village

Go and Look at the Dead Tigers

As a child, I had a terrible fear of tigers. At night I would lie in my bed, with the kerosene lamp turned low and if a gentle breeze moved the cotton curtains at the door, I would imagine a tiger walking in to eat me. I could hear the hooting of owls and the howling of jackals in the valley below the bungalow and closer, the quieter sounds of my family reading or playing games in the front room.

The threat of tigers was real enough. The village behind our compound in Assam in northeast India was called Mopungchukit and quite often the villagers would kill tigers that preyed on their cattle. Typically, the Nagas mounted a dead tiger on a bamboo frame, lashing the massive body with vines and opening the dead mouth in a threatening grimace, to warn other tigers away from the herd. Once, when I was five or six, the villagers killed five tigers, which they impaled on bamboo sticks on the outskirts of the village. My brothers and two sisters, all older, thought it a great lark to go and look at the dead tigers and they insisted I accompany them. Jongpong, our dhobi or laundryman, thinking he could overcome my terror, carried me piggyback - and screaming - up the hill to view the dead tigers. More years than I like to admit later, I tell people I think tigers are quite beautiful and in need of protection. However, no tigers, dead or alive, have visited me lately.

The people of the village were of the Ao Naga tribe, reputed to be savage headhunters by some, but known to me as friends.

The Nagas would eat just about any meat, except that of the tiger. They believed that some tigers had a secret human ‘partner’, who might be living among them in the village. In Naga lore, if the tiger or the man died suddenly, his ‘partner’ would immediately die as well. The villagers seemed to know which tigers shared the soul of a neighbor and these tigers were rarely threatened.

There were plenty of tigers and leopards in the jungles adjacent to our house. The natives did not distinguish between the two species, calling the tiger the big one and the leopard the little one. An experienced hunter would rather face a tiger than a leopard, because a cornered tiger will seek escape, whereas a leopard fights to the end. Even if a hunter survived a fight with a leopard, he faced the likelihood of deadly infection from wounds inflicted by the leopard’s claws, which harbour bacteria from rotten meat. The Nagas respected the leopard’s persistence and cunning, knowing that the ‘little one’ would watch and wait for an opportunity to attack again.

These people and their customs made up much of what I knew of life as a child. I did not speak English till I was five because Tsungkumla, my ayah, spoke to me in the Ao Naga language. It’s one of twelve languages spoken by the people with whom my parents worked as Baptist missionaries in India from 1926 - 1954.

Most people think of India as a land teeming with humanity. Many picture holy men, temples and sacred cows. Most know the associations of snake charmers with a cobra in a basket and Maharajahs, with incredible wealth, riding elephants in procession. Some may even imagine fertile fields, fruitful valleys, whispering palm trees, deep jungles and ponds laden with lotus blossoms. But in the northeast lies a part of old India less well-known, where the landscape is dominated by the towering Himalayas. Here, in one of the most beautiful parts of India, is the state known as Nagaland, rarely visited by outsiders.

Many different tribes inhabit this section of northeastern India and they incorporate a wide range of religions, culture, languages and social systems. One of these cultures is a tribal group known as Nagas. For centuries, the Nagas were warring headhunting tribes. Animists, the Nagas traditionally worshipped nature and offered sacrifices to spirits, both good and evil.

No one really knows where the name ‘Naga’ comes from. One theory is that it is from the Burmese ‘Na-Ka’, meaning people with pierced earlobes - a widespread practice among all the Naga tribes. Another is that it comes from the Assamese word for naked – ‘noga’. A third theory, though less probable, is that the name came from the Sanskrit word ‘nag’, which means snake.

As for the people themselves, neither anthropologists nor British colonial officials have been able to clearly identify the roots of the Naga people. Who are these Nagas and from where do they come?

They have skin the colour of café au lait, with high cheekbones and Asian eyes. They build their villages on mountaintops so they can see any enemies before they arrive and they cultivate crops along the hillsides. They travel daily to rivers in the valley for water, which they carry up the mountain in hollowed-out bamboo, so all the people have strong legs, tight buttocks and great endurance. My ayah, whom I last saw in 1996, is still alive in her nineties. Some suspect these people came from Borneo, or even the Philippines, but how they might have arrived in northeast India, no one can say. The Nagas are not a single homogenous people, but a composite of some eighteen tribes speaking about thirty dialects and with different customs.

