Nagaland, India

For photos, see greatmirror.com
For a transcript, see Buzzsprout.com1970784

Transcript

In 2024 I found myself about 400 miles northeast of Calcutta.  The map said I was in Nagaland, one of India’s smaller states.  In an effort to placate the obstreperous people there–yes, they’re the Nagas–India in 1963 had carved for them a new state out of the much larger state of Assam.   Nagaland is about half again as large as Los Angeles County.  It presses against India’s border with Burma, and it’s home now to about two million people.

The most dramatic description I know of the place comes from a pair of British police officers in the 1940s.  “It is a country of an almost terrifyingly prodigal Nature, overgrown by rank and luxuriant jungle, beaten by rains of tropical fury, intersected by numberless rivers pouring their torrents into the majestic Brahmaputra, and racked by earthquakes and pillaged by elephant, rhinoceros and equally savage man.”  

Reviewing that sentence, I’m amused to see that they fail to  mention the topography, so I will add that you should think of the Naga Hills as mountains. The pattern is one of long, parallel ridges with hardly any flat land at the top, plus intervening rivers and occasional valley floors, and then the rest–probably 90 percent of the whole place–steep slopes running a thousand feet up or a thousand feet down, depending on your perspective.  The Nagas are famous for bulging muscles in their calves.  

I speak of the Nagas, but that’s a recent label, originally applied by outsiders.  The Nagas themselves belong to one of twenty or so separate tribes, separate because they speak different languages.  These tribes had no awareness of a collective identity until the British gave them one.  That process took the better part of a century but began in 1835, when the word Naga appeared in print for the first time.  The British officer using it said it was used not by the people themselves but by the Bengalis down on the lowlands.  It’s a pretty safe bet that the word was a slur.

Back in 1947, a Naga delegation met with Nehru, who was about to take India over from the British.  They asked for independence, and one of them recalls that Nehru “banged the table with his fist: ‘India cannot be split into a hundred bits.  If you fight, we shall resist.”  

No surprise: few governments anywhere politely accept the loss of even a shovelful of their territory, but the Nagas  80 years later haven’t given up, and they have on their side the fact that the Government of India these days says that India is the land of the Hindus.  Almost nobody in Nagaland, except for a few economic migrants, is a Hindu.  

The Nagas certainly don’t look like Hindus.  They look Chinese.  This was obvious as soon as I got to the gate for my nearly three-hour flight from Delhi to Dimapur.  That’s the grimy town of 200,000 people that sits at the western toe of the Naga Hills.  It’s the biggest city as well as the commercial center of Nagaland.  Need some part for your truck, which has broken down somewhere in the Hills?  Phone in the order to Dimapur, and you’ll have what you need tomorrow.  

I met one man who had just returned from an overseas trip.  He was still angry because the immigration officer had demanded to know where he had gotten this Indian passport.  It had to be fake, the officer was thinking, because the man didn’t look Indian.  I met another man who had spent some time in southern India.  He said he was often addressed there as “chin chin.”   

In the spirit of reciprocity, the Nagas may have derogatory names for Hindus, but the only one I heard was “mainlander.”  That’s what I heard Nagas call the economic migrants I mentioned a moment ago.  As slurs go, mainlander is pitifully weak, but it does suggest that the people of Nagaland think of India as a place across some imaginary ocean.

Naga villages are almost always on ridge tops.  That’s not because the Nagas want to avoid that ocean.  It’s because into the twentieth century the prestige of Naga men–and sometimes their ability to get married–depended on the number of human heads they had collected.  

Here’s an official account from several villages on the eve of World War II.  It was compiled by the British governor at the time: “Early in 1939 Yungkao, Tamkhung, and Ukha took 12 heads off Agching, and in June of that year Pansha, Ukha and Yungkao destroyed Agching, taking 96 heads.”  Again, that’s 1939.  

