Nagaland: A Journey to India's Forgotten Frontier
by Jonathan Glancey
Faber and Faber
Nagaland is a small, land-locked state in modern India that is best located on a map using a magnifying glass. Aim for the eastern edge of the Himalayas, with Assam to the west and north, Myanmar to the east.
For the past 60 years, its population of two million people has been caught in two different wars. There's a battle for independence with India, and an internecine conflict among its various tribes, a combination of Tibetans, Burmese, Indonesian, Chinese, Maoist-Christian insurgents and headhunters.
It is an unlikely sort of place, and an unlikely sort of subject for Jonathan Glancey, an English journalist who writes mainly about architecture. His interest in Nagaland is partly familial - his father, grandfather and uncle all served there in the British armed forces. But the project is also personal. 'A deep part of my own imagination, and of my desire to travel to parts of the world that had become virtually inaccessible, was nurtured [in Nagaland],' he writes.
The resulting work is part memoir, part history lesson and part travel book. This latter is no mean feat. Although tourists can visit Nagaland, it is difficult to travel far in this largely uncharted country.
All three literary disciplines (memoir, history and travel) are required to get near the heart of this most obscure of places. Glancey notes, for example, that Nagaland's tribes have been estimated at anything from seven to 37 (he prefers 16). Or there is the reputation for cannibalism, regularly repeated, but rarely proved. Its reputation for headhunting, by contrast, is well documented, although it is 50 years since the last headhunting mission was officially recorded.