Lushei tribes,[1] traces of tree burial are found, so that the practice of placing the head of an enemy in a tree maybe remotely connected as a ceremonial survival with a practice, once general, which has now become obsolete.[2] It was no easy matter to persuade the Nāgas of my frontier that the heads had to be restored to the friends of those to whom they had belonged, but arguments and stubborn facts prevailed in time to prevent the necessity of recourse to other methods of persuasion.
This incident was only a case of self-defence in a sudden quarrel, and was amply punished by six months' hard labour,—not, let me observe, for murder, but for the offence,—which is not yet formally in the statute book,—of cutting off the head of a fallen foe. Another incident which happened to me in the neighbourhood, but months later, brought me into contact with yet another phase of head-hunting. I myself was busy with the census, an operation which in the Meithei language is described as head-seeking, (mī kōk thī-ba, to seek the heads of men). I was marching ahead of my commissariat, when suddenly at my feet fell a pitiable creature, a Nāga in as abject a state of terror as poor humanity could be. It took me some time to get a clear understanding of his distress. The headman of a large and powerful village over the border and outside my jurisdiction was engaged in building himself a new house,[3] and, to strengthen it, had seized this man and forcibly cut off a lock of his hair, which had been buried underneath the main post of the house. In olden days the head would have been put there, but by a refinement of some native theologian a lock of hair was held as good as the whole head, for the ghost of the wretch would go there and seek the missing lock and be
- ↑ Capt. T. H. Lewin, Hill Tracts of Chittagong etc., p. 112.
- ↑ See Grant Allen, The Attis of Cains Valerius Catullus, passim.
- ↑ Cf. L'Année sociologique, vol. ii., p. 104; Grant Allen, op. cit., pp. 117 et seq.
