How a people known first by their villages came to claim a political destiny the colonial map never fully contained
Besesayo Kezo, IPS
Retd. DGP
The Nagas did not begin as a nation. They began as villages. A man of Khonoma, Mokokchung or Longwa, or of a settlement on the Myanmar side of the Patkai, knew himself first by clan, khel and village. Law was customary, authority sat with the elders, and the horizon of obligation rarely ran past the next ridge.
Writers have compared that arrangement to the Greek city-states. The comparison is an analogy: there was no Naga Athens. Between the Brahmaputra and the Chindwin, the village was the republic, ordering its fields and judging its disputes without a plains king above it. The later claim to nationhood was not the restoration of a lost empire. It was a modern voice given to a freedom that had been local.
Named from outside
Outsiders noticed the difference first. British officers described a hill population unlike the valleys: distinct in language, dress, the Morung, the feast of merit, and a religion neither Hindu, Buddhist, nor Muslim. At places such as Kikrüma, the feast of merit left standing stones. “Naga” was largely an external label for communities who shared no political center. It stuck because the distinction was real, even if the unity it implied still lay ahead.
There was no Naga king with whom the British could negotiate, so British power arrived through military expeditions. In 1832, Jenkins and Pemberton crossed the hills. In 1851, the Battle of Kikrüma ended with the defenders massacred, prompting the British Empire to revise its policy toward the Naga Hills and adopt a policy of non-interference. The Naga Hills District was established in 1866, followed by the Inner Line in 1873, a military settlement, and the fall of Khonoma in 1879–80. A separate district on the Burma side was not proclaimed until 1940. A boundary the Nagas had not drawn divided Naga country.
A club, and a sentence
The first statement in a common name originated with men taken from the village. Labor Corps sent towards France in the First World War, and the interpreters of Kohima returned knowing that the plains political class did not speak for the hills. The Naga Club was formed there in 1918. On 10 January 1929 it gave the Simon Commission a memorandum. Indian parties boycotted the Commission. The Nagas used it.
It asked for no seat in an Indian parliament and no union with Burma. The hills, it said, had been included in the reformed scheme of India without the people’s knowledge, and when the British left, the Nagas should be left as they had been. The sentence quoted ever since is plain: the British alone had conquered them, and when that power departed, they should be as they were.
The request was refused but registered. The Government of India Act of 1935 made the Naga Hills an Excluded Area, outside the ministerial politics of Assam. Exclusion was not independence. It was an admission that the hills were not an ordinary district, which is why the memorandum is still cited.
Transfer, and the refusal
The war of 1944 made Kohima a battlefield and the hills a hinge between India and Burma. A tribal council encouraged in 1945 became the Naga National Council in 1946. The Hydari Agreement of June 1947 left a closing clause Naga leaders read as a right to decide after ten years, and Delhi did not. On 14 August 1947 the Council declared independence. Neither India nor Burma, independent from January 1948, accepted it. What 1929 had imagined as a return to the old freedom became a transfer. A people recognised as distinct were disposed of as territory.
India inherited the refusal. A plebiscite held by the Naga National Council on 16 May 1951 was later announced as a 99.9 percent affirmation of independence; Delhi has never accepted it as a legal referendum.
The 1952 election was boycotted, and from mid-decade the disagreement becamean armed conflict. Statehood, on 1 December 1963, gave Nagaland Article 371A and protection for customary law and land. For many Nagas it was a real gain. For the national movement, it covered only part of the people named in 1929, and the argument continued through the Shillong Accord of 1975 and the later splits.
Two countries, two demands
Nagas inhabit two countries: Nagaland, the hills of Manipur, parts of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam, and, in Myanmar, the Naga Self-Administered Zone of Sagaing and parts of Kachin. The boundary runs through settled country. A paper signed in Delhi cannot redraw it.
Two demands are regularly confused. Integration would bring the Naga areas of Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, and Assam into a single unit within India, and would clash with those states, especially Manipur. Sovereignty, as the national movement defines it, would cover both countries and cannot fit within the Indian Constitution without changing it. Conflating the two has made every talk of autonomy sound like a talk of secession.
What is actually unique
What is unique is the sequence, not the suffering. A people of villages was marked off by an empire, told by a statutory commission it wished to be left alone, written into the excluded areas of 1935, and transferred all the same. No other movement in the north-east draws such a straight line from January 1929 to a negotiation still open: a Framework Agreement with the NSCN (Isak–Muivah) in 2015, an Agreed Position with the Naga National Political Groups in 2017, and no final settlement. The blocks are the old ones. What can a separate flag or a shared sovereignty mean inside the Union; is integration a condition or a hope; who may sign; andwhat can be said of Nagas beyond a border India cannot redraw.
The village has not disappeared, and a settlement that ignores it will not survive. The republics are gone as a system. The memory that they were free, and that others noticed the freedom before it was transferred, has not gone. That memory is the unique aspect of Naga political history and the reason the question remains open.
