In the Shadows of Naga Insurgency -

Tribes, State, and Violence in Northeast

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In the Shadows of Naga Insurgency
 CHINA
PRADESH
HAL
NAC
TIBET U
AR
SIKKIM
Itanagar
Gangtok BHUTAN

NEPAL ASSAM
Dispur NAGALAND
Kohima
BIHAR MEGHALAYA
Shillong Imphal

ND
KHA
BANGLADESH

AR
MANIPUR

JH
Agartala

TRIPURA Aizawl
MIZORAM MYANMAR
WEST BENGAL
Bay
of
Bengal

Political map of Nagaland and Northeast India

Source: Adapted from http://www.emapsworld.com/north-east-india-map.html.
Note: This map does not claim to represent authentic international boundaries. This map is not to scale and is provided for illustrative purposes only.
 In the Shadows of
Naga Insurgency
Tribes, State, and Violence in Northeast India

Jelle J.P. Wouters

1
 1
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 CHINA
PRADESH
HAL
NAC
TIBET U
AR
SIKKIM
Itanagar
Gangtok BHUTAN

NEPAL ASSAM
Dispur NAGALAND
Kohima
BIHAR MEGHALAYA
Shillong Imphal

ND
KHA
BANGLADESH

AR
MANIPUR

JH
Agartala

TRIPURA Aizawl
MIZORAM MYANMAR
WEST BENGAL
Bay
of
Bengal

Political map of Nagaland and Northeast India

Source: Adapted from http://www.emapsworld.com/north-east-india-map.html.
Note: This map does not claim to represent authentic international boundaries. This map is not to scale and is provided for illustrative purposes only.
 To Beduhü Tunyi
who adopted me as his son
Figures

1.1 View of Phugwumi village 24

1.2 View of Noksen village 25

2.1 Tunyi clan meeting in Phugwumi 49

2.2 Modern village gate in Noksen 52
2.3 Old village gate in Phugwumi 53

4.1 Megaliths erected in honour of a feast-giver in Phugwumi 157

6.1 Frontier Nagaland banner hung on the facade of a shop

in Noksen Town 206

7.1 Polling day in Phugwumi 239

Preface and Acknowledgements

T
his book invites its readers to the upland tribal state of
Nagaland in India’s Northeast to reflect upon what hap-
pens to a society long saturated in violent political conflict.
It points to the ways in which Naga insurgency and the Indian state’s
response to it aggravated the imbrications of violence and disorder,
tribalism, failing development, volatile politics, and corruption into
the socio-political fabric of post-statehood Nagaland. However, for all
the precarity and strain that political conflict produces, Naga society is
not incarcerated in a terrifying epic of violence and political disorder
in any simple sense. Theorizing from the vantage of rural Nagaland,
I shall show ethnographically how the acts, articulations, and aspira-
tions of Naga villagers are infused with an agency and imagination
of their own making, albeit often in ways that complicate, if not con-
tradict, normative practices and principles of state, development, and
democracy. Their everyday enactments are undoubtedly a product of
the condition of protracted political conflict but not necessarily wholly
xii preface and acknowledgements

eclipsed by it, often revealing themselves, indeed, in the shadows of

Naga insurgency.
First things first, however. For over six decades, the Naga Movement—
in its now different forms, factions, and, dare I say, facades—rejects and
rebels their enclosure into postcolonial India, aspires to realize Naga
independence through the barrel of the gun, and in doing so presents
itself as a people’s movement. A ceasefire is in place since 1997. However,
this manifests itself on the ground not foremost as a period of relative
political stasis but as a complex social reality that witnesses the con-
tinuation of conflict by other forms and means. These can be seen in a
rampage of factional faultlines and an ever more complicated relationship
between the offices and officers of state and Naga ‘underground’ actors.
While the antecedents of the Naga uprising trace back to the era of late
colonialism, in more concrete form the Naga nationalist project took off
in the 1950s. ‘Simply because a strong people got the control of political
administration of a country over a weaker people it does not mean the
end of history’, A.Z. Phizo (1951), the erstwhile president of the Naga
National Council (NNC) and the prophet of Naga nationalism, pro-
nounced, as he orchestrated a near millennial movement galvanized by
a messianic, salvific promise of Naga political and spiritual redemption.
‘I always have a feeling that God, our Heavenly Father—our Creator—
is with us and guiding us. What is there for us to fear?’, Phizo added.
The Naga armed resistance that emerged provoked a massive escala-
tion of violence from the Indian state, the dense militarization of the
Naga highlands, and the enactment of draconian laws that turned the
Naga highlands into a ‘state of exception’ (Agamben 2005). This was
soon followed by stories and reports of wanton killings, unprecedented
levels of violence, torture, abductions, village regrouping, ambushes, and
burning villages and granaries of what seemed to be a murky geography
of misery. It did not cause the NNC’s Naga Army to give up its fight.
‘For every Naga life that was taken, ten others joined the Naga Army’, an
NNC veteran once told me with lingering patriotic fervour. As with most
people’s movements, however, the spread of the Naga Movement and
the ways in which the Indo-Naga conflict evolved, are not reducible to a
simple singular narrative of Nagas mobilizing as one homogenous and
uniform group against the domination and overrule they experienced
at the hands of the Indian state. Among other things, such a narrative
 preface and acknowledgements xiii

glosses over the diversities and politics internal to the Naga struggle,
in particular the generational, tribal, and factional conflicts that came
to divide and drain the Naga Movement and the very diverse attitudes
and aspirations taken on by different Naga communities and individu-
als. Today, listed amongst the most protracted postcolonial struggles
anywhere, the impact of the conflict on Naga society is complicated,
dispersed, and polyphonous and felt in the everyday contexts of social
relations and moral judgments, governance and politics, societal tensions
and violent memories, imagination, affect, and affliction.
For these reasons, I wish to see Naga insurgency not as a historical and
straightforward narrative of resistance nor yet as extracted from wider
social processes, or, for that matter, in terms of clear victims and victors.
Instead, this book explores how protracted political conflict affects
and afflicts ‘the everyday’. I, therefore, approach Naga insurgency—and
herein lies this book’s main contention—as a complex, an ‘insurgency
complex’, and explore the consequences of and corollaries to protracted
conflict, illustrating and arguing how Naga insurgency and the state’s
reaction to it has long flooded the banks of political conflict and surges
through all areas of social life.
Amidst the Indo-Naga conflict, which, at the time of my research and
writing remains unresolved in spite of two decades of political dialogue,
it is impossible to write anything about Nagas without it being some
kind of politics and protest. In a way, participant observation and eth-
nography, on which this book heavily relies, is, writes Shah (2017: 56),
always a ‘political act’, even a ‘potentially revolutionary praxis’ because
it ‘enables us to challenge received wisdom and produce knowledge that
previously had no space in the world, was confined to its margins, was
silenced’. Projecting ethnography as politics connotes not just the search
for new ontologies and cosmologies, or the genuine appreciation of fun-
damental moral differences between societies, but also to foreground
and privilege in the art of theorizing, the views, experiences, and con-
cerns of ‘ordinary’ men and women as they go about their lives and make
sense of the world around them.
Every ethnographer, I would like to think, has an academic (and
moral) obligation to not be allied with power—whatever form that
power might take—but to breathe ethnographic life into the everyday
acts and articulations of the people he or she resides and works with, in
xiv preface and acknowledgements

our case Naga villagers whose selves, individual biographies, and social
lifeworlds have long been wrought by political violence and volatility. If
doing so, in the Naga context, amounts to a ‘potentially revolutionary
praxis’ it is because the competing analyses and discourses that emerged
from the Indo-Naga conflict belong either to the Indian state or to Naga
militant leaders, in the process often glossing over the experiences and
views of Naga men and women living in villages (and towns).
Besides being scant on people’s experiences, the now considerable
literature on the Indo-Naga conflict, both contemporary and historic,
remains, with few exceptions, also largely derivative of formal declara-
tions and manifestos, colonial documents, and other secondary sources.
Starting with depictions of who the Nagas are, most such accounts
narrate the history of Nagas’ resistance to British colonization, the arrival
of missionaries and the spread of evangelical Christianity, the creation of
the Naga Club and the memorandum its members sent to the Simon
Commission in 1929 (which goes as the first official record of Nagas’
desire for Independence), the advent of the Naga National Council
(NNC), and the role of A.Z. Phizo in conducting the 1951 plebiscite
and in organizing the Naga rebellion. They then discuss the state vio-
lence and repression, the enactment of the state of Nagaland in 1963 as
an envisaged (but failed) political compromise, the abortive treaties and
peace processes of the 1960s and 70s, the demise of the NNC, the rise of
the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (NSCN) and its subsequent
splits into rivalling factions, and finally the 1997 ceasefire and the elusive
status of the peace talks. This literature, while certainly valuable, pays
virtually no attention to the dialectical interactions between the Naga
Movement and Naga society, to the particularistic state-society rela-
tions that protracted conflict and capricious violence produces, and to
the wider consequences and carryovers of conflict on the fabric of Naga
social and political life.
This lack is understandable as all these years of insurgency and
counter-insurgency was hardly conducive to the practice of ethnography
in the area. Moreover, a stringent Inner-Line regime and the additional
requirement for foreign nationals to obtain a (sparingly granted)
Protected Area Permit long restricted access to the Naga highlands.
This long-lasted impossibility of doing fieldwork in the Naga highlands
feeds into a larger absence, as Shah and Pettigrew (2009: 230) note, of
 preface and acknowledgements xv

ethnography and analysis of insurgency and revolutionary movements

as they unfold because ‘most anthropological work is done post-conflict,
when the guns are silent’. The relaxation of restrictions on foreigners to
enter Nagaland from 2011 onwards was the awaited policy change that
enabled my fieldwork and which subsequently took place in the liminal-
ity between conflict and post-conflict with ‘guns’ less ubiquitous but far
from locked away. This account, based on extensive fieldwork, now hopes
to add ethnographic flesh to the theoretical bones of the Naga Movement
and the Indo-Naga conflict through a discussion of the implications of
long years of insurgency and counter-insurgency on Naga society and
polity. The story of this book is told through many Naga voices, weaving
a texture that pays attention to both individual biographies and senti-
ments widely shared, to commonalities and disagreements and debates,
to generality and specific struggles, aspirations, and concerns.
My arguments, I hope, will have some resonance beyond Naga society
with which they are immediately concerned. Particularly so in the con-
text of Northeast India, a region long home to animated political conflicts
over identity and belonging, territory, and ethnic self-determination.
A region located on the margins, but whose historical specificities and
social and political processes offer a crucial site for reflection on the theo-
ries and concepts central to the production of knowledge in South Asia
(and not just there). Within the Indian polity, the label ‘Northeast’ clubs
together eight states, most of which contain hilly expanses that fold and
unfold in neighbouring China, Burma/Myanmar, Bangladesh, Bhutan,
and Nepal and connect to India’s ‘Mainland’ only through a narrow
swathe of land couched between Nepal and Bangladesh. On a political
map, consequently, Northeast India assumes a peculiar shape, jutting
out of India as though it is ‘an inconvenient outlier that is regulated to
an inset’ (Van Schendel 2002: 652). Its appearance on India’s map—as
simultaneously part of it and beyond its pale—has contributed, cer-
tainly in parts, to a popular ignorance of the region and its ethnicities,
languages, and historical narratives in national discourses, prompting a
leading magazine to paint India’s Northeast as On the map but off the
mind (Tehelka 2006).
While studies on Northeast India witnessed a surge of promising
scholarship in recent years, at the national and popular levels the region
remains subject to social processes of ‘othering’ and marginalization.
xvi preface and acknowledgements

The nomenclature ‘Northeast’ itself contributes to this marginaliza-

tion as this is the only region in the country named after a cardinal
direction. The name is further ambiguous because as a region with a
reasonable level of internal coherence and commonalities, the location
and identity of the ‘Northeast’ or ‘Northeasterner’ does not exist (Subba
1998), at least not within the region itself. Per contra, its communities
have been likened to an ‘ethnic explosion’ (Nibedon 1978), an ‘ethnic
mosaic’ (Bhaumik 2009), a ‘rainbow of people’ (Rajkumar 2010), and
because of such ethnic and cultural diversities (and because of the
stereotypical conviction that this is what anthropologists necessar-
ily crave for) an ‘anthropologist’s dream’ (Narahari 2002: 4). To the
extent, then, that the ‘Northeast’ or ‘Northeasterners’ exist as a unitary
region or identity, it does so as a social category produced in relation
to India’s mainstream. The Northeast has become a coherent and
meaningful unit, as Tanka Subba and I argued elsewhere, only through
colonial and postcolonial administrative and political conceptions of
order and institutionalized discursive spaces, including the enactment
of special government institutions and ministries such as the Ministry
of Development of the North-Eastern Region (MDoNER) and the
North-Eastern Council (NEC) (Wouters and Subba 2013: 131).
In academic parlance, Northeast India is also part of a region recently
inaugurated as Zomia—that vast upland tract that transcends political
and academic boundaries (Van Schendel 2002) and whose historical
peopling, according to James Scott (2009), was the result of communities
consciously ‘opting out’ or ‘evading’ the oppressive tax, conscription, and
corvée obligations of states that flourished in adjacent valleys (for more
and less constructive critiques of Scott’s thesis see, among many others,
Lieberman (2010), Jonsson (2010), Brass (2012), and for Northeast
India specifically Wouters 2011 and Karlsson 2013). Despite vast varia-
tions between people of Zomia, or highland Asia, what they seemingly
share is, first, their peripheral inclusion in different nation-states (in the
case of Nagas their enclosure into two distinct nation-states: India and
Myanmar), and secondly, that from ‘Mainland’ points of view, they—be
they ‘Jummas’ in southern Bangladesh (Van Schendel 1992), highland
communities in Myanmar (Gravers 2007), the Miao minority in upland
China (Schein 2000), or ‘Northeasterners’ in India—are imagined as
collectively different (in terms of history, language, religion, social mores,
 preface and acknowledgements xvii

