The rugged hills over which Harry Neveu’s C-46 climbed that clear morning of August 2, 1943, were inhabited by an ancient tribal race of whom the occupants of the aircraft were entirely oblivious. They had not met a Naga before nor been briefed on the Naga culture, customs, or conventions. In any case, the origins of the people who inhabited what the British first called the Naga Hills in 1866 (parts of which were initially incorporated into the British Raj in 1881) remained then, as today, an ethnological mystery. According to the noted Edwardian gentleman scholar (and commandant of the Assam Rifles) Colonel Leslie Shakespear, the name of this scattered, warlike, Mongoloid race is a corruption of the Assamese word for “naked” and when originally coined was strongly pejorative, a fear-filled description (like that of the bogeyman) by the Assamese of the plains of the benighted savages who inhabited the vast sweep of tangled hills that separated Assam’s Brahmaputra River Valley and Burma far to the east.
The lack of a written history has placed the Nagas at the mercy of every kind of speculation. The British officiating political agent for Manipur, G. H. Damant, who was killed fighting the Nagas at Khonoma (near Kohima) in 1879, believed that as a race they originated from the southeastern corner of Tibet.aa The British colonial administrator and noted anthropologist Dr. John Henry (“J. H.”) Hutton noted that connections had been made between the Nagas and the headhunters of old Malaya and Borneo, and others have traced their presence in these tangled hills to a great migration countless centuries before from northwestern China. Certainly many points of similarity exist between these people and those of other Mongoloid races scattered across Asia and the Pacific: their predilection for eating dog, for instance, for head-hunting, for practicing common types of weaving, and for the large number of highly prized seashells that bedeck their ceremonial clothing to this day. In the first quarter of the twentieth century Shakespear was especially interested to note the commonalities between the coastal-dwelling Dayak (Iban) headhunters of Borneo and the hill-dwelling Nagas, the conch shells present among the Nagas being a natural connection between the two peoples.
As in many British colonial endeavors, the growth of the Raj’s engagement with the inhabitants of the hills between the Brahmaputra (in Assam) and the Chindwin (in Burma)—a population of perhaps no more than 100,000 in the 1880s—was gradual. Contrary to popular opinion, this growth was undertaken not as the result of some kind of master plan but in the teeth of opposition from administrators and politicians alike, who were combined in their objections to the untrammeled growth of their obligations. Imperialism cost money. In fact, the ink-stain effect of colonial expansion in northeastern India took place for another reason, namely, the repeated attacks by the hill people against the lowlanders in the Brahmaputra Valley. This had been a persistent problem in the long history of British engagement with this remote part of northeastern India. Looking back from the time of writing in 1924 to the inception of control in Assam by the East India Company nearly a century before, Sir Joseph Bampfylde Fuller, then governor of Assam, considered the essential security problem in northeastern India to be not the fear of transnational invasion (from Burma) but rather the clash between the growing commercial interests of the East India Company and the continuance of the warlike (and head-hunting) depredations of the Nagas.bb
The raids by Nagas on the plains were meant not for seizing territory but rather for securing and consolidating local power through fear and keeping the peoples of the plains at bay. For most of the imperial period, beginning in the mid-1850s, the problem (to British colonial administrators at least) was that Naga behavior was unsuited to the progressive growth of a law-abiding, socially stable, and economically prosperous empire. The British even suspected that the Nagas enjoyed these expeditions. The language employed by Fuller—and his successor, Sir Robert Reid—was typical of the observations made of the hill people when seen through an imperial lens. Reid described them as an extremely attractive but slightly juvenile race of otherwise manly warriors:
[They] . . . are still inspired by the ancient ideas that war is one of the most exhilarating of life’s experiences, and its commemoration, in war-dress and war dances, the most enjoyable of amusements. To possess the head of an alien man, woman or child has been a treasured assurance of success and a necessary passport to good fortune in courtship. Society is organized on a war footing. . . . Peoples of the same blood have grouped themselves into clans, isolated so completely as to have developed languages that are mutually unintelligible. To ambuscade an alien village—even its women when drawing water from the stream—to burn its houses and massacre its inhabitants have been regarded as “sporting” enterprises that relieve the monotony of life. Forays into the lowlands have been still more tempting.
More than one report described their breaking of the law as behavior reminiscent of that of errant children requiring loving discipline rather than that of irredeemable criminals. Like wayward offspring in need of a firm hand, the Nagas needed only to be encouraged to obey the Christian imperialist injunctions to “love one another” and “live peaceably with all men” in order to be accepted fully into the enlightened panoply of consenting nations that made up the rich canvas of the British Empire.
The economic foundation of Assam referred to by Fuller was tea. The Treaty of Yandabo on February 24, 1826, ceded the ancient Ahom territories of Assam and Manipur—lands that included the Naga Hills—to Britain from Burma at the conclusion of the ruinous (for both sides) First Anglo-Burmese War. The result of the war meant that Britain lost its global monopoly on the Chinese tea trade, but in 1832 the British discovered the precious bush growing in Assam. As the century progressed and the East India Company gave way after the mutiny of 1857 to the Raj, cultivation of the Assamese hills increased exponentially both in terms of acreage under cultivation and profit. But the commercialization of the hills created rich targets for raiding parties from the hills. Had such despoliations by these near-naked savages not been checked, Fuller observed, “the development of the tea industry would have been impossible.” Imperialism meant nothing unless it was accompanied by order; security; and the onward march of a civilization, based on loosely defined Christian values, that protected commerce. Measures were therefore undertaken during the second half of the nineteenth century to stamp out this brigandry and to impose a degree of order on the otherwise independent Naga tribes scattered across the vast greenery of their hilltop home.
