Tribal Cultures in the Eastern Himalayas, Through the Eye of Time: Photographs of Arunachal Pradesh, 1859-2006 (v. 1)

Through the Eye of Time



Brill’s Tibetan Studies Library Edited by

Henk Blezer Alex McKay Charles Ramble

VOLUME 16/1 ii

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Apatani priest looking through the viewfinder of one of ­Fürer-Haimendorf  ’s cameras.   Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, Apatani valley, 1944

Through the Eye of Time Photographs of Arunachal Pradesh 1859–2006 Tribal Cultures in the Eastern Himalayas

By

Michael Aram Tarr and Stuart Blackburn

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2008



Cover illustration: Apatanis welcoming the Fürer-Haimendorfs to the Apatani valley. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, March 1944, SOAS 155 (5) 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tarr, Michael Aram. Through the eye of time : photographs of Arunachal Pradesh 1859-2006 : tribal cultures in the eastern Himalayas / by Michael Aram Tarr and Stuart Blackburn.    p. cm. — (Brill’s Tibetan studies library ; v. 16/1)   Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-90-04-16522-9 (hardback : alk. paper)   1. Indigenous peoples—India—Andhra Pradesh—Pictorial works. 2. Tribes—India—Arunachal Pradesh—Pictorial   works. 3. Arunachal Pradesh (India—Pictorial works. I. Blackburn, Stuart H. II. Title. DS485.A5542T37 2008 954’.163035—dc22 2008002432

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ISSN: 1568-6183 ISBN: 978 90 04 16522 9 Copyright 2008 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints BRILL, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

Table of Contents Abbreviations of sources of archival photographs  viii Acknowledgements  ix About the authors  ix Introduction  1 A. B. C.

People and Place  1 Map 1 Arunachal Pradesh and the eastern Himalayas  2 Map 2 Arunachal Pradesh  2 Colonial Contacts  4 Portraits in the Plains: 1860s  4 Expeditions into the Hills: 1870s-1930s  7 Staying in the Hills: 1940s-1960s  12 The Uses of Photographs  17

Notes  19 Bibliography  22 Plates  25 Appendix: List of Photographs  213

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Abbreviations of sources of archival photographs BL (British Library, London) BM (British Museum, London) NAM (National Army Museum, London) PRM (Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford) RGS (Royal Geographical Society, London) SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, London)

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Acknowledgements This book is based on research carried out during the ‘Tribal Transitions’ project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) from 2002 to 2007. Based at the School of Oriental and African Studies (London), the project partners were the British Museum (London), the Centre for Cultural Research and Documentation (Itanagar) and Rajiv Gandhi University (Itanagar). Some of the images in this book were shown as part of a touring exhibition in India during 20052006, which was supported by the British Council in New Delhi. The publication of this book was made possible by the generous support of the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation. Norma Schultz drew the maps. We are grateful to the following institutions for permission to use images from their collections: the Royal Geographical Society, London; the Pitt

About the authors

Rivers Museum, Oxford; the British Library, London; the School of Oriental and African Studies, London; the National Army Museum, London and the British Museum, London. We also wish to thank Ashok Elwin in Shillong for his cooperation in arranging for digital copies of photographs taken by his father,Verrier Elwin, to be deposited in the British Museum. We are equally grateful to Nick Haimendorf in London, who granted us special access to the photographs taken by his father, Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, which are held at SOAS. We are especially indebted to Toni Huber, at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and to John Falconer, at the British Library, for their advice, knowledge and enthusiasm while preparing this book.

The contemporary photographs in this book were taken by Michael Aram Tarr, and the great majority were taken between 2002 and 2006 as part of the ‘Tribal Transitions’ project. Mr. Tarr, who lives in Berkeley, California, has been photographing in India since his childhood and in Arunachal Pradesh since 1996. He also selected the historical photographs to be included in this book from a total of approximately 8,000 photographs of Arunachal Pradesh now located in several collections in the U.K. and in the Elwin collection in Shillong. The Introduction was written by Stuart Blackburn, director of the ‘Tribals Transitions’ project. He is a Senior Research Associate at SOAS and the author of several books on folklore in India.

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Introduction People and Place

In addition, the almost yearly expeditions by the sen mainly but not exclusively on aesthetic criteBritish authorities into the hills provided countless ria. A degree of geographical and ethnic diversity Arunachal Pradesh is a little-known corner of the also influenced selection of the historical images; opportunities for photography. world tucked away between Assam,Tibet, Bhutan and most of the contemporary photographs were and Burma. Few people, even today, have heard Historically, the region that is now Arunachal selected in order to complement or comment of the Adi, the Monpa, the Nyishi, the Khampti Pradesh lay on the periphery of two great civilisa- upon the historical ones. Whenever possible a or any of the other thirty or more groups who tions, the Tibetan across the tall peaks to the north narrative structure guided the sequencing of the live in this part of the eastern Himalayas. So it is and the Hindu/Ahom in the Assam valley to the images. A focus on rituals emerged from our all the more fortuitous that photography, within south. Both Tibetan and Ahom written sources research interests in these events, which display twenty years of its invention, had made its way up record the presence of hill tribes on their borders, culture in an especially visual manner. the Brahmaputra River and that over the course but only when the British empire pushed into the of the next century several thousand photographs Assam valley in the early nineteenth century do In the end, of course, the photographs in this book were taken in these mountains on the northeastwe find any detailed descriptions.2  From the 1820s do not tell anything like a complete story; the arern frontier of India. This unlikely photographic onward, the people of Arunachal Pradesh appear chival images are reflected through a colonial lens, documentation of tribal life was created by many in essays, books, diaries and official reports; their and the contemporary ones are also selective. But different, unrelated hands and motivated by a vavillages are sketch­ed and their portraits drawn. placed side by side, they present, for the first time, riety of aims, which is why the photographs are The first photograph of a person from the region Arunachal Pradesh through the eye of time. scattered in several archives.1  Taken as a whole, was taken in 1859, but it is published here for the however, the photographs have a depth and qualfirst time. In the roughly one hundred years that The state, with a population of just over one mility due in no small part to individuals, especially followed, thousands more photographs were taken lion, has approximately 35 tribes and 25 languages to a civil surgeon with unus­ual technical talent, of these hill tribes, mostly by colonial officials and (numbers vary according to how one classifies to officers with a sympathetic eye and to anthroanthropologists.The majority of these images, too, groups and sub-groups). For convenience, the state pologists convinced of the value of the camera. may be broadly divided into three cultural zones: have never been displayed or printed. tibetanised Buddhist groups in the west and along Fig. A For this book, we have selected a little more than the northern border; a central zone of primarily Dadaso Manyu’s family and friends who came to participate in a Du 100 of these historical images, from the 1860s animists, with a growing Christian presence; and festival. to the 1960s, and added about 100 more mostly the southeast with groups from Burma, some of Michael Aram Tarr, Hayuliang, 2004 taken between 2002 and 2006. Brought together, whom are Theravada Buddhist, and Naga-related Dadaso Manyu is the man in the centre wearing the baseball hat they show change—in housing, clothing and land- tribes, who practice both animism and Christianbackward. The first of his four wives, in whose house the ritual scape—but also continuity—especially in rituals ity.These regions or culture zones are also defined took place, is to his left, wearing a traditional Mishmi shawl. Da- and ceremonies.The photographs have been cho- by major river systems: the Kameng in the west; daso is a Digaru Mishmi, but his family includes Miju Mishmis as well. Other guests are behind the family on the porch. See also photographs # 61-63.

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Map 1 Arunachal Pradesh and the eastern Himalayas.

Norma Schultz, 2007

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Map 2 Arunachal Pradesh Norma Schultz, 2007

the Subansiri, Siang (Tsangpo/Brahmaputra) and and slavery, the coming of good roads, telephones, Dibang in the centre; the Lohit and Tirap in the hospitals and literacy, but also to a considerable southeast. military presence, a growing influence of Hinduism and a startling rise of Christianity. According to the Indian census of 2001, 35% of the state’s population are Hindu; 31% are tribal When the British assumed control of the Asanimist (‘Other’); 19% are Christian; 13% are Bud- sam valley from the Ahom kingdom in the early dhist; and a fraction are Sikh, Muslim or Jain.3 The nineteenth century, they inherited, almost unhigh figure for Hindus is partially explained by the wittingly, the hill areas encircling it. Initially, the large number of Indians who are concentrated in government in Calcutta wished to leave the hill the state capital and district headquarters, where tribes alone, or at least bypass them, as they sought they work as government employees, small busi- new trade routes to China. Soon, however, the nessmen and shopkeepers. Another reason is that fledgling colonial administration in Assam was some tribals, especially Idu Mishmis and Noctes, dragged into long-standing economic relations consider themselves ‘Hindu.’ All tribes, with one in the region. The British happily took over land exception (the Tai-speaking Khamptis in the revenues in Assam but soon found that they also east), speak Tibeto-Burman languages. Only the had to manage trade between the valley and hills. Khamptis and some of the tibetanised groups have In order to regulate this trade, the colonial govhistorically used a script. ernment revived two institutions begun by the Ahoms, a Tai-speaking Shan people who had enIn the course of the 150 years shown through the tered the valley in the twelfth century and become photographs in this book, the people of Arunachal thoroughly hinduised by the time the British arPradesh have seen fundamental changes in their rived. First, the colonial government encouraged a lives. During the first 100 years, they slowly ab- series of annual fairs held at duars (or ‘doors’) near sorbed the impact of British colonial rule; admin- the foot of the mountains. Second, they revived istrative control in the interior was limited even an annual tax called posa, which obligated some at Indian Independence, but the market economy, villages in the plains to give a specified amount tea estates and schools in Assam gradually pulled of goods and money to hill tribes; even the posthill populations southward. The emergence of Independence Indian government continued to new economic relations in the hills was signalled make some of these payments into the 1950s. as early as the 1830s when annual payments to one tribe were changed from salt and cloth to The only lithic evidence of what must have been rupees;4  and in the 1940s, the first air-drop in the extensive contact between the hill tribes north of hills symbolised a new political order. During the the Brahmaputra and the Ahoms records another past fifty years, these new forces advanced further type of arrangement (see fig. B). An inscription and further into the hills: a cash economy re- on a stone pillar, erected probably in the early placed barter, and political authority was displaced sixteenth century, pledges the local Ahom ruler from local councils to elected elites based in the to protect the settlements of Idu Mishmis if they state capital and funded from New Delhi. These provide him with baskets of a valuable medicinal changes have resulted in a virtual end to feuding plant:

I, the Dihinga Bar Gohain, do engrave on the stone pillar and the copper plate these writings (on the strength of which) the Misimis [sic] are to dwell on the hills near the Dibong River with their females, children, attendants and followers.They will occupy all the hills.They will give four basketfuls of poison and other things as tribute and keep watch over the body of the fat Gohari (Sadiya Khowa Gohain). If anybody happens to be in possession of and wishes to encroach on both sites [sides?] (of the hills), he is prohibited from encroachment. If anybody should dwell by the side of the hills, he will surely become a slave (of the Misimis). I do proclaim wide that if anybody sits exalted (i.e., comes in power, i.e., becomes a ruler) he should break the agreement and break the stone.5 

Such promises, even in stone, and even when changed to written ‘treaties’ by the British in the nineteenth century, were easily broken. Disagreements led to raids on villages in the plains, which in turn prompted the colonial government to send military expeditions into the hills. Throughout the colonial period, in fact, relations between the British and the hill tribes in the northeast were characterised by a low-level but more or less continuous warfare.6  Pacification required penetration into the hills. Following the conquest of Assam, army regiments were stationed at various points along the Brahmaputra River; otherwise, however, colonialism was thin on the ground. From the beginning of British control in the 1820s, the northeast region was absorbed into the Presidency of Bengal and ruled from Calcutta.The Commissioner of Assam had his office at Gauhati, in lower Assam, but the vast stretch of upper Assam, where most contact with hill tribes occurred, had few personnel. In

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campaigns against hill tribes, and railways reached upper Assam at the end of the nineteenth century. By mid-century, other colonial outposts, consisting of a District Commissioner and his small staff, were set up on the north bank, at Darrang and Lakhimpur.7  Although the D.C. headed frequent punitive expeditions into the hills, his principal task was to collect revenues in the plains.

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In the 1870s an ‘Inner Line’ was drawn along the base of the hills to divide British-administered territory from the area controlled by the tribes.8  Colonial administration pushed right up to this line of control when a British officer (Assistant Political Officer) was stationed at Sadiya in the 1880s and another at Pasighat by 1912. However, these posts were still in the plains, on the British side of the Inner Line; it was not until the 1940s that even a semi-permanent government presence was established anywhere in the hills.9  After Independence in 1947, the Indian government set up the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA), with a full administrative apparatus of schools, courts Fig. B  Stone pillar with Ahom inscription, probably early and police at several locations in the hills. In 1972, Maan Barua, Assam State Museum, Guwahati, 2003 16th c. NEFA became the Union Territory of Arunachal Pradesh, which then became a state in 1987, with the 1830s, responsibility for the hill tribes was the its capital at Itanagar.10  remit of the Political Agency at Sadiya, the farthest outpost of colonialism located where three rivers converge to form the Brahmaputra. Here a British Colonial Contacts officer and his assistant, plus a few Assamese and tribal interpreters and peons, backed by a regiment Portraits in the Plains: 1860s of Assam Rifles, negotiated posa payments and treaties with several hill tribes. Sadiya was aban- We know that photography went hand in hand doned after an attack by tribesmen in 1839, but with ethnography in colonial India. As Christotroops were soon stationed at the small towns of pher Pinney and John Falconer have shown, soon Tezpur, on the north bank, and Dibrugarh, on the after the new technology arrived in British India, south, because these river locations enabled easy photographers were enlisted in the project of clastransportation. Gun-boats were used in military sifying the tribes and castes of the subcontinent.11 

From the mid-nineteenth century onward, the camera proved admirably suited to take over from the draughtsman and the painter in the ‘passion for documentation’ (to use Falconer’s phrase) that energised the colonial enterprise.12  It is also true that the camera followed the gun: in 1855, for example, photography was added to the curriculum at the East India Company’s military academy in Surrey.13  Cameras, as Samuel Bourne suggested in 1863, were part of the colonial arsenal, which ‘though as suspicious perhaps in appearance, attained their object with less noise and smoke.’14  It is also more than coincidence that the collodion necessary for the wet-plate processing of photographs in the mid-nineteenth century was essential for making gunpowder.15  Seen from one angle, the historical photographs of people from Arunachal Pradesh provide another illustration of these observations. Yet it would be a mistake to conflate the camera with the pen or the gun, or to push the collusion between photography and colonialism too far. Although some of the earliest photographs assembled in this book were commissioned in order to construct racial categories, in fact they often reveal the idiosyncracies of their subjects. Similarly, while many of these historical photographs were taken during military campaigns, they usually show us the complexities of colonial contact. Although photography had to wait until midcentury, drawings, etchings and watercolours had established the popularity of representing Indian subjects, especially ‘types’, since the second half of the eighteenth century. Colonialism came late to the northeast, but visual representations of people in this isolated corner of empire followed almost immediately on the conquest of Assam in the

1820s.A drawing from about 1825 (in theVictoria and Albert Museum, London) shows a man from the Subansiri area of Arunachal Pradesh wearing a bear pelt head-dress and bead necklaces that are still symbols of tribal identity today.16  Lithographs of river scenes illustrate the 1837 Topography of Assam by John M’Cosh, who was himself a pioneer photographer in India. The first published representations of people from Arunachal Pradesh, however, were lithographic portraits of Hill Miris and Nyishis by Colesworthy Grant that appeared in his Sketches of Oriental Heads in the 1840s (see fig. C).17  Another set of colour lithographs of four Arunachal tribes appeared in John Butler’s A Sketch of Assam and Hill Tribes in 1847.18  The clothing, machetes and ornamentation are more convincing in Grant (indeed, the figures in Butler resemble Nagas), but neither could make sense of the braided hair knot with brass skewer that distinguishes these tribes of the Subansiri area. Photographs would reproduce these details more accurately, but precision did not always solve the problem of identification and many photographs are mislabelled. Even today, the lack of ethnographic information and inconsistent labelling in the original documentation often make it difficult and sometimes impossible to identify the tribe of people in colonial photographs.

