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Editorial Introduction to “Across Cultures: Ibero-America and India”

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Ranjeeva Ranjan¹& Mala Shikha²

¹Department of Educational Foundations, Faculty of Education, Universidad Católica del Maule, Talca, Chile.

²Department of Spanish Studies, School of Languages, Doon University, Dehradun, India.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 3, September 2022, Pages 1–2. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n3.00

First published: September 20, 2022 | Area: Latin America | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This editorial is published under the themed issue “Across Cultures: Ibero-America and India”)
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Editorial Introduction to “Across Cultures: Ibero-America and India”

Rupkatha Journal in collaboration with Universidad Católica del Maule, Chile and Doon University, India has published this special issue on the theme “Across Cultures: Ibero-America and India”. The volume is edited by faculty from Universidad Católica del Maule, Chile and Doon University, India along with a team of experts from the Rupkatha Journal. This special volume titled “Across Cultures: Ibero-America and India” intends to shed light on the trans-axial South-South history that implicates academic, cultural, intellectual, commercial and political exchanges between India, Spain, Portugal and Latin America. This special issue is an attempt to fill in the existing void in the academic literature on the theme, by exploring the bonds between the two cultures, so distant from each other and yet continuing to contribute towards the process of mutual understanding of their respective societies and thus reinforcing socio-political and cultural relations between these two regions. We propose to record segments of the crucial dialogue that imbricates these extraordinary geo-cultural entities through their various interactions and evolution in far and recent history.

In the current special issue, papers were invited from distinguished scholars working in areas of expertise related to the theme of the issue. We received seven invited papers; the other papers were selected from the call of the journal for this special issue. As this special issue is being published in a continuous mode, we shall be reviewing some more papers, which could add value to this debate on the relationship between Spain, Latin America and India. In our selections for this special issue, the main focus was on articles that did not just present a comparative study from different points of view (literary, political or social) but rather incorporated a critical historiographical analysis of the themes.

As mentioned, the papers in the special issue deal with different themes. For example, Castillo and Bhaumik in their paper discuss the idea of the border in the digital age. The paper illustrates different types of borders, citing examples from films. It also discusses how historical narrative and mediation influenced the concept of nation and border, primarily in the context of the border as an intellectual entity both in Mexico and India. It further elaborates on the concept of virtual ethnicity, and digital citizenship in the context of posthuman presences and projections. Óscar Figueroa presents a unique and first-hand empirical study on the representation of India in two works of the nineteenth-century travel writer from Mexico, Ignacio Martínez. The paper also underscores the difference between the representations of India in Ignacio Martínez perceptions of the region before it emerged as an independent nation and the representation of India in the writings of Mexican intellectual Octavio Paz, who reflects on India’s consciousness and symbolic projection of itself as a newly independent nation. Canzobre in his paper underlines the Argentine women’s contribution to the knowledge of India’s culture in Latin America. López Torres and Fierro Concha in their article analyse the representations of Indian culture in the writings of two of the Chilean writers Pablo Neruda and Juan Marín. We also include one article by Seshasayee who provides an overview of the encounters between these two geopolitical regions on various levels of cultural signalling and responses. Through interviews of diplomats, journalists, businesspersons, he presents a Latin American perspective of India.

The collection of scientific manuscripts included in the issue highlights the strong interdisciplinary methodology that is always promoted at Rupkatha, an approach which draws from diverse fields like literature, politics, gender, culture etc., to address and focus on the human question as a contested projection and intersection of narratives. This special issue represents dialogue and exchange of ideas from two distant regions and is true to the objective of Rupkatha that the history of humanity can no longer be analysed in terms of its singular objectivity but as a contending hierarchy of discourses emerging from multiple or variable branches of knowledge like as in intersections of economics and travel writing, politics and poetry, culture and information science. We are happy that the issue includes authors from different parts of the world, thus, also embodying the reflections of an international community with significant commitment to a Latam India dialogue. We would like to thank all the contributors, the Chief Editor of Rupkatha, Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay and the Editor, Tarun Tapas Mukherjee, for providing an opportunity to publish this special issue on a theme that has not received fuller consideration as of yet and for creating the freedom of space for aspiring scholars like us who are ever committed to a refreshing dialogue and synthetic view of cultures who are weaving together in the fabric of a closer and more bonded narrative of human values, discoveries and critical understanding of the need for coming together on the same platform.

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Comparative Analysis of Flash Fiction by A.P. Chekhov and J. Joyce: The Narrator and the Main Character in the Structure of Narrative

Modernist Studies/Russian Literature/V14N2

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Z. S. Baisarina¹, A.M Malikova², O. I. Denisova³, P. V. Ulianishchev⁴, E. V. Mussaui-Ulianishcheva⁴, S. N. Bogatyreva⁵

¹L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan
²Kazakh National University of Arts, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan
³Moscow Aviation Institute (National Research University), Moscow, Russia
⁴Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia (RUDN University), Moscow, Russia
⁵K.G. Razumovsky Moscow State University of Technologies and Management (the First Cossack University, Moscow, Russia. Email: baisarina_zhazira@mail.ru

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages 1-12. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.29

First published: June 30, 2022 | Area: Modernist Studies | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Volume 14, Number 2, 2022)
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Abstract

The article presents a comparative analysis of the relationship between the narrator and the main character in the structure of flash fiction by A.P. Chekhov and J. Joyce. The authors conclude that there are typological similarities in the relationship between the narrator and the main character in the flash fiction of A.P. Chekhov and J. Joyce. This was influenced by the global trend in literature at the turn of the 20^th century, according to which the role of the author as an omniscient and omnipresent demiurge of the fictional world started to wane. The paper puts forward that the unique entwinement of the narrator’s and the main character’s voices in A.P. Chekhov’s and J. Joyce’s short stories is the main structural-constructive factor of the free indirect speech and contributes to revealing the subtle creative substance of the works.

Keywords: flash fiction, short story, narrative, narrator, free indirect speech, discourse, Chekhov, Joyce.

Introduction

Late 19^th – early 20^th century was marked by fundamental changes in all spheres of life and society. The crisis of rationalist-positivist ideology, the discovery of the unmanifest and unconscious world, and the revival of the mythological model of life shifted the world order that had been established during the relatively “calm” 19^th century (Jardine and Drage, 2018). A global worldview revolution took place: the “philosophy of thought” was replaced by the “philosophy of life” with its affirmation of the precedence of spirit, “organic matter”, reconsidering the role of the spontaneous and irrational foundations of being (Zolotukhina-Abolina, Lysikov 2021). Not only social life but also the individual’s inner world became more complex and acquired dramatic tension, which began to be perceived as a multilevel mental structure where factors of consciousness and subconsciousness interact and intertwine. These processes were comprehended artistically in the context of rethinking the connection between art and reality, in particular the autonomy of the artistic sphere and the socio-historical determinism of artistic images (Kozel, 2019).

New knowledge about the world and man was authenticated and often suggested, by fiction, where the adjustment and redistribution of genre-style systems took place, and a new understanding of the author and the author’s position in the literary text was affirmed (Grechnev, 1979). Poetry and flash fiction was becoming the centre of artistic transformations of the era since these aesthetic systems showed the greatest sensitivity and mobility concerning modern challenges of life. Numerous literary scholars note the active development (Burtsev, 2010; Zenin, 2020) and the expansion of genre and style boundaries (Jackson, 1991; Friedman, 1976; Sharonova & Beavitt, 2020) of small genres in crucial times and, in particular, at the turn of the 20^th century (Collins, 1965). The works by A.P. Chekhov and J. Joyce organically fit into these processes and can become material for discovering the typological patterns of the historical and literary process of the late 19^th–early 20^th centuries.

The selection of flash fiction by J. Joyce and A.P. Chekhov for analysis is due to several factors. First, both writers are vivid national artists, which makes it possible to diagnose various national mentalities in the similarities and differences (Fokina, 2010; Kuznetsova et al., 2020). Secondly, the writers’ works reflected the cardinal processes of breaking down the forms of social life and reassessing the values, which naturally caused the search for new artistic and aesthetic forms of reflecting reality (Puchkova, 1993; Kaskatayeva et al., 2020). Thirdly, the new artistic concept of a person needed a transformation of approaches to the embodiment of the specific features of a person’s inner life and new forms of expressing the author’s position (Meletinskii, 1990; Tan, 2021). The indicative nature of these processes at the time was evidenced by flash fiction – a field in which both J. Joyce and A.P. Chekhov are justly considered to be acknowledged masters. Therefore, the comparative analysis of A.P. Chekhov’s and J. Joyce’s flash fiction provides an opportunity to explore more deeply the typological correspondences and original creative features of both authors. At the same time, the central issue in the focus of literary research is the problem of the status of a narrative as a manner of narration, and presentation of facts and events in the author’s work.

The hypothesis of the study: the typological similarity of the flash fiction by J. Joyce and A.P. Chekhov is a specific relationship between a narrator and a character which acts as the main structural-constructive factor of free indirect speech and contributes to revealing the subtle creative substance of the works.

Methods

We used both general research methods (analysis, synthesis, description, definition, interpretation) and proper methods of literary studies; a complex of approaches and methods is integrated, the main ones being the ideas and principles of the traditional cultural-historical method which provided general culturological, sociological and psychological aspects of the study of J. Joyce’s and A.P. Chekhov’s flash fiction. The narratological approach to flash fiction by J. Joyce and A.P. Chekhov is used to analyze the narrative structure, the correlation between the author’s and someone else’s speech, identify different points of view on the problem, and establish the ambiguity of the author’s position (Birke, von Contzen, Kukkonen, 2022; Toivo, Willumsen, 2022; Eiranen, Hatavara, Kivimäki, Mäkelä, Toivo, 2022). We used elements of intertextual analysis to identify the relationship between the works of J. Joyce and A.P. Chekhov at the level of ideas, stylistic features, etc.

Results

The function of the narrator as the key narrative instance in fiction

Every literary work is built according to certain rules – the writer’s peculiar way of organizing events within. In the narrative of a literary text, an important figure is the one who leads the story – the narrator, that is, a person invented by the author. This literary figure can be the author, a character, or some other person. It is the narrator as the key instance that determines the features of revealing the content of the work, and the nature of the narration/story in the text. It is the important subject of the narrative space that verbalizes artistic information. F. Stanzel (1982, p. 48-49) points out the main function of the mediator-narrator in the narrative text; E.S. Maslov (2015) notes that: “a narrator is a linguistic and stylistic epicentre of narration, a fictional person invented by the author, derived from the author’s consciousness” (p. 67). L.V. Tataru (2011) argues that: “The real subject of narration in a literary work is the narrator, therefore, speaking about the attitude between the world of the author and the main character, we mean, first of all, the relationship between the level of the narrator and the character” (p. 57).

W. Fisher (1985) points out that:

“a narrator is a fictional storyteller created by the writer, predominantly one (sometimes several) in the same diegetic space as the narrator whom the narrator is addressing. A narrator can be vivid (explicit), omniscient, self-aware, and confident. The narrator forms the object of the narrative, the fictional world, can distance themselves from the narrative, characters and the narrator” (p. 348).

There is a definition stating that the narrator in the narrative text is a “voice” that speaks, is responsible for the act of narration, and tells an event as a “true story” (Belousov, 2012, p. 19).

W. Schmidt (2003) notes that “the narrator is perceived by the reader not as an abstract function but as a subject with certain anthropomorphic features of thought and language” (p. 38). Usually, the purpose of a narrator in a literary text is identified with the points of view present in the narrative. An important understanding of the narrator’s status in artistic and textual communication was offered by G. Prince who pointed out the following significant components of this literary category: the ability to assimilate a complex of prompts from the “author’s discourse” into the reader’s one and become the centre of understanding in the classic oppositional structure between addressee and recipient. According to the scholar, the narrator’s main function is focused on establishing the level of the reader’s independence and responsibility and delineating the boundaries of the artistic space (Prince, 2003).

The main criteria in determining the types of narrators are the dichotomies of diegesis (a fictional world in which narrative situations and events occur) and exegesis (non-narrative units of the text: explanation, interpretation, comments, reasoning, meta-narrative). It is necessary to clarify that diegesis and exegesis represent the text of the narrator, and mimesis represents the text of the characters of a literary text. With a diegetic narrator, the narrative is about oneself, and with a non-diegetic narrator, the narrative is about other objects. It has been established that the diegetic narrator functions in two hypostases: as the subject of the narrative and the object of the narrative story (Schmidt, 2003). Moreover, the following types of narrators are distinguished according to their functions (based on the classification by G. Genette (1998)): homodiegetic – a narrator who functions in the text and acts as a participant in the events. In this type of narrative, the narration is usually in the first person; heterodiegetic – a narrator who is in the fictional world, but outside of the action, the narrator appears as an outside observer, although the narrator leads the story; extradiegetic – a narrator who leads the reader, acts as a commentator on events, reflects on the events. Usually, such a narrator is not present in the fictional space of the work so the story is presented in the third person. In any case, a narrator is a fictional person created by the writer.

In modern narrative discourse, using F. Stanzel’s principles, there are actorial, auctorial, and neutral narrative types (and, consequently, the types of narrators). The narrative type is actorial if the narrator’s judgments, assessments, and remarks come to the foreground; in auctorial type, the fictional world of the work is presented through the character’s eyes; the neutral narrative type is devoid of individualized interpretation and is characterized by an impersonal image of what is seen and heard in the outside world (Stanzel, 1982). The narrator, as the main subject of the narrative, on the one hand, can be a prominent individual, on the other hand, simply a bearer of some impersonal assessment of others. It is discovered that when a narrator is an impersonal bearer of a feature, then there is often an ironic context. In this regard, W. Schmidt (2003) notes that “the reduction of the narrator directed towards the ironic voice is mainly found in the ‘personal’ narration, that is, where the nation is oriented towards the character’s point of view” (p. 39).

In the modern literary plane, the existence of two main narrative forms has been noted: I-narration, that is, the narrator in the first person and the narrator in the third person with an objective presentation. Under those conditions, when the writer talks about events in the third person and indicates their presence as a character, it is said that a narrator takes the “position of an Olympian”. In the narrative continuum, an equally important function is performed by the image of the author that directly or indirectly influences the image of the narrator, coordinating the narrative realm. Speaking about the correlation of the narrator with the author, various trends were revealed: on the one hand, the narrator may have in common with the author, and be simply imagined by the latter; on the other hand, the narrator may be a direct reflection of the author’s positions, thoughts, and ideas. Such a narrator acts according to the author’s strategies and appears as the author’s “mask”. The narrator can be viewed identically to the author, or completely differently.

The narrator and the main character in flash fiction by A.P. Chekhov and J. Joyce

Researchers of A.P. Chekhov have repeatedly noted the important role of narrators in organizing the narration (Tamarchenko, 2008). Chekhov often creates a multilevel system of narrators, the relationship between which creates the plot and, most importantly, the semantic tension of the text. Thus, in the story “Lights”, the narration begins with the “I”-narrator, and then the function of the narrator is taken over by one of the characters participating in the night conversation at the railway construction – engineer Ananyev, who details his visits to the childhood city and meeting a young the woman who was called Kisotchka in her youth. At the same time, the engineer’s story returns several times to the starting point of narration, forming the so-called “dashed narrative”, when the built-in narrative is intermittently interrupted by the framing story (in terms of narratology these are extradiegetic and intradiegetic narratives). The short stories “About Love”, “Gooseberries”, “Easter Eve”, etc. are organized similarly.

Unlike A.P. Chekhov, J. Joyce usually does not use too complex narrative forms or create a multilevel narrative in flash fiction. Even such a common narrative situation in short stories as “I”-narration, does not often occur in Joyce’s work. Namely, out of fifteen stories in the collection “Dubliners,” only three (“The Sisters”, “An Encounter”, “Araby”) have just such a narrative structural form. However, even when there is only one narrator in the story, and the event of the narrative and the narrated event do not seem to be separated at all (neither in time, nor in space, nor in terms of lexical and grammatical parameters), one can find markers hidden in the verbal-compositional development of the text that indicate the heterogeneity of these events and the significance of the relationship between them.

