Sounds of Trauma: Naga Song Responses to Political Conflict

How does music become a vehicle for communicating suppressed political views and processing traumas from colonial and postcolonial conflicts marked by excessive military violence? Examining this question in the example of the Naga people, a South Asian ethnic minority, the project will investigate the topic from a novel interdisciplinary perspective, connecting ethnomusicology, oral history, trauma studies, and postcolonial studies. For generations, various culturally diverse Naga communities have lived in the eastern Himalayan region, in an area that encompasses the Indian state of Nagaland and parts of Assam, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, and northern Myanmar today. Since 1832, these Naga homelands have seen profound social, cultural, and political change through British colonization, Christian proselytization, and Westernization. Moreover, colonial and postcolonial conflicts often went along with prolonged military interventions that brought immense suffering to the Naga population. After a century of violent British colonial conquest, British and Japanese armies clashed in the territories of Nagaland and Manipur In World War II, thrusting Naga villages between the frontlines. After Indian independence in 1947, political strife persisted, as demands of the Naga National Congress (NNC) and successor organizations for a sovereign Naga state sparked a six-decade conflict between Naga nationalists and the Indian government. During the insurgency, Indian military forces punished civilians for supporting rebels, destroying entire villages and displacing their populations, making Nagas refugees at home and abroad. For more than a century, Naga artists have responded to these colonial and postcolonial clashes with songs about freedom fighters, army massacres and counterattacks, and the quest for Naga national independence. Considering this repertoire, the project will investigate through ethnographic fieldwork and online ethnography the social milieus of musical-political activism among Nagas, the gendering of composition and performance processes, how songs have supported Naga political movements, and how their global online dissemination has contributed to reinforcing a sense of nationhood among Naga communities and diasporas in recent decades. Furthermore, the project will use musical analysis to investigate the meanings, musical styles, and indigenous aesthetic perceptions of selected compositions, relying on field recordings, online resources, and historical collections of Naga performing arts held at archives in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany, and India. By combining these methodological approaches, the project will shed light on what role music has played in Naga lives in processing historical traumas of colonial and postcolonial subjugation and repression and how shifting cultural and religious values have altered the musical responses of Nagas to political and military conflict over time.