Philip Greenberg for The New York Times
Fiercely Modern: Art of the Naga Warrior Tomb figures wearing bracelets, chest pieces and headdresses made of beads, feathers, animal bones and teeth.
By KEN JOHNSON
It would be hard to imagine a more misleading title than “Fiercely Modern: Art of the Naga Warrior,”
the name of a show at the Rubin Museum of Art. The Naga, a diverse
collection of peoples speaking similar languages and residing in a
mountainous area in northeastern India, certainly were fierce.
Headhunting was one of their prized pursuits. But they were far from
modern by present-day standards. In fact, the culture of the Naga was
nearly destroyed by modern Europeans. First came mid-19-century
subjugation by the British, who wanted to stop the irritation of
headhunting raids on neighboring Indian territories. Then American
Baptist missionaries invaded, eventually succeeding in almost totally
suppressing the Naga’s “satanic” practices and converting nearly all of
the population to nominal Christianity.
A human head trophy in “Fiercely Modern: Art of the Naga Warrior."
Including clothing, jewelry, weapons and ceremonial objects, the Rubin’s
exhibition serves more as an enticing introduction than a deep and wide
exploration of its subject. It was drawn from a collection assembled in
the 1930s by the anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf and now owned by the Welt Museum Wien in Vienna (previously the Museum für Völkerkunde).
The exhibition’s most attractive objects are those worn by warriors,
including bracelets, chest pieces and elaborate ceremonial headdresses
made from metal, beads, feathers, animal bones and teeth, dyed hair and
fur. Many are extraordinarily beautiful and positively flamboyant.
Wonderfully imaginative hats rigged with extensions from which hang
feathers, hair and other richly colored materials have a surrealistic
and sometimes comical appearance that might have inspired Dr. Seuss.
To contemporary Western eyes, however, the most sophisticated works are
the shawls and wrap skirts, which, in the Naga’s strict division of
labor, were woven exclusively by women. (Basketry was the men’s purview,
and the show includes some impressive examples of that craft.) With
their stripes, grids and zigzagging lines producing rhythmic geometric
patterns, the textiles on view look as if they were designed by a
mid-20th-century Modernist like Anni Albers.
The Naga were not just aesthetes, however. The things they made were
loaded with codified meanings. Motifs woven into shawls and skirts could
be read by others as indicators of identity, status, family relations
and notable accomplishments. A striking example consists of gridded red
and black squares and stripes. The museum label explains: “The large
black boxes on each end represent the dark side of life, which could be
made brighter only through headhunting and hosting feasts of merit. The
red squares represent the parts of flesh distributed to the community
after a successful headhunt, and the red on the edges commemorates the
blood that has been spilled.”
For a modern viewer it is hard to fathom that something so lovely should
be designed to celebrate such an abhorrent practice. The grisly style
of a “Head Trophy” on display seems more appropriate. It consists of a
series of woven rattan spheres hanging in a line ending at the bottom
with a pair of human skulls, one of which has bull’s horns attached to
each side. The horns, notes the museum label, were supposed to make the
victim “deaf to the calls of his own community asking for the name of
the man who had killed him.”
While this head trophy has a bracing and disturbing ugliness, what is
more shocking is that headhunting was so thoroughly woven into the
fabric of Naga culture at every level. Successful headhunters were like
star athletes, admired by all and especially attractive to women. “A
young man who had yet to bag a head would be teased by the girls in his
clan, and simply ignored by those in other clans,” notes the
introduction to “Naga Identities: Changing Local Cultures in the
Northeast of India,” a book of scholarly essays sold in the museum
bookstore and a must for anyone who wants to know more about the Naga.
(There is no catalog for this show.)
More important, the Naga believed that bringing home heads would ensure
the prosperity and general happiness of their village. It was important,
for example, to consecrate with fresh heads the giant dugout log drums
they made and used as musical instruments and as communication devices.
On the other hand, daily life was not oriented around headhunting. It
was an occasional activity pursued when villagers felt a need for
community uplift. An old, former headhunter quoted in “Naga Identities”
said, “Headhunting, that was like Christmas!”
Mostly the Naga devoted themselves to the less sensational practices of
farming and constructing mountainside villages of considerable
complexity. Old photographs in “Naga Identities” show big thatched-roof
houses outfitted with monumental wooden sculptures. The Rubin’s show
gives but an intriguing glimpse of how highly developed Naga culture
was.
Since World War II, Nagaland
has been rived by continuous violent conflicts between the Indian
government and groups seeking independence and, internally, between
radical and conservative factions. To the extent that the old Naga
culture survives today, it is in the form mostly of nostalgic revivals
catering to tourists. Younger Nagas generally are more interested in
assimilating into Western consumer and entertainment cultures than in
connecting to their precolonial roots. As it does everywhere in the
world, modernity rolls on, fiercely.
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