cultural expressions, and phenotypes) from national mainstreams

(Wouters and Subba 2013).
Such differences, both real and imagined, have led, in whole or in
parts, to Zomia communities’ uneven, hesitant, or haphazard accommo-
dation in different nation-states. While I have some reservations about
the contemporary exultation of Zomia, in the sense theorized (or politi-
cized?) by James Scott (2009) (What, in the end, is the point of talking
about a region that exists only in scholarly imagination?), the more mod-
est trend of taking highland Asia as a field of comparative ethnography
and study, the way originally intended by Willem van Schendel (2002),
offers a fertile counterpoint to the ‘methodological nationalism’ (Gellner
2012) that long impeded scholarly imagination. Naga resistance against
the Indian state, for one thing, is part of a wider pattern in highland
Asia, spawning precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial epochs that saw
fractured, often hostile, relationships between highland communities
and kingdoms, dynasties, and modern states with their powers centred
in the plains.
I first arrived in India’s Northeast in 2007 when I, rather inno-
cently, took admission as an exchange student in the Department of
Anthropology at North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU) in Shillong,
situated on a pine-clad plateau and the capital of Meghalaya. To not
appear altogether ignorant of my new surroundings, I recall trying
to memorize the names of the eight states and their major cities the
night before the start of classes, as I was told that NEHU attracted
students from across the region. One of the names I learned that night
was ‘Nagaland.’ I also learned that its capital was Kohima and that its
inhabitants, called Nagas, lived not only in Nagaland, but also in the
neighbouring states of Manipur, Assam, and Arunachal Pradesh, as
well as across the border with Myanmar. As is regularly the case with
ethnographers, my eventual interest in the study of Naga society grew
out of a host of personal encounters and friendships. Not only were
many of my classmates Nagas but so was my roommate. Unable to get
a hostel-seat inside the University campus (the University was adamant
in their conviction that it would be impossible for me to adjust in one of
the student halls, a stance they finally changed in 2011, when I enrolled
in a PhD programme, although not without my supervisor having to
exert considerable pressure on my behalf ), I began searching for a place
xviii preface and acknowledgements

to live inside the main city of Shillong. In this search, I was joined by
Wungreithing Sali, a Naga classmate whose application for a hostel
seat had been similarly unsuccessful, although for different reasons. We
decided to rent a room together. For the next year we shared the same
living-space, during which Mark (the Catholic name by which he was
better known) often spoke about life ‘back home’, the Naga struggle, and
the many conundrums Naga society was facing. While Mark and I were
formally the only tenants of the room, there was a continuous arrival of
his relatives and fellow-villagers, who came to Shillong for admissions in
schools and colleges, medical treatment, or in search of employment, and
who rolled out blankets on the floor and often stayed for weeks. Besides
the pleasure of making new friends (and the taste of the dried meat they
invariably brought with them), the many stories and personal experi-
ences they shared as we sat together during evenings gradually convinced
me that I wanted to pursue ethnographic research among the Nagas.
Of course, back then, I was formally still an undergraduate student and
lacked the training required to conduct fieldwork. In any case, Nagaland
was then still near hermetically sealed for foreign nationals.
In more concrete terms, this book has its origins in a PhD programme
at NEHU, which culminated into a thesis unimaginatively titled: State,
Development, and Democracy in Nagaland. Initially, my research project
was registered as ‘Land relations and development in Nagaland: A case
of the jhum and terrace villages’, but even as I collected a good amount
of ethnographic data on this while in the field, I soon discovered that my
informants were greatly interested in talking about the Naga struggle,
governance, development, and, most of all, politics. This eventually led
me to request the University to allow me to change the topic of my
research. My request was granted, although I was advised to leave out
the politics of Naga insurgency, at least so from my thesis title.
From Shillong, the town of Dimapur, the main gateway into
Nagaland, was just an overnight bus journey away, making ‘my field’
readily accessible (at least so in theory as military checkpoints, Assam
floods, and abruptly announced bandhs now and then blocked the
highway and prolonged journeys). Being a doctoral student at a uni-
versity inside the region, moreover, helped me navigate the exhaustive
paperwork and permits needed to carry out prolonged fieldwork in
Nagaland (again, in theory, as despite possessing the necessary permits,
intelligence agencies continually doubted my presence and intentions
 preface and acknowledgements xix

in Nagaland. I hope this book, at last, proves that my intentions were

what I insisted they were; carrying out ethnographic research).
Few worlds are perhaps as cosmopolitan as the world of anthropology.
However, it does not (as yet) seem common practice for an anthropologist
first trained in the so-called ‘West’, as I was in Amsterdam and Oxford,
to pursue a doctorate from a university within the broader region of
ethnographic study. This is understandable for a variety of reasons.
I, however, found residing and writing in a university campus close to my
fieldwork area extremely rewarding on a number of counts. First, most
of my teachers hailed from the Northeast, including from Nagaland, and
their teachings and insights, often based on first-hand experiences, have
been formative of my understanding of the region. To all of them, and in
particular to T.B. Subba, B.T. Langstieh, L. Zehol, H. Lamin, Q. Marak,
R. Khongsdier, and V. Pakyntein, I remain heavily indebted.
Second, my fellow PhD scholars, hostel-mates, and friends in
NEHU were all researching the region in a wide variety of disciplines.
A good number of them hailed from Nagaland, or from Naga inhabited
areas in surrounding states, and over the years our countless conver-
sations greatly helped me to work towards a better understanding
of my fieldnotes and of the issues troubling Naga society. Sincere thanks
to the following: Zhoto, Neibu, Asiele, Chan, Chiete, Mhonthung,
Asakuo, Sezolu, Chumchano, Temsu Among, Robert, Gideon, Sunep,
Aaron, Kensibo, and Nsungbemo—your friendship is what made
Shillong such a happy place. Third, while the NEHU library cannot,
as it stands, compete with the library resources available in major
research universities elsewhere, it houses a precious collection of mate-
rial published by local scholars and intellectuals. They significantly
shaped my own thinking and ‘seeing’ of the Northeast, but which, often
poorly printed and distributed, are hardly available outside the region.
Lastly, but most importantly, pursuing my doctorate at NEHU
allowed me to work under the supervision of Tanka B. Subba, who
supported me far beyond the call of duty, shipped my thesis through
some very murky waters, and through it all was a never-ending source of
inspiration. I owe him not just much of my anthropological thinking but
also important lessons that he taught me about life in general.
Over the years of researching and writing this book I have incurred
many other debts in many different places, too many, I fear, to do com-
plete justice here.
xx preface and acknowledgements

To start with, I must thank Ellen Bal, who, about a decade ago,
when I was an undergraduate student in Amsterdam, dissuaded me
from taking up admission as an exchange student at Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi, which I had applied for and been granted.
Instead, she suggested that I must take admission at North-Eastern
Hill University in Shillong, some of whose faculty she knew person-
ally. Everything else followed from this early intervention. When, as an
MPhil student at Oxford University, I first started thinking and writing
seriously about Naga society and political conflict, David N. Gellner
generously commented on my ideas and drafts and was an incredible
source of intellectual inspiration. I also thank Willem van Schendel,
whose student I was, much to my regret, only briefly, but whose insights
on the region, encouragement of my research, and in his role as an
external examiner of my PhD thesis was a beacon of light. I received
similar encouragement from Philippe Ramirez, whose deconstruction
of ethnicity and kinship in the Assam-Meghalaya borderland influenced
my own understanding of social bonds among Nagas.
I carried out fieldwork in Nagaland for roughly two years between
2011 and 2014. I am grateful to Lucy Zehol, Besasayo Kezo, and
Kühüpoyo Puro for guiding me to the Chakhesang Naga village, which
I shall call Phugwumi, and for facilitating my fieldwork there. Kühüpoyo
Puro especially was a constant source of support and his house in
Kohima a place of intellectual and bodily nourishment. My second
fieldwork took place in the Chang Naga village of Noksen, for whose
arrangements I thank Achu Chang in Pune and his extended family in
Noksen. My fieldwork in Nagaland was funded by the Wenner-Gren
Foundation, for whose generosity I remain deeply grateful (the disser-
tation fieldwork grant that they awarded enabled me to release myself
from a very edifying but marginally paid position at the Don Bosco
Museum for Indigenous Cultures in Shillong and to fully concentrate
on my PhD research).
My greatest debt, as ever, is to the Phugwumi and Noksen villagers
who warmly welcomed me into their lives and whose never faltering
cooperation, hospitality, and kindness I am at loss to ever be able to
reciprocate. For reasons of confidentiality, and in view of the sensibilities
that run through this book, I have to restrain myself from mention-
ing those who helped me so immensely, but they certainly include my
hosts, interlocutors, and friends in both villages. While I have used
 preface and acknowledgements xxi

pseudonyms throughout, I am sure some of you will recognize yourself

in the pages that follow. I am less sure that all of you will be equally
pleased with what this book has turned into but I nevertheless hope that
my arguments will contribute, even through their criticisms, to debates
on the past, present, and future of Naga society.
Elsewhere in Nagaland I thank Toshinaro Longchar, Aziebu Shaiza,
Panger, Aküm Longchari, Takatemjen Ao, Thungti Chang, Ejan Ngullie,
Dzuleno Zhimomi, I.L. Chingmak, Wondangbeni Shitiri, C.M. Chang
and his family, Dozhuhy Tunyi, Zubenthung Ngullie, Shiroi Shaiza,
and Muzito Tunyi. In Kohima, I specifically thank Neichute Doulo, a
trusted friend and sparring partner for many of the arguments I advance
in this book, as well as Michael Heneise for his friendship and many
fruitful conversations.
This book was written, in bits and pieces, while teaching at three
different academic institutions. When my supervisor, Tanka B. Subba,
was bequeathed the position of Vice-Chancellor of Sikkim Central
University in Gangtok he took me along to assist him in establishing
a department of anthropology. While I hardly got any writing done
during the first couple of semesters in Sikkim, starting a department
from scratch (with Samson Singh, who took care of physical anthro-
pology) was a privilege and opportunity I would not have wanted to
miss. I started writing my ethnography in the Department of Social
and Cultural Anthropology at Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen,
where I was invited on a ‘Teaching for Excellence Award’ granted by
the German Research Foundation. In Tübingen, I thank Gabriele Alex,
Roland Hardenberg, Baktygul Tulebaeva, and particularly Vibha Joshi
Parkin and David Parkin for their support and insightful discussions.
The bulk of this book was written at Royal Thimphu College, my pres-
ent institutional home-ground, during the early hours before and after
dawn when most students are still asleep and our hilltop campus is
an abode of silence and serenity. At Royal Thimphu College, I thank
Tenzing Yonten, T.S. Powdyel, Shivaraj Bhattarai, and Samir Patel for
creating such a conducive environment. I also express my gratitude to
Leishipem Khamrang, colleague and neighbour, for reading through
multiple drafts and for many stimulating discussions.
Several other colleagues and friends generously read portions of
this book, offered useful comments and prevented me from fossilizing
to paper some embarrassing mistakes (for those that still remain the
xxii preface and acknowledgements

responsibility is solely mine). I thank, in no particular order, Zhoto

Tunyi, Michael Heneise, Iris Odyuo, Shrochis Karki, Riku Khutso,
Meenaxi Barkataki-Ruscheweyh, Arkotong Longkumer, Jasmine
Yimchunger, and Asojiini Rachel Kashena as well as two anonymous
reviewers at Oxford University Press, India. I also thank my student
Karma Yangden for helping me sort out the references.
Certain sections of this book are based on earlier versions of my
research published in various journals and permissions to reproduce
them are gratefully acknowledged.
Parts of the following article have been used in Chapters 2 and 5 in
this book: ‘Who is a Naga Village? The Naga “Village Republic” through
the Ages’, The South Asianist: Journal of South Asian Studies 5(1): 99–120
(2017), (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
2.5 UK: Scotland License).
Parts in this book, especially in Chapter 7, have been reproduced or
expanded upon from: ‘Polythetic Democracy: Tribal Elections, Bogus
votes, and Political Imagination in the Naga Uplands of Northeast India’,
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(2): 121–51 (2015), (Creative
Commons-Jelle J.P. Wouters- Attribution 4.0 International).
The following article has been used in parts at various places in this
book especially in Chapter 2: ‘Sovereignty, Integration or Bifurcation?
Troubled Histories, Contentious Territories and the Political Horizons
of the Long Lingering Naga Movement’, pp. 97–116, originally pub-
lished in Studies in History, Vol. 32 No. 1, copyright © 2016 Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the
permission of the copyright holders and the publishers, Sage Publications
India Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi.
I thank the team at Oxford University Press, India for their constant
support and inputs in the journey of this book.
I end by thanking my family; my parents for never doubting my life-
decisions, no matter where and how far they took me, and my siblings,
Elke and Remy, for their support, even as the friction of distance often
prevents us from meeting for long stretches of time.
Finally, I thank Kikee. Without her, nothing.

