A people with no writing had their beliefs written for them by colonisersCan We Recover a Worldview Lost to Colonialism?

The Ao Naga of northeast India kept no written records before the nineteenth century, and today nearly all of them are Christian, leaving their old worldview only in the words of missionaries and colonial officers.

In northeast India there is a people called the Ao Naga. They had no writing, so everything before the nineteenth century passed down by word of mouth.

Then missionaries arrived, and British officials with them. Today almost every Ao is Christian, and no one practises the old traditions any more.

Who got to write down what they believed

The earliest written accounts came from colonial administrators and missionaries. In 1925 an American sociologist and Baptist missionary, W. C. Smith, called the Ao an example of 'primitive man', and said they worshipped out of fear of 'unknown powers'.

He sorted the good spirits, tsüngrem, from the bad ones, mojing and temenen.

The next year the British official J. P. Mills published another book, arguing that Ao religion was not a set of moral rules but a set of ceremonies for calling on deities for help. He also said Lichaba was chief of the tsüngrem, a kind of god.

The people who wrote about them later were Christians too

The leading experts on Ao pre-Christian religion today are Ao Christian theologians. Working inside a Christian framework, they mainly ask how the old beliefs prepared the ground for the conversion that followed.

The anthropologist Tiatemsu Longkumer tries another route. He borrows the idea of animism — a worldview in which humans are not special, rivers and mountains have spirits, and everyone counts as a 'person' in relation to everyone else.

He thinks Mills got it wrong: the Ao were not amoral. Their morality was living in harmony with the spirit world.

Good and evil were not black and white either. Tsüngrem, mojing and temenen could all act well or badly toward people — helper or troublemaker depended on the situation.

Then there is tanüla, roughly 'soul'. Traditionally it was not separated from the material world. Humans and other spirits all have tanüla, but only humans have several, matching their different inner qualities and outside relationships.

Longkumer admits we can never really know how the Ao saw the world two hundred years ago. But he argues that animism at least lets you see how complex that system was.