Consonant Aspirations - Archive

As I prepare to leave India again (this time to spend Christmas at home with the family for the first time in years), I thought I'd share some photos from a visit to another friend's village in Nagaland. Like Khonoma village that we also visited, Khuzama is an Angami village. You can tell it's an Angami by the suffix -ma (corresponding to Sumi village names that end in -mi ). However, most Angami speakers seem to replace the -ma with -ra / -rie  when they refer to the villages in speech. While Khonoma is a Western Angami village, Khuzama is one of the Southern Angami villages situated on the highway between Kohima and Imphal in Manipur. It's also the last Angami village before you reach the state border with Manipur and the start of Mao territory. The Maos (not to be confused with Maoists) are another related tribe. Linguistically, Southern Angami dialects are so different from Tenyidie (standard Angami based on Northen Angami) that they might constitute a differen...

Two years ago I visited Khonoma village, which is about 2 hours from Kohima (depending on road conditions). Unfortunately, the day I visited was terribly foggy and it was hard to see anything (see here ). This time, I visited again shortly after the Hornbill Festival. Thankfully the weather was much better, since I also came with a friend from Australia who may not have another chance to come back. Now, there are some friends who don't feel that Khonoma needs any special mention or recommendation. Even among my Angami friends, people from Khonoma are often perceived as being particularly proud, arrogant even. The village itself is famed for its defiance of the British which culminated in the Battle of Khonoma in 1879 that resulted in the deaths of a number of British soldiers. The villagers even manufactured their own guns, based on models acquired in the plains of Assam. This particular gun required two people to hold it up, while a third person loaded i...

So the Hornbill Festival at Kisama has come and gone. This year I brought a friend from Australia along to enjoy the festivities. After my experiences at the festival last year and the year before, I didn't really want to spend all week in Kisama, since many of the shows start to feel repetitive after a few days. I thought it'd be best if we arrive on the 4th day for the last few days, then stay back a few more days to enjoy some of the sights around Kohima when most of the other tourists would have moved on. I think it was a good decision (as I sit here typing this in our now empty guest house). My friend quite enjoyed the whole event, which his colleague in Melbourne had described last year as 'better than National Geographic', which makes me laugh a little. Sadly, in this post I won't be waxing lyrical about the festival, but would like to point out a few things that made me quite unhappy and in the process, perhaps raise a few questions about the future of t...