including Damant, whose headless and handless corpse was found months later by a British patrol. The official inquiry noted, with characteristic understatement, that his preparations ‘had not in all respects been well judged’. A general rebellion followed the killing of Damant and the Naga advanced on the British fort at Kohima where 414 people, including women and children, had sought shelter. The first siege of Kohima began on 16 October 1879. There were just over 130 men under arms inside the stockade, but many of them were raw recruits, and the water situation was perilous. Attackers could easily cut off the spring that flowed into the fort.
Water rations were reduced to a quarter and food began to run low. A contemporary account described what a ‘pitiful sight it was to see the poor little creatures [children] crowding together, holding out their cups’. The siege was eventually lifted when a British officer leading Manipuri state troops rode through the mountains and scattered the Nagas. The retribution was savage. A punishment force of 1,300 troops, all of them Indians under British officers, along with mountain artillery and rocket units, was sent into the Naga territory in November 1879. As they advanced the British burned villages and destroyed the Nagas’ crops and livestock, rendering thousands of people destitute. The less militant villages were fined in rice and made to provide labour for the army. Villages that failed to supply the number of coolies demanded as forced labour were warned with the firing of shells and rockets around the settlement. ‘This had the desired effect and the coolies were speedily produced,’ the commanding officer reported.
In his telegram to the government of India at the end of the campaign the expedition commander, General Nation, was exultant, taking particular pride in the punishment meted out to the Khonoma Nagas, the most troublesome of the clans. ‘Their lands have all been confiscated and themselves broken up as a village community forever … The occupation of the country for so long by such a large body of troops has inflicted serious punishment, as we have drawn largely on their supplies of grain and labour … their fortified village [has been] levelled with the ground, and their magnificent stone-faced, terraced rice land, the work of generations, has been confiscated.’ In this manner was the Pax Britannica brought to the Naga Hills.
In Parliament the following year the Irish Home Rule MP, Frank Hugh O’Donnell, asked, with his tongue firmly in his cheek, whether ‘the Nagas have asked for annexation to the British Dominions’. The British then dispatched a deputy commissioner to Kohima, as well as political officers working under his direction. Together, they acted as a mix of spy, liaison officer, magistrate and mediator, and above all they provided an early warning system to ensure that Delhi was never again surprised by an uprising. Peace of a kind settled on the hills.
In 1918, when Charles Pawsey was fighting on the Italian front, the territory was again convulsed by violence. This time it was not the Nagas but a neighbouring tribe, the Kukis, who rebelled against the British, an uprising partly motivated by fear that men were about to be forcibly recruited to serve in the Labour Corps on the Western Front. The British achieved their declared aim of ‘break[ing] the Kuki spirit’ by blockading their fields. ‘For had they not surrendered … they would have been too late to prepare the ground for the next harvest, and would in consequence have been faced with famine.’ A total of 126 villages were burned. The official report noted that a policy of search and destroy ‘energetically carried out’ and ‘giving them no rest at all … has always subdued rebellious savages and semi-civilised races’.
The last uprising of any significance took place in 1931, before Charles Pawsey became deputy commissioner but at a time when he would have been working in the Naga Hills. A Naga religious visionary rose against the British and proclaimed a sixteen-year-old girl named Gaidiliu to be his priestess. She told her people to destroy their grain because the end of the British time was coming and they would inherit a new world. The priestess also promised the warriors that by sprinkling them with holy water she would protect them from the bullets of the enemy. When they charged a section of Gurkhas at Hangrum village eleven warriors were killed and many more wounded. Gaidiliu was eventually captured and imprisoned for fourteen years.*
Four years later, a statutory commission, which included Labour’s Clement Attlee and the Tory MP Stuart Cadogan, visited the Naga Hills to investigate the opinions of the local tribes. Cadogan referred to the Naga as ‘little headhunters’ who met the British for a palaver. ‘Presumably the District Commissioner had informed the tribal chieftain that my head was of no intrinsic value as he evinced no disposition to transfer it from my shoulders to his headhunter’s basket which was slung over his back and was, I think, the only garment he affected.’ Cadogan listened while the Nagas spoke of their fears about the future. Rumours about the protests led by Mr Gandhi and his Congress Party had reached the Naga Hills. The British politicians were told that the tribespeople feared the arrival of a ‘Black King’ who would replace the Raj. It is a measure of the isolation in which they had been kept that they told the delegation they preferred to have Queen Victoria as their ruler. Cadogan told the House of Commons: ‘they are an extremely moral people and live apparently decent lives, and … if we leave them alone, they will leave us alone.’ Clement Attlee, who as prime minister would eventually have to decide on the future of India and the Nagas, agreed with Cadogan: ‘There was overwhelming evidence that these people must be protected, and that they are far more liable to exploitation.’
Another British visitor was RAF Sergeant Fred Hill who spent a week living among the Naga as part of a survival course. Hill’s memories are not those of an anthropologist or a politician but of a working-class boy from Birmingham entranced by an alien world. From the Nagas he learned how water could be found in bamboo stalks and how to watch what the monkeys ate because ‘whatever they eat you can eat because if it kills the monkeys then it will kill you’. But he also recorded the deaths of Nagas from food poisoning as a result of eating rotting rations abandoned by the British. ‘Civilisation was no good to them, not our type of civilisation.’
Charles Pawsey saw his mission as one of protection. To achieve this he enforced the doctrine of Naga separateness laid down by the Raj. Visitors to the Naga Hills had to have a permit, and these were given out sparingly. Except in isolated cases, the planting of land for commercial purposes was forbidden. The same prohibition applied to private industry, with a handful of exceptions. Within the constraints of the imperial imagination this policy was benign and it ensured relative peace in the region, but its effect was to preserve Naga life in a political vacuum. As one Indian writer has put it, ‘Any observer of the North-East Indian situation may conclude that the tribal people there were purposely kept in isolation from the Indian nationhood.’ The logic of Naga separateness, codified under imperial rule, was to have devastating consequences when the Raj retreated.
Pawsey, like so many other servants of the Raj, could hardly have foreseen what war and the rising tide of nationalism would do to this world within a very short space of time. But the Japanese conquests in 1941–42 had an electrifying effect in India. By the summer of 1942 Gandhi and his supporters in the Congress Party had launched the Quit India campaign, demanding an immediate British withdrawal.* In the tea country of Assam next to the Naga Hills there were anti-British protests. In September 1942 thirteen people were shot dead in demonstrations at police stations. The following month Congress activists derailed a train carrying British troops into Assam, causing several deaths and widespread injuries. A militant was hanged and many others were sentenced to long prison terms. British troops arriving in India that year cound find themselves confronting angry crowds. Captain Gordon Graham of the Cameron Highlanders arrived with the British 2nd Division in June 1942 and recalled asking a Sikh man for directions to the police station: ‘My friend,’ the Sikh told him, ‘you will learn that the police in India are not here to help people. And neither are you.’
But among the Naga population, mistrustful of the Indians from the plains, there was negligible support for the Congress protests. If anything, Naga opinion had been radicalised in support of the British by the behaviour of some Indian troops retreating through the Naga Hills from Burma earlier in 1942. Rape and looting were reported from several areas as gangs of deserters moved towards Assam. To the Nagas, Charles Pawsey and his colonial administration seemed