This took time, however. Fighting bands of Naga warriors continued to descend from the hills to wreak havoc on the tea plantations of the plains, causing untold disruptions to the commercialization of tea, as George Barker complained in 1884:
For the benefit of those of my readers who are ignorant of the whereabouts of the Nagas, I must premise by saying that they are a warlike hill tribe, peopling the range of hills which form the southern boundary of the Assam Valley. The last Naga Expedition (1879–80) had a disturbing effect on the communications between Calcutta and the planters. Both of the steamboat companies were requisitioned for Government service, and every steamer that came up was laden with commissariat or military stores. During this time very few of the civilians’ stores found their way up the river: those that did were badly treated. What difficulties the wretched planters had to put up with during this fearful period, arising from the uncertainty of supplies and consequent deprivation of the absolute necessaries of life that had been reckoned upon! Even when the orders had been executed and the packages brought up the river, the trouble of obtaining advices as to their whereabouts made this a memorable time for the unlucky fraternity.
The argument went that if Delhi managed to subdue these peoples’ warlike instincts in order to protect the interests of capitalism in the Assamese hills, it was only fair to extend this security to individuals and villages within the Naga Hills, if only to manage the worst vice of the region. A common feature of life in these territories was vicious intervillage feuding, including indiscriminate head-hunting. Establishing the king’s peace was expensive, however. Certainly Delhi wasn’t going to provide local security and policing for free, and local taxation followed.
Until 1877, therefore, British policy was to restrain the worst excesses of the people of the hills where they were directed against the people of the plains under the protection of the government of Assam. Military and police actions were undertaken, beginning in the 1840s, on an occasional basis to punish villages—especially those of the Angami tribe, centered on Khonoma and Kohima—for raids carried out into British-administered territory, although they were not always successful. Khonoma and Mozema were first encountered by the British, and burned, in 1850, and at Kohima—a large village of 900 houses—a “bloody battle” was fought outside the village the following year. But the Raj had no stomach for the expenditure of money on retaining troops in these hills and withdrew after concluding this demonstration of its power. Leslie Shakespear recorded that this policy allowed the Angami Nagas to “riot at their own free will”: “Reports of those days show the jubilant Nagas when once they realized they were left alone, celebrated the new conditions by making twenty-two serious raids that year into British territory, i.e., down into the main Assam valley where the tea industry was progressing. This alone showed the impracticability of non-interference.” Sir James Johnstone, onetime Manipuri political agent for the Raj, blamed the repeated snubbing of British authority by the Angami Nagas squarely on the government of India. After continued provocation a large force was sent into the hills east of Dimapur in December 1850:
Kohima, which had sent a challenge, was destroyed on February 11th, 1851. In this last engagement over three hundred Nagas were killed, and our prestige thoroughly established. We might then, with great advantage to the people and our own districts, have occupied a permanent post, and while protecting our districts that had suffered so sorely from Naga raids, have spread civilization far and wide among the hill-tribes. Of course we did nothing of the kind; on such occasions the Government of India always does the wrong thing; it was done now, and, instead of occupying a new position, we retreated, even abandoning our old post at Samagudting, and only maintaining a small body of Shan militia at Dimapur. The Nagas ascribed our retreat to fear, the periodical raids on our unfortunate villages were renewed, and unheeded by us: and finally, in 1856, we withdrew from Dimapur and abandoned the post. After that, the Nagas ran riot, and one outrage after another was committed.
Another reason for Western engagement with the Nagas was religion. It was a series of American missionaries who first brought a confident, evangelical strain of American Protestantism to the Naga Hills in the mid-nineteenth century; within that strand of Christianity was one specifically of the Baptist variety. The influences of the Great Awakening in the late eighteenth century, together with the expansion of civilization into territories occupied until then by “Red Indians,” and the march of a nascent American imperialism in Central America and southeast Asia made evangelizing missions the obvious concomitant of a new Americanism. With the destructive introversion of the Civil War now behind it, opportunities for the promulgation of a newly self-assured brand of American identity appeared widespread. The Nagas became—among many others—the targets of this imperative. New Yorker Miles Bronson first arrived in Assam in 1838 with his wife and daughter at the invitation of the East India Company. The “John Company” was not interested in evangelism per se as much as it was in civilizing the natives. If the local Nagas were to become Christian, they would cease their interference in company business. The Baptists were therefore good for business. Either way, at the time missionary work was considered good for both parties, and Bronson recorded gifts from company officials (possibly given in a private capacity) totaling 840 rupees in 1838, 250 rupees in 1839, and 300 rupees in 1840. Indeed, the true ulterior purpose of John Company largesse was laid bare in a memorandum by the local company agent in 1840 to Sir Thomas Maddock, secretary to the government of India, suggesting that the company support plans by Bronson to set up a tea plantation for local Nagas to introduce them to the discipline and rewards of cultivation: “I conceive that by a proper cooperation with that gentleman [Bronson] and the encouragement of the Nagas to cultivate the products of their hills and tea in particular, we may hope ere long to see civilization greatly advanced among these Nagas, and our supremacy gradually extend over the hills, without which, and the consequent suppression of the constant feuds amongst the tribes, there seems to be little hope of effecting any great change in the habits of the people, or of our being able to avail ourselves of the great natural resources of the fine tract of mountainous country.”
