Arkotong Longkumer
Travelling to Oxford is like visiting two worlds. The streets, though Victorian in architecture, are transformed into minuscule blocks of consumer paradise that flash trendy Nokia phone shops and blossom McDonalds restaurants, competing with the local pastry kiosks just around the corner. Enter a local pastry shop that sells traditional Yorkshire puddings and you are greeted by a Polish, Punjabi or Chinese person—most of them students at the many Oxford colleges. The vivid and colourful shops and people remind one of the changing situation, where the local is diversified into the global and where sometimes the global sucks up the local.
As I stroll along cobblestone roads, I pass through narrow college gates decked up in their Greco-Roman archway that open into lush, sprawling green lawns, Imperial in perspective. My discomfort becomes all too evident (memories of my childhood school with its authoritarian disgust!) as I shuffle past tourists, leaving traces of only my shadow in camera flashes, to cross the lawns.
Colleges proudly display their luminaries: Imran Khan attended this college, or Tony Blair, Gerard Manley Hopkins…Within these ancient walls, there seems to be the mixture of an aura of respectability and disdain: who can understand irresponsible leaders, tyrants, gifted artists, writers, educators, and explorers that all walked on these English greens? Some mad, some crazy, some compassionate, some wanting to explore the unknown with courage and zeal—to go where no one has gone before: I have come to explore such men and women.
I head towards Banbury Road where the research wing of the Pitt Rivers Museum is located. Pitt Rivers Museum probably contains the largest Naga collection outside the Naga Hills, in terms of artefacts, manuscripts on the Nagas, and objects, which are a meticulous display of painstaking collecting. It also contains the largest photograph collection of the Naga Hills taken during the colonial time: old men in their loin cloths, young women in their traditional attire with the wonderful aesthetic array of beads, woven cloth, shells, and dishevelled children standing by sucking their thumbs, wide eyed at the enigmatic, replicating tool.
Without doubt my favourite is a striking photo of an English man with one of the chiefs of the village: the Englishman holds his double barrel gun, while the Naga chief is holding an English tobacco pipe: shot in 1910, viewed by countless people, the negative of conquering wild men—perhaps deceptive only in their repose.
These images remind one of the changing world, the quickness of everything; and within this need for change, the past is left idle in photographs and glass cages. The daring supposition is all too visible in the preservation work that somehow instils a sense of respect. Yet these photographs are less understood now than they were then. What is etched on mercurial paper now seems alien even to most Nagas. The visibility of photographs is distorted by the gap between the past and the future, and what to make of it in the present is constantly deflated by the lack of representation. (Most people at Pitt Rivers thought that since I was Naga, I would recognise most of the images from the early 1900’s Naga Hills. Yes, I could guess some easy ones - like the Zeme shawls, the Angami kilt, Khonoma village—but these were often the most obvious ones to me as I have been exposed to these innumerable times and read of them).
Through time the incursion of ‘outside’ influence into our society seems to have altered our livelihoods. In turn, this is accommodated into our mind space into what we understand as ‘culture’. Yet culture in its own time evolves into something that is unrecognisable. It is then that the unrecognisable becomes less attainable—which in turn is paraded in glass cages and ‘cultural exhibitions’ or ‘traditional dances’. These are the rhetoric of a dying culture. Sometimes the need to preserve presupposes death. How much do we need to entomb the fragmentation of a body cloth that we don’t even have now? These are questions we cannot answer because they are investigations into oblivion. Only time will tell.
One of the most moving diaries I have ever read was written by Henry Balfour on his year long visit in the Naga Hills. It was possibly during the 1930’s. The vivid account of Mokukchung district, aided by wonderfully placed drawings of villages, womenfolk, clothes, and dances, seemed like a far away world for me. Time, with its menacing distance, evoked a sense of nostalgia as I caressed the coarse pages: every turn became an endless journey for me. I am fascinated by the past. Not because of its romanticism; the more I delve into the past, I take a peek, through the window of worn out manuscripts, to parcels of a primal nature that I am a part of.
These transportations are not merely looking into something no longer there: they resurge in me a sense of mission, a passion that can only be quelled through greater knowledge. But I also realise that there is a limit to how much we know of the past; by digging deep, we come to an understanding of a society: its where, its when, its how, and sometimes maybe the why? At least, we forage, hoping to find the seed that can be sown. Maybe, that’s why I appreciated the Pitt Rivers Museum and its grand mission to preserve so that someone, one day, may enter the deteriorating Victorian buildings, take away a piece of his past and share it with those around. Maybe, that’s what the world needs.
