Consonant Aspirations - Archive

To start the new year, I thought I'd focus on a very linguistic issue. At the wedding I attended a few weeks ago, I had a long conversation with a guy who remained convinced that the Nagas needed both a common 'Naga' language, as well as their own unique script. -What about Nagamese? People from all different tribes and language backgrounds already speak it. -But it's not Naga. It's from Assamese. He was right - the local lingua franca Nagamese is largely based on Assamese, with a fair bit of Hindi and Bengali vocabulary thrown in, and hardly any input from individual 'Naga' languages. But the suggestion that all Nagas needed a common 'Naga' language (and script to boot) seemed to me a tad ridiculous. From a practical perspective, creating a 'new language' from scratch is a massive feat. Which languages do we draw from? And how much should the new language draw on each existing Naga language? 20% Angami, 20% Sumi, 20% Ao... ? Or sh...

On the day of the Christmas feast, the whole (or most of the) village gathered in front of I.'s parents' home (well technically the house owned by her father's brother - I think). I noticed that most of the people sitting in this area were kids. They brought their own plates - you can some of them just brought the usual asükhu , the wood plate with its own stand. As with the Christmas feast I attended last year, the morning's festivities began with the cake ceremony, after a prayer or two of course. The cake here was brought all the way from Dimapur. The entertainment programme began with ashi kimiki , where one (or two) guys(s) holds a large piece of pork meat and fat and other men try to bite off chunks of meat / fat. There's also some stylised jumping involved, but I'm not 100% certain what the rules are. Also, even though the name of the game contains the word ashi 'meat', most of it is really fat - maybe some people call it atha kimiki ? The ...

Everyone will tell you that Christmas time in Nagaland is best spent in a village. The towns and cities tend to empty out. It's just as well I wasn't in Zunheboto town because there was a situation involving two UG factions, so people weren't even setting off fireworks on Christmas Eve, which is the usual thing to do. You might remember that last year I was in the village of Natha New , which is actually just next to Zunheboto town. This year I spent Christmas in Vishepu, since my friends I. and N. had come back from Australia to throw a Christmas feast for the village. As with all Christmas feasts, preparations start weeks, if not months, ahead. But it's in the week before the feast that most of the village is mobilised for the feast. One important thing is pounding rice into rice flour. Here, two kinds of rice flour (normal and glutinous) are mixed and water (and some salt and sugar) is added to make a a kind of dough. This is then wrapped in banana leaves a...

Given the number of villages I've managed to visit in Nagaland, I thought I'd do a 'village focus' post for specific ones. This first one has a special place in my heart, because in a sense it's where my relationship with Nagaland started. My friend I., who now lives in Melbourne hails from this village, and it's thanks to her that I started learning Sumi. A few months ago, Vishepu made it into the local news because some white smoke was seen coming from the top of Mt Vishepu, which is right next to the village. Reports of a new volcano proved unfounded, although no one's quite certain what the cause of the smoke was - some reckon it was just steam being released. In any case, Vishepu was the first village I visited in Nagaland, back in early 2009 (so it's almost been 3 years since I first came here). I posted some photos on Flickr a while back. One of I.'s sisters was amazed that when she recently googled 'Vishepu', she didn't just ...

Most people coming from Kohima to Zunheboto take the Chozuba road (which most people pronounce as 'Chazuba') which passes through the town of Chozuba in Phek district. Technically, it's a state highway, but you wouldn't know from the condition of the year. However, this year they've started work on widening the road. As a result, most of the sumos are avoiding the road and opting for the 'shortcut' which takes the Wokha Road and involves fording the Langki River. So this time I haven't a chance to see the condition of the Chozuba road. On Monday, we went down to the village of Chishilimi to watch a rain invocation ceremony (sorry guys, still no rain). To get there, we needed to take the Chozuba road past Satakha, up till the village of M Tsügho (aka M6 - the name of this village could be another blog post) which is the last Sumi village before one enters Chakhesang land / Phek district. This gave me the chance to see what work was being done. You can...

