Yaoreipam Makang

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA will attempt to understand the evolving cultural identity of the Tangkhul Naga community through an ethnographic and performative exploration of the Luira Festival and its iterations in four diasporic sites - Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Shillong, further drawing up a comparative analysis with Luira celebrations at Ukhrul in Manipur. Yaoreipam Makang will be the Coordinator of this project.

Yaoreipam Makang has recently submitted his PhD thesis, titled Performing Personhood: Rites, Rituals and Cultural Practices of Tangkhul Nagas, at the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Besides having presented and published research papers on this subject, Yaoreipam organises bi-monthly talks and seminars in his capacity as an executive member of the Naga Scholars’ Association (NSA) to build a more robust network of young scholars. For a short while in 2017, he taught as an assistant professor in the Department of English at Delhi University. Given his expertise, he is best suited to be the Project Coordinator for this Foundation Project of IFA.

In this project, titled Examining Iterations of the Luira Phanit Festival: Looking at Cultural Identity and Indigenous Personhood of Tangkhul Nagas in Contemporary India, Yaoreipam will attempt to chart the transforming cultural geography of the Tangkhul migrants within the context of urban India. The project, in its interdisciplinary research methodology, takes insights from anthropology, culture studies, performance theory, and indigenous philosophy of nature and environment in the South Asian context. The aim is to study iterations of Luira at five sites in total - Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Shillong, and Ukhrul - to reflect on how indigenous ‘culture’ transports and transforms along with migration, situating celebrations of Luira away from ‘home’ within the systemic marginalisation and cultural ‘othering’ experienced by this community in urban spaces. 

This research shall rely strongly on ethnographic methods, such as in-depth interviews with the community elders and youth groups in Ukhrul district in Manipur and semi-structured in-depth interviews with migrants from the community who have now settled in spaces such as Shillong, Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore. The interviews will address themes such as diasporic nostalgia, economic and cultural concerns related to (rural-urban and hill-city) migration, and the symbolic role of cultural artefacts, rituals, folk songs, and traditional weaves in refashioning the community’s sense of belonging in an urban space. Subsequently, in the case of the four urban spaces chosen, participant observation as a method will be used to gain an in-depth understanding of the subject matter.

The outcome of this research will be a monograph and audio-visual documentation of the festival events. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA, along with the final reports, will be the monograph, audio-visual recording of the festival from five different geographical spaces, excerpts of the interviews from the field, copies of brochures, photographs, and lyrics of songs.

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Research programme in its exploration of how migration alters notions of identity of a community and how certain cultural practices become important spaces to refashion a new sense of personhood and formulate new cultural networks, leading to the emergence of newer forms of cultural belonging and citizenship.

IFA will ensure that the project is implemented on time and that the funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is complete and deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with the Trustees.

This project is made possible with support from BNP Paribas India.