The structure of literary speech for both Joyce and Chekhov is characterized by a tendency to overcome the “author’s subjectivity”, which manifests itself in the search for various forms of indirect speech and the dominance of free indirect speech. The authors utilize this form of narration in an attempt to impartially reproduce complex internal collisions of characters through the contamination of the means of external and internal narrative planes. As a result of such a narrative strategy, a situation is created when the concept of “author’s voice”, which is traditional for analyzing the stylistic features of a work, is unproductive. The author, as a biographical personality, remains outside the created fictional world. However, the narrator’s discourse and the character’s discourse are actualized in the text.

Both in Chekhov’s short stories and Joyce’s novellas, tense internal collisions that hide external inactivity break through outward in the very nature of the narrative. The latter becomes not descriptive but dramatized and is conducted mainly from the point of view (“in perspective”) of the character, and the character’s state, feelings are not described at all but are embodied in detail, conveyed in gesture, facial expressions, facial expressions, intonations, etc.

J. Joyce, while working on the collection of short stories Dubliners, formed the conviction that artistic creation is not journalism or journalistic reporting but a specific transformation of the real world and human consciousness. The writer brings this belief into fruition in the idea of epiphany which is understood as a state of insight and sudden spiritual clarity which gives rise to specific images of objects that “combine physical and psychological reality (the physical reality of their being in the world and the psychological reality of their perception by the subject)” (Puchkova, 1993, p. 168).

In the work, this phenomenon is manifested in a wide variety of elements: facial expressions, a suddenly uttered phrase, unexpectedly accented interior details that can associatively convey a person’s state of mind, etc. In the text, epiphany takes on the form of diffused speech, in which the voices of the narrator and the character are combined due to the absence of axiological comments. At the same time, there is no direct immersion into the inner world of a person like L. Tolstoy. To gain access to the hidden images of human consciousness, the author resorts to a strong intrusion from the outside which ensures the launch of active processes in the consciousness. Such a situation occurs in the short story “A Little Cloud”, when the main character Chandler, after a conversation with his former friend, sharply realizes the hopelessness of his existence; in “A Painful Case”, where Mister Duffy, having learned about the suicide of a loved one, actually admits his guilt; in “The Dead” where “freelance artist” Gabriel Conroy, discovering an unknown past of his wife’s life, reveals a sense of mental stagnation and spiritual baseness. Moreover, all these realizations are given to the reader not through the author’s direct characterizations but exclusively through their observations and conclusions.

The uniqueness of the narrative discourse in most of Chekhov’s stories is also largely because the work lacks the author’s assessments and characterizations of the events. Everything that is presented to the reader from the impersonal narrator passes through the prism of the main character’s consciousness: we only have access to what the main character sees, hears, and feels. For example, this is the structure of the short story “At Christmas Time”. At the same time, in some works, for example, in the short story “Gusev”, there are clear transitions from the narrator’s point of view and voice to the main character’s narrative perspective, which are set by parentheses (Chekhov, 1986, p. 327).

Both Chekhov and Joyce, as authors, try to objectify the narrative as much as possible and distance themselves from the axiological sphere of narrative. Contemporary literary criticism calls fictional discourse of this kind “the poetics of absence”, linking it with the phenomenon of “open work” (Eco, 2003). The characteristic features of such poetics are the author’s non-interference in the development of events, the avoidance of any value judgments, the open motivation of the characters’ behaviour, explanations regarding changes in the temporal and spatial plans of the story, the reduction of cause-and-effect relationships in the plot development, the dissolution of the author’s thoughts in the speech of the characters. In the short stories by Chekhov and Joyce, the dominant speech form is textual interference, that is, the combination of the narrative planes of the narrator and the main character performing the structural and constructive function and serving as the main means of revealing the subtle artistic content of works.

Typology of fictional speech in prose usually involves the identification of such types of speech as the author’s, free indirect, and character’s speech. Each of them represents a certain compositional structure, organized by the ratio of the voices of the author, narrator, and character, and has its content, and functions, characterized by a relatively fixed set of constructive features and speech devices (intonation, the ratio of tense-aspect forms, word order, the general nature of vocabulary and syntax) (Kozhevnikova, 1994, p. 133). In the general structure of the text, the uniqueness of these types of narration is determined by the presence of an identified or unidentified subject of speech and is embodied in the corresponding speech forms, which in themselves evoke, with some certainty, an idea of the subject, create the subject’s image. Thus, a special type of narration (or some combination of the types) is distinguished by the sphere of the prevalence of forms of one’s own/author’s or someone else’s/character broadcasting within a literary and artistic work.

Free indirect speech is particularly common in flash fiction of the psychological direction. This type of indirect speech is characterized by the presence of two voices in the structure of separate fragments of the text. It can be a phrase or several phrases that are most often distinguished by a paragraph in writing. As a rule, a paragraph begins with the narrator’s speech, and has the goal of introducing the reader to a new situation, a plot twist, and preparing a psychological motivation for events. Further, with more or less obviousness, the main character’s speech is interspersed into the voice of the narrator, forming a two-voice narration, in which, depending on the specific goal, one or another voice dominates. In the development of free indirect speech, emotive elements (colloquial vocabulary, epithets, individually marked phrases) play an important role, since their emotional-subjective colouring makes it possible to identify the character’s voice and establish the semantic significance of the transition from one type of speech to another.

Flash fiction by Chekhov and Joyce is characterized by a general tendency in literature at the turn of the 20th century, according to which the role of the author as an omniscient demiurge of a literary text is gradually lost (Meletinskii, 1990). In the structure of fiction, this trend is manifested in the search for various forms of indirect speech and the dominance of free indirect speech. The authors resort to this form of narration, trying to impartially reproduce complex internal collisions of characters through the contamination of the means of external and internal speech. As a result of such a narrative strategy, a situation is created when the concept of “author’s voice”, which is traditional for analyzing the stylistic features of a work, is unproductive. The author, as a biographical personality, remains outside the created fictional world.

To characterize the features of the relationship between the voices of the narrator and the character in the narrative discourse by A.P. Chekhov and J. Joyce, let us consider the stories “The Bishop” by A.P. Chekhov and “The Dead” by J. Joyce. These works are chosen because these works represent the most characteristic features of the writers’ flash fiction: “The Dead” completes the collection Dubliners (Joyce, 1982; Joyce, 2019) (the last of the 15 stories included in it) and summarizes the ideological-content and formal searches of the early period of the writer’s work. “The Bishop” was written by A.P. Chekhov in 1902 and marked the transition, according to the author, to a new outlook on life (Chekhov, 1986, p. 452, 456).

A key episode in A.P. Chekhov’s short story is the visit of a mother to her son, “his Reverence Peter”, who was called Paul in his childhood. This episode significantly changes the stylistic pattern of the text, in particular the nature and content of free indirect speech. The latter organizes the narration from the very beginning of the work when the voice and focus of the character’s vision are emphasized:

“One could not see the doors through the haze (“one” obviously means the Bishop – author’s note); the endless procession rolled toward him, and seemed as if it must go on rolling forever” (Chekhov, 1986, p. 186).

Illness, fatigue and physical exhaustion of the main character are conveyed by a gradational series of emotional statements and a string of epithets,

“How hot and close the air was, and how long the prayers! His Reverence was tired. His dry, parching breath was coming quickly and painfully, his shoulders were aching, and his legs were trembling” (Chekhov, 1986, p. 186).

After the news of the mother’s arrival, the Bishop’s outlook sharply changes perspective. From the “difficult” present, the Bishop organically moves to the “easy” past, the time of his childhood. The main character returns to the childish, directly intuitive way of thinking about the world, in which the subjective-evaluative categories of a “positive” plane play a decisive role, and are conveyed through several appropriate epithets,

“Oh, that dear, precious, unforgettable childhood of his! Why did those years that had vanished forever seem so much brighter and richer and gayer than they really had been?” (Chekhov, 1986, p. 188).

As one can see, the stylistic patterns in this and the above passage are significantly different: before the mother’s arrival, stylistic components with negative connotations prevailed in free indirect speech, and the components with positive connotations were predominant after the arrival.

The narration in Joyce’s story “The Dead” (Joyce, 2019) unfolds in a similar pattern. The narrative here is in the third person but mainly from the perspective of the vision and perception of the main character, Gabriel Conroy. The constant fluctuations between the narrator’s voice and the main character’s voice create the discrete, undulating speech movement of the narrative. Each fragment, starting with the neutral voice of the narrator, is then transformed into free indirect speech with the dominance of vocabulary and intonation-syntactic structure, which are characteristic of the main character’s speech. The text fragment ends with a brief conclusion to the situation that belongs to the main character or a more or less detailed meditation about certain circumstances or problems. Cf.:

“He waited outside the drawing-room door until the waltz should finish, listening to the skirts that swept against it and to the shuffling of feet. He was still discomposed by the girl’s bitter and sudden retort. It had cast a gloom over him which he tried to dispel by arranging his cuffs and the bows of his tie. <…> He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand. They would think that he was airing his superior education. He would fail with them just as he had failed with the girl in the pantry. He had taken up a wrong tone. His whole speech was a mistake from first to last…” (Joyce, 2019).

As one can see, at first the narrator’s voice is completely devoid of subjectivity, but the fragment ends, in fact, with the main character’s direct speech which is not in quotation marks. It gives a negative assessment of his actions, even running ahead since his speech has yet to take place during the evening feast.

Joyce, as an author, tries to distance himself from the organization of the story and present a direct look at the psyche of the main character using free indirect speech. This technique subsequently developed into the method of the stream of consciousness consistently and systematically applied in J. Joyce’s famous novel “Ulysses”.

It is important to note that, the opposition of the bottom and the top is an important factor in the narrative structure of both stories. In the perception of Chekhov’s character, the horizontal projection of space is indicated by the dominant “dark” with the appropriate stylistic design: “dark streets”, “black shadows” (shadows – that which is located on a plane, that is, horizontally). However, the “top” is represented by images of height and light: “a tall belfry, all bathed in moonlight”; “calm, brooding moon”. The “earthly” world for the bishop is darkness, an unpleasant, hard monastic life, in which the bishop notes the burden of “low ceilings”, “heavy smell”. The upper world is always dominated by light, solar or lunar (“the sky bathed in sunshine”; “in the moonlight, bright and tranquil”) and life-affirming sounds: birdsong in the sky, music of church bells. It is significant that individual details of the “lower” world act as a kind of mediator relative to the upper ones (for example, “white crosses on graves”), and also carry semantics similar to the “upper” images. As one can see, the structure of the fictional space of Chekhov’s short story is formed with the help of markers of free indirect speech, which makes it possible to understand that the death of the protagonist is not final (it is significant that the author, obviously, deliberately did not include either the bishop’s death episode or the burial episode in the plot of the story).

The chronotope of Joyce’s story is limited to a short period (one evening) and the space of the house (at first the action takes place in the house of the Morkan sisters, and ends at the hotel, where the Conroys come after the party). However, here, too, is an antithesis between the internal and the external. Gabriel, just before the speech at the table, which the character already assessed as hypocritical and unsuccessful, suddenly turns his inner eye to what is happening on the street,

“People, perhaps, were standing in the snow on the quay outside, gazing up at the lighted windows and listening to the waltz music. The air was pure there. In the distance lay the park where the trees were weighted with snow. The Wellington Monument wore a gleaming cap of snow that flashed westward over the white field of Fifteen Acres” (Joyce, 2019).

Later, at the hotel, after the wife’s confession, Gabriel looks outside again,

“He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead” (Joyce, 2019).

These final phrases of the story, of course, are performed in a minor key, but the phrases simultaneously expand that narrowed world of a hardened and self-confident existence that was previously characteristic of Gabriel.

In addition to the spatial opposition, the temporal opposition of the present and the past is also significant in both short stories, which are also organized using the relationship between the narrator’s voice and the characters’ voices. In Chekhov’s short story, the narrative unfolds in time as a movement from the present, which describes the mother’s arrival to the bishop and his death, to the past, in which two periods of the bishop’s life are presented in more or less detail – his childhood and his eight-year stay abroad.

The antithetical comparison of the present and the past is reinforced by the opposition of darkness and light. Thus, when the bishop returns late in the evening after the service to the monastery where he lives, and the bishop is informed of the arrival of his mother, pictures of the past stand before him painted in clear, light colours. The next time, during the evening service, listening to the chanting of the monks, the bishop sits in the altar (“it was dark”) and unexpectedly compares the “other world” (the conventional future) and childhood (the idealized past), which seems to him bright and joyful. In this fragment, the saturation of free indirect speech with numerous signs of the character’s worldview makes it possible to understand his inner drama, which has, in fact, an existential meaning, as it portends the imminent departure of the bishop from “this” world – at the same time inexpressibly beautiful and vain and sinful.

Like Chekhov, Joyce unfolds a dual time perspective – the perspective of the present and the memory perspective. In the short story “The Dead”, there are quite a few scenes of dual time perspective. The present and the past are clearly opposed to each other in the main character’s inner world. Gabriel Conroy is not fully aware of his drama, which is the artificiality of his life, alienation and the inability to establish a truly organic connection with the world around him and those closest to him. The main character loves his wife but cannot express his precious thoughts to her, feels helpless and confused. Therefore, Gabriel is trying to cross the boundaries of the present and plunge into another, ideal world, which to him is the circumstances of his past: the first letter received from Greta, their honeymoon, sailing on a ship, etc. (Ghandeharion, Abbaszadeh, 2020).

Conclusion

The results of the study indicate that the typological similarity in A.P. Chekhov’s and J. Joyce’s flash fiction is the relationship between the narrator and the main character. This is determined by the global trend in literature at the turn of the 20^th century, according to which the role of the author as an omniscient and omnipresent demiurge of the fictional world starts to wane. Joyce unfolds the narrative in such a way that a certain story is not told but shown. In this case, the author’s participation is reduced to a minimum not only in the development of events but also in the descriptions and characteristics of the characters; cause-and-effect relationships are not accentuated at all; rather, on the contrary, are veiled in every possible way. Like Joyce, Chekhov avoids “the author’s” describing the state of mind of the characters; this state of mind is understandable from the comparison of the main character’s actions with the details of his inner monologue, the details of his perception of reality, thoughts and feelings, which are reflected in his inner speech. At the same time, the uniqueness of psychological analysis in the works of both authors lies in the fact that the authors give preference to the disclosure of the internal state through portrait and object details, landscape, gesture, and action. However, the author’s “analysis-motivation” is completely absent.

The unique entwinement of the narrator’s and the main character’s voices in A.P. Chekhov’s and J. Joyce’s short stories is a main structural-constructive factor of the free indirect speech and contributes to revealing the subtle creative substance of the works. For Chekhov, this is the realization that the story told in the short story is not death, but the resurrection of the main character; then the author’s deepest idea of the unity, integrity and invincible essence of life is embodied. For Joyce, on the one hand, a person overcomes speculative, arrogant ideas about his superiority over other people, and on the other, liberation from suppressed desires, overcoming alienation and comprehending the higher essence of life. Therefore, the hypothesis of the study was confirmed: the typological similarity of the flash fiction by J. Joyce and A.P. Chekhov is a specific relationship between a narrator and a character which acts as the main structural-constructive factor of free indirect speech and contributes to revealing the subtle creative substance of the works.

Declaration of Conflict of Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest.

Acknowledgement

This paper has been supported by the RUDN University Strategic Leadership Program.

