Origin of the first Naga village

At a Glance

• Central figures: Lijaba, the first ancestor of the Ao Naga, and his companion Tejangba; the sky-being who gave them fire and the knowledge of building.
• Setting: The Ao Naga tradition of Nagaland, northeast India; the settlement of Chungliyimti, regarded as the origin-place of the six Ao clans.
• The turn: Lijaba and Tejangba descended from the stone called Longtrok - six stones in the earth from which the first people emerged - and had to choose where to settle and how to live together without killing each other.
• The outcome: Lijaba established the first village at Chungliyimti, dividing the people into clans with separate duties, raising the first morung, and setting the rules by which a village could hold.
• The legacy: The morung system - the bachelors’ dormitory that served as school, armory, and council hall - and the clan divisions of the Ao Naga, which persist in living memory and practice.

The stone split open and six people came out of it. That is what the Ao say. They do not say “once upon a time.” They say: six stones at a place called Longtrok, in the hills above the Dikhu River, and six people emerged from them, and those six became the six clans of the Ao. Lijaba was the first. He stood in the open air and looked at the forest that covered everything and the river below and the sky that gave no instructions, and he had nothing - no fire, no blade, no house.

Tejangba came out of the second stone. He was not Lijaba’s brother. He was the other one, the companion, the man who would argue with Lijaba about everything and in this way help him think.

Longtrok

The place was real. Ao elders could point to it - a rocky outcrop on the ridge between the Dikhu and Tsurang valleys. The stones were there. Whether they had cracked open or had always been open was not a question anyone asked, because the story was not about geology. The story was about what happened next.

Six people stood on bare ground. They did not know each other. They had no language in common - not yet. Lijaba spoke first, or made the first sound, and the others understood it because they had come from the same earth. He said: we need fire.

No one had fire. The forest was wet. The sky was grey and low, as it often is in Nagaland in the months before the rains break. Lijaba went looking. He walked downstream along the Dikhu until he came to a place where the rocks were black and warm. A being was sitting there - not a man, not an animal. The Ao call this being different things depending on the village telling the story. Some say it was a sky-spirit. Some say it was the first Tsungrem, a divine force. What matters is that it had fire, and it gave Lijaba a burning stick, and it showed him how to keep the fire alive by feeding it.

Lijaba carried the fire back. The six people sat around it. That was the first gathering.

The Argument at the River

Tejangba wanted to go east. Lijaba wanted to stay near Longtrok. The argument lasted - the story does not say how long, but long enough that the others grew tired of listening. One of the six, a woman whose name the Ao remember as the ancestor of the Pongen clan, said: stop talking. Build something.

Lijaba listened to her. He began to clear ground on a ridge above the Dikhu - a defensible spot, with sight lines in three directions and water below. The place would become Chungliyimti, the first Ao settlement, the village from which all other Ao villages descend.

But clearing ground was not enough. Six people could live anywhere. The question was how to live when there were sixty, or six hundred. Lijaba had seen what happened when people crowded together without structure. They fought. They stole. They let grudges rot into killings.

The Morung

Lijaba built the first morung. It was not a house. It was not a temple. It was a long structure, open-sided, with a fire pit in the center and sleeping platforms along the walls. Every young man past a certain age slept in the morung. He did not sleep in his mother’s house. In the morung he learned to make weapons, to track game, to sit still when an elder was speaking, to endure cold and hunger without complaint. He learned the songs. He learned which plants healed and which killed. He learned the boundaries of the village land and where the enemy villages lay.

The morung was also the armory. Spears stood against the walls. Shields hung from the beams. The skulls of enemies taken in battle would later hang there too, though that came later, after there were enemies.

Lijaba’s rule was simple: a man who has not lived in the morung is not a man. He cannot marry. He cannot speak in council. He cannot own land. The morung made men out of boys, and it made the village out of men.

Tejangba built a second morung on the other side of the ridge. This was deliberate. Two morung meant two groups of young men, which meant competition, which meant both groups trained harder. It also meant that if one morung was destroyed in a raid, the other could still fight.

The Six Clans

Lijaba divided the people. Each of the six who had come from Longtrok became the head of a clan - the Pongen, the Longkumer, the Jamir, the Ozukum, the Aier, and the Imchen. Each clan had its own section of the village, its own morung, its own burial ground, its own set of gennas - days when work was forbidden and rituals had to be performed.

No one married within their own clan. Lijaba set this rule and it held. A Pongen man married a Longkumer woman, or a Jamir woman, or an Ozukum woman. Never a Pongen woman. The clans were bound together by marriage the way the posts of the morung were bound together by crossbeams. Pull one out and the structure falls.

Each clan also had a duty. One clan kept the fire. One clan kept the granary. One clan watched the eastern approach. One clan watched the western. The duties rotated with the seasons, so that no clan grew lazy and no clan grew resentful.

Chungliyimti

The village grew. More people came - some say they emerged from additional stones, some say they came from other hills. Chungliyimti became the largest settlement the Ao had known. It sat on its ridge with its ring of morung buildings and its terraced fields dropping down toward the river, and for a time it was the only Ao village in the world.

Then it divided. That is how Ao expansion worked. When a village grew too large - when the morung could no longer hold all the young men, when the fields could no longer feed the families - a group split off and walked until they found another defensible ridge. They built another village on Lijaba’s pattern. Same morung system. Same clan divisions. Same gennas. Same rule about marrying outside your clan.

Chungliyimti eventually emptied. The Ao moved outward, village by village, ridge by ridge, across what is now Mokokchung district. But they remembered where they came from. The stones at Longtrok were not forgotten. Elders could still recite the path from Longtrok to Chungliyimti to the next village and the next, naming each ridge and river crossing, a map carried entirely in the voice.

The morung still stands in Ao villages - some as active institutions, some as ceremonial buildings maintained for festivals. The clans still hold. A man’s surname tells you which stone his ancestor came from. The divisions Lijaba made at the beginning have not been unmade.