Glenn C. Kharkongor
Research and Reflection
Thomas Jones has been placed on a pedestal in our Khasi Hills. The man has been canonised by a holiday, held up as the father of the Khasi alphabet in schools, and the legacy has been embellished by a new tombstone laid in 2018 by the Khasi Jaintia Presbyterian Synod. It further elevated him as the Father of Khasi Literature. All controversies and contestations about this pivotal figure in our colonial history have seemingly been laid to rest in peace.
Andrew May, professor of history at the University of Melbourne recently delivered the First Thomas Jones Oration at Martin Luther Christian University. This great-great grandson of Thomas Jones has scoured the archives in an obsessive quest for revealing the real Thomas Jones. No more the detached academician, May’s pursuit is an emotional journey in which he is a participant observer, albeit of historical facts rather than of contemporary gleanings. This entanglement provides us with a sentimental study that evokes the empathy of the listener.
This is so very tribal: embedding concepts and facts into a narrative that centralises the story teller. Positionality, meaning the stated stance of the researcher is growing in importance as a tool in ethnographic studies. In his oration May demonstrated this self-disclosure. He went further by first paying his respects to the Indigenous peoples of the land where he works, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation in what is now called Australia. In doing so he paid his respects to his tribal audience in Shillong.
Indeed, Bah Andrew is rightfully and legally one among us. This claim is staked on a written bequest by “Oo Boomon, the Priest of Mowleem, and the … representatives of five families (who) have agreed and consented of our own good will to allow the Revd Thomas Jones to build & make gardens on the Shillong land”. This document goes on to extend the bequest to the descendants of Thomas Jones.
Resolution and Redemption
Reading ‘against the grain’, May’s study of his ancestor seems to have a four-point agenda: firstly, the wish to ameliorate the harsh judgement of the Church in punishing him for his marriage to the 15 year-old Emma Catell. While such a liaison would hardly have raised an eyebrow among the Khasis, it was scandalous for the strait-laced Welsh Calvinist Methodists and Jones was summarily dismissed from the service of the church.
Secondly, to draw attention to the nepotism, corruption and exploitation of the Khasis by the British government, blatantly supported by the local colonial courts, Jones became a champion of poor Khasi farmers who were grossly underpaid for their oranges by British businessmen. Those that protested at this cruel extortion were “caught and tied up by the heels or neck or arms & hung to trees &c. until they are (at) the point of death and they or their friends promise to give any sum it may the pleasure of the parties to demand – their pigs & fowls are shot & and their women violated and their money extorted at the point of the Company’s Bayonet”.
In protest, Jones wrote petitions and long letters to the government pleading the cause of the ill-treated Khasis. These petitions, preserved in the volumes of the Bengal Criminal Judicial Consultations contain lines such as “…if I kept silent, I would be a partaker of the sins of their oppressors” and “I therefore crave the considerations of Govt not only on my own behalf but on behalf of thousands of oppressed Kassias whose welfare is inseparable from mine”. His petitions fell on deaf ears.
Thirdly, there has been charge of linguistic imperialism in the paternalist and racist manipulation of the Khasi language in makings translations into English. Language is an instrument of power in the hands of the dominant. The Reverend Hugh Roberts described the Khasis as ‘absolutely unreliable’ translators and wished the language to be rid of its ‘barbarisms’ and ‘ugly brutal sounds’. In the effort to make a script for the Khasi language and create published materials, a panoply of actors were involved: William Carey, Alexander Lish and others. May says, “At best, the missionaries messed and meddled with language; at worst they destroyed something of it”.
May absolves his forbear of deliberate complicity in this linguistic conspiracy, pointing out that Jones came with the mandate for attainment of the language spoken by the natives as his first objective. Jones acknowledges the help he received from two young Khasi lads who knew a little English and taught him Khasi pronunciation and grammar. Credit needs to be given to these joint efforts, just as Tenzing Norgay helped Hillary to the summit of Mt Everest.
Fourthly, May concedes the “intergenerational damage to culture, identity and self-respect” and regrets the participation of his family “in the long march of imperialism”. He phrases this as an “uncomfortable legacy to sit with…in the smoke haze of settler-colonialism”.
But the Jones family, impoverished to begin with, gained no material advantage unlike many of their rapacious co-colonialists. Their gains were mixed, a legacy of respect in the Khasi Hills, but stains of scandal and vilification in the church and government records. Jones himself became a victim of the corrupt colonial government and courts. In the end he was a man on the run, hounded by these authorities, his servants beaten, his wife and relatives terrorised and his house vandalised.
His compassion for the Khasis are seen in several examples. At the request of the people of Nartiang, Jones wrote a petition to the Political Agent requesting him to release their priest from prison and to allow them to conduct their puja. He added that “there is no other European that knows so much about the case as I do”. He taught the locals carpentry, how to improve their iron works and make rice beer.
May clings to “the good in this man” who stood amidst the ideological hypocrisies and ruins of empire as an example of humanism. “Thomas Jones was neither saint nor sinner, coward nor prophet – he was just a man, like you and I.”
This historian-grandson craves exoneration for his ancestor and his impassioned research and its conclusions have indeed achieved a posthumous absolution for Thomas Jones. It is also a monumental addition to the historical record.
Reconciliation
For those who study the predations of colonialism, the book Orientalism by Edward Said was a release of captive minds. It enables us to correctly place supposed classics like Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Empire and Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations as apologia for racial domination.
May on the other hand, admirably calls for reconciliation. He quotes Aristotle’s categories of orations, focusing on the ‘deliberative’ speech which exhorts the audience to action. The imprinted and integrated effects and damage of the imperial and missionary enterprise is impossible to erase. But we can move on, beyond the idolization of Thomas Jones, by subliming it into something better.
The Khasi community and its academicians could re-appraise the historical records and come to a rapprochement. Take the best of this double-edged legacy and intertwine it with the richness of Khasi tradition, knowledge and worldview, using it to inform our educational system and our evolving social norms so as to create a destiny of purpose.
(The author is chancellor of Martin Luther Christian University)