Nagaland: Megalithic or Mythological

NAGALAND: MEGALITHIC OR MYTHOLOGICAL?
By Carol Miller


According to the belief of the Naga tribesmen of densely forested Northeastern India (between Assam and Burma), the human soul, at the moment of death, is divided into two parts, known in the Wanchu dialect as yaha (the animated, or physical, aspect) and mío (the ethereal and spiritual aspect).

When a Naga dies, the yaha travels to the land of the dead, while the mío remains in the village with his relatives. Abundant mío is considered beneficial to the prosperity of the Nagas and the fertility of their crops, so village elders zealously preserve the supply of mío within their domains, by reciting incantations when a villager dies, in order to prevent the mío from wandering off into the forest. Throughout the year ritual hospitality is lavished upon ancestors to insure that their spiritual force is added to the vitality of the living warriors, swidden agriculturists, and hunters, a continual Día de muertos with lanterns to guide the spirits with everlasting light, abundant fruits for their nourishment, flowers to tempt them like bees or flies to remain among the living, precious feathers and beaded headdresses or offerings embellished with human or goat hair and dried seeds not unlike Mexican colorín, all of which celebrate the joyous presence of mío.

At one time the Nagas believed that mío resided in a person’s head, thus the “spirit reserve” of the village was augmented by the taking of heads of enemy warriors from neighboring tribes. When a head was brought into a Naga village, the spirit of the slain victim was told, through chanting and prayer, that his relatives no longer cared for him, so he should feel welcome among his new friends. By the same token Naga warriors, upon discovering their own comrades among those slain by enemies, removed the heads to prevent their falling into rival hands, while at the same time avoiding an increase in the mío of an enemy village.

Trophy heads represented the wealth of a village and were displayed with pride. Skulls to this day are stacked like books on a shelf in the village longhouses, which shelter the boys in puberty. Since these longhouses or morungs are built of wood, bamboo and thatch they easily catch fire, but if trophy skulls are lost the Naga artisans carve surrogates of wood or bone, usually displayed as masks, or miniature replicas strung as beads for necklaces, considered to be equally imbued with mío, and assuring the wearer of health, prosperity, many children, lavish crops and success in hunting.

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How did the Naga and their neighbors, claimed by some to be a megalithic people originating long before the Bronze Age, established by others as an Indo-Mongol offshoot related to the Kachiri dynasty of the thirteenth century, or perhaps both, manage to survive nearly intact, disdainful and in fact virtually oblivious of the British, who built their Raj, or kingship, all around the nearly impenetrable forest, exercising jurisdiction over it but never actually penetrating its mysteries? Are the Naga still headhunters? Or is that all part of their past? Is their yaha a derivation of yama, the god of death to the pre-Aryan Indus Valley cultures, with whom they are possibly related? Did the epic Mahabharata, which enters into their territory, distort their racial, cultural and linguistic history?

All these, and other questions, have presented themselves in the course of a strange but intense correspondence with a man to whom I, a sculptress and writer in Mexico City, now presume kinship in the remote Northeast of India.

With no preamble or preparation, I was contacted by an academic of sorts from a village near Dimapur, capital of Nagaland, who in cruising the Internet had stumbled upon my article on Amrit on the Syriagate website. “Dear Mam”, wrote Dr. Wati Ao Pangrak on Wednesday, the twelfth of August, 2009, “I have research on a Semitic inscription in the NE of India.” He suggested that this might offer the link I was seeking in connecting the enigmatic courtyard and fountain of Amrit in Syria with the Punjab and the pre-Aryan Indus Valley cultures, but he took his hypothesis a step farther, implying a connection as well in Southeast Asia, which by all logic would have to reside somewhere between Burma (Myanmar) and ancient Lanna, that is, northern Thailand and Laos.

He added that, “I’ve discovered a script [inscriptions carved on stone markers] resembling ancient Semitic-Hebrew script as confirmed by the AHRC [“The Arts and Humanities Research Council”]. I would be grateful if u would be interested on this subject, as this will rewrite the history of the NE rich ancient history, and its brave ancestors. There is no mention of such in the Indian history [books] but the rock inscription preserved by our ancestors tells a different story. We, especially our clan members, has been worshipping this great rock till the advent of Christianity, one hundred years back. The script is written vertically and the letters aleph, hey, zayin and lamed are clearly visible. [Others of the letters] are yet to be identified.”

A subsequent letter adds: “It is not that I want to prove [the Naga] as the descendants of Shem, but the history of NE India is a world of messed up histories with so many tribes and races with very rich cultures and traditions, that does not fit at all to the current history. The government of India is silent on the Indus Valley civilizations [I would imagine, in part, because their remains since 1947 and Independence from Britain lie in Pakistani territory] and ‘cos they knew it belonged to the mongoloids; the Aryans [from Central Asia] are later arrivals and they now dominate the country. [They have superimposed their god Indra, their preference for a light skin color, their myths and religion on our entire nation.] But the NE people stands on a very different footings untouched by civilizations until the arrival of the Britishers, during 1800 A.D., and u know they (Britishers) were not specially qualified researcher but armed officers who did write something on the books that divided our people into numerous tribes ‘n cultures [though] we were living as one since time immemorial.”

Pangrak’s third letter continues: “Semitic script discovery in our region is no co-incidental but its just like the saying ‘the builder who rejected the stone became the …’. I know this research will open the gate for unification of hundreds of tribes ‘n cultures, and this will bring the many conflicts with India into a new understanding. The Mythological Indian epic called Mahabharata never mentions how it ended, as well as [never explaining] the lost Indus Valley civilizations, but this research will speak something on the ancient history for a change.”

The British and the Indian governments, he goes on to say, “knew something on these area. They researched so much without informing the locals the purpose, but now I understand clearly their motifs and this is why I desperately wanted to contact somebody in this field. D/Mem Carol, it looks mountainous, bigger than Everest, but beyond there, God is waiting to reveal.”

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Dr. Wati Ao Pangrak, assuring me that he was my brother and that we were inextricably bound by our thirst for research and knowledge, declared me “his sister” and invited me to Dimapur, where his family would meet me, travel with me the eight hours into the interior needed to reach the site of the inscriptions, and accommodate myself and my husband, “with the best available”, providing ‘foodings and lodgings’, not a ‘tourist setting’ but not inaccessible, either. “Our place is strange n may b full of new experiencies not like d sophisticated west.”

From his village and the home of his clan we would travel, presumably by foot, to the site where we would then, he insisted, decipher the inscriptions on the local stelae. These indecipherable letters, he told me, are “the key to the history of my people”, are unquestionably Hebrew, and therefore necessarily associate the tribes of headhunters, megalithic warriors and slash-and-burn (swidden) farmers in the Himalayan foothills with the Semitic peoples of Western Asia.

This was the bait, and I was hooked. After the research on Amrit, near Tartus in Syria, I was convinced of a bond somehow with the pre-Aryan ethnicities of the Indus Valley, yet how did we get all the way to the Eastern Mediterranean coast from a Dravidian-Tibetan-Burmese linguistic and genetic blend in the jungles of Northeast India, or even the Munda (negroid-Mongolian) speakers on India’s western border with Pakistan, both of these constituting the legendary high ground that sheltered the survivors of a volcanic eruption and corresponding tsunami, which flooded the Punjabi and Gangetic plains at approximately, says Dr. Pangrak, from 1800-2200 B.C.?

Dr. Pangrak emphasizes “our ancient cultural song” or hymn, describing the people in the Ethi/Enthi/Inti/Indi as “swallowed up by the giant waters of a tsunami” which was over many, many years “gradually seen to be disappearing”. One of the stanzas tells “how our lion-hearted forefathers [though this might refer to the more prevalent tigers, marauders of the region where lions were at that time unknown and unheard-of, except of course, ah ha!, in the Indus Valley], who possessed Tantric swords and built the Ethi city. “Interestingly,” he goes on to say, “the lion and the ocean, or ‘giant waters’, are synonymous only in our dialect.”

And he continues, though I have polished his text: “If we go back to world history around 1500 B.C. we learn of the unrecorded great sea peoples [probably the Hyksos, to this day of unknown origins] plundering Egypt and the Syro-Phoenician coast, concurrent with the decline of the Indus Valley cultures, as the light-skinned Aryans from the Altai crossed Central Asia, breached the Hindu Kush, and descended on the Indus through the Northwest Passage, and by so doing displaced, both to the east and to the west, the dark-skinned civilizations only known today by the name of the two most prominent remaining sites, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, among so many others that have been damaged or erased by time, history, conquest, floods or the limitations of archaeology to encompass so much, while [at the same time, these Aryans] imposed the Vedic cultures and its deities, as described in the epic Mahabharata, or ‘Book of Wars’.”

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Further correspondence with Dr. Wati Pangrak, ever more frequent, is addressed to “D/Mem Carol: Why I m so deeply convinced is that when I first started to research on my tribe history 15 yrs ago, I came to learn that history was hiding things. The more dominant tribes still extant today are ignorant of all events related to the past, [especially beyond the last] six hundred years, and now [at this point] they don’t even know why or how this happened. I went deeper and deeper studying my small historically complicated village. I first studied the different names of geography of my village and visited the stones and found something as if scratched by someone but it was not possible since this stone was possessed and guarded within a perimeter of 1 km from time immemorial [and is therefore inaccessible to all] except our clan who happens to be the priest/king’s descendants.

“Our clans speak orally of many ups and down-migration after migration, but [while other people entered the region for various reasons] our lineage, the thirty forefathers described in our hymn and in our oral history, who dominated this region for 1000 years, never moved from this site from ancient times, and flourished here while the water level subsided. From then on I focused on the [megalithic] Kachari and [the medieval] Ahom civilizations, hostile to each other since the latter invaded the region beginning in 13th C., possibly coming from Thailand or Burma, but I came to conclude that they were also residing in our area at a previous time, but then they left, abandoned the region, perhaps moving into Assam, yet their linguistic remains, of Siamese-Chinese origins, still dominate us.” As it happens, “the first Hindu Ahom king Suhungmongba, dating from 15-16 century A.D. was brought up by a Naga chief, yet how can this be if the Nagas were still headhunters at that time? History fails to mention the king’s village of origin. And that is where the missing link begins…”

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The Kachari people to whom Dr. Wadi Pangrak refers left ruins still visible in the city of Dimapur, their capital, one of three important municipalities, along with Kohima and Mokokchung, in Nagaland, and linked to Imphal and Moreh on the Myanmar border, in a region also accessible to the remote states of Manipur, Tripura and Mizoram, and by extension home to several of these clans of the elusive origins.

The ancient Kachari capital, despite Pangrak’s resentment regarding the scant research effected here, was considered to be a site of major importance with regard to megalithic cultures. Though the Kacharis are predominantly non-Aryan, with elaborate rituals and emphasis on the cult of fertility, and have left seals displaying women with traditional headdresses of precious hoopoe feathers, as well as pious ceremonies of sacrifice, they have obviously been influenced over the centuries by a superimposition of Hindu patterns of custom and worship. Whether they brought these customs with them from the pre-Aryan Indus Valley or whether religious practices of Vedic origin have been superimposed by the dominant Hindu patterns throughout the country, is still a matter of conjecture, and without precise dating, will remain so.

The Kacharis inhabited the area leaving no known designation, although the later Ahom people called it Che-din-chi-pen, “The Brick City”. Worthy of note is the fact of the mud brick or baked brick construction prevalent among pre-Aryan Indus Valley sites, notably Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro.

Etymologically, Dimapur is “the city by the big river”, a later appellation originating in the Kachari dialect, referring to the Dimasa River. The Archaeological Survey of India maintains ruins of a fourteenth century Kachari palace in the city, which obviously survived the Ahom invasion. There are also the ruins of temples, reservoirs and palaces, as well as significant monolithic structures, “assigned to the elaborate rituals of the cult of fertility”, according to local anthropologists. The beautifully executed entrances to these religious compounds remain in perfect condition, even now. Blocks of stone and brick, inscribed with a variety of designs, just as described by Pangrak, dot the landscape, but they are only a few among the wealth of stelae and stone ruins in the region. The North-East Zone Cultural Center, about three kilometers from the Dimapur railway station, maintains a small museum dedicated to the still-dim cultural heritage of the Northeast.

