Among the Headhunters

by Robert Lyman

  On Wednesday, December 3, the expedition had something of an easy march for five miles before reaching a camp prepared for it by the village of Panso. A gentle uphill climb included traversing a large log on an incline, and Mills could not begin to understand how he would be able to climb down it on the return journey. “At the top of our climb was Yukso village, a place of about 50 houses in which no white face has ever been seen before. They were a little sore at having lost a head by treachery a few days ago, but were most friendly to us.” For the excited Mills, with his eye on collecting artifacts for the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, Panso was like entering an ethnological treasure trove:

  I collected one or two things I wanted, including a real “crash helmet,” a huge thing of cane with rope coiled round it, and padded inside with a filthy rag! They use them in village fights when it is “genna” (against their own tribal laws) to use steel, but you may hit the other fellow on the head with a club, as hard as you like! Also a very fine drum in the village of the curious type one gets round here. I also collected a set of ladies’ combs. One for the scalp has fine teeth, and the other one has a long handle and blunt bamboo teeth. This is used for twisting the back hair when it is being done in the morning.

  Instructions had been sent ahead and a large encampment prepared for them by Panso, separated from the main village. “It was of vice-regal proportions,” a surprised Mills observed. The views were spectacular. Across the broad valley looking northeast they could see the slope at Wenshoyl from which they had made their rapid withdrawal five days before. What surprised Fürer-Haimendorf, however, was the warmth of the welcome they received. On reflection, he considered, it had much to do with the humbling of Pangsha as, like Noklak, the village lived in an uneasy relationship with its aggressive neighbors. “They are all very pleased with us for burning Pangsha,” Mills told Pamela. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf explained why:

  They have seen the smoke of the burning Pangsha in the distance, and are beside themselves with joy at the defeat of their enemies. There is a certain maliciousness in their remarks on Pangsha’s ruin when they meet us before the village; and we soon realize that it is not altogether without reason, for early this year a troop of Pangsha men, appearing before the gates of Panso and challenging them to fight, had taken without any losses to themselves no less than twelve heads. The Panso men were inside the strong fortifications of their village; why, then, we asked, had they ventured outside? But Panso prided themselves; they were famous warriors, they said, and could not allow such a challenge to go unanswered. Well, Pangsha had taken twelve heads, but the white men have burnt her to the ground, and she has paid for those last insulting remarks her warriors had thrown over their shoulder as they left: “We only wanted to show you what sort of men we are; you have nothing more to fear, only be careful! Don’t follow us.” Sadly the men of Panso tell us they had not had the courage to follow and take revenge. Now we have destroyed their enemies, and the people of Panso joyfully acclaim the victors.

  It was yet more confirmation to the Europeans that fear was the driving ingredient in the exercise of power in the eastern Naga Hills. The celebrations of the victory over Pangsha were, as a consequence, fulsome and elaborate. Fürer-Haimendorf described the color and spectacle:

  The great dance in honor of the victors is soon to begin, and a wonderfully colorful crowd gathers on the open space outside the village. The men stand in a long row, stretching from our camp down the slope, and start the dance with slow, measured movements. They wear full ceremonial dress—you might be tempted to describe it as full war-dress, but the Nagas never risk their costly feathers and ornaments in a raid. They treasure them for the glory of the dance. They have conical hats of red and yellow plaited cane, tufted with flaming red goat’s hair, and surmounted with two white hornbill feathers striped with black. Warriors who have themselves captured heads are permitted to load their hats with shining mithan horns and hold their hats in place with chin-straps set with tiger claws. Cowrie shells are embroidered on most of the dark blue cloths and the small aprons reaching from the belt to the knee. The broad belt is set with white seeds, and supports a wooden sheath at the back, which takes the long dao when it is not in use. In fact, their ceremonial dress is very like that of the Changs, except that, in addition, they wear leggings of bearskin which not only protect the legs against panji but complete the harmony of the costume.

