Settlement patterns

The Nagas have build their villages at altitudes of between 1,000 and 2,000 meter, perched like fortresses on the highest points of hill-ranges and spurs from which the land drops sharply down into the surrounding valleys. The choice of such strategically advantageious sites dates from the days of head-hunting, when settlements had to be easily defensible against raiders. The insecurity created by the fear of head-hunting resulted in the isolation of villages, and a consequent development of numerous cultural patterns and dialects confined to very small areas. Some neighboring villages speak such different languages that they cannot understand each other.

A Naga village is a territorial unit claiming an exclusive right to a clearly defined tract of land. A powerful village had exercised the right of overlordship over tributary villages in a wider territory.

The villages consist of spacious houses built of broad wooden planks and enhanced with carvings of buffalo-horns, pig-heads, women’s breasts, head-trophies and other fertility symbols. Some of the houses, whose masters had given expensive "feasts of merit," are decorated with crossed barge-boards which rise from the gables like the antlers of enormous stag. The Naga houses are closely packed together. The roads through the villages are uneven but communication is allowed in all parts of the village by numerous lanes which traverse in all directions.

The construction of a house is a communal responsibility. When an individual constructs a house, he is helped by all the adult male members of the village.

A noted speciality of a Naga village is its bachelors’ hall(s). Known as "Longshim" in Tangkhul dialect, these dormitories are a characteristic feature of the Naga society. They serve as dormitories for boys and unmarried young men (even married men frequent these great men’s houses whenever their personal domestic pressures allow them to do so) and also as focal points of social and ritual activities for all the men of the village. Their massive main posts are elaborately carved with figures of men, tigers, women’s breasts and animals in high relief, and these carvings are usually painted with color washes in red, white and black. The front porch of a Longshim often contains a wooden gong up to 8 meter long, carved from the trunk of a single tree. During festive occasions and head-hunting rites, baskets containing captured heads were hung up on the gong and two lines of warrior-drummers, standing on boards at each side, beat out an appropriate rhythm with wooden mallets.

Besides serving as a guard post, the "longshim" serves as a meeting place for the boys and girls, a place in which these young people come together prior to bedtime every night before their marriage, where guests are received, and certain community affairs are discussed and decided upon. Oral tradition, too, is kept alive from one generation to the next through teaching of songs, dances, and folk tales, and the example of the elders shape the personality of the young people in harmony with the village way of life, developing their sense of love, loyalty, disciplines, social responsibility and duty towards the village.