Abstract
This paper intends to contextualise the life of Christianity in British India through the developments in military theology in the late eighteenth and through the nineteenth century that put forth the image of the ‘soldier saint’- a true Christian soldier, British in blood and in faith. This discourse intensified after the military turned civilian Indian rebellion of 1857 which was immediately coloured in Christian vs heathen terms, and following which, the spiritual needs of Christian soldiers came into focus with the East India Company. The deaths, rituals and continued traditions of burial of the Christian soldiers, officers, and civilians have been marked through some prominent cemeteries and war memorials in India. While studies of these sites of memory have focused on the graves, tombs, and memorials in parts of north, west and south India, the frontier region of northeast India has remained outside the focus of most studies. This paper has chosen the eastern Himalayan territories comprising Sikkim and Kalimpong that fall on or near the Silk route to bring attention to the history of territorial aggression and the resulting material memory of lesser-known cemeteries and memorials Further. This paper analyses lesser discussed fiction to bring into focus the region’s human geography. This paper recognises the need to study inter-religious relations through materiality and afterlives of Christianity in India that was shaped to a large extent by the soldiers-both British and native, and the chaplains, gravediggers, priests and nurses and caregivers whose lives are recorded in the memory of death. By doing so, this study hopes to bring new dimensions to the study of Christianity in India with the inclusion of the materiality of religion, the postcolonial gothic imaginary and military theology.
Introduction
In the colonial history of the eastern Himalayas, there is the marked presence of two categories of British people- the missionaries and the military men. The evangelists and the officers, the nuns and the soldiers, the cassocks and the uniforms were both driven by the Christian justification for imperialism. In the second wave of colonial incursions- doctors, nurses and teachers followed and the perceived history of Sikkim, Darjeeling and Kalimpong hills remains dotted till date with the establishment of sanatoriums and schools, mapping the space as places of recuperation, rest and Christian education. However, an aspect of Christian history lies embedded in the memories of the mountains through material and emotional remnants of military men resting in graves.
This paper starts with the argument that mapping the colonial history of the eastern Himalayas is incomplete without taking into account the material absences and spatial presences of men who died in battles on the mountains and whose narratives remain underrepresented in postcolonial scholarship. This argument will aid in understanding the religio-psychological dimensions of death in the context of colonial Christianity, while adding a much-needed layer to the historiography of mountains that appear to carry the burden of colonial guilt with Christian schools, confectionaries, chapels, and quaint bookstores, all the while remaining exotic and historically inadequate in the mainstream gaze of independent India.
Further, this paper also argues for the need to study the social life of Christianity in India through the spatial dimensions of death. For instance, the attitudes of neglect, ‘othering’ and colonial hangover can often be seen in popular responses to Christian graveyards, as depicted in mass media and localised cultural imaginaries. These attitudes highlight the intersectionality of colonial history, urbanisation patterns and interreligious relations in a multicultural and densely populated nation-state like India. The emergence of the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia (bacsa) in 1976, its stated objectives and continued activities have been closely analysed by Buettner, who recognises the value of studying cemeteries as “they act as a barometer that signals how the ex-colonised and ex-colonisers alike not only approach the physical relics and spaces of empire but also reassess the colonial era more generally, imparting them with a diverse range of meanings specific to a historic moment”.1
In this historic moment lie contests, confrontations and clashes not only through military power for territorial supremacy, but also beliefs, customs, and rituals of living and dying, marking the full circle of life between the natives and colonisers. Since the living and dying of British men and women were defined by their religious beliefs and practices, studying the interreligious dimensions of the material memory of death inscribed as graves and tombs appears as a worthy exercise. The model of understanding personal religiosity as proposed by Zelinsky2 as the ‘Gravestone Index’ is particularly significant in this context wherein the Gravestone Index intersects with colonial memory, racial supremacy, and contemporary interreligious relations. In India, honouring the Christian traditions are enacted by the friends and family members of buried officers, soldiers and civilians of British India, thereby drawing our attention to the cultural continuities of death. Adding to this model, this paper proposes to highlight the postcolonial gothic imaginary3 as a valid model of exploring the life and afterlife of Christianity in India, particularly as the military graveyards have now turned civilian, and horror narratives abound in the popular imagination.
Also, by the time the cemeteries emerged outside church spaces in the first half of nineteenth-century Europe, there were Christian cemeteries in India already dating as far back as the mid-1600s.4 While cities like Surat, Kolkata, Bombay, Madras can recount cemeteries from the seventeenth century onwards, the eastern Himalayas as frontier lands does not possess an old history of colonisation that can be separated from military aggression. In Darjeeling, Kalimpong, Pedong, Gnathang and other villages and towns on or near the Silk Route, the graves of colonisers exist mainly as war memorials of officers and soldiers or religious memorials of lone missionaries who ventured into the mountains to bring the Word of God to an alien people. This paper remains focused on these frontier mountains to highlight the presence of such memorials that compel us to contextualise material memory and spatial aesthetics with the hope that the histories of colonisation in the mountains may restore a layered imaginary to the inhabitants too.