In Nagaland, November to January really is the season for weddings here. Just ask my friend Cana who's been singing / planning / attending weddings for the past few weeks almost non-stop. I'd be interested to see what the official statistics are for the state (like the average no. of weddings per day in the month of December). Last year I ended up at a Rengma wedding, then a Lotha wedding in Kohima on the same day. I was also invited to an Angami wedding on Wednesday in Bara Bosti in Kohima, but my friend managed to organise a ride back to Zunheboto for me that morning. All the major local papers have also reported on Friday's 'mass wedding' at the Ao Baptist church in Dimapur as a means of keeping wedding costs low, and Yan Murry at the Naga Blog has written a post calling for more 'mass weddings' in the state: Mass Weddings need to be encouraged in Naga society . But if people want to have their big Western style weddings and have the money to afford ...

I was actually going to promote my friend Abokali 's new business, but I ended up promoting her brother's art exhibition in Kohima first. In any case, Abokali recently started her own business called Organic Nagaland .  As you can guess, they specialise in organic produce from Nagaland - given that artificial fertilisers and pesticides are practically non-existent in most parts of the state, it's not hard to find quality 'organic' produce here. However, it is difficult to transport and store the produce given the lack of infrastructure (such as good roads and constant electricity). Yet somehow she's managed to source local produce like oranges and kiwi fruit (which don't require refrigeration) and market it at recent agriculture expos in Bangalore, Delhi and now Guwahati. In the process, she's also rallied together local farmers, particularly women, and given them a source of income. The main shop (I'm calling it her flagship store) is in Project...

Last year at the Hornbill Festival I bought a wood plate ( asükhu in Sumi) and tried to send it to Singapore . The parcel was never delivered, even though I paid for registered mail at the India Post office here in Kohima. Why? They didn't give me the customs forms to fill in, and it didn't occur to me at the time either (you expect post offices to know this sort of stuff). And this was the state in which the parcel was sent back to my friend's address. The packaging had never been good to begin with, but the cloth looked filthy and the box was bulging more than when I sent it off. On opening the parcel, I found the sides of the plate had chipped. So I bought a new, slightly smaller, wood plate at this year's Hornbill Festival. It was nicer than the one I bought last year but this is more ornamental because the top surface is polished, as opposed to last year's one which one could still eat out of. I then walked around NST Road looking for cellophone, ban...

So I'm stranded in Kohima for the foreseeable future. My ride from Zunheboto never materialised, but at least I'm not in a hurry anymore. I was originally meant to go to a village called Chishilimi tomorrow to watch them perform a traditional rain invocation ceremony (although it's an odd time of year to do it). Also, getting around the state in hired vehicles at this time of year is an absolute nightmare because everyone's going home for Christmas, including people living outside the state as well as people finishing their Christmas shopping in Dimapur. In the meantime, to mark the fact that I'm not moving out of Kohima, I thought I'd post some photos from when we drove from Zunheboto to the village of Khetoi and few weeks back to watch some of the villagers rehearse for the Hornbill Festival. We had to descend into the Tizu River valley, then come up again towards the town of Aghunato, following the road to Kiphire, which is the main town of the district ...

I'm meant to be going down to Dimapur at some point today, if my ride from Zunheboto actually comes to pick me up from Kohima. (We're meant to be picking up some people in Dimapur before heading back to Zunheboto tomorrow.) Anyway, to mark my potential arrival in Dimapur on a Sunday, I thought I'd share some pictures that I took 2 weeks ago when I was in Dimapur. (It's pretty photo-heavy, so apologies to people with a slow internet connection.) The friend I was staying with in Dimapur brought me to the Sunday market just outside Dilai Gate on the road to Diphu, which technically means it's in Assam, not Nagaland. There's a sign that says 'A K Market' but most of my friends (even the ones in Kohima) know it as the Dilai Gate Market. It's pretty much strewn next to the side of the road, which happens to be a national highway... At the market, you can find your usual vegetables. Gourds. Local varieties of ginger and garlic. And little ...