Reconstructing Naga History from Oral Tradition: Retrieval and Evolution

Dr. Visier Sanyü

Whether memory changes or not, culture is reproduced by remembrance put into words and deeds. The mind through memory carries culture from generation to generation. How it is possible for a mind to remember and out of nothing to spin complex ideas, messages and instructions for living which manifest continuity over time is one of the greatest wonders one can study, comparable only to human intelligence and thought itself. Oral tradition should be central to students of ideology, of society, of psychology, of art, and finally, of history.

(Jan Vansina, Oral History as History, Wisconsin, 1985, xi)

Introduction

We know of course that human beings exist in time and space. The events and experiences that make up our lives occur at some time, in some place, and work in a dynamic, interactive relationship. So, remembering is not a simple phenomenon. But being able to remember and recount what our lives are made of is central to our sense of who we are, and who we might become — both as individuals and as a people. We know, too, that the foundational categories of time and place, and the constitutive experience of becoming, occur in a complex environmental and social context we broadly refer to as culture.

Remembering and Narrating Living Cultures

Nagas have a rich repository of oral traditions, being home to hundreds of tribes and languages. They are the meeting point of the Tibeto-Burman and Indo-Aryan languages and cultures.

Each tribe has unique traditions, cultures and histories, with much still remaining to be explored. The diversity of culture, language, and traditions of Naga tribes have much to offer the world as it continues to evolve. Fortunately, we now have many competent and reflective research scholars who are tapping into this precious mother lode of stories, traditions, and oral histories. In addition, with the onset of new technology, the living cultures and ancient stories are being recorded in community events and festivals in villages across the region. These traditional ‘oral’ accounts, where our Ancients and elders speak and interact across generations, are being captured on film, including on video by everyday people even on their mobile phones and uploaded to social media as instant, virtual records. So the community has become available in new ways, and its voices reach us in multiple modes, with greater immediacy than was ever possible.

This is for the most part a positive and promising development. I opened my talk with an epigraph, a quote from the famous oral historian Jan Vansina, because his words have a bearing on the cultures of the Nagas. It was Vansina who laid the foundation for a worldwide theoretical framework for research in oral history. Let me reiterate his key idea on the relationship between memory and culture: “Whether memory changes or not, culture is reproduced by remembrance put into words and deeds.” What he says here about the pivotal role of memory, inflected by repeated narration and lived experience, is critical to keeping alive the immensely rich and diverse cultures. Until recently most of our histories and indigenous cultures existed in the form of oral tradition. We knew all along, of course, that the lives and minds of our ancestors from centuries past were continually recorded in the living memories and performative arts of the successive elders and story-tellers, and passed down the generations. So, we are receptive to modern scholars like Vansina who speak of the centrality of oral culture in human development and societal evolution as a whole. If as Vansina argues, transmittable memory is inseparable from the very workings of the human mind, then oral history to indigenous societies like the Nagas is the book of life itself. The main takeaway from both Vansina and the oral traditions of indigenous peoples is that a living culture is one that renews itself through iterative narration and progressive enactment for evolutionary growth. This is the reason behind Vansina taking his argument one step further and recommending that Oral tradition be made a component of formal education, be it the study “of ideology, of society, of psychology, of art, and finally, of history.” In short, it is to Oral culture that indigenous people owe their collective identity, hence, also, their survival and growth.

Threats to Living Cultures: Past and Present

There are serious threats to the oral traditions and the indigenous people. If oral tradition can engender and nurture its own community, as historians and indigenous cultures agree it does, then if and when an oral tradition dies, so does the community. We don’t need to recite the list of cultures that have gone extinct. Too many groups have died off altogether or have “disappeared” themselves into oblivion through assimilation. We also know that the threats to a people with a living culture can come from within and from outside forces. The people of this region have faced and continue to face threats to our existence on both levels, from the 19th century on to the present. We are living through a critical period of transition.

A ready example of internal threats — a major weakness to say the least — is tourism culture. We often hear about cultural days and events where people wear their traditional costume, dance, sing, and party in exotic make-believe villages and venues. Occasions like the annual Hornbill Festival come to mind. These festivals may serve modern-day purposes and needs, but we know they are staged shows. They are merely shadow images of our culture. There’s no harm celebrating our culture for and along with tourists, of course, provided the celebrations are manifestations of a living culture within the communities. But that would require us to ensure that what we sing and perform reflect states of being in the interior life of the community that gave birth to the songs and dances. In other words, indigenous culture has meaning and value only to the degree that its narratives and performances have lived equivalents in the community, down to the home and family, which are the basic units of any whole and cohesive society. Alternatively, at the very least, the tourism culture we exhibit for commercial consumption should help us recognize the absence of equivalency in real life and prompt critical self-examination for corrective change. 

