The dancers are young and barefoot. 20 to 30 of them in red headresses with a single feather and wearing black tunics with elaborate cowrie shell decorations. They are also adorned with what look like boars’ teeth around their necks and circular brass plates over their groins. These dancers of the Yimkhiung tribe are demonstrating one of their celebratory dances outside their morung, communal house with a wonderfully thatched roof and dangling corn-cobs.
This is the Yimkhiung compound in the Naga Heritage Village in Kisama, just outside the capital of Nagaland, Kohima. The Yimkhiung, from the east of the country, are one of the 17 recognised tribes in Nagaland, each with a compound of traditional structures in the Heritage Village. An 18th tribe, the Garo, are also included in the Cultural Village, although they migrated here from Burma and Manipur to the south. Alongside the morungs, each with their own distinctive style, there are stalls for local food - smoked pork with fermented soya beans or bamboo shoots is popular - as well as rice and millet beer and wine served in bamboo mugs. Local crafts are on display as well.
This is the location of the Hornbill Festival, held in Nagaland, India from December 1-10 each year. They say it’s the largest festival in India and indeed it goes on for 10 days.
Nagaland is one of seven small states, known as the ‘seven sisters’ in the far northeastern corner of India, east of Bangladesh. Bordering Myanmar, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh are as far east as you can go in India. It feels like a world apart from the rest of the country. There is virtually no Hindi script to be seen - the many local languages are written in Roman letters and English is a common language - and 90 percent of the population is
Christian.
Historically, the tribes here were rivals, even enemies and, until the arrival of American and European missionaries in the 19th century, headhunting was practiced. The last reported headhunting amongst the Konyak tribe, in the north of Nagaland, was as recently as the 1960s. There are still cultural ‘memories’ of headhunting with heads depicted on village gates or skulls (of animals) displayed in the morung. The fierce history of the Konyak is certainly not evident in their compound which was one of my favourites places to go and enjoy a millet beer.
All of the ethnic groups have their own celebrations throughout the year, but they combine at the Hornbill Festival, always held from December 1-10, no matter the days of the week. Named after the spectacular local bird, nowadays pretty hard to see, this last festival was the 26th and it provides an easy way to witness the music and culture of each of the tribes in one location with local performers alongside international acts. “Hornbill Festival is primarily a tourism project,” says Theja Meru, Chairman of the Task Force for Music and Arts (TaFMA) who organise the event, “to showcase the the rich culture of the 17 tribes, to the entire world.”
Hornbill takes place in a newly built arena adjacent to the Cultural Village. There is banked seating, a central circular plaza and a large stage with screens for the big presentations. For the opening, groups from all 18 tribes are lined up in traditional costumes and are already performing in the central arena. There are a number of speeches from local politicians and guest-country ambassadors, but once it gets underway, the opening show is a spectacular mixture of music, choreography and visuals involving 450 performers. The rich iconography of the tribal architecture, the horns of the mithun buffalo (the state emblem) and the
hornbill crop up again and again. The show is clearly based on tribal music and ritual but brought into a compelling 21st century format.
[It was a specially formed Irish group named Boínn, largely drawing on members of The Mary Wallopers, that had to follow the opening show, no easy task. But the lively four-piece group of vocals, violin, banjo/guitar, uilleann pipes and concertina changed the mood entirely and got the audience doing a long conga dance around the arena. The other spectacular international group was the Japanese taiko group Drum Tao featuring a woman performing on their massive horizontal drum and a brilliantly choreographed routine featuring not only drums, but flutes and plucked shamisens.]
For many years Nagaland was a region of insurgency and foreign visitors were only admitted in 2000 - since when the Hornbill Festival has been a part of integrating Nagaland into mainstream India. “Hornbill Fest brings India closer to Nagaland and closer to the northeast and vice versa,” says Abu Mehta, advisor to the Chief Minister of Nagaland. “And it promotes this culture to the international community. People are often shocked,” he chuckles, “it’s not the Indian culture they expect and it hasn’t been exposed enough.”
Obviously, the Cultural Village at Kisama is a touristic curation - a bit like the Sarawak Cultural Village where Malaysia’s Rainforest Festival is held. But a great place to see a ‘living’ tribal village is Khonoma, which put up a brave fight against British colonisers (1850-79), has been central to the insurgency movement in India and is now described as the first green village in India, relying on its sustainable agriculture. Kohima, the capital, Kisama, the Cultural Village, and Khonoma are all in Angami territory, home to one of the largest of Nagaland’s ethnic groups. All Angami place names end in -ma.
The
villages are always on a hill - for defensive purposes - and Khonoma overlooks fertile rice paddies that are also used for garlic and mustard. The village houses are now all concrete with corrugated iron roofs, but there are still morung communal houses in the village, where the young men meet, and a ceremonial area for village ceremonies. There are striking monuments outside the town in support of those who resisted Nagaland’s integration to India.
During the Hornbill period there’s also the annual stone-pulling of the Angami tribe taking place in Tuophema this year. Hundreds of men are lined up with four ropes. They are all dressed in traditional costume - feathered headdresses, decorated scarfs and loin-cloths, but all wearing trainers. At the end of their ropes is a huge stone - the size of one of the uprights at Stonehenge. It’s attached to a wooden platform on which it is to be pulled. None of the participants I spoke to knew about Stonehenge, but the Angami do indeed have a megalithic culture. Many of the villages have large stone gates, monuments to significant people or events or to mark the anniversary of the local church. But while the trilithons of Stonehenge were erected around 4500 years ago, the Angami have only been here for around a thousand years.
