White Mountain

  And though he got through two checkpoints with bluster and guile (as Ward once told me: ‘If you want to be an armed robber, you need either to be prepared to shoot someone with the intention of seriously injuring or killing them, or be a bloody good actor’), at the third they became embroiled. Word had come through on the radio. The soldiers were clear now about what had happened. Both men were arrested. Ward was beaten. The doctor was not sent to the hospital and died that night. And Ward would eventually spend a year in a tough Indian jail for his actions.

  In Kathmandu, when the meetings and negotiating got too much, David would take me out to a dingy drinking den in the old part of town. He had been born in Assam, where his father had been a tea planter who stayed after the British left in 1947. The plantation was in eastern Assam, up near the Naga border, and Nagas sometimes worked on the plantation; David remembered they would arrive carrying their spears. But this idyllic life ended when he was sent to boarding school in the UK. He didn’t like it. A born rebel, he left school early and joined the army, left that, and became a youth worker on a hard estate in south London. Here his moniker became ‘Peace Dave’, as he sought to bring warring factions together. But what goes into a salt mine becomes salt, and David Ward became a criminal. He targeted stately homes and country houses, rationalising it as part of his own ‘war on the undeserving rich’. After this, he graduated to armed robbery. All along he was looking for a cause he could wholeheartedly believe in. He told me that being a gangster ‘got silly’ after a while. He became paranoid, worried if someone had dissed him or not, dishing out violence or threats if someone ‘looked at him in the wrong way’. He was caught, sentenced, then he and two others managed to escape while in custody travelling between one prison and another, having overpowered the guards and taking the van. They left the van on the Old Kent Road and went to their local to show their faces and have a ‘laugh at the old bill’. Though they hid out for several months, Ward was eventually recaptured and sentenced to six years, to be spent largely in solitary confinement, owing to his escape. It was in solitary that he became aware of the Naga separatist movement. He organised a consciousness-raising show of Naga songs and poetry and some Naga dancing – all in the prison. By now, Ward had become a poet himself, and a convinced supporter of Naga separation from Indian rule.

  As soon as his sentence ended, Ward and a fellow former prisoner headed off to India and entered Nagaland illegally. Ward managed a year of activism – which included taunting authorities by sending press releases to the local paper in Kohima. The authorities decided to capture him and make an example of him.

  After jail in India, Ward returned to the UK. He now had a Naga wife and worked tirelessly on managing his charity, Naga Vigil.

  The purpose of the Kathmandu meeting was to achieve some measure of unity between all the different factions of the Naga separatist cause. Seventeen of them arrived in the big rented villa that David Ward had secured for the main meetings. General Moh, a veteran of the 1956 Naga war against the Indians, was residing in another villa. He was now an alcoholic and enjoying his reputation as an ex-guerrilla fighter. He liked to shock, and told me that the Nagas ate dogs. But my father had told me that years ago. ‘I know,’ I said.

  Susan, the young Australian activist, became interested in visiting eastern Nagaland, on the Burmese side. This was also my plan. Being young, she talked about it to everyone. The representatives of the eastern Nagas grew cautious. My own visit became vaguer the more I tried to press them for concrete details. I couldn’t hold it against Susan, though. I would have to get to Nagaland a different way.

  I spent a lot of time hanging round the villa while the elders talked and negotiated. Eventually, they came to a big agreement. They wanted David Ward to sign the agreement too. They considered him an equal in their attempts to gain a country free from Indian domination. But he told them it was their cause; he knew that if he got too involved, people might resent such an ‘imperialist’ intrusion.

  I spent time talking to Lucy, a young Naga whose brother had been killed in Nagaland fighting against Indian soldiers. Lucy asked me to get her French women’s magazines and a Teach Yourself French book. Her English was fluent, but she had a dream to learn French and visit Paris. Every day she got up early and helped cook the immense vats of chicken curry and rice consumed by the Nagas. She was always dressed far more elegantly than seemed appropriate for a freedom fighter working in a greasy kitchen. I thought about doing a story about her as the ‘women’s angle’ on the Naga problem, but decided it would blow her cover. I realised that, without her family connection, Lucy would never have been involved in what many would call terrorist activity. She would have been a schoolteacher or a government worker, reading her French novels in the evening. The tragedy of such a war of liberation is the way its tentacles spread everywhere, far beyond the confines of the original conflict. But I saw that life has to go on, however committed you are.

  Susan and I never made it to Nagaland, not for another fifteen years anyway. Susan gave up activism and became a fashionable DJ and audio artist in Australia. David Ward went back to Nagaland in 2002, was captured again in 2003 and served another eleven months in an Indian jail – losing twenty kilos during his imprisonment. He eventually gave up the cause in 2007 and returned the archive of the separatist movement to Nagaland. This archive, with its symbolic overtones, had been entrusted to Ward by Phizo, a man who had known my grandfather in the 1940s. The architect of the original plans for the Naga nation, Phizo had been exiled to the London borough of Bromley of all places, and built up a vast archive of books and material relating to the Naga cause. Some Nagas wanted it back, but factionalism again reared its ugly head. David Ward was seen as a neutral figure, and he looked after it for many years before giving up solving the Naga problem.