Another ready example that comes to mind – this time of threats from outside – is what happened our villages several decades ago. The Indian Army burned our villages in 1956-58. We went into hiding in the jungle for years. We then returned from the jungle and relocated to new villages.After being displaced for so long, we experienced an unexpected social phenomenon. We went through a new cultural upheaval.

What happened to our way of life as a result of the long period of displacement and suffering merits recounting because it brought about something strange and remarkable. I can only describe it as a cultural renaissance. New songs were written; new myths and legends were created; traditions were altered, and taboos were broken out of desperation. Festivals, weddings, and funerals began to change as a result of a deep search for meaning. The physical hardships forced us to look at the world from a different perspective. Deprivation led to changes in our food, our belief system began to change, and many superstitions melted away. Many converted to Christianity during this period due to factors known and unknown to us, most beyond our control, including our inability to observe traditional rituals adequately, or observe taboos, which we were compelled to break because of the changed circumstances. For three long years the jungle gave us life and nurtured us, and forever changed us. The shock of physical and cultural disruption disoriented us. We were confused and shaken, and were desperately searching for something within and beyond that would bring healing and give meaning to our harsh and altered landscape. Our worldview was so disrupted we had to reinvent ourselves in response.

The Challenging Opportunity of Cultural Reinvention

What Nagas experienced from mid-1950s to 1970s was nothing short of cultural trauma as a result of massive physical force imposed on us from outside.

The transition for the Nagas as a whole has nonetheless been one of estrangement — a prolonged, disorienting separation from the oral roots and traditions that had nurtured us for centuries, probably longer. It is easy to observe the still unresolved struggles from the anxiety of separation in the Naga society today.  

As some of you would know, the ancient Angami Sekrenyi festival has been dead for some years now. It went through a slow death for nearly 50 years before disappearing altogether. Then recently Christian Angamis have revived the traditional festival in a new form. I attended a celebration of the newly “birthed” Sekrenyi by a church community in Medziphema.

There were a few of us present who had experienced the traditional Sekrenyi in our own lifetime. We realized that what we were observing this day bore absolutely no resemblance to our ancient festival. For me, it was a day both of mourning and of celebration. I was mourning the death of Sekrenyi, a precious and beautiful part of my Angami culture that was now forever lost. At the same time, I rejoiced and embraced the birth of this new Sekrenyi, waiting to be given a renewed lease of life. It occurred to me that I was witnessing first-hand the evolution of my culture from ancient times to the 21st century. Sekrenyi was being reinvented and given a new narrative and performative form.

Celebrations like these show that we could be in a crucial moment of cultural redefinition. Christianity is a relatively new faith in Naga history and culture. We know Christian theology and exegesis, like in other faith traditions, are coloured and shaped by culture. The indigenous peoples of the North East, particularly the hill tribes, are now Christian — a Christianity that came packaged with colonial Western culture. The early missionaries were extremely ethnocentric and convinced of the superiority of their faith, culture, and race. They forbade converts from performing traditional rituals and taking part in festivals. They were very particular about the formal signs of conversion. They urged converts to discard their native appearance by dressing in Western clothes and changing their hairstyles to make their conversion to Christianity visible, to mark their difference from their supposedly “benighted” past. These Eurocentric attitudes undermined some of the priceless values of indigenous culture, like the Naga sense of self and place within the cohort, which was intimately connected to the community’s wellbeing as a whole, alongside that of the life-giving natural ecology. The evangelical missionary attitudes also caused social disharmony in many villages and created confusion of values for generations.

Given this history, today’s Christian communities attempting meaningful cultural rebirth, like the celebration of Sekrenyi, will find the process perplexing. But we will need to ensure we do it right on two main fronts. The first is how to facilitate the transfer of the old to the new in terms of ritual changes. This will require creative imagination but will be the easy part. The harder task will be merging the best of both worlds into the renewed festivals in communities and villages which are now for the most part Christian. How do we nurture the ancient ethos of the common good back to everyday life such that our ancestors will find a comfortable home among us in the churches and the society at large? The occasional anxiety and growing pains in the transition process should not discourage us, because in the end the result will be deeply satisfying. It could become the starting point of healing for society.