  Mills was less enthralled with the proceedings. “I have seen too many Naga dances to be very interested,” he told Pamela, and “he was tone-deaf [although the] . . . Baron loved every moment of it, and rushed about like a press photographer. He wants spectacular pictures which he can sell.” The day following—December 4—Mills, Smith, and Fürer-Haimendorf had the opportunity of examining Panso at close quarters while Major Williams attempted to throw off his cold by lying in the sun at the encampment. Like Noklak, the village was enormous. It was a jammed-together higgledy-piggledy collection of hundreds of houses, each of which, as in Noklak, seemed to be vying to sit on the highest piece of ground. They didn’t see any women, apart from the wives of the gaonburas in their houses, but the men of the village were welcoming and eager to show their visitors around. When questioned, they insisted that no slaves remained in the village. All had been released back to their homes except one, who had been sold into Burma. With the vastness of the village, there was little that Mills could do but believe them. They were disparaging about Noklu, and it was apparent that they would have liked nothing better than for the British to travel to burn their powerful neighbor too.

  Late in the evening, after Mills had lost hope that the men of the Noklu morungs would obey his instructions to meet him at Panso, they turned up. The scraps of the Statesman that he had sent had done their job in persuading the village gaonburas to travel to Panso in order to make their peace with the sahib of Mokokchung before their village was set upon and burned like Pangsha. “I interviewed them by lantern light,” Mills wrote. “All went well.” They insisted that they had returned their two slaves to their homes, although another had died and a fourth had also been sold into Burma. Without marching on their village Mills had little choice but to accept their stories. The fact that they had turned up in large numbers to make obeisance to him demonstrated that, for a while at least, the white man’s strange injunctions against slave trading would be obeyed. Now, with the images of Pangsha burning on the distant hillside, they feared the consequences of disobedience. Mills was relieved. “Noklu having come to terms, we have been able to shorten our tour a little,” he wrote to Pamela. “We shall all be glad to turn our noses towards home.”

  On December 6 the column began its homeward journey, its mission of war over but that of diplomacy not yet complete. Undoubtedly they did so much to Noklu’s relief. Leaving Panso, they retraced their steps to Chentang, which they had left six days before. The journey entailed the long, steep climb back up to Sangpurr, passing through the village of Yukso and camping near Sangpurr at an elevation of 7,600 feet. The campsite prepared for them was shaded from the sun and icily cold, whereas at Sangpurr, after a short walk to the summit, they were able to bask in the sun’s warming rays. There were some benefits of living at such an altitude, but the welcome that Mills and Fürer-Haimendorf received was a grudging one. Visitors were rarely seen here, and white ones never. The houses were shut up, with the occupants cowering inside and women and children dispatched to safety in the jungle farther down the slope. Signs of fear and hostility were all around them, as during the march to Chentang the following day panji littered the paths and caught two porters unawares, piercing their feet to the extent that they had to be carried in litters. Somehow they managed to climb down the tree trunks over the path and had an easier time of it than they had when they had begun the climb to Sangpurr a few days earlier.

  At Chentang, where the column rejoined the porters and guards they had left behind to guard the camp while the Panso party was away, a pleasant surprise awaited them. Pangsh
a had kept its promise, and the final slave child had been returned. The slave was accompanied by a fine of five mithan cows and message from Pangsha that Fürer-Haimendorf abbreviated thus: “They are very proud to be considered ‘sons’ of the Government, but beg us not to return, for as it is, they have a difficult enough time with their wives, who refuse to allow them to rebuild their houses as long as we remain in the neighborhood. We send them all the necessary assurances, for we understand that even bold Pangsha men may have difficulties with their own wives.” To the slaver-hater Mills it was a particularly proud moment, as he told Pamela: “After the show I feel I have not lived in vain. I have actually found and got into our own hands 5 children and 2 adults and have caused 2 more children to be returned to their parents. All have been saved from a life of drudgery and disgrace and very likely from human sacrifice.” All this war and diplomacy had a purpose, he considered, and it was scenes such as the family reunion at Chentang that made the exhausting marches, endless politicking, and brief moments of fear during the running battle at Wenshoyl worthwhile. While Fürer-Haimendorf snapped photographs of the slaves, and of Mills sitting in their midst, by some extraordinary combination of circumstance every slave was reunited with a member of his or her family:

  The child was the son of a man called Pangting [from Kejok] who was here simply beaming. The child is dumb, but an absolute little lamb. The poor hangdog little wretch had become a laughing baby. He came and sat with me and played. “Girly’s” parents [from Saochu] were supposed to be dead and weren’t, they were here as large as life. Even the unutterable “Girly” herself looked quite attractive with happiness. Her mother was almost speechless. We mustn’t forget “Bert.” It appears that that incredibly ugly youth has a wife whom he thought had been killed in the raid, but now she is alive and well, even he smiled. Just before the little party set off ahead of us to their home, “Girly’s” mother told me that the slave we have been trying to get back from Burma was also her daughter, and begged me to get her back. I could only say I would do my best. Two hours later a real life drama happened. The poor little slave girl from Burma was brought in. How glad her mother would have been! But they will meet in a few days. I do feel rather proud of getting her back from miles inside Burma.

  The bagpipers of the Assam Rifles happily played their Scottish airs in celebration of the event.

  It was here that their journey home took a different path from the one they had taken from Mokokchung, for instead of returning to Helipong they marched northward directly to Tuensang, the homeland of the Chang people. It was a long, hard march, beginning at 6 a.m. on the morning of December 7. Tiredness now replaced the elation of the previous day, and tempers frayed, Mills again finding fault with Smith’s organization of the porters. Lunch was called at 2:30 p.m. Afterward the column began the daily climb to habitation, again to 7,000 feet. Eventually Tuensang—“an enormous village” in Mills’s words and the Chang’s “great mother-village” in Fürer-Haimendorf’s—came into sight. The column marched through its cramped streets and then dropped a good distance to camp on the northern side—at a height of about 4,000 feet—where eleven bamboo structures had been built for it. Tuensang had been visited several times before by tours setting out from Mokokchung, including by J. H. Hutton, and the white man and his laws were well known in these parts. The area was also relatively peaceful: Pangsha’s depredations and those of warlike villages to the northeast were restricted to the area farther east. It didn’t stop the panji appearing on many of the tracks, however. One of the porters stepped on one and severed an artery, nearly bleeding to death.

  To Mills’s delight, a great pile of mail awaited the column at Tuensang, where letters had been accumulating for days. A rare repast of tinned salmon, bully beef, cold chicken, potatoes, baked beans, and cheese filled their hungry bellies, and fines against various villages for what Mills described as “contumacy” enabled the entire column to feast off mithan beef that night—to Pangsha’s four cows had been added four from Ponyo and several from other villages. Mills spent the evening under a hurricane lamp meeting deputations from an array of villages who came to see him to discuss their grievances or to give an account of some misdemeanor or other. The great joy for Mills the next afternoon was catching up with the little party of freed slaves and their families, whose journey home from Chentang meant a first stop at Tuensang. He told Pamela, “I forgot to tell you the little girl from Burma was restored to her parents today, and I saw them all together. Another absolutely miraculously transformed child, a little smiling imp. Pangting’s little boy was too busy stuffing food into his mouth to play, but he gave me a beaming smile. ‘Girly’ and the little one are the oldest and youngest of four sisters, the two middle ones lost [in the original attack].” The sojourn at Tuensang was for two nights to enable the column to reorganize and for Mills to conduct business as the deputy commissioner. He toured Tuensang and was struck by its considerable size, perhaps two miles from end to end, he estimated. Ever the anthropologist, he scouted out material to send back to Balfour at the Pitt Rivers Museum. These duties complete, and after saying farewell to the freed slaves as they made their own way home, the column packed up camp and headed northwest on December 10. The journey was to take them another three days via the villages of Hgabu, Longtang, and Loksan. The farther they headed back toward administered territory, the more relaxed the Naga villages became. It was obvious to the entire column that this was because they didn’t fear the attacks of violent aggressors such as Pangsha and felt more secure the closer they were to British protection.