The previous year, a lightly armed expedition had been beaten back by bows and arrows, leaving two sepoys dead. Intended to restore lost prestige, the 1859 expedition consisted of 400 sepoys, 60 tribesmen (mostly Singphos and Khamptis) armed with bows, arrows and machetes, and two howitzers. This large force, including Carter mounted on an elephant, attacked villages above Pasighat, burned two of them and succeeded in driving the Adis back but suffered several causalities and wounded British officers. The British force then pulled back to Dibrugarh, where the photograph was taken, not by Carter but (almost certainly)

The earliest known photograph of a person from an Arunachal tribe has an interesting history (see photograph #1).This portrait of a young woman belonged to Sergeant-Major George Carter, who pasted it into his scrapbook, along with diary entries and other memorabilia during his service in India. Many of his diary entries describe the military expedition launched in 1859 to punish Fig. C  ‘Tema, Huzara, and his Wife. Hill Mirrees [Hill Adis who had attacked a village near Dibrugarh, by Colesworthy Grant, Sketches of Oriental Heads Miris].’ on the south bank of the Brahmaputra River. (Calcutta, Thacker and Spink, 1840s), BL

by Rev. Edward H. Higgs of St. Paul’s Church, Dibrugarh.19  Rather than follow the gun, in this case the camera met it in retreat. This photograph was unlikely to have helped anyone classify the castes and tribes of India. The young woman in it is identified by Carter as a ‘Chief ’s daughter, Bor Abor Tribe: inhabit the mountains immediately north of Debroogurh, Upper Assam.’20  ‘Bor’ or ‘Bori’ was used in the nineteenth century to refer to tribes who lived near or in the plains and were ‘dependent’, that is, not hostile to the British; they were distinguished from the ‘Abor’ tribes, who were ‘independent’ and typically lived in the high hills.21  ‘Bor Abor’, a curious combination, was often used to denote Padam Adis, who lived at various elevations.22  Although the face of the young woman in this historic photograph looks more Assamese than Adi, her dress is similar to that seen in nineteenthcentury photographs of Adis; and in this border area Adis and Assamese often intermixed and married, and still do.23  She is ‘dressed up’ for this portrait, wearing a full set of necklaces, earrings and arm bracelets. Despite her bemused face, the photograph has a light-hearted feel and was probably given to Carter as a souvenir, to take home when he left India a few years later. Carter’s obscure photograph has never before been published, but other early images of Arunachal tribes have acquired a modest place in the history of photography in India.That achievement is largely due to one man. Sir Benjamin Simpson was born in Dublin, joined the East India Company as an Assistant Surgeon in 1853 and served with a series of regiments in north India. In 1860, he returned to India (possibly with his camera) after a three-year leave, and was promoted to Civil

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Surgeon in the 24 Paraganas in Bengal and later held that same post in Darjeeling, where he served until his retirement in 1869.24  By that time, he had taken a series of ‘travelling studio’ portraits of tribal people in northeast India, Bhutan and other parts of the Himalayas.We have included several of his portraits of Arunachal tribes (taken in Assam) not only because of their technical sophistication but also because they display the dignity of their subjects.

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The exact dates of Simpson’s photographs of Arunachal tribes are unclear, although some were taken in 1861 or 1862 and displayed in the annual exhibition of the Bengal Photographic Society in Calcutta in December 1862.25  The remainder were taken between December 1867 and April 1868 when Simpson was sent to Assam to collect more photographs for an exhibition to be held in Calcutta in 1869. Precisely where in Assam these wonderful photographs were taken is also uncertain—perhaps in Lakhimpur or Dibrugarh—but most were probably taken in Sadiya, the colonial outpost in upper Assam where the tribes in the images (Khampti, Singpho,Adi, Galo, Idu Mishmi, Miju Mishmi and Digaru Mishmi) either lived or came to trade at that time.26  Throughout the 1860s, Simpson’s portraits were admired at the annual exhibition held by the Bengal Photographic Society in Calcutta, of which Simpson served as Vice-President. It is difficult to improve on a contemporary assessment that his ‘large portraits are excellent, full of artistic merit; they are not to be surpassed.’27 

part of the Indian displays at the International Exhibition held in London in 1862; most of his ‘likenesses of natives’ were portraits of people from Bhutan, Sikkim, Kabul and Chota Nagpur, plus two from northeast India (a Garo and a Kachari) but none from Arunachal Pradesh. Simpson’s portraits of Arunachal tribes finally reached an audience outside Calcutta when four of them appeared in the first volume of The People of India published in 1868.28  The large and heavy eight volumes of The People of India, containing over 500 photographs, stand as an impressive monument to the early use of photography in India.29  Although never influential in its day, this book is now thought to epitomise the colonial preoccupation ‘to accumulate, or­ganise and use ethnological information in ways which both justified and reinforced notions of dominance.’30 Whatever the intentions of the men who planned this project, however, the camera sometimes produced photographs at odds with both military conquest and racial typing.

The ‘Assam’ section of the first volume, illustrated with Simpson’s four portraits of Arunachal tribes and five of Assamese tribes, is a case in point.This section was introduced with an essay that underlined both the commercial and the ethnographic potential of Assam.31 The author pointed out that although this area was still a relatively unknown corner of the Raj, it would provide the long-desired northeast passage to facilitate trade between India and China. It was also a fertile region, he claimed, so rich that ‘it might one day be converted into one continued garden of silk, cotton, coffee, Simpson’s work was commissioned as part of an sugar, and tea, over an extent of many thousand ambitious project, supported by the Governor- miles.’32  Of its potential contribution to science, General of India, to document the ‘people of the author enthused that ‘[t]here is perhaps no India.’ Eighty of his photographs were shown as country of the world, of the same extent, where so

many different races of men are collected together as in the valley and hills of Assam.’33  The attempt to classify these ‘many different races,’ however, ran into difficulties, which the photographs and their confusing captions did little to resolve. For one thing, tribal populations in the northeast never fitted easily into the narrative of India’s racial history put together during colonial times. Neither ‘military’ nor ‘criminal’ caste, neither Aryan nor Dravidian, they (along with the Assamese) were a pale streak of yellow ‘Mongoloid’ at the edge of Risley’s famous racial map of 1915.34  A fundamental problem was that a lack of knowledge about these people and their languages produced inconsistent labels and imprecise descriptions. As already mentioned, ‘Bor’ and ‘Abor’ were used inconsistently and with political undertones. Another label applied with little discrimination was ‘Miri’ (in various spellings), which was used for populations living both in the Subansiri region (later called ‘Hill Miri’) and in the Assam plains (later known as ‘Mishing’), and for certain Adi groups, as well.35  Certainly the essay in the Assam section of The People of India volume made no headway by classifying the hill people in Arunachal as the ‘Indo-Chinese tribes… easily dis­tin­guish­ed…by high cheek bones… also fairer and of a more yellowish colour than the other sections of the people.’ Similarly, in the captions, Arunachal tribes are variously labelled a ‘wild frontier tribe’,‘hill tribe’,‘frontier tribe’ and ‘warlike frontier tribe (Laos).’36  Although Simpson’s subjects were often shown in anthropometric profile, frequently holding weap­ ons and sometimes with little clothing, their proud bearing and sensitive eyes create an impression different than that implied by these captions and

descriptions. A ‘Dhoba Abor’ Galo man is apparently about to draw his machete (see photograph #3), but the look of anxiety on his face is more pensive than threatening; at what was probably his first contact with photography and Europeans, he is surprisingly relaxed. Other men also have a hand on their machete, but few viewers would know that the dao was an everyday tool and not primarily a weapon of war. Even the long spears, held by some ‘warriors’ in the group shots, point to the ground and appear to have been placed in their hands just before the shutter opened. Curiously, given its scope, official patronage and high quality of images, The People of India did not attract much attention at the time.37  Far more influential was a publication in 1872 that carried 24 of Simpson’s portraits of Arunachal tribes. As with the Watson and Kaye volumes, the catalyst for E. T. Dalton’s Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal was an exhibition. In 1866, the Asiatic Society of Bengal decided to sponsor a ‘great Ethnological Congress…to bring together in one exhibition typical examples of the races of the Old World to be made the subject of scientific study.’38  This Congress, in which ‘[e]very physical character will be carefully noted and registered by means of photographs,’ was intended to be an auxiliary to a general industrial exhibition scheduled for Calcutta in 1869-70.39  But this ambitious exhibition never took place. A major reason was official concern about transporting tribesmen and women from Arunachal Pradesh and elsewhere in the northeast.According to Dalton, the Commissioner of Assam feared that bringing the ‘strange shy creatures’ to the big city would result in ‘casualties that the greatest enthusiast for anthropological research would shrink from encountering.’40  In the Com­missioner’s words, if any of the ‘specimens’

were to die,‘it might lead to inconvenient political the aesthetic of European nineteenth-century complications.’41  portraiture to upper Assam. However, when later photographers were freed from official comBefore these scruples scuppered the Congress, missions to classify ‘race, caste and tribe,’ they however, Simpson was sent back to Assam, ‘that did occasionally produce revealing images, close most prolific of ethnological fields,’ to take pho- to tribal life and sometimes with ethnographic tographs for the planned Calcutta exhibition.42  value. Good examples are two fine portraits of The job of collecting and collating the ethno- Khampti men (see photographs # 68 & 69) from graphic information was given to Dalton, who the early twentieth century, pasted into a scrap had held posts in Assam in the 1840s and 1850s, book about transporting elephants from Assam to during which time he visited hill tribes in both Burma.44  Still, most of the photographs during the Subansiri and Lohit river valleys. Crucially, he the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries succeeded in obtaining 10,000 rupees from the were taken by British officials, usually during the Government of India to support the publication many military campaigns that penetrated higher of his Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal. In contrast and higher into the hills north of Assam.The first to The People of India, Dalton’s book put ethnog- photographs actually taken in the hills, and not raphy ahead of photography: a mere 37 plates somewhere in the plains of Assam, are from the (lithographs based on photographs) are scattered late 1870s; although posed in front of a hastily over nearly 400 pages of scholarly description, hung blanket or backdrop of banana leaves, these vocabularies and a detailed index. Fifteen of those people, unlike those posed by Simpson a decade plates, containing 24 separate images, are Simp- earlier in the plains, look at home. son’s portraits of people from Arunachal Pradesh; in addition to the Khamptis, Singphos, Digaru Photographs of Arunachal people in everyday Mishmis and ‘Miris’ in the earlier book, we now situations, however, did not appear until the folsee Idu Mishmis, Miju Mishmis and various Adis, lowing decade. If not the first, then certainly a fine including highly composed groups shots with an example is a group portrait of Akas standing on unconvincing generic hut as background. Here, the porch of their longhouse in 1883-84 (see phofor the first time, photographs of people from tograph # 164).This peaceful image, nonetheless, Arunachal Pradesh reached a sizable audience, and belies the story behind it. Since the 1870s, Akas Dalton’s book soon became the standard reference had been in conflict with the government over in a field with few reliable markers.43  their rights to rubber trees and elephant hunting in the forests close to Assam. Then, in late 1883, an Assamese man working for the British governExpeditions into the Hills, 1870s-1930s ment was sent into the hills to collect objects and a ‘model Raja and Rani with their ornaments’ for No photographer after Simpson produced por- the Calcutta International Exhibition to be held traits of the people of Arunachal Pradesh with a that same winter. Incensed, the Akas held the Assimilar technical sophistication; in the controlled samese officer and his party prisoner, while they conditions of his travelling studio, he brought attacked a village and a forestry office in Assam

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and carried two officials back to the hills as hostages. It was to recover these captives that R. G. Woodthorpe led an expedition into the Aka hills; after burning villages and granaries, he returned with both captives and a number of photographs, including #164 in this book.45 

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Photographs of other tribes who lived far from governmental offices in Assam were taken by F. M. Bailey, adventurer, spy and gifted writer, as well as an officer in the Military Police. In particular, on two expeditions between 1911 and 1913, he used his camera and his diary to record his travels to Idu Mishmi and Khamba villages in the northeast corner of Arunachal Pradesh, where Idus had been at war with the recently-arrived Khambas. At the beginning of his trek, Bailey was visited in camp by an Idu Mishmi headman, ‘who made a rather lengthy speech in which he said he was glad to be under British control and asked us to stop in his village…he killed a mithan for us.’46 Two days and two marches later, Bailey met Andron, another Idu headman, this time of Lemo village, whom he photographed with his three sons and their wives (see fig. D). ‘The people of Lemo,’ wrote Bailey in his diary, ‘were the most friendly that we have yet seen, in fact the further we penetrate into the country, the better class of people we meet. We spent some time in the house of the headman… The old father of the headman said there was always some fighting here but no longer since under one gov’t.’47  Bailey met Khambas, the Idus’ rivals, on an expedition in 1913, when he went further up toward the Tibetan border. In the village of Mipi, he photographed a group of these tibetanised Khambas, including their headman (see photograph #31 and fig. E), ‘with tousley hair and a yak’s hair overcoat. He is going to take us over the pass to Chimdo [Chamdo].’48  Bailey also noted that the headman ‘erected a mark above

which Mishmis are not to come.’49  Another set of photographs of Arunachal tribes beyond colonial rule was taken further west along the northern border with Tibet (see photograph # 151). These images of people (mostly Sulungs and Nyishis) who traded with Tibetans in the upper reaches of the Subansiri River, near the international border, were taken in the 1930s by G. Fig. D  ‘Up Sisseri River. Headman of Lemo. His three sons and their wives.’ Sherriff during expeditions Frederick Marshman Bailey, 1911, BL led by the botanist and explorer Frank Ludlow. Ludlow’s description of these ‘Lobas,’ as they were known to Tibetans, includes details of material culture not found in earlier accounts (including the braided hair knot so confusingly depicted in the lithographs a hundred years earlier); and, what is even more unusual, he comments on one subject’s reaction:

Fig. E  Detail of photo­graph

The majority wore skins of animals such as takin [similar to a large mountain goat], barking deer, and monkeys. A few had black shoulder capes which at first sight look like bear skins, but eventually proved to made of palm fibres. Many wore close-fitting bamboo [sic. cane] skull-caps furnished with a spout.This was kept in place by a brass or wooden skewer which pierced a knot of hair hanging over the forehead. Some had lammergeyer’s [a vulture] feathers stuck into their head-gear. All carried bamboo bows about 4 1/2 feet long, iron-shod at one head, which they used as a khud [walking] stick whilst on the march.Their arrows were smeared to the barb with the deadly aconite. Many bore long lances and clumsy swords. They smoked tobacco

#31. Frederick Marshman Bailey, March-April 1913, BL

continuously out of metal pipes.The head-man had a two-pronged musket, and wore a chuba reaching to his knees. His gay young wife looked like a Tibetan and dressed like one. Aware of her good looks, she enjoyed being photographed.50 

Other photographs give us a glimpse of the dynamics of the colonial encounter during this period. Static yet revealing are the group shots taken during official expeditions, which present British,

Arunachal and Indian figures in close proximity. Their calm, orderly arrangement is an ironic contrast to the animated chaos of these expeditions: hundreds of men, officers, sepoys, interpreters and guides, an equal number of porters, plus horses and elephants, carrying equipment, ammunition, rations and tents, attempting to move several miles each day in steep mountainous country. Motionless for the moment, the British officers, Indian sepoys, tribal interpreters, guides and porters pose for the camera. Two early group shots were taken by W. Robert, an assistant surveyor during topographical surveys in 1877-78, first to the lower Subansiri and then to the Idu Mishmi hills (see photographs # 35 and 93).51  The two photographs have a similar composition: British officials sit stiffly, Indian soldiers stand proudly erect, while Idus and Hill Miris sit on the ground in the first row smoking their pipes, with a few small boys who have come along to see the show. All, however, are alike in their concentrated stare at the camera. A more historic moment is captured in the picture of a meeting between a British and a Tibetan official in 1910 (see photograph #7). Noel Wil­liam­ son, Assistant Political Officer at Sadiya, is seen taking tea with the so-called ‘Governor of Rima’ in a woodland setting far up the Lohit River valley near the present-day border between India and China; seated with them are a Tibetan interpreter and a Khampti leader, with Miju Mishmi porters and Tibetans in the background.52  Only a few years after Young­husband’s advance to Lhasa but before the Simla Agreement drew a line along the high Himalayas, the British government grew anxious about Tibetan influence in this part of the unadministered northeast frontier. They sent the energetic Williamson to investigate and if possible to secure this region for trade to China and

Burma.Williamson reported that the government had nothing to worry about and that ‘presents were exchanged in a cordial atmosphere.’53  The image, with its key figures named on the print, is a good example of how photography provided documentation for political intelligence.

