Postcards from Khasi Hills
Images that mix politics, history and discomfort to document how the Khasi people made Christianity,
a ‘foreign faith’, their own.
HYNNIEWTREP. Seven huts. The Khasis, a matrilineal community in India’s north-eastern region, believe they originated from seven families who remained on earth when the tree connecting heaven and earth was cut down. Khasis call their land Ki Hynñiewtrep.
They have their own Niam or faith community, rooted in their land, clan and family.
June 22 is a recently sanctioned State holiday commemorating a long dead Welshman. On this day in 1841, a Welsh miller’s son arrived in Cherrapunjee. He wrote home: “When you receive this you can venture to tell all our friends at home that we have arrived safely at Cherrapoonjee... My address will be Revd T.J. Missionary, Cherrapoonjee, Cassia Hills, Bengal”.
Reverend Thomas Jones would baptise nobody. And would translate only a part of the Gospel. Instead, they say he taught the locals how to brew alcohol, use a saw, purify lime. Then he got involved in defending the Khasis from exploitation by the East India company. He was thrown out of the church and his missionary licence cancelled. Driven out of the Khasi-jaintia hills, Jones died a lonely death in Calcutta.
The faith TJ brought would sweep through north-eastern India, nativising itself. But not without indigenous challenges and reworkings.
But being a Christian (or for that matter Muslim) in India these days is not a joke. India is being remade. Once celebrated as a great pluralist success of decolonised nation-building, many of its postcolonial benchmarks such as secularism and religious freedom are being reworked, erased, made redundant in an authoritarian imagination of a monochromatic decolonised Hindu India. State after State legislates laws that criminalise “foreign” faiths.
For the minuscule indigenous populations of the north-east, where Christianity is the primary mode of its faith community, mainland India seems increasingly foreign. A land whose masters can once again hound Reverend TJ out of their imagination.
In 2006-07, Meghalaya’s Khasi-jaintia hills were abuzz with stories of “revival” among Presbyterian Christians, an “event” that showed non-believers that the word of God was real. Signs and wonders swept through the hills. I started making images of this phenomenon.
My initial curiosity was about the transcendence of belief. Then slowly I started thinking about the material manifestation of Christianity in these hills. About the changing public-political discourse around faith, religion and national identity and