Nagaland's Hornbill Festival showcases the extraordinary diversity of the state's Naga communities.
Music, dance, food, crafts, traditional knowledge and cultural performances create an introduction to a region of India that many visitors know too little about.
The 17 Naga Tribes
Nagaland is home to 17 major Naga tribes, each with its own language, textiles, music and traditions. The Hornbill Festival gathers all of them under one roof.
Each tribe has a morung (traditional bachelor's dormitory-turned-cultural-pavilion) at Kisama Heritage Village, the festival ground outside Kohima.
Music, Food and Fashion
Traditional dance performances, indigenous games like Naga wrestling, chili-eating contests, folk singing and rock competitions all coexist at Hornbill.
Naga food — pork with bamboo shoot, smoked meats, dried fish, fermented soybean (akhuni), sticky rice, King Chili preparations — makes the festival a genuine culinary revelation.
The festival also raises an important tourism principle: India's tribal communities should be presented as living contemporary cultures, not frozen images of an exotic past.