Among the Headhunters

by Robert Lyman

  One day in early 1936 a man named Matche, a Kalyo Kengyu from the mixed village of Yimpang, rushed into Chingmei asking for sanctuary. He was lucky to be able to do so without losing his head—Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf described traveling alone in the Naga Hills as akin to suicide—but Matche brought news that was of considerable use to Chingmak, as he was able to provide the chief with information directly from the seat of power of their greatest rival: the village of Pangsha. It is unclear why Matche fled to Chingmei in the first place, but he had upset the people of Pangsha for some reason and was now in fear of his life. The news he brought concerned the extent of the recent ravaging of local villages by Pangsha and its allies on the Burmese side of the Patkoi Hills. Chingmak duly fed this information to Philip Mills in Kohima, where Mills had moved following his promotion to the rank of deputy commissioner in 1935.

  Pangsha’s reign of terror was well known in these territories, of course. Survivors had managed to escape the pillaging to spread the alarm to other villages, which served to further propagate Pangsha’s message. Under the leadership of its three principal khel headmen—Mongu, Mongsen, and Santing—it had recently attacked the neighboring villages of Saochu and Kejok, taking a substantial number of heads, and young slaves, in the process. Reports reaching Mokokchung on January 6, 1936, stated that Pangsha and Yimpang had exterminated Kejok on Christmas Day 1935 and that fifty-three heads had been taken. Pangsha had already taken nine heads from Panso and seven from Ngobe in recent weeks. Then, on April 16, 1936, the subdivisional officer reported to Kohima that Pangsha had raided Agching or Saochu and killed about fifty and that since the start of the year Pangsha had taken 140 heads from this village.

  Mills estimated in a letter to Shillong on April 29, 1936, that 200 people had lost their lives as a result of this raiding. The future for those who survived as slaves was a terrifying one: they could look forward only to being put to death at some later date as part of a human sacrifice, their heads to adorn the village head tree and other body parts—limbs, hands, and so on—to decorate various parts of the village. Both villages were close to the Control Area—the boundary of which ran through Tuensang—and instability caused by Pangsha, in addition to its rank lawlessness, could have a destabilizing effect on the whole of the Naga Hills. It was also a direct challenge to the authority and prestige of the Raj. Could it not enforce its law even in these remote places? Pangsha didn’t think so and was content to thumb its nose at the king-emperor as a result. Pangsha’s aim was to sow terror among its neighbors; by so doing, it could dominate the region and guarantee its own security from attack. It was the only village in the Naga Hills that had no defenses. As has been seen, intermittent head-hunting was tacitly accepted by the British as part of the Naga way of life; widespread and systematic terror could not, however, be condoned.

  For Philip Mills, the reports of Pangsha’s depredations were deeply worrisome. His primary worry was that, if left unchecked, such lawlessness would lap up against the administered territories, for whose security he was directly responsible. He was also concerned for the security of those Naga villages in the Control Area—such as Chingmei—that had demonstrated loyalty, albeit in a distant sense, to the Raj. In these circumstances the question “Who is my neighbor?” was not a difficult one to answer. His friends were in trouble, the peace of the realm was being threatened, and Mills’s conception of his role as the upholder of the king’s peace demanded action. The government of Assam in Shillong and the government of India in Delhi agreed, and Mills was authorized to proceed with a military expedition to punish Pangsha and by so doing to persuade it to desist from its violent practices. The role of the mission was to proceed into the Control Area not to threaten Pangsha but expressly to punish it. If Pangsha, under the threat of British action, appeared to back down during the operation, it was not to be forgiven for its recent activities without formal retribution.

  From the outset, the sacking of Pangsha was to be the principal purpose of the raid. New Delhi’s permission was carefully couched in terms that Mills had first advised, namely, the abolition of slavery as an adjunct to both head-hunting and human sacrifice.

