Kezha Whiso
My memories of the Hornbill Festival 3 or 4 years ago spin around the Kohima Local Ground - hundreds milling around the stalls turning up dust more than anything else. And if Hornbill (Festival of Festivals) was meant to showcase the Naga culture it appeared rather far from being a success. I found the largest crowds of people gather around the games/gambling stalls.
My memories of the last one (2005) do not seem to be better off, the way I have seen so many comment, not so positively, in our local dailies. Among others, thanks to Susan Waten Naga for doing a marvelous job in frankly and honestly typing out our own epithets and also-known-for’s of the Hornbill Festival - Mudu festival, Hornbill babies, drunk driving et al. Add to that someone’s observation; Moatsu the festival of Harvest, Sekrenyi the festival of Cleansing and Hornbill the festival of getting drunk. Very practical epithet, huh! Ms. Naga has also described some of the “heated activities” as un-cultural and uncultured, even. Quite rightly so.
What is culture, anyway? My 2000 page Chambers Dictionary defines culture as ‘a type of civilization; the attitudes and values which inform a society’. Could I then, though loosely, put it this way; Culture is what we do based on our attitudes and values and through which people of other cultures may know, identify and recognize us? In the past we (men folk, especially) in order to be known by others needed to go hunting heads of fellow human beings. Today that’s not our culture anymore. In fact that’d be a most barbaric thing to do and (to put it mildly) down right uncultured! Culture, therefore must and does change with time. Otherwise we are in for a shock- by our ‘own’ culture!
Back to the infamous ‘dog-ged’ issue, then. Well, if one could go head-hunting humans, I suppose tearing a live dog apart is not a big deal. After all it’s just a dog! A friend wondered if the ‘tearing the dog apart’ ritual really formed part of a culture in the past. For me it doesn’t really matter whether it did or did not. My point is IT should not. Not today. Not now. Not here. By giving the dog such a treatment, I am afraid we have become less than the dog itself! Perhaps, in this instance we failed to change our culture with time and as result we ourselves (let alone people of other cultures) were in for a sort of culture shock! We need not be shocked by our own culture. If we are then it need not be our culture at all.
As far as the sacred bird, under whose name we have named our festival is concerned, I certainly don’t want to see a stuffed copy, least a live one in the cage. I would love to see the real, live hornbills freely flying around Kisama, in fact all over the Land of the Hornbill Festival. After all, we have changed our culture from hunting Hornbills to preserving them, haven’t we? The few other things through which I got my taste of Hornbill 2005 included pork from the Kuki stall. That was yummy! Passion fruit juice (stall unknown) from a friend of mine. Yechhh! Grossly diluted version of the real thing! Another “sub-culture” stuff!? Kisama is still only a word to me. It has yet to ‘take on flesh’ for me. I’ll sure hope that it won’t turn out to be a case of a once bitten twice shy experience when I debut in December of 2006. I’d love being a patron of the Hornbill Festival. Without regrets. Long live Hornbill Festival! Long live true Naga Culture!
