Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains

by Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent

  In the afternoons I explored the packed earth alleyways of Miao, where Chakma women sat on the porches of their bamboo houses weaving bolts of red, fuchsia and indigo cotton. Asked into one house by a charming, pretty teenage girl, I sat on a low stool on the swept earthen floor while she made me milky ginger tea on a stove made from dried mud and cow dung. Delighted to use the English she’d learnt at the ‘most big and beautiful’ school in Miao, she told me about her people. They were a Buddhist minority from the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, she said, and had been coming to Arunachal Pradesh since the 1960s, when religious discrimination and the construction of a hydroelectric dam had rendered them homeless. Now there were 100,000 of them here, fighting a long battle to be given official refugee status and recognized as Indian citizens.

  When her father, a carpenter, came home, he pulled up a stool beside me, took my hands in his and asked his daughter to translate. How glad he was to meet me, he said, and although he was black and I was white we were all the same – all just human beings. The girl wanted to be a bank manager when she grew up, so she could look after her parents when they were old. As with the Bangladeshis in Dibrugarh, I left feeling humbled by their kindness and resilience.

  The very few tourists who come to Miao are on their way to Namdapha, a largely unexplored wilderness of alpine meadows, Himalayan peaks and tangled forests jutting 200,000 hectares into the easternmost nook of India. It’s not an easy place to visit. Apart from a single mud-clotted track winding some hundred miles from Miao to the Burmese border, there are no proper roads, very few trails and immense tracts of uncharted land. The forests are so dense that even conservationists who spend weeks sloshing through the dripping jungle rarely glimpse anything of the tigers, snow leopards, leopards, clouded leopards, hoolock gibbons, red pandas or hundred other species of mammal that live here (not to mention nearly 500 species of bird and a thousand types of plant). Encounters with snakes and leeches are far more common. There are about one million snake bites a year in India, 45,000 of them fatal, and few areas have more snakes than the jungles of this, the Northeastern frontier.

  ‘You’re lucky the snakes are still hibernating,’ said Phupla. ‘A bite from most of the snakes around here means you need to say your last wishes and tell your relatives goodbye.’

  There was the added risk of insurgents. Researchers conducting a tiger census in 2012 had been shot at by militants and had all their camera traps stolen by poachers. But I wanted to have a taste of Namdapha, and to do so I’d need both a permit and a guide. Phupla applied for my permit in Miao, dashing off at 11.45 one morning to catch the park office before its staff went home for their three-hour lunch.

  ‘When you Britishers left all Indians became lazy,’ said Phupla with a chuckle.

  My guide would be Japang Pangsa, Namdapha’s head mahout, a man I’d been told about over email by a leading Indian conservationist. A dying breed, these mahouts held a strange allure, jungle knights aboard their giant steeds. But there was another reason I was itching to meet Japang. He was a Wancho Naga from the Patkai Hills, the very area Herman Perry had fled to. Of all the Naga’s roughly seventy sub-tribes they were one of the least known, and had once enjoyed a reputation for being among the most terrifying.

  Read anything about Northeast India and you’ll soon be entranced by tales of the terrible Naga. Inveterate headhunters, until as recently as the 1990s there was nothing a lusty Naga warrior adored more than returning from a raid on a nearby village with a bloody basket of freshly taken heads. Heads, they believed, were the dwelling place of the soul and hence receptacles of great power: the more of these grisly, staring prizes a village had dangling from their ‘head tree’, the greater fertility and good fortune they’d enjoy. Best of all were the heads of women and children but essentially any old noggin would do. The men brave enough to conduct such raids wore little brass heads around their necks, one for each victim. One can only imagine the inconvenience of having the Naga next door. In 1837 a Scottish tea planter observed that ‘they are the wildest and most barbarous of the hill-tribes, looked upon with dread and horrour [sic] by their neighbours’.

  No one knows where these paleo-Mongoloid peoples came from, or when they arrived in these hills. But their myths and headhunting ways are closely connected with those of tribes in Borneo, Sarawak and the Philippines. It’s possible they were all part of the same diaspora that walked and paddled south from Mongolia, Tibet or Yunnan sometime around the tenth century. Although they had no written script until very recently, ancient Naga folktales talk of great sea journeys, and their obscure origins only add to their mystique.

