Reading the Ao-Naga Folksongs: Rewriting the Custom of Head Taking

Abstract

Besides the transformation brought to the Naga Hills by colonization and American missionaries, the subsequent colonial documentation/ representation of the community has been of academic and scholarly interest in the recent years. Naga Hills were turned into a field of study. The literatures of the colonizing cultures distorted the experience and realities of the Nagas and portrayed them as inferior. The literatures framed the mindset of the readers to see the Nagas as chaotic, irrational and primitive, savage and effeminate people while the colonizers as ordered, rational and masculine. This article aims to focus on the Naga custom of taking heads that served as the important foundation of the ancient Naga society. The Nagas in the colonial literatures by and large are famously known for their “headhunting” tradition. This custom has given them a widespread notoriety in the colonial documentary records and in the neighbouring valleys. In fact, no tribe has a more established reputation for “headhunting” than the Nagas and even today Nagas are strongly associated with the term “head-hunters” by other ethnic groups. At present,, this practice may sound “barbaric” and “savage” but this game of glory was a part and parcel of every Naga village and was a serious business where the social, economic, political and other significant aspects of the lives of Nagas were tightly interwoven to this custom. However, the invading, “cultured” colonial Euro-Americans promoted the image of “headhunting” as a cruel and barbarous practice. The standards of “evaluation” deployed by the ethnographers which was not really an anthropologist’s array was not just. The ancient Nagas practised decapitation to serve a different purpose. Here, the intention is not to defend head-hunting” as a practice, but to provide a socio-historical perspective of it from within, from the perspective of the Nagas.