Indian Dancers, Ex-Headhunters Greet Pope

SHILLONG, India —  It was the kind of audience that Pope John Paul II enjoys--native dancers, former headhunters, thousands of newly minted Roman Catholics who just a generation ago were among the world’s most primitive people.

And the Pope seemed exuberant Tuesday at this hill station, known locally as the “Abode of the Gods,” in remote northeast India where as recently as 1967 tribesmen boosted their spirits by lopping off other people’s heads.

The Pope’s message for the 64 colorfully dressed tribal groups that were among the 100,000 or so people who turned out to listen was a reassurance that Christianity had “not come to abuse their traditions, but to enrich them.”

“The Gospel has come in order to be incarnated in your cultures without doing violence to them,” the golden-robed pontiff told the throng gathered on what used to be the fairways of a golf course built in British colonial days.

On the fourth day of his 10-day “pilgrimage of peace” to India, John Paul was visibly delighted when long-tressed, barefoot tribal girls, the knife-wielding former headhunters and other ceremonial groups from this most oriental of India’s regions greeted him with dances, chants and music at the foot of a towering outdoor altar.

From his red-plush throne he could see for miles in the clear mountain air of this region where, in a rarity for India, Christians are in the majority.

Shillong, once a favorite summer retreat of the British, is the capital of Meghalaya, which borders Bangladesh and the Indian state of Assam. Perhaps because of the high rate of tribal conversions, it has been closed to foreign missionaries since the 1960s by an act of the Indian government, and few non-Indians have been permitted to visit.

Recalls Last Beheading

In Tuesday’s crowd, some of whom were dressed in feathers, boar tusks and bear skins, was Abraham Nyamnye, 62, who brandished a razor-sharp dao, a machete-like instrument that he said he last used for a beheading in 1967. It was the fifth and last head he took, he said, under the old tribal religion that considered the heads of friends and enemies to be the repositories of their spirits. By removing a head and taking it home, one added to one’s own spirit, he said.

But Nyamnye, who converted to Catholicism in 1984, said that “when all of Nagaland (the tribal homeland) started to become Christian, what was the use of my remaining pagan?”

Around his neck and tattooed on his chest, Nyamnye still wears the symbols of the five heads that he took. And he fondled his dao lovingly.

“For a Nagaland tribesman the knife is everything,” said Father Jesudah Fernando, who translated for the former headhunter. “He will use it for everything from felling mighty trees to cutting his hair.”

After flying to Shillong for the colorful Mass on Tuesday morning, the Pope returned to Calcutta to celebrate a second Mass at the city’s huge Brigade Paradeground park. There, perhaps the largest crowd of his visit so far heard a frankly evangelistic message that condemned injustice, the arms race, hatred, oppression and suffering.

At the Mass, attended by as many as 200,000, the Pope said he will not halt Catholicism’s much-criticized missionary activities.

Although Hindu opposition to conversion has prompted two states to pass anti-conversion laws, John Paul said the church is committed to spreading the Gospel.

“It is the fundamental mission of the church to proclaim to the world the good news of redemption,” he said.