William Pettigrew: Mythicizing the Man and His Work

Work and struggles

Pettigrew’s achievements are as numerous as they are astounding. As an honorary inspector of schools, he helped establish many schools—twenty-eight by 1903. As a missionary, he founded the mission center at Ukhrul and helped plant several churches. He wrote a Manipuri grammar in 1912, the first Tangkhul grammar and dictionary in 1917, and many primers, and he translated hymns, books of the Bible, and biblical stories. He worked as a superintendent of census operations in 1911, 1921, and 1931. He helped recruit 2,000 laborers during the First World War, and he was appointed a captain in the army. During his first furlough, he took a two-year medical course at the Livingstone College, in Walthamstow, England. In addition, he learned two major Indian languages (Bengali and Manipuri) and two tribal languages (Tangkhul and Thadou).

For his military service, Pettigrew received the Kaisar-i-Hind Silver Medal in 1918 and a war medal in 1920. In recognition of his religious work and translations, he was made a member, later on an honorary governor, of the British and Foreign Bible Society. Acknowledging his linguistic competence, the Asiatic Society of Bengal inducted him as a member.

The path to honor, however, was beset with struggles and frustrations. Soon after he arrived at Hunphun (Ukhrul) in February 1896, Pettigrew erected a building to serve as a school. (At that point he had already established nine schools in the valley and one in the hills.) He invited the villagers of Hunphun to send their children to his school, but not one child was forthcoming. His aggressive search for pupils only aroused suspicion of the villagers, who surrounded his house and told him to leave the village. H. A. Raihao, the village chief, intervened and sent the crowd away. Pettigrew informed Maxwell of the event. On the way to the Somra Tract, now in Myanmar, Maxwell stopped at Hunphun, gathered the villagers, caned five elders who led the protest, and warned the village elders that if they did not send twenty children to the school, they would be sent to jail. ⁴ With great difficulty, the village council found twenty children for the school; the families had to be assured that the village would recompense them for the loss of their children’s labor. ⁵ Pettigrew started the school in February 1897 and found that his patience was soon tested. “The students’ behaviour was wild. Some sat quietly, some lay on benches, some read, some wrestled, some sang their national song, some came late and some went home at will. With great patience the Apostle teacher gradually induced them to the proper behavior.” ⁶ Four years later, he won his “first fruits” when twelve of his pupils were baptized. The next year, on February 23, 1902, the first church was founded.

By 1908 the church membership had grown to thirty-five. Pettigrew, however, was not satisfied with the way the converts practiced their Christian faith. He noticed that they participated in the celebration of an important festival called Thisham (in which the souls of those who have died are sent off to the kingdom of the dead). He was faced with a decision: Should he allow the converts some leeway by letting them partake in traditional practices, or should he strictly forbid them. He decided to put his foot down and prohibited the converts from drinking rice beer and from participating in any customs and traditions that involved “offering of sacrifices to evil spirits.” All but five of the Indian converts deserted the missionary, and the church membership was reduced to seven. Pettigrew, however, was contented, for he believed that “the church of the future will be in reality a Church of real converted members.” ⁷

When Lord Curzon visited the state in 1901, Pettigrew sought permission to open a mission center in the valley, and he did the same in 1908, when the raja of Manipur ascended the throne. He appealed to the chief commissioner of Assam to shift the mission station to “a more central spot in the valley,” which would allow him to evangelize the western hills of the state. He requested the Manipur State Durbar (i.e., the royal court) to “increase the number of missionaries” and “branch out to other tribes in the State.” He was confident that the door to evangelize the valley would open soon. ⁸ But all of his petitions were rejected, which dashed “his hopes of preaching among the orthodox Hindu Manipuris.” The sluggish growth of Christianity must have been wearying. In a report for the year 1916 he wrote, “The church at Ukhrul, which is the only church among this tribe, has passed through troublous times, and descended to a low spiritual life.” ⁹ Perhaps frustrated by constraints and the stunted growth, in 1916 Pettigrew shifted the mission headquarters to Kohima. ¹⁰

