Konyak

Clans and Kinship

Konyak society was divided into chiefly and common lines. Fürer-Haimendorf (1939, pp. 111-112) describes Oting, where the aristocrats were of the Ang clan and the commoners of the Ben clan: the adult men of the Ang clan formed the chief's council, and a man of either class had to marry a woman of the other, the children belonging to the father's clan. The Great Angs of villages such as Mon, Chi, Sheangha and Hangnyu married only within the Great Ang clan, and only the children of such a marriage took the father's rank; they ruled their own villages and the villages under their overlordship, and no commoner approached them standing upright (p. 44). Hutton recorded two groups found side by side in the same villages, the Thendu, who tattooed the face, and the Thenkoh, who did not (Angami Nagas, p. 385). A village was made up of morungs, each with the houses round it a social and political unit: Wakching had the Oukheang, the oldest, built by the founder of the village, and the Thepong, Balang, Bala and Angban, and a man of the Oukheang had to find his wife in one of the three morungs not related to his own (pp. 68-69).

No list of Konyak clans was found in the sources used. Fürer-Haimendorf (1939) names the Ang (chiefly) and Ben (commoner) clans of Oting and the Great Ang clan of the great chiefs; clan names differ from village to village.

In the Official Lists

• Scheduled Tribe

  Nagaland

  Within the single entry 'Naga' in Nagaland's list. Census 2011 counted the Konyak by name under that entry.

Konyak villages also lie in Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Myanmar; the lists of Arunachal Pradesh and of Assam's autonomous hill districts have an entry 'Any Naga tribes', but no separate census count of the Konyak there was found. The compilation used may not show amendments made between 2022 and 2024.

Checked on 2026-11-07 against the sources below. The lists are amended from time to time and can differ by district; for a certificate, the current order or the state's list is what counts.

Name and Origin

Hutton (1921, Appendix III, pp. 383-384) used 'Konyak' for the tribes north-east of the Ao and Chang. The people of Tamlu applied the names Konyak and Haha to themselves and to the closely related villages east of them, and both names, he wrote, apparently refer to the way the hair is dressed. He quoted Peal's earlier note that the villages between the Dikhu and the Disang were all reputed to descend from one village, Changnyu, a 'tribe-mother' to which many of them sent small presents every year, which were not tribute.

History

Older books know the Konyak villages by their Assamese names, such as Tablungia, Banpara, Mutonia and Namsangia (Hutton, p. 384). The villages round Tanhai and Pungkhung, above Charaideo in the Sibsagar plains, had long ties with the Ahom kingdom: Tanhai tells that an Ahom king who had lost his throne took refuge there and married Watlong, the chief's daughter, and the people pointed out the tank, paved road and stone bridge he built as part of her bride-price (Hutton, p. 385). The Austrian anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf lived among the Konyak from 1936, mostly at Wakching, and described them in The Naked Nagas (1939). Wakching then had some 250 houses and five morungs, and fourteen Konyak villages paid it tribute (p. 43). The American Baptist mission had a footing in only two Konyak villages, Tamlu and Kanching (p. 54); most Konyak are Christian today.

Faith and Worship

In the older religion recorded by Fürer-Haimendorf, the sky-spirit Gawang watches over the crops and punishes wrongdoing in this life. The first sowing of the year was done by a descendant of the village founder on behalf of the whole village: he sacrificed a chicken in his field and asked Gawang for rice and millet (1939, p. 90). Most Konyak are now Christian.

Customs

Girls were tattooed on the legs and arms at eight or nine, and the full tattoo of two broad bands above the knees was finished when a young wife moved into her husband's house: its completion marked her entry into his clan (Fürer-Haimendorf, 1939, p. 119). Boys and girls of intermarrying morungs worked in the fields in gangs together (p. 90). The Konyak of Wanching and Wakching were known as makers of daos, the broad chopping knife of the hills (Hutton, p. 385). Once a year, at the spring festival, families brought out their heirloom beads, shells and brass bells, and the girls danced in them (Fürer-Haimendorf, pp. 219-221).

Festivals

Stories and Legends