Expedition Naga: Diaries from the Hills in Northeast India: 1921-1937; 2002-2006 (With DVD)

It is a pleasure and an honour to introduce Expedition Naga–Diaries From the Hills in Northeast India by Peter van Ham and Jamie Saul. One particular interest in this fascinating account of various visits to the Naga Hills on the Assam-Burma border is the way in which it weaves back and forth from the tours that the Deputy Commissioner for the Naga Hills, J.H. Hutton, made through the unadministered areas as early as 1921 and then again in 1923, followed by his successor, J.P. Mills, along with Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf in 1936, and those made by the authors between 2002 and 2005. In fact there is a deep symmetry to be found in these encounters with the Naga, which are some eighty-five years apart. Hutton has been in the Naga Hills from 1912 to 1929 and, as a synthesis of his researches, published his two classic monographs, the Sema Nagas and the Angami Nagas, in 1921. The following years he toured in the remote, unadministered areas in the north of the Naga Hills where the Konyak and others lived, and wrote an ethnographically extraordinarily rich account in the form of a travel diary. Eighty years later, after a visit to Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland in 2002, and consecutive visits to the Burmese Naga Hills, Jamie Saul synthesized his immense knowledge of the Naga on the Burmese side of the border into The Naga of Burma (2005). Meanwhile, Peter van Ham and Aglaja Stirn had travelled through the Southern slopes of Nagaland in the 1990s and then in 1998 to the Tirap District of Arunachal Pradesh. They went on to visit various restricted areas in 2002 and the following year published their magnificent set of Naga photographs, along with a deep knowledgeable text, in The Hidden World of the Naga (2003). Van Ham and Stirn continued their research in the remoter parts of the state in 2004, which Hutton had also visited. Then, Saul and van Ham made another expedition in 2005 to the remoter interiors that Hutton had traversed–the Konyak Northeast. The result of all this is an ethnographically intense and yet highly readable and adventurous account in the form of a travel diary presented in this book.