Digging the Past

Even though the detail historical account of the Naga people is shrouded in obscurity owing to the loss of their written scripts, we can reconstruct their past fairly well from the stories and legends that were passed on verbally from generation to generation since time immemorable.

The Naga people, according to the legend, came to Nagalim from China. This account tallies well with those of historians who are of the view that the Nagas lived in China in the third millennium B.C. (around 2500 B.C.). According to Chinese sources, the ancestors of the Nagas were part of the Chiang group that lived in northwest China. This group was forced to take refuge in northeastern Tibet owing to the hostility of the Shang dynasty and later the Chou dynasty. From there they migrated to upper Mynmar, then moved into the Irrawady valley, the Malay and the Indonesian peninsula. From there certain patches turned northward and entered their present habitat through the Thwangthut area and some tracks of the Patkai Range of the Naga Hills.

Though it is true that the Naga people belong to a single homogenous family and share the basic social and cultural traits, yet it is also true that over the centuries many factors had come into play to make one region and community slightly different from the other. Geographical isolation, head-hunting practices, external influences and internal innovations, and adaptation to natural environments are some of the factors that brought about the marginal variations. Nonetheless, besides so many basic characteristics commonly shared by them, the Nagas have collectively inherited the sublime values of life, namely, bravery, honesty, self-reliance, simplicity, hospitality and hard-working. Other noteworthy features that need mentioning here are that of the institutions of socialism and democracy that exist in their purest forms among the Nagas.