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The Battle of Belonging: A Study of Contemporary Shillong Poets

North East Literature & Culture/V14N2

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¹Amanda B. Basaiawmoit & Dr. Paonam Sudeep Mangang²

¹Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Meghalaya, India. Email: amandabashishabasaiawmoit@nitm.ac.in

²Associate Professor & Head, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Meghalaya, India. Email: paonam.sudeep@nitm.ac.in

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022. Pages 1-15. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne31

First published: June 30, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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Abstract:

The British colonialisation, the partition of India during independence, growing urbanization and increased human mobility led to the growth of migrant settlers belonging to a number of cultural, racial, ethnic and religious groups in the state of Meghalaya, particularly Shillong which is the state’s capital. These factors contributed to the transformation of the city into a multi-cultural centre. However, contradicting this development was the increased desire of the indigenous tribals of the state to exclude and otherise the non-tribal settlers by way of promoting the ‘sons of the soil’ policy. Though in the recent decades, statistics depicts (2011 census) more out-migration with a decreased share of the non-tribal to the state’s population, yet a perceived notion of increased in-migration was fed by the indigenous tribal belonging both to pressure groups and political parties leading to issues of insider-outsider the concept of belonging and un-belonging. Sigmund Freud and Abraham Maslow were the early psychologists who recognized that humans strive to belong. However, it was Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary’s seminal work “The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation” that contributed to the theoretical understandingof belonging. Belongingness in today’s multicultural society has become all the more relevant wherein the questions of belonging and un-belonging and the complex politics of belonging are issues that confront us. This in turn has led to ‘belonging’ emerging as a subject of interest and interrogation across multiple disciplines. The un-belonging felt by the people of the Northeast which results from their being ‘othered’ by their fellow Indian citizens of mainland India has been well documented but there is also a need to study how the same is reversed and how it is enacted and experienced in the context of the Northeast. This paper intends to analyse the select works of contemporary Shillong poets to depict how this otherisation and battle for belonging is enacted and experienced by the non-tribal settlers living in Shillong. In doing so, an attempt will be made to trace the complex working of the politics of belonging and how it manifests itself in present day Shillong.

Keywords: Shillong, Contemporary Shillong Poets, Otherisation, Belonging, Un-belonging.

Introduction:

In recent years, scholars working in the area of Northeast India have taken an interest in questions concerning identity, wherein the politics of identity has revealed aspects of inter-group relationships that are complex, yet necessary for a better understanding of human relations. A facet of inter-group relations is the othering which has led to the creation of binaries of ‘us and them’, ‘majority and minority’. This is evident in the identity studies in Northeast where much discussion has taken place on how the people from this region have always been marginalised for, they belong to the periphery and as such are otherised by their fellow citizens of mainland India who impose on them a ‘Northeast identity’ calling them ‘chinky’ and looking at them differently as if they don’t belong (Haokip, 2012, 2020). However, this politics of othering in the states of Northeast is reversed wherein the non-native settlers of the region are othered and this is also true in the context of Meghalaya¹. This paper attempts to analyze the experiences of othering as reflected in the works of the Shillong poets and note how the politics of belonging is enacted and experienced by them. The voicing out of the Shillong poets is not only an assertion of identity but also a battle for belonging, for man as a social animal desires close social connections which implies the need for belonging.

Theoretical framework

A.H. Maslow (1943) had formulated the theory of human motivation, where according to hierarchy of needs depicted through a pyramid, belongingness lies at the centre of the pyramid as part of the social needs. However, the groundwork towards understanding belonging as a theory was laid by Baumeister and Leary (1995). According to them, this need to belong is rooted in the evolutionary theory wherein man as a social animal depended on close social connections which implied the need of belonging to a group for survival. This need to belong or belongingness, involves more than simply being acquainted with other people rather it is centred on the emotional need to affiliate and be accepted by members of a group.

Therefore, belongingness as argued by Youkhana (2015) is “a rather new theoretical term”, (p.12) one which has become all the more relevant in today’s multicultural society ¹wherein the questions of belonging and un-belonging are issues that confront us. Hence, the processes, practices, and theories of belonging have become a subject of interest and interrogation across disciplines (Halse, 2018). According to Pfaff-Czarnecka (2013) belonging is, “an emotionally charged, ever-dynamic social location- that is: a position in social structure, experienced through identification, embeddedness, connectedness and attachments” (pp. 4-5).

Further, when we look at how individuals join or are accepted into groups, we realize that such groups or social bonds of belonging are formed when there are commonalities between the two. This implies that the concept of belonging is related to concepts such as identity and affiliation. According to Pfaff-Czarnecka (2011), “identity caters to dichotomous characterisation of the social” (p. 4) and this identity politics influences one’s sense of belonging. Nira Yuval-Davis (2004, 2006) another noted scholar of belonging when focussing on how different social groups interact, tries to understand and differentiate between how people belong and the politics of belonging that arise thereof. About belonging she writes:

[b]elonging is not just about membership, rights, and duties […] Nor can it be reduced to identities and identifications, which are about individual and collective narratives of self and other, presentation and labelling, myths of origin and destiny. Belonging is a deep emotional need of people. (Yuval-Davis, 2004, p. 215)

This notion of the politics of belonging as explained by Yuval-Davis (2010, 2011) reveals that belonging whether at the level of the individual or the collective is never free of the dynamics of power. This was why Walton and Cohen (2007) in their experimental study of belonging stated that stigmatized groups face issues of social belonging.

Shillong: A background

Before we attempt to trace the sense of belonging as reflected in the works of the contemporary Shillong poets let us look at the historical background of Shillong which will provide an insight into the complex dynamics of identity construction and its representation in contemporary Shillong. This background will reveal that identity plays an important role in the politics of othering and belonging.

Meghalaya is home to three major tribes namely the Khasis, Jaintias, and Garos and other minor indigenous tribes like the Dalus, Rabhas, Hajongs, Koches, Bodos, etc. The British colonization and the missionary zeal to redeem the hill people consequently led to Shillong turning into a multi-cultural centre. The partition of India, urbanization and increased regional mobility saw the growth of migrant settlers belonging to a number of cultural, racial, ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities in Shillong. These migrant settlers which are a minority, comprised of two categories – the non-tribal¹ such as the Bengalis, Nepalis, Marwaris, Punjabis, etc., (who are locally referred to as ‘dkhar’) and the non-native tribal communities such as the Nagas, Mizos etc. The inter group relations in this multicultural society of Shillong have led to assumption of the identity of ‘us’ and ‘them’ that point to the asymmetrical power relations.

The indigenous tribal’s desire and struggle for regional autonomy led to the creation of Meghalaya as a separate state in 1972 and thereafter, there has been a pursuit of the ‘son of the soil’ policy by the state government and the eruption of ethnic conflicts (Myrboh, 2018). Even after statehood, the native tribal belonging to pressure groups and political parties continued to fan the perception of increased in-migration. Consequently, attempts were made to adopt measures to protect the native tribal communities’ identity, resources and interests. In this process the minority non-tribal settlers of the state were otherised. This othering though inextricably linked to ethnicity, it became more aggressive as the native tribal became wary of the effects of settler colonialism.

Depiction of Othering and Belonging in Shillong Poetry

In light of the above background, Shillong poets who are engulfed on the issue of othering are divided into binary positions- those who perceive the non-tribal as others and those who express their pain as a result of this process. The above classification is intentionally done not only to show how the imposed identity of an insider or outsider affects one’s sense of belonging, but more importantly to understand what factors determine whether one is to be termed as insider or outsider.

Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih one of the stalwarts of Northeast poetry, belonging to the majority Khasi tribe in his poem “Only Strange Flowers have Come to Bloom” mirrors the thoughts and feelings of the Khasi people who view the influx of outsiders as a threat to their identity and culture. In this poem he states:

“In the park I saw

Those strange flowers again

That I have seen bossing around

[…]

Like flowers, only strangers

And strange ways have come

To bloom in this land” (Nongkynrih, 2011, pp. 6-7).

In this poem, the poet uses the metaphor of ‘strange flowers’ that have come to bloom in “his land” to represent the outsiders, particularly the non-tribal who the tribal community view as different. Further, in this poem these strange flowers are described as ‘blooming’ and ‘bossing around’ thereby revealing the poet and his peoples’ bitterness against these outsiders who they feel have invaded the personal place or land (Sankhyan and Sigroha, 2020). This bitter expression of Nongkynrih also reveals that the native tribal perceives the transgressing non-tribal settler as a threat—one with whom they would have to compete for scarce resources. B. P. Singh claims:

[…] the large-scale migration of population from outside the region […] and the total dependence of people on the land and the State’s apparatus for a livelihood […] the local population feel(s) outnumbered and swamped by people of different cultural origins. (Singh, 1996, p. 192)

Singh (1996) further adds that the failure of the various sections of the settler population to adapt to the local language, customs and traditions further widened the gap between the outsider and insider promoting exclusion of sorts.

Iadalang Pynrope (2013), another Shillong poet in her poem “They said long ago” , juxtaposes the past with the present. She states:

“They said long ago, let us settle and do business here.

Warm, hospitable people and

Endless avenues to lead to prosperity

Today, they say apprehensive stares have replaced the smiles

And they claim to have diagnosed the disease

Fear Psychosis alas! ” (Pyngrope, 2013, p.61)

In these lines she refers to the settler migrants or the non-tribal who in the past came to these hills to do business finding the native tribal “warm and hospitable” for they smiled at them. Today, however this same non-tribal feels otherised by the native tribal which is evident in the fact that “apprehensive stares have replaced the smiles” (Pyngrope, 2013, p. 61). Here the change in this attitude can perhaps be attributed to the change in the condition of the non-tribal settler who now is prosperous. This changed condition of the non-tribal is viewed with suspicion by the native tribal eventually leading to the anxieties that in turn promoted otherisation of the non-tribal settlers. Mukhim (2013) states that this “fear psychosis that non-tribals would walk away with our land, our jobs and our women” was promoted by a few politicians to acquire political power. Bakshi (2018) on the other hand explains using the “karma philosophy” linking it with “cause and effect” (Bakshi, 2018, p.146). Relating to old stories that he has heard of non-tribal settlers—how they took advantage of the simplicity and naiveté of the native tribal while the ‘others’ behaved like the brown sahib— he explains the cause and the resultant changed attitude in the following lines, “Somewhere this must hurt in the collective conscious of the local people. What is happening today is perhaps some form of historical revenge” (Bakshi, 2018, p.146).

Pyngrope in this same poem justifies the stance of the native tribal by pointing out:

“But wouldn’t you suffer from this same malady

If you also belonged to a people who comprise

A grain of rice

In a bagful of India

A grain that could simply slither away

And be forgotten

Because they did not know it existed in the first place” (Pyngrope, p. 62).

The lines by Pyngrope, asks the non-tribal to look from the perspective of a small ethnic national minority to understand the basis of this ‘fear’ one which Mukhim (2005) explains stating:

Pitted against a people with a five thousand year old civilisation and a more advanced culture makes the Northeasterner a wee bit wary, lest he be taken for a ride by the more enterprising, intelligent, wise and progressive ‘Indian’ from the mainstream. Their fears are not altogether misplaced. (Mukhim, p.181)

Pyngrope also refers to mainland India’s ignorance of the Northeast, a fact that Mukhim (2005) corroborates that many a times our state, our people and our tribes “[…] is Greek to many Indians” (p.180). In fact, this ignorance is one of the causal factors that have propagated the othering of the Northeast tribal in mainland India, making them feel that they can be easily forgotten.

Paul Lyngdoh, a poet from Shillong, in his poem “To Whom it May Concern” points out how the non-tribal community considers the ethnic struggle and conflict to be without a cause and how they regard it to be a violation of human rights. While doing so, Lyngdoh, however, questions the non-tribal community if they would voice out against the otherisation of the tribal by the mainlanders, who he states are referred to as “chinkis”, “immigrants” and “wild tribals”. He argues that such name-calling also goes against the concept of human dignity and is a violation of human rights. Further, while calling the non-tribal ‘my friend’ he urges them to look at the circumstances from the perspective of the ‘otherised tribal’:

“But wait, my friend.

We will break bread with you, for sure,

but only when you

can truly accept that we haven’t descended from tree tops

to be in your midst,

stop insisting on passports when we identify ourselves

or leering at our womenfolk just because

they look so unlike your daughters and your wives” (Lyngdoh, p. 56)

The above lines depict that the othering and unbelonging that is experienced by the non-tribal settler in Shillong, will and can end on the condition that mainland India treats the tribal community as their equals, their own Indian brothers and sisters.

Deeply entangled in the question of identity and belongingness, the Shillong poets have not only addressed this issue of insider and outsider but have also noted the rift between these two communities. Almond Syiem’s “79 to Corona” is a poem that was written during the Corona lockdown when, despite restrictions on movement, it saw the migrant exodus from the cities. In this poem the poet points out how the imposed insider-outsider identity led to violent conflicts ultimately forcing the non-tribal families to leave Shillong to relocate elsewhere leaving behind their homes and their businesses. Perhaps the choice of the title “’79 to Corona” is also intentional for the poet wanted to point out the year, 1979, which marks the beginning of the first major riot in Shillong that resulted from the division imposed between insider-outsider identities. The second part of the title perhaps is reflective of how the same condition is prevalent even in the present century. In this poem, Syiem refers to a particular year, perhaps 1987, that saw schools locked up due to the imposed curfew. Describing the times he writes:

“[…] I learnt the vocabulary

of hate and placed my preadolescent signature

on a certificate that declared my neighbour

and friend Abhijit, his family, had become

our enemy. So, we grew up drinking xenophobic

wine and transitioned seasons in communal stupor,

bullying Bengalis, questioning our Indianness.

[…]

Those were the days we walked perpetually

stoned on the marijuana of blaming settlers

for all our problems, washed our parched throats

with the scotch of ethnocentric justification

to prevent our extinction” (Almond Syiem, 2020)

These lines which depict the reality of those times sadly reflect the discourse during those turbulent years. It was one difference, though built around some of those stereotypes it was directed externally to the Indian state but internally to the larger and smaller cultural, linguistic, ethnic, religious, racial communities who had settled here. These lines also point out that the identity of an outsider is determined and stamped by the eyes of the beholder, who in this case belongs to the majority or the insider group. One can also note in the lines above, the Khasi community’s desire to affirm and protect its native tribal and insider identity- one expressed by the idea propagated during those times: ‘Khasi by blood, Indian by accident’ (Prakash, 2007, p. 1728). In this poem, Syiem’s reference to ‘xenophobic wine’ is pertinent for he acknowledges what Sen calls “the xenophobic persecution” of the non-tribal settlers “that ran over two decades particularly from 1979 all the way to the late ‘90s”. (Sen, 2018, p.107) Almond Syiem writes:

“While curiously blind

To our own decadence, excusing our politicians

For their predictable theatre of well-rehearsed lies

And serpent-tongued promises” (Almond Syiem, 2020)

In the poem Syiem goes on to portray the realization that had dawned on the Khasis, that this was all part of the dirty game of politics played by politicians who theatrically presented ‘well-rehearsed lies’ and fed ‘serpent-tongued promises’ to the gullible native tribal to fuel the ‘sons of the soil’ movement while they themselves ironically “shook their contaminated hands/ with the merchants of agricultural death, who told/ them to look the other way” (Syiem, 2020) thereby turning into businessmen with vested interests. This realization that dawned on a few of the native tribals is evidently reflected in an article published in the local daily where Mukhim (2013) states, “The politicization of ethnicity has been a vote-getting strategy for many since 1979. All the bloodshed and violence of that era can be traced to the desire of a few politicians to acquire political power by stressing on differences and creating fear psychosis that the non-tribal will walk away with all our land, our jobs and our women.”

