By Aheli Moitra
Once, on a journey between borderlands, I met the wife of a popular Tangkhul singer at their home, busy weaving the Rose kashan—a mekhala, or traditional wrap-around, dedicated to the memory of NS Rose.
In March 1974, Rose committed suicide in her village, Ngaprum, in Ukhrul, after being sexually assaulted repeatedly by members of the Indian security forces.
Following the incident, Tangkhul women weavers designed the Rose kashan to dedicate the weave to her memory—to mark in their literary tradition the culture of human rights abuse that had come with the war. In the 1980s, the stories repeated themselves and so did the literature.
1986 saw the fatal shooting of Luingamla from Ngainga village inside her home, also by members of Indian security forces. She was sexually attacked first. The Luingamla kashan was designed by a Tangkhul woman weaver, and approved and promoted by the Tangkhul Shanao Long (Tangkhul Women’s Union) in the 1990s as a traditional wear for Naga women.
The red, white, green and black kashan is a tragic, but fiery, reminder of the sexual oppression faced by Naga women—the story is woven through generations, passed on necessarily, creatively and with bravado intricately designed by an organic women’s movement for peace.
Stories were always woven into the kashan, or the mekhala. The literature of the weaves reflected, previously, the fields, crops, seasons, rituals, relationships and many more aspects of lived reality. Today, Luingamla’s, as well as the Naga peoples’, story is immortalised also through women’s traditional jewellery that was designed and promoted in her memory. To understand the patterns on the weaves, or the jewellery, one has to understand the motifs and hear the story. The works create the rich imaginative experience—through visual and oral narration—that, in some ways, the reader of a novel goes through when s/he understands the nuances of the language deployed.
At a recent colloquium on Naga oral and literary traditions, held in Bhopal, Professor Temsula Ao noted how the Naga people “exist within the ambit of our languages which defines the significance of being what we are.”
In a moving observation, she said that today, writing has become primary and the orality of language discarded as a relic of the past. For her, the literature of the Naga people lay in the spoken language, history, customs, beliefs, stories, legends, myths, lore of migration and settlement, arts, crafts, and every small detail of everyday lives. “Literature resides in the traditions which constitute our primary literature.”
Through the weaving of contemporary stories into kashans, Naga women in the Tangkhul country have shown how these traditions have not been relegated to the past. In a world where written literature has made individual credit (for the writer) a norm, the literature produced by the weaves belongs to the community—everyone has ownership over them, and can learn, reproduce and share them.
It is young Naga women at the forefront of this literary tradition. As the Professor noted, the youth today is “creating a new literature of reality, fusing their modernity with new insights from their past;” no doubt bringing new meaning to the present, to be handed over to the future.
Ideas may be shared at moitramail@yahoo.com
