Introduction
The subdivisional officer (SDO) of Mokokchung, W. G. Archer, toured the ‘Unadministered’ Naga Tribal Area between British India and Burma in 1947, a few years after the failed Japanese invasion of India from British-occupied Burma into the Naga Hills during the Second World War. On this tour, Archer noted that ‘if roads, schools, hospitals, and agricultural advice are how the Indian Union will seek to obtain a loyal and contended frontier, how can these amenities be given so long as head-taking flourishes?’.Footnote 1 He argued for Indian central government intervention (and greater investment) in setting up a protective administration along British India’s Northeastern frontier with China and Burma, pointing out the incompatibility of the continuing ‘anarchy’ with strategic defence requirements. This was a recurring argument in the history of state formation here.
Headmen of all Naga groups in the area except the Konyaks met Assam’s governor and requested the extension of control, reportedly due to the impression of ‘peace and prosperity’ in the administered areas and fatigue from insecurity and economic loss caused by headhunting.Footnote 2 Moreover, administrators understood Naga chiefs’ invitation to extend administration into their areas as evidence of how communities understood the ‘advantages of peace’ accompanying colonial administration.Footnote 3 Archer advocated the expansion of ‘Administered Areas’ instead of random tours and expeditions. A Konyak man Archer met on his March 1947 tour ridiculed punitive columns by saying, ‘It comes and burns a village, then it goes away. And we simply sit and laugh.’Footnote 4
The above statements highlight the enduring portrayal of upland frontier and border territories, such as those of the Nagas, as ‘anarchic’ and ‘dangerous’. Historians and geographers frequently label these areas as exceptional ‘violent’ geographies.Footnote 5 Crucially, they also highlight concerns over so-called ‘primitive’ and ‘remote’ highland inhabitants rejecting and ridiculing colonial authority.Footnote 6 After a global war and with impending decolonization, such ridicule tested the colonial state’s inability to maintain sovereignty. Underlying this mockery was not resistance to states, but rather a dynamic reformulation of mimetic governance and developmental relations.Footnote 7 These dynamics reveal how colonial allegories of coercion continued in post-colonial border development, violence, and securitization, fuelling a quest for a state that acknowledged Naga cultural differences while incorporating them as Indian citizens.
By engaging with debates on ‘state-evasion’ within Zomia studies (discussed further below), I examine the diverse border and developmental state-building interventions that Nagas either demanded or resisted, using violent cultural metaphors and practices like headhunting.Footnote 8 In the 1950s, intertribal headhunting raids transitioned into organized armed resistance against India, employing the symbolic language of headhunting to frame mimetic and ritualized violence. The figure of the headhunter, initially representing violent tendencies, was recast as the ‘insurgent’ in post-colonial India.Footnote 9 Both the Indian state and its dissenting forces appropriated headhunting discourses and practices as metaphors to legitimize violence. For instance, during the 1950s, both Indian armed forces and Naga rebels decapitated the heads of their slain enemies.
This article illustrates how post-war political vocabularies leveraged violence to demand specific forms and degrees of statehood and borders. This dynamic perpetuated colonial-style frontier governance, embedding violence as a fundamental tactic in post-colonial state-making. Both colonial/post-colonial states and the Nagas contested territorial sovereignty, exploiting ambiguities in colonial cartography to justify inclusion or exclusion from nation-state borders.Footnote 10 Thus, a ‘stateless’ upland periphery became a subversive border or ‘buffer’ between India and its neighbours.Footnote 11 Thus, violence and spatial politics had long-standing ideological connections in articulating state inclusion or resistance to it.
I argue that Naga communities living in so-called political ‘vacuums’, such as the highland Unadministered Areas (zones without administrative presence; see Figure 2) between British India’s Assam province and Burma, neither fully resisted state control nor did states try to consolidate authority uniformly. By complicating discussions on state-evasion, I reveal the dual refusal by states and social actors, demonstrating the negotiated and uneven practices of sovereignty. Violence was crucial in shaping states, tribes, and borders in these ‘state-thwarting’ societies.Footnote 12 Furthermore, I demonstrate the inequalities and exclusions caused by spatial and cultural reorientations after 1945, spurring narratives that radicalized some Nagas, leading to an armed uprising in the ‘stateless’ Naga territories during the 1950s.
Contrary to notions of outright state refusal, competing territorial claims and mimetic violent practices between 1944 and 1964 (after the Second World War to the first Naga ceasefire) spurred state-led coercive development. State-tribe relations combined coercion with statehood’s perceived benefits, employing the rhetoric of unruly ‘empty spaces’ while appropriating state symbols to manage local power structures.Footnote 13 The uneven access to political claims and development resources fuelled post-war Naga nationalism and armed insurrection, which in turn invited violent state formation. This cyclical coercive developmentalism heightened inter-group violence, exacerbating social inequalities, evidenced in the ongoing proliferation of ‘ethnic-territorial’ boundaries and competition for material gains.Footnote 14 Christian Tripodi’s analysis of the British Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) illustrates how violence, poverty, and spatial exclusion created cycles of escalating conflict. The colonial policies of indirect rule under the guise of developmental ‘peaceful penetration’ increased dependency on the state, intensifying internecine conflicts and anti-state violence.Footnote 15
These dynamics similarly explain why impoverished and state-thin Naga areas became zones of anti-Indian resistance, challenging reductive claims that armed conflict arises in ‘zones of neglect’.Footnote 16 The concept of ‘buffer zones’, hollowed out by colonial interventions, remains helpful in understanding such resistance.Footnote 17 The cultural link between violence and space reveals the foundations of persistent conflict, challenging ideas that caricature violence as inherent to the ‘Naga way of life’—a trope found in both statist and self-internalized Naga representations. Existing studies have focused on state-imposed violence or anti-state resistance in the region, particularly in peripheral areas shaped by shifts in sovereignty, trading networks, and agrarian dispossession under colonial expansion.Footnote 18 I depart from these approaches by highlighting how violent resistance often attracted greater state incorporation into previously ‘stateless’ areas. Local populations sought to shape state formation by drawing it into their service through mimetic engagements rather than complete evasion.Footnote 19 In examining these dynamics in the post-war Naga context, I nuance the literature on contested cartographic histories of Assam, Bengal, and Burma.Footnote 20
This article reveals the stakes of state possession in former colonial frontiers, where uneven bordering and exclusion followed decolonization. The period between 1944 and 1964 highlights how newly decolonized post-colonial states inherited colonial bordering and securitization strategies despite opportunities for territorial state-making. After 1955, state formation intensified in response to social actors’ demands for or rejection of statehood. These territorial contests expose the dangerous relationship between territorial enclosures and mass violence, as seen in other global conflicts, underscoring how spatial history and violence interconnect. My article aims to make a dual contribution. First, I expand historiographically by demonstrating how violence and spatial ideologies shaped developmental inclusion and exclusion during post-war nation-building in the lower Himalayas. Second, I contribute to the theoretical understanding of violence by showing how non-state actors used it to invite state formation. This challenges notions of barbarism and highlights that violence was not solely the state’s prerogative. My work provides historical and theoretical depth to contemporary studies in political geography and the anthropology of violence and space, using Zomia debates on state-evasion since the 1940s. I draw on private collections, memoirs, and archives from the United Kingdom, India (Assam, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, and New Delhi), and Myanmar, as well as writings by British, Indian, and Naga individuals. By reading these archives ‘against the grain’, I uncover the long-term impacts of war and decolonization.Footnote 21 This approach reveals Nagas’ political agency in negotiating with colonial and post-colonial states. Both state actors and dissidents appropriated stereotypes of ‘anarchy’, ‘remoteness’, and ‘barbarism’ using headhunting and statelessness metaphors.