Although the ethnic conflicts of 1979 and 1987 lessened in intensity and normalcy was almost restored, these incidents had their aftermaths. Community relations in general became polluted with an air of suspicion and hatred towards the other. The out migration of the non-tribal community transformed Shillong but this did not necessarily lead to the recession of the ‘sons of the soil’ movement. Rather, the movement continued in the name of anti-foreigner agitations (Bhattacharjee, 2020). On the positive side what we can note from the works of the above tribal poets there is the growth of dialogue by native tribal writers, artists and intellectuals on aspects of insider-outsider dichotomy.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are poets like Ananya Guha, Nabanita Kanungo, Purabi Bhattacharya who as second and third generation non-tribal settlers have grown and have lived in Shillong, thereby identifying it as their home. These poets in their works portray how their otherised identity imposed on them by the tribal has impacted their sense of belonging. Ananya Guha in his collection of 85 poems aptly titled “I am not a Silent Poet” shows how he silently scripts the experience of pain and protest as he voices out on issues of discrimination, injustice, death/killing and the loss of humanity. He beautifully captures the politics of otherisation that prevails in India and afflicts society in his poem “Them and Us” (20019.p.26). In this poem, he seems to suggest that the destructive divisive forces which are propagated in society all around have made a life of love, peace and harmony seemingly impossible. Further, in this same collection in his epilogue, he includes his ‘Five Hill’ poems where he specifically refers to Shillong —the hills which he calls home. In his untitled fifth poem, he depicts his love and concern for the people and the city. This concern and love are evident in the lines where he states:

“I’d rather die

than see these

hills decapitated

they are cutting down forests

suppose they behead these

hills with their neat chop

whom will I look up” (Guha, 2019, p. 108)

These lines reflect the destruction of nature commtted in the name of progress and development. In fact, this concern that he has for the place he calls home shows not only his love for the people but also his concern for the society which is afflicted by individuals with vested interests who will do anything for profit. Further, in this intense love that the poet feels, one can also note a certain unease that reflects these changing times, for in this same poem he states:

“When a child, mother said

these are not dogs barking

but hyenas or wolves

as Laitumkhrah, somnambulist

walked steadily in my carping dreams” (Guha, 2019,p. 108)

These lines depict how the nights of Laitumkhrah—one of the localities of Shillong in which the poet resides— has changed. As a frightened child his mother would tell him that the howls he hears in the stillness of the night are not those of dogs but of hyenas or wolves perhaps symbolically referring to the vested few, who fuelled the ideas of insider-outsider for their own profit. These vested few preyed on the sentiments of the gullible tribal, thereby changing the discourse of identity and belonging in Shillong. The reference to the years to come metaphorically represented here as ‘dreams’, reveals the poets feeling that the insiders will be critical of his identity as an outsider or non-tribal and question his belonging.

It is no wonder that Guha in the untitled third hill poem, voices out his plight of unbelonging indirectly wherein he writes:

“my mind sinks into horizons

of a hill town which I ask

to love,

Me.” (Guha, 2019, p. 106)

This expression of Guha is what Satpathy (1999) notes as one which “springs from his dual allegiance…one of insider as outsider” (p.20) one representative of those non-tribal who call these hills home and as such crave to be loved, to belong, to be accepted and not otherised.

Nabanita Kanungo in her collection, A Map of Ruins (2014) delves deep into a sense of displacement and belonging, one which she felt in Shillong, the place where she was born and grew up in. In her poem “The Missing Tooth”, she draws a parallel between the experiences of an uprooted native non-tribal of Shillong to the uprooting of a tooth which she describes as painful. She states:

“There were reasons for which we had it painfully uprooted

And now the gap of the missing tooth

Is an embarrassing memory in the mouth” (Kanungo, 2014, p.5)

These lines perhaps refer to an experience she had faced in 2008, when she lost her job as teacher in a college in Shillong on ethnic grounds propagated through the state reservation policy. This particular event of otherisation or being called the outsider made her feel uprooted and created a sense of un-belonging though she had always regarded her birth place Shillong as her home. In fact, the incident singularly changed the way she had experienced and understood place, identity, and belongingness. She, like the tooth uprooted herself from Shillong yet her nostalgia and the paradox of loss is clearly evident in the lines below as she seeks to belong.

“But the tongue is a child,

Habitually searching for a world

Where it is not,” (Kanungo, 2014, p.5)

In dealing and negotiating with this sense of un-belonging, memory plays a very important role. Hence in another poem “It is not about what I want to take with me when I leave the city of my birth” as she describes her leaving Shillong ‘the city of her birth’, she carries with her bitter-sweet memories that help her negotiate this sense of loss and un-belonging as she expresses:

“I will carry this helpless bridge

[…]

and each time, from anywhere in the world

one is enabled to sniff the way back

to a meaning called home” (Kanungo, 2014, p.70)

In the above poems, we may note that for Kanungo memory is all she has, and using this memory she feebly asserts her love and belonging to her home town Shillong though society treats her as an outsider.

Purabi Bhattacharya has two collections of poems Call Me and Sands of Column published by Writers’ Workshop. In one of her poems “You say, Let them be” she refers to the 2020 incident of non-tribal boys being assaulted at Lawsohtun, a locality in Shillong. In this poem, the incident makes her lament and notes:

“How distant we have grown. How possibilities

Of good days are finally coming to an end.

Like I often hear my mother

Wording out: “Kali yuga, time to wrap up” (Bhattacharya, 2021)

These lines depict how the feelings of otherisation that resulted in ethnic conflicts have in the present day widened the rift between the insider and the outsider. As a scarred third generation non-tribal who has left Shillong but still regards it as her home, Bhattacharya painfully regrets that the ‘good days’ of living in harmony are a distant dream. She further goes on to describe how the otherisation takes place and what determines the imposition of the tag of an outsider and writes:

“they’d call us out for our religion

Our taste buds, our wear and the tears we shed” (Bhattacharya, 2021)

In this poem, Bhattacharya bravely questions society, particularly the Khasi society which has remained a silent witness to this conflict and states:

“I know you’ll still then say “let them be.”/ and smile.” (Bhattacharya, 2021)

In yet another poem, “Canopy of Underaged Cloud”, Bhattacharya again refers to the abode of the clouds, Meghalaya, and in particular Shillong. In this poem, she refers to Christmas which sadly reminds her of her birthplace and her home—Shillong. However, these memories are painful ones, for she recollects:

“The pain of

Becoming homeless, of being an unwelcome prowler

The pain of

Losing a land, of becoming few empty digits” (Bhattacharya, 2021)

This is the pain of unbelonging, of being the ‘other’, the ‘dkhar’, the excluded and the lesser human. Again, she points out the bitter truth that the treatment meted out to the ‘other’ is never addressed. This is evident in the lines:

“….The hills

preoccupied with war talks. There’ll be massacre again

They say, but who cares” (Bhattacharya, 2021)

Bhattacharya who identifies herself as a Shillong poet is a strong voice, one who questions the silence of the non-tribal and the tribal community. While depicting her love for Shillong, her birthplace which she regards as her home, she also articulates on the insider-outsider issue to depict how the imposed outsider identity has denied her a sense of belonging.

The works of the above non-tribal poets reveal that the opposition towards otherisation is more pronounced in the poems of the young non-tribal poets. The complex question raised by them on whether they as second and third generation settlers should still be termed as outsiders and be made to feel that they do not belong. It is pertinent to note here that the works of the young non-tribal poets reflect their love for Shillong and their efforts to integrate certain elements of local culture in their works. The first eight poems of Bhattacharya’s 2015 collection titled “Call Me”, subtitled “Home” are expressive of her love for Shillong and the nostalgia for this land which she considers home. In the poem “Silence (Home-III)”, Bhattacharya mentions the “mythical serpent” (Bhattacharya, 2015, p. 19) which reveals her knowledge of the Khasi folklore of ‘U Thlen²’. On the other hand Kanungo, in the poem “Shillong-Shillong” describes the strange inter-community friendships which she calls “Strange Shillong-Shillong combinations” and compares it to the “sohphlang and nei lieh came³”. (Kanungo, 2014, p. 55) This reference is perhaps reflective of the personal experience of Kanungo one that indicates that she has formed deep bonds with the people despite the unkind history Shillong is in the end all about those little places of kinship and love. In the collection “A Map of Ruins” (2014), Kanungo has made use of Khasi words like “biskot⁵, rynsan⁶, kong⁷, soh phlang, nei lieh , kthung⁸, soh baingon dieng⁹” which not only render musicality to her poems but also depict how she has tried to assimilate the local language using it—while speaking and writing— so as to belong . However, understanding the language or learning to speak is not enough to be considered an insider or to belong. Samrat (2018), as a second-generation non-tribal settler reaffirms this stating that “In Shillong, in those years … the line of belonging and not belonging had been decided… by the accident of birth.” (Samrat Choudhury, 2018, p. 153). Therefore, these poets have through their works depicted their crisis of location and have attempted to negotiate with the oscillating sense of belonging and unbelonging. It may also be highlighted here that the non-tribal settler poets in portraying the plight of the non-tribal as victims of otherisation choose not just to describe the pain of unbelonging but also to exemplify the imperative to voice out, rather than opting, what Samrat (2018) terms as, “the silence of the repeatedly oppressed” (Samrat, 2018, p. 158).

Othersiation by the tribal has its’ own historic-political significance. The tribal of Meghalaya view otherisation of the non-tribal settler and the subsequent question of belonging as a means that has helped prevent the emergence of settler colonialism, land alienation and subjugation because of the unequal power relationship with the more advanced settler community. Further, in this context, the fate of the native tribal of Tripura may be cited as an example where today they feel that have been subordinated politically, economically and culturally by the settler community (Hazarika, 1994, p.123). As such in the larger context of India, the otherisation by the dominant majority over the small minority represents the struggle for dominance and power, one experienced by the Northeast tribal. Therefore, otherisation has different connotations for the native tribal and non-tribal settler.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, it can be stated that the dichotomy between otherisation and belongingness is a political and social reality in Meghalaya in general, and the city of Shillong in particular. The Shillong poets, as artists, have welded passion in their words to mirror contemporary society for they believe that the art of writing is a subversive act. The poets have each shared their views on the insider-outsider issue and this voicing out is essential for informed dialogue and mutual understanding. This view is reiterated by Hazarika (2018) who states that the insider-outsider syndrome “is about accountability…equality and the need to assert” (Hazarika, 2018 p, 186).

Otherisation and belongingness are complex issues especially in the context of relationships between the native tribal and settler communities of Meghalaya. While otherisation as perceived by the tribal of Meghalaya is important to preserve their identity, resources and interests, the non-tribal settlers feel that as residents, they have been severed from their claim to belong. However, it may be noted that this otherisation of the settler community by the natives is not prevalent only in Meghalaya but in other states of Northeast India as well.

Thus, this question of insider-outsider in Meghalaya has to be understood in the context of the larger picture of the process of otherisation of the Northeast India by the so-called custodians of Indian nationhood and Indian nationalism. This is evident in the observation made by Baruah (2020, p. 13) where he states that “There is ample expression in contemporary Indian popular culture of the Northeast as a place of danger located outside the effective boundaries of the nation”. Ethnic communities of Northeast India in the popular Indian mind is “imagined as an internal other” (Baruah, 2020, p.12). The relationship between the mainland Indians and the people of North East India as evident from the above can be viewed as that of the superior mainland and the inferior Northeast, with the superior power positioning itself as the manager and the latter treated as the managed. It is in this context, that otherisation and belongingness of the non-native settlers in Northeast India takes place. Therefore, to resolve the issue of otherisation in Northeast India particularly Meghalaya, it is pertinent for the relatively more empowered communities to be more accommodating and adopt an inclusive approach towards the tribal communities of the region. It is also important as Hazarika (1994, p. 128) states for Meghalaya’s ethnic communities, especially those who live in Shillong “to learn how to live with each other”. This need for harmony becomes all the more important since conflicts that fuel questions of belonging, otherisation, and nationality perhaps when promoted and assisted by external forces “poses as much a danger to the state’s stability as does the threat of an armed insurrection” (Hazarika, 1994, p. 128), one that can divide the nation.

Declaration of Conflict of Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest.

Funding

No funding has been received for the publication of this article. It is published free of any charge.

Notes:

¹The population of non-tribal communities in Meghalaya, according to 2011 census, was 13.85 per cent of the total population. The population of the non-native tribal communities, according to 2011 census was approximately 8 percent of the total population of Meghalaya^.

²U Thlen is a reference to the popular story in Khasi folklore of the mythical serpent or giant snake.

³Sohphlang is a pale white edible root which is eaten with a dark paste of nei lieh a local sesame. This combination of sweet and savoury is strange and one which the poet compares to the Shillong inter community bonds

⁴biskot is the Khasi name for Squash

⁵rynsan is the Khasi word that refers to the bamboo support that the climbers grow on.

⁶kong is the local word for a Khasi lady.

⁷ktung is the khasi name for fermented fish

⁸soh baingon dieng is a Khasi name for tree tomato

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¹Amanda Bashisha Basaiawmoit, is a Research Scholar in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Meghalaya, India. She is also a faculty in the Department of English at Shillong College, Shillong.

²Dr. Paonam Sudeep Mangang is an Associate Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at National Institute of Technology Meghalaya. A Ph.D. from Manipur University, his areas of interest include Northeast literature, Genocide Studies, European Literature, Gender Studies and Disability Studies. He is the author of more than 20 research articles.

History, Memory and Trauma in Selected Works of Arupa Patangia Kalita

Gender Studies/North East Literature & Culture/Postcolonial/Trauma Studies/V14N2/Women's Issues

1.7K views

Manashi Bora

Department of English, Gauhati University, Guwahati, Assam. Email: manashibora@gauhati.ac.in

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022. Pages 1-9. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne30

First published: June 30, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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Abstract

India’s North East, including Assam, has a history of militancy arising from various socio-political causes. Writers have responded to this aspect of the history of this region by producing works that record and commemorate particular events and experiences for posterity. Of particular significance in these works is the record of the impact of the disturbances on the everyday lives of people, many of whom, though unaware of the main issues being debated, are affected beyond measure by the turn of the events. Arupa Patangia Kalita’s short stories collected in Written in Tears (2015), The Musk and Other Stories (2017), and The Loneliness of Hira Barua (2020) document a momentous phase in the recent history of the North-Eastern region of India especially Assam, marked by student agitation and militancy which mobilized the people around particular issues on the one hand and inflicted sufferings of various kinds on innocent people on the other. A writer is, among other things, a recorder of the experiences of a region who investigates in the form of a narrative the fallout of social upheavals on the everyday lives of people. The proposed paper will look into the aspects of the recent history of the North East touched on by the writer in her short stories using insights from studies on history, postcoloniality, memory and trauma. It will focus especially on the documentation of women’s experiences during that phase from a woman’s perspective.

Keywords: agitation, militancy, poststructuralism, postcolonial feminism

Introduction

Engaging with the events in the history of a region has been a major concern of literature in recent times. There has been a historical turn in fiction writing especially, an exercise in memorialization since the Second World War. The past has been delved into to unearth little-known aspects of it, record individual memories, and find out the genesis of particular problems so as to shape the future. The past, the present, and the future are now seen as inextricably intertwined as a continuum. Alan Robinson (2011) talks about “the present past” (4) and argues that “at any given moment several dimensions of time coexist in present consciousness” (4).