Military Theology: Soldier Saints of the British Indian Army
“I do believe, in the bottom of my heart, that that empire was given to England because we were the country of the open Bible.”
lt. col. herbert edwardes, 18605
Herbert Edwardes (1819–1868) was an Evangelist and a close friend of General Nicholson (1821–1857). The soldiers who executed the designs of the Company and later the Raj were mostly Indian men, drawn from varied social and cultural backgrounds and sustained with the utilitarian martial race theory. Along with Gurkhas, Rajputs, Sikhs, Madrasis, Bengalis, and other sub-ethnic formations in the British army, there was the marked presence of white soldiers too- boys and young men from Irish, Scottish, and Welsh backgrounds, serving the cause of the British Empire. By 1857, about half of the Company’s 14,000 soldiers and around 40% of the British army soldiers were Irish.6 The intensification of this discourse was to be clearly seen in the military rebellion, or the Indian mutiny of 1857. This rebellion that initially appeared sporadic, disparate, and localised was soon recognised as being organised, consolidated, and well networked, stretching from north India to northeast India. As has been well established in the histories of this rebellion, the catalyst was the religious sentiment, fuelled by the militarisation of cross-cultural theologies, making a heady mix that was only waiting to explode.
The colonial depictions of native mutinies and skirmishes, especially the Mutiny of 1857 have relied heavily on the image of the pure Christian, especially the whitewashed victimhood of the pure English woman pitted against the heathen natives.7 The patriotic nationalist fervour across the British army and its support base was successful in binding Irish and Scottish elements in the larger Christian narrative. The Martial race theory, as faulty and misleading as it was, originated in the British appropriation of hardy labour and was used to extract from the Scots, Welsh and Irish in the ensuing years. Against the Indian enemies, indeterminate in creed and caste, the Christian army defended its innocent believers- women and children. The effects of the Crimean War, the popularisation of military evangelical literature as in the writing of Catherine Marsh and the patriotic fervour infused by the Indian Mutiny led to considerable changes in the attitudes towards soldiers in Britain. Anderson has shown how the term ‘Christian soldier’ had become commonplace by 1860s:
Moreover, since it was a Christian and not an Anglican army which became the object of official policy in these decisive years, official encouragement to the public to regard the army as a part of the religious life of the nation was able to operate without provoking counterbalancing denominational jealousy and resentment, at least on any serious scale.8
The narratives of the Lucknow siege were ripe with pictorial and textual descriptions of the powerless White women, with pious eyes raised to the heavens, awaiting the rescue of their Christian souls from the barbarity of the heathens. The religious trope was not limited to the British army but was fundamental in shaping the structure and demography of the Indian army too. For instance, the martial race theory was applied to Indian races and extolment of Sikh and Gurkha military formations was done9 with the use of ethno-religious sentiments. The popularisation of ‘Sat Sri Akaal’ and ‘Jai Mahakali’, religious utterances of Sikh and Shakta Hindu traditions, hailing the supremacy and glory of god became and remain widely acceptable. Scholars of the 1857 rebellion have noted the role of religious zeal, almost an evangelical zeal on the part of the British Christian soldiers (and native Christian soldiers) as well as the Muslim and Hindu soldiers in the British army. Bates and Carter10 have noted the changing trends in the scholarship on the Mutiny, especially in the South Asian context where religious fervour is recognised as an integral part of the rebellion. More recently, studies have begun to highlight the role of Christian zeal as a motivation for counter-insurgency in the rebellion. Also, studies have emerged that critique the attitudes and practices of post-insurgency “pacification” that liberally used a Christian vocabulary for violence and excesses of many kinds.
As much as the British Army tried to keep the missionaries at bay, the rising evangelical fervour in England in the 19th century was to be reflected in the entry of evangelists in the British army in India. The officers were fully aware of the potential for cross-cultural mayhem it signalled, yet lived realities of the British soldiers could not be ignored, fed as they had been on religious-ethnic pride.11 For, every Welsh, Irish, or Scot soldier stationed in the tropical clime of India, was fighting for the Christian cause,12 even if alongside heathens. The report on ‘Indian Converts in the Mutiny’ delivered by The Rev. C.B Leupolt, of Benaras at the Liverpool Conference on Christian Missions in 1860 makes great claims about the fortitude of native Christians in the face of death, their refusal to convert to Islam when charged at by native mutineers and the solace and support the European and native Christians received from European soldiers, bonded together by Christianity. The European soldier is seen as a faithful Christian, one whose inherent religious zeal and racial loyalty created the figure of the true Christian soldier/officer- real Protestant heroes like Havelock and Outram, or evangelical martyrs like Nicholson. His soul needed sustenance, troubled as it was by adverse living conditions, unfamiliar terrain, frontier aggression, blinding cultural diversity, and painful nostalgia.13
Anderson says that “In view of the widespread mid-nineteenth century assumption that physical, mental, and spiritual ‘improvement’ could not be separated, ‘raising the tone of the troops’ inevitably entailed the provision of chapels, Bibles and chaplains as much as the provision of schools, gymnasia and model barracks”.14 After the war of 1857, many British soldiers were sent to Darjeeling and other parts of the mountains in northeast India to find succour, rest, and some semblance of familiar clime. Darjeeling, Shillong and Kohima, as much as they provided respite from the heat of the plains and the familiarity of undulating mountain ranges, weren’t exactly blank spaces to be filled with the presence of recuperating white soldiers. These were indigenous civilisations with their inbuilt governance systems, frontier policies, cultural realities and, above all, people. In Darjeeling, suicides began to be reported soon, as soldiers could not cope with the rains and the mist, sinking into depression and bone-crunching alienation. The history of the two world wars is ripe with abandoned, fugitive English soldiers choosing to or forced to live in familiar yet alienating mountains of northeast India, living on and remembering home while trying to blend with the cultures of the new homes.