  India is a party to the Slavery Convention, 1926, and has undertaken to bring about progressively and as soon as possible the complete abolition of slavery in all its forms. It was, however, found necessary to make a reservation in respect of certain outlying and inaccessible areas bordering on Assam and Burma where, it was thought, it would be difficult to implement our undertaking effectively. Recently the Government of India have agreed to the reservation being withdrawn in respect of certain cases including the Naga Hills area in Assam. As a first step towards the fulfilment of the requirement under the Slave Convention to bring about the abolition of slavery in this area, the Government of India, at the request of the Government of Assam, agreed to an expedition, headed by the Deputy Commissioner, Naga Hills, and composed of a column of Assam Rifles. The object of the expedition was to acquaint the headmen of the villages with the determination of Government to suppress the practice of slavery and, if they persisted in an attitude of defiance, to punish them. This action was rendered imperative by the conduct of one of the villages in that area, namely, Pangsha, which, with the assistance of certain other villages, had been raiding and destroying the weaker villages in their neighborhood and holding their captives as slaves in defiance of warning from Government.

  It wasn’t the prospect of punishing Pangsha, however, that excited the anthropologist, as well as the administrator, in Mills but rather the prospect of traveling as far as the Patkoi Range, to which no white man had ever journeyed. The entire area beyond Tuensang was unsurveyed, and there was much to discover about the tribespeople living in areas never before exposed to the gaze of Europeans. He knew of the villages that lay beyond—he had met Chingmak, of course—but he had never, nor had any of his predecessors, set foot in these territories. The prospect was an exciting one. He half suspected that it would be his last professional opportunity to undertake a journey of this kind.

  Shillong had agreed to Mills’s request that an invitation be extended to Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf to accompany the expedition, and it was an eager Austrian at Wakching who received instructions from Mills to proceed to Mokokchung to prepare for the start of the expedition on November 10, 1936. He traveled—delayed for five days by a bout of malaria that he worried might cause him to miss the expedition altogether—accompanied by his Konyak friend Nlamo and some porters carrying the camping equipment Europeans regarded as indispensable in this terrain: a canvas tent, bedroll, mosquito net, and camp bed.

  The normally tiny settlement of Mokokchung was a hive of noisy activity. The home of the local subdivisional officer, G. W. J. Smith, who occupied a European-style bungalow in the town, was now swarming with hundreds of Nagas from neighboring villages—Aos, Lhotas, Rengmas, and Sangtams in particular—who wanted to be hired as porters. They were unable to bear arms against the brutal Pangsherites, who were legend in these parts, so traveling with the expedition as porters was the next best thing to being warriors on a war party. Mills had determined that to sustain the 150 men of the Assam Rifles and the command party, they would need 360 porters to carry their food and camp equipment so far into unknown territory. It was Smith’s responsibility to hire the porters and allocate their loads.

  One of the distinctive features of Nagadom was and remains the complete linguistic separation of each tribe. This separation is not so much a difference in dialects as it is entirely different languages. Accordingly, British-appointed interpreters wearing the distinctive red sashes, dobashis, denoting their appointment bustled about, attempting to create seamless communication between the British overseer and the men of many different Naga tribes—few of whom could communicate with each other in their own tongue—who were queuing up for the chance of being a warrior once more. The local doctor, Dr. Vierya, who accompanied the expedition, insisted on inoculating those selected, much to the annoyance of
Philip Mills, who regarded the eager medic as something of a fusspot and meddler.

  They would be able to count on very little provisioning from the villages through which they passed, even those that were friendly. As subsistence farmers, Nagas rarely had spare food available, barely extracting a living for themselves from the thin soil of their hilltop homes. The expedition would need to carry all its provisions on its back. It would receive gifts from friendly villages along the way, but not enough to support the requirements of 500 hungry mouths. Of course it wasn’t portering that these Nagas in Mokokchung wanted but battle. The prospect of joining a punitive expedition whose task was to fight the rebels at Pangsha was an exciting one for young Naga men whose warrior culture had been emasculated by British laws prohibiting head-hunting and yet for whom taking a head was an important part of their tribal and masculine identities. The irony that they were joining a British military expedition designed to stamp out head-hunting in territories far beyond their own so that they could have the opportunity to take heads probably passed them by. In any case this moral confusion—if it was ever seriously contemplated—was quietly ignored in the face of the eagerly awaited prospect of a fight. The presence among them of the uniformed platoons of the Assam Rifles, smart in their light blue uniforms, canvas webbing, and British Service Lee-Enfield .303 rifles, together with the long sword-bayonet that, when fixed to the end of the rifle, looked very much like a Naga spear, only served to generate more martial excitement.

