Both the above quotes that appear in the Baptist Missionary Records of Nagaland present a change that not only meant a change in local perceptions towards life, with the coming of a new religion, but a new ordering of time among the Yimchunger Nagas. In this chapter, I take the village church and its constitution of time as key to my analysis of temporal regulation of village life by the new faith. An analysis of time has now been used in numerous ethnological literatures to show its association with power relations (Rutz and Balkan 1992; Hoskins 1993; Bourdieu 1968). This chapter is about the politics of time: how, in rural-agrarian Nagaland, the Baptist Church shaped political and social relations through the regulation of time. By centralizing and scheduling agricultural time, the church as an institution of faith emerged as the most important social entity in the village, regulating economic interactions and social transactions. I thus propose to show the dialectics of the time–labour relationship in Naga society.

It is now widely accepted in the social sciences that time is an organizer of power relations (Rutz 1992). Here I look at how the monopolization of agricultural time through the church schedules of calendric time regulates farming and allied farm-based activities (rituals and festivals) in a Naga village. Pre-Christian notions of time among the Naga tribes, particularly the Yimchunger, among whom I conducted my research, saw farming activities based on lunar positions that were decided by village calendric experts (who were the elder farmers themselves, members of the first settlers or founders of settlement). These farmers claimed to have tacit knowledge of seasons, the timings of sowing and harvest, by looking at the position and shape of the moon.