Jelle J.P. Wouters

Thimphu, September 2017
Abbreviations

ACAUT Action Committee Against Unabated Taxation

AFSPA Armed Forces Special Powers Act
APBF Asian Pacific Baptist Federation
BDO Block Development Office
CPO Chakhesang Public Organisation
CTC Chang Tribal Committee (Council)
DUDA Department of Underdeveloped Areas
ENPO Eastern Naga Peoples’ Organisation
ENSF Eastern Naga Students’ Federation
FGN Federal Government of Nagaland
FGN- N/A Federal Government of Nagaland (Non-Accordist)
FGN-A Federal Government of Nagaland (Accordist)
FNR Forum for Naga Reconciliation
GOI Government of India
GPRN Government of the People’s Republic of Nagalim
MDoNER Ministry of Development of the North-Eastern
Region
xxiv abbreviations

MGNREGA Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment

Guarantee Act
MLA Member of the Legislative Assembly
MP Member of Parliament
NBCC Nagaland Baptist Church Council
NEC North-Eastern Council
NEFA North-Eastern Frontier Agency
NHDTC Naga Hills District Tribal Council
NHTA Naga Hills Tuensang Area
NNC Naga National Council
NNC-A A Naga National Council (Accordist)
NNC-N/A Naga National Council (Non-Accordist)
NNO Nagaland Nationalist Organisation
NPC Naga People’s Convention
NPF Naga People’s Front
NPMHR Naga People’s Movement for Human Rights
NPSC Nagaland Public Service Committee
NSCN-IM National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak/Muivah)
NSCN-K National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Khaplang)
NSCN-KK National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Khole-Kitovi)
NSCN-R National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Reformation)
NSCN-U National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Unification)
PWD Public Works Department
RGN Revolutionary Government of Nagaland
UDF United Democratic Front
UNPO Unrepresented Nations and Peoples’ Organisation
VC Village Council
VDB Village Development Board
WGIP UN Working Group for Indigenous Peoples
1 Introduction
The Shadows of Naga Insurgency

I
t is autumn 2013 and a mass protest is scheduled in Dimapur.
Schools and educational institutes are closed, and shops and busi-
ness establishments have rolled down their shutters. Only a few
minutes have passed and already thousands of Nagas are spilling onto
the streets to air their anguish against the internal divisions and per-
ceived degeneration of the Naga National Movement. The number of
protestors first swells below the clock-tower, a landmark in the heart of
Dimapur, from where they fan out across the town’s lanes and streets,
shouting, sloganeering, and flaunting banners as they march.
For over 60 years, since the mid-1950s, the Naga Movement—
in its various forms, factions, and guises—has fought for Naga
Independence, and in doing so presents itself as a people’s movement
supported by tribal and Christian uplanders.1 The Naga armed struggle
provoked a massive escalation of violence from the Indian state, a dense

In the Shadows of Naga Insurgency: Tribes, State, and Violence in Northeast India.
Jelle J.P. Wouters, Oxford University Press (2018). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199485703.003.0001
2 in the shadows of naga insurgency

militarization of the Naga highlands, and countless tragedies. The Naga

Movement persevered across decades, and in 1997 a ceasefire was struck
between India’s Central Government and the National Socialist Council
of Nagalim–Isak/Muivah (NSCN-IM), arguably the dominant force in
an increasingly divided and disjointed Naga Movement. It was from the
moment of ceasefire, my Naga friends and interlocutors explain, that the
perceived downfall of the Naga Movement began. Post ceasefire, they
narrate, the earlier mostly noble and selfless motivations of ‘national
workers’, as cadres of Naga underground groups are called locally, quickly
degenerated into greediness, intimidation, and internal bickering, lead-
ing to a general air of unpleasantness between rivalling Naga factions and
the wider Naga populace.2 Of course, in a region long poised between
the violence of insurgency and counterinsurgency, terrible things keep
on happening, but it is nevertheless widely held that the ceasefire has
not made things better for ordinary Naga men and women. Frustrations
long cropped up, or expressed only in hushed conversations, finally
turned to shouts on a hot and humid Dimapur afternoon.
In most visual representations, the Naga highlands make for idyllic
sceneries of forest-clad, rolling hills veiled by low-hanging fog, and
dotted with picturesque hilltop villages. Oftentimes the Naga uplands
are painted as a landscape filled with age-old traditions, year-round
festivals and merrymaking, and colourful culture and customs; the
perfect stuff for ‘ethnic’ and ‘exotic’ photography and glossy coffee-table
books (for example, Kunz and Joshi 2008; Stirn and Van Ham 2003;
Welman and Jagoi 2013).3 Not here in Dimapur (neither in Naga
villages, as this book will variously show), which is a town of business
and bustle built on flatland alongside, and across, the Nagaland–Assam
border.4 Rows of buildings sit in a monotonous urban landscape
of concrete, while new shopping complexes and apartment clusters
sprout fast to cater and accommodate Dimapur’s rapidly expanding
population. Because of its commerce and trade, Dimapur is also the
territorial locus of Naga underground groups, which collect the bulk of
their finances from taxing all peoples, goods, and services in the area;
rebellion and resistance, including the maintenance of a ceasefire, after
all, requires resources and thence ‘rebels must raise capital’ (Weinstein
2007: 7). Camp Hebron, as the designated post-ceasefire headquarters
of the NSCN-IM was christened, is just a few miles away, and so are
 Introduction 3

the camps and hideouts of several other underground groups such as

the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Khaplang) (NSCN-K),
National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Unification) (NSCN-U),
Naga National Council (Non-Accordist) (NNC-N/A), and National
Socialist Council of Nagalim (Khole-Kitovi) (NSCN-KK).5 Many of
its leaders and cadres have built houses in the town, sometimes neigh-
bouring those of Naga bureaucrats and politicians with whom, formally,
they are at loggerheads.
What is protested in Dimapur, more specifically, are the endless
and excessive taxes and collections Naga underground groups, and
their respective parallel governments (even as Naga factions resist the
Indian state, each faction simultaneously mimics structures and func-
tions of the Indian government to themselves look like a state) levy from
government offices and ordinary Nagas, and which have long curbed
household budgets, business profits, and public monies. Protested, too,
is the prevailing factionalism that spreads violence and death, and which
results from an enormous struggle that is fought out between seven or
eight Naga underground groups over historical legitimacy, ideological
differences, leadership, and territorial and tribal domination within
the broader Indo-Naga conflict. While the plot of Naga resistance was
never simple, the post-ceasefire era witnessed further seizures and splits
within the Naga Movement. Some of the banners protestors carry now
read: ‘One [underground] government, one tax’,6 ‘We don’t work to feed
you guys’, ‘Stop factionalism!’, ‘If a man will not work, he shall not eat’,
and ‘Who lives, if Nagaland dies?’
The public rally was organized by a newly floated civil society orga-
nization that called itself the Action Committee Against Unabated
Taxation (ACAUT), and took place in spite of dictums served against it
by Naga underground leaders, who insisted the rally went against Naga
nationalism. The National Socialist Council of Nagalim–Isak/Muivah,
for one, declared the ACAUT as ‘anti-national’, condemned the rally as
maligning the Naga cause, and as undermining the peace talks it had
held with the Centre since 1997, and which, they insisted, was mak-
ing good progress. The Action Committee Against Unabated Taxation
spokespersons reasoned differently. The protest march, they explained,
was not against but in support of Nagas’ historical and political rights
for sovereignty and self-determination. What they, and the protestors,
4 in the shadows of naga insurgency

rejected and resented, however, was the current form and factions of the
Naga Movement, and which to their eyes had reduced Naga nationalism
to a pretext for national workers to accrue purely private material gains
and to fight over interpersonal and intertribal differences.
I was not in Dimapur at the time of the rally, but seven hours
of winding roads away in a Chakhesang Naga hilltop village I shall
call Phugwumi, and where I learned about the protest march, as did
the villagers, through the radio, newspapers, and phone calls.7 Most
villagers talked about the protest as ‘bold’ and ‘daring’. One villager,
whom I grew to know well, told me: ‘There is a problem with our
national movement. Before we used to respect national workers,
almost worshipped them as supra-humans, but now they fight amongst
themselves and things are topsy-turvy’. Another commented: ‘Earlier
national workers served the Naga cause, but today it seems we are serv-
ing them’. Some in the village, however, expressed apprehension about
the possible consequences of the rally: ‘Could the Central Government
use the protest march to weaken the NSCN-IM’s negotiation posi-
tion and so impede an honourable political solution?’,8 ‘Would Naga
underground groups react and retaliate by going after the organizers
of the protest?’, ‘Might this lead to a new wave of violence?’ These were
genuine worries villagers expressed.
Dimapur’s public rally drew widespread attention, both within and
outside Naga society. Never before, in long decades of political conflict,
had ordinary Nagas come out in large numbers against the form and
functioning of the Naga Movement. But even as multiple analysts,
commentators, and media channels interpreted the protest march
as foreboding the implosion of the Naga Movement, this was not the
message either the ACAUT or the protestors, several of whom I spoke
with later, wanted to express. For instance, while they rejected the exces-
sive and multiple taxes levied by national workers, they did not object
to contributing financially to the Naga Movement per se. A Dimapur
resident (and a former classmate) working in a government office told
me: ‘I am ready to contribute part of my salary to the Naga cause.
Almost all Nagas remain willing to do so. But we cannot be expected to
finance the existence of rivalling underground groups and governments
whose existence serves no purpose except causing hardship, violence,
and tribalism’. In fact, by rejecting the disintegration and degeneration
 Introduction 5

of the Naga Movement, most protestors, if anything, saw themselves as

protectors, not dissenters, of the Naga cause.
In Phugwumi, too, villagers usually separated their frustrations and
disillusionment with the present-day Naga Movement from the deeper
rationalities and doctrines of Naga sovereignty, a political aspiration
many supported, or certainly felt sympathetic towards, even though they
understood that chances of Nagas achieving this were both complicated
and slim. Not a few Phugwumi villagers had their individual biographies
linked to the Naga Movement and, in the past, had risked their lives
and limbs battling India’s military and paramilitary forces, while all
villagers had variously suffered as the result of the conflict. Most villagers
had experiences to share and stories to tell, and to which I spent many
evenings listening.
This was no different in the Chang Naga village of Noksen, where
I carried out a second stint of fieldwork, even as for many Noksen
villagers, and the Chang more widely, the Naga Independence struggle
has been put on the backburner in favour of a—for them—more press-
ing political demand: the bifurcation of Nagaland state through the
creation of a new state to be called Frontier Nagaland (Chapter 6). Their
political and territorial demand cuts through an envisaged integrated
Naga homeland, and makes one of the multiple complications, convul-
sions, and apparent contradictions that have emerged within the broader
contours of the Indo-Naga conflict.
These internal complications, as well as the protest rally, evade most
popular images of the Naga struggle, which conjures that of a margin-
alized and culturally distinct community resisting, against all odds,
invading and repressive Indian and Burmese states; of a popular move-
ment driven by rights of self-determination and self-preservation as a
distinct Naga nation. Oftentimes the term Nagalim (or Naga Land) is
invoked, which projects the political integration of a contiguously inhab-
ited Naga territory presently bifurcated between India and Burma/
Myanmar,9 and ultimately the emergence of an independent, upland
country where Naga culture and Christianity structure social life.10
My ethnography, as ethnography does, complicates any such singular and
simplistic readings by providing a worm’s eye-view of Naga insurgency,
revealing some of the complex ways in which the tentacles of insur-
gency and counterinsurgency attach themselves to everyday social and
6 in the shadows of naga insurgency

political life. Roughly two years of fieldwork revealed a plethora of

political voices, motivations, and aspirations, the articulation of social
binds and divides that obscure images of the Naga nation as a single
ethnic rubric, and an ever-contested linkage of ‘overground’ appara-
tuses of state, development, and democracy with the politics of Naga
insurgency. ‘Nothing is ever what it seems in Nagaland,’ as a Naga
friend in Shillong once confided to me. Through a fine-grained
ethnographic account, this book nevertheless hopes to distil some of the
inner logic, intricacies, and indeterminacies that shape everyday social
life as it unfolds in the (often murky) ‘shadows’ of Naga insurgency.

In the Shadows of Naga Insurgency

‘In this transitional period of history, we the Nagas are in a very delicate
position,’ wrote A.Z. Phizo from Calcutta’s Presidency Jail, where
he had been incarcerated on charges of ‘stirring trouble’ in the Indo-
Burma borderland. The year was 1948. India had just woken up to ‘life
and freedom’ and the Nagas, of whom Phizo introduced himself as a
spokesperson, now wanted India to set them free. His letter continued:
‘We occupy a territory at a point of transfusions and we cannot permit
Naga territory to be political polemics.’11 What Phizo invoked was
the colonial geopolitical objectification (Zou and Kumar 2011), the
administrative and cartographic ordering and reordering of a hitherto
non-state upland space, thence transmuting Naga lands from a fringe,
rugged and remote, into a crucial and potentially subversive border or
buffer zone between India and China, Burma, and, at some distance,
(erstwhile) East-Pakistan. ‘[The Nagas] are not planning Machiavellian
politics’, Phizo, witty as always, assured, then asserting that it was ‘not
the nature of the Nagas to be secretive…. We never made a secret of our
aspiration to be independent again when the British leave India’.
This letter by Phizo was sent to Rajagopalachari, the first Governor-
General of free India, but he immediately rejected its plea, as did Nehru,
Patel, and other Indian leaders (bar, it must be said, Mahatma Gandhi).12
Phizo, after his release from jail, became the fourth president and main
ideologue of the National Naga Council (NNC), which launched
and spearheaded the Naga Movement for Independence. To justify its
claim for Independence, the NNC insisted and persisted that neither
 Introduction 7

were Nagas Indians, nor had their hills ever been Indian terrain, be it
in terms of precolonial political realities, mythological and cosmological
configurations, or the cultural stretch of Bharat. Naga spokespersons
had articulated this viewpoint as early as 1929, when a memorandum
signed by members of the Naga Club, the first Naga apex body of sorts,
was submitted to the Simon Commission, which had come to British
India to study constitutional reform. The memorandum read:

Before the British Government conquered our country in 1879–80, we

were living in a state of intermitted warfare with the Assamese of the
Assam Valley to the North and West of our country and Manipuris
to the South. They never conquered us nor were we subjected to their
rules. On the other hand, we were always a terror to these people…. Our
language is quite different from those of the plains and we have no social
affinities with the Hindus or Mussalmans. We are look[ed] down upon
by the one for ‘beef ’ and the other for our ‘pork’ and by both for our want
in education …
(cited in Vashum 2005: 175)

