Journal of Borderlands Studies

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Understanding Margins, State Power, Space and

Territoriality in the Naga Hills

Debojyoti Das

To cite this article: Debojyoti Das (2014) Understanding Margins, State Power, Space
and Territoriality in the Naga Hills, Journal of Borderlands Studies, 29:1, 63-80, DOI:
10.1080/08865655.2014.892693

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08865655.2014.892693

Published online: 04 Mar 2014.

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 Journal of Borderlands Studies | 29.1 - 2014

Understanding Margins, State Power, Space and

Territoriality in the Naga Hills
∗
Debojyoti Das

Abstract
The Naga Hills frontier of British India, located between present day India and Burma, should not only be seen
as a geographical or political construction, territorialized by states’ administrative and political practices, but as
a space of culture and resources. In this paper I argue that the colonial frontier of the Naga Hills does not present
a homogenous “out-of–the-way” place, but is mediated by the practice of colonial territorialization, based on the
politics of “cultural difference” and the construction of the “other.” The notion of a uniform state space is
contested in the present reading of Naga Hills as a frontier. Indeed, I seek to show how multiple, contingent
spaces exist, which are the converse of a homogenous marginal state space. Further, I argue that the practices of
territorialization are to be located against the backdrop of the late 19th century global economic transformation
(the establishment of world markets through trade and monopoly through plantation farming) and territorial
portioning and redefinition, and based on ethnic classification or “ethno-genesis” (the classification of hill people
as opposed to the plains). The present analysis is of relevance to world regions, as it helps us to understand the
colonial strategies of territorialization that have shaped contemporary ethnic identity struggles within
borderlands.

Introduction
There were two frontiers of India, the North-West –‘full of romance and danger do’-
and the North-East, virtually ignored and, in many areas, unexplored up to the
Second World War. The former had long been the scene of constant political and
military activity, with ‘this little air of anger, where there was always the chance of a
stray bullet’. As a result it retained a powerful hold over the imagination of the British
both at home and in India (Alen 1976).

There is a new interest in the study of South Asia borderlands and Northeast India in particular, as the
region can become the corridor for commerce with South East Asia, and lies at the fault line of struggle
between India and China for regional dominance. Putting this into perspective my paper presents an
alternative reading of space and territory in contemporary borderlands, and serves to shed light on the
colonial practice of territorialization, by taking the Nagaland region (colonial Naga Hills of Assam) of
North-East India as the focus of study. The Naga Hills frontier of British India, located between present
day India and Burma, should not only be seen as a geographical or political construction, territorialized by
states’ administrative and political practices, but as a space of culture and resources. I will argue that the
colonial frontier of the Naga Hills does not present a homogenous “out-of-the-way” (Tsing 1993) place,
but is mediated by the practice of colonial territorialization, based on the politics of “cultural difference”
and the construction of the “other.” The notion of a uniform state space (Goswami 2004; Vandergeest
and Puleso 1995) is contested in the present reading of Naga Hills as a frontier. Indeed, I seek to show
how multiple, contingent spaces exist, which are the converse of a homogenous marginal state space.
Further, I argue that the practices of territorialization are to be located against the backdrop of the late 19th
century global economic transformation (the establishment of world markets through trade and monopoly
through plantation farming) and territorial portioning and redefinition, and based on ethnic classification

∗
ERC Post-Doctoral Research Associate, Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of
London, Room 314, 27 Russell Square, London, WC1B 5DQ | das.birkbeck@gmail.com
This article was originally published with errors. This version has been corrected. Please see Erratum (http:dx.doi.
org/10.1080/08865655.2014.903082).

© 2014 Association for Borderlands Studies

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08865655.2014.892693
Journal of Borderlands Studies | 29.1 - 2014

or “ethno-genesis” (Van Schendel 1992) (the classification of hill people as opposed to the plains). The
present analysis is of relevance to world regions, as it helps us to understand the colonial strategies of
territorialization that have shaped contemporary ethnic identity struggles within borderlands. The clinical
divide between the hills and the plains is problematic in understanding the politics of highland frontiers,
where spaces were territorialized according to the priority of colonial needs, as these areas constantly
shifted from “out-of-the-way” places to becoming a resource frontier rich in timber, coal, oil and, of late,
“bio-diversity” and “wildlife” conservation sites to promote eco-tourism.

In the post-independence period this area again became the center of conflict between different Naga
tribes because of development and aid programs launched by the Indian administration. In addition,
counter insurgency operations created new social categories based on levels of economic and cultural
development. It created a new typology of backwardness. This resulted in labels like the backward and the
advanced Nagas who were classified on the levels of their economic status. The frontier now became a
space of contestation between the already advanced Naga tribes and the non-administered Nagas who laid
claim that their backwardness was caused by years of administrative and political isolation and neglect.
The process of ethnic classification started during the colonial administrative phase. I discuss this issue
later in the paper assessing the post-independence Indian state. The paper draws its analytical strength
from a temporal–historical perspective expressed through colonial map-making exercises, and ethnic
classification of colonized subjects.

The Colonial Imagination of Naga Hills

The earliest descriptions of the Naga Hills in North-East India come from travel writings, military reports,
surveys and treaties produced by travelers, botanists, explorers and colonial officials. Such writers describe the
hills as terra incognita, spaces of wildness in the midst of barbarism and chaotic statelessness. After the Treaty
of Yandabu in 1826, the British Empire’s need to control the Manipur princely state brought them into
contact with the Nagas. On the Burmese side of the Naga Hills, colonial officials encountered the Nagas
much later, during the 20th century, when they extended administrative control through slavery and human
sacrifice pacification. The Nagas became a frontier people, first of the Bengal eastern frontier, then Assam, and
later, the hills of the North-Eastern Frontier of India. In 1958, after nearly a century of colonial contact and a
decade of post-independence administration, the political territorialization of the Naga Hills was complete.

