Nagaland village focus: Khuzama

As I prepare to leave India again (this time to spend Christmas at home with the family for the first time in years), I thought I'd share some photos from a visit to another friend's village in Nagaland. Like Khonoma village that we also visited, Khuzama is an Angami village. You can tell it's an Angami by the suffix -ma (corresponding to Sumi village names that end in -mi). However, most Angami speakers seem to replace the -ma with -ra / -rie when they refer to the villages in speech.

While Khonoma is a Western Angami village, Khuzama is one of the Southern Angami villages situated on the highway between Kohima and Imphal in Manipur. It's also the last Angami village before you reach the state border with Manipur and the start of Mao territory. The Maos (not to be confused with Maoists) are another related tribe. Linguistically, Southern Angami dialects are so different from Tenyidie (standard Angami based on Northen Angami) that they might constitute a different language altogether. My friend from Khuzama says he finds it easier to understand Chokri (one of the main languages of the group previously classified as 'Eastern Angami' but now known as Chakhesang).

The current Khuzama village gate

The weekend my friend from Australia was around, our Angami friends who usually live in Kohima had a church function to attend in Khuzama. I thought it'd be nice to go for a walk around the terraces and they were happy for us to take us to the village. They got one of the boys in the village to take us around, and also to explain to people why a couple of strangers were walking around their village.

Our 'guide' for the afternoon brought us to our friend's plot of land. Unlike with jhum cultivation, which involves shifting to a new field site every 2 years and the re-allocation of new plots to people to cultivate (typically by the village chief), terraces are 'owned' by the same people every year. They are also passed down from generation to generation, but only to sons I believe.

From the village, we could also see the neighbouring village of Viswema. I'm told it's the largest of the Southern Angami villages. If you've been on the highway from Kohima to Imphal, you would have probably noticed that most of the roofs on the houses have been painted red, making it almost look like some Italian village on a hilltop.

We walked down all the way to the little river / stream. It would've been nice to have a picnic on the rocks in the middle of the stream, but we hadn't organised ourselves that well.

We had a really pleasant afternoon walking around the terraced fields down to the stream. It didn't take us long to get down, but the climb back up was quite strenuous, and we weren't carrying baskets of grain or anything back up to the village with us! We were told that when there's a lot of work to be done in the fields, some villagers do sleep in the field huts that you can see dotting the hillside.


I should add that the Angamis and Chakhesangs (formerly 'Eastern Angamis', as mentioned above) are cited as the only two tribes in Nagaland to have started practising terracing before the arrival of the British. (They do still practise some jhum cultivation to grow other crops.) I've been asking around about the origins of terracing in these tribes, as it strikes me as imported technology, but no one I've asked has been able to give a satisfactory reply. I would be quite interested to find out more about local stories / folktales surrounding its origins in these communities.

Alright, this will probably be my last post in India for a while. I still have a backlog of material to upload, and I'll try to do that when I'm back in Singapore or Australia. In the meantime, Happy Holidays everyone!

Khonoma village (Take two)

Two years ago I visited Khonoma village, which is about 2 hours from Kohima (depending on road conditions). Unfortunately, the day I visited was terribly foggy and it was hard to see anything (see here). This time, I visited again shortly after the Hornbill Festival. Thankfully the weather was much better, since I also came with a friend from Australia who may not have another chance to come back.

Now, there are some friends who don't feel that Khonoma needs any special mention or recommendation. Even among my Angami friends, people from Khonoma are often perceived as being particularly proud, arrogant even. The village itself is famed for its defiance of the British which culminated in the Battle of Khonoma in 1879 that resulted in the deaths of a number of British soldiers.

The villagers even manufactured their own guns, based on models acquired in the plains of Assam. This particular gun required two people to hold it up, while a third person loaded it.

Another reason for the perceived 'smugness' might be because the village has also produced a number of intellectuals. I'm told the reason for this is that during the British siege, the villagers smuggled out a number of kids to Dimapur where they eventually received their education (and hence the overall better standard of education in the village compared to others in Nagaland). I'm not quite sure how true this is, but in the absence of other explanations, I'm willing to accept it. The village also produced a number of founding members of the Naga independence movement, including Phizo himself.