Were the British to depart, as rumour already had it, they pleaded, ‘we
should not be thrust to the mercy of other people … but to leave [sic] us
alone as in ancient times’ (cited in Vashum 2005: 175). It was a reading of
history and a future political vision India’s newly Independent government
rejected. In the 1940s and early 1950s, these conflicting interpretations
of what was, and what was not, Indian territory, and who was, and who
was not, an Indian, were battled with rhetoric, historical narratives,
political treatises, and symbolic acts. However, when subsequent talks,
negotiations, and attempted treaties failed, Jawaharlal Nehru ordered in
his military and paramilitary forces. In those early days, few perhaps had
foreseen that this political disagreement would become accompanied by
anything like the protracted conflict, violence, and bloodshed that even-
tuated. ‘Troops moved into Tuensang by Oct. 1955’, B.N. Mullik, then
Director of India’s Central Intelligence Bureau recounted, ‘and the war
with the Nagas started from then’ (cited in Vashum 2005: 12).
The subsequent history of the Indo-Naga conflict is a history of a
daring resistance, one defying the odds of a small, initially ill-equipped
Naga force holding out despite being outnumbered many times over.
Over the past decades, several ceasefires and treaties were signed, but in
8 in the shadows of naga insurgency

the end each failed to hold or backfired, turning Naga insurgency into
a multi-generational struggle. But there is more to the Naga Movement
than resistance against Nagas’ enclosure into the Indian nation-state.
‘When history is written as a history of struggle’, Pandey (2004: 4) writes,
‘it tends to exclude the dimensions of force, uncertainty, domination and
disdain, loss and confusion, by normalizing the struggle, evacuating it
of its messiness and making it part of a narrative of assured advance
towards specified (or specifiable) resolutions’. Pandey diagnoses this in
relation to the history of Partition, but, in adapted form, his observation
bears on the Naga struggle, which besides a history of resistance (and an
advance towards a political solution favourable to Nagas) also contains
a history of multiple dissensions, coups, rivalries, acts of tribalism, and
factional feuds within, splitting and complicating the Naga Movement
into myriad rivalling underground groups.
What sets the Indo-Naga conflict apart from most armed conflicts
is its longevity, its listing amongst the longest postcolonial struggles
worldwide. Scholarship on armed conflict is voluminous, and I do not
intend to traverse its theoretical triumphs and pitfalls here. What never-
theless needs pointing out is that most treatises on conflict concentrate
on tales of violence, resistance, and survival, often emphasizing the
destructive nature of violent conflict on social life. Violent conflict,
Carolyn Nordstrom (2004: 68) posits, ‘undermines core foundations of
society … [it causes] the wounding of culture, social dislocation, and the
destruction of the very epistemological and ontological tools by which
we construct our world and ourselves in it’. The realization that the rami-
fications of armed conflict go beyond bodily damage and destruction is
pertinent, and perhaps still too often overlooked. However, most such
approaches end up essentializing armed conflicts in terms of violence,
and in so doing quarantine them from wider social processes, struggles,
and realities that continue alongside it, rather mistakenly presenting the
conflict as a ‘thing in itself ’ (Richards 2005: 3).
Tobias Kelly (2008: 351) critiques such ethnographic studies of
armed conflict for ‘over-determining violence’ and ‘ignoring the mundane
nature of most political conflicts’. This is not to underestimate the real
devastation and destruction armed conflicts cause, but to acknowledge
that social life, even in situations of conflict, usually remains a great deal
more complex and ‘thicker’ than tactics of coping alone (Thiranagama
 Introduction 9

2011: 7). To capture everyday life amidst continuing conflict, Kelly

(2008: 353) argues, ‘an examination of the ordinary is just as important
as the apparently extraordinary or exceptional…. If we are to understand
the specific shape that armed conflicts take, with their particular peaks
and troughs, we need to understand the lulls as much as the spikes
of violence’.13 Wars and armed conflicts, especially protracted ones,
Stephen Lubkemann (2008: 1) contends, should not be understood as
a suspension of social life but as a complex ‘social condition’; it is ‘not an
“event” that suspends “normal” social processes but instead has become
the normal—in the sense of “expected”—context of the unfolding of
social life’. For several generations of Nagas, the politics, perils, and
precarities of insurgency and counter-insurgency, the militarization of
the landscape, and ceasefires and their breakdowns have indeed been the
‘expected’ context of social life as most Nagas have no historical point of
political stability they can refer back to.
Instead of reducing conflict to violent struggles for territory and
power, anthropologists studying (in) conflictscapes, Lubkemann
(2008: 14) postulates, should concentrate on ‘everyday social life and
the process of its realization’, taking into account the many ‘complex and
multidimensional social struggles and concerns, interpersonal nego-
tiations, and culturally scripted life projects’ that continue to orient the
social lives of ordinary men and women, and which may deviate from ‘the
macro-political terms of the conflict’. In approaching Naga insurgency,
I perceive as its ‘macro-political terms’ the different political positions
that exist between Naga undergrounds and the Government of India,
the armed conflict, violence, and current ceasefire that emerged from
this, and the political shadow this casts over Naga society. This shadow,
as shadows are in spite of their darkness, is nevertheless translucent;
through it can be seen the social practices, processes, and relations,
political aspirations, normative imaginations, moral values and struggles
that inform the more minute texture of everyday life, and which, while
certainly influenced by the macro-political terms of Naga insurgency, are
not fully eclipsed by it.
For most of my Naga friends and respondents, and especially after
the 1997 ceasefire and the related withdrawal of Indian Armed Forces
(mostly) to their barracks, Naga insurgency existed behind the immedi-
ate scenes and compulsions of everyday life. Even if past experiences told
10 in the shadows of naga insurgency

Naga villagers that violence could potentially re-emerge without prior

notice, the conflict did not preoccupy their daily lives in the ways that
fulfilling kinship obligations, religious duties, studying, marrying and
establishing families, cultivating fields, or otherwise carving out a living
did. While war and conflict, as Sharika Thiranagama (2011: 6) rightly
argues, tends to have ‘its own parameters, frames and codes, and gener-
ated different forms of sociality’, it does ‘not obliterate preexisting social
projects, fantasies or social mores’.
In line with these approaches, I do not perceive of the Indo-Naga
conflict as dissected from wider patterns and precepts of social life.
However, with Thiranagama (2011) I argue that this should not
lead to an abandoning of the social and political specificities of life
in a conflict zone. Naga insurgency, as I will variously show, has long
flooded the banks of political conflict and washes through all fields of
social life, and is thence best understood as a complex—an ‘insurgency
complex’. Approaching Naga insurgency as a complex, thus traversing
beyond armed conflict in the strict sense, recognizes how Nagas’ histori-
cal and embodied experiences of resistance and state aggression, violence
and political volatility, struggle and suffering link together, how they
produce long-term mentalities and prejudices, shape social norms, moral
evaluations, local struggles, and magnify interpersonal and intertribal
relations in expected and unexpected ways. What emerges from this is
perhaps not a complete transformation of social life (or conflict-induced
‘cultural chaos’ as Lubkemann (2008) argues armed conflict causes),
but a situation in which social relationships, moral reasoning, political
sociality and aspirations, and culturally scripted life-projects become
variously entangled in, and complicated by, the past and present of Naga
insurgency.
What follows, then, is not a panoramic overview of the protracted
Indo-Naga conflict, but an ethnographic underview of the social corol-
laries, carryovers, and consequences of Naga insurgency.14 The seven
chapters that make the main body of this book explore, in multiple
ways, the form and substance of social life as it emerges in the shadows
of political conflict. I variously look at how kinship networks, social
bonds, and tribal identities constitute themselves and interrelate with
the politics of insurgency, the kind of state-society relations that have
grown, how development schemes and projects manifest themselves
 Introduction 11

locally, and, amidst all this, what agency and imagination Naga villagers
possess to appropriate and rework apparatuses and policies of state,
development, and democracy to their own uses, understandings, and
distinctive lifeworlds.

Where Is Nagalim?
When the Central Government, in 2016, began fencing and trenching the
international boundary between India and Myanmar the ‘trans-border’
Khiamniungan Naga tribe protested. Its apex body condemned it as a
‘felonious act’ and explained that the ‘Khiamniungan have always lived
as one community’ but that ‘after British colonialism an imaginary line
was drawn between India and Myanmar, dividing the tribe between two
countries’. This ‘imaginary line’, it is popularly imagined, ‘was drawn over
the Patkai ranges when Jawaharlal Nehru, the then Prime Minster of
India, and U Nu, the then Prime Minister of Burma, flew over the area to
determine the international boundary, thus unwittingly dividing villages
perched on the mountaintops between the two nations’ ( Joshi 2013: 166).
The National Socialist Council of Nagalim–Isak/Muivah also
objected to the physical demarcation of the international boundary in,
what it called, ‘the heart of the Naga homeland’. It stated, in a public
communiqué, ‘We shall no longer accept any policy to further divide the
Naga family in the form of an artificial boundary fencing between India
and Myanmar’. The Naga Hoho—a pan-Naga apex body—similarly
issued a newspaper statement rejecting the border fencing as ‘an attempt
by India and Myanmar to rewrite the history of Nagas’. Nagaland’s
Chief Minister, in turn, stated: ‘Even if we may not be able to do much
to change the international boundary, we will do everything to see that
the traditional right of the Naga people to move about freely within their
own ancestral land is not taken away’. These public outpourings were
followed up by Nagaland’s lone representative to the Lok Sabha, who
wrote, in a letter addressed to the Prime Minister, that ‘the people living
in both sides of the border in the Naga areas belong to similar tribes and
have been living as one community since time immemorial’.15
If borders are amongst the ‘most paradoxical of human creations’
(Gellner 2013: 2), this is, in parts, because they often either join
what is different or divide what is similar (Van Schendel 2005a: 9).
12 in the shadows of naga insurgency

The contemporary criss-crossing of political boundaries across the

Naga highlands—and the mismatch between tribal, ethnic, and political
borders this generates—is a prime example of ‘borders that divide’.
Political boundaries, of course, are not natural and permanent, but
reflect the historicity and politics of a place, and always carry within
themselves the potential to be redrawn or abandoned. Such a redraw-
ing of borders lies at the heart of the territorial and political projection
of Nagalim, which protests the bifurcation of Naga territory by the
Indo-Myanmar border, and its further fragmentation, within India, by
the political boundaries of four states (Nagaland, Manipur, Assam, and
Arunachal Pradesh). Hence, the NSCN-IM defining as ‘the heart of the
Naga homeland’ that which the Indian and Myanmar states perceive as
the outer edges of their respective territory and nation.
Akin to colonial subalterns subjugated and marginalized elsewhere,
Nagas had little or no say in the drawing of borders that divided
them. Its delimitations, instead, were concocted and chiselled at the
convenience of the colonial administration and later confirmed and
congealed (but also added to) by the postcolonial Indian government.
Even as boundaries in South and Southeast Asia did not dwell on the
catastrophic notion, once popular in colonial Africa, that straight lines
make uncomplicated borders, they hinged on arbitrary considerations,
political motives, and bird-eye perspectives all the same. Consequently,
for Nagas, they not just truncated what was, or came to be, Naga political
consciousness across different state territories, but also cut across single
tribes and villages, and in at least one instance runs through a house, as
happened to the dwelling of the Konyak Naga chief of Longwa village
(Longvah 2014: 44).
In crafting his case for Naga Independence, and the territorial reorga-
nization of the region, Phizo wrote:

The Nagas were divided by the British administration into three major
units. About one fifth of the Naga population with that much in
proportion of our land were administrated from British India [Naga
Hills district]. About the same proportion was administrated by British
Burma. And approximately sixty percent of the population occupying a
territory of about seventy percent of Nagaland [Naga-lands] were left
untouched and undisturbed, who were absolutely independent.
(cited in Nuh 1986: 101)
 Introduction 13

It is the coming together of these Naga lands under a single political,

administrative, and sovereign roof that remains projected as the ultimate
outcome of the Naga struggle. Even as the NSCN-IM, in its political
dialogues with the Centre, professed readiness to absolve its demand
for complete Independence, it remains firm on the unification of Naga
territories: ‘We will never compromise on our demand for the reunifica-
tion of the Naga homeland. We were divided first by the British and
then India perpetuated the divisions. The NSCN wants a unified Naga
homeland and we will either have it or we will fight for it’ (Muivah cited
in Samaddar 2009: 182).
This desire to unify Naga lands (certainly those lying within India)
elicits support across the Naga political spectrum, and a resolution
unanimously adopted by the Nagaland Assembly in 1994 reads thus:

Whereas, by quirk of history, the Naga-inhabited areas have been

disintegrated and scattered under different administrative units without
the knowledge and consent of the Nagas…. Whereas, the Nagas
irrespective of territorial barriers have strong desire to come together
under one administrative roof … the Assembly, therefore, resolves to
urge upon the Government of India and all concerned to help the Nagas
achieve this desired goal.
(cited in Chasie 2005: 61)16

Naga civil societies, too, demand this and, in 2010, the Naga Hoho
proclaimed: ‘henceforth, we derecognize any artificial boundary lines
drawn across our ancestral lands in the so-called Manipur state’ (cited
in Longvah 2014: 44).17

