Accompanying one of this erudite force was a remarkable young woman called Ursula Graham Bower. More at home holding a Bren gun than a Bacardi, the 31-year-old anthropologist was fresh from a wartime stint in the Naga Hills, where her original mission ‘to potter about with a few cameras and . . . maybe write a book’, had turned into captaining a 150-man-strong Naga guerrilla force against the advancing Japanese. One of the very few women to fight in the Second World War, and the only female guerrilla commander in the history of the British Army, her ‘Bower Force’ proved so effective that the Japanese put a price on her head, and many a downed Allied pilot owed her their life. Indeed, she was lucky to escape with her own life. Allied losses in this forgotten theatre of the war were heavy and the Japanese showed no mercy to captured enemies: one British guerrilla commander had his eyes gouged out before being executed. So as to avoid such a fate, Ursula had arranged to shoot herself if ever threatened with capture. Her loyal Naga servant would then chop off her head and take it to the Japanese in order to prevent a manhunt. Fortunately, such a situation never arose.
Adored by the Naga – who believed her the reincarnation of a goddess – and her Allied commanders alike, her gutsy jungle endeavours caused quite a stir. Dubbed the ‘Naga Queen’ by British troops, she even graced the cover of the January 1945 edition of Time magazine. Inside, an article titled ‘Ursula and the Naked Nagas’ wrote breathlessly of the bravery of ‘pert, pretty Ursula Graham Bower . . . Roedean-educated debutante, rally driver, traveller and anthropologist’, the soldier who looked ‘like a cinema actress’. And well they might be breathless. Our Ursula was one hell of a girl, a gun-toting glamazon who broke every mould in the book.
One of the many people who fell for her charms was tea planter turned soldier, Tim Betts, a cool, no-nonsense sort of chap who’d also led a guerrilla unit against the Japanese in Burma. Upon hearing of this famous Naga Queen, he resolved to seek her out and marry her – which is exactly what he did. ‘As we both seemed to be mad along the same lines, it appeared a very suitable match,’ Ursula later wrote. When Tim was appointed Political Officer of the recently established Subansiri Area soon afterwards, the newly married couple were dispatched to build a new British outpost in the wilderness. At first the government didn’t want Tim to take his young wife, believing the job unsuitable for a lady, but thankfully they were persuaded otherwise. As Ursula wrote in The Hidden Land, her thrilling and often hilarious account of their tenure:
‘The Subansiri Area was a weird, unexplored, strange and unchartered [sic] world. Its tribes came from no one knew where, its hinterland held no one knew what . . . The map showed it as a blank, a vast virginal space . . . a mountain labyrinth of unbelievable difficulty . . . and nobody knew what lay further in at the foot of the snow ranges . . . from one end of the Area to the other there was nothing but cliff and torrent, harshness and savagery. It was wild, sinister and unbelievably beautiful.’
The heroically unflappable pair spent eighteen months among Subansiri’s ‘fantastically Martian’ Apatani and Dafla (since renamed as the Nyishi) tribes, attempting to establish a modicum of government control in this forgotten corner of India. Fresh from a war in which the Allies and Imperial Japanese armies had been pulverizing each other with tanks and bombs, they now found themselves in a society frozen in a medieval time warp. Their new subjects were a Rabelaisian bunch who inhabited a torrid world of constant tribal warfare, ‘horrid butchery’, slavery, kidnapping, mithun theft, polygamy and animal sacrifice. The men were scantily clad in loincloths, cane hats and primitive (yet highly effective) cane armour, their long black hair tied at their foreheads in topknots secured by brass skewers. Daos, Tibetan swords and tiger jawbones hung permanently at their sides, ready for any sudden skirmish. The Apatani women – allegedly as a deterrent to slave-raiding neighbours – had their ‘noses turned into hippopotamus-snouts by large black resin discs’ and their faces heavily tattooed. It was a galaxy away from the genteel society of postwar England.
It wasn’t your typical honeymoon. But by the time the rushed Indian Independence forced Tim and Ursula to return to England, the couple’s initial uncertainties had given way to love and ardent loyalty. They were heartbroken at having to leave.
‘We’d come to care passionately, vehemently, fanatically for the area and its people,’ our heroine writes. ‘Home was in the Assam Hills and . . . there would never be any other . . . for the rest of our lives we should be exiles.’
