10 hours on a bus

On Sunday at 4pm, I left Dimapur with Ab. and a whole busload of farmers heading back to Zunheboto after the Agri Expo. Given that sumo tickets are sold out till after Christmas, this was the best option for the return trip to Zunheboto for Christmas. The trip was meant to take 12-14 hours, though it only took 10 hours in the end.

Now, 10 hours on a bus doesn't usually sound like a long time to be since I've been on much longer bus rides and I usually end up sleeping most of the time. This time however, I was aware that we were travelling at night on some very winding and badly maintained roads. I was also aware that there was no heating on the bus and that we was going to get very cold at night, especially as the bus approached Zunheboto.

Ab. rugging up for the cold night.

The seat would've been more comfortable if I could've stopped it from reclining all the way back every time I leaned back.

The worst thing about the trip was that just as we were leaving Dimapur - and in a scene reminiscent of the last time I was leaving Nagaland via Dimapur - I realised I was down with a case of food poisoning. I'm not sure what it was, though I'm happy to blame the pork chow mein I ate at the Agri Expo just before leaving (I really don't do well with chow mein in this country). So basically, I spent most of the trip trying to fight off the accompanying nausea from the food poisoning, while trying to field questions from farmers who had no idea who I was or that I didn't understand most of what they were saying. I did manage to will myself to sleep at times, but the bumpiness of the road and the cold later kept waking me up.

As usual my survival instincts kicked in and somehow I made it to Zunheboto 10 hours later. At 2am. We were told that the reason for leaving Dimapur at 4pm (and not a reasonable like say, 11am) was so that we would arrive bright and early in Zunheboto between 4am - 6am when transport would be available. Of course, arriving at 2am meant that the town looked like this:

Ab.'s father came to pick us up shortly after. We made it back to Nito Mount where they broke the lock to the room in the guest house and I collapsed in bed, weak from the journey and the food poisoning. Thankfully, the diarrhoea only kicked in after I got back.

Feeling too weak to stand up for long stretches, I spent most of yesterday in bed, eating mostly bananas and a rice porridge mixed with the some leafy greens (which the Angamis call galho). But given the iron gut I've cultivated, I'm pretty much back to normal today.

So I survived my first night bus ride in Nagaland. And while having food poisoning to boot!

NE Agri Expo 2010

Since I have to wait for the bus to go back to Zunheboto with Ab. and the farmers (which was meant to leave at 4pm, then 9am, then 4pm again), I thought I'd post a few pictures from the North-east Agricultural Expo that's on (and ending today) here in Dimapur. The expo showcased produce from all over the 7 northeastern states of India - Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura, among other things. They also had a few model morungs from each of the major Naga tribes like at the Kisama Heritage Village.

I came to town to meet up with some people who've been doing work on Sumi, and the meetings went pretty well. Ab. was also in town for the entrepreneur seminars happening at the expo and we're going back to Zunheboto, hopefully, later today.

The 'welcome mithun' showcasing local beans and king chillies.


The governor was arriving the day I took this shot. The costumes reminded me a lot of China for some reason. Maybe it was the tackiness of it all.


No NE India expo would be complete without raja mircha 'Naga King Chillies' featured.


At Honey Fest 2010 - the government's really pushing for people to start bee cultivation in the state.

Khonoma village on a foggy day

After the two weddings on the day I was meant to leave Kohima, my friend's sister and cousin surprised me by telling their driver to take us to the nearby town of Khonoma, Nagaland's first 'green village'. It's not just the roofs that are green, the village actually has rubbish bins everywhere, and with the exception of a few bottles on the street, it looked like the locals actually used these bins. Certainly not something you see everyday in Nagaland.

I'd wanted to visit Khonoma this time. Unfortunately, getting here from Kohima isn't easy unless you have a private car - there's no regular bus / taxi service to and from Kohima and  the town's inhabitants have their own bus to take them to Kohima and back. My original plan to spend a few nights here at a guest house  (basically someone's house with a room or two for rent) wasn't feasible either, and I don't know if I would've enjoyed the stay if it was just me.

So I was really happy to be able to see Khonoma, except of course for the fog obscuring most of the valley. I guess it gives me something to look forward the next time I come here, and I'm planning to come here with anyone who comes to visit me on my next trip here to Nagaland.

View of the surrounding terraced fields


View of Khonoma village from above


The new Khonoma village gate

Khonoma village gate - the old one that was placed to the side, out of sight to people walking up the hill.

The Khonoma Baptist Church, which looks quite modern compared to even some of the new churches I've seen here.


A memorial to all the people who fought for independence from India


There were also some memorials for four senior British soliders who died trying to capture Khonoma in 1879, I'm told as part of a larger British campaign to capture Kohima.

Oh well, till next time.

'Tis the season to get married

So my original plan to travel to Dimapur fell through today, given that I would probably have had to spend the night in a hotel, and without a hard copy of my new Restricted Area Permit, that might be a bit of a problem. Means I'll be heading down there tomorrow morning.

