Tetseo Sisters

Music has always been rife and rich in the northeastern corner of India.

- Verus Ferreira

The legendary Bhupen Hazarika and Lou Majaw from the days of yore to contemporary favourites like Soulmate, Boomarang, Ambiogenesis, the North East has consistently produced music synonymous with brilliance.

Besides soloist and groups, several all-women bands are proliferating in the North East. The Tetseo Sisters are a household name, hailing from the Chakhesang tribe; the sisters come from a small village of barely 400 people in a town called Thüvepisu in Nagaland.

For the uninitiated, the quartet consists of four sisters from Nagaland — Mütsevelü (Mercy), Azine (Azi), Kuvelü (Kuku) and Alüne Tetseo (Lulu). Their genre is folk — traditional Naga folk songs in particular. They were trained in performing Li songs of Chakesang tribe by their parents who are actively involved in the cultural revival movement of Nagaland. An ‘a cappella’ style of singing combined with storytelling, and the occasional use of one-stringed instrument ‘tati’ or ‘heka libuh’ (mithun horn), their compositions are mostly lores on Nagaland. Some of the folk songs they sing have been compiled in the traditional songbook Li kukre kutiko. The sisters continue to learn Li, mostly in Thüvepisü, their ancestral village in Phek district, and regularly perform in different parts of India and overseas.

In a state that has a reputation for being highly musical, today the Tetseo Sisters are one of just a handful of professional bands that perform traditional Naga music, whereas all the other bands across Nagaland have drifted to perform gospel, rock, pop or other Western genres of music.