Next month: Naga

Myanmar’s Naga Self-Administered Zone, a forbidding land that forms the jagged spine of the Indo-Myanmar border, is home to 120,000 Naga – a Tibeto-Burman people made up of an estimated 70 tribes. Yet while much has been written of the Naga tribes in India, Myanmar’s Naga are barely known. ‘Their villages, and the mountains they perch on, have remained a rare blank space on the map – ungoogleable, uncharted and far, far away from the pages of any guide book,’ writes journalist Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent. It was for this reason that she wanted to go.

In next month’s Geographical, Antonia recounts her experiences with the Naga as part of a two-month expedition across the Naga Hills. There, she discovered a beautiful land: ‘When I dared look back half an hour later, Lahe had been swallowed by an ocean of emerald forest. All I could see was a crumpled quilt of mountains unfurling in all directions, the vivid green of the nearest bluffs smudging to a blue, supernal mist.’ But this beauty disguises a dangerous homeland and a people plagued by poverty, forced to grow and sell opium, trap bears or work in jade mines. So too are they divided. For the Naga, the border between India and Myanmar is a meaningless, unwelcome division. ‘We knew nothing about the border until 1971, when the army came and put markers in the ground,’ Antonia remembers one man saying. The villagers she met used Indian rupees, bought rice from a Konyak village across the border and sent their children to study in India. One of the Naga’s rebel groups had attacked an Indian Army post a few weeks previously.

More than anything however, what Antonia remembers is the poverty she encountered. ‘While many of us may be temporarily deprived of our freedoms,’ she writes, ‘we still have running water, electricity, shops and healthcare, luxuries that the villagers I met can only dream of. For this, we should be extremely grateful.’