. Mission wrote: ‘The poor Koles know not about God, the largest group among them, the Munda Koles, have no word for the name of God . . . The Ura Koles have a better expression . . . They call him Dhurme, the good and right.’Footnote 51 And yet, they had never prayed to this God, but propitiated instead the malignant and bloodthirsty spirits, referred to as the bongas or nads. Their miseries were the result of inadequate sacrifices to these bongas, the ‘host of devils’ in every village;Footnote 52 these bongas, unless propitiated, caused every kind of pain, disease, and calamity.Footnote 53 The Kols feared the Devil the most and preferred to serve him; their religion was thus referred to as ‘Demonolatry.’ Indeed, they had ‘an especial care for the good-will of that arch-enemy of all good, Satan’.Footnote 54 Clearly, these Kols were ‘steeped in ignorance and superstition’; they believed in ‘witchcraft’ as well.Footnote 55 Drunkenness was a ‘vice universally present’ among them.Footnote 56
The Kols were heathens, or unbelievers in the God of Christianity. But among the different kinds of heathenism, theirs was of an inferior order. It was unlike that of the ancient Greeks and Romans, whose ‘worship’, though ‘bad, foolish and degraded’, was ‘noble and fine’ when compared to ‘some kinds of heathenism’. While some of the Greek and Roman ‘heathen customs and religious festivals . . . were very wicked and shocking’, and ‘some of the fables told of their false gods and goddesses were disgraceful’, what redeemed their heathenism was that ‘they did worship their false gods as gods’. The Kols, in contrast, like ‘many races in India and Africa’ had ‘some dim notions of a good and just God’, whom they did not, however, worship. Rather, they prayed to ‘inventions of man and Satan’, ‘which they themselves do not think to be gods’. These evil bongas or bhuts ‘existed in every wood, mountain, river, lake’, and were appeased ‘through sacrifices of buffaloes, goats, pigs and chickens to keep these spirits from sending disease or famine into the villages’.Footnote 57
This absurd and degenerate form of Kol heathenism was objectified, made visible in missionary discourse. It could, however, be repudiated by the superior Christian faith. Lusty, the S.P.G. missionary, wrote about his ‘interesting experience’ at Banhara, a village near Ranchi, where he witnessed the eventual destruction of a heathen deity by a family who had decided to convert to Christianity:
They expressed their willingness to set their seal to this decision by burning their household God. The deity was. . .to be found at some little distance from the village, among the fields. After a prayer in the house the menfolk of the family accompanied by one or two Christian neighbours . . . started, carrying native spades and a smouldering plait of straw for the uprooting and destruction of the idol . . . I was marching along in the direction indicated by the people behind, searching the landscape for anything that might look like the doomed deity when one of the company remarked ‘This is the place’. ‘Where’ said I. ‘Here’ pointing to a dirty little bit of wood sticking about two inches out of the ground, against which I had just escaped knocking my toe. Well it certainly did not look much of a deity. There was nothing at all about it to indicate that it was in any way different from any other dirty bit of wood, and it was to uproot and burn that that we had come! I sat down on a neighbouring stone, and the spades went to work, and very soon the bit of wood revealed itself entirely. It was a bit of an old wooden plough which the owner had finished with a year or two before, and had then buried in the ground leaving an end showing, and had worshipped it ever since! Well the old plough was chopped up and burnt that day and its former worshipper is now under instruction for baptism.Footnote 58
The ‘household God’, now the ‘doomed deity’, was first denounced as an ‘idol’ and eventually recontextualized and dismissed as a ‘dirty little piece of wood’, the remnant of an ‘old wooden plough’. Chopping it up, and then burning it, indicated the ultimate transformation of the heathen. Although given to abhorrent practices, the Kol could be transformed into a potential convert ready for the message of Christ.
For the process of conversion of the heathen, the visual was prioritized over the aural: the Kols could cognize through the prism of the ‘spectacular’. ‘Object-lessons’, besides ‘exciting curiosity’ were ‘a necessity to adapt (emphasis original) our abstract teaching to the mentality of our people’, stated Letelher, the Roman Catholic Father. ‘We like explanations; they prefer visualizing. We like a string of arguments; they prefer an appeal to their senses.’ Lantern shows, marionettes’ shows, large pictures, placards, and transparencies were essential as aids for evangelizing. In the Jesuit Church, during the Retreat, a big chulha (fire) with burning charcoal was presented to the people with the challenge to touch it if they wanted to find out what Hell was like.Footnote 59 Reason, then, was beyond the heathen's capabilities; he was represented in terms of his unscientific and non-modern sensibilities.Footnote 60
And yet, the ‘simple earnest faces’ of the Kols showed ‘minds of . . . attractive and promising order’. Attributed an innocence, a purity, they were willing to learn, and possible subjects of conversion. They were superior to the ‘civilized heathens like the Hindoos’ who followed ‘time-honored traditions’ and were difficult to convert.Footnote 61 Fr Horny, a Roman Catholic, wrote about his flock in Sarwada: ‘Those who do not know them will find them wild and uncouth, and will scarcely believe . . . that among these seemingly savages, genuine pearls and golden hearts and peasant brains with the soundest common sense, can be found, ready to defend not only their religion but even the elementary rules of honesty, modesty and straightforwardness.’Footnote 62 Had the Kols been immutably savage and heathen, the project of conversion and civilization would inevitably have collapsed.Footnote 63
In affirming the Kols’ amenability to civilization, the rhythm of their agrarian world was celebrated by the missionaries in evocative and redolent language. There was perfect division of labour in the egalitarian family, the unit of production in the peasant economy, where each individual cheerfully performed the allotted task. This idealized countryside stood as much for ‘the possibility of paradise regained, Jerusalem rebuilt, a Utopian rhapsody for the future’.Footnote 64 Since evangelical dreams could not be realized in the countryside of England transformed by the Industrial Revolution, ‘the open vistas of the non-European world’—and in this case Chhotanapur—offered ‘limitless possibilities’.Footnote 65 With a rare illustration (see Figure 1) accompanied by a short explanatory text, Moody of the S.P.G. described the practices of harvesting, ‘so different from harvesting at home’ that he wished his readers ‘could all come and see them for (themselves)’.
This is the threshing floor. The little booth is on the right and so is the heap of straw and a piece of strawrope. The heaps of grain and husks are on the left and the bale of grain is behind one of the heaps. The girl is letting the husks fall in the wind while she slowly strains the grain in her bamboo scoop. Source: ‘Report’ by Millicent K. Moody, Missionary at Kamdara, Ranchi District, for the period June 1931–February 1932, dated 17 December 1931, Missionary Reports, e Series, Vol. 86b, 1931, R.H.L.
