NAGALAND
Edges – Beyond Europe
Oral literature of the Tenyimia of Nagaland
In the beginning, Earth was bigger than Sky. Sky and Earth were man and wife, Sky was the husband, and Earth, his wife. When they lay together, Sky said to Earth, “Wife, wife, fold up your knees so I can cover you.” So Earth folded up her knees and they became the mountains. But Earth was so big, there were edges of her left out when Sky covered Earth. The people living on these edges of the earth suddenly discovered that there was no sky covering them. And they began to howl. They howled through the long night. The wind carried their voices. Listen carefully when the wind howls. You can hear their voices carried along the wind. Listen when the wind howls. Just close your eyes and listen, listen, listen.
This is how we ended the production called “Hvorfor gråter trærne?” which is a program where Sami Yoiker, Inga Juuso and I, Naga storyteller, meet to share songs and stories. After every performance, I was invariably asked, “But where is Nagaland?”
I think I wouldn’t be very wrong to suppose that Nagaland was one of those edges of the earth left out when Sky covered Earth. Naga history begins before the 13th century when the first written accounts mention the Ahom kings of Upper Burma and Western Unan who entered the Naga Hills and were repulsed by fierce Naga warriors. Mention was already made of the Nagas by Ptolemy, in 150 AD (Geographia vol VII (ii)p.18).
The Naga tribes trace different migration routes and the Tenyimia tribes point north to probably Mongolia or Siberia. Difficult treks through snow-covered passes, to escape a land with a very inhospitable clime is found in our myths. The Naga tribes then settled in the area now known as the north-east of India, a land-locked mountainous region, with pristine waterfalls and rivers. Rain in the monsoon months feed the rice fields, and the Nagas mainly subsist on rice as their staple food. Edible herbs from the forest, meat and a large variety of spices, such as country ginger, soybean, bamboo shoot etc, are used to flavor Naga food. Naga culture is nature- oriented. Among the Tenyimia, which is a conglomerate of seven or eight Naga tribes with the same language and cultural habits, literature existed in an oral form for many years; a literature of poetry and stories and poem-songs which were passed down from generation to generation in the age-group houses. These were large houses in which young boys are initiated into at age fourteen or fifteen in order that they may receive cultural education and learn the ways of the tribe. Young girls of the same age had a corresponding house. Both houses had a presiding elder or parent, who was responsible for their cultural initiation.
Poetry, the carrier of Culture
For the Tenyimia people, stories and poems are considered the carriers of culture. Thus a great deal of effort is put into handing down the stories and poems in the right manner. The stories teach right behavior and contain moral lessons for the young. The poem-songs are more poetic and idealistic. Almost all of the Tenyimia poem-songs have a story behind them which a poet-singer will explain as he introduces his song especially if it is not a familiar one. Tenyimia poems are always written to be sung or chanted, hence the reference, poem-songs. If we examine the content of an oral poem-song, we will see that it carries a great deal of cultural information:
Lhudizhüü no
On the day my father and my mother blest me
and gave me my marriage basket
On that night when I made my way to my husband’s house
My spirit refused to enter and at the gate it said it would leave me and go.
My husband was good, nay, more than good,
they said this of him and I wed happily
But the spirits broke up our household early
and so I am grieved by that.
My husband lies on his bed
and thinks desolately on my going
I have been told these stories of his sorrow over my going
and I listen eagerly for any news of him.
I say this to him;
“Do not think on me any more but marry again
and raise our child as fruit of our short union.”
Marriage is the next most important event for the Tenyimia people. Birth is, of course, the most important event. Death shares equal importance with birth. The dead are lovingly prepared for burial by relatives, mourned loudly and buried the next day or even on the day of death if death has occurred early in the morning. The poem begins happily, describing the cultural action, of parents giving a daughter who is setting out for her new husband’s house, a basket full of food. But in the poem, what should have been the happiest moment in the bride’s life is overshadowed by a strange omen. At the entrance to her husband’s house, her spirit refuses to enter and even says it would leave her and go. For the native listener, that is in itself sufficient to indicate that something is going to mar the marriage. Sure enough, the next lines tell us that the happiness of the two was short-lived, with the woman dying suddenly after childbirth. The story has been related by a medium and composed as a poem by a relative of the woman and the first person narrative expresses the feelings of loss deeply felt by both lovers.
The next poem is a lament:
KONITSO
Like a sprouting flower plant you grew up as the child of your parents
And are gone early away from others
This is your sad fate, Si-u
Your parents asked for a good day
And then they performed your rituals of initiation
With ritually cleansed water, pronounced
Good words over you,
Why have the spirits then cut your name off early
It is not yet time for you to die Konitso.
Perhaps if those who thought of taking necklaces
To the female-spirit to ask for your being
Had succeeded, they would have comforted your parents
Oh would that you were still alive
Making plans to go to the fields
Nevertheless, you are gone and all these words are in vain
When you wore the ornaments made by your wife
And wearing those, went into the best place in the sitting-place
To jest with the matrons of the village
On that evening, no name was as great as yours.
Your female friends brought your ornaments
And placed it on you and stroked you in grief
We will substitute you with your ornaments
And jest with those instead
Glory of the age-group, flower of childhood
You have lived too short
Would that you were alive and could live long with us.
