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Sending out the spears: Zeliangrong movement, Naga Club and a nation in the making
Abstract
In the 1920s and 30s, the Naga areas comprising Naga Hills and the adjoining Naga inhabited hill tracts of Manipur witnessed two important initiatives which were to become integral to the imagining and making of a Naga nation: the movement among the Rongmeis, Liangmeis and Zemes under the leadership of Jadonang and later Gaidinliu—popularly known as the Zeliangrong movement—and the programmes and activities of the Naga Club. Both the Zeliangrong movement and the Naga Club had a history and trajectory of their own but at the same time, faced with situations that seemed to threaten their way of life, they envisioned and anticipated a moment when Nagas would be united as a single political entity independent from the kingdoms of the plains and other external political authorities. This article looks closely at these initiatives, their shared and particular histories, how they made sense of and negotiated with their existing reality, and finally the visions they had of their anticipated Naga nation. The article concludes by briefly looking at how and why the Naga national movement, in the later decades of twentieth century, came to privilege one initiative over the other.
... The Kalyan Ashram point out that, unlike their Christian counterparts, Jadonang and Gaidinliu located their resistance within the prophetic tradition of their people and utilised the cultural resources available to them (Thomas 2012). Jadonang and Gaidinliu's activities (now called the Heraka movement) would become an ideal platform for the Sangh to make the Heraka a Naga cultural and religious movement against the foreign invasion of Christianity. ...
The paper will examine the intersection between Sangh Parivar activities, Christianity, and indigenous religions in relation to the state of Nagaland. I will argue that the discourse of ‘religion and culture’ is used strategically by Sangh Parivar activists to assimilate disparate tribal groups and to envision a Hindu nation. In particular, I will show how Sangh activists attempt to encapsulate Christianity within the larger territorial and civilisational space of Hindutva (Hinduness). In this process, the idea of Hindutva is visualised as a nationalist concept, not a theocratic or religious one [Cohen 2002 “Why Study Indian Buddhism?” In The Invention of Religion, edited by Derek Peterson and Darren Walholf. Rutgers: Rutgers University Press, 26]. I will argue that the boundaries between Hindutva as cultural nationalism and its religious underpinnings are usefully maintained in the context of Nagaland because they allow Sangh activists to reconstitute the limits of Christianity and incorporate it into Hindu civilisation on their own terms.
... Even as the NNC in the NHD was making official representations on behalf of Nagas everywhere, the Zeliang, Rogmei and Kabui Nagas, under the appellate of the Zeliangrong, came into the fold of a powerful nativist movement under Jadonang and his disciple Rani Gaidinliu. As one of the largest conglomerates in the region, the politics of the Zeliangrong Nagas are even today often at loggerheads with the dominant politics of the ethno-national movement (Thomas 2012). ...
The article concerns itself with the current phase of the Indo-Naga peace talks, seemingly rendered intransigent on the contentious issue of administrative integration of contiguous Naga-inhabited areas. It historically examines the ethno-territoriality of the Naga national movement in the states of Nagaland, Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. This article finds that notwithstanding the soundness of the claims, Naga territoriality is not a non-negotiable given but an active construction of the changing politics of the movement. The findings suggest that any proposed federal arrangement should balance ethno-territorial urges with historical peculiarities. A substantial measure of non-territorial autonomy, in a mutually binding federal arrangement, would necessitate a redefinition of both Naga ethno-national aspirations and the post-colonial Indian states insecurities. However, it holds the potential for sustainable peace in the region.
This essay sees the form and functioning of the Zeliangrong Naga community as a work in progress. Rather than a perennial, historically immutable and delimited entity, the (relatively recent) formation of the Zeliangrong community indicates that tribes can be formed afresh and that tribal identities are constantly in flux. I begin by tracing and placing the origins of the Zeliangrong Naga as told by Zeliangrong elders and circulating origin and migration stories. Then, continuing my focus on ethnic alignment and realignment, I studied the Zeliangrong movement that emerged in the 1920s. At first, they advocated a Naga Raj through the ousting of the colonial government. Over time, however, this rebellion changed direction and reduced its ambitions to the creation of a Zeliangrong homeland that would unite the Zeliangrong people who currently inhabit three different states of Northeast India, namely Manipur, Nagaland and Assam. Drawing both on historical analysis and fresh ethnography this essay shows how over time the Zeliangrong ethnic identity has come under strain and is increasingly internally contested with its constituent parts now expressing divergent political aspirations while also struggling over status, standing and dominance within.
The North-East in India is a shorthand for a territory built on violence, commodity extraction and exceptional laws. For years now, the region has nurtured a stygian discontent. However, instead of succumbing to the despair and disapproval of technocrats and security personnel such crises usually evokes, one can find political and analytical sustenance in such turbulent histories. Often in the histories of ‘failed’ states, ‘disturbed’ frontiers and borderlands, one finds cyphers to modern governance. In this sense, the North-East is quite au courant. In this analytically productive sense, the essay will discuss the recent and older trends of historiographies of the North-East. How is the North-East located within South Asian historiography? How does it speak to academic collectives beyond the Indian/South Asian historiography? How does the political discord and potential of the region shape academic engagements? Answers to these questions will provide insight into the production and nature of academic silos or lumps as the North-East simultaneously poses as a political problematic at the heart of Indian democracy and a component of an emergent field of South-Asian, South-East Asian and global scholarship.
Citizens First
This is an unedited & unpublished chapter in Meena Radhakrishna (ed.) "Citizens First: Studies on Adivasis, Tribals, and Indigenous Peoples in India," Expected date of release July 2016
Nineteenth century millenarian movements in the Northwest Amazon region are interpreted through an analysis of the ways in which Venancio Kamiko, an indigenous shaman and millenarian leader of the 1850s, improvised upon the symbolism of indigenous Arawakan myth and ritual to formulate a strategy of resistance to the oppressive political-economic conditions imposed by non-native peoples and institutions. Illustrations of this process include a detailed reconstruction of Venancio Kamiko's life and the culmination of his movement in the 1850s, an overview of the history of interethnic relations in the region, a discussion of indigenous mythical concepts and ritual activities that entered into Venancio's movement, and spoken narratives about Venancio's millenarianism. Venancio Kamiko's millenarianism is best understood as a reorientation of indigenous social relations in which the refusal to cooperate with the external, dominating order of the white men became elevated to a sacred cosmological postulate.
This article investigates the link between religious change and perceptions of and attitudes towards ‘hygiene’ and ‘order’ amongst adherents of Heraka, a religious reform movement among the Zeme Naga of Assam. It examines the problematic role of sacrifice, its relation-ship to the economy, and the consequent theological shift towards a monotheistic god, Tingwang, by focusing on the ritual of a Heraka village renewal. Not only does this ritual validate the abandonment of sacrifice, but also greatly diminishes disease-creating conditions—with blood equalling dirt—that traditional sacrifices had allegedly involved. Thus, while it can be said that ‘secular’ factors such as economic and health benefits explain the ‘conversion’ to Heraka, the article argues that theological beliefs, in particular Christian notions of ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’, also had an impact on the Heraka.
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