In any case, Khonoma is a pleasant place to visit if you're in Kohima for the Hornbill Fesitval (although the Southern Angami villages past the Kisama Heritage Village are also quite picturesque - but that's for another post). It prides itself on being a 'green village', and there are rubbish bins all over the village which to my eye are actually used. To my surprise, I learnt that the village still has a functioning morung, a kind of dormitory where young men were sent to learn about traditional ways and to form bonds with members of their peer group. (It was even more of a surprise for me because Hutton in his book The Angami Nagas mentions that the morung wasn't very significant to the Angamis). Some villages also had a female equivalent, although I was told there was none in Khonoma at the present time.

The streets are generally well maintained, with competitions between the various peer groups, known as peli in Tenyidie (the standard Angami dialect used in church and schools). Here, one can see the work of one peli working on a section of road, so that they don't get outdone by other peli who are in charge of other sections of the same road.

My Angami friends in Kohima organised the visit for us. We had a local guide named Michael, who used to be the president of the students' union here (I believe), and who was very knowledgeable about the village's history.

I don't normally do such recommendations, but I was quite impressed by his role in organising the members of the village to maintain its cleanliness and preserve the local wildlife. I would say that many villages in Nagaland could benefit from learning from Khonoma's system of organisation, but I don't want to inflate the villagers' egos any further!

If you are interested in visiting Khonoma village, you can contact Mr Michael Saphi (Khonoma Tours & Treks) at +91 98 5655 9394.

Hornbill Festival 2012

So the Hornbill Festival at Kisama has come and gone. This year I brought a friend from Australia along to enjoy the festivities. After my experiences at the festival last year and the year before, I didn't really want to spend all week in Kisama, since many of the shows start to feel repetitive after a few days. I thought it'd be best if we arrive on the 4th day for the last few days, then stay back a few more days to enjoy some of the sights around Kohima when most of the other tourists would have moved on. I think it was a good decision (as I sit here typing this in our now empty guest house).

My friend quite enjoyed the whole event, which his colleague in Melbourne had described last year as 'better than National Geographic', which makes me laugh a little. Sadly, in this post I won't be waxing lyrical about the festival, but would like to point out a few things that made me quite unhappy and in the process, perhaps raise a few questions about the future of the festival.

Looking at the photo below, you might notice the big black stage that was set up right next to the performance area, taking up a large chunk of what was previously audience space. This stage was used for the opening and closing ceremonies of the festival, on the 1st and 7th of December respectively. In between those two days, it seems that the stage was not used at all.

As far as I could see, additional seating had not been provided (apart from some reserved seats for soldiers and their families), even though a third of the previous years' seating was now taken up by a stage that was largely non-functional for the majority of the festival. And when it was used, the sight lines were so bad because of the large speakers, that many people sitting in the audience area (myself included) weren't able to see the actual performance onstage and had to resort to watching a small screen at the back of the stage. It seems the only people with a proper view of the stage were the people in the VIP area.

This non-consideration of general audience members was apparent during all the cultural performances too. While some performances were geared to the audience, most of them, especially the song items were not oriented to the general seating area, but to the VIP booth.

The Zeliang cultural troupe performing a song for the VIPs

If I now asked: "Who is the festival really for?", the answer would be rather straightforward. Not Nagas from all over the state. Not tourists, domestic and foreign. It's the small group of people that the organisers have deemed 'very important'.

I'm sorry, but people didn't come all this way to see performers' behinds while they perform. (Okay, maybe some people did, but only to take photos of them in costume.)

I was particularly disappointed at the closing ceremony - it didn't help that I could barely see the stage. At one point, the performers from the various cultural troupes had to get up and form the usual lines to welcome the Chief Guest who, as custom dictates, arrived late. In the middle of their chanting and singing, the 'pre-entertainment' started on the opposite side of the performance area, where singers on the big black stage started their renditions of ABBA and Bruce Springstein, while Bebop dancers popped and locked to Michael Jackson and the Black-eyed Peas. Given the much louder competition from the stage, many of the cultural troupes eventually stopped their own singing to watch the concert, as it was unclear when Neiphiu Rio was actually going to turn up.

