In the skin of a tiger
A Naga poet keeps her culture alive even without a recognised homeland Easterine Iralu had her first encounter with the spirit world of the Naga people at a young age. One evening in north-east India, after she and her cousins had finished playing, she noticed a little boy still hiding under the table. Before she had time to let him know the game was over, the boy was gone.
‘He had this mischievous look on his face and he looked as though he wanted me to keep his secret,’ she says. ‘And then a few more minutes later—I don’t know if he disappeared or not—but it struck me that he was not any one of the children I knew.’
It may have been a lucky escape for Iralu. Many Naga stories, passed around the village and between generations, tell of people lured away by the sweet calls of forest spirits. Some return, unable to speak of their experience. Others never come back, but they are not considered dead. They have left their human form behind.
‘It’s not just magical realism, it is there,’ Iralu says. ‘As recently as 1998, the lady who used to come and clean our office went missing for a week. She’d been spirited away. The whole village came out to look for her, after a week they found her somewhere in the forest and brought her back.
‘She was home for two days and then she went missing again. And then they got her back for good. She was quite disturbed by the whole thing so she couldn’t clearly say what had happened, she just said some people called her.’
Iralu says she has a foot in both worlds. Her sense of the other-worldliness still present in Naga culture sits comfortably with the Christianity brought by the missionaries who followed the first British punitive raids into the Naga Hills in the 1830s.
A poet, writer and translator of traditional verse from her Angami tribe, Iralu also teaches in the English department at Nagaland University. She is in Sydney to attend a conference on reconciliation and healing before heading south on a three-week tour of Australia. It is all good material for the diary she is keeping of her travels. Her meetings with the locals and impressions of the land prompt some on-the-spot lyricism. ‘Nothing pantheistic,’ she jokes.
There are three million Nagas, and as many as 50 tribes,