Nostalgic Piety and Evangelical Zeal in Missionary-Military Literature
Based on the concept of applying homogenous religion and language to seek control of the people of the colony, the Empire, to a large extent, depended on the missionaries who scaled high spaces to have their mission superimposed on the natives who firmly held on to their indigenous beliefs and ways. Compared to the plains, the missionaries saw the mountains as abstract frontiers of the mind, exotic spaces that not only were the sources of rejuvenation and recuperation from the tropical climate but also as spaces that challenged and tested their faith through overwhelming geography. As argued by McKay, the missionaries used religious conversion and provided new lifestyle and employment opportunities in these mountain spaces. Soon, the frontier mountain towns of Darjeeling and Kalimpong became centers of political and missionary activities simultaneously.15
The presence of colonial Christianity at these high places facilitated opportunities, but it also faced political, social, and, most interestingly, psychological challenges. Through the missionaries, the Empire had the political agenda of making advances to closed Buddhist countries like Tibet, Sikkim and Bhutan for which the frontier mountain towns became crucial sites of expansion and control. The challenges and repercussions of these imperial designs have been portrayed in the colonial missionary novel of Anglo-Indian writer Rumer Godden (1907–1998) titled Black Narcissus (1939). Set in the Eastern Himalayan region of colonial India, this novel examines how unfamiliar topography and cultural terrain challenge the zeal of the missionaries. The topographical shift of the Imperial gaze from the plains’ harsh tropical climate led to the exploration of High Places16 that instantly evoked in the British people a memory of their distant homeland. In an attempt to recreate this notion of home, the colonial officials went on to make these spaces conform to their needs and requirements which led to the disruption of its ecological balance.17 Further, to facilitate the desire to civilise the natives by engaging them with various aspects of modernity, the missionaries moved beyond urban lowlands to hitherto ‘unexplored’ highlands to set up convents. The desire to control, a central trait of the Empire’s representatives, turns ambiguous when there is a shift of topography; the unfamiliar terrain witnesses a disruption of the dominant discourse of the civilising mission, which flourished smoothly in plains.18 Therefore, the physiography of mountains which make them a distinct geographical region is not only an indication of highlands19 but also a cultural landscape that accommodates a diverse community of indigenous people.
In Black Narcissus, with their placement in a nostalgic yet unfamiliar terrain, the nuns encounter the extreme weather of the highlands that proves to be a hindrance in their civilising mission. The presence of the majestic snow-capped Khangchendzonga peak accompanied by incessant rainfall and penetrating winds, which disrupt the liturgical and prayer rituals of the nuns in the makeshift convent; so too the spiritual and ‘superstitious’ natives. The sudden psychological change is visible when Sister Ruth gets so overwhelmed by the mountains that she forgets to say the Angelus or when Sister Honey slowly starts prioritising the children and gets emotionally involved with them or when Sister Phillipa gets too engrossed in gardening. Here, the cultural geography of the mountains extensively re-signifies the purpose of the convent itself, questioning its sacredness and highlighting the emotive responses of the nuns whose primary duty is to convert the palace of General Toda Rai, which once housed women into a convent. The setting of convents in colonial spaces differs, given the kind of topography it is subjected to. The Indian plains offer the closest replication of convents as seen in the West as it displayed “same brick buildings”, “same green walls”, “stone stairs”, “same figures of saints”, “same chapel” and the “same close warm convent smell”.20 However, the attempt to construct convents in the mountainous terrain is far from the original as well as its replica. The palace turned convent, though aloof from the settlement, requires and needs to rely on native people for renovation. In this landscape, the nuns encounter isolation either through the non-acknowledgement of their presence by the natives or the wind that willingly disrupts their privacy to ultimately creating a communication gap among the sisters themselves as all of them begin to immerse themselves in this terrain.
Compared to the central Himalayas, the eastern Himalayas did not serve as natural choices for constructing concrete Christian structures. The sisters come to Mopu because “their order had no cool place to go to from the plains; there was no room for them, as every hill station had its convent.”21 This ‘terra incognita’ space was seen as an opportunity for carrying on the civilising mission and marking the frontier, as by now, other hill stations like Shimla and Ooty, dotted with missionary activities. Sister Clodagh tells the other sisters how fortunate they are to have come to this place because, “The people must need us here”.
Similar is the case in Mamang Dai’s novel The Black Hill (2014), based on the real life of Father Krick, a Jesuit priest whose persistence to reach Tibet through Arunachal, home to various tribes, results in inter-tribal conflict and a bitter ending. In this narrative too, the imagined idea of Shangri-La encourages Father Krick to take the Jesuit mission overcoming fatigue, hunger, and superstitions in the mountains until he meets his end there. One thing in common between the two novels is the zeal of the missionaries, both nuns and the priest, to set up a mission or a convent in an unfamiliar geography and the unfortunate consequences they bring along in the form of social disruption and psychological deterioration. What is further intriguing is to note the diametrically opposite responses of the nuns and the priest in carrying forward their mission in such topography. While the nuns become nostalgic and eventually falter in their mission when confronted with the forces of nature and the mountain aesthetics, which accentuates their distraction and alienation, the Father, who is keen and zealous about penetrating into Tibet with the hope of setting up the mission and spreading the word of the gospel, tends to ignore the topographical detailing of the place and the mountains as he spends most of his time in. The imperial gaze of the nuns and the explorer’s eyes of Father Krick obscure the presence of natives and undermine the resistance -religious, cultural and even topographical that the people of the mountains presented to colonisation. The missionary novel had become successful and immensely popular through Miss Owen’s The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811), a work of Oriental romance that was critical of the use of religion for imperial control. Writing more than a century later, Godden has introduced the spiritual crises and the affective topographical aesthetics, disrupting the trend of Oriental romance and drawing our attention to the gray areas of inter-cultural relationships.
