Death of my Tangsa friend

The news, when it first came, was shocking. One moment, he was sitting at the dining table having his lunch. The next moment he had collapsed onto the floor, where he died moments later. Of a massive heart attack, the doctors said. But he had never had a heart attack before although it seems he had a problem for which the doctors had recommended getting a pacemaker. But they had not said it was urgent and he had postponed getting one to the next opportune moment. Otherwise he was fine, he had given others no reason to worry about his health; he was not even 60 years old; he would walk more than 10 kms. most evenings and he led a busy and very active life. 

He was widely known and much loved and respected. The news created a storm. How could he just drop down and die like that? Of course for him it was immediate release -- the best possible kind of end. But for his friends and family, the suddenness of it all was just too much to handle. Many of his friends were still in shock. As were his immediate family. I could see that everyone was still struggling. Even if he had been ill for a few days, people around him would have had the time to come to terms with the thought of what could or might happen, but this way, there was just no warning whatsoever.

People tried to find various possible explanations for his sudden death.  True he liked to eat well, was very generous with his drinks and was rather heavy for his age and height. For the more rationally inclined all these factors and the weak heart was enough of an explanation for his death. Others spoke of destiny, of karma, of dreams and premonitions... it was clear that they were clutching onto every little straw...

All the children were far away in Guwahati when disaster had struck that afternoon; they had to travel through the night to be back home in time for the burial. All of them were still studying -- their father had not prepared them for the duties and responsibilities that lay ahead of them. For my friend had single-handedly managed an entire empire -- rice fields, tea gardens, logging and  timber, road construction, and what not... he had not taken anyone into confidence... and now he was not there to guide them to show them the way...

'He appears in my dreams every night,' his eldest son, told me, 'and he guides me about how to proceed with the problems I have. He gives me specific instructions, even tells me names of people who I should contact, tells me the names of timber factories where I should sell the logs, he is there with me all the time. He has not gone away.'

That sounded almost too good to be true. But strange things happen. And if the father was helping the eldest son to get the hang of the job that had so suddenly been thrust on him, it was all good. The elder son had the same nature as his father. Both were happy, caring and patient individuals who carried their own burden silently. The elder one had had no time to grieve or to recover. He simply had to jump in at the deep end and start doing what was expected of him. The younger son was different. It was clear he was still under shock, it seemed as if there was some grief bottled up deep inside that needed to come out before he could start getting back to normal. The daughter had already gone back to Guwahati to resume her training -- she needed to keep herself diverted and busy to be able to cope. 

People tackled their grief in different ways. The widow was still very unstable and would break into tears and start blaming herself for everything, every few minutes. She just could not accept what had happened. She was miserable and unforgiving.  'Why did I have to get up and go before him from the table that day? I feel so guilty.' She just couldn't forgive herself for what had happened, even though she knew that she would probably not have been able to prevent it, simply by her presence. After all she was educated enough to understand and appreciate the scientific reasons for what had happened.

I tried my best to help her to cope. And not keep blaming herself for everything.  But with very little success. 'I feel so angry with myself,' she continued. She was angry because all her various illnesses, the treatment for which had kept her away from him for weeks and months together, had completely vanished, or were at least under control, since he left. 'I should have been with him, and taken care of him, instead of being away getting treated for my illnesses. He was the one who needed care, not me. But I will not get a chance to do that any more...' she told me breaking into sobs yet again.

I asked about the old father who was still alive. How did he cope with the news? The old man came to Nampong on hearing the news, stayed till a couple of days after the burial and then went back to his village. He was sad but apparently all right. But the newly bereaved widow thought otherwise. 'He was not in his right mind,' she informed me. 'He kept saying that someone had shot him with a gun or with an arrow through the ears. He kept asking me look at the neck and the ears and see if I could find any marks, or if it had got blackened. He was talking nonsense. Who could shoot him in his own dining room in broad daylight like that? There were so many people around him. Would they not have seen anything? That old man seems to have lost his head after losing his eldest son.'

But something told me that there was more to the story than just that. That old man was very special. If he was asking such a specific question, there was some reason for it. It was not madness. And since my dear dead friend had married an Assamese girl, there was also a chance that she might have misunderstood something. After all, she was not a born Tangsa, although she had become more Tangsa than Assamese in those many years of living with her Tangsa husband in Nampong. 

We went to visit him in his basti a couple of days later.  He was in bed when we arrived but not because he was ill. He was close to a 100, so he did not sleep too well at night. Therefore he took short naps every now and then. But he was fit as a fiddle. And still actively caring for his own goats and chicken, besides his fields and besides doing his job as Gaonbura of his village. He was overjoyed to see me.

'Why did your son have to die so young?' I couldn't help asking. He was so wise.  But he did not take it as a rhetorical question. He replied immediately.

'Someone shot his tiger through the ears and killed it. So he had to die too.' It was all crystal clear to him. He did not sound too excited or upset. He was just stating facts, for what they were.

Suddenly I understood -- his tiger? 'Do you mean the animal that his soul resides in? How do you know that it was a tiger?' 

'I don't know for sure, but think that it must have been a tiger. He lived like a king -- and the tiger is the king of the forest.'

That was true. 'That is why I asked my daughter-in-law to check for marks on his body. If someone shoots his tiger and kills it, then he will also have to die. But there will be the wound marks on his body at the same place as where the shot or arrow entered the animal's body. But she could not find anything.'

Suddenly it all seemed to make sense. For the Tangsa believed that the soul of each person resides in an animal with which it is paired -- a snake, a chicken, a tiger, a kite,... their destinies are bound together, if one of them falls ill, so does the other, if one dies, so does the other, there are many stories of people being brought back to life by transferring the soul from a dead animal or bird to that of a live one.

Your daughter-in-law was too upset to understand what you meant, I wanted to tell him, but stopped myself. There was no point in creating this needless tension between them.  After all, they would all need to rally around one another even more closely now that the king tiger was gone and had left them to their own defenses. It seemed to me that each one had found his or her way of explaining my friend's death to himself/herself. That they did not necessarily agree on the cause was besides the point. They only needed to believe in the explanation they had found for themselves...

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Another conference on the Northeast, this time in Delhi

The Northeast is making the news in Delhi for all the wrong reasons these days; but our little conference on the Northeast titled 'Diversities and Connections: Reconsidering ethnic boundaries in Northeast India ' at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) at Teenmurti on the 6th and 7th Feb. 2014 gave us some reason to cheer.

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Back from the field again

I am writing this from Chile where I arrived after spending just three days in Volkach on my way back from India. This time I spent almost two full months in 'Tangsaland' with two weeks in Guwahati thrown in at the end. Looking back, this trip did bring a sense of closure to my whole Tangsa project, and also made me feel that it was time for me to start 'writing up' my findings for whatever they were worth. There are many things that happened but considering everything there are three aspects of this recent trip worth writing about.


The first is the fact that as far as my field work with the Tangsa is concerned, I have probably come full circle -- when one begins to hear the same stories being told again and again and the same names of people who I should meet, then it is probably time to call it a day. This was my fourth time in the field and I have now spent at least 1 + 3 + 6 + 2 months, that is more than a full year with the Tangsa. And have come to be accepted by them. The proof of that came right at the end when I heard that the Tangsa have begun to refer to me amongst themselves as the 'pagli baidew' meaning the 'crazy sister'. At first I was a bit miffed by this but then Lukam Aphu explained to me that nobody but someone crazy could physically do what I had done, and that by calling me crazy, they were not making fun of me, but just acknowledging my incredible physical capacity to go to so many different places to meet so many different people in the little time I had.

I ventured out to many new places in Arunachal Pradesh this time -- to Changlang town, to Miao, to Roing, to Renuk, ... and met many new very interesting people. The absolute high point of this field trip (and also possibly of all my trips so far) was attending the Wihu festival at Kantang village beyond Changlang town where I recorded a 'shamma' sing the Wihu song and with her singing making the 'riben' thread bend to drink rice-beer from a container and the 'sun-se-po' flower dance to her wishes. I had heard that such things happen from many Tangsa before but had never imagined that I would actually have the good fortune to see it happen with my own eyes. In Changlang I also heard of many miracles performed by the healers of the new Rangfraa faith of the Tangsa. The big moment came at the very end of my field-season when I had the opportunity of meeting the man behind this new religious movement, who many revere as Rangfraa's eldest son. More about that some other time...

Another new aspect of this trip was the widening of the range of people I met in the field and in Guwahati. Since I needed to place the Tangsa is the wider world around them I had decided this time to try to meet also other people who either lived close by or were somehow relevant -- Nepalis, Singphos, Asamiyas, as well as politicians, bureaucrats, and officials from the various oil and coal companies of that area. What they told me helped me a lot to understand the bigger picture better. And much to my surprise they turned out to be a much nicer bunch of people than I had imagined. For example, one day I called Mr Borun Bora, a retired teacher who lived in Margherita and who had written a lot about the ethnic communitities living in that area, and asked whether I could come to meet him the next morning. He readily agreed. I had not expected much, but when I arrived, not only was Mr. Bora very interested to hear about what I was doing and very keen to help in whatever way he could, he also had looked through all his books and papers and had made photocopies for me of everything he had that could possibly be relevant to my work with the Tangsa -- and all this with one night's notice and entirely at his own expense!

I also had the good fortune of meeting and spending time with Mr. Suren Barua who had worked in the office of the Assistant Political Officer at Margherita from pre-Independence times. Basing his story on meticulous notes that he had maintained throughout his service career, Mr Barua has written a splendid book 'Tribes of the Indo-Burmese Border' which is a gold-mine of information about the people of that area. Although in his nineties, Mr. Barua is still absolutely fit mentally and he happily discussed my project in detail with me and also gave me some invaluable maps of the area before I left, which he claimed he had shown no one to date. I felt so happy to have the blessings and affection of his amazing and great man. It was sad to learn that there was no one willing to republish his book, which has been long out of print, and I came away telling myself that I would try to do whatever I could to change that.

Things were not as happy once I got back to Guwahati, and my experience at trying to work in the State Archives at Guwahati, despite having friends in Dispur who could vouch for me, was nothing short of a disaster. The details some other time. But my meeting with the MLA of Margherita, which I had kept till the absolute last moment, did lead me to question the rather dark opinion I had about politicians in general. Although he was surprised that we had not met earlier, Mr. Bordoloi was very friendly, interested and eager to hear how he could be greater help to the ethnic minorities of his own constituency. Having met him and also a few very friendly and helpful government officials in Margherita and Tinsukia, not to speak of the many good friends I already have amongst the Tangsa big-shots in Arunachal, all the worries and fears I had all these years about meeting people who were in power, began to look rather foolish and misplaced.

Finally, what made this trip very special were some incidents -- some beautiful, some scary, some extraordinary -- that occured around me this time. For instance, one day I set out to visit a village called Wagun Ponthai, near Bordumsa, for the very first time. I knew absolutely nobody there when I arrived. And I stayed there for slightly less than 24 hours in all. But when it was time for me to leave, there were tears in a few eyes, my hostess had not only cooked and fed me an early lunch, she had also packed another full meal for me and my driver for the way, and in the village Rangfraa temple earlier that morning, the entire village had prayed for my well-being and safety. I came away wondering how lucky I was for where else on earth could one expect to meet with such affection and good will, all within the space of less than a day!

The most scary incident was being nearly robbed of my lap-top and a lakh of rupees in the middle of the night while travelling on the Intercity Express to Ledo. It was sheer luck that I woke up in time and was sleepy enough to dare to hold tightly on to the wrist of the robber till other passengers got up and handed the man to the police. The other very close-shave was leaving a Tangsa basti on a sudden hunch one evening and hearing that there was some serious trouble with the army and the underground ultras there just couple of hours later.

It could have been sheer luck that kept me safe and helped me avoid danger. But every time something like that happened I could not but think of what Maitu Mama had said to me one day in Nampong this time -- he told me that he believed that I had a guardian spirit taking care of me and which would keep me from coming to harm. He said that he (and also a few other old Tangsa like Lukam Aphu) has always been worried about me and the fact that I was a woman travelling alone to so many new and supposedly dangerous places. But that after he saw that vision, he felt certain that I would be okay. I do not know whether I have a guardian spirit or not, what I do know now after so many years of working with the Tangsa is that their affection, their blessings and their prayers are always with me. And they will keep me safe.


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Report on the recently concluded workshop at Goettingen

I recently organised a workshop titled ‘Performing Identity: Ethnicity and Ethno-nationalism in the South-east Asian Borderland Region of North-east India’ 15-17 Dec. 2011 at Göttingen, Germany. When I first started toying with the idea of organising a workshop in spring this year, it was mainly with the aim of connecting with scholars working on north-east India in other European universities. In its final form in mid December it grew into much more than that -- thanks to the very enthusiastic response I received from scholars from Europe, the US and India, to the generous sponsorship we received and to the immense support that was extended by Professor Lauser and her DORISEA team at the University of Goettingen. A (rather impersonal) report of the highlights follows.



The workshop was hosted by the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology in co-operation with the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen. The BMBF-funded competence network "Dynamics of Religion in Southeast Asia" at Göttingen University was actively involved in the local organisation of the workshop. The workshop was sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation, the University of Göttingen and the Asian Borderlands Research Network.

The event was inaugurated on Thursday, 15 Dec. afternoon, jointly by the Dean of the Social Science Faculty of Göttingen Univeristy, Professor Roman Loimeier and the Cultural Attaché at the Indian Embassy in Berlin, Professor H.S. Shivaprakash, who is also a professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New-Delhi. The event also included a special screening of the film ‘A Measure of Impunity’ produced and introduced by Professor Sanjoy Hazarika, a renowned media personality, columnist and intellectual from Jamia Milia Islamia, New Delhi. Furthermore, screening of two ethnographic films from the region, a book exhibition, a photo exhibition on the Asian Borderlands and a book-reading (of a recent publication: Unruly Hills by BG Karlsson) were also organised within the framework of this workshop.

The interdisciplinary workshop brought together more than forty social scientists, including several leading experts and many young researchers, from over a dozen countries and over thirty universities world-wide, working on issues of identity and ethnicity in North-east India, and provided them a platform for sharing and discussing their field-work experiences and ongoing projects, and for making contacts for future collaboration. The main speakers included Professor Barend Jan Terwiel, an established expert on the Tai-Ahoms in Assam, Professor Sanjib Baruah, a distinguished political scientist from Bard College, New York, Professor Guido Sprenger, a well-known South-east Asia expert from Heidelberg University, Professor Ülo Valk, a reputed folklorist and religion expert from the University of Tartu in Estonia and Dr. Philippe Ramirez, a distinguished anthropologist working on the region at CNRS, Paris.

