Preserving the vanishing: Naga Oral Tradition

Sümi

Many of the oldest oral traditions of the Sümi people of Nagaland have never been documented and are on the verge of disappearing forever. There have been a few anthropologists... ethnographers, researchers from other lands who have documented some aspects our culture at a time when we did not know the importance of nor had the facility and knowledge to do these things. We are truly grateful to those people for the documents, pictures and films they've left us. 

A person can write about another person very well if she has the facts and figures and the writing skills yet it is not possible for the writer to completely capture every emotion, every thought or action that runs through another individual's life-time.It is probably time to write and record about ourselves from our own perspective about the people we've been and become to understand ourselves better.

Since ours is an oral tradition without a writing system, all knowledge we have of our past has been verbally transmitted over the ages from one elder to the next purely through the power of memory. There are just a handful of elders left who know the significance of the old Sumi cultural practices such as songs, ceremonial chants, poetry, stories and dances and their importance for our cultural identity, origin, history and everything we are today. 

In times like now with rapid globalization and its negative aspects and the obsession with all things foreign including language, literature, philosophy, clothing, food, TV shows, films, buildings, gadgets and a thousand other invasive, non-native species of things and thoughts, an oral culture such as ours with its traditional mode of knowledge transmission hardly stands a chance. We scarcely have the time to sit and listen to stories and songs of old or value what is ours and gone, more importantly to keep alive the things and thoughts that shaped us, while competing with a fast-changing world, trying to carve a niche for ourselves in the quickly-evolving clone cities, towns and villages.

The tragedy is not just about losing track of where we came from, the rituals and customs our grandmothers and grandfathers held dear and the wonderful stories, songs, poetry, war-dances and practices of old as repositories across time of a way of life of a group of people but the real tragedy is about losing ourselves -- about becoming what we are not.

I strongly believe that it is essential to learn about other cultures, respect and recognise the uniqueness of a particular way of life but it is equally important to appreciate and value the differences that make each culture different and to truly love what is our own first, certainly not with a racist agenda but just as different flowers blooming their best adding colour and beauty to a garden. I don't know if we can truly love and respect the great qualities of others if we fail to see and care less for what is our own.

Mother Earth is beautiful and is alive because of the millions of species of plants, trees, flowers, herbs, shrubs, twiners and creepers of all kind each holding a rightful place contributing to the harmony and flow of life. Although beautiful and useful the eucalyptus tree if it were to cover the entire face of the planet annihilating all other species, the Earth would surely lose its charm and the meaning of its very existence. 

Preserving the vanishing:

The Sümi Mesho Meghi Küqhakulu and the Sümi Oral Tradition Documentation Team is currently recording folk songs and dances in some of the Sümi Naga villages:

Khükiye & Lukhai

Khükiye & Lukhai Village is 2 kms from Satakha town of Zunheboto District. A village that has grown now to about 170 houses, it was created by two warrior chiefs from the Jimomi Clan - Asüh Khükiye and Asüh Lukhai, hence their namesake. If you're travelling from Kohima to Zunheboto, you will first come across Satakha and then the district headquarters after 20 kms.  

Here are pictures of villagers performing agricultural songs - songs related to a specific 

season in the Jhum cultivation cycle:

The song is called Thigha leh (breaking up lumps of soil and roots after the forest is cleared and burned down :-( for cultivation). It is sung by women, usually during the month of March. 

Lotisa leh - a song for the weeding season when the crops have grown some inches high and it's time to uproot weeds and clean the field. This particular song was learned by K&L villagers from another village some hundreds of years ago and has a really touching story behind it but I'll talk about it in another post. :-) 

Thishe Leh - the rice pounding song. There are different variations of Thishe leh, the song sung by K&L village women during our visit talks about a woman not wanting to marry a stranger from a distant village. :O) 

Aphilakuwo - this a famous dance performed by the menfolk and it also has a long story behind it that has supernatural influences. I'll do a separate post for this too.  

Sükomi Village:

One of the oldest villages in the central Sümi area near Asukhuto Town and around 25 kms from Zunheboto, Sükomi phuh is about 900 years old according to the count of ancestors recorded by the village chiefs and elders.

In the pictures are women of Sükomi in their traditional dresses ready to sing. 

Kholakithi in the kitchen: A traditional Naga kitchen with maize drying above the fireplace. 

More clouds and no roads: Monsoon Nagaland

Beautiful land, beautiful people, beautiful festivals and terribly scarred and ugly roads don't go too well together. Only if our roads were living beings they'd sort themselves out in no time. Unfortunately they need human intervention in not only using them but also maintaining them regularly. Give to Ceasar what belongs to Ceasar...but it's time now to give to roads the public funds that belong to roads - the God of all transportation and communication in this remote rural patch of Earth.

Here's something to cheer for after all the grotesqueness of what used to be nice, smooth, death-risk-free roads a long time ago. A sight that money can't buy nor be marred by human selfishness (for now at least).

Summer in Nagaland: Roads and clouds

If you enjoy summer rain and clouds and if you are also a bit of a wild adventurer and a lover of "rough and dangerous" terrain, this is probably the best season to tour the hills and villages of Nagaland to soak your Hunting Boots (but totally against hunting) or rubber chappals in mud and experience extremely heavy downpours clobbering corrugated iron roofs with raindrops as big as juicy local plums. You can take a bus, Sumo or hire a private taxi. Shared Sumo taxi works good for me: less fuel consumption per head, good for environment/Mother Earth, co-passengers to help in case of a vehicle/mental break-down, enlightening conversations, occasional drunks with endless stories and hot mid-way local meals.

