[ Stephen Naulak SJ ]
Three Jesuits from Karnataka – Stany Coelho, Ligoury Castelino and Raymond D’Souza – reached Kohima, the capital of Nagaland, in April 1970 to open the Nagaland Jesuit Mission. This mission has today grown into its highest administrative unit of a province that spreads to the whole of the Northeast.
Their superior general (international head based in Rome), Dr Arturo Sosa will officially inaugurate the Kohima Jesuit Province on 10 March in Umbhir in Ri Bhoi district of Meghalaya. For all the 170 Jesuits of the Northeast (more than 100 of them of Northeastern origin), it is a moment to give thanks to the almighty and to their collaborators.
The origin of this mission lies in the request of John Bosco Jasokie, education minister, later chief minister, of Nagaland, to the Church authorities to send Jesuits to Nagaland to open schools in his state that was in the throes of a nationalist struggle but was educationally neglected. He viewed education as an alternative to armed struggle and a path towards peace. At their meeting in October 1969, the heads of all the Jesuit units of India entrusted this task to the Jesuits of Karnataka, who had enough men to spare for this distant mission. That is how the three pioneers from Karnataka launched the mission with support from some Salesian priests, with a mass in Kohima on 22 April, 1970.
Though invited by the minister of education to open institutions in Jotsoma and Kohima, the pioneers met with opposition from some vested interests. That is when they fell back on the Jesuit vision of being available where the need was the greatest. Their search for alternative locations took them to Jakhama, 15 kilometres from Kohima. They saw the finger of god in this apparent setback and realised that the rural tribal areas did not have access to education while there were some institutions in Kohima and Dimapur to which a small tribal elite and non-tribal bureaucrats and traders sent their children. They felt that the greatest need was in the tribal villages without access to education. Thus, from this apparent setback evolved a policy that in the Northeast all the Jesuit institutions would be in its tribal villages.
But for exceptions, they have tried to follow this principle during the last 55 years of their presence in the Northeast. During the first 25 years, they focused on the southern Angami and the Chakesang areas of Nagaland. In order to bring schools close to children, in southern Angami they followed the ‘garland school system’ of a primary school in each village, a middle school for a hub of villages, and Loyola High School in Jakhama. Three of the middle schools have grown into high schools and Loyola has become a HS School.
When need arose of higher education for the products of their schools, in 1985 they opened St Joseph’s College, Jakhama. All the centres in southern Angami, the eight centres in eastern Nagaland and four others established in the Imphal valley combined education with the pastoral and social sectors because intrinsic to the Jesuit vision is to train ‘men and women for others’ who are at the service of their society.
The third part of their vision of availability is to open institutions, build them up, hand them over to others if required, and move on to areas with greater need. That need arose in the 1990s, when invitations to open Jesuit institutions came from states other then Nagaland and Manipur, but they did not have enough men to respond to these needs. They, therefore, handed over to others, seven out of eight centres in eastern Nagaland, St Joshep’s College and two other centres in the southern Angami area in order to free men for work in the rest of the Northeast. In this response too, they opted for communities whose need was the greatest.
In Assam they chose the Adivasi tea garden workers, the most exploited community in the region. Among them they have established a college and seven schools and parishes. The next call came from the Dimasa of Dima Hasao district. Among them they have six centres, one of which they have handed over to others. In Meghalaya they have two colleges and five schools.
From the time they decided to move beyond Nagaland, their eyes were on Arunachal Pradesh, the Land of the Rising Sun. They opted for the Aka in West Kameng district, since they were among the educationally neglected communities. Well aware that education is the best tool to develop a society, they opened St Xavier’s School in Palizi in 1998 with Paul Coelho as its principal. Other centres followed in Bana, Bomdila, Buragaon, Hulubro, Thrizino and Bhalukpong. Apart from education, Vijay D’Souza, who was teaching at Palizi and was learning the local language, realised that Aka was an endangered language. Hardly 40 percent of the Aka spoke their mother tongue at home. Over the last two decades he has worked with Aka leaders and intellectuals to revive the language. Since they did not have a script and no written literature, he worked with the community to develop an internationally recognised orthography based on the Roman script, and to write the first books in that language. Today, around 80 percent of the Aka speak their mother tongue at home. After completing his doctorate in linguistics at the Oxford, Dr D’Souza has been entrusted with the task of developing the North Eastern Institute of Language and Culture (NEILAC) to support these processes in the whole of the Northeast.
At the turn of the century, the Jesuits realised that the region known for its nationalist struggles and ethnic conflicts needed a pool of local socially committed young researchers to respond to its needs. Dr Walter Fernandes was asked to develop a research institute that would focus on helping the youths of the region to look at the socio-political issues of the Northeast and search for solutions together.
The North Eastern Social Research Centre has done that with the young researchers of the region for the last 26 years. To build legal awareness among the tea garden workers and others who needed legal support, in 2007 Ravi Sagar started the Legal Cell for Human Rights, now headed by Owen Chourappa.
It is this vision of responding to the greatest need, serving the most excluded and forming men and women for others that the 170 Jesuits of the new Kohima Jesuit Province have to commit themselves to once again. They have to live up to this call through their mission of education, social action, culture, peace-building and spiritual work. While committing themselves to this mission they look with gratitude at the last 55 years of love and service that became a reality because of people’s support. (The author teaches at St Xavier’s High School, Palizi, and can be reached at Northeast.aulaksj@gmail.com)