  For their part, Mills and Major W. R. B. (“Bill”) Williams, the commandant of the Third Battalion, Assam Rifles, were considerably less enthusiastic about the prospect of violence. Their task was to execute the law, not conduct a war, and if the expedition could be undertaken without bloodshed, so much the better. The prospects of a nonviolent resolution were slim, however, they mused over supper that night with Fürer-Haimendorf and Smith. The Nagas’ favorite military tactic was the ambush, in which they were very proficient, and the deep ravines and thick vegetation of the hill country made attacks of this kind very successful against long, strung-out columns. They thought of the previous infamous punitive expedition against the Konyak village of Chinglong on February 5, 1913, when so many men had been killed. It had taken four months to subdue the Nagas on that occasion. Would this be any different? Whatever happened, they all believed—unlike the excited porters who were already considering the prospects of victory—that the subjugation of Pangsha would not be a walkover.

  Two days of organization were required before, at 8 a.m. on Friday, November 13, the long files of men left Mokokchung for their distant adventure. Bamboo cups of zu, a traditional farewell gift to departing war parties, were offered by the gaonbura to the command party (Mills, Williams, and Fürer-Haimendorf) as the mile-long column began to wind its way down into the valley leading east, most of the village watching the events with a solemnity that contrasted starkly with the excitement and noise of previous days. After leaving Mokokchung the route wound down around the cultivated hillsides deep into the Dikhu Valley and crossed the river, which flowed lightly in this postmonsoon period, before climbing stiffly into the hills once more, with the first day’s camp located at Chare. An advance guard of twelve sepoys led the way, followed by the command party leading the main party of Assam Rifles. The porters followed, led by Smith and guarded by small groups of sepoys, a group of whom also brought up the rear.

  The track down to the Dikhu River was poor, and the ramshackle bridge across it was too slight to accept more than a few men at a time. Most men waded across. It was a hard first day’s march. The weather was warm, and Mills described himself as “fairly cooked” but was somewhat dismissive of the fitness and attitude of Smith, who appeared to struggle with the terrain. It would get worse, Mills considered. He was right. That day’s march was a foretaste of what was to come, as the route east ran against the grain of the country, in which the mountain ranges ran roughly north-south. Steep climbs into the hills were followed by equally steep descents into thick, warm valley bottoms before heading, it seemed, directly up into the skies again.

  When they reached their destination toward the end of the afternoon, they were met by a delegation of village elders offering gifts of fish taken from the Dikhu. Later these gifts were added to by five enormous pigs, four goats, “and chickens without number.” “Of course,” Mills noted, “we shan’t do as well as that everywhere.” The first task on arriving outside Chare was the organization of the campsite for 500 men. The village had prepared the site and built a number of rudimentary shelters, which the porters and sepoys immediately got to work improving. There were tents for Williams’s sepoys and the command element, but most of the porters slept under the stars. Chare was friendly territory, and defenses were not required. Before long fires were lit across the hillside, soon followed by the smell of roast goat, pig, and chicken that would satisfy the hungriest of appetites.

  The following day—Saturday, November 14—dawned wet and cold. A heavy mist had draped itself over the mountains. It failed, however, to dampen the enthusiasm of the expectant warriors. What did this more effectively than anything else was the extreme difficulty of the march. As the crow flies, the distance between Chare and Phire-ahire, their destination that night, was a mere ten miles. But in miles walked it seemed three or four times as long. Mills admitted to his wife, Pamela, in his daily letter that he had had a “bellyful of hills today.” On leaving Chare the path dropped steeply 2,000 feet into the valley (a descent undertaken in heavy rain), climbed 1,500 feet to the village of Thurigare before dropping into another valley, through which flowed the Chimei River, and then rose yet again some 3,000 feet to their camp.

