A quest to uncover the Feast of Merit leads a young Naga woman to rediscover her culture and homeland.
WORDS Küvethilü Thülüo | IMAGES Küthonüyi Chotso
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My earliest memory of visiting my paternal grandparents was when my grandmother Azutsa told me to avoid sitting in certain spots in her kitchen because a bird was nesting under her roof, and there had been incidents of bird poop dropping on her and her guests’ foreheads. The architectural design of my grandparents’ house featured a high ceiling, elaborate carvings of animal heads on the wooden walls, and a horn-like structure with two wooden boards crisscrossed on the front of the house. This type of design is called cieka cie, literally translated as “horned house.” My grandparents lived in one of the few cieka cie scattered across Phüsachodü village, and it was earned by performing the Feast of Merit.
The Feast of Merit, which was prevalent before the coming of Christian and new economic ideologies, is a tradition of radical giving practiced by the Naga Indigenous community of Northeast India and Myanmar (Burma). Performing the Feast of Merit was the result of many years of hard work earning and accumulating wealth in the form of food grains and livestock. The products amassed by a family were then redistributed to the villagers in the form of feasts, which were accompanied by various sacred rituals. The Feast of Merit, known as Zhotho among the Chokri speakers of the Chakhesang Naga tribe, to which I belong, was a demanding practice as it cost a married couple all the wealth they had acquired over the years and required them to start all over again.
The Feast of Merit is a tradition of radical giving practiced by the Naga Indigenous community.
Though Zhotho was an expensive undertaking, it was a sought-after practice among the Naga people. After performing a number of feasts, people were granted certain privileges reserved only for those who had given Zhotho. They received social recognition and status in the community, and their words became highly regarded in village meetings. They were accorded special shawls, and their homes were marked with unique architecture. When a family offered several feasts, their generous contributions were symbolically commemorated by menhirs (upright stones) erected in the village vicinity.
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A well-to-do couple hoarding their wealth without performing the Feast of Merit was unheard of. A village Elder commented, “If you do not share with your fellow villagers, what is the use of working so hard?” Another Elder said, “I have never heard of a rich person refusing to perform Zhotho, but if one does refuse, I assume they will be ostracized.”
A well-to-do couple hoarding their wealth without performing the Feast of Merit was unheard of.
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Today, Feast of Merit menhirs can be found outside the village gates in rows or strewn along the footpaths leading to the fields, often on small hilltops, in other places with good views, or along thoroughfares. They are usually accompanied by what is known as utsuba, or table stones, which are set up [on the sides of the menhirs] to keep them from tilting and falling over. They also serve as resting spots for weary villagers returning from their fields with heavy loads.
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When I got the opportunity to document the Feast of Merit culture in my village, I chose to explore the megalithic aspect of this tradition — the practice of erecting the commemorative menhirs. Uncle Vemütsu Thülüo guided me, and Küthonüyi Chotso, a fellow community member, took photographs. The attempt to locate all the Feast of Merit menhirs took me to my ancestors’ footpaths, which have now become part of the jungle.
What started as a project to identify the menhirs of Feast of Merit became a journey of homecoming for me.
What started as a project to identify the menhirs of the Feast of Merit became a journey of homecoming for me. Walking the jungle of my village felt like a pilgrimage that reconnected me to my ancestors and my ancestral land. As I climbed the steep hills, I munched on the sweet gooseberries and gulped water that I found on my way. I rested and propped my tired legs in the same spots where my ancestors once rested with their bamboo baskets filled with fruits, vegetables, firewood, or rice, depending on the season.
Our journey in search of the Feast of Merit menhirs took three full days to locate most of them and five more trips to go over the few places we missed. We located over a hundred megalithic spots belonging to different Zhotho performers spanning centuries. These stones — some fallen over, some neglected with plants growing over them, some covered in mud from the newly paved road above, and most of them grown over with moss and lichen — stood as a quiet testament to the legacy of my community’s deep values of generosity and shared wealth.
