FORKED POST (TSONGZÜ) AT YEKHUM, PUT UP INSTEAD OF A “GENNA” STONE 144 THE TWO PUTHIS OF AKUK COLLECTING RICE FOR THE TUKU CEREMONY 144 ENO 160 NRITANGPENG OF A MAN WHO HAS KILLED AN ELEPHANT 160 A MEDICINE MAN (RATSEN) IN A FIT 164 A DANCER AT THE REBUILDING OF A MORUNG 164 MAPS SKETCH MAP TO SHOW TRIBES AND PLACES MENTIONED IN THE INTRODUCTION xl MAP SHOWING LHOTAS AND NEIGHBOURING TRIBES at end MAP OF THE LHOTA COUNTRY INTRODUCTION When I made over charge of the Mokokchung Subdivision of the Naga Hills to Mr. Mills in November 1917, I urged him to study in particular the Lhota tribe with a view to writing a monograph on them. The reason why I selected the Lhotas was that it appeared to me that they, more than any other tribe in the Naga Hills District, were beginning to lose their distinctive features and were in danger of early denationalization between the upper and the nether mill-stones of Christianity, as taught by the American Baptist Mission, and Hinduism, as practised by the Nepali settler or by the Assamese who are the neighbours of the Lhota on the plains side. It was already a very rare thing to see a Lhota in ceremonial dress, and it was a, to me, unpleasantly common thing to have Lhota ceremonies and the officials of the Lhota hierarchy spoken of in spurious terms of Hinduism. The Baptist Mission, with its headquarters at “Impur” in the Ao country, was at work in the north, and one of the first disputes I had to deal with when I went to Mokokchung in 1913 was a complaint from the village of Pangti that a missionary had been initiating his converts by immersing them in the village spring, to which the village elders objected both on sanitary and religious (or, if you will, superstitious) grounds on the lines of Tennyson’s Churchwarden when he complained of the Baptists— “They wesh’d their sins i’ my pond, an’ I doubts they poison’d the cow.” The Hindu tendency was most noticeable in the south, and it was at Kohima that one of my Lhota interpreters, by his office the natural guardian and exponent of tribal customs, came to me to ask for leave, as his village was about to perform the “Lakshmi puja,” by which he meant the Rangsikam.