The Politics of Swidden farming: Environment and Development in Eastern India

By Debojyoti Das

The Politics of Swidden Farming offers a new explanation for the changes taking place in swidden farming practised in the highlands of eastern India through an ethnographic case study. The book traces the story of agroecological change and state intervention to colonial times, and helps understand contemporary agrarian change by contextualizing farming not just in terms of the science and technology of agriculture or conservation and biodiversity but also in terms of technologies of rule. The Politics of Swidden Farming adds a new dimension to the underdeveloped literature on shifting cultivation in South Asia by focusing on the social ecology of farming and agrarian change in the hills. It provides a comparative viewpoint to state-centred and donor-driven development in the frontier region by bringing in different actors and institutions that become the actants and agents of social change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Sep 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781783087778

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The Politics of Swidden Farming

The Politics of Swidden Farming: Environment and Development in Eastern India

Debojyoti Das

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2018

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© Debojyoti Das 2018

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Das, Debojyoti, author.

Title: The politics of swidden farming : environment and development in eastern India / by Debojyoti Das.

Description: London, UK; New York, NY: Anthem Press, an imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018022207| ISBN 9781783087754 (hardback) | ISBN 1783087757 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Shifting cultivation–India–Nagaland. | Naga (South Asian people)–Agriculture.

Classification: LCC S602.87.D37 2018 | DDC 631.5/8180954165–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022207

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-775-4 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-775-7 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

This book is dedicated to Georges Condominas (b. 1921) who passed away on 17 July 2011 and who had such a remarkable influence on swidden studies in Southeast Asia (Vietnam); and to the friends of the study village who helped me in every possible way during my fieldwork; and to our loving son, Aryan.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Foreword

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

1.Introduction

2.Methodology and Fieldwork: Negotiating Hazardous Fields

3.Ethnography, Violence and Memory: Telling Violence in the Naga Hills

4.Jhum and the ‘Science of Empire’: Ecological Discourse, Ethnographic Knowledge and Colonial Mediation

5.Land and Land-Based Relations in a Yimchunger Naga Village: From Book View to Field View

6.The Politics of Time: The Missionary Calendar, the Protestant Ethic and Labour Relations among the Eastern Nagas

7.Micro-Politics of Development Intervention: Village Patrons, Community Participation and the NEPED Project

8.Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure

6.1Index: L1 – Church, attending church service and meeting; L2 – Meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner; L3 – Hanging around and visiting people’s houses; L4 – Ceremony: Collective rituals related to church; L5 – Rest, lying down in one’s own house during daylight hours, reading, listening to music

Images

1.1A climate-change poster at Clerk Theological College, Mokokchung

1.2Moyang, the highly popular Konyak chief

2.1The Compromise Document

2.2AK-47 bullet mark on the village lamp post

2.3A public servant being guarded during the Hornbill Festival, 2008

2.4Journalist photographing folk dancers during the Hornbill Festival, 2008

3.1Pictures depicting a Japanese raid in 1944

3.2Major R. Kathing and his wife with early village guards

3.3Arms captured from the first China-returned Naga rebels

4.1Irrigation marvels of the Angamis

4.2Konyak Naga headhunters as swidden cultivators

5.1Bird’s-eye view of the study village

5.2Murung house in the middle khel of the village

5.3Citizens’ pillar in the village

5.4Wet irrigated field opened in the 1980s

5.5Traction plough

5.6Household labour in irrigation fields during the cropping season

5.7Man engaged in controlling irrigation water in paddy fields

6.1Yimchunger Baptist Church Calendar

6.2Church revivals session 2009, Leangkonger

7.1Naga villagers as represented by the project staff

7.2Yimchunger Naga villagers drinking locally made wine. Photograph taken in Kutur village by anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf (1937)

7.3NEPED handbook showing Leangkonger success story

7.4Maize and long beans relay cropping in Leangkonger

8.1Alder-based plantation in Leangkonger village

8.2A poster depicting potential of a tree

Maps

1.1Location map of Nagaland and the study region

3.1Topographical maps of Assam and Burma; the blank space is an un-administered and unsurveyed area

3.2Assam–Burma frontier map of area brought under Naga Hills in 1937 after the Pangsha anti-slavery campaign

3.3Route followed by the 1936 expedition

5.1Sketch map of the study village, prepared in the field with the help of village informants and host

