Agriculture

Traditionally, the Nagas are first and foremost agriculturists. They have always depended on agriculture for their livelihood. Their farming activities are divided between slash-and-burn or jhooming cultivation and the tillage of irrigated rice terraces. As the terrain is mountainous throughout the length and breadth of Nagalim, the scope for a diversification of agricultural methods is limited. The overwhelming majority of Nagas practice slash-and-burn cultivation on hill-slopes. A particular tract is selected for this purpose and is cultivated over a two-year period, and then lies fallow for several years, allowing new jungle to grow up. The forest, thus earmarked for cultivation, is cleared. A few trees are spared, but are so severely pollarded that their shade does not affect the growth of the crops. The felled trees and cut undergrowth are left to dry for several weeks and then set on fire. On windless days the smoke rising from the hill-slope envelopes the landscape.

To prepare the ground for sowing, all charred wood is collected and the soil is dug with small hoes. Each family construct a hut which provides shelter from rain or the heat of the sun. Men do the sowing and women, singing choruses and working behind with tiny hoes in a line behind, cover the grain with earth. Gangs of women, boys and girls work in these fields on the basis of rotation. This system not only enliven the monotonous task but also provides an opportunity for romance, and wherever such mixed labor-gangs are at work, there is much laughing and joking.

The rice is cut with small iron sickles, and the bundled sheaves are taken to a centrally located flat land or field hut where the men tread out the grain with their feet and forked stick called yairong. It is then carried up to the village in large baskets and stored in granaries which lie at the outskirts of the settlement.

Some Naga communities, however, practice a meticulous system of irrigated rice-terrace which enables them to cultivate the same plots year after year. Similar to the terrace-fields of the Ifugao community of the Cordillera Central in the northern mountain province of Philippines, these Naga communities have constructed rice-terraces which are remarkable feats of landscape engineering, carved out of the hill-slopes over drops of hundreds of meters. Reinforced by walls of pebbles, plastered with mud often as much as 4 to 8 meter wide, these terraces represent a large investment of human labor. On the steep mountain sides which rise to heights of 1500 to 2000 meter, the Nagas working only with tiny spades and hoes have carved out terraces that run in large flights of steps from the foot of the slopes almost to the summit. Water to flood these terraces is brought over long distances by an elaborate system of pipes and ducts. No mountain is too steep to be terraced as long as it affords an unfailing supply of water for irrigation.