It is on the lower slopes of a hill and is where an outcrop of rock makes a good camping place. Here, a whole family have been camping for over a week. They have built a booth of branches and interwoven them with leaves and straw. On the top they have put a little straw figure of a man to drive away evil spirits . . .There is a father, mother, big sister and two small children, a boy and a girl. They all have a minimum of clothing and are all simple, uneducated folk. The father, mother and big daughter go off to the fields near by to cut the rice with tiny curved knives and when they have gathered a large heap they carry it on their heads to the threshing floor. Meanwhile the two small children drive the family cattle to the encampment . . .Then the elder people go off to cut more, leaving the small children to drive the oxen round and round so as to tread out the grain . . .
As the sun sets and no more cutting can be done the father sits down by the heap of straw and begins plaiting it into a thick rope. He will sew this into an enormous round bale for storing the grain . . .
At night the family makes a big fire to keep themselves [sic] warm and to scare off wild beasts. As I go to bed I see almost eight of these threshing-floor fires twinkling in the distance, and I think how jolly it must be to share in the harvesting of the rice.Footnote 66
In a sense, this strand of missionary discourse that appreciated the material world of the Oraons and celebrated their ‘village-system’ was quite at odds with the discourse of Kol heathenism and savagery. But the contradiction was a necessary one: the discourse of savagery pointed towards the need for missionary presence in Chhotanagpur; the discourse of materiality pointed towards the possibility of improvement of the heathens and therefore the justification for missionary intervention.
But the Kols were characterized not only in biblical terms as the heathen, but also as the conglomeration of different ‘races’ or ‘tribes’ of Chhotanagpur—the Oraons, Mundas, Cheros, and Hos. Described in 1845 as ‘isolated people’ who had been ‘sent back’ to the mountains by the ‘penetrating Hindus’, they were portrayed as ‘smaller and more strongly built than the Hindus, of a darker complexion and have somewhat thick lips’.Footnote 67 There was little to distinguish the Munda and the Oraon except their languages, which were ‘worlds apart’, wrote Lievens from the village of Jagain. ‘These people are pretty dark but not Negroes . . . Thick lips, flat nose, round face, long black hair, and little beard.’Footnote 68 As a ‘race’, they differed from their neighbours, the Hindus and the Muslims, ‘as much . . . in creed and character as they did in appearance and temperament’, and were
sometimes so small as to seem almost dwarfs beside the martial physique of a Rajpoot of Oude, or the muscular frame of a stalwart Pathan of the Punjab frontier; yet well proportioned, many of them almost to symmetry, all well-knit, muscular and ‘active as monkeys’; their faces darker than the average Hindoo; their thick prominent lips, and broad flat noses contrasting strikingly with the fine chiselled features of the Brahmin, or the classic contour of the Mahometan . . .Footnote 69
How far the missionaries borrowed consciously from Orientalist ideas is a matter of speculation.Footnote 70 But what we do know is that missionaries were a part of the discussions in Madras between British Orientalists studying Tamil, Telegu, and Kannada, and Indian scholars. While the conceptions of an aboriginal identity based on linguistic differentiation were already traceable in the earlier phase of Orientalism, these debates in Madras led to the making of a distinct ‘Dravidian language family’. By the 1840s, Brian Houghton Hodgson, a colonial administrator, and Rev. John Stevenson, a missionary, talked of the existence of a unitary aboriginal language and of a group of people who had a distinct language, religion, customs, and manners and who had preceded the Aryans in India.Footnote 71 In the Deccan where these original inhabitants of the soil had retained possession of their lands, the Dravidian languages showed much integrity and refinement. On the other hand, the aborigines, who had been pushed into the ‘jungly and malarious recesses of the north’, spoke the ‘great Kol language’,Footnote 72 a language that was derived from the Dravidian language but was broken into rude fragments.Footnote 73
Missionary descriptions of the Kols, however, moved beyond Orientalist inscriptions that drew upon links between race and language, talked about histories of migration, and referred to epic battles between the Aryans and the non-Aryans. Stark was the transformation of the Hindu and the Brahmin in the evangelical understanding. The Kols had ‘energy, in the place of the listless apathy so characteristic of the worshipper of Brahma’ and ‘simplicity of character, so different from the bold, licentious look which too often marks the followers of the Prophet’.Footnote 74 They were also distinct from those who followed ‘worthless’ religions of the subcontinent with their ‘abominations of idolatry’.Footnote 75 The Brahmin was one who was crafty, vile, and scheming, waiting to ‘outwit the naive and gullible aboriginal with a cunningness that was born out of their religious practices’. These ‘aboriginals’, as the ‘original clearers of the soil’, were greatly attached to their lands, and required ‘justice and deliverance from the hands of avaricious landlords and moneylenders’, usually Hindus. It was ‘absolutely necessary in the interests not only of philanthropy, but also of peace, to take energetic measures for securing the welfare of these aborigines’—to ensure the ‘security of tenure for the peasant (emphasis original)’.Footnote 76 Aboriginality, then, was a powerful trope that structured the missionary understanding of the Kols and of the Oraons.
Thus, an array of categories—heathen, savage, race, tribe, and aboriginal—seemingly jostled with one another as the missionaries sought to understand the Kols/Oraons of Chhotanagpur. It was, however, not so much a confusion of categories, but an inattention to their nuances, that marked missionary narratives. Even if in the fray, they could not be immune from nineteenth-century racial perspectives, so intimately linked with the growth of Britain's modern empire, which clashed with the supposed egalitarian principles of the Church. Yet, they did not, and often would not, grapple with scientific developments and disciplinary interventions that had given a sense of reality to racial categories, but gave primacy to their everyday experiences and interactions with the different peoples of Chhotanagpur. And thus emerged the apparent inconsistencies, disorder, and bewilderment in missionary voices.