The demarcation of an international boundary across the Saramati Mountain was mutually agreed
between the premiers of India and Burma through an aerial survey, conducted after the military had taken
the Saramati Mountain, within the present day Nagaland state of India. This territorialization project
began much earlier, in the late 19th century, with the discovery of tea in the foothills of Brahmaputra
Valley in Upper Assam, which had ultimately led to a slow clearance of the forest, the declaration of
wasteland grants (Wasteland Grant Rules of 1838), and the establishing of colonial tea plantations.1 The
expansion of railways carried by the Assam Bengal Railway Company along the tea garden estate, and the
discovery of minerals such as coal and petroleum in Assam led to the territorialization of the foothills,
which emerged as resource frontiers in the early 20th century. This was partly achieved through the
declaration of wasteland grants and the demarcation of a line of control between the hills and the plains,
known as the “Inner Line,” which set limits to expanding the resource frontier.2

This administrative measure, adopted by the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation of 1874, also known as
the “Inner Line Regulation,”3was seen as effective in protecting the interests of British tea planters and
mining syndicates from the surrounding Naga settlements. The expanding tea frontier was frequently
raided for tribute payment and claims over Khats (diplomatic spaces that acted as tribute land for Naga
chiefs who acted as vassal chiefs for the Ahom Kingdom in Sibsagar) (Kikon 2008).The “Inner Line” was a
political strategy, to territorialize the foothills’ settlements, as well as to contain raids on indentured
laborers brought from the central Indian highland as “coolies” and “porters” to work in the tea gardens.
The “Inner Line” became an administrative apparatus to distinguish hill men from those of the plains, and

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served to regulate the mobility of the population, thereby protecting the highlander’s identity and their
native “life world.” In practice, however, the Inner Line became a powerful government tool to
territorialize space within this resource frontier. By extending the Inner Line dividing the Naga foothills
from the plain, resource-rich wooded tracts (virgin teak and sal forest) and swidden (slash and burn)
fallows were reclaimed by the colonial government for “wasteland grants,” along with land leases for
rubber speculators, forest departments, tea planters, the Assam–Bengal railway establishment and mining
syndicates. The Naga foothills soon emerged both as centers of global capital and as a landscape of
disquiet, in which native rights over forest use were exhausted through legislation that demarcated forest
reserves, whilst permitting the expansion of tea gardens.

As the commercial nature of the tea gardens attracted global capital, the need to create forest reserves
developed, and these areas became contested ground between the native chiefs and the colonial local
administration, as plantations came into conflict with jhumming.4 The creation of the Assam Forest
Department in 1874 further intensified the struggle between the farm and the forest, as tea planters now
had to compete with the Forest Department for wasteland grants (Saikia 2011). Land for jhum cultivation
that was kept fallow for many years by the Naga chiefs was reclaimed by the Forest Department, by
declaring wasteland and petty compensation that brought the jhummias into confrontation with forest
officials. Often, the surface rights that belonged to the whole clan, as opposed to individual chiefs, triggered
multiple claims to land over the ownership of surface rights. The negotiations and settlements between the
colonial district administration and the village chiefs ended in a misunderstanding of native land rights in
the hills and the communal principles of ownership. As the landscape came to be territorialized through
wasteland grants, the colonial administration ended by confronting the natives’ claim to territory.

The Forest Department staff were engaged in carving out state forests, and proposed “Working Plans”
(scientific afforestation programs) for regenerating the forest, and the settlement of immigrants, mostly
Nepali woodcutters and planters in the “reserves” and declared state forest. As forest colonies were formed
within the forest, they came into confrontation with the Nagas, who found their abandoned jhum land
cultivated by new forest settlers. Their right to jhum was denied inside the Reserves Forest demarcated by
the department. Direct confrontation and protests took many forms on the reserve frontier, through crop
raiding, burning of harvests, and claiming of rights over permanently established forest regeneration plots
by the Nagas. Often, these steps resulted in arrest, and animosity grew among the new immigrant settlers
and the Nagas; such cases were frequently reported to the Deputy Commissioners of the Naga Hill district
from late 1860. Like the “Inner Line boundary,” tea maps (maps prepared for demarcating the tea garden
boundaries in the foothills) brought valuable foothill plots under plantation farming for colonial capitalist
expansion through a cartographic imagination of space on which the colonial frontier administration
could draw the revenue limits of administration. The foothills were constrained by plantation estates that
permanently settled the land as plantation reserves. The pre-colonial arrangement of territorial control
between the Naga Chiefs and Ahom Kings through khats (diplomatic spaces of political control), where
Nagas had the right to collect tribute from the Assamese peasantry in the foothills, was now disturbed.

By 1880, the colonial administration made a final push into the Naga Hills by capturing Kohima and
Mokokchung, as well as Wokha, their earlier headquarters of the Naga Hill district. In 1884, a permanent
administration was established in Kohima, and a cart road was developed via the Kohima headquarters to
connect the Manipuri princely state. The advance into the hills for a permanent residence was made in 1874,
after a detailed topographical survey by Woodthorpe. His earliest visual images included sketches of Eastern
Angami, Hatigoria and other Nagas who were photozincographed at the Surveyor General office for
publication in his Topographical Survey Report, and simultaneously featured in the Journal of the Asiatic
Society of Bengal publication (1873–1876). These visuals became the first representation of the Nagas as hill
people, with distinct racial traits that separated their ethnology from their neighbors of the plains.

On the other hand, the Burmese side of the Naga Hills was territorialized, at the beginning of 1920, as
military and topographical. Geological and economic surveys reported the provenance of slavery and

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human sacrifice that led to a slave release campaign between 1925 and 1928 by the Burma frontier
administration who were holding the Durbars in Burma’s Naga, Kachin and Shan non-administered
territories. The expeditions ended in 1928 due to the financial constraints faced by the Burma frontier
administration. In 1937, when Burma was separated from India as a crown colony, fresh plans were drawn
up to end slavery in the Burma Naga areas through the progressive dissemination of new ideas, such as
farming, missionary faith, road construction work and the rule of law. The context of the British Burma
expedition in the Naga Hills, whilst having similar goals, differed in bringing about civilization, progress
and colonial order through surveillance of the “blank-unadministered frontiers.” Annual tours had begun
much earlier, to survey economic resources, but the mapping of these often quoted “out-of-the-way”
places began in the late 1920s, as the colonial administration wished to extend its Naga frontier to stop the
slave trade and human sacrifice.

In 1936, the Government of India decided to take part of the Assam Hills and Balipara and Lakhimpur
Frontier tract out of article 9 of the League of Nations’ anti-slavery memorandum, which had earlier made
an exception for these areas to end slavery in all forms.5 This new admission for the entire Naga Hills
compelled the Assam-Burma administration to draw up plans to abolish slavery in the Naga Hills. It also
allowed for the territorialization of the unadministered Naga Hill areas, where slavery, head hunting and
human sacrifice were seen to occur. By 1941, most unadministered Burma Naga territories were mapped
and conquered as “slave taking Naga” and “human sacrifice Naga” areas. Butler’s campaign to quell slavery
in the Burma Kachin-Naga areas was accompanied by “slave release maps,” which mapped the slave rescue
mission and established the colonial moral order of “progress” and “civilization.”

