Aiming for a boar on the other side of the river, the Anghbha (Anghlong Konyak), or tribal chief, sights a “white ghost” floating by—a flesh and blood American missionary (Douglas James Henshall) on a boat, with his jeep and some Nagas who have converted. The music is ominous. The ghost waves at him—does the Angbha understand this gesture? The ghost takes out a camera and captures him in film—does the Angbha understand this technology? All we see is his face, shaped by doom.
He is hunting the boar with a gun, and not bow and arrows, nor spears, so technology has seeped even into his cloistered world from beyond. What else has slipped through the cracks? What has he resisted?
Angbha returns to his village, which is now populated only by his ailing wife and mute son, Amao (Sobino Rengma). Angbha has banished the village, for they decided to convert to Christianity, taking up new skin—clothes—and new symbols—the cross. When they pass by him, they call him “old chief”. They still respect him, but some primal cultural tether has been severed.
On the threshold of this new world erupting, in 1962 Nagaland, Theja Rio sets his feature film debut, Angh, an expansion of his namesake short film. Shot on 16mm film, it patiently archives the feeling of dislocation without putting forth resolved arguments for or against this onslaught of modernity. If anything, the film argues its inevitability.
The Baptist American missionaries—different from the Catholic missionaries, and certainly separate from the British imperialists—worked with such remarkable success, they turned around 90% of the Nagaland population Christian, with some tribes becoming entirely, exclusively Christian in the span of a century. While this was not the violent conversions of, say, Goan Catholics, it required the missionaries to come and bestow on these tribes “the truth”. In a confrontation in Angh, when the white ghost tells the Angbha about his desire to give—and not take—“the truth”, the Angbha shouts back, “Don’t speak to me like an animal.” The Angbha’s retort is not heroic, nor is the ghost’s rhetoric noble. They are both given space in the film to express their anxieties—hunched over, looking inward.
The ominous music when we see the white ghost, then, is not the film being wary of missionaries. It is the Angbha’s anxiety given voice. For later, it is this ghost who will save the life of Amao—a boy who is drawn to the new village, with its clothes, its Christ, and the children learning English, playing football. The missionary, in his jhola and chappals, formal white shirt tucked into his black pants, will offer an alternative vision of life.
They are living healthier and peaceful lives here. The children are beaten by teachers if they speak any language other than English. Roads are being built for which trees are being felled. Private property is mushrooming as commons recede. Modern medicine is being made available as is access to markets, hospitals, and the world beyond.
It requires a remarkably assured voice to tell this story without taking a polemical stance, or without getting tied up in trying to forcefully “balance” the narrative. Rio’s storytelling is precise, uninterested in larger points as it needles smaller indignities. Rio is not professing Angh from the pulpit of history. He is in the gallery, with the people, overhearing, taking notes, filming scenes. This is the deep, abiding humanism of this film, its incorrigible appetite for people, not histories.
He gives us the tribal rituals—the dog being sacrificed at the funeral; the head of the departed being severed, and then boiled till all the flesh melts off, retaining only the skeleton and hair. He also gives us tribal knowledge—do not eat mushrooms until after the monsoon; everything belongs to everyone. Neither is fetishised—as nauseous or nostalgic.
The scholar Kanato Chophy writes in Christianity and Politics in Tribal India: Baptist Missionaries and Naga Nationalism, “[T]he point of nostalgia lies less in its lack of absolute historical accuracy than in showing up contemporary failure when modernity sweeps aside some essential elements of value in earlier ways of being and living.” Rio is able to shepherd in modernity, without resorting to nostalgia, not because there is nothing to be nostalgic about, but because the register of his filmic language is expression, not debate.
Large passages of the film are endured in silence, aided by Amao’s muteness. Both Konyak and Rengma hold the camera’s gaze as though a puppeteer dextrously pulling strings. They never feel one thing on their face, and yet, the riot of feeling never overwhelms. The camera, helmed by the cinematographer Adam Pietkiewicz has an observational, unobtrusive presence, panning patiently as characters walk through forests. Being shot on film, the texture of skin, the fever sweats that bead it or its dry ashen sheen otherwise, is made vivid.
When language is used, it circles around the imprecision of English. Even the “white ghost” that Angbha calls the missionary is not merely a perky pejorative, but has this looming sense of people haunting lives, floating above it, and somehow not subsumed by the laws you thought applied to all flesh. It is not “You have spoken” but “You have found your voice”—implying muteness not as an external condition but an internal muffling. It is not betrayal but “straying from your shadow”. These are not cosmetic synonyms, it is a metaphysical shift. A new language is a new world—and the loss of language is the loss of that world. New worlds are opening up as old ones are being sealed shut. This is the trauma of transformation. It must be endured to be enjoyed.
Angh premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival