Robert & Odile's Journey to the Hornbill Festival

The Long Road North

The first four days were spent climbing into Arunachal Pradesh — Guwahati to Shergaon to Dirang, and then over the Sela Pass at 4,170 metres into Tawang. Basumutary drove the switchbacks slowly, in the way an experienced mountain driver does; there was no hurry. Robert and Odile stood in the great courtyard of Tawang Monastery, and in front of the giant gilded Buddha above the town, in the thin cold air of the Bhutan border.

Zemithang and the Apatani Valley

From Tawang they made the day excursion to Zemithang, a quiet valley of Monpa villages, prayer flags and the Nyamjang Chu. Then south again — Bomdila, Itanagar, and down into Ziro, the Apatani homeland. Pradeep took them through the villages of Hong and Hija, past the paddy-fish fields, and introduced them to the elders — the last generation of Apatani women with the ceremonial nose plugs and long facial tattoos.

Across the Brahmaputra

On the eleventh day they crossed the Brahmaputra by ferry to Majuli, the world's largest inhabited river island. The car went with them on the deck. They spent two days among the satras — the Vaishnavite monasteries where monks still dance in painted masks — and watched Samaguri's mask-makers stretch bamboo and clay over the wooden armatures of Hindu deities.

A Meal on Majuli

One afternoon on Majuli they sat down to a slow lunch in the smoke-blackened kitchen of a Mising home — rice, fish curry, bamboo shoot, tea. Overhead, baskets and gourd containers hung from the bamboo rafters; the hearth burned in the middle of the floor. Pradeep translated the introductions. It was the kind of quiet, uneventful hour that later becomes the strongest memory of a journey.

Kaziranga

The Brahmaputra floodplain came next — three days at Kaziranga, in the elephant grass and shallow beels. They took two safaris in the open jeep at the park gate: one-horned rhinos in the mist at dawn, herds of wild elephant on the far bank, water buffalo, hog deer, and once — briefly, at distance — the outline of a tigress moving through the grass.

Arrival in Kohima

On the sixteenth day they turned south-east and drove up into Nagaland. The road climbs steadily out of the Assam plains into the Angami hills, and Kohima appears on a series of ridges. Robert and Odile arrived in the late afternoon, in the cold, dry light of a Nagaland December. This was what the sixteen days had been leading to. The Hornbill Festival would begin the next morning.

Inside the Morungs at Kisama

The festival is held at Kisama Heritage Village, a purpose-built ground about ten kilometres south of Kohima. Each of the seventeen Naga tribes keeps its own morung there — a longhouse of thatch, timber and carved posts that serves as a living room, a kitchen and a stage. Robert and Odile moved between them slowly. Pradeep introduced them at the Konyak morung, and at the Ao and Chakhesang morungs, and translated where the older hosts spoke only in Nagamese or their own tongues. Smoked pork hung from the rafters; rice beer was offered in bamboo cups.

The Arena

The arena programme is the loud, public face of Hornbill — the massed dances, the log-drum calls, the warrior processions in red-fur headdresses and mithun horns. Robert photographed from the arena rim; Odile watched, mostly, from the shade of a morung doorway. Nothing about it felt staged for a visitor. It was, plainly, the tribes doing what they have done for a long time — only now, once a year, with a stand of chairs on one side.

The Food and the Craft Bazaar

Between arena sets they ate the way the hosts ate — smoked pork with bamboo shoot, sticky rice, boiled greens, fermented soybean, hot bhut jolokia chutney used sparingly. In the craft bazaar behind the morungs, weavers worked at back-strap looms; there were naga shawls, beadwork, dao knives in carved sheaths, and coffee grown in the eastern districts. Odile bought a red-and-black Chakhesang shawl.

Khonoma, and Away

On their last morning in Nagaland, Basumutary drove them out to Khonoma, the old Angami warrior village about twenty kilometres west of Kohima — stone-paved lanes, terraced rice fields stepping down the hillside, and the tall wooden gates carved with mithun heads. In the afternoon they descended to Dimapur and flew out the next day. Nineteen days across Northeast India, and one festival at Kisama that had, in the end, held the whole journey together.