Interviewee: Mr. L.Keivom (LK)
JI: In what way do you think Thangngur’s Christian folk songs (lengkhawm zai) influence the Hmar christians?
LK: With electrical effect. To understand this, one must know the background. Let me explain in the shortest way possible. Christianity came to us along with the British rule. This was our first direct encounter with the western civilization and for that matter, with any established religion and culture. We had little or no problem with the teachings of Christ as it matched very well with our social philosophy and practice ‘tlawmngaina’, a spirit of self-sacrifice for the good of others.
But the new religion introduced to us was already wrapped in westernized culture. To be a Christian, the new believers were under the impression that they had to ape the European style of worshipping and sing songs in their tunes which were completely different from our traditional tunes. Instead of discouraging the aping, the missionaries even went to the extent of discarding our ubiquitous drums from the churches and bragged about doing it. The new converts had to migrate from our culture to an alien culture very different from ours. This was not only inconvenient but a demeaning experience and in some ways, traumatic. The effect is still reverberating in some form or the other to the present day.
Thankfully, when the 1919 revival came, those with spiritual insight including Thangngur as one of the leading lights cut the Gordian knot and burst out into new songs with new tunes close to our traditional beats, a kind of synthesis of Welsh tunes and our traditional tunes. Along with the new hymns with traditional tunes, the discarded drums triumphantly returned to its honored place. The moment they could praise God in our own cultural voice and tune, the foreignness of Christianity soon vanished. It was Thangngur who succinctly reflected this position thus:
Before I knew of my Savior,
I took him as somebody’s God;
But when I read of his gospel,
He’s my Father I deserted.
From then on, they could now see God and the manifestations of his love through the prism of our cultural eyes, hear his voice through the window of our cultural ears, praise him in our cultural voices and tunes and they accepted Christ in droves as their own Savior. The Spirit mightily used hymns composed by Thangngur and others of his day to bring Christ to our doorsteps and our hearth and home. And revival spread like wild fires.
JI: What is your view of the contemporary Hmar Christian hymns in comparison with Lengkhawm zai, namely Thangngur’s Christian folk hymns?
LK: Lengkhawm Zai are locally composed Christian hymns based on traditional tunes. They are meant for community singing. They were the product of 1919 Revival, the third one after 1906 and 1913. The theme of the 1919 Revival was the Cross and the Crucifixion. As I mentioned earlier, it heralded in for the first time many inspired Christian hymns based on traditional tunes which were well suited for group singing with drums. These beautiful hymns, especially Thangngur’s hymns, remain till this day the backbone of christened Hmar culture and literature.
Contemporary Christian hymns in Hmar are not the product of a spiritual revival but individual efforts to meet the need of the generation of the keyboards and the pop culture. The songs they composed generally reflected the age of the gun and drug culture, of corruption in all spheres of life, of hypocrisy and self-deception, of degeneration and rottenness and all kinds of evils afflicting the society. The tunes are pop-based with a thin mix of translated westernised hymns; the lyrics are in a bazaar tongue with little or no depth; and the theological soundness of some of the songs is highly doubtful. Apparently, few are spiritually inspired. They came out easily from the chin and not from the heart and died quickly as they came. The bulk of these hymns did not seem to last more than a season. They are kind of filmy type, written for an album or a concert. Very few may survive.
JI: In the light of Thangngur’s christian folk hymns, how do you understand the spirituality of the Hmar christians?
LK: This is a very difficult and tricky question to answer. Songs and poems or any piece of literature by and large reflect real life drama and the mood of the time. Many of Thangngur’s hymns came out of anguish and travail resulting from the bitter conflict within the church since 1929 when H. H. Coleman dislodged Watkin Roberts, the founder of North East India General Mission (NEIGM) which led to the birth of Indo-Burma Pioneer Mission and the Independent Church of which Thangngur belonged. He depicted his real life experiences in hymns as a spiritual struggle between good and evil which his opponents interpreted as either an indictment of or an allusion to their position and therefore reluctant to sing any of the songs composed by him and his contemporaries loyal to the pioneer missionary.