Pettigrew and his wife, Alice, lived at Ukhrul from 1896 to 1916. He called this period “twenty years of confinement” and “twenty years of isolation,” the times in which they lived “away from our ‘ain folk,’ 45 miles distant from the capital of the valley, 134 miles from the railway and its communications, amid animistic fear and superstition, and the fight against the devil and all his works.” ¹¹ During this period S. W. Rivenburg and his wife, a missionary couple in the Naga Hills, paid them a short visit in 1901. Pettigrew later commented, “It may be [news] to some of you when I tell you that only one missionary and his wife has visited Ukhrul during the past fourteen years, and they did not come without being ordered, on account of sickness in the family.” ¹² However, if Pettigrew felt frustrated, he hardly showed signs of weariness in his reports and letters except for wistful reminiscences. U. M. Fox, who looked after the Ukhrul mission during Pettigrew’s second furlough, was more outspoken. Remoteness of Ukhrul, he admitted, “results in very greatly increased expense in living, also in great loneliness, sometimes nearly overpowering, on account of the isolation from civilization and from kindred peoples.” ¹³ Who would blame Fox, a foreigner? Even Gokul Singh, a Meitei teacher, refused to stay, despite Pettigrew’s importunate request, because he refused “to spend his life in such a place as Ukhrul.”

Alice Pettigrew would have readily agreed with Fox. Their daughter Margaret (Peg) empathized, “The days seemed long and lonely for Mother, almost overpowering at times—with no white women to talk to.” ¹⁴ Having graduated from the Missionary Training School in Brighton, which included medical and nursing training at Sussex County Hospital, England, ¹⁵ Alice came to Calcutta (now Kolkata) to be married to William Pettigrew in 1896. She accompanied her husband to Ukhrul, and like a good Victorian lady, she taught the “native” girls sewing, knitting, sanitation, and personal hygiene. Peg described her mother’s initiatives: “Mother started the first girls school in the State of Manipur. . . . The indifferences on the part of the State Darbar to female education made the task very difficult. Mother started with 5 girls—teaching home duties—cleanliness—bringing up children from birth upwards and of course to sew, and the seed of the Kingdom.” ¹⁶ She also treated the sick using a small, one-room thatched building as a clinic. She is fondly remembered as the pioneer of women’s education in the hills of Manipur, as the lady who went from door to door “urging the parents to permit their daughters to attend the night school after the day’s work.” ¹⁷ She succeeded in attracting some girls to the mission school at Ukhrul in 1908, and in 1910 nine girls from the school were baptized. In this effort, she could have come into conflict with her husband, for Pettigrew thought that “the girls . . . are not deemed worthy of any help from the State,” by which he meant that the state did not need to give the girls the scholarship of three rupees per month awarded to the boys. ¹⁸ In any case, she procured scholarships for the girls from the Women Baptist Foreign Mission. ¹⁹

What would have been most difficult for the missionaries as parents was living away from their children. Their daughter explained: “Missionary children—after reaching 7 years of age—were left in Missionary Homes in England or America—because there were no schools on the Mission Station for them to attend and the nakedness of the children was not a proper place to bring them up.” ²⁰ Three of their children were “born amongst the heathen,” and the last one was born in England during their first furlough. On their return after the first furlough, they left the two oldest children at a missionary home and took the two youngest ones with them; on their second furlough, they had to leave all four in the missionary home in Newton Centre, Massachusetts. ²¹

In 1920, after the Great War, William and Alice Pettigrew settled at Kangpokpi, the new mission center, along with Dr. and Mrs. Crozier. Also after the war, the Christian community grew by leaps and bounds. In 1927 the whole hill area came within the sphere of activity of the American Baptist Mission. In 1928 the field was divided into two parts; Pettigrew looked after the northeast area, G. G. Crozier the northwest area. ²² What Pettigrew hoped for in the beginning was becoming a reality toward the end of his mission work. By 1935 the number of Christians “passed the 5000 mark,” with over 200 churches, 18 evangelists, and 186 workers. ²³ In the autumn of 1933, Pettigrew left for the United States to tend to his wife, who died of an aneurysm in 1934. At her grave he is said to have remarked, “It was like coming home, for the cemetery was on a hill at the foothills of the Litchfield Hills”; Peg added, “a hill like those in Ukhrul.” ²⁴ Having lived in Manipur for about forty years, Manipur could have become more like their true home. Pettigrew was sixty-five years old when his wife died, but he was in a hurry to get back to Manipur. While traveling on a ship to return to Manipur with his second wife, Ethel Margolis, ²⁵ he received a message to return to the United States. Some Tangkhuls and Kukis had cabled the Home Board of the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society (ABFMS), saying that “they did not want William Pettigrew to come back.” Hearing the report, some requested that the Home Board send Pettigrew back to Manipur anyway. ²⁶ Pettigrew, however, did not return; instead, he and his second wife set sail for England, where he lived till his death in 1944.

Mythicizing the man

The magnitude of Pettigrew’s service need not be reiterated here. Suffice it to say that he opened the door to modernity for the hill peoples, because of which he is held in high esteem, almost like a godlike figure. However, he was also rejected by a certain group of the people he had served, whose complaint cut short his mission. Such a remarkable career could not have ended more ignominiously.

