‘Naga youths too busy for jobs instead of culture’

Our Correspondent
Kohima, Sep. 24(EMN): The young generation is too busy acquiring modern skills than being interested in the Naga people’s cultural heritage, says Anungla Aier, retired director of the department of Higher Education.

Aier was speaking at the two-day national seminar, ‘Kelhou Zho-Cultural heritage among the tribes of Nagaland: Balancing Tradition and Modernity,’ conducted on September 24 and organised by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, Northeast regional centre at Guwahati and the Culture Study Centre of Baptist College in Kohima.

“With modern education gaining more and more grounds, the traditional institutions that channelised the continuity of our cultural heritage are becoming rare,” said Aier, expressing concerns about how globalisation will turn ‘Naga’ into just a brand name someday ‘if we do not preserve our culture and tradition.’ She urged the academic bodies to take it forward as they have the opportunity now.

AIer stated that despite the apparent dissimilarities that exist at the conscious and visual level, ‘when we delve deeper into the significance and the thought processes behind the diverse cultural symbols, we find how distinctively dissimilar they are and not more than variation of the same themes.’ This enables the people to make a cultural connection with one another at a deeper level making the Nagas unique, the gathering was told.

‘Our people and society over the past few decades have been witnessing tremendous social and cultural changes,’ she said. She explained that contemporary culture today as a modernising and developing society is incomparable to the cultural traditions of the Naga ancestors.

She expressed her concerns over how our tradition is disappearing in the name of developemnt. “If we are to listen to any historical accounts of our ancestral past, we find that the narrative, the song tell of events associated with specific geographical landmarks. But with modernity many such landmarks are no more visible and along with changes in our geography of the landscape, the memories and the stories have also been forgotten”, she said.

Further, Aier mentioned another critical area of cultural heritage that is ‘progressively under the onslaught of modernisation in regard to the diversity of our cultural heritage’: “Closely linked with the language is not the oral tradition but also the traditional knowledge for the management of our resources and biodiversity.”

She said that today, English, Hindi and ‘Nagamese’ are becoming more important than the local dialects. She spoke about how this will lead to loss of biodiversity-based knowledge in the long run as children will fail to pick up language-based knowledge from their forefathers.

The chairman of the Kohima village council, Neiphi Kire, was the guest of honour at the event. He said that the seven Northeast states were bound together by culture and history. One activity in a region affects the other, he said. He expressed concern about ‘how our culture and tradition is disappearing.’

“We see a lot of transition in our society, we have forgotten so many traditional practices,” Kire remarked.

“We have forgotten the ‘morung life’ but this need to be revived. We need to preserve it for prosperity because without cultural roots we lose our identity,” he said.

Kire said that the elderly people in the society are the living diaries. He appealed to the researchers present at the event to research the traditions of the land with a sense of urgency.

“Sense of respecting the elders which was in our tradition should be preserved and continued,” he stated.