I should mention that for added safety Naga villages were fenced and gated.  That’s because the most valuable heads were those of women and children, and they were the most valuable precisely because they were behind those fences and gates and hard to get.  It does rankle our sense of fair play.

Nagas were and are famously indiscriminate omnivores, but they weren’t cannibals.  A Naga took the head of his victim and left the rest.  After a while, he cooked the head, then mounted it on the front of his house or on one of his village’s community buildings.  It wasn’t just a hunting trophy.  The Nagas believed that if they had a person’s skull they had that person’s soul. 

Now I have no idea what a soul is, or even if souls exist, so I’m the last person to talk about soul force, but plenty of people are confident that souls exist, and those people should at least acknowledge that Naga headhunting, barbaric as it was, had an underlying logic.   If souls exist and if they are powerful, it’s not unreasonable to try to stock up.  Two obvious residual questions are whether the soul is located in the head and whether it sticks around after decapitation.

Now I’m not defending headhunting, and neither were the British, who between 1878 and 1947 had officers living in these hills and trying to suppress the practice, but the British did admire and like the Nagas.  The British believed that the idea of accumulating soul-force by nailing skulls to your front porch was demented, but the British also recognized that 96 heads are trivial compared to the poison gas and trench warfare of World War I.  

They are perhaps even more trivial compared to what would come in World War II and certainly more trivial than our situation today, when we ignore the danger of weapons so powerful that if they went off one day the last hundred or perhaps five hundred would have nothing to do but, as the lovely phrase has it, make the rubble bounce.  Who were the British and who are we to call the Nagas nuts? 

That’s why James Mills, a civil servant who worked with the Nagas in the 1930s, could write that “the people are primitive” and why he could add “long may they remain so.”  He added that they were “exceedingly picturesque, cheerful, brave, and loyal.” There’s a rebuttal, which is that Mills is patronizing and that he seems to want to preserve a human zoo, where primitive tribes are left in their savage paradise.  I don’t think he wanted any such thing; I think he believed on the contrary that Naga culture was doomed.  He was just expressing his regret that it had to be so. 

Ursula Graham Bower, a British photographer who worked in the hills long enough to find herself leading a band of Nagas against the invading Japanese, wrote that Naga life was “simple and pagan and brief and happy.”  Was she wrong?  It’s hard to look a Naga in the eye–and believe me they will look right back at you–and see someone who would be  happier with a mortgage in Houston.  

One of the last British officials to work in the hills was an Irish policeman named Eric Lambert.  He was more explicit than the others about the contrast between Nagas and Europeans.  He writes of “a beautiful country and a happy and lovable people.  May they long be spared from the terrible consequences of Western Civilization.”  Ouch.  Like all Britain’s Indian officials, Lambert lost his job in 1947, but he was unusual because he spent the next decades bashing around the planet for MI6.  

Walking out of the Dimapur airport terminal, I was asked to register as a foreigner.  That’s never happened to me after any other domestic flight in India, and on leaving Nagaland a week later I thought the airport security was tighter than usual.  That’s saying something, because security in Indian airports is tight to begin with.  

At the time, I didn’t know that in 2004 two bombs had exploded at the Dimapur railroad station.  Several dozen people died and more than that were injured.  Violence has come from the other direction, too.  In 2021 Indian soldiers shot six miners dead.  The military said the men had been mistaken for militants, and that was the end of it.  Protests broke out, and eight more civilians were killed.  A soldier was killed, too. 

I mentioned the conversation with Nehru in 1947, but this lust for independence goes back farther.  In 1929, a group of Nagas asked Britain’s Simon Commission to please leave the Nagas alone.  The commission did not grant this request.  Neither did the government of India when one of its own governors argued that Nagaland should be made into a freestanding Crown Colony. 

The Nagas continued to seek independence.  The violence peaked in 1956.  India since then has signed three cease fires with Naga insurgents.  The documents have presumably moderated the violence, but long military convoys still move up and down the highways of Nagaland, and I saw senior military officers traveling with heavily armed escort vehicles.  

