Naga Hills · Northeast Hill Massif
Dance
Lines of men in full shawl and headgear advancing with dao and spear to a shouted call-and-response and a stamped rhythm, with a leader's cry answered by the group. Every community has its own version and they are not interchangeable; the differences are in the footwork and the shout, not the costume.
Performed by: Men, by community. Occasion: Festivals and public receptions
A household that had accumulated grain and mithun could give a graded series of feasts to the whole village, earning the right to new shawl designs, house horns and carved posts. The pulling of a memorial stone or a log drum into the village was done as a mass rhythmic haul with its own song cycle. The institution redistributed surplus and converted it into status — a wealth-levelling machine with a textile receipt.
Performed by: Whole village. Occasion: When a household gives a Feast of Merit
Circling and line dances performed through the six days of the Konyak spring festival, the men in full ornament, the women in bead collars, with songs that mark the turn from sowing to waiting.
Performed by: Konyak men and women. Occasion: Aoleang Monyu, early April
The Angami purification festival's public half — processional singing and dance after the private household rites, with the young people's Thekra Hie day given over to song.
Performed by: Angami. Occasion: Sekrenyi, February
Rhythms taken from work — the paddy pounding table, the clash of bamboo — turned into set dances, in the same way as across the massif to the south.
Performed by: Women. Occasion: Harvest and festival
Music
Naga singing is unusual in India for being genuinely polyphonic — two or more independent vocal lines, often with a held lower drone, rather than a melody with accompaniment. This is why four-part Baptist hymnody took root so completely from the late nineteenth century: the choral habit was already there, and the hymnal supplied notation for it.
The Chakhesang folk-song repertoire in Chokri — courtship, harvest, ancestry and lament, sung in interlocking parts and usually accompanied by the tati, a one-string bamboo-and-gourd fiddle. The Tetseo sisters of Phek have carried the form onto record and onto stage.
A whole tree trunk hollowed into a canoe shape, up to ten metres long, housed beside the morung and beaten with pounding sticks by several men. It was signalling equipment before it was music — different rhythms announced a death, a raid, a fire or a feast — and it is the largest single object in the material culture.
Mouth organs, flutes, trumpets and the bamboo mouth harp, all cut locally. The Ao musician Moa Subong's bamhum, a bamboo wind instrument invented in the 2000s, is a rare modern addition to the family.
Nagaland runs one of India's densest live-music economies relative to population, with church-trained singers, a state music task force and the Hornbill Festival's rock contest as the annual clearing house.
Theatre
The morung, the bachelors' dormitory, was the theatre as well as the school: genealogies, migration accounts, village histories and song cycles were transmitted orally there, at night, by elders to boys sleeping in the same building. When the institution declined the repertoire lost its venue, and most of what survives was written down between the 1920s and the 1970s.
Modern staged representation of village life — mock hunts, feast sequences, war dances — performed at Kisama and at community festivals. It is a genuine form with its own conventions, and it is not the same thing as the ritual it depicts.
Crafts
The foundation craft of the region, worked almost entirely by women at home. Only the Chakhesang shawl currently holds a geographical indication; the rest of the repertoire is unprotected, and machine-made copies of restricted designs are a standing grievance among weavers.
Material: Cotton, and now acrylic yarn. Technique: Back-strap tension loom — one end tied to a post, the other to a belt around the weaver's waist, tension set by leaning back. Warp-faced striping, supplementary weft for motifs, and hand-seaming of narrow panels into a shawl.
Registered as a geographical indication in 2017 on an application by the Chakhesang Women Welfare Society — the first and so far only Naga textile to be protected.
Material: Cotton. Technique: Warp-faced loin-loom weaving to a fixed repertoire of striped designs.
Morung and village-gate carving in mithun heads, hornbills, tigers, warriors and human figures, in a flattened frontal style. Konyak carving is the most sought after, and the trade has moved to portable pieces for buyers.
Material: Hardwood. Technique: Adze and chisel carving of house posts, morung facades, doors and figures.
Baskets graded by function — head-load carrying baskets with a tumpline, grain stores, fish traps, shields, rain shields, chair frames — plus the cane leggings worn as ornament. The Diezephe craft village near Chumoukedima is the organised cluster.
Material: Bamboo, cane. Technique: Split-and-plait construction without nails or glue.
Naga Mircha holds a geographical indication registered to the state's horticulture department. It was certified in 2007 as the hottest chilli then measured, at over a million Scoville units, and cultivator groups have since been authorised as registered users of the tag.
Material: Capsicum chinense. Technique: Sun-dried, smoked over the hearth, or made into paste and pickle.
The dao — a heavy single-edged blade used to clear jhum, butcher, build a house and, historically, to fight — is the one tool a household cannot do without, and village smiths still make and re-temper them.
Material: Iron. Technique: Forge, anvil and water quench, with a bamboo or hide double-piston bellows.
Old bead strings were high-value property, exchanged as bride-price and inherited. The brass head pendants of the Konyak are the most recognisable single ornament in the region.
Material: Carnelian, glass and shell beads; brass. Technique: Stringing, lost-wax and beaten brass work.
Both hold geographical indications — the tree tomato registered in 2015, the cucumber in 2021, both on applications by the regional agricultural marketing corporation. They are the region's other two protected products alongside the chilli and the Chakhesang shawl.
Material: Cyphomandra betacea; local cucumber landrace. Technique: Jhum-plot cultivation without irrigation.
The dance, music, theatre and crafts of Naga Hills, from classical forms to village traditions. (20)