Introduction

Grammatical descriptions of languages spoken in North East India often rely on the classification and terminology used for the classical Indo-European languages, particularly Latin and Sanskrit. Thus one often reads about ‘Nominative’, ‘Accusative’, ‘Dative’ and so on, regarding languages as widely divergent as those of the Tibeto-Burman, Indo-Aryan and Tai families. While these terms should of course be used when they are appropriate, we suggest that for some languages of the North East they are not, and that more semantically based terms like ‘agentive’ and ‘antiagentive’ should be used.

One of the features of the Latin and Sanskrit systems is that they are systematic: every noun must be marked by one or other of these cases. Words that modify the noun, like adjectives and demonstratives, also get marked. Pronouns are also marked for case, though the form of the marking may differ. At least some of these markers are clearly syntactic in nature: for example, the normative case is used to mark the subject of a sentence. These systems form paradigms that are learned by students as the declensions of Latin and Sanskrit.

Introduction

The Tangsa (Tangshang) people of North East India and Myanmar comprise many sub-tribes, almost all of them having distinctive varieties of oral language and cultural features. The distinctive language varieties are in some cases mutually intelligible, but in other cases they are so divergent as to be unintelligible. The Tangsa have lived and moved about in the Patkai Hills on what is now the India-Myanmar border for a very long time, but in the last several hundred years there has been a progressive movement of Tangsa people down to the plains of Assam from the hills of Burma and Arunachal Pradesh. Since the early twentieth century, there has also been adoption of established world religions, first Buddhism and later Christianity. More recently some Tangsa groups have adopted Rang Fraa (also spelled Rangfra and Rangfrah), a kind of codification of the traditional beliefs supported by Hindu organizations like the Vivekananda Kendra. These changes in recent times have had a big impact on the continuity of their cultural traditions.

In this paper, we would like to explore in detail the social and linguistic background to the Tangsa traditional Wihu song, which exists among the Pangwa (see section 2) subtribes who are now mostly Christian. The Wihu song is sung in different cultural settings, but essentially it is a part of the ritual of praise to the spirit of mother earth (Wihu). There are several styles of Tangsa songs, of which Wihu is one. These styles can share the same content – the same set of words being used in a sacrifice song, a spirit calling song or even a love song (see Morey 2012; Morey and Schöpf in press).

Introduction

In this paper we will examine poetic forms of four languages spoken in Upper Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, India: Nocte, Singpho, Tai and Tangsa. As far as we know there are no words that equate to English ‘poem’ or ‘poetry’ in any of these languages, though each of the languages has a word for ‘song’, and has words for different song styles, such as dance song or antiphonal (call and response) song. Except for the Ahom texts in §5 (which are taken from manuscripts), the examples in this paper were all performed with melody and sometimes rhythmic accompaniment such as the beat of the pestle on the mortar during rice-pounding (see below §3). All could thus also be termed ‘songs’ and it is not easy to make a distinction in these communities between ‘poem’ and ‘song’. Some styles resemble sprechstimme, a style of song more approaching spoken form, and some styles are more melodic (see List 1963: 9 for a discussion of such different styles). In this paper we will not deal with the musical melody. Poetic devices are also found in story telling, but we will not deal with those here.

Kiparsky (1973: 231) claimed that the “fundamental stylistics of poetry … have existed from the beginning”, based on comparison of poetics in ancient and modern times. We expect that the features of the poetry discussed in this paper represent very old and deep cultural artefacts, and will illuminate our knowledge of these languages.