The thing nobody tells you before you go
You expect colour. You expect drums. You have seen the photographs, the headdresses made from the tail feathers of the great Indian hornbill, the warriors in full Naga regalia standing against a pine-green hillside outside Kohima. What the photographs cannot carry is the sound of sixteen tribes performing simultaneously in adjacent morung, the traditional clan houses that line the festival grounds at Kisama Heritage Village, each group singing in a language the others do not speak. You are not watching a performance. You are standing inside a negotiation between cultures that have coexisted for centuries without dissolving into each other.