A master of military fiction, Rudyard Kipling’s (1865–1936) short stories have also contributed to the evocation of nostalgic piety through military theology. The short story titled ‘Namgay Doola’ traces the misfortunes of an ‘outlander’ born to an Irish Sergeant and a native woman from the Lepcha community in the eastern Himalayas. It explores the “exotic” spaces through a King troubled by the mannerism of a red-haired man who refuses to pay taxes, worships an unknown God, and hums some incoherent lines. Kipling constructs the Himalayas by posing a smell attached to these highlands. The monk in Kim (1901) is said to ‘reek of the stinking artemisia of the mountain passes’.22 In ‘Namgay Doola’, Kipling lets the king of the Himalayan kingdom remain unnamed: ‘Now and again, this king whose name does not matter would mount a ringstraked horse’.23 Namgay Doola was the son of the Irish-Lepcha marriage, and he was sighted and caught in the bazaar of Darjeeling by British military men. For Bubb,24 Doola is a ‘relic of Clive’s era’ who, even after being a descendant of a rich Irish soldier, is seen ‘still cleaning his company musket in the Himalayan valley’, which again remains nameless. Considering it to be a strange story, Hopkirk25 introduces Namgay Doola as the son of an Irish sergeant named Tim Doola, who deserted his regiment after the mutiny of 1857 and was later hanged for murder of a nameless Tibetan girl. Another version of it appeared in The Globe in 1889 under the title “An Episode in the Sikkim Campaign” which sawDoola as one of the wounded Tibetan soldiers. Here his mother is some ‘young native woman’. Gautam Chakravarty points out that the ‘hoary tradition of intercultural love’26 was never fully explored by the Mutiny novelists, while C Lestok Reid in The Masque of Mutiny (1947) creates a Tim Doolan like character named Robin Westerne who deserts his army to marry a Hindu woman named Shalini and eventually feels betrayed. The difference between the two narratives is in the namelessness of the native woman in Kipling’s story, lending weight to the argument that geography plays a vital role in cultural constructs. It is easy to see how the British military narratives in colonial India abound in patriotic piety, imperial masculinity and mountain mysticism.
As seen in the military fictions, it is clear that while the British women acquire victimhood that presents them as fragile and more seductive, the ‘native women’ remain functional and marginal to imperial narratives. If, on the one hand, imperial women occupied centre stage in such narratives, an obsession with Buddhist countries was discernible too. Recent scholarships on political ties of the Empire with Tibet or Shangri-La27 show the Empire’s need to make advances to Tibet through what has been called as either ‘expedition’ or ‘invasion’ by Western and Chinese scholars respectively. The desperate need to travel to Tibet to lay the foundation of their mission can be seen not only in expeditions like that of Francis Younghusband (1863–1942), who used the Sikkim route to make entry into Tibet or the battles fought on highlands between the British and the Tibetan men but also in several missionary fiction novels. The Himalayas have been serving as either magnificent frontiers28 or as fortification providing security; these mountain spaces still do not serve as valid places for literary exploration. Instead, it is always viewed as spaces of leisure, adventure and servitude.
Oral history in this region highlights the fascination of the indigenous people with the missionaries. While the missionaries were enthralled by the idea of Shangri-La but not the people belonging to it, the Tibetans, on the other hand, seemed more inquisitive of the missionary’s physical appearance than their country of origin. These missionaries aroused curiosity among the Tibetans, who would often gather to stare at them.29 In Kalimpong, an orally passed down legend talks of how two Fathers of Paris Foreign Missions Society, a Roman Catholic missionary organisation formed in 1660, came to Pedong in the 19th century, a small town that lies on the way to the Indo-Tibetan border in Sikkim. Father Augustine Desgodin, the first French missionary, laid the foundation of the Catholic Mission at Pedong, and was followed by a series of French Missionaries. Among them was Father Mossot, who is said to have been killed by Tibetans as he attempted to enter Tibet. Local folklore stresses the appearance of the father behind his murder, for all the missionaries appeared to the indigenous people as Bhut (ghost). Tall men wearing white dresses and speaking a foreign language were enough to have them characterised as white ghosts. When such an unfortunate incident transpired, the other missionaries then constructed a cross about 10 -12 feet high atop a hill facing towards Tibet and Mt. Khangchendzonga. It is believed that the missionaries took an oath to take their mission to Tibet and have the gospel spread in the coming days. The significance of the cross-facing Tibet is to have someone gaze at it as if keeping an eye on a place they will soon set foot in. Set in an alleviated space with a long and steep flight of stairs, this colonial remnant of the material memory of Christianity in the mountains is named Cross Hill. This town also has one of the oldest churches to have been established in the year 1882 and called the Sacred Heart Church. Within the premises of the church is a cemetery from the 19th century. Though covered in grasses and not too well maintained, it is said to be cleaned once a year in November to mark All Souls Day.
