Sir James Johnstone’s My Experiences in Manipur and the Naga Hills (1896) is often read as a frontier memoir; a record of administrative life in a remote corner of British India. Yet such a reading remains superficial. Beneath its descriptive surface, the text operates as a deeply ideological document, one that reveals how colonial authority understood itself, justified its dominance, and transformed power into moral necessity. Johnstone’s narrative does not merely describe empire; it enacts the colonial mindset, converting personal experience into epistemic entitlement, domination into benevolence, and historical violence into moral order. Read critically, the book stands as an exemplary text of colonial consciousness.
Johnstone announces his ideological position with remarkable clarity in the Preface. He declares himself “one of those old-fashioned Anglo-Indians who still believe in personal government, a system by which we gained India, solidified our rule, and made ourselves fairly acceptable to the people whom we govern” (My Experiences in Manipur and the Naga Hills (1896). This sentence is foundational. Empire here is not a political problem but an accomplished moral fact. The verbs ‘gained’, ‘solidified’, ‘made acceptable’, assume the legitimacy of conquest, presenting domination as historical achievement rather than ethical question. What requires explanation is not why Britain rules, but how best it should rule. The right to govern is never in doubt.
Central to Johnstone’s colonial mindset is the belief that experience produces truth. His prolonged residence among the Nagas and Manipuris is repeatedly invoked as a warrant for authority. The book claims significance because it describes “a state of things that has passed away for ever” (My Experiences in Manipur and the Naga Hills (1896). This formulation is revealing. Indigenous societies are transformed into finite objects, intelligible only through the colonial observer who records them before their disappearance. The colonial administrator thus becomes both witness and archivist of native life, arrogating to himself the power to define not only governance but historical meaning. Indigenous societies do not speak in the present tense; they survive only as remembered conditions.
Such experiential authority is inseparable from epistemic hierarchy. Johnstone consistently assumes that British judgment constitutes “common sense,” while indigenous perspectives appear as habit, superstition, or resistance to progress. “The great principle on which to act,” he writes, “is to do what is right, and what commends itself to common sense, and to try and carry the people with you” (My Experiences in Manipur and the Naga Hills (1896). The phrase is deceptively liberal. “Common sense” is not negotiated; it is imposed. Indigenous populations may be “carried,” but never consulted. Political disagreement is reclassified as backwardness, and coercion is re-signified as guidance.
This paternalism is not incidental; it is structural. Throughout the text, indigenous societies are framed as morally and politically incomplete. Even when Johnstone appears to recognize the adequacy of native institutions, the recognition is immediately neutralized. “Wherever you go,” he concedes, “if there is a semblance of native rule left, you find a system admirably adapted to the needs of the population, though very often grown over with abuses” (My Experiences in Manipur and the Naga Hills (1896). The compliment is hollow. Adaptation is acknowledged only to justify intervention. Indigenous governance can never stand on its own terms; it is perpetually provisional, awaiting colonial correction. In this way, colonialism presents itself not as erasure of sovereignty, but as its rational purification.
Johnstone’s defence of “personal rule” further reveals how colonial domination is moralised through individual character. Bureaucratic governance, parliamentary oversight, and administrative “machines” are denounced as alien impositions unsuited to “Oriental races.” What replaces them is the figure of the strong, decisive officer whose authority derives from firmness rather than procedure. “The strongest officer is generally the most popular,” Johnstone asserts, “and is remembered by the people long after he is dead and gone” (My Experiences in Manipur and the Naga Hills (1896). Power here becomes self-justifying. Obedience is retrospectively interpreted as affection, and fear is translated into loyalty. Colonial violence disappears into the narrative of masculine virtue.
Equally revealing is Johnstone’s treatment of time. Indigenous societies are repeatedly positioned as living survivals of an earlier world, placed outside historical coevalness with modern Europe. Manipur and the Naga Hills appear not as contemporaneous political entities but as remnants of a fading past. When Johnstone laments that the Manipur he “knew and loved” has been overwhelmed by administrative change, he observes that if it rises again, “it will not be the Manipur that I knew and loved” (My Experiences in Manipur and the Naga Hills (1896). This lament is not political but aesthetic. Destruction is regrettable, even tragic, yet necessary. Colonialism thus mourns what it destroys while denying responsibility for the loss. History happens to indigenous societies, never with them.
Perhaps the most powerful evidence of the colonial mindset lies in what the book does not allow: indigenous voice. The Nagas and Manipuris appear throughout the narrative, but never as subjects of political thought. Their consent is assumed, their resistance pathologized, and their silence interpreted as acceptance. Colonial authority speaks for them, about them, and over them. When Johnstone criticizes metropolitan “theorists” in Britain for interfering in Indian administration, his anxiety is revealing. What he resents is not ignorance but accountability. Empire, in his view, functions best when insulated from critique; when authority remains local, discretionary, and unchecked from above.
Read in this way, My Experiences in Manipur and the Naga Hills becomes a crucial text not for understanding Manipur, but for understanding empire. It exposes how colonial rule naturalized itself through experience, how domination disguised itself as responsibility, and how moral certainty replaced political legitimacy. Johnstone does not defend empire because, for him, empire requires no defence. It exists as common sense, as duty, as history fulfilled.
The enduring significance of the book lies precisely here. Johnstone’s words, read critically, serve not as testimony to administrative wisdom but as evidence of the epistemic and moral architecture of colonialism. The text reveals how empire sustained itself not only through force or law, but through certainty; the certainty that governing others was both necessary and right. It is this certainty, more than any battlefield victory, that constituted the deepest violence of colonial rule.
The writer is Assistant Professor, Imphal College
