This essay traces the early beginnings of the Indo-Naga conflict, which erupts in the 1950s and continues into the present-day. It focuses on the period roughly between the Battle of Kohima in 1944, which ends Japanese expansionism in the east, and the enactment of Nagaland state in 1963 as an envisaged (but failed) political compromise to the demand by the Naga National Council (NNC) for complete Naga sovereignty. This essay uses hitherto scantily used tour and personal diaries, government reports, private correspondence, memoires, and recorded memories to interrogate the master-narrative of the Naga struggle that reconstructs a relatively straight and uncomplicated historical trajectory that sees the genuine awakening and NNC-led political mobilization of an upland community situated off the beaten track of both Indian civilization and colonial domination, and of Nagas’ collective resolve to take up arms to fight for a place on the table of nation-states. Alternatively, if the story is told from the vantage of the Indian state, the dominant narrative apportions blame to a ‘misguided’ Naga elite that seeks to undermine the territorial and national integrity of the Indian state. These prevailing views, attractive for their absence of complexity, however, ignore the anguished debates, interpersonal and intertribal differences, contingent histories and events, dissenting voices, political assassinations, and sharp divisions within the rank-and-file of the NNC, and whose inner dynamics and sentiments could as well have produced outcomes other than war.

Chapter 4 of In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast (Stanford University Press, 2020).

'Nationalism' among the Nagas and the struggle for 'Nagalim' has, in the half-century since the 1951 Naga referendum witnessed several shifts and changing phases. While definitions of 'freedom' and 'self-determination' may differ, and there is at present a plethora of Naga representative bodies, there is nevertheless broad agreement among Nagas, like with other movements in the north-east, of the hegemonic power of the Indian state. Governments at the centre have, by turns, adopted a policy of nzilitarisation and of extending grants to a small section of the local elite that it has co-opted in the task of governance. Any resolution of conflicts in the north-east, including the Naga one, could begin when both sides negotiate from a position of equals, and by an end to the process of militarisation that has tended to largely view dissent as a sign of subversion and anti-nationalism.

Taking the upland, tribal Nagas, and the long lingering Indo-Naga conflict, as my case, this article positions divergent contemporary political and territorial claims and counterclaims in the historical longue durée. While the initial assertion for a sovereign, independent Nagalim envisaged a political and administrative reordering of a region cut across by the colonial Indo-Burma border, over time the Naga national movement increasingly conformed to this international boundary—at least in praxis—as political attention shifted towards the integration of Naga lands within India but presently divided across multiple states. More recently, another territorial quandary emerged as the Eastern Naga People's Organization articulated a demand for the bifurcation of present-day Nagaland, as it was enacted in 1963, through the creation of a new state to be called 'Frontier Nagaland'. If amidst ongoing strife and uncertainty, these divergent political and territorial aspirations suggest a sinking ever more deeply into a morass of conflicting aspirations, oppositional sentiments and political disorder, this article attempts to historically situate each of these claims, as well as discusses some of their implications, inner intricacies and indeterminacies, in the upshot serving a heady cocktail of colonial legacies, borders that divide, and post-colonial political imaginations, spiked with shots of old tribal antagonisms and new alignments.

Tribe is a social construct which has no constant meaning. While the word ‘tribe’ is used to describe a group of people, the understanding of this narration is very often delusional, leading people to believe that the concept associated with it is fixed and rigid. The label of tribal is repeatedly understood to mean primitive and backward and is attached enduringly to numerous communities who were unable to control their mode of production, particularly during post-colonial phase. In this paper, I contend that ‘tribal’ cannot be generalized as a homogenous social category. If we regard a tribe as a social group that has certain territory, simple political organization, common religious beliefs and single spoken language, with respect to the Nagas, this is not the case. Likewise, this paper will take into consideration the political history and ethnohistory of the Nagas so as to identify the construction and changing patterns of Naga culture and identity politics. In this review, the...

Women in India's Northeast have had a long history of spearheading movements of protest against social and cultural oppression. In Nagaland, which has witnessed the longest struggle against the Indian state till date, women have been very visible components of the struggle, albeit at an informal, grassroots level. Their exclusion from formal spaces of power and decision-making reflect certain social and political realities regarding the status of women in Naga society (Triveni Goswami 68).