While Shangri-La continued to fuel the Romantic imagination of the British, the territorial aggression did not abate, leading to the Anglo-Tibetan war of 1886. In the battle, there was a significant presence of young Irish soldiers, many of whom died in the battle of Tukula. It is interesting to note how the Scottish kilt was portrayed in British popular writing as the exotic, unexpected garment hiding behind it irrepressible masculinity as displayed in the battleground. There are narrative accounts of how the native Indian men were afraid of the petticoat/ghagrawaalahs as they referred to the Scottish soldiers wearing the kilt and charging mercilessly on the native bands of rebels and troublemakers.30 It is equally interesting to note that the bakhu, the traditional Tibetan dress worn by men, is almost similar to the Scottish kilt. However, in accounts of the Tukula battle, even those maintained currently by the Indian army, the Tibetan soldiers are described as weak, ill-equipped, almost ridiculous and the British Indian soldiers comprising of Irish, Sikh and Gorkha ethnicities as meticulous and sustaining negligible injuries or death.31 As succinctly argued by Kenneth Mc Neil, the Scot highlander in the British army was portrayed as the nemesis of the native heathen in colonial military narratives of the first organised war for independence fought in 1857. Conway has drawn attention to how the British army appropriated the clannish loyalties and governance structures of the Scot highlanders that sometimes presented challenges too.32 McNeil has argued that the British military imagination used the alterity and exoticism of the Scot kilt for its own self-aggrandisement in British military narratives. We see here how the exotic yet familiar Tibetan kilt (bakhu) is reduced to a symbol of threat and territorial aggression. The generically same garment comes to acquire opposite meanings through colonial and neo-colonial eyes in the mainland and frontier military narratives. The relationship between geographical masculinity and modern nationalism holds immense scope for further exploration as we compare and contrast the highlanders from Scotland and Tibet and their representations and use by the British army.
Christianity and Postcolonial Gothic
Earlier known as Military Cemetery, the Nicholson cemetery in Delhi is a site of colonial memory. Hosting the graves of the officers, soldiers, women, and children who died in the 1857 mutiny, this place now abounds in urban lore of haunting and sightings of Brigadier Nicholson’s headless ghost. He is believed to be roaming around in the cemetery even today. The colonial soldiers’ inconclusive narratives appear as the real ghosts of the past in a city that is still trying to process histories of invasions, consolidations, failures, disruptions, and chaos.
Christianity in the context of north India, and its spiritual alterity serve as a convenient trope for horror and thrill. The ghost is always an outsider, a non-welcome intruder who destabilises the ordered present. In the religious history of north India, Christianity is naturally seen as the ‘other’- the unwelcome, intruding presence that initially shocked and eventually refused to go away. Mac-Donald-D’Costa33 has argued that the Anglo-Indians are depicted in cinema and popular culture as the Freudian “uncanny”, representatives of a religion and culture that is a pneumonic symbol of the violence of colonisation. In popular Hindi cinema, we often see the Catholic priests as the first-round ghost busters who eventually fail whereas the ghosts themselves always carry Christian-colonial markers through sites of hauntings- cemeteries, hostels, bungalows, rest houses, circuit houses, and other colonial structures. These sites serve as liminal spaces that are already impregnated with the memories of decadence, indulgence, exploitation, and oppression. After the going away of stationed British forces, troops, officials and others post-independence, these sites are metonymic wastelands, remnants of a broken Empire, and reminders of native victory. It is but natural that these will become intermedial spaces- neither rooted in a past of certitude nor pointing to a clear future.
Colonialism and Christian structures tend to be seen as extensions of each other, with chapels too becoming sites of haunting narratives as, for instance, the Victorian gothic chapel at Mount Abbott in Uttarakhand. The local folklore believes that Dr Morris, who administered medicine there, was gifted, maybe possessed black magical powers so that he could exactly predict the death of every patient of his. It is believed that he would give quicker deaths to those patients who were in mortal pain, and now the souls of those men and women are haunting the place, while the spirit of Dr Morris himself keeps walking around calling out ‘Hello’. In a paranormal investigatory video at Nicholson Cemetery in Delhi, the electromagnetic waves claimed to note the words ‘Go away’ coming from the grave. These verbalisations of the colonial past reflect the pathos of the memory of colonisation itself wherein military men, doctors, priests, nurses, and nuns joined the Empire at different levels of social hierarchy, rendering their services to a cause they believed in for religious, economic or racial convictions. On a recent visit to Nicholson cemetery and talking to the caretaker’s family, we were struck by the words of a woman who said that as Christians, the cemetery is a place of rest for the souls of the departed, and she wondered how could a sacred place like this be haunted? She was an adivasi Christian woman living in a Christian cemetery in Delhi, holding on to her beliefs while the Youtubers and social media enthusiasts visit the sacred spot with cameras and gadgets to establish the attractive urban lore of ghosts and sahibs.
