The Lakher Pioneer Mission

Written by Martin F Walker 

from Mission papers and family letters lodged in the British Library 

and from conversations in 2007 & 2009 in India

1.01

I was visiting a relative, in pursuit of some family tree material when the name of mutual cousin came up. Our relative, Violet Lorrain Foxall, lives in India’s North Eastern Frontier hills in Mizoram near the Burma border. She is the granddaughter of a Pioneer Missionaries, who in 1907, with his wife, were almost the first Europeans to be seen in this area. My relative informed me that shortly there was to be a great ‘Centenary Celebration’ of the Mission’s founding. Our faraway cousin hoped that a family member would make the journey to India for the event. As we speculated together who might go, it became clear that our clan members were not a very eligible lot; the keenest all seemed to be to close to their 80^th birthday or had dodgy hips or knees. I went off thinking that I might be the only one fit and able to make the trip. The very idea brought memories flooding back from my childhood. In 1947 my family welcomed four houseguests who came to stay with us for a whole year. Our visitors were, Violet then aged nine, her mother and father and her widowed grandmother. These four were the Lakher Pioneer Mission family. Violet, being just a year older than me soon found plenty to do. I had been given a brand new bicycle and my old hand-me-down was available for this visiting learner. 

Violet with Martin Standing and a friend seated

Her father and mother, Bruce and Tlosai Lorrain-Foxall, were kept busy giving talks to their mission supporters, while the elderly grandmother, Maud Lorrain, widow of the Pioneer Missionary, kept the family in order.

I listened in on many table conversations and was taken along to Magic Lantern Show illustrating the mission’s work.  All this was rich food for the young ears and imagination of an eight year old. They told terrifying jungle stories of their isolation, of tigers and pythons, of cobras and monkeys, bamboo forests and the ways of the East. The Missionary’s bravery filled me with admiration whilst I quietly prayed that the Good Lord would not call me to follow him to such dangerous creepy crawly places. Uncle Bruce’s most terrifying party trick was to roll out the skin of a 22ft python that he had shot. Their visit left an indelible impression that was kept alive by the mention of names and places in the prayers of our little church. Bruce and my father had been best pal in their youth, often known as David and Jonathan. Some years later my dad would court and marry Bruce’s sister Minnie, cementing their friendship for life. Now I had the opportunity to visit this mythical place that had meant so much to my family. This would be the journey of a lifetime.

The Lakher or Mara People occupy the southern end of Mizoram 

and over in to neighboring Myanmar (Bruma)

1.02

In preparation for the centenary visit I looked out a copy of “Five Years in unknown jungle”. This was the pioneer, Reginald Lorrain’s, substantial report on the first five years of the Lakher Pioneer Mission. I also read John Whitehead’s “Far Frontiers”, he charts in his book, people and events of the North East Frontier region of India during the years 1857-1947”. Some years of John Whitehead’s military career was spent in the hills around the end of WWII. He wrote mostly form a British India point of view. 

The Centenary September 2008.  

1.03

On arrival in Calcutta I met up with four more travellers from England who would share this 21^st century adventure into the hills. We were booked on the midday flight to Aizawl, the capitol of Mizoram province. Our most seasoned traveller on this journey was Revd Janet Wooton, recently Moderator of the International Congregational Church Fellowship. 

                                                           Janet Wootton 

Janet had discovered our Mission when she was visiting churches just over the (Burma) Myanmar border. They told her that the Mara people straddled the border and that they all owed their Christian conversion to the Lakher Pioneer Mission. In 2005 Janet found her way to the Mara Church on the Indian side, there she was introduced to the Lakher Pioneer Mission. I could now talk to someone who, just two years ago slept in my cousin’s house and ate at her table, Instead of relying on vague family snippets and forty year old memories. Another traveller was the Revd John Taylor. John was currently the minister of Penge Congregational Church in South London. Penge was the home church of Reginald and Maud Lorrain, Pioneer Missionaries. John had heard vague stories of these missionary protégés of his Church but had no first had experience of the Mission. He brought along two young men from his congregation to make up our quintet of travellers. 

                                 Calcutta  Kolkata   in the rain

Although the monsoons are supposed to end in August, the plug had been out of the Calcutta sky all the previous night so the taxi to the airport had to negotiate deep flooding and the plane took off at a crazy angle through some pretty heavy weather. In just over an hour we were approaching district capitol Aizawl, sinking steadily below the mountaintops then turning into a deep valley. The airport is quite modest with access only in and out at same end of the runway. There is very little flat ground to be found in Mizoram, just two percent plateau and four percent bottomland. It was only recently that enough ground could be levelled for an airstrip to handle passenger jets. Our plane, a European Airbus A320 dropped us off and went on to make other Assam domestic calls.

