Research Scholar, Banaras Hindu University, India.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21659/jsae/v3n1/v3n122
[Article History: Received: 15 April 2026. Accepted: 18 August 2026. Published: 02 October 2026]
Abstract
The Battle of Kohima (1944) has been called Britain’s Greatest Battle. Yet the people on whose land, and through whose labour, it was fought remain largely unaccounted for in its telling. This paper reads Kohima as a space of urban mediation: a city whose landscape, identities, and social fabric were constituted through the spatial violence of colonialism, war, and forced urbanisation. Drawing on Mmhonlumo Kikon’s His Majesty’s Headhunters (2023) and an interdisciplinary framework, the paper examines how the British and Japanese forces assigned exchange value to Naga land, labour, and loyalty as instruments of territorial control. It traces a transformation that no military history has adequately named: how the Nagas, the traditional headhunters who became dobashi, porters, nurses, and scavengers, were remade by a conflict that seized their land and transformed their city. Kohima was not caught in the war; the war was built through Kohima.
Keywords: : Kohima, urban mediation, Naga identity, Second World War, postcolonialism.
