Naga village republics

The village as the state

Each Naga village was an independent polity, often fortified on a ridge, making war and peace on its own account. Government was by a council of elders and by age-group institutions centred on the morung, the young men's dormitory, which functioned as school, barracks and civic hall.

Among the Konyak of the northeast the pattern differed: hereditary chiefs called Anghs held real authority, in some cases over several villages, with an elaborate ritual status.

Headhunting was practised across much of the region and was bound up with fertility ritual, the morung system and inter-village relations. Its suppression under colonial and then missionary pressure changed Naga society profoundly, and it ended within living memory in some areas.

Resistance and after

The British fought a long series of expeditions into the hills through the nineteenth century. The siege of Khonoma in 1879–80, following the killing of the British political agent, was the largest of them, and the village's resistance is central to Naga historical memory.

American Baptist missions produced one of the most complete Christian conversions of any population in Asia. Naga political demands for independence, articulated from 1929 and asserted in a declaration of 1947, produced the longest-running insurgency in India; Nagaland was created as a state in 1963, and Article 371A protects Naga customary law, land and village institutions from parliamentary legislation without the state assembly's consent.

The village republics therefore persist in law, which is an unusual survival for a pre-colonial political form.