She reminded us of Brother Patrick, whom we met at Gnathang, a high mountain village in Sikkim near the India-China border. Brother Patrick was one of five Christians living in that village, the only Catholic believer who had spent most of his life in an almost entirely predominant Buddhist community. When we asked him how he dealt with his loneliness and sustained his beliefs without a community, he shared his convictions with a twinkle in his old worn-out eyes. The life of hard labour and poverty could not deter him from his path. He shared how many people suggested that he should convert to the Buddhist faith, and even his community from his own hometown, some hills away, offered him comfort and return. Yet, he chose to live alone on a land he said had sustained him long enough for him to leave. The whole village was struck by the fact that the only thing he requested his community to do for him was to dig a grave in preparation for death, something he had been prepared for many years.34
The emotion of piety and the moral value of sacredness that these two people attached to graves are a reminder that ordinary experiences carry profundity when we contextualise the life of a minority religion by seeing how people hold on to whatever symbols they can easily find amidst a multitude of alien and majoritarian symbols. Graves, tombstones, memorials and cemeteries are not the norm in India as they are in Europe, and therefore, their presences are charged spaces of historical, social, and interreligious significance. Just above Brother Patrick’s home, we could see the Gnathang War Memorial, hosting thirteen graves in memory of Christian soldiers who died in the Anglo-Tibetan war of 1886–88. While we were processing this, he showed us a small, solid metal object, perhaps a part of a gun or some weaponry or a burner, a colonial remnant that he had preserved when he was digging at one site in the village. Incorporating material memory in contemporary postcolonial research presents exciting possibilities in mapping the transformations in the aesthetics of colonial symbols from the historical to every day.
‘By the God of my father I cannot tell,’ said Namgay Doola.
‘And who was thy father?’
‘The same that had this gun.’ He showed me his weapon--a Tower musket bearing date 1832 and the stamp of the Honorable East India Company.
‘And thy father’s name?’ said I.
‘Timlay Doola,’ said he. ‘At the first, I being then a little child, it is in my mind that he wore a red coat.’
‘Of that I have no doubt. But repeat the name of thy father thrice or four times.’
He obeyed, and I understood whence the puzzling accent in his speech came. ‘Thimla Dhula,’ said he excitedly. ‘To this hour I worship his God.’
‘May I see that God?’
‘In a little while--at twilight time.’
…
Dir bane mard-i-yemendir
To weeree ala gee.
I was puzzled no longer. Again and again, they crooned, as if their hearts would break, their version of the chorus of the Wearing of the Green--
They’re hanging men and women too, for the wearing of the green.35
Highland Deaths: Cemeteries and Graves in the Mountains
The Battle of Tukula was a series of confrontations between Tibetan men and British soldiers between 1886 to 1888, which started with the occupation of Gnathang by Tibetan men. These men are remembered in history as ‘militia’ who constructed a two km long wall at Tukula pass to prevent the advances of the British soldier under Col. Thomas Graham of the Royal Artillery Regiment. His troops were assigned to evict the Tibetan men along with the 2nd Derbyshire Regiment, 32nd Sikh Pioneers Infantry and the 13th Bengal Native Infantry who fought in the mountains. However, even though this battle was responsible for accelerating the advances of the British to Tibet, it has often been treated as a forgotten battle fought in ‘terra incognita’ places of the mountains. As such, the ignorance of these high places and its people has resulted not only in the ‘scant attention’ devoted to the conflict till date in Western scholarship, but has also affected the historical memory of these highlands. As argued by Cheng,36 the infamous battle has been vaguely mentioned in different perspectives. Whether it has been called as the ‘Sikkim Expedition’ or ‘First British invasion of Tibet’, there is still more to be explored than what has already been documented. One aspect is the deployment of young Irish soldiers in the British army who died young in the highlands of Gnathang. Even today, these highlands remain under the control of the military, from being spaces controlled by the British then and the Indian army now. The presence of the military in these regions for decades is responsible for distorted history, under development of the place and ignorance in presenting Buddhists from Tibet and Sikkim. Cheng points out how the Sikkimese, Bhutanese, and Nepalis provided intel to the British troops against the Tibetan army they saw as enemies. Despite having the same cultural roots and sharing geographical boundaries, Buddhists of these different regions have been homogenised and portrayed as enemies.
The presence of these young army men highlights the kind of loneliness and difficult terrain encountered in the highlands. What is interesting to note is that most of the soldiers who met untimely death were Irish in their twenties. The racial prejudices within the British army are evident in the treatment of the Irish soldier as ‘foolish, drunkard and laughable’,37 their enlistment for the sake of adding only hands and not heads and seeing them as ‘colonial administrators for winning the Empire rather than ruling. As British army saw a mixture of races, the deployment of young Irish soldiers in the mountains may have been because of their connection to the highlands and their ability to have been accustomed in dealing with altitudes.
Lack of proper roads, sparse settlement, and the harsh climate often resulted in loneliness in these new mountains they had to get used to. Geographical difficulties aside, the Irish soldiers faced prejudices from the Indian people too. One reason was that they too were a colonised race and the other was their location. Bubb38 mentions a memoir of an Indian sepoy authored by Sita Ram that gives approval of ‘true English sahibs, not sahibs from hilly island’.39 The highlands, be it the Eastern Himalayas or Ireland, seem to have been marginalised, but the degree to which they are marginalised varies from location and culture. The former is undoubtedly a more ‘under examined ‘region of the world’40 and therefore, the people belonging here, be they the permanent inhabitants or the ones who come for a certain duration of time, especially soldiers, are exposed to loneliness and economic disbalance simultaneously.