Violence in Zomia’s vacuum
In July 1947, Mildred Archer’s memoir described her husband, W. G. Archer’s role as SDO in Mokokchung, detailing his efforts to mediate violence in and beyond the ‘Control Area’, which bordered the Unadministered Naga Tribal Areas straddling the Indo-Burma border. She likened these Tribal Areas to the Scottish borders:
This area must be very much like the Scottish border in the thirteenth century, when war seldom ceased, and clans of farmer warriors were at feud among themselves, at war with the Scots and acknowledged no officer of the Crown.Footnote 22
That same month, prominent Naga leader A. Kevichusa characterized the Nagas as perpetually warring due to their ‘profound love of freedom’.Footnote 23 These conflicts included inter-village wars, not just against outsiders. Kevichusa self-appropriated colonial discourses, echoing Mildred, which persisted into the 1950s insurgency era. The former deputy commissioner of the Naga Hills in the 1940s, Charles Pawsey, reinforced these caricatures of violent Naga highlanders:
Must these hills always be the scene of bloodshed, the pre-British head-taking, the battles of the Japanese war, and the pre-British conflicts? Sometimes, it seems that the Naga Hills will be destined forever to be the scene of bitter warfare.Footnote 24
Stereotypes linking Nagas to violence and unruliness tied spatial imagery to identity construction. State actors adapted such portrayals of highlanders’ ‘martial’ traits to meet securitization needs.Footnote 25 For Nagas, these discourses served dual purposes. While they emphasized martial prowess as headhunters to secure wartime roles, the state used these stereotypes to justify brutal counterinsurgency measures in the 1950s. Scholars of Zomia critically examine how such representations manipulated cultural differences and highland–valley spatial binaries. These misrepresentations allowed colonial authorities to dismiss highland communities’ military and political complexity in pre-colonial sovereignty structures, portraying them as ‘barbaric’.Footnote 26
The paradigms of state evasion and resistance in highlands, highlighted by Zomia debates, are crucial for understanding the ideological link between violence and space. These debates illuminate discussions on political dominance, resistance, sovereignty, and territory. Willem van Schendel proposed Zomia as an alternative conceptual and cartographic category to reimagine connected South and Southeast Asian highland spaces, transcending nation-state and area-studies frameworks.Footnote 27 James Scott popularized Zomia as a ‘shatter-zone’ where populations strategically sought refuge from state centres by moving into highlands and adopting sustenance methods and social structures that prevented centralized, coercive state formation. Scott proposed an anarchist history of local populations as ‘state-evaders’, which has sparked productive debates on resistance, agency, and the stakes of state control. He viewed Zomia’s inhabitants as deliberately ‘anarchic’ (not in the Hobbesian sense of perpetual savagery and warfare), exercising agency by resisting state integration. Scott assumed that after the Second World War, almost all such stateless and ‘remote’ zones would eventually fall under the control of modern nation-states due to post-war ‘distance-demolishing technologies’ like roads, railways, and airways.Footnote 28
Zomia has sparked many debates on state-society relations, power, and agency.Footnote 29 Scholarship engaging with Zomia shows that states were often reluctant to integrate peripheries, preferring itinerant governance and coercive, exclusionary bordering practices over welfare and long-term development.Footnote 30 Critiques of Zomia are numerous and generative, recognizing the concept’s utility in studying power and agency. Zomia illuminates how ‘peripheries deal with states’, by examining how local elites and inter-group competition resist imperial state-making or create mutual dependency.Footnote 31 Further engagements with the Zomia paradigm suggest mutual ‘incorporation’ to pursue specific state relations rather than state integration or expansion.Footnote 32 The 1940s offer insights into how development and violence intertwined to produce a specific type of post-war and decolonized borderlands on the Assam-Burma frontier.
Adelman and Stephen Aron’s seminal article illustrated how inter-imperial rivalries gave agency to Indigenous American polities in negotiating favourable exchange relations based on mutual dependency through their military alliances with the British.Footnote 33 Diplomatic peace between empires after 1812 and the gradual introduction of liberal constitutionalism hardened borders in previously fluid borderlands, eventually dispossessing Indigenous American societies of political leverage and land.Footnote 34 Bérénice Guyot-Réchard departed from this approach with a focus on intra-imperial border politics by illustrating that ‘rigidly territorial thinking’ in delineating borders along the Patkai mountains (including the Naga domains) on the Indo-Burma frontier involved dual violence in shaping colonial borderlands—one from colonial rule and the other from decolonization.Footnote 35
The Second World War created inter-imperial rivalries and intra-imperial deliberations by destabilizing British sovereignty arrangements due to their withdrawal from Burma in 1942. The Japanese occupation of Burma and the invasion of India in 1944 increased existing ‘No-Man’s Lands’ and ‘blank spaces’ from the colonial state’s perspective.Footnote 36 During the war, the British secured Naga support like military service and logistical aid by offering political power and material rewards like guns and money. Naga allegiance strengthened as the likelihood of Allied victory increased.Footnote 37 The war also reshaped spatial borders and ethnic divisions.Footnote 38 After the war and subsequent decolonization, sovereignty arrangements between the British state and highland tribes like the Nagas shifted. After defeating the Japanese, the colonial state tried to reclaim the political vacuums created during the war in the Burma borderlands. Some Nagas tested British sovereignty claims, but the colonial government often did not respond.
Different Naga tribes used violence to assert dominance over others in administered areas or directly engage the government in unadministered areas. They appropriated colonial tropes of barbarism and statelessness to negotiate state formation, sometimes leveraging violence to invite or resist state presence. Colonial officials portrayed headhunting raids and the slave trade as markers of ‘savagery’ and ‘anarchy’ stemming from statelessness, using these stereotypes to justify expanding territorial administrative control. Nagas, in turn, adopted these caricatures when dealing with the post-war colonial state.
Geographers studying Zomia have framed such regions as ‘spaces of refusal’, challenging binary debates about dominance (marked by exceptional state violence) and resistance (interpreted as outright state rejection).Footnote 39 Instead, these dynamics reveal a selective process where states and social actors mutually accept or reject each other, depending on border realignments, developmental presence, and violence. This selective engagement heightened the stakes of the nature and degree of statehood and developmental inclusion.