Fellow officer G. A. Nevill wrote that the Raja ‘was very nervous and evidently much afraid. He said that his heart was as clear as the Tenga river, but that the last sahib came 30 years ago and the visit was not friendly.’55  Nevill then added that the ‘Tagi is gifted with a good deal of in­tel­li­gence… he has been much spoiled when visiting Assam A more ambiguous photograph of an equally stra- and is now somewhat puffed up with the sense tegic meeting was taken during an expedition to of his own importance.’56  the Aka hills, on the other side of Arunachal (see photograph #165).The photographer was a young This is the figure we see sitting (with his wife) on medical officer, Robert Siggins Kennedy, attached a raised bench, in a relaxed moment during what to an expedition of more than a thousand officers, looks like an official reception.The large black obsoldiers and porters that advanced up from Assam ject on the bench to the far left is a gramophone, in late 1913 and reached the village of Jamirigoan which the Raja is said to have enjoyed hearing by New Years Day 1914. One of the expedition’s almost as much as the sound of British military aims, once again, was to monitor Tibetan and/ bugles. In another photograph, he is shown standor Chinese influence, as is clear from Kennedy’s ing with a group of his followers (see photograph description of meeting the Tagi Raja, a local leader # 166). But is this man the Tagi Raja? Despite of Akas, a few days later: the details in contemporary descriptions, local people have expressed doubts that the man in the Today about 1pm the Raja arrived, surrounded by photographs is an Aka: to some he appears to be a motley crew of courtiers and followers. He was a Monpa, to others a Bugun or a Tibetan, while preceded by two standard bearers carrying white still others confirm that he is an Aka.Whoever he flags on long poles, and two wretchedly small and was, this unusually tall figure, who loved listening miserable ponies, bedecked with saddle and saddle to the gramophone, did not oppose the expedicloths of Tibetan pattern were led behind. This tion, which later met armed resistance from Mijis whole show reminded me forcibly of the procession of a Bhutanese chieftain.This raja is a big man, and Nyishis. During one of those skirmishes, standing almost six feet high, which makes him very Kennedy helped to build a makeshift bridge over conspicuous amongst his rather low set subjects. which the British party fled; at other times, he He has an evil cast of countenance, with thick lips, was busy treating local people for goitre. At the and strikes one as being a shifty character. His age end of the Aka expedition, he went to the Monpa is about 30 years. His dress was that of a Tibetan country, where he took a number of memorable official, of some importance and was pretty correct photographs, including one of a young boy (see in detail, though he denied ever having been to photograph # 175).57  Tibet. His ‘chuba’ [coat] was of blue Chinese silk, and he wore a gilt mandarin hat, with a red coral Another dynamic colonial encounter is captured button on top, which according to Chinese usage denotes high rank, though I fancy his wearing it in a group photograph taken in 1897, during the first official British visit to the Apatani valley (see was purely accidental.54 

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photograph # 105).The photograph shows us the familiar groups—British officers, Indian officers and soldiers, interpreters and local tribesmen—but in a different kind of arrangement: not in rows posed for the camera but in a tight circle of Apatani and Nyishi negotiators, surrounded by British officers and others. The photograph was labelled ‘The Palaver’ by the British officer who took it, and looking closely (with a magnifying glass) at the faces in the inner circle, one can almost hear the speeches that went on for many hours during two cold days in February.

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The story behind the photograph is complex.58  When a Nyishi man living near the Apatani valley murdered a fellow tribesman, he fled and took refuge with an Apatani friend in the valley; that Apatani friend spirited him away and hid him in a village near the plains. When the hiding place was divulged to the family of the murder victim, they hunted down the murderer, took him back and killed him.Assuming that the Nyishi murderer would wrongly believe that he had betrayed him, the Apatani friend now feared that the murderer’s soul would wreak revenge on him; so the Apatani man decided to attack those who had betrayed the hiding place and had thus placed him in danger. Going down to the plains, the Apatani man killed a man (a Hill Miri) on a tea estate, and this is what brought the British to the Apatani valley. Because this second murder was committed on British soil, on the Assam side of the Inner Line, the authorities sent an expedition to the Apatani valley to investigate. The negotiations, shown in the photograph, lasted for two full days. When the commanding officer, Capt. R. B. McCabe (seated to the left, wearing a beret in the photograph) opened the parley with

an accusation of murder on British territory, the Apatanis claimed they knew nothing of this ‘Inner Line.’ On the second day, an Apatani named Murchi, admitted to having led the raid but first subjected McCabe to more than two hours of oratory in which he enumerated every Apatani grievance against Nyishis and Hill Miris; he laid out small pieces of bamboo: one piece for each mithun stolen, each woman taken hostage, every man wounded or killed.59  After listing these past wrongs, Murchi then argued that the murdered man was a labour contractor for the tea estates who had cheated many Apatanis. Listening to this speech through his interpreters, McCabe heard the words ‘finally’ and ‘in conclusion’ innumerable times before what he called this ‘long Scottish sermon’ finally came to a stop. By the end of the day, the Apatanis turned over three captives, as well as a gun belonging to the owner of the tea estate. Impressed, McCabe fined the Apatanis a single mithun, which he then handed back to them because he did not know what else to do with the large animal. A more violent colonial confrontation is shown, at least partially, in photographs taken a few years later in the Adi area. Like the Apatani incident, this conflict also began with a murder; but this time the victim was a British officer, the same Noel Williamson whom we see taking tea with a Tibetan official in photograph #7. Only one year later, in 1911, Williamson was killed along with Dr. Gregorson, a British medical officer, and 44 of their porters. After his posting to Sadiya in 1905 as an Assistant Political Officer, Williamson made several trips into the high hills beyond the Inner Line. Guided by the goals of his political masters, to counter Tibetan interests and establish friendly relations with tribes in the interior, this

enthusiastic young man travelled up the Siang, Subansiri and Lohit rivers, and into the Mishmi and Naga hills; more than once, in the course of his duties, he ordered villages burned and livestock destroyed.According to a contemporary, however, ‘Mr. Williamson had been very popular among these people [in the Lohit valley], largely cupboard love I am afraid, for he used to give them large presents of opium and other things.’60  On his final journey in 1911, he returned to the upper Siang, once again to monitor the extent of Tibetan influence and extend British control toward the northern border.Williamson knew well that he might encounter resistance: as mentioned above, Adis from this area had fought SergeantMajor Carter back in the 1850s, and peace had never been fully established since. On his trip to the same villages only two years before, in 1909, Williamson himself had gained firsthand knowledge of the continuing resistance to any kind of British authority in the hills. He reached Kebang village, something no other official had managed to do since Carter’s time, but despite his speaking some Adi and entertaining village leaders with a lantern show, he could not persuade them to give him permission to push further up country.61  While halting at Kebang, a leader from Riu village, described as the ‘war minister’, arrived and addressed the local audience for about an hour: ‘He and his attendants wore tall round hats of sambhur [a large deer] skin and long coats also of Tibetan texture. He had a short beard and moustache, held a spear in his left hand, gesticulating throughout with his right’62  (see fig. F). After this rousing speech,Williamson was told that war between Adi villages was imminent and that the area was too dangerous for him to proceed further.

In 1911, Williamson did not even reach Kebang. When rations went missing in camp a day’s march from Kebang,Williamson accused the Adi porters and told them that he ‘would require satisfaction on his return journey.’63  Some Adis wanted to kill him right then and this was reported to Williamson, but he dismissed it as rhetoric.What actually tipped intention into action appears to have been a mixture of misunderstanding, fear and pride. When Williamson sent a ‘Miri’ (Padam?) carrier back to the plains to bring up more rations, he also gave him letters to take to the post office.The carrier, however, reportedly showed the official red and black envelopes to Adis and ‘boasted’ that they were orders to punish the villages of Kebang and Rotung. Oral accounts also claim that Williamson had earlier insulted and slapped a man, who then planned to retaliate.64 Within days,Williamson and all but five of his party were murdered; Gregorson and most of his party, camping nearby, were also killed. Whether their bodies were recovered is in doubt, but stone memorials were erected to mark the spots where they were killed.65 

reported that the Major-General believed their story and spared their villages from the revenge he was seeking.67  Later that same day, another Adi headman, this time from Pangin village, arrived waving a white flag of truce (see photograph #10) and he too was exonerated. Retaliation was taken against Kebang alone, which is seen burning in photographs # 12 and 13. Two of the three men accused of killing Wil­ liamson were captured, tried and found guilty: one was given a life-sentence and the other 10 years (see photograph # 14). Two men found guilty of the murder of Gregorson received death sentences, which were later commuted to life sentences; three other men accused of killing the porters were

also given prison sentences. When Williamson’s murderers were photographed, the extensive visual documentation of the Abor Expedition came to an end; no fewer than eight different men, who served as military or civil officers, took photographs of these historic events. The Abor Expedition is still remembered by local people in the area. When interviewed in 2005, many people in Komsing and Kebang villages spoke about what happened nearly a century ago, and detailed accounts were collected from the descendants of the murderers of Williamson, Gregorson and the porters. 68  Matmur Yamoh proudly showed the machete his great grandfather had used to kill Williamson and explained

The British response was the Abor Expedition. A force of nearly one thousand soldiers, military police and officers was sent to find and punish the murderers. On 18 December 1911, while camped at Yambung village, not far from Kebang, the headmen of Komsing and Riu villages arrived to protest their innocence to Major-General Bower; reassured by friendly Adis in the British camp, these local men had summoned up the courage to present themselves.A journalist with the British army reported that ‘[t]heir arrival had a touch of tragic humour about it. They were accompanied by a slave behind whom they screened themselves, while he waved a flag, made out of a copy of the Fig. F  ‘Another group at the village of Kebang.The gam of Reu [Riu] addressing the village.’ Dugald McTavish Lumsden, February 1909, RGS Calcutta Statesman.’66  Another British officer

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that some family members had recently begun to hoist a flag to celebrate what they consider to be a courageous act of defiance against an external aggressor (see fig. G). None of this is surprising since the murder of Noel Williamson was arguably the single most significant event in the colonial history of Arunachal Pradesh.69  Questions arising from it—What exactly was the nature and extent of British control in this corner of the Empire?—were debated in Parliament and led to four separate expeditions.70 

The burning of Kebang marked the end of Adi resistance and the beginning of a permanent colonial presence beyond the Inner Line. Soon after the Abor Expedition, new outposts were established at Pasighat and Along, which then became the centres whence emanated the forces of change that transformed most of the state during the twentieth century: education and literacy, increasing Christianisation and Hin­dui­sa­tion, and, in response to these changes, cultural revival movements.

Staying in the Hills: 1940s-1960s ‘Clearly no real progress can be made till…the officers in charge of the tribal areas move up into the hills.’71  

The gradual colonial penetration of the hills also brought a new kind of photography to Arunachal Pradesh. As already mentioned, photography in India was allied to ethnology from the midnineteenth century, but in truth this marriage produced little more than measured crania for scientific exhibitions and exotic portraits for books and postcards. These early photographs of ‘natives’ in India have been, quite properly, documented, dissected and displayed as specimens of racialist colonial thinking. What we know much less about, however, is the use of photography in ethnographic research in India in the first half of the twentieth century, during which the camera was used extensively by anthropologists who produced large photographic collections. Arunachal Pradesh, and northeast India more generally, played a significant role in these developments.

stay in the hills for longer periods of time. Living for months at a time in a single region allowed an officer with a camera, and a little curiosity, to observe local culture and record a wide spectrum of activity, and in some depth. In these circumstances, he was able to capture aspects of life that the leader of a military expedition or manger of a tea estate in the plains could not: for the first time, for example, we see a ritual unfold over a sequence of six or eight shots; we see agricultural practices throughout the year; and we see the everyday activities that only a long-term visitor would notice. A second reason for the new ethnographic photographic collections was technical. No longer burdened with heavy, wooden came­ras and awkward tripods, by the 1920s even ama­teurs used smaller cameras and faster film to record life with greater spontaneity. This led to collections not of hundreds but of thousands of photo­g raphs. Finally, in the early twentieth century, the concept of culture, not just of different racial types but of different patterns of behaviour and thought, was gaining wide recognition and appreciation. It certainly fascinated many of the British colonial officers who worked in northeast India in the first half of the twentieth century, several of whom were also among the first anthropologists to embrace the new visual methodology of their trade.

