Tuesday, November 5, 2024
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Fifty Years of Jesuits in the Northeast

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Walter Fernandes

 

On 22nd April 1970 two Jesuits from Karnataka, Liguory Castelino and Raymond D’Souza arrived in Kohima to begin their mission in the Northeast. The third, Fr Stany Coelho reached a few days later. They had come at the invitation of the Nagaland Minister of Education, Mr. John Baptist Jasokie whose sons were studying at the Jesuit-run St Joseph’s College, Bangalore. As such he and some other cabinet ministers whose sons were studying at the Jesuit-run North Point College, Darjeeling knew the Jesuits. So when they felt that the state required good facilities of education, a consensus arose that the Jesuits were the best suited for it. Accordingly Jasokie approached Bishop Hubert Rozario who in his turn wrote to the Jesuit Superior General who followed it up with the Jesuits of Calcutta. Since the Calcutta province did not have enough Indian Jesuits to work in this sensitive state, the lot fell on the Karnataka province which had a fairly big number of Indians. A delegation from Karnataka that visited the State gave a positive report. That is the origin of the Nagaland Jesuit Mission which has today become the Kohima Region comprising all seven states of the Northeast.

They were asked to open a school or a college at Kohima, the Nagaland State capital. But they met with opposition from some powerful persons and eventually landed up in Jakhama, fifteen kilometres away where the village offered them a steep abandoned hill that was of no use to anyone and was used as a dumping ground for waste from the army cantonment. The Jesuits had to sink crores of rupees into it in order to turn into what is today the 15-acre Loyola School campus. Amid the disappointment at their failure to open an institution in Kohima they reflected on what it meant to be forced to shift to a village. They realised that an institution in Kohima would have catered to the privileged class of ten percent tribal elite and mostly non-tribal children of bureaucrats and traders. They felt that the finger of God had led them to a village with very little access to education, health and other services. In a village all their students would be from rural tribal families. They considered it a sign from God that all their institutions should be in similar rural areas. That became a policy which they have adhered all over the Northeast for five decades.

Loyola School began to function in March 1971 with only 180 students, 40 of them girls. In order to ensure better access to the tribes, primary schools were built in many neighbouring villages. They improved the access to schools of girls in particular. In the jubilee year 45 to 55 percent of students in their 25 schools in the Northeast are girls. A study done thirty years after their arrival showed that two thirds of the graduates and post-graduates in the Southern Angami area of Nagaland were women. The Jesuits did not have a conscious policy on this issue. It shows the need to study the processes that resulted in it in order to replicate them elsewhere. In 1971 only three out of 11 staff members of Loyola School were Naga, all of them non-teaching. Similar was the situation in much of the Northeast. Teachers had to be recruited from outside the region. School fees were kept low in order not to turn education into a burden on the family. As a result, salaries too were low and staff turnover was high. It showed the need to train local teachers and St Paul Institute of Education, Phesama, opened its doors in early 1978. Its products are found in the primary schools all over the Northeast. As more and more students who completed their high school went to cities like Shillong in search of good colleges, most parents had to sell some of their best land in order to pay for their college education. It could result in poverty and conflicts. The Jesuit response to it was St Joseph’s College, Jakhama which was founded in 1985 and handed over to the Kohima Catholic Diocese in 2000. Today they run a college in the tea garden area of Assam, two in Meghalaya and one in Mizoram. In 1972 they heard the call from Eastern Nagaland and Fr Castelino shifted to the Chakhesang area where more than ten schools and parishe centres were opened, developed and handed over to the diocese. Only Nazareth School and parish at Pfutsero remain in their hands. Then it was the turn of Manipur where they run two parishes and four schools.

That is where the Jesuits found themselves in 1995 twenty five years after their arrival. In that year the Nagaland Mission became the Kohima Region extending to all the Seven Sisters. The Jesuits from Ranchi joined them in the tea garden areas of Assam where they run five parishes and high schools and a college. From Kohima they expanded to Dima Hasao in Assam, to the Aka region in West Kameng in Arunachal and to Meghalaya. Jesuits from Darjeeling run a college in Mizoram and from Kerala they have come to Tripura.

They run several centres in Meghalaya. In 2002 they opened a novitiate in Shillong which was later shifted to Mawshoroh in the Ri Bhoi district. In 2003 a parish was opened at Maweit on the Bangladesh border and one more at Chidimit in the Garo Hills. The latter has been handed over to the Diocese of Tura. Then followed the Mater Dei parish and Loyola School at Dawagre in East Garo Hills and Loyola College in Williamnagar. In 2014 they accepted the Umbir parish carved out of Mowlai Parish by separating from it all the villages in Ri Bhoi District. Two years later they accepted the Syrlein High School and St Paul’s Parish at Jalapet in East Jaintia District. Finally in 2017 it was the turn of Umoid in South West Khasi Hills to have St Xavier’s Higher Secondary School which will become a college during 2020.

In their golden jubilee year the 160 Jesuits of the Northeast are reading the past in order to write the future. There are demands for more colleges and a university. Should they agree to all of them or consolidate their gains or hear the call of the wild from different directions? Will further expansion take them away from their policy of focusing on the rural tribal areas? As they struggle with these questions they are clear that they would not be where they are without the collaboration received from hundreds of people in the Northeast, religious Sisters, committed teachers, catechists, drivers, kitchen staff, village leaders and others who have supported them in their enterprise. They showed their gratitude on 7th March when they celebrated their golden jubilee at the Loyola Campus, Jakhama, in the presence of the Jesuit Superior General, ten bishops, scores of priests and nuns and more than 2,000 people. It was their way of saying to the people of the Northeast, “For all that has been, thanks. For what will be Yes.”

The author is Director of North Eastern Social Research Centre, Guwahati. [email protected]

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