From blank spaces to checkered lands
The Naga armed struggle began in the ‘Free Naga’ territory in Tuensang (former Naga Tribal Area), an area excluded from the British administration that experienced occasional visits and punitive expeditions. Naga leaders later invoked the memory of Tuensang as a stateless region to justify demands for independence, arguing that this area had ‘never been under British, Indian, or Burmese sovereignty’.Footnote 40 This rhetoric remains influential today, with villages in Tuensang using stereotypes of extreme violence and ‘warlike’ behaviour to deter extortion raids from Naga insurgent groups or to resolve inter-village disputes.Footnote 41 Territorial imageries of ‘blank spaces’ and violence continue to serve political negotiations.
Borderland studies employ numerous spatial concepts, but scholars have hitherto underutilized ‘blank space’. This term, often associated with statist views that depict stateless zones as devoid of political communities, has gained analytical relevance in studying sovereignty practices along the Indo-Burma frontier. Recent research reclaims the term to move beyond colonial tropes or comparisons to places like Switzerland, instead focusing on statelessness and fragmented sovereignty in southern Asia.Footnote 42 As a conceptual tool, ‘blank space’ offers a canvas for mapping imagined, real, and contested borders. We may use the concept to sketch out states’ selective commitments, societies’ demands for state presence or absence, and the interplay of violence and space shaped by ‘internal borders’ and ‘borderscapes’.Footnote 43
Using ‘blank space’ in this way reframes diverse territorial frontier governance arrangements, which evolved after global wars and decolonization into a ‘tapestry’ of fragmented spaces.Footnote 44 Along the Indo-Burma borderlands of Zomia, state power operates through concentrated nodes rather than uniform authority or total absence. While Adelman and Aron’s ‘bordered’ concept implies the finality of national borders, ‘checkered’ spaces describe fluid dynamics between blank zones and politically occupied lands, characterized by ongoing demands for border creation.Footnote 45 These ‘checkered’ zones reveal historically dynamic negotiations and shifting bordering practices. For instance, colonial administrators rhetorically differentiated ‘barbarous’ Nagas from peaceful ones. Charles Pawsey, deputy commissioner of the Naga Hills in the 1940s, noted that ‘no administered village was ever burnt’, illustrating how de-facto administrative borders legitimized state violence while sparing governed/civilized areas.Footnote 46
The Naga Hills District, established in 1867, was regulated by the Inner Line, which separated arable lands for capitalist extraction, like tea plantations, from the ‘unproductive’ Hills. However, the Inner Line shifted to accommodate changing colonial economic priorities. This flexibility excluded certain areas from capitalist development, creating ‘anarchic’ zones where jurisdiction expanded opportunistically into perceived ‘empty spaces’. Footnote 47 From the nineteenth century onwards, ambiguous border demarcations enabled colonial administrators to define frontiers flexibly, hollowing out the political and cultural connections of buffer zones.Footnote 48
Sanghamitra Misra discusses the colonial intellectual frameworks and policies that depicted Nagas in the ‘stateless’ highlands as lawless, ‘anarchic’, and inherently violent. These portrayals framed their customs and ‘love of freedom’ as consequences of state absence. The policy of ‘non-interference’ permitted customary rule while justifying selective coercion under indirect rule. This strategy facilitated the construction of a Naga identity tied to territory, allowing colonial authorities to target resource-rich highlands while minimizing costs in asserting influence and expanding control. By mapping tribes and ethnological boundaries, they transformed the highlands into strategic territories. As early as 1842, proposals emerged to separate ‘rebellious’ tribes in ‘total anarchy’ from those under British control, leading to the formal boundary between Angami tribes and Manipur in 1873. These borders often reflected colonial ambitions rather than local realities, embedding spatial hierarchies that linked civilization to levels of administration.Footnote 49 By the 1880s, officials debated shifting from punitive expeditions and village burnings to legal frameworks. They argued that ‘administered’ Nagas were no longer barbarians and could be civilized through governance rather than force, equating spatial order with political control.Footnote 50
In 1907, the central government withheld approval to control the ‘No-Man’s-Lands’ between Assam and Burma.Footnote 51 In 1925 and 1927, administrators sought to extend state influence in the Unadministered/Naga Tribal Areas after six villages requested British protection. Officials designated the buffer zone as a ‘Control Area’, exercising ‘loose control’ through contact with Naga tribes such as Changs, Sangtams, Semas, and some Konyak villages while keeping them outside Assam’s jurisdiction and taxation.Footnote 52 J. P. Mills, SDO in Mokokchung in the mid-1920s (later adviser to the governor of Assam in the 1940s), developed the Control Area system after successfully proposing administrative expansion in 1927. Officials observed that villages near administered borders sought government intervention to resolve disputes, reducing headhunting and warfare.Footnote 53 In 1937, Mills described the Control Area system’s effectiveness in the Naga Hills as ‘slice-by-slice’ territorial annexation that kept costs low while officials debated further expansion.Footnote 54
The Second World War altered this system, bringing the Unadministered tribes into greater contact with the British and each other, reviving earlier proposals for systematic administration after 1945.Footnote 55 That year, British administrators sought to redraw borders in the Unadministered Areas. Wakching, the furthest British administrative node, was administered from Kohima (Naga Hills’ administrative centre), but officials debated shifting control to Tirap, seen as a political ‘vacuum’.Footnote 56 In 1943, Tirap (Figure 2) became a new sub-division, no longer ‘stateless’, prompting officials to propose governing Wakching from there to unify Konyak administration. British officers depicted Nagas such as Konyaks as ‘primitive and warlike’ headhunters due to a lack of administration.Footnote 57
Colonial administrators reinforced these spatial divisions post-war, excluding ‘primitive’ hill tribes from democratic governance and erasing histories of anti-colonial resistance.Footnote 58 The idea of an administrative ‘vacuum’ shaped debates on statehood. Some Nagas demanded ‘complete independence’ alongside India’s in 1947, arguing that the pre-British Ahom rulers of Assam never conquered Naga territories, making it ‘immoral’ for the British to transfer them to Assam.Footnote 59 Today, Eastern Nagas invoke their historical exclusion to advocate for a separate Frontier Nagaland, citing underdevelopment. Some argue they once lived as ‘free’ and ungoverned people, and regretted participating in the Naga armed struggle, which began in Tuensang in 1955–1956.Footnote 60
Naga self-determination is premised on the rhetoric of cultural separation and non-belonging to post-colonial nation-states and is continually reinvented today.Footnote 61 The Naga nationalist claim of ‘Free Nagaland’ (former Tuensang Division and present-day Eastern Nagaland) as a non-British, non-Indian space underscores the ideological use of ‘empty’ stateless spaces and cartographic ambiguity in nation-building. Today, irredentist projects invoking Greater Nagaland or Nagalim (see Figure 1) under dominant Naga armed groups like the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah faction [NSCN-IM]) and Nagaland’s border disputes with neighbouring states reveal how both non-state and state actors exploit colonial cartographic ambiguities.Footnote 62 Their narratives contest India’s inheritance of Naga territory from the British and seek to expand Naga territorial control.