A Brief Naga Historical Detour

The kinds of past we conjure, David Lowenthal (1985: xvi) writes, is
‘largely an artefact of the present’. This is because we selectively recall and
celebrate some historical events, and invoke them to justify the present,
but expunge or ignore others. Lowenthal explains: ‘as the past has new
consequences for each successive generation; we are forever reinterpret-
ing it’ (1985: 62). Most Naga history writing is fraught with the volatile
politics of the Indo-Naga conflict. Ask a Naga and Indian scholar to
interpret the same historical sources and the conclusions drawn by
14 in the shadows of naga insurgency

each are likely to differ. Nor, perhaps, could this be otherwise. Besides
political colouring, our understanding of Naga history is also ‘thin’.
Much of what we assume we know about Nagas’ ancient and precolonial
pasts is either derived from oral histories, legends, songs, and folktales,
or is an interpretation of fragments and shards of historical accounts
written, not by Nagas, but by litterateurs of neighbouring kingdoms and
dynasties in the Assam and Imphal valleys. This section, in the briefest of
summaries, sketches Nagas’ political history up till the demand for Naga
Independence on 14 August 1947, one day before India gained hers.
The Naga inhabited hills are usually said to be made up of dispa-
rate tribes. These, prior to their (partial) incorporation into the British
Empire and later complete enclosure into the Indian and Burmese states,
were political communities with a fierce history of self-governance.
In actual practice, however, both the locus and ethos of Naga political
organization was vested not in the tribe, but in the prototypical Naga
‘village republic’ (Chapter 2 in this volume). It was only seldom that
separate villages asserted themselves as a tribal entity that in its func-
tioning was considerably constant, corporative, and cohesive. From
the earliest documentary accounts we have, we know that these Naga
villages maintained complex sets of relations with kingdoms and dynas-
ties in the adjacent Brahmaputra, Barak, and Imphal Valleys, and which
across time and space included raids and retaliations, trade and tribute,
cooperation, co-optation, and conflict, suzerainty, and submission
(Devi 1968; Mackenzie 1884; Wouters 2011).
As a general principle, however, Naga villages, while occasionally
subdued, were never administrated by an external force, but left to fend
for themselves. This relative seclusion was—though never completely
isolated, bounded, and sealed—first, because the rugged uplands seemed
to offer little of value to dynasties in the plains. Secondly, because plain
dwellers both scorned and feared the upland Nagas as headhunters,
found their behaviour as fickle as the upland winds, and generally looked
upon the hills as a fortress of savagery, nakedness, and barbarity best
kept away from.18 And thirdly, because Naga villages and communities
themselves fiercely resisted intrusions into their hills, putting up fero-
cious fights to push back invaders. This was also the evaluation of the
few European travellers who ventured into Assam before its formal
annexation by the British Raj, and who described the Naga highlands as
 Introduction 15

the place where civilization ended and unruly, violent savages took over
(Mackenzie 1884).
With measures of historical verifiability, the relations between Nagas
and Ahoms (whose princes and nobles reigned over large swathes of
the Brahmaputra Valley from roughly the thirteenth till nineteenth
century) were documented in the Ahom Buranjis, or court chronicles.
Some selected passages detail: ‘the Itania Nagas revolted’, ‘the Chiefs
of the Lakma Nagas came down and hurdled spears into the air’, ‘the
Nagas of Tirualia revolted…. They entered into our villages, murdered
our men, and pillaged the people. For many days, they devastated the
villages and our men had no peace’, and ‘Malauthupia Nagas killed a
number of our villagers and pillaged their properties’ (Baruah 1980).
While such accounts evidence the early presence of upland Nagas,
specifications as Itania, Lakma, Tirulia, and Malauthupia Nagas but also
‘Barduria, Paniduria, Mithonia, Banfera, Joboka, Jaktungias [Nagas]’
(Prakash 2007: 384) have long fallen into oblivion, and it is hard, though
not always impossible, to reconstruct to which Naga villages or village-
clusters they referred.
By the first decades of the nineteenth century, and as a result of
Burmese incursions followed by the authoritative arrival of the British
in Assam, Ahom rule first crumpled, then was obliterated. The colonial
administration that followed, certainly in the beginning, strongly
revolved around the causes of tea, taxes, and timber. It was the cause of
tea that led the British into the Naga foothills, which, even if not always
inhabited, were used by Nagas as ancestral hunting grounds. As early as
1844, Owen, a British officer, invoked a report from ‘scientific gentlemen’
to claim that ‘these Naga Hills must undoubtedly bear better sorts of tea
than is found in the plains of Assam’ (1844: 8). Soon, the acquisition
of Naga lands began. In fact, a major contention between the British
and upland tribes, including Nagas, was the ‘pushing of hill tribes up
into the hills, alienating them from land previously under their control
and granting such land, formally declared “wasteland”, to tea planters and
immigrant peasants from Bengal’ (Karlsson 2011: 270).19
Naga villages responded in ways they knew best, and carried out raids
on tea plantations and the Assam plains beyond. They would swoop
down, usually after dark, and destroy produce, loot harvests, and, in
some instances, capture labourers which they put to work in the hills
16 in the shadows of naga insurgency

or traded as slaves.20 These raids reduced British revenues and were

retaliated with punitive expeditions, often including the burning of Naga
villages and granaries. The first such expedition ensued in 1832 and
was led by Captains Jenkins and Pemberton accompanied by ‘a party of
700 soldiers, and 800 coolies’ (Mackenzie 1884: 101) All along the way,
they were attacked by Angami villagers who ‘rolled down stones from the
summit of the hills, threw spears, and did their utmost by yelling and
intimidation to obstruct the advance of the force’. Such and subsequent
British-Naga encounters were never fought on equal footings: ‘[Naga
warriors] were astounded at perceiving that their wooden shields were
no protection against leaden bullets’ (Butler 1855: 171). Still, Nagas
refused to surrender, and it took the British several decades, the loss of
many lives, and tremendous expenditure, to subdue Naga villages into
notional submission (Elwin 1961: 147–95). To effectuate control, the
Naga Hills district was created in 1866, of whose decision Colonel
Woodthorpe (1882: 57) wrote: ‘Suffice it to say that in consequence of
the raids continually made by the Nagas on our territory, it was found
necessary to locate a Political Officer at a place called Samaguting, just in
the hills’. In 1878, this outpost was moved up to Kohima, which remains
Nagaland’s state capital today.21
While slow at first, and not without setbacks, the colonial government
gradually expanded its sway over swathes of the Naga uplands. Once in
place, colonial rule led to the political, economic, and legal restructur-
ing of the Naga uplands. Headhunting and slavery were made illegal,
and punishments meted out against those who transgressed.22 The new
colonial administration also introduced ‘house-tax’ and monetized the
local economy to enable Naga villagers to pay these. These taxes turned
into a source of continual contention, and in their memorandum to the
Simon Commission (mentioned above), Naga representatives wrote:
‘We are afraid new and heavy taxes will be imposed on us, and when we
cannot pay, then all lands have to be sold and in long run we shall have
no share in the land of our birth and life will not be worth living then’.
If the Naga highlands, and adjacent hills, were already remote, what
made them more remote still was the imposition of the Inner Line in
1873 with the motive to provide a ‘territorial frame to capital’ (Kar 2009:
51). More deeply, Kar explains, it sought to ‘demarcate “the hills” from
the “the plains”, the nomadic from the sedentary, the jungle from the
 Introduction 17

arable—in short, “the tribal areas” from “Assam proper”’ (Kar 2009: 52).
What lay beyond the Inner Line, the Naga Hills included, was legally
notified as ‘backward tracts’, which entailed that laws passed by legisla-
tures did not apply to them but that they were administrated directly by
the offices of the Governor. Later the term ‘backward’ was replaced with
‘excluded’ and ‘partially excluded’ areas, although the same principle of
governance largely remained in place (Robb 1997).23 Areas beyond the
Inner Line were also subjected to a permit regime, ostensibly to ‘protect’
Nagas against the perceived cunning and deceit of the more ‘advanced’
plainsmen. But even as total seclusion was not enforceable since hill and
valley people needed to meet for purposes of trade, more stringent forms
of regulations did curb the frequency with which such interactions took
place, in the process isolating the Naga uplands in unprecedented ways.
In the wake of British rule came missionaries, most of them
belonging to American and Welsh Baptist missions. Within the course
of a century, they succeeded in converting most Nagas to Christianity
( Joshi 2012; Thomas 2016). Besides ‘sin and salvation’, missionaries
also brought with them modern education and medicine, which they
promoted across the hills, and in doing so shaped not only novel reli-
gious and moral outlooks but also new perspectives, ways of thinking,
and expectations. Some colonial officers supported, and facilitated, the
arrival of missionaries and missions—‘Who shall say that the Bible will
not be the means of changing the habits and ideas of these wild savages?
The experiment is worthy of trial,’ wrote John Butler (1855: 66). Most
British officers, however, felt ambivalent, if not rancorous, towards these
missionaries, whom they accused of destroying Naga traditions and
culture. J.P. Mills (1935: 148) wrote thus: ‘Government has been at pains
to preserve them [Naga customs] to the utmost limit possible…. In
strong contrast has been the attitude of the American Baptist Mission.
As religion is a part in every Naga ceremony and as that religion is not
Christianity, every ceremony must go’. In spite of cultural loss, what
Christianity did offer was a common denominator among Naga commu-
nities in a way disparate languages, cultural practices, customs, beliefs,
and bloodshed histories of inter-village strife could not. Ultimately, it
was Christian faith, and the universal truths it espoused, that ‘mediated
the formation of a modern political identity among Nagas’ (Thomas
2016: 1). Over time, Christian discourses, symbols, and slogans became
18 in the shadows of naga insurgency

deeply intertwined with the Naga Movement, as evidenced by the still

popular slogan: ‘Nagaland for Christ’.
Then came the World Wars into which Nagas were drawn in unex-
pected ways. During the First World War, about 2,000 (estimations
vary) Nagas were assembled and dispatched as part of the labour-corps
to war trenches in France and Mesopotamia, where they were intro-
duced, for the first time, to ideas of nation, nationalism, and patriotism.
Henry Balfour, then curator of the Pitt-Rivers Museum and with a keen
interest in Naga artefacts, came across ‘a gang of Nagas’ in France ‘engag-
ing in road-repairing in the war zone, within sound of the guns’. Balfour
was to reflect later:

One wonders what impressions remain with them from their sudden
contact with higher civilizations at war. Possibly, they are reflecting
that, after what they have seen, the White Man’s condemnation of the
relatively innocuous headhunting of the Nagas savours on hypocrisy.
Now that they are back in their own hills, will they settle down to the
indigenous simple life and revert to the primitive conditions which were
temporarily disturbed?
(Balfour 1921: xvi)

Settling back into ‘indigenous simple life’ they did not, and France return-
ees were amongst those who initiated the Naga Club in 1918, the first
pan-Naga apex body. Initially a social club, which ran, among others, a
football team and a cooperative store, the Naga Club gradually assumed
a more political character as its members started, the Naga historian,
Mashangthei Horam, writes,

Preparing themselves politically in the event of India gaining her

Independence from the British—a happening they then visualized as
being imminent. Thus their chief concern was the political future of
their homeland after the exit of the British. The Naga club was still in its
infancy then, but the pattern of the future had already been installed in
their minds.
(cited in Franke 2009: 60)

Whereas the Naga Labour Corps had travelled far to participate in

the First World War, the Second World War announced itself at Naga
 Introduction 19

doorsteps as Japanese and Allied Forces battled over Kohima in 1944. In

this battle, Nagas fought, suffered, and sacrificed at the behest of Allied
Forces, making Swinson (1956: 213) conclude: ‘how many [Allied] lives
were owed to the courage and skill of these remarkable [Naga] hillmen
will never be known; but the figure must certainly run into thousands’.
The battle of Kohima often fails to make it into standard textbook
versions of the Second World War, but it was in Kohima that the
Japanese expansion was fought to a halt, making Kohima to the Japanese
‘what Stalingrad was to Russia and Alamein to the Desert’ (Philips cited
in Horam 1988: 57). For Naga villagers, the Japanese invasion and the
presence of large numbers of Allied Forces provided ‘a definite break
from the uninterrupted past and brought to their unaccustomed eyes
the glare of a totally new world—new people, new weapons, new attire,
new food and above all new ideas’ (Horam 1992: 162). One such ‘new
idea’ was the vision of an independent Naga nation.
The war reduced Kohima to ruins and rubble. The colonial govern-
ment, in an attempt to compensate Nagas’ loyalty and losses, offered
post-war reconstruction. It was to streamline the distribution of materi-
als and cash that Charles Pawsey, the last British District Commissioner
of the Naga Hills, facilitated the formation of the Naga Hills district
Tribal Council (NHDTC) in April 1945, and whose mandate it
became to unite Naga tribes to effectuate reconstruction. Less than a
year later, the council had re-christened itself as the NNC, and became
the platform for debates on Nagas’ political future. Initially the debate
was between those who envisaged a genuine Naga autonomy within
Assam and India and those who insisted that only an independent ‘gov-
ernment of the Nagas, for the Nagas, by the Nagas’ (Kevichusa cited in
Archer 1947) would ensure Nagas’ welfare. At first, it was the stance for
autonomy that drew majority support, and found expression in several
memorandums the NNC dispatched to Jawaharlal Nehru. For a number
of reasons, but including the ‘indifferent and non-committal’ attitudes of
Indian national leaders (Thomas 2016: 2) and because no definite agree-
ment seemed forthcoming, the voice for Naga Independence amplified
in sonority.24
This initially led to a division within the NNC, and the split of a
group calling themselves the ‘People’s Independence League’, of which
A.Z. Phizo was a member. It was the People’s Independence League
20 in the shadows of naga insurgency

which on the 14th of August 1947 unilaterally, and without consent of

the NNC, declared Naga Independence. In the confusion that followed,
Phizo was first arrested, then released, and in 1950 selected as the fourth
President of the NNC. Under Phizo’s leadership, the NNC’s stance
formally changed from meaningful autonomy to complete Independence.
Characterized as a ‘swayer of men’ (Horam 1988: 27), Phizo travelled
across the Naga uplands to promulgate the stance for Naga Independence,
and did so with notable success: ‘for the first time, who for centuries had
had no contact with the people of the next village, had been chopping of
each other’s heads without pity, fear or remorse, joined hands to attain
independence’ (Anand 1980: 70). This was followed by a monumental
plebiscite held in 1951, presided over by Phizo and the NNC, during
which, Naga historians tell, 99 per cent of those Nagas consulted
pressed their thumb in favour of Naga Independence. In 1954 the NNC
declared the People’s Sovereign Republic of Free Nagaland, which was
soon replaced by the Federal Government of Nagaland (FGN) as the
political wing of the NNC and the government of Nagaland. Soon after,
the war began.