To understand this position better, it is necessary to recall the background history. When Coleman snatched NEIGM from Watkin Roberts in 1929 for some flimsy but calculated charges, he moved the mission headquarters from Lakhipur to Churachandpur and in collusion with the British officials in Manipur did his best to harass and torture those loyal to the pioneer missionary, leaving at one point of time, only skeletal workers including Thangngur. They suffered innumerable trials and insults but clung faithfully to what they believed was right. They were poorly and irregularly paid and became a public spectacle. But they were happy because of the spiritual gifts bestowed on them and revivals that visited them from time to time. They learnt the secret of contentment in extreme want; faith when nothing was left to hope for; love where deception and ill-will concentrated. Thangngur’s hymns faithfully depicted their pathetic condition but without any trace of resentment or ill-will.
The Mission led by Coleman, on the other hand, looked upon them as spiritually misguided lots and rejected wholesale any charismatic trend like revival and its offshoots. As a result, they were not touched by any wave of revival and virtually no member from this group composed any new hymn after the mission conflict. The leadership even discouraged their followers to sing Thangngur’s hymns or any other ‘lengkhawm zai in Hmar’ composed by others at that time as they considered them taunting. Reversely, they encouraged their followers to sing only hymns translated from English in bazaar language. Any sign of charismatic expression like clapping of hands or quick beating of drums was suspect. This was generally the position till 1960 when the new wave of born-again teaching removed their long held reservation against revivalism.
I hope the above background roughly explains the mixed attitude and reaction of our christened community towards Thangngur’s hymns. One man’s spiritual food can be a deadly poison for another man. But truth, like a refined gold, cannot be tarnished. His spiritually inspired hymns are timeless and ageless. Time has repeatedly vindicated Thangngur and his works during his life time and after his death. He was the recipient of the highest number of awards given out during the celebrations of the Gospel Centenary of 2010 in South West Manipur. He has recently been selected to be one of the four leading poets to be honored in April 2011 by installing his bust at the Poets’ Corner known as Hla Kungpui Mual at Khawbung in South Mizoram, the first poet ever held this honor from Manipur.
JI: What elements make Thangngur’s christian folk hymns so different?
LK: Thangngur’s poetic genius is unquestionable. To me, his hymns are different genres from other hymns in Hmar for the following reasons: (1) His successful and measured blending of thoughts, ideas, words and imageries into a beautiful poetic form and hymn with tunes reflecting the mood of the subject and object described; (2) His exceptional mastery of language and cultural history which helped in preserving valuable words that would already have been lost and effective explanation of the extent of the love of God ( e g. Van a tieve’n an khoi a, Damna thu hrilna dingin) no other poet of his generation and after could do; (3) Invention of a new tune by blending beats and tunes of various traditional songs and the Welsh tunes known as “Hmar hla thluk or Independent Hla thluk’ which is mainly composed of d m s l with no f and t; (4) Courage and faithfulness to speak out his mind and thoughts with beauty and verve; (5) His unswerving faith in God and his intimate relationship with Him like a close father-son relationship which form the main strain of his hymns; (6) The vivid description of his mystical encounters and experiences with the spiritual world and the angels in a choral piece (Jordan Ral); (7) Theological and cultural soundness of his hymns and many others which brought home Bethlehem and Calvary to our doorsteps.
JI: Do you find any connection between Lengkhawm zai and Hmar christian life and spirituality?
LK: If I have to plant a seed, I have to prepare the ground first and make sure that it germinates and grows well. Every plant grows best in its natural environment because of its adaptability. Planting ideas and philosophy is the same. So also is planting the seed of the gospel which, in its original form, is adaptable in every condition and locality because it for all people. But if I wrapped up the gospel in my culture and tried to sell it to other people in that fashion, they may be reluctant to accept it. One of the reasons why the white missionaries had little success in spreading the gospel in India was their attempt to sell a gospel clothed in the Whiteman’s culture. How could people who had already developed a highly advanced civilization a few thousand years before them accept?