A map depicting contemporary political boundaries, terrain, and the imagined, contested cartographies on the India-Myanmar borders. Source: Prepared by Ali Hossaini and Aditya Kiran Kakati. Disclaimer: Boundaries and imagined cartographic spaces depicted are from source maps and do not reflect the personal views of the designer and author.
Historically, these narratives framed ‘administered’ Nagas as British subjects, neither Indian nor Burmese, while ‘unadministered’ Nagas remained beyond state sovereignty. Indian Prime Minister J. N. Nehru used this rhetoric to justify Assam’s partitioning in 1963, creating Nagaland in response to Naga demands for territorial administration.Footnote 63 Even after decolonization, policymakers viewed Northeast Indian hill tribes, particularly Nagas, with suspicion, citing cultural differences. This justified centralized control over India’s territorial limits by stereotyping border societies as incapable citizens.Footnote 64 Naga social actors’ negotiations to invite or resist state control challenge such stereotypes, though they have at times appropriated violent caricatures like headhunting. Intersecting violence and historical geography sustain coercive nation-building and development today.Footnote 65 This history explains Eastern Nagaland political groups’ demands for more borders and states due to developmental exclusion.Footnote 66 The historical fluidity of Naga territories and shifting borders of Zomia highlight the stakes of state possession.
Savages in No-Man’s-Lands
Post-war bordering and impending decolonization created ‘checkered’ lands, reorienting former ‘No-Man’s-Lands’—stateless, developmentally excluded Naga areas along the Assam-Burma border. While some Nagas invited state-building, primitivist stereotypes justified violent securitization, later redefined through counterinsurgency and coercive development. Both state and Naga actors reinforced ideas of ‘primitiveness’ and ‘remoteness’, shaping itinerant state-building and bordering.Footnote 67 Colonial cartographic and ethnological depictions of ‘primitivity’ conflicted with conventional notions of borders as state sovereignty markers. Statist concepts like ‘No-Man’s-Lands’ misrepresented inhabited spaces as ‘empty’ for extraction, expansion, or exclusion.Footnote 68
Despite their statist origins, such zones can be examined as sites where communities appropriate spatial liminality. Colonial interventions among ‘non-state’ tribal polities often escalated ‘internecine’ violence by disrupting existing political structures, misrepresenting them as Hobbesian ‘anarchy’ and savagery.Footnote 69 Unpacking violent stereotypes in ‘blank spaces’ reveals how local communities appropriated savagery tropes to forge identities, either resisting marginalization or becoming further trapped in poverty and exclusion.Footnote 70 Understanding this region’s ‘checkered’ nature requires recognizing how colonial frontier capitalism relied on multiple spatial-legal arrangements, such as Inner Lines, Excluded Areas, Partially Excluded Areas, and princely states (see Figure 2). These imposed varying degrees of sovereignty and control, creating buffer zones. Naga Hills district and Tirap were Excluded Areas, administered directly by Assam’s governor, bypassing elected legislative codes. British reforms in 1919 classified revenue-deficit hill areas in Assam and Burma as ‘Excluded Areas’, using geographical and ethnological arguments to define boundaries between ‘civilization’ and ‘backwardness’. This classification later justified denying democratic structures such as elected assemblies.Footnote 71
A map showing colonial cartographies that included a tapestry of bordered areas such as ‘Excluded’, ‘Partially Excluded’, ‘Unadministered’, ‘Control Area’, and so on. The map is primarily based on data and cartographic divisions between 1942–1946. Source: Prepared by Ali Hossaini and Aditya Kiran Kakati (in colour).
The Naga Tribal Areas on both sides of the Indo-Burma border were considered a stateless frontier, akin to Baluchistan’s Tribal Areas. They included land beyond Assam’s Naga Hills district, established in 1866. Across the loosely defined Assam-Burma border, the government upgraded the Naga Hills Tract to a district in 1940, administered from Singkaling Hkamti, excluding the unadministered Tribal Area.Footnote 72 In 1954, this Unadministered Area became the Tuensang Frontier Division of the Northeast Frontier Agency (NEFA), adjacent to Tirap (Figure 2). In 1957, it separated from NEFA, merged with the Naga Hills, and became part of Nagaland, created by partitioning Assam in 1963.Footnote 73 Despite its new status, Tuensang remained underdeveloped. Located on the northeastern frontier, Tirap and Tuensang shared an unclear boundary with Burma. Anticipating Indian independence in 1947, British officials proposed incorporating all Naga tribes into India in response to Administered Naga Chiefs’ requests.Footnote 74
In 1942, External Affairs Ministry officials debated the sovereignty of the unadministered Naga Tribal Areas, assessing whether they were part of British India. One proposal suggested keeping them as a ‘No-Man’s-Land’ between India and Burma. Legally, this was not British territory unless absorbed into provinces or Assam to maintain ethnic homogeneity under a single administration. Expansion proposals stalled but resurfaced after the Second World War.Footnote 75 Post-war headhunting violence prompted state expansion, as administrators framed the Unadministered Areas as anarchic voids. This increased pressure on some Naga groups to seek state inclusion. While some feared violence and sought development, others strongly opposed Indian nation-building. This divide continues to fuel violence and territorial demands.
The Naga Hills Tribal District Council (NHTDC), established in 1945 for post-war reconstruction, later became the Naga National Council (NNC), with Angami Zapu Phizo leading its pro-independence faction.Footnote 76 After Indian (1947) and Burmese (1948) independence, state presence in these ‘empty’ spaces remained hesitant, driven by selective securitization and Naga invitations. Between 1945 and 1947, the outgoing British government proposed a ‘light’ form of administration in Sadiya (north of Tirap; Figure 2) to support tribal development and reinforce the McMahon Line boundary with Tibet.Footnote 77 On the Burmese border, security concerns focused on controlling headhunting and the slave trade, responding to Naga villages’ demands.
Administrators preferred a ‘buffer zone’, avoiding full administration and taxation in unadministered territories to sidestep responsibilities for justice and costly infrastructure like roads, education, and healthcare.Footnote 78 After decolonization, the incomplete delimitation of the Indo-Burma border created fragmented spaces, while India’s fears of Chinese expansionism reinforced the need for a buffer.Footnote 79 The 1954 Naga republic declaration preceded the organized armed resistance of 1955–1956, led by Phizo’s NNC, both emerging in this ‘No-Man’s-Land’—the formerly unadministered Tuensang Frontier Division, where Indian state presence and ‘moderate’ Naga leadership influence were weak.Footnote 80 By the 1950s, the state shifted from colonial non-interference to coercive development, driven by escalating Naga violence.