From a Cradle of British Social Anthropology

to Ethnographic Scarcity
In studying the Naga highlands, and tracing social and political change
and complexities, contemporary scholars grapple with a decades-wide
ethnographic void, largely as a side effect of the protracted Indo-Naga
conflict which long impeded the rise of Naga scholars and imposed
research restrictions on nonlocal researchers, be they Indian or foreign
nationals. Thankfully, academic interest on Nagas is currently on the
rise, as evidenced by several recently published monographs (Longkumer
2010; Joshi 2012; Thomas 2016). On the whole, however, scant academic
treatises, even less ethnographic ones, emerged between roughly the
1950s, when the Indo-Naga conflict erupted, and the second decade of
the twenty-first century.25 The limited ethnographic scholarship that
does exist is fundamentally patchy as while formerly colonially admin-
istrated tribes such as the Angami, Lotha, Ao, and Sema have attracted
some scholarship, our ethnographic understanding of eastern Naga
tribes remains much more deficient (fewer still are accounts of Naga
 Introduction 21

tribes across the border into Myanmar). Much important work is yet to
be done, but for which a large number of Naga anthropology and sociol-
ogy students are now being trained in universities inside and outside
India. Important to highlight, however, is that today’s ethnographic
scarcity contrasts starkly with the colonial era during which Naga tribes
turned into an ethnological hotbed, arguably even a cradle of British
Social Anthropology.
While administrated ‘lightly’, Naga culture and customs became
subjected to intense ethnological scrutiny and speculation, mostly by
‘administrator-anthropologists’. British military and civil officers like
Davis, Butler, Woodthorpe, Godden, Mills, and Hutton repeatedly
addressed gatherings of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great
Britain and Ireland and the Asiatic Society in Calcutta (now Kolkata),
and amongst whose eminent audiences their ethnographic material
incited lively, if at times fantastical, discussions. After retiring from
the colonial Indian Civil Service, J.H. Hutton and J.P. Mills, moreover,
and based on their ethnological studies of Nagas, were appointed as
Anthropology Professors at Cambridge University and the London
School for Oriental and African Studies respectively. Till date, most
reputed university libraries in places across the globe flaunt a shelf of
Naga colonial monographs, most of them bound in characteristic dark
blue colour covers, and carrying titles such as The Angami Nagas (Hutton
1921a), The Sema Nagas (Hutton 1921b), The Lhota Nagas (Mills 1922),
The Rengma Nagas (Mills 1937), The Ao Nagas (Smith 1925), another
The Ao Nagas (Mills 1926), The Naked Nagas (Fürer-Haimendorf
1939), The Naga Tribes of Manipur (Hodson 1911), and Naga Path
(Bower 1950).26 Ethnographic museums—be they in Oxford, Basel,
or Berlin—too continue to showcase Naga skulls, spears, headgear, and
other artefacts. Such was the interest in Naga material culture that there
are reportedly ‘over 12,000 Naga artefacts in Britain alone’ (Macfarlane
and Turin 2008: 370), all of which were variously confiscated, gifted, and
procured by colonial administrators, missionaries, curators, and travellers,
today spurring, besides a continuing popular interest in Naga material
culture, complicated debates on authenticity and ownership, including
calls to have these artefacts returned to their villages of origin.
Back then, writings on Naga communities were diverse and colourful,
including detailed narrations of religious beliefs and rituals, origin and
22 in the shadows of naga insurgency

migration stories, headhunting, megalithic culture, khel (village ward)

and clan set-ups, political structures and sentiments, ornaments, archi-
tecture, tigermen, and so-called feasts of merit. While colonial writings
were certainly rich; not all early writers were equally careful in their gath-
ering and interpretation of data, while their analyses remained invariably
(and understandably) couched in dominant ideas of socio-evolutionary
paradigms and British hegemony (Asad 1973; Said 1978). This has led,
in recent years, to a trend of ‘corrective anthropology’ in which mostly
Naga scholars try to rectify what has been written about them (Wouters
and Heneise 2017: 7).
Commenting on early colonial writings on Nagas, Elwin (1969: 1)
evaluated: ‘There are certainly many mistakes of fact, misunderstand-
ing of customs and institutions; almost everything is very different
now’. Much has continued to change since Elwin’s observation. But
few societies perhaps witnessed social change at such rapid pace as
Naga villagers have over the past 150 years or so. These changes can
be captured along a number of axes: from a non-state to a state society,
‘animism’ to Christianity, tradition to modernity and developmentalism,
from powerful chiefs and village elders to participatory democracy, or
from a social landscape inhabited by disparate clans, villages, and tribes
to a political projection of a more or less unified Naga nation. This book
treats some of these axes in conjunction with my ethnography, and in
doing so it aims to return some of the fine-grained ethnographic under-
standings Naga society was long known by.