Besides the five special lectures delivered by the distinguished experts named above, the 21 papers accepted for presentation at the workshop was divided thematically into 7 panels, each led by a discussant. Only one paper-presenter could not attend (due to passport problems) and his paper was read out in absentia. All the papers had been submitted earlier so that participants were expected to have read and to come prepared for the discussion. Papers on the themes politics of identity, dynamics of religious conversions, belief narratives, new approaches, performance of identity as well as on the immediate region beyond the north-east, and belonging to the disciplines of anthropology, political science, sociology, folklore and religion, history, geography and literature were presented.

The principal objective of the workshop of bringing together European scholars – both beginners and established scholars -- working on the north-east was really fulfilled as an overwhelming majority of the participants were from Europe. Since most of them were sole representatives of their home institutions, the initial assumption that European scholars working on north-east India were often working in very small groups in their departments and hence were rather isolated within their research environments was confirmed. Moreover, there were a dozen Indian scholars, about half of them actually native to north-east India, and this brought in a new dimension to the deliberations. There were many new faces, and lots of interaction between the experts and the beginners, the ones from the region and those form outside, all united by their common interest in the region.

Professor Sanjib Baruah’s talk titled provocatively ‘After Identity: Hydropower and the Politics of Anxiety in the Eastern Himalayas' in which he claimed that it is no longer ethnicity and identity issues but issues like dams, earthquakes and floods that are and will bring people from the north-east together, started the proceedings on Friday morning while Dr. Ramirez’s catchy title, ‘Did the British Really Invent the Northeastern Tribes?’ in which he maintained that the north-east forms a consistent regional system – an idea worth exploring in itself and which might form the basis of a lot of future work on the north-east -- brought up the end on Saturday afternoon. Several excellent student presentations, especially those by Kaustubh Deka (JNU, New Delhi) on the role of student organisations in ethnicity formation, by Miriam Bishokarma (Zuerich) on the Gorkhaland state demand issue, by Margaret Lyngdoh (Tartu, Estonia) on the Name Magic of the Khasis and by Andreas Kuechle (Berlin) on using Bourdieu’s theory to understand Naga village society were the highlights of the workshop. The participation of native researchers like Dr. Abraham Lotha (Nagaland) and Charisma Lepcha (Sikkim) added depth and value to the discussions and the well-researched and illuminating papers of European researchers like Dr. Erik de Maaker (Leiden) and Professor Gunnel Cederloef (Uppsala) ensured the high academic standards of the meet. Several new research projects, book projects and Ph.D. projects were also presented and discussed during the meet.On the whole, it was a great learning experience for everyone.

Of course there were also faults and shortcomings. Despite the great diversity of themes represented, some disciplines like philosophy, languages and the humanities were not well-represented. Another issue was that the workshop schedule was just too tight and the half an hour time allotted for discussions at the end of the panels was never enough to do justice to the many issues that the papers brought up. But then there was a lot of support for the single session format as it enabled people to get introduced to each other’s work. These views were expressed at the Round Table Discussion which took place just before the closing and there were many suggestions for venues and locations for the next workshop, also in India, as well as announcements of a few forthcoming conferences.

The workshop ended with the hope that this kind of initiative would be taken by others at other locations in the future and that a network of scholars working on the north-east could be formed, perhaps using the ABRN site or the Brahmaputra Studies site as the means. It was also quite a pleasure to hear that this was the very first time that a workshop focussing on Northeast India had been organised in Europe, and as the organiser, I can only hope and wish that it will not be the last.

For more on the workshop, please go to http://www.uni-goettingen.de/de/215003.html


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Another season with the Tangsa

I had planned to spend half a year with the Tangsa this time, in order to get all that I needed to start writing my dissertation. Well... in the end I did stay for six months, and I did collect a lot of material; I also made many new experiences, met many new people, visited many new places -- for what it will all be good for is yet to be seen, but being with them for so long has changed my attitude towards the Tangsa -- I'm not sure any longer that I'm qualified to talk about them. And even if I could persuade myself to do so, I don't know what I should be talking about. I guess it will take a while for me to be able to put everything into perspective -- for now let me just write up the high points and the lows during my time in the field in the last season.


I set off on Diwali evening by train from Guwahati in order to be in Malugaon in good time for the Hakhun Festival scheduled for the 8th November. The festival was a bigger affair than last time, stage-managed almost entirely by the shrewd Gaonbura, Tehon Hakhun, and his band of loyal villagers. And although their star performer, the one and only Phulim Hakhun, was not present, nobody seemed to bother too much and it did not make too much of a difference in the end. What really annoyed me was the attitude of some of the VIP guests, in this case a couple of Assamese AGP politicians, who came from Digboi to attend the festival. Their main reason for coming was of course the forthcoming elections and not any real concern for the Tangsa. But then if they had a hidden agenda, the Gaonbura was also not totally innocent either. I'll tell you why I think so before I end.

From Malugaon I went to spend some time in Chamro basti in Arunachal to talk to the amazing Gaonbura Phanglim Kimching. The grand old man is very impressive, not only because of what he has achieved in his life (and still wants to do), but also because of all that he knows, his wisdom and good sense shining through in every sentence he uttered. It was just great to have had the chance to spend a few days with him and to get him to tell me a little bit of his thoughts and views about different things. I learnt a lot about what it means to be truly brave and to take pride in being a proud Tangsa from him.

My next stop was Mokukchung in Nagaland where I met yet another larger-than-life old man, the Sema Gaonbura of Lumami village, where the campus of Nagaland University is located. This Naga gentleman was also close to a hundred, had suffered unimaginable hardships during his lifetime, but had gone on to become one of the richest people in the area. But none of all that had not touched him, it had only taught him to be generous and modest -- he told me amazing stories of what he had actually witnessed and experienced first hand during the troubled Naga years. And when one day I asked him why he trusted me, why he was telling me so much without bothering to first find out if I was a government spy, he looked straight at me and said 'I haven't grown so old for nothing, you know.' That was that. When I left he made me promise that next time I came to Mokukchung, I would stay at least three days in his house -- that will never be, for he is dead. He died after being taken ill soon after I met him and if eye-witnesses are to be believed, his funeral was the biggest anyone had ever seen in that area.

I also visited Impur where the very serene and beautifully maintained headquarters of the Baptist Mission in Nagaland is located. That was where I learnt how the British administrators (who were keen that the Nagas kept their indigneous culture even while trying to civilise them) came into conflict with the American Baptist missionaries (who wanted the Nagas to give up everything of their old ways of life when they converted to Christianity). The Baptists had started the Tangsa mission in 1972. I was surprised at how openly and easily Reverend Walling admitted that Baptist pastors in the 70s and 80s were responsible for misguiding the people to give up their own culture when they converted -- he also spoke of how the view of the church has changed in recent years and how the church was now actively playing a role in preservation of the indigenous culture of the tribal people.