The Connaught Rangers, who are said to celebrate anniversaries of their victories, also laid graves of their fellow comrades who died in such battles.41 Tending graves, helping in their restoration and remembering the names of lives lost, the bacsa still works at keeping the material memory of Christianity intact in the colonies they once ruled. However, what is interesting to notice here is the fact that as much as the graves in the plains are looked after or mentioned in media, the same attention is not given to the graves built in the highlands. Adding depth to this dimension of loneliness and underrepresentation is the construction of the British War Memorial at Gnathang, consisting of thirteen graves of soldiers, mostly from the Connaught Rangers. Based on Sikkim records, the memorial stone is regarded sacred to the memory of the undermentioned men of the Connaught Rangers and also has a stone erected in the memory of Sergt. R Moloney who died at Gnathang two years after the battle at the age of 20. Beyond the romantic undermining of human history lies the possibility of seeing the mountains as more than just geographical entities in the kind of work done by cultural geographers like Denis Cosgrave, Peter Bayers, Veronica Della Dora and others who have been emphasising the need to look at the ways a place denotes not just location but ‘relationship between location and human experience’.42
Conclusion
From the depiction of the missionary figures in Anglo-Indian fiction to martyr narratives about the Christian soldiers in military fiction, biographies and memoirs, it is clearly established that the relationship between the military and religion shaped the workings of colonisation deeply. The British (including Irish, Scottish and Welsh) military men held firmly to their religious beliefs that deepened in patriotic fervour, especially in the years following the Mutiny of 1857. The post Mutiny years saw a marked presence and involvement of women as wives, nurses, and caregivers, forging a formidable category of true Christian women, standing by their men’s sides as they battled Indian rebels from time to time who were even referred to as ‘incarnate devils’.
While reflecting on the life of Christianity in India, a close study of material memory and gothic narratives of alterity and the uncanny reveal themselves as lesser-explored phenomena to locate and trace the evolutions and transformations in the narrative of the religion itself. These sites, narratives, structures and their affective aesthetics invite us to understand religious life, not predictably led within institutionalised patterns of living only but as everyday practices and, like any practice of living, leaving behind objects and stories to be processed. Graves, tombstones, memorials, objects, songs, phrases and even geographical memory are crucial elements of the life of Christianity in the Himalayas. Fahlander and Oestigaard have argued for the relevance of studying the materiality of death.43 They comment on how the soteriological and eschatological conceptions remain the same for a community. However, the responses to these conceptions can be understood clearly through the materiality of body, practice, interments, memory, social change, age, sex and gender, and eternity. Taking this argument further, we propose that the postcolonial dimensions of the materiality of death can richly highlight the afterlife of Christianity in India, a religion whose association with colonisation is inseparable. Some aspects of exploring the afterlife of Indian Christianity could include an inquiry into social relationships, local memory and spatiality, urban planning and cultural attitudes. Also, historical and archaeological neglect and obfuscating of the spiritual dimensions of death remind us of the need to archive, interview, transcribe and document local histories and oral narratives of people and communities. This paper is a small attempt at unearthing and contextualising colonial Christianity in the north-eastern part of India with the hope of understanding religion and geography in a new light.
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Pande, Sita Ram. From Sepoy to Subedar: Being the life and adventure of Subedar Sita Ram, a native officer of the Bengal Army written and related by himself (London and New York: Routledge. 1861).
Rand, Gavin., and Bates, Crispin. Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857, Vol.4 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2013).
Schwamenfeld, Steven. “The Foundation of British Strength”: National Identity and the British Common Soldier (Dissertation, Florida State University, 2007).
Silvestri, Micheal. Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
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Zelinsky, Wilbur. “The Gravestone Index: Tracking Personal Religiosity Across Nations, Regions and Periods.” The Geographical Review 97 (4) (October 2007), 441–466.
Elizabeth Buettner, ‘Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia in Postcolonial Britain and India’, History and Memory 18:1 (Spring/summer 2006), 5–42, at 7.
Wilbur Zelinsky, ‘The Gravestone Index: Tracking Personal Religiosity Across Nations, Regions and Periods’, The Geographical Review 97:4 (October 2007), 441–466, at 441.
‘Postcolonial gothic imaginary’ refers to the evolutions in the genre of gothic literature and popular culture which engagewith postcolonial concerns of cultural domination, native resistance, gender and caste/class intersectionalities.
Buettner, ‘Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia in Postcolonial Britain and India’, 10.
The Secretaries to the Conference, eds, Conference on Missions held in 1860 at Liverpool (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1860), p.338.
Micheal Silvestri, Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 80.
Silvestri, Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory, p.81.
Olive Anderson, ‘The Growth of Christian Militarism in Mid-Victorian Britain’, The English Historical Review 86:338 (Jan 1971), 46–72, at 61.
Pradip Barua, ‘Inventing Race: The British and India’s Martial Races’, The Historian 58:1 (Autumn 1995), 107–116; Tejimala Gurung, ‘The Making of Gurkhas as a “Martial Race” in Colonial India: Theory and Practice’, Proceedings of the Indian Historical Congress 75, Platinum Jubilee (2014), 520–529.
Crispin Bates and Marina Carter, ‘Holy Warriors: Religion as Military Modus Operandi’, in Gavin Rand and Crispin Bates, eds, Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857, vol.4 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2013), pp. 41–60.
Anderson, ‘The Growth of Christian Militarism in Mid-Victorian Britain’, and Ian Copland, ‘Christianity as an Arm of Empire: The Ambiguous Case of India under the Company, C. 1813–1858’, The Historical Journal 49:4 (Dec 2006), 1025–1054 have argued at length to demonstrate the Christianization and the propagation of the patriotic and religious sentiment in the British army.
