Lotha

Clans and Kinship

Mills (1922, pp. 86-92) describes an exogamous system that was breaking down. The tribe has three phratries, Tompyaktserre, Izumontserre and Mipongsandre, held to be of equal standing and divided into clans (chibo), some of which are split into kindreds (mhitso, literally 'tail'). Strictly a man should take his wife from a phratry other than his own; marriage between different clans of one phratry was allowed everywhere by Mills's time, and in some southern villages even between kindreds of one clan. Several clans are said to descend from Ao, Sumi or Rengma families who joined the tribe or from 'jungle men' (orakyon), and with one small exception all clans have equal rights. Lotha clans also have 'corresponding' clans in other tribes: the Lotha Chami with the Ao Chamir and the Sumi Yepothomi, the Muri with the Ao Pongen and the Sumi Chishilimi. Each village had a priest (puthi) and a young men's house (champo) where no woman might set foot.

The phratries and clans as Mills (1922, pp. 88-92) lists them, in his order; the phratry order is that in which the first ancestors are said to have come out of the earth. Mills marks the clans held to be of outside origin; those notes are kept here without ranking, since all clans but one small one have equal rights.

In the Official Lists

• Scheduled Tribe

  Nagaland

  Within the single entry 'Naga' in Nagaland's list.

Checked on 2026-11-06 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

Mills (1922, p. 1) could find no derivation for the name Lhota. Lotha traditions of origin differ. The usual one, close to the Angami story, says that three brothers, Limhachan, Izumontse and Rankhanda, the ancestors of the three phratries, came out of a hole in the earth near the stone at Kezakenoma, on which one load of paddy spread to dry became two; a small piece of the stone is kept at Pangti. Another says that the Lotha and the people of the plains were once one people who came from a place called Lengka. A third has the common ancestors of the Lotha, the Southern Sangtam, the Sumi and the Rengma coming from near Mao, moving by Kohima to Lozema, where the Sumi split off, and on to Themoketsa hill, which the Lotha call Honohoyanto, where the Rengma parted. Most Lotha in Mills's day traced their descent nine or ten generations back to an ancestor who lived there (pp. 3-4).

History

In Mills's day the Lotha numbered about twenty thousand. Many of their villages held grants of land in the plains from the Ahom kings. Those living on the left bank of the Doyang were called Ndrung and those on the right bank Liye, and the river, unfordable for much of the year, had brought slight differences of dialect and custom. In 1878 a stockade was set up at Wokha and the Ndrung villages came under British rule; the rest of the tribe followed later. J. P. Mills described the tribe in The Lhota Nagas (1922), with an introduction by J. H. Hutton. Most Lotha today are Christian, chiefly Baptist.

Faith and Worship

Each village had a priest, the puthi, chosen when a new village was founded, who announced the days of the village ceremonies. The Pikuchak genna marked the start of the farming year and had to be held before the rice was sown, the northern villages holding it before clearing the jungle and the southern ones after (Mills, p. 128). Most Lotha today are Christian, chiefly Baptist.

Customs

Marriage should be outside one's phratry. Mills found that a man nearly always took his wife from his own or a neighbouring village, and that the marriage price was paid in instalments, never in a lump sum (pp. 86-87). The champo, the young men's house, stood at the end of the village; it was rebuilt with long ceremony, the boys of the champo slept there, and every champo had land of its own (pp. 24-27). The Nagaland government's calendar gives Tokhü Emong in November as the Lotha festival.

Festivals