Evaluate the impact of Christianity on Scheduled Tribe societies of North-East India. (Answer in 250 words)

- Evaluate the impact of Christianity on Scheduled Tribe societies of North-East India. (Answer in 250 words)
Introduction
Conversion in the North-Eastern hills was massive and rapid: Mizoram, Nagaland and Meghalaya are today overwhelmingly Christian. The balance sheet is one of large material and educational gain bought with the loss of the indigenous religious order.

Body
1. Religion and ritual: the American Baptist mission among the Nagas, from E. W. Clark at Molungkimong in 1872, and the Welsh Presbyterians among the Khasi and Mizo, from Thomas Jones in 1841 and Lorrain and Savidge in 1894, displaced sacrifice, genna taboos, feasts of merit and the propitiation of spirits. Head-hunting ended, and the morung dormitory decayed with it.
2. Social organisation and welfare: the missions gave Khasi, Mizo and Ao their Roman scripts and their first written literature, and with them literacy rates now among the highest in India. Mission schools and dispensaries, the abolition of the bawi form of bondage and of ritual drinking, and the rise of a Church-educated elite shifted authority from the chief to the pastor and the village church.
3. Politics and reaction: Christianity became the idiom of ethnic nationalism, from Nagaland for Christ to the Mizo National Front, and it sharpened the divide between Christian hill tribes and the plains. It also provoked revivalism — the Heraka movement of Jadonang and Rani Gaidinliu, the Seng Khasi of 1899 and Donyi-Polo in Arunachal, which the Freedom of Religion Act of 1978 accompanied.
4. The balance: gain in literacy, health, women's position and political voice; loss in oral tradition, indigenous religion and material culture.

Conclusion
Christianity modernised these societies faster than the state did, and simultaneously erased much of what anthropology had come to study. On balance it strengthened tribal identity while replacing tribal religion.