Reordering borders, reclaiming sovereignty in a vacuum
After Japan’s failed invasion of India via Burma, Nagas from the Burmese Somra Tract sought help due to famine and disease at a British army camp in Layshi (Figure 1).Footnote 81 In October 1944, G. E. D. Walker, political officer in Tirap, reported increased interactions between state officials and local populations across the border in the Hukwang Valley. Despite wartime cooperation, there was a dearth of British authorities to settle disputes, which locals expected from the government. Walker advocated integrating the primarily Konyak Naga Trans-Patkai region with Tirap to establish administrative and ethnological unity, especially as Burma showed little interest in managing Naga affairs.Footnote 82
Since 1941, Konyak villages in administered areas, citing neglect, requested a sub-division for better gun control and protection from headhunting. Those outside the Control Area were particularly vulnerable, prompting calls to extend it to Patkai.Footnote 83 Post-war development plans for the Unadministered Naga Tribal Area, Sadiya, and Tirap remained exclusionary, delaying the creation of tribal councils to disburse Indian development funding.Footnote 84 In mid-1946, the NNC passed a resolution demanding Konyak inclusion in future Naga administrative structures, aiming to integrate unadministered Naga tribes into a ‘greater Naga Nation’.Footnote 85 Nehru supported incorporating Excluded Areas into Assam for Naga autonomy under the NNC but hesitated over including headhunting communities.Footnote 86
In December 1946, administrators postponed plans to penetrate and develop Tirap, opting instead to govern areas near Margherita’s ‘more civilized fringe’ to exploit forest wealth around Ledo Road, but excluding tribes like the Konyaks. They justified these exclusions by claiming such ‘wild tribes’ were not ready for democratic governance and development. The Konyak domain extended across the Burma border, and several chiefs sought inclusion in the Naga Hills for access to development schemes.Footnote 87
In early 1947, the Indian government proposed a Five-Year Development Plan as a ‘cheaper’ way to secure Tribal Areas through limited state expansion rather than military force. Officials considered the Naga Tribal Area de jure part of Assam but never administered it. They viewed the boundary between Tribal and Excluded Areas as a gradient of ‘wildness’ moving eastwards and debated whether a constitution could be imposed on de jure Tribal Areas like Namsang-Borduria in Tirap and the Naga Tribal Areas. Footnote 88 A consensus emerged to exclude tribes like Konyaks and Changs from constitutional provisions. Administrators debated whether these areas should fall under Assam’s electorate within the Naga Hills or be governed centrally via the governor, as in NEFA. The latter option prevailed due to security concerns along the frontier.Footnote 89
In February 1947, Konyak Angs (chiefs) and other Nagas met Assam Governor A. G. Clow, requesting administrative extension for economic improvement, security, and headhunting control. Clow supported extending governance to the Patkai border, but officials preferred a buffer strip near the Burma border, controlling the area through punitive missions rather than full administration.Footnote 90 Burma also planned thin administrative extensions, prompting Assam’s governor to mirror this while excluding Konyaks and Changs from the Naga Hills.Footnote 91
In April 1947, Mills urged Administered Nagas within the Control Area to accept India’s constitutional provisions but deferred this choice for ‘independent’ Naga tribes like the Changs in Tuensang.Footnote 92 By mid-1947, authorities planned to include most Naga tribes in the Naga Hills district while excluding Konyaks, Changs, and Kalyo-Kengyu (now Khiamniungan) Nagas.Footnote 93 Aligning ethnological and geographical boundaries proved difficult, and Mills noted challenges in distinguishing Konyaks from other groups. Tirap would encompass most Konyak-inhabited areas in the redefined borders, leaving some settlements in the Naga Hills. Konyak inclusion in development schemes remained uncertain, and administration would gradually extend towards the Burma border, albeit unevenly.Footnote 94 In June 1947, a Hill Officers’ Conference decided that most of these areas would join Assam with greater autonomy through administrative and customary institutions. J. P. Mills and other British officers recommended constitutional protections to shield highland tribes from market exploitation, advocating for a gradual introduction of modern civilization in ‘small and carefully measured doses’.Footnote 95 Meanwhile, Konyak chiefs opposed their proposed transfer from the Naga Tribal Area to Tirap, as Archer noted:
The Konyaks had not heard of their proposed transfer to Tirap […] all Konyaks in the administered area are now accustomed to looking southwards to Mokokchung and Kohima […] they regard their country as very much an integral part of the Naga Hills […] they will feel themselves cut off from all that they regard as Naga … none of our own Konyaks have any dealings with the Konyaks of Tirap and in fact they regard them as utter strangers.Footnote 96
The Konyak villages, fearing developmental exclusion if detached from the Naga Hills, expressed discontent with veiled threats of agitation. They preferred the district’s expansion rather than losing territory to Tirap.Footnote 97 On 14 August 1947, the Konyak Nagas, along with Naga tribes in Manipur and Cachar, declared independence a day before India, diverging from the NNC’s resolution to remain with India.Footnote 98
In October 1947, the Konyak Ang of Wangla objected to former British head interpreter Chingai, stationed in Wakching, claiming he had illegally collected taxes and that there was no longer a ‘Sahib’ in Mokokchung. In response, the Ang of Mon threatened to declare his own Raj, while the Ang of Namsang refused to provide coolies to the government, rejecting Indian rule.Footnote 99 To address the unrest, Archer proposed reversing the transfer of unadministered Konyaks to Tirap and instead rejoining them with the Naga Hills under a new Wakching sub-division, but this did not materialize.Footnote 100 Meanwhile, Burma rejected India’s proposal to exchange territory to unify Naga areas, asserting that its Nagas preferred to remain in Burma.Footnote 101
In 1948, an outpost was established in Tuensang to curb headhunting, integrating the Tribal Areas under the Naga Hills as Tuensang Frontier Division.Footnote 102 The Indian Constitution of 1950 introduced the Sixth Schedule, dividing Assam’s highlands into Part-A and Part-B areas. Part-A, including the Naga Hills district, gained civil administration through autonomous councils, while Part-B—comprising Tuensang, Tirap, and Sadiya—remained under limited governance.Footnote 103 This arrangement motivated cross-border Nagas, including Konyaks, to align with the Naga Hills for better development. In 1954, Part-B was reorganized as the Northeast Frontier Agency (NEFA). Tuensang was reattached to the Naga Hills in 1957 and incorporated into Nagaland upon its formation in 1963.Footnote 104
In the 1950s, Phizo led the NNC’s pro-independence faction, gaining support in Tuensang and, to a lesser extent, in Konyak areas, where officials feared unrest. Indian authorities anticipated Burma’s increased control over border villages through house taxes and hoped the appointment of a new officer in Tuensang would strengthen governance.Footnote 105 Meanwhile, Nagas in the Mao area of Manipur also sought inclusion in the Naga Hills, leading to sporadic violence.Footnote 106 India and Burma held border conferences to coordinate punitive missions and ‘flag marches’ to assert state authority.Footnote 107 Throughout the 1950s, Tuensang remained volatile. Until armed resistance erupted in 1956, security concerns emphasized headhunting control, often linked to inter-village conflicts. However, violence evolved from sporadic raids into an organized armed insurrection against the state, intertwining with discourses on headhunting and caricatures of savagery.
