Tezenlo Thong
Weaving was a pivotal part of the Naga culture, and every average woman knew the art of traditional weaving. Our foreparents grew cotton, spun it into yarn and dyed it. Then, our honorable ladies wove beautiful traditional clothes out of it to adorn our beautiful bodies. Today, this invaluable tradition is being gradually forgotten and lost as manufactured clothes and fabrics take the place of the traditional weaving. Our Naga women need to learn to weave again, no less than our Naga men who need to salvage traditional line of male works.
It has been often said that society is like a fabric, and so if we have forgotten the art of actual weaving, we also have forgotten the art of weaving our very own society. Just as manufactured clothes have taken over traditional weaving, our highly evolved traditional values are being replaced by Western or foreign values. Furthermore, it is common empirical knowledge that when one removes any threads, the fabric is weakened proportionately, because every thread in a fabric exists to strengthen the entire piece. In traditional weaving, in particular, the threads are woven together to give a distinctive texture, design and cultural meanings to the fabric. And when any piece of thread is pulled out, the fabric not only begins to weaken and disintegrate, but also its distinguishing and artistic features that exude cultural meanings begin to fade away.
Analogous to a piece of fabric, our Naga society has been in tatters because of the onslaught of modern Western culture. Since the inception of Western colonial and missionary conquests in the nineteenth century, the threads of our cultural fabric have been pulled out one after another, which has come to greatly weaken our society. Vices that were foreign to our foreparents have taken deep roots among us. On the other hand, traditional virtues that underpinned our society and kept it going for ages have almost disappeared. Thus, our society has been greatly weakened and is rapidly disintegrating. Today, we live in a dysfunctional society, characterized by economic and power disparity, class distinction between the haves and have-nots, venality, unrestrained corruption, insatiable greed, a penchant for accumulation and affluence, senseless homicide and all sorts of conceivable vices. There is, therefore, an urgent need to reweave traditional values and meanings into the fabric of our contemporary society.
What would reweaving the fabric of our society entail? It will mean several things. First, we need to make a concerted effort to reaffirm our Naga identity and values. Most youngsters have lost, if not almost lost, the will power to reassert our identity, culture and history. The notion that indigenous culture is deficient abounds, which the colonized deliberately fabricated to colonize the minds of colonial subjects in order to generate civilization, conversion and change. Also, modern scientific culture conceives what is natural as primitive, backward and lacking in features of civilization, which we have all unfortunately come to imbibe ardently. It is, therefore, not uncommon for the colonized to engage in self-shame, self-negation and self-sabotage. When in Indian cities, for instance, many of us often deliberately choose to hide our identity and pretend to be aliens from one of the affluent countries such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore or Hong Kong (China). The cause for this is that, not unlike other Indigenous Peoples with similar histories of traumatic cultural disruption and colonial experiences, we have deflated and wounded self-pride, which is why we make no serious efforts to recover, revive and relive our traditional values. There is, therefore, an urgent need to reconstitute our spirit and restore the self-pride, which was our foreparents’ treasured possession that provided them with the resilience and tenacity to thwart the onslaught of foreign cultural and military invasions.
Second, we need to identify the bedrock principles rooted in our traditional culture and reclaim and relive them. We need to revive and make functional our moribund bedrock principles and values that define our being and guide our actions in modern-day existence. So that instead of defining and judging ourselves, our conducts and that of others in terms of Western values, our traditional values will determine our social relationships and conducts. In today’s globalized world, our survival as a distinct people and minority group or nation hinges on our ability to reclaim and retain our historical and cultural identity and principles. We will, otherwise, soon face the fate of many indigenous peoples who have been fully inundated by dominant cultures and have become untraceable.
Third, we need to pass on those traditional values, culture and history to posterity. Can we imagine a future generation of Nagas that knows nothing about our history and culture? Can we build a nation out of a generation that has a deluded and negative view of or impression on its own history and culture? Obviously, we cannot expect to build a vibrant and healthy nation out of a generation that knows nothing about its historical past and culture beyond the delusion that its ancestors were fierce headhunters or bloodthirsty savages.
We have been pursuing a sovereign nation-state, so whose history are we going to teach our children should we become politically independent? Are we to continue teaching Indian and Western histories and ways of living, exclusive of Naga history and culture as it is the practice now? Unfortunately, whereas knowing Naga history and culture is only incidental for our youngsters, learning and knowing Indian and Western cultures and history is officially mandated, when the reverse should have been the norm. The Nagas are not devoid of history and culture, and so it defies common sense as to why nothing is been done by our government to reclaim, revive and teach our history and culture in schools.
How can we teach, adopt or relive our history, culture and traditional values if we do not know anything about them? How can we truly desire to know or learn them if we have the misconception that there is nothing virtuous about our past? To reweave traditional values into our contemporary society, we need to change our mind-set, recover, revive and relive our culture and values and impress these great values of our foreparents upon future generations. Time is of the essence. In fact, it is against us. Therefore, something needs to be done urgently lest the traditional knowledge bank should go bankrupt and we find ourselves groping in darkness forever.