Like other regions of the world, the North-eastern region of India has its own unique history; militancy and violence rooted in various geographical, socio-economic and cultural factors constitute a significant feature of the histories of many of the states of the region. With the signing of various accords, the normalcy of a sort has returned to the region, but the events of the past are stored in the individual and collective memories of the inhabitants of the region and provide the background to much of the literature produced here. As Anne Whitehead remarks, “The desire among various cultural groups to represent or make visible specific historical instances of trauma has given rise to numerous important works of contemporary fiction” (3). A number of writers from Assam writing in English and the regional language Assamese, have recorded the experience of agitation and militancy in Assam in the 1970s and 1980s. Mention may be made of Mitra Phukan (The Collector’s Wife, 2005), Arun Sharma (Sankalpa, 2008), Aruni Kashyap (A House with a Thousand Stories, 2013) and Rita Choudhury (AbirotoJatra, 1981) and Ei Samay Sei Samay, 2007). Arupa Patangia Kalita has carved a niche for herself in the echelon of Assamese writers with her strong portrayals of the social-cultural life of Assam in her works like Felanee (2003), Oyonanta (1994), Written in Tears (2015), and The Loneliness of Hira Barua and Other Stories (2020). She has first-hand experience of the days of agitation and militancy in Assam. In an interview, she has talked about how as a teacher of Tangla College she saw insurgency from close quarters; she was affected by the shooting down of the Principal in front of the college and the death of many students, and the money that the teachers and other government employees were forced to pay to the militants¹.Among the works of Patangia Kalita which look back on the happenings of the past in the North-Eastern region, especially Assam, are the stories included in the collections Written in Tears (2015), The Musk and other Stories(2017), and The Loneliness of Hira Baruah and other Stories (2020). Originally written in Assamese, many of the stories in the collections were translated into English by Ranjita Biswas. The stories throw light on different aspects of militancy in the region, especially its impact on the everyday lives of the common man. Arupa Patangia Kalita is known for her belief in the connection between literature and life as it is lived, and her concern for the underdogs as she was influenced by the Marxist thought of the 1970s. Many of the characters in her novels are people she had met in real life and she articulates the voice of the silent and the strength of the neglected mostly women and the oppressed. This paper aims to analyze how a woman writer looks back on the events of the past, what aspects of agitation and militancy are remembered and recorded for posterity, and what individual and collective trauma people suffered. The focus will be on the experiences of women during times of unrest.

Historiography has attracted a lot of attention from scholars in recent times. Dominick LaCapra (2014) talks about two approaches to historiography; one is the documentary research model which involves collecting evidence and making truth claims based on that. Capra claims that, as opposed to the documentary method, “narratives in fiction may also involve truth claims on a structural or general level by providing insight into phenomena such as slavery or the Holocaust by offering a reading of a process or period, or by giving at least a plausible ‘feel’ for experience and emotion which may be difficult to arrive at through restricted documentary methods” (2014, p. 13). Toni Morrison’s Beloved on the aftermath of slavery falls in this category. In other words, fictional narratives also provide useful insights into the history of a period by making creative use of individuals and collective memories. Although history and memory are seen as binary opposites and history is valorized as the realm of critical rational inquiry and memory is regarded as simplistic and confused, a critically tested memory can serve a useful purpose and light up many dark alleys of the past.

Poststructuralist ideas which have swept across academia have emphasized the histories of the margins —women, blacks, and ethnic minorities. “History from below” has become the buzzword. Postcolonial feminism too lays stress on the stories and experiences of women in the developing or the third world. Ours has been termed the catastrophic age. The field of Trauma Studies which developed in the 1980 and 1990s focused on studying trauma associated with catastrophic events like the World Wars, the Holocaust, anti-colonial movements, civil wars, and militancy in different parts of the world. Dominick LaCapra observes, “Trauma and its causes may indeed be a prominent feature of history, notably modern history which should not be airbrushed or denied” (LaCapra, 2014, p.xi). There is a growing realization that there has been too much focus on studying the experiences of the white western world and that the events of the non-western world need to be recorded so that some link can be established between cultures. Craps and Buelens (2008) talk about “the risk of ignoring or marginalizing non-western traumatic events and histories and non-western theoretical work which may “assist in the perpetuation of Eurocentric views and structures that maintain or widen the gap between West and the rest of the world”(2). The colonial experience and the movements for national independence, for instance, thus got to be written about and the cultures and histories of the non-western world were inscribed. There is an increasing recourse to the anecdote or the story to recover the voice of the marginalized and the abject. Mass movements which often give rise to militancy have weighty causes, but most often the toll that they take on the lives of the people, especially the vulnerable sections, is overlooked. Literature is one of the ways in which the sacrifices and sufferings of communities like women and ethnic minorities can be commemorated and resistance to acts of terrorism and brutality can be built up and this is what Arupa Patangia Kalita does in her collection of stories.

A distinctive feature of the largely patriarchal societies of the third world is women’s association with home, with the inner space. The stories in the collection Written in Tears by Patangia show how the inner space is destroyed by the outside conflicts which leave women lonely and destitute. A number of stories in the collection deal with the destruction of the home. The story “Arunima’s Motherland” is a narrative of how a family pays the price of having a son as a member of an outlawed organization. Not only is a wedding engagement of a daughter of the family cancelled because of this, but the entire family is annihilated by a bomb hurled at their house with the daughter-in-law and her infant son having a providential escape because they happened to be elsewhere at the time of the blast. In the span of a few moments, a wife loses her husband and the protection he provides to the family, an infant loses his father and the love of the doting paternal grandparents, uncles, and aunts. What is very poignant here is the picture of cozy domesticity in the early part of the story —the endearing relationship of the members of the family, their everyday life as they go about cooking, tending to the flowers and vegetable gardens, and preparing the bride’s trousseau in anticipation of a wedding —all of which give way to a gruesome picture of a burnt house with the mangled remains of bodies strewn all over as the daughter-in-law comes back with her newly born son to be welcomed by her husband’s household. Preceding this catastrophe is a phase of acute fear and anxiety as the younger brother of the sought-after militant, who is pursuing his studies in a college, is picked up for questioning and the house seems to be haunted by strange people who have their faces covered with black clothes even as a series of secret killings, bomb blasts, derailments of trains, demands for food and money by the outlaws, and constant army surveillance induce a fear psychosis among the people. The family becomes the butt of caustic remarks by the neighbours who blame them for the army’s presence in the locality. Arunima is pitied by a neighbour for marrying into a family of criminals—“What bad luck that you have to live with this family of criminals!” (28). They are not invited to social functions and no doctor agrees to come to their house to examine Arunima’s aged father-in-law. What is seen in the end is the uncertain future before the daughter-in-law with an infant in her arms. She had ceased to be welcome in her mother’s house as quite some time had passed after the birth of her son and she sensed that her sisters-in-law would be happy to see her gone. What she faces when she returns to her in-law’s house is something she could not have imagined in her wildest nightmares. The author deftly uses contrasts — pitting the warmth of family relationships against the chilling devastation of militancy. Metaphors are also used -of bees building their comb when Arunima enters the house as a daughter-in-law and then of them flying away from the honeycomb before the destruction of the home that Arunima cherished. Women are the givers of life as is put forth by the image of Arunima and her newly born child; it is the cult of violence mostly perpetrated by men that destroys life and relationships.

The other stories in the collection deal with the different ways in which women suffer during times of unrest. Almost all the stories talk about hard-earned money and resources taken away by the militants or the army. The simple villagers are caught in the crossfire between the army and the militants and are unable to decide whom to obey. Teachers are served notices to pay huge amounts from their salaries. There are gruesome acts of violence —the hurling of bombs, blowing up of bridges and vehicles full of people, molestations of women, stillbirths due to the stressful lives of expectant mothers, army atrocities on the villagers who are herded into open fields and punished for helping the militants, and an overall fear psychosis which permeates into the everyday life. “They could not breathe, they could not eat, they could not sleep” (29). It is as though they were suffering a death-in-life existence, an aspect discussed by Amit Baishya in his Contemporary Literature from Northeast India (2019) where he considers the representations of the effects of political terror in the contemporary necropolitical literature from the North-Eastern region.

Women often bear the brunt of militancy and the diktats of the agitationists. They issue instructions regarding women’s dress and Mainao in the story “The Girl with Long Hair” has her hair cut off when she defies the instructions in order to have some fun with her friends. As a result, not only is her beautiful hair chopped off in public view but she is also forced to marry the boy who cut her hair as it is a tribal custom for a girl to marry a person who touches her in any manner. It is the most drastic punishment meted out to a fun-loving girl. Women are compelled to be the bearers of the culture of the community as there seems to be no strict dress code for the males.

The story “Surabhi Barua and the Rhythm of Hooves” deals with the way people who opposed the Assam andolan were harassed. Surabhi Baruah, who works in a college and has leftist leanings, writes articles opposing the movement. She and another of her colleagues, Professor Bordoloi, have to bear the brunt of the students’ ire for opposing the andolan. Students walk out of their classes, there is hooting, and Professor Bordoloi is attacked and injured. Surabhi Barua’s engagement is called off by her fiancé’s family and she is forced to apply for a fellowship and move out of the town. She becomes a liability even to her own family so much so that her own mother does not try to dissuade her from moving out of town. Her story bears testimony to the ways people who opposed the movement were harassed and became socially ostracized.

“Kunu’s mother” is another story that testifies to the vulnerability of women especially women who are without the support of men. After the death of her husband, Kunu becomes the centre of her mother’s world. Kunu grows up to be a beautiful young woman who begins to attract the attention of young men. A particular young man, a militant, enamoured by her beauty starts visiting her house and demands that he be allowed to marry her, sending alarm signals to her mother. She decides to send the girl away to live with relatives. When she returns after leaving her daughter at a relative’s house, she faces the anger of the young man and all the people of the village who told her that if she wishes to live in the village and retain her plot of land there, she will have to abide by the wishes of the community and in this case, that means marrying her daughter off to the young man who wanted her. Kunu’s mother finds herself alone and absolutely helpless, unable to decide on a course of action.

The last story “Ayengla of the Blue Hills” bears testimony to the trauma induced by army atrocities on women. Cathy Caruth (1995) defines trauma as “The pathology consists, rather, solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatised is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (4-5). The story is a tragic narrative of a young woman who is happy with her family and who does not understand much about the happenings in the outside world, but as fate would have it, she is raped by the army and the trauma of the incident leaves her crippled for the rest of her life. She becomes frozen in time and is unable to assign the incident to her past and to move on with her life in the present. In spite of the efforts by her husband and the other members of the family, Ayengla does not recover. Her husband marries another woman and starts a new life, and Ayengla lapses into gloom, loneliness, and finally death. Her story shows the damaging psychological effects of oppression, especially when it involves the violation of the body in case of a woman. Another story, “The Face in the Mirror” deals with the impact of an aunt’s rape on a little girl from Nagaland named Zungmila. The rape left her disturbed for the rest of her life so much so that she suffered from periodic fits when she would pour out her hatred for the Indians who occupied their land and could go to sleep only with the help of injections, “mumbling about her aunt and her distended breast” (131).

The stories are based on characters who belong to different communities —Assamese, Bodo, and Naga. The customs, beliefs, and everyday lives of these communities differ as also the problems which give rise to militancy in different places. What holds the stories together are the similarities in the experience of militancy and the sad plightof women in times of unrest. As a woman writer, Arupa Patangia Kalitahas given us a collection of tales that are to a great extent women-centered and represent the myriad ways in which militancy affects women. While women are, by and large, left destitute, helpless, and in a state of mental and emotional shock, there are also positive developments that help them to be self-reliant and earn an income. Mainao in the story “The Cursed Fields of Golden Rice” is forced by circumstances to learn to make snacks, weave shawls etc. and sell them in the market to earn a living. She is helped in her endeavour by women’s cooperatives which supply her yarn and help her to sell her products. Women thus adopt various survival strategies to pull out of difficult situations.

The cultural distinctiveness of the non-western world is also inscribed in the stories even as they record the experience of agitation and militancy. The women belong to different communities and locales— hills, plains, tribal and non-tribal— are part of various customs of the community. “Arunima’s Motherland” shows a typically Assamese household with a kitchen, flower garden and Assamese food cooked with great care by the women of the house. The landscape of the hills is celebrated in “Ayengla of the Blue Hills”. In the story, “The Girl with Long Hair”, the tribal custom of a girl having to marry the man who happens to touch her is alluded to. Names of the characters (Arunima, Zumgmila, Alari), food items and drinks (zumai), articles of clothing (dokhana), kinship terms (mami, bou, khuri), names of places (botabari chowk), ceremonies (ghargochoka) gods and goddesses, beliefs like the belief in spirits and witches, in the afterlife, and a number of songs (e.g. names) locate the stories in the cultural landscape of the North-East. The centrality of western culture is thus undercut by the inscription of the local modes. The patriarchal structure of these societies is borne out by the fact that all the women, whether they are literate and employed or not, are alike victims of different kinds of oppression. Women are associated not with the outer world but with the inner space — the home — which is destroyed by the violence of militancy: “They had helped Mainao set up home. Those evil men had destroyed it within one year. Only a woman understood how much effort it took to set up a home, and now in front of their eyes the beautiful house had disappeared” (“The Cursed Fields of Golden Rice” p.116). It was the ‘jungle party’ that destroyed the house (“The Cursed Fields of Golden Rice” p. 113). After Mainao left for Delhi where her husband had found work, her house was taken over by the outlaws who finished off everything there was in the house. They kept abducted people in the house till they were driven out by the military, but by then there was no trace of the beautiful house that Mainao had set up.

Insurgency and the common people’s miseries resulting from it is a theme that Patangia Kalita keeps returning to in her works. “Two Days from a Phantom’s Diary,” a story included in The Musk and Other Stories (2017) deals with the predicament of individuals suffering untold hardships owing to extortion and exorbitant demands for money by the militant organizations which target the passengers of the buses, as also people making both ends meet with great difficulty. People refusing to pay would be gunned down mercilessly. On the other hand, people paying the terrorists like Chandan Saikia would also be in danger of getting arrested for helping the insurgents. There is mention of residents having to keep a vigil in certain strategic spots like bridges; they are treated by the military as “bonded slaves” (21) who could be slapped and subjected to other abuses by military men. “A Precarious Link” is another story that deals with the miseries of a fruit vendor named Manohar who faces serious economic hardships as the fruits he wants to sell are spoilt due to disturbances related to insurgency and counter-insurgency operations. There are references to bandhs, killings of army men as well as the extremists, bomb explosions, and the difficulties faced by a family in getting medical help following disturbances that turned a “sweet, fresh, fragrant and colorful”(58) town into something “totally putrid”(58) and into a “valley of death,”(64) with the well-to-do escaping to trouble-free places.

The Loneliness of hira barua (2020) is another collection of stories by Arupa Patangia Kalita. Some of the stories here deal with insurgency. The story “The House of Nibha-bou” for instance, narrates what befalls an otherwise happy household because one family member happened to join an insurgent outfit. Much of the story deals with the description of the life of a household centred on Nibha bou, who enters the household as a bride, gives birth to two children, and wins everybody’s admiration because of her skills in running the household with meticulous care. Nibha bou’s qualities are traced back to her childhood – even as a child, she had exhibited great acumen in the orderly arrangement of things and in taking charge of the family matters in case of a mishap like her mother’s ill-health.

The family’s life moved on at the usual pace. The only thing that was disturbing was Nibha’s brother-in-law Bijit’s joining the ULFA when he was sent to study at the university. He used to visit the family after his joining under cover of darkness. Dressed in fatigues and carrying a haversack with a heavy gun, he had become unrecognizable even to his family. There was a rumour that he had become a dreaded militant leader involved in a few killings and was carrying a huge price on his head. His visits stopped after some time and the family members moved ahead with their lives. Nobody could imagine in their wildest of dreams that Bijit’s being in the ULFA would one day spell disasters for the family though they were used to being visited by the security personnel now and then looking for the outlawed.

All of a sudden, on a certain day the family was surprised to see a group of men getting down from two vehicles in front of their house and asking them how much money their outlawed son had hidden in the house. They were asked to hand over the money immediately. When they said that they had no money, the men themselves set about the task of searching every nook and corner —dismantling things and turning the house upside down. The family sits in a corner, terrified and pained by the way their cherished objects were thrown asunder by the unfeeling strangers. The house wore a picture of devastation when the men left. Nibhabou’s father-in-law was in danger of suffering a collapse under the strain and his son had to go out in search of a doctor.

The story “Scream” is a different kind of narrative where the hill functions as a symbol that obstructs the light that metaphorically represents goodness, happiness, kindness, and other positive sentiments: “Who doesn’t want the warm rays of the sun? But the cruel hillock shuts it out and casts a shadow over all” (100). The hill is different in different sections of the story. In the first section of the story, it is the heap of newspapers carrying the news of massacres, bomb blasts, dowry deaths, floods, bandhs, and rape. The narrator says that newspapers, TV, and the radio conspire to build up the hill in front of him and he desperately looks for sunlight. Sometimes, the hill takes the form of extortion threats, of young men swooping down and misbehaving with girls out on a picnic with their professor, or of unfeeling men felling trees to construct buildings. The last snapshot is of the people of a village observing a fast every uruka because on that day the terrorists swooped down on the village and killed innocent people preparing to have the customary feast on uruka night in the month of Magh after a good harvest. While the rest of Assam celebrates, the people of that particular village fast in memory of those killed: “their resentment, their grief, slowly create a dark hill. An angry hill bereft of water, lacking a cool shade under which to rest” (116).

In “The Half-Burnt Bus at Midnight”, a half-burnt bus is being dragged to a garage by a truck — “this terrible bus, destroying everything on its way” (127) becomes the symbol of the destruction that terrorism unleashes. The bus full of passengers had entered an area where a bandh was in force, which resulted in the supporters of the bandh setting it ablaze and killing everybody inside.

III

The short stories in the three collections Written in Tears, The Musk and other Stories and The Loneliness of hira barua look back on a tumultuous phase in the history of the North- East India and record the myriad ways in which agitation and militancy affected everyday life and the coping mechanisms adopted by the people. Many works coming from the postcolonial world, commemorate the strengths of women—their participation in movements for national independence and other causes. But “Written in Tears”, the collection which has the largest number of stories centred on women, focuses largely on the victimhood of women; women are sufferers not only when they keep to the boundaries set for them, but also when they are bold and speak their minds out as in the case of Surabhi Baruah. It emerges that while chalking out programmes of action for various causes, the fallout on different sections of people, especially women and other subalterns, is not considered that resulting in tragic consequences in their lives. Patangia Kalita’s language is lucid and sometimes poetic in its use of images, metaphors, and symbols as the image of the hill in “Scream” which has symbolic significance. Patangia Kalita does not experiment much with style confining herself to the social realist, omniscient narrator mode combining it with descriptive felicity and an eye for detail, but occasionally, in stories like “Scream” and “A Precarious Link” there are some attempts at narrative innovation and the use of the anecdotal, fragmentary, and snapshot mode. The stories are, on the whole, stories of dispossession, economic hardship, forced migration from one place to another, segregation and isolation, destruction of family relationships, loneliness and unforgettable violence to the body and mind especially of the womenfolk. Inscribing human agony in words can be seen as the writer’s attempt to raise voice against brutality in the name of different causes. LaCapra and Cathy Caruth, in their studies of traumatic experience, offer valuable frameworks for analyzing such experience in different parts of the world in different periods of history, while the importance of integrating such analysis with the peculiarities of the local context shall always remain. Third world experience can offer valuable insights into studies of history, memory and trauma.

Declaration of Conflict of Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest.

Funding

No funding has been received for the publication of this article. It is published free of any charge.

Notes:

¹See Bedabrat Bora’s interview with ArupaPatangiaKalita, June 10,2017.youtube. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FItY1cOw_fM >

References:

Baishya. Amit R. (2019) Contemporary Literature from North East India: Deathworlds, Terror and survival. Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series, 2019

Caruth, Cathy. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press.

Caruth, Cathy. (1995) Ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. The John Hopkins University Press.

Craps, Stef. & Gert Buelens. (2008) “Introduction: Postcolonial Trauma Novels” in Studies in the Novel.Vol.40,No.1/2,Postcolonial Trauma Novels(spring and summer) pp 1-12 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29533856. Accessed on 16.12.2018

Kalita, Arupa Patangia. (2015) Written in Tears. Translated by Ranjita Biswas. Harper Perennial,

Kalita, ArupavPatangia. (2020) The loneliness of hirabarua. Translated byRanjita Biswas. Macmillan, 2020

Kalita, Arupa Patangia. (2017) The Musk and Other Stories. Niyogi Books. New Delhi, 2017

LaCapra, Dominick. (2014) Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

Robinson, Alan. (2011) Narrating the Past: History, Memory and the ContemporaryNovel. Palgrave Macmillan.

Whitehead, Anne. (2004) Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.

Work Consulted:

Rothschild, Babette. The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment. New York and London: W W Norton and Company, 2000.

Manashi Bora is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Gauhati University. Her doctoral dissertation was on the French feminist writer Luce Irigaray. Her translations of folk narratives of Assam are included in the book Mothers, Daughters and Others: Representation of Women in the Folk Narratives of Assam. She has edited the anthology, A Treasury of English Poetry: From William Blake to Seamus Heaney. She has written critical introductions to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer for DC Books and EC Media, Bengaluru. She has worked extensively in the areas of translation, literary theory, women’s studies, and the literature of North-East India.

Imagined Ethnography and Cultural Strategies: A Study of Easterine Kire’s Sky is My Father and Don’t Run, My Love

Indigenous Studies/North East Literature & Culture/V14N2

1.7K views

Shiv Kumar

Department of English, Faculty of Arts Benares Hindu University, Varanasi, India. Email: bhushiv3@gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022. Pages 1-12. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne29

First published: June 30, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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Abstract

Stuart Hall, in his 1983 lectures states, “people have to have a language to speak about where they are and what other possible futures are available to them….These futures may not be real; if you try to concretize them immediately, you may find there is nothing there. But what is there, what is real, is the possibility of being someone else, of being in some other social space from the one in which you have already been placed.” (Hall, 2016, p.205) The literature from Northeast India puts forward the issue of systematic erasure and structural exclusion [institutionalized through legal mechanisms like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act.] from the mainstream national imagination and literary space. Easterine Kire’s primary agenda is to revitalize cultural practices that have been facing “historical elision.” (Sarkar, 1997, p.359) This elision threatens the poly-ethnic, culturally vibrant, and tribal cultures by constructing and presenting the northeastern region of India as a conflict-ridden space. Situated within this ontology of existence, reality, and becoming, Easterine Kire’s Don’t Run, My Love (2017) and Sky is My Father: A Naga Village Remembered (2018) revive and revitalize the folktales and cultural practices to assert the cultural economy of the Naga tribes. Her writings represent a politically conscious positionality of the characters, context, and the plot to assert the culturally constituted identity through the revival of vibrant cultural practices and tribal epistemologies.

Keywords: Imagined ethnography, colonization, culturally-constituted subject, folklore, vernacular, memory, erasure, revival

Introduction

Writers from Northeast India like Temsula Ao, Mamang Dai, Aruni Kashyap, and Easterine Kire, among others, deal with the issue of cultural conditions consequent upon Northeast India’s encounter with the British invasion and exclusion from mainland India’s political and literary imagination. Their writings contextualize the gradual and systematic erasure of indigenous tribal epistemologies and oral cultures. They question the structural exclusion from national and literary imagination and attempt to create their own unique space. The genesis of India’s northeastern states’ isolation and separation from mainland India can be traced back to colonial times when the colonizers refused to acknowledge their poly-ethnicity and social and cultural assertion[i]. The social and spatial otherization of the Northeast as a monolithic cultural space was achieved through “an undifferentiated picture of nameless insurgencies.” (Baruah, 2007, p. 01) As a result, all the states of Northeast India share “a persistent indifference and neglect on the part of [the] mainstream.” (Venkatesan, 1989, p.128) This crisis led to a desire to revive and recuperate their lost cultural moorings by producing alternative historiography. Easterine Kire deploys an imagined ethnographic approach in Don’t Run, My Love (2017) and Sky is My Father: A Naga Village Remembered (2018) to “questions about where one can speak from, to who one speaks, and why one speaks at all seem to be more immediately articulated within ethnography than elsewhere.” (Elspeth Probyn quoted in Gray, p. 23)

The politics of cultural strategies through imagined ethnography, as a methodological tool to revive the cultural past, becomes evident in the opening of the text, Don’t Run, My Love where the central characters are presented as a part of a culturally constituted space. The text is about Visenuo and her young marriageable daughter Atuonuo. The narrative begins with a description of the work that both women perform without any support from a male figure. It portrays a space where women are not dependent on patriarchs to survive rather, they together weave their lives around each other. Both are presented as belonging to some “ancient green valley” that to the outside world remains unknown and mysterious. (Don’t Run, 05) It is from this same timeless and undefined space that Kevi enters into their lives. Kevi is described as “anyone who set eyes on him, man or woman, young or old, had to admit that he was a beautiful creature indeed, the young man who called himself Kevi and who walked into the lives of two women at harvest time.” (Don’t Run, 01) He describes himself as “a trapper and a hunter”, a traditional Naga community activity. (Don’t Run, 06) Through imagined ethnography, Kire engages in the task of rewriting cultural narratives, by using ‘alternative signifying’ (Schwab, 2012, p.02) symbols, to produce resistance to dominating powers through significant cultural intervention. In this context, Kevi is presented as an archetypal figure descended from a legend and called “tekhumevi”, whose “face was completely covered with hair and he looked nothing like himself” when Atuonuo and Kevi spent a night in her mother’s hut. (Don’t Run, 78, 91) Their positionality, within a culturally defined space, determines the politics of recuperation and revival of a culture threatened by colonial experiences and modernity. It is the folkloric legend that is brought into context in this text where the lives of the central characters are integrated with oral tradition and a legend. Kevi’s presence represents the Naga community’s belief in lycanthropy, where one individual possesses dual souls of an animal and a man. When Visenuo asks whether he was a man or a tiger, Pfenuo, a woman who stays in the Village of Sheers, answers;

‘they are both’… ‘They have a foot in both the worlds. So long as they are alive, they belong to both the world of men, and the men that we call their owners grow more powerful and wealthy from this connection. But it is wrong to call them tiger-owners: the tiger and the man, they are one and the same. When the tiger eats, the man eats: we always say that. Some people insist that the man participates when the tiger is out hunting. We also say, when the tiger dies, the man dies. So they are very closely connected; they say the man is the body and the tiger is the soul. Some say they can interchange at will. (Don’t Run, 92-93)

Kevi, a ‘were-tiger’, taken directly from a Naga legend and textualized in a plot, seems to jolt the dominant sensibility by remaining as mysterious throughout the text as he was in the beginning. It shakes the aesthetic sensibility of the reader who reads the text with the baggage of preconceived notions and beliefs. Such literary experiments open up a process of dialogic exchange. Strange objects emerge through language that negotiates the boundary between the self and the world which challenges what is considered known, and familiar. It opens up new patterns of reading of otherness, something that remained beyond the mainland imagination. The narrative broadens the perspectives of readers about supernatural beings and how literature reflects on cultural representations. Barker (2000) calls such culturally-constituted expressions “signifying practices of representation” (p.08) that constitute and function as the cultural strategy to revive the lost folkloric tradition and legends to counter the stereotype.

Also, the village, which exists outside the reach of common people, and those who are in the dire need can only find it, seems to come from a legend “the village of Meriezou was legendary among the Angamis; it was the seat of culture, the birthplace of many famed seers, and people still sought it out for answers. But the more adventurous and the needy traveled to the Village of Seers.” (Don’t Run, 81) The northeastern region of India follows many ancient traditions of religious beliefs and spiritual practices that have been essential aspects of their culture. The village plays an important role as a repository of their cultural beliefs in the interplay between natural and supernatural, as the village erases the difference “between the natural and the supernatural.” (Don’t Run, 83) At the Village of Sheers, both mother and daughter witness the supernatural activities taking place at night which further reflects the Naga’s belief in the parallel existence of the spiritual and natural world.

They heard ululating in the distance and, as they waited, a group of warriors appeared waving spears and prancing about in mock battle steps. While one line of warriors jumped forward with spears upheld as if to challenge an invisible foe, the other group went a step forward at the same very moment as if to avoid a spear thrust. It was a macabre dance executed very slowly.’

Pfunuo returned to their room.

‘None of that is real, mind you. Don’t be deceived, and don’t ever run out to watch. It’s hard to save a human life when a spirit spear finds its target. (Don’t Run, 94)

Through the figure of Kevi and such belief systems from the folklore, the writer revives and establishes the Naga community’s cultural economy. Through it, she also re-examines preconceptions, misconceptions, and erroneous stereotypes associated with the Northeast. Here Kire transforms the imaginary into reality in an attempt to hold together and make meaning to their existence in a situation of disintegration and fragmentation. According to Marcus, (1986) “ethnography originates in orality” (p.264-265), and it is actively “situated between powerful systems of meaning. It poses its questions at the boundaries of civilizations, cultures, classes, races, and genders. Ethnography decodes and recodes, telling the grounds of collective order and diversity, inclusion and exclusion. It describes processes of innovation and structuration, and is itself part of these processes.” (Clifford, 1986, p. 2-3) Through such strategy, she unsettles the dichotomous cultural narratives and “rewrite cultural narratives… [where she] use[s] alternative signifying practices and bold refigurations to undo cultural iconographies and unsettle the status quo of habitual cultural codes.” (Schwab, 2012, p.02)

An identical political and cultural framework becomes evident in the Sky is My Father. Structurally, the novel can be divided into two sections, i.e., the first part is about the lost cultural past and practices that define the Naga communities’ cultural rootedness and identity. The second part is about the narrative construction of colonial experiences. The first part leads towards the second part when the reader experiences political and cultural developments. As a result, the text becomes more of a postcolonial text depicting colonial domination, the effects of conversion, and the slow death of indigenous culture.

In this text, Kire locates her subjects within a colonial phase and charts anti-colonial historiography through the means of historical events, language, conceptual framework, and experiences of the tribal people. The first part represents the lost cultural past that the text attempts to reclaim by textualization. It opens with an assertion that the Naga community is a male dominant community that does not take women as equal to males. It is a masculine society where women are kept in their designated places and not allowed to participate in issues considered masculine. Their patriarchal ideology gets further reflected when they hold important meetings or “talk at the thehou, the community house, often centered around what was called man’s talk. No women were allowed to come to the thehou or enter the male dormitories. Reminiscing about hunts and battles in the past made the thehou a place where any youth with a man’s heart inside him would linger and listen or add his stories as well.” (Sky, 07)

Similarly, male dormitories, a central social and cultural institution of the Naga community, are used to inculcate social behavior and moral code among children to train them as socially responsible beings of the tribe. It is a communal place meant to help the young learn skills like hunting, crafting, building a house, etc., and the values of the tribe are passed on to the next generation. It provides a sense of security and a feeling of community that helps to ensure the longevity of the tribe and its culture. It brings the community together with a sense of relatedness. This place acts as a repository of collective and shared consciousness of the society that gets transferred among children of the tribe through educational pedagogy. The author shares one of the teachings of dormitories;

the key to right living- avoiding excess in anything- be content with your share of land and fields. People who move boundary stones bring death upon themselves. Every individual has a social obligation to the village. When you are older and your hearts are strong within you, you will take on the responsibility of guarding the village while others will go out to earn a great name for our village. (Sky, 30)

Pedagogically, the children are educated in the history and cultural components of the tribe by recounting legends and events of the past, as “the past is an integral part of the present where the oral informs the written in that the creative writers redefine ethnic-cultural identities in reprocessing cultural memory.” (Zama, 2013, p.06)

Memories constitute dialogic processes in public spaces. It articulates some particular past and brings together two different spaces and times. As a result, it is multi-dimensional and trans-cultural by nature. Remembering a specific event from the past reprocesses a cultural past and its practices. It is through their struggle against time and forgetfulness in an oral environment that such strategies become essential to remember, learn, and carry forward. The author recounts one such village gathering when Vipie states, “the village has not been feasted so well since Nikerhe’s title-taking feast,’…… Nikerhe had feasted the village some fifteen years ago. But many were too young to remember that. Nikerhe’s paternal relatives of Kigwe village had herded down five excellent cows for his feast.” (Sky, 28) It is a close-knit community system where everyone participates and contributes to village function as “Keviselie’s kinsmen and friends had gifted him nine heads of cattle. The village talked about Keviselie’s Feast of Merit for a long time to come.” (Sky, 28) It is through recounting such events that the past is kept alive in the memories of people that later gets transferred to the young generation as the continuity of a tradition is “ensured by passing down shared traditions, customs, language and social norms or culture from generation to generation.” (Mukhim 2006, p.183) This process of remembering needs to be understood within the context of colonization and the erasure of the Naga culture at the time of the high point of cultural colonization[ii].