Headhunting games: Tactical violence, testing authority
Colonial officials depicted headhunting and slave trading as evidence of anarchic barbarism, using this narrative to justify territorial expansion. Scholars have shown how this discourse became entrenched from the 1900s, especially under anthropologist-administrators like T. C. Hodson, J. H. Hutton, J. P. Mills, and C. F. Haimendorf. Before this period, ‘head-taking’ was a more common term than ‘headhunting’, which later framed the practice as a martial sport and survival tactic. Archival records reveal debates among colonial writers about which communities practised headhunting and to what extent.Footnote 108 Naga scholars like Tenzenlo Thong challenged its pre-colonial prevalence, arguing that colonial officials shaped both the discourse and practice.Footnote 109
These administrators moved away from portraying headhunting as mere ‘bloodthirst’ and ‘craving for skulls’, instead framing it as a customary practice.Footnote 110 They constructed a cultural archive that combined anthropological interest with administrative violence, distinguishing between headhunting and ‘peaceful’ villages. This categorization aligned with colonial governance, justifying intervention. The global war experience momentarily disrupted this dynamic, but British efforts to reclaim war-affected areas after 1945 and impending decolonization created new conditions for resisting state authority violently. Violence increasingly played a role in state-making after decolonization.
Controlling headhunting, often involving village raids and attacks on state outposts, became a metaphor for asserting or rejecting colonial sovereignty. The British saw it as defiance, justifying violent incorporation when convenient. This reflected coercive development along the frontier, where violence mediated state negotiations. Until the mid-1950s, checkered spaces excluded from state development became sites of anti-Indian resistance. While spatial exclusion alone did not cause the Naga uprising, colonial blank spaces became fertile ground for armed insurrection. Colonial narratives of stateless anarchy and barbarism persisted into the post-colonial era.
The post-colonial period marked a rise in state militarization. After the war, the colonial state hesitated or failed to reassert authority, as many Naga villages, particularly in Burma, had acquired modern weaponry like Tommy guns and grenades.Footnote 111 The government relied on punitive village burnings to perform authority, sustaining an ambiguous approach to borders and governance that allowed flexibility to choose the level of state investment. The proliferation of weapons weakened colonial leverage in unadministered areas (recall the jibe in the opening vignette). Colonial policies reinforced notions of savagery, portraying ‘wildness’ as increasing with distance from the administration. As a legacy, lack of governance equated to a lack of ‘civilization’, which today is reframed as a ‘development deficit’ in Eastern Nagaland.Footnote 112 Acts of violence, like raiding and headhunting, invited colonial intervention to assert control. British frontier governance in Assam continued pre-colonial Ahom practices like khats (land grants) and posa (tribute) to deter Naga raids on resource-rich areas, including tea plantations and oil fields along the Assam-Naga Hills border.Footnote 113 Colonial ethnographic records depict headhunting raids as an inherently ‘indigenous’ practice, obscuring colonial involvement in fostering ritualized violence. This narrative legitimized state violence while hill communities used it to negotiate with states.Footnote 114 Naga headhunters leveraged this discourse to enhance their material and political standing. For instance, when Allied troops withdrew from Southern Sangtam (now Pochury) Naga areas in September 1944, locals questioned why they were barred from taking enemy heads when Allied soldiers had done the same against the Japanese.Footnote 115 After 1945, inter-village raids resurged, fuelled by wartime arms and the state’s prior sanctioning of head-taking against Japanese forces.
The British government showcased power through punitive village burnings and tribute collection. A key example is Pangsha (Figure 1), a Kalyo-Kengyu (Khiamniungan) village, burned in 1936 and 1939 for repeated attacks on Administered villages. ‘Friendly’ Nagas like the Changs, whom the British armed, assisted these missions, effectively outsourcing securitization. Post-war, the colonial state, often unable or unwilling to punish offenders, reframed headhunting as a customary right rather than a crime. This marked a departure from pre-war policies that stressed gun control, village burnings, and bans on headhunting to reassert authority.Footnote 116
In 1947, due to resource constraints, officials debated shifting from ‘loose control’ to ‘ordinary administration’. The former used limited securitization, while the latter entailed post-war development projects, including medical and agricultural initiatives.Footnote 117 ‘Loose control’ relied on a single officer, minimal staff, and a company-sized Assam Rifles detachment, reflecting a militarized governance approach. Retaining a buffer zone allowed selective punitive missions against raiding villages, avoiding the complexities of extradition and court trials.Footnote 118 Projecting sovereignty required state representatives and a military presence to mediate violence, dispense justice, and provide occasional development aid.
A report from 1947 attributed increased headhunting in unadministered Konyak Naga areas to the wartime absence of state authority and government ‘neutrality’, which:
… led the Konyaks to conclude that government approve of their head taking and even desire to maintain it. When government had sufficient force in the area but did nothing for four years, they argue that head taking has Government support. Moreover, the fact is that before the war various columns themselves took heads, has given further cover to the view that government is not averse to head-taking.Footnote 119
Konyak Nagas negotiated their right to continue headhunting by feigning ignorance of government policies.Footnote 120 They argued that the administration’s failure to stop headhunting during the Second World War implied tacit approval, exposing British inability to enforce authority. The British used headhunting narratives to justify killing Japanese soldiers and rewarded Nagas who brought back mutilated remains to gain their cooperation.Footnote 121 The Konyaks, however, criticized the government’s sporadic presence through ‘casual expeditions’ and preferred continuous administration, which Assam officials supported but Indian and Burmese central governments rejected.Footnote 122
Since 1941, villages like Ponyo and Tsawlaw in Burma and Kun in Assam competed for political dominance.Footnote 123 Their continued headhunting and control over cross-border slave and arms trading led to discussions about punitive raids after 1945. By late 1946, these villages had taken over 700 heads in Assam raids and stockpiled hundreds of rifles.Footnote 124 Assam and Burma officials considered punitive expeditions but realized small forces were ineffective against well-armed villages like Tsawlaw.Footnote 125 Both governments stalled taking action, claiming villages had ‘never been warned against trans-frontier raiding’.Footnote 126 A joint military expedition without air support was unfeasible, and neither government committed substantial forces. Instead, in 1947, administrators proposed persuading village leaders to sell modern weapons, though supplies from Burma remained plentiful.Footnote 127
P. F. Adams, the governor’s adviser, led a delegation to negotiate arms sales and warn of punishment. Burma set up a temporary military post in Lahe to intimidate troublemakers. In early 1947, Tsawlaw’s leaders were in a ‘truculent mood’ and refused to meet the governor.Footnote 128 By mid-1947, Tsawlaw were continuing raids on Konyak areas, Pangsha attacked kidnappers passing through their territory, and Chang villages ambushed Konyaks, taking 11 heads.Footnote 129 Burma justified its inaction, citing Tsawlaw’s claim that headhunting was ‘common practice’ and punishing tribes without warnings was ‘unfair’.Footnote 130 After military failure, the post-colonial Indian state responded by extending development schemes in March 1949. Pangsha’s violent history prompted pioneering state projects like wet-rice cultivation in Burma border villages, demonstrating how headhunting invited state intervention and administrative expansion. However, Tsawlaw, Law Nukkon, and the Konyak village of Chen in Burma, excluded from such initiatives, continued threatening Indian-controlled villages (see Figure 1 for locations of these settlements).Footnote 131
Decolonization’s discontents, inviting violent states
After decolonization, Nagas used violence to negotiate leverage with post-colonial governments. The 1950s saw increased violence, prompting state intervention through coercion rather than development. In winter 1948, a Naga raid from Assam on a Burmese Naga village near Layshi led victims to seek Burmese government help instead of retaliating. They questioned why Burma refused to punish the Assam village, exposing the colonial state’s weak security enforcement.Footnote 132 Similarly, in 1949, the Kamhau chief requested a punitive expedition against raiding villages but was dissatisfied with the ‘light’ sentence of forced labour imposed by the government.Footnote 133 After Britain’s formal departure, Burma ignored Indian External Affairs Ministry’ requests for punitive action, including against Tsawlaw, continuing such negotiated state-society dynamics.