Their Apatani and Dafla subjects had come to equally love the couple, affectionately nicknaming the tall, lanky Tim soping, meaning lizard, and the curvaceous Ursula yaping, meaning rice bowl.
Coincidentally, while writing this book, I discovered that Tim’s cousin was the surveyor Henry Morshead, F. M. Bailey’s fearless companion in No Passport to Tibet. Hardiness obviously runs in the family.
Seventy years later here I was, sputtering up to the crest of a 2,000-metre pass, keen for my first glimpse of Tim and Ursula’s beloved valley. How much would life here have changed in the intervening decades? Would I still find men garbed in loincloths and cane armour, their bare, brown bottoms winking in the sun as they jogged barefoot across the fields? Would I experience the same weak-kneed awe as Ursula upon first seeing the valley? When they’d arrived in 1946, panting up from the plains with their butterfly nets, linen, lamps and Union Jacks, they’d been amazed at what they saw – for the Apatani may have been primitive by Western standards, but they lived in a wide, flat-bottomed valley ‘as rich, cultivated and serene as an Italian garden’. Excellent farmers, they practised a settled form of wet rice cultivation that was far superior to the shifting cultivation practised by almost all the other tribes in the Northeast. Amidst the untended wilderness of the surrounding hills this neat complex of rice paddies was an unexpected oasis, the sight of which caused Ursula to fall to her knees in wonder.
But Tim and Ursula had walked north from Assam and I was approaching from the east. Before I knew it the road had carried me down into a tunnel of tall, fragrant pines and debouched me onto the hem of the valley itself. It fanned ahead of me, a wide, flat plain covered in a seamlessly interlocking maze of rice paddies; not the phosphorescent green I’d expected but brown, waterlogged and humming with frogs. Pines marched around the edge, walling in the amphibian din, and here and there villages bulged up from the paddies like islands. It was a landscape like nowhere else I’d seen in Arunachal Pradesh.
By now the sun had lowered and the air was too cold to linger. Riding slowly on, I found myself in Ziro, the main hub of the valley, a dusty, dishevelled place where cows munched on piles of rubbish and curs sniffed at the gutter. Grimy buildings jostled for space. Wires sagged. Cars beeped. Signs advertised the numerous Baptist and Revivalist churches that were springing up in the area. Satellite dishes budded from walls and roofs. Shops spilled with car parts, plastic toys, cheap clothes, medicines; proof that commercialism had long taken over from the bartering economy of Ursula’s time, when the Apatani traded with neighbouring, and occasionally distant, tribes, swapping smoke-dried rats for safety pins, handfuls of rice for matches, pine resin for Tibetan turquoise. Not everything in Ziro had changed, though. Among the people I rode past were old Apatani women with black resin nose-plugs and tattooed faces, the last to undergo the tradition before the newly formed Apatani Youth Association banned these old-fashioned, non-progressive practices in the mid-1970s. When I stopped to ask one of these leathery old ladies for directions she just looked at me in silent astonishment and shyly scurried away.
The hotel, when I found it, was a Swiss-style chalet surrounded by pines and croaking paddies whose manager, a pudgy, eager Apatani, bobbed around me as I unloaded the bike.
‘My name is Haj Lodhe,’ he chirped, dragging my dusty panniers across reception, ‘but you can call me Abraham.’
Abraham, like so many of his people, was a recent convert to Christianity, baptized six years ago at the behest of neighbours who told him God would cure his fath
er’s alcoholism. But, alas, God hadn’t cured the man and he’d died not long afterwards. As it was Good Friday, I asked Abraham if he celebrated Easter by gorging on chocolate, as we do.
He giggled, a little guiltily, I thought. ‘No, we sacrifice mithun.’
Easter, ironically, coincided with the Apatani festival of Myoko, a ten-day bacchanal in honour of the arrival of spring and the strengthening of clan ties. For centuries every Apatani had revelled in Myoko’s sacrificial rituals, but missionaries from the evangelist-dominated states of Mizoram and Nagaland were sweeping away the old ways in a proselytizing tide of Christianity. Now, while half the valley spent Myoko divining omens from the livers of sacrificed animals, the other half sang ‘Praise the Lord!’ in crude bamboo churches. I was curious to find out more.