A search for the authentic tribe
The missionaries anticipated the results of their intervention: the converts would regard their tribal ancestors as alien, their earlier customs and rituals as unholy and evil, their traditional tribal leadership as irrelevant. A sobriety that matched the doctrines of Christianity would be instilled. Converts would not participate in dances or festivals; they would sing in melodious voices the hymns of the church. Rather than ‘offering bribes to evil spirits’, they would ‘come to Church before sowing their rice’.Footnote 77 In appearance, too, ‘the profession of Christianity’ would lead to a ‘most remarkable’ transformation. In his ‘heathen state’, the Kol had presented ‘a picture of combined tawdriness and filth’: ‘long-matted hair which no comb could penetrate, twisted up here and there into knots, through which pieces of carved wood, bone, or ivory were stuck’; his neck was ‘laden with two or three chains of beads, or strings of charms, and talismans of gold, brass or stone’. Once he became a Christian, however, his hair would be cut short, his neck and arms bare of ornaments.Footnote 78 The focal points of modernity, ‘civilization’, and reform were inevitably the mission stations with their churches, Bible schools, boarding houses, and hospitals. As the work and leisure of the converts were ordered within a rigorous behavioural code, they could select their vocation from a variety of possibilities: some became school teachers, Scripture readers, and native pastors; others became carpenters, policemen, or worked in government courts or in other government services; many went off to work on the tea-gardens of Assam, Cachar or the Dooars; the majority remained in Chhotanagpur as agriculturists who farmed their own holdings.Footnote 79 Nineteenth-century missionary enterprise was thus a two-pronged civilizing mission, secular and religious. In a quasi-familial structure, the missionary would ‘shepherd’ his ‘flock’ who needed ‘a great deal of looking after’ and ‘building up in everything’: they required ‘the watchfulness, the guidance, the care of the European Missionary’.Footnote 80
But within this apparent story of optimism and progress lay another story, one of uncertainties and failed expectations. While some Oraons converted and clung on to their benevolent mentors even in the most hazardous of moments, others found it difficult to distance themselves from the more familiar practices of their world: bongas and nads, sacrifices, dances, festivity, and liquor drinking. Converts switched faiths as Jesuits and Protestants competed to attract them, and abandoned the church altogether in moments of crisis. Acrimonious disputes raged over the method of evangelization; debates extended beyond spiritual matters as well. Often under instruction from the missionary, Christians huddled together in moments of crisis as they derived strength from one another. Others fell back upon heathen practices as the missionaries repeatedly asserted the supremacy of the Christian God over the spirit world and expressed the difficulties of retaining the converts within the fold: ‘It is one thing . . . to live in a Christian land amidst a civilization based upon Christian principles, and quite another to live as an uneducated peasant in an uncivilized country surrounded by superstition and paganism.’Footnote 81
Indeed, between the delivery of the message of Christ and its reception by the possible convert, there seemed to have always remained a potential gap, one that bewildered the missionary. The S.P.G. Missionary O’ Connor wrote of one of his itinerant tours:
An important part of my equipment was a magic Lantern with 16 slides representing instructive incidents and scenes in the Life of our Blessed Lord . . . I found this an unfailing attraction in the various villages . . . I will here say once for all, that with hardly any exception, the people in every village I visited listened to my addresses with attention. They seldom expressed any dissent from what was said, and in fact there generally was a spokesman present who would punctuate my address with expressions of approval and agreement. This seems to be a point of etiquette in many places and I often noticed that whenever this spokesman left before the address was over, someone else would take up the duty of showing me that my words were not falling on deaf ears. I must say that an expression of dissent or enquiry would very often have been far more stimulating, for it would have proved that my hearers were in earnest, and that the great facts and truths which I feebly tried to put before them were awakening a responsive feeling in their minds . . . I do not remember a single instance of anyone responding to my frequent invitations to come and discuss religious matters with me during the day at my tent . . .Footnote 82
The initial bewilderment and dismay were replaced by indignation. It was not the Kol races that were degraded or had misunderstood the Gospel; their natural innocence had been tainted by external agencies. The Hindus were nailed as the culprits. But it was difficult to always separate the Hindus and the Kols at the level of cultural practices: in 1845, the Kols were found to be without caste,Footnote 83 and yet in 1848, ‘the caste system and idolatry’ were considered to be a part of their belief structure.Footnote 84 As Schatz wrote, ‘Had the Kols been an isolated people and not disturbed by the Hindus . . . it could have been possible to hope for an . . . overall and quicker influence of the Evangelium on them. They had borrowed from Hinduism for the past fifty years . . .’Footnote 85 In 1901, Rev. Chatterton of the Dublin University Mission summarized the missionary opinion on the ‘Hinduizing of the aborigines’ that was ‘going on for centuries’:Footnote 86 ‘popular Hinduism, especially in jungle districts, is largely tinged with the demonolatry of the aborigines . . . many of the aboriginal tribes, who in past centuries have been absorbed into the Hindu system, have brought in with them demon gods and goddesses to swell the numbers in the already crowded Hindu pantheon’.Footnote 87
Two identities of the ‘aboriginal races’ of Chhotanagpur thus came to be created. On the one hand were those that had merged into the ‘great Aryan body’.Footnote 88 Others, however, had been ‘able to maintain a certain national independence, they . . . preserved their hereditary laws, and customs, and character . . . And in maintaining their independence from the great invading body, they have also to a great extent preserved their tribal individuality among themselves.’Footnote 89 Those who were outside the orbit of the corrupters of free will—the Hindus—were able to exist as a separate ‘nation’, and retain the essentials of their tribal character. In their attempt to identify, understand, and thereafter convert the ‘authentic’ Oraon, the missionaries searched for a language of communication, and for myths, traditions, and histories, to provide the cultural coordinates for a distinct ‘tribal’ identity. The ethnographic project was a part of the missionary instrumentality to convert.