Despite dropping plans for a joint expedition, rumours of an attack led Tsawlaw to seek allies in Assam to disrupt an Indian column in February 1949. Meanwhile, famine-affected Tuensang saw limited administration through development, including seed distribution, a vegetable garden, and a road from Mokokchung.Footnote 134 In southern Tuensang, Sema Nagas pressured Sangtam and other tribes for tribute as ‘protection fees’, prompting affected village headmen to petition a touring British officer, asking for Indian Sarkar’s (government) control.Footnote 135 British intelligence reported that an increased Indian presence in Tuensang and Tirap led Burmese Nagas to seek Indian protection from Kachin officials. Within Assam, the Konyak Ang of Namsang agreed to partial government forest control, while some unadministered Naga chiefs sought ‘cordial terms’ with the state. Meanwhile, controlled Konyaks requested permission to take heads from unadministered areas for prestige tattoos, reinforcing performative authority linked to government proximity.Footnote 136 These Konyak domains acted as buffers, maintaining ties with state agencies.
By 1950, jungle foothills remained hubs of underground activity.Footnote 137 The political officer in Tuensang warned of potential raids by Wakching in November 1952.Footnote 138 Indian and Burmese governments launched a joint cross-border expedition in response to continued headhunting raids and the opium trade, confiscating 400 guns. India claimed to extend governance ‘in principle’ to unadministered areas through roads, schools, and hospitals, though costs delayed implementation.Footnote 139
Meanwhile, Phizo was briefly jailed in 1948 before escaping to Burma in the early 1950s. Burmese authorities arrested him in 1952 while he sought UN support for Naga independence but released him in June 1953. He returned to the Naga Hills, operating underground around Mokokchung and spreading ‘anti-Indian’ sentiment.Footnote 140 In September 1954, reports claimed a leader named ‘Hongkin’ had declared an independent Naga republic in unadministered zones between Tuensang, NEFA, and Burma. The local government initially denied this, noting increased Naga demands for development in Tuensang.Footnote 141 Phizo and his associates recruited government and military personnel who defected, taking refuge in unadministered Tuensang near the undefined Indo-Burma border. He allegedly planned an attack on an Assam Rifles outpost in Tuensang and warned Gaonburas and Dobashis (village headmen and interpreters) against cooperating with Indian authorities, mobilizing NNC workers in Chingmei, a Chang Naga village.Footnote 142
In 1952, a feud led Chang Nagas to raid and burn Panso, a Yimchunger Naga village. The political assistant punished Chang villages in Tuensang with taxes and forced labour, sparking discontent. About 40 tribal leaders appointed Thungti Chang, a former British Assam Regiment soldier, to lead anti-government activities, supporting the NNC by fundraising and forming ‘Free Naga’ tribal councils. Chang later commanded the NNC’s Naga Home Guards, the precursor to the Naga Army that fought India.Footnote 143 In April 1955, Naga groups allegedly launched an insurrection by attacking Assam Rifles in Tuensang. Initially, the Assam government dismissed it as a village retaliation for a massacre, where 64 were killed in a Yengpang headhunting raid. The government accused the NNC of spreading rumours that the Assam Rifles had massacred Nagas to incite revenge.Footnote 144
British anthropologist and tribal adviser Verrier Elwin, in his book Nagaland, attributed violence to administrative expansion in Tuensang, with outposts established in Kiphire and Noklak between 1951 and 1953. Villages constantly demanded development and administrative expansion after suffering headhunting raids. Meanwhile, NNC hostilities grew, including threats, kidnappings, and attacks on officials and infrastructure. The NNC considered armed insurrection in 1953, aiming to mobilize ‘more virile tribes’ in recently administered Tuensang due to their limited state contact.Footnote 145
Accounts of Naga armed resistance and its link to headhunting vary. Government reports noted sporadic violence from Phizo’s supporters between 1950 and 1954, escalating into an organized rebellion by the mid-1950s.Footnote 146 Official records suggest Naga attacks on Assam Rifles initiated conflict, while Naga writers like Kaka Iralu argue Indian forces shot Nagas taking refuge in Tuensang in 1948, provoking violence. Iralu criticizes Naga scholar Murkot Rammuny’s book on the Naga conflict for omitting India’s ‘inhuman treatment’ of ‘freedom-loving Nagas’, which provoked their violent responses. Iralu accuses Indian forces of arming Pangsha for the Yengpang massacre, where 63 villagers were beheaded for supporting the NNC.Footnote 147 Naga activist Visier Sanyu offers a non-statist perspective, attributing armed resistance to Indian military atrocities in the Yengpang incident, including rape, arson, and public executions of NNC leaders.Footnote 148
Phizo sought international support in London in 1960, documenting the Yengpang massacre based on survivor testimonies. He claimed an Indian political officer had boasted of being a ‘better headhunter’ than Nagas, ordering beheadings, mutilations, and public executions, including the brutal killing of a schoolteacher and her family.Footnote 149 Phizo’s account of this incident illustrates a gruesome dual appropriation of headhunting to highlight Indian ‘barbarism’, mimicking nineteenth-century British colonial accounts.Footnote 150
Elwin described the violence as a ‘revival’ of headhunting due to ‘insurgent propaganda’ in Tuensang’s ‘innocent border ranges’.Footnote 151 His paternalistic explanations justified Pangsha’s role in Yengpang as a ‘normal’ revenge act within Naga headhunting traditions.Footnote 152 These archival dissensions highlight how colonial stereotypes of Naga headhunting shaped perceptions of anti-state resistance. Phizo’s efforts to frame the Naga movement as a modern nation-state aligned with global decolonization.Footnote 153 Most accounts confirm that the Naga federal government was formed in March 1956, modelled on a modern nation-state with a flag, a constitution, a president, and a parliament with a Council of Ministers.
