Historical Period20c CE
Pre-historic; Christian conversion 20th c.; folk retention
📷 Navaneethpp · [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)
Deities
Angh — Konyak clan-king god
Angh — deified clan-chieftain of the Konyak of Mon
Angh — deified clan-chieftain of the Konyak of Mon
This entry honours the self-representation of Konyak tradition. India's sacred landscape includes hundreds of traditions beyond the Brahminical-Vedic canon. Each has its own cosmology, priesthood, ritual calendar, and relationship with the sacred landscape. Each deserves first-person recognition.
The Konyak (~200,000, largest Naga tribe) of Mon district, Nagaland, had until the 1960s a headhunting warrior culture. The Angh was their clan-chieftain — with absolute authority, power of life and death, and considered semi-divine. Today the hereditary Anghs are honored but largely Christianized; the older Konyak animist yaha tradition (worship of ancestors and sky-spirits) survives in villages like Longwa (straddling Indo-Myanmar border). The Hornbill Festival (December, Kohima) showcases Konyak heritage.
Oral Konyak invocations
Drawn from scholarly ethnographies of Indian tribal and regional religions (Roy, Vidyarthi, Sinha, Fuchs, Sarkar, Sontheimer, Kinsley), colonial-era gazetteers, and contemporary community documentation.
