14. Hearing images, tasting pictures: making sense of Christian mission photography in the Lushai Hills district, Northeast India (1870-1920)

Abstract

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

From Tintype to Twitter: Photography at the Irish Jesuit Archives

“…In the photograph, the bride's expression gives the impression that she may be reticent, sorrowful, or is asserting agency, by perhaps denying the gaze of the missionary's camera. 60 In fact, O'Connor explains the local tradition with a caption on the reverse: "Notice that the Bride refused to face me-the photographer! not that she feared to break my camera.…”