Kekhrie Yhome
[dropcap]E[/dropcap]veryone knows that “excessive” alcohol kills! Apart from saving the soul, saving the human liver has been one of Nagaland Baptist Council of Churches’ (NBCC) most celebrated missions (and, oxymoronically, if so to say, defeated achievement!). The utopian dream to send all post-1989 Nagaland habitants to Heaven minus alcohol content in the blood stream is also controversially disputed: given the present state of affairs and mockery in Nagaland as a Dry State.To therefore start the old debate of “for” and “against” Prohibition is a smack of memory and yawningly boring! To be briefly reminded—the two old megalomaniac issues, i.e., “revenue loss” and “failure of implementation,” does not concern this write-up. What is interesting to the whole debate assumes a totally different perspective, only when the historico-cultural is segregated from the doctrinal, only when the political is segregated from the religious.
What has influenced NBCC’s vociferous and fanatical law of providence (primacy of being over praxis) to midwife the birth of Nagaland Liquor Total Prohibition Act, 1989 (NLTPA)? Especially, when such legislations are found to be impractical in free societies? Two major influences may be traced:
Firstly, the import and continuity of Victorian sensibilities through nineteen-century colonization and Western theology, which is still strongly imprinted in the precepts of Naga theological and cultural orientations! Discussing on the drinking habits of the Nagas, one of the earliest Christian missionaries to the Nagas (December 1872), and the first to the Ao Nagas (through Molungkimong Village), the Right Reverend Dr. E.W. Clark, in 1886, observes:
One difficulty is, the Nagas do not get drunk easily. When does the drunkenness begin? It is difficult to say just what is to be called drunkenness. Total abstinence is best.”
When does “drunkenness” begin to take place in a Naga? Such curious anxieties were debated under the theme “Prevailing Vices, Our Treatment of Them,” on the occasion of “Gospel Destitution About Assam” [The Assam Mission of the American Baptist Missionary Union, The Assam Mission of The American Baptist Missionary Union: Papers and Discussions of the Jubilee Conference, Nowgong, December 18-29, 1886 (Calcutta: J.W. Thomas Baptist Mission Press, 1887), p. 230.].
What was making the Nagas drunk in the last quarter of nineteenth century? What happens when intoxication takes place? “Maud-drinking,” as the brews are called, which the American Baptists went on to argue: “There is no excuse for the Assamese, but there seems to be for the Nagas, as the rice is almost all damaged. They ferment the rice, and it becomes eatable. So far, good; but as fermentation proceeds, the liquid which trickles out is intoxicating. This they [Nagas] drink. It seems that the best thing would be to eat the fermented rice, but not drink the liquid. But the former leads to the latter, so we think we must teach them to dispense with both, lest the temple of the Holy Ghost be [defiled]” (Ibid., p. 228.).
Secondly, the privileging of liquid spirits over any other allure of ‘gift’ politics—constructed during the colonial times as the ultimate prototype of seducing the Nagas—comes as an influence that is well within the narrative. As John Butler, (Travels and Adventures in the Province of Assam, 1885, p. 22.) cites an example: “In the afternoon, a few Rengmah Nagahs visited us, and presented a fowl and a little rice, for which civility we gave them a bottle of spirituous liquor, which they prized more than money or any other remuneration” (quoted in Verrier Elwin, Nagaland, p. 356.).
With such improvised taming of savagery through tempting indulgence, the historicized “rum politics” in recent Naga history equally proved to be a beckoner for the pathological. Nagas, like many indigenous peoples, particularly Aborigines of Australia, took to drinking—not because there was a gallant award for it but because of unmitigated social depression that could not be arrested in a radically changing environment of social and cultural habitus. The then context of prohibition movement therein was fertile—and individual fatalities are approached through limitless invocation of the social evil, and also as a respond to the moral legitimacy of a new social category that was fast emerging—the nuclear family over the community.
In 19th-century—one does not, of course, expect Nagas to be sipping or toasting scotch or blended whiskeys—or, least, the Bourbon type that was popularly beginning to be brewed in evangelical America then. Although the Rev. Clark found it actively difficult to define when exactly a person is in a state of “drunkenness”—his abhorrence for the fermented element of “rice,” which was culturally alienating for American palette, was outrightly found to be disgusting. By invoking the legend of Mordiford’s Wyvern and Maud, evil and the devil was categorized into the food habits of the Nagas as maud-drinking. “Total abstinence,” in Clark’s own words and parroted even today by NBCC, being not only the uncanny orthodox solution, but also recommended as the “best.”
To drink or not to drink, or to lift the prohibition of Dry State or not, one does not require any postcolonial theologizing or doctrinal indigenizing, in the Naga context. Religion, although culturally rooted by now, is still experimental, lacking the intellectual rigor of a traditional culture. It is not so much the fear of the Lord but the fear of a predominantly religious denomination, based on the simple calculus of vote-swings in electoral politics, wherein various political parties have had also desisted from testing the wrath (not of the God but) of the general public, by fearing to lift the Nagaland Liquor Total Prohibition Act.
It is not by researching the alcohol content of Jesus’ first miracle—the wine converted from water—or by debating the statistics that out of the 60 legislators elected to the present 12th Nagaland Legislative Assembly, only four are teetotalers—that the issue of Dry State is expected to be put into perspective!
At the core of NBCC’s Alcohol Prohibition campaign, both philosophically and onto-theologically, is the need to evaluate the cognitive structures of Naga cultural and social reasoning! The seduction laws of physical look as the primary appeal for the normal (judgemental) and the closure of the pathological as a subjugated reason is central to NBCC’s Cherry Shoeshine erudition for Dry State. The premise of ideological stubbornness woven into an aesthetic judgement is deeply rooted in cognitive phenomenology, and the power of exercising such righteousness as decreed is a theological misinterpretation of a historicized faith, much in tune with the usual excuse of pariah edicts in medieval sophistry. There is nothing spiritual in containing liquid spirits, whether it is defended as justified from a teleological view: of causes-and-effects in the origin of evil!
Similarly, the ability of a religious denomination to exercise not only control over the public space but also literally foreground its role in the legislative (rex inutilis)—is an unsubstantiated claim that democratic principles govern the power of the public. The church has no right to enforce its moral policing into governance. The church is free to interpret, but should not legislate! To drink or not to drink is not a moral-religious issue in the first place; we cannot afford for it to be converted into religious tenet that constrict individual choice (however, different from Christianity’s problem with Stoic’s freewill of men)! The road to evil in pastoral deliverance is not negotiable with absolute terms of power and intolerance.
The fascinating ethos of modern but fragile Naga public culture—fabricated on the metaphors of very ancient religions and civilizations—needs to move away from the colourful and mimicry culture of sloganeering and befooling. Unless a foundation of reason and governmentality is charted into the course of our everyday politics or future polity, the militancy of make-believe virtuosity or satanic fears shall continue to perpetuate the psyche of a theocratic society. What social or political mercies do we nitwit ourselves with Dry State or, for that matter, Nagaland for Christ? But for the quick-fix sensual religion, pleasing to the senses, as a cognitive logic of interplay between absence and presence! Feeling good, with sacramental faith alone, does not really change society or abide upstanding progress!