J. P. Mills, Deputy Commissioner of Naga Hills (Assam), carried out a similar anti-slavery expedition in
Kolyou-Kangyo (present day Kheimungen) Naga territory between 1936 and 1937. The result of this
appeared in leading Victorian journals and magazines that periodically informed metropolitan
institutions, such as the League of Nations and the Native and Aboriginal Anti-Slavery Committee. These
photographs created an image of the Nagas as “slave traders,” and hence, as uncivilized among the
metropolitan public. This was reinforced by publications and particular forms of representation, such as
native Nagas carrying machetes and spheres, and dancing naked. These strategies of representing natives to
the outside world produced uniform spaces, and spaces that were mediated by different government tactics
in classifying the Nagas, as opposed to their plains’ neighbors, as peasant farmers in the plains to colonial
subjects in the hills and the ultimate “savage” head-hunters and slave takers of the unadministered areas.
As one Burmese frontier colonial correspondence suggests:

The position regarding slavery is reasonably satisfactory but until control is better
established, slavery will not be wiped out. The recalcitrant attitude of Tsawlaw,
Ponnyoand Tsaplaw [villages in unadministered Naga areas] should not be
overlooked and if they ignore a formal summons next open weather a punitive
expedition would have to be sent. The proposal of next year’s meeting would depend
upon whether a scheme to make control over the scheduled areas in the Upper
Chindwin district [including the Unadministered Areas] more effectively would then
be in force. 6

The above statements were made on the eve of the 1936 anti-slavery expedition in the Naga Hill areas in
Burma, where control over Naga territories was established through anti-slavery and anti-human sacrifice.
The maps in Figures 1 and 2 show the route of the expedition and portions of the “Blank Space” that were
brought under Naga Hills administration just after the Pangsha campaign in the unadministered Naga
Hills along the Indo-Burma frontier.

These “out-of-the-way” places are presented, at the time, as the nation’s margins, borderlands and upland
frontier regions. But if we examine their history, the spatiality of these marginal spaces has been mediated
by colonial practices of state making, with multiple spaces emerging with the flexible regime of

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 Journal of Borderlands Studies | 29.1 - 2014

Figure 1. The Route Followed by J.P. Mills during the Pangsha expedition 1936–1937
Source: The Pangsha Letters, 1995, Pitt Rivers Museum: Oxford.

governance. Administration was let loose to incorporate these territories, based on the specificities of
traditional customary rules and practices. Conflicts were negotiated by regimes of control that produced
differences within the community in terms of administered-unadministered Nagas, settled (terrace rice
cultivators) and vagabond swidden farmers, governed and ungoverned spaces. The Naga Hills do not
represent a homogeneous marginal landscape. Rather, their marginality represents various factions, best
understood if we see the region from its social context in terms of how the areas of the Naga frontier were
territorialized from head-hunting to sites of material culture, noble savage, labor reserve (Naga coolies) and
moral progress.

In the colonial construction of the Nagas through visual images, anthropological knowledge played a
crucial role in bringing about difference. To cite one example, Furer-Haimemdorf, who worked among
the Konyak Nagas, writes:

The cultivation of taro [yam] is only one of the points on which the Konyaks differ from the south-western
group of the Naga tribes. There are other elements peculiar to them: the man’s elaborate face tattoo and
their habit of letting the hair grow, the blackening of the teeth, the wearing of the tiger belt of cane and
bark as their only piece of dress of the women. (Fürer-Haimendorf 1938, 212)

Such representation of the Konyakshave created a vivid impression of difference that finds its impression
in constructing their identity within contemporary Naga society as the most backward tribe.

Colonial Policies and Territorialization

In this section, I discuss the colonial policies pursued by the local administration since the 1840s, when
the British soldiers who sought to open routes to the Manipur valley first encountered the Nagas. The
contest over space and territorial extension began first along the foothills, and finally engulfed the whole of
the Naga Hills. Territorial expansion was gradual, and mediated by sets of rules that differentiated people
and places. Areas of the foothills evolved as areas of disquiet and accumulation. The administered districts
became governed, regulated spaces where administration produced a tamed legible space through

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Figure 2. Topographical Map of Assam and Burma showing the blank un-administered space
Source: Expedition Nagas: Diaries from the Hills in Northeast India (1921–1937; 2002–2006), 2008,
p. 16.

institutional taxing and the legitimization of conventions and traditions surrounding land rights and by
institutionalizing the village level leadership (Naga Chiefs and headmenship). Beyond the politically-
controlled areas, official tours were conducted to punish head-hunting villages and slave traders (Rangpang
Nagas). The colonial government had no permanent control over such territories. In conducting its
administration, the colonial administration legitimized certain practices that produced inter-community
difference, conflicts and created privileges for people who were already in power (village chiefs, headmen)
and people who were facilitating administration in the frontier villages, and among “unadministered
territories” that were engaged in feuding and head taking in the administered villages. These people were
the most important link between the administration and the village, and their proficiency in mediating

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conflict and interpreting customary law was the most important means of conducting day-to-day
administration. Writing on the role played by the Dobashis (political go-between) on the Assam side of
colonial administration, Messrs H. J. Mitchell and R. E. Mc Guire stated as follows:

These [Dobashis] are a very important link in the administration generally and in fact
are described as the very backbone of the administration. The ability to interpret is
one of the least important of their duties. The interpreter is the eyes, ears and tongue
of the district officer and is the expert adviser on variations of tribal and customary
laws. He solves the greatest number of petty cases which cannot for some reason be
settled in the village. He conducts numerous local enquiries and investigates crimes
when necessary. He sets the whole tone of the administration as the ordinary villager
sees it. 7

In addition to the Dobashis, the village headmen acted as village mediators in establishing colonial rule. As
the colonial administration firmly established itself over the Naga Hills, there was a growing threat of
maintaining territorial integrity and stabilizing the frontier. This was made more vocal by the native’s
statelessness, represented through their warlike activities—head taking, raiding and feuding and occasional
arson of arms from government forces and the capture of slaves from British administered villages for
trade. The unadministered Nagas’ actions on the administered territories gave legitimacy to colonial
administrators to punish and extend the territorial frontier beyond the general administered tracts or
politically-administered territories.

To administer the new territories brought under the administrated district through pacification of head
hunting the colonial government experimented with the “Control Area System.”8 The “Control Area
System” further classified subjects as governed and non-governed, administered and unadministered,
tamed-obedient and barbaric hedonistic subjects. As Van-Schendel argues, “territoriality is inherently
conflictual, and tends to generate rival territories. Hence, borders need to be constantly maintained and
socially reproduced through particular practices and discourses that emphasize the ‘other’” (Van Schendel
2005, 3). The construction of the other constantly reformulated both space and territoriality in the Naga
Hills since the late 19th century. Ethnographic and administrative accounts talk of the good
(administered) and the bad (unadministered) non-trustworthy Nagas. In post independence, popular day-
to-day gossip among the Naga elite, policy doctrine and public literature; the ideas of administration have
been fostered within “development categories,” advanced against the backward underdeveloped Nagas.

