Miss Ursula Graham Bower, arriving at Manipur Road railway-station in
1937, aged twenty-two and on her first visit to India, drove up the spectacularly lovely motor-road that runs over the mountains from the Brahmaputra Valley to Manipur State and noticed, standing by the Khudside, little groups of Nagas in their black kilts decorated with lines of white cowrie shells, their gaily coloured plaids and their feathered head-dresses. Although her destination was a trim bungalow at Imphal, she early decided that it was in the Naga Hills that she wanted to live. "It was as though I had dis- covered a world to which I had belonged the whole time ; from which by some accident I had become estranged." Naga Path tells in great detail the story of how this intrepid young woman achieved her ambition, of her day-by-day existence among her primitive but essentially likable neigh- bours, and how these Nagas and Kukis organise their lives. Anthropologists and all who enjoy learning about strange people and far-off lands should enjoy this book, but to one reader at least its peculiar fascination lies in the fact that it explains a legend.
In March, 1944, I chanced to drive up this same road, stopping for the night at Kohima, the pleasant little hill station which was so soon to be the scene of some of the hardest fighting experienced by the Fourteenth Army in the whole of their campaign. I, too, had been intrigued by the Nagas, and I pestered my host for information about them. I was told, inevitably, that they had been head-hunters to a man, that some' of them had not yet completely relinquished this traditional sport, and that somewhere in these wild hill tracts a young and beautiful white woman was living alone in a Naga village and was worshipped as a queen.
As I now know, this was Miss Graham Bower. The fact that she was for a time regarded by at least some of the Zami Nagas as a queen, or rather worshipped as the reincarnation of the Goddess Gaidiliu, is too long a story to go into here ; and in any case the whole business proved a sad embarrass- ment to all concerned. The important thing is that in 1939, with the blessing of the authorities, Ursula Graham Bower finally succeeded in establishing herself in a permanent camp at Laisong, in North Cachar, from which base she sallied out to near and distant Naga and Kuki villages, carrying out a dual mission of anthropological study and medical relief ; that she succeeded in gaining the coniidence of these shy people ; and that, when the rapanese invasion of India threatened, she was entrusted by Fourteenth Army's redoubtable " V " Force with the organisation of a\watch-and-ward service in the North Cachar district. The recital of the true facts, as Naga Path shows, is even more intriguing than the legend to
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