I knew very little about the northeast parts of India. Chances are that even now most people in the old country who live way to the west of the “chicken’s neck” know even less than me about their fellow citizens whose lives are in India’s northeast.
The “chicken’s neck” is a narrow corridor that is the physical connection between India’s northeastern states and the rest of India.
The map (source) shows how the political boundaries of Nepal, Bangladesh, and Bhutan choke India’s contiguity through a 14-mile (22 KM) corridor.
When I was a kid, even when I was a teenager, the areas that are east of the chicken’s neck were a mystery to me. The photos of the people who lived there, their foods and dresses, seemed alien to me. Something alien becomes familiar when we travel, but I have never been to India’s northeast. To a white colleague at the university where I worked, well, those areas were not only familiar to her, it was also her home.
She was most excited to introduce herself and tell me about her India background soon after I joined the university. This colleague’s parents were missionaries from the UK (Wales) who lived among the Khasi people in what is now the Indian state of Meghalaya. She grew up there speaking the language like how the locals do.
I, on the other hand, had no idea about the Khasi people, their language, their history, their everything.
(Given the remarkable differences in the histories and cultures and languages and everything else of the northeast and the peninsular part of India where I was raised, I could never understand why we were fellow Indians. I continue to believe that forming a country that was the legacy of the British Raj was a terrible mistake. Instead, the Raj ought to have been broken up into several independent countries, which could have formed an Indian Union similar to the European Union.)
There was another female colleague who had had a similar growing up experience, but in a different part of India. Her parents were missionaries in Mussoorie (not to be confused with Missouri here in the US) which is almost a 1,000 miles northwest of the chicken’s neck.
The Khasi people, like the indigenous population everywhere in the world, worshiped nature. The hills and trees and rivers were not for them to exploit for their personal benefit. Instead, those are, in their traditional faith, “the manifestation of the divine on Earth.”
Now, the Khasi people are Christians. As Wikipedia notes, “Meghalaya is one of three states in India to have a Christian majority.” The other two states with Christian majority populations, Nagaland and Mizoram, are neighbors to Meghalaya.
Within a century or so of the arrival of white missionaries, the largely indigenous population in these areas on the other side of the chicken’s neck had become Christians. And with that, centuries of their beliefs and ways of life were overturned.
This is not a unique story in these modern times. Columbus “discovered” America, and opened up the world for Europeans to proselytize and colonize people in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and even in remote Pacific islands. At least the Khasi people are alive and well, unlike the peoples in the Americas who were nearly wiped out by white Christians. Jesus has been saving lives in strange ways!
Right from a young age, I have been at a loss trying to understand why white missionaries from far away lands came to India’s remote corners driven by their faith in their god. Why was it so important for them to sell their god to strangers who believed in their own gods?
I did not dare to discuss such issues with those two colleagues. We were merely colleagues who knew each other’s first and last names. We had not interacted enough to become close colleagues, leave alone developing a friendship. Wouldn’t it be educational, to say the least, to find out what they think about their parents’ missionary zeal?
I am re-visiting those issues because of a book that I am reading. The author is not only a child of missionaries in India but is a grandson of missionaries in India. The author’s grandfather came to spread the Christian word to people in Mussoorie, which is where the author’s father was born. Mussoorie was also where the author, Stephen Alter, was born and raised. Alter continues to split his life between India and the US.
Perhaps Alter has written about the thorny issues elsewhere. In Becoming A Mountain: “Searching for solace and healing, following a violent attack that left him physically and psychologically wounded, Stephen Alter sets off on a series of treks in the Himalayas to reconnect with the mountains of his birth.”
The final part of his therapeutic trekking takes Alter to Mount Kailash, which is about as far removed from Jesus and Christianity as one can imagine. Kailash, and the nearby Manasarovar Lake, are sacred to Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, and the traditional Bon faith of Tibetans who lived—and live—in that remote part of the world.
Kailash, at slightly more than 22,000 feet, is worshiped by Hindus as Shiva’s home. Other faiths have their own stories about this Himalayan snow-capped peak. This is also the origin of the mighty rivers that are the lifelines for people in the northern part of the Subcontinent.
Stephen Alter’s grandfather and father preached to the people in the lush hills and valleys that the traditional beliefs were wrong, and that Jesus alone could save them. Alter, a scion of missionaries, who describes himself as an atheist, comes across as a practitioner of the old indigenous tradition of worshiping nature. I wonder what Alter’s missionary grandfather, and my colleagues’ missionary parents, might think about Alter having become a nature worshiper after ditching the savior Jesus.