This post is written by Jelle J. P. Wouters, an Associate Professor and Chair of the Himalayan Centre for Environmental Humanities at Royal Thimphu College, Royal University of Bhutan.
During my ethnographic fieldwork in the village of Phugwumi in the Naga uplands of Northeast India, villagers readily spoke of Phugwumi’s fierce history of self-governance. In their narrations, they often drew comparisons between their indigenous polity and those of ancient Greece, as arranged in city-states, or poleis.
‘Before the state arrived, Phugwumi was an independent republic, akin to a Greek city-state’, Ato, a Phugwumi villager, explained. ‘We defended our gates, we sat in assembly to make decisions and had our own justice system based on customary law.’ Ato continued: ‘We still sit in assembly and follow our customary law, but the presence of the Indian state has made things more complicated.’
Not just Ato, but many Phugwumi villagers invoked ancient Greece to situate their village’s history, both to refer to its independent status and democratic functioning. ‘Just like the ancient Greeks’, was an oft inserted phrase in the conversations I had with villagers about Phugwumi’s past.
However, whereas the Ancient Greeks figure centrally in the history and theory of procedural democracy, which is dominantly thought to have emerged from an Athenian hillside, Naga hillsides find no place in these classic discourses on democracy. And this is problematic.
The Chakhesang Naga tribe, to which Phugwumi belongs, had no traditional vocation for kings, chiefs, or headmen, but made decisions in assembly through public deliberation; ‘just as the Ancient Greeks did.’
Indigenous scholarship is replete with comparisons between the prototypical Naga ‘village republic’ and Greek city-states. ‘If the Greek had city-states, in Nagaland every village is a small republic’, writes Namo (cited in Singh 2004, 14). ‘The ancient Naga possessed [a] political spirit like the people of Ancient Greece’, agrees Singh (2004). Writes Horam (1975, 85): ‘Any matter under dispute is taken before a meeting resembling the ancient Greek democratic meetings.’ Following this trend, Nshoga (2009: 6) states that ‘the structure and function of Naga villages were similar to a Greek city-state.’
Comparisons between Naga polity and the ancient Greeks was also a colonial trope with the colonial officer J.H. Hutton (1921: 46), for instance, noting that in their organization and functioning Naga villages are ‘something after the manner of an ancient Greek city state.’ This scholarship has percolated to Naga villagers who, like scholars, find validation of their political traditions from drawing parallels to Ancient Greece.
This linking of the Naga village republic to the ancient Greek city state and its cultural heritage of public deliberation evidences the modern influence of ancient Greece on the contemporary Naga. However, it is also part of a wider problematic in which ancient Greece is regarded and celebrated as the cradle and reference point for the global history of democracy and public deliberation as we know it.
This is problematic on various accounts. Amartya Sen (2005) shows that the Greek tradition of public discussion, while rightly celebrated, did not emerge in isolation but incorporated certain thoughts and attributes from India.
Milinda Banerjee (2022) goes a step further and critiques the dominant linear history of modern Western ideologies that ascribe the arrival of democracy in India to a Western educated, mostly high caste Hindu elite. In this sequel, democracy traveled from an Athenian hillside to India. Banerjee relates a different temporality and the multiple geographical roots of democracy. He highlights the case of traditional Tripura and the complex genealogical continuity of its ‘polycracy’, that is, the rule of many.
Indigenous traditions of polycracy, as well as of public deliberation as I shall illustrate for the Naga, are not made to count in the dominant intellectual history and normative theory of democracy, however.
The democratic canon always begins in Ancient Greece. What is worse, indigenous communities, the world over, are often found fault with in their political traditions by highlighting the presence of internal hierarchies and exclusions (whereas Ancient Greece – no voting rights for women, slavery – is getting a free pass!), or for the absence of state structures among them.