These various factors—staying in the hills, improved technology and a growing awareness of culture—first produced new ethnographic photography in the Naga Hills, where colonialism was already well established by the first decades of the twentieth century. During these years, J. H. Hutton and J. P. Mills served as district commissioners in Fig. G  Matmur Jamoh and the machete with which his great grandfather, Manmur Jamoh, killed Noel Williamson Several factors contributed to this new photo­ the Naga Hills, wrote ethnographic monographs graphy. One was that colonial officers began to and used the camera extensively.72 And it was Mills Sarit K. Chaudhuri, Yagrun village, 2005. in 1911.

who provided the link for the arrival of the new and Hill Miris, plus several hundred feet of movie photography in Arunachal Pradesh. film, to which he added during a few more visits until 1980.75  In late 1936, Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, who had just completed his academic training Soon after Fürer-Haimendorf left, another anthroin London, went to the Naga Hills for his first pologist arrived who extended the photographic fieldwork.There he met Mills, who soon took him documentation he had begun. Ursula Betts (née on a tour of Adi villages, the same villages fatally Graham-Bower), like Fürer-Haimendorf, began visited by Williamson two decades earlier, where her ethnographic work among the Nagas in the Fürer-Haimendorf took the first photographs 1930s, but she came to the Apatani valley in 1946 of an archive that would eventually reach nearly as wife of Major F. N. Betts, who was appointed 18,000 images (not just of Nagas and Arunachal Political Officer of the Subansiri area. During her tribes but also populations in central India and nearly two years in the area, she took approximateNepal). Later, when Mills was in charge of tribal ly 1,100 photographs, a collection that compleaffairs for the entire northeast, he sent the young ments Fürer-Haimendorf ’s by its emphasis on Austrian to the Subansiri area to do what virtu- ritual practices.76  Remarkably, Betts was followed ally all his predecessors had done: investigate the by yet a third photographer in the Subansiri region extent of Tibetan influence and establish friendly in the same decade. C. R. Stonor, a botanist and an relations with tribes. Before leaving with his wife agricultural officer attached to the Assam Rifles, on the seven-day hike from the foot of the hills to was also an amateur anthropologist who published the Apatani valley, Fürer-Haimendorf made two several essays and left a collection of about 400 important decisions: he ignored the advice of local photographs, mostly of ritual and material culofficials to take an armed escort and he resolved ture.77  The combined photographic collections to take two cameras (plus a movie camera).73 The of Fürer-Haimendorf, Betts and Stonor—more ‘riotous reception’ he received in the Apatani val- than 3,000 images—show us a comprehensive ley, for which the lack of military escort was surely view of life in the Subansiri region, especially of one reason, is shown in photograph #106 (and also Apatanis, Nyishis and Hill Miris, just prior to the on the cover) and described in his words: imposition of a new political order. …there on a grassy meadow, dominated by a huge pine tree, was the place the Apa Tanis had chosen for our camp. It seemed a truly delightful site. But we hardly had time to appreciate its beauty for… we were soon the centre of a dense crowd all of whom shouted and pushed in their eagerness to catch a glimpse of their unusual visitors.74 

Much of what we see in their photographs from the 1940s is no longer visible. Some of the most obvious changes are in clothing and body decoration, such as abandoned grass skirts, bamboo penis covers, fibre raincoats, red cane wrapped around a man’s waist, tattoos on men and women, and nose plugs on women. All these practices soon became During eight months in the Apatani valley in two unwanted signs of backwardness, were discourvisits during 1944-45, Fürer-Haimendorf took aged by local leaders and discarded in favour of about 1,600 photographs of Apatanis, Nyishis more fashionable attire. As early as the late 1940s,

a few Apatani and Nyishi men began to wear the canvas shoes and khaki shorts, acquired from soldiers, which are still worn today by some older men. Modern haircuts for younger men began to replace the traditional braided hair knot with a metal skewer in the 1960s, about the same time that shirts and trousers became popular and that women stopped wearing large, hoop earrings (see photograph # 109).That decade also saw the decline and disappearance of blacksmithing and pottery, abandoned because these products were more easily obtained in the market (traded up from Assam). Similarly, but much more recently, roofs of flattened bamboo, which replaced thatch in the 1940s in the Apatani valley, have given way to aluminium roofing in order to prevent the frequent fires that consume local houses; and cement slabs have all but replaced wooden planks on the ritual platforms (lapang). Another important group of customs no longer visible are those concerned with managing conflict and maintaining social order. In the photographs from the 1940s, we see an Apatani girl held by placing her leg in a huge block of wood (see fig. H & photograph # 155);78  a high bamboo tower erected as protection against a rival clan; mock warfare, involving hundreds of men dashing about and waving spears in the Apatani valley (fig. I);79  and negotiations between feuding parties, who enumerate their points by use of bamboo counters (fig. J). What we cannot see in the historical photographs, however, is the resentment among local people created by the replacement of these traditional practices by a new civil authority backed by firepower. Discontent also arose from forced port­erage; several photographs from the 1940s show the long lines of porters required, before the building of an airstrip in the Apatani

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Fig. H  ‘Apa Tani justice: a girl with one leg encased in a log tied up at a public sitting- Fig. I  ‘Gambu [mock warfare] scene.’ platform in Haja.’ 

Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, 1944-1945, SOAS

Fig. J  Negotiations between parties enumerating their points with bamboo counters. Ursula Betts, Apatani valley, 1947, PRM

Ursula Betts, Apatani valley, 1947, PRM

Fig. K  ‘Kago Bida, Chigin Nime [foreground] and Tim [Betts] watching the air supply drop.’

Ursula Betts, Yazali, near the Apatani valley, 1947, PRM

valley in the 1950s, in order to supply the new authorities and their staff with everything from sugar to socks.Apatani men, who had never before been forced to work for anyone, were required to carry heavy loads to and from the plains 10 or 15 times a year. These two related changes—the loss of local authority and forced porterage—were the underlying causes of the first and only act of armed resistance by Apatanis against the outsiders.

For instance, some of the necklaces worn everyday by the women of the Subansiri, and shown in the lithographs from the1840s, are visible both in the 1940s and today. A more complex example is identifiable in Fürer-Haimendorf ’s and Betts’ photographs of an Apatani festival, which is a local version of the ‘feast of merit’ celebrated throughout the hills between India, Burma and Bangladesh, as well as upland Southeast Asia. The Apatani Murung is a public performance of That attack occurred in 1948, after Fürer-Hai- culture and a display of wealth by an individual mendorf and Betts had left the Apatani valley, and his family, who sacrifice eight or ten mithuns but their photographs contain traces of the event. Both left memorable portraits of the Apatanis who assisted them, and no one was more instrumental to their success than Chige Nyime (see photographs # 121 and 122). He was the priest who had performed the house-warming ritual when Fürer-Haimendorf first arrived in the valley and had guided them on dangerous tours to the interior and negotiated them out of conflicts with Nyishis and Apatanis alike. No wonder FürerHaimendorf called him the ‘seer’. Betts and her husband, too, relied on Nyime to settle disputes and smooth the transition to the new system of power based in the plains (see fig. K). Despite this, the Apatani attack in 1948 was led by Chige Nyime. The secret raid on government and military buildings on a hill overlooking the valley was easily repulsed by gun fire, which killed two Apatanis; later the government burned two villages and all their granaries, killing another three Apatanis and wounding two more. Among the dozen men sent to prison in Assam, Chige Nyime was one of the few who returned.

and cows, and then distribute meat to every single family in the valley. In addition to this general largesse, the sponsor of the festival makes gifts to a series of ceremonial friends and relations; in return, he receives donations of pad­dy and millet from hundreds of women. On the first of the twenty-one days of the festival, a priest stands on a ritual platform (lapang) and chants for 12 to 14 hours, inviting spirits and ancestors to take part in the sacrifice and bring prosperity to the hosts (see photograph #129). During that morning, the daughters-in-law in the sponsor’s clan stand

While cultural change is perhaps more obvious, Fig. L  ‘[Apatani] priests on a lapang during a sacrificial rite.’ Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, 1944-1945, SOAS we can also find continuity in the photographs. A scene from the day of the procession during the Murung festival.

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in a tableau, displaying their wealth by wearing expensive bead necklaces (see photograph # 130).

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The Murung feast, like most of Apatani culture, has changed during the past sixty years; but, unlike clothing or conflict management, this performance remains remarkably similar to its earlier form. Now, the day-long procession through the valley does include young women and more entertainment, but the complex sequence of rituals over three weeks, including the long chant and tableau of married women, the network of gifts and donations, are little different to those photographed and described by Fürer-Haimendorf and Betts sixty years ago (see fig. L; photographs # 114, 126-147).

where), he favoured a gradual process of integration and not the acculturation that, as he had seen up close in other parts of tribal India, often brought degradation and pauperisation. His views, however, were publicly criticised as a backward policy of keeping ‘tribals in a museum.’80 

One dimension of Elwin’s multi-faceted life that has yet to be examined, however, is his photography. In contrast to both Fürer-Haimendorf and Betts, Elwin’s field research in Arunachal Pradesh was spread widely across the entire state. His main interest in NEFA, again unlike Fürer-Haimendorf and Betts, was not social anthropology but art and folklore, especially oral stories, which he collected during long walking tours among most tribes in the state, from The final figure in the history of ethnothe Monpas in the west to the Wanchos graphic photography in mid-twentieth in the east. His approximately 2,500 century Arunachal Pradesh stands apart photographs, covering the full cultural from the others.Verrier Elwin, like Betts Fig. M  ‘Sarak [Hill Miri] woman of Kabak wearing the characteristic cane bras- spectrum in the state, is unparalleled in and Stonor, became an anthropologist siere, Subansiri.’ Verrier Elwin, March 1955, BM breadth, although it sometimes lacks (and folklorist) in the field; and like depth and contains many staged shots. his near-contemporary Fürer-Haimendorf, he in central India. As a high-profile figure, his writ- This thin ethnographic surface is partly explained worked in both central and northeast India. Only ings pitched him into the heated debates in the by the fact that he usually spent only a few days he, however, was a figure of national importance, 1940s over the proper place of tribal groups in in any single place. the soon-to-be-independent India. The special as well as controversy, in India. status of NEFA raised similar questions:Were the Despite this limitation, his photographs record A personal friend of Nehru, Elwin was appointed prohibitions against outsiders owning land and aspects of tribal life ignored by others. More phiHonorary Adviser on Tribal Affairs when the businesses in this tribal area a necessary protec- losopher than anthropologist at this stage of his North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) took over tion from unmanaged modernity? Or, were these life, he attempted to capture beauty; the young are the administration of Arunachal Pradesh in 1954. restrictions, including the Inner Line, impediments everywhere in his photographs, while old people Even before that post, which he held until his to progress? Should these tribes become part of are difficult to find. His eye was also drawn to death a decade later, Elwin had published eth- mainstream India or remain separate? As Elwin designs, shapes and colours: through images of a nographies and collections of oral stories of tribes made clear in his A Philosophy for NEFA (and else- Wancho grave, a Sherdukpen jacket and an Idu

Mishmi shawl, he sought to reveal the imagination and aesthetic of tribal culture in Arunachal Pradesh. Because he wanted to preserve these artistic traditions, Elwin also proposed various schemes to nurture arts and crafts; for example, he planned and designed the district museums, with their distinctive octagonal shape, to showcase local culture. Like those buildings and his writings, Verrier Elwin’s photographs show that his understanding of the cultures in Arunachal Pradesh was visual.

The Uses of Photographs

Calcutta, where they were admired for their artistic quality. Photographic portraits of tribal people from the northeast (and elsewhere in India) had commercial value, as well; they were sold in Calcutta both through the Photographic Society of Bengal and the several commercial studios active at the end of the nineteenth century.82 

when they were presented within the larger narrative of the expansion of empire. Throughout early 1875, for example, The Illustrated London News followed the unfolding drama of a military expedition by publishing engravings (and articles), including an evocative image of two ‘scouts of the Abor Dufflas [Nyishis] reconnoitering on a hill side’ (see fig. N).83 

Although the appeal of such portraits back home in Britain was limited, there was a public appetite When the camera did follow the gun, as it did on for images of natives, tribal or otherwise, especially the numerous military and civil expeditions that penetrated the Arunachal hills in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the photographs produced were often submitted as part of official reports: these prisoners captured, this terrain surveyed. Not all were official documents, of course, and images of friends fishing and picturesque landscapes were kept as souvenirs. F. M. Bailey, for example, who travelled all over the eastern Himalayas in the early decades of the twentieth century, sent many of his photographs home to his mother for safe-keeping.84  Likewise, in the 1920s, Robert Charles Case, a railway engineer, took a series of holiday snaps of Adis and Mishmis when he and his sister rode into the hills above Sadiya in a bullock cart.85 

If, as Samuel Bourne suggested 150 years ago, the camera was part of the arsenal of colonial India, the images it produced had a variety of uses. In the early period, as we have seen, some of the photographs of people from Arunachal Pradesh served pseudo-scientific purposes and imperial ideology. However, as Chris Pinney noted, the earliest portraits, before the Indian uprising of 1857, contained a ‘creative un­predictability’ that was ‘capable of collapsing colonial distance.’81  Although Pin­ney considers the portraits in The People of India to have lost this quality and to have acquired the formality of imperial rule, I would suggest that Simpson’s portraits of Arunachal tribes have an intimacy and dignity that make them more than instruments of colonial policy. In any case, we know that his photographs, as well as those of others, were displayed not only in large ethnological exhibitions but also in the annual exhibition held by the Photographic Society of Ben­gal in Fig. N  Illustrated London News, 27 March 1875.

Nevertheless, public interest in photographs of Arunachal Pradesh was limited. In the many picture-books of India that appeared throughout the colonial period, portraits of tribal people in an isolated corner of northeast India could not compete with magnificent monuments or dazzling Himalayan snowpeaks, let alone naked head-hunters in

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the Naga Hills. Even in the popular writings of Frank Kingdon Ward (in the 1930s and 1940s), his photographs are secondary to the thrill of adventure and dangers of exploration described in his prose. Photographs of Arunachal Pradesh were only used, with any frequency, in scholarly essays, books and teaching about this part of the world. A set of glass-lantern slides of various Arunachal tribes, for example, illuminated the lectures given by J. P. Mills and Fürer-Haimendorf at the School of Oriental and African Studies, in London, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Images of Arunachal tribes also illustrated articles, travelogues and ethnographies published in the twentieth century, just as they had done for Dalton’s famous book in the 1870s.86 

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As we have seen, the uses of the photographs of Arunachal Pradesh conform to the general history of the colonial camera in India; although I have mentioned qualifications and inconsistencies, the intended purposes of the images were primarily ethnological and political. However, and as Chris Pinney has demonstrated, while serving these colonial purposes, photographs also slowly entered the life of the people whom they recorded.87  A ‘social life’ of photographs in Arunachal Pradesh is beyond the scope of this essay—except to say that holidays to Shillong, ‘picnics’ at New Year and major ceremonies have been captured by snaps since the 1980s; that postcards of tribal life have been produced by the State Department of Tourism since the 1990s; and that video is now fast overtaking photography. Still, what I have tried to emphasise in this Introduction is that photographs are part of broad historical forces: the first photograph of 1859, taken by a missionary and pasted into the scrapbook of a British soldier, refects an early stage of a transformation of tribal life that

began with colonial rule in Assam in the early somewhere outside the state, usually from Tibet. Local scholars have attempted to recover this past nineteenth century and continues to this day. by studying these local histories and migration In other words, the historical photographs in legends; some groups have mounted expeditions this book are not just passive documents of the to follow the path of migration back to their past; they also represent a modernity that moved legendary point of origin. Another sign of this gradually but persistently into the hills, along with growing movement to reclaim history is the inroads, schools and plastic buckets. Evidence of this sistence that old labels for tribes be replaced by transformation is visible in the photographs in this others that the people themselves prefer:‘Adi’ not book, such as the airplane that landed in the Apa- ‘Abor’; ‘Nyishi’ not ‘Dafla’ or ‘Duffla.’88  tani valley in the 1960s (see photograph # 148). Besides the obvious differences noted above— Photographs are also beginning to play a role in in clothing, conflict management and building these attempts to recover the past. Faded photomaterials—the contemporary photographs also graphs from the NEFA years are regularly reproshow change on a deeper level: traditional culture duced in government publications and displayed in is increasingly concentrated in ritual, especially museums in Itanagar and the district headquarters, festivals.Textiles and ornaments that are no longer but they do not attract many viewers;89  on the worn everyday are put on for these events; with other hand, locally produced and widely distribwarfare a thing of the past, helmets and armour are uted books and pamphlets increasingly use historinow worn by Adi men when participating in the cal photographs to display heritage. A booklet for ritualised activity of building a bridge. ‘Tradition’ the fiftieth anniversary of a school, for example, is has also become detachable, as in the artificial hair filled with photographs from the 1950s. Similarly, pieces, worn instead of the braided hair knot by the pamphlets published every year as part of a many Apatani and Nyishi men on special occa- tribe’s annual ‘official’ festival now include phosions. On an institutional level, since the late 1960s tographs of festivals in past years. and early 1970s, most tribes in central Arunachal Pradesh have established a new, centralised and This local interest in photographs was brought community-wide festival in place of more indi­ home to me when I used the 1897 image of the vidualised and scattered celebrations, in an attempt first colonial contact in the Apatani valley to elicit to provide a focal point for tribal identity. As oral histories (see photograph # 105). Expecting traditional culture is increasingly squeezed into a few vague recollections, I was surprised when these formal events, historical photographs have several people told me in detail what had hapentered local debates about the past. pened more than a hundred years ago. During my next visit, I showed a man some of the 1940s In today’s Arunachal Pradesh, the past is increas- photographs of the Murung festival in this book. ingly contested and politicised; historical origins He took them over to the light of a window, sat are a vital element of cultural identity. Every down and began to study them, holding them at tribe in this part of the eastern Himalayas has a various angles, and then excitedly identified the migration legend that traces its movement from village and clan of the individuals shown.

