Geographies of Difference

Explorations in Northeast Indian Studies

Mélanie Vandenhelsken, Meenaxi Barkataki-Ruscheweyh, Bengt G. Karlsson

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367277901
• eBook ISBN: 9781351615624
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book rethinks Northeast India as a lived space, a centre of interconnections and unfolding histories, instead of an isolated periphery. Questioning dominant tropes and assumptions around the Northeast, it examines socio-political and historical processes, border issues, the role of the state, displacement and development, debates over natural resources, violence, notions of body and belonging, movements, tensions and relations, and strategies, struggles and narratives that frame discussions on the region.

Drawing on current and emerging research in Northeast India studies, this work will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, human geography, sociology and social anthropology, history, cultural studies, media studies and South Asian studies.

Part I
Historical and ethnographic encounters

1 Reading Fürer-Haimendorf in Northeast India

Sanjib Baruah^*

‘Anthropology is political engagement, whether we want it to be or not’.

– Laura Nader, The Life of the Law (2002: 230)

The late Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf (1909–1995) is a familiar name to most people interested in Northeast India. I was born in that region: in the hill city of Shillong, then the capital of Assam, a province that in Fürer Haimendorf’s time included much of what is called Northeast India today. Books like Naked Nagas, Himalayan Barbary and Apa Tani and Their Neighbours – or more accurately, the titles – made an impression on me at a fairly young age. That was well before the thought of becoming an academic ever crossed my mind. I knew that Fürer-Haimendorf was Austrian, and that he was from Vienna. That bit of information stayed on my mind probably because one’s hometown is an important part of a person’s identity in India. Long before I connected Vienna to Wittgenstein and Freud, I associated it with Fürer-Haimendorf.

Fürer-Haimendorf was often asked how as a person born and brought up in sophisticated Vienna he managed to live among ‘primitive tribesmen in jungles and hills remote from all centres of western civilization’. He didn’t have a good answer, he said. But his response was that he was ‘happy just among such simple people’ (Fürer-Haimendorf 1990: 1). It is hard not to read an air of condescension in the use of the adjective ‘simple’. What makes certain peoples of the world ‘simple’? Fürer-Haimendorf didn’t think it was necessary to elaborate. He assumed that his interlocutors and readers would know the difference between simple and complex peoples and their cultures. Yet it can perhaps be said that in at least one unexpected way, Vienna had prepared Fürer-Haimendorf for life in the hills of Northeast India. While doing fieldwork during 1936–1937, when he lived in Wakching – in today’s Mon district of Nagaland – he said, he ‘was never bored and never longed for the pleasures of western civilization’. Yet once in a while he found himself singing ‘a Schubert or Hugo Wolf song, or even a passage from an opera’ (ibid.: 20). And he knew that music by heart, thanks to his early years in Vienna when he developed a passion for music and the opera.

We live at a time when cultures, as Ashis Nandy puts it, have ‘begun the return, like Freud’s unconscious, to haunt the modern system of nation-states’ (Nandy 2003: 2). It may be productive at this juncture to reflect on Fürer-Haimendorf’s intellectual project – of finding, understanding, recording and collecting for posterity the specimens of what he viewed as archaic and isolated cultures that were sure to vanish, or at least to change beyond recognition, under the onslaught of industrial civilisation.

I am not an anthropologist. But Fürer-Haimendorf’s books were not all anthropological texts; some were written with a wider readership in mind. Indeed the German translation of The Naked Nagas was published by a mass-market publisher, Brockhaus Verlag (Schicklgruber 2008: 359). This is his most famous work, and it is about a people now best known for their rejection of the postcolonial Indian political dispensation. The very moment of India’s independence in 1947 saw the beginnings of the Naga campaign for independence from India. And cultural arguments are central to the Naga movement. ‘[W]e have our own culture and civilization,’ declared Naga leader Angami Zapu Phizo, ‘which our forefathers developed centuries ago… . It has stood the test of time’ (Phizo 2002: 203). Naga nationalist assertion that they have their ‘own culture and civilisation’ underscores the restructuration, contestation and redefinition that cultural forms go through. The idea that all peoples have a right to self-determination emerged as ‘a principle of the highest order’(Anaya 1996: 75) in the international system that came into being after the imperial order unravelled at the end of the Second World War. That the idea of self-determination would inspire culturally empowered movements whose aspirations might collide against the statist logic of the world system of states and its ‘metrics of the possible’ (Appadurai 2007: 30) is hardly surprising. Anti-colonial nationalists such as India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru were important in the crafting of this world order. Yet Nehru had only this to say in response to the demand for Naga independence:

In the present context of affairs both in India and the world, it is impossible to consider, even for a moment, such an absurd demand for independence for the Nagas. It is doubtful whether the Nagas realize the consequences of what they are asking for.

