Hornbill — the festival of festivals

The Hornbill Festival runs from 1 to 10 December at the purpose-built Kisama Heritage Village, about 12 km from Kohima. It is named for the hornbill, the bird whose feathers feature in Naga ceremonial dress and which recurs across the peoples' folklore. Each of Nagaland's seventeen major tribes maintains its own morung at Kisama — a full-scale ceremonial house — and uses it as a base from which to perform its dances, songs, games and rituals and to host visitors over food and rice beer. Across the ten days you see warrior dances, the hauling and beating of the great hollowed log-drums that once carried messages and called villages to gather, mock head-taking displays drawn from the peoples' martial past, wrestling, Naga games, and a running market of weaving, woodcarving and cuisine. The festival was established in 2000 specifically to hold these traditions together: many Naga ceremonies had been weakened by a century of Christian conversion and by the long political conflict in the region, and the state's wager was that a shared annual gathering would let the peoples keep and exchange what remained. That wager has been argued over — some Naga scholars criticise the festival as a packaged, touristic version of living cultures — and the catalogue keeps that tension in view: Hornbill is at once a genuine instrument of preservation and a state-managed showcase, and both things are true at the same time.