Laments and ballads for those who died young are very frequent in Tenyimia poetry. The poem reveals that there is a lot of faith placed in rituals and their observance. The question posed by the poet is, “Why, when all the rituals or initiation were performed in the right way for you, have you died early?” Then it goes into soul-searching over the incomprehension and sorrow that death brings. The sacrifices of carnelian necklaces to the female spirit who might have induced his fatal sickness failed to pacify her. As the poem indicates, life is so very precious and so much more valued when death suddenly strikes and takes away a young person. The importance of performing the rituals at the right time and in the right way cannot be overemphasized. It draws attention to the fact that the Tenyimia are very cautious in their social conduct, careful not to displease any of the many spirits that cohabit their world. While they worship only the one creator-deity, the power of other spirits is acknowledged and placated by sacrifices. Great fear of death is present in the cultural world-view of the Nagas because there is such finality to it. The Tenyimia believed that the dead traveled on to the underworld and began existences very much like what they had lived on earth. Thus, it is customary to bury a man with the items he would need in the next world, such as seed grains. Great loss and grief is always sought to be alleviated by chanelling it into poems though it is customary to mourn the dead for months or years. Life, according to the Tenyimia, should be lived in a cautious manner so that one may live long by not incurring the displeasure of any spirit, and thus, gain the privilege to be buried in the proper manner with the right rituals of burial. Certain deaths are considered by the village-society as abominable deaths, and, in these cases, the burial rituals are not administered. Such deaths are always abhorred.
By contrast the following poem is light hearted:
Chakrü
On the night I went forth to court you
The day had been kind to me, moonlight lit my way
Even the path to your house seemed smoother to walk on than on other days.
I desired both to court you and to know the way to your house
But I felt unworthy and in the first year I did not attempt to court you
Much time has passed and now, I come tonight to court you.
It is an eager suitor’s song embodying all the enthusiasm of a first meeting. There are enough of such poems to balance the darkness of poems about death and warriors who invariably die young and tragic love stories that end in the death of one partner. Poem-songs are also to be seen as conversation because the use of poetry enables young suitors to express deep feelings of love in a culturally acceptable manner. Many love poems are sung as Songs of the forest, when the lover addresses his beloved who is gathering herbs on the next mountain. These clear voices carried across the mountain heights and evoking response are delightful to hear.
In the next poem, a mysterious aspect of the old religion is revealed:
Rakerhurie
These places are unclean
Newcomers are warned not to come here.
If you come upon an unclean spirit,
Take down a rooster and a carnelian necklace
And supplicate the messenger of the spirits.
Yet it is said that these objects have not saved (them).
The poem reveals the deep acceptance of the spiritual world around them by the Tenyimia. Spirits inhabit dark, desolate places in the forests and cause sickness to the people who cross those places. Those who are afflicted by spirit-induced diseases are asked to make the right sacrifices. But there is a lot of ambivalence in this belief. One may sacrifice to the spirits and have faith that healing will follow. But healing does not always occur, hence, the last line of the poem. Tenyimia culture is a taboo culture. There are many taboos that direct social life. But when a taboo is violated because the violator was ignorant of it, it is usual to placate the spirits with appropriate sacrifices.
Metaphors in Tenyimia poetry are unusual but always drawn from the natural world. A love poem opens with this favorite metaphor:
“Putsoü’s brother, you are like the dew fallen from heaven
and collected in a seno leaf, so fair are you”
Another metaphor: “Yahu lights up the place where he is
like fresh vegetation lighting up Dzünha
Yahu excels others, Yahu, you are like the bright brew horn.”
Metaphors like, “unfading rainbow,” “tiger killer” are common to love poetry. The metaphors themselves give a new listener a clue to the cultural idea of beauty among the Tenyimia. Poets strive to find new metaphors, which strike, not so much by their metaphysicalness but by their ability to spark off immediate association with the objects people see everyday. At the same time, there is a wide gap between the oral poems and oral stories. The poems are permitted to use hyperbolic images and metaphors. But the stories are characteristically shorn of metaphoric ornamentation. They are simply told around a wood fire, in the open or by a kitchen fireplace (which is always in the middle of the earth hut) and told by a Grandmother to the small circle gathered around her after the evening meal. Then she will tell of the man, who, with his dog, went hunting a deer but they chased the deer so swiftly that the three of them ran off the earth, and ran into space and were turned into stars. Then, at this point, the listeners are encouraged to leave the warm hearth and step outside so that the Grandmother may point the stars to them that were once man, dog and deer.
Unlike literature of the west, so readily published and documented and made available to an eager reading public, oral literature of the Nagas is not to be found in books yet. It is small wonder that Europe is yet to hear of it. I like to think of it as a living literature, abiding in its people. Translations of more than 200 poems and collecting of the stories took me more than four years of painstaking work. But the reservoirs of our poetry and stories, the old, are dying out from old age and more and more young people are leaving the villages to seek easier ways of earning money in the towns. The age-group houses are no longer used regularly, the numbers of their users having dwindled. A terrible ongoing political conflict consumes the energies of the people. And then, when there is a political struggle for freedom and the right to be one’s own, stories and poems are neglected and new stories come to replace the old. Hopefully, there will be enough of the old passed on before their carriers turn spirit.
On the eastern edges of the earth, the voices of the Tenyimia grow faint. How they cried to be let in when Sky first covered Earth. But now, their voices are almost indistinguishable. The wind, powerful and brutal, sweeps them aside and all you can hear now is the howling of the wind. Pushed to the edge, not forgotten, but never known. For you can forget only what you have known. But if you have not known how can you forget?
Note: For more information on the Naga people and their land and culture, and the political conflict with India, you can check out the following websites: kuknalim.com and morungexpress.com
Some more of my favourite webspots!
These are some of my favourite Naga Sites and if you love the photography, it belongs to Rita Willaert, link below!