Their diet consists primarily of rice, pork, greens and eggs, although, at times, they also eat grubs and insects. They are, by and large, happy and carefree, with an extraordinary capacity for enjoying life. They laugh frequently and they love to sing, often chanting a call and response, oh-he-ho, in musical thirds as they work. My father often speculated that they chanted to ward off marauding jungle animals.

Traditionally, the Nagas believe that some spirit inhabits all things, animate or inanimate, though the Sema tribe also believed in an unseen higher power. When my parents first came to India, before I was born, the natives told them about a rock in the area that was so powerful that, if anyone touched it, he or she would die. Intending to prove them wrong, a missionary defied their belief and kissed the rock. He died of typhoid within a year - a fact the Nagas impressed on my parents early.

The Nagas are a proud and strong-willed people. Each village has a chief who has absolute power over them, but the people often fought, even village to village. After the British came to India, Naga raiders would attack British tea gardens on the plains. By the mid-1800s, the British government, in an effort to control the headhunters, undertook a few military operations into the hills, but these tactics often failed. After that, the British began to restrict entry to the Naga Hills.

They also refused to allow the tribal people to come down from the mountains to the plains to barter for salt, kerosene and occasionally steel for spears. Some even say that the British secretly hoped the mountain tribes would kill each other off.

Certainly, the British neither understood nor accepted the Naga belief that by killing a man and taking his head, one gained the dead man’s power.

An Ao Naga chief wearing an elephant tusk armband, a cowrie shell wristband and a wild gardenia in his ear.

Human skulls adorning a chief’s house

Human and methan [wild buffalo] skulls on a morung post

Inaho, a Sema with an Angami teacher

Under the Red Blanket - my father with a delegation of chiefs

Eventually, as the British realised the value of negotiating only with the headman in each village, they took to giving each chief a red wool blanket to wear, making him easy to identify. These blankets became a symbol of authority and pride to the Naga people. Thus, when my family arrived in India, we first came to know the people living under the red blanket.

Headhunting was still practiced by several Naga tribes at least until 1958 and has occurred in many cultures. The Nagas regarded the man who took the most heads as their greatest warrior. When one considers that by taking a head, one captures the other man’s strength, the custom seems, if not more palatable, at least more understandable. Sometimes the Nagas also enslaved or sacrificed their prisoners. All these practices earned them both curiosity and reprobation from the world beyond the hills. Less well-known was the fact that these people have a deep faith that the soul transmigrates after the death of each person and the head is the receptacle of the soul. The Nagas honour the head as an object of immense vitality and a source of creative energy. When the Nagas brought the heads of their slain enemies home, they poked a hole in each skull to release evil spirits. The cleaned skulls were then mounted on the front of each warrior’s house as a symbol of his courage and strength. In the villages near our bungalow, some warriors had as many as forty heads mounted on the front of their thatched houses. Terrifying as these grisly ornaments were, we soon learned it was necessary to understand the people’s customs so we could relate to them and they to us. Several of the best and most faithful warriors on our hill station and in the surrounding villages were reformed headhunters.

Among these was Inaho, a famous Sema chief. I remember being entertained by him during a Mungdong, or tribal convention. This was when the Nagas gathered en masse in a basha, or temporary shelter, which was open on all sides, constructed of bamboo and thatched over with palm fronds. Sometimes as many as 1,500 Nagas from many tribes would gather under a basha to discuss joint issues and mission concerns. My father used these gatherings as an opportunity to preach. Sometimes this required as many as four interpreters, simultaneously translating for the several tribes. All this seemed extremely boring to me as a child. Inaho, seeing that I was restless, would take palm fronds left over from the construction of the basha and whittle small animals for me to play with in the dust. However fierce he may have been as a headhunter, Inaho was attentive and generous to the tiny blonde daughter of the people who had converted him, or nearly so. Later, my parents were both understandably upset when Inaho, one of their most dedicated disciples, took a second wife - a practice not uncommon among the Semas.

Since the British did not spend as much time among the Nagas and with bigamy common and headhunting rampant, the colonial authorities were not always willing or able to patrol the Naga Hills. However, when tea plantations encroached on the hills, the British government once again was forced to connect with the Naga natives. A border was maintained beyond which the Nagas were allowed to headhunt without retaliation, but our safety could not be guaranteed should we go beyond these borders. In any case, travel through the dense jungles was always difficult, so little was known beyond the hills of these primitive tribes. But with the outbreak of World War II, the American military established an air base in Jorhat, three days’ journey from our village by horseback and the Nagas became valuable as guides for military operations and, eventually, air rescue. Many a downed flyer owed his life to the skill of these tribesmen, as journalist Eric Sevareid reported in ‘Not