A Distinct and Identifiable Entity Spanning Borders
Besesayo Kezo, IPS, Retd DGP
For centuries, the Naga peoples inhabited a rugged highland expanse that today straddles four Indian states: Nagaland, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, and Assam, and two states in Myanmar. They lived as a constellation of independent village republics, each a self-governing polity bound by kinship, custom, and the defensive geography of the hills. Mutually hostile and lacking a central monarchy or overarching authority, they fought British expeditionary forces individually rather than collectively when the colonial power first pressed into their territories in the nineteenth century. This history of fiercely defended autonomy, interrupted by external intrusion yet never fully extinguished, forms the foundation of the modern Naga claim to a distinct political entity and to the human right to self-determination.
Village Republics Before the British
Before sustained British contact, the Nagas lived in what colonial observers later called "wild country." Each village functioned as a miniature republic: decisions were made by councils of elders and warriors, land was held communally, and social order rested on customary law rather than written codes or royal decrees. Inter-village warfare and head-taking raids were endemic, reinforcing local identities and preventing the emergence of larger political structures. Some villages near the plains or valleys acknowledged the suzerainty of neighboring powers and paid nominal tribute. Kangleipak (Manipuri) rulers, Burmese kings, and the Ahom kings of Assam all encountered Naga groups, yet none exercised direct administrative control over the interior hills. The terrain itself (steep ridges, dense forests, and monsoon isolation) served as the most effective barrier to external domination. In this environment, political life remained intensely local. A man was first and foremost a member of his village and clan; the idea of a wider Naga nation had not yet taken shape.
The Treaty of Yandabo and the Opening of the Hills
The region's geopolitical landscape shifted decisively with the Treaty of Yandabo, signed on 24 February 1826. After defeat in the First Anglo-Burmese War, the Burmese kingdom ceded Assam, Manipur, and related territories to the British East India Company. The treaty extinguished Burmese claims to the Brahmaputra Valley and neighboring principalities, clearing the way for British expansion. The Company soon recognized the economic potential of Assam's tea and oil and needed a reliable land route linking its new territories to Burma. That route necessarily passed through the Naga Hills, which had been a remote frontier but suddenly gained strategic value.
Nagas, long accustomed to raiding the plains villages under British protection, regarded the newcomers as trespassers. Survey teams and road parties entering the hills in the 1830s were ambushed. These early confrontations set a pattern: the British sought order and communication, while the Nagas defended their territory and the right to continue traditional practices. The disparity in weaponry was stark (British muskets, artillery, and disciplined infantry versus Naga daos, spears, and bows), but the hills' topography repeatedly frustrated colonial columns. Multiple punitive expeditions were launched, yet no permanent control was established.
The Battle of Kikrüma, 1851
The first major pitched engagement occurred at Kikrüma village on 11–12 February 1851. The Kikrüma Village Republic, a powerful Eastern Angami (Chakhesang) settlement with more than a thousand households and approximately two thousand warriors, had openly challenged British authority. Two heralds delivered a formal challenge and presented a spear as a token. Captain Reid's force, equipped with three-pounder guns, mortars, and muskets, and supported by approximately 800 warriors from neighboring villages that were traditional adversaries of Kikrüma, attacked from the north. The defenders, armed with traditional weapons, fought with exceptional tenacity. Both colonial accounts and oral histories report heavy casualties: hundreds of Kikrüma warriors were killed, much of the village was burned, and noncombatants sheltering in nearby fields were massacred by allied levies. Major John Butler later described the engagement as one of the bloodiest battles ever fought in Assam.
The scale of the bloodshed shocked Governor-General Lord Dalhousie. In a minute dated February 1851, he rejected permanent occupation, arguing that the hills would yield no profit commensurate with the cost and difficulty of administration. He recommended a policy of non-interference, provided the Nagas ceased raiding protected villages. "Hereafter we should confine ourselves to our own ground," he wrote, "protect it as it can and must be protected; not meddle in the feuds or fights of these savages." The policy proved unenforceable. Raids continued throughout the 1850s and into the early 1860s. British prestige suffered, and by the mid-1860s the government shifted to a forward policy. The Naga Hills District was proclaimed, and administrative headquarters were eventually moved to Kohima in the 1870s to enable closer supervision of the "unruly" tribes.
The Fall of Khonoma and the End of Armed Resistance
The last great military resistance came from the village republic of Khonoma. In October 1879, Deputy Commissioner G. H. Damant was killed while attempting to enter the fortified village with a small escort. The ensuing uprising drew contingents from numerous Angami settlements (estimates range into the thousands) and briefly besieged the Kohima stockade. A large British force stormed Khonoma on 22 November 1879. The defenders withdrew to the Chakka forts higher on Mount Japfü, from which they continued guerrilla operations, including a daring raid on the Baladhan tea garden in Cachar, more than eighty miles away, in January 1880. Only in March 1880 did the remaining stronghold submit. Thereafter, a comparative, if uneasy, peace settled over the hills under a relatively light colonial administration that largely left customary life intact, so long as no direct challenge to the state arose. Fines were imposed, firearms surrendered, and some villages were relocated from inaccessible ridges, but the daily rhythms of Naga society continued largely undisturbed.
