Darlong Erotic

The Darlong are a small hill people of northern Tripura, in India's northeast, who belong to the wider Zo family that also includes the Mizo, the Hmar and the many groups outsiders lumped together as Kuki. They number somewhere around ten thousand, concentrated in a cluster of villages in the Unakoti, North Tripura and Dhalai districts, with Darchawi near Kumarghat among the best known. What marks them out is less a dramatic difference from their cousins than a stubborn insistence on their own name. For decades the state counted them simply as Kuki, and it took until 2022 for the Indian parliament to write the word Darlong into Tripura's list of Scheduled Tribes, as a named sub-tribe of the Kuki.

Their language, also called Darlong, sits in the central branch of Kuki-Chin, close enough to Mizo and Hmar that speakers can follow much of each other's talk. It is written in Roman script, a legacy of the missions, and most Darlong also get by in Bengali, the language of the plains around them, and some in Kokborok. Like their kin, they tell of ancestors who came out of a cave, Sinlung in the Hmar telling, and of a long drift through the Chin and Lushai hills before settling under the rajas of Tripura, who treated Kuki chiefs by turns as frontier allies and as raiders to be contained.

The old religion centered on a high god, known across the Kuki-Chin world as Pathian, and on a crowd of local spirits kept quiet with sacrifices made by a village priest. Christianity arrived in the early twentieth century, and today nearly the whole community is Christian, across several denominations. Church is the real center of village life: it sets the week, runs the choirs and youth groups, and brought the schooling that gave the Darlong a reputation in Tripura for high literacy and a presence in government service well beyond their numbers.

Farming used to mean jhum, the slash and burn rotation of hill rice and vegetables on cleared slopes. Many families have since shifted to settled plots, orchards and plantation crops. The older culture survives best in music and dance, including a bamboo dance of the kind the Mizo call Cheraw. Its best known carrier was Thanga Darlong, a master of the rosem, a mouth organ of gourd and bamboo pipes, who received the Padma Shri in 2019 when he was close to a hundred years old.