A novel use of photographs of Arunachal Pradesh took place in 2005-2006, when many of the images in this book, both historical and contemporary, were exhibited in New Delhi, Calcutta and Itanagar. Not only was the exhibition in Itanagar the first showing of these photographs, it was the first photographic exhibition of any kind in the state.While looking at the pictures, viewers spoke excitedly about the time of their parents and grandparents, pointing out small details of dress or adding anecdotes about the events pictured

project, and they now play a role in the recovery of the past by local people. They may reveal only fragments of colonial contacts, but through these images, through research, local knowledge and memory, the people of Arunachal Pradesh are gaining new perspectives on the past 150 years As the cultural distance between generations of their history. widens, and when (as in most of the state) there has been no tradition of writing, photographs take on extra significance in the interpretation of the Notes past. Photographs played a part in the colonial  1 In addition to the collections mentioned in the Ac(see fig. O). The exhibition generated opinion pieces and letters to local newspapers, proposing corrections to the identifications of people in some photographs and discussing the value of photographs as historical records.

Fig. O  The Tribal Transitions photographic exhibition: school children discussing Fig. A.

Moji Riba, Itanagar, 2006

knowledgements, a small number of photographs from Arunachal Pradesh are held at the Centre for South Asian Studies, Cambridge University, at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris and at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. In India, the Department of Information and Public Relations in Itanagar has several thousand images from the 1950s to the present; another large collection, beginning with the same period, is held by the Anthropological Survey of India in Calcutta. A collection of photographs taken in the early twentieth century by S.W. Kemp of the Indian Museum in Calcutta unfortunately remains untraced.  2 Arunachal tribes are mentioned in Tibetan sources from the twelfth century; in the Ahom chronicles (buranji, written in both Tai and Assamese scripts), which cover the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries but were first composed in the seventeenth century; and in a Persian history that recounts the Mughal invasion of Assam in the seventeenth century. Ahom relations with the Mishmis are also the subject of an inscription on a stone pillar of the early sixteenth century (see pp. 3-4).  3 These census statistics on religious groups are best viewed as estimates.  4 Mohanta 1984: 38.  5 Dikshit 1927. Although he does not mention the original Tai-Ahom word, Dikshit suggests that ‘poison’ probably refers to a local aconite (bih); it might also refer to tita, another medicinal plant traded down from the hills. When the stone pillar was found in the 1920s by a British official, it was indeed broken but has since been repaired and is now in the Assam State Museum in Guwahati.We are indebted to Maan Barua, who took photographs of it in 2003.  6 A partial list, of more than 100 raids, is given in Chakravarty 1995 [1973]: 136ff

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Mills 1854, Appendix L. The Inner Line remains (with minor adjustments) the border between Arunachal Pradesh and Assam.The northern border with Tibet/China was inconclusively negotiated in 1914, when the McMahon line was imagined across the Himalayas.  9 At Karko and Riga on the upper Siang in 1941 (Reid 1997 [1942]: 262), and at Ziro in the Subansiri region in 1944-1945.  10 In 1963 a portion of NEFA was given to the new state of Nagaland.  11 Pinney 1990a; Pinney 1990b; Pinney 1997. Falconer 1984; Falconer 1990; Falconer 2000; Falconer 2002.  12 Falconer 2000. As the primary uses of the new technology were expected to be cartographic, the Government of India commissioned a study of European advances in this field, published as Waterhouse 1870.  13 Desmond 1982:111. For an overview of photography in the military service of the British empire, see Ryan 1997, chapter 3.  14 As quoted in Falconer 1990: 264.  15 Dehejia 2000: 17.  16 The man appears to be either Nyishi or Hill Miri (Victoria and Albert Museum, reference IS65-1946. For this image and information we are indebted to Dr. Mandy Sadan). Sketches of a Singpho village, dao (long knife for daily work) sheath and shield were also published in Neufville 1828.  17 Colesworthy Grant (1813-1880), British Library, P2628, ‘Hill Mirrees. After sketches by Capt. G. Dalton (1812-1848).’ Various editions of the Sketches of Oriental Heads were issued from Calcutta in the 1840s. On this lithograph of Hill Miris (and others of Nyishis) Grant wrote:‘from drawings by Capt. G. C. Dalton, Assam’; and on another set he wrote only:‘G. Dalton’. However, no G. C. (or G.) Dalton served in the Bengal army at this time. On the other hand, Lt. E. T. Dalton not only served in Assam during the 1840s (at Lakhimpur near the foothills) but also made trips to Hill Miri and Nyishi villages in the hills (Dalton 1845). On one visit, he met the Hill Miri man depicted in Grant’s lithograph shown here (identified as ‘Tema Hazaree’ in Dalton, and as ‘Tema, Huzara’ in Grant). Finally, inserted into one edition of the Sketches is a typed list of all the portraits in the series, which mentions that the Hill Miri, Nyishi and Garo lithographs were done from ‘sketches by Colonel Dalton.’ E.T. Dalton was promoted to Colonel in the 1860s.  18 Butler’s lithographs depicted ‘Meeres’ [Miris; probably Padam Adis], ‘Abors’ [Adis], ‘Dufflahs’ [Nyishis] and  8

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‘Akhas’[Akas]. Lithographs, sketches and drawings remained popular media for illustrating books well after photographs began to be published; Dalton’s famous Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal of 1872, for example, used lithographs. Official reports were also illustrated by lithographs based on drawings; see, for example, R.G. Woodthorpe’s letter of 1878 at the Royal Geographical Society (JWA/2).  19 Other photographs on this same page in the scrapbook have the initials of Rev. Higgs (John Falconer, personal communication, 2006).  20 British Library, Mss Eur E 262, ‘Sergeant-Major George Carter Collection:Views of Bermuda, Canada, and Assam.’  21 Dalton 1960 [1872]: 26; Butler 1847: 110; Roy 1997 (1960): 2. See also British Library, L/P&S/10/180, p. 175. Today, the Bori tribe lives in the middle and high hills of the Siang area.  22 Elwin explains that ‘Bor Abor’ was changed to ‘Padam Adi’ after more accurate information was gained during the Abor Expedition of 1911-1912 (Elwin 1959:224, fn. 1).  23 She might belong to the Padam Adis whom Rev. Higgs ‘settled’ near Dibrugarh in the 1850s (Elwin 1959:218). See also photograph #6.  24 British Library, L/MIL/10/81, pp. 103-104. See Falconer 1984 for other details on the photography of Benjamin Simpson.  25 In December 1862 the annual exhibition of the Bengal Photographic Society in Calcutta displayed Simpson’s photographs of the ‘Frontier Tribes of Upper Assam’ (Journal of the Bengal Photographic Society 1 (3) December 1862, p. 68). His second visit to Assam in 1867-1868 is mentioned in Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal January 1868, p. 28. We know from his service record, written in his own hand, that he ‘proceeded to Assam on special duty to take pictures of the aborigines on the N.E. frontier for Bengal government on 21 Dec. 1867. Returned to Darjeeling on 15 April 1868’ (British Library, L/MIL/10/81, p. 104).  26 The annual ‘trade fair’ at Sadiya, which was set up in the1860s in order to regulate trade with the hills, attracted approximately 3,000 tribesmen and women in 1876 (Report on the Administration of Assam, 1874-75, 1875-76. Shillong, 1876, Part II, p. 12.)  27 Journal of the Bengal Photographic Society 11 (7), March 1864, p. 87.  28 The portraits were of a Khampti, a Digaru Mishmi, a Singpho and a ‘Miri.’

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Falconer 2002 provides a detailed history of this publication (Watson and Kaye 1868).  30 Falconer 2002: 53.  31 The essay and other notes were apparently written by Capt. Meadows, who earned a fee of £400 for his labours (Desmond 1982:122).  32 Watson and Kaye 1868: vol. 1 (quoting from M’Cosh 1836: 193 and M’Cosh 1837: 132).  33 Watson and Kaye 1868: vol. 1 (quoting from M’Cosh 1836: 193 and M’Cosh 1837: 132).  34 Risley 1915.  35 The Assam essay in The People of India stated that the Miris’ land touched Adi territory on the north, that they cultivated land along the Brahmaputra river and that their ‘head village’ was Motgaon (Watson and Kaye 1868), all of which describes Mishings.The ‘Miris’ in Simpson’s portraits, however, resemble Adis, especially Padams. By the 1880s, the distinction between Hill Miris and Miris in the plains (Mishings) was well recognised (Michell 1973 [1883]: 239).  36 Capt. Meadows cobbled together these descriptions from the meagre literature available at that time.  37 Falconer 2002: 52.  38 Dalton 1960 [1872]: i.  39 From a letter by Dr. Fayrer, published in Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal April 1866, p. 84.The original idea for the exhibition, however, came from Dr.Thomas Oldham, President of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal January 1868, p. 28).  40 Dalton 1960 [1872]: i.  41 Dalton 1960 [1872]: i. The Commissioner was probably aware that, only a decade earlier, the drowning of an Idu Mishmi chief ’s son, who had gone to Assam to visit Dalton, had sparked a retaliation that included the killing of two Europeans.  42 Dalton 1960 [1872]: ii.  43 Having lost some of his field notes during the chaos of the 1857 uprising, Dalton admitted that his text was not as complete as he would have wished. For contemporary criticism of Dalton’s book, especially the Naga material, see Elwin 1959: xxv.  44 These photographs are at the British Library, in the collection of E. H. Soole, who worked for a tea estate in upper Assam.  45 Osik 1999: 10-11; in Elwin 1959: 433-434. The Calcutta International Exhibition in 1883-84 was the indirect cause of at least one more flashpoint between Arunachal tribes and British authorities.When an Idu Mishmi headman

named Lakho died after having returned from the exhibition, his relatives took revenge by killing a British subject (an Assamese fisherman). The Assistant Political Officer at Sadiya then led 50 soldiers to Lakho’s village, but when the villagers refused to hand over suspects, he imposed a blockade on the Idus’ trade with the plains. The blockade made life difficult for Idus in the higher elevations and was only lifted in 1887 when the Idus paid a fine of 2,000 rupees (Assam Secretariat 1884, Foreign-A PROGS, August 1884, Nos. 23-2874/1334; State Archives, Itanagar [I am indebted to Sarit K. Chaudhuri for transcribing this document]; Osik 1999: 71). Lakho himself is shown in a drawing in Michell 1973 [1883], facing p. 102.  46 British Library, Mss Eur F 157/205, entry dated 10.12.11.  47 British Library, Mss Eur F 157/205, entry dated 12.12.11.  48 British Library, Mss Eur F 157/173, entry dated 27.4.13 at Mipi.  49 British Library, Mss Eur F 157/205, entry dated 4.4.13. G. A. Nevill, who accompanied Bailey, noted in his report that the Khambas of Mipi had come from Riwoche, west of Chamdo, and from Pashen, north of Shiuden Gompa (British Library, Mss Eur F 157/324(f), p. 8).  50 Ludlow 1938: 7. This passage does not describe the people in photograph # 151 but others seen on the same journey, whose photographs are published in both Ludlow 1938 and Ludlow and Sherriff 1937.  51 Although these negatives are catalogued in the collection of R. G. Woodthorpe, they were taken by W. Robert. The date of 1872 for these photographs in the Pitt Rivers Museum documentation is also incorrect since the Subansiri expedition took place between December 1877 and January 1878, and the Mishmi expedition in March 1878 (Royal Geographical Society JWA/2; British Library, V/24/3976, General Report on the Operations of the Survey of India, 1877-78, Calcutta 1879). Robert was also part of a punitive expedition to the Subansiri region from November 1874 to January 1875 (the ‘Duffla Expedition’ reported in the Illustrated London News; see fig. N); but none of his photographs from this journey appear to have survived.  52 The Tibetan official came to Williamson’s camp at Tatap Pi, a stream just south of Rima (Reid 1997 [1942]: 217); another source, close to the event, reported that Williamson met ‘representatives of the Dzonphon [official] of Sangacho Dzong,’ which is about 60 miles and several days’ walk away (Bailey 1945: 141). The Royal Geographical Society, which holds this photograph, dates it to 1907-08,

when Williamson did indeed travel up the Lohit but only as far as Sati, 35 miles before Rima (see Williamson 1909). He met the ‘Governor of Rima’, or the representative of a Tibetan governor, only once, in 1910.  53 Reid 1997 [1942]: 217.  54 British Library, Mss Eur D 516, Kennedy’s Aka diary, pp. 10-11.  55 British Library, Mss Eur D 516, G. A. Nevill’s report on the Aka Promenade, 1913-14, p. 2.  56 As quoted in Reid 1997 [1942]: 285.  57 It was taken during Kennedy and Nevill’s visit to But village, en route to Dirang and Tawang in March 1914.  58 More details are given in Blackburn 2003.  59 These bamboo counters can be seen in fig. J.  60 Bailey 1945: 141.  61 This journey is described in Lumsden 1909.  62 Lumsden 1909: 625.  63 Reid 1997 [1942]: 218.  64 Accounts of this incident were collected by Sarit K. Chaudhuri in January 2005; see also the accounts in Nyori 1993:114; Nath 1998: 140-141.  65 Reid, the Governor of Assam, claimed that they were buried (Reid 1997 [1942]: 233), but Dunbar, who was actually on the expedition, believed that their bodies were probably thrown into the Siang (Dunbar 1932: 121).  66 Hamilton 1912: 298.  67 From a report dated 18 Dec. 1911 by A. H.W. Bentinck, District Commissioner Lakhimpur, who served as Assistant Political Officer on the expedition (British Library L/ PS/10/181).  68 Interviews and photographs were taken by Sarit K. Chaudhuri during January 2005.  69 Another British officer, Lt. Holcombe, and 80 others in his survey party were murdered by Wanchos in the Tirap area of Arunachal Pradesh in 1875 (see Chaudhuri 2006; photograph # 85); John Butler, Deputy Commissioner of the Naga Hills and son of the author of A Sketch of Assam, was killed by Nagas in the same year. Neither event, however, triggered a response as extensive as the four expeditions that followed Williamson’s murder.  70 In addition to the punitive Abor Expedition, the authorities launched three survey expeditions, two to the Mishmi Hills and one to the Subansiri area (Miri Mission).  71 J. P. Mills 1943: 3.  72 Mills, Hutton and others were encouraged to use photography by Henry Balfour, the first Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.

