Christianity in Assam is the third largest religion in the state, after Hinduism and Islam. According to the 2011 Census of India, Christians in Assam numbered 1,165,867, or about 3.74 per cent of the state's population, up from 986,589 in 2001. Although that proportion is small beside the Christian-majority states of Mizoram, Nagaland and Meghalaya, Assam holds a distinctive place in the history of the faith in Northeast India, because the mission work begun in the Assamese-speaking Brahmaputra Valley in the 1830s became the base from which Protestant Christianity spread across the surrounding hills.
The community is drawn overwhelmingly from groups outside the Hindu Assamese and Muslim Bengali mainstream. Its two largest components are the Scheduled Tribes, chiefly the Bodo, Karbi and Garo, and the tea-garden community, the descendants of Adivasi labourers brought from the Chota Nagpur Plateau and central India to work the plantations in colonial times. Of about 1.17 million Christians counted in 2011, only some 495,000 belonged to the Scheduled Tribes, about 42.5 per cent of the total, the remaining majority being largely from the tea-garden and other non-tribal communities.
The faith is unevenly distributed. Its strongholds are the hill and Bodoland districts, with Dima Hasao recording about 29.6 per cent Christians and Karbi Anglong about 16.5 per cent, while in the lower Barak Valley and the densely settled central plains Christians are very few. Beyond its size, the influence of Christianity in Assam has been felt most strongly in two fields, education and the Assamese language, for the printing press and schools brought by the first missionaries played a central part in the modernisation of Assamese letters.
Background
Assam before the missions For six centuries before the arrival of the British the Brahmaputra Valley was dominated by the Ahom kingdom, while the surrounding hills were home to a great variety of peoples, among them the Bodo-Kachari groups of the plains and foothills, the Karbi and Dimasa of the central hills, and the Khasi, Naga and other communities along the frontiers. The plains population was largely Hindu, much of it shaped by the Ekasarana Dharma reform movement of the medieval saint Sankardev, with a large Muslim presence of long standing, while many of the hill and plains tribes followed their own traditional religions, such as Bathouism among the Bodo. Assam passed under East India Company control after the Treaty of Yandabo of 1826, which ended a period of Burmese occupation and brought the region into the Bengal Presidency. The new administration encouraged the growth of a tea industry and sought to bring order to the frontier peoples, and it was partly in the hope that missions would help to educate and settle the tribes that Company officers first invited Christian missionaries into Assam.
Earliest Christian contact The first recorded Christian presence in Assam was fleeting. On 26 September 1626 two Jesuits of the Cochin province, Estêvão Cacella and João Cabral, reached Hajo and the area of present-day Guwahati while travelling from Hooghly towards Tibet. They founded no congregation, being only in transit, but they are remembered as the first Christian missionaries to set foot in the region. A small Catholic community of Portuguese soldiers and their families existed in the seventeenth century at a Mughal outpost at Rangamati, on the western fringe of the region, but no lasting church grew from these contacts, and more than two centuries passed before sustained Christian work began.
The American Baptist Mission
Origins of the Shan Mission Organised and lasting Christian work in Assam began with the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, which already had missionaries in Burma. Officers of the Company administration, in particular Francis Jenkins, the Agent to the Governor-General on the north-east frontier, encouraged the Burma Baptists to extend their work to Assam, hoping that they might reach the Shan and other frontier tribes and open a route towards China. On 23 March 1836 the Reverend Nathan Brown and the printer Oliver Thomas Cutter, with their wives, reached Sadiya at the far eastern edge of Assam, bringing with them a printing press. They were joined in 1838 by Miles Bronson and Jacob Thomas. The route to China never opened, and the languages of Sadiya proved unrelated to Burmese, so the mission turned its attention to the people among whom it found itself.
Relocation and consolidation The early stations were precarious. After the Khamti rising at Sadiya in 1839 the work was moved upriver, first to Jaipur and Naharkatiya and then to Sibsagar, where the press was re-established in 1845 as the Sibsagar Mission Press. In late 1844 Brown walked from Sibsagar to Guwahati, studying the peoples along the way, and on 25 January 1845, with Miles Bronson and Cyrus Barker, he organised the first Baptist church of the valley at Panbazar in Guwahati. The missionaries also founded schools, beginning a tradition of mission education that continued through the century. The work spread along the river towns of upper Assam and, from the Guwahati base, towards the Bodo of the north bank and the hill peoples beyond.
The Orunodoi and the Assamese language The most far-reaching legacy of the Baptist press was secular rather than religious. From 1836 the colonial government, in the mistaken belief that Assamese was merely a dialect of Bengali, had made Bengali the language of the courts and schools of Assam, opening a period later called the Dark Age of the Assamese language. The Baptist missionaries, who had learned and printed in Assamese, became prominent champions of the language. In January 1846 the mission published from Sibsagar, under Brown's editorship, Orunodoi (the sunrise), the first magazine in the Assamese language. Conceived as a monthly devoted to religion, science and general intelligence, it ran with occasional breaks until about 1880 and became a nursery of modern Assamese prose.