Likewise, gospel has to be sown in the cultural environment of the people and not impose one’s christianized culture on them. Missionaries came to us along with British colonizers and introduced the gospel to us along with their culture. They discarded almost all our cultural practices as pagan and the new converts had no alternative but to fall in line. They now had to worship three entities: God, the Whiteman and his culture. They had to worship and praise God in the Whiteman’s fashion. They had to learn to sing in English tunes completely different from theirs. No more drum to accompany their singing. Their cultural voices were silenced. Until Lengkhawm Zai was introduced, the growth of Christianity was therefore naturally slow and tardy.
As I mentioned earlier, God wanted us to worship him in our cultural way, see him in our cultural eyes, hear and listen to him in our cultural ears, praise him in our cultural tunes and voices and talk to him in our language. We are most comfortable when we sing his praise in our own fashion and lengkhawm zai is the key to release our spiritual energy. I have not seen any of our people dancing by listening or singing Hallelujah Chorus. But there were times during revival gatherings when our people repeatedly sang just one song and danced the whole night without break and they were not tired of it.
JI: Do you think Thangngur’s folk hymns are revelant to day?
LK: Thangngur’s hymns are as popular and relevant at present as at the time he composed them some 80 years ago. For example, his first piece was composed in Lushai in 1917 and six years from now, it will hit a century. The popularity of this hymn remains and it continues to be a choice piece on every sacramental occasion in Zoram khawvel, the world of the people of Zo descent on this planet. The more time crystallizes the works of Thangngur, the more valuable they have become. That’s the true test of good literature, whether religious or secular. In fact, Thangngur’s hymns have been a choice subject of study for Hmar vernacular at high school and college levels in the States of Manipur and Assam since many years.
JI: Your comments and suggestions on indigenous songs, present and future.
LK: You see, the development of music, or for that matter any development follows the well-known Hegelian concept of dialectical materialism of thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis. This is an endless process in life’s journey towards perfection.
Take our traditional songs as thesis. Blending of our traditional tunes and the Welsh tunes provides anti-thesis and the result is Lengkhawm Zai or Hla. Fusion or synthesis of Lengkhawm Zai and songs from R. Sankey’s compilation Sacred Songs & Solos and other compilations provides a new tune which is partly western and partly ours and most songs or hymns composed between 1970-1980s belong to this category.
From here, some of us went back to our cultural roots and composed songs based on analogies from our folk tales and these new songs are published under the title of Hla Thar Bu (New Song Book). Some fundamentalists amongst us are up in arms against some of these songs as being too mundane and theologically untenable and forbid their members from singing in the church and formal occasions. Others however do not see any harm in using our cultural analogies to bring home a gospel message to the people. The common theme of these songs is escapism, perhaps subconsciously influenced by the drug culture.
Along with these escapist songs, a new strain of hymnal has sprung up in the 1990s with much faster beats and lively tunes to keep pace with the demands of the generation of the keyboard culture, gun culture and drug culture resulting in the mushrooming of new songs almost at the rate of commercial production level. The common subject of these new songs is revolving around corruption and degeneration of all kinds that are gnawing away the moral fabric of the society, the various ailments afflicting the society and the church, the urgent need for a reform and a return to God and a desire to inherit heaven. Many of these songs are running commentaries on what they wanted God to do for them and not what they can do for God. One composer even went to the extent of asking God to tell him who his families were! They lecture on God as if he were deaf and dumb or stupid and ignorant of his duties. Many of these songs seem to lack theological soundness and most important of all, divine inspiration. Literature reflects the space and image of the society it portrays.
All said and done, what is most important in any fusion of culture is the retention of the major trait of its original character and personality which is the backbone of its identity. Culture is a living thing and keeps on evolving through innovation or fusion with other culture it comes into contact. In this process, there is a tendency for stronger and more developed culture to submerge the weaker one. This is the point that needs to be addressed in all seriousness. If we go too fast in copying the tunes and music of others, we invite the danger of losing our own and the next step is extinction. I strongly believe that one of the keys to our survival is to firmly cling to our cultural moorings and welcome any positive evolution towards perfection. In this process, Thangngur’s hymns will always serve as a ready-made survival kit.
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