Missionaries, Education and the Birth of a Pan-Naga Consciousness
Into this post-conquest landscape came American Baptist missionaries. Conversion to Christianity, the establishment of schools, and the introduction of written forms of Naga languages gradually broadened social horizons. For the first time, people who had identified primarily as men of Kikrüma, Khonoma, Kohima, or Mokokchung began to see themselves as part of a wider Naga community. Education created a small but articulate class of interpreters, teachers, and clerks who moved between villages and colonial centers. The shared experience of colonial rule, however light, provided a common reference point that village feuds had previously obscured. Christianity also provided a common moral language and an institutional network that transcended tribal boundaries.
This emerging consciousness was dramatically accelerated by the First World War. Thousands of Nagas were recruited into the Labor Corps and sent to France and Mesopotamia. Grouped by the Allied forces and exposed to the wider world, they returned with a sharpened sense of collective identity. In 1918, they founded the Naga Club in Kohima, the first modern political organization to claim to speak for Nagas across tribal lines. The Club's members were mostly educated clerks, interpreters, and former Labor Corps men who had seen the colonial state treat them as a single category.
The Simon Commission Petition of 1929
When the Simon Commission visited the Naga Hills in January 1929, the Naga Club submitted a memorandum that has since become a foundational document in Naga political thought. The petitioners requested that, should the British ever leave India, the Nagas be "left alone to determine for ourselves as in ancient times." They explicitly stated that they represented not only the Club's members but also the tribes to which they belonged. The request was not granted. Instead, the colonial boundary between India and Burma was drawn through Naga territory, arbitrarily dividing a people who had never been subject to either state. Neither India nor Burma had exercised effective control over the Naga Hills before the British arrived; the partition was an administrative convenience of empire, rather than a recognition of pre-existing sovereignty. The memorandum's central demand has remained a moral touchstone for subsequent generations of Naga political leaders.
An Unfulfilled Demand and the Question of the Future
The demand "to be left alone" has remained the moral core of Naga political aspiration for nearly a century. After 1947, the Naga National Council and later other organizations pursued that aspiration through both political negotiation and armed struggle. Ceasefires, accords, and frameworks have come and gone, yet the underlying claim (that the Nagas constitute a distinct people with the right to determine their own political future) has endured. The geographic reality remains: Naga communities continue to live across the Indian states of Nagaland, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, and Assam, as well as in Myanmar beyond the international border. Any durable settlement must therefore reckon with this trans-border character. Decades of conflict have exacted a heavy human and economic cost, yet they have also kept the question of political status alive in ways that purely administrative integration might have obscured.
What bright future, then, can the Nagas realistically envision under the human right to self-determination? History suggests the answer will not lie in a return to isolated village republics, nor in simple integration that erases the distinctiveness forged through resistance, conversion, education, and wartime service. A sustainable vision would need to rest on three pillars. First, recognition of the Nagas as a distinct people whose political status cannot be reduced to that of ordinary citizens of the successor states of the British Empire. Second, institutional arrangements (whether within a federal or confederal framework or through special autonomous status) that enable genuine self-government over land, resources, customary law, and cultural affairs. Third, a cross-border dimension that acknowledges the reality of Naga populations in Myanmar and creates mechanisms for free movement, cultural exchange, and coordinated development without compromising the sovereignty of either state.
Such an outcome would require political imagination on all sides. For the Nagas, it would mean translating the heroic memory of Kikrüma and Khonoma into practical governance rather than perpetual confrontation and addressing internal divisions that have historically weakened collective action. For India and Myanmar, it would mean accepting that the colonial boundaries drawn through the hills were not the final word on the political identity of the people living there. The record of the past two centuries shows that force alone has never produced lasting submission and that the demand first articulated to the Simon Commission has not faded with time. Education, Christian institutions, and modern political organization have given the Nagas tools of cohesion that their ancestors lacked; the challenge is to use them constructively.
The Nagas began as mutually hostile village republics. Under pressure from external intrusion and the opportunities offered by education and war, they became a people conscious of a shared destiny. Whether that destiny can be realized through the peaceful exercise of the right to self-determination remains the central unanswered question in their modern history. The answer will determine not only the future of the Naga Hills but also the credibility of claims, repeatedly advanced since 1947, that the successor states of the British Empire can accommodate distinct peoples without extinguishing their identities. A bright future is possible if historical memory is paired with pragmatic institution-building and all parties accept that the unfinished business of 1929 still requires a just resolution.