The practice of Zhotho stopped almost entirely after British colonization and the arrival of American missionaries to the Naga territory. The radical sharing in the hills was perceived by the White people as a poor economic choice against the capitalist idea of accumulation for oneself. Furthermore, Zhotho was denounced as evil by the foreign Christian missionaries because it involved partaking in the local brew called zotho, made from fermented rice, which could be intoxicating.
The Naga people thought they needed to change their ways of ‘wasteful sharing’ to ‘sensible hoarding.’
Consequently, the Naga people, whom the Whites referred to as “savages,” thought they needed to change their ways of “wasteful sharing” to “sensible hoarding.” Zhotho, which was rooted in a deep sense of communal sharing and also acted as a source of economic equilibrium in the village, was perceived as nothing more than a senseless merry-making of the “uncivilized” forest people. Thus, Zhotho became one of the many Indigenous practices the Naga people were forced to abandon to enter the life of “righteousness” and “civilization.”
The principle of Zhotho provided the world with an alternative way of looking at wealth. It was radical because it demanded thinking about the whole of community rather than the individual self. Some saw Zhotho as either a utopia or plainly idiotic. For the Indigenous Naga people, however, Zhotho was the very principle that governed the community’s sustenance and provided the parameter by which success was measured — not by one individual’s accumulation, but by how much an individual could give back to the community.
The principle of Zhotho provided the world with an alternative way of looking at wealth.
In modern times, the practice of Zhotho has been reintroduced by the Naga community in a more “Christian-friendly” manner. The intricate rituals have been removed, and the feast is now commonly held on Christmas Day as the Christmas Feast. With increased access to money, those hosting the feast now purchase items rather than grow grain or raise livestock themselves. The significance and atmosphere of the feast are no longer regarded with the same level of reverence and sanctity. An Elder expressed the worry that the Feast of Merit appears to have lost its former splendor as people’s economic priorities have shifted from sharing to personal accumulation.
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During our journey to locate the menhirs, Uncle Vemütsu Thülüo told stories about how the menhirs were obtained or about the individuals in whose honor the stones stood. Once, when we reached a spot, we saw three stones that showed signs of neglect, with overgrown shrubs and dead tree branches covering them. We almost missed it. One of the stones was smooth and oval-shaped: probably it had been collected by the river. Uncle told me that the smooth stone was the “wife’s stone” and that the woman, on every trip to and from the field, must have stopped to pat it and sing praise to its beauty, being so pleased with her menhir. We had already heard that the stone cracked due to excessive patting. After careful inspection, we indeed saw a small crack in the stone.
When we saw these menhirs, we realized that what once stood as a glorious trophy of achievement and honor had become part of the wild. In my people’s attempt to attain “civilization” and modernity, we abandoned our ancestral legacies, which are quietly waiting for our loving touch of revival.
These stones stood as a quiet testament to the legacy of my community’s deep values of generosity and shared wealth.
If experiences are like menhirs, my journey of documenting the Feast of Merit is comparable to a beautiful oval-shaped smooth stone. I pat it day in and day out. Even if it might crack and break into a thousand pieces from my excessive fondness for it, then all these pieces will still be a legacy of the time I had my homecoming in the forest of my land — Naga-Land.
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Call to Action: RRaD is an initiative working to examine the lasting impact of colonization on Naga culture, beliefs, economy, and policy. It seeks to develop a Naga consciousness through Indigenous knowledge, foster decolonizing efforts, raise public awareness, and create a Naga pedagogy for repatriating ancestral remains. Learn more about them at rradnagaland.org
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Küvethilü Thülüo is a Chakhesang Naga from Phüsachodü village. Currently, she teaches at Mount Olive College Kohima, in Nagaland, India. She is an enthusiastic footpath seeker and story listener. When she is not in the city, she can be found in her village sipping zotho (traditional rice beer) from the cup of the Elders and listening to their stories.