At the Nagaland University I met many Naga teachers and also a few activists and leaders, and I was most impressed by their knowledge, their commitment to their own people, and also their rationality and pragmatism -- they were not just sitting there building castles in the air or blaming the central government for all that went wrong, they were actually thinking of constructive ways to go forward and of concrete steps to get out of the present impasse between the two NSCN factions. Those few days in Lumami and the week in December in Kohima were enough to assure me that Nagaland was indeed in good hands and that ther Nagas were completely able and competent to take charge of their own affairs. Of course I could sense that the Naga tribes are still pretty much divided and this big hype about Naga unity etc. is still a myth. I also did not get much of a clue about the connection between the Naga and the Tangsa more than what I already knew -- that the closest amongst the Naga tribes related to the Tangsa would be the Konyaks in the continuum via the Noctes, the Wanchos and now also the Tutsas living in the Tirap district of Arunachal Pradesh.

My next trip was to the heart of Tangsaland -- to the village of Phulbari close to the Assam-Arunachal border where I planned to spend Christmas and New Year. It was very nice to be among friends again and it felt like coming home. The Rera Tangsa in Phulbari are almost all Baptists and I tried to participate in the celebrations as much as I could. I thoroughly enjoyed going carol singing with the village youth on the evenings of the 23rd and the 24th December. I also attended the services, which were solemn occasions and longer than usual, with a lot of singing both of hymns during the service and newly-composed ones at the end. The village was nicely decorated with the church as the focal centre for all the activities. A true sense of community and brotherhood could be felt among the village people at that time with community feasts organised both on Christmas day (sponsored by the most politically active Rera in Phulbari, Molu Rera) as well as on New Year's Day with sports and games for everyone thrown in. What was remarkable was the big role played by the village youth and the womenfolk in the organisation. Feasting, praying and singing were what Christmas at Phulbari was mainly about. While there I could also really start the process of getting ready for publication a book of Rera history and stories. Sadly though, Shimo Rera, one of the village leaders who was so supportive of this project, will not be there to see the printed book -- he died suddenly early in April.

Between Christmas and New year I made a quick trip to Kharangkong, my other home in Tangsaland, to be present when Lukam Tonglum's 5th daughter, who had recently eloped with and married a Christian Tangsa youth, came home for the first time with her husband. Lukam Tonglum, the self-styled chief of the Tangsa Nagas in Assam, is perhaps one of the last upholders of the old order. It was almost tragic to see this fiercely proud old man brought to his knees by this act of defiance of his most-loved daughter. He had pinned great hopes on her and had secretly hoped that she would take on the mantle of leadership of the Tangsa at least as far as upholding Tangsa culture went. Her reason for running away was that her father would have never agreed to her marrying a Christian otherwise. He seemed to suffer not only under the hurt that his daughter had inflicted to his pride by running away but also with the worry that some harm may come to his new son-in-law who worked in the army and was posted in strife-torn Kashmir.

After attending the Wihukuh festival once again in Kharangkong I went off on a long and complicated 15 day tour of some remote areas of the Changlang district of Arunachal Pradesh -- there I learnt about the old and new forms of the Rangfrah religion, there I visited a house in which the walls of the open sitting area in front was lined with hundreds of skulls of animals of various kinds. Talking to people living in the hills beyond Manmau one could begin to imagine how life for the Tangsa could have been in the days when they still lived in the hills, with no contact with the outside world. This trip opened my eyes to all that I did not know about the Tangsa and made me realise how incomplete my analysis would be if I did not include the Tangsa from Arunachal, and perhaps by the same logic, also those Tangsa who still live across the border in Burma. To have spent three seasons in the field only to find out that one had actually got the address wrong was a feeling that I could have done well without. Anyway, it told me that I had no time to waste. The Tangsa in the more remote areas of Arunachal are more 'tribal' and their lifestyle is still quite a lot different from that of the modernised Tangsa living in the plains of Assam. But what was I was really looking for?

I was supposed to be working on Tangsa festivals -- and to that end I had already attended three different festivals plus Christmas and New Year by that stage. The state-sponsored three-day Dihing Patkai Festival that happened in mid-January was the third and biggest of them all. It was supposed to showcase the culture of all the people living in that area of Assam, and the Tangsa were only one of the several groups represented. But what culture could one hope to find in an event of that scale? Well... everything and nothing, I guess; it all depended on what one thought of as culture. For instance, our Nocte taxi driver came running up to me when he saw a group of Nocte dancers performing on stage, and exclaimed excitedly,'Baidew, look, look, that is our Nocte culture!'

And what of rituals in such a newly-concocted and multi-ethnic festival -- there was a Tipam pooja conducted in the morning of the first day of the festival to propitiate the gods of that area. I tried hard to ask around what Tipam meant, and also to figure out why that particular ritual was selected to get things going for that festival. But as is with many such questions, most of the people who were involved with it did not know very much. All I got were vague and tentative answers with nobody wanting to take responsibility but nobody wanting to appear ignorant either. I thought this reaction was quite typical of many such events that an anthropologist could want to explore in the course of one's work. But when a dreadful storm blew off the huge pandal of the festival area and wrecked havoc on all the stalls later in the day, everyone (and that included many Christian people as well) very happily claimed that there was some fault in the performance of the Tipam pooja in the morning that had angered the gods who had justifiably shown their wrath by destroying everything!

The much-hyped 'authentic' demostration of indigenous culture and way of life at that festival only left me with more questions than answers. Was I missing something? Why did it all seem not to fit? Wanting a break to figure out a few things for myself first I went to attend the NEILS conference at Tezpur, with the hope that talking to others working in the region might help me cope with my own worries better. My paper there as well as in Kohima (at the Indian Folklore Congress) earlier received a lot of response but it didn't help me sort the bigger picture. I understood that research is essentially a lonely journey, be it in mathematics, be it in anthropology. I would have to sort out by myself what to do with my festivals and what they might be good for.

From Tezpur I went on to Itanagar, the capital of Arunchal. Talking to people there I realised that though Itanagar was the capital of the state where most Tangsa lived, the two eastern-most districts of Tirap and Changlang were somewhat neglected despite being the most troubled, infested as they were with NSCN camps spilling over from neighbouring Nagaland. Being so far away from Itanagar and being so numerically weak, the Tangsa as well as the other tribes living in those two districts did not really have much say in the government of that state. But there are a couple of very high-powered Tangsa in place in Itanagar -- the state finance minister is a Kimching gentleman and he is perhaps one of the most dynamic people I met on this trip. The Chairman of the State Women's Commission is also a Tangsa -- a very outspoken and down-to-earth Mossang lady from Jairampur. Both of them cared deeply about the Tangsa and were very keen on preservation and revival of Tangsa language and culture. They were very happy to have our team join that effort and assured me of every possible help. They were also very keen that the Tangsa get better educated (for instance, the facts that there wasn't a single science graduate, nor an IAS officer from amongst the Tanga so far bothered them) and claim their place in the national mainstream.

For me, it was very good to have a chance to see how far the Tangsa have made it on the one hand while also observing how the ones who had made it still retained their strong sense of belonging and responsibility for their own community. I also understood that for the Tangsa there was only one way forward from here -- education, development, progress, modernisation,... -- they had come too far already, soon they would become like the rest of us, their difference lying only in their mostly unrecorded and soon to be forgotten past. Well... a pity maybe in some respects, but then it was their choice, and would have to be respected. After all, haven't we all made the same choice too at some point in our past. Mulling over those thoughts in Itanagar, and also while interacting first with the teachers and students at the Tribal Studies Institute of the Rajiv Gandhi University and later with many well-to-do and educated Tangsa at the residence of the Finance Minister, I realised that my attitude towards the Tangsa had changed -- that within these six months I had somehow stopped thinking of them as objects of study, they had become my friends. That I could no longer just be a neutral observer while talking to them, I had become part of their families, as much as they had become part of my life.

How that will impact on my work and my understanding of the data I have collected so far will have to be seen. But it does not worry me too much, for by that point I had come to an important realisation -- that one must not try to find additional meaning in things simply because one had originally hoped them to be more important than what they turned out to be. If festivals are nothing more than simply occasions to come together, to eat, drink, dance, sing and be merry, then I will have to be happy with that. If culture is just song, dance and dress for the people themselves then I would have to accept that. And if in the end, being honest about what I found in the field implies that my dissertation does not have anything profound to say about the Tangsa or their festivals, then I would have to live with that.

Towards the end of March came the big news that a Development Council had been awarded to the Tangsa, the Singpho and a few other tribal groups. While it was seen by many as just an election stunt by the outgoing government, the tribal groups were jubilant. Lukam Tonglung was elected the Deputy Chairman of the Council while Tehon Hakhun and Molu Rera were inducted as the Tangsa members of the Council. While one could have guessed Lukam Tonglung and Molu Rera to be part of any Tangsa leadership, the fact that Tehon Hakhun was also in showed how well he had played his cards, and what his own personal agenda was in organising those annual festivals in Malugaon.

As such I gave up my plans to go back to Tangsaland (as many of my Tangsa consultants had become totally preoccupied with their plans for the Council) and spent the rest of my time working in libraries, archives and with books, attending conferences, interviewing people, many of them Tangsa, many of them people who had worked on the Tangsa. Most of that time I was in Guwahati but I also used the opportunities to go to Shillong (to attend the Interim Conference of International Society for Folk Narrative Research) and to Delhi (to speak at the newly started Ambedkar University) to get some important interviews.

But it was just after I had finished my presentation at a seminar hosted by the Indian Council for Historical Research in Guwahati that I was put to the hardest test -- when a young man stood up and asked me 'So what is so special about your Tangsa that we need to know about them at all?' If I wasn't so stumped by his brazenness I could have thrown a glass of water at him and replied, 'What is so special about you that I have to bother to reply?' But later when I thought about it I realised that I had no honest answer. Given what I know so far, I do not know if there is anything so very special about the Tangsa that might have convinced the young researcher to lend me his ear. But why do they have to be special -- is it not special enough to be ordinary yet perhaps just a wee bit different?












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Eating cham and drinking phelap with the Tangsas

Some observations about the food habits and life-style of the Tangsas

I have always stayed with my Tangsa consultants during my field-trips in the last years. Although the Tangsas live not far away from big towns like Margherita, Ledo and Jairampur, their style of living and their food habits are very distinctive. I am rather cross with myself for not having really bothered so far to learn to cook a few typically Tangsa dishes. But, as often happens in the field, there always seems to be something more important to do, and later, it is just too late.


The Tangsas are a small hill tribe who have migrated to India from Myanmar probably within the last couple of centuries and have settled in the north-east Indian states of Assam (mainly in the Margherita area of Tinsukia district) and Arunachal Pradesh (in the Changlang and Tirap districts). Most Tangsas today regard themselves as Nagas, but as a distinct group within them. The Tangsas in India comprise over 30 different sub-tribes , with considerable linguistic diversity, and although the cultural or linguistic difference between some groups may not be very large, there is a large amount of variation, allowing for further re-grouping of the Tangsa sub-tribes into Pangwas and Tangwas. Most of what I describe below is based on my observations and documentation of the food and life-styles of three Pangwa subtribes – namely Cholim, Lochhang and Rera, using the names they use for themselves – or alternatively, Tonglum, Langching and Ronrang, using the names others use for them.

I have been working with the Tangsas since 2008 and have spent a few months in the field, both as part of a team with the other project-members and also on my own. What struck me most about Tangsa food when I first arrived in ‘Tangsa-land’ were the timings and the menu -- huge mounds of plain boiled rice (cham) formed the major part of every meal; and there were two main meals per day – the first rice meal was served around 7 a.m. – rice with a bland and very watery śak-soup , sometimes with a very hot and spicy chutney (basically a paste of tomatoes and chilles), sometimes with a spicy vegetable item and every few days a few pieces of roast or fried meat (mostly pork). My colleague Stephen, who is an egg-etarian, sometimes got a couple of boiled eggs instead. Another meal, with roughly the same items but even less elaborate, was repeated at dusk, around 4 p.m.

In the morning we got milk tea sometimes with a few biscuits when we got up which was usually early, say around 5:30 a.m.; then in between the two main rice meals separated by nearly 10 hours, we got almost nothing -- sometimes at around noon we got black tea (see more about it below) with a piece of boiled ‘simon-alu’ (a sweet potato-like tuber), or a couple of cookies, or a slice of bread, if we were lucky. For anything more than this, we needed to go visiting other people’s homes (where we could be sure of being offered a cup of black tea at least) or were at the mercy of the occasional guest: for we would also get a cup of tea if we happened to be around when the guests were being served their tea. But otherwise that was it. It took me a few days to get used to this new regime – I was not used to eating so much rice at a time, that too so early in the morning, was not used to the very long gap in between, and the food was either too bland or extremely spicy for me. But I quickly adjusted...

The first Tangsa word I learnt almost automatically, out of sheer necessity, because I am somebody who cannot survive for long without tea, was phelap. Phelap is the black and bitter tea that the Tangsas left ‘cooking’ (more appropriately ‘smoking’) in a black and sooty kettle on a tripod over the hearth (not the inner kitchen hearth but the one in the adjoining outer area where the men usually sat) most of the time. Except for the one cup of milk-tea served in the morning (which was usually served sweet), the rest of the day one got mostly phelap. I was completely fascinated by the self-made and much-used bamboo mug which our host used to drink his tea from. Home-made wooden ladles, spoons etc. were also regularly used in the kitchen.

They rarely used sugar in their tea, and even otherwise they had no idea of a dessert, did not cook anything sweet in all the time I was there, and also very rarely used milk or milk-products. Even the one cup of milk-tea we got in the morning was usually made with milk powder. I wondered about the children, but never saw a child being given milk to drink, probably a consequence of the fact that traditionally Tangsas did not rear cows. After mother’s milk, they moved straight on to drinking phelap, I guess. And their diet did not include fruits either, apart from a few, like bananas and papayas, that grew locally.



Another omission was potatoes, simply because they did not grow it in the hills – Tangsas seldom eat potatoes even today. They eat cho (arum; kasu in Assamese) instead. The food is mostly boiled and roasted, they use hardly any oil for their normal cooking , nor our normal spices. But they did use chillies and some other herbs that made certain items of the menu really eye-wateringly spicy.

One special vegetable that I encountered was called ‘khi-mo-jak’, which is a kind of vegetable they got from the jungles (called ‘nefa-phool’ in Assamese, I was told); although they ate it in the winter it turns very bitter in summer. Another herb which was commonly used at least in Balinong was called ‘nge-tang-pe’ (see picture above). Another vegetable, that I encountered for the first time in Balinong, was called, not surprisingly, 'sari-kona-sabji' or 'four-cornered-vegetable' (see picture below). It can also be eaten raw.



Rice and arum were the staples, and there were various things that they made out of these two basic ingredients. Of course rice was used also to make rice-beer (chhai, lao-pani in Assamese), while various some types of arum served as fodder for pigs. For ceremonial and festive occasions, the rice would be wrapped in koupat(a kind of big flat and thick leaf, that grew wild and abundantly in the jungles) in the form of rice-balls, and this not only kept the rice warm for longer and facilitated distribution but also when opened the koupat served as a plate to eat from. Bamboo sungas (containers) would normally be used for serving water or for rice-beer. A very good lesson in environmental-friendliness to be learnt there...

While women did most of the usual cooking at home, at big festive occasions, it was usual to see the women in charge of making the rice, wrapping them in koupat and brewing the rice-beer (and also cutting tomatoes, onions and cucumber to make a sort of salad, which I assume is a modern addition) while the men were in charge of cutting, cleaning and cooking the meat – be it pork, beef, or of any other sort. I have often wondered about the reason for this obvious division of labour, but don’t have any clear notions yet.



In the picture is a locally-made container for storing and serving rice-beer.
What surprised me very much in the beginning was the amount of rice-beer the Tangsa women could drink – although they did not drink regularly, on festive occasions they did not lag behind the men at all as far as drinking and making merry were concerned. Equality, I guess, even in such quaint forms...

And as one dug deeper, there were amazing facts that one discovered related to food: for example that in the Hakhun language the verbs for preparation of different foods are different: so for example: the verb ‘to make’ in English can take different forms in Hakhun: to make vegetables (phom) the Hakhuns would use the verb ‘abbi’, but to make tea (phelap) they would use the verb ’lomlo’ for rice (cham), the verb ‘poilo’ and ‘limlo’ for meat (gnam) and so on. Stephen, our linguist, told me that among the Pangwas there are three words for the verb ‘ingest’. One, sah means ‘to eat rice, bananas, fish, eggs’, a second phak means ‘to eat meats and vegetables and other solids’ and a third nying or something like it means ‘to drink’ but would also be used for smoking. Our Cholim host often said mitha (sweet) to me in Assamese when he actually meant ‘salty’ – it took me a long time to figure out how salt could taste so sweet ...

Soon it was clear to me why the meal times were the obviously natural ones – the Tangsa villagers, who are predominantly farmers, try to work and sleep according to the sun (and that, given the very erratic and unreliable power situation in most villages, is a very sensible thing to do in any case). They get up almost before dawn, and the women start cooking the morning meal while the men tend to the pigs, the poultry and other animals. Soon after the morning meal, almost every able adult member of the house – men and women alike – leave for their tea-gardens , paddy fields or their vegetable patches where they work during the day. Some older member of family – usually a grandfather or a widowed grandaunt -- remain at home and took care of the kids, if any, left at home.

The women return home only around 3 p.m. often carrying loads of fire-wood on their heads, while the men follow a little later, carrying leafy arum stems for pig fodder from the forests. Then the women begin with cooking the evening meal in the main kitchen, while the men cut up the arum stems and put them to cook in the outer hearth. By the time the animals are fed, the meal is eaten and the dishes done, it is well past 6 p.m. – and soon after it is normally bed-time for the Tangsas.

Despite the over-consumption of rice at the price of under-consumption of almost everything else, the Tangsas are remarkably healthy and strong and hardy. And they have incredible stamina – especially the women, who never sit idle for a minute, and do not wait for their men to do the heavy work – I have often seen young Tangsa women running up the narrow wooden ladder of their chang-ghars carrying a full sack of rice (mostly half quintal sacks but often heavier too) on their backs, after having carried it from the fields on their bicycles for several kilometres.

When I marvelled about this many Tangsas told me that the secret lay in their preference for boiled and bland food. Many older Tangsa men told me that the fish, water and rice from the hills were tastier and healthier, and the air was purer there. But times were changing. Mr. H.K. Morang from Nampong maintained that the earlier way of life and food habits of the Tangsas was much healthier and better – for example, earlier they used to drink the juice of raw fish called ‘psa’ which was very good for health – now they eat unhealthy fried fish instead . Today they don’t drink home-made rice-beer which never did anybody much harm but drink cheap rum and brandy instead! And of course there is still the problem of opium addiction – the British introduced opium in the hills with the hope of keeping the hill people quiet – but the Tangsas seem to have adopted it for their very own now and show no sign of letting go...

Of the various other facets related to food I tried to find out more about the use of food items for other purposes – such as for performing rituals, for doing augury and even for sending messages. In the village of Jengpathar in Arunachal Pradesh I was shown how messages were sent in olden times. As people were illiterate, the Tangsas would normally send little packets (called ‘gyeng-fit’) through messengers. Chillies and coal would mean bad news (usually war, in which case the fellow-tribe-members would make haste to come armed with guns and rifles ready to go and fight the enemy), rice for good news (like a birth or a marriage) and tea-leaves to express anger or unhappiness (as it was bitter).

It will take me much longer to figure out in detail the ritual use of food, but one thing that was very clear to me at the end of already my first field trip was that rice is not just the staple food of the Tangsas, it is also an essential element of a lot of other activities that define Tangsa life and culture. But to be able to say more a lot more work will have to be done... not just in this one aspect but in many other aspects as well. For besides their very healthy food-habits and egalitarian lifestyles, besides their almost involuntary environmental friendliness, besides their ability to live much closer and yet in complete harmony with nature, I believe there is a lot more about the Tangsa way of life that we would do well to emulate...

Volkach, 15th May 2010









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The Tangsas and the Asamiyas

Some instances of cultural misunderstandings, some illustrations of Tangsa simplicity and integrity, and some reasons why the Tangsas can’t like the Asamiyas

I have been working with the Tangsas since 2008 and have been spending a lot of time in the field, both in a team with the other project-members and also on my own. And in this time, I have discovered a whole new world of wonderful people, living right around the corner from where I have lived most of my life but with whom I had had absolutely no contact with before. Did I say I learnt a lot about the Tangsas, I think I learnt as much if not more about us Asamiyas as well.



The Tangsas are a small hill tribe who have migrated to India from Myanmar and China probably within the last couple of centuries and have settled in the north-east Indian states of Assam (mainly in the Margherita area of Tinsukia district) and Arunachal Pradesh (in the Changlang and Tirap districts). Although probably of the same stock as the Nagas, most Tangsas consider themselves to be a distinct and separate ethnic group.

I am an Assamese living in Germany and although I have visited Tinsukia and Dibrugarh and have also been to Margherita in the past, as is most often the case, I have only visited my own relatives and friends in those places and have never had much to do with people from other ethnic communities who also live there. Therefore I wanted to work with a minority community in Assam to get to know at least one such group a little better. That chance came my way when I was offered a job in a DOBES -project documenting the music, song and dance of three communities (including the Tangsas) of Upper Assam.

And even as I got to know the people better, I realised how easy it was for me to make mistakes, to misunderstand and to misinterpret, all the more because we Assamese tend to look at things through our own coloured lenses. A good example of this was the time when a senior Asamiya journalist, when called upon to speak at a meeting held to celebrate the Wihu-kuq festival of the Tangsas declared with great elan that the word ‘Wihu’ was derived from our Assamese ‘Bihu’, without giving any reason whatsoever why it should be so (and why, for example and using the same logic, it could not be the other way around). He even went so far as to question the sense of celebrating the festival already on the 5th Jan. when our Bihu was still 10 days away! Why do we Assamese believe that we always know better? It seems that even after having paid the price so many times over for our patronising attitude, we have still not learnt our lessons. And I wouldn’t mind so much if we at least had our facts right.

In that sense it can be even better to be a complete outsider and arrive with an unprejudiced and neutral mind and take it from there. In that sense I did envy my foreign project-colleagues, as they did me, because I could start talking to everyone almost immediately as most of the Tangsas can speak Asamiya. But the mistakes were not all in one direction. All through my long stay last year, I had noticed that my informants were always careful and very polite whenever they mentioned the Ahoms. I wondered why, but could not find any plausible reason. It was not until almost the very end of my trip that I could get to the end of that – we were talking about languages and the Tangsa gentleman I was talking to accused me of having forgotten my own language and adopting Asamiya instead – suddenly it dawned on me that for some unknown reason the Tangsas seemed to believe that because I was Assamese, I must be Ahom, and hence had made every effort not to offend my Ahom sentiments!

The funniest incident happened however, when I arrived in Nampong. Our host while politely welcoming me, kept looking behind me, as if expecting someone else to come too. Later he told me that he was a bit puzzled when he first saw me because he was expecting a German guest! The cloud cleared much later when I asked the person who had made the arrangements for me at Nampong – for him it was clear that I was German since I was married to one! Such are the rules of the Tangsa world. And of the rest of the world as well, he claimed. For according to him, Benazir Bhutto who was allowed to rule over Pakistan, since she was married to a Pakistani and hence one herself. But the same did not apply to the Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi as she was married to an American. So much for our naive assumption that the tribal people are ignorant and completely unaware of the big wide world!

They are not only well-informed, they are also incredibly knowledgeable and wise. Since their languages are oral, and most of the older people are completely illiterate, they simply had to ‘remember’ everything. But it was mind-boggling to realise just how much they could remember. Just to illustrate my point, let me tell you a story: Phulim Hakhun, completely illiterate, aged about 75 years, is our principal informant in Malopahar near Ledo town. One time when I was there, we arranged that he would come for a chat with me at 3 p.m. one afternoon. He came around that time but looked rather troubled and disappeared quickly, telling me that he had to go to the village first. When he came back a couple of hours later, I was really annoyed and asked him why he had kept me waiting for so long. It took me a while to understand that the problem was that he had forgotten a line from the song he wanted to sing to me that afternoon – so he went to ask if anyone in the village could tell him the missing line! But nobody knew it (which was not surprising given the fact that he was the eldest in the village), so he had come back, only to tell me that he would have to go all the way to Burma to find some old man who could fill in the missing line!

Since I do not know the Hakhun language, I would certainly not have noticed anything missing – and I told him so. But that didn’t matter to him – he told me that if he was singing something he had to sing it right – whether I understood it or not was not his problem. After a lot of coaxing he finally agreed to sing the song for me (and hum the line he didn’t know) – he went on to sing, from memory, for a full 45 minutes! It was not only his powers of memory but Phulim Hakhun’s pride, his honesty and his integrity that shone through that evening and made me feel lucky to be there. To have the strength to speak the truth and to be able to say it simply, without fuss, is something that we probably need to learn from the Tangsas.

And there were times when one just couldn’t help loving and feeling sorry for them – like the other time when I was working with another old gentleman, Mohen Ronrang, nearly 90 years old but still fit and active. We had worked out a pattern of starting work early every morning. One morning, Mohen Adu came looking very crestfallen and unhappy. He kept muttering ‘Kot je herai gol’ (don’t know where it is lost) to himself. I was still not quite awake and not quite ready with my equipment and didn’t pay much attention at first. But I asked him what he had lost when he continued distractedly, ‘bisari to powa nai’ (have not found it) ‘kot bisarim’ (where should I look)… Without replying to my question he kept muttering to himself ‘sabate salu, katu nai’ (I have looked everywhere, it is nowhere to be found) and looked really upset. My first thought was that probably his cow or pig or hen had gone astray overnight, but he shook his head when I asked. The real story was nothing that I could have figured out by myself: while going home the previous evening Mohen Adu had remembered a very nice story. He decided he would tell me the story the next morning, and went to bed happily after having thanked Jesus for having reminded him of the story – he was sure it would make me very happy when he told it to me. But the next morning, he could not remember the story anymore and he did not know where to look for it, and where it had hidden itself again!

Before we left Phulbari, Mohen Adu pestered me to arrange some way for him to record the story, should he happen to remember it again between now and our next visit, because he was terrified he could lose it again. It made me sad to see how helpless he felt. But his sweet child-like simplicity and innocence was simply out-of-the-world. I tried to make sure that someone would write it down, next time he remembered. For, he had told me some wonderful stories already, ancient stories about where they came from, from the time of the beginning of creation, full of beauty and wisdom. I was constantly amazed at how willingly and how ungrudgingly they shared their knowledge with me, and I took it as a sign of their trust and their incredible generosity.

There were many times, however,when they were not sure what to do with me because even though I was not quite a Tangsa, I was not a complete outsider either; what is more, I was a woman, that too, a woman, apparently claiming to have a husband but one that none of them had ever met, roaming around all by myself, or with a bunch of men, none of whom was my husband! Of course I got adopted as a daughter and a sister into many households very quickly but still I am sure many of them must have wondered, if I was not a government spy or some undercover agent, at least in the beginning. I did take pains to explain what we were doing to everyone who asked, but I am not entirely sure they believed me – after all, why should Germany pay for an Assamese woman to go and hang around with the Tangsas for months on end, with apparently no other job but to just chat with people and make free video recordings of village events for them.

That much suspicion is unavoidable, and even understandable, under the circumstances. But it was the reaction and the conclusions drawn by other Asamiya men, who did not know me and who happened to run into me accidentally in Tangsa-land, that were much more annoying. Most of them never bothered to come up to me and ask me who I was and what I was doing – they already ‘knew’, it was absolutely clear to them that I was a journalist, especially if I happened to be filming with my video-camera at that time. After looking around in vain for a heavy-duty vehicle of the sort normally used by media-personnel, the only question they deemed fit to ask was which television channel I worked for! And if I happened to be with any of the foreign project-members, then I was equally clear that I was their interpreter! I am not sure what it is about us Assamese that makes our minds work in this fashion, and why we are so incapable of coping with anything more than a few standard categories – I wonder if it is simply a lack of imagination, or if it is just a complete disregard for womenkind beyond a certain level. Not very complimentary, in either case.

But many of even those who knew me and also knew what I was doing, among them quite a few of my high-flying and modern convent-educated friends in Guwahati and elsewhere, did not lag behind in making clear their incredible ignorance of and their complete disdain for their tribal neighbours – do they still eat snakes? do they wear any clothes at all? Many would beg me to tell them more only to scream and squeal to express their utter inability to cope with any of that; many of them were ready to swoon when I described a Tangsa toilet to them – how can they live like that, and how can you call them human when they live like that? None of them asked me to tell them the ancient stories (full of beauty and wisdom) that I had heard from the old men in the villages, nor was anyone interested in finding out the secret behind how the incredibly hardy but beautiful Tangsa women could work so hard all day in the fields and then come home to do all the house-hold chores, and then find time to sing to their children or weave intricately beautiful patterns on their looms. We were such a pathetic lot, I was beginning to lose my self-respect. Did I also behave like this a few years ago? I wondered. Who was more human? I asked myself.

What was it about us that made us so blind, so lacking in curiosity, so lacking in respect... It did seem to me that we had deliberately built a wall between us and them – a wall that kept them out, a wall that only spoke of our insecurity. And it was not only the rich and spoilt Asamiya lot living in cities that behaved like this, even those who lived nearby, who were forced to come in contact with the tribals on a daily basis, wanted to pretend that the tribals did not exist, that at best they were unavoidable nuisances which one should not suffer a moment longer than absolutely necessary. In the field, I often witnessed the absolute arrogance and total disregard for the local people demonstrated by many of the Assamese bureaucrats, police officers and civil servants posted in that area . The very hospitable tribal people on the other hand treated them like royalty. I will never forget the time when a young Asamiya SDO, gracing a public function organised by the Tangsas as the honoured Chief Guest, spent all the time that he was not speaking into the mike to deliver his lecture , talking into his mobile phone, paying scant attention to what was going on around him. I was very ashamed and did not dare to think what the dignified tribal people themselves must have thought of such outrageously bad behaviour. I never could understand why the Asamiya officers behaved the way they did – to think that these people had this wonderful opportunity to get to know the tribal people better and that they just couldn’t be bothered...

Nor will I forget the occasion in the last field season when after a long wait, the local BDO and SDPO arrived at a cultural event organised by one of these groups, more than an hour later than promised – nevertheless they were given an incredible welcome and a ceremonial guard of honour accompanied by the beating of gongs and drums and the showering of flower petals. There were many older and distinguished guests (like the much-liked Singpho veteran leader Bisa Raja and the highly respected Tangsa leader Lukam Tonglung) in attendance (who were the real VIPs if you ask me) who got barely a namaskar as greeting

It was already well past noon then but since the organisers had arranged for tea to be provided on arrival to the VIPs, the two officers (and their attendants) were first treated to a lavish round of tea and a large assortment of home-made snacks typical of the host community, while the Bisa Raja who had arrived much earlier had to do with a little cup of tea. After this the VIPs did a round of the stalls, inaugurated the exhibitions and and stayed maybe in all for about half an hour. Then they declared they had to leave – this made the programme go hay-wire as the organisers felt obliged to offer lunch to the VIPs (and their huge security entourage) before they left, as a result of which the open session, in which the VIPS were supposed to participate, got postponed by more than a couple of hours. The ones who came and stayed on to participate in the Open Session had to either wait on an empty stomach or wait till the VIPs had left and hope that someone would let them partake of the left-overs. I have never felt so outraged by the behaviour of my fellow-Asamiyas and so ashamed at being Asamiya myself ever before in my life.

Mercifully, there were a few redeeming exceptions – like the old retired Asamiya school-teacher who had spent all his life trying to educate Tangsa children, and who knew no other way to refer to the Tangsas but in terms of equality and respect. And I tried to learn from that humble but great teacher and made an extra effort to behave properly with my Tangsa hosts, hoping that I could make up in some small way for the offence and hurt that the arrogant Asamiya officers must cause to these proud but helpless people.

For I felt very lucky to have the love and affection of these wonderful people, despite the fact that I was also a wretched Asamiya. Proof that they had accepted me as their own came on the very last day of my last field trip: I was doing my final rounds of farewells when an old Tangsa lady, who lived in the village but with whom I had not had much to do came up to me and asked me whether I had been there ‘all the while’ – yes, I said. You mean, since that time a few months ago when you first came here? Yes, I said again, since then. She went away but came back a few minutes later looking very troubled, didn’t you say you were just recently married? she asked. Yes, I said a third time. Where is your husband? At home, I said. Who is cooking for him? I’m not sure, perhaps he is cooking himself, I replied. Will he be angry with you for being away for so long? I hope not, I said. The other women tried to reassure her that there would probably be no problem. But she cut them short saying, with men, you never know; if you are lucky well and good but if not then it can be bad. Then turning towards me she said, in case your husband is cross with you and misbehaves with you then you come right back here – you can stay with me in my house, you are my daughter. Saying this she gave me a hug and walked off.

I came away happy and secure in the knowledge that the ice had been broken – that although I had begun with a disadvantage – the disadvantage of being an Asamiya – I had managed to make it to level ground, and that next time, it will be much easier for me, not only to go deeper into the amazing world of the Tangsas but also to not get so worked up and hassled about the outrageous misbehaviour of my fellow Asamiyas... next time I promise to tell you more about the Tangsas and not just about why it is important to work with the Tangsas in order to find out why they cannot like the Asamiyas...

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The Tangsas in Assam – in quest of a new identity in an altered world

Abstract

The Tangsas are a small hill tribe who have migrated to India from Myanmar and China mostly probably within the last three centuries and have settled in the north-east Indian states of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. Although probably of the same stock as the Nagas, the Tangsas have over time evolved into a distinct and separate ethnic group.

According to a recent count, the total Tangsa adult population in Assam is not more than 15,000. However, they do not have a common language, but speak the language of the sub-tribe to which they belong. Furthermore, since none of the Tangsa languages have a written form, most Tangsas learn to read and write in Assamese, Hindi or English.

The old Tangsa communities living in temporary settlements in remote hilly areas in earlier times were mostly hunters and agriculturalists doing shifting cultivation. But many have since moved down to the plains, hence have been forced to give up hunting altogether and have starting breeding pigs and poultry instead, and have taken to permanent wet-rice cultivation. This has brought about a drastic change in their life-styles.

The old Tangsa hill communities were mostly self-sufficient and had very little contact with the outside world. Recent governmental efforts towards development of infrastructure, mainly in the form of better roads and a better communication network, have made these remote areas more accessible. Better facilities for education, increasing exposure to the pan-Indian culture through cinema and television, better prospects for employment and better connectivity with the outside world has meant that the younger generation of Tangsas are slowly opting for the new ways over their own traditional life-styles. This has resulted in a massive loss of cultural and traditional knowledge in the past 3-4 decades.

Finally as a result of intense missionary activity in north-east India, many Tangsas have converted to Christianity in recent times . This has, in many cases, implied giving up almost completely their old cultural traditions, and this has further aggravated the loss of traditional knowledge.

However, many of the educated Tangsas are now slowly waking up to the realisation that in trying to become modern and Christian they have also endangered their own distinct identity as an ethnic group. The past two decades have seen intense efforts, in some of these sub-tribes at least, to recover or reinvent their own traditions and culture – with some surprising and unexpected consequences.

In this paper I wish to investigate some of these consequences in the light of the social, cultural, linguistic and environmental background of the Tangsas on the one hand, and the rapid changes – economic, cultural and structural – taking place all around them on the other. Language, more explicitly, multilingualism, will be shown to be the thread of continuity and the crucial factor which could unite the old and the new worlds of the Tangsas and secure their identity in the future.

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