Vaseem Khan’s latest murder mystery is set in Nagaland, in the north-eastern region of India. He writes about the history of the area once known as the Naga Hills and the tribes who lived there – people who were, until fairly recently, headhunters.
In the far north-eastern corner of India is the state of Nagaland, the site of an insurgency that has been active since India threw off the British yoke in 1947.
Following independence, the local Naga population split into those who favoured continuing as part of the new India – with all that entailed – and those who wanted to go their own way. Various names were proposed for this new territory: Greater Nagaland. Nagalim. An independent nation for the Naga people.
The region provides the backdrop for The Edge of Darkness, the sixth novel in my Malabar House historical mystery series, featuring India’s first female police detective and an English forensic scientist from Scotland Yard posted to India.
Before the end of British rule on the subcontinent, the area was known as the Naga Hills, a district within the Assam province of British India, and home to over a dozen native tribes, notorious for their enthusiastic battle habit of headhunting, a practice that, allegedly, continued into the middle of the 20th century.
The Edge of Darkness sees Inspector Persis Wadia banished to a tiny police station in the town of Kohima in the Naga Hills. Whilst temporarily billeted at the Hotel Victoria, an old colonial-era hotel, she is called to a locked suite on the hotel’s top floor. Inside, she discovers the headless corpse of the region’s political governor.
The novel is essentially a locked room and closed circle mystery, set against the backdrop of the burgeoning Naga insurgency. Persis is tasked with solving the murder, knowing that failure on her part could lead to a heavy-handed response from the central government, intent on blaming local insurgents for the killing.
But there are other suspects in play; namely Persis’s fellow residents at the hotel, a mix of colourful characters including an American mining company boss, an Italian journalist, and a pair of Baptist preachers.
India’s northeastern tribes have long been a law unto themselves, out in the misty hinterlands beyond the so-called ‘chicken’s neck’, that narrow pass that connects mainland India to the semi-tropical tea-growing regions of the northeast.
Persis, like many Indians of the time, knows nothing of the Naga Hills save the little she has gleaned from Pathé News snippets, and a book her father presses into her hands on the day she departs: The Naked Nagas by Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf.
The book’s subtitle is telling: Head Hunters of Assam in Peace and War. Von Fürer-Haimendorf, an Austrian ethnologist who spent decades studying the tribes of northeast India, was the first to document the individual characteristics of the various tribes, their divisions and their culture.
When the British arrived en masse, soldiering their way into the jungle, they were unsure what to make of the Nagas and their wild Shangri La. In time, they built railway lines into the interior, spearing into uncharted forests, inevitably fetching up against the brute reality of engineering in the tropics.
Many a British engineer was sent packing by a combination of heat, malaria, and the unwillingness of the natives to play ball with their own subjugation.
Or perhaps it was stories of the Naga penchant for collecting heads and using them to decorate their distinctive huts that sent watery-bowelled Englishmen running back to Blighty?
Headhunting and the Naga tribes enjoy a long and complicated history. Naga youth earned their spurs by the heads they brought back from the battlefield. The practice was only officially banned in 1969, with the last cases reported in the early 1960s. The gradual lapsing of the custom can be credited to the proliferation of Christianity, brought to the region by British missionaries and then, even more fervently, by American Baptists.
Conversion was no easy task and early Naga Christians found it difficult to completely abandon their animist leanings, syncretising a unique blend of Protestantism and their ancient pagan faith.
During WW2, the region briefly flickered across the consciousness of the Allied High Command. The Battle of Kohima remains one of the bloodiest of WWII, known today as the ‘Stalingrad of the East’.
The conflict centred on a Japanese attempt to advance into India through Burma, hacking their way through the dense jungle that blankets the subcontinent’s eastern reaches.
In April, 1944, the Japanese 15th Army worked its way up from Imphal to the Kohima Ridge – in the Naga Hills – where it was met by troops from the British IV Corps. The resulting battle, 64 days of mayhem, left 10,000 dead and the region devastated.
The fighting was particularly fierce around the bungalow of the Naga Hills district’s deputy commissioner, which stood on the hillside at a bend in the road, housing, among other things, a private tennis facility.
The Battle of the Tennis Court, an encounter that would later invite comparisons to the massacre at Verdun, saw the combatants dug into slit trenches so close they were able to lob grenades at one another.
Ultimately, the Japanese were beaten back due to a tactical miscalculation. They ran out of food. Many later died of starvation as they withdrew back into the jungle.
Three years later, the Naga National Council declared ‘independence’ on 14th August 1947, one day before India officially became independent from Britain.
In 1963, the Naga Hills region became an Indian state called Nagaland. An insurgency in the region in support of Nagaland’s independence has been ongoing till today, with many deaths on both sides, and regular accusations of murder and torture.
The fact that America’s CIA has been involved in supporting this insurgency has been recorded in official assessments of the region by several sources.
In The Edge of Darkness I hope to capture the wild beauty and political turmoil of the jungle home of the Nagas. With a dead body or two thrown in for good measure.
The Edge of Darkness by Vaseem Khan is published on 22 January, 2026. It’s the sixth in his Malabar House series.
Read more about this book.
Vaseem is a former chair of the UK Crime Writers’ Association and the author of several award-winning crime series including the Baby Ganesh Agency novels, set in modern Mumbai, and the Malabar House historical crime series, set in 1950s Bombay. He’s also written Quantum of Menace, the first in a series featuring Q from the world of James Bond.
You may enjoy reading Vaseem’s other Historia features:
Calcutta Blues: why Kipling despised the city
Partition, politics, and a prime minister’s passion
Other features on the history of India include:
1920s Bangalore, a city of diversities and
Magic versus jadoo in 1920s British Colonial India, both by Harini Nagendra
It’s time to remember Ganga Singh: maharaja, reformer, statesman by Alec Marsh
Unforgettable legacies of the East India Company by Vayu Naidu
Re-examining the history of Empire in fact and fiction by Tom Williams
Finding empathy – the complexities of writing Robert Clive by Diana Preston
Images:
- The entrance to the Naga hills, Nagaland: Girish Mohan PK for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
- A young man of the Konyak Naga tribe, India, holding a human head: Wellcome Collection (public domain)
- People celebrating the annual Hornbill festival with traditional dance, Nagaland: Kaushik Mishra for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
- Headhunter from the Konyak tribe of Nagaland: Avantikac98 for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
- View of the Burmese landscape from the Dimapur-Kohima road near Imphal, 1942: IWM (COL 214) (IWM Non Commercial Licence)
- The mined tennis court and terraces of the District Commissioner’s bungalow in Kohima, July, 1944: IWM (IND 3483) (IWM Non Commercial Licence)