But witnessing the stone pulling made me realise that it’s not just about the logistics of the people, the ropes and the platform. But whole sense of ritual around the event. Women arrive with baskets on their backs with refreshments, there are speeches and there is a vocal limbering up with the pullers alternating between two notes and others shrieking as the note changes. The Angami are joined by teams from three other local tribes to help, the Sumi, Rengma and Chakhesang. In the old days they would have been enemies, of course. The master of ceremonies
announcing the event makes much of the four tribes coming together to achieve a common aim. Indeed the motto of Nagaland is unity through diversity and this stone-pulling ceremony, which takes places in a different Angami village each year, is surely a symbol of that. The chanting builds up to a huge climax, celebratory shots are fired and then the pulling begins.
The ropes go taut and with immense grunts the pulling starts. Pull, pull, pull. But nothing moves and they are told to relax. Another attempt, but still no movement. For the third attempt a JCB is summoned and nudges the stone from the end. A friend who has participated previously reckons there was a miscalculation with the numbers of pullers and the size of the stone. He shows me great videos from previous years when a stone was moved smoothly and successfully with just muscle power alone. So this one was slightly disappointing, although the ceremony was still kind-of spectacular.
Back at the Hornbill Festival, during the day, the arena features carefully curated performances by all 18 tribes lasting three hours from 11.00 till 14.00. Each tribe does just one piece and it varies day to day, so it’s a bit of a lottery what you get. But the performances vary from traditional songs and dances - a harvesting song from the Yimkhiung, a warrior dance from the Konyak, a tiger hunt from the Ao, and a kind of dramatisation from the Phom of their migration from their ancestral homeland to their current home. Most of the Naga tribes are thought to have migrated to Nagaland from southern China in various waves and started to arrive in their present territory from the 10th to 12th century CE.
Musically, the most impressive piece was the Kachari’s ‘Bagurumba’ (Butterfly) dance featuring an ensemble of bamboo flutes, a bowed sarinda-like instrument and long dholak drums. A group of female dancers in orange and green with red wing-like shawls did a graceful dance which clearly
gives the butterfly dance its name.
These morning performances at Hornbill are a great way to hear the pure traditional music. But it doesn’t work so well in a large arena, it’s clearly meant for much more intimate circumstances, which is where the morungs of the Cultural Village come in.
They are not scheduled, so it’s a bit hit and miss, but wandering round the various morung you can encounter music and ritual dances close-up. I saw spectacular dances amongst the Yimkhiung and Khiamniungan tribes, who both have impressive tribal outfits. But it’s the Kachari who play the most appealing music.
The Kachari are based around Dimapur, the commercial hub and where the Nagaland airport is. Dimapur - literally meaning ‘great town on the river’ - was their capital, established in the 10th century. And there are spectacular carved stone monoliths of the Kachari Kingdom dating from the 16th century. The designs are mostly abstract, arches and circular ‘sun symbols’, but there are also carvings of animals and birds. There was clearly a sophisticated civilisation here.
The Kachari monoliths - looking like giant haystacks - are depicted on the front of their morung in Kisama. And there I was delighted to find their musicians ready to play. Much of the tribal music is rather simple chanting and drumming, but the Kachari have a rather more sophisticated musical culture with ensembles of bamboo flute (sifung), bowed four-string sarinda (serja) and dholak double-headed drum (kham). These were played for dances as well as accompanying the women singing - and the group makes an exquisite sound.
What’s pretty annoying in the Cultural Village however, is the obsession with selfies. Seemingly everybody HAS to have themselves photographed next to someone in tribal costume - or getting themselves dressed in tribal costume. I ask one of the Kachari musicians if he gets fed up of the endless posing. “We are very happy to promote our culture of which we’re very proud,” he says dutifully. But he ultimately agreed the selfies were a bit of a pain. And another quite irritating tribal speciality is small firearms, in which they are quite adept. So while you are sitting with a tasty local snack of snails or silkworms hoping to hear some local music with a rice beer, there is the constant sound of rifles fired into the air - with blanks at least - but the sound is quite alarming. The atmosphere isn’t as relaxing as it might
be. Kisama is about 1500m above sea level and in there evening the temperature drops. It’s great for the sale of tribal shawls - the most popular are those of the Ao tribe, usually in red and black. They become like a uniform for visitors in the arena or in the moorings eating local food and drinking rice beer.
In a way, Hornbill Festival is like two festivals in one. During the day it’s the traditional tribal music in the arena or Cultural Village and in the evening a festival of Indian rock and pop bands who compete at the Ticket to Hornbill competition in October to win a chance to play at the festival. The bands are mostly standard rock format of vocals, electric guitar, electric bass, keyboards and drums with singing in English. Alongside, there are the bands of the international partners, so last edition there were bands from Ireland (Friends of the Mary Wallopers), France (Agniva), the UK (Scottish accordionist RuMac), Japan (Drum Tao), and Korean pop band Mong Doll.
“I’m on a mission,” says Theja Meru. “The vision is to help Naga artists be at the the forefront of the music business and entertainment.” That meant that two evenings were curated and supported by Spotify India to present independent Indian bands. A commendable project to make this festival relevant to 20th century India.
But for folk music fiends, the primary interest is the tribal music. Of course, it still exists in the local tribal festivals, but Hornbill is the most accessible place to hear it in all its variety and the experience is thrilling. The log drums, the vivid music in the morungs, the roasting pig over the fire and the frothy punch of the rice beer makes Hornbill an experience like nowhere else.
Simon Broughton
Tags:
I Luoghi della Musica