Pastor Gossner, the founder of the G.E.L. Mission, emphasized in one of the clauses in the Constitution of the mission the importance of learning the language as the ‘first priority’ for the conversion of the heathen.Footnote 90 And yet, there were various linguistic configurations that greeted the missionaries in the mission field.Footnote 91 In 1847, Batsch, one of the earliest of the G.E.L. missionaries in Chhotanagpur, complained upon his arrival at Ranchi: ‘It is extremely difficult with the language . . . There are four races [Oraons, Mundaris, Hos, and Cheros] . . . each do not understand the other . . . with each must a person use a different word, and this makes it very difficult for us newcomers.’Footnote 92 Framing the ‘babble of languages’ into a ‘common language which at present had not a sign or a character, and varied in its very sounds, valley from valley’, was a formidable task, one ‘which seemed to . . . involve an amount of labor of which there was no hope of corresponding results’.Footnote 93 Language skills were difficult to acquire, and often the missionaries expressed a frustration with the efforts of learning an unfamiliar language amid daily uncertainties. And if one mastered the language and qualified in the language test, with quiet pride would he record his achievement.Footnote 94 Even Lievens, known for his mass conversions amongst the Mundas, was initially reluctant to tour the Oraon lands due to his lack of acquaintance with their language.Footnote 95
The missionaries decided that the recognized language of instruction in the mission would be Hindi: it was the medium of daily communication; it was the language of the court and the market and served as a mode of communicating with a larger audience. For the missionaries, Hindi served another purpose: it was a language with a large body of religious literature. The Oraons, Batsch had argued, had ‘no religious terms’;Footnote 96 thus tracts for the purpose of propaganda were printed in Hindi.Footnote 97 Yet, the crisis of languages remained unresolved. Hindi, it was pointed out, was based on Sanskrit, the language of the oppressors, and was therefore considered to be unpopular among the Oraons and Mundas; it was also a new language for the ‘hill tribes’.Footnote 98 As Rev. Whitley of the S.P.G. wrote: ‘In our villages, when the peasantry or our servants try to talk it, they talk bad Hindi. Hence the idea has arisen that bad grammar or careless grammar is the best vehicle for speaking to these people. Women and children in the district, heathens and Christians, simply cannot follow Hindi pure and simple.’Footnote 99 It was in this context that Whitley emphasized the importance of Ganwari, or the ‘village language’: it was spoken ‘quite correctly, according to the laws of its development observing number and tense most exactly’. Whitley spent the year collecting ‘the local patois’ and proceeded to make ‘a little primer of the dialect’ that would always be ‘useful to Missionaries for learning the dialect in the district’; he hoped that the primer would be printed by the government or the S.P.G. since ‘no missionary has hitherto taken the dialect up as a subject for examination and the Bishop has only recently resolved to require this of Missionaries residing in Ranchi.’Footnote 100 In 1896, Whitley introduced his published work, Notes on the Ganwari Dialect of Lohardaga, Chhota Nagpur:Footnote 101
These notes treat only of [sic] the dialect or patois chiefly spoken by zamindars and raiyats, and has been very largely adopted by those Mundas and Oraons who formerly spoke only their aboriginal languages. Its use is constantly increasing. Hence the importance of understanding and speaking this Ganwari to the Magistrate and Missionary alike.
Any one speaking this variety of Ganwari will be understood by villagers over a large area of country to the north, south, and west of Ranchi, though not far to the east, in which direction Bengali prevails, and some other peculiar dialects.Footnote 102
Hindi or Ganwari was never entirely abandoned by the missionaries, even as the search for the authentic language came to the fore. It was, however, emphasized that the Mundas and the Oraons needed ‘their own separate languages, so absolutely different from each other that it was out of the question to choose either of them as a medium of reaching both tribes’.Footnote 103 As an unwritten language was reduced to a written form, the missionaries chose and codified the ‘correct form’ of a particular language, its vocabulary and grammar. Batsch, an acknowledged scholar of the Oraon language, prepared his notes on the ‘Language of Dravidian Aborigines’.Footnote 104 Rev. Hahn of the G.E.L. Mission also devoted himself to a study of the Oraon language, composing the earliest grammar of the language and translating biblical stories of the Old and New Testaments, hymnbooks, and other canonical literature.
Once an unwritten language was given a formal orthography and a regular grammar, the ‘vocabularies of test words’ and ‘the sketches of . . . grammar’ provided by the missionaries were used by colonial ethnologists like Campbell to prepare ‘the rough elements for a comparison of all the dialects of India’.Footnote 105 Campbell, who spearheaded the new ‘ethnological’ initiatives that the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal undertook in 1866, hoped to provide the ‘ethnological skeleton’ of ‘the various races and classes existing in . . . all parts of India’ for use by ‘Government officers and private persons’ who had ‘little knowledge of ethnology as a Science’.Footnote 106 Drawing upon the ‘Language of Dravidian Aborigines, Notes on the Oraon Language’, prepared by Batsch, Campbell divided the Oraons and Mundas, seen in early nineteenth-century missionary representations as the ‘Kol aboriginal races’, into ‘two great classes’ according to ‘the test of language’:Footnote 107 the Dravidian Aborigines and the Kolarian Aborigines.Footnote 108 Batsch's text was used by Dalton in the same volume of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in order to support his hypothesis of Oraon migration from the southern part of India.Footnote 109 What is significant, however, is that the idea of the ‘Kolarian’, drawn from Campbell, entered into the missionary narrative. In the ‘Introductory Remarks’ to his Grammar of the Kol language published in 1905, Rev. Nottrott of the G.E.L. Mission referred to the Mundas as distinct from the Oraons and belonging to the Kolarian race:
The Mundas into whose language the following Grammar will introduce, belong to the so called Kolarians . . . For centuries they defended their new abode in the forest covered mountains of Chota Nagpur against their pursuing enemies, and even after they were conquered by them, they retained their own language and customs with great pertinacity till the present day . . .Footnote 110
If language provided the means of tracing the early history of migrations, corroboration was sought from oral traditions. The missionaries collected and recorded myths and traditions, folk-tales and songs, riddles and proverbs; these were seen as cultural expressions of the carefully preserved collective consciousness of a community. Hahn, who put together Oraon Folk-Lore, claimed his collection to be ‘in style and working, manifestly aboriginal’.Footnote 111 And yet, while he tried to record the folklore ‘as it was’, the process of writing attributed fixity to the different modes of telling, the various versions of a tale; the language was sanitized, ‘immoral’ and sensuous expressions repressed. The shift had occurred, in Fabian's language, from ‘descriptive appropriation to prescriptive imposition and control’.Footnote 112
But myths and oral traditions of the communities, in the positivist tradition of the nineteenth century, did not have the same status as ‘history’. The missionaries would need to trace the ‘early history of this remarkable race’;Footnote 113 history would describe a process through which the Hindus and Muslims deprived the aboriginals, the ‘original inhabitants of the land’, of their rights. Hurad, a Protestant Oraon convert, reiterated the claim of his Christian mentors as he referred to the ‘dim days of yore’, to the ‘very old days when the people of this land were utterly neglected by its . . . rulers’, Hindus and Muslims, all of which changed with the advent of Christianity in Chhotanagpur:
These Hindu rulers never cared to give any civilization in any form to the inhabitants of this land . . . Mohammedan governors . . . left their subjects at the mercy of the Hindu chiefs . . . Christian rulers were the Good Samaritan to the Mundas and Uraons of this Province . . . they felt compassion on these people and brought them to the inn and gave them to the host, i.e. entrusted them to the care of the Church and its ministers. The year 1845 saw the beginning of a new era in the history of this small province . . . It is Christianity and Christianity alone that has given a new impetus to the intellectual, social and moral uplift of this land. There is no denying of the fact that before 1845 the history of Chota Nagpur was exceedingly imperfect.Footnote 114
The successive representations of this history—the exploitation of the Kol races/Oraons by the Hindus/non-Oraons—were etched differently across time. In missionary narratives of the 1860s and 1870s, the Kols were the ‘trusting’ and ‘guileless’Footnote 115 aboriginals/races/tribes who had cleared the ‘almost impenetrable forests’ with ‘incessant toil’.Footnote 116 Their protests were directed against ‘well off’ landowners, usually Hindus, who could ‘purchase large areas for little money from the Kols’ and ‘imposed on them heavy laws according to their own will and pleasure’. This narrative changes when Rev. Wagner of the G.E.L. Mission wrote his account in 1905: the ‘Hindu’ zamindars are now always the Aryans; the Kols, who appeared as a conglomerate of different races/tribes not easily separable, were now separated ‘ethnographically’ and ‘linguistically’ (emphasis added) into the Oraons and Mundas, who had ‘lived the life of peaceful colonists’ in an era of ‘the golden olden times’ before the ‘Aryans’ had arrived in Chhotanagpur. It was ‘their common sufferings and hardships’ against ‘the common enemy, the Aryan Hindus’, which had united them.Footnote 117 The idioms of colonial ethnography had begun to appear in missionary language. In 1934, Whitley gave a comprehensive meaning to the imprecise term ‘tribe’ as it was hitherto used. The Kol ‘races’ of Chhotanagpur, he argued, belonged ‘to some of those ancient tribes who were scattered far and wide in India over five thousand years ago . . . the Mundas, Santals, Hos, Oraons, and many others, are now gathered in the country known as CHOTA NAGPUR’ after being driven out of the ‘fertile plains into the wild hilly tracts, covered with dense forests’.Footnote 118 As tribes, their religious beliefs were different from those of the Hindus; they were ‘animists’, a term he had borrowed from the British evolutionary anthropologist E. A. Tylor:
The aborigines of Chota Nagpur have not been drawn to any great extent to the worship of the Hindu gods. They are what is [sic] called Animists or spirit worshippers. It would be nearest to the truth to say that they worship the unseen powers of Nature, and these powers are regarded as personalities.Footnote 119
Yet, the impossibility of a complete separation of Oraon and Hindu practices is captured in the seemingly contradictory statement that appears within the same text: ‘The animistic beliefs and practices of the original inhabitants of the country were largely absorbed by the later comers, and often only covered over with a thin veneer of Hinduism.’Footnote 120
How did the missionaries establish the credibility of this history that they had constructed for the Oraons? Since written ‘records’ of the earliest history of these ‘pre-Aryan races’Footnote 121 were not available, Rev. Cave-Browne of the S.P.G. argued that archaeology had provided the verifying index. ‘Records, unwritten, aye, and many of them written in stones [emphasis original], of a period before Buddhism or Brahminism overran the country, or even a Hindu had set foot in India’Footnote 122 testified to the antiquity of these people. But writing history in the nineteenth century, Pagden points out, demanded of the historian that he consider the people he was describing as living in societies which, typologically, were comparable to his own.Footnote 123 It required as much a borrowing from, and creative reworking of, disciplinary interventions like that of geology.Footnote 124 Cave-Browne, while a historian tracing the past of the ‘Dravidian tribes’, drew parallels between ‘the poor uncultured Britons’ of North Wales and the ‘tribes of the Vindhyas’, between the ‘Angles of England’ and the ‘Hindu’ of ‘Hindustan’:
The remote, wild, high grounds of North Wales and Cornwall to this day possess, in the dialect and character of their people, traces of the old Briton occupation; so does the great Vindhyan range. . .retain evidences of a long extinct supremacy, in the remnants of aboriginal races who erst in primitive barbarism and savagery, in ages gone by, lorded it over the plains of India.Footnote 125
What authenticated later missionary narratives, however, were not their own experiences in Chhotanagpur and their interactions with the Kols/Oraons. Ethnographic texts of colonial administrators were cited as empirical evidence, as validating yardsticks, to corroborate their claims. The assertive power of the bureaucratic and ‘ethnographic’ state, under which the ethnographic texts were sponsored, was now supreme. In ‘the high imperial age’, writes Porter, amid the rhetoric of empire building and the multiplication of imperial and colonial interests, the Christian missions were losing their space both in the metropolis and in the colony.Footnote 126 The conviction in the missionary voice receded as they began to quote from texts to the making of which they had once contributed. As Cave-Browne wrote in 1870, his text staked ‘no claim to originality’. In order to present ‘a continuous, truthful history’ of the Gossner Mission among the Kols, ‘facts’ had been ‘gathered from every available source . . . (and) strung together in narrative form’. The author had adhered to a ‘two-fold object’: ‘his account of the mission should be reliable, and that it should if possible, be readable’.Footnote 127 What made his account ‘reliable’ were, in addition to references to annual reports of the mission and missionary pamphlets, the ‘labors’ of colonial administrators like Depree, Hodgson, Hunter, and DaltonFootnote 128 who had cleared for him the ‘fog’ that shrouded ‘the earlier past of India’.Footnote 129 The author was careful to indicate the sources of his information in order to persuade his readers ‘that there is not a statement made in these pages for which good authority cannot be produced. In the case of every important statement, or actual quotation of words, the exact reference has been given, at the risk of burdening . . . pages with footnotes.’Footnote 130
Perhaps the inability of the missionaries to relate to wider debates and modes of knowledge led to a tension in their narratives. They were forced to accept their limitations and the speculative nature of their exercise; the uncertainty was reflected as much in the language of reticence that they adopted. Wagner noted: ‘They [the Mundas and Oraons] are aborigines who have lived together since times so remote as to make it impossible to trace any reliable information.’Footnote 131 Elsewhere, he commented: ‘They immigrated most probably [emphasis added] through the great Himalayan passes in migrations which cover a long period of time.’Footnote 132
To sum up, an independent language, folklore, and history had given the Oraon aboriginal, untainted by Hinduism, a distinct identity. Unstructured characterizations from early encounters were altered under the influence of newer methods of classification and differentiation. The plural modes of imagining the Kols/Oraons as heathen, pagan, and savage receded as Oraons and Mundas appeared as ‘races perfectly distinct, and in a far earlier stage of civilization; vestiges of whom still remain here and there to testify to a once almost rule of what are now called pre-Aryan races’.Footnote 133 From those whose religious customs, physical appearance, and social practices had been so conspicuously unfamiliar, they became part of a universal category, the tribe. While they continued to lack the light of religion, it was not the earlier compact of the Kols with Satan, or Devil-worship, that characterized their faith, but the practice of ‘animism’ or ‘primitive religion’. And yet, as the missionaries moved beyond their forte to newer terrains of analysis, the uncertainties in their narratives were only to increase.
