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Inevitably, the press got to hear of her and stories began to appear in the papers of the ‘White Queen of the Nagas’. Despite her protestations, Bower found herself mythologised as a female Lawrence of Arabia, a beautiful English rose who had led savage, head-hunting Naga war-parties on daring raids against the Japanese.
Fortunately, she kept a diary in which she set down the day’s events in the same no-nonsense style in which she went about her business. It is this diary which forms the core of Vicky Thomas’s biography, the somewhat inappropriately titled The Naga Queen. Bower herself set the right tone when she wrote her own down-to-earth account of her war in her book Naga Path, now long out of print.
It is a most unusual story and one that deserves to be retold. Thomas sets the scene well with her account of the Bower family and the very ordinary middle-class milieu from which this remarkable woman emerged. She goes on to provide a readable account of the war years and the inevitable anti-climax that followed. Yet it has to be said that her subject might have been better served had her biographer stuck to Bower’s diary.
The complexities of the political system that operated on the Assam-Burma border areas before and during the second world war are not easy to grasp today. Even so, it is hard to understand why Thomas chose to locate the Subansiri Frontier Division of the North East Frontier Agency, where Bower’s husband was posted in 1946, in Tibet, or why she should have described Tibet as the scene of their
honeymoon.
Rather more seriously, she fails to make clear that the region in which Bower and her Naga scouts operated was not Nagaland but north Cachar, and that this area was never occupied by the Japanese. As Bower herself states at the most critical point of her war, ‘We were left with a handful of troops . . . and had to do the best we could for about a week . . . but the Japs failed to arrive’. This was after she had been ordered to pull back but had chosen, Nelson-like, to disregard the order and request that some weapons be sent instead.
Gallant as they were, Bower’sscouting force played no more than a peripheral role within V Force, which really only came into its own after the Japanese had been turned back at Kohima and Imphal — and after her scouts had been disbanded.
Nevertheless, this is a remarkable story about a thoroughly remarkable woman.
Because you read about book review
Also by Charles Allen
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