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!

Ahuna Festival 2012, Zunheboto (I)

I was in Zunheboto town all of last week for the Ahuna / Ahunah (post-harvest) festival, and to get some project work done. I'm still recovering from the trip back to Guwahati, but here's a quick recap of last week's events.

Monday night, we had the premiere of the film The Silent Field, or Yenguyelei Qha in Sumi. It's something that has come out of the cultural documentation project that Abokali and I have been working on the past 2 years with H.S. Rotokha and Pukhazhe Yepthomi. Most of the work on this film was done by Abokali and our wonderful video editor Vito Sumi (who had to work with most of our amateur footage), but I'll get to that in another blog post. Just to be clear, it's still a first edit that we were trying to rush for this year's Ahuna festival, but we hope people still enjoyed it.

From L to R: Me, H. S. Rotokha, Abokali Sumi, Pukhazhe Yepthomi.

Before I get into the cultural activities in my next post, I thought I'd just talk about the entrance to the festival ground.

The photos below [WARNING: some nudity] are of what I think was a modern take on an old tradition: the genna post. The word genna appears to come from the Angami kenna, which according to Hutton, in his book The Angami Nagas, translates as 'prohibition' (1921: 190), though the meaning of the term is quite broad and would deserve a blog post of its own. [Note that the Sumi equivalent is chine, presumably related to the Angami word, but with the initial velar stop palatalisating before the front vowel /i/.]

The post was erected at the entrance to the local ground, with the words sasüvi, meaning 'welcome' in Sumi.

On the right side, we see the chief guests for all the various events this Ahuna festival. Since every single event needs its own chief guest, a very important part of modern Naga culture.

And on the other side, we have pictures of the moon, sun, pieces of meat (steak actually), tiger, a pair of and a mithun head. Yes, disembodied breasts. I had to do a double take on that, especially given the highly conservative nature of Baptist Zunheboto.

I have no idea who commissioned the post, but it does bear the elements of a traditional Sumi genna post. Of such posts, Hutton (in 1921) wrote:

Genna posts, whether the front centre post of the house or the forked posts set up outside it, are carved both in high relief and with incisions, the latter taking the form of horizontal lines, crosses, circles, or arcs, and used to fill in space not devoted to the serious carving, which generally consists of mithan heads more or less conventionalised, and highly conventional representations of the article of ceremonial dress known as "enemies' teeth " (aghühu). ... The only living thing other than mithan which seems to be represented in Sema art is the bird, which is carved out of a piece of wood and fixed to a crossbar between the "snail-horns" of the house. ... The sun and moon are also represented, usually as plain circles or concave discs, also breasts, singly, not in pairs, significant of success in love, and wooden dao slings. - The Sema Nagas (1921: 48)

I'm not sure if anyone was offended by them (I suspect some people might have been ), but as you can see, there was some cultural precedent for them, even badly photoshopped ones. Of course, it doesn't completely match Hutton's description, but I'm sure there were others types of genna posts that he didn't get to document.


For most of the festival I was actually busy at the Sumi Cultural Association stall (since the members were busy with the main festival events.) We were selling DVDs of the film, as well as calendars for 2013.

The calendars (tsalaphi) are unique in that they are completely in Sumi, with short explanations about the Sumi names for the various months. They are also accompanied by photos depicting the traditional agricultural activities / events typically associated with each particular month.

Here's our little (unofficial) calendar mascot. The girls helping us run the stall picked him up on the first day.

If you're interested in purchasing a calendar and live in Zunheboto, you can contact the Sumi Cultural Association in Zunheboto town. Alternatively, we will be trying to make them available in Dimapur, and also at the Hornbill Festival in Kohima. More information to come.

Happy Diwali 2012

Happy Deepavali / Dipaboli / Diwali to all who celebrate it (and happy Tihar if you're in Nepal).

I'm actually currently in Zunheboto, Nagaland for the Ahunah festival - Ahunah lokivi peitha tsü ani! (but more on that when I find the time and internet to post later during the week.)

In honour of Diwali, here are some photos I took last Monday as I was walking past Dighalipukhuri in Guwahati. I saw the entire pond lined with lit clay lamps (dīpa in Sanskrit, but saki in Assamese).

I mistakenly thought it was an early Diwali celebration, but my students told me later (and I should have realised it myself) that it was actually to mark the death anniversary of Bhupen Hazarika, who passed away a year ago on the 5th of November.

It really was an impressive sight to see the whole lake lined with lamps that had to be lit individually. I wonder if they're doing something similar for Diwali itself today.

The Silent Field (Yenguyelei Qha)

As part of the festivities for the annual post-harvest festival Ahunah (or Ahuna) in Zunheboto, the Sumi Cultural Association will be premiering the documentary The Silent Field (Yenguyelei Qha) today at 4.30pm at the Zunheboto Town Hall.

Shot over two years in villages across the district of Zunheboto, this film presents a selection of recorded material that covers over 25 groups performing different cultural activities associated with the traditional Sumi agricultural cycle. The film is part of a larger project aimed at documenting traditional rituals and songs that are no longer being transmitted to the next generation. Its title reflects the current anxiety associated with the loss of culture and identity among the Sumis.

A collaboration between old and young, foreign and local, this project hopes to create awareness and interest in traditional Sumi customs, and to help preserve the Sumi language and its various verbal art forms.

The makers of the film acknowledge and are grateful for the support of the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, the Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the Sumi Cultural Association.

Rural Resource and Training Centre

Last weekend, I needed a little time-out from everything. Things have been difficult for me on a lot of fronts lately. Fortunately, I knew someone residing at a place on the road between Guwahati and Shillong in neighbouring Meghalaya that sounded like a good retreat for the weekend. Even better, I managed to score a ride with some friends heading up to Shillong for a conference.

The place is called the 'Rural Resource and Training Centre' (or RRTC). If you're coming from Guwahati, it's about 18km past Nongpoh, near the town of Umran.

It's one of many Don Bosco initiatives all over NE India. I was already friends with one of the two main priests based at the centre, Father Jose, a linguist who speaks many languages of the NE, and who's currently working on a dictionary of Tiwa. I was introduced to the other main priest, Father James during the course of my stay, who proved to be quite a magician and aping pong player!

The centre typically hosts large groups of people coming in to do all sorts of training, from agriculture to bakery. They also get lots of guests popping in for a cup of tea. Recently, they hosted about 100 school dropouts doing some course on gaining employment - another friend of mine who was staying there at the time didn't think it was all that quiet.

Thankfully, it was nice and peaceful when I was there. Add to that near-constant electricity and water, lots of food, tea-making facilities, places to walk about, limited phone and internet connectivity, and it really made for a nice weekend get-away. Plus, I could talk to Father Jose about linguisticky things, dictionaries and community involvement.

The reception area (below) was also appropriately named because it was one of the few spots in the centre where I could get phone and internet reception! I really didn't mind the lack of connectivity for a few days though.

There were also some reminders to the centre's guests, in both English and Khasi, the local language and one of the official languages of Meghalaya.



The property on which the centre is built actually spans about 40 acres. It used to be 60 acres, but they sold off 20.



What I found nice about all this space, was that I was able to go for long walks by myself, with no fear of insurgents or anyone worrying about me getting lost. Being higher in altitude than Guwahati, it was pretty cool, but not too cold.



Most of the property are used for cultivating crops, including ginger (see below), turmeric and pineapples.



Other parts of the property are used for rearing livestock, poultry, fish and also bees. These 'units' are also used as demonstration sites for groups who come to the centre to learn more about agricultural practices.



There's a big focus on organic farming, and vermicomposting (composting using various worms). Ultimately, the aim is self-sufficiency, something my friend in Nagaland is also hoping to achieve with her business Organic Nagaland (see here).

You can see some of the results of their work: the papayas here were gigantic! If you didn't know what a papaya plant looked like, you'd have thought they were some kind of melon.

Anyway, after 2 nights, it was back to Guwahati. I doubt I'll have time to visit again this trip, but I hope to be able to again soon. Diwali's coming up next week, but I'm off to Zunheboto in Nagaland again for the Sumi post-harvest festival, Ahunah.