Not only cultural practices but tales also get textualized where they are recounted and transferred to the next generation to bridge the gap between past and present, and to generate cultural consciousness among young minds. One incident of Vikhwelle, who “came back six days after he went missing, bone-thin and near death. He had a terrifying tale to tell. Tall, dark creatures had carried him off against his will, keeping him for days altogether”, contextualizes the existence of the spirits that belong to folklore. (Sky, 37) Similarly, the folktale of Kirhupfumi, of “two women who could never wed” (Sky, 51) is used to exemplify the existence of a supernatural spirit and is used as an example of the consequences of disregarding genna days that would lead to death. The Naga community believes that both the human and spirit world exist together and various kinds of spirits that are believed to dwell in water bodies, stone, and the jungle, are worshipped by them.

Likewise, storytelling is an essential component of folk culture. As in almost every culture, storytelling is a quintessential part of the growing-up experience of every child in India. “Storytelling is a living art” and in many societies, it is a means of ‘educating and training children from childhood. (Rollins, 1957, p.165) It acts as a pedagogical technique to impart cultural, moral, social, and historical literacy to the audience. Kire deploys the storytelling technique to bring into context the forgotten traditions and customs of the Naga tribe to assert their cultural economy. Atunuo tells the story of her deceased paternal grandfather who offered a feast to the four villages, and later “the four monoliths erected after each feast of merit were set up on the way to the fields. People passed them every day when they went to the fields. They rested at the foot of the monoliths and recounted the feasts of Kezharuoko, using those moments to recall the great man’s name.” (Don’t Run, 08) The memory of the feast and the feast function as a process of building fraternity, collectivity, community, and also one’s identity as individual memory transforms into collective memory after a point of time. Erecting a monolith acts as synonymous with the Feast of Merit, or what Jay Winter (2010) would call “sites of memory”, which stands as a symbol of the living history of grandfather Kezharuoko and the rich cultural heritage of the Naga people. (p.312) As spoken by Visenuo, such cultural memories revive lost cultural traditions that most Nagas, especially the Angami-Nagas, have practiced for ages. In this story, cultural memory, legends, and past interactions with each other in a meaningful dialogic manner that produces a meaningful understanding of the Naga communities’ vibrant cultural past and the importance of feast, as Easterine Kire puts it;

the Feast of Merit was to the Nagas, what the educational degree is to present-day students… It was partly the generous philosophy of feeding the poor and sharing of [the] wealth of the entire population, but in most cases, the competitive spirit to climb the ladder of social recognition that prompted the tribal rich people to perform the series of [the] feast of merit and honor round which the wheels of Naga Society revolved…. it is on the feast he has given that his social status depends. (Cited in Patton. Contemporary Naga Writings: Reclamation of Culture and History through Orality)

Memory and identity are interrelated and complementary to each other. It is a way to examine an individual and a society within the context of present conditions, lost time, and history. For many thinkers, memory is socially constructed. (Halbwachs, 1968; Candau, 1996; Tonkin, 1992; Rampazi, 1991) Within cultural anthropology, Pool (2016) categorizes memories into two types, i.e., cultural memories- related to cultural practices and lost culture- and political memories- related to the effects of colonization that have caused the erasure of the indigenous culture. According to Cappelleto (2003), individual memories have the capacity to transform into collective memory. It broadens the scope of communication, and as performative, a dialogic process is shared among various groups. Collective memories represent the collective consciousness of the past that helps to understand and interpret the present and orients towards the future. Also, it preserves the events, incidents, images, symbols, etc., that help to counter the identity crisis. It is not only an expression but also performative in which identities are performatively constructed. It functions as the multiple modes of beings that shape the present and future as historically rooted, as Brady (1982) states “memory is used in literature to relate the present to the past.” (p.200) It helps to chart a meta-historical account of Naga communities by bringing into the context the “transgenerational memory.” (Schwab, 2012, p.04)

Storytelling disseminates the cultural epistemologies to the young in oral form. The cultural beliefs and knowledge associated with itis shared with the next generation to empower them with knowledge. Such transfers take place through the oral form in a conversational manner. Visenuo shares such knowledge with her daughter;

‘Your grandfather used to say that a house needs a fire. The smoke from the fire strengthens the walls and helps it stay in place for a longer time. When a house is abandoned, it falls apart very soon. The house was missing its owner, that is what we say when that happens.’

‘You know so many things Azuo,’ Atuonuo said. ‘I wish I knew half the things you do.’

‘Well I only know the things that the village has taught me from childhood, and try to pass them on to you. Do you know that some people are called thehou nuo?

‘What does that mean?’

‘Since the thehou is the communal house where men spend their nights, thehou nuo means child of the thehou. The boys who have been brought up in that tradition learn things about our culture. They use it to guide them through life and when people see them behaving in certain way, people refer to them as thehou nuo. A girl can also earn such a title when people see that she knows the ways of the village.’ (Don’t Run, 18-19)

The author abundantly employs vernacular expressions in both the texts that reflect the creative richness of the culture and marks a creative disruption in the form of the reading experience of a reader who does not belong to the Naga culture. Culturally-constituted native expressions like tekhumevi, kepenuopfu, kichuki, thehou, thehou nuo, dahou, japan nha, kephou, Tekhumevimia, Kelipie, Terhunyi, Sekrenyi, nuou, etc., reflect their cultural landscapes and cultural-specific-expressions. Walter J. Ong, in his Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World (2002), contends that orality is a mode of consciousness. It is a distinctive method of acquiring, sustaining, managing, and verbalizing knowledge that he identifies as, “primary oral cultures.” (Ong, 2002 p. 01). It is a culture “with no knowledge at all of [the] writing” (Ong, 2002 p. 01), as it is historically and culturally rooted and is not affected by the use of print culture, considered to be modern and progressive. His argument is based on the cultural differences between the two communicative orders, orality and literacy. According to Ong, changes in human thought processes and advancement have led to the spread of literacy. It has altered the human consciousness. In his model, once literacy is introduced the primary oral culture gradually disappears. For him, this transition from oral to literacy is based on a paradoxical process as he states, “this awareness is agony for persons rooted in primary orality, who want literacy passionately but who also know very well that moving into the exciting world of literacy means leaving behind much that is exciting and deeply loved in the earlier oral world. We have to die to continue living.” (Ong, 2002, p. 14)

It is through this dialectical tension to preserve the oral form amid the spread of literacy that the writer employs such culturally-rooted indigenous expressions in the dialect form. Such local idioms of expressions, as values and practices, are embedded in the Naga community’s social and cultural practices. Politically, such linguistic expressions provide authenticity of representation to the local realities. Also, it accentuates associated sensibilities and preconceptions around northeast India and functions as a tool of cultural critique to challenge the normative. Simultaneously, it plays an important role in establishing an identity based on language and culture. Language plays a paramount role in ethnographic studies to understand and establish the authenticity of a particular culture, as Barker (2000) states that “language gives meaning to material objects and social practices that are brought into view by language and made intelligible to us in terms which language delimits. These processes of meaning production are signifying practices. In order to understand [a] culture, one needs to explore how meaning is produced symbolically in language as a ‘signifying system.” (p.07-08) The relation of native language, its communal connection, and its relation to self-identity is the “key to cultural identity.” (Thong, 2000, p.05)

Furthermore, vernacular, as a cultural component, functions as a challenge to cultural imperialism and exposes the limits of nationhood. Kire’s usage of vernacular implies the dominance of orality in her culture that she politically and consciously textualizes in the text, as the purpose of ethnography is not only to represent but also it is the ‘invention…of cultures’ (Clifford, 1986, p. 2) that seem to have been lost in a mono-vocal representation of India’s northeast. It involves a translation of a culture into a text that can be read as a representative text, as “ethnography is inescapably a textual enterprise[iii].” (Atkinson & Hammersley, 2007, p.191)

Similarly, ethnographic ideology “draws attention to aspects of cultural description” (Clifford, 1986, p.100), that have been erased or minimized. Such descriptions indicate more metaphorical and allegorical meanings associated with events or incidents. It draws attention to the cultural representation through which the political gets embedded in the representation of temporal events. This is reflected in the twist in the plot of Don’t Run. The twist changes its narrative from a possible love story to that of a chase and pursuit narrative where a young woman refuses a male and his advances that result in his ego-hurt. In a patriarchal environment, any kind of resistance is not allowed, so Atuonuo’s refusal to accede to Kevi’s proposal led to physical violence. He clutched her from behind when she visited her hut and “blood spurted out from the cuts on her arm where he had sunk in his nails.” (Don’t Run, 69) In the mysterious and serene environment, the violence that percolates in the lives of central characters dissipates the naive structure of the plot. Rather, it allegorically represents the violence, literal as well as metaphorical, that has come to define the northeastern states of India in recent times. Allegory provides a double edge of meanings, of descriptive surface and deeper levels of meaning. Violence, which both, Atuonuo and Kevi experience, can be termed as an allegory[iv] of gender relationships and material reality. It is an attempt to dominate the ‘other’ that leads to violence that draws on the similitude in this context. Such violence and disturbing relationship can be read as symbolically representing the mainland politics, where the Northeast and its people have “undergone historical and political trauma of untold suffering and marginalization.” (Zama, 2013, p. xi)

Similarly, in the second part of Sky is My Father, Kire politically locates the Naga tribe’s colonial past in the heat of the anti-colonial struggle. It recounts historical events of the year 1879 when the Naga villagers countered the British invasion, and the war led to the burning of their Khonoma village, “the thatch roofs had burnt easily but the posts of houses took a long time to burn out completely. Finally, half-burnt posts and ashes were all that remained, blackening the whole site. This was the punishment of a proud people who had dared to control their destinies.” (Sky, 108)

It depicts the heroic struggle of the Naga tribe against the British colonization and religious conversion that was initiated by the missionaries like Dr. Sidney Rivenburg. Kire archaeologically identifies a historical moment, in a widely shared story, that eventually leads to the spread of Christianity in the Naga community, and in the Northeast of India. It is captured through an experience of a soldier who witnesses spirits during his night shift while on duty. Next day when Dr. Sidney Rivenburg inquires him about his witnessing spirits during the night;

The soldier confessed to a nightly experience of seeing, near the water source, a spirit that grew larger and larger till he stood as big as mountain before he disappeared from view. Rivenburg instructed the soldier to wake him if he saw the spirit again. The next night, when the soldier sighted the spirit, he woke Rivenburg and they walked to the river source together. The spirit showed itself again but this time, the spirit miraculously grew smaller and smaller till it disappeared altogether. The soldier was amazed by this and became a Christian thereafter. (Sky, 117-118)

This incident is marked as the beginning and spreading of the Christian faith in the Northeast of India. Levi’s death, who stands for an archetypal Naga figure, who represented and followed the teachings and values of Naga culture, signifies the end of resistance to colonial powers. With his death, the Naga culture also started dying which is allegorically presented through his son Sato’s conversion. Christian Missionary gradually wiped out the indigenous culture and people drifted towards them. It lured people in the guise of modernity as “in 1897, Sato was nearly nineteen when the first man of Khonoma was baptized. (Sky, 121) Levi’s desire to maintain cultural independence from religious colonization is juxtaposed with Sato’s desire to convert to Christianity. Levi’s death marks a symbolic shift from old tribal ways to new modern and Christian ways of the world. It is a society where norms of conduct, institutions of beliefs, and cultural practices are falling apart. The passing away of traditional Naga culture is presented from the perspective of a dying culture under the adverse impact of an alien culture.

Similarly, conversion into Christianity and not choosing any other mainland religion can be seen as a deliberate political stand that the people of the northeast take. It can be deduced from such action that the experiences of people of northeast India with mainland socio-political culture have not resulted in positive development. The continuation of conflict in various forms, political dissent, armed resistance, unprecedented levels of violence, dense militarisation, enactment of laws that transformed the Naga highland into a special state of exception, etc., and “the domination and overrule they experienced at the hands of the Indian state” (Wouters, 2018, xii) have given rise to disenchantment among the people of northeast India. Such repressive techniques/ methods of rules can lead to many forms of resistance where the massive acceptance of Christianity by the native tribes of Nagaland can also be seen as a collective act of resistance. This conversion to Christianity can be considered to be one of the most important historical events in the Naga imagination that fostered “a pan Naga identity” (Baruah, 2007, 106). Sato’s conversion captures this historical process and the end of the text depicts the accelerated process of religious conversions as “the number of converts was steadily growing at the Mission.” (Sky, 145) Sato, who wanted to be “a follower of Isu” (Sky, 120), finds similarities between their deities and Jesus and creates a discourse of religious compatibility and similarities that seemed to be used for conversion in northeast India. This conversion to Christian identity keeps them “apart from the mostly Hindu and Muslim population of the Indian heartland (and) has been partly an act of resistance that parallel the political and armed resistance.” (Baruah, 2007, 110)

Conclusion

Kire reconstructs and recuperates Naga’s past by deconstructing counterfeit or biased narratives that were imposed on them. It comes out as a kind of meta-historiography, representing cultural and historical tragedy. It is through the imagined ethnographic account of the Naga tribe, with a careful excavation of historical accounts and scholarly engagement with it, that Kire asserts a vibrant Naga culture and represents the politics of the region. Kire’s texts come out as politically conscious attempts in terms of their historical-rootedness, ethnocultural struggle against the postcolonial situation, to counter popular misconceptions and mark its presence in the cultural and literary imagination of mainland politics. It focuses on the state of condition, contexts, experiences, and the limitation of what Benedict Anderson (2006) would call the ‘imagined community’ of a nation. As an ethnographic account of the Naga community and their ways of life, Kire can deal with various issues. Kire deploys an ethnographic framework to establish cultural epistemologies of the Naga community through the legend of ‘were-tiger’, folkloric tales, cultural symbols, activities, traditions, customs, historical accounts of anti-colonial struggle, and conversion to Christianity, etc. Through her writings, Kire not only rewrites cultures but also formulates culture by using discursive and aesthetic practices. “Textualization is at the heart of the ethnographic enterprise” (Marcus, 1986, 264) and her texts are based on “indigenous cultural categories” and “folk models.” (Atkinson & Hammersley, 2007, 191 and 194) Her “texts (act) as imaginary ethnographies, that is as texts that write culture by inventing a language that redraws the boundaries of imaginable worlds and by providing thick descriptions of the desires, fears, and fantasies that shape the imaginary lives and cultural encounters of invented protagonists.” (Schwab, 2012, 02)

This study helps to understand the connection between power and cultural politics that can be utilized to bring cultural changes. Kire establishes the Naga culture by representing various cultural epistemologies through her texts. Both the texts, act on a similar ground of recuperating, reviving, and establishing their gradually forgotten culture and historical past of their heroic struggle against the British invasion. She uses memory and remembering to contextualize and bring into context past epistemologies to consolidate a present sense of cultural rootedness. Cultural politics allows literature to intervene at a linguistic, cultural, and epistemological level. Through the methodology of imagined ethnography, Kire textualizes the indigenous struggle against stereotype and colonial domination, reclaims cultural epistemologies, and redefines the geo-spatial pluralities of the Northeast of India. By positioning her characters within a geopolitical situation, she attempts to decolonize the essentialized imaginary powers of hegemony that define the Northeast as primitive and a conflict-ridden space. The ethnographic framework helps her to establish the Naga community’s cultural economy as the ethnographic framework “has provided [her] a vehicle for the voicing and preservation of stories and memories that have long been excluded from hegemonic discourses of cultural and collective memory” (Leggott, 2004, 13).

