Place · Angami Naga village · India
Khonoma
Also known as Khonoma — Angami Naga history
The Angami Naga village of Khonoma in Kohima district, Nagaland, famed for its three major 19th-century battles against British expansion into the Naga Hills — Khonoma Attack of 1850, Siege of 1879 and the 1880 Battle of Khonoma (one of only two Victoria Crosses awarded for action against Naga troops). The village held out longer than any other Naga settlement against the British before accepting a treaty in 1880. In the 20th century Khonoma was the birthplace of A.Z. Phizo (1904-1990), founder of the Naga National Council and the architect of the Naga independence movement from 1947 that produced the still-unresolved Naga political crisis. The 1996 declaration of Khonoma as Asia's first 'Green Village' banned hunting; the village's conservation of the Blyth's tragopan is widely cited.
- Date
- 1850–2026
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Condition
- living village
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 25.650, 94.020
Connections (4)
- AnalogueKangla Fort, Imphal
Khonoma's stockade held out in 1879 and Kangla fell in 1891, twelve years apart at opposite ends of the same annexation of the eastern hills. Both were settled by negotiated terms that left the conquered institutions partly standing: the Angami khel system and the Meitei monarchy as a protected state. The Northeast was absorbed last and on different terms from anywhere else.
- AnalogueRani Gaidinliu
Gaidinliu's Heraka movement in the Zeliangrong hills and Khonoma's four decades of resistance are the two Naga-country entries here, and both were as much about religious and community authority as about the administration. Khonoma negotiated terms in 1879; Gaidinliu was imprisoned for fourteen years from 1932 and released only in 1947.
- Alternative toKisama Heritage Village
Kisama is an assembled village built to display Nagaland's tribes to visitors; Khonoma is a lived village that fought the administration for forty years and then banned hunting on its own land by its own decision. The two together are the difference between heritage as presentation and heritage as a working institution, twenty kilometres apart.
- Shared sacred geographySekrenyi
Khonoma is Angami and keeps Sekrenyi, and the two things the village is known for belong together. It resisted the British through three sieges to 1879 and negotiated its own terms, and it later declared its forest a conservation area and banned hunting in it — decisions taken by the same village institutions that settle the quarrels Sekrenyi requires to be settled. The purification festival is the annual working of a system that also handles war and forest.
On these journeys
- States that held out
- Adivasi histories — rebellion, polity, village
- Northeast India — landscapes & cultures
Sources
Colonial records and Naga regional/community histories.
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