As a case in point: when Nagas’ incorporation in an independent India was discussed in the Constituent Assembly in 1949, several members objected against the proposal of providing autonomy to them. Their argument was that ‘the Nagas are a very primitive people’ and that if you allow them to run their own administration it will be ‘a negation of justice or administration and it will be something like anarchy.’[1]
Such statements were driven by preconceptions and biases about the Naga, and tribal communities in general. For one thing – there is no evidence – be it written or oral – that anarchy was commonplace in nonstate Naga villages. Per contra, their endurance and flourishing evidences the possibility of democracy existing without the presence of a state, as a nonstate democracy.
Colonial officers were astounded by this, and in their writings and correspondence praised Naga villages as, variously, ‘thoroughly democratic communities’, ‘decidedly democratic’, a democracy in its ‘extreme’ and the ‘purest democracy’ (see Wouters, 2018).
Elsewhere (Wouters, 2018), I have called the Naga a ‘society against voting’; not because they don’t value the idea and principles of democracy but, per contra, because their sense of the good political life is shaped by values of communal harmony, public deliberation, consensus-making, and complimentary coexistence. In their experience, party politics and elections divide and unsettle this traditional gemeinschaft – of the village as a reciprocal community with shared concerns and ends.
In the absence of voting, or raising hands, and also in the absence of traditional kings, chiefs, and headmen, how then were decisions ever arrived at?
In what follows I delineate the indigenous Naga political principle of müthikülü, which translates as the community’s thought/opinion, the voice of the assembly. I argue for its affirmation as a deeply profound democratic tradition; one that was arguably more democratic than the public assemblies and voting procedures of ancient Greece.
The Chakhesang Naga, of which Phugwumi is part, and the Tenyimia Naga group more broadly, politically operate through assemblies held at various levels; clan, khel [village ward], village, range, and tribe. Views and decisions must rise or digest through these assemblies, risking abortion at each level, to become rightful.
The assembly serves to reconcile the diversity of voices into müthikülü, Individuals commit to this ‘community-thought’ through the solemn utterance: müthikülü Omüdozo, ‘to the voice of the assembly, I agree.’ It is considered immoral for anyone to criticize or backpedal on an assembly agreement.
When there are disputes and disagreements, these are deliberated through küdzükhoküyi, agreement-making. Agreements are sealed through an oath (rüswu): a sacred covenant sworn on the lives of the oath-takers and their kindred, and symbolized through the breaking of a spear, the biting of a bullet, or, more recently, a hand on the Bible.
The Naga traditional assembly was multispecies in its constitution, and was so more inclusive and encompassing compared to the popular Greek ideal-type. In Subaltern Studies 2.0: Being against the Capitalocene, Milinda Banerjee and I note that Nagas were keen observers of animal behaviour. They kept close track of tiger collectives, which they conceptualized as also constituting assemblies, where some tigers have a more dominant voice than others. Nagas also identify python collectives as assemblies.
Further, they asserted that the ancestors and spirits also led collective lives. There were designated sites – hills, trees, rocks – especially identified as their sites of habitation. The multiple assemblages variously interlaced: tiger assemblies discussed human affairs; human assemblies discussed other animate beings. Human collectives traditionally honored and shared food with spirit assemblies; humans and tigers sometimes shared souls (in the form of ‘tigerman’), creating a particularly strong interspecies bond; ancestors and other spirits communicated their wishes and wisdom to humans. This rendered the Naga political assembly a – what we might call – transbeing democracy.
Some of these political thought-worlds have since been challenged and undermined by the arrival of the modern state and Christianity, but they continue to exist beneath the immediate surface.
In a human Naga assembly, everyone was allowed to raise their voice, at any time, on any topic, proposing any resolution. However, this was not pure egalitarianism. Everyone’s voice was not given equal weight. The sonority of one’s political voice was set by one’s antecedents and achievements, by the merit, virtue and wisdom a person had accumulated over a lifetime.
In the past, to increase the sonority of one’s political voice, the throwing of successive ‘feasts of merit’ (zhotho müza) was a powerful pathway. Feast-givers were respected and their wealth and generosity revealed their virtue, and their views demanded attention. Bravery and physical strength, in offering protection and through ritually fertilizing the village by bringing in the ‘soul matter’ of decapitated enemy heads provided another political axis. Perhaps most importantly, it was the wisdom and acumen associated with ageing that demanded listening ears.