  Aware of their unsavoury habits, the British initially left the Naga tribes to their own devices, but when Assam planters kept finding headless coolies among their tea bushes they couldn’t let it slide, and there followed several decades of bloody skirmishes. Gunpowder didn’t always win against dao, and in one nasty incident in 1875 Wancho Naga tribesmen ambushed and decapitated eighty British soldiers, legging it with the head of the commander, Lieutenant Holcombe. Holcombe’s head wasn’t found until 1925, when another British Political Officer found it occupying pride of place on the head tree in a nearby Naga village.

  British attempts to outlaw headhunting failed abysmally; it was simply too important to Naga society. Verrier Elwin, a British anthropologist and passionate advocate of tribal rights, who became Nehru’s tribal advisor in 1954, wonderfully summed up their passion for taking heads.

  ‘If you talk to a Naga on such tedious topics as theology or economics . . . he quickly slips away to have a refreshing rice beer. Open the question of head-hunting and his eyes light up and a torrent of exciting and improper information pours from his lips.’

  When they weren’t boiling heads in pots of chillies their shamans were said to engage in a spot of therianthropy, turning themselves into tigers and leopards to roam the jungles in search of prey.

  Incredibly, by 1914, relations between the British and their uppity subjects had improved to the point where around 5,000 Naga fought with the Allied Labour Corps on the Western Front. The Germans were appalled, some even complaining to their High Command about having to fight ‘savages’. But they proved a welcome novelty among the British troops. A copy of the Illustrated War News from 1917 describes them as ‘wild looking little fellows who . . . in their native hills do a little head-hunting when the humour takes them . . . but here in France they are quite good tempered and jolly’. Needless to say, the ‘jolly’ Naga were bitterly disappointed when they were ordered not to take German heads, and to settle for just helmets instead.

  Thirty years later they fought for the British again, acting as scouts and trackers for the Allies in the jungles of the Indo-Burmese border. Not interested in cash, they were paid in trinkets such as matches, buttons and safety pins. This time the rules were looser and many a Japanese head ended up decorated with grass and buffalo horns, hanging from a head tree.

  Dawn had broken on another sultry day when Japang arrived. I’d pictured a gnarled old warrior with skin like knotted teak, his scraggy neck hung with rows of little brass heads – a man who’d lassoed wild elephants and wrestled the odd tiger. But the individual who stood in front of me was a vision in grey nylon – a small, stocky fellow with rounded features, a pot belly and closely cropped hair. No more than forty, his unlined skin was conker brown and his eyes round and hazel. Painfully shy, he knew only fragmentary English and spoke it with a furrowed brow and flickering downward glances. Only his shot-putter’s thighs, straining at his grey nylon trousers, and calloused toes, rough from a lifetime of digging into the back of leathery elephantine ears, betrayed him as a mahout.

  Japang was the master of seven working elephants, leviathans that could crush him in a moment or snap him in two with their trunks. And he was a Wancho Naga, the descendant of men who had hunted human heads. But he’d never ridden pillion with a woman before, and a foreign one at that, and apprehension squirmed in every nerve and musc
le. He threw his leg gingerly over the seat, flattened himself against the top box and clutched his small rucksack to his chest. But the rough track to the park was blind to his plight. It shunted him into me at every bump, cracked his bare head on the back of my helmet and pressed him awkwardly close to female flesh. He wriggled, he tensed, he shuffled backwards, the epitome of cringing discomfort. But as soon as he’d restored the gap between us another bump would cruelly shoot him forwards again. Given a choice, I’m sure he would rather have been on the back of a wild tusker in musth. Now probably wasn’t the time to tell him that, apart from my short forays into town with Singing Sanjay, it was the first time I’d taken anyone pillion. I was every bit as nervous as he was.

