Customer Reviews

The Nagas: Hill Peoples in Northeast India

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
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Most illustrated "coffee table" books about indigenous peoples are fluffy and romantic. Julian Jacobs book is a noticeable exception. The photos are excellent, realistic and informative, and every word of the book is worth reading .... a great backgounder on am intriguing and reamarkable people.

The photographs were amazing . I wondered how they got all that stuff together. I sat for hours going over each one of them,trying to imagine how eachone of them must have been taken by the various individuals in their own time and space. Ok Ok so I got carried away a little, they are just pictures taken by people who had come to the Naga area either as tourist or as administrators but since there are such few photographs depicting the life of the naga people in the begining of the 20th century it was an amazing experience going through the photographs. So much has changed since then, both good and bad and like all tribal society that came into contact with the outside world only in the later half of the 19th century the Nagas also had to go through the usual problems symptomatic ofsocieties going through changes that came too fast at times. And in that process of getting educated and westernized and christianized somewhere along the way we lost touch with certain aspects of our tradition and culture. Lets just say the Nagas were victims of a histirical process demanding too much change. This loss was not just spiritual or intelectual but also material.In fact, to give a small example there was a shawl in one of the photograph worn by the Tangkhul tribe which is now no longer weaved because nobody knows how to anymore.I think it is important to know our roots because only then can we define ourselves and move ahead as a` people' in the ever changing dot com world we live in. This book is about how the world saw the nagasand also an attempt to undestand our way of life(the chapter on Fertility is interesting ) Of course only the Nagas can really know who they really are as people and as a nation but it is enlightening to be defined and analyzed by others especially if it has lots of pictures taken by them and all the good ones are brought together in one such book.(oh! so this is how my great granpa dressedup for the big hunt....) I think now that i have written about it I should buy a copy for my mom. She loves old photographs.

This book offers great photography into the Nagas,
showing their traditional dress, artifacts and amazing culture.
A great book for the coffee table, very interesting.

So little is written about the Nagas - Tangkhuls, Maos, Kabius etc living in the Manipur State, or elsewhere in the north-eastern states of India. So this book doesn't represent 'all of the Nagas'. The modern-day Nagas are warm, friendly, very hospitable and peaceful folks. Music runs in their soul and they've got the voice to match! Yes, they are indeed, beautiful people.