In Phugwumi, both in the past and the present, the views of the village elderly, as a general political norm, superseded the voices of younger generations whose opportunism and naiveties had to be kept in check. In the cultural etiquette of the past, village youth, while never silenced, were expected to show deference by acknowledging, before speaking in public, the incomplete understanding and limited knowledge that came with being young and unmarried, the absence of fields and cattle in one’s possession, and their overall still limited experience of the perils and complications of life.
Youth learn from elders how to behave in the assembly and serve not the one but the many. Elders, in turn, defer to ancestors, who are wiser still and appear to them in dreams to nourish their decisions. Women generally spoke less than men, at least in public; an observation that is today often invoked to disqualify Naga traditional political thought.
This is an ontology of social differentiation which places the collective over individuals, those regarded as more meritorious – the brave, the generous, the wise – over those seen as less.
Determining the müthikülü, hence, did not rely on the equal participation, or equal weight, of all village voices. It was also often not easy, and could entail lengthy and contentious discussions, but whereas in certain Marxist circles consensus is seen as a euphemism for ideology, or false consciousness, in Phugwumi consensus-building itself constituted the political ideology. Crucially, the müthikülü arrived at did not imply that all villagers endorsed the same view. Often the meeting’s outcome, the resolution adopted, or the leader chosen was usually not the one to which the largest numbers of villagers agreed but the one to which the least numbers vehemently disagreed. As such, it was the tyranny of the majority in its reverse.
This principle continues to reign in the state-protected realm of customary governance today. ‘We never vote,’ as Phugwumi’s chairperson told me. ‘We discuss until we reach an agreement among all [nineteen] council members.’ As a result, council meetings were often lengthy, occasionally stretching for days on end. If no agreement could be reached a case or issue was declared unresolved or kept pending, which was preferred over forcing an outcome through the divisive practice of voting or raising hands.
On the whole, consensus-making, even if a long-drawn exercise, was regarded as more cohesive as it reified a sense of community, skirted open competition, avoided disputes, and thence minimalized the risk of instigating disharmony within the village community
That Nagas invoke ancient Greece to compare and validate their own political traditions reveals its salience as the cradle of public deliberation and democracy, even in the most faraway and unlikely of places from the viewpoint of ancient Greece.
However, rather than only an uncritical celebration of how ancient Greek ideas have traveled far and wide, this blog entry is also a call to politicize the foreclosures and exclusions that the celebration of ancient Greece as the cradle of pivotal democratic ideas and institutions inevitably entail; including the blackening out from intellectual history the ancient, indigenous, nonstate, and multispecies political through-traditions, of which müthikülü is one concept out of very many.
As electoral democracy, in its current form, is everywhere running out of steam, inspiration for its resurrection might well be found in the intellectual history that developed in Naga hillsides, and other indigenous communities, rather than in ancient Greece.
[1] Speech of Kuladhar Chaliha, Constituent Assembly Debates, vol. 9, 6 September, 1949,
References
- Banerjee, Milinda, 2022. ‘A Non-Eurocentric Genealogy of Indian Democracy: Tripura in History of Political Thought.’ In: Vernacular Politics in Northeast India: Democracy, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity, edited by Jelle J.P. Wouters, 83-110. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Banerjee, Milinda and Jelle J.P. Wouters, 2022. Subaltern Studies 2.0: Being Against the Capitalocene. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
- Horam, M. 1975. Naga Polity. Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation.
- Hutton, J.H. 1921. The Sema Nagas. London: Macmillan
- Nshoga, A. 2009. Traditional Naga Village System and its Transformation. Delhi: Anshah Publishing House.
- Sen, Amartya. 2005. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture, and Identity. London: Penguin.
- Singh, C. 2004. Naga Politics: A Critical Account. New Delhi: Mittal Publications.
- Wouters, Jelle J.P. Wouters, 2018. ‘Nagas as a Society against Voting? Consensus-Building, Party-less Politics, and a Culturalist Critique of Elections in Northeast India.’ The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 36(2): 113-132.