ABSTRACT
In August 2009, New Delhi Television (NDTV), a private, English-language television channel, aired a program called Warrior Tribes of Nagaland. ‘The longer I travelled, civilization as I knew it, was being left behind,’ says the program anchor as she crosses a modern-day bridge in a four-wheel drive luxury car and enters Nagaland. Her statement seems a carry-over from British times. Read alongside the Assam District Gazetteer's Report Volume IX, Naga Hills and Manipur (1905) prepared by B.C. Allen of the colonial government, it displays an uncanny similarity in content, and possibly also in their authors' mindset. Allen writes that the British thought there were places in Nagaland that were inhabited by ‘pertinacious savages.’ Allen's comment in 1905 demonstrates a long-standing colonial belief that had resulted in 10 military expeditions into the region by 1850. Each expedition involved the slaughter of locals, and the 10th expedition alone claimed 100 Naga lives. An 1873 missive from Lord Dalhousie, the British Governor General, makes explicit the British attitude towards the people of British India's northeastern region:
Hereafter we should confine ourselves to our own ground; protect it as it can and must be protected; not meddle in the feuds or fights of these savages; encourage trade with them as long as they are peaceful towards us; and rigidly exclude them from all communication either to sell what they have got, or to buy what they want if they should become turbulent or troublesome.
(Lord Dalhousie 1873, in Allen 1905)