Myoko is hosted by a different village each year, and this time it was Hong’s turn to lead the festivities. Allegedly the second largest village in Asia, Hong was a stilted metropolis of 10,000 people, its numbers swelled to double that by the Myoko celebrations. Traditional bamboo huts stood eave to eave with modern concrete houses in tight, ordered rows and cars clogged the narrow streets. Locating Takhe Kani – a local historian I’d been told about by Tim and Ursula’s daughter, Catriona – here could prove harder than finding a grain of rice in a paddy. But pointed hands and pattering feet soon led me to Kani’s house and, before long, I was seated beside an Idu-style fire with his round-faced wife pouring me a mug of o a la, or rice beer, and handing me a lump of Apatani salt. A briny, solidified ash made from burnt plant matter, the idea was to take a glug of beer followed by a lick of the salt. A few minutes later a small man of about fifty, with gold-rimmed spectacles, a flop of hennaed hair and flecks of chewing tobacco on his lips, tumbled into the flame-lit hut. It was Kani, swaying slightly, fresh from a nearby party. Apart from the faded ‘T’ – signifying the Tani people – tattooed on his chin there was nothing to mark him out as Apatani. No cane hat, dao or palm-leaf cloak, just a very ordinary T-shirt and jeans.
Takhe Kani and I had communicated briefly by email a few weeks ago, but I hadn’t been able to reach him since, and he certainly wasn’t expecting me tonight. Entirely unperturbed, though, he shook my hand warmly and we sat by the fire to chat, his wife handing us a plate of small, green berries to nibble on.
‘Don’t eat too many,’ said Kani (in Apatani the first name comes second) in good English, biting into one of the hard, peppery berries himself. ‘They make you fall asleep.’
Whether it was the berries, or the slight altitude – 1,500 metres – or today’s eight-hour ride, or the rice beer, I can’t recall much of the few hours I spent at Kani’s house. I can see the dark hut flickering in the firelight, and Kani rolling tobacco in his palm as he talks. I can remember him telling me the Apatani came from somewhere near Mongolia, but no one knows why, or how or exactly when. And I can picture myself walking out of the hut into the bitterly cold, starlit night and being told to come back the next morning. The family were holding a private Myoko ritual, he said, and I might find it interesting.
I arrived to find Kani and five other middle-aged men standing in a cluster outside the house examining a small, slimy piece of reddish flesh. One of them held it delicately between his rough fingers while they all took turns to peer at it, muttering and adjusting spectacles as they did so.
Kani grinned when he saw me. ‘It the liver of sacrificed chicken. We look for omens,’ he explained. ‘You see here—’ he pointed to a piece of the liver with his little finger, ‘those red lines mean there will be a death in the clan.’
‘How many people are in the clan?’ I asked.
‘About a thousand.’
Another liver, a tiny yellow one, delivered another dubious prophecy. ‘This one says there will be a fight in the family,’ said Kani, pursing his paan-flecked lips.
Next, a handful of boiled eggs were sliced in half and examined for signs. Kani held one up to his glasses to make sure he didn’t miss anything. ‘Sometimes the eggs are very precise and tell you to sacrifice a dog, and then we find an omen in the dog liver. Shaman also use eggs to check if two people should marry. If egg says so, the marriage not happen.’
But today the bright-yellow yolks were silent.
Inside the dark hut a nyibu, or shaman, was sitting beside the fire, showered in ash, chanting as he dangled a tiny, chirping chick in the smoke. You didn’t need a degree to work out things weren’t looking good for the chick. The shaman, a sinewy old imp with dark, impudent eyes and a face like crumpled leather, wore a black embroidered waistcoat and near-indecently short shorts, out of which stuck a pair of twig-like legs.
‘What are they for?’ I asked Kani, pointing to tight white bands of cotton around each of the imp’s upper calves.
‘They vital. If the nyibu isn’t dressed properly the spirits won’t listen to him.’
I wondered if the spirits had noticed that the nyibu’s long black hair, knotted at the forehead in the old Apatani style, was actually a wig. Or perhaps the spirits weren’t bothered by toupées.
Scattered around the fire was a handful of other men, bottles of Royal Stag at their feet, laughing and talking noisily. Like Kani, the only thing that marked them out as Apatani were the faded blue tattoos on the older men’s chins.