Declaration of Conflict of Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest.

Funding

The publication of this paper is supported by the Institute of Eminence (IoE), Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi.

End-notes

[i] Baruah, Sanjib. Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India. Oxford University Press. (2007).

[ii] According to Indian Express-News of January 7, 2018, “Nagaland is known as “the only predominantly Baptist state in the world” and more than 90 percent of the Naga people identify themselves as Christian.” https://indianexpress.com/article/north-east-india/nagaland/in-christian-nagaland-indigenous-religion-of-pre-christian-nagas-withstand-test-of-time-5010777/

[iii] Ethnography is a process of data collection for analysis. It is produced in written form through the medium of language. Similarly writing any imaginative text, or otherwise, requires data. In this sense, writing any text and writing ethnography involve textual enterprise as they both involve a process of textualization for analysis. Hence, the producer of an ethnography becomes a writer of a text, producing a narrative. See. Atkinson, Paul, and Martyn Hammersley. (2007). “Writing Ethnographies.” Ethnography: Principles in practice. London and New York. Routledge, 191-208.

[iv] Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Allegory.” Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. University of California Press, London. 1986.

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Dr. Shiv Kumar is an Assistant professor in Department of English, Faculty of Arts at Benares Hindu University, Varanasi. He did his graduation and master’s in English from the University of Delhi and pursued his M.Phil in Gerontology and Ph.D. in Dalit autobiographies from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. His research areas include Dalit writings, writings from the Northeast of India, literature from marginality, Hispanic writings, Grey Areas, and Indian writings. He has also presented papers at national and international conferences and published in the same areas.

Editorial Introduction: The Saga of the A·bri dal·gipa: The Ontological Turn in Northeast Studies

Editorial/North East Literature & Culture

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Jyotirmoy Prodhani

North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU), Shillong, India. Email: jprodhani@nehu.ac.in/ rajaprodhani@gmail.com.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022. Pages 1-8. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne00

First published: June 30, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This editorial is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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Though the territory that is known as the Northeast of India is an ancient region in terms of its civilisation, culture, and history; the emergence of Northeast as a discursive terrain, however, is a relatively recent phenomenon. In that, it has significant linkages with its assertions of resistance against the metanarratives of pan-Indian nationalism. In his seminal essay, “The Margin Strikes Back” (2005), Udayon Misra argued how the Northeast, commonly referred to as the periphery or the margin of the mainland, almost soon after India’s independence, had given the first ‘jolt’ to the metadiscursive idea of ‘one nation’ (p. 266). It was the tiny territory of Nagaland that had posed the biggest epistemic challenge forcing a paradigmatic shift in re-defining the parameters of the nation-state. This resistance has also shaped one of the primary categories of Northeast—a space of dissension and resistance. As Misra (2005) pointed out, it was the Naga question that had prompted Jayprakash Narayan, as the head of the Naga Peace Mission in 1964, to recognise the legitimacy of the ‘small nations’ and brought into circulation the idioms like ‘self-determination’ and the ‘urge to preserve’ culture and identity (p. 268) into the parlance of political discourses wherein the notion of ‘the mainstream’ (p. 266) found to have been not essentially central but rather incidental. What Northeast has defied is the singularity of meaning, the essentialist absolutism. This resistance has been one of the embedded cores of the region to deal with the multiplicities of voices inherent to the lay of the land. Notably, on fundamentalism and its growing dominance to assign primacy to the singular immensity of meanings, eminent critic and writer, Pradip Acharya expressed his understanding of the term as ‘ruling out doubts’, and as a contrast, he said, ‘In the Northeast, we celebrate doubt’ (2017, p. 3).

In the imaginary of what can be said as the national mainstream, in continuation of the colonial cartographic orientalistation, the Northeast has been largely perceived as a frontier, what Michiel Baud and Willem van Schendel (1997) would define as an ‘empty area’ (p. 213), a vague territory without meaning, historicity and even an agency of its own, a veritable empty signifier. Nevertheless, this region has been one of the primeval territories having its eminent presence since the times of the great Indian epics, a territory with profound historical, literary, and cultural antiquity, and more importantly, a region with its own medieval history when the rest of India mostly had a shared medieval history by being part of the common political empire.

The story of Northeast is quite similar to that of the abiding fable by Amitav Ghosh, The Living Mountain (2022). Quite significantly, the book resonates with the geo-cultural history of the Northeast too, for the region has gone through similar crises and turbulences like that of the Elderpeople and the Adepts, the indigenous men and women, of the Great Mountain, the Mahaparbat, where they were reduced by the imperialist Anthropois into Varvarois as they were rendered culturally inadequate and subjected to brutal dislocations. But finally, it was the resurgence of the native pedagogy that had redeemed indigenous inhabitants. Northeast too is a metaphoric Mahaparbat. A region with almost half of the 450 tribes of India who speak about 200 different indigenous languages (Sharma, 2019, p. 1), it is indeed an a·bri dal·gipa, an A·chik phrase for great mountain.

However, the immensity of the region cannot be measured only in terms of its spatial coordinates, rather one has to take into account its vast cultural contexts. From being a terra exotica, it has formidably emerged as a terra significatio; from being an exotic space of mystery and enigma for the onlookers, it emerged as a territory of discursive significations; instead of just being part of the newspaper footnotes, it has evolved into a powerful domain of literary and cultural discourses. Following the substantial proliferation of its native literature in the English language, reaching out to readers across the world, Northeast has acquired a space of its own. The English language in the Northeast has been provincialized as one of its ‘local languages’ (Prodhani, 2022), as language has not necessarily affected an alienation in the literary expressions of the region. As Robin S. Ngangom (2018) has said about the English poetry from the Northeast, “Instead of the expected radical break with the near past, Northeast poetry written in English suggests a continuity with the past” (para. 2). However, English is not the only language in which major literary works have been produced in this region. Literature from the region in the other native languages in written form has deeper antiquity going back to the 10^th to the 12^th century CE and beyond, especially in Assam and Manipur. The region’s oral literary tradition is even older. Tilottoma Misra (2016) defined the history of literature of the Northeast as a ‘complex literary tradition’. She points out, “This complex literary tradition requires a detailed analysis of the historical process of the emergence of manuscript and printed texts in cultures which were predominantly oral” (p. 46). A comprehensive volume on Northeast literature, therefore, is always challenging, for it must not privilege the written over the oral; it should also include all the eight states that form the Northeast and therefore such a volume, by default, would be polyglossic, which, of course, is one of its biggest strengths.

In this special issue on Northeast literature and culture, papers from various states of the region—Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Tripura —address a wide range of genres; from poetry to fiction, from theatre to cinema, from folklore to graphic narratives and so on. Among other innovative critical engagements, the young scholars from the region have made some audacious departures from the dominant center-periphery paradigm and have tried to make epistemic interventions affecting a possible new turn in the critical discourses on the Northeast through their attempts to theorise ‘land’ as a crucial ontological premise towards evolving an indigenous hermeneutics. From the perennial presence of violence and identity anxieties, the emerging critical discourses have turned to exploring the embedded ecology of the region to come up with fresh critical insights. One of the most potential dimensions of the prospective new direction in the Northeast discourse might well be, what Fabricant and Postero (2018) called the ‘Indigenous Turn’ (p. 128) wherein ecology and decoloniality are some of the most crucial influences. This has engendered fresh energy among the young thinkers from the region. The scholars have also engaged to problematise the insider-outsider binaries, a phenomenon that has gained attention in recent times. Though the insider-outsider discourse has quite subtly made certain legitimations to re-orientalise the region as a territory of native xenophobes putting the entire range of obligations on the insiders of the region absolving the outsiders of any such ethical imperatives, the papers here have tried to provide alternative idioms to look at the issue from nuanced critical vantages.

Here is a brief introduction to the papers included in this special issue. Two of the articles in this themed issue look at the unique tradition of buranji as a vernacular history project of the 13^th century Assam. In the essay, “Buranji in Northeast India: A 13^th Century History Project of Assam”, Dwijen Sharma refers to Suryya Kumar Bhuyan’s model of vernacular history writing and examines how the buranjis constitute a unique form of history that is indigenous and considerably different from the western paradigm of historiography disseminated by the colonial project. Dhurjjati Sarma in his paper “Vernacular Historiography and North-East Literature” specifically looks at the representation of the Kacharis, a formidable cultural community and a powerful political entity, in the historical narrative of the Ahom buranjis.

Anjali Daimari in her paper, “Internal Instabilities: Nationalism in the Context of Nagaland” has taken up two seminal novels, Birendra Kumar Bhattacharya’s Yaruingam and Easterine Kire’s Bitter Wormwood” and attempts to understand the ambivalences in the discourses of Nationalism as ‘internal instabilities’. In the context of Nagaland, the author explores the prospects of a ‘human solution’ to address the Naga question. In their essay, “Travel, Empire and Ethnographic Self-Fashioning of a White Headhunter”, Mehdi Hasan Chowdhury and Dipendu Das have taken up Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf’s travelogue, The Naked Nagas, for a critical re-look on contested affinities among ‘travel, empire and ethnographic exercises’ and their role in the configuration of colonial Northeast India as a ‘frontier’. Shiv Kumar in his paper, “Imagined Ethnography and Cultural Strategies: A Study of Easterine Kire’s Sky is My Father and Don’t Run, My Love looks at how Easterine Kire reinvents folklore of the Nagas and evolves a politically conscious positionality through her fictional narratives. Suganya V. and Padmanabhan B. have taken up stories from the iconic collection of short stories by Temsula Ao, These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone, to look at the role of storytelling as a means to preserve linkages with the past of the community against the context of transgenerational transmission of trauma.

This issue has included papers that look at the poetry from the Northeast from the perspectives of fresh critical insights. Kshetrimayum Premchandra in his essay, “The Rise of Yawol Poetry in Manipuri Literature” looks at yawol poetry of Manipur which is associated with militancy in the state. In the paper, he tries to explain why for a significant number of poets blood and violence keep coming as recurring motifs in their poems. The paper, “Resistance and Ungendering” looks at the emerging feminist voices in the Northeast with special reference to the poems of Monalisa Changkija and Mona Zote wherein Debajyoti Biswas and Pratyusha Pramanik have argued how ‘performativity’ has been utilised as a discursive tool to counter gendered societies and ‘un-gendering’ the essence of cultural constructs. In the paper, “Yemapoetics: Towards a Theory of Healing in Indigenous Poetry from Sikkim”, the authors, Swarnim Subba and Namrata Chaturvedi have tried to formulate an indigenous theory of poetry based on the idea of poetry as shamanism what they have described as ‘Yemapoetics’ with reference to the poems of the Limboo community from Sikkim. The paper, co-authored by Austin Okeke, Emeka Aniago, Mary-Isabella Ada Igbokwe and Kenneth C. Ahaiwe, “Monumental Inhumanity beyond Tears: Lamentations of Despoil in Nagaland and Niger Delta Eco-poetics” makes a comparative study of the select poems of Temsula Ao of Nagaland and Tenure Ojaide of Nigeria to underline how both theses poets have reflected their anxieties in the growing despoiling of the eco-heritages in their respective locations. The authors, Gourab Chatterjee, Debanjali Roy and Tanmoy Putatunda have taken up the poems of Temsula Ao, Mamang Dai, and Esther Syiem in their paper, “From Anonymity to Identity: Orality in Three Women Poets from North-East India” and explore how these poets have utilized native orature as a primary tool to construct an indigenous poetics dismantling the colonial hierarchy that privileges the written over the oral. Gunajeet Mazumdar in his paper, “Topophrenia and Indigenous Belonging”, takes up Rajbanshi poetry, one of the peripheral and emerging literary developments of Northeast, and problematises the notion of spatial memory in Rajbanshi poetry taking a recourse to Robert Tally’s concept of Spatial Memory and the decolonial critic Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s theory of land as pedagogy. Analysing the poems of Northeast from a purely linguistic perspective is not quite common. Charanjit Singh and Gurjit Kaur have carried out a linguistic analysis of two of the major poets from Northeast using the tools of Systematic Functional Linguistics (SFL) techniques in their paper, “Text Formation in the Poetry of Robin S. Ngangom and Mamang Dai”

There are papers that have attempted to explore the possibilities of constructing alternative hermeneutics based on the indigenous cultural discourses. Kimthianvak Vaiphei, in her paper, “Indigenous Ontology In Zo Oral Narratives: A Study of the Zo Indigenous Cosmovision”, explores the indigenous ontology and argues that the Eurocentric critical frameworks, which are often inadequate to interpret and understand the indigenous culture and native epistemology, needs to be replaced with fresh ontologies grounded in indigeneity. Taking the folklore and oral narratives of the Zo tribe of Southern Manipur, the paper attempts at evolving indigenous hermeneutics to herald a possible critical turn in Northeast studies. Zothanchhingi Khiangte in the paper “An Identity Born Out of Shared Grief: The Account of Rambuai in Contemporary Mizo Literary Texts” takes up three fictions from Mizoram to examine how the memories of rumbuai evolved the Mizo identity forging the spiritual and the cultural past of the community. Karyir Riba, in her paper “The forest is my wife”: The Ethno-political and Gendered Relationship of Land and the Indigene”, takes up select texts by Easterine Kire and Mamang Dai and argues that ‘Land’ has a personified presence in indigenous literature where there is a merger of land with that of the women self, that nurtures its feminine dimensions of fertility and service. Partha Sarathi Gupta takes an anti-anthropocene approach to study the folk orature of the Bongcher and Chakma communities of Tripura in his paper titled, “Art, Ecology and Affective Encounters: An Ecosophical Study of Folk Tales from Tripura”. Drawing on Guattari’s notion of ‘ecosophy’, he tries to look at how the folk narratives of Northeast have encompassed ecology as one of its intimate affinities. Pronami Bhattacharya takes up the folktales from Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Arunachal, Tripura in her paper, “Ecofeminist Consciousness in Select Folktales from Northeast India”, wherein she explores the possibility of constructing indigenous critical perspectives on nature and ecofeminism. Usham Rojio in his paper, “Performing the Landscape: Orature around Loktak Lake and the Love Story of Khamba Thoibi”, explores the relations between landscape and performative traditions around Loktak Lake and Moirang of Manipur with special reference to the epic narrative of Khamba Thoibi. Aritra Gupta in the paper, “Architecture without architects: Eve’s dropping into the Reang House’s Dialogue with its Environment”, looks at the indigenous Reang houses of Tripura and explores the materials and methods of their constructions to explore what the paper has described as vernacular architecture.

Theatre has a vibrant history in the Northeast, however research in this area is not quite adequate yet. Parismita Hazarika and Debarshi Prasad Nath have taken up the plays of two of the major cultural icons of Assam, Jyotiprasad Agarwala and Bishnuprasad Rava, to address the issue of Assamese nationalism and the critical parameters with which it has been evolving across various phases of history. Pranjal Sarma Basisth and Gautam Sarmah in their paper, “Kanhailal’s ‘Theatre of the Earth’ as Political Allegory”, look at the unique theatre genre developed by Kanhