Cultural similarities of the Nagas & South East Asian tribes

Growing up in India in the 1960s and1970s references to the Nagas evoked awe and fear. Nagaland was created during this period, which upset several separatist tribes opposed to joining the Indian Union. Insurgencies and killings continued until 1975 when India imposed Presidential rule and sent in the army.
The British who ruled India until 1947 had a very checkered history in the Naga Hills. The Naga Hills, with tropical and subtropical evergreen forests, border Burma, where many tribes live on both sides. The Nagas consisted of 17 major tribes who have been referred and written in Indian History since the 13 th century. Assam, the tea cultivation region for the British, bordered Nagaland. Between 1839 and 1850, the British conducted ten military operations, eventually subjugating the lower half of Nagaland. The northwestern part of Nagaland was marked as an unadministered area on British India maps due to continued resistance from the warriors who were vary of British intentions.
This area has captured the attention of many anthropologists and showcases a culture distinct from that of the Indian subcontinent. Of the tribes that occupy that area the Konyak Nagas still maintain a degree of isolation from the rest of Nagaland. While Nagaland is well integrated as an Indian state with many of its younger population working in the rest of the country.
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I became interested in Nagaland due to its cultural similarities with other Southeast Asian tribes I encountered during my travels. Similarities in head hunting traditions, burial customs, body art, dormitory system and terraced rice fields found by me in Burma, Sulawesi, Borneo, and Sumatra motivated me to travel to norther Nagaland’s Mon district which is the home of the Konyaks. Although not part of Sino-Tibeto-Burmese cultures, Fiji and Micronesia (Papua New Guinea) and Madagascar have many similar customs thus raising the specter of a culture that likely spread into the Pacific from a central location, the Yunnan province of today’s China.
Modern developments are rapidly transforming traditional practices, but in several villages of the Mon district, the tattooed headhunters of Nagaland can still be found. These octogenarian warriors still tell stories of their past and dress in their native outfits for visitors like me. In another few years it will be another culture lost to time.

In this article I will proceed to compare my travel experiences and photographs of Batak, Dayak, Bugis, Toraja and Iban people with those of the Nagas and other photographs extracted from the web to establish their common ancestry that emerged from China.
While cultures all over the world have given up traditional practices and have adopted to an everchanging world, any references to the past regarding their cultures are in no way a poor reflection of the modern Naga Indian citizens.
Headhunting Practices.
The Igorot-Kalinga of Philippines were well known for their Headhunting like the Nagas in India. Like the Nagas, they carried home the chopped off head of their victims as trophies. Great celebrations were held to honor the brave warrior for his deed. Headhunting was driven by the belief that a human head held great power and could bring fertility and good harvests. It gradually became taboo with the advent of Christianity to both the Igorot and Nagas.
The Iban of Sarawak and the Dayaks of Kalimantan are both reputed to be the most fearsome of Borneo’s headhunters not so long ago. They too celebrated the captured heads of their enemies with a great festival called Gawal Kenya Lang (the Hornbill festival). The heads were thought to bring strength, virtue, and prosperity to the long house. Hornbill skulls are currently utilized as substitutes for human heads in these ceremonies. Such festivals were also common among the Nagas and known as the “Feast of Merit.”
In 2015 I traveled 6 hours on a speed boat from Panganiban, Kalimantan to spend a night with the Beconsu Pyan Dayaks in their long house in Borneo. ( Read my Blog: A night with a head-hunting tribe in Borneo) to witness their burial customs and to catch a glimpse of their lives. The long house, which previously displayed skulls of victims, now features hornbill casques as decorations.
In Sumatra there are six groups of Batak living around Lake Toba who distinguish themselves with their languages and habits. I had the privilege of visiting several Batak villages in 2022. The Batak, like the Naga tribes, were well known for their headhunting. They lived in isolation for centuries in the hilly regions. Their bloody feuds and guerrilla attacks on each other’s villages gained a well-earned reputation for ferocity. They also practiced ritual cannibalism in which a token piece of flesh of a slain enemy or of one judged guilty of a major violation of traditional laws was ceremoniously consumed. War captives' heads and hands were kept as trophies, similar to the practices of the Dayaks and Nagas. The Naga tribes, along with the Dayaks and the Atayal tribe of Taiwan, had a tradition where individuals needed to bring back a head to demonstrate their manhood and qualify for marriage within the village.


Dormitory culture
The Morung (Nagas Dormitory) system in the past was similar to that of the Igorot. The young Naga boys and girls slept in their Morungs (dormitories) in ancient times. Back then, the Morung served as the educational hub for various life skills. In every village there were two or three Morongs, both for boys and girls. The young men and women continued to live in Morungs till they are married. While men were permitted to enter the women's Morung, the women were not allowed to enter the men's Morung, a practice that is also observed in the Tsou tribe. The Nagas believed that if woman enter the men’s dormitory, it would bring misfortune in the village.
The boys were allowed to go to the girls' Morung, but the girls were not permitted to do the opposite. After the advent of Christianity in the Naga Hills – Morong culture vanished from the villages. The Bontoc and Kankanaey groups of Igorot were also well known for their dormitory system. I could not find any photographic evidence from a web search.
There are ten tribes in Taiwan (Formosa) with each having different cultures and traditions. The Puyuma and Tsou tribes of yore exhibited certain traditional similarities to the Nagas tribe. The Puyuma tribe had special institutions for males known as Assembly Halls, to train them in warfare and physical strength in order protect their tribe. Before men got married, they lived in their assembly halls.
The activities in Puyuma assembly hall and Nagas Morung are largely similar.
Village design and long houses:
Traditionally, the Dayaks live in communal long houses known as Lamin in East and West Kalimantan, Sarawak, and Brunei. Long houses are usually built parallel to the river. Rice barns and storehouses containing valuable items are kept separate from the main building to mitigate the risk of fire. Most Naga villages have separate houses for living and storehouses, like the Dayak tribes.
Storehouses near the main house protect rice, millet, and other grains in the event of a fire in the main house. The Bugis people are seafarers spread throughout the Indonesian archipelago. They have settled in Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sumbawa, and Malaysia and have trading with all the smaller Islands. The Bugis have traditionally lived in pile-built wooden houses with slatted bamboo floors similar in style and layout to the basic Malay prototype. The characteristic decorative feature is a pair of crossed roof finials symbolizing buffalo horns.
Certain Naga tribes resided in stilt houses, similar to those of the Bugis people. The Nagas old house structure is remarkably like that of Bugis’ old house, which have a pair of crossed roof symbolizing the buffalo horns. Nagas who hosted the 'Feast of Merit' had houses with wooden beams crossed diagonally, attached to the eaves to symbolize buffalo horns.
Toraja is a name of Bugis origin given to the different people of the mountainous regions of the northern part of Sulawesi, which remained isolated until recently. Their traditional religion involves the worship of natural elements and spirits, and includes practices such as animal sacrifices, elaborate funeral rites, and large communal feasts. Historically, Toraja villages were strategically located on hilltops and fortified with walls and a gate similar to the Nagas. The villages of Taroja were fortified to a degree that access was occasionally restricted to tunnels carved through rock. This was all part of the common Indonesian custom of headhunting and inter-village raids.
Batak also have separate houses and granaries like the Toraja people and have crossed wooden beams symbolizing buffalo horns. In addition, the Batak builds architecturally significant homes remarkably like the Torajans. The inverted boat like roofs is supposed to remember their ancestors who arrived by boat.

Burial traditions:
The disposal of the dead varies from tribe to tribe. The Angami and Lhota Nagas buried, often in stone- lined graves, sometimes
excavating a vault out of sandstone, and sometimes using a canoe-like coffin. Canoe-like coffins are very similar in Toraja villages. The Ao Nagas dispose of their dead on platforms; the Chang Nagas practiced both plat-form disposal and burial; the Konyak disposed of died on platforms, but separated the head, which was placed in a pot, or into a stone cist, or facing inwards into the side of a hollow cone of sandstone covered with a bamboo sheath. Some of the more easterly Konyak tribes set up a human effigy in wood or wicker-work on which the head of the deceased was placed for a time to let the soul descend into the effigy and wooden effigies of the dead again are set up by many of the Angami over the grave Some Konyak villages
disposed of their dead in baskets which held them in a sitting but more or less upright position. The one form of disposal of the dead regarded with unanimous disapproval is cremation.
Tana Toraja people, who live in the central highlands of Sulawesi, conduct elaborate feasts after burials. I had the privilege of visiting Toraja in the nineties and attending funeral ceremonies shown in the images. They bury their dead in caves, in steep cliffs and in elaborate casks. Like the Nagas the Toraja people create effigies of the dead and place them in areas overlooking their villages. The number of buffaloes killed on such events bring pride to the family. The houses are decorated with buffalo horns, like that of the Nagas who decorate their homes with Mithuns, a domesticated bison, along with other mammalian skulls.

While a few articles have been written on the comparative studies of tribal cultures of SE Asia, I have attempted herein to include my travel experiences and photographs to further enhance earlier works.
The end
Ramdas Iyer/ [email protected]
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Sources include:
J.P.Mills- Royal Anthropological Society publication
Dr. Thohe Pau, NDA, Pune
Illustrations: Last of the tattooed Konyaks by Phejian Konyak