  The 500-strong column now began to prepare for home, to relax, and to lose some of the tension it had exhibited when marching into the badlands of the eastern Patkois. At Longtang on December 10 Mills recorded singing and feasting, the Changs chanting, and everyone enjoying a full belly: the Nagas of roast pigs; the Gurkha sepoys of goat; and the Europeans of chickens, mithan’s tongues, and a little goat’s milk for breakfast. It was at Longtang, after a hard march that Williams described to Mills as “blood-stained,” that Chingmak, whom Mills described as his “old friend,” turned for home. He had insisted on accompanying the column with his own retinue of Chingmei warriors until Mills had safely left Chang territory. It was an emotional parting. Mills had formed a personal and political alliance with this giant of the eastern hills, a man who had decided to ally himself and his village with the distant Raj and who was to prove loyal to it through thick and thin. “I am afraid we shall never meet again in this world,” Mills lamented. “He is a very fine type of man, and without him we should never have got our slaves back. He nearly broke down when the moment came, and I hated it.”

  For the porters, each forward step brought them one step closer to home, and on the evening of December 11, from Loksan, they were able to gaze on the Dikhu Valley, the great green gouge in the earth that separated the Control Area from the Administered Area. They had begun the day with a very steep descent to a stream, of which they had taken advantage for a wash—the first for some days—before a steep climb of some 2,500 feet to Loksan. That night the festive spirit continued, with the sepoys having a party and keeping everyone awake until late with a din that drove Mills “nearly silly. Discordant raucous Hindu songs are bad enough but the tom-tom is the crowning evil. They have a huge fire burning and there is a fellow dancing in front of it.” At every stop the local gaonburas would come and pay him their respects, which would keep him busy for most of the evening, but for virtually all others on the expedition, home was nigh, spirits were high, and the serious intent of the expedition now lay far behind them. They were returning as victors, even those who had been engaged merely to carry loads.

  The following morning they began their descent into the valley, where they camped on the Dikhu River. Williams took the opportunity to fish, and they were met with mail from Mokokchung and a fresh set of newspapers from New Delhi. Horrifyingly, for Williams, Smith, and Mills, the papers were full of depressing news about the cons
titutional crisis in London. They now found it difficult to hide this news from Fürer-Haimendorf, and the representatives of the king-emperor on the edge of the world’s greatest empire now felt embarrassed beyond words for the behavior of a king who didn’t practice what they, as his emissaries, had to do every day of their professional lives as colonial servants: self-effacing and self-denying subservience to the imperial ideal. Edward VIII was failing to behave in the way that his own servants believed he should and to give full and proper dignity to his role as monarch. It was deeply unsettling and disturbing. “We are all utterly miserable,” wrote Mills to Pamela. “We’ve no news yet of what finally happened, whether the King abdicated, or whether he gave the woman up. It is not easy to gauge public feeling properly from the many extracts in The Statesman but here I think we would prefer him to abdicate: his reputation will be so terribly damaged in any case.” The crisis in London didn’t prevent Williams from landing seven or eight mahseer and all enjoying a fish supper, but the following day it was all over. After a long, hard climb into Mokokchung they reached home, passing a number of welcoming villages—and cups of the ubiquitous zu—on the way. The march into the hills from Mokokchung took four hours, but much of it was undertaken with rice beer pressed into their hands and the cheers of Nagas welcoming back their triumphant army, returned from teaching the “savages” of the Patkois a painful but necessary lesson. In the Ao village of Longmisa long rows of zu were laid out to quench the thirst of the porters, and the village allocated a pig, which, as Fürer-Haimendorf reported, “Nakhu, as the oldest and most esteemed Naga of our column, kills with the lower end of his spear. Such is the old Ao custom of greeting the home-coming warriors.”