Yet, despite these modernist trappings, headhunting remained a symbol of defiance (Figure 3). In 1956, Nagas allegedly sent a severed Indian official’s head to Shillong with a note: ‘Please send us a more polite man.’Footnote 154 The shift from headhunting to ‘insurgency’ and Indian ‘counterinsurgency’ intertwined with state expansion, reinforcing violence mimetically as both a symbol of defiance and justification for military intervention.Footnote 155 This ritualized appropriation of violence and the representation of anarchic blank spaces, increasingly ‘filled’ a militarized state presence due to armed resistance.
Naga resistance fighters with Indian heads. Image probably taken in the very early days of the revolt. Source: Ursula Graham Bower's personal collection, Sussex.
From stateless to ceasefire state
British foreign intelligence confirmed the NNC encouraged attacks on pro-government Naga villages in unadministered areas, prompting India to deploy troops. Reports claimed that the Indian Air Force bombed Naga ‘jungle headhunters’, forcing them into Burma and NEFA, though Indian authorities denied this.Footnote 156 Development remained inconsistent in former unadministered areas, fuelling anti-state violence. Armed clashes pushed insurgents into Burma’s Naga areas, still a ‘No-Man’s-Land’ by colonial administrative definitions, leading to Indian military mobilization in the Naga Hills.Footnote 157
The conflict severely impacted civilians, who faced retaliation from both sides, including executions and village burnings.Footnote 158 The army conducted ‘flag marches’ to reinforce civilian confidence and display strength against NNC supporters.Footnote 159 In 1956, the Assam governor acknowledged Indian army atrocities, including executions, village burnings, and sexual violence, which pushed neutral Nagas towards the NNC. Some pro-government factions preferred using armed Naga militias against dissidents rather than full military occupation, mirroring colonial indirect rule and guerrilla levies from the Second World War. Pro-negotiation Naga groups demanded unifying the Naga Hills and Tuensang, requiring redrawn state borders.Footnote 160 The government controlled access to resources, deciding who received financial incentives or punishment, continuing past distinctions of being administered or unadministered.
In 1958, Indian forces captured Thungti Chang, whose interrogation report indicated Tuensang Nagas distrusted the Naga Hills and Phizo. Chang preferred that Tuensang Nagas remained in India with a separate district if Phizo’s UN self-determination bid succeeded.Footnote 161 Internal frictions among Naga leaders influenced competing border demands within India or as a sovereign state. Many Naga leaders continued advocating for the Inner Line’s retention through the 1950s and 1960s, a stance that persists today.Footnote 162
The Indian government enacted the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) in 1958, enforcing martial law which persists in parts of the region. Amid intensified military violence, some Naga civilian leaders sought political resolution within India. The Naga People’s Convention (NPC), led by Dr Imkongliba Ao, advocated merging the Naga Hills and Tuensang Frontier Division (separating it from NEFA) and incorporating reserved forests in Assam. The NPC pressed underground factions to renounce violence.Footnote 163 Dr Ao successfully negotiated the Sixteen Point Agreement before his assassination in 1961, allegedly by Phizo’s faction. This agreement led to Nagaland’s creation on 1 December 1963, partitioning Assam.Footnote 164
In 1964, as the Naga Peace Mission negotiated a ceasefire, the Naga federal government insisted Nagas had never been conquered by India, though they acknowledged British annexation a century prior.Footnote 165 The new state’s creation and 1964 assembly elections co-opted moderates, weakening the independence movement. ‘Headhunters’ became ‘hostiles’ in post-colonial discourse, but Indian narratives continued portraying Naga savagery and conflict to undermine self-determination while maintaining indirect rule during the ceasefire years.Footnote 166 State-making in the Naga Hills formalized development fund allocation and employment in Nagaland. Both Indian and Burmese governments combined financial incentives with coercion, embedding a system of ‘ceasefire capitalism’ that persists today.Footnote 167 These policies institutionalized state presence rather than evasion, fostering violent competition within Naga society while perpetuating the rhetoric of ‘anarchic’ freedom and a martial past.
Conclusion
Nagas resisted post-war and decolonization-era state territorial projects that conflicted with colonial mapping, nation-state borders, and competing nationalisms rooted in alternative cartographies. Early British frontier policies created a regional ‘geo-body’, while India and Burma’s boundary delineations since the mid-1960s further divided communities, clashing with pre-existing political and social affiliations.Footnote 168 Unlike Indian and Burmese nationalism, Naga nationalism initially sought colonial state support rather than outright rejecting new nation-states. Internal and international boundary-making continues to shape developmental policies, fostering competing territorial and political identities within Naga society.
Portraying trans-border Nagas as ‘state evaders’ relied on narratives of violence, including headhunting, warfare, raiding, slavery, and illicit trade. However, communities in unadministered areas did not always resist states, nor did states consistently seek control. These communities selectively engaged with state authorities, both welcoming and resisting borders based on their interests. Violence became a mimetic communication mechanism between local groups and state agents, shaping cultural and territorial boundaries. Such practices led to selective border securitization, creating fragmented spaces in the decolonized highlands. Over time, violence and development demands spurred state expansion and new boundaries.
These processes resulted in exclusionary and checkered ‘No-Man’s-Lands’ in Zomia’s decolonizing frontiers. The term remains central in narratives of violent state resistance, including contemporary ‘rebel literature’ in the Assam-Burma borderlands.Footnote 169 Colonial state imagery persisted post-decolonization and influenced modern armed conflicts. Legacies of the Second World War and decolonization continue to shape sovereignty and integration demands, as seen in the Eastern Naga People’s Organization’s push for a separate ‘Eastern Nagaland’ state. Today, Eastern Nagas demand more boundaries and greater access to Indian state resources, intensifying conflicts among different groups.Footnote 170
Acknowledgements
I thank Tina Harris, Gerben Nooteboom, David Brenner, Willem van Schendel, and Catriona Child for their comments and suggestions in various iterations of this article. I am grateful to the ‘Boundary Pushing in Asian Studies’ workshop organized by the Journal of Asian Studies and the Asian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh for helping improve early versions of the manuscript. I thank the universities of Amsterdam, Leiden, SOAS, Vienna, and Zurich for providing opportunities to discuss parts of the research. I am grateful to the numerous archives in Guwahati, Kohima, Delhi, London, and Yangon and their helpful staff for enabling the research. I am extremely grateful to Ali Hossaini for producing and designing the maps, and Pundarikakhi Gogoi for helping me collect some of the research data.
Funding statement
I thank the Swiss National Science Foundation and International Institute for Asian Studies for the initial funding.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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