PETER & FRIENDS
2010
2010
text and images by Mahesh Shantaram
published in Motherland
published in Motherland
In January 2010, I travelled to Nagaland on what could best be described as a social adventure. My plan was to simply land unprepared in Dimapur, make friends with the first person I meet, and hang out with him. For better or for worse, that guy happened to be Peter.
Peter and I made the strangest of bedfellows. We journeyed in his dilapidated car. I got to meet everyone from the Chief Minister to undercover informers. He introduced me to the delicacy of dog meat. Over endless rum sessions (drunk in innocuous tea cups behind downed shutters because Nagaland is a ‘dry’ state), Peter and his friends shared with me their philosophy of life even as the Naga-Manipur crisis broke out right under our very noses.
This landscape is unique to the month of December when all houses and establishments are decorated with Christmas lights.
ZhaZo is a photographer whose work I got acquainted with a couple of years ago. I saw an exhibition of his work at D Cafe and decided to contact him. We met up at Hornbill Festival and bonded over his tribe's rice beer. It turned out that his girlfriend is Merenla. She's a famous youtube star and standup comedian based in Mumbai. Merenla routinely uses her Naga identity in her scripts. We met art Merenla's grandfather's house for this portrait.
From D cafe above her building, I saw her down below sitting by the window and sipping tea. I had to make a portrait of her, the first one of this trip. Peter and I went through the maze of Kohima's streets to find her. She obliged shyly.
Friends since childhood, Neilie and Neivinuo live and attend senior school in Kohima.
I was at Kohima's popular D Cafe when the distinctively attired George walked in. He sat at a table and played his guitar, singing along to the tunes playing on the cafe's music system. I thought he was an aspiring young musician. It turned out that he was actually an assistant professor of archology at a local university.
I met Temsu during my last trip to Nagaland (Peter & Friends 2010). At that time he used to work as a postman at a post office deep in a forest near Mokokchung. Over the years, he got transferred to the main post office in Kohima. Temsu is now a postal asssitant. He and his wife of two years are expecting their first child next month.
The wedding of Shilu and Rangte in Dimapur on 18.12.2019
The wedding of Shilu and Rangte in Dimapur on 18.12.2019
Hornbill Festival - tribal parade through the streets of Kohima.
Preparations preceeding the feast of Akangla & Avizo's wedding. Here we witness the making of 'modi' - a sought-after preparation of beef wrapped in a banana leaf and distributed to guests as a parting gift.
Preparations preceeding the feast of Akangla & Avizo's wedding. Six pigs were slaughtered for the feast. This is the last one awaiting its destiny. As I was leaving, a man gave it four-five-six blows to the head with an axe, bringing it to a slow end.
Preparations preceeding the feast of Akangla & Avizo's wedding.
Dzuleke village. Nagaland, India, 2019.
Dzuleke village. Nagaland, India, 2019.
Portrait of Kevizaselie Nagi and his children. (His wife was away at teachers training.) Kevizaselie is a radio engineering working for All India Radio in Mon district. He had returned home only yesterday for the holidays.
Mokokchung, Nagaland, India, 2019
I was at a fair at Solidarity Park when I saw Ketsei arrive on his motorcycle. I mistook his bike to be a Harley-Davidson but it turned out to be a heavily modified Bajaj Avenger with a Harley logo stuck on to it. Ketsei is a dealer of motorcycle spares and accessories. He belongs to Angami tribe and lives in Kohima village, the original owners of the land on which the city stands today.
Wokha district. Nagaland, India, 2019.
Paddy field. Jotsoma village. Nagaland, India, 2019.
Wokha district. Nagaland, India, 2019.
My friend and guide Peter Chachei in his family home in Dimapur.
Mokokchung, Nagaland, India, 2019
THE NAGAS: THE FORGOTTEN PEOPLE OF INDIA
2019
2019
text extract by Guillaume Delacroix
published in Geo France
published in Geo France
When she returns to Kohima and sets out to stroll down the main street of her hometown, Merenla is often stopped by passers-by. "I saw you on Youtube and Instagram, right? Are you Miss Imsong? May I have an autograph?" At 32, Merenla Imsong, originally from Nagaland, in northeast India, and gone to live across the country in the urban madness of Bombay to become an actress in Bollywood, slowly gets used to her celebrity. She saw her life take a dramatic turn one day in 2017 when she uploaded a video that quickly went viral (330,000 views to date) to humorously denounce the stereotypes her people are victims of in the subcontinent. The idea, for example, that Nagaland is so tiny that there everyone necessarily knows each other. Or that the names of the Nagas, the inhabitants of Nagaland, are unpronounceable. Or again, that "these people" all look alike. This is Miss Imsong's specialty: making fun of the Indians who mock the dozens of ethnic minorities of Tibetan-Mongol origin who inhabit the Himalayan foothills of the far east of India, wedged between Bangladesh, China and Burma. Merenla is, she says, "more than fed up" with being called a "Chinese" in Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi or Madras – when you don't take her for a Japanese or a Thai. "I took the side of derision, and the exposure of these tough prejudices," she explains.
The very existence of Nagaland, a modest territory three times the size of the Ardèche, remains largely unknown to the Indians. The contours of this small state—one of India's 28—were drawn by the British just before the country's independence in 1947, without taking into account the actual areas of the Nagas. The latter are indeed 2.3 million in Nagaland, as it appears on geography maps but also a million in Burma and another million spread over three neighbouring Indian states: Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh.
The region is still largely unknown for three reasons. First, because it is difficult to access: it is only driven on bumpy roads that mostly turn into dusty tracks. Then, because according to the 2011 census, 88% of its inhabitants represent a tiny religious minority in India: while the country, whose global population now exceeds 1.35 billion people, is 80% Hindu and 14% Muslim, the sixty or so Naga tribes are indeed Protestant. A confession which today constitutes a very strong cement, and protects this population from the caste system. Last reason for the discretion of this State, which displays better performance than the rest of the country in terms of life expectancy and infant mortality and whose specificities are recognised by the Indian Constitution: it dreams of emancipation and has been disturbing the central power in Delhi for decades. Which in turn superbly ignores its existence.
Kohima, the capital of Nagaland and its hundreds of thousands of souls, is a strange town resting like a horse saddle on the backbone of a mountain ridge at an altitude of around 1,400 meters. The reliefs have been skilfully concreted, but from the urban anarchy a pleasant harmony is born at sunrise, punctuated by the spires of large Baptist churches. We owe these to American pastors who left to evangelise Burma and who stopped there around 1870, no one really knows how or why. And who strove to convert the hitherto animist Nagas tribes to Christianity.
When she returns home, Merenla Imsong loves snooping around at the Central Market, where the stalls offer live silkworm larvae, fried grasshoppers, dried fish, frogs and dog meat. Seated in a tiny almond-green canteen open to all winds and famous for its fermented soy porridge served with fried beef intestines, the influencer confides a dream: that of seeing India put an end to pity and condescension that it often detects in the eyes of the Hindu majority.
