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himself if he gives to the chief ‘payment for board of house hold members’ (chhokha), one family will be allowed to ransom themselves.

If the sei controversy is studied from the postcolonial perspective, the Colonial administrators, with good intentions tried to protect the Mara custom, tradition and culture for administrative purposes.

1.      Reflection on Medical Mission

In this section the author wants to present the medical mission which enlightened and completely changed the philosophy of medicines in connection with sacrifices to evil spirits in the Mara context. The Mara philosophy and world view before the coming of the British and the Christian mission was that any sickness was ascribed or attributed to the work of malignant evil spirits. John Hughes Morris writes, “The average Lushais-Chins-Maras had more faith in a tuft of goat’s hair or in a number of dog’s teeth strung around his neck, than all the medicines in the world!”[1] So the appeasement of the evil spirits and offering sacrifices were the major means to cure sick people.

The founder of the Lakher pioneer Mission had studied medicine before coming as a Missionary into Maraland. His mission was with the knowledge of medication. Thus, the Mara Missionaries work was also called Medical Mission.

Medical mission by Missionaries not only brought physical healing, but also changed the Mara world view in terms of psychological, intellectual and spiritual changes. Sacrifices to evil spirits for cure were more expensive than buying medicine. The Mara society greatly benefited from the medical mission and its education and enlightenment in all spheres of life. In other words, it was the medical mission that changed the minds of the Maras and enlightened and transformed their attitudes to evil spirits and this played a vital role in a transformation of Mara culture and religion. Communication of the gospel by means of medicine and prayer proved to be a wise missionary method in a society where people associated sickness with evil spirits and religion.

2.      Education was a means for conversion

The term conversion has been used with different spectrums of meaning according to the context in which it is used. It can mean conversion of currencies, change of religious affiliation, and experience of inner change among Christians. The main concern in this section is to study religious conversion from the perspective of Mara Christians, with a view to finding correlation between personal and social change. Let us first briefly look at the matter of religious conversions and the deep theological and sociological questions they raise. According to R.S. Sugirtharajah, religious conversion means a shift from one religion to another, but also more importantly, from one community to another. It is a change of outlook and an orienting of one’s life to a different focal point, but it also means leaving one’s own cultural heritage and joining a Christian community whose style of worship and church structure follows western cultural patterns.[2] Therefore conversion raises many theological issues such as: Is one religion superior to the other? What aspects of culture and social life should a convert is encouraged to preserve? In what way should he or she be helped to make use of his or her rich tradition to interpret the new faith? Should one leave one’s own cultural social tradition entirely in accepting another faith?

Trusting in the power of the western education and the universality of English literature, missionaries often ignored some of the burning issues of the day and were concerned only about converting and Christianizing the people. For example, the introduction of the Commission III Report of the World Missionary Conference in 1910 confessed that it considered education only as a means, either direct or indirect, to fulfill the great commission in Matthew to make disciples of all nations and to baptize them.[3] This observation was in agreement with a majority of educational missionaries including Alexander Duff, who argues that the Colonial government was a powerful force, sent by God to Christianize India and the government should do all in its power ‘for the conversion of a hundred and thirty millions of idolaters’.[4] Jonathan Ingleby, who worked for more than twenty years in education in India, agreed that the main British supporters of the Indian mission saw the conversion of the heathen as the missionary primary task.[5] The long running debate as to whether the men and women who gave themselves entirely to educational work were really missionaries was an indication of this concern. The dispute between the Serampore missionaries and the BMS had partly to do with the Serampore College offering a general education which according to its critics had lost its evangelistic cutting edge. This means that officers of the missionary societies wished to emphasise the task of the missionary as first and foremost converting non-Christians and building up the church. The failure to obtain conversions might have been expected to lead to the

Education as justification for Colonial Rule closing down of the schools, colleges and the diversion of resources into other enterprises.

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[1] John Hughes Morris, In the Step of the Good Physician: The Story of Medical Missions (Canarvon: The Calvinistic Book Agency, 1938), 57. Hereafter cited as ‘Morris, Medical Missions’.

[2] R.S. Sugirtharajah, ed., Voices from the Margin Interpreting the Bible in the Third World (New York: Orbis/SPCK, New Edition second impression, 1997), 307.

[3] Report of Commission III, Education in relation to the Christianisation of National Life, World Missionary Conference, 1910 (Edinburgh and London: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier), 16.

[4] George Smith, The Life of Alexander Duff, 291, quoted in Jacob S. Dharmaraj, Colonialism and Christian Mission: Postcolonial Reflections (Delhi: ISPCK, 1993), 70. Hereafter cited as ‘Dharmaraj, Colonialism’.

[5] Jonathan Ingleby, Missionaries, Education and India: Issues in Protestant Missionary Education in the Long Nineteenth Century (Delhi: ISPCK, 2000), 368. Hereafter cited as ‘Jonathan Ingleby, Missionaries Education’.