Between the 1870s and the end of World War II approximately sixty American missionaries committed significant portions of their working lives to bringing the barbarous Naga tribes from darkness into light. Although most of this endeavor was concentrated in the western hills—missionary activity never reached as far, for instance, as the Patkoi Range—the results of this work by members of organizations such as the American Baptist Foreign Missionary Society was dramatic. By the time of the outbreak of war in 1939 perhaps 50 percent of Nagas—from a population now of some 200,000—called themselves Christian. Despite their quite obvious association with (British) colonialism, Nagas on the whole have consistently regarded the efforts of (American) Baptist missionaries to be “a good thing.” Although the evangelizing imperative of the Baptists irritated the desires of the anthropologically minded British colonial administrators in the first decades of the twentieth century—by associating Christianity with specifically American customs and social mores (such as in clothing, personal hygiene, habits, music, and so on)—the one thing that united these cultural opposites was opposition to head-hunting. Although the swiping of the odd head or two by a village was put up with by the British—because the act was vested with deep cultural significance and it was thought that trying to stamp out the practice would provoke a violent backlash—the wholesale slaughter of villages was not, because it signaled insecurity in an area and a threat to the rule of law, however distantly applied. For the missionary, of course, nothing was more sacrosanct than life itself and nothing more heinous than its cheap destruction, especially in the name of culture or tradition.
The eventual extension of administrative control over these territories came about in the 1870s because of British reaction to attacks on the Assamese tea plantations and the internecine struggles for local power among the Naga villages. Stories of these often horrifying despoliations seeped out of the hills. A head of political steam was got up in the mid-1870s in the government of Assam when humanitarian intervention into the wildest of the western territories was advocated in order to stamp out this barbarism and to save the Nagas from themselves. The policy of preventing external raids had largely succeeded but had singularly failed to remove the local penchant for internal feuding and didn’t protect British surveying expeditions into the hills. Two such expeditions were destroyed in 1874 and 1875 by Naga attacks, with most of their members killed and only a few survivors escaping. A report in 1876, for instance, blamed the Angami Nagas for the despoliation of six villages in a single month, causing the deaths of 334 men, women, and children. Continued warlike behavior resulted in a punitive expedition by the British in late 1877 that punished the two villages most at fault: Khonoma and Mozema. According to Shakespear, the punishments imposed on these large, wealthy, and powerful villages were pathetic and were a decided factor in their warriors’ continuation of raiding: failing to punish the Nagas properly led only to continued impertinence.
Until the late 1870s administrative control over the eastern Naga tribes had been based in the large village Samagudting (now Chumukedima) a few miles into the hills from Dimapur. As time went by this village came to be considered too far removed from the real center of necessary influence in the hills, and an alternative site was sought. One option was Kohima, forty-six miles into the hills toward Manipur, although at the time no road ran to it from Samagudting. At about this time a new phenomenon influenced British thinking: individual Naga villages began asking for British protection, in return for which they offered to pay tribute. By 1878 seventeen villages had voluntarily come under the protection of the crown. The 1877 punitive expedition to Khonoma made the location of the district officer in these hills a sensible option in order to keep a permanent peace, and in 1878 a post was authorized for Kohima. It was established in March of the following year. The first political officer to take residence was G. H. Damant. He was not to last long, however. The nearby village of Khonoma (twelve miles away), which had supposedly been pacified after the 1877 expedition, together with the village of Mozema, rose against the new British threat to its hegemony in the hills. Damant and thirty-six members of his escort were killed while visiting Khonoma on October 13, 1879, and Kohima was then subjected to a siege that lasted twelve days. The British garrison of some 180 men, women, and children was surrounded by 6,000 Naga warriors who wanted to sweep the British from their hills so that they could continue their traditional practices unimpeded by the white man’s law.
These sieges were a common characteristic of Britain’s imperial experience along the fringes of its empire. The siege of Kohima was lifted only after the arrival from Manipur of a small army of 2,000 Manipuris and 40 sepoys of the Thirty-Fourth Native Infantry, led by Lieutenant Colonel James Johnstone, the Manipuri political agent based in Imphal, 120 miles to the southeast. The raja of Manipur had long wanted to subdue these unruly hills, and supporting Johnstone’s relief of Kohima helped him toward achieving this ambition. Sporadic skirmishes and bloodletting followed, with Khonoma bowing its knee, finally, in March 1880. Shakespear concluded that it was only by means of a strong hand that this troublesome tribe was subdued: “It is also conceivable that the drastic punishment meted out by Colonel Johnstone on Phesema village who attacked his convoys during the winter may have somewhat taken the heart out of the Angamis, who were in the end well punished by fines in cash and grain, unpaid labor, the surrender of firearms, and demolition of defenses; while Khonoma in addition had all its cultivated lands confiscated, and its inhabitants dispersed among other clans. Since then this powerful tribe have remained quiet.”
In the hills to the east of Sibsagar, a tea-growing center in the Brahmaputra Valley thirty miles northeast of Jorhat, trade had existed for centuries between the Nagas of the northwest hill area (the Ao tribe) and their plain-dwelling neighbors. The British first came into contact with the Ao people by virtue of a journey through the hills by Captain T. Brodie of the Second European Regiment of the East India Company in 1844. Their incorporation into a British sphere of influence came about at the Nagas’ own instigation; they even agreed without murmur to the annual tax of two rupees per household that the British political agent insisted was the price of British administration and security. From the outset gross violations of the king’s peace were ruthlessly exterminated by the application of the law. The district officers served as magistrates and, when not sitting at Kohima, undertook regular—usually annual—tours into the remote villages to hear cases and apply the law. Significant infractions, such as murder or head-hunting, resulted in military expeditions setting out from Kohima to end the fighting, by force if necessary, and to capture and punish the perpetrators. But British government was for the most part benign, fitting comfortably alongside that of the village chiefs. Local customs and laws were largely left alone so long as villages behaved peaceably. In fact, through the gaonbura system the British were able to reinforce their power by passing down authority to the local headman, whose own authority was worn literally in red in the form of a blanket or waistcoat provided by the British. As the Naga historian Khrienuo Ltu explained, British “rule therefore didn’t seriously affect the basic structure of the Naga society.”
It remained traditional in character and content. Moreover, the system of administration which the British followed in the Naga Hills ensured social continuity and at the same time made it easier for the people to accept the British rule. The British intervened in the village administration only in disputes which could not be settled by the village courts. The main intention of the British Government in recognizing the village chiefs as undisputed leaders of the village was to make them loyal agents of the colonial administration. Thus, while continuing as leaders of their people they became an important link between the British Government and the tribal masses.
As British influence moved north from Kohima and east from Sibsagar, it became apparent that another administrative site was required in Ao territory. Mokokchung, eighty-seven miles north of Kohima, was duly chosen and became the location, beginning in 1890, of a British political officer responsible for the administration and security of a vast area of the northwest containing people of the Ao, Sema, Lotha, Konyak, Chang, and Sangtam tribes. But in what the Australian academic Geoffrey Blainey in another context described as the “tyranny of distance,” the further reaches of the Naga Hills were too far distant even for the imperial power to apply its civilizing influence, and anything outside a directly administered area was, frankly, left to its own devices, even if it did (as was often the case) experience regular outbreaks of murder and mayhem. Until, that is, any lawlessness spilled over into the British Administered Area and upset the tranquillity of the order imposed by the deputy commissioner in the hilltop village of Kohima and his assistant, the subcommissioner in Mokokchung, farther north.
The process of administration quickly overtook that of militarization in terms of how imperial rule was applied to subject peoples in these parts. The period in the southern and western Naga Hills after 1881 was therefore marked by the development of political and civil administration, with the enforced acquiescence of the villages within British-administered territory if they stepped out of line. A regular question that arose during the tours of the early administrators was the extent to which they should control the activities of “British” villages mounting incursions into nonadministered territory, and vice versa. Considerable debate took place between those advocating a “forward” (interventionist) policy along the Naga frontier with nonadministered territory and those who argued for a more laissez-faire approach. Sir Robert Neil Reid, governor of Assam from 1937 to 1942, for instance, supported the former approach, dismissing the occasional “promenades,” or punitive expeditions into nonadministered territory, as having no real impact on the incidence of feuding among the Naga villages outside the British Administered Area. The only solution to repeated and destabilizing lawlessness was for recalcitrant areas to be brought formally under British control. It was the latter view that prevailed and largely survived through the end of the Raj in 1947, with only a gradual, even reluctant, encroachment of British hegemony into previously unadministered areas. For much of the final four decades of British presence in these hills, attacks on British subjects inside and over the border would be punished, but feuding outside British territory was of no concern to the authorities in Kohima or Mokokchung. This policy didn’t prevent the gradual expansion of British territory by 1910 to encompass the entirety of the northwestern hills and a zone of influence that extended well into the territories that bordered these.
There was another problem. The relinquishment of head-hunting and blood feuds among villages in the Administered Area suddenly made those communities vulnerable to raids from the nonprotected areas. Because the newly law-abiding villages no longer responded in kind, they were suddenly soft targets. The British promise of security had now to be made real, or these villages would regret the decision they had made to pay tribute to a power that proved unable to protect them.
Occasionally, therefore, armed expeditions set out to punish villages for repeated infractions of the king’s peace. The Pangti expedition of 1875, the Chang expedition of 1889, and the Yachummi expedition of 1910 were three such. A fourth, which remained in the collective memory of the region for another generation, was to the Konyak village of Chinglong, which lies northeast of Mokokchung toward the village of Mon. This expedition demonstrated that such ventures were not to be entered into lightly. In 1910 raids were reported from Chinglong against Chingtong, a village within British-administered territory. The subdivisional officer at Mokokchung, on investigating the situation, overreached his orders. He marched into nonadministered territory with Captain Hamilton and eighty men of the Naga Hills Military Police (later the Assam Rifles) and burned part of Chinglong. The subdivisional officer lost his job for this indiscretion of mounting an attack against a village that was outside his jurisdiction. Chinglong knew nothing of these imperial niceties and continued to be a thorn in the side of its neighbors and of the British inside their administered territory. In July 1912 the young men of this lawless village compounded a spate of recent raiding delinquencies by an act of treachery that outraged the sensibilities of colonial administrators. They were normally content to allow the occasional head to be removed from unsuspecting shoulders, but they could not turn a blind eye to a massacre. Chinglong deliberately lured a group of men from a neighboring village into its territory with the promise of a harvest of much-prized betel leaf and then attacked them en masse for their heads. Three were killed. The commissioner for Assam determined that enough was enough and ordered that a punitive expedition be dispatched at the end of the monsoon. The events that followed demonstrated, however, that there was a gap between the theory of an expedition and its successful execution.
Although a decision was reached in November 1912 to launch the expedition, a lack of suitable troops held up its departure from Mokokchung until January 1913. Repeated demands sent to Chinglong to hand over the murderers received hostile and scornful responses, and, emboldened by Chinglong’s refusal to bow to British intimidation, the general attitude of other villages across the frontier became hostile. It was therefore considered prudent to reinforce the expedition with an additional 150 men of the Dacca Military Police. A military post that had been established at Chingpoi (thirty miles northeast of Mokokchung as the crow flies) reported that the men of Chinglong had a habit of advancing to the river separating the territory of both villages, waving their daos, and chanting taunts at the British to come and die at their hands. By February 2 the men of the Dacca Military Police had arrived at Chingpoi, where they met up with seventy-five men of the Naga Hills Military Police. Leaving some of the men at Chingpoi, a mixed force of 196 soldiers and porters marched toward Chinglong on February 5. This was typical Naga hill country. Impossibly steep hillsides were bisected in the valley bottoms by rivers tumbling over rocky beds on their journey either to the Brahmaputra (to the west) or the Chindwin (to the east). Thick vegetation grew down to the water’s edge and bloomed in intense green explosions that off the beaten tracks was impossible to cut through without considerable physical effort and a sharp dao. Even the paths were few in number and unless well tended fell into the habit of quickly overgrowing, a particular problem during the monsoon, when relentless rain allowed the exuberance of growth to know no bounds. In this terrain the advantage lay with those who knew it intimately, who could dart in and out of cover as required, using the jungle to move and to hide. It was ideal for the Nagas’ favorite tactic: the ambush.
The British force departed Mokokchung happily enough. The rifle-armed troops were well drilled and in fine fettle, although few had fought in this rugged terrain and none knew the territory. They knew that the men of Chinglong had some weapons—probably ancient muskets, some homemade, or more modern single-shot Martini-Henry rifles—but these guns were no match for the disciplined firepower of the Lee-Enfield. Their camp equipment was carried for them by a cluster of locally recruited Naga porters, and this long, winding procession offered itself to the eager warriors of Chinglong as an ideal target. An advance guard of sepoys managed to push its way through a number of barriers set in its way, such as groups of panji traps (poisoned shafts of hardened bamboo driven into the ground and designed to penetrate the foot of a careless enemy) and trenches across paths that were overlooked by stone walls designed to offer cover to men firing the Naga’s deadly crossbow. But it wasn’t the armed troops whom the men of Chinglong targeted. A sudden and savage rush through the single extended line of porters caused shocking devastation. Frightened porters reported “hundreds” of Chinglong warriors appearing at speed through the long grass and cutting a swath of heads as they swept by. The onslaught was so swift and silent that men were killed as they stood without any chance to escape. As quickly as the swinging daos appeared, they disappeared again into the towering vegetation that closed in against the winding hillside track.
Despite the sudden horror of the attack, the now empty village was occupied and much of it burned to the ground. This, after all, was the meaning of punitive. The bulk of the force rested there that night. The following day the remainder of the village and its surrounding fields were put to the torch, and the expedition withdrew to the relative safety of Chingpoi to lick its wounds. It was not strong enough to remain in Chinglong and to defend itself from counterattack, and in isolated and vulnerable position created a risk of having the withdrawal route cut off. Eleven men had been killed and thirty wounded already, most by swinging daos in the close quarters of the jungle track where the porters had been ambushed. It was a serious loss, a casualty rate to the entire column of 22 percent. Unfortunately, three rifles had fallen into the hands of Chinglong, which didn’t augur well for future peace in the region. Chinglong had been hurt but not subdued, and it took the arrival of Gurkha reinforcements the following month to finally bring its resistance to an end. It had been a long and painful experience for the British, and something of a humiliation. There were strong humanitarian and even legal imperatives to exert force across the frontier simply because it seemed the right thing to do, but such actions were fraught with danger, unintended consequences, and no guarantee of early or easy victory.
These lessons were to live with the colonial authorities for a generation. Far to the east, in the blue-shrouded hills of the Patkois, lay dozens of other villages that, like Chinglong, would no doubt resent any attempt to force the Raj and its rules on their way of life. One such was the mighty village of Pangsha, nestled at the western edge of the mountains that separated India from Burma, known of and feared by the entire region but entirely unreached by any white people. The Naga Hills were not to be easily tamed.
The generation of Britons who followed the soldiers into the Naga Hills as members of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) were a remarkable hybrid of colonial administrator and anthropologist. The first was J. H. Hutton, who led the way for Philip (“J. P.”) Mills and Charles Pawsey, followed by Philip Adams and Bill Archer. The Viennese-born aristocrat and anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, inspired by Hutton, joined Mills in the Naga Hills in the mid-1930s, and together they fashioned a golden age for the study of the varied tribes of the Naga people. Hutton arrived in 1912 at the age of twenty-seven. Despite the fact that he came as a member of the ICS in the role of colonial administrator, he felt an immediate attraction to the task of recording details of the cultures he encountered. The ICS had taken on the role of administering the Raj once Britain had taken on responsibility for India after the mutiny and the demise of the East India Company. A tiny, elite band of administrators—never more than 1,200 carefully selected Britons and, as time went on, an increasing smattering of Indians—ruled a population of some 300 million at the outset of World War II. Their jobs were hard, and the more successful were arguably those—such as this remarkable succession of ethnologically minded men in the Naga Hills—who were interested in their subject peoples and worked from a genuine desire to bring good to their lives. It was certainly not a glamorous life. It entailed living far from the bright lights, walking vast distances through difficult terrain, living a mainly camping lifestyle, and achieving very little material reward. It must have appeared a thankless task for the most part, their efforts seemingly a drop in the vast ocean of imperial endeavor. It seems clear, nevertheless, that a passion for the people they administered was the principal driving force of these men. What was primarily important for them was not merely the virility of the empire they represented, nor indeed the power and prestige of their positions, but the people among whom they lived. In this respect those in the Naga Hills were unusual members of the ICS. In 1909 the Hobhouse Commission concluded that across the ICS as a whole, few officers could speak the native vernacular of their district or knew anything about the customs, way of life, or habits of their subject peoples. This was not a charge that could ever have stuck to the administrators of the Naga Hills district of Assam.
Hutton desired more than anything else to understand the people whom he administered. It is fair to say that he became driven by the need to record the lives of this hill-dwelling civilization before it was washed away without trace by the surging tide of Westernization even then lapping against the Naga foothills. A measure of his success is the fact that his work as a civil servant has long been eclipsed by his anthropological work, which resulted in scholarly evaluations of Naga cultures, especially the Angami and Sema (Sumi) Nagas, both published in 1921, and his foreword to Philip Mills’s The Ao Nagas in 1926. Hutton’s great success lay not merely in observing his people but in living with them as intimately as a stranger was allowed and becoming their friend. He was especially well liked because his impish character fit in well with the characteristic playfulness of the Nagas. The historians Peter van Ham and Jamie Saul told the story of a Chang Naga once saying to Bill Archer, “You and Hutton Sahib come from the same village. Hutton Sahib was a thorough Naga. He was always fooling about.”
Several Europeans—mainly tea planters and soldiers—had written of these people in the casual way common to travel writers and passing journalists over the previous seventy years, but none before had made the effort to become one of them; to see life—as much as one could—from their perspective and to understand their lives from the viewpoint of their culture. In the introduction to his monograph on the Sumi tribe, Hutton laid out, as if to head off any possible criticism, the reasons why he felt able to present this analysis to the world despite having no academic anthropological credentials (he had gained a third-class degree in modern history from Oxford in 1907):
The account of the Semas given in this book has been compiled at Mokokchung and at Kohima in the Naga Hills, during an eight years’ acquaintance with them, during which I have learnt to speak the language fairly fluently and have been brought into contact with the life of the individual, the family, and the community more or less continuously and from many angles. For there is hardly any point of tribal custom which is not sooner or later somehow drawn into one of the innumerable disputes which the local officer in the Naga Hills is called upon to settle, and it is my experiences in this way which constitute my credentials in writing this volume.
He need not have feared. The University of Oxford conferred on him a doctorate of social science, formal recognition to accompany the honorary title he had been awarded in 1921 as the director of ethnography in Assam. Resigning from the ICS in 1935, he returned to Britain to join the academic fraternity to which he had long contributed while in the field, becoming the William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement in 1950 at the age of sixty-five.
Perhaps Hutton’s greatest legacy was to inspire others to follow in his footsteps, two of whom were to play leading roles in the events of 1936. The first was Philip Mills. A product of both Winchester College and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, he, like Hutton before him, became a member of that tiny, elite band of men in the ICS who ran India for the Raj. In 1916, at the age of twenty-six, he found himself the subdivisional officer at Mokokchung, where he remained until he became the deputy commissioner, based at Kohima, in 1933. His daughter Geraldine later described Mills as a man who came to believe “that anthropology often provided the key to a problem, by working with ‘tribal’ custom, rather than imposing alien western values” on native communities. He was “definitely not the ‘white overlord’ type,” she recalled. Taking a lead from Hutton, Mills considered that cultural anthropology—the deep study of the indigenous people—would enable him to be a better administrator, the job that he was paid to do. He sought not to impose his own views on the people he administered—aside from the bare bones of the application of the law—but rather to interpret and apply the law in a culturally sensitive manner, striving to be fully cognizant of centuries-old customs and beliefs that were part of what it meant to be Naga. Mills modeled his approach on his mentor, Hutton, working hard to base his approach on friendship and mutual respect. “No one could despair who, like me, numbers chiefs among his real friends,” he noted, “[and they] have time and again proved literally indispensable.” His friend Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf described Mills’s “sympathetic and unbureaucratic approach to the Nagas and their problems,” concluding that it was this that ideally “suited the administration of a loosely controlled frontier region.” Ursula Graham Bower, the “Naga Queen,” became very friendly with the Millses in Assam. She observed:
The administration of hill districts was a very personal matter, depending almost entirely upon the individual officer and his influence. It called for men of integrity, tact, infinite patience and real devotion to their often obstreperous charges. Speaking as one who has seen the process of government from a worm’s eye view and not from a coign of vantage in official circles, I should like to pay tribute to the remarkably high standard attained. The district of Naga Hills in particular was fortunate in its officers, and under men such as Hutton, Mills and Pawsey it enjoyed a long period of just and sympathetic control to which Naga loyalty and co-operation in two wars are a tribute.
In his 1953 presidential address to the Royal Anthropological Institute titled “Anthropology as a Hobby,” Mills explained that friendship lay at the base of his approach:
In my view, friendship, and by that I mean real friendship, is the master key to the amateur’s work in the field. The hobby brings you friends, and without friends it cannot be properly pursued. Real mutual trust and confidence must be established, and if you show your interest in and appreciation of their institutions, your friends will in turn reveal to you their pride in them and tell you things you might not otherwise learn. Your friends will include priests, medicine men, warriors and so forth, and as friends you often see them in mufti as ordinary family men.
In September 1945 he prepared a secret paper for the then-governor of Assam, Sir Andrew Clow, arguing for the separation of the hill tribes in northeastern India in the event of Indian independence. He made no pretense of objectivity: “For nearly 30 years my service has been spent almost entirely on work to do with the hill tribes. I have not, alas, been able to see them all, but I have attempted to study those I have seen and to read everything available on those I have not. I am therefore writing about my friends, whose welfare I seek before all else, and to that extent I can fairly be called biased.”
Like Hutton before him, Mills was appointed to the honorary post of director of ethnography in Assam, and, also like Hutton, he produced monographs on Naga tribes, concentrating on those tribes that Hutton had not, namely, The Lhota Nagas (1922), The Ao Nagas (1926), and The Rengma Nagas (1937). In his 1945 paper for Clow he described what the Naga were like and what they wanted:
(1) What is he like? He lives in a village, which may be very small or may contain 500 houses or more, according to the tribe. He and his fellow clansmen and villagers form a mutual co-operative society, helping each other to build their houses and cultivate their fields, and supporting each other in old age and times of sickness and need. He lives by agriculture, which usually yields a small surplus, and in a bad year he can always borrow grain, which he will repay in kind or in better times. . . .
Villages within fairly easy distance of the plains grow a considerable quantity of cash crops, such as cotton or pan, but in those further in the hills there is normally little or no money in circulation, since they are practically self-supporting except for salt and iron, and most transactions are by barter. Self-sufficiency has produced a strong artistic sense, which is virtually dead in the plains. . . .
Great pride and self-reliance are combined with a sense of humor so like our own that it forms one of the main ties between Europeans and hill men. The great majority of hill men are honest and truthful, for not only would it be a matter of shame to be otherwise, but in a small and closely knit community dishonesty quickly meets its reward. In a country where all journeys have to be performed on foot visits to the outside world are necessarily difficult and infrequent, and this inevitably means a narrow outlook. . . .
Clan feeling is strong and governs daily life. All fellow members of a clan are not only invariably addressed as, but are actually regarded as “fathers”, “sisters”, “brothers”, and so on. . . .
(2) What does the average hill man want? The answer might be summed up by saying that, like most people, he wants a Government which will leave him alone except when he requires help.
A recently severed head of a Saochu villager found at Yimpang Village by the punitive expedition on November 23, 1936. Head-hunting was the scourge of the region and the reason for the punitive expedition against the primary troublemaker, the village of Pangsha. Fürer-Haimendorf
Major Bill Williams and troops of the Assam Rifles on a track close to their target, Pangsha, on November 25, 1936. Fürer-Haimendorf
Under the watchful eyes of their Pangsha enemies, members of the expedition build a protective stockade on the bed of the Langnyu River to spend the night before battle, November 25, 1936. The Nagas, who never fought at night, failed to make use of the darkness to discomfit their enemy. Fürer-Haimendorf
The Pangsha leader and warrior Mongsen, seen here meeting the punitive expedition with a gift of goat, November 25, 1936, in the vain hope that it would persuade Mills to turn back. Fürer-Haimendorf
After spending the night in their stockade, the Assam Rifles moved up the Langnyu River to attack the Wenshoyl khel, a “suburb” of the large village of Pangsha, November 26, 1936. The men had their bayonets fixed, ready for action. Pangsha warriors tracked their progress from the high ground above. Fürer-Haimendorf
Sepoys of the Assam Rifles storming into Wenshoyl khel, November 27, 1936. It was undefended; the Pangsherites had withdrawn from the village, taking what valuables they could with them. Fürer-Haimendorf
Philip (“J. P”) Mills, Major Bill Williams, and G. W. J. Smith resting on November 28, 1936, a day after the skirmish at Wenshoyl khel. Fürer-Haimendorf
Wenshoyl khel burns, November 27, 1936. The village was so large that only a small part was put to the torch. Fürer-Haimendorf
The march back from Pangsha to Chingmei, November 28, 1936. Fürer-Haimendorf
Porters and sepoys making their way to the safety of Chingmei, November 28, 1936. Fürer-Haimendorf
The expedition stockade at Sangpurr, December 2, 1936. Fürer-Haimendorf
Victor: J. P Mills sitting with a young freed slave at Chentang, December 7, 1936. Fürer-Haimendorf
Chingmak, renowned chief of Chingmei and a great friend of J. P. Mills, December 1936. It was Chingmak and his two sons who protected the survivors of Flight 12420 in August 1943. Fürer-Haimendorf
One of the expedition Nagas—possibly Emlong of Mokokchung—showing off a captured head taken from Pangsha’s extensive collection at ceremonies to welcome home the expedition and “share” the captured heads in January 1937. Fürer-Haimendorf
A collection of heads at Pangsha. Fürer-Haimendorf
The defeated Mongsen at Chingmei, November 30, 1936. Mongsen had come to parley and make terms with Mills, the victor of the battle of Wenshoyl. Fürer-Haimendorf
A Naga crossbow mounted as a trap. These were usually hidden overlooking a jungle path and were set off by a vine tripwire. Fürer-Haimendorf
Vindication for Mills: a party of slaves freed from Pangsha. Mills recalled that they looked miserable to start with but cheered up considerably as the days went by. Fürer-Haimendorf
Sworn enemies of Pangsha, the Chang warriors of Chingmei Village provided long-range intelligence to the British deputy commissioner in faraway Mokokchung, November 30, 1936. Fürer-Haimendorf
A Naga spear in flight. Fürer-Haimendorf
Konyak Nagas during the postexpedition victory celebrations, December 17, 1936. Fürer-Haimendorf
On December 14, 1936, Smith, Fürer-Haimendorf, Mills, and Williams gather somewhat shyly in the garden of the deputy commissioner’s bungalow at Mokokchung at the conclusion of the punitive expedition against Pangsha. Fürer-Haimendorf
A Curtiss C-46 of the USAAF, similar to Number 41-12420, which crashed near Pangsha on August 2, 1943. National Archives
An aerial shot of the sprawling Chabua air base, Assam, in 1944. National Archives
Three survivors of Flight 12420 at the end of their ordeal, left to right: Jack Davies, William Stanton, and Eric Sevareid, September 28, 1943. Corbis
A photograph of Pangsha taken by Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf the day before the Wenshoyl battle. Fürer-Haimendorf
A contemporary newspaper shot of some of the survivors back at Chabua following their return from Pangsha. USAF
A newspaper photograph of the three men—left to right, Richard Passey, Colonel Don Flickinger, and William McKenzie—who volunteered to parachute into Pangsha to look after the survivors. Photo by Frank Cancellare, War Pool Photographer for Acme News Pictures, September 28, 1943
Pangsha, March 2014. Hugh Young
Schoolchildren in Pangsha, March 2014. Hugh Young
For his part, Dr. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf arrived in the Naga Hills in 1936 after securing a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, having received his doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1931 on the subject of the hill tribes of Assam and northwest Burma. He had met up with Mills in Britain and eagerly accepted the offer of friendship and support for his studies while in Assam. Taking up residence in the Konyak village of Wakching, he immersed himself in the study of his subjects for thirteen months, learning the language of his hosts and becoming the first Westerner to spend more than a few days in the midst of this ancient race. He described his experiences in The Naked Nagas (1946), and the fruit of his time among the Konyak villagers came to print as The Konyak Nagas: An Indian Frontier Tribe in 1969.
The men who followed Hutton and Mills also possessed deep ethnological instincts, even if they could not be called “collectors” or anthropologists in their own right. Deeply sympathetic to the people with whom they lived, men such as Philip Adams and Bill Archer all followed the same dictum: to administer the people for whom one had responsibility, the best, indeed the only way, was to live among them and become, as much as was possible, their friends.
For the East India Company and the Raj that followed it, the “Naga problem” began as one of security and transformed itself over time into one of cultural dissonance. How could the imperatives of Christian civilization—living peaceably under the rule of law, respecting other people’s lives and property, and thus allowing the structures of mercantile commerce to benefit everybody—be in any way compatible with the indiscriminate lopping-off of heads, even if the imperatives that drove this behavior were deeply ingrained in the local culture? Thus it was that the great ethnological impulses motivating humanitarians such as Hutton, Mills, Pawsey, and Adams were trumped by their horror at the “cultural” practices enjoyed by the people they otherwise so much admired. This was the challenge for the colonial ethnological administrator: when to admire and record, when to punish and destroy? They were not missionaries. Although Mills was a practicing Anglican of the High Church variety, the others had no strong religious convictions. Indeed, they were all suspicious of most of the evangelical missionaries in the Naga Hills because the preaching of such people tended to change the way in which the native people lived their daily lives—for example, the Christians encouraged the near-naked Nagas to wear more rather than fewer clothes—and therefore impacted the culture. In actuality not one of the ethnologists who recorded the history and culture of these remote hill people in the early twentieth century gave the question much thought—life and freedom always outweighed culture, especially when that culture involved any one of the three great prohibitions: slavery, head-hunting, and the casual abuse of animals.
Native “culture,” in the minds of these men, though important to capture and record and unarguably important to the lives, histories, and experiences of the Naga tribes as a whole, was not a perfect right in itself and did not trump the claims of other practices in other, competing cultures. In their view head-hunting and slavery were manifestly so abhorrent to right-thinking men and women that not an inch of the written word in the diaries, papers, and reports they left behind in any way condones or supports the practice. Could head-hunting be acceptable simply because it was part of an ancient culture? Was it, in other words, inviolable simply because it was an essential ingredient of that culture? The answer was no. To all of these men, to remove an innocent person’s head simply because it was a cultural practice was indefensible. Mills argued in 1945 that the tribes must not be put into “human museums,” as that “would be both impossible and wrong, for change is inevitable.” If a head was removed in battle, then that might be a different matter, but if the battle was itself the consequence of indiscriminate lawlessness between villages flouting the prohibition against the use of armed force against each other, then it too was unacceptable. This is not to say that the attempts of these men to remove head-hunting from Naga culture was easy. They may actually have been self-defeating. The ethnologists Peter van Ham and Jamie Saul argued that the work to stamp out head-hunting as an occasional cultural practice in fact fed the flames of an illegal head-hunting culture:
By imposing their “Inner Line System,” the British changed the delicate balance of power between certain villages and their subordinates and, as a result, were confronted with a lot more headhunts than before, involving a much higher loss of lives than had previously been the case. For example, when villages were no longer allowed to wield power to keep others in check, the threat of possible raids increased. It is known that Naga at times undertook week-long marches to take a head from an enemy village because, although there were many villages in their vicinity, they were not hostile. The subordinate villages often lay in the unadministered zone and, consequently, villages that had been weak now formed alliances among themselves and set out, united in hatred, to fight a powerful village located within the administered zone. Then the long-established rage was often unleashed in bitter killing of sometimes hundreds of victims. Since, however, it was British policy to guard its “citizens of the Empire,” the colonial forces on their part were compelled to set out on a punitive expedition in order to avenge the raid against its citizens—expeditions that presumably could have been waived if the random border hadn’t been drawn in the first place.
This assessment confuses two issues, however. The first concerns the exercise of head-hunting as a cultural rite and the second the exercise of power by local villages determined to use force to maintain that power. This point is sometimes missed in the scholarly discussion of head-hunting. Head-hunting as a cultural practice was one thing (and bad enough), but the head-hunting that took place because of an absence of a universal system of law across the hills was another, and it was the latter that drove the colonial administrators in their quest for order in their universe. In other words, their principal concern lay not in what was, as some argue, a relatively insignificant (in numerical terms) cultural activity but in the widespread lawlessness caused not because villages wanted heads, but because they wanted to exert their own power over others, which itself was a consequence of having no overarching system of effective government.
