Among the Headhunters

by Robert Lyman

  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.a 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.

  Damant’s opinion is chronicled in Reid, History of the Areas Bordering on Assam from 1883–1941.

  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.b

  Fuller’s opinion is given in Reid, History of the Areas Bordering on Assam from 1883–1941.

  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. Daman
t 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.”