Orunodoi drew in a generation of Assamese writers, among them Anandaram Dhekial Phukan, Hemchandra Barua and Gunabhiram Barua, whose work, together with the petitions of the missionaries Brown and Bronson, pressed the government to reverse its policy. Brown's Grammatical Notices of the Assamese Language (1848) and Bronson's A Dictionary in Assamese and English (1867), the latter containing about 14,000 entries and printed at the Sibsagar press, gave the language scholarly standing. In 1873 the colonial authorities restored Assamese as the language of administration and instruction, and the change was confirmed when Assam became a separate Chief Commissioner's province in 1874. The contribution of the American Baptist Mission to this revival is widely acknowledged in Assamese historiography.
Bible translation and first converts Nathan Brown translated the New Testament into Assamese, publishing it in 1848 under the title Amar Tronkorta Jisu Christor Notun Niyom, and in 1854 issued a further work on the life and teaching of Christ; Bronson and others produced additional scripture, hymns and devotional material. The first native convert in the whole of northeast India is generally said to be Nidhiram, a man of the Kaibarta community, who was baptised by Bronson on 13 June 1841 and took the name Nidhi Levi Farwell; he later became a contributor to Orunodoi and a respected figure in Assamese letters. Conversions among the settled Hindu population of the valley remained few, but the mission gained a foothold that would prove decisive once it reached the tribes. An Assamese convert, Godhula Brown, together with the missionary E. W. Clark, carried the gospel into the Naga Hills, where the first Naga church was organised in 1872 at Molungyimjen in the Ao country, an event that opened the great expansion of Baptist Christianity across the eastern hills.
The Council of Baptist Churches As Baptist congregations multiplied, indigenous Christians began to organise. In 1914 they formed the Assam Baptist Christian Convention, and in January 1950 the various bodies were brought together as the Council of Baptist Churches in Assam, later renamed the Council of Baptist Churches in Northeast India (CBCNEI), with its headquarters in the old mission compound at Panbazar in Guwahati. The council is today one of the largest Baptist groupings in India, reported by the World Council of Churches to comprise about 1.2 million members in some 7,500 congregations across the northeastern states, and it operates hospitals, nursing schools and a network of theological colleges, including the Eastern Theological College at Jorhat, founded in 1950.
Anglican and chaplaincy presence A parallel English-speaking Protestant presence grew out of the colonial chaplaincy. Christ Church at Panbazar in Guwahati traces its beginnings to the arrival of the first chaplain of Assam, the Reverend Robert Bland, on 9 May 1844. The neo-Gothic building, damaged by the severe earthquakes of the later nineteenth century and rebuilt in 1901, is often described as the first church of the northeastern region and a landmark in the institutional establishment of Christianity there. Anglican work later extended to the Bodo and to the tea-garden labour force, though it remained relatively small; many of these congregations passed in 1970 into the united Church of North India.
The Catholic Church
Foreign mission societies Sustained Catholic work resumed in the mid-nineteenth century, more than two hundred years after the brief Jesuit visit. In June 1850 three priests of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, among them Nicolas Krick, reached Guwahati; Krick and his companion Augustin Bourry were killed in the Mishmi Hills in 1854 while trying to reach Tibet. In 1883 Father Jacopo Broy of the Milan Foreign Missions settled in Guwahati and built a brick church, regarded by some accounts as the first Catholic church in Assam, and from there he cared for the scattered mission.
Prefecture of Assam and the Salvatorians The decisive step came in 1889, when the Holy See created the Prefecture Apostolic of Assam, with its headquarters at Shillong, and entrusted it to the German Salvatorians. Fathers Gallus Schrole and Rudolph Fontaine reached Guwahati in February 1890, and by this time many tribal Catholics from Chota Nagpur were already at work in the tea gardens, forming the nucleus of a substantial Catholic population. The outbreak of the First World War forced the German fathers to leave, and the Jesuits of Calcutta cared for the mission until it could be reassigned.
Salesians of Don Bosco In 1921 the Assam mission was given to the Salesians of Don Bosco, who arrived in 1922 under the leadership of Father Louis Mathias. The Salesians, an order founded by Saint John Bosco with a special vocation for the education of the young, transformed the Catholic presence in Assam through schools, technical training and social work. Among the best known of the early Salesians were Stephen Ferrando, later the founder of the Missionary Sisters of Mary Help of Christians, and Oreste Marengo, who as a young missionary travelled the villages learning the local languages. The Salesians opened Don Bosco schools in Guwahati and elsewhere, beginning with an orphanage and technical school in the 1920s, and the network later grew to include the Assam Don Bosco University, established at Azara near Guwahati in 2008. The present Catholic structure of Assam grew out of this work, with the dioceses of Dibrugarh (1951), Tezpur (1964), Diphu (1983), the Archdiocese of Guwahati (1992) and Bongaigaon (2000) among its units.
Lutheran and Presbyterian missions
Santal and Lutheran mission