The situation was paradoxical. At first, the peoples of Chhotanagpur were recognized as the Kol aboriginals, and denigrated as heathens and savages. As conversion in Chhotanagpur progressed, and failed, these Kol aborignals came to be fragmented into the ‘heathen aboriginals’ and the ‘Christian aboriginals’; those who refused to convert and remained heathens, in turn, were seen as increasingly coming under the influence of the Hindus. At one level, there could be no meeting point between religiosity and non-religiosity, interpreted in terms of the difference between Christianity and heathenism. At another level, however, the separation was limited. Both heathens and Christians belonged to the Kol aboriginal races/tribes, comprising the Mundas, Oraons, and Kharias, whatever their religious affiliations were. The tension between race and religion in characterizing the peoples of Chhotanagpur could never be resolved in missionary narratives; this tension was expressed as much in colonial ethnographic literature, which, as I have argued, drew upon and in turn contributed to missionary understandings. Thus Dalton, who was in close contact with the missionaries, found in Chhotanagpur ‘a most important section of the population, comprising several millions of people, who are certainly non-Aryan, but whom (from their having lost their own language, mystified their early history, and adopted much that is Hindu in their customs and religion) it is not at first sight easy to class’. These people were described in his Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal under ‘a third denomination’ as ‘Hinduised Aborigines’.Footnote 134 In the Report on the Census of Bengal, 1872, in which Dalton's text had been referred, this category of ‘Hinduised Aborigines’ reappeared as the ‘semi-Hinduised aboriginal’. Beverley, the Census Commissioner, working simultaneously with the two principles of ‘race’ (used interchangeably with ‘nationality’) and ‘religion’, found in Chhotanagpur the existence of tribes ‘in every stage of civilization’.Footnote 135 While some had ‘retained their primitive wildness’, others had been ‘subjected to Hinduising influences’. The former, whom he labelled as ‘aboriginal tribes’, spoke a language of their own and practised a faith that was uniquely theirs; the latter were classified as the ‘semi-Hinduised aboriginals’, aboriginals by race who were nevertheless Hindu by religion.Footnote 136
The heathen and the Christian: capturing Oraon voices
‘Conversion’, Gauri Viswanathan has pointed out, ‘is arguably one of the most unsettling political events in the life of a society’;Footnote 137 the implications of conversion for politics and political identity run deep. Conversion to Christianity in Chhotanagpur, this section will argue, was a contentious issue in the colonial period as missionaries, Arya Samaj activists, Congress nationalists, and Oraons, Christian and non-Christian, engaged in battles of words on the differences between the converted and unconverted. It became even more so in independent India when claims to rights and privileges from the state sharpened the divisions amongst the Oraons and brought into focus the question of identity based on the contending criteria of race and religion. The unresolved tension in defining an authentic Oraon identity had appeared in missionary narratives, moved into colonial ethnography, and haunted the Oraons in the colonial period. This anxiety continued into the period after independence as a reading of the case ‘Kartik Oraon vs David Munzni and Another’ will show.Footnote 138
But how far do missionary narratives in the colonial period capture the voices of the Oraon converts: their experiences of conversion, their negotiation with the community to which they had once belonged, and in certain senses continued to belong? And how did the unconverted, in turn, view the convert? In missionary reports, letters, and diaries, the voices of the converts are largely eclipsed. And in the fragmentary references that we find, it is often difficult to disentangle their voices from those of their mentors. Let me, however, quote from one of the rare statements that we have of the convert, Hurad, who wrote in May 1930, after a visit among his ‘unconverted brethren’:
It is indeed sad to see so many of my own race still groping in the darkness of ignorance . . . It is not astonishing that they are somewhat imbued with this false conception that Christianity is something foreign, which an Uraon could not conveniently embrace without to some extent at least ceasing to be an Uraon. It took me rather a long time to get into their head that I was one of their own race.Footnote 139
Hurad had argued that all Oraons belonged to the same race, whatever their religious affiliations were. The unconverted, or those ‘groping in the darkness of ignorance’ to borrow a Christian metaphor, were, however, convinced that Christianity was something ‘foreign’; an Oraon could not embrace Christianity without ‘ceasing to be an Uraon’.Footnote 140 For them, religion was a fundamental marker of Oraon identity. Christian converts were seen as outside the community due to their closeness to a ‘foreign’ religion. Conversion had indeed splintered the Oraons as a community.