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Fürer-Haimendorf used Zeiss Ikon AG cameras to take his photographs during the 1940s. Although his wife, Betty, may have taken some photographs, there is no evidence that she did.  74 Fürer-Haimendorf 1955: 25. ‘For the ethnographer, who often faces problems of photographing camera-shy people, it may be interesting to know that for the portraits reproduced here I used a 13.5 long-distance lens’ (FürerHaimendorf 1956, foreword).  75 Although at least two other films of people from Arunachal Pradesh were shot in the 1930s, Haimendorf ’s films were the first of any ethnographic value. One of these early films, which I have not been able to locate, was shot by Brooks-Carrington of the Raycol British Corporation on the British Museum’s Assam-Burma expedition in 1933-34 (with Frank Kingdon Ward); the other, shot in 1934 by a tea planter in Assam, shows mask-dances, acrobatics and other activities, presumably as part of some official programme for visiting dignitaries (‘Aka and Daffla Dances,’ at the British Film Institute, London).  76 A typewritten account by Ursula Betts (at the Pitt Rivers Museum) explains that she used a ‘Leica IIIa, with 35mm, 50mm, 90mm and 135 mm lenses.’ She considered her Naga photographs to be superior to her later photographs in the Subansiri region because the former were on Agfa Isophan F stock and were developed in London, whereas the latter used Kodak film and were processed in Calcutta.  77 Stonor’s collection also includes photographs of Adis and Monpas. He visited the Apatani valley at least twice: first with J. P. Mills in late 1945 and then with Ralph Izzard, a London-based journalist, in 1946.  78 The girl was taken as a slave during the resolution of a dispute about a missing brass plate (Fürer-Haimendorf 1955: 72-73).  79 This event is described in Graham Bower 1953:119127.  80 This controversy is described in Guha’s biography of Elwin (Guha 1999).  81 Pinney 1997: 70.  82 An example in this book is the picture of Lt. Holcombe’s murderers (photograph # 85), which belonged to a set of photographs by Oscar Jean Baptiste Mallitte, who travelled in northeast India and was active in Calcutta during the second half of the century (British Library, Photo 913; personal communication, John Falconer, May 2006). For details of commercial photography in nineteenth-century Calcutta and elsewhere in India, see Karlekar 2005; Thomas 1981.

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Illustrated London News 27 March 1875. Earlier issues contained news items and other images, mostly of natural scenes on the route of the advancing expedition sent to punish Nyishis for a raid on a village in Assam in 1873.  84 British Library, Mss Eur F 157/173. Bailey’s diary entry dated 18.4.13 contains a list of photographs sent by him to his mother, including a few of his friends (G. A. Nevill and R. S. Kennedy) fishing, of rivers, mountains and camp scenes. In the same entry, Bailey writes that he has asked his mother to have his camera repaired by Kodak.  85 British Library, Mss Eur E 335,‘Indian Reminiscences’, by Robert Charles Case, p. 11. His photographs are in the British Library, Photo 930 (1) and 930 (2).  86 For example, Fürer-Haimendorf 1955; Graham-Bower 1953; Stonor 1957; Roy 1997 [1960]; Fürer-Haimendorf 1962.  87 Pinney 1997.  88 In 2003, a minister of the Arunachal Pradesh state government made a public request that we (the Tribal Transitions project) attempt to change what are perceived as offensive labels in British colonial sources. Even today, the central government continues to use ‘Dafla.’  89 A collection of several thousand of these photographs taken during the NEFA years and later are held by the state government in Itanagar. Although most have been digitised, the collection remains uncatalogued.

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Dalton, Edward Tuite. 1845.‘On the Meris and the Abors of Assam.’ Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal 14, part 1: 426-430. Dalton, Edward Tuite. 1960 [1872]. Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal. Calcutta: K. L. Mukhopadhayaya. Davy, Capt. A. E. G. 1945. ‘Tour diary of Capt. A. E. G. Davy, Additional Political Officer, Balipara Frontier Tract, 1944-45.’ typescript, SOAS Library. Dehejia,Vidya. 2000. ‘Fixing a shadow.’ In Vidya Dehejia (ed.), India through the Lens, Photography 1840-1911, pp. 11-34.Washington, D.C.:The Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. Desmond, Ray. 1982. The India Museum, 1801-1879. London: HMSO. Dikshit, K. N. 1927. ‘Note on Ahom stone pillar inscription.’ Annual Report, Archaeological Survey of India, 1924-25, pp. 157-58. Calcutta: Government of India. Dunbar, George. 1932. Frontiers. London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson. Elwin,Verrier. 1959. India’s North-East Frontier in the Nineteenth Century. Bombay: Oxford University Press. Elwin,Verrier. 1964. The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin: An Autobiography. Bombay: Oxford University Press. Elwin,Verrier. 1970. A New Book of Tribal Fiction. Shillong: North-East Frontier Agency. Falconer, John. 1984. ‘Ethnographical photography in India, 1850-1900.’ Photographic Collector 5 (1): 16-46. Falconer, John. 1990. ‘Photography in nineteenth-century India.’ In C. Bayly (ed.), The Raj: India and the British 1600-1947, pp. 264-277. London: National Portrait Gallery, Falconer, John. 2000. ‘A passion for documentation: Architecture and ethnography.’ In Vidya Dehejia (ed.), India through the Lens, Photography 1840-1911, pp. 69-118. Washington, D.C.: The Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. Falconer, John. 2002. ‘‘A pure labour of love’’: A publishing history of The People of India.’ In Eleanor M. Hight and Gary D. Sampson (eds.), Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place, pp. 51-83. London: Routledge. Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph von. 1945. ‘Tour diaries of the Special Officer Subansiri, 1944-45.’ typescript, SOAS Library.

Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph von. 1950 [1947]. Ethnographic Notes on the Tribes in the Subansiri Region. Shillong: Assam Government Press. Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph von. 1955. Himalayan Barbary. London: John Murray. Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph von. 1956. Glückliche Barbaren. Bei unbekannten Völkern an der Nordostgrenze Indiens. Wiesbaden: F.A. Brockhaus. Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph von. 1962. The Apa Tanis and their Neighbours.A Primitive Civilization of the eastern Himalayas. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Graham Bower [Betts], Ursula. 1953. The Hidden Land. London: John Murray. Grant, Colesworthy. 1844-1850. Sketches of Oriental Heads [various editions]. Calcutta: Thacker and Spinck. Guha, Ramachandra. 1999. Savaging the Civilized:Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hamilton, Angus. 1912. In Abor Jungles, Being an Account of the Abor Expedition, the Mishmi Expedition and the Miri Mission. London: Eveleigh Nash. Karlekar, Mavalika. 2005. Re-visioning the Past: Early Photography in Bengal 1875-1915. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kingdon Ward, Frank. 1942 [1941]. Assam Adventure. London: Jonathan Cape. Ludlow, Frank and G. Sherriff. 1937. ‘Expeditions:The sources of the Subansiri and Siyom.’ Himalayan Journal 9: 142-147. Ludlow, Frank. 1938. ‘The sources of the Subansiri and Siyom.’ Himalayan Journal 10: 1-17. Lumsden, Dugald McTavish. 1909. ‘A journey into the Abor country, 1909.’ The Geographical Journal 37: 621-629. M’Cosh, John. 1836. ‘Account of the mountain tribes on the extreme N.E. frontier of Bengal.’ Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 5: 193-208. M’Cosh, John. 1837. Topography of Assam. Calcutta: British Military Orphan Press. Michell, Captain St. John F. 1973 [1883]. The North-East Frontier of India (a topographical, political and military report). Delhi:Vivek Publishing. Mills, A. J. Moffatt. 1854. Report on the Province of Assam. Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing.

Mills, J. P. 1943. ‘Tour note on Balipara Frontier Tract, November 11th-15th, 1943,’ typescript, SOAS Library. Mohanta, Bijan. 1984. Administrative Development of Arunachal Pradesh 1875-1975. New Delhi: Uppal. Nath, Jogendra. 1998. ‘Murder of Capt. Williamson and the McMahon Line.’ In S. Dutta (ed.), Studies in the History, Economy and Culture of Arunachal Pradesh, pp. 133-146. Itanagar: Himalayan Publishers. Neufville, Capt. John Bryan. 1828. ‘On the geography and population of Assam, 1823.’ Asiatic Researches 16: 331-352. Nyori, Tai. 1993. History and Culture of the Adis. New Delhi: Omsons. Osik, N. N. 1999. Modern History of Arunachal Pradesh (1825-1997). Itanagar: Himalayan Publishers. Pinney, Christopher. 1990a. ‘Classification and fantasy in the photographic construction of caste and tribe.’ Visual Anthropology 3 (2-3): 259-288. Pinney, Christopher. 1990b. ‘Colonial anthropology in the “Laboratory of Mankind”’. In C. Bayly (ed.), The Raj: India and the British 1600-1947, pp. 252-263. London: National Portrait Gallery. Pinney, Christopher. 1997. Camera Indica:The Social Life of Indian Photographs. London: Reaktion Books. Reid, Sir Robert. 1997 [1942]. History of the Frontier Areas bordering Assam, 1863-1941. Shillong: Assam Government Press. Risley, H. H. 1915. The People of India. Calcutta:Thacker and Spinck. Roy, Sachin. 1997 [1960]. Aspects of Padam Minyong Culture. 3rd edition. Itanagar: Directorate of Research. Ryan, James R. 1997. Picturing Empire. Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire. London: Reaktion Books. Stonor, Charles R. 1957. ‘Notes on religion and ritual among the Dafla tribes of the Assam Himalayas.’ Anthropos 52: 1-23. Thomas, G. 1981. History of Photography in India. Hy­ derabad: Andhra Pradesh Akademi of Photography. Waterhouse, J. 1870. Report on the Cartographic Applications of Photography as used in the Topographical Departments of the Principal States in Central Europe, with Notes on the European and Indian Surveys. Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing.

Watson, J. Forbes and John William Kaye. 1868. The People of India, vol. 1. London: W. H. Allen. Williamson, Noel. 1909. ‘The Lohit-Brahmaputra between Assam and south-eastern Tibet, November, 1907, to January, 1908.’ The Geographical Journal 34: 363-383.

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

Plates





 ‘Chief’s daughter, Bor Abor [Adi] Tribe: inhabit the mountains immediately north of Debroogurh, Upper Assam.’ Rev. Edward H. Higgs, near Dibrugarh, 1859, BL

The identification of the girl in this photograph is uncertain; when it was exhibited in Arunachal Pradesh in 2006, many local people did not recognise her as being from Arunachal. Photograph #2 reveals how both dress and ornamentation changed during the intervening 80 years.



 ‘Gallong Abor [Galo Adi] woman.’ John Howard Fry Williams, 1940s, BL



 ‘A Dhoba Abor [Galo] (helmet decorated with boar’s tusks and ‘Lama’ sword of Tibetan manufacture) in Assam – East India.’ Benjamin Simpson, 1860s, RGS

 Adis taking a break during a bridge-building ceremony. Michael Aram Tarr, Shimong, 2002

See photographs #18, 20, 21, 23 and 25 for this same ceremony.



 Drinking rice-beer from a bamboo tube during a break in the bridge-building ceremony. Michael Aram Tarr, Shimong, 2002



 ‘Dhoba Abor [Galo] in Assam-East India.’ Benjamin Simpson, 1860s, RGS

This man does not resemble any hill tribesmen in Arunachal Pradesh and may belong to a tribal or low-status caste in Assam; he may also have assimilated into a Galo community or be the result of a marriage between Galos and Assamese.

> The ‘Governor’ was a local Tibetan official. Chawna Khamti was a local Khampti chief, who aided Williamson. The ‘Mijus’ are Miju Mishmis, one of the tribes in the region, who served as his porters.



 ‘Meeting of Mr. Noel Williamson with the Governor of Rima.’

photographer unknown, 4 February 1910, RGS

> When the Abor Expedition returned to Riga in March 1912, two months after this photograph was taken, Bentinck noted in his diary that a large number of people came to visit the camp and that about ‘200 men gave an exhibition of the art of war,’ dressed in ‘scarlet Tibetan coats, light blue glass necklaces, which they are fond of, hats of deerskin with tufts of black bearskin or red-dyed yak hair, and cane helmets… Unfortunately, it was too cloudy to take photographs’ (BL, Mss Eur D 1024/3, p. 53).



 ‘S[h]imong Abors [Adis] and Mr.Williamson’s servant, who escaped.’ Arthur Harold Walter Bentinck, February 1912, RGS

< The murder of Noel Williamson, a British political officer, in 1911 prompted a punitive expedition against the Adis.The ‘Abor Expedition,’ however, met no resistance in Shimong, which was not involved in Williamson’s death. His servant (far right) was a Naga named Vichy.While in Shimong, Bentinck, the Political Officer on the Abor Expedition, wrote in his diary: ‘[I] sewed up photos to be sent back, 72 in all but some I know are failures’ (BL, Mss Eur D 1024/3, p. 49).



 ‘Abors [Adis] at Riga camp: Assam, India.’

photographer unknown, January 1912, RGS

 ‘Village of Kebang.’

Dugald McTavish Lumsden, February 1909, RGS

This photograph was taken during Williamson’s (and Lumsden’s) earlier visit to the village, when he demonstrated the gramophone and gave a magic lantern show to local people. 

 ‘Gam of Panghi [Pangin] and slaves, Statesman flag of truce.’ photographer unknown, Yambung, 18 December 1911, NAM

Headmen (gams or gamburas) from several Adi villages sued for peace and were spared retaliation. The flag was fashioned from a page of the Calcutta Statesman newspaper.

 ‘The burning of Kebang village.’

Capt. D. H R. Gifford, 9 December 1911, NAM



 ‘The burning of Kebang village.’ Soldiers of the 8th Gurkha Rifles during the Abor Expedition.

Capt. D. H R. Gifford, 9 December 1911, NAM



 ‘The murderers of Williamson.’ Two of the five men in chains were found guilty of killing Williamson; one, Manmur Jamoh, was ‘transported’ for life to a penal colony, while the other man received 10 years in prison. The other three men, found guilty of killing his porters, were given shorter prison sentences. See also Fig. G.

photographer unknown, Pasighat?, 1912, BL

> This picture is part of a series with the following note: ‘Abors putting on a mock battle and attack on a village, preparation to slaughtering a mithun (tame bisan) before a feast.’



 ‘Abor [Adi] warrior.’ John Howard Fry Williams, 1940s, BL

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 ‘A young Abor [Adi] matron.’ Robert Siggins Kennedy, 1911-1912, BL

Note the decorative plaited cane worn on the lower leg and the coin necklace. The upper garment has been replaced today by a generic, mass market blouse, and the lower garments are now woven to cover most of the leg.

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 ‘Unmarried Abor [Adi] girls wearing “bayops” [beyops].’ John Howard Fry Williams, 1940s, BL

Beyops, usually leaf-shaped and made of embossed bell-metal, were traditionally worn by Adi girls until marriage or the birth of their first child.

Adi Bridge-building in Shimong



In early Spring 2002, Shimong Adis decided to replace an aging lego (tree-bridge) with a new bridge across a stream on the main path linking the village to the road that leads to the district headquarters of Yingkiong. Although the bridge was a practical necessity, local people did not hire contractors or labour; instead the event was punctuated with rituals and conducted like a festival. First, a small group of men searched for the rightsized tree, which, when cut in half length-wise, would stretch well across the deep stream and allow more than one person, or even a motorcycle, to make an easy crossing. They then chopped it down with small axes.The next morning, the men returned and began to haul the enormous tree down the hillside toward the stream, some two kilometres away. As they pushed on the specially cut knobs and pulled on thick vine ropes lashed to the log, they sang songs, called ‘ant-songs’ because they are believed to be sung by ants when they build homes or transport food. Many of the men also wore the spectacular headgear once worn by their fathers and grandfathers when they went to war with outsiders (other Adis, Tibetans and the British), which can be seen in photographs # 4, 5, 18, 20 and 21. While the men and boys dragged the tree, the women and some men ran an efficient catering system. The final step came three days later when the tree-bridge was pulled and pushed down a steep incline just above the stream. Then, moving quickly, in small groups, with few words and no leaders, they formed a human chain and lifted stones from the stream bed to shore up the bank under the bridge.The new bridge was now ready for use.

 Adi men passing stones in a line as they build up the support wall during the bridge-building ceremony. Michael Aram Tarr, Shimong, 2002

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

 ‘Construction of the Shimong R[iver]cane bridge.’ John Howard Fry Williams, 1940s, BL



 Adi men dragging the single log to be made into a footbridge over a stream. Note the thick vine ropes used to drag the log.

Michael Aram Tarr, Shimong, 2002

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 Adis battling with the thick vine rope during bridge-building.

Michael Aram Tarr, Shimong, 2002

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 ‘Construction of the Shimong R[iver]. cane bridge.’ John Howard Fry Williams, 1940s, BL

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 Adi men and women pulling on a thick vine rope during bridge-building. As the log got close to its final position, more and more people joined in the pulling; some of these women are also ritual specialists.

Michael Aram Tarr, Shimong, 2002

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 ‘Construction of the Shimong R[iver]cane bridge.’ John Howard Fry Williams, 1940s, BL

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 The completed bridge. Michael Aram Tarr, Shimong, 2002



 The Gandhi Bridge at Yingkiong, upper Siang River. Michael Aram Tarr, 2002

Built in 1968 and named for Indira Gandhi, this bridge was rebuilt after it was destroyed by a flood in 2001.



 ‘Palibo who came to Pagum during our halt there to trade wool and ornaments for rice, 2.3.56. Siang.’ Verrier Elwin, 1956, BM

Palibos are a small Adi tribe, only about two or three hundred people, who live in the Siyom river valley.



 ‘Palibo Hunter.’ Verrier Elwin, 1950s, BM

Note the bear pelt on his hat and the long quiver (also in photograph #29).



 Tangam man carrying a large basket. Verrier Elwin, 1950s [1958?], BM

This huge basket was used primarily for carrying rice paddy. Tangam Adis, who number only a few hundred people, live along the upper Siang River close to the international border with Tibet/China. Elwin recorded a visit to Tangam villages in February 1958 (Elwin 1970: 6-7, 153ff).

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 Tangam woman smoking a pipe. Verrier Elwin, 1950s [1958?], BM



 ‘Group of Tibetans at Mipi.’ Capt. Bailey was Assistant Political Officer on the section of the Mishmi Mission that surveyed the Idu Mishmi area, including Mipi on the upper Mathun River. In his diary Bailey described some of the figures in this photograph: ‘Gzamto, headman, with tousley hair and a yak’s hair overcoat. He is going to take us over the pass to Chimdo. Tibetan, Tsona Chugya, striped boots.’ (BL, Mss Eur F 157/173, 27 April 1913)

Frederick Marshman Bailey, 27 April 1913, BL



 ‘Tibetans at Gyari Shing near Mipi.’

Frederick Marshman Bailey, March-May 1913, BL



 ‘Ableo Chulikata [Idu] Mishmi Chief.’ Benjamin Simpson, 1860s, RGS

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 ‘Ableo Chulikata [Idu] Mishmi Chief.’ Benjamin Simpson, 1860s, RGS

The same man as in photograph # 33 but showing the distinctive hair style (for both men and women) that prompted the Assamese to call these people chulikata (‘hair-cropped’).



 ‘Capt. Woodthorpe, R. E.’ R. G. Woodthorpe, a Royal Engineer with the Topographical Survey of India, as well as illustrator, painter and author, is the hatless figure seated in the centre of this group of British officers, Indian soldiers, Idu Mishmis and possibly other tribes.

W. Robert, 1878, PRM



 ‘[Idu] Mishmi children.’ Robert Siggins Kennedy, 1911-1912, BL

Idu Mishmi Funeral



Idu Mishmis, like other tribes in central Arunachal, bury the dead, whose soul is then guided by a priest (igu) during a long and difficult journey to the sunny and prosperous land of the dead. Idus, however, have elaborated this basic pattern into four different kinds of funerals, the most complicated of which (yah) lasts 3 or 4 days (see photographs # 37-46). After a mourning song (anja), sung by family members and friends beside the corpse inside the house, the priest begins his specialist chant. He speaks directly to the dead person, advising it about the condition of death, the dangers of the journey and the food that must be taken. As he continues to chant, the body is carried on a bier in a small procession to the grave site: for a dead woman, the person in front holds her weaving shuttle (see photograph #43); for a man, he carries a machete. When the burial is complete, the priest comes to the grave and hangs a small bamboo container of rice, rice-beer and meat on a fence in front of the grave. Rapping his machete on the fence to get the dead person’s attention (see photograph #37), the priest addresses the soul and prepares it for the journey to the land of the dead. He and his two assistants strike the lizard-skin head of small drums (ripung)  Rapping his machete on the fence to alert the dead person’s with a bamboo stick; a fourth man uses his hands soul, the priest addresses it and prepares it for the journey to to beat the lizard-skin heads of a larger barrel drum the land of the dead. Michael Aram Tarr, New Elope, 2003 (amba). Chanting and dancing, the priest guides the soul, naming almost 150 places along the path that reaches into Tibet/China. The final place is Asi Akhrika, ‘where the door to the soul’s place is closed, so I cannot say anymore.’

 A priest ritually cleansing people with special leaves after the burial during an Idu Mishmi funeral. Michael Aram Tarr, New Elope, 2003

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 Cooking for the feast during an Idu Mishmi funeral. Michael Aram Tarr, New Elope, 2003



 A boy making a basket for the distribution of food after the feast during an Idu Mishmi funeral. Michael Aram Tarr, New Elope, 2003

 Family members and friends at the grave during an Idu Mishmi funeral. Michael Aram Tarr, New Elope, 2003

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Although Idu Mishmis publicly disapprove of marriage outside the tribe, inter-marriage with other groups does occur. The man wearing glasses in the centre of the picture is the Rajasthani son-in-law of the deceased, an old woman of a prosperous family.

 Labourers preparing the burial chamber during an Idu Mishmi funeral. Michael Aram Tarr, New Elope, 2003

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 The eldest son leading his mother’s body in procession and holding her weaving shuttle during an Idu Mishmi funeral.

Michael Aram Tarr, New Elope, 2003

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 Family members placing food gifts for the deceased in her burial chamber (visible in photograph # 45) while friends and relatives look on during an Idu Mishmi funeral. Michael Aram Tarr, New Elope, 2003



 The burial chamber before it was sealed with all the possessions that the deceased will need in the land of the dead. Note the baskets of pigs in the lower right corner.

Michael Aram Tarr, New Elope, 2003

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 The priest communicating with the dead person’s soul while holding purifying leaves late at night during an Idu Mishmi funeral.

Michael Aram Tarr, New Elope, 2003

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 Idu Mishmi cane and bamboo bridge.

Michael Aram Tarr, Anini, 2003

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 ‘Digaro [Digaru] Mishmees in Assam-East India.’ Benjamin Simpson, 1860s, RGS

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 ‘Mijoo Mishmee [Miju Mishmi] woman in Assam-East India.’ Benjamin Simpson, 1860s, RGS

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 ‘Mijoo Mishmee [Miju Mishmi]-AssamEast India.’ Benjamin Simpson, 1860s, RGS



 ‘[Digaru and/or Miju Mishmi] Headmen.’

M. Steele, 1934, RGS

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 ‘Mijus and Tibetan traders at Sati.’

photographer unknown, 1907-1908, RGS



 ‘Minyong [Adi]. Grave of village headsman [sic].’ Frederick Marshman Bailey, 1913, RGS

This grave appears in fact to be either Digaru or Miju Mishmi.



 Miju Mishmi grave for two people. Michael Aram Tarr, Lohit Valley, 2004

Note the deceased woman’s possessions inside the structure, like the Idu Mishmi grave shown in photograph #45.



 ‘Taraon [Digaru Mishmi]: Dancers at Tushe, Lohit.’ Verrier Elwin, 1950s, BM

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 Digaru and Miju Mishmis celebrating at a party held during a sacrifice.

Michael Aram Tarr, Hayuliang, 2004

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 Digaru Mishmi woman weaving.

Michael Aram Tarr, Trafraliang, 2004

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 Digaru Mishmi man making a basket.

Michael Aram Tarr, Loliyang, 2004

Digaru and Miju Mishmi healing ritual Domo is a healing ritual among Digaru and Miju Mishmis of the Lohit Valley. It is performed at night by three priests ( gwak), working individually but in coordination: in a specific part of the ill person’s house, each man builds a different structure of bamboo and leaves to a different spirit

(for example, see photograph #60). Each priest, who may be either a Digaru or a Miju, then intones the chant appropriate to that spirit, while accompanying himself on a small drum or other percussion instrument. The domo, which continues for most of the night, is conducted to im-

prove the mental and physical health of the person in whose house the ritual takes place. When the ritual is finished in the early morning, carved pieces of wood (representing a fish, arrow etc.) are hung on a pole that stands in a small fenced area in front of most houses.

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 Sotha Chaitom, Miju Mishmi priest, at the domo ritual.

Michael Aram Tarr, Loliyang, 2004

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 Structure of bamboo and leaves for addressing spirits, constructed and used by Sotha Chaitom during the domo ritual.

Michael Aram Tarr, Loliyang, 2004

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 Priest making offerings to the ancestors at their symbolic resting place during the first night of the Du festival sponsored by Dadaso Manyu, a Digaru Mishmi.

Michael Aram Tarr, Hayuliang, 2004

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 Priest making a food offering to a cow prior to the main animal sacrifice at Dadaso Manyu’s Du festival.

Michael Aram Tarr, Hayuliang, 2004

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 Mithun and cow sacrifice at Dadaso Manyu’s Du festival.

Michael Aram Tarr, Hayuliang, 2004

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 Mithun and other skulls hung as ritual trophies near the entrance of a Digaru Mishmi house.

Michael Aram Tarr, Trafraliang, 2004

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 ‘Khamti [Khampti] Woman (elevation of the hair on crown indicates marriage) wearing black velvet bodice and ear ornaments of amber.’ Benjamin Simpson, 1860s, RGS

 ‘A Kamti [Khampti] Raja, a kind of Shan who came to Sadiya—with his attendants.’ photographer unknown, 1911-1913, BL

The ‘Raja’ is the figure in the centre.

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 Chow Khamoon Gohain Namssham, Khampti Chief and first Arunachal Pradesh member of the Raja Sabha in New Delhi. Michael Aram Tarr, Chowkham, 2004

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 ‘[Khampti] Head man of Village.’ photographer unknown, 1908-1909, BL

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 ‘Khamptee [Khampti] Tribe, Dehong River, North Assam.’ photographer unknown, 1908-1909, BL



 Khampti house.

Michael Aram Tarr, Empong, 2004

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 Khampti fisherman on his porch.

Michael Aram Tarr, Empong, 2004



 Khampti Buddhist nuns at the World Peace Pagoda blessing Chow Sanjay Mein, grandson of one of the nuns and a highly Michael Aram Tarr, Chowkham, 2004 respected man in the community.

 Khampti Buddhist nun at the World Peace Pagoda. Michael Aram Tarr, Chowkham, 2004

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 Buddhist statue in a small roadside shrine. Michael Aram Tarr, Pang Khao, 2004



 Dhammakirti, head monk of a Khampti Buddhist monastery.

Michael Aram Tarr, Khenem, 2004

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 Small stupa in the prayer hall of a Khampti Buddhist temple.

Michael Aram Tarr, Empong, 2004

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 Remains of a Khampti ritual. Michael Aram Tarr, Empong, 2004

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 The 7th Day of a Khampti Funeral:The lay priest, Chow Tiyot Mancheykum, who represents the family of the deceased in their supplications to the monks.

Michael Aram Tarr, Khenem, 2004



 The 7th Day of a Khampti Funeral: Monks listening to the lay priest as he requests a good rebirth for the soul of the dead man.

Michael Aram Tarr, Khenem, 2004

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 The 7th Day of a Khampti Funeral:The lay priest asking the monks to bless everyone present.

Michael Aram Tarr, Khenem, 2004

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 The 7th Day of a Khampti Funeral:The breakfast.

Michael Aram Tarr, Khenem, 2004

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 Khampti Buddhist funerary structure on the riverbank where cremations are held.

Michael Aram Tarr, near Momong, 2004

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 ‘Singpho. Warlike frontier tribe (Laos). Southern frontier of Assam.’ Benjamin Simpson, 1860s, BL



 ‘Singhpos [Singphos].’ Bourne and Shepherd studio, 1890s, BL



 ‘Nagas [Wanchos]. The murderers of Lieut Holcombe and party.’ Oscar Jean Baptiste Mallitte, Calcutta, c.1875, BL

Lieut. Holcombe and 80 men in his survey expedition, including officers, Indian sepoys, porters and servants, were killed in a Wancho village in 1875. Four men accused of the murders were imprisoned in Calcutta, where this photograph was taken.



 ‘Wancho: Boy puts on his cane-belt at Longkao, 5.12.54.’ Verrier Elwin, 1954, BM



 ‘Wancho: Men [man] with carved hands in their [his] hair, Nov. 1954.’ Verrier Elwin, 1954, BM

Carved wood hands, and other similarly carved objects, were worn by Wanchos who had taken a head or assisted in killing an enemy.



 ‘Wancho: Scenes at the wedding at Senua, 23.11.54.’ Verrier Elwin, 1954, BM

In the notes accompanying his negatives, Elwin identified this Wancho girl as ‘Sinkeo, daughter of the Wangham’s brother at Senua in her wedding attire.’

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 ‘Wancho: Scenes at the wedding at Senua, 22.11.54.’ Verrier Elwin, 1954, BM

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 ‘Wancho: The war-dance at Longkao, 5.12.54.’ Verrier Elwin, 1954, BM

Elwin described this dance as ‘an attempt to recapture the old days of head-hunting, to which they all looked back as the time then they were really men…every now and then the boys would let off their guns just behind me to see me jump’ (Elwin 1964: 282).

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 ‘Wancho with the tattoo-marks of human figures allowed only to the headhunter.’ Verrier Elwin, 1950s [1954?], BM

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 ‘Young Wancho man smiling, large comb, Nov.-Dec. 1954.’ Verrier Elwin, 1954, BM

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 ‘Capt.Woodthorpe, R. E.’ Capt. Woodthorpe, with a peaked cap, farthest right of the four British figures, sits among this group of sepoys, Hill Miris and possibly other tribes.

W. Robert, 1877-1878, PRM





‘Miri [Hill Miri].’

W. Robert, 1877-78, PRM

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 Young Hill Miri man. Christoph von FürerHaimendorf, 1945, SOAS

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 Young Hill Miri girl. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, 1944-1945, SOAS

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 Young Hill Miri man. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, 1944-1945, SOAS

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 Young Hill Miri woman. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, Upper Kamla, March-April 1945, SOAS

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 ‘Miri [Hill Miri], woman of Dobom [Dodom?] village with grass skirt.’ Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, Upper Kamla, March-April 1945, SOAS

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 Hill Miri man. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, Upper Kamla, March-April 1945, SOAS

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 Nyishi or Hill Miri girl. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, 1944-1945, SOAS

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 ‘[Hill] Miri woman of Rute-Hate village smoking a pipe.’ Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, Upper Kamla, March-April 1945, SOAS

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 Hill Miri man. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, Upper Kamla, March-April 1945, SOAS

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

Hill Miri or Nyishi men.

