Khonoma in the clouds

Illustration/Uday Mohite

Living in a big metropolis like Mumbai most of my life, I've had a lifelong delight in smaller towns and villages. I intensely savour how different smaller towns are, what people eat and how, their songs, how they swear, what the morning air feels like, and what they enjoy doing for ‘timepass.'

Kochi is an all-time favourite. To that you can certainly add Khonoma, a most gorgeous, teeny-weeny village in Nagaland, in India's Northeast. It was a celebration of the senses - the sights, the morning light, the birdsong, the scents, the flowers, the pomelos, the people. It is just 20 km from the state capital Kohima, and about 70 km from Dimapur, which has an airport. Teetering on the top of a hill at 5,300 feet, it is a heritage village of the Angami tribe in the Dzukou Valley (population 4,000, 800 households). You can hire a local tourist guide for a two-hour village walk, or do the four-hour walk in the village and terraced paddy fields. My lovely guide, Kedoseno Punyu, was a charming, articulate young woman, who showed us around with quiet pride. I later discovered she had an MSc in Botany from an institute in Dehradun.

There were narrow cobbled lanes, with small houses huddled on the hillside, all swathed in mist and clouds. When the sun peeped through, you could see beautiful eddies of terraced fields below, in alternating green and yellow: the yellow being paddy and the green being mostly young garlic. The locals also practise jhum or shifting cultivation, in which they change land use for farming for limited plots, using nitrogen-fixing Nepali Alder trees, interspersed with organic crops of rice, potatoes, corn and garlic, and trim limited branches with the trunk intact: the trees replenish the soil when they leave it fallow for a few years and move to the next plot.

In weaver Ano Mor's modest room, she worked a basic, T-shaped wooden ‘loin loom', placed between her outstretched legs, swiftly passing shuttles of red, black and white threads, then pressing down her work with a large, curved metal blade. She had not married, in order to look after their parents and her brother's little daughter Bibi: he had moved to the city for a job.

We saw the traditional morung, a centre of learning and social values for youth of 12-15 age group, typically boys, with a guardian teaching them crafts, social work, defence, living together by sharing resources, and traditional song and dance. The typical cross-beam wooden architecture is painted with symbols and decorated with bison horns, and includes a dormitory. Honesty and hard work is valued above all. "Boys are trained to carry the heaviest loads; those picking the lighter loads are seen as weaklings," Kedoseno had said. It seemed like an equivalent of the ghotul, common among Gond and Muria tribes in central India.

The verandah had a central fireplace with low seating around. Next came the dormitory, with a long wooden bed, with a long, raised, wooden bed-head about five inches wide, that served as a common ‘pillow' - uff! On display were beautiful, traditional, woven cane and bamboo baskets, spears, bear skin shields and elephant skin shields (made of the skin stripped off an elephant's trunk, eeks!). Beyond, was someone's home. A woman was frying ‘Nepali rice puris' - all village food is cooked on a woodfire. The puris, made with a glutinous local rice, were crispy, yet chewy.

Khonoma is a ‘warrior village' with three khels or clans, Thevomia, Merhümia and Semomia. Each clan had its own fort on the hilltop, from which a series of Anglo-Khonoma battles were fought from 1850-1879. There were also three churches in the village - mainly Baptist - the conversion of many Nagas to Christianity started around the mid to late 19th century. The locals speak the Tenyidie language, which has Tibeto-Burmese roots, and the village has a rich heritage of folklore, myth and legend. Banning hunting and timber logging in 1998, the Khonoma village council created a ‘green village' and the Khonoma Nature Conservation and Tragopan Sanctuary over 20 sqkm, to protect Blyth's Tragopan, the state bird, and an exotic, endangered pheasant species.

There were tiny stalls with handwritten signs for Roselle tea (a superbly flavoured, gloriously pink tea made from a local flower) and Job's Tears tea (made from a local grain that tastes like barley). And, of course, you could buy beautiful home-woven Naga clothes - mekhalas (a Naga sarong), shawls, jackets, bead jewellery, and dried Naga King Chilli. You can stay at the Dovipie Inn hotel or bed-and-breakfast homestays. I can think of nothing lovelier than staying on the hill, overlooking the Dzukou valley, watching the clouds gambol all day, their shadows playing hide and seek over the terraced paddies.

Meenakshi Shedde is India and South Asia Delegate to the Berlin International Film Festival, National Award-winning critic, curator to festivals worldwide and journalist.
Reach her at meenakshi.shedde@mid-day.com