Contested customs in the Naga hills: Baptist reformers, colonial ethnography and the construction of a modern Naga identity

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper directs attention to the Naga Hills, an outlying hill district in British India’s Northeast frontier, that became a site of conflict between the early Baptist converts and the non-converts over the nature and authority of customs which were recorded in the colonial archive as ‘Christians vs Ancients’. These conflicts produced two opposing discourses on ‘tribal’ customs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: the reformism of the American Baptist missionaries and the romanticism of the colonial anthropologists. However, the path of self-determination that the Nagas chose defied these established paradigms even as they fashioned a modern Naga political identity that appropriated strands of both colonial ethnography and Baptist Christianity. This article contends that the Christian-Ancients conflicts are significant not only for understanding the ideological underpinnings of Naga ethnonationalism but also for providing a historical intervention into contemporary debates on Naga customary law.