Yet Dr. Pangrak maintains that the more remote among these monuments , referring to engraved stones removed or distant from the Dimapur area, or even the sites he mentioned at a distance of eight hours from Dimapur, “Are very specific colonies [which mark the ruined remains of ancient villages], and have been totally overgrown; they are now thick jungle, with sites barely visible though they still reveal the stones with their inscriptions and engravings. Many of the stelae are still erect, others are broken and scattered. When I saw these for myself I was awed by their size. How could these stones have been transported from at least a mile, up a steep hillside? It would be a challenge even today, with modern equipment.” Yet this phenomenon persists in so many ancient cultures, from the Nile to Stonehenge to Angkor to Easter Island to the Andes to Mexico and Central America, and the secret, whether using trees as rollers, employing earth ramps, or slave labor, has been lost; the movement of large stones or large amounts of stone, like the stories of a race of gigantic men, or an overwhelming flood, while common to every culture, remain a matter of speculation.

Another letter arrives from my brother: “With this I continued a study of our oral culture, especially as expressed in song, which speaks of 1000 elephants, the herds of the kings, and of a gigantic human race. One of our ancestors could easily embrace an elephant, shoulder to shoulder. It was about this time, according to my calculations, that names, translatable to Christian words, were assigned to places, inscriptions, clans, and so on.

“We have also learned of a colony for the elephant riders, not only the mahouts or handlers, but also warriors who rode the elephants into battle. Much has been recorded—described in words, painted in pictures, displayed in temples and palaces-- of the persistent battles between the war elephants of the Thais and the Burmese, but our people probably took part in these battles, very likely on behalf of the Ahom in these disputes for territory and dominance, or perhaps our clans fought on the side of the Burmese, our neighbors. Our stories record tales of ‘enemy chasers’, battlefields, enemies penetrating to the royal palaces, elephants trampling the panji [rice] fields, [a term actually originating in Java in Indonesia].

“These stories are mixed with descriptions of a great body of water, surely the tsunami that invaded the flatlands or flood plains, and can be pinpointed in at least seventy different areas. These stories have become local myths, which I am currently translating. Research in this area is sponsored. There is no independent research. But if you come here, and take me as your brother (I am married with two young kids, ok?) we will pursue this matter, if God wills it, in order to give the souls of my forefathers their much-deserved ever-lasting peace. Nothing stands in our way. I don’t think anyone else is really interested, there are no references, no guides or books, nor are there facilities for obtaining a doctorate.”

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The Mahabharata, the epic “Book of Wars” beloved of the Aryan people, continues to puzzle Pangrak, though many of its inconsistencies have been attributed to esoteric symbolism or hermetic references.

“Imagine,” says Dr. Wati, “that this saga was written by a critical racist scholar, who fails to understand even the sexes. The heroic figure of Bhima and the Pandavas enter the thick jungles of the Northeast regions at some point in the past, only to discover a race of Rakshas, that is, the Mongoloid giants [oversized men of Mongol descent], of the Heremba kingdom.

“Here the author describes how the Raksha siblings, called Hidimba, encounter Bhima. Hidimba (female) takes the form of a beautiful maiden, who was actually instructed to kill Bhima and the Pandavas, and for this purpose she successfully entices Bhima, but this relationship enrages her brother, also called Hidimba. Now Hidimba is a man. He wrestles with Bhima, then Bhima kills Hidimba and marries Hidimba. Could they have been twins? Symbolic soul-mates? Polarized values? Could Bhima have ascended to Heaven as a deity, while Hidimba (female) remained human? In which case Bhima could not have married the she-Hidimba, for she was human and not divine. With this Bhima must kill her in order for her to ascend to Heaven and thus share his divinity, and with this be able to marry.