Sometimes, a hero must be condemned, only later to be worshiped. A few years after Pettigrew’s death, one of the earliest converts, T. Luikham, called him “the MAN” “destined to bring . . . the word of God.” Pettigrew was an “instrument chosen by God” who “sacrifice[d] his life to bring . . . the light of civilization”; an “apostle” who (like St. Paul bypassing Bithynia to go to Europe) bypassed the Imphal Valley to take Christianity to the hills; his mission was “the divine mission,” which is to “save the poor and unfortunate hill people who were dead in sin.” He was described as an extraordinary man who worked for “a prosperous and a progressive hill people.” ²⁷ Luikham’s A Short History of the Manipur Baptist Christian Association Golden Jubilee (1948) abounds with such words of adulation, and it set the stage for the apotheosis of Pettigrew. One of Luikham’s remarks is interesting: “Our fathers living in caves and jungles were blind to the advantages of education and averse to its introduction. But the untiring efforts of Mr. Pettigrew brought about a lasting effect on the younger generation.” ²⁸

Born in or around 1890, Luikham knew that the hill peoples were certainly not living in caves and jungles when Pettigrew came to Ukhrul. His hyperbolic expression is meant to evoke an image of the savage state in which Pettigrew supposedly found the hill peoples so as to underscore how he led them from barbarism to civilization. In Luikham’s words, “No one would deny the name ‘savage’ for our people. . . . We should feel proud that we have come from that stage to the present civilized state.” ²⁹

Drawing from the repository of biblical symbolism and formulated in conformity with the colonial vocabulary, the transition from “tradition” to “modernity” has been described in colorful metaphors such as “from darkness to light” and “from head-hunting to soul-hunting.” Conversion to Christianity is said to have lifted the hill peoples from “barbarism” (symbolized by the imagery of darkness) to “modernity” (represented by the contrast between head-hunting and soul-hunting, between darkness and light). By conceiving the transition to modernity in terms of religion, education is made an adjunct to religion rather than an independent factor of change. Hill peoples used to see education as a ruse to spoil their children. Instead of recognizing it as empowerment, they originally viewed education as a tool of proselytization. The power of education increasingly dawned upon the people in the 1950s, when the salaried people, who were always the educated Christians, began to actually wield power. Ironically, the recognition led to misrecognition: they came to perceive education as inseparable from Christianity. To be educated was to be a Christian. And since education was equated with progress, to be Christian was to be “modern.”

Besides the icon of torchbearer, Pettigrew was perceived as an epitome of wisdom. M. K. Miksha, one of the earliest converts, called the setting up of a school before evangelical work “the quintessence of Pettigrew’s wisdom.” He explained, “God knew that Tangkhuls would not understand the Gospel unless they were first educated. He therefore sent Pettigrew who had such foresight to the Tangkhul area.” ³⁰ Education and medicine had been the common partners of evangelism long before Pettigrew came to the field. The life and work of William Carey, for example, had earlier set this pattern of mission strategy. For S. Kanrei, another of the earliest converts, Pettigrew’s wisdom was innate: descended from royalty, he possessed “royal traits.” ³¹

These images of a torchbearer, the chosen man, and a wise man have been etched in the minds of the “native” converts.

Mythicizing his coming

The heroization of Pettigrew the missionary was achieved most clearly through the myth of his coming. According to a Tangkhul myth, an apparition in the form of a man appeared to Rashing, chief of the village of Hunphun. This man’s hair was the color of corn silk, his face was the color of the albino buffalo, and his eyes were like those of the cat. The man told Rashing that he would come to “give them light, and when the people received the light, [leaves] would speak and their [daily] needs would be met from their pockets.” ³² Rashing narrated “what he saw” to his son Angayung, who in turn transmitted the story to his son Yomnang, who passed it on to his son Raihao. When Pettigrew came to Hunphun, so the story goes, a crowd gathered around him; some men came with spear and shield and wanted to take off his head. When Raihao asked around, he was told that “there was a cannibal with the skin of an albino buffalo.” Immediately recalling his great-grandfather’s story, he told the story to his villagers and thus saved Pettigrew from losing his head.

The prophesy purportedly came true. When Pettigrew reduced the Hunphun dialect to writing, it was as if leaves could speak, because people could communicate through letters. When money was introduced, people were able to buy things from their pockets, instead of having to carry everything with them. The myth serves to bear out the legitimacy of some common images in the general imagination: first, the savagery of the Tangkhuls (before Pettigrew); second, the wisdom of Raihao; and above all, the “divinity” of Pettigrew. K. Prongo drew a parallel between the coming of Christ and that of Pettigrew: “Rev. William Pettigrew’s coming to Ukhrul was foretold … some 300 years before Pettigrew came, ³³ and the revelation was made by God to Rashing in his apparition. This is similar to the birth of Christ, which Isaiah prophesied some 700 years before Christ was born. From this we know that Rev. William Pettigrew was a real messenger of God to give light to the people in darkness.” ³⁴ The myth is based on a tenuous assumption that Pettigrew is the first white man whom the Tangkhuls encountered, or at least the first to go to Hunphun. History tells us that he was far from being the first.

To cite just a few examples: E. W. Dun undertook a reconnaissance of the hill tribes in the early 1880s. In his book Gazetteer of Manipur (1886), Dun described each village, including its population, its “fighting men,” an interpreter or an important person of each village, livestock, water sources, food, climate, and so forth. James Johnstone, political agent of Manipur between 1877 and 1886, recorded his numerous tours to the hills, including the Tangkhul area and the Somra Tract in his book My Experience in Manipur and Naga Hills (1886). In a report on the Manipur boundary, Major Austen accompanied Thangal Major (better known as Thangal General) and the Hunphun headman to the peak of Shiroi in 1873. Since the Meiteis were unable to identify the villages north of the peak, the Hunphun headman (possibly Yomnang) spelled out the names of the villages. ³⁵

Conclusion

Contradicting the historical facts, Pettigrew is celebrated as the first white man that the Tangkhuls encountered. This is an example of myth as a fictitious story. However, the myth of Pettigrew’s coming has a deeper function—like the origin myth, it describes the origin of “modernity” for the Tangkhuls, that is, the creation of a new reality. Put differently, his coming signaled the beginning of a new order, an enlightened age. As reflected by the structure and chapter titles of Champhang Jajo’s book Christian Life in a Tribal Context: In Manipur, the social history of the tribal peoples in Manipur is divided into “The Heathen Age” and “The New Age,” in which the defining boundary of the ages is “The Coming of Christianity.” ³⁶ However fictitious the story of Pettigrew’s coming is, it is or was widely believed in with a sense of sacredness. By recounting the myth, the people “live” the myth as though, in the words of Mircea Eliade, “one is seized by the sacred, exalting power of the events recollected or re-enacted.” ³⁷

In the process of canonization, Pettigrew’s shortcomings have been swept aside—but we cannot forget that he was a human. Two of his failings stand out. First, he believed that traditional practices like the drinking of rice beer and the celebration of festivals like Thisham were evil. Pettigrew’s demand that converts must forsake traditional practices reduced the Christian community to seven members, but he was glad that “the new church adopted a covenant which takes a strong stand against this evil [Thisham], and most of the evils found on this field.” This belief made him antagonistic toward the “heathen teachers” who taught at his school. Despite years of teaching, he complained, their desire remained the same—“to build a big house, buy two or three buffaloes and sufficient cultivation for their needs,” which to Pettigrew amounted to nothing less than leading “a lazy dissolute life.” ³⁸

In short, Pettigrew left no room for indigenizing the new religion or for integrating Christianity with the traditional ways of life. The notion of contradiction between the traditional belief system and Christianity had been so instilled in the minds of the converts that Luikham came to believe that “it was not possible for the Christians and the heathen to come together in any kind of agreement for the peaceful transaction of social functions.” He further noted, “The habits, behaviour and customs of the Christians are quite different to those approved by old usage. They [the converts] accepted the new faith and translated its spirit into their actions.” ³⁹ Acceptance of Christianity, so to speak, entailed a way of life opposed to traditional habits, customs, and beliefs.

Pettigrew’s second failing was his belief that the hill peoples did not need to pursue education after middle school. In keeping with this belief, Pettigrew did not send his students beyond Ukhrul Mission School. It was Reverend Fox who, in the words of Luikham, “opened the gate for higher education by sending boys to high school.” Even after twenty-five years in Manipur, Pettigrew stuck with his opinion: “Personally the writer is not yet convinced that it is necessary for such people as we have to deal with to have anything higher than a Middle English school grade.” Toward the end of his mission work, however, he proudly reported that a son (Bob Khathing) of one of the first converts (Hamring) who had attended the school at Ukhrul was studying in Cotton College, Guwahati.

Despite his failings, the overall contribution of Pettigrew to the hill peoples of Manipur is immense. He deserves to be remembered as the torchbearer who laid the groundwork for the transformation of the hill communities.