Michael Aram Tarr, Tamen, 1996

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

Asher Leventon, Apatani valley, February 1897, BL

‘The Palaver.’

This photograph, taken by Surgeon-Lt. Leventon, shows a scene during the first colonial expedition to the Apatani valley. British officials are negotiating with Apatanis over compensation for a murder, with Nyishis

and others in attendance. Robert Blair McCabe, Political Officer on the expedition, is shown sitting (apparently taking notes). Lt. H. F.‘Norie’ and Capt. G. R. ‘Row’ are British military officers. ‘Singh’ is Jamadar

Buta Singh, second from left; the other Indian officer is probably Subadar Gopal Singh. ‘Tegu’ remains unidentified.

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

Apatanis welcoming the Fürer-Haimendorfs to the Apatani valley.

Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, March 1944, SOAS

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 Young Apatani woman with a baby standing on the wooden steps of a house. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, 1944-1945, SOAS

Traditionally, young girls (and boys) were tattooed and wooden plugs were placed in girls’ nostrils. In 1974 the Apatani Youth Association demanded that these practices be abandoned and today they are only seen on older people.

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 Apatani men carrying firewood. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, 1944-1945, SOAS

Since the 1980s, carrying wood (and working in the rice fields) have become primarily women’s tasks.



 Young Apatani woman with large hoop earrings. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, 1944-1945, SOAS

These earring are no longer in fashion (although priests wear a similar type).

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 Apatani man with pipe. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, 1944-1945, SOAS

A less elaborate version of this hair-style is still worn by older men.





Apatani priest in a sacred grove performing a ritual during the Myoko festival.

Michael Aram Tarr, Lempya, 1996

 > Bamboo strips placed as protection around a ritual structure during the Myoko festival. Michael Aram Tarr, Hari, 2002

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



Apatani man leaping over a bamboo pole during the Myoko festival.

Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, 1944-1945, SOAS

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

Apatani man leaping over basket containing rice-beer during the Murung festival.

Michael Aram Tarr, Reru, 2005

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 Apatani ropi ritual. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, March 1944, SOAS

This ritual, Fürer-Haimendorf explained, was performed in the context of an ongoing dispute. An Apatani man was captured by Nyishis but escaped and took his revenge by killing a woman relative of his former captors. He then brought her hand back to his village as a trophy, where it was kept in the nago hut (on the right in this photograph). On the third day, a ropi ceremony was performed in which the spirits of the dead woman’s ancestors are invited to take ‘the offerings of food and rice-beer placed on the altar; the men and boys…had danced most of the night; and early in the morning the hand had been taken out of the nago, covered with pigs’ fat and then burnt to ashes in the fire which we still saw smoldering’ (FürerHaimendorf 1955: 47).

 Apatani men and priests watching the ropi ritual. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, March 1944, SOAS

 Apatani ropi procession. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, March 1944, SOAS

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 Apatani ropi procession. Michael Aram Tarr, Hari, 2005

A version of ropi is still performed when certain animals are killed, in this case, a jungle cat. Apatanis believe that, in the world of ancestors and spirits, this animal is closely allied to humans; as with humans, the ritual is intended to prevent retaliation by the victim’s ancestors. The procession to the nago is led by one of the oldest and most respected priests, Hage Gyati, followed by the young man who killed the cat, followed by his father with the cat’s skin hanging from his back.

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 The young man who killed the jungle cat. Michael Aram Tarr, Hari, 2005





Hage Gyati, an Apatani priest, during the ropi ceremony.

Hage Gyati wears a scarf around his neck, much as Fürer-Haimendorf described the ropi priest in 1944 wearing ‘a thick, embroidered muffler round his neck [see photograph # 116]… perhaps symbolic protection against sword thrusts or perhaps just part of a warrior’s normal outfit’ (Fürer-Haimendorf 1955: 47).

Michael Aram Tarr, Hari, 2005

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

‘Chigi Nime, the seer of Duta, invoking the gods before sacrificing a mithan.’

Photographs #121-125 were taken by Fürer-Haimendorf during a campaign led by the colonial government, in collaboration with Apatanis, against a Nyishi clan who for some time had kidnapped Apatanis and their animals, and ransomed them back to their families; the ropi ritual in 1944 (see photographs # 115-117) was prompted by one such kidnapping. Before the war party—consisting of Assam Rifles and Apatanis and led by British officers, including Fürer-

Haimendorf— set out to free an Apatani man taken hostage by the Nyishis, Apatanis performed a pre-raid ritual. These photographs are unusual because they show a war ritual performed for an actual raid and not staged for the photographer (as in photographs #15 and #90). ‘A few days ago a Dafla [Nyishi] brought a mithan calf as a present and on the eve of our departure for Licha [name of Nyishi clan and hamlet] we gave the mithan

Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, 12 December 1944, SOAS

to be sacrificed and eaten by the men coming with us to Licha. Chigi Nime took it to the sacrificial place near our camp and there for long [sic] invoked the gods lunging again and again at the beast with his long dao. At last the mithan was killed by Nime and other Apa Tanis helped with their dao in cutting up the meat for the Apa Tanis and Daflas who assemble (or are expected to assemble) tonight in our camp’ (FürerHaimendorf 1945: 60).

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Apatani priest (probably Chige Nyime) performing rituals for success in the raid against Nyishis.

Early the following morning, Chige Nyime, who had chanted most of the night, led Apatani men in a dance in front of a bamboo structure dedicated to Karun, a spirit who gives strength in time of war. A small dog (to be sacrificed) is tied to the left of the ritual structure; shoulder armour, also worn by the men in the photograph, is piled up behind it.

Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, 13 December 1944, SOAS





‘Apa Tani war-dance on the morning of the departure to Licha.’

Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, 13 December 1944, SOAS

 Apatani men set out for war. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, 13 December 1944, SOAS

The man standing far right appears to be counting the warriors by marking each man with a small bamboo piece, the traditional Apatani method of counting (see also fig. J).



 Nyishi village of Kirum burning. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, 18 December 1944, SOAS

Following unsuccessful negotiations to free the captive man, Capt. Davy, Additional Political Officer, ordered his men to burn five houses in Kirum owned by men of the Licha clan who had refused to cooperate. This generations-old conflict was eventually settled, temporarily, by the traditional method of negotiating, using bamboo pieces as counters (see fig J; Davy 1945: 59).



Apatani Festival of Murung The Murung festival is celebrated during the cold winter months in the Apatani valley in order to prevent illness or misfortune and to bring general prosperity. It is sponsored by individual families throughout the valley, each of whom voluntarily makes the decision to commit considerable resources to the feasting and rituals that continue for three weeks. Divinations by reading chicken livers and eggs begin months, even years, in advance, but the festival itself starts with an all-day chant by a priest or nyibu (see photographs #128 & 129). Standing on the lapang (ritual platform), to which the sacrificial animals are tied, he invites spirits and ancestors to the feast to ensure that the sponsor’s family and domestic animals enjoy prosperity. During the long chant, family members decorate the mithuns with bamboo shavings, smear them with rice powder and pour rice-beer on them (see photographs # 131-135). Once sacrificed, various parts are given to spe-

 Apatani women donating rice and millet during the Murung festival. Michael Aram Tarr, Lempya, 2005

The day after the sacrifice, female friends and relatives come to the sponsor’s house to donate rice and millet for the festival, especially for making rice-beer.

cific people, both relatives and those with whom the sponsor has formed a ritual bond. On the following morning, hundreds and sometimes thousands of women donate rice and millet to the festival sponsor, which is then made into ricebeer (see photograph #126). A week later, in the early morning one piece of meat is distributed to every single family among the 30,000 Apatanis living in the valley. That same day a procession of men and boys, brandishing machetes, winds through the valley, visiting every neighbourhood in every village where they are given food and drink (see fig. L, photographs #141-144). The procession is a time for pleasure and fun, including singing bawdy songs and waving phallic bamboo staves (see photographs #145 & 146). Today, the procession is more popular than ever; a recent Murung sponsored by a local politician had more than 2,500 participants.Women, previously only observers, have also begun to take part.





 Apatani priest during the Murung festival. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, 1944-1945, SOAS

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 Apatani priest holding bamboo sticks with pieces of ginger and chicks during the Murung festival. Michael Aram Tarr, Lempya, 2005

Unlike the dress of other men, that of Apatani priests today looks much like it did in the 1940s. Shorts have replaced the cane belt around the waist (banned by the Apatani Youth Association in 1974), and the hair style is a little less elaborate. The shawl and jacket also now include synthetic dyes, and the materials are bought in the market instead of obtained through barter. Nevertheless, these textiles are essentially the same and are still handwoven at home. This priest is also wearing a headman’s red coat for extra warmth on a cold January day.The concrete flooring and aluminium roof on the lapang are recent changes.





‘Morrum [Murung] festival. Kago Tajo, in his capacity as priest, conducting a ceremony with a mithan sacrifice.’

Ursula Betts, Hija, 1947, PRM

> On the day of the sacrifice, as the priest chants, wives in the sponsor’s clan stand behind baskets of rice powder and gourds of rice-beer, which they will later distribute in the neighbourhood.





Murung festival.

Michael Aram Tarr, Reru, 2005

 Apatani man, Rubu Tangu, decorating a mithun with rice powder during the Murung festival. Michael Aram Tarr, Lempya, 2005

Rubu Tangu, the sponsor of this Murung, is wearing the ‘neo-traditional’ dress for men: his purple storebought shirt under a handwoven jacket with traditional colours in a slightly modified design.The bronze bracelet is the only part of his dress that his grandfather might have worn.



 Apatani woman, Rubu Tangu’s mother, putting rice powder on a mithun during the Murung festival. Michael Aram Tarr, Lempya, 2005

As seen in this photograph, the ceremonial dress of Apatani women, especially older women, has changed only a little less than that of men.The large hopped earrings are gone; the hair style and jacket are different; a knitted sweater and shoes are now worn.

 ‘Tint [Tendin] ceremony. Preparing a young mithan for sacrifice.’ Ursula Betts, Duta, 1947-1948, PRM

The Tendin is a less elaborate version of a Murung.



 ‘Tint [Tendin] ceremony. Woman wearing her best clothes offering the mithan salt and sprinkling its forehead with rice and flour.’ Ursula Betts, Duta, 1947-1948, PRM





Apatani man smearing rice powder on a mithun during the Murung festival.

Michael Aram Tarr, Reru, 2005

 Apatani men tying a mithun to a post behind the sponsor’s house just before sacrifice during the Murung festival. Michael Aram Tarr, Lempya, 2005



 The same scene, a few minutes later when the mithun is killed. Michael Aram Tarr, Lempya, 2005

Once the axe blow stuns the mithun, clan members and friends jump in to help cut up the animal.





Apatani boys carrying meat of the sacrificed mithun in a basket during the Murung festival.

As the mithun is cut up, body parts and internal organs are taken to a hut built for storing and drying the meat; some parts are later given to relatives and ceremonial friends.

Michael Aram Tarr, Lempya, 2005

 Sacrificial blood in an aluminium pot during the Murung festival. Michael Aram Tarr, Lempya, 2005

The blood of the mithun is stored and eaten later.

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 The severed head of the mithun during the Murung festival. Michael Aram Tarr, Lempya, 2005





‘Morrum [Murung] festival. Dancers performing in village street.’

About a week after the sacrifice, a procession of men and boys of all ages travels through all seven villages in the Apatani valley.

Ursula Betts, Duta, February 1947, PRM

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

Murung procession on its way through Hari village.

Men now often wear suits instead of the raw (ere) silk shawls worn in the 1940s and later. Some also wear the zilang shawl, which was formerly worn only by priests, instead of the simpler white shawl.

Michael Aram Tarr, 2005

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

‘Morrum [Murung] festival. Dispensing hospitality to dancers.’

Ursula Betts, Duta, February 1947, PRM





Young men, sporting paper mithun horns, march along in procession during the Murung festival, while onlookers offer rice-beer.

The procession has always had an element of clowning and today includes costumes of all sorts, as seen here.

Michael Aram Tarr, Reru, 2005

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

Men playing with phallic bamboo staves during the Murung festival.

Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, Hija, February 1945, SOAS

 Phallic joker in a Murung procession. Michael Aram Tarr, Hari, 2005



 Joker in a Murung procession. Michael Aram Tarr, Hari, 2005

Another sign of changing times, women now participate in the formerly male-only procession



 Nani Sala (left, in airplane) and Padi Lalyang (right, in airplane) in a Dakota airplane. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, Apatani valley, 1962, SOAS

These two men were the most powerful political leaders among Apatanis in the mid-twentieth century. Kago Bida (foreground) was also an influential man of the period.



 ‘A Daphla [Nyishi] at Dikalmukh. July 1921.’ Charles Dennis Balding, 1921, BL



 ‘Group of Daflas [Nyishis], Assam.’ Oscar Jean Baptiste Mallitte, 1870s?, PRM

Oscar Jean Baptiste Mallitte was a well-known and admired photographer working in Calcutta during the 1850s-1870s (and possibly later).This photograph was probably taken during the 1870s and most likely in Assam, where Mallitte worked at the time. The word ‘Dufflas’ [Daflas, Nyishis] added as a stencil below the negative suggests that this photograph was part of a series of ‘types’ popular at the time. The sitters, certainly not Nyishis, are possibly tribals from central India working on a tea estate in Assam; their hair styles and ornaments are a bizarre mixture from Nyishi and other groups.



 ‘Loba, at Trön, from the Kashong La.’ G. Sherriff, 1936, BL

This photograph was taken along the international border between India and China, near the Chayul Chu, a tributary of the Subansiri River. The people in it have been identified by local inhabitants in the area as either Sulungs or Nyishis from the upper Kamla valley (information from Toni Huber).



 Nyishi man. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, Talo, 1944, SOAS



 Nyishi or Hill Miri woman wearing an Apatani shawl. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, 1944-1945, SOAS

Apatanis wove shawls for Nyishis in return for cotton.



 Nyishi man, probably a porter, preparing his hair inside a temporary shelter during the Fürer-Haimendorfs’ first trip, a seven-day walk, to the Apatani valley. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, March 1944, SOAS



 ‘A young Dafla [Nyishi] man held prisoner in the Apa Tani village of Haja [Hija].’ Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, 1944-1945, SOAS



Nyishi Festival of Nyokum Photographs # 157-159 were taken in 1948 by Charles R. Stonor, an agricultural officer with the Assam Rifles, in a Nyishi settlement near Balipara in Assam. These photographs of a healing ritual provide the closest parallel with the now widelycelebrated Nyokum festival, shown in photographs #160-163, taken at Doimukh, near Itanagar in 2002. Nyokum is an example of the centralised and community-wide celebrations that have been established, with political support, throughout central Arunachal Pradesh. Once a minor agriculture rite performed in isolated settlements every few years, in the 1960s Nyokum was redesigned as an annual event and has now become a government recognised holiday celebrated annually on a fixed date in several centralised locations. Combining new elements of flag, songs, dance competition and speeches with traditional ritual chanting, elaborate bamboo altars, mithun sacrifice, rice-beer offerings and women’s dress and jewellery, Nyokum has became an important symbol of Nyishi identity. The core of the festival, and older ritual, is the negotiation with the vast spirit world in an attempt to protect crops and increase prosperity.The focal point of Nyokum is the set of bamboo altars built in honour of various spirits, especially Donyi (Sun), who are offered chickens and a mithun, and possibly a goat or pig. During the sacrifices, and beforehand, two or three nyubs (priests) chant, while women pour rice-beer on the altars from gourd ladles. This complex series of chants and rituals, which used to stretch over four or five days, is now condensed into two or three days.