8.1Mokokchung villages land dispute maps with signatures of dobashis

Tables

4.1Chronology of legislation passed in Assam since 1834 by the British Indian Administration

4.2Fund allocation to creating rice terraces in Naga villages

4.3Mokokchung subdivision

4.4Showing amount spent in Kohima Sadar

4.5Showing amount spent in Mokokchung subdivision

4.6TRC Projects implemented in Assam Hills District and their relative success

6.1Yimchunger ‘Forefather’ Calendar

FOREWORD

The title of this book, The Politics of Swidden Farming: Environment and Development in Eastern India, hardly conveys the ethnographic depth and historical reach of the study. This scope becomes apparent as the reader comes to discover the significance of swidden or shifting cultivation, not just as a relationship of communities to land and ecology, but as a critical mediator of relationships with the colonial and postcolonial state and its civilizing or development projects over the past century. The study is located in a region and among people who become, through their social lives and livelihoods (including their swidden cultivation), as Anna Tsing puts it, ‘icons of the archaic disorder that represents the limit and test of state order and development’ (Tsing 1993: 28). The remote Naga villages that are the ethnographic focus of this book are in this sense represented simultaneously as a political–administrative border, an agricultural margin and a moral frontier. The kinds of colonial and postcolonial projects that have sought to regulate and control such borderland communities, whether irrigation projects, roads, settlement schemes or plantations, are well known, but what is rarer is the kind of longitudinal account offered here of the interplay of state power, Christian mission and local communities, examined also through the complex relationships between and within these Nagaland villages themselves. With regard to this latter theme of the role and agency of local communities in their own transformation, it becomes evident not only that colonial administrative power was asserted through harnessing inter-group antagonisms, but also that transformations brought to the cultivated landscape, to social institutions and cultural practices through Christian missions, came by way of neighbouring social groups, who modelled new ways of worshipping and working the land, expanding cash-crop or rice cultivation (an established archetype of settled civility).

Violence is a thread that runs through the account of the political and moral relationships of this frontier zone. Debojyoti Das offers the reader his own experience of being caught up in a violent episode involving a kidnap, interrupting the decade-long ceasefire between the army and Naga militants, as a route into ethical and methodological reflection. As the book explains, through use of remarkably candid archival sources on the brutality of the British administration, the people of this frontier have long existed as the target of counter-insurgency violence, both physical and representational. Having imagined the local Naga communities in terms of their violence – as head-hunting, slave-taking savages and insurgents – British ‘punitive expeditions’ of quite remarkable destruction and violence were undertaken. The moral framing of such violence as civilizing allowed an unguarded record of the dreadful violence involved in such penalizing action. All the more disturbing for the scholarly discipline in which Das is trained, is the evidence he brings to show that it was in alliance with this administration that anthropology’s ‘rescue and record’ ethnography was produced, including the photographic capture of the ‘naked Nagas’ for display in the Illustrated London News from the 1930s. Intersecting violence meant the British frequently exploited existing inter-group rivalries, and in the context of World War II, actually rewarded Nagas for the taking of Japanese heads, the practice that had justified their punitive expeditions.

Das has discovered a wealth of new archival material on the colonial administration of this frontier region kept in local record offices. Despite the important light thrown on direct military assertions of colonial power, these sources are used to show how in practice the colonial administration was an outcome of negotiation and depended significantly upon the recognition of local rights in land, and that it was through ‘customary practices’ that the government control over land was legitimized. This turned village heads into brokers or middlemen in the extension of commercial forestry, and the transformation of swidden (jhum) land with new rotations and alder pollarding, alongside the expansion of permanent wet-terrace rice farming. A new regime of stabilized land tenure went along with and allowed new farming practices. We learn that the familiar story of swidden as a farming system pressurized to the point of collapse with increasing population and shortening fallow cycles is a simplification, and with case-study detail we come to understand the remarkable adaptability of such land-use practices to changed circumstances.