I would have rented a car at Dimapur, but there were no rental car agencies at the airport.  I’m glad now, in part because it took my driver three hours to go the 43 miles from Dimapur to Kohima.  That’s the capital of Nagaland, and it’s almost 5,000 feet above Dimapur.   I’ll blame landslides. They are ever present in Nagaland, and although a lane is cleared quickly, travel for some time is reduced to one-way, which means waiting your turn.  I should also blame poor road construction and a resulting abundance of broken pavement.  It’s not that Indian engineers can’t design or make good roads, but construction funds bleed into the pockets of politicians and contractors.  As someone told me, you’ll never see a poor government minister.  I asked how a certain minister had gained the wealth needed to buy his office. I was told, with a smile, that he had been a government contractor.

The topography between Dimapur and Kohima is sufficiently forbidding that the British never bothered to fortify this part of India’s border.  Nobody, they thought, would be crazy enough to attempt invading India this way.  The British were wrong, of course, but at Kohima in 1944 the British did at tremendous cost stop the advancing Japanese army.  The senior British general on the spot, William Slim, later wrote that the Japanese would have marched all the way to Delhi if their general hadn’t been a blockhead.  It would have been easy, Slim wrote, to encircle Kohima, pin it down, and move on.  Instead, the Japanese insisted on trying to take Kohima by sending wave after wave of soldiers to their deaths.

The Commonwealth War Cemetery, with about 1,400 graves in the middle of town, is Kohima’s biggest tourist attraction.  It may be unique as the only Commonwealth War Cemetery where the Cross of Sacrifice, a standard feature in all these cemeteries, stands in the middle of a tennis court.  Once attached to the bungalow of the British colonial officer in charge of the district, the court has been preserved because it was the site of intense hand-to-hand combat.  Eighty years later, in 2024, the Japanese funded a peace memorial about half a mile to the south.

There’s not much else to draw visitors to Kohima, a town of 150,000 people sprawling several hundred yards down both sides of about three or four miles of a ridge.  There’s a single road on the crest.  There are almost no road signs.  Traffic is very slow, even though trucks are prohibited from entering during the day.  Parking is difficult or next to impossible.  The road is lined with nondescript commercial buildings, and it splits in the center of town into one-way roads straddling both sides of the city’s soccer field, which enjoys the town’s premier patch of flat land.  

Some houses can be reached by occasional branch roads that dead end several hundred meters down one side of the ridge or the other, but most houses can only be reached by foot paths that run on contours.  Going between contours means stairs.  We’re back to strong legs.  

Seen from a distance, the slopes are picturesque, and walking the paths is much nicer than walking along the street up at the top.  The houses themselves–on small lots because land is very expensive–are packed together tightly.  They’re mostly of painted brick or concrete blocks, two or three or four or even more stories high or, if older, of rusted corrugated sheet metal.  There are no building regulations, no sewage systems, and garbage collection amounts to a truck that parks once or twice a week, honks, and waits 10 minutes for nearby householders to bring whatever they want to get rid of.  It’s dumped in a convenient gully.

At first I found it difficult to orient myself because there were so few landmarks other than the war cemetery and a new Kentucky Fried Chicken.  (The soccer field doesn’t qualify, because it’s hidden between the one-way roads.)  The basic problem, I think, is that the town was destroyed in 1944.   The oldest intact building I saw was a small wooden building on the campus of what used to be the American Baptist Mission.  (The word American has been dropped.)  The building was like a one-room schoolhouse, and it had a sign dated 1912, which by Kohima standards is antediluvian.  It’s not an eye-catcher like Bombay’s railroad station or Delhi’s Red Fort, and anyway you can’t see it from the main road.

