Rethinking the Past and Contextualising the Present: Reading Moko Koza's "Boy from the Hills"

This paper critically examines Moko Koza’s music video, Boy from the Hills — and its account of the Japanese invasion of the Naga Hills during the Second World War — as a creative process of culture. It locates the video as a contemporary text shaped by an intricate network of tradition, shifting cultural ethos, evolving musical sensibilities, and the access aff orded by the globalised domain of digital media within the local milieu. Accordingly, it argues that the video enables alternate, yet grounded, ways of reading history and understanding the Naga sense of selfhood in the present. The paper explores the oscillation between accounts from the past — voiced by multiple perspectives in the song — and their retelling by Koza from a contemporary temporal location. It further examines how Koza’s emergence as a cultural representative, embodying a new form of iconicity in the contemporary music scene, is central to the consolidation of his persona as an authorial voice in the reconfi guration of history. Finally, it analyses the role of folk-fusion rap — the genre of this particular music video — in the broader debate on cultural change and loss in Naga society and its connection to the study of history.