Nocte people

The Nocte people, also known as the Nocte Naga, are a Tibeto-Burmese ethnic group primarily living in Northeast Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. They number about 111,679 (Census 2011), mainly found in the Patkai hills of Tirap district of Arunachal Pradesh, India. Ethnically related to the Konyak Naga, their origins can be traced back to the Hukong Valley in Myanmar, where they migrated from between the 1670 and 1700. Their chiefs who were originally known as Ang exert control over the village with his council the "Ngoang-Wang" (modern-day cabinet), and since they did not have an army under their control they would consult trusted family (lowang-tang) on an important matter. The Chief also consult village elders and priests on all important socio-religious ceremonies. The term Nocte was coined in the 1950s. It has been derived from two words: Nok, which means village, and Tey, which means people. In the medieval and the colonial period, the Nocte people was called Noga or Naga because of the close ethnic relation with the Naga people of Nagaland. As per the location of the village, the Ahoms called the Noctes as Namsangya or Namsangia, Borduaria or Bor Duris, and Paniduaria. In 1776, Sir Joseph Banks, a British botanist, recommended for the first time that tea cultivation should be taken up in India. Four years later in 1780, Robert Kyd, who founded the botanical garden at Kolkata in 1787, started experimenting with tea cultivation in India with consignments of seeds arrived from China. Decades later in 1815, Colonel Latter, a British army officer, reported that the Singpho people gathered an indigenous species of tea, and ate its leaves with oil and garlic. In 1820s, Maniram Dutta Baruah, an Assamese nobleman who was hanged for his role in the Indian Rebellion of 1857, informed the British cultivators - Major Robert Bruce and his brother Charles Alexander Bruce - about the indigenous tea growing in the jungles of the Nocte and the Singpho countries, which was hitherto unknown to the rest of the world. C.A.