ANTHROPOLOGY AND SUPERSTITION
The Rengma Nagas. By J. P. Mills. (Macmillan. 25s.) IF you look at the map of the world, Assam is a little triangular strip of country stretching from the north east of Bengal and the north west of Burma to the high walls of the Himalayas, which divide it from Tibet and lower China. Covered with insidious vegetation whose claws spread in a tangle of over- growth and undergrowth more thickly than in almost any other part of the Himalayan terai, it has been peopled " for generations " by a microscopic bacterial life, and all the species of insects, from the fly spider, the grasshopper to the cockroach, by an incalculable variety of reptile and bird and wild animal, and by a few primitive tribes. Several branches of the princely houses which ruled in the Gangetic delta held sway over it, till the last of them, the Ahom kings, yielded to the agents of the Honourable East India Company. But through the uncanny stubbornness of the economy of early man, layers of some of the oldest and most primitive tribes in Asia have subsisted side by side with the city civilisation developed by the Hindus.
The impact of the modern commercial European civilisation brought in by the English, which changed the whole structure of the elaborate, though antiquated feudal system of India, was bound, sooner or later, to have repercussions also on the lives of such survivals from history as had lagged behind by at least two thousand years and yet persisted in the dark corners of the peninsula. This essentially economic fact was early recognised by the scientist. And, when in the wake of Darwin's Origin of Species, the science of anthro- pology came to be, men like Tylor, Frazer and Malinowski hurried to draw special attention to the necessity of research among the Toda, Bhil and Naga tribes of India, before the inroads of modern influence affected the customs and con- ventions of these primitives.
The highly competent monograph by Mr. J. P. Mills on a branch of the Naga tribes in Assam, one of a series of ethno- logical surveys published at the expense of the Government of Assam, was, for instance, necessitated by the author's fear that the influence of Christian missions is spreading and
customs and conventions of great interest would soon have gone for ever.
I have said " necessitated by the author's fear," but I might almost have said " by the author's regret," for Mr. Mills, unlike some of his predecessors in the field of anthropology but like most of them, sighs at the passing of things, deplores the changes being rapidly wrought by the American Baptist mission, and mourns that no attempt was made to counter the new teaching. Is this, one asks, the kind of passion which a scientist has for a " beautiful operation " that makes him want to keep the corpse on which he has performed for ever in a glass case, or is it the nostaglia of the sophisticated modern, turning, like D. H. Lawrence, to the code of the living Huitzilopochtli and the blood cults of Quetzalcatl ?
From Mr. Mills' tragic plaint—" New culture must inevit- ably impinge on them, and that it should destroy them is painful to those who love them "—it would seem that anthro- pologists are by no means free from superstitions, similar to or different from those of the primitive peoples, super- stitions which destroy the belief in their objectivity, their detachment and scientific accuracy that we have so long cherished. And when, for instance, in describing the character of the Rengma Nagas, Mr. Mills illustrates their bravery by saying that " their staunchness was proved in France, where men who had volunteered to face the utterly unknown served in the Labour Corps," we become very suspicious indeed about the kind of bias that must have entered his survey—especially as his assumption about the warlike nature of the Nagas is nowhere qualified by any reference to its origins. For, recently, from the defenceless, weaponless, kingless character of original settlements in India, Mr. Gerald Heard has very ably argued in his Source of Civilisation that primitive civilisation was peaceable and not warlike.
MULK RAJ ANAND.
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