“Meantime, the author clearly discriminates against the northeastern people, by his inability to distinguish between a man and a woman, although of course I understand that the dichotomy of gender exists in many cultures [prominently so in the Precolumbian cultures of Mexico and Central America], and I also appreciate polarized values, [another commonplace in Mexico, as in India].

“Yet the Rakshas are described as dark-skinned and are therefore equivalent to demons, satanic figures by inference evil and threatening, as opposed to the light-skinned Aryan heroes.

“Meantime, Bhima kills one of the Hidimba symbols of the Heremba kingdom, but does not destroy the entire Heremba people. I interpret this to indicate the age of the people of the Northeast, as the influence of Hinduism is buried deeply in the history and the rich past of the Northeastern clans.

“I even suspect the Ramayana, where Ram was aided by a monkey, an inference to a mongoloid group. Hanuman, the monkey king, may even have been a Mongol general, as he defended Rama and won, and to this day monkeys, though a great nuisance, are considered sacred in India and are protected.

“Hanuman lifting an entire hill, to me, is a joke, though this is also symbolic. He carries the burdens of the world on his shoulders. The hill is obviously the magic Hindu mountain, sacred Mt. Meru, atop which stands the supreme temple and thus is closest to heaven [a fact shared by other cultures, like the Maya or the Aztec, builders of symbolic sacred mounts topped by temples], but it could also be a reference to the sacred art of healing so dear to my people, and to the shrubs and herbs collected from a particular hill.

“In my opinion, all of India was once inhabited by the Mongols who lost their great cities in a volcanic eruption, followed by a devastating flood and tsunami. About this time the Aryans, most likely of Altai origin [like so many of the Turkic or Mongol groups that migrated toward the west], entered the Subcontinent through the passage between Afghanistan and Pakistan and drove away the indigenous people, sending them either west to Egypt and the Syro-Phoenician coast [which would explain the mysterious Hyksos] or east into Southern China, Laos, Thailand and Burma.

“And if the Kachari tribes are recorded as the earliest native inhabitants of the Northeast, then how about our cultural songs which mention the Kachari groups allied with the children of our ancient village? Personally, I think that after the Indus Valley civilizations ended, large migrations took place, both by land and by sea, and this gave way to the Hyksos among other Indo-European peoples in the west, and after passing through our jungles and hills in the Northeast, they continued into Southeast Asia. Many commentaries exist in the chronicles of Chinese tradesmen and travelers, of Arab travelers and scholars, testimonies of the Mongols or the people conquered by them. Why would they visit these savage people in the NE jungles? Because they knew these people were their brethren, lost long ago. All the great navigators, from the Chinese on, to the Portuguese, the Spanish, Dutch, French, English, had heard of their great wealth. Alexander knew, but his generals refused to let him penetrate beyond the Punjab. Ptolomy knew. Columbus knew. They all knew the place where the script was found. I am convinced that the entire NE was a seaport as well as the great Indian plains. Transportation was by boat from the sea side and horses by land.

“Proof of this lies in the fact that the mongoloids of NE India are very different from the people of the rest of the Subcontinent. They were never conquered and their lands were never fully explored. I am convinced that the NE people from pre-Aryan Indus Valley, who abandoned their site due to volcanic eruption, might even have coincided with the eruption at Thera (Santorini) at the height of the Bronze Age.

“Our cultural hymns speak of lions, a jungle kingdom, Mithun sacrifice in which a calf is anointed, its horns doused with milk, afterward the villages wrestle with it before ritual sacrifice, when the elders then don the horns as part of their headdress and emblem of their authority. This custom gained prestige with the gods. [see the stone seal on which the ceremony is inscribed.] These people describe their kingdom engulfed by a churning sea as great boulders disappeared. There are clues that speak of the past, but none can decipher the tales told by our forefathers. We do not understand them. We think they are crazy.

“Naga warriors possess gigantic log drums resembling a canoe stranded on a hilltop. They perform their rites, they respect their sacrifice, they gain the prestige and the approval of the gods, but they cannot explain why. Thank you, Mem Sister, for listening to the silent voice from Heaven.”


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