Thick fog covers the roads, hills and houses every other day this season like a white blanket with moving wispy tentacles. It is dangerous and a great strain for the eye to drive through cloud-shrouded roads  especially when the potholes-sculpted roads resemble volcanic craters and small and large landslides surprisingly greet you with big boulders, uprooted trees and eroded soil that guide you all the way to wherever your destination is within the State.

Despite the suicidal conditions of the road in many areas, i believe that humans still love an element of risk and dare in life, besides, it’s not like we’ve got great many options of commuting in this region. I won’t take a helicopter ride at this time of the year and get lost among the clouds forever. Geographically we are far away from the Bermuda Triangle. 

If anyone wishes to travel here this season and if you’d love to see hilly areas with thick jungles inhabited by ferocious-looking tribesmen and tribeswomen - there are no leaves skirts, skull-necklaces and head-hunting these days unfortunately but it will still be worth all the pain and inconvenience because there are over a hundred shades of green in all their leafy shapes and sizes, scenes of blue-green hills drowned in oceans of cottony clouds, spectacular sunsets and the peak season for lots of lots of rain, mud (chemical-pollution-less, we can mud-wrestle), bugs and bug-songs, cicada-songs 24/7, plums, water-plums, peaches, pears, chillies, beans, cucumbers, wild edible leaves with medicinal properties, all organic. Traditionally, we love to over-feed our guests despite their polite protests and most locals usually like to entertain visitors and strangers in town - invite them to lunch and dinner for free over and over unlike a few other places. :-p

Btw, don’t worry about the state of the roads, you won’t die. How have locals here survived for centuries otherwise?

Gorgeous Moths of Nagaland - but how to identify them?

Took these pictures at Zunheboto. As summer begins here, hundreds of moths and bugs of all shapes and sizes come alive, flying, crawling or just meditating on the walls and roofs and around light bulbs and sometimes they annoy a lot of people :-) but they're such a pretty sight, aren't they? I think they're interesting creatures. I can hardly differentiate between a moth and a butterfly but I guess these ones are moths because they come visiting at night :-). Perhaps some lepidopterist could help identify a few here.

A thought to ponder upon for villagers of Nagaland too

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13624077

The Sun should rise at 10PM in this corner of Nagaland: my 'on' and 'off' relationship with electricity

What exactly is the use of electricity after 10 PM in rural areas where there are no huge machineries or industries run by electricity. I can of course think of some uses – to charge your Chinese emergency lamps to light it as soon as the power goes off after a few hours, to burn a bulb in the chicken coop for the ballooning broiler chicks, charge mobile phones and perhaps a laptop or two.  Maybe it’s for the sake of hospitals. However, these reasons still do not satiate my electrifying desire to know what could be the other more useful uses of electricity for the public at midnight; maybe it’s for us to burn the ‘out-light’ at the verandah to scare off unwanted other-worldly pests... but there aren’t many were-tigers, goblins or evil spirits around these days preying on human flesh at the stroke of twelve. They’ve probably taken other human forms.

This continuous hide-and-seek game with electricity and my on-and -off relationship with all types of communication devices including mobile networks makes me wonder - why was this thing called electricity even discovered? Who was this madcap who thought such a thing would help mankind? Seriously, here in ZUNHEBOTO, no such thing exists. It’s a nuisance. When you need it, it’s never there and when you don’t, that is, in the dead of the night when the entire household is snoring dreaming of uninterrupted power supply, it just insistently lights up upswept cobwebbed corners of the house and someone has to sleep-walkingly switch off the offending brightness throwing in a few expletives. You just don’t know when the light is coming or going. It is supernatural -- amazingly out of this world. From darkness to more darkness, come storm, come rain, come wind. The only consoling fact is that after 10PM the citizens are assured that the power supply will continue till 6AM. I don’t know if it goes off in between because I’ve not yet done an all-nighter yet to monitor its visitations but once the town’s people are up and about after six in the morning, it goes off, for sure.

Only if the Sun rises at 10 PM then can it match the timings of our town’s power supply, and the Sun can set at 6 AM so that people can work at daylight with the added bonus of uninterrupted power supply, sleep when the Sun sets and not become nocturnal creatures waiting for electricity at sleep-time. The Solar System has to change its course to suit the moods of our town’s electricity supply, there aren’t better options. If there were, it couldn’t have taken 60 years.

Rural India connecting India? Absolutely not.  No uninterrupted electricity, water supply, bad roads, it took six months to fix an existing broadband connection that went faulty and when it was finally fixed  the entire network goes down, yet again.  How is that connecting India? The day’s newspapers reach at night or days late, come rainy season and the roads are blocked with landslides. What are the other modes of communication? Pigeon post? How can a rural area with conditions such as these really connect and participate with the larger crowd outside in the country and the world? It’s not only about my town but there must be many other areas facing these frustrations.

It would have been a different ball game all together if we were kept at that rumoured anthropological zoo with no contact with the outside world, only unseen prying eyes studying, dissecting our every move. At least there would be no “need” created for electricity, water supply, internet and emails and connections and much more. Unfortunately, the Zoo did not happen... or did it and it backfired? Whatever the case, I hope this current zoo with major “current” problems get resolved soon.