Despite the organizational force of colonial administration, one of the surprising lessons is that perhaps the greatest change in the village community Das lived in was wrought through self-transformation initiated by Christian (primarily Baptist) missionization by evangelists from neighbouring rice-growing communities. Many accounts of the evangelization of Indian communities show Christian adaptation to existing cultural and agricultural systems, as church festival and ritual systems are moulded to an existing popular religious culture to produce forms of religious synthesis. In this account of Nagaland, by contrast, conversion to Christianity brings new order and discipline that involve the transformation of cultural and agricultural systems – a disinvesting from the old sources of social power and investing church-based institutions with authority, including in matters such as labour control as well as connecting outwards to aspects of Naga nationalism’s cultural forms. Time and its reorganization in terms of calendrical systems turn out to be a critical linking medium of religious, social and agricultural change. New agricultural practices, especially irrigated rice, become stores of symbolic capital and social differentiation.

It is perhaps unsurprising that development-project planners with characteristic lack of historical sensibility and the tendency to dichotomize the recent traditional past and the technologically improved future fail to perceive the dynamic systems into which their interventions are introduced. And so it is with the Nagaland Empowerment of People through Economic Development (NEPED) project, which for Das first encapsulated the conundrum of swidden farming. Project goals of forest regeneration to produce ‘carbon sinks’ and to counter global warming are realized through incentivizing swidden farmers – simultaneously the most knowledgeable custodians of local biodiversity and its principal threat – to grow horticultural and plantation cash crops and thereby achieve sustainable swidden farming. But contrary to expectations, the transition from swidden to agroforestry does not bring livelihood improvement for all. Instead the development project is another chapter in the long story of intersections between diverse local interests and outsider ambitions for cultural–agricultural change; and in this case new opportunities are found to encourage forms of development brokerage, elite capture and the privatization of benefits, which Das uncovers.

Few accounts of remote borderland regions show with such attention to historical and local contexts how technologies of cultivation and technologies of rule are interconnected; how marginality is reproduced through regimes of development, alongside internal differentiation and tension within communities. The story reveals how the interweaving of changes in political, economic and religious relations can only properly be understood by paying attention to what is happening in the landscape; and simultaneously how the landscape must be read as a palimpsest of political and cultural histories.

It takes sensitive development of relationships with communities through long-term fieldwork, an arduous searching out of local records and informed use of a visual archive of colonial ethnography to arrive at such understanding. This in turn has to be treasured for the lessons it offers to current and future projects in such frontier regions, allowing more informed critical awareness of how developers’ enduring notions of civility and proper citizenship come to be expressed in the idiom of improved forms of land use and farming. And at the very centre, and representing the ambiguity of such development, is swidden cultivation balancing between visions of primitive destruction and sustainable ecology that are part of contemporary environmental discourses.

David Mosse, FBA

London, April 2018

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Scores of people and many institutions have been helpful in the preparation of this book, and I wish to acknowledge their assistance. I shall remain ever indebted to their sincere help and generous goodwill. It is through their constant encouragement and support that I was able to complete my enduring field research amid medical problems, anxiety with settling down in the field villages and the challenges I faced while doing fieldwork. I would like to thank my advisor David Mosse for his expert guidance, stimulating discussions and practical instructions for my research and writing up despite his family bereavement and research leave. I would also like to thank my second supervisor Johan Pottier (an Africanist) for his encouragement and help at every stage of the work.

In the study village I was well supported by my host family and the village people. I would like to thank my host’s daughters and his nephew, who helped me in my interviews and made me understand the social geography and clan dynamics of the village. The pastors and women leaders were of incredible help and I enjoyed passing the time talking about their daily life and often cracking jokes. I would also like to convey my regards to the village ‘citizen president’, the second gaon burha, and other headmen who took me to their jhum and paddy fields and helped me to understand the complicated issues surrounding farming, land use and social relations. I am also thankful to the Catholic father of Shamator town who hosted me on several occasions when I could not go back to the village after dark. Also, the head dobashi and head gaon burha of Shamator town shared invaluable information on administration and colonial times. Similarly, I am indebted to the help extended by the Kecham family, who hosted me in their house.

I am indebted to my parents and younger brother for having taken pains to periodically send articles, books and periodicals published from the region. I also thank my relatives, friends and members of my extended family who hosted me during fieldwork trips between Assam and Nagaland.

