Angami Naga

In his seminal text The Angami Nagas, British colonial administrator-ethnographer J.H. Hutton noted that “of all forms of second sight, dreaming is the favourite and the best. The Angamis have almost
a science of dreaming” (1921, 246). Indeed, interpreting umho (the dream), or simply mho (dream, dreams, or dreaming), was an important part of everyday social life among the Angami in the early 20th century. A century later, despite significant changes (including widespread conversion to Christianity, globalization, and political conflict), dreams continue to be important among the Naga.

The proposed paper is a case study of the spirit practices at Khonoma village of Nagaland. This village is mostly inhabited by the Angami Nagas who have been Christianized. However, the remnants of their actual belief systems often misconstrued as ‘animism’ still shape their everyday performativity. Spirits are thus a contemporaneous reality for most inhabitants of the village. They have designated spaces, associative materiality, ritualistic presence, and specific categorization. The term ‘spirit’ has been used in this
paper in its broad category to encompass a wide range of ostensibly non-physical entities like forest spirits, ancestor spirits, spirits of lovers, spirits of heroes, spirits of enemies, animal spirits, evil spirits, and even one’s own soul as a freewheeling spirit. There is a long list of prohibitions or gennas to deal with them. The villagers are also engaged in a contestation with the spirits to show the superiority of man over supernatural. Besides, some noble gestures are attributed to spirits and they are revered for the same. Spirit possession is a reality for them and there are specialized shamans to rid the afflicted person of the evil spirit. Sometimes, the spirit has a mind of its own and wanders away leaving the person listless and it has to be coaxed back to re-enter the person it left. At other times, there is a duality of spirits especially in the case of tekhumiavi or the Naga Tiger-Man. While this paper proposes to highlight spirit culture in Khonoma village, at the same time, it also aims to find meanings in these formulations and constructions. The three basic questions, which this paper would grapple with, are: Firstly, does the Khonoma spirit world reflect a way of pseudo-scientific enquiry and explanation for the phenomenon not understood by the inhabitants? Secondly, is the spirit world simply an abstraction of human mind? Thirdly, do we accept spirits as an essential part of the Angami Naga life at Khonoma (with or without accepting or discrediting their existence) and try to decipher the meanings the locals accrue from them? In conclusion the paper tries to envisage a macro history of the region by locating spirit world and its continued functionality as a challenge, a resistance, a survival of the indigenity of this village with the onslaught of modernity which most famously brought Christianity to this village. The spirit world in this sense is a relic of the past, which needs to be maintained irrespective of its truth claims because its agenda is much bigger.