Within everyday household talk encountered during my fieldwork in Nagaland, and more specifically
Khonoma village, my interlocutors identified quickly with those categories established through the
administration and extension of control of the far frontiers of the Naga Hills. According to my host who
lived in Kohima town the capital city of Nagaland, the Yimchungers and Konyaks were backward, as they
had remained unadministered for a longer time, and hence were able to preserve their traditions. In
visiting the Yimchungers in Shamatur village, I recorded the counter voice by Yimchunger Naga elites,
claiming their distinctiveness from the administered Naga tribals, who were advanced because of their
longer contact and subjugation under colonial administration. Both Christianity and colonial
administration served to produce these identities of progress vis-à-vis backwardness. The effects of
administration, mission work and education advanced with colonial administrative apparatus, as well as
the “ethnic innovation or ethno genesis” of tribal identities (Guha 1999, 1; Scott 2009, 238; Van
Schendel 1992, 95), the Nagas were further categorized by colonial officials, based on the level of
administration and colonial contact with each individual sub group. For example, the British used terms
such as Kacha Naga, meaning “forest” in the Angami dialect, and the remote, unexplored Nagas
surrounding the Angami country. The term became popular for a group of Naga tribes whose origins and
genealogy were unclear to the colonial administrator ethnographers until the late 1930s.9 Similarly, the
term “naked Rengma” was used to identify with “wildness.” The term “Naked Naga” was invented by
Christopher Von Fürer-Haimendorf (1939), to denote the unadministered and savage trans-frontier

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Konyak Naga tribe of eastern Nagaland. Haimendorf crystallized this textual representation of Konyaks in
tour diaries through the visual images of Konyak women photographed nude, along with brave Man “head
hunters” wearing their traditional ornaments and displaying their half-naked tattooed bodies. The image
making of the Konyak Nagas emerged in Victorian journals and newspapers such as the Illustrated
London News, which covered stories from the Naga Hills through photographs and illustrations from
Fürer-Haimendorf’s tours.10

The ethno genesis of Naga tribes was furthered to produce the ethnic other in the frontier by adopting
different governmental practice. Thus, I classify the Naga Hills according to three administrative and
spatial territorial units (1) the foothills; (2) the areas of political control; (3) the land beyond the areas of
political control (the unadministered Nagas). One hundred and fifty years of British territorial expansion
(1840–1947) in the Naga Hills resulted in “legible” subjects among the Nagas, through the various
colonial projects of objectification such as the census, ethnographic monographs, topographical and
military surveys, cartography, photography and by opening up the hills through roads, taxation, the
imposition of fines, and settled agriculture through the promotion of wet terrace rice farming.11 British
territorial conquest in the hills was a dynamic process, which not only used military force, but was
established by shrewd diplomacy, involving building patronage with the local chiefs, and recognizing their
social position with the village as first settler, (de-facto) owners.

Territoriality was effectively contingent in time and space, with the colonial administrators adopting multiple
strategies involving suitable laws, map making-cartography (cartography that served the process of
territorialization by producing linear boundaries) and by building patronage with political go-betweens and
influential tribal elders. Equally, land and land relations central to Naga livelihood and the customary rules of
access and rights were sanctioned by the colonials. Colonial administration legitimized and strengthened
tradition/customary decision maker’s roles (the village headman and first settlers) in deciding upon the
distribution of resources. Disputes were now mediated by state intermediaries, and customary rules were,
again, acknowledged by the government as a principal code of conduct to give justice. Here, the colonial
administration allied with the powerful decision makers in the Naga Village “Naga man from the first settler’s
clan,” the owners of the village. Even in democratic societies like the Tynemia Nagas of the Angamis, Rengma,
Pongmai and Zemi Nagas, men with high respect and command over their clans were carefully selected to
settle disputes. According to Hussain (2000), in Khonoma, the nerve center of Naga politics, the government
won over one clan to its side, acting as a safety valve to the hostility during the Naga national movement.

The recent research on the relationship between “states” and “space” has focused on the formation of
“state space” (Goswami 2004; Scott 1998). The highlands have been constructed as a refuge of
statelessness, which produces a neat boundary between state and stateless people. Thus a highland–
lowland dichotomy is neatly produced (Burling 1965; Leach 1960) although these neat boundaries are
problematized by Li (1992). She identifies the highland as a dynamic space of power, culture and
production in which territoriality is determined by the geography of the landscape and the contingent
practices of governmentality. Highland spaces like the Naga Hills, the “out-of-way” place of the British
Empire were systematically governed and territorialized by the colonial local administrators, through
politics of patronage with chiefs and headmen, who became conduits in establishing colonial order.
Successful administration of the tribal areas came by winning over the Chiefs through offers of gifts, the
right to collect house tax and slave release payments made to local patrons (village headman’s and chiefs)
who were deeply implicated in state revenue generation and “state making” practices. These intermediaries
and political go-betweens often switched sides, thus remaking their affiliations acts in “boundary
crossing.” To illustrate this, we refer to Man Bahadur Rai’s tour report, as follows:

On our way to Leangnyu village there is a plot of land where sometimes back terrace
cultivation was done by Shri. Imti-Chuba, the then Agricultural Demonstrator, but
now active member of the hostile party [NNC-Naga National Council].Since Imti-
Chuba deserted from Government service the plot has been laying waste.12

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Many similar stories of boundary crossings emerged during my fieldwork interviews in Yimchunger
villages from the detailed biographies of farmers, who were once hostile leaders, then joined the Church
and later retired as schoolmasters. The people inhabiting these frontier spaces were tied down to the
politics of the state after 1947, and were constantly negotiating with state power. Here, the concept of
scale that connects national to local (Van Schendel 2005, 7) is important in understanding territoriality
and state power as it is exercised in a contemporary borderland landscape like the Naga Hills.13 Van
Schendel stresses the importance of temporal and linear historiography, the genealogy of place making in
borderland-frontier space. Without scaling, connecting remote borderlands to the global and national
metaphor of space territoralization remains problematic. Here, I choose to focus on the territoralization of
the Naga life world, which produced three distinct spaces able to contest the homogenous identity of the
Naga Hills as the frontier margins or the periphery of the periphery.

In his book The Art of Not Being Governed, James C. Scott acknowledges that marginality does not simply
imply “highlanders;” rather, people who have opposed state power and have articulated their existence by
practices that vanish them from being governed (Scott 2009, 13). While this claim may be true if we read
through the chronicles of time, people have also been assimilated into state strategies of control, and have
acted as powerful intermediaries, negotiating state and non-state practices of panoptical over native life
worlds in the frontiers and borderlands. A web of inter-relationships between state agents and governed
subjects thus needs to be focused upon, rather than mere geographical location of place. Recent
ethnographic work by Sturgeon has shown the practice of time and scale in developing Aka land use on the
China–Thailand border, under different political regimes and nation state orders (Sturgeon 2005, 42–64).
A similar story remains to the told along the Indo-Myanmar border, where the effects of colonial
administrative strategies have produced both “obedient–developed–progressive” and wild Nagas as one
traverses the Naga Hills from Assam into Burma. The ethno-politics of Naga Hills often conceals the
question of backwardness and how it has caught the popular imagination of the contemporary Naga
population internally within present day Nagaland state, and internationally territorialized across frontiers.
The histories of these developments can be better understood by looking back at the colonial tactics of
governing the hills and the territoralization of space.

