The siege that shaped Naga destiny

HIS MAJESTY’S HEADHUNTERS: The Siege Of Kohima That Shaped World History

Author: Mmhonlumo Kikon

Publisher: Penguin

Price: Rs 599 
Pages: 256

“The whole forest is moving! So many of them have come”, shouted a villager as Japanese soldiers swarmed into the village of Viswema, 20 kilometres south of Kohima, in the first week of April 1944. Lieutenant General Mutaguchi Renya, commander of the Japanese Fifteenth Army in Burma, had launched a four-pronged attack aimed at smashing and rolling up British Indian forces all the way up to Dimapur in the north and Imphal in the south. The troops entering Viswema were from the Japanese 31st Division—tasked with advancing through the Naga Hills, capturing the town of Kohima and helping mop up Dimapur and Imphal.

The Japanese swiftly cut water supply to the town, forcing the garrison to rely on air supply of water as well as food and ammunition. It took two weeks for British Indian forces to relieve the garrison, but the battle for Kohima continued for another six weeks. The Japanese had dug into defensive positions on the heights overlooking the town. It took a string of heavy set-piece attacks backed by massive artillery and air power (which the Japanese entirely lacked) to force them out of the Naga Hills. The British commander, General Billy Slim, would note of Kohima after the Japanese withdrawal: “The whole place is a mass of splintered trees, shell craters, a honeycomb of trenches and dugouts, spread out over precipitous, broken hills, 5000 ft high.”

For decades after, the campaign in Northeast India and Burma was the Cinderella of the Second World War. More recently, though, it has drawn some interest among historians and curators of museums. Mmhonlümo Kikon rightly holds that these accounts tend to focus on soldiers (mostly British and American) and battles—practically airbrushing the local people out of the picture. Both the impact of the war on the Naga Hills and the role of the Nagas in shaping the outcome of the battle (as well as the wider war) remain largely unexamined by historians. This is the tangled, shadowy history that Kikon seeks to explore in this insightful and readable book.

Kikon is a politician, a member of the Nagaland legislative Assembly, and a published poet. His interest in this subject was apparently kindled some years ago by a request from the Japanese Association for Recovery & Repatriation of War Casualties to visit his official residence in Kohima to search for the mortal remains of Japanese soldiers. The same year, the Nagaland government observed the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Kohima under the theme, “Remembrance, Reconciliation and Rebirth”. 

Noting the oddity of “Rebirth”, Kikon writes that the event was attended by senior Japanese and British officials as well as families of those who had fought. Repatriation and commemoration, he observes, are contrasting ways in which the countries and people pulled into the vortex of the war attempt to make sense of it.

Kikon, by contrast, offers more historically grounded reflections. He invites us to ponder the significance of the battle for the Nagas by juxtaposing it with their longer encounter with colonialism. Indeed, the first half of the book focuses on the 46 years preceding 1878 when Kohima became the seat of British administration in the Naga Hills. Kikon deftly unpacks this violent and contested construction of colonial rule. Thereafter, too, the colonial power continued to skirmish with the Naga tribes. Eventually, the British lit upon more sophisticated forms of control via excluded and partially excluded areas of administration. These coupled with Nagas’ embrace of Baptist Christianity gave them a new sense of common identity.

Against this historic backcloth, Kikon argues, the Nagas’ active wartime support for the British was the “unlikeliest of partnerships”. Using oral histories and local narratives as well as published accounts, he foregrounds various aspects of the Naga experience in this brutal conflict. The Nagas’ support for the British was not a foregone conclusion. The Japanese proclaimed the racial solidarity of Asian peoples and presented themselves as liberators from the colonial yoke. Their promises to pay for supplies and build schools went down rather well. Yet, in a couple of weeks, they dropped the veneer of camaraderie, adopting a robustly hierarchical stance and forcefully requisitioning meat and grain. In so doing, they “pushed the Nagas right into the arms of the British.”

Kikon captures shards of wartime memory through such artefacts as the Japanese Rupee introduced into the Naga Hills (some still in the possession of individuals as well as institutional collections) and the millions of American cigarettes sent to Kohima and Imphal during the campaign. 
 

Another recurrent wartime memory is the rumour of Subhas Chandra Bose being sighted in the Naga Hills. In fact, the Bose Brigade of the Indian National Army was deployed in Kohima in mid-May 1944. Its most successful action, alas, was to raise the Indian flag in Kohima. But the Nagas played a critical role in logistics and intelligence gathering as well as operating with the labour corps and the legendary V Force.

Kikon’s fluent and considered account is needlessly festooned with some hyperbolic claims. Kohima, he writes in the opening page, was “the site of the most ferocious battle in the annals of human history”—a claim repeated in the title of a chapter. In another attempt to justify such extravagance, he says that the British National Army Museum has voted the Battle of Kohima and Imphal—note the latter—as Britain’s greatest battle: “over and above the Battle of Waterloo, the Normandy Landings and Stalingrad.” The last is surely a revelation in British military history.

Such sales pitches are unnecessary. Kohima and Imphal decisively turned the tide against the Imperial Japanese Army in Southeast Asia. They and the subsequent campaign in Burma are the only land battles in which Japan was defeated during the Second World War. More importantly, wartime experience decisively transformed Naga society with consequences down to the present. This is as good a reason as any to come to terms with this history. And His Majesty’s Headhunters is a good place to start.

The reviewer is Professor of International Relations & History at Ashoka University. The book releases on November 27