1.04

The welcoming committee at Aizawl consisted of a senior pastor, Revd Lychhua Lapi and a church elder Molua, also Violet’s son Michael and his cousin Francis. On our way into town we ran into the first of many landslides. The overnight rain had destabilised a streambed and brought thousands of tons of soil slipping down 1,000 feet to the road, and on a further 1,000 to the valley floor. There was a mile of lorries, tankers and buses waiting for the road to be cleared, our drivers just pulled out and forged on up the queue until the first vehicles coming through the newly cleared mudslide forced them to give way. Calcutta taxi drivers have a hair-raising way with traffic, it was clear that their mountain cousins where up for it too. Most places in the hills are built beside a single road but Aizawl has a dozen layers all perched on a 70-degree hillside. To keep things moving there is a one-way system that takes the traffic all-round the town. After our grand tour of the system we arrived near the top of town at a government tourist lodge. The lodge is perched on the end of a small promontory with a rare piece of flat ground in front, about big enough for a five-a-side football park. A second reception committee awaited us here headed by a state Deputy Secretary for Culture. He was very proud that members of his family had been among Reginald Lorrain’s first students at the mission school. The Deputy Secretary came to our room later and told us how sad he was that the Mara Church was now divided. He implored us to urge the Lakher Church everywhere to reunite. The work of the Lakher Pioneer Missioners had paved the way for the whole tribe to turn to the Christian Faith, now a thriving local church it seemed able to afford the luxury of division. Currently there is a Maraland Baptist Church, a Maraland Presbyterian Church, a Maraland Evangelical Congregational Church and the Maraland Congregational Church. All my life I had known of Lakher Land and the Lakher Pioneer Mission, now I discovered on arrival that the place is known as Maraland. The mystery was explained; the Missionaries where introduced to the Mara people by the neighbouring Lushai’s, they called them Lakher’s, now the Mara’s prefer to be know by their own historic name. Another difficulty with which I have had to struggle is the variation in spellings between the founders colonial usage in the Mission papers and contemporary usage. After editing several chapters I realise that it was getting very confusing, some names even migrated through several versions. I have resolved that except for the ‘The Lakher Pioneer Mission’, I will attempt to stick to contemporary usage.

1.05

             After the reception we found our rooms and were advised to order a meal over the internal phone to be taken in our rooms. My roommate for the duration was The Revd. John Taylor. We now had first sight of the week’s programme and began to share notes in preparation for this adventure. We had been told to expect a single long day’s run to make the 220 miles from the capital to Serkawr; this turned into two very long days. The following morning our first task was to report to the local visa office to have our permission to enter Mizoram recorded and chit ties issued to go south. Next we went on a search for a cash point to top up our wallets. Wonder of wonders the machine knew immediately about my building society cash balance in England and spat out the maximum daily amount, 12,000 rupees, (about £150). Tarmac roads run all the way from Aizawl to the Burma border in the south. These are built and maintained by the Indian Army Boarder Roads Corps. The Hills appear to consist of smooth rock sheets that seem to lie nearly on end at about 70 degrees and run for hundreds of miles in close parallel north south ranges. The thin topsoil readily landslides off these great ridges, especially during the rainy season. We were to see many landslides in our journey but only a few would cause us delay. Four of us set off in the first vehicle and waited a few miles down the road for the second. While we waited I noticed trucks going a little further down the road to a spot apparently dedicated as the civic tip. It seems that no one has any interest in the jungle choked valley bottoms so all and sundry can freely throw their rubbish into the abyss.  An hour later a replacement for the other 4x4 hove in sight, the first one had failed on the car park. We spent the next hour driving down to the bottom of the valley and over a river. This was followed by an equally long clime to gain the next ridge. The north east frontier’s great north south mountain ridges soar up to between 4,000 and 5,000 feet with valleys more than 2,000 feet below. Mostly the roads and the communities have been built near the top or even right on the ridges. Roads only make the long decent when it is necessary to cross the valley to the next ridge. I guess that when India collide with Asia and put up the Himalaya Mountains the sea to the east was a shallow sheet of sedimentary rock, the collision must have shattered this sheet like ice and then piled it up nearly on end in this vast interminable jungle fastness.