  At the park gate, where a rusting green ‘Project Tiger’ sign reminded visitors that this was a designated tiger reserve bolstered by millions of rupees of government funds, I signed a register in a wooden hut. Beyond, the track wound along the lip of a ridge that plunged on the left to the wide, pebbly plain of the Noa-Dihing and soared on the right in a sheer wall of greenery. Near the river, stilted Chakma houses sat neatly amidst a patchwork of brown paddies and tufts of palms. From here it looked idyllic: the mist-cloaked hills, the fertile plain, the palms, the quietly grazing cattle. But life for the Chakma was hard, and the river a mercurial neighbour. Only two months later the water would come roaring through here, bursting its banks and flooding two nearby villages.

  I wanted to meet Japang’s elephantine charges but all of them, bar one female, were deep in Namdapha on logging duties and ranger patrol. The female was having a day off, munching her way through the undergrowth somewhere in the vicinity of the collection of dilapidated concrete huts that served as the park’s elephant station. Elephants, despite their size, can melt into the forest and, for an hour, I followed Japang into the humid gloom, his dao cracking at bamboo and slashing through shrubs that wiggled with leeches blindly seeking our blood. The few that were around now were nothing compared to the plague of the summer months. Piles of fly-swarmed elephant dung and the odd broken branch indicated we were close, but there were no five-tonne pachyderms to be seen. Then Japang, sniffing the air like a keening hound, stopped and pointed to a slope above us where, just five metres away, a wrinkled grey bottom was poking out of a thicket of bamboo. Had I been on my own, I’d have walked straight past it.

  Elephants are insufferably greedy and Kanchi, the 21-year-old female, was not amused at being disturbed from her morning’s gluttony.

  Japang stood at the bottom of the slope, enticing her with a handful of ferns. ‘Lo! Lo! Lo!’ he commanded, which I presumed meant ‘come here’.

  A minute or two later she slid down the slope with a snapping of branches and a rattling of leg chains, turning her bottom towards Japang and letting out an enormous, noisy pee. Only when she’d finished did she swivel around to face us, her expression a resigned: ‘Yes? And what do you want?’

  He patted her rough forehead tenderly and commanded her to greet me with her trunk. ‘Salaam! Salaam!’ he ordered.

  But that cunning proboscis was far more interested in the food in Japang’s pockets than in saying hello to me. Armed with 100,000 muscles and a sense of smell sixteen times more powerful than a dog’s, an elephant’s trunk can winkle a sweet out of your pocket or lift a tonne of logs. In South Africa I’d seen elephants trained to track poachers, hunting them for miles through the bush after the briefest smell of an abandoned camp. Now, with a surgeon’s precision, Kanchi probed and sniffed Japang, flapping her ears intently as she hunted down the goods. When he produced a bag of salt and placed handfuls in her trunk, she blinked and blew contentedly as she swung it into her mouth. I stood beside her, awed, looking into her amber eyes, wondering how such intelligent giants have allowed man to tame them. Only the previous evening Phupla had told me a story about an old Assamese mahout he knew. Once, during the monsoon, the Forest Department’s elephants were helping to evacuate villagers across a swollen river. One mahout became so drunk on rice beer that on the way home he slid off his elephant for a pee and passed out drunk on the ground. Rather than leave him, the elephant wrapped its unconscious master in its trunk and carried him many miles home, depositing him at the door of his hut.

  We left the bike at a forest camp and spent the rest of the day squelching along a muddy track between matted escarpments of foliage. Everywhere the jungle harried at the road, threatening it with the soft teeth of giant ferns, the caress of bamboo, the sigh of banana palms and a guard of slender orange trunks that surged towards the canopy. A brilliant naturalist, Japang could identify every shriek, warble and trill that erupted from the trees around us: the distinctive triple call of the blue-throated barbet, the hoarse chattering of a courting rufous woodpecker, the shrieks of a yellow-necked woodpecker, the melodious call of a laughingthrush. Much more exciting, though, were the prints of a big cat, padding along the track for several miles beside us.

  Japang squatted down for a closer look. ‘Common leopard, yesterday,’ he said with assurance.

  The trees were so thick here that we wouldn’t have known if the leopard was just metres away, licking his paws at the prospect of an English hors d’oeuvre. Later we saw the much smaller prints of a fishing cat, daintily picking its way through the mud.