In a grim parody of Easter today’s ritual involved the sacrifice of a number of tiny chicks. They cheeped in a basket beside the shaman, balls of yellow fluff no more than a few days old, soon to be offerings to the many Apatani gods. To appease Luto, the spirit of domestic animals, the imp went outside and squatted in front of an egg on a leaf, muttering as he doused a dangling chick in flour and beer. Seconds later he’d slit its throat and blood was dripping onto the egg from its limp body. Other chicks were hung upside down on a bamboo and leaf altar by the door while the shaman plucked bleeding wing feathers out of a squawking black hen.
‘This altar to keep spirits out of house – like security guard,’ explained Kani over the cheeps and squawks.
Minutes later their charred bodies were being turned on a spit over the fire and the hut smelt of blood and burning feathers. When the bloodshed was over everyone sat around the fire and ripped at bits of cooked chicken and egg.
‘We’re “all-a-tarian”,’ quipped Kani’s son, a policeman, when he discovered I didn’t eat meat. ‘We eat everything. Dogs, cats, frogs, rats, tadpoles . . .’
At one point the conversation turned to my apparent bravery. The men, most of whom spoke some English, were astonished that I was travelling alone on a motorbike.
‘We tribals are afraid to even go to Guwahati,’ said one of them. ‘We get called “Chinky” and treated like outsiders when we leave Arunachal Pradesh.’
His work done, the nyibu sat coquettishly on a stool, one scrawny leg crossed over the other, holding forth about the need for more people to become shamans. Like the Idu, none of the younger Apatani wanted to be shamans anymore, and the nyibu were dying out. When I asked to take his photograph he puffed out his chest, stuck out his chin and held up a surviving chicken in mock-ceremony, vainly rearranging his wig when I showed him the image. Maybe I’m being unfair, but from my outsider’s perspective I felt him to be more a strutting showman than a genuine conduit to the gods.
Dawn broke with a record-breaking round of epiglottal exorcism; a concerto of throat-clearing, spitting and gurgling of phlegm that lasted at least ten minutes. Of course I was accustomed to the unsavoury noise of the Indian male’s morning ablutions by now. I’d got over the urge to dash into the communal bathroom and perform the Heimlich manoeuvre on its occupant. I’d trained my mind to recognize that no, that violent choking coming from the next room wasn’t the sound of someone being strangled. But I was still dumbfounded by the range and volume of hoicks, gargles and chokes that ricocheted through the musty corridors of Indian hotels at dawn. I mean, what exactly were they doing in there? This morning I loitered outside my room, curious to see what Goliath could produce such a racket. But when the
bathroom door opened one of the kitchen boys walked out, a reedy Assamese of no more than twenty. I’d hate to hear a heavyweight Indian wrestler at their morning toilet.
Later I asked Abraham, the enthusiastic manager, the purpose of such forceful ablutions. He looked shocked.
‘You mean you don’t do this in England?’
I shook my head.
‘But it’s very necessary to do this, to clean your throat and tongue. Otherwise—’ he scrunched up his chubby face and fanned his hand in front of his nose in distaste, ‘little smelly.’
It was Easter Sunday, and by ten o’clock a deserted, foggy Ziro rang with the sound of electric keyboards, tuneless singing and shouts of ‘Pays da La!’ (Praise the Lord). Kani had told me only four per cent of the Apatani were Christians, but I’m sure the figure is far higher. Intrigued as to what went on in these services, I followed the sound of singing into a barn-like Baptist church. Inside, about a hundred people, nearly all women, clapped and swayed and sang along with a smiling, clean-cut youth who, with his gelled hair and denim jacket, reminded me of an eighties Blue Peter presenter. Beside him ten teenage girls in shirts and sarongs, pretty and sinless-looking, led the congregation in a choreographed dance. They shimmied and clapped and wiggled their hips, and the worshippers shufflingly followed. I noticed, among the smooth-skinned youths and young mothers, a number of old women, their tattoos and nose-plugs seeming oddly out of place in a church. It was easy to see why young people, influenced by travel and the media, might be cynical of the old animist ways. But it was harder to understand why the old would turn their backs on the Apatani gods in the twilight of their lives.
Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains Page 22
