Colonial Knowledge Production in North-East India
- Part II -

Dr Syed Ahmed *

Two Nagas in traditional attires (photographed by Ursula Bower)
Photo courtesy: The Highland Institute

Ursula Graham Bower: The woman who lived among the Nagas and led Naga guerrilla fighters during the IInd World War

Ursula Bower (1914-1988) was one of the pioneer British amateur anthropologists who lived among the Zeme Nagas of Naga Hills from 1937 to 1946. She also raised a Naga force and fought against the Japanese in Burma during the IInd World War from 1942 to 1945.

Bower was educated at Roedean School in Brighton, UK. At the invitation of a friend, Alexa Macdonald, she visited the Naga Hills and Manipur in 1937. Alexa was then staying with her brother, an ICS officer, posted in Imphal.

Bower soon fell in love with the Naga Hills and the tribes inhabiting there. Bower lived among the Naga tribes and did anthropological studies of their society and culture. Interestingly, she also took innumerable photographs which documented the life of the Naga tribes. She is said to have resided at Laisong village.

During the IInd World War, in 1944, the Japanese troops invaded the jungles of Naga Hills from Burma. Bower, who was skilled in the use of firearm, assisted the British force. At the request of the British army officials, Bower raised and trained a guerrilla force of 150 Nagas and engaged in the fight.

Field Marshal, William Joseph Slim (alias Bill Slim), who then led the Burma Campaign, acknowledged the contribution of Bower and her Naga force, and supported her with arms and re-inforcements, integrating the unit within the V Force (intelligence-gathering and guerrilla organisation). Bower’s unit was nicknamed “Bower Force.” The force became so strong and effective that the Japanese put a price on Bower’s head.

A short but interesting article, titled Ursula and the Naked Nagas, which appeared in Time (1st January 1945), describes the Naga force of Bower thus:

“Are wa ittai nan dai?” (What on earth is that?) cried a startled Japanese officer as a burst of elephant-gun fire whistled past his ears and a troop of half-naked Nagas leaped out of the bushes. He found out, but too late. He and his jungle patrol were wiped out. But last week other Japs who had survived the fight in northern Burma knew more about the Naga raiders and their leader. The half-naked tribesmen from northeastern India were directed by a white woman: pert, pretty Ursula Graham-Bower, 30, an Anthropology student who looks like a cinema actress.

In 1939 Miss Graham-Bower went out from England to India “to putter about with a few cameras and do a bit of medical work, maybe write a book.” She disappeared into the Assam hills to study the Nagas. These lithe-limbed warriors live in fortified hilltop villages, lead a somewhat humdrum existence punctuated by occasional raids to cut off their neighbours’ heads, which they carry about in wicker baskets.

Miss Graham-Bower managed to keep her own head on, and presently won the friendship of the Naga chieftains. Now and then people in the outside world got letters from her, exulting over the pictures she was taking of primitive dances and ceremonies. Some of the more pretentious Nagas wore a little apron in front, but most just wore bracelets. They cultivated little patches of cleared jungle for rice, and, like the South American Indians, used drugs to catch fish. They begged Miss Graham-Bower to name their babies. She named most of them Victoria Elizabeth.

When the Japanese armies surged across the Burma border and threatened to spill into India, Miss Graham-Bower declared war on Japan. She placed herself at the head of the mobilized Nagas. By her orders guards were posted on main and secondary trails, a watch-and-warn system was established. Over these trails thousands of evacuees, deserters, escaped prisoners and bailed-out airmen fled from Burma to India. Miss Graham-Bower also directed Naga ambushes of Japanese search parties.

She is still leading her pleasantly active life among the head-hunters. In Leigh Hall, Cricklade, Wilts, Miss Graham-Bower's mother commented on her daughter’s fighting blood, added proudly: “An extraordinary girl; she never would sit still.”

A Tangkhul Headman - (Photographed by Ursula Bower)
Photo courtesy: The Naga Path

For her role in the war, Bower was decorated with the Lawrence Memorial Medal, and also appointed as Member of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1945. Bower also became a protagonist of a popular American comic book, Jungle Queen.

Bower married Lt. Col. Frederick Nicholson Betts (1906-1973), whom she met when he was serving in the V Force in Burma in mid-1945. Betts worked as Political Officer in the remote and volatile Subansiri region (towards Tibet). In 1948, she and her husband moved to British Kenya (took up coffee plantation), but had to shift to Isle of Mull (lies off the west coast of Scotland) due to political unrest.

Bower passed away on 12th November 1988. She was survived by two daughters, Catriona and Alison.

Bower wrote three popular books based on her sojourn in North-eastern India, namely The Hidden Land: Mission to a Far Corner of India (first published by Butler & Tanner Ltd., London in 1913), The Naga Path (published by John Murray, London in 1950) and Drums behind the Hill (published by William Morrow & Company, New York, 1950).

The Hidden Land is an account of her travels, studies and observations in Subansiri region. Bower describes that “the area lay in the foothills belt which runs between the plains of Assam and the Great Himalayan Range on the southern borders of Tibet (referring to the remote parts of today’s Arunachal Pradesh). The map shows it blank, a vast, virginal space, broken only by the conjectural courses of the three major rivers, the Subansiri, Kamla and Khru.”

