Go India: Melosina Lenox-Conynghamgrew up hearing about her aunt's time in Nagaland, a remote Indian state where life had barely changed in 5,000 years. She jumped at a chance to track down some of the startling traditions of its past
THOUGH THE NAGA people at the time were notorious as headhunters, my aunt tramped through their hills, in the northeast corner of India, in the 1920s. This was not so daring as it sounds, for she was escorted by an entourage of 55 men, including one to carry the cook’s black cotton umbrella and the kettle.
My aunt, who was accompanying the political agent on his official tour of the state of Nagaland, described how they would start at dawn, while the valleys were thick with mist, to follow the trail through the thick jungle of bamboo, banana and elephant apple twisted with lianas and decorated with orchids, begonias and tree ferns. They traversed mountain ranges and crossed rivers by bamboo bridges that swung wildly as they walked.
Entranced by the thought of this remote, inaccessible place, I snatched an opportunity to go there.
This part of India is politically sensitive, as it borders Burma and has not always maintained a peaceful relationship with the federal government, in New Delhi. Nagaland has some peculiar visa regulations. Only parties of at least four or couples who have been “properly” married may visit.
Once inside, you learn that this inaccessible mountain region is inhabited by a tribal people whose way of life survived unchanged for 5,000 years. It has 16 major tribes and many subtribes, each with its own language and customs. Taking a head, for example, was believed to confer on the taker the magical forces inherent in the skull, as well as prosperity, fertility and wealth on his village. The Nagas were very nice to the heads, and for the first year they fed them with rice beer, hoping to persuade them not to seek revenge from the afterlife.
Alas, we were not as intrepid as Aunt Cicely, whose 300km trek lasted two or three weeks. We were picked up by two Land Rovers at the airport at Guwahati, in Assam, where we had flown from Calcutta.
My four companions, who except for one were grandmothers or, in my case, a great aunt, were exceptionally experienced travellers. We all wanted to see tribal customs that are now under tremendous pressure from the outside world.
Our first stop was in Ziro, in Arunachal Pradesh, where we attended a ceremony for the marriage of an Apatani couple. The women from the village and its neighbours arrived with baskets suspended from bands across their heads. The baskets were filled with the gift of husked rice. In the early morning, with the sun just risen, they walked in a long, colourful procession on the narrow bunds that terraced the rice fields.
The baskets were emptied into a granary, and then we went to the feast. I picked fussily at pieces of a piglet that had been sliced up nose to tail and then boiled, bones and all. In spite of my care I ate a raw chilli, which set me skipping in agony to the surprise of my travelling companions, who asked how much rice beer I had drunk, while the feasters, who had downed a lot of rice beer themselves, were delighted by my activity. They clutched my hands and we danced in a long line, singing a repetitive song.
The Apatanis are known for the beauty of their women – so much so that neighbouring tribes took to kidnapping the girls for brides. To make the women unattractive, large wooden plugs were put in each side of their noses and their faces were tattooed. I suppose it worked: most older women were disfigured in this way; those under 30 had given up the practice.
The people of Nagaland look far more Burmese than Indian – indeed, I crossed a room one day and was in Burma. The houses of the Nagas, particularly the Noctes and the Konyaks, are long palm-thatched sheds that stand on stilts. In front of each house is a platform where people gossip and where the women weave thick cotton thread into lengths of cloth that they wear as sarongs or shawls, in the tribal patterns and colours.
Traditionally, some villages are governed on republican principles, others through hereditary chiefs or anghs. In one village an endearing notice read: "The Chief Angh's Residence." We joined him and the village elders around an open fire on the floor to admire a display of horns, skins, skulls, spears and shields that hung from the smoke-blackened rafters.
With hardly a flicker of disappointment at having to turn away from the cricket on a television in the corner, he showed us his traditional head-dress, a skimpy beret of bearskin, decorated with the tusks of a boar, that is tied on under the chin.
Most of the older men have tattoos on their faces and bodies, and many wear the tips of goat horns in the lobes of their ears (which is useful for carrying tobacco, apparently).