What was Kohima like before World War II?  The short answer is that there were two Kohimas: a Naga Kohima and, next to it on the south, a British Kohima.  The British bit had been set up in 1878 when the British decided to get physically closer to the Nagas.  The problem wasn’t the Nagas hunting each other: the problem was that the Nagas insisted on coming down from the hills and taking heads from villagers in the Brahmaputra lowlands, where the British had tea plantations. As one administrator wrote, it was the Nagas’ own fault that the British moved in.

Old photos show that the British part of Kohima was very modest, a forest clearance with a dozen or so widely spaced, one-story wooden buildings with corrugated-metal roofs.  Ursula Graham Bower, the photographer, writes of tidy bungalows with red roofs.  Marguerite Milward, a sculptor who also came in the 1930s, says that the bungalows were mounted on posts about five feet high to withstand earthquakes.  She adds that she needed permission to enter the Hills.  Then “after four hours travelling we stopped at the gate of Kohima, the headquarters of the Naga Hill District.”  There is no gate today, and my registering at the airport in 2024 was a faint echo of the security regulations of her time.  

I haven’t seen good descriptions of the Naga part of Kohima, though Milward wrote that “above the village, too high to be visible, there was a great Angami Naga Settlement, with its huts clinging to the summit of the hill.” (I should explain that among foreigners the Angamis are probably the best known Naga tribe.  They are certainly the tribe whose militancy gave the British and, later, the government of India, the most trouble.)

I have, however, seen a photograph of part of the Naga settlement.  It’s from about 1920 and shows a hilltop with eight or nine tidy rows of almost identical houses: simple rectangles, like giant pup tents with high, thatch-covered roofs.  Most of the houses line up to face east, toward the rising sun, not a bad idea at a high elevation.  

It looks so much like tract housing that I wonder if this was really the way the village looked in centuries past.  I raise the question because we know that the village was burned to the ground in 1851.  That was when the British decided they had to teach these Nagas a lesson.  They were slow learners, and the British burned Kohima down again in 1879.  Don’t forget that it would be destroyed once again in 1944.

The prewar distinction between British Kohima and Naga Kohima is gone now.  Kohima is all Naga, though I think from the size of houses that wealthier families favor the old British end.  I don’t know if that’s a coincidence, but even at the north end of town people have cell phones and the internet, and there are ATMs.  I already mentioned the KFC.  I was more impressed by some hard green Granny Smith apples from Australia.  They had come a long way, including those final 43 miles up from Dimapur. Marguerite Milward, the sculptor, wrote that she had “never met anyone in Kohima who wore European dress.”  I saw just the opposite.  

I wanted to see house-sized pup tents roofed with thatch, and so I went south a few miles to Kisama.  That sounds like the name of a Naga village, but it isn’t.  It’s a name cobbled together for an outdoor museum established in 2003 to show visitors the range of house types built by 16 of the Naga tribes.  There were some wonderful thatch roofs here, and there were others made of wood shakes and even slate tiles, which I had no idea the Naga had used, but I was shocked to find one building being roofed with imitation thatch made of plastic.  

This was the Angami building, the diehard defenders of Angami culture, and the crew on the roof was nailing to the roof pieces of plastic that looked like big hair combs.  It probably came from China.  Almost as bad, somebody had decided that the museum needed an amphitheater whose steel frame towered over the traditional buildings.  

I shouldn’t have been so surprised, because at the start of the highway up to Kohima I had stopped at a massive “Welcome to Hills of Nagaland” display.  The center of the display, flat against a cliff wall, was the gable of a traditional Naga house.  I think it was made of concrete, but on either side of it there were six irregular stones, roughly resembling arrowheads but unshaped and standing between 10 to 15 feet high.  Stones like these–in the literature they’re always called  monoliths–have attracted the attention of foreigners since the English first saw them, and there’s still a degree of mystery about them, but these particular stones had signs in front of them reading “Environmental cleanliness begins with each individual desire to be clean.”    

I headed to Khonoma, a rebellious village the British destroyed in 1879 and which the Government of India attacked in 1956.  

Khonoma sits on a ridge 500 feet high and about half a mile long.  It’s surrounded on both sides by paddy fields.  Climbing the ridge, my driver and I passed another landslide, and I looked up to see an impressive Catholic church perched just above the start of the slide.  It’s a good thing that Catholic churches don’t have organs with 32-foot pipes whose vibrations could send this church skiing downhill.

Most visitors to Khonoma come to see the Damant Memorial.  It’s not much–an obelisk maybe four feet high, but it’s mounted on a plinth atop a stone platform at the very top of the ridge.  The east side of the obelisk, badly scratched and nicked but not energetically vandalized, reads “G. H. Damant, M.A., CS [that’s presumably for Bengal Civil Service]. Killed Khonoma, October, 1879.”  The precise date has been obliterated, but it was the 22nd, and the G.H. stood for Guybon Henry.  He was 33, a gifted linguist, and he had been posted to the Hills only the year before.  He was the one who decided that the British should get closer to the Nagas by transferring their local headquarters to Kohima from a village down near Dimapur.    

Here’s an account from 1905 of what happened:  "It is said that an interpreter from Jotsoma [a nearby village] warned him that the village was hostile, and on more than one occasion fell on his knees before him and begged him not to proceed.  Mr. Damant declined to believe that there was any danger...he advanced... up the steep pathway leading to the village.  The gate was closed, and as he stood before it he was shot dead... The Nagas then poured out of the village...and completely dispersed the troops, killing 35 and wounding 19…”  The author of this narrative concludes: “It was obviously time that the Nagas should be taught a lesson.“  The British sent a much larger force that burned Khonoma to ashes and dispersed the villagers.  Eventually they were allowed back to rebuild the place.

The view from the obelisk was both spectacular and discouraging.  Spectacular because it offered a commanding view of the paddy lands and of the higher mountains beyond.  Discouraging because the thatched houses that I had seen in photographs of Khonoma from about 1920 were all gone.  Instead, all the buildings were either made of corrugated sheet metal or painted masonry, and all of them were roofed with sheet metal, either rusted or bright green.  

On arrival, I had been told very firmly that all visitors had to have a guide.  I was talking with the guide, who was actually very good, and lamenting the green roofs when he explained that the government had given the paint free of charge to homeowners so that Khonoma could become India’s first green village.  I thought this was a joke, but apparently it isn’t. I’m  still skeptical, but I suppose an ambitious civil servant might have thought it was a brilliant idea, and perhaps one he’d find profitable.  One man was building a concrete framed, five-story building with a stylishly sloping pent or skillion roof.  It would do wonders for the skyline and might even get a green roof.

Lanes ran through the village.  I  call them lanes because they were narrow, not quite straight, and they were paved with square-cut stone blocks.  Houses here are often built on stone platforms, and the edges of those platforms sometimes form walls bordering the lanes.  Many of those walls had geraniums growing in the cracks or in pots on top of the wall.  Somebody was watering them, which probably is not traditional, because In the old days water had to be carried up to the village; now it comes in a long, gravity-fed pipeline and is distributed through rubber hoses that run alongside the lanes.  Water, in other words, isn’t as precious as it used to be.  I saw a communal tank with hundreds of gallons of water.  Women were hand-washing clothes, hard work but a lot easier than it would have been in the old days.

I found a couple of buildings whose walls were made not of masonry or sheet metal but of bamboo rods about the diameter of a pencil.  They were set parallel to each other but with a bit of space between.  Then mud was squeezed onto and between the rods.  The mud set and formed a solid wall. 

I also saw paddy spread out on the ground to dry, but what took my breath away was a basket that stood five feet high and was shaped as gracefully as a vase.  It was made of thin bamboo strips and was used to store unhusked paddy.  It sat on a wide plank on which the paddy was pounded to remove the husk.

I thought this basket was the first beautiful thing I had seen, and I initiated a stupid conversation, entirely my fault, by saying that the basket would sell for thousands of dollars in Los Angeles.  I made it worse by saying that the villagers could make a lot of money by authorizing a luxury hotel overlooking the paddies.  The hotel could charge guests a fortune, and the village’s share could be used to send village kids to college.  Mid-sentence I slowed and admitted that I was offering a formula for the village’s destruction, because the kids would not come back. 

As it was, the villagers didn’t need my help: many houses–possibly even a majority–were owned by people who had already moved to Kohima or elsewhere and who came back only for special occasions. 

A trio of old ladies sat outside on stools.  The stools were shaped like drums maybe a foot in diameter and a bit taller than that, but, like the basket, they were made of woven bamboo with contrasting bands of color, and they were curved in the middle so they resembled an industrial-sized pulley or the waist of the kind of dress that American women once wore with girdles.  

To my short list of beautiful objects I’ll add a magnificent short-handled rake made from a single piece of bamboo perhaps 18 inches long and split at one end into fingers that were somehow bent to form six tines in a row.  It was an elegant tool, but I have no idea how it was made.  I’d like to know if it’s still being made, and I’m worried that it’s not. 

I don’t know why the Damant monument hasn’t been more seriously vandalized, because although the village looks radically different from the way it did a century ago, the villagers are far from whipped or beaten.  This was obvious from an inscribed monolith erected in 2004.  Here’s what it said: “This memorial is dedicated to Judelie Hiekha… a renowned warrior of Khonoma.  He played a prominent role in Khonoma’s victory over a British expeditionary force sent against the village as he initiated the attack and killed their leader, G.H. Damant ….”  The inscription went on to praise Hiekha: “His life was a life of distinction and public esteem as well as hardship and sacrifice.  He had to leave Khonoma due to British persecution and he settled and died in exile….”  

The words were written in English, for which I suppose you can thank the missionaries, and, yes, there’s a large Baptist church in Khonoma, along with the Catholic church and a revivalist one.

The town today is no longer walled and gated, but there is one heavy door set in a stone wall.  It may be the wall where Guybon Damant died.  Photos from 1920 show it in poor shape, so it’s been rebuilt.  In an age of artillery, it has no defensive value–you could obliterate the village from neighboring mountains–but the gate is a symbol of village pride. 

The village has a fort, too.  Militarily it’s worthless, because it’s no more than a rectangular, flat-topped building with a stone facade  and a balcony on one side, with glass windows even.  A plaque explains that the fort had been built in 1825, then destroyed by the British in 1879.  The fort was rebuilt in 1890 by villagers who apparently weren’t willing to throw in the towel.  It was destroyed by the British again in 1906.  It was rebuilt in 1919 but then demolished by the Indian army in 1956.  It was rebuilt in 1990 as we see it today, like the gate purely as a symbol.  

Two of the most important leaders of the Naga insurgency of the 1950s were born in Khonoma.  They were friends but had a falling out because one of them–he was called with his initial T. Sakrie–was convinced that Gandhi’s non-violent methods were the most likely to succeed.  You can perhaps thank the missionaries for that, because Sakrie was a man of Christian faith.  He was assassinated in 1956, probably on the order of his former friend.  Before then, his house at Khonoma, along with the rest of the village, had been raided and heavily damaged by the army. The fort had been destroyed.  A European observer wrote at the time, “the Indian Army is in full occupation of every section of the Naga Hills.”  

Sakrie’s former friend fled India and moved to England, where he died 30 years later.  His name was Zapu Phizo, and he is still referred to as “the Moses of his people.”  He is now buried in Kohima, next to the Nagaland secretariat,  which, along with the fact that his grave, in splendid isolation, is approached via a monumental stairway, is proof that he is not a fringe figure.  

On the road to Khonoma there’s an impressive monument to one insurgent named Sievizo Seyie.  A lengthy text explains that the Indian army tied him to a stake and told him he would be executed if he did not beg forgiveness.  The text quotes Sieye saying, “In my custom and my religion it is a grave sin to deny my guilt if I am guilty.  But in that same religion it is equally sinful to say that I am guilty when I am not…  I did not burn other people’s villages or rape or murder other people.  I only killed in self defence of my lands and my rights.  Therefore I cannot ask pardon.”  The text explains that the officiating Army officer was so impressed that he let Seyie go.

It does sound like George Washington and the cherry tree, but the monument is very impressive, with a full-length statue of Sieyie standing on a massive rock on a platform with a splendid view of the hills.  

I asked whether students in Nagaland schools learned this story.  The answer was they did not, because the curriculum was set by Delhi.  Well, you can see why Delhi might not want this story taught, but children passing the monument would sometimes ask or be told about it.  Seyie stands there every day as a reminder, and the government of India has chosen to leave the monument alone, presumably because demolishing it would be like taking a broomstick to a hornet’s nest.

Someone said I might want to visit the Peace Camp at Chedema.  I had no idea what a “peace camp” was, but this one turned out to be a building that looked a lot like a one-room schoolhouse with a wraparound porch.  It was a very long two miles east of Kohima, and it sat on an acre of grass.  There was nobody around, but somebody was keeping the grass short.   The door wasn’t locked.  Inside, it looked like a classroom except for large black-and-white photos of the people who in 1964 had moderated and negotiated the first ceasefire.  They included Michael Scott, an Anglican clergyman well known in South Africa for being the first white man jailed for protesting against Apartheid.  The government of India said he was advocating instead of moderating, and it deported him.  

I was growing to like monoliths, and there was an especially handsome one at the edge of the peace camp lawn. It was ten feet high, with irregular edges.  In the old days, it would have been dragged here by a line of men pulling ropes; this one probably came by truck.  A  plaque had been set into it and read, in part, “this monolith stands in gratitude to acknowledge the Nagaland Peace Mission Members.”  Two of those members had resigned and Scott had been deported,  but the monolith had been placed by the Nagaland Baptist Church Council which, without taking sides, had instituted the Mission.    

You might say that the missionaries had made World War II easier for the Nagas by having already introduced them to the outside world.  Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, a German anthropologist who lived with the Nagas in the 1930s, later wrote that “soldiers of various races passed through, lived, fought and died among the Nagas.  Thus new people, new weapons, new attire, new food and above all new ideas were introduced to the Nagas and when the War came to an end, they could not go back to the old secluded life.”  Fürer-Haimendorf didn’t specify what new ideas he had in mind, but I suspect the most important was the centrality of money, which would replace freestanding heads as the obvious marker of a man’s worth.  

I don’t disagree with Fürer-Haimendorf, but I go back to the missionaries and think of John Henry Hutton, who all the way from 1917 to 1935 was the district officer in charge of the Naga Hills.  As early as 1922, he wrote “the spirit of change is invading and pervading every aspect of village life.”  Officers like Hutton were in no hurry to introduce the Nagas to the outside world, but the missionaries were teaching children to read English.  Lord knows where that leads.

What’s left of the old Naga culture?  Chedema stands atop a ridge with views west to Kohima and east to Burma some 40 miles away.  The view was scenic enough that India’s minister of state tourism arrived in 2005 to lay a foundation stone for a tourist resort. Two years later, the honorable parliamentary secretary for tourism and women development came to open the resort.  He, too, got a plaque, but the resort itself was closed in 2024.   I was told that the management had been incompetent, but I think the problem may have been the remoteness of the place.  Two miles from Kohima doesn’t sound like any distance, but the road was long, curvy, and bumpy.

The resort building was in good shape, but the design was embarrassing.  Here’s what I mean.  Naga houses, as I have said, were basically big pup tents.  The houses of important people could be indicated by roof materials–wood shingles, for example, instead of thatch–but more often they were identified by barge boards, wide planks framing the gable, and if the occupant was majorly important the barge boards extended above the ridgepole to create curved ornaments perhaps six or eight feet high and called house horns.

So here at the resort was a perfectly ordinary industrial building that you could find anywhere in the world.  The rooms had porches with panoramic views of 180 degrees or more.  Very nice, but this plainer than plain building had house horns.  That’s the answer to my question about what’s left.  Emblems.  Symbols.  Reminders.

Well, that’s not quite true.  The resort’s front door was open, and there was nobody around.  I walked behind the front desk and was surprised to see a board with hooks, and on the hooks were neatly labeled room keys.  That simply could not happen in the United States.  I’m reminded that in the old days the big rice baskets were kept away from the owner’s house because they attracted rats.  It would have been easy to steal rice but nobody did.  It was the same with the keys.

There had never been much to do at the resort except admire the view and walk over to the Peace Camp. You couldn’t get drunk, because Nagaland is dry.  Thank the missionaries, again.  A mile or so from the Peace Camp, however, I saw a sign pointing to a tobacco-free model village sponsored by the Tobacco Control Cell of the Nagaland Department of Health and Family Welfare.  It certainly sounded like Nehru’s India, proudly democratic but economically strangled by its faith in central planning.  

The village had a school with a soccer field.  It had one tiny shop, unmanned but protected by an angry monkey in a cruelly small cage.  There were some big houses, indicating money earned somewhere else, and there were small houses whose owners probably were supported by absent family members sending money from somewhere else.  One man cheerfully slopped three large pigs in a covered sty.  Another neatly stacked his winter wood supply. A woman was gathering greens from a small garden that she had fenced with corrugated sheet metal.  At the far end of the village there was a church.  The plaque said Christian Revival Church, Chedema Model Village, dedicated for the Glory of God, 1994.  

I don’t know in what way this could be said to be a model village, but I do know that the only traditional element I saw was the village entrance arch, with steel poles supporting–but you know where this is going–a gabled roof of corrugated sheet metal hidden by barge boards rising to form house horns.  It was like a certificate of Naga authenticity.

Everywhere I went around Kohima I saw stacks of firewood, mostly round wood a few inches in diameter.  South of the outdoor museum at Kisama, I visited a village called Kigwema and walked along a village road that almost looked like a lumber yard.  This was November, and I suppose things would look different in May.  The road itself was extremely clean.  Not a bit of litter or even bits of gravel.  It was Singapore-clean, which may seem unremarkable until you read what John Henry Hutton wrote about Naga villages a hundred years ago.  They were filthy both indoors and out, he wrote, and the only sanitation service came from free-range pigs.  Shall we credit the missionaries or shall we credit working with the military during the war?  I don’t know.

I went to Kigwema to see the house of General Kotoku Sato, who had the unfortunate task of carrying out the suicidal strategy devised by General Renya Mutaguchi.  The house was a square cabin not more than 15 feet on a side.  It was unusual in having walls of planks laid horizontally.  It may well have been the first in the village to depart from Naga style.  It had been demoted now and was just somebody’s house.  No signs, no bother.

The path to the general’s house went past houses with lots of  ornamental plants, and we came to one that had so many plants that I asked what was going on.  I learned it was a florist shop or, more properly, a retail nursery.  Odd, I thought.  Annual income here, per capita, is under $2,000, yet people were buying ornamental plants.  Erstwhile headhunters were buying them, or at least their wives were.  What’s more, there was nobody around, not even a caged monkey to make a racket.  

It would have been easy to swipe a plant or two, but it didn’t seem to be a problem.  People told me that illegal drugs had become a problem in Kohima and that the drugs brought thievery, but out here, as out in the boonies in most places, older traditions were still intact, and though this village looked different now than it had a hundred years ago, the invisible part of the culture, whether it was lodged in people’s hearts or in their skulls, was for now intact.