  Namdapha is supposedly the only park in the world that is home to four species of big cat – leopard, snow leopard, clouded leopard and tiger. But there was little chance of seeing tiger prints. The reserve and its grandly named Tiger Strike Force are a farce. Everyone knows there are no tigers left here – or only a handful at best. They’ve been poached to oblivion, their skins, teeth, claws and bones sold to Burmese middlemen for six lakh rupees, roughly £6,000. The Strike Force are a shambolic bunch of sixty underpaid Tangsa, Singpho and Lisu men with eight guns between them, four of which actually work. (Although since my visit I hear that more guns have been purchased.) Of the four rangers employed to cover the 200,000 hectares, one of them never leaves the office in Miao. When I asked a local conservationist if it was possible to go on an anti-poaching patrol they laughed and said, ‘There is no such thing.’ The poachers can effectively hunt at will, and they know it.

  The disappearance of Namdapha’s tigers is largely blamed on the Lisu, a Kachin people first discovered on Indian soil by an Assam Rifles border patrol in 1961. They’ve been drifting across from Burma ever since, clearing the jungle for wet rice cultivation and cardamom plantations and hunting the forests to silence. The fact that Namdapha is a protected wilderness means little to them: not recognized as Indian citizens until 2015, these skilled hunters have few job opportunities or possible sources of income. Cordoned off by Burma on one side and the Himalayas on the other, they have nowhere else to go. Arunachal’s unforgiving terrain has always been a last resort, a place where vanquished, fleeing tribal peoples have perched on mountainsides or hewn homes out of the jungle. And now it’s no different. With India’s population rising faster than almost anywhere else on earth (India is due to become the world’s most populous country by 2022) and parts of Burma riven by conflict, minority peoples with nowhere else to go are being squeezed into these blank spaces on the map.

  That night I stayed at the run-down forest camp where I’d left my bike, on a bluff above the Noa-Dihing, in a creaking hut whose floorboards scuttled with cockroaches. It was run by a booze-sodden Assamese whose breath could have pickled gherkins. The lake of empty rum bottles behind the kitchen betrayed the fact it wasn’t a one-off. The only other guests were a couple of Danish birders, lean, intense and swathed in swishing shells of Gore-Tex, their necks hung with lenses the width of dinner plates. Over supper their conversation rarely strayed beyond ornithological matters. If a tiger had danced the tango in front of them they wouldn’t have cared – they couldn’t tick it off on their spreadsheet or tell their twitcher friends. It was birds, birds, birds.

  Tired of talking birds I retired early to my hut, tucking my holey mosquito net under the thin mattress and huddling
under a pile of musty blankets to keep warm. At some point it began to rain, the drumming on the metal roof drowning out the roar of the river below, and several times in the night I awoke, turning on my head torch to find cockroaches hurrying across the bed, retreating from the sudden light. Repulsed, I pulled the blankets over my head and fell back into a fitful sleep.

  6

  OPIUM COUNTRY

  Daylight dispensed with the cockroaches but in their place arrived an unwelcome brigade of the collywobbles. They scaled the ramparts of my rational defence, slung out Calm and Reason and replaced them with Fear and Doubt. With well-practised efficiency they pulled ropes around my chest, polluted my mind with negative thoughts and unleashed a river of nerves. And all because Japang was needed on elephant duty and I had to return to Miao alone. It was only twenty miles but the overnight rain had cloaked the hills in fog and churned the track to a soupy mire. There was no phone reception, few people and, if yesterday’s prints were anything to go by, the odd cat with very big teeth. I didn’t have a satellite phone or any sort of emergency beacon – if anything went wrong I really was on my own. This was what I’d wanted; to shed all the ‘what if’ paraphernalia of the paranoid modern traveller, choosing instead to trust in humanity and the universe, and in my own ability to cope. But now I wasn’t quite so sure. I couldn’t help recalling Cambodia’s Mondulkiri Death Highway, a road I’d had to tackle during my journey down the Ho Chi Minh Trail that had come uncomfortably close to living up to its name.