As for the various institutions that gave research support, I am grateful to the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, the National Archives and the Central Secretariat Library in New Delhi; the Nagaland University, ICSSR-NER Shillong Library, North Eastern Hill University and North East Council Library and the Keeper of Records of the Meghalaya State Secretariat in Shillong; the Asiatic Society of Bengal; the Assam State Archives in Dispur, Guwahati; the West Bengal State Archives in Kolkata; the Arunachal State Archives in Itanagar; the Department of Antiquarian Studies; the Department of Art and Culture–Record Cell, Nagaland, Kohima; the Nagaland State Secretariat and the Naga Student Federation (office records) in Kohima; the Clarke Theological College (CTC) and Deputy Commissioners Office Records in Mokokchung; the Village Guard and Land Survey Department, Agricultural and Flood Control Department and Deputy Commissioner’s office in Tuensang; the Nagaland Baptist Church Council (NBCC) Library in Guwahati; the School of Oriental and African Studies Library (SOAS) and Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf Special Collection, JICS Digital Archives, the Royal Anthropological Institute Archives, Anti-Slavery International, Kew Botanical Garden Archives and the British Library in London.

Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the various institutions that helped me with financial support. I am particularly thankful to the Felix Foundation that supported my PhD research for three years (2007–10). Similarly, I would like to thank the trustees of the Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf Anthropological Fund for awarding me a fieldwork grant. My special thanks to Nick Haimendorf, who took time out of his busy professional life to attend my departmental postgraduate PhD seminar presentations. I thank the University of London and SOAS for their fieldwork grant, and the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) for awarding me the Emslie Horniman Anthropological Research Grant to buy equipment (a camera and GPS with which I took beautiful pictures in the field, measured altitude and determined coordinates).

My research was also supported by bursaries and writing-up grants. I would like to thank the trustees of the Leache Trust, the Gillian Diamond Trust, the Nora Henry Trust, the International Student House Hardship Fund, Churches Together of England, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Radcliffe-Brown Sutasoma Award, the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Sydney Parry Foundation for their crucial support.

I am most indebted to my Yimchunger Naga friends and companions whose names appear in pseudonym for obvious reasons (matters of confidentiality). This thesis has been a result of teamwork not only between my interlocutors and me, but also between the various institutions, individuals, jhum farmers, civil society members and church office bearers and academics who participated and made this research possible. Also, thanks go out to a few academic mentors and friends who have been a source of inspiration throughout the writing process: Vinita Damodaran (Sussex University), Edward Simpson (SOAS), Ambika Aiyadurai (NUS), Sunil Amrith (Harvard University), Amit Kisku (SOAS), Niranjan Saha (SOAS), Raminder Kaur (Sussex University), Andrew Ainsley (Reading University), Barbara Harris White (Oxford University), Mandy Sadan (SOAS), Willa Zhen (CIA), the late Bianca Son (SOAS), Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt (ANU), Keerty Nakrey (Queens University), M. Satish Kumar (Queens University), Rohan D’souza (Kyoto University), Antonio Moon (British Library), Farzana Whitefield (SOAS), Sahil Warsi (SOAS), Vibha Arora (IIT, Delhi), K. Sivaramakrishna (Yale), Mahesh Rangarajan (Ashoka), Erik De Maaker (Leiden University), Angela Chiu (SOAS) and George Kunnath (Oxford University).

For their editorial support I would like to thank Kieran Nelson, Baverley Brown and the copyediting team at Anthem Press, who carefully edited the manuscript to flawlessness. My special thanks go to the commissioning editors. The shortcomings in this book are entirely mine. And for copyright clearance I would like to specially thank SOAS Library, the Illustrated London News, Pitt Rivers Museum – University of Oxford, and Nick Haimendorf for allowing me to reproduce the photographs and works of Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf and J. P. Mills.

Lastly, I shall not forget the service rendered by the University College Hospital (UCH) team of doctors in the Department of Respiratory Disease who helped me recuperate from my medical condition, tuberculosis, which temporarily endangered the prospects of my preparation for field research. I am also thankful to Pie Chen, Max Mazamdar and Ian Harper at Edinburgh University for their valued counselling and support.

ABBREVIATIONS

1

Introduction

Both colonial technical staff and farmers in the plains show little consideration for and even despise swidden practices all over their colonies in Southeast Asia. Yet one hears little of the centuries during which the Mayan civilization ruled over Central America, which is strewn with their masterpieces. The colonial administration did not know, for example, that swidden had played a major role in the demographic expansion of the twelfth century in France: it transformed vast areas into cultivated fields of cereals. It was also the case that swidden was widespread in Europe during the nineteenth century, and it is also mentioned as existing in Austria during the 1960s. If you walk through the forest of Fontainebleau you will come across many sites or hamlets with the name ‘I’Essart’ or ‘Essart’ (swidden) on the survey maps. (Condominas 2009, 267)¹

The seed of this book dates back, at least in part, to 2006, when I attended a seminar on ‘shifting cultivation’ – swidden farming, pejoratively known as ‘slash-and-burn’, and in northeast India as jhum. This seminar, delivered by P. S. Ramakrishnan, inspired me to undertake my research among the hill farmers of Eastern India. This manuscript is a labour of love, written through years of commitment working with jhum farmers in Nagaland. Ramakrishnan was, at that time, a member of the advisory committee in a transnationally funded jhum regeneration project. The project, entitled Nagaland Empowerment of People through Economic Development (NEPED), was funded by the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the India–Canada Environmental Facility (ICEF) primarily to implement ‘carbon sink’ and target global warming and climate change–induced environmental risks through the regeneration of forest land and by incentivizing farmers to grow horticultural and plantation cash crops in the eastern Himalayas. This region is a major biodiversity hot spot in South Asia and has grasped the attention of biologists, geographers, climate scientists and ecologists who see jhum as a hazardous and unproductive form of farming, threatening local biodiversity. The appraisal of the project’s success and research funding from the Felix Scholarship, UK, to pursue my work at the Anthropology Department of the School of Oriental and African Studies drove me to hike the Saramati mountain range across the India–Myanmar borderland. I lived among the Yimchungers to develop my field-based knowledge, which informs the ethnography in the book.

In this book, I trace the story of agroecological change and state intervention back to colonial times when the Naga Hills were seen as the frontier of state and ‘civilization’. We need to understand contemporary agrarian change by contextualizing farming, not just in terms of the science and technology of agriculture or conservation and biodiversity, but also in terms of ‘technologies of rule’. For the colonial administrators of the Naga Hills – who saw their role partially in terms of rescue-and-record ethnography – jhum practices were part of backward Naga customs and traditions. ‘Improving’ farming practices was bound up with indirect rule as a distinct process of governance involving forms of knowledge and intervention. It was political expediency rather than ‘imperial science’ that changed local agroecologies and put pressure on the practice of shifting cultivation. Crucially, neighbouring Naga terrace rice cultivators were promoted as offering a more civilized – yet local – alternative.

Here I propose to deliver anthropological insights into the social ecology of farming that may help to understand how swidden has been framed within statist and epistemic discourses that have informed both policy and practice on agriculture development in upland South Asia. Besides developing an ethnography of jhumland development in the hills, the work has other objectives that originate from my engaged and collaborative ethnographic fieldwork and from my use of multiple sources and methods of data collection in a sensitive field site (particularly colonial photographs, archival records and policy dossiers). This work also demonstrates how contemporary agrarian development reflects this complex colonial heritage, including linkages between the state and village elites. Evangelical missionaries in the post-independence period also contributed by appropriating local institutions and incorporating them into a Protestant (Baptist) ethic of work. Reinforcing the colonial state’s favouring of rice as the ‘crop of civilization’, the missionaries’ moral discourse installed new time disciplines geared to settled agriculture.

Methodologically, I engage with the many voices that shaped my field research, providing evidence from in-depth, household-based participant observation and life histories and a household survey, while also drawing extensively on original archival research and colonial photography to provide documentation of colonial representations of the swidden landscape. This research was undertaken in a milieu of fear and violence, which raises further methodological and ethical issues in the book that are relevant for ethnographies carried out in dangerous field sites (see Chapter 2).

Global Discourses: An Overview of Swidden

To begin with I provide an overview of jhum, northeast India’s swidden farming. Swidden agriculture is a technique of rotational farming in which land is cleared for cultivation (normally by fire) and then left to regenerate after a few years. This is followed in a cycle. However, in northeast India, as elsewhere in the tropics, various factors – such as demographic changes, the introduction of new cash and plantation crops, the building of big dams and the submergence of forest land in catchment areas – have reduced the land use needed for swidden farming. Simultaneously, governments worldwide have long sought to eradicate swidden agriculture, terming it ‘slash and burn’ because of an erroneous belief that it is the sole driver of deforestation and soil erosion in the hills.