The missionaries were aware of the growing schism between the unconverted and the converted, and feared that ‘heathen aboriginals’ would increasingly come under the influence of the Congress, or of Hindu reformist movements led by the Arya Samaj. The Mission Field discussed in 1927 the ‘very aggressive attitude’ adopted by Hindus towards the missionaries: ‘In the eyes of our pagan neighbours, Christianity, in all its forms and denominations, remains a foreign importation.’ Some blamed the growing spirit of nationalism for the ‘danger . . . lurking where so far no interference was known’. Others talked about the Arya Samaj, which had begun the ‘shuddi or reconversion movement’ in an attempt to extend Hindu ‘missionary activity’ in Chhotanagpur.Footnote 141 Hindu preachers were distributing ‘tracts by the thousand’. An example of this, titled ‘Padre Saheb se bachao’ (Save us from the priest), was written in the form of a confrontational dialogue between a Lalu and the Padre Saheb, or priest, who was trying to sell copies of the scriptures and talk to the people. Lalu inevitably had the upper hand, found faults with the doctrines preached, and made ‘blasphemous fun of the arguments’. Finally, the Padre Saheb abandoned the contest. The dialogue ended: ‘aur Lalu ne logon ko Padre Saheb ke phande se bacha liya’ (And Lalu saved the people from the trap set up by the missionaries). Against the attempts to ‘create a Hindu society’, the missionaries urged that the work of conversion be zealously pushed forward ‘lest Hindus cut the grass from under our feet’.Footnote 142
More sensitive missionaries were critical of some of their own Christian practices that had led to the ‘Hindu prejudice’ that Christianity was ‘a mere English religion’ that would ‘denationalize’ people. An anonymous author stated in the Calcutta Review:
It is to be regretted that the native names of the Christians are changed at baptism, and we have such names given to Kols as Chota Dalton, Hilder, Bertham, and Joseph (which they pronounce Jew Sahib). Englishmen or Germans would be the first to cry out were their children baptized by the names of Ram Chandra Sandys, Jay Kissen Duff, or Krista Mohan Stewart.Footnote 143
The fear of non-Christians that Christianity was a foreign imposition intensified in the 1950s, as did the conflict between converts and non-converts. It was argued that Christian missionaries were converting ‘the illiterate aboriginals and other backward people’ either forcibly or through fraud or temptations of monetary gains. Schools and hospitals were being used to secure converts; missionaries were ensuring that converts had Christian names added to their original Indian names, thus alienating them from their communities; there was an influx of foreign money for supposed evangelistic work, but which was being used for political or extra-religious purposes. The Christian missionaries, in turn, charged local government officials and non-Christians of harassment.Footnote 144
In the context of conversion, Viswanathan incisively remarks, ‘Religion in the modern secular state is less a marker of the subjectivities of belief systems than a category of identification.’Footnote 145 The conflict around missionary activities and conversion to Christianity was precisely woven around this issue: would religion or race be the ‘category of identification’ that determined whether an individual belonged to a tribal community. It is in this context that I turn to the contentious case between Kartik Oraon and David Munzni in 1963 in order to capture the voices of the Oraons—the converted and the unconverted—in their engagement with the missionaries, a legal system, and the state. A span of three decades elapsed between the time when Hurad, the Oraon convert, had spoken in the 1930s, to the time when Kartik Oraon,Footnote 146 the official candidate of the Congress Party, had filed a case in the 1960s against David Munzni, a Protestant Christian and the official candidate of the Swatantra Party. The question raised by Kartik Oraon was ‘whether, by embracing Christianity’, Oraon Christian converts, and in this case David Munzni, had ‘ceased to be Oraons’.Footnote 147 Interestingly, Hurad had used almost the same expression in 1930.
In the general election of 1962, David Munzni had defeated Kartik Oraon in the contest for the parliamentary seat from the Lohardaga Parliamentary (Scheduled Tribe) Constituency by a margin of 16,369 votes.Footnote 148 Kartik Oraon filed a petition before the Election Tribunal headed by the judicial commissioner of Chhotanagpur in February 1963, challenging the validity of the election. The petition was, however, dismissed in November 1963. He then filed a case in the High Court in 1964, and when defeated once again, he appealed to the Election Commission of India. The case ultimately went up to the Supreme Court in 1967.
Kartik Oraon's principal argument was as follows. David Munzni, along with the other respondent, the official candidate from the Jharkhand Party, were ‘Indian Christians’, and hence were not entitled to contest the parliamentary seat in Lohardaga ‘purely meant for Scheduled Tribes’, the constitutional term for tribes/adivasis in India. Even if their ancestors were originally Oraons, by subsequently embracing Christianity, they had ‘nothing to do with the animistic faith and tribal way of life, nor do they follow the manners and customs of the tribes, and have no affinity nor any common interest, defence or aspirations with or for the tribal people’. Religion, for Kartik Oraon, decided whether an individual could claim to belong to the category of ‘Scheduled Tribe’. Tribal religion, in turn, was essentialized as ‘animistic faith’. One who did not follow it was alienated from the ‘tribal way of life’, and could not therefore represent the Scheduled Tribes. Kartik Oraon referred to the Government of India (Provincial Legislative Assemblies) Order, 1936, by which a separate territorial constituency for Indian Christians was established.Footnote 149
In post-1947 India, the question of conversion, as a contentious issue, had surfaced time and again. Constitutional acts and provisions had addressed the question, as had legal battles over claims to land, laws of inheritance, and contest over electoral seats. The Government of India's position on the larger issue of conversion was, however, unambiguous. The Constitution (Scheduled Tribes) Order, 1950,Footnote 150 the Report of the Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribe, 1961–62,Footnote 151 and the Lok Sabha debate in 1961 with regard to adivasis and conversionFootnote 152 had repeatedly indicated that religion was immaterial for determining whether a person belonged to the category of Scheduled Tribe. One could be a member of a Scheduled Tribe even if he changed his religion. Indeed, Christians had contested parliamentary and Assembly seats that were reserved for members of Scheduled Tribes long before Kartik Oraon had filed his case.