(Linter 2012: 70)

Yet this supposedly absurd demand grew into one of the world’s oldest unresolved armed conflicts. Fortunately, this conflict appears to be finally heading towards a settlement. In August 2015 Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that his government has signed ‘a historic peace accord’ with the major Naga rebel organisation, the Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah).

It was his interest in so-called remote pre-contact primitive societies that took Fürer-Haimendorf to what was then the Naga Hills district of the colonial province of Assam, and later to the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) – today’s state of Arunachal Pradesh. It was ‘the relatively unknown parts’ of the Naga Hills that interested him (Fürer-Haimendorf 1962b: 2). That sitting in Vienna he could distinguish between the known and the unknown parts of those hills reflects the fact that by the time Fürer-Haimendorf entered the scene there was a long tradition of ethnographic studies of the Nagas by British colonial administrators and military officers.

The second area of focus of his Northeast Indian work – the ‘Apa Tanis and their Neighbours’ – refers to peoples who live in what is now the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. This work was the result of an unexpected official assignment that he got from the British colonial state in 1944: to ‘establish friendly relations with the un-administered hill-tribes, collect data on general conditions and tribal customs and ultimately explore the upper reaches of the Subansiri River’ (cf. Fürer-Haimendorf 1955: x).

Some of Fürer-Haimendorf’s accounts about peoples of Northeast India could easily have been the inspiration for anthropologist Bernard Cohn’s satire on ‘Anthropologyland’ – the model he says once existed in the practices and minds of anthropologists:

The anthropologist posits a place where the natives are authentic, untouched and aboriginal and strives to deny the central historical fact that the people he or she studies are constituted in the historically significant colonial situation… . [In their model of change] with the onslaught of the new, the social structure, values and lifeways of the ‘happy’ natives crumble. The anthropologist follows in the wake of impacts caused by the Western agents of change, and then tries to recover what might have been.

(Cohn 1980: 199)

In his preface to the second revised Indian edition of Naked Nagas published in 1962, one encounters exactly that kind of ‘imagined nostalgia’ (Appadurai 1996: 77). What he observed in 1936 and 1937, said Fürer-Haimendorf in this new preface, ‘is now a page in India’s history, to be remembered and recorded but never to be observed again’. Like archaeologists unearthing ‘with infinite care the brittle remnants of past civilizations,’ he wrote, ‘the anthropologist contemplates with nostalgic affection the way of life of a people he was fortunate enough to know before their traditional world fell to pieces’ (Fürer-Haimendorf 1962b: Preface).

A lot has been said about the history of anthropology’s complicity with empire. Indeed confronting that past – the intense questioning that occurred during the debate on the crisis of anthropology – led to a radical transformation of the discipline (Asad 1985). The lessons are relevant not just to anthropologists, but to all of us engaged in the study of so-called non-Western societies or developing countries.

Fürer-Haimendorf was born in Vienna in 1909. His interest in the hills of Northeast India preceded his first visit to the region. In 1931 he completed his doctoral thesis at the University of Vienna on a comparative study of the social and political organisations of the ‘hill-tribes’ of Assam and Northwest Burma. This was before he had ever set foot in Assam or Burma.

Following his doctoral work he had a research position at University of Vienna from 1931 to 1934. A Rockefeller Foundation grant to support European institutions impacted by the First World War enabled him to go to London. He attended Bronislaw Malinowski’s now-famous seminar at the London School of Economics in 1935 and 1936 and prepared for ‘anthropological work in Assam’. At that time the ethnographer and colonial administrator James Philip Mills, author of monographs on Ao and Lotha Nagas and deputy commissioner of the Naga Hills district, was on ‘home leave’ in England. When Fürer-Haimendorf met him, Mills took great interest in his plans and it was thanks to his encouragement that he decided to work on the Konyak Nagas (Fürer-Haimendorf 1962b: 2–3).

A chance meeting with a woman at a ball in the Austrian Embassy in London proved helpful to Fürer-Haimendorf. When he told her that he was going to India, according to Fürer-Haimendorf’s account, she said: ‘Oh, I have got friends who are going too.’ The woman was friends with none other than the family of Victor Alexander John Hope, or Lord Linlithgow who was leaving for India to be viceroy and governor general (Fürer-Haimendorf 1983). Not surprisingly, during his fieldwork Fürer-Haimendorf was known in some circles as the Viceroy’s friend, probably an enviable reputation for a non-official anthropologist in a colonial frontier.