Supposed Inferiority of the People of Northeast India

On the broader political front, the estrangement of this region’s indigenous societies from customary forms of government seems to be already decisive. It happened over decades. For Nagas, the disruption of traditional institutions started with India’s repression of the freedom movement and the creation of Nagaland state, along with the introduction of party-based rivalry in electoral politics, followed by political intrigue and infighting among Naga national factions. All of this has left the Nagas physically and psychologically wounded. The effects are too deep to get into at this lecture.

What is more to the point here is the current sociocultural climate in the Northeast as a whole, in relation to mainland India’s persistent domination of the region. The Central Government’s imposition of its political will has a history that includes an assumption on its part of a natural inferiority of the people compared to Indians on the mainland. The Northeast’s satellite status was put into policy by the leaders of the newly Independent Indian government back in the mid-twentieth century; it was consistently pursued by the successive Central Governments; and has now reached a new level.

The BJP government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has unabashedly ratchetted up its dominance over the region. The governance structure built around this assumption of inferiority has resulted in an outcaste-like state of national exception for the region. But the institutionalisation of inferiority has gone beyond governmental structure and policy. It has translated into forms of racism in everyday life and acts of ethnic discrimination and open violence against Northeastern people in the mainland. Over the decades, the uneven power relation has morphed into an insidious group mentality: unthinking sense of superiority on the part of mainland India and subordination fatigue for the region. Even intellectuals and professionals now seem untroubled by the naturalisation of the northeast’s status as India’s outcast region. 

Morbid Symptoms of Communities in Crisis

Colonial history is replete with chronic problems it generated among the native peoples of the world from being uprooted.  You combine close to a century, or longer, of colonial British rule of the region with another close to a century-long takeover by postcolonial India, and all of that history now culminating in the current BJP government’s feverish agenda of a monolithic India, and what you have is a perfect recipe for societal breakdown. This state of continuous control under the two dispensations of divide-and-(mis)rule have not afforded the people of this region a viable chance to work through their crises of identity. We have been consistently denied the wherewithal to make a transition from colonial to postcolonial self-rule. State autonomy and productive intra-regional collaboration are hard to come by in the northeastern part of the world’s “largest democracy.” Meanwhile, history marches on — as it has always done — and the world has become even more complicated in the 21st century. So, the people of this region have no choice but to muddle through as best as we can the political debris from several generations past, in addition to the uncontrollable challenges currently coming at us from the forces of globalization.

The depressing signs of our crisis at all areas of society (political, social, psychological, and moral) have been evident for a long time. They can be seen in the public sphere as well as in local communities and individuals across the region. Among these include: chronic micro-nationalisms, insurgencies, intra-regional rivalry, extortion by underground groups in the name of Christ and for patriotism, corruption in electoral politics, nepotism in public life, inadequate rule of law, violence, depression, alcoholism and substance abuse, loss of human dignity, so on and so forth. These are group and individual responses of a society uprooted and imposed upon by external forces, without the means to reconnect with their cultural roots for replenishment from enduring traditional values. For the people of this region, particularly the indigenous groups, the age of colonialism never ended. We have been, still are, living under what Italian political theorist and writer Antonio Gamsci said back in the 1930s about “a great variety of morbid symptoms” (Prison Notebooks, 1929-1935) that predictably attend periods of failed transitions of this nature. The people of this region are no exceptions to human frailties in the face of trauma.

Challenges and Ways Forward

How then do the Naga people recover from the history of subordination and loss, and work our way to becoming a region of diverse and living cultures, co-existing side by side in mutual cooperation in the interest of a plural society?

We face a two-faceted challenge: a monolithic national assimilationist drive on one hand and globalization on the other. And the way to meet them can be summed up in two words: retrieval and evolution. Avoiding cultural oblivion is the first step and this is done through retrieval of the old traditions. The other is evolving from the old traditions to new modes of being in the current realities of the 21st century world. 

Retrieving oral cultures:

I started out this talk with a premise, based on historian Vansina’s theory of oral culture and the existential history of indigenous societies, that the health and growth of a people are reflected in the dynamic fusion of their narrative and performative cultural repertoire that arise from lived reality. The Nagas have lost much of the traditional stories and the worldviews they gave them birth. We need to retrieval them from our archival memories, and we can do that using conventional methods as well as new technologies. The crucial thing to bear in mind is — as we attempt to reconstruct history and document culture from oral sources — accuracy of the material being recorded and integrity of interpretation we bring to that material. There is considerable responsibility in committing stories to the written record, or into video format, so the responsibility should be well considered. In pursuing oral tradition while reconstructing history and birthing the language of a new emerging culture, we must employ methodologies that are ethical, preserve human dignity, and are in search of the truth. The application of oral traditions varies from place to place. So, pursuing the study of oral culture requires that detailed work with and interviews of older generations and traditional storytellers should be diligently conducted. The stock of folk tales, legends, sayings, poems, prayers, and proverbs enrich our understanding of a society, and careful attention given to them from perspectives of an insider can urge us to pursue questions we hadn’t considered, forcing us to engage with material in new and deeper ways. Because oral traditions in Naga areas are in the process of being freshly documented, we need to be especially aware of the need for patience and discernment in this process. As I ponder this question, I am reminded of an old saying among my people: “Niaki kele tieki rei phichii mia diezelie”. Loosely translated, this means: Listen to the voice of your elders even as the sun is setting. When all seems to fade in the face of impending darkness, the wisdom of the Ancients will be your beacon. The hope lies here — in the voices of the Ancients. They are the basis for nurturing the birth of the new when the old day has waned. We need to listen to them and retrieve what we can.

Evolution: Reinventing Selves in the Present Realities.

At another level, the globally interconnected world of the 21st century requires of people everywhere to forge new alignments and collaborative relations with others near and far. We cannot begin to do these things empty handed. Every group has to bring something, offer something, to the new ventures. Only a people with a cultural identity of their own can engage in mutually beneficial relations with people different from themselves. So those ancient voices, stories, and traditions we retrieve must help us grow and evolve as a people. The process would involve renewing our society on the basis of the old in the changed circumstances of the present. Like the trickster of oral culture, we will need to acquire new skills, learn new languages and idioms, and adapt to new situations. We will have to reinvent ourselves. As we put the interior cultural life of our group in functioning order, it will be necessary to look out to our neighbours in the region, and farther out to the rest of the world. The historical trajectories of the people of the region suggest certain shared sociocultural values. They can act as guiding principles for our ever-expanding relationships. Those values come from our shared past that has taught us about the importance of social justice and human rights for all and the wellbeing of community and environmental health going forward.

Conclusion

Physical dislocation, cultural disruption, spiritual disorientation are all common human experiences throughout history. The recent history of the peoples of this region encompasses all of these situations in large measure.  What lies ahead, namely cultural reinvention and retooling, is an uncertain and arduous process, yet it must continue, because without it we fade into oblivion.  We escape oblivion by strengthening the cultural life of every culture-group, forging lasting social structures within and among the diverse groups, along with building bridges and relationships with people in mainland India, and extending lines of connection beyond the country out to the rest of the world. We do these things from a position of strength in our diverse cultural identities. We just need to work together to make it into a thriving multicultural society. The Internet and global travel are opening new lines of cross- and inter-cultural interaction with the wider world. As T. Sakhrie said, we are taking a leap, as it were, “from a distant past into the glare of the present century”.  At this juncture, from the relative isolation I reflect that we would do well to consider the journeys of our indigenous brothers and sisters from other parts of the globe, like Australian Aborigines, who have had to navigate the risks and challenges of multiculturalism and are embracing the emergence of new avatars of identity.

We can picture ourselves as a people staring down a two-lane road to a viable, thriving future. One lane is freedom from the ghosts of oppressive history — whoever they have been or may want to continue haunting us. We are a small nation with strong and diverse traditions and rich biodiversity. We have differences among us sometimes, but we should all be agreed on one thing about how to deal with dominators: We refuse to be people in any country whose government and citizenry use us to feel superior and to act as though they were. The second lane would lead every tribe to a revival of ancient traditions for holistic wellbeing, and from the strength of that foundation to evolve further out to forge relations among the peoples of this region and beyond to the fast-changing world. The potential of a culturally multifaceted, plural society that this region offers can open us to greater horizons, a wider sense of common humanity, and a shared embrace of the best in the human spirit. But travelling on the fast-track highway of monolithic nationalism and unbridled globalization is a difficult and dangerous adventure. Our values and spirit will need keen awareness and insight as we make the journey. I can hear the words of my Elders: “Kejiimia mu ketuomia ketsolie yamo shie” – He who sleeps will not catch up with the one who walks.

May we walk with our eyes open.

Lecture at the 1st Dr. P. S. Lorin Annual Impact Lecture 2024 by Dr. Visier Meyasetsu Sanyü

PhD History, NEHU

Member, Forum for Naga Reconciliation

Adviser to Naga Global Forum

President of Peace Initiatives in North-East India (PINE)

Dated: November 1, 2024