“Were I to claim that I am not a Naga, what will be the criteria to decide my identity?” I once asked this question to a fellow Naga friend who was then working on Naga nationalism for her university degree.
Her immediate reaction was “How can you say that you are not a Naga?” She was politically right in her retort though my hypothetical question was not dismissed there and then. It did pick up some discussion, but only to put us and also our audience into a very unsettling and disturbing situation. I was grappling with the issue of my Naga Identity then. Not that I doubted my Naga identity but that I was struggling to find some grounds on the basis of which various Naga tribal groups have come together to assert our unique identity and our rights to freedom of self-determination. Read the rest of this entry »
Every time I try to make a sense of our Naga culture, an inexplicable sense of procrastination somehow takes the better of me. Until now, I have kept myself from plunging into it. There appears to be some kind of ‘no trespass’ signboard attached to it, some kind of uncertainty or uneasiness about it, the kind that is perhaps normally associated with unpleasant discovery or realization. Some truths are not always a delightful thing to discover after all. Often certain truths are found to be covered with layers and layers of narratives, narratives involving lies and deceptions as well.
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I’m almost certain that there is hardly any educated person who has not heard or thought or talked about the impact of westernization in our society today, and rightly so. But it is disheartening to see that often westernization has been confused with modernization and vice versa. Obviously, one cannot be understood fully without the other. However, there is a thin layer of difference between westernization and modernization. Read the rest of this entry »