In the context of the recruitment of Irish soldiers, Schwamenfeld points out that it was only by 1799 that the Protestant oath was no longer necessary for recruitment in the army. The suspicion of Irish Catholics was a major factor and it is important to note that memoirs and records of soldiers of the Catholic faith also testify to their solidarities with Protestant Britons even when surrounded by Catholics from a different race/country. For details, see Steven Schwamenfeld, The Foundation of British Strength: National Identity and the British Common Soldier (Dissertation, Florida State University, 2007).
Michael Snape has studied the role and scope of pre-Mutiny to Mutiny Chaplaincy in the British army, drawing attention the challenges, compromises and adjustments of priests and pastors during the war years in India. See Michael Snape, ‘British Military Chaplaincy in Early Victorian India’, Cahiers victoriens et edouardiens (66 Automne, 2007).
Anderson, ‘The Growth of Christian Militarism in Mid-Victorian Britain’, 64.
Alex McKay, Missionary Medicine and the Rise of Kalimpong. Their Footprints Remain: Biomedical Beginnings Across the Indo-Tibetan Frontier (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), pp. 55–84.
Denis Cosgrove and Veronica della Dora, High Places: Cultural Geographies of Mountains, Ice and Science (London: I.B. Tauris and Co Ltd, 2009).
Jill Didur, ‘Guns & Roses: Reading the picturesque archive in Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain’, Textual Practice 27:3 (May 2013), 499–522.
Alaknanda Bagchi, ‘Of Nuns and Palaces: Rumer Godden’s “Black Narcissus’’’, Christianity and Literature 45:1 (Autumn 1995), 53–66.
Jon Mathieu, ‘The Globalization of Mountain Perception: How much of a Western Imposition?’, Summerhill iias Review, xx:1(Summer 2014), 8–17.
Bagchi, ‘Of Nuns and Palaces: Rumer Godden’s “Black Narcissus’’’, 53–66, at 59.
Rumer Godden, Black Narcissus (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1939), p.9.
Rudyard Kipling, Kim (UK: Macmillan & Co., 1901), p. 4.
Alexander Bubb, ‘Life of the Irish Soldier in India: Representations and Self-Representations 1857–1922’, Modern Asian Studies 46:4 (July 2012), 769–813, at 792.
Peter Hopkirk, The Quest for Kim: In Search of Kipling’s Great Game (USA: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p.21
Gautam Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 116.
McKay, ‘Missionary Medicine and the Rise of Kalimpong’; Cheng Yi, ‘Expedition turned Invasion: The 1888 Sikkim Expedition through British, Indian and Chinese eyes’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 31:4 (April 2021), 803–829.
Susan Walcott, ‘Bordering the Eastern Himalaya: Boundaries, Passes, Power Contestations’, Geopolitics 15:1 (January 2010), 62–81.
George Bogle’s diary mentions that he was the first British envoy to be sent to Tibet and how the Tibetans stared at him during his stay at Panchen Lama’s monastery. See Lezlee Halper, Tibet An Unfinished Story, p.9.
Kenneth McNeil, ‘“Petticoated Devils”: Scottish Highland Soldiers in British accounts of the Indian Rebellion’, Prose Studies 23:3 (December 2000),.77–94, at 79–83.
Recorded as such on the Indian Army stone inscription at Tukula, Sikkim, May 2022.
Stephen Conway, ‘War and National Identity in the Mid-eighteenth-Century British Isles’, The English Historical Review 116:468 (Sep 2001), 863–893, at 866.
Alzena Mac-Donald-D’Costa, ‘India’s uncanny: Anglo-Indians as (post) colonial Gothic’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 23:3 (2009), 335–349.
By the time this paper was completed, Brother Patrick left us in October 2022. With him, pneumonic codes of everyday spirituality in the context of the materiality of death are lost, especially as we try to understand the patterns of living (and dying) in the life of minority religions.
Kipling, Life’s Handicap, pp. 331–333. This Irish ballad talks about the repression faced by the supporters of the Irish rebellion (1798). Apart from Kipling’s short story, we find a reference to this song in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936), a popular novel about the American Civil War. It is interesting to note that Namgay Doola’s father was wont to hum an Irish ballad that talks about the British atrocities for a rebellion centred on religious denominational differences, while Kipling is exploiting British patriotism by creating nostalgic piety for an Irish soldier of the British army.
Cheng Yi, ‘Expedition turned Invasion: The 1888 Sikkim Expedition through British, Indian and Chinese eyes’.
Alexander Bubb, ‘Life of the Irish Soldier in India: Representations and Self-Representations 1857–1922’, pp. 769–813, at 770.
Bubb, ‘Life of the Irish Soldier in India: Representations and Self-Representations 1857–1922’.
Sita Ram Pande, From Sepoy to Subedar: Being the life and adventure of Subedar Sita Ram, a native officer of the Bengal Army written and related by himself (London and New York: Routledge, 1861), p.788.
Walcott, ‘Bordering the Eastern Himalaya: Boundaries, Passes, Power Contestations’, Geopolitics 15:1 (2010), 62–81, at 64.
Bubb, ‘Life of the Irish Soldier in India: Representations and Self-Representations 1857–1922’, 786.