In 1855, Thakur led a rebellion of the tribal Santals against the British in eastern India. Some historians refused to admit Thakur's involvement in the event because of a three-century-old prejudice against giving supernatural beings agency when we write history. In Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that historians must "anthropologize" such beliefs rather than take them seriously. Taking a cue from their less-than-marginal place in scholarship today, we call supernatural beings the "Unbelieved" and the explicit or implicit denial of them "Dogmatic Secularism." We argue that objective historians should not discount, in advance, evidence that points to the existence or involvement of the Unbelieved in history; instead, we should cultivate a sceptical attitude towards all sources. In this, the first half of a two-part essay, we trace the boundaries of this epistemological problem in the scholarship about the Santal Rebellion and beyond.
The borderlands of India's northeast are often seen as historically isolated, remote and inaccessible. In recent years, there has been a growing awareness that such areas were much more open than hitherto assumed. This article tracks dynamic historical change in the Lushai Hills District, or what is today the state of Mizoram. Taking the upland colonial headquarters of Aijal as its vantage point, the article looks closely at the coerced construction of a network of thoroughfares that underwrote new commercial, ecological and missionary presences in the region, and that allowed both the development and dodging of new regimes of state control and surveillance. A borderlandrather than state-centred approach reveals vibrant trans-regional trails of money and information, trade and technology, migrants and labourers, plants and animals. While colonial agents in the early twentieth century sought to congeal longstanding flows of guns and people, restrictive measures were often met with subterfuge and evasion, producing new opportunities and corridors for movement. Understanding Aijal's position as an entrepôt of pluricultural exchange and as an intensifier of regional circulation draws attention to ranges of human experience that stretch beyond the usual state-focussed boundaries of historical inquiry. This article seeks to contribute to a growing literature that challenges the idea of northeast India's remoteness.
If today the sky were to thunder and the local church bell to peal in the mountaintop village of Aithur in Northeast India's Mizoram state, the resident Christian Mizo villager would simply pack an umbrella to church. However, a century ago the same soundscape would have held radically different meaning for most listeners. 2 Thunder was not a sonic shockwave devoid of transcendental meaning, but rather evidence of the god and healer Pu Vana -Grandfather of the Sky -as he dragged a bamboo plate about the heavens. The church bell would have rung out in direct contravention of the village headman's strict order for its silence. Its sound was thought to bring pestilence upon Aithur, whose tiny minority of first Christian converts were far from welcome and farther still from representing the near total majority that Christians would enjoy a century later, when the first converts were long dead and Pu Vana long forgotten. 3
In 1937, a spirit moved in the mountains of Northeast India. It presented local villagers with a visceral anticolonial vision, laicized religious practices, and offered alternative definitions of expertise and literacy that sidelined colonial and missionary authorities. Its message pulled together a complex range of clans, pilgrims, and roadworkers, and reconciled them according to contemporary local logics. This article uses the ‘Kelkang incident’ of the Lushai Hills District (today: Mizoram) to reverse the polarity of conventional writings on prophetic rebellion in two ways. First, it asks not how the colonial state dealt with a prophetic rebellion, but how a prophetic rebellion dealt with the state. Second, it asks not what the moving spirit of Kelkang symbolized, but what it did and how people interacted with it. Placing upland spirits, humans, terminology, and concepts at the centre of the analysis, the article argues that a more open-minded approach to the history of religion can better reveal processes of mediumship and rapidly indigenizing Christianities as well as the much broader malleability of concepts like ‘conversion’, ‘revival’, and ‘Christianity’.
This teaching and learning guide accompanies the series of "The Unbelieved and Historians" articles, which argues that we should approach religious history with open minds. This guide offers related resources, readings, and a project designed for classroom use.
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