Colonial Capitalist Expansion, Foothills and Tea Frontier

A common sense understanding of marginality at the nation’s frontier is dispelled by the temporal and
spatial dimension of colonial intervention in the Naga Hills. Historians have looked at colonial and pre-
colonial relationships between states and non-state spaces, and reflected on the interaction of vassal chiefs
and kingdoms that evolved political alliances and social relations between the hills and the plains. In the
Naga foothills, the territorial spaces, as many authors claim, were not rigid. For example, in the Naga
foothills, Ahom kings had established diplomatic spaces, known locally as Khats, containing Naga
incursion on the plains peasantry by paying them tributes. Thus the success of administration in the plains
depended on their effective diplomacy with highland chiefs and “village republics” through the
recognition of their autonomy. The entry of the British administration centralized control over these areas.
Thus, the foothills soon emerged as a contested space, in which the interaction between plains and hills
were guarded, regulated, checked and mapped for colonial revenue administration. The Naga were also
contained and controlled through boundary making and enclosures, in the form of reserve forests, state
forests that limited Naga rights to access, and hence control over resources that were central to subsistence
( jhum economy).

With the expansion of the colonial capitalist interest in the forest frontier, linear boundaries were drawn
up to territorialize space. This confronted the jhumias’s (swidden farmers) lived space. By territorializing
the foothills through land grants and permanent settlement, the colonial state established private access
over resources that were otherwise under the collective control of the swidden community and the first
settlers of Naga villages (malik or owner) (Barua 2001). The colonial administration also resettled forest
villagers in these carved out forest areas in the Assam-Naga boundary, to develop “working plans”

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(forestation plan) in the reserves along the lines of scientific forestry. These experiences were shattering for
the native Nagas, now marginalized in their lived space by colonial capitalists and administrative interests
that established “district boundaries,” “the inner line” and “forest reserve boundary.”

Between 1873 and 1930, the “Inner Line” was modified several times by colonial frontier administration,
to include and exclude territories in the Naga foothills that suited the interests of British mercantile
capitalists applying for wasteland grants to open up coal mines and oil-rigs in the politically administered
frontier tracts (Naga Hills). The foothills thus became the center of a resource struggle, and were vertically
integrated into the global capitalist production. A number of litigations emerged in the first half of the 20th
century over claims to cultivable land and the encroachment of tea gardens in the Naga Jhum plots. The
colonial official understanding of linear spaces based on aerial boundaries came into conflict with a native
understanding of space that was not bound by linear demarcations, and resulted in the exhaustion of a
native’s rights over the forest.

The foothills, unlike the plains and the hills, thus emerged as a resource frontier and as spaces of
negotiation and transgression, where the panoptical of state control resulted in the coercion and
territoralization of space, based on colonial demand for timber, tea and coal. Beyond these resource-
frontiers lie the plains and the enclaves of revenue settlements. Meanwhile, the hills were the settlements of
the “primitives,” assessed only through “hoe tax” or house tax. The foothills emerged as a locus where
colonial administration could open up their resource frontier. In other studies in South East Asian
contexts, people have explored the relationships of “frontiers” by looking at rice frontiers; this may be
understood as the spatiality of state control and market integration (Adas 1974). Colonial parchments and
correspondences frequently referred to the entire foothills surrounding the Assam plains as frontiers, until
the last decades of the 20th century. As control over the highlands became consolidated through a
formidable military administration, the definition of the frontier changed to incorporate the
unadministered Naga areas (The Dikou river was defined on the map as the territorial unit of Naga-
administered areas of Assam). Similarly, in Burma, the Kachin territories controlled by frontier Burmese
British Administration were the territorial frontier in Burma.

Territoriality, as it is used here, is a process by which resources are not only controlled, mapped and
assessed by the state, but also people’s lives and their activities and livelihoods. The Jhum cultivation
landscape of Naga Hills is a classic landscape symptomatic of state territorial practice. As one travels from
the foothills to the state capital and then towards the designated underdeveloped districts of Eastern Naga
Hills a perceptible change in landscape can be witnessed, with an increase in the size and extent of charred
fields of Jhum farmers. In the administered districts of the Naga Hills and the foothills, plantation agro-
forestry and commercial horticulture have replaced much of the scene. The interaction between the farm
and the forest are, today, shaped by state agriculture improvement programs that regulate cultivation and
choice of farming. However, this landscape change has been mediated by longstanding practices and
strategies of territoriality, marked by forest reserves and plantation estates. The reserve boundaries have
been the centers of constant protest, the ramification of which can be seen in the present context of
boundary disputes in Nagaland.

Political Control as Territorial Entity: Administered Naga Areas and Sedentarization

Kohima was established as the district headquarters of the Naga Hills in 1884, and ever since, colonial
frontier administration proliferated in the Naga Hills. The administered part of the Naga Hills was called
the Tribal Areas, and by the 1935 Government of India Act, these areas were reclassified as “Excluded
Areas.” The foothills were simultaneously included in this excluded area. However, the distinction of
administration lay not in governance or administration of the tribal areas, but in the practice of scale,
integrated into colonial grids of control by proliferation ideas of sedenterization and conservation through
paternalistic control and concessions—“a flexible” local administration and legislation that suited both
native and state territorial interest. The overall emphasis was on sedentarizing Jhum (slash and burn)

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cultivators. Unlike the foothills where conflicts grew between forest-settled villagers, tea plantation
workers and the excluded Nagas. In politically-administered areas, territorial control was established
through the distinction of spaces between the administered and those that were unadministered.

British administered territories in the Naga Hills were banned by law from settling feuds through raids and
headhunting. Guilty villagers who took heads were punished during annual tours that were often
accompanied by local go-betweens (dobashis) and the military police. The colonial administration had
inherited the traditional authority structure of these villages by not disturbing the local arrangement of
governance based on “customs and traditions” set by lineage and orally transmitted practices of land use.
The other voices of authority were the village headman(gaonburas), the recognized heads of “village
republics” often quoted as malik or owners. They enjoyed significant powers, controlling the second
settlers as lineage elders and as ritual-ceremonial heads who allocated lands to their clan affiliations for
cultivation. Thus, it was a form of strategic territorialization aimed at sedentarizing settlement and
negotiating conflicts based on customary practice.

With the promotion of settled farming in the early 1920s, in the predominantly jhum cultivation areas, the
programs of Wet Terrace Rice farming mostly benefited political intermediary village headmen who
collaborated in state programs of paddy farming in terrace plots. Likewise, in the area of administration,
annual tours of the administered villages were aimed at settling disputes. In many tours of the late 1920s in
the Mokokchung sub-division, village maps were prepared with the help of a political go between, to end
historical disputes over land titles, the sharing of water, fishing rights and other inter-village conflicts over
use of resources. Village boundary maps were recorded for future reference by district administration, and
have today become legal documents for dispute resolution in Naga villages. A number of case files seen at
the Deputy Commissioner office, dating from the 1930s prove evidence to these kinds of records.14
Although these were not part of revenue cartography missions, they had become established strategies in
territorializing village settlements that were mobile, and had no settled land tenure.

A further measure of territorialization was based on the collection of hoe tax or house tax. In the “Excluded
Areas” report, prepared for Robert Reid, Governor of Assam, the colonial local administration note
referring to the Chin Hill Regulation that the “local hillman who do jhuming, in villages with less than 10
houses were taxed at Rs 6 per house per person per year; in villages with 10 or more houses, house-tax at Rs
3 per person per year.”15 This policy clearly exemplified colonial attitudes towards sedentarization.
Likewise, Naga jhum cultivation was annually made to pay Rs 5 per annum as Dao or machete tax, while
the non-natives and immigrant laborers and government servants did not pay. Thus, a distinction was
drawn between natives and non-natives. By imposing such progressive taxing, the colonial officials
proclaimed a civilizing mission, often in the name of “improvement.” Thus, improvement has been used
as an important governmental policy through the practice of the state as trustees in the politics of
improving native life. Christopher Von Fürer-Haimendorf, who studied the Konyak Nagas during his
fieldwork year in 1936, states as follows:

Primitive husbandry is certainly crude when gauged by modern standards. It is

“predatory” in the sense that there is little, if any systematic practice of crop rotation
or soil compensation. The consequence is naturally exhaustion of soil, involving
removal to a new plot, where a new clearing is made with much wastage of timber and
energy … The development of agriculture techniques by the adoption of the plough
paves the way for large-scale agriculture operations and surplus production. It
emphasizes the permanence of field and settlement and individual claims of specific
tracks of land, in other words it encourages private property rights and the growth of
permanent villages. 16

Sedentary farming, through the promotion of permanent cultivation, was used as a state territorial strategy
of resource control, although in the beginning it had a limited effect on the practices of containing

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swidden farming in the Naga Hills. By the early part of the 20th century, raids and head taking had
completely stopped in the administered areas, with the diffusion of administration and the Baptist
missionary work, but were still used in unadministered parts of the Naga Hills. Both J. P. Mills and
J. H. Hutton (who wrote the monograph on the Ao, Angami and Sema Nagas) carried punitive raids in
the unadministered areas to abolish such practices. By late 1930s and early 1940s, the administered areas
of the Naga Hills became settled districts, as villages started adopting wet terrace rice cultivation. The
growth of the Christian faith also changed the notions of fertility that were earlier bestowed through head
taking and human sacrifice. Colonial administration had become a normal order of life.

While I was doing fieldwork in the Mezoma village, an old Naga nationalist (Naga Notational Council
member) narrated the story of Mills’ visit to their village. For the villagers of his generation the British
administration was seen as just. Hutton Saheb’s administration over Angami areas was giving real justice to
the people in the light of pacification of head-hunting raids. The colonial government, by this period, had
already become entrenched in the lives and practices of the native Angamis after more than five decades of
colonial rule. The politically administered (control area) Nagas emerged as law abiding, taxpaying and
“ordered,” regulated tribes who could appreciate the “white man’s burden,” and were linked to the
colonial circuits of administration and power. Not only did they help British administrators in politically-
administered areas, but were also involved in the tours of deputy commissioners in the unadministered
tracts, acting as interpreters, coolies and porters, and joined the colonial marching parties in the
pacification of head hunters and slave keepers. They became the guardians of the empire and its civilizing
mission. The histories of the administered Nagas were also recorded by the colonial administrators, and
they soon evolved as “good Nagas” and law-abiding citizens.

During the Pangsha anti-slavery expedition (1936), Mills specifically mentions the names of “Chang
Dobashis” and shopkeepers from the administered areas of Tuensang who helped him carry out raids in
Pangsha village to pacify slavery in the unadministered Kalyou-Kengyu Naga areas. The efforts of the local
administration and the dobashis were appreciated even by Williamson, the commanding officer of the
Assam Rifles in the tour. For colonial administrators, the quelling of slavery was essential in establishing
“order” in the frontier. The perceptions of “wilderness” were established through the colonial classification
of the frontier Naga tribes as “British protected” and “unadministered Nagas”. Mills, in his Pangsha
Expedition letters, writes that the Yimchunger and Changs are less reliable Nagas, unlike the sophisticated
Sangthams, and had become the trusted souls of colonial administration in the no-man’s land of the Naga
Hills frontier by the 1920s.17A similar fortnightly report from the frontier of the Naga Hills on the eve of
India’s Independence reads as follows:

The Ao villages in the administered district are seriously alarmed at the infiltration of
arms from Burma into our tribal area and fear that they may be used in raids on them.
Ao land is richer and better than that of the tribes to the east, and raids by land
hungry Chang was the ground for the protective annexation of the Ao country in
1889.18

From these reports, we may conclude that colonial policies of rule were based on the production of
“difference.” By defining the Chang Nagas as a “land-hungry” community, colonial administration
justified their punitive action while downplaying the way in which territorialization triggered such
conflicts. Territorial control and internal classification, based on the threats of feuds, were thus used to
legitimize control, while governing the subjects that produced hierarchies of “wildness” and “barbarism” as
“savage natives.” These territorial classifications have been flattened by the generic understanding of hills
and the plains—mainland and its margins. On the eve of India’s independence in 1947, these areas of the
formerly unadministered Naga territories were brought under NEFA (North East Frontier Area)
administration, later to become the Naga Hills Tuensang Area by 1958, when the Naga Hills frontiers
were demarcated between India and Burma by an aerial survey. Under the NEFA administration, these
unadminstered Naga Hills had become “no-go” areas for civilians, heavily militarized as border patrol by

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Assam Rifles and the Village Scouts (recruits from Naga Villages) intensified. Only post-colonial frontier
administrative officials would venture into the “wildness” to pacify the former raiding, along with
renegade head hunters now turned militia Naga Nation Workers,19 who were actively pursuing hostile
activities against the government.

Man Bahadur Rai, Assistant Political Officer, in his Tour Report of 1956, writes that these areas present as
the “out-of-way” places in the Naga Hills frontier. The villages he visited were engaged in truces, feuds and
acts of sedation. Rai’s description of frontier Naga communities: especially the Yimchungers, Sangthams,
Chang and Kheimungen villages that he visits, resembled his colonial predecessors. The expression of “awe
and shock” matched the “no man’s land” description. Post-independence officials classified the frontier
Naga in much the same way as did their colonial predecessors, as “uncivilized and backward.” The
popularization of Wet Terrace Rice cultivation was the new occupation of frontier administrators, and was
aimed at sedentarizing the vagabond habits of the swidden cultivators and to promote civility. Thus, in the
post-decolonization era, these borderlands of the Naga Hills had become further territorialized into
frontier regimes of administration and political control, whereby the government actively pursued a policy
of hard militarized control, and provided incentives for improvement under the “Backward Area
Development programs”.

The introduction of Wet Terrace Rice Cultivation, along with administrative control over the Naga
villages, sedentarized the Naga settlement. First in the administered district, and then in the un-
administered areas in the post-colonial period, as they came to be administered. The boundaries between
administered and unadministered Nagas no longer exist in the Naga Hills, as these territories have been
incorporated into the nation-state and have become part of the federal unit Nagaland state since the
1960s. However, colonial statelessness in the unadministered areas has added to a new delineation of
“backward” Nagas, as opposed to the advanced Nagas.20 The wildness is measured in the popular
imagination on two counts—their unadministered status within colonial administration and their
consequent backwardness within the Naga communities.21

Conclusion
In this paper, I have sought to discuss not only the political boundaries in the Naga Hills, but also the
cultural and resource boundaries that were created to produce effective governance, through a measure of
difference. The colonial ruling strategies, based on bringing about “order” and “civilization,” have today
been replaced by ideas of “development” and the “integration-through nationalization” of frontier space.
These processes of integration have created enormous tensions, and have also implied a further
territorialization of the Nagas through the process of state development, as expressed in the sub-tribal
identity struggle.

Post-independence strategies of domination and control followed the colonial threads, but these were
framed around the question of national development, which produced developmental categories among
the most backward, by labeling identities such as advanced and backward Nagas. The unadministered
backward Nagas thus became eligible for grants and projects created especially for the Backward
Borderland Development Fund. Such incentives, indeed, were not always in the interests of those who
were supposed to benefit from them, while frequently, the material consequences were outweighed by
bureaucratic red tape. Yet these ideas of development have been internalized by the Nagas, as well as state
officials, who tend to maintain control by promoting ideas of backwardness, progress and development.

In the Naga case, the territorialization process took three forms—visual representation, map making and
ethnic classification, all of which produced a powerful discourse of the other. The Nagas were thus seen as
marginal to the idea of Empire. Yet, if we examine closely the colonial administration produced in the
Naga Hills, rule was established through the constant production of difference. The colonial photographs
taken by administrator-anthropologists and amateur photographers-cum-explorers like Fürer-Haimendorf

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produced “shades of wildness” that fitted into the administered–unadministered discourse of the Naked
and the noble savage. Fürer-Haimendorf, who conducted yearlong fieldwork among the Konyaks and
participated in the Pangsha expidition of 1937, not only helped articulate the identity of the Konyaks as
“savage,” but also legitimized the extension of colonial administration through his photographic
representation of the anti-slavery campaign. The Konyaks were distinguished from the neighboring Ao,
Sema and Lotha and Angami Nagas as “wild savages,” and are reclassified as “backward Nagas.”

One decade after the anti-slavery expedition in the Kalyo-Kengyo Naga territory in 1936–1937, India
attained independence, and little moral progress could be brought to these areas of eastern Nagaland. In
the post-independence period, these areas were engulfed in violent counter-insurgency activities, first
under NEFA administration and later as they were integrated into the Naga Hills to become part of
Nagaland state. Since the first Five Year Plan (1951–1956) the Kalyo-Kengyo Konyaks, along with their
eastern Naga neighbors, have been designated as a new development category. Now, their measures of
backwardness are used to territorialize their development as the backward other. Since 1970, the eastern
Naga territory has undergone much federal restructuring, with the creation of new districts and sub-
divisional headquarters to extend and make state control more effective, whilst disciplining the frontier
through development programs. These shades of “development deficit,” as propagated by the post-
colonial Indian state, have been internalized not only by state officials and planners, but by Naga elites and
advanced tribes, who see the Kalyo-Kengyo Nagas through the relation of economic and social difference.
The best (authentic) dance forms, artifacts of the past, rituals and age-old traditions of authority are still
said to be preserved by the Eastern Nagas, who remain “backward.” The colonial category of frontier tribe
has gained a new meaning among borderland tribes. The state articulates its agenda of improvement
through special packages of development for the borderland district. In the 1990s, Nagaland underwent a
massive administrative restructuring through ideas of decentralized planning with civil society actors
coming into the foray of peace building, reconciliation with warring Naga factions, and social
development. The decentralization schemes are aimed at breaking away from the rigidities of
bureaucratization and the direct participation of people in the democratic process of the state.

With these measures have come new strategies to territorialize the margins. The establishment of a
Department for Underdeveloped Areas (DUDA), the recognition of six tribes of the formerly
unadministered Naga areas as backward and underdeveloped through provisions of reservation in public
jobs (affirmative action) has established new regimes of control and politics of appeasement. The cultural
attributes of their “backwardness” are expressed through dance performances, which are showcased to the
world through an exotic representation of the tribes as past head hunters who have preserved their “savage
heritage” in the context of modernization and change (Van Ham and Saul 2008). Backwardness is, thus,
used as an asset to claim more privileges and concessions in the form of reservations and benefits. Such
post-independence representation has produced a territorialization of the Naga sub-tribes, now required to
contest for equal rights and privileges with their advanced neighbors.

All this points to the fact that the ways in which territorialization and state power have worked in the Naga
Hills have shaped Naga identity rearticulated through the vision of place and space and the politics of the
state. State practices of territorialization that I have discussed in this paper attempt to focus on the cultural
boundaries created by the colonial administration besides the political administration of the Naga Hills
that bifurcated it between Assam and Burma (and with Assam after it was bifurcated into hill states). The
boundaries became apparent through the colonial description of natives, the use of visual images and the
annual description of place in tour diaries. In the foothills, the constant territorialization of the Nagas was
contested and remains a complicated colonial legacy that continues to be fueled with internal state
boundary and border disputes. The people in the colonial unadministered tract today articulate their
historical relationship as a non-state people, while negotiating claims for backward-underdeveloped status
and demands for reservation and adequate representation and participation in electoral politics. State
policies of appeasement and positive discrimination have produced territorialized identities that not only

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rearticulate Naga-nationalism and ethno-nationalist sentiments, but feed into ethnic categorization, based
on the production of difference and the territorialization of space.

Acknowledgments
The paper was first presented at the Second Asian Borderland Conference Held in Chiang Mai, Thailand,
2010 on the theme “Asian Borderlands: Enclosure, Interaction and Transformation.” I am grateful to Erik
de Maaker, Willem Van Schendel, Gerard P. Sharpling and Bianca Son Mai Mang for their editorial
comments and useful suggestions in an earlier draft of my paper.

Endnotes
1
The conditions of the grants were very liberal. For instance, one fourth of the area was perpetually
revenue-free, and no revenue had to be paid on the remaining land for 20 years if it was under forest and
for fewer years if it was under reeds and high grass. The land revenue rates to be paid after the expiry of that
period was very low—lower compared to even what Assam’s impoverished peasant cultivators were
paying.
2
The resource frontier was established through an alteration of native land rights from notions of
communal land to the creation of private property, where land that remained uncultivated such as forest
land, grazing land, jungle and shifting cultivation fallows was declared waste and opened for European tea
planters through “wasteland grants” auctioned by the colonial revenue administration. This gave rise to
private property and the territorialization of commons in the foothills by the tea planters and Rubber
speculators of the East India Company.
3
The “Inner Line” Regulation of 1874 made it mandatory for the plain’s non-tribal population except
missionaries and government officials to get permission from the colonial local government to enter
the hills. In policy this was a prudent attempt to protect the identity of the natives from being
threatened by lowland peasantry and “caste Hindus.” However, in practice, it had wider policy
implications. It was an important governmental tactic to produce administered and unadministered
subjects in the frontiers.
4
Jhumming is the local name given to “slash and burn” or shifting agriculture in the Naga Hills.
5
IOR. M/3/162, B503/37 Slavery—International Convention of 1926—reports of tours in Naga Hills
—Policy on Slavery in Naga Hills 13th of April 1937–14th of August 1941.
6
P226. Future Policy in Naga Hill Tracks. Minute paper, Burma Office, Serial No B. 3548/37.As seen in
IOR/ M/3/162. (slavery Convention 1926), Policy in the Naga Hill Tracts. (Burma 503/37).
7
Report prepared by Messrs H. J. Mitchell OBE, BFrS and R. E. McGuire, OBE, ICS, to Assam to study
the administration of the Excluded and Partially Excluded Areas. February–March 1943. Government of
Burma, Reconstruction Department Report. As seen in IOR, M/3/1457—Frontier Excluded areas of
Assam and Burma prepared by Sir Robert Reid.
8
The Control Area System was an administrative strategy to advance political control over Naga villages
that were outside the administered district, but were recently pacified. These areas were lightly
administered and the Deputy Commissioner had the legislative and judicial powers to decide on local law
and order situation. The village headsman’s and Dobashis acted as the main link between the government
and the people. They were visited during annual tours and the village heads were loyal to the British
administration.
9
See MS 95022, Higgins Collection 6. Nagas of Manipur State. SOAS archives, University of London.

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10
See, Fürer-Haimendorf’s, “The Life of Women among a people untouched by civilization,” Illustrated
London News, 1938.
11
Even in 1947 when the British left some territories in the Naga Hills remained unmapped and these
were the “blank spaces” of colonial administration as written by Edmund Leach and Fürer-Haimendorf.
However, if we look closely at the colonial administrative records, we can read that these areas were
frequently visited by colonial administrative and military officials to pacify raids, punish headhunters and
to rescue what the colonial government termed as “slaves” from their capturers. The unmapped territory
was a small plot of land, and the colonial government made every effort to win over the confidence of the
territorial chiefs, who claimed to be the head (owners-malik) of the “village republics.”
12
See the File No.TNR. SL885/1958, Tour Diary of Man Bahadur Rai, Assistant Political Officer
(APO), Noklak, 1956, Political Department, Confidential Branch, NEFA administration.
13
The importance of scale in the Naga Hills can be gauged from the fact that Naga Hills divided between
India and Burma is not just national state space, but part of South Asia with South East Asia. In the last
decade, India’s Look East Policy has placed the northeastern region into focus, and has been rescaled as a
transnational corridor for trade and business. Similarly, transnational donor-driven conservation and
development programmes are constantly rescaling the region as a “global hot-spot” of biodiversity
conservation.
14
These files are part of the case files relating to land disputed that are kept at the Deputy Commissioner’s
Office in Mokokchung, Nagaland.
15
Report prepared by Messrs H.J. Mitchell OBE, BFrS and R. E. McGuire, OBE, ICS, to Assam to study
the administration of the Excluded and Partially Excluded Areas. February–March 1943. Government of
Burma, Reconstruction Department Report. As seen in IOR. M/3/1457—Frontier Excluded Areas of
Assam and Burma prepared by Sir Robert Reid.
16
Christopher Von Fürer-Haimendorf archival notes as seen in Fürer-Haimendorf Archives kept at the
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. PPMS, Box 31. pp. 11–12.
17
See J. P. Mills, 1995, “The Pangsha Letters: An Expedition to Rescue Slaves in the Naga Hills,” with an
introduction by his daughter Geraldin Hobson. Oxford: Pitt River Museum Publication.
18
“Fortnightly report on the Assam tribal area for the second half of June 1947.” Enclosed in India,
Foreign Secretary letters, no 61, date 9–8, received August 8, 1947. As seen in Northeast India Fortnightly
Reports on the Assam Tribal Areas, external department collection. IOR/l/prs/12/3117. p. 21.
19
The Nagas who raised arms for self determination after India’s Independence in 1947, the members of
the Naga National Council who had gone underground would call themselves as Nation Workers.
20
The classification of backward Naga, within the present federal unit of Nagaland, comes from the
historical strategies of administering the frontier. Until 1947, in the days of British administration,
sections of the Naga territories were administered as parts of the Assam Frontier Tract and a large part
remained outside the direct remit of colonial administration. In 1948, the Konyaks along with their
eastern neighbors were made part of the North East Frontier Area and were administered centrally and not
within Assam’s Naga Hill District. In 1957 the Naga Hills Tuensang Area (NHTA) was formed out of the
Naga Areas from the North East Frontier Area administration and was subsequently merged with the
newly created federal unit Nagaland in 1961. When these areas were incorporated in the Naga Hills, it was
realized that the NHTA Nagas were backward. Hence, an interim period of 10 years was placed, before
general election could be held in the recently incorporated territories. During the interim period, members
were represented through selection from the NHTA area to the state legislative assembly. In this way, the

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colonial unadministered areas were given a new classification of backwardness in the post-independence
Naga Hills.
21
During my fieldwork year, 2008–2009, I came to realize that the former unadministered territories of
present day Tuensang and Mon District are today designated as “backward-underdeveloped” districts, in
contrast to the rest of Naga Hills. Backwardness is also often co-terminus with colonial and postcolonial
administration. Many villagers referred to themselves as free Nagas, never administered by the British
Indian government or being part of the revenue assessment. Thus backwardness is produced out of the
ungoverned spaces where these areas were placed and is intricately linked to the nature of control and
governance.

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