What could have been 'cultural fusion' had turned into 'cultural confusion', with modern pop music drowning out the traditional (or rather, the acceptable version of 'traditional').

Once the Chief Guest arrived, the audience was treated to a concert, but it eventually took two hours for the large bonfire to be lit. During the concert, audience members were encouraged to come and dance, and many did, even though my friends and I thought it would have been much better to finish the formalities, like lighting the fire before asking people to jump in and let loose. I felt quite sorry for many of the cultural troupes, especially villagers from the eastern parts of Nagaland who looked cold as they shivered through the concert. A large bonfire while the concert was going on would have much more comfortable.


The question here I posed was: "Who is the concert for?" Maybe it was to expose the villagers, especially from the eastern regions to modern culture? It didn't look like many of them enjoyed it though. Maybe it was for the tourists, to show people them that 'Nagas are modern'. But after 2 hours of listening to Adele, Celine Dion, Psy and ABBA, my friends and I were saying, "Yes, we get it: Nagas are modern. Just light the damn fire already!"

Perhaps it was most obvious, when in the middle of the show, there was a request made to the Chief Minister to let the youth 'party a little bit more'. What could have been interpreted previously as an act of education, I now simply viewed as an act of self-indulgence, at the expense of all other audience members. Of course, even before the fire was lit, many younger audience members had already left, presumably to the Hornbill Rock Festival at the IG Stadium on the other side of Kohima.

In a number of ways, I think this year's festival truly reflected Nagaland in its current state. You could see the over-privileging of a small elite, the over-indulgence of youth consumerist culture, and the general struggle for a sense of cultural identity in today's world.

I don't think there's an easy way to address any of these issues. However, before I encourage other friends to come attend this festival (which itself was a creation of the government), I think the organisers need to sit down and reflect on who the festival is really for: Nagas (and which ones in particular), tourists (domestic or foreign) or just the VIPs?

Visit to Umananda Mandir, Guwahati

As I'll be heading back to Nagaland in a few days' time for the Hornbill Festival, I thought I'd finish posting about some of the sightseeing I've been doing in Guwahati the past two weeks. Last week, my friend A. S. dropped into Guwahati for a few days and we ended up doing a bit of sightseeing, visiting places that I hadn't been to, even though I've been in Guwahati since August, and this is the 2nd extended stay here.

One place we visited was the Umananda Mandir on Peacock Island, situated in the middle of the Brahmaputra, just north of the city. I'd seen the island many times from my walks along the Brahmaputra, but had never actually visited the island.

Getting there isn't too difficult. There are ferries (shared or for individual hire) at Sukreswar Ghat (or rather, the makeshift ghat next to the Sukreswar Ghat park between Fancy Bazar and Pan Bazar). We paid Rs 550 to hire a whole boat to take us to the island and back at our own leisure, but some guys that came back as we were heading off paid Rs 500. I think there was also a shared ferry that left at regular intervals, though I can't remember the price for that.

There is another ferry service that lives from Uzan Bazar Ghat, but I don't know the price either. [Note: this photo was taken near the end of the monsoon, when the water level was still very high. At this time of year, the boat on the left sits on a sand bank.]

The boat ride was pleasant enough, and took us past the real Sukreswar Ghat.

The highlight though, was seeing the sun set over the river. We left around 3.45pm, and given how far east we are within this time zone, the sun sets by about 4.30pm at this time of year here.

The temple complex itself was charming enough. It was originally a Shiva temple built by an Ahom king. (The Ahoms actually came from further east, speaking a language that is closer to Thai than to Assamese.) However, most of the original temple was damaged in the quake of 1897 and the temple was subsequently rebuilt. The current Wikipedia article says it was a 'rich local merchant', and judging by the use of tiles, I would hazard a guess that it was a Marwari merchant whose family hailed from Rajasthan.

And this is the temple itself.

Apart from the temple, the island is known to be home to a small troupe of golden langurs (a kind of monkey). We didn't have enough time to look for them as we walked around the island, but we did manage to see them in the trees on the boat ride back to Guwahati.

