In January 2003, after 40 years of bloodshed, the NSCN, National Socialist Council of Nagaland, met in Delhi and announced that the war was over. Others are not so sure. They claim that the dream of an independent Nagaland will never go away.
The problem is that the Naga tribes remain essentially a trans-border people who don’t fit neatly into any of the boxes that the politicians have created for them. This may vex central government but it also means I can stand astride this particular frontier without fear of being mined, electrocuted or shot.
The people of Longwa are Konyak Nagas, the most numerous of 16 sub-tribes. They used to be known as the Naked Nagas, the title of a book by an Austrian anthropologist who worked here in the 1930s, some of whose observations, such as ‘Virginity wins no halo in the Naga heaven’, suggest reasons for his fascination with them.
Today, things are very different. Such has been the success of the American Baptist Church that 99 per cent of the Naga have been converted to Christianity. Nakedness is a thing of the past, as is the once common custom of head-hunting. (Though a recent National Geographic article reported evidence of active head-hunters as recently as 1991.)
We have come here with Shingwong, whose official title is Extra Assistant to the Deputy District Commissioner. He’s a soft-spoken Konyak, with square, grave features, more Tibetan than Indian. He wears a Western jacket and trousers. Tomorrow there will be a big spring festival here and the guest of honour will be the local MP.
The MP has asked to meet us and after our meal tonight Shing-wong takes us to see him, in a small, dark barn, with a hard earth floor. By the looks of things the MP’s had a few. His eyes are unfocussed and his mouth seems to have collapsed at one side, making him look not only unattractive, but dangerous.
Squatting on stools around him and lit only by flickering firelight is gathered a cross-section of mountain people, who seem to be from a completely different world. Most have red shawls thrown over bare shoulders and round their waists are aprons, held in place by belts made of bamboo cane. Some have bones in their hair and through their ears and small bronze skulls hanging from a necklace. These represent the heads that man has taken.
They grin vaguely at us as our purpose is explained.
‘BBC. Journey round the Himalaya.’
But none of it’s going in. They’re all completely rat-arsed.
Day Ninety One : Longwa
The concrete walls of our rooms in the government guesthouse seem to attract and trap the cold. I get up early. Outside, the mist lies in the valleys, as thick as fresh snow. I walk around the chief’s hut, in and out of India, measuring its circumference as 250 yards. I’m full of admiration that something on this scale is built entirely from leaf, stalk, bark, branch and trunk. Shingwong tells me the whole village helps in the construction of these longhouses.
A little further along the ridge, a cluster of tall stones rises from a grassy mound. It looks like a graveyard but is more of a trophy room. These stones represent the number of heads brought into the village.
A crudely dug, stone-stepped pathway runs down from the top of the ridge to a wide flat area with the white cross of a newly built church (by far the biggest building in Longwa) looming over the festival site. Stalls have been set out round the side of it, selling antique gongs, rattan umbrellas, wooden figurines as well as essentials like clothes, cooking pots and local medicines such as cinnamon sticks for toothache. Food ranges from lemon grass and betel leaves to porcupine, bred for eating. Its strong, tangy, venison-like flavour is considered a delicacy round here, and the quills are cut up and made into necklaces.
In fashion, the generational difference is marked. The young favour saris, jeans and T-shirts but the grannies and grandfathers still go barefoot, their thin, spindly legs often pocked with sores and unhealed grazes.
One very senior citizen leans proudly on an old flintlock rifle. Bamboo sticks have worn long, distended holes in his earlobes. He has skull medallions round his neck and is clearly very proud of his hunting past. He obligingly confirms that he has taken five heads.
His face, like those of many of the older generation, has what looks like a black stain running across it. On closer examination I see these are tattoos and not black but deep indigo, made of a number of very fine pin-prick marks. He pulls aside his shawl to show me that the tattoos extend across his chest and stomach and round onto his back. The old man knows Shingwong. He used to help his father, a surveyor working for the British on the first maps of Nagaland. He says he was ten years old when he first saw an Englishman. At first he had been frightened to go near them, they were so white he assumed they had no blood.
I ask if this old man with the skulls round his neck and headdress of boar’s teeth and hornbill feathers is now a Christian and he nods emphatically.
Shingwong thinks that conversion was made easier among the Nagas because their belief system was always based around one invisible god, one creator, which made the transition to Christianity seem less drastic.
Despite the grip of the Baptist church, the Konyak culture is still taught in schools and pre-Christian dances form the highlight of today’s festival.
Women process down from the ridge, four abreast, holding hands and wearing coral bead necklaces, headdresses, blue or black tunics and skirts with striped hoops. They form wide circles and move round infinitely slowly, chanting almost sotto voce. The slow, dirge-like pace is dictated by purely practical considerations. The jewellery of each dancer weighs 10 to 25 lb (5 to 10 kilos) alone.
The men then perform a war dance, which recreates the story of a head-hunting party. They appear, ironically enough, from behind the Baptist church, armed with machetes in one hand and rifles or spears decorated with goats’ fur in the other. On their heads are bear-skin caps and hornbill feathers, round their waists aprons and cane belts, squeezed tight to help puff out their chests, and on their feet incongruous black leather shoes of the sort you might wear to the office. On their backs are baskets in which to bring the heads home.
There follows a dramatic enactment of a raid on another village. Children cover their ears as the rifles are discharged, and the men end up with a celebratory python dance, in which their gyrations cause the sun to catch the glaze of their feathers and thus recreate the sinuous movement of the snake.
In the afternoon the arena is cleared and football posts are put up for a game between Longwa and Khemoi, a village in Myanmar. As there are no official games between the two countries, this is the closest there is to an India v Myanmar international. Despite a hard-fought first half, the Blues of India pip the Reds of Myanmar 8-2 and, to add insult to injury, the defeated team from Khemoi has a two and a half-hour walk home.
In the evening I have an opportunity to see inside the chief’s house. He’s agreed to be interviewed, and, armed with a bottle of rum as a present, I clamber through an entrance at one end. It is a cavernous space inside, like being in the upturned hull of some great ship. As there is hardly any natural light coming in, the soaring height of the roof is lost in gloom. I find myself in a long chamber, empty save for two huge, hollowed-out tree trunks, which Shing-wong says are war-canoes, and an aircraft seat, which they say came from a bomber shot down in the war. The Nagas are proud of the fact that they saved nine Allied airmen.
In the heart of the house, the chief sits at the centre of a semicircle of elders, an impressive number of brass heads hanging on their chests. A fire blazes. Above it hang various trophies, animal skulls and horns, and a number of ceremonial gongs.
The chief doesn’t look like a man who needs another bottle of rum at the moment. As I hand it over, his wide, bloodshot eyes meet mine for a moment, and I feel like someone who’s arrived very late at a party.