When he arrived in the Naga Hills in 1936, Mills took him under his wing. ‘The day after tomorrow I am going on tour through some Eastern Angami villages. Would you like to come with me? We shall be away for a fortnight’ (Fürer-Haimendorf 1962b: 5–6). That invitation is the moment of origin of the Naked Nagas.

In 1949 he began teaching at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He taught there for nearly three decades until he retired as professor of Asian Anthropology in 1976. Apart from his writings on Northeast India he is known for books and articles he wrote on certain peoples of central India and Nepal as well. Fürer-Haimendorf was also a collector who brought numerous artefacts to European museums including the Museum of Ethnology in Vienna. As recently as 2013, objects from that collection were on display at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City in an exhibition called ‘Fiercely Modern: Art of the Naga Warrior’.

Austrian scholar Christian Schicklgruber has written about Fürer-Haimendorf’s contradictory intellectual legacy. He flirted with National Socialism in 1930s. His portrayal of an ethnic group as a barbaric culture that is inferior to Western civilisation, says Schicklgruber, served to legitimise the two oppressive systems he served one after the other: German (Austrian) National Socialism and British colonialism. Yet based on his writings and the ethnographic collection he painstakingly brought together, he can reasonably be described as a chronicler of Naga culture. Indeed Schicklgruber finds that many Nagas today use Fürer-Haimendorf’s words to represent their past (2008: 356, 366).

Fürer-Haimendorf died in 1995 at the age of eighty-five.

In the service of Empire

It has been said that anthropologists of Fürer-Haimendorf’s generation relied on the colonial infrastructure for their fieldwork, and ‘yet this facilitating bond between colonialism and anthropology is written out of most ethnographic texts’ (Chambers 2006: 15). To say that the ‘Viceroy’s friend’ had the help of the colonial governmental infrastructure during his fieldwork will be an understatement. But Fürer-Haimendorf cannot be accused of writing the role of colonial power out of his texts. ‘The circumstances of my work in the Subansiri region,’ he says frankly in his introduction to The Apa Tanis and their Neighbours, ‘was only partly anthropological’ (Fürer-Haimendorf 1962a: 3). He then points the reader to Himalayan Barbary for an account of those circumstances. That book describes an expedition into the North East Frontier Agency in 1944–1945 designed to extend colonial administrative control over that Indo-Tibetan borderland (Fürer-Haimendorf 1955). Fürer-Haimendorf was the head of that expedition, and he was appointed assistant political officer under the British colonial administration for that purpose.

The assignment was more significant geopolitically than it might appear. To put it plainly, it was a late colonial campaign of pacification. The Japanese attack during the Second World War on British colonial India’s eastern border at the Naga Hills brought home the dangers of leaving that frontier region of British imperial India unprotected. The colonial government then decided to extend its control to the un-administered tribal areas of the North East Frontier Tracts in the eastern Himalayas – if possible, all the way to the vague line that was drawn as the border between India and Tibet at the Simla talks of 1913–1914. Until this day, the Chinese government views the Simla agreement as a British imperial attempt to encroach on Chinese territory. The border remains disputed. No government of China has ratified the Simla agreement, and China today likes to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as China’s southern Tibet. The task given to Fürer-Haimendorf during the last days of British Raj – to establish friendly relations with the Apatanis (also known as Apa Tani, the form used by Fürer-Haimendorf) and their neighbours – was meant as the initial step to bring the North East Frontier Tracts under effective control. It was odd for an anthropologist – a non-official and a native of Austria – to be given this assignment. The poor state of imperial finances probably had something to do with it. It was Fürer-Haimendorf’s mentor the anthropologist and senior colonial administrator J. P. Mills’s idea to appoint him to that position.

The Fürer-Haimendorf expedition was successful in achieving its political aims. Stuart Blackburn summarises the outcome as follows:

A government outpost was established in the valley; warring groups negotiated settlements under government supervision; the surrounding regions were explored, although circums...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Remembering Bianca Son
• Introduction: Northeastern research entanglements
• Part I Historical and ethnographic encounters
• Part II Politics of land and material resources
• Part III In and out of the state
• Afterword: contested, vertical, fragmenting: de-partitioning ‘Northeast India’ studies
• Index