by Robert Lyman
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 i
n 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:
