Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944 – The Epic Story of the Last Great Stand of Empire. Fergal Keane

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СКАЧАТЬ in clothing, carving and body tattoos. A Naga warrior would cut his hair in a pudding-bowl shape and decorate it with the bright feathers of a forest bird and the tusks of a wild boar; he would garland his ears with shells and feathers or with the tresses of one of his victims; while around his neck he would string numerous strands of brightly coloured beads. The shawls they wore varied according to sex, age and marital status. For the warriors they could be red, or a mix of red and yellow stripes against a black background, often adorned with symbols denoting wealth and martial prowess. The warriors’ shields were frequently adorned with the hair of those they had slain in battle.

Until the First Anglo-Burmese war, the Naga Hills were nominally under the control of the Burmese kings of Ava. Under the Treaty of Yandaboo the lands were ceded to the British, who, like the previous rulers, exercised nominal control, certainly for the first fifty years of their administration.^* The outsider presence was restricted to groups of missionaries, occasional explorers and anthropologists, and the more intrepid traders from the Assam plains.

By the 1870s, however, a combination of Naga raids into British-administered territory and the expansionist designs of the Raj towards neighbouring Burma made a more comprehensive imperial intervention inevitable. Another factor intervened, too: the discovery of wild tea growing in the jungles of Assam had led to a massive programme of plantation along the frontiers of the Naga territory and the importation of hundreds of thousands of indentured labourers. The presence of unruly tribes who could threaten the future of this lucrative enterprise was not to be tolerated. The Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, Sir Cecil Beadon, a man of notably dubious judgment, was concerned that, ‘exposed as Assam is on every side, if petty outrages are to be followed up by withdrawal of our frontier, we should very speedily find ourselves driven out of the province’.^† Contemporary accounts of the fighting that followed are full of references to ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’. It is the language of a particular time, when the unassimilated native, whether on the North-West Frontier or in the jungles of the Naga Hills, was viewed by the imperial warrior with a mixture of fear, bemusement and condescension.

In November 1878 the Raj extended its administrative reach to what was then the native village of Kohima, at the centre of the most troublesome of the Naga districts and lying along a mountain track that led to the plains of Manipur, a princely state whose maharajah gave his allegiance to the British.^* The British appointed a political officer, G. H. Damant, to Kohima in 1878, and when he set out for some mutinous Naga villages with only a small escort, the inevitable occurred. Despite being warned by friendly villagers not to continue on his way, Damant rode at the head of the column, straight into an ambush at Khonoma. Thirty-nine men were killed, 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 СКАЧАТЬ