The region was named after the Subansiri River, a tributary of Brahmaputra, which flows passing though Tibet, Arunachal Pradesh and Assam. At present, Lower Subansiri and Upper Subansiri are the two districts of Arunachal Pradesh.

In the book, Bower notes the commencement of British Government’s attention and evolution of policy for North-eastern frontier in the early part of the 20th century. The region which had, so far, been left in isolation by the British Raj began to be given serious attention with the initiation of China’s aggressive policy in the Himalayan (Tibet) and North-eastern region and further by the Japanese invasion on the Burma ad Naga Hills. The British authorities strengthened their control in the region by opening security posts and line of communication.

Bower observes:

“The isolation of the northern mountains ended abruptly in 1910. China, which had long claimed suzerainty over Tibet in spite of Tibet’s assertion of her independence, invaded that country, deposed the Dalai Lama and occupied Lhasa, and a garrison of Chinese troops appeared at Rima on the Assam Tibet border and ordered the local Mishmi tribesmen to cut them a road to India. Since there was no knowing where China would stop (she had already hinted at claims to the buffer states of Nepal and Bhutan) information on the frontier territories was urgently needed, and in the next few years considerable stretches of the Northern Assam hills were more or less thoroughly explored and surveyed.

The main routes from Tibet were located and a military bridle-road was built up the most important, that running from Rima, but in the deepest part of the hills, the Subansiri region, no through route could be found; the heavily escorted Miri Mission moved a long way up the Kamla River without meeting Tibetans, and the rest of the Subansiri country was then left to itself.

Finally, in 1914, Sir Henry MacMahon negotiated a tripartite Convention between India, China and Tibet and fixed the hitherto undefined Indo-Tibetan frontier along the Great Himalayan Range. Tibet accepted the Convention, but the Chinese Government repudiated its representative’s actions and refused to sign.

The invasion of Burma and the Naga Hills by the Japanese had taught the Indian Government that undeveloped territory, however difficult the terrain, could no longer be reckoned on as a defence, and the Chinese threat made it desirable that a firm claim to the Subansiri region be established. A prerequisite for this was the pacification of the tribes.

The Apa Tanis presented no great problem; their peaceable and highly developed social organization could be left to itself during the initial stages and though certain of their customs, notably domestic slavery, must inevitably be changed, these were an integral part of an economy so specialized and delicately poised that too rash interference might have disastrous results. The Daflas were far more difficult to deal with.

No progress of any kind could be made till their internecine warfare was ended and free movement in their country became possible. It was necessary with them to develop control and eventually administration among a warlike and savage people who had no conception of unified and organized government and whose home was in mountainous and almost entirely unexplored country; to accomplish this forcibly would entail a major military operation, which, owing to the scattered population and the incredible difficulty of the country, would have been both prohibitively costly and largely ineffective. The alternative was to proceed by slow pressure and gradual infiltration, and this was the course chosen.

The Government decided to begin by establishing a permanent post as far out as conveniently possible in tribal territory. As it was essential that there should be no withdrawal during the rainy season and a consequent relapse into anarchy in the hills, it would be served by a line of communication to supply and maintain it throughout the year.

To feed the line of communication, a base for the collection and dispatch of stores and the housing of a permanent porter-corps of Nepalese was to be set up in the plains near North Lakhimpur. The tracing and construction of an all-weather porter-track was bound to be a long business and to save time it was arranged that when a Political Officer was appointed he should move straight into the hills with a platoon of military police and a small staff of interpreters, select a site for the post and receive a year’s stores by air; thus, cushioned against major transport problems for at least a season, he could open the line of communication, make the acquaintance of the tribes and learn his way about the country before any serious attempt at administration began…”

In the book, The Naga Path, Bower recollects her experiences of living among the Naga tribes in the Naga Hills. Bower’s research papers on Nagas are now in the custody of Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge. The photographs of the Nagas taken by Bower were deposited to the Pitt Rivers Museum of the University of Oxford. These photographs are now available online (wwwe.lib.cam.ac.uk).

Over the years, several documentaries have been made which documented Bower’s life and works, particularly her collection of photographs and artefacts gathered from Naga Hills.

BBC Radio 4 produced a programme titled, The Naga Queen, and a play, The Butterfly Hunt, based on the life of Bower ad her husband. A two-part 1985 interview of Bower with Professor Alan Macfarlane is also available on YouTube. Vicky Thomas authored a book, The Naga Queen: Ursula Graham Bower and Her Jungle Warriors, 1939-45, in 2012.

Bower’s eldest daughter, Catriona Child, is married to an Indian businessman, Tahir Hussain, and the family resides in Delhi. She converted Bower’s remarkable life in Naga Hills into a play based on her mother’s diaries and papers. Chris Eldon Lee was hired as the playwright. The play, titled Ursula: Queen of the Jungle was showed to full houses at the Edinburgh Festival in August 2017.