Fieldwork during Ceasefire

After 138 years of dubious service, Nagaland’s Inner Line was partially
lifted in 2011, permitting freer movements of foreign nationals within
the confines of the state. The year 2011 was also the year I started my
fieldwork, and had it not been for the Centre’s shift in policy—the
Nagaland government had long asked for the partial removal of the
Inner Line with the view of promoting international tourism—this book
would not have been written. At the time the Inner Line regime was in
place, and because of the Indo-Naga conflict, entering Nagaland was not
just notoriously difficult, but a permit, if granted, would hardly exceed
seven days, not a time span that enables sustained ethnographic inquiry.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Stutgardt, no man should dare to assail the dwelling of Reuchlin. The
two knights left the city to proceed to the spot in the wood where still
lay buried the body of the murdered John von Hutten. “It had lain
four years in the grave,” said Ulrich, “but the features were
unchanged. As we touched him, blood flowed afresh from his
wounds; recognise in this the witness of his innocence.” The corpse
was eventually transported to the family vault at Esslingen.
The cities of the hard-pressed duke fell, one after the other, and the
guilty prince was driven from his inheritance. Von Hutten remained
with the army, busily plying his pen; his sword on the table before
him, his dagger on his hip, and himself encased in armor to the
throat. Erasmus laughingly wrote to him to leave Mars and stick to
the Muses. He scarcely needed this advice, for his letters from the
camp show that fond as he was of the field, he loved far better the
quiet joys of the household hearth. Amid the brazen clangor of
trumpets, the neighing of steeds, the rolling of the drum, and the
boom of battle, he writes to Piscator (Fischer), his longing for home,
and his desire for a wife to smile on, and care for him; one who
would soothe his griefs and share his labors—“One,” he says, “with
whom I might sportively laugh and feel glad in our existence—who
would sweeten the bitter of life and alleviate the pressure of care. Let
me have a wife, my dear Friederich, and thou knowest how I would
love her ... young, fair, shy, gentle, affectionate, and well-educated.
She may have some fortune, but not excess of it; and as for position,
this is my idea thereon: that she will be noble enough whom Ulrich
von Hutten chooses for his mate.” As a wooer, it will be seen that the
scholar-knight had as little of the faint heart as the audacious
“Findlay” of Burns, and I might almost say of Freiligrath, so spiritedly
has the latter poet translated into German the pleasant lines of the
Ayrshire ploughman.
Well had it been for Ulrich had he found, in 1519, the wife of his
complacent visions. The gentle hand would have saved him from
many a cruel hour.
On his return to Mayence he had well-nigh obeyed the universal call
addressed to him, to join openly with Luther against Rome. He was
withheld by his regard for his liberal patron, the archbishop. He
remained, partly looking on and partly aiding, on the outskirts of the
field where the fray was raging. He published a superb edition of
Livy, and to show that the reforming spirit still burned brightly in the
bosom of the scholar, he also published his celebrated “Vadiscus,
sive Trias Romana.” This triple-edged weapon still inflicts anguish on
Rome. Never had arrow of such power stricken the harlot before. Its
point is still in her side; and her adversaries knew well how to use it,
by painfully turning it in the wound.
The knight now hung up his sword in his chamber at Stackelberg,
and devoted himself to his pen. In the convent library at Fulda he
discovered an ancient German work against the supremacy of the
Pope over the princes and people of Germany. Of this he made
excellent use. His own productions against Rome followed one
another with great rapidity. Down to the middle of 1520 he was
incessantly charging the Vatican, at the point of a grey goosequill.
He had at heart the freeing of Germany from the ecclesiastical
domination of Italy, just as the men of Northern Italy have it at heart
to rescue her from the cruel domination of Austria.
To accomplish his ends, Von Hutten left no means untried. Knight
and scholar, noble and villain, the very Emperor Charles V. himself,
Ulrich sought to enlist in the great confederacy, by which he hoped to
strike a mortal blow at the temporal power of the “Universal Bishop.”
His books converted even some of the diocesans of the Romish
Church; but Rome thundered excommunication on the books and
their author, and directed a heavy weight of censure against his
protector, Albert of Mayence.
The archbishop admonished Von Hutten, and interdicted his works.
This step decided Ulrich’s course. He at once addressed his first
letter to Luther. It began with the cry of “Freedom for ever!” and it
offered heart, head, soul, body, brains, and purse, in furtherance of
the great cause. He tendered to Luther, in the name of Sickingen, a
secure place of residence; and he established his first unassailable
battery against Rome, by erecting a printing-press in his own room in
the castle of Stackelberg, whence he directed many a raking fire
against all his assailants. “Jacta est alea!” was his cry; “Let the
enemies of light look to it!”
From Fulda he started to the court of the Emperor Charles V. at
Brussels. But his enemies stood between him and the foot of the
throne, and he was not allowed to approach it. His life, too, was
being constantly threatened. He withdrew before these threats, once
more into Germany, taking compensation by the way, for his
disappointment, by a characteristic bit of spirit. He happened to fall in
with Hogstraten, the heretic-finder, and the arch-enemy of Reuchlin.
Ulrich belabored him with a sheathed sword till every bone in the
body of Hogstraten was sore. In return, the knight was outlawed, and
Leo X. haughtily commanded that hands should be laid upon him
wherever he might be found, and that he should be delivered,
gagged, and bound, to the Roman tribunals.
Franz von Sickingen immediately received him within the safe
shelter of his strong fortress of Ebernberg, where already a score of
renowned theological refugees had found an asylum. The colloquies
of the illustrious fugitives made the old walls ring again. Von Hutten
reduced these colloquies to writing, and I may name, as one of their
conclusions, that the service of the mass in German was determined
on, as the first step toward an established reformation.
The attempt of the Pope to have Ulrich seized and sacrificed, was
eagerly applied by the latter to the benefit of the cause he loved. To
the emperor, to the elector, to the nobles, knights, and states of
Germany, he addressed papers full of patriotism, eloquence, and
wisdom, against the aggression on German liberty. Throughout
Germany this scholar-knight called into life the spirit of civil and
religious freedom, and Luther, looking upon what Ulrich was doing,
exclaimed: “Surely the last day is at hand!”
These two men, united, lit up a flame which can never be trodden
out. One took his Bible and his pen, and with these pricked Rome
into a fury, from which she has never recovered. The other, ungirding
his sword, and transferring his printing-press to Ebernberg, sent
therefrom glowing manifestoes which made a patriot of every reader.
The lyre and learning were both now employed by Von Hutten, in
furtherance of his project. His popular poetry was now read or sung
at every hearth. Not a village was without a copy, often to be read by
stealth, of his “Complaint and Admonition.” His dialogues, especially
that called the “Warner,” in which the colloquists are a Roman
alarmist and Franz von Sickingen himself, achieved a similar
triumph. It was to give heart to the wavering that Von Hutten wrote,
and sent abroad from his press at Ebernberg, those remarkable
dialogues.
Franz von Sickingen, his great protector, was for a season
apprehensive that Ulrich’s outcry against Rome was louder than
necessary, and his declared resolution to resent oppression by
means of the sword, somewhat profane. Ulrich reasoned with and
read to the gallant knight. His own good sense, and the arguments of
Luther and Ulrich, at length convinced him that it was folly and sin to
maintain outward respect for Rome as long as the latter aspired to
be lord in Germany, above the kaiser himself. Franz soon agreed
with Hutten that they ought not to heed even the Emperor, if he
commanded them to spare the Pope, when such mercy might be
productive of injury to the empire. In such cases, not to obey was the
best obedience. They would not now look back. “It is better,” so runs
it in Von Hutten’s “Warner,” “to consider what God’s will is, than what
may enter the heads of individuals, capricious men, more especially
in the case wherein the truth of the Gospel is concerned. If it be
proved that nothing satisfactory, by way of encouragement, can
come to us from the Emperor, they who love the Church and civil
liberty must be bold at their own peril, let the issue be what it may.”
The dialogue of the “Warner” was, doubtless, not only read to
Sickingen during the progress of its composition, but was
unquestionably a transcript of much that was talked about, weighed,
and considered between the two friends, as they sat surrounded by
a circle of great scholars and soldiers, for whose blood Rome was
thirsting. It ends with an assurance of the full adhesion of Franz to
the views of Ulrich. “In this matter,” says the “Warner” to the knight of
Ebernberg, “I see you have a passionate and zealous instigator, a
fellow named Von Hutten, who can brook delay with patience, and
who has heaped piles upon piles of stones, ready to fling them at the
first adversary who presents himself.” “Ay, in good sooth,” is the
ready answer of Franz, “and his service is a joy to me, for he has the
true spirit requisite to insure triumph in such a struggle as ours.”
Thus at Ebernburg the battery was played against the defences of
Rome, while Luther, from his known abodes, or from his
concealment in friendly fortresses, thundered his artillery against the
doctrines and superstitions of Rome. The movement had a double
aspect. The Germans were determined to be free both as Christians
and as citizens. The conducting of such determination to its
successful issue could not be intrusted to worthier or more capable
hands than those of Luther, aided by the Saxon Frederick the Wise,
and Ulrich von Hutten, with such a squire at his side as hearty Franz
von Sickingen.
In 1521 the young emperor, Charles V., delivered a speech at
Worms, which seemed to have been framed expressly to assure the
reformers that the emperor was with them. It abounded in promises
that the kaiser would do his utmost to effect necessary reforms
within the empire. The reformers were in great spirits, but they soon
learned, by the summoning of Luther to Worms, and by the
subsequent conduct of the emperor, that they had nothing to expect
from him which they could thankfully acknowledge.
Ulrich only wrote the more boldly, and agitated the more unceasingly,
in behalf of the cause of which Luther was the great advocate. To the
kaiser himself he addressed many a daring epistle, as logical as
audacious, in order to induce him to shake off the yoke of Rome, and
be master of the Roman world, by other sanction than that of
German election and papal consent. Von Hutten was more bold and
quite as logical in his witheringly sarcastic epistles addressed to the
pope’s legates at Worms. These epistles show that if at the time
there was neither a recognised liberty of the press nor of individual
expression, the times themselves were so out of joint that men dared
do much which their masters dared not resent.
To the entire body of the priesthood assembled at Worms to confront
Luther, he addressed similar epistles. They abound in “thoughts that
breathe, and words that burn.” In every word there is defiance. Every
sentence is a weapon. Every paragraph is an engine of war. The
writer scatters his deadly missiles around him, threatening all,
wounding many, sometimes indeed breaking his own head by rash
management, but careless of all such accidents as long as he can
reach, terrify, maul, and put to flight the crowd of enemies who have
conspired to suppress both learning and religion in Germany.
In unison with Sickingen, he earnestly entreated Luther to repair to
Ebernburg rather than to Worms, as there his knightly friends would
protect him from all assailants. The reply of the great reformer is well
known. He would go to Worms, he said, though there were as many
devils as tiles on the roofs, leagued against him to oppose his
journey thither. We can not doubt but that Luther would have been
judicially assassinated in that ancient city but for the imposing front
assumed by his well-armed and well-organized adherents, who not
only crowded into the streets of Worms, but who announced by
placards, even in the very bedchamber of the emperor, that a
thousand lives should pay for the loss of one hair of the reformer’s
head.
Had it depended on Von Hutten, the reformers would not have
waited till violence had been inflicted on Luther, ere they took their
own revenge for wrongs and oppressions done. But he was
overruled, and his hot blood was kept cool by profuse and prosaic
argument on the part of the schoolmen of his faction. He chafed, but
he obeyed. He had more difficulty in reducing to the same obedience
the bands of his adherents who occupied the city and its vicinity.
These thought that the safety of Luther could only be secured by
rescuing him at once from the hands of his enemies. The scholar-
knight thought so too; and he would gladly have charged against
such enemies. He made no signal, however, for the onslaught; on
the contrary he issued orders forbidding it; and recommended the
confederates to sheathe their swords, but yet to have their hands on
the hilt. The elector of Saxony was adverse to violence, and Luther
left Worms in safety, after defying Rome to her face.
Then came those unquiet times in which Charles V. so warmly
welcomed volunteers to his banner. Seduced by his promises, Franz
von Sickingen, with a few hundreds of strong-sinewed men, passed
over to the Imperial quarters. The old brotherly gathering at
Ebernberg was thus broken up; and Ulrich, who had offended both
pope and emperor by his denunciations of ecclesiastical and civil
tyranny, betook himself to Switzerland, where he hoped to find a
secure asylum, and a welcome from Erasmus.
This amphibious personage, however, who had already ceased to
laud Luther, affected now a horror against Von Hutten. He wrote of
him as a poor, angry, mangy wretch, who could not be content to live
in a room without a stove, and who was continually pestering his
friends for pecuniary loans. The fiery Ulrich assailed his false friend
in wrathful pamphlets. Erasmus loved the species of warfare into
which such attacks drew or impelled him. He replied to Ulrich more
cleverly than conclusively, in his “Sponge to wipe out the Aspersions
of Von Hutten.” But the enmity of Erasmus was as nothing compared
with the loss of Von Sickingen himself. In the tumultuary wars of his
native land he perished, and Ulrich felt that, despite some errors, the
good cause had lost an iron-handed and a clear-sighted champion.
There is little doubt that it was at the instigation of Erasmus that the
priestly party in Basle successfully urged the government authorities
to drive Ulrich from the asylum he had temporarily found there. He
quietly departed on issue of the command, and took his solitary and
painful way to Muhlhausen, where a host of reformers warmly
welcomed the tottering skeleton into which had shrunk the once well-
knit man. Here his vigor cast aloft its last expiring light. Muhlhausen
threw off the papal yoke, but the papist party was strong enough
there to raise an insurrection; and rather than endanger the safety of
the town, the persecuted scholar and soldier once more walked forth
to find a shelter. He reached Zurich in safety. He went at once to the
hearth of Zuinglius, who looked upon the terrible spectre in whom
the eyes alone showed signs of life; and he could hardly believe that
the pope cared for the person, or dreaded the intellect, of so
ghostlike a champion as this.
Ulrich, excommunicated, outlawed and penniless, was in truth
sinking fast. His hand had not strength to enfold the pommel of his
sword. From his unconscious fingers dropped the pen.
“Who will defend me against my calumniators?” asked the yet willing
but now incapable man.
“I will!” said the skilful physician, Otto Brunfels; and the cooper’s son
stoutly protected the good name of Ulrich, after the latter was at
peace in the grave.
The last hours of the worn-out struggler for civil and religious liberty,
were passed at Ufnau, a small island in the Lake of Zurich. He had
been with difficulty conveyed thither, in the faint hope that his health
might profit by the change. There he slowly and resignedly died on
the last day of August, 1523, and at the early age of thirty-eight.
A few dearly-loved books and some letters constituted all his
property. He was interred on the island, but no monument has ever
marked the spot where his wornout body was laid down to repose.
Through life, whether engaged with sword or pen, his absorbing
desire was that his memory might be held dear by his survivors. He
loved activity, abhorred luxury, adored liberty; and, for the sake of
civil and religious freedom, he fought and sang with earnest alacrity.
Lyre on arm, and sword in hand, he sang and summoned, until hosts
gathered round him, and cheered the burthen of all he uttered. “The
die is thrown! I’ve risked it for truth and freedom’s sake.” Against
pope and kaiser, priest and soldier, he boldly cried, “Slay my frame
you may, but my soul is beyond you!” He was the star that
harbingered a bright dawn. His prevailing enemies drove him from
his country; the grave which they would have denied him, he found
in Switzerland, and “after life’s fitful fever,” the scholar-knight sleeps
well in the island of the Zurich-Zee.
From the Zurich-Zee we will now retrace our steps, and consider the
Sham Knights.
 SHAM KNIGHTS.
Between Tooting and Wandsworth lies a village of some celebrity
for its sham knights or mayors—the village of Garrat. The villagers,
some century ago, possessed certain common rights which were
threatened with invasion. They accordingly made choice of an
advocate, from among themselves, to protect their privileges. They
succeeded in their object, and as the selection had been originally
made at the period of a general election, the inhabitants resolved to
commemorate the circumstance by electing a mayor and knighting
him at each period of election for a new parliament. The resolution
was warmly approved by all the publicans in the vicinity, and the
Garrat elections became popular festivities, if not of the highest
order, at least of the jolliest sort.
Not that the ceremony was without its uses. The politicians and wits
of the day saw how the election might be turned to profit; and Wilkes,
and Foote, and Garrick, are especially named as having written
some of the addresses wherein, beneath much fustian, fun, and
exaggeration of both fact and humor, the people were led to notice,
by an Aristophanic process, the defects in the political system by
which the country was then governed. The publicans, however, and
the majority of the people cared more for the saturnalia than the
schooling; and for some years the sham mayors of Garrat were
elected, to the great profit, at least, of the tavern-keepers.
The poorer and the more deformed the candidate, the greater his
chance of success. Thus, the earliest mayor of whom there was any
record, was Sir John Harper, a fellow of infinite mirth and deformity,
whose ordinary occupation was that of an itinerant vender of brick-
dust. His success gave dignity to the brick-dust trade, and inspired
its members with ambition. They had the glory of boasting that their
friend and brother “Sir John” sat, when not sufficiently sober to
stand, during two parliaments. A specimen of his ready wit is given in
his remark when a dead cat was flung at him, on the hustings during
the period of his first election. A companion remarked with some
disgust upon the unpleasant odor from the animal. “That’s not to be
wondered at,” said Sir John, “you see it is a pole-cat.”
But Sir John was ousted by an uglier, dirtier, more deformed, and
merrier fellow than himself. The lucky personage in question was Sir
Jeffrey Dunstan. He was a noted individual, hunched like Esop, and
with as many tales, though not always with the like “morals.” He was
a noted dealer in old wigs, for it was before men had fallen into what
was then considered the disreputable fashion of wearing their own
hair, under round hats. Sir John was a republican; but he did not
despise either his office of mayor or his courtesy title of knight. Had
he possessed more discretion and less zeal, he probably would have
prospered in proportion. In the best, that is, in the quietest, of times,
Sir Jeffrey could with difficulty keep his tongue from wagging. He
never appeared in the streets with his wig-bag on his shoulder,
without a numerous crowd following, whom he delighted with his
sallies, made against men in power, whose weak points were
assailable. The French Revolution broke out when Sir Jeffrey was
mayor, and this gave a loose to his tongue, which ultimately laid him
up by the heels. The knight grew too political, and even seditious, in
his street orations, and he was in consequence committed to prison,
in 1793, for treasonable practices. This only increased his popularity
for a time, but it tamed the spirit of the once chivalrous mayor. When
he ceased to be wittily bold, he ceased to be cared for by the
constituents whose presence made the electors at Garrat. After
being thrice elected he was successfully opposed and defeated,
under a charge of dishonesty. The pure electors of Garrat could have
borne with a political traitor; but as they politely said, they “could not
a-bear a petty larcenist,” and Sir Jeffrey Dunstan was,
metaphorically and actually presented “with the sack.”
When Manners Sutton ceased to be Speaker, he claimed, I believe,
to be made a peer; on the plea that it was not becoming that he who
had once occupied the chair, should ever be reduced to stand upon
the floor, of the House of Commons. Sir Jeffrey Dunstan had
something of a similar sense of dignity. Having fallen from the height
of mayor of Garrat, what was then left for Sir Jeffrey? He got as
“drunk as a lord,” was never again seen sober, and, in 1797, the year
following that of his disgrace, the ex-mayor died of excess. So nice
of honor was Sir Jeffrey Dunstan!
He was succeeded by Sir Harry Dimsdale, the mutilated muffin-
seller, whose tenure of office was only brief, however brilliant, and
who has the melancholy glory of having been the last of the
