Imlisanen Jamir
Somewhere in Osaka, long before any dignitary stood up to speak at the Museum Annexe Courtyard in Kohima, someone had already spent years handling negatives that Yuzo Morita brought back from Nagaland in 1979. They sorted them by village and subject, checking them for decay, and slowly building the digital record that made last week's exhibition possible.
That person's name appears nowhere in the coverage of the inauguration. The photographer, at eighty-six, was the one being honoured, his travels through Nagaland recalled in speech after speech as the origin of everything now on display. Yet the ceremony only existed because of work that nobody thought to mention, work that has none of the romance of a young ethnologist wandering through highland villages with a camera and everything of the tedium of a filing cabinet.
This is worth noticing because the entire occasion was built around the language of memory and its preservation. Officials spoke of records of cultural memory, of reconnecting with tradition, of bridging Japan and Nagaland through friendship and scholarship. All of that rhetoric depends on a much plainer fact, which is that 249 objects and several decades of photographs have to be catalogued, labelled, and kept from disintegrating before anyone can stand in front of them and feel moved. Preservation is a task list, executed by someone who will never be thanked in a welcome address.
There is something almost domestic in this kind of labour, closer to housework than to scholarship as it is usually imagined. A household holds together through the unremarked repetition of small maintenance, and nobody notices it until the day it stops. Archives function the same way. The moment a database goes untended, or a print is left to fade in poor storage, the loss only becomes visible generations later, when someone realises that a face or a place can no longer be identified.
Nagaland’s Commission and Secretary for Art and Culture Bodeno Colo, in her address, hoped that visitors might recognise loved ones and familiar faces in these photographs, taken forty-seven years ago. Along with Morita’s camera, that is a gift of whoever, decades on, sat down and made sure a name could still be attached to a face on a strip of ageing film.
None of this is an argument against the exhibition itself, or against honouring a man who did, after all, choose to travel through Nagaland with genuine curiosity at a time when few outsiders did. It is simply a reminder that the ceremony also needs to recognise and flatter another kind of labour. Nagaland's own institutions might also ask whether they have their own equivalent of that unnamed archivist, someone doing the slow, unglamorous work of keeping the state's own memory intact.
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