When Phejin Konyak was nine, at boarding school in Dimapur, she remembers the other children staring at her in the dining hall. They whispered things about her and her siblings, saying, “Don’t mess with them. Their fathers and grandfathers will come and chop your head off.” From an early age she understood that there was something uniquely different about her people.
Phejin is a Konyak, one of the last Naga tribes to be converted to Christianity, and who, until the 1970s, practised headhunting. I met her some years ago near the border town of Mon in Nagaland, where I was on a project with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). I remember seeing old men and women walking around the market with tattoos on their faces and bodies, coloured beads around their necks, and impressive animal tusks in their ears. Phejin told me that Konyaks believed the soul force lies in the human skull, which is why headhunting was a way for people to seize power and settle disputes. Every young man had to take a head in order to become an adult. Tattoos were made to denote these achievements, but also as marks of identity and rites of passage.
Not just skin deep
Phejin spent three years going to remote areas of Nagaland, interviewing the elders of her tribe, documenting their stories and experiences. Accompanying her was Dutch photographer, Peter Bos, who made a series of striking portraits, and the resulting book is The Konyaks: Last of the Tattooed Headhunters, which hit stores last month.
A book that documents disappearances is bound to be steeped in a kind of melancholia. “When I began talking to the elders and hearing their stories, I felt nostalgic because it transported me back to the fond memories of my grandparents and my early childhood in the village,” Phejin tells me, “I was born and raised till I was four in a traditional Konyak longhouse surrounded by my grandparents, who were tattooed elders themselves. Somehow I always felt more connected to them than to anyone.” Her great-grandfather, Honreih, was appointed dobashi or interpreter for the British in 1918. He accompanied ethnographer JH Hutton to the uncharted territories of the Naga Hills in 1923, and, in many ways, her journey retraces his footsteps.
All the elders Phejin spoke to knew of her great-grandfather. Initially, they’d been surprised by her inquisitiveness. Even their own children hadn’t been interested in their folk tales and tattooing adventures. But once they opened up, it was like a barrier had been broken, and the stories kept coming. One man in the Chen Loishu village, who is featured on the cover of the book (right), even wanted to give them money from his cardamom crop because he was so appreciative of their efforts to keep the dying traditions of the Konyaks alive.
Christianity and change
In his foreword to the book, William Dalrymple relates how, in 1869, a Reverend Edward P Scott entered Ao country and was met by 12 naked spear-holding warriors. He took out his violin and played ‘Am I a Soldier of the Cross’, and the warriors apparently threw down their spears and begged for more. This could be pinpointed as the beginning of the end. The advent of Baptist Christianity in Nagaland, Dalrymple writes, is a story of hyper-development. In 30 years, they underwent something that had taken a 1,000 years in Europe: “Paraffin lamps replaced torches made of rushes; matches replaced flints; guns replaced spears and swords; doctors prescribing penicillin replaced shamans polishing skulls.”
Phejin and Bos’ journey is an interesting reversal in the gaze of the missionary eye. Contrary to the platoons of missionaries who arrived in India’s northeast with their systems of morals and modernisation, the goal of this book has been simply to document, not with the idea of resuscitating or judgement, but to say, this was once a way of life. Phejin concedes that they couldn’t have remained isolated as tribes forever, that her missionary education has helped her become who she is. But she wishes some of the old ways had been allowed to flourish — the bead work and wood carving, the longhouses and poems, the tattooing equipment (sharp rattan thorns and sap from the red cedar tree). She wishes they could have retained some of their relationship to nature (they used to ask permission from a tree before felling it), that they could still be alert to forest ghosts and omens.
“People are too caught up with the influences of modernity and materialistic inclinations,” she says. “Even my parents’ generation’s view is that the traditional culture of my grandparents is something old and different. And, by this term, old means bad and new means good. The influences of Christianity and the new modern lifestyle has brainwashed our people into believing that only the new way is acceptable.”
The great vanishing
The effect of reading this book, and examining the beautiful portraits — each of its subjects having lived more than seven decades on this planet — is to read a larger story of India: a vanishing. In some of the photographs, grandchildren in hoodies huddle close to their grandparents, who stand like grand relics, already consigned to another time. I think of my days in Mon, how, despite all its modernisation, Nagaland is one of the most militarised zones in the country with problems of drugs, arms, child trafficking, and insurgencies. How the entire northeast is still largely cut off from the mainland in terms of jobs, healthcare and opportunities, and how they face routine harassment and racism when they visit the mainland.
I remember my translator friend, Pholei, telling me change has to be embraced with both hands. But it’s hard not to feel a kind of heartbreak listening to the song of Ngon-am Anghya, the tattooing artist who sings, “Bring the machete to cut the rattan palm bushes my love, Go and burn down the bushes and destroy them completely, I cannot endure the pain of seeing them grow any more.”
Published by Roli Books, The Konyaks: Last of the Tattooed Headhunters, costs ₹2,525. Available at all leading bookstores.