Next time I go, I'd probably give myself another half an hour or so and leave Sukreswar Ghat around 3pm (or roughly 1.5 hours before sunset), as I would've liked to have more time to look for langurs.

Still, it was a wonderful afternoon out on the Brahmaputra, and we got to see one of those amazing sunsets over the river that I've come to love.

Xtrm txt msging

Whenever I'm in India, I'm often struck by the 'extreme brevity' of some of the text messaging language or textese here. It may certainly be as extreme back in Australia among certain age groups, but I don't communicate via phone with any of these groups.

Here are just a few examples of messages I've received over the past few months. See if you can decipher what they mean.

1) M sori 2 say bt gues i wont b able 2 mak it on tuesday bcoz of d shftn... Will it b k if we mit on friday noon??

2) U cn kum 2 r plc bt d thng s we rnt stl proprly stld so it may b an inconvinc 4 u! If not u r most wlkum :-)

3) Its fyn... Do tk kr of ur health! So wn shl we mit? Ran ut of sms blnc!


[My apologies if I cause any embarrassment here. However, my point is not to embarrass, but to simply show examples of textese.]

You can see typical features of textese such as vowel deletion and the Rebus principle, whereby a letter or number that sounds like the word is used instead of the whole word. However, the reason I find this sort of texting 'extreme' is that most of the abbreviated forms are not in my textese vocabulary (which does include forms like 'cos', 'u', 'r'). In fact I wouldn't consider some of these to be conventionalised short forms of words.

I do acknowledge that there is a good economic reason underpinning this extreme brevity: fitting in as much information into a text message so you don't have to spend so much on phone credit. Consequently, more of the onus is transferred to the receiver to decipher the message, and not on the person texting to make the message more reader-friendly.

In the end, I did manageto understand the messages, but it took a lot more cognitive work on my part.

At this point, I can almost hear the usual complaints and laments about how things like text messaging and Twitter are causing the English language is going to the dogs. To this, I usually say, "Well, I can see that prescribed English spelling is suffering, but doesn't mean that the language itself is in a state of degeneration. Languages are constantly evolving and people often mistake change for degradation." There is however, some research out there about how texting can cause reading ability (and even grammar) to suffer.

TXT BAD 4 UR BRAIN? Text messaging can dent your reading abilities, say scientists. (Daily Mail, 17/02/2012)
Texting May Lead to Bad Grammar. (LiveScience, 26/07/2012)

I'm not about to critique these studies, as the findings seem to be all quite preliminary and there are other studies that suggest texting might help children's language development. Personally, I'm used to a certain amount of textese and I'm happy if the message is easy to understand. For me, communication is about a shared code, and if both parties are using the same code, then that's fine.

I do gripe occasionally when my students email me as if they're texting a friend, although I suppose that's to be expected as more people send emails from their phones. However, I think I gripe more about people who think that since I'm a linguist, I must be concerned about spelling, and worse, people who think 'good grammar' and 'good spelling' are the same thing!

Dog-tailed Tigers in Assamese

I saw this comic on xkcd last week (link):

(Or a cabbage, for that matter. The goat makes sense. Goats are fine.)

Too true.

Anyway, I showed this to an Assamese friend of mine, who told me that the Assamese version contained a tiger, not a wolf. But then again, he added, a 'wolf' in Assamese is literally a 'dog-tailed tiger' (with a little sound change involved).

So here we have the word for 'wolf' in Assamese: কুকুৰনেচীয়া বাঘ kukurnesiyaa bagh - it also could be transliterated as kukurnechiyaa, but the transliterated 'ch' is pronounced like [s] in Assamese.



We can clearly see the words কুকুৰ kukur 'dog' and বঘ bagh 'tiger'. We can also kinda see the word for 'tail', which in Assamese is নেজ nez - it could also be transliterated as nej, but in Assamese, what is transliterated as 'j' can also be pronounced as [z].

At this point you may be wondering how or why কুকুৰনেচীয়া kukurnesiyaa and নেজ nez are related. I myself am not sure what the -iya does here and am assuming that it's some sort of attributive marker. However, most linguists will quickly see the connection between the [s] in kukurnesiyaa and the [z] nez - the difference between the two sounds is just a matter of whether your vocal folds are vibrating or not (the former being a 'voiceless' sound, and the latter a 'voiced' one with your vocal folds vibrating).

And there you have it, wolves are literally 'dog-tailed tigers' in Assamese.

One might wonder then if Assamese বঘ bagh then refers to any 'big scary animal that might eat you' with the prototypical example being 'a big orange cat with black stripes'. Of course, the danger for language learners like myself is to interpret these compounds too literally. I mean, most English speakers wouldn't perceive the food item 'hot dog' as a sizzling canine - the meat is never dog, and they're still hot dogs even when they get cold!

So with that in mind, how can it be fair for me to assume Assamese speakers perceive wolves as big striped cats with dog tails, amusing as it may be!

Ahuna Festival 2012, Zunheboto (III)

The final performance at last week's Ahuna festival in Zunheboto was by the boys from North Point Colony, Zunheboto. They performed the game/dance called Imu no pi 'süjo süjo', which translates as 'My older brother said 'sujo sujo'.' The word süjo is a verb meaning 'to pull out'.

Here are some photos and videos of the game.

One guy has a 'tiger's tail' attached to his behind.

 

 Despite the fact that it's quite a famous game here, I'd never actually seen it before. I tried asking friends about the rules of the game, but no one could really tell me what they were.

A few days later, I asked H. S. Rotokha what the significance of the game was. He told me that there was once a man who had three sons. When the man was about to die, he called his sons together to tell them not to fight among each other after his death, lest their enemies take advantage of this.

Unfortunately, at this point in our conversation, dinner was ready and he had to stop the explanation.

So now, I'm still pretty clueless as to the rules of the game, or its cultural significance. Perhaps someone who comes across this blog post can explain it to me?

With that said, I hope everyone had a happy Ahuna!

My only disappointment was that I didn't get to eat any ahuna, i.e. the newly harvested rice cooked in a bamboo vessel (read here)!

Ahuna Festival 2012, Zunheboto (II)

So the turn-out at the Ahuna celebration in Zunheboto was small in comparison to the one in Dimapur, but here were some of the highlights of the cultural performances. I was a little disappointed that the organisers decided to make all 4 cultural troupes perform at the same time, so you'd have to rush from performance to performance, with no clear sense of what you were seeing if you didn't already know what the troupes were doing (and also only if you were lucky enough to be able to enter the performance area - most of the spectators from the town had to sit at a distance).

Thankfully, I was allowed into the performance area, and was already familiar with most of the performances because of the cultural documentation project.

The villagers from Chishilimi perform the rain invocation ceremony called Tala Dala (or Dala Dala). According to them, they are the only Sumi village to perform this ceremony, which involves two rows of men taking turns to hit a raised mound of earth with long sticks. The action of hitting the mound is quite similar to the action of hitting the creeper called ayichi during community fishing (called ayichi küvvü).

In addition to the men hitting the raised mound with the sticks, others stand to the side pulling strips of bamboo (I think), while others swing bits of bamboo attached to a piece of string, all of which make a sort of buzzing noise, that I believe is supposed to 'call the thunder'.

They also performend hango leh, which is a song sung while sowing.

The men from the village of Khükiye-Lukhai did aphila kuwo, which is often mistranslated as a 'war dance', since it was never performed by warriors before they went off to battle, or by victorious warriors. It was simply a dance performed during festivals.

The women from Khükiye-Lukhai performed thigha leh, a song sung while breaking up the soil with sticks, usually performed after hoeing (phushe) has been done.

Some men from Zunheboto performed winnowing of the paddy. According to H.S. Rotokha, the proper way was to have one man waving the paddy sifter up and down (along the vertical axis), while another waved his from left to right (along the horizontal axis).

And the women from Lazami village performed a thread spinning song called aye küzü, while 'spinning' thread from balls of harvested cotton.

They also demonstrated how fabric used to be dyed black and red (the most important Sumi colours). Here we have a pot of black dye.

Here's the red dye.

The GB (at least I think he was the GB - someone can correct me on this) of Lazami village showed me the plant used to make the red dye, called aghüsa in Sumi.

And here we have a close-up of the aghüsa plant.

Alright, just one more post about Ahuna!