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Mongre - Yangpire and Lhoshyepu - Kosanasami land disputes - allowed to fight each other; Kiyakhu - Ghukhwi land case settled; Kiyakhu - Zhekiya land dispute not investigated |
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26th. The night of the 25th was made hideous by hordes of litigants, and by quarrelsome trans-frontier Semas declaring war, or wanting to. The villages of Mongre and Yangpire (Yatsumi) have a land dispute and wish to fight, or pretend they do. I said they might fight until it inconvenienced me, and that I should interfere when I pleased, and that meanwhile no other village was to join in. If they have the field to themselves little damage will be done. I applied the same principles to a land dispute between Lhoshyepu and Kosanasami, allowing the parent village of Kukishe to join the latter (as I cannot possibly prevent it) and an offshoot of Lhoshyepu's to join it to make two a side ; I doubt its coming to much, but if it does it will probably have to be stopped pretty soon, as it would be too near to the boundary not to be a nuisance. Meanwhile, however, I do not propose to settle their land disputes for them. The ones inside our present boundary are bad enough as it is. |
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Mr. Pawsey, with the escort, left me for Sakhalu on his way back to Mokokchung. I went up to Kiyakhu, and dealt with the Kiyakhu-Ghukhwi land case and then over the hill by Zhekiya down to Satakha, about 10 miles. This case probably settles the matter as far as Kiyakhu and Ghukhwi are concerned, (their dispute dates from at least 1897), but a pretty quarrel is brewing between Zhekiya and Kiyakhu, which I refused to go into, as one such case is enough for one day and I should have had to go out of my way at least to Shevekhe to see all the land concerned. Zhekiya split off from Kiyakhu some time in the nineties. The Kiyakhu chief gave Zhekiya all the land on the Zhekiya side of the Yaputhoyi saddle (there is an erect stone at the spot) the boundary going down the Kutho-Agulo nulla to the Kuthu river on the south, and somewhere along the Chethu stream (which I did not see) to the north to the existing boundary between Zhekiya on the one hand and Shevhekhe and Yemeshe on the other. Probably a future settlement must be more or less on these lines, but as Zhekiya refused to give the customary leg of a sambhar he had killed to the Kiyakhu chief the latter revoked his settlement, and since then the two villages have jhumed theoretically in common, though most of the land now seems to be privately owned. Personally, I see no particular need for a partition, but Zhekiya is loud in its claims and it must be admitted that if it is not done in this generation, it will become appallingly complicated by the next, when there will be so many more claimants. |
