ABSTRACT
The Naga Students’ Federation, a body whose support to Naga nationalistic aspirations and Naga sovereignty is well known, issued a directive and a warning requiring non-Naga scholars to secure its permission and clearance before undertaking any academic research pertaining to the Naga people, in particular their history. Interestingly, admonishments against Naga men marrying non-Naga women are seldom issued, consistent with the cultural norms in the rest of the country that see a woman as the custodian of a people’s history and heritage and whose ‘purity’ has to be maintained. In other words, suspicion and disapproval of ‘foreign’ influences on the subjects of history while those tasked with shaping that history revel in absorbing every aspect of that very same pernicious ‘foreign’ culture is a near universal phenomenon. Several ‘sensitive’ areas of study and, in some cases, whole physical spaces, have been demarcated as out of bounds, not solely to foreign scholars but to locals as well.