Each village has a morung, an imposing building with a soaring thatched roof that used to be a dormitory and meeting place for young men and boys. We looked up at its collection of human skulls. They looked pretty old and dusty, grinning from their shelves. Headhunting was still said to be carried out in the 1990s, but government disapproval and the influence of the Baptist Church have suppressed the practice.
Besides the skulls, the morungshouse the ceremonial drum, a hollowed-out tree trunk that the men beat with sticks to make a curious throbbing sound.
The buildings' wooden pillars are carved with animals, particularly tigers, monkeys and snakes, as well as sometimes sexually explicit carvings of men and women – the Nagas had very liberal views towards sex before marriage, and the men were allowed to visit the unmarried girls in their morungs.
The few roads in Nagaland are impressive feats of engineering as they wind up and around the steep hills; the annual monsoon often washes away the surface, which makes for a bumpy ride. We saw little traffic except for buses and huge colourful lorries decorated with such biblical aphorisms as “The Lord Is the Way” or “In God We Trust”.
Every village is dominated by a church – if not several, as the Pentecostal, revivalist and Roman Catholic Churches all have their adherents. Baptists predominate, however, making up three-quarters of Nagaland’s two million people. American Baptists came here 150 years ago, and now this is the largest Baptist community in the world, sending missionaries not only to neighbouring Indian states but to Africa. Our guide’s brother was a missionary in Zambia.
On Sunday the church I attended in a Konyak village was packed. The choir sang; five men played guitars; a middle-aged woman said a passionate extemporary prayer; and the congregation listened intently to several lengthy homilies.
One morning, while we were staying in the village of Mopungchuket, a ghetto blaster was turned on outside our window at 5am for half an hour of community hymn singing.
It was meant to be a tourist hostel, but there seemed to be few of us around. Each little cement cell was carefully numbered, and there was one locked door labelled Conference Room.
Another night we stayed in a luxurious bungalow that had belonged to tea planters. It had white pillars, deep verandas, chaises longues and portraits of the former owners leading racehorses or photographed with dead tigers.
Kohima, the capital, sprawls over steep hills. During the second World War Japanese troops besieged the town, but the Nagas in the surrounding countryside remained loyal and, acting as spies and messengers, offered no support to the Japanese, who ran out of food and were defeated. Now there is an immaculate war cemetery, with a panoramic view over the countryside.
A monument to an earlier battle stands in Khonoma, where the Nagas defended themselves against the British army in 1879.
From the memorial, at the highest point in the village, we looked down on a lacework of rice terraces and across to the hills that protect the Dzukou Valley, which is immortalised by Vikram Seth in his book Beastly Tales from Here and There.
Decorating the exterior of the houses, clusters of sky-blue orchids, or exotic creamy yellow ones, look like hundreds of butterflies gathered together. More than 350 species of wild orchid grow here.
Men and women, though mostly women, were returning from working in the fields and the forest. The beautifully woven baskets on their backs were filled with heavy loads of grain, firewood or the thick bamboo canes that are used to hold water. They laughed and smiled at us as they wended their way effortlessly up the steep hillside and we, hot and sticky, went back to our Land Rovers.
How to plan a trip, and where you'll stay
Our 14-day tour was organised by Jungle Travels India, in Assam (00-91-361-2602223 or 2602186, www.jungletravels india.com). It arranged our flights from Calcutta to Dibrugarh and, on the return, from Dimapur to Calcutta. It also organised accommodation and food, plus transport in two air-conditioned Land Rovers for the five of us. Our accommodation in Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland ranged from luxurious "heritage bungalows" to basic rooms with a bucket of hot water for washing. The tour cost €1,300, including taxes and a permit to enter Nagaland as part of a party of at least four people. The best time to visit is from October to May.
I spent my two nights in Calcutta, on the way to and from Nagaland, at the Tollygunge Club (00-91-033-24732316, 24734539 or 24734741, roomreserve@tollygungeclub.org, www.tollygungeclub.org), which cost €50 a night.
Go there
British Airways (www.ba. com), Air India (www.airindia. com) and Jet Airways (www. jetairways.com) are among the airlines that fly from London Heathrow to Calcutta. Aer Lingus (www. aerlingus.com), BMI (www. flybmi.com) and British Airways fly to Heathrow from Dublin, Cork, Shannon and Belfast.