Swidden is today increasingly understood in national and transnational agroecological discourse as an obsolete form of land use that not only puts pressure on land and its dwellers, but also destabilizes forests, soil and biodiversity in highland ecosystems. The environmental narratives of shifting cultivation that induced damages to ecology were produced, and scientifically deliberated, during the early nineteenth century and later reaffirmed in colonial forest policy during the British empire’s scientific conferences held between 1921 and 1951 (Rajan 2006). Since the 1950s, soil erosion and desiccation narratives have joined neo-Malthusian discourse on the ‘carrying capacity of land’ to discourage swidden farming. More recently, revisionist scholars have critiqued scientific claims about the negative impact of swidden by looking at national programmes of territorialization that historically marginalized the forest-dependent swiddeners and separated them from their livelihood. Among the revisionist school, neo-indigenistas argue that swidden farming is sustainable when practised under long cycles of field rotation (Agrawal 1995). They cite the cultural attributes of swidden that make it impossible to be abandoned completely, leading to the failure of many jhum improvement schemes of national governments and transnational conservation organizations that deny this reality. Agriculture, as the neo-indigenistas claim, is inherently a cultural practice, and if communities are alienated from it, the process of institutional intervention through new technologies and incentives for improvement will fail. On the other side of the political scale, the radical camp of ‘political ecologists’ base their critique on the economic and political circumscription of swidden populations by national policies that favour big capital and transnational timber cartels (Dove 1983). Taking into account the points of view and contemporary critiques on jhum, I argue for a ‘cultural ecology of conservation effort’. I will explain through a village-level case study the less-understood histories of state territorialization of swidden landscapes, ideas of modernization brought in by missionaries, changing land use and labour relations and shifting values towards access and rights to land under ‘community ownership’, along with the rhetoric of population implosion in swidden villages. Jointly, these developments have transformed swidden landscapes from their ideal beginnings as self-sustaining ‘little insular-barter economies’ into timber and cash-crop plantations that sustain export to urban and regional markets on the plains. In a rapidly changing globalized rural situation, swidden farming is hybridized with the introduction of agroforestry, silviculture and timber-plantation economies overlaid by traditional land-use systems. Villages are vertically integrated to the market and to transnational capital. Equally, swidden farming performed under state surveillance is territorialized, fragmented, settled and regulated by forest and wildlife protection laws as well as by new schemes of permanent husbandry. The modern swidden economy has to be understood as an agroecological and cultural system under transition and shaped by epistemic discourses, state and transnational development promises and programmes of conservation as well as the swidden communities’ ‘will to improve’ (Li 2007) – a desire to catch up with the outside world.

This book is based on my ethnographic case study of the Yimchunger Naga tribal group, a minority within the pan-Naga and Indian identity. They remain one of the least documented of the Naga tribes bordering India and Myanmar. Their marginality is evident both in their geographical and political relationships with the lowland (plains caste) population and with the Indian state: theirs is a region that rarely figures in Indian Studies (Kejariwal 1987, Maaker and Joshi 2007, Kumar and Zou 2011). The region’s farming and landscape can best be compared with the mountain in Southeast Asia that James C. Scott has generalized as ‘Zomia’ (2009: ix).² The central purpose here is to test the simplifying discourses of swidden agriculture as ‘underdeveloped, backward, waste and marginal’ which, after being initially established in the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries within colonial rescue-and-record evolutionist Naga ethnography (Lotha 2007), later became incorporated in the process of state planning. By contrast, I hope to demonstrate the dynamic nature of swidden agriculture among the Yimchunger Nagas, while also tracing the historically specific social and political factors that shape this land-use practice.

I narrate here, in brief, my entry to the field, which will serve as a vignette to the perceptions on swidden, or shifting cultivation. In February 2009, I made a trip to Tuensang town via Mokokchung with a friend who worked as the principal in a government college. The journey to Tuensang was memorable, and in the coming months it became more regular once I established my fieldwork base among the Yimchunger Nagas (a Naga subtribe inhabiting the Tuensang and Kiphire districts of Nagaland; see Map 1.1). The tribe’s members offered insights into their agricultural methods, my subject of enquiry. During the journey, I encountered the natural beauty of the landscape, spotted with dark, charred