But the debate in this case hinged around a fundamental issue: how was one to understand the tribe? Was it, following the anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers, a ‘social group of a simple kind . . . based primarily upon a sense of extended kinship ties’,Footnote 153 or was it, as D. N. Majumdar had pointed out in his Races and Cultures of India, a ‘heterogeneous category’ as indicated in the Census of 1931, a category that included ‘Muslim tribes of Pathans, Baluchis, Brahuis or Mapilias, comparatively primitive tribes like the Toda or Nicobarese who still worship their own tribal deities, those who have become partly Hinduized like most of the Bhils and Gonds where the tribal name is on the way to become a caste name, those largely Christianized like the Oraon or the Lushai, and others wholly Hindus, like the Manipuri but retaining their distinctive language and culture’?Footnote 154 And did the term ‘Oraon’, as was argued in the Jena Uraon vs Johan Uraon, Second Appeal No. 1573 of 1948, in its ‘ordinary connotation’, refer ‘only to the members of a race or sect of tribe’ and had ‘no religious significance’?Footnote 155 The judgement in the case based itself upon statements, reports, and deeds from colonial times: on authoritative texts of missionaries, anthropologists, and ethnographers, and upon legal documents like sale deeds, parchas, and khatians (land records). It observed: ‘On the principle of law enunciated in the decisions referred to above and on the authorities considered above, it appears to me that Christian Oraons are Oraons in spite of their conversion and are entitled to the rights and privileges of the tribals.’ If non-Christian Oraons referred to the converted Oraons as ‘Christian Oraons’, it proved that they were Oraons first and Christians next. David Munzni was thus entitled to contest the parliamentary seat reserved for the Scheduled Tribes.Footnote 156
The Christian community in Chhotanagpur were thrilled with the decree: it was ‘glorious news’ that the petition of Kartik Oraon had been dismissed.Footnote 157 The Decree, as Munzni wrote, would ‘affect each and every Christian tribals [sic] throughout the length and breadth of the country’.Footnote 158 But Kartik Oraon had extended the scope of his action far beyond the limited realm of a conflict over a parliamentary seat at Lohardaga. As an elected member of the parliament in 1969, he sought to bring about an amendment to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Amendment Bill, 1967: ‘No person who has given up tribal faith or faiths and has embraced either Christianity or Islam could be deemed to be a member of a Scheduled Tribe.’Footnote 159 In his ‘The Task before Tribal India’ published in 1970, Kartik Oraon argued that Christians take away the major part of the financial aid offered by the government to tribals.Footnote 160 To draw the non-Christians away from Christians, he started a religious movement of his own—training and maintaining pracharaks (Catechists as the missionaries had termed them, or pracharaks in the tradition of the Arya Samaj), gathering people together on Thursdays for singing and praying, and collecting subscriptions for the expenses of his movement.Footnote 161 By now his agenda was supported by political organizations like the Jan Sangh, and political leaders like Jagjivan Ram and Morarji Desai.Footnote 162
In a rejoinder to Kartik Oraon's position, the Christians issued a pamphlet, ‘Long live tribal unity’. It argued that in Bihar, tribal Christians and non-Christians had lived in perfect amity; they were the same people speaking the same language, following the same pattern of life, and the same social customs.Footnote 163 And yet, the circumstances had now changed. ‘Communal virus is the bane of our country . . . Mutual trust is gone! No one feels safe! Even our Christian community is under threat and in some areas of the city our families are having a very anxious time . . . We feel he (Kartik Oraon) is under the influence of some very powerful communal groups or individuals.’Footnote 164
The missionaries were no longer framing their argument in terms of the earlier fragmentation that they had posited between the ‘heathen aboriginal races/tribes’ and the ‘Christian aboriginal races/tribes’. The threat before them was that those who had been denigrated by the missionaries as mere heathens were now beginning to challenge the Christian convert's claim to be an authentic tribal! If the missionaries had tried to carve an identity of the ‘tribal’ who would be uninfluenced by the ‘Hindu’, the fear of the missionaries now was that only non-Christians, rather than Christian converts, would be declared as ‘tribal’. This implied that the ‘heathen aboriginals’, who were increasingly coming under the influence of Hindu proselytizing agencies, would alone retain the status of Scheduled Tribes. Once again, the missionaries recalled ‘all the well known anthropologists of the past’ who had ‘written on the tribes of the Ranchi District’, and had ‘always considered tribal religion as distinct from Hinduism’.Footnote 165 The texts of the colonial ethnographer Dalton, who had drawn upon and later structured missionary narratives, of the missionaries Hahn and Hoffman, and of the anthropologist S. C. Roy, were invoked. ‘Since the tribals worship no major Hindu deities, and do not believe in important Hindu tenets like Karma and samsara,Footnote 166 and since they are not served by Brahmins and do not occupy any caste groups, it is most misleading to call them Hindus’, the missionaries now argued.Footnote 167
Today, at a time when such fragmenting histories within a tribe are best forgotten and adivasi activists seek to present an adivasi united front, Kartik Oraon, one of the foremost of adivasi intellectuals and an icon of adivasi assertion, must not be remembered for his attempt to divide the adivasi community on religious lines, but rather as one who showed the path towards progress and development. His daughter, a former member of the Legislative Assembly with a ticket from the Congress, and with whom I had a very lively discussion on many interesting issues, did not understand my need to investigate this case. Nor did Bishop Dr Nirmal Minz of the Gossner Lutheran Church, a contemporary and friend of Kartik Oraon. Kartik's forefathers had belonged to the Christian faith, he pointed out; Jesus bhakti (devotion) persisted in the family for as long as he lived. A photo of Jesus was in his home.
And yet, in a sense, the legacy of the case still continues. The questions asked resonate in the political scenario of Jharkhand. The Rashtriya Sevak Sangh, a Hindu right-wing organization, is expanding its base in the region; the Hindu Right and its affiliated organizations carry on their tirade against the ishaais or the Christians. The texts of colonial ethnographers and anthropologists like Dalton, Risley, and Roy, all of whom interacted with the missionaries and drew upon some of their ideas, continue to be the foundational texts used by bureaucrats, practitioners of law, activists, and academics in order to understand the Oraons and their practices. But all these would be stories that would require another telling.
Towards a conclusion
Let me then summarize the arguments that I seek to make in this article. I argue against the definitiveness of the tribe in missionary discourse, and show how the missionaries, in their attempt to understand the Oraons of Chhotanagpur in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, negotiated with several categories: heathen, pagan, savage, race, tribe, and aboriginal. As they initially encountered the Kols/Oraons in unfamiliar lands, they drew upon their experiences and interactions in the mission field, but in addition, framed their depictions in biblical and evangelical language: the Kols/Oraons were represented as heathen and savage races, immersed in a world of idolatry and demonology, awaiting salvation. Religion here was the defining frame; the Oraons were divided into the heathens, who increasingly came within the Aryan/Hindu fold, and the Christians. By the 1850s, however, emerging disciplines and a scientific temperament gave new meanings to race and tribe. At times, the missionaries engaged with such interventions as well: sometimes consciously, and often tangentially. But through this encounter, their narratives were gradually transformed: the Oraons became a part of the universal category of the tribe; their ‘primitive’ religion was termed as ‘animism’. A new set of cultural co-ordinates—language, folklore, myths, tradition, and history—marked their distinct identity.
However, within the evangelical narrative, it could never be resolved whether religion or race would be the ultimate marker of tribal identity. While the missionaries, particularly from the second half of the nineteenth century, gave primacy to disciplinary interventions in writing about the tribe and the Oraons of Chhotanagpur, their interactions with the peoples in the mission field continued to be important. It was this engagement ‘in the field’ that had enabled them to converse with colonial ethnographers and anthropologists and carve out for themselves a space in their texts. These texts, in which were embedded the voices of the missionaries, were selectively used in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and continue to be used even today, to authenticate tribal identity and debates around conversion. Today, legal battles, contests over electoral seats, and discussions amid bureaucrats, activists, and academics, bring to focus anew claims to identity based on the contending criteria of race or religion. The unresolved tension in defining an authentic Oraon identity moves across missionary narratives and colonial ethnography, and structures the divergent voices of the convert and the unconverted, the tribal and the non-tribal.