illustriously dirty line of knighted mayors of Garrat. It was not that
there was any difficulty in procuring candidates, but there was no
longer the same liberality on the part of the peers and publicans to
furnish a purse for them. Originally, the purse was made up by the
inhabitants, for the purpose of protecting their collective rights.
Subsequently, the publicans contributed in order that the attractions
of something like a fair might be added, and therewith great increase
of smoking and drinking. At that time the peerage did not disdain to
patronize the proceeding, and the day of election was a holyday for
thousands. Never before or since have such multitudes assembled
at the well-known place of gathering; nor the roads been so blocked
up by carts and carriages, honorable members on horses, and
dustmen on donkeys. Hundreds of thousands sometimes
assembled, and, through the perspiring crowd, the candidates,
dressed like chimney-sweepers on May-day, or in the mock fashion
of the period, were brought to the hustings in the carriages of peers,
drawn by six horses, the owners themselves condescending to
become their drivers.
The candidate was ready to swear anything, and each elector was
required to make oath, on a brick-bat, “quod rem cum aliquâ muliere
intra limites istius pagi habuissent.” The candidates figured under
mock pseudonyms. Thus, at one election there were against Sir
Jeffrey, Lord Twankum, Squire Blowmedown, and Squire Gubbings.
His lordship was Gardener, the Garrat grave-digger, and the squires
were in humble reality, Willis, a waterman, and Simmonds, a
Southwark publican. An attempt was made to renew the old
saturnalia in 1826, when Sir John Paul Pry offered himself as a
candidate, in very bad English, and with a similarly qualified success.
He had not the eloquent power of the great Sir Jeffrey, who, on
presenting himself to the electors named his “estate in the Isle of
Man” as his qualification; announced his intention of relieving the
king in his want of money, by abolishing its use; engaged to keep his
promises as long as it was his interest to do so, and claimed the
favorable influence of married ladies, on the assurance that he would
propose the annulling of all marriages, which, as he said, with his
ordinary logic, “must greatly increase the influence of the crown, and
vastly lower Indian bonds.” He intimated that his own ambition was
limited to the governorship of Duck Island, or the bishopric of
Durham. The latter appointment was mentioned for the purpose of
enabling the usually shirtless, but for the moment court-dressed
knight, to add that he was “fond of a clean shirt and lawn-sleeves.”
He moreover undertook to show the governors of India the way
which they ought to be going, to Botany Bay; and to discover the
longitude among the Jews of Duke’s Place.
Courtesy was imperative on all the candidates toward each other.
When Sir Jeffrey Dunstan opposed Sir William Harper, there were
five other candidates, namely—“Sir William Blaze, of high rank in the
army—a corporal in the city train-bands; Admiral Sir Christopher
Dashwood, known to many who has (sic) felt the weight of his hand
on their shoulders, and showing an execution in the other. Sir
William Swallowtail, an eminent merchant, who supplies most of the
gardeners with strawberry baskets; Sir John Gnawpost, who carries
his traffic under his left arm, and whose general cry is ‘twenty-five if
you win and five if you lose;’ and Sir Thomas Nameless, of
reputation unmentionable.” Sir John Harper was the only knight who
forgot chivalrous courtesy, and who allowed his squire in armor to
insult Sir Jeffrey. But this was not done with impunity. That knight
appealed to usage, compelled his assailant to dismount, drop his
colors, walk six times round the hustings, and humbly ask pardon.
Sir William Swallowtail, mentioned above, “was one William Cock, a
whimsical basket-maker of Brentford, who, deeming it proper to have
an equipage every way suitable to the honor he aspired to, built his
own carriage, with his own hands, to his own taste. It was made of
wicker work, and was drawn by four, high, hollow-backed horses,
whereon were seated dwarfish boys, whimsically dressed, for
postillions. In allusion to the American War, two footmen, tarred and
feathered, rode before the carriage. The coachman wore a wicker
hat, and Sir William himself, from the seat of his vehicle, maintained
his mock dignity, in grotesque array, amid unbounded applause.” It
should be added that Foote, who witnessed the humors of the
election more than once, brought Sir Jeffrey upon the stage in the
character of Doctor Last; but the wretched fellow, utterly incapable
and awfully alarmed, was driven from the stage by the hisses of the
whole house. Let us now look abroad for a few “Shams.”
If foreign lands have sent no small number of pseudo-chevaliers to
London, they have also abounded in many by far too patriotic or
prudent to leave their native land. The Hôtel Saint Florentin, in Paris,
was the residence of the Prince Talleyrand, but before his time it was
the stage and the occasional dwelling-place of an extraordinary
actor, known by the appellation of the Chevalier, or the Count de St.
Germain. He was for a time the reigning wonder of Paris, where his
history was told with many variations; not one true, and all
astounding. The popular voice ascribed to him an Egyptian birth, and
attributed to him the power of working miracles. He could cure the
dying, and raise the dead; could compose magic philters, coin
money by an impress of his index finger; was said to have
discovered the philosopher’s stone, and to be able to make gold and
diamonds almost at will. He was, moreover, as generous as he was
great, and his modest breast was covered with knightly orders, in
proof of the gratitude of sovereigns whom he had obliged. He was
supposed to have been born some centuries back, was the most
gigantic and graceful impostor that ever lived, and exacted implicit
faith in his power from people who had none in the power of God.
The soirées of the Hôtel St. Florentin were the admiration of all
Paris, for there alone, this knight-count of many orders appeared to
charm the visiters and please himself. His prodigality was enormous,
so was his mendacity. He was graceful, witty, refined, yet not lacking
audacity when his story wanted pointing, and always young, gave
himself out for a Methuselah.
The following trait is seriously told of him, and is well substantiated.
“Chevalier,” said a lady to him one night, at a crowded assembly of
the Hôtel St. Florentin, “do you ever remember having, in the course
of your voyages, encountered our Lord Jesus Christ?” “Yes,” replied
the profane impostor, without hesitation and raising his eyes to
heaven. “I have often seen and often spoken to Him. I have
frequently had occasion to admire his mildness, genius, and charity.
He was a celestial being; and I often prophesied what would befall
Him!” The hearers, far from being shocked, only continued to ply the
count with other questions. “Did you ever meet with the Wandering
Jew?” asked a young marquiss. “Often!” was the reply; and the count
added with an air of disdain:—“that wretched blasphemer once
dared to salute me on the high-road; he was then just setting out on
his tour of the world, and counted his money with one hand in his
pocket, as he passed along.” “Count,” asked a Chevalier de St.
Louis, “who was the composer of that brilliant sonata you played to-
night, on the harpsichord?” “I really can not say. It is a song of
victory, and I heard it executed for the first time on the day of the
triumph of Trajan.” “Will you be indiscreet, dear count, for once,”
asked a newly-married baronne, “and tell us the names of the three
ladies whom you have the most tenderly loved?” “That is difficult,”
said the honest knight with a smile, “but I think I may say that they
were Lucretia, Aspasia, and Cleopatra.”
The gay world of Paris said he was, at least two thousand years old;
and he did not take the pains to contradict the report. There is
reason to suppose that he was the son of a Portuguese Jew, who
had resided at Bordeaux. His career was soon ended.
There was a far more respectable chevalier in our own country to
whom the term of Sham Knight can hardly apply; but as he called
himself “Sir John,” and that title was not admitted in a court of law,
some notice of him may be taken here.
There was then in the reign of George III., a knight of some notoriety,
whose story is rather a singular one. When Sir John Gallini is now
spoken of, many persons conclude that this once remarkable
individual received the honors of knighthood at the hands of King
George. I have been assured so by very eminent operatic
authorities, who were, nevertheless, completely in error. Sir John
Gallini was a knight of George III.’s time, but he was so created by a
far more exalted individual; in the opinion, at least, of those who give
to popes, who are elective potentates, a precedence over kings, who
are hereditary monarchs. The wonder is that Gallini was ever
knighted at all, seeing that he was simply an admirable ballet-dancer.
But he was the first dancer who ever received an encore for the
dexterous use of his heels. The Pope accordingly clapped upon
them a pair of golden spurs, and Gallini was, thenceforth, Cavaliere
del Sperone d’Oro. Such a knight may be noticed in this place.
Gallini came to England at a time when that part of the world, which
was included in the term “people of quality,” stood in need of a little
excitement. This was in 1759, when there was the dullest of courts,
with the heaviest of mistresses, and an opera, duller and heavier
than either. Gallini had just subdued Paris by the magic of his
saltatory movements. He thence repaired to London, with his
reputation and slight baggage. He did not announce his arrival. It
was sufficient that Gallini was there. He had hardly entered his
lodgings when he was engaged, on his own terms. He took the town
by storm. His pas seul was pronounced divine. The “quality” paid him
more honor than if he had invented something useful to his fellow-
men. He could not raise his toe, without the house being hushed into
silent admiration. His entrechats were performed amidst thundering
echoes of delight; his “whirls” elicited shrieks of ecstacy; and when
he suddenly checked himself in the very swiftest of his wild career
and looked at the house with a complacent smile, which seemed to
say—“What do you think of that?” there ensued an explosion of
tumultuous homage, such as the spectators would have not
vouchsafed to the young conqueror of Quebec. Gallini, as far as
opera matters were concerned, was found to be the proper man in
the proper place. For four or five years he was despotic master of
the ballet. He was resolved to be master of something else.
There was then in London a Lady Elizabeth Bertie. Her father, the
Earl of Abingdon, then lately deceased, had, in his youth, married a
Signora Collino, daughter to a “Sir John Collins.” The latter knight
was not English, but of English descent. His son, Signor Collino, was
a celebrated player of the lute in this country. He was indeed the last
celebrated player on that instrument in England.
Gallini then, the very head of his profession, ranking therein higher
than the Abingdons did in the peerage, was rather condescending
than otherwise, when he looked upon the Earl of Abingdon as his
equal. The earl whom he so considered was the son of the one who
had espoused the Signora Collino, and Lady Elizabeth Bertie was
another child of the same marriage. When Gallini the dancer,
therefore, began to think of proposing for the hand of that lady, he
was merely thinking of marrying the niece of an instrumental
performer. Gallini did not think there was derogation in this; but he
did think, vain, foolish fellow that he was, that such a union would
confer upon him the title of “my lord.”
Gallini was a gentleman, nevertheless, in his way—that is, both in
manners and morals. Proud indeed he was, as a peacock, and
ambitious as a “climbing-boy,” desirous for ever of being at the top,
as speedily as possible, of every branch of his profession. He was
the “professor of dancing” in the Abingdon family, where his
agreeable person, his ready wit, his amiability, and the modesty
beneath which he hid a world of pretension, rendered him a general
favorite. He was very soon the friend of the house; and long before
he had achieved that rank, he was the very particular friend of Lady
Elizabeth Bertie. She loved her mother’s soft Italian as Gallini spoke
it; and in short she loved the Italian also, language and speaker.
Lady and Signor became one.
When the match became publicly known the “did you evers?” that
reached from box to box and echoed along the passages of the
opera-house were deafening. “A lady of quality marry a dancer!”
Why not, when maids of honor were held by royal coachmen as
being bad company for the said coachman’s sons? It was a more
suitable match than that of a lady of quality with her father’s footman.
Gallini happened to be in one of the lobbies soon after his marriage,
where it was being loudly discussed by some angry beauties. In the
midst of their ridicule of the bridegroom he approached, and
exclaimed, “Lustrissima, son io! Excellent lady, I am the man!” “And
what does the man call himself?” asked they with a giggle, and
doubtless also with reference to the story of the bridegroom
considering himself a lord by right of his marriage with a
“lady”—“what does the man call himself?” “Eccelenza,” replied
Gallini with a modest bow, “I am Signor Giovanni Gallini, Esquire.” In
the midst of their laughter he turned upon his heel, and went away to
dress in flesh-colored tights, short tunic, and spangles.
The marriage was not at first an unhappy one. There were several
children, but difficulties also increased much faster than the family.
Not pecuniary difficulties, for Gallini was a prudent man, but class
difficulties. The signor found himself without a properly-defined
position, or what is quite as uneasy probably in itself, he was above
his proper position, without being able to exact the homage that he
thought was due to him. The brother-in-law of the earl was in the
eyes of his own wife, only the dancing-master of their children.
Considering that the lady had condescended to be their mother, she
might have carried the condescension a little farther, and paid more
respect to the father. Dissension arose, and in a tour de mains family
interferences rendered it incurable. The quarrel was embittered, a
separation ensued, and after a tranquil union of a few years, there
were separate households, with common ill-will in both.
He felt himself no longer a “lord,” even by courtesy, but he resolved
to be what many lords have tried to be, in vain, or who ruined
themselves by being, namely, proprietor and manager of the opera-
house. This was in 1786, by which time he had realized a fortune by
means of much industry, active heels, good looks, capital benefits,
monopoly of teaching, prudence, temperance, and that economy,
which extravagant people call parsimony. This fortune, or rather a
portion of it, he risked in the opera-house—and lost it all, of course.
He commenced his career with as much spirit as if he had only been
the steward of another man’s property; and he made engagements
in Italy with such generosity and patriotism, that the Pope having
leisure for a while to turn his thoughts from divinity to dancing,
became as delighted with Gallini as Pio Nono was with Fanny Cerito.
We are bound to believe that his holiness was in a fit of infallible
enthusiasm, when he dubbed Gallini, Knight of the Golden Spur. The
latter returned to London and wrote himself down “Sir John.” Cards
were just come into fashion, to enable people to pay what were
called “visites en blanc,” and “Sir John Gallini,” was to be seen in
every house where the latter had friend or acquaintance. His portrait
was in all the shops, with this chivalric legend beneath it, and there
are yet to be seen old opera libretti with a frontispiece exhibiting to
an admiring public the effigies of “Sir John Gallini.”
The public liked the sound, liked the man, and sanctioned the title,
by constantly applying it to the individual, without any mental
reserve. They had seen so many fools made knights that they were
glad to see a spirited man make one of himself, by application of
“Sir” to a papally-conferred title. The law, however, no more allowed
it than it did that of the Romanist official who got presented at court
as “Monsignore something,” and whose presentation was cancelled
as soon as the pleasant trick was discovered. Gallini, however,
continued in the uninterrupted title until circumstances brought him,
as a witness, into the presence of Lord Kenyon. When the Italian
opera-dancer announced himself in the hearing of that judge as Sir
John Gallini, the sight of the judge was what Americans call “a
caution.” His lordship looked as disgusted as Lord Eldon used to do,
when he heard an Irish Romanist Bishop called by a territorial title.
As far as the wrath of Lord Kenyon could do it, metaphorically, the
great judge un-sir-John’d Sir John and chopped off his golden spurs
in open court. Gallini was so good-natured and popular, that the
public opinion would not confirm the opinion of the judge, and Sir
John remained Sir John, in the popular mouth, throughout the
kingdom.
He was growing rich enough to buy up half the knights in the country.
He built the music-rooms in Hanover Square, for Bach and Abel’s
subscription concerts. That is, he built the house; and let it out to any
who required any portion of it, for any purpose of music, dancing,
exhibiting, lecturing, or any other object having profit in view. He
lodged rather than lived in it himself, for he had reserved only a small
cabinet for his own use, magnificently sacrificing the rest of the
mansion for the use of others, who paid him liberally for such use.
Therewith, Sir John continued his old profession as teacher as well
as performer, manager at home as well as at the theatre; wary
speculator, saving—avaricious, as they said who failed to cheat him
of his money on faith of illusory promises, with an admirable eye for
a bargain, and admirable care for the result of the bargain after he
had concluded it.
Everything went as merrily with him as it did with Polycrates, and ill-
fortune and he seemed never to be acquainted, till one fatal night in
1789, the Opera House was burned to the ground, and the tide that
had been so long flowing was now thought to be on the ebb. Sir
John was too heroic to be downcast, and he did what many a hero
would never even have thought of doing, nor, indeed, any wise man
either. He put down thirty thousand pounds in hard cash toward the
rebuilding of the opera-house, sent to Italy for the best architectural
plans, left no means unemployed to erect a first rate theatre, and
worked for that object with as much integrity as if the safety of the
universe depended on the building of an opera-house in the
Haymarket. What the public lost in one night was thus being made
good to them by another.
Meanwhile fashion was in a deplorable state of musical destitution.
What was to become of London without an opera? How could the
world, the infinitesimal London world, exist without its usual
allowance of roulades and rigadoons? Our knight was just the
champion to come in beneficially at such an extremity. He opened
the little theatre in the Haymarket, and nobody went to it. Fashion
turned up its nose in scorn, and kept away; nay, it did worse, it acted
ungratefully, and when some speculators established an opera at the
Pantheon, Fashion led the way from the Haymarket, and a host of
followers went in her train to Oxford street. “I will victoriously bring
her back to her old house,” said Sir John. The knight was gallant-
hearted, but he did not know that he had other foes besides Fashion.
Sir John got into difficulties through law, lawyers, and false friends.
He ruled as monarch at the opera-house, only to fall, with ruin. But
he was not a man to be dismayed. His courage, zeal, and industry,
were unbounded. He applied all these to good purpose, and his life
was not only a useful but an honorable and a prosperous one. It
ended, after extending beyond the ordinary allotted time of man,
calmly, yet somewhat suddenly; and “Sir John” Gallini died in his
house in Hanover Square, leaving a large fortune, the memory of
some eccentricities, and a good name and example, to his children.
For my part, I can never enter the ancient concert-rooms in Hanover
Square, without wishing a “Requiescat!” to the knight of the Golden
Spur, by whom the edifice was constructed.
If Sir John Gallini, the dancer, could boast of having been knighted
by a pope, Crescentini, the singer, could boast of having been
knighted by an emperor. He received this honor at the hands of
Napoleon I. He had previously been accustomed to compliments
from, or in presence of, emperors. Thus, in 1804, at Vienna, he sang
the Ombra adorata in the character of Romeo, with such exquisite
grace and tenderness, that, on one occasion, when he had just
finished this admirable lyric piece, the whole court forming part of his
audience, two doves descended from the clouds, bearing him a
crown of laurels, while on every side, garlands and flowers were
flung upon the enchanted and enchanting warbler. The Austrian
Emperor paid him more honor than his predecessor had ever paid to
the Polish king who saved the empire from the Turks. The reputation
of Crescentini gained for him an invitation, in 1809, to the imperial
court of France. He played in company with Grassini, the two
representing Romeo and Juliet. The characters had never been
better represented, and Talma, who was present, is said to have
wept—an on dit which I do not credit, for there is not only nothing to
cry at in the Italian characters, but Talma himself was in no wise
addicted to indulgence in the melting mood, nor had he even
common courtesy for his own actual Juliet. But the great actor was
pleased, and the great emperor was delighted; so much so, that he
conferred an honor on Crescentini which he would never grant to
Talma—made a chevalier of him. It is true that Talma desired to be
made a knight of the Legion of Honor; but the emperor would not
place on the breast of a tragedian that cross which was the reward,
then, only of men who had played their parts well, in real and bloody
tragedies. The French tragedian declined the honor that was now
accorded to Crescentini, whom the emperor summoned to his box,
and decorated him with the insignia of the knight of the Iron Crown.
The singing chevalier was in ecstacies. But the Juliet of the night had
more cause to be so, for to her, Napoleon presented a draft on the
Treasury, for 20,000 francs. “It will be a nice little dower for one of my
nieces,” said the ever-generous Grassini to one of her friends, on the
following day. Several years after this, a little niece, for whom she