  The welcome they received from the villagers of Phire-ahire made up for the agony of the march. Mills and Fürer-Haimendorf (to whom Mills referred affectionately in his letters as “the Baron”) were well received by the villagers and were given a demonstration of the crossbow, a weapon in common use in the Sangtam territory into which they had moved, and the usual gifts of food—“three enormous pigs, a cow, three goats, ten chickens, some excellent fish.” Mills was quick to identify deficiencies in Smith, who was responsible for the logistics of the expedition and for managing the porters, who by some oversight (one of many, it seemed) had neglected to provide sufficient vegetables among the foodstuffs to feed the column. They enjoyed a pleasant meal of soup, fish, barking deer, dried fruit, and, because of Smith’s carelessness, tinned baked beans rather than fresh vegetables. For his part, Fürer-Haimendorf was less concerned with the lack of vegetables than with the demonstration by Phire-ahire’s gaonbura of the crossbow. It was a wicked-looking weapon firing foot-long poisoned bamboo arrows tipped with iron-barbed heads.a The gaonbura boasted that a wild boar struck by such an arrow would not run more than thirty yards: “The poison is applied in thick layers just behind the head, and the shaft nicked so that it breaks off easily, leaving the poisoned head in the wound. Sometime ago Mills had obtained a small quantity of this substance and sent it to Calcutta to be analyzed. It had not been identified, but experiments proved that it was a powerful poison, causing death by paralyzing the respiratory organs. The victim, the report continued, could be saved by the administration of oxygen through artificial respiration. Not exactly a comforting thought many days’ march from medical aid.”

  See the drawing in Appendix A.

  A calm and much more pleasant day followed as the column wound its way through Sangtam territory to the village of Chongtore, where the men were to spend two nights. They left Phire-ahire at 7:30 a.m. The first steep descent of some 2,500 feet was followed by a long climb to 6,500 feet. Mills and Fürer-Haimendorf left the column to find its own way to Chongtore while they indulged their anthropological instincts by visiting a string of Sangtam villages never before visited by Europeans—Holongba, Sangsomo, and Anangba—but whose inhabitants knew Mills through their own regular visits to Mokokchung. Many of these villagers had volunteered to serve in the 2,000-strong Naga Lab
our Corps, which had been recruited by the British to serve in France during World War I. Most had thought they were signing up for the head-hunting expedition of a lifetime and had been disappointed to find that they were not even allowed to fight against the enemies of the empire, instead expending their martial energies in road building in France. One of these veterans whom Mills wanted to visit at Anangba was Chirongchi. It was with some amusement that he discovered that this incorrigible old rogue—a “magnificent specimen” who had plenty of enemies—had secreted a Lee-Enfield rifle down his trouser leg when he was discharged and brought the weapon, together with ninety rounds of ammunition, back to his khel. How many bullets had he discharged over the years? Rather reluctantly, Mills was forced to confiscate the gun. “I simply couldn’t let him go round slugging his enemies with it,” he told Pamela. The expedition left Anangba after Fürer-Haimendorf had taken a photograph of Chirongchi with the skull of Pukovi, a notorious Sema scoundrel whom he had killed, presumably to local approbation. With his military rifle? Possibly. Mills looked at the Viennese anthropologist’s camera with envy. Such things had not been invented, he observed, when he had begun his work twenty years before.b

  Fürer-Haimendorf took some 1,157 photographs during 1936 and 1937 and approximately 291 during the punitive expedition to Pangsha. All can be seen online at http://himalaya.socanth.cam.ac.uk.

  They stayed comfortably at Chongtore, the last place in the hills where they didn’t need to consider security and therefore have to build a palisade around the camp. When they traveled farther east into Yimsungr and Chang territory, their safety would become increasingly less sure. The gifts of food from Chongtore that night were listed by Mills as “one cow, five pigs, four goats and a mass of chickens and eggs.” That evening they received visits from the gaonburas of the neighboring villages, all coming to pay their respects to the deputy commissioner for the Naga Hills—“a pretty hard bitten lot,” Mills noted as they drank their proffered zu. As the campfires blazed across the hillside that night, the column enjoyed its last night of peace.