Road side refreshment in Mizoram

Standing John Taylor present Pastor of Penge Congregational Church

seated tow of his previous congregation members

1.06

Presently we made our first refreshment stop at a ‘road house’; a bit of a shock at the time, but in the light of experience to come, one of the better venues. Omelettes of one sort or another seem to be always available but by this stage my digestion was suffering from culture shock as well as being thrown about in the back of a 4x4. Our next stop to get a puncture fixed was at a modest town called Serchhip. Here we stood in the street for nearly an hour and watched a busy builder’s merchant store nearby. Tradition hill houses were built of bamboo with a frame of long hardwood poles, platted split bamboo for wall panels and a thatched roof. Houses nearly always need long foundation poles at one end because of the slope of the hillsides. The builder’s merchant was doing a roaring trade in cement and steel reinforcing bars, we soon discovered why, most new houses are now built on long pillars formed from steel reinforced concrete. Later that evening the engine in our 4x4 stopped abruptly, it was soon clear that one of the auxiliary drive pulleys had sheared. Our two drivers went off in the other vehicle to organise a relief car and look for a garage to make a replacement part. We were left stood on the jungle road for a couple of lovely quiet hours as the dusk gathered. We stood in awe as thousands of moths deploy for their nightly foraging from a nearby rotten trunk. The steep hills were covered with lush jungle growth dotted with banana trees and in places great groves of bamboo. In other parts there were plots of young trees beside the road, these we discovered to be commercial teak plantations, that and bamboo seemed the only commercial timber.          

1.07

It was to this beautiful but wild and inaccessible place in 1907 that Reginald and Maud Lorrain came. In the 19^th and early 20^th century every church in England had its part in the great world mission movement. Young men and women would wrestle with the call; clergy and people would raise funds, pray and boost the cause. Reginald Lorrain, at the age of twenty-four was no exception. In 1902 this young man had returned from a four-year spell working as a Cowboy on a ranch in the Argentine. His first intention was to settle to a banking carrier in London. It soon became clear that Reginald’s heart was not in business but out on the mission field. For the next three years although engaged to Maud Ulander he had tried hard to find someway of getting out where the action was. In frustration he was beginning to resign himself to a life of banking and matrimony when a letter arrived from his brother Herbert. Herbert was then a missionary at a Baptist Mission station in the Eastern Indian hills on the Burma border. He told Reginald of a whole tribal district south of his station to which no one had yet gone with the Gospel. Reginald took this cause to heart and after prayer resolved to become their missionary. On 11^th February 1905 he submitted an article to a Mission Magazine announcing the launch of the ‘Lakher Pioneer Mission’.  He approached the Baptist Missionary Society, the London Mission Society and other missions asking to be trained and sent to the Lakher people. His requests met with little success, mission agencies claimed that they were too overstretched just then to take on new fields but they would consider him for work in their existing missions. All this was very frustrating for Reginald who was now sure that God was calling him to the Lakher tribe. Having exhausted all channels he resolved to dedicate himself forthwith as the Lakher’s Pioneer Missionary regardless of any other agencies support. Reginald resolved to postpone his marriage for a year, resign the job at the bank and enrolled at Livingston Missionary College. The year of study would give him basic medical skills that would be vital in years to come. But as yet the infant Lakher Mission had no formal support and Reginald had only just begun to publicise its existence. On the fateful morning when he must give in his notice at the bank and enrol for college he still had no funds for the task. When he came down to the breakfast table in his lodgings he found a letter waiting for him, it contained a cheque for £45. A person previously unknown to Reginald had read his article and after the briefest of enquires sent enough money to support him for several months. He took this as a clear sign to go ahead in faith. The Lakher Mission has continued in the same way for 100 years without the support of any but its own band of dedicated supporters.

1.08

            At this very time in the dense hill jungle on the Burma border a raiding party from a Lakher village known as Zongling crossed into British India in pursuit of escaping slaves. The Lakher tribesmen recaptured their escapees and strung one of them up causing his death. The incident triggered a response from the British administration. The army was sent in to punish the village and discourage them from further raids. The military spent weeks cutting a two-foot wide track through the hills from Lunglei right to the guilty village. This rout just happened to pass through Serkawr village. Without this track the Lorrain’s may have found the jungle cliffs virtually impenetrable, instead they had a basic rout to the site for their new home and the Lakher Pioneer Mission Station.

1.09

            The region called by the Lorrain’s ’Lakher-Land’ covers some ninety villages belonging to a distinct tribal group. They are known today as the Mara People. Their neighbour’s the Lushai’s gave them the name Lakher, Herbert Lorrain worked amongst the Lushai’s and first described the Mara’s as Lakher’s, Reginald took it up and so it remained until the Mara’s began to run their own local government. The current (Burma) Myanmar boundary cuts off a portion of Maraland. The Burma regime has a reputation for ruthlessly controlling its borders; this appears to have little effect on the Mara people who seem to come and go across the boarder without difficulty. Groups crossed the boarder on several days to attend the Maraland Gospel Centenary in 2007. The distinctness of the Mara language presented the missionaries with their first problem, communication! Herbert sent his brother off with a Lushai who could understand a little Lakher. With this man’s help Reginald set about the task of mastering the language. He had to devise a phonic system so that he could record on paper the sound that he heard, then a grammar. He and Maud burnt the late night oil over their card reference system gradually amassing a workable dictionary. There first printed work was a primer for use in the school that Reginald established in his first months, soon they had a translation of St John’s Gospel, eventually the whole Bible was available in the Mara language.  The Mara Churches now claims the area to be completely Christian. Most other district throughout the northeast frontier hills region also became Christian. Today there is a thriving indigenous Mara church, led by local pastors and elders. It is strong and vigorous enough to afford the luxury of division even so the Lorrain’s Mission Bungalow is becoming one of the local church’s historic sites. I was deeply moved by my visit to the home of the pioneers of the modern Maraland Church. The bungalow built in 1913 and largely untouched is now venerated as the cradle of the Mission. Violet, and Mark her husband, frequently have visitors who just want to look at this special place. Although it is their home they are becoming more and more aware of its historic importance accepting that it will soon becoming some sort of museum.

1.10

The history of this mission is unusual, in that had a mission society taken it on, the Lorrain’s would have served their time and passed the baton to successors; instead they stayed and made the mission their home. Reginald became ill as the Second World War developed but the family ignored a directive from the British administration to leave the hills and Reginald died at his post in 1944 with the sound of the Japanese invaders within earshot. At first the Lakher’s paid little attention to their new missionaries. The incomers made small inroads with events such as the successful treatment of a sick boy but the most substantial and enduring connection with the local population was Reginald’s school. Each year more students came wishing to learn to read and write and willing to hear the Christian message, their numbers only limited by the Mission’s shortage of funds. Almost certainly the single most significant event in the early years was the birth to Reginald and Maud of a baby daughter. They gave their child the names, Louise Margaret, but the locals called her ‘Tlosai’, Lakher Princes. That became the name by which everyone knew her for the rest of her life.

           

1.11           

The Lorrain’s employed several assistant missionaries through the late 1920s and early 1930s, most of whom stayed for two or three years. In 1928 Reginald recruited Bruce Foxall to his staff. Bruce promptly fell in love with Tlosai and they married in 1932. Together they continued the work of the mission after Reginald’s death. Bruce revised and completed Reginald’s translation of the Bible and saw the full volume come into circulation in 1956. He further developed the training and ministry of local pastors until by the mid 1960 the Maraland Church was becoming quite independent. Indian Independence hastened the redundancy of the missionaries. A local freedom movement caused a clampdown by the Indian state and who became suspicious of all foreigners. By the 60s and 70s the missionaries where losing the fight to prevent divisions within the church. Now Bruce and Tlosai lie buried with Maud and Reginald on the mission compound. There child Violet Married Mark, a Lakher head teacher. They still serve the local church and live in Reginald’s bungalow. Their four children and grandchildren live in the village and district.   

1.12

            The Maraland Gospel Centenary in September 2007 was a great event. A temporary shelter was erected from Bamboo and light plastic sheeting to seat 2,000. It was very moving to see this place filled three or four times each day throughout the Centenary Week with a changing congregation from all around the district. The presentation of Maraland Bibles to about 40 women’s fellowship members seemed to encapsulate the Missionaries achievements in one act. Not for the first time in history the translated Bible had brought the double blessing of the Gospel and a literate society. The Gospel centenary was a demonstration of the power of the Good News of Jesus Christ and witness to the fruitfulness of the missionaries preaching. Although the language was impenetrable to our English ears the Centenary meetings were stirring events. Each village brought a Gospel Choir dressed in distinctive uniform. The boys wore grey or green slacks and matching white or cream shirts, the girls in long skirts and tailored tops. I recall uncle Bruce on his 1947 visit say that the Lakher’s could not sing in tune, that certainly was not the case now. One village choir boasted a core group of pop gospel singers with a regional reputation. A large drum drove the singing, dictated the meter exactly; any tendency to slow the pace was punished with a deafening double whack bringing everyone back to conformity. We each preached with the aid of an interpreter, and listened to other sermons with or without interpretation. The week was a wonderful and memorable event and a great witness to the love of God displayed through his mission church.

1.13

            Janet Wooton had with her a catalogue of the Mission papers and publications that have been deposited in the India section of the British Library. She challenged me to read these up as a retirement project. This I have began to do. It seems that, apart form Reginald Lorrain’s book “Five Years in Unknown Jungle’ the story of the Mission has never been written up. There is a complete bound set of the Mission’s quarterly journal, ‘The Lakher Pioneer’ in the British Library. They run from 1912 to 1970 and record in general terms for the home supporters, the progress of the Mission. From his arrival in 1928 Bruce wrote a letter home every three or four weeks, first to his parents and on their death to my mother and father and later to others, these too are all in the British Library together with a substantial quantity of his diaries. My hope is to gather from this material and from a further visit to Mizoram a fair record of the Mission over its 100 years. Perhaps as my manuscript’s progress is posted on the Internet others will feel free to advise and contribute to the story.