by Robert Lyman
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.
9
THE 1936 PUNITIVE EXPEDITION
By the mid-1930s the farthest east any previous expedition—punitive or otherwise—had reached into the Naga Hills was Tuensang. From here one could look out at the dark blue smudge on the horizon that denoted the Patkoi Range, on the other side of which lay Burma, but no white man had ever reached these distant hills, from the Indian side at least. There was no intelligence to suggest that any European had ever set foot in these hills from the Burmese side either. One Naga chief from the village of Chingmei, Chingmak, had nevertheless visited Mokokchung several times, beginning about 1920, and did so again in 1934 to complain that Tuensang was restricting his village’s trade—and to swear his fealty to the British king-emperor, George V. This visit followed a tour of Chang territory in January that year by Philip Mills, the subdivisional officer in Mokokchung. Chingmak and Mills got on famously from the first time they met and remained firm friends thereafter. Chingmak had even gone so far as to send one of his sons, Sangbah, to Mokokchung to learn something of the ways of the British overseers of this green and pleasant land. Although the relationship was a distant one, geographically speaking, Chingmak nevertheless kept Mokokchung abreast of affairs in eastern Tuensang a
s regularly as was needed.