  Which is? A tragic situation involving a people caught between modernity and traditional tribal life, riven by missionary activity and the desire of modern India to assert its unity. Though they had been offered Hong Kong status in 1956, Naga leaders refused – they wanted full independence from India or they would fight. The fighting caused much hardship and many lost lives. There are still separatist groups way up in the hills. Most Nagas have largely turned their backs on them. They have decided to get on with their lives. Make the best of the situation.

  In the end, the Indian government solved the ‘Naga problem’, as it’s called, with money. Nagaland has better roads and more government-paid jobs than a completely ‘Indian’ part of the Himalayas – the Garwhal, for example. There is a lot of evidence of government spending in Nagaland. There are also very big churches, funded in part by donations from Baptist associations in America.

  Nagaland has a very bizarre appearance on first acquaintance – Western-style churches and jungle houses. There are music shops selling electric guitars in Kohima and Mokokchung. Unlike the rest of India, where the aim is to look like your dad, here the young people acquire quiffs and riffs, wear leather jackets and perform Naga rock music. There’s a Naga heavy metal festival in Kohima, which I just missed when I was there. Maybe it’s better that they wield axes in this way rather than their old head-hunting daos.

  I remember Yong Kong at the meeting in Kathmandu, beaming and being friendly to everyone. It was the first time I had seen diplomacy and nation-building in action. Yong Kong told me he said nothing of import to anyone. He told me that creating the right atmosphere was a slight talent he had (he was always, like most Nagas, incredibly self-effacing) that was very useful in making agreements happen. ‘People can disagree because they are personally unhappy – for no other reason – I try to make them a little happy.’

  He was a benign old man – or seemed to be. But I also heard him use the power of the cause to encourage young men to fight. He was quite prepared to send the next generation to die for Naga independence – he was no Dalai Lama, nor would he claim to be. I learned that any cause, when it takes up violence, is pretty ugly close up.

&n
bsp; Uncle Yong Kong died in 2008. He still had his suitcase ready to go, sadly, no longer needed.

  Yong Kong as a young man

  4

  Two Faces of Nagaland

  Affairs cannot be handled by a two-pointed mind; sewing cannot be done by a two-pointed needle.

  Tibetan proverb

  I am looking at two photographs separated by fifty years. One is of the headman of the Seangha village – a Konyak Naga from the unadministered area. It was taken in 1936. The other is the headman from Pangmi village in Burma, 1985. They could be of the same man, but they are not. Nor are they similar in any way that is crucial and significant. They merely look as if the man photographed in each one is related to the other. They are both dressed in native style.

  Both have taken heads: that is the significance of the monkey skull hat and the brass heads round the Pangmi elder’s neck, though he converted to Christianity in 1982.

  I would rather look at their faces. The Konyak man from 1936 has a face stretched over hardened bone; there is no surplus, only watchfulness and warrior hardness, quick-fighting confidence. It is a broad face, unmarked by any signs of literacy. Everything he knows he carries with him. His intelligence lies in his muscled arms, heavy with a surfeit of rattan bracelets that add to his strength, or the impression of it, in the way his feathered high hat adds no doubt to the impression of height.

  The other elder is broken. He looks lost, squatting like a boy; all that was important in his life has been changed or taken away. Maybe he is an opium addict, like some of the Nagas I met on the Burmese border. Christianity has stripped his past of any meaning. He is strung with beads, and clutches a fighting dao. He looks startled and sad.

  A 1936 headman next to a 1985 headman

  The man from 1936 is planning something. He means business, he has somewhere to go. The poor Naga of 1985 might be his son, though by the magic of photography he looks older, and his demeanour is a thousand times older. It is someone who cannot understand the world they live in. The bottom has dropped out of everything – no morung, no head-taking raids, no drinking. What must it be like to suffer such a vast change and not want it, or to go along with it because that’s what you do in a tribe, only to find you have nothing left?

  The whole dilemma of ‘development’ can be seen in these two faces. Do we leave well alone? Or give them everything we have – from plastic bags to Jesus? Certainly, the missionaries, armed with the miracles of the West – guns mainly – wreaked the biggest changes in Nagaland. The enormous American-funded churches sit on every hilltop. It gives Nagaland a bizarre aspect – like a cross between Europe and the jungle. Christianity must have appealed to the Nagas; the idea of a father god who sends his son coincided with certain existing Naga myths. And the colonial governors of the region were, until the 1920s, active in encouraging American Baptist missionaries. After the First World War, they were less sanguine. Mills and Hutton, the district commissioners from that time, started to oppose the missionaries; they saw the disappearance of tribal customs, rituals and security as a loss, not a gain. Nagas had fought in the First World War (you can still find the odd Naga headdress fashioned from a German helmet with added horns – very Viking – brought back by Naga troops in 1918). The men who had seen Europe and the destruction of Europe formed the first pan Naga group – the Naga club. Nationalism took hold. The agitators were all Christian converts. As late as the 1980s, Naga nationalists were ‘encouraging’ Christian conversion among the Burmese tribes where they hid from Indian soldiers.

  And yet the British are not remembered fondly, though the Indians who came later were more murderous and less just. It was the British who wanted to keep the Nagas in aspic – certainly after 1920 – to preserve their culture from the rampages of the Indian plains. Like a parent who is hated for keeping a child indoors, this was not appreciated.

  What is lost when a tribe loses the old ways? I have seen in the faces of elders in the remoter parts of Nagaland that look of lostness, a cynicism, an interest in oblivion because nothing else is on offer. Old men pose for photos wearing their tribal rig and puffing on opium pipes. People complain about drugs and alcoholism among indigenous people, but if you take everything that gave meaning to their lives away, is it much of a surprise? This is where the big concrete forthright churches come in: they are the new meaning, the new life. Nagas with electric guitars playing in gospel rock groups abound.

  They fought for sixty or more years for their independence – from what? From the twentieth century? From India? From Britain? When one culture is stronger than another, is there any escape? It still seems a terrible shame that tradition, albeit a tradition of taking people’s heads, should be ignored – and yet how many British people celebrate druidism, pay homage to standing stones and dance around yew trees? Folk dancing in the UK excites mockery. There are no clans, except in Scotland – perhaps a better example of cultural survival in the modern age. The Nagas still have their costumes, and you can still buy spearheads for pig-sticking in the market. Everyone carries a dao; many men are armed with ancient rifles. They are a warrior people, and that hasn’t been taken completely away.

  I look again at the hard bone face of yesterday. Everything such a man does has an urgency and a singing connection to the world he lives in. He is utterly self-sufficient. He is eternal and yet of the moment. The linkage to his whole world is taut; the wires are singing.

  But the man fifty years on has no necessity. He could be on stage or in an old people’s home. His world does not sing to him or connect to him, he is of the past, not the moment. He has become unnecessary in his own eyes.

  One would desperately like to come down on one side or the other. Condemn one, say all was for the best or the worst. Softies and people who like showers and supermarkets find in their materialism excuse enough for annihilating other cultures. I cannot be so sure. But neither is it all for the bad. Nothing is ever completely lost. I think it is like death – it is another death in the Naga hills, end place of the white mountains. Emotionally, the loss must be borne. We have to wear white and go high into the hills and let the wind take away our grief for those who have passed away. We may be sure of their destination, but will always still feel a loss, a parting, a grief.

  Is there anything else to say?

  5

  A Journey to the Burmese Border

  A wise man seeing coming danger should avoid it; on seeing it approach he should remain fearless.

  Naga proverb

  This was really the end of the line. I had dreamed about coming here for so long. I knew the names of villages and towns from things my father had said and from my interest in the Naga cause in the 1990s. The hills were less wooded than I imagined. Deforestation is a big problem in Nagaland – slash-and-burn agriculture breeds a casual acceptance of commercial logging – and as I pounded along dirt roads to the border, truck after truck went past loaded with logs about the diameter of telegraph poles. These were not the giant trees needed to make log drums (later I would find out that such trees still existed, but they were many miles from the road).

  There are no flat places in Nagaland once you travel through the Assam hinterland where tea planting is in evidence. You start to climb quite soon. But not the horrendous hairpins of the high Himalayas; here it is gentler, but always you are going either up or down. The hills are intermittently wooded, things grow fast here, and areas that have been logged are quickly green again. The trucks loaded with logs were carting away secondary growth, a sign of a certain sustainability.

  My driver was a fat laughing Konyak Naga from Mon. Mon is a town with two hotels though not much else for the sightseer in search of more than local colour. For me it was the staging post for this relentless drive to the border.

  Our vehicle was a Japanese mini-van with tiny wheels. Gamely the driver gunned it up and over muddy ruts and rubble-laden roads. Skidding and lurching up insanely steep tracks, I finally topped out at Long Wa – the village that straddles the borde
r between India and Burma. Hill and mountain ridges are chosen as borders when the map-makers arrive – it’s easier that way – but here, as on the Tibetan-Nepalese and Tibetan-Indian border, there was no real difference in landscape either side of the frontier. I was happy to see there was no fence or border crossing. There was only one official who spoke perfect English and probed why I was here, but in a very polite manner and not in the slightest with that disbelieving air so favoured by British police and immigration officials. He invited me to have a cup of tea with him in his office, but it was less like an office than his front parlour.

  I was shown round by the leader of the student council in Long Wa. He was also excellent at English, but then English is the official language of Nagaland (a sort of snub to their Indian overlords). I was introduced to the King of Long Wa. He was smoking opium and having a good laugh with his pals in the longhouse. It was all a bit awkward as the student was embarrassed by the King’s lack of sobriety. But he was a canny old king and he laughed mockingly at the young, rather stern lad. The King’s mates wore traditional warrior kit, while His Majesty wore a necklace with several brass skulls – proof that once he had taken heads. But now he was half off his head. He offered me a blast on his pipe, but it didn’t seem appropriate with my guide so disapproving.