The story
Hornbill Festival in Kisama
The Hornbill Festival gathers all of Nagaland's major tribes at Kisama Heritage Village for ten days every December, with each tribe operating its own morung, a traditional dormitory structure, to display food, crafts, and performance. Contests include Naga wrestling, archery, and a widely covered Raja Mircha king chili eating competition, alongside the more recently added Hornbill International Rock Contest.
Nagaland's government created the Hornbill Festival in 2000 to gather all of the state's major tribes into one place and give a fading tradition of inter-village exchange a fixed annual home, choosing the hornbill, a bird woven into the folklore and headgear of several Naga communities, as its namesake.