All wasn't lost today. The sister and cousin of the friend I'm staying with here in Kohima brought me along to two different weddings. At first I was told that at the first wedding, it was the brother of a cousin who was getting married (which made me wonder why she didn't just say 'cousin') but I told out later it was the brother of a friend. It sounded all very complicated, so I didn't probe.

Given that it's December, two weddings in one day is not common. In fact, even after attending the ceremony, I counted no less than 3 different venues sporting the banner 'Wedding' and no less than 2 car entourages on the street, each car bearing the sign 'Wedding'. December is clearly the time to get married here in Nagaland because people tend to have more free time off work, and relatives who are studying or working in the rest of India are also usually back for Christmas. 

What was more interesting about the two weddings was that even though my friend's sister and cousin are Angami (one of the major tribes of Nagaland and the main tribe of Kohima district), the first wedding was a Rengma wedding, conducted in a language that they don't speak, and the second was a Lotha wedding, conducted in another language that they don't speak. To my ear, Rengma sounds similar to Angami, but my friend's cousin said she couldn't understand what was being said. It was also good that I had a little booklet with some hymn lyrics written in Rengma.

Classifications of the languages of Nagaland often group Angami, Rengma and a little more distantly, Sumi. Lotha, by comparison is grouped with Ao, another major language of the region. Looking at the hymn lyrics printed in the booklet for the Lotha wedding and hearing how they were pronounced, I noticed a few similarities of the sound system with Sumi, particularly the pronunciation of si as [si] with a high central vowel. Just first impressions here though, nothing concrete.

What was most surprising by far at the Lotha wedding, was that, following the service, there was a vegetarian buffet section! Vegetarian! In Nagaland!

Okay, so maybe it was more 'Vegeterian', but it was still something I had not expected at all to see here.

Not that I partook of any of that, especially when there was pork at the main dining area. And there was cake! Cheesecake (with a biscuit layer), some soaked chocolate cake, and fruitcake (the wedding variety).

Even if we hadn't gone to visit the pretty little town of Khonoma afterwards, the cake would've made my day.

Does the language we speak shape how we think?

The blogosphere is all atwitter with the debate on the Economist website, the proposition being:

This house believes that the language we speaks shapes how we think.
http://www.economist.com/debate/overview/190

My friends in linguistics will not find any of this new, but I did made a small comment on the site, mostly because people were arguing that it was culture, not language that shaped thought, which I agree with (I'm sure the situation is far more complex than I care to think about), but didn't feel was actually relevant to the points being raised by the proposer.

I'm certainly not a hard-core Whorfian believer in linguistic determinism - that the language I speak somehow limits my experience of the world - but I do believe in linguistic relativism in its 'weaker form'. There's something about the grammatical structures and lexical items in our native language/s that we retrieve so habitually and 'naturally' that we don't even realise it until we start to learn another language as adults.

Nick Evans writes in his book Dying words: endangered languages and what they have to say, "Languages differ not so much in what you can say as in what you must say" (paraphrasing Roman Jakobson). In learning a new language, one often encounters distinctions that one wouldn't otherwise have to consider in their own language, like having to specify each time whether I'm going to get from point A to B on foot or by transport in Russian, or specifiying whether I farted on purpose or by accident in Sherpa (see here). Native speakers of these languages don't realise they're making these decisions because they're so automated, but for someone else trying to learn these languages, I don't think there's any doubt that they require a slightly different way of thinking about events in the world.

Anyway, whatever! Have a look at the live debate at the Economist site and see what others are saying!

Going in all directions

One thing I had noticed when I was working on my MA thesis was that along with the verb wu 'to go' (though I think it might actually just be u), Sumi also had two other verbs: wo and hu.

The verb wo is generally used with the noun aki 'house', as in aki lo wo 'to go home' (lo is a locative or allative marker), suggesting that the verb also conveys the meaning of motion towards one's home / point of origin. The verb hu is usually used with the noun alu 'field', as in alu lo hu 'to go to the field', suggesting that the verb also conveys the meaning of motion away from one's home / point of origin. The verb wu therefore simply means 'to go' with no direction specified. Let's also not forget the verb ighi 'to come', which specifies direction towards the speaker / hearer / some common reference point, but at the time I was more interested in the wo and hu distinction at the time, which I think I've worked out.

In addition to these, I'd also found two other verbs, ipe which one speaker had told me meant 'to go out' or and ilo 'to go in' (iloghi also appears, containing the same ghi found in ighi 'to come' - something to work on). Again, I wasn't that surprised that the language made these distinctions. After all, English distinguishes between 'to enter' and 'to exit'.

Just recently on this trip, I'd been alerted to two more verbs: iqi 'to go down' and iqho 'to go up'. These can also mean 'to go South' and 'to go North' respectively. This is just like how people in Melbourne might 'go up' to Sydney for the weekend or people from Sydney will 'come down' to Melbourne. In French, on peut descendre sur la Côte d'Azur ou monter à Paris, ('One can go down to the Cote d'Azure or go up to Paris.'), assuming I'm coming from somewhere like Lyon. The image in people's minds I assume is that of a standard geographical map with North pointing up.

Similarly, a speaker in the town of Zunheboto might say:

(1)    Satakha lo iqini.
        (I) will go to Satakha.' (Satakha is south of Zunheboto)

(2)    Suruhuto lo iqhoni.
        '(I) will go to Suruhuto.' (Suruhuto is north of Zunheboto)

However, and this is the curious thing, if a speaker was going to Nito Mount (where I was and will be staying) from the centre of Zunheboto town, they would say:

(3)    Nito Mount lo iloni.
        '(I) will go to Nito Mount.'

And if a speaker in Nito Mount was going to the Zunheboto town centre, they would say:

(4)    Zünheboto lo ipeni.
        '(I'm) going to Zunheboto.'

At first I thought it was strange that one would say literally that they were 'going out' of town, where in English one would say 'I'm going into town.' Someone then pointed out that the important thing was that one was travelling west to Nito Mount and east to Zunheboto (which I'm slightly dubious about). Similarly, people would use the verb ilo to say they were going to Dimapur or Delhi, which all lie west of Zunheboto.

What it looks like then, is that the four verbs: ilo 'to go in', ipe 'to go out', iqho 'to go up' and iqho 'to go down', can also mean 'to go west', 'to go east', 'to go north' and 'to go south'.

As I've noted 'going up' and 'going down' are often associated with 'going north' and 'going south', but are there other languages where 'going in' and 'going out' correspond to 'going east' and 'going west'? And I don't just mean phrases like 'going into the East' or 'going out west', but instances where people will say the equivalent of 'I'm going in to (PLACE)' when that place is east of the speaker.

Indian Folklore Congress 2010

On Thursday (9 Dec) I was invited by a friend to attend with her the inaugural programme (basically the inauguration ceremony) of the 34th Indian Folklore Congress at ATI (Administrative Training Institute) Kohima. I thought it would be a good idea, given that the chief guest (guest of honour), Khekiye Sema, is Sumi himself, and back in Zunheboto we had originally planned to come down to Kohima to meet with him and discuss the oral literature project.

After the sweet little traditional song presentation by some Angami kids (see above), Professor Jawaharlal Handoo, the President of Indian Folklore Congress, gave the keynote speech. I wasn't terribly impressed with the speech because he simply read off a 5-6 page document that only some members of the audience were given. Still, I suppose it's the fashion for some professors to do that here (and having spent a year at a French university has given me more patience for such things). In the talk he mentioned issues to do with folklore and the construction of ethnic identity (I prefer the term 'negotiation'), which was all quite expected.

When the time came for the chief guest, retired government official Khekiye Sema, to speak, he was much more candid and natural. He started off by congratulating everyone who'd come from outside the state, suggesting that everyone should be given a medal of courage for 'daring' to come to this part of the world (to the few Indians who've heard of Nagaland, the place conjures up images of bloodthirsty headhunters, a violent insurgency, or just frightening food). He spoke about the loss of traditional oral literature and its transmission mechanisms, particularly with the loss of the traditional morung system after the arrival of Christianity. Also in more recent times, Nagaland University has not been giving much attention to the study of such traditional folklore.

Sure, there was the usual lament that with modernity and Christianity, the younger generation no longer knew the old traditions, but bear in mind that all this happened within the span of a generation or two (almost like Singapore's rapid urbanisation). At the moment, there is a cultural cringe among the younger generation who are quickly embracing Korean culture, after having done the same with American culture. (I'm sure it's a familiar story in other parts of the globe.)

He also spoke of the connection between Nagas and nature, and recounted his own experience with an old man from Aghünato village who was a were-tiger - I'd heard about such stories from friends in Zunheboto. Unlike the werewolves in the European tradition, people who are were-tigers don't physically transform into tigers, but their souls simply become tiger spirits (according to some people, these people actually have tiger spirits). In any case, there seems to be some bond between the human spirit and that of the animal, allowing that person to find out things happening in the jungle even if their body is physically at home. I like to think it's a kind of 'astral projection' of the soul.

After the talks were over, I decided to go up and speak with Mr Khekiye himself. I mentioned the World Oral Literature Project to him, and he suggested I speak with another Sumi man in Dimapur who'd done quite a bit of cultural documentation with the help of Mr Khekiye.

My heart sank a little bit when he gave the name of the person. I'd just received a copy of this person's 'Sumi grammar' and it wasn't particularly great. It wasn't even a grammar, more a vocabulary list, with a number of short traditional stories, presumably from the documentation project. But most of these were very badly translated from Sumi into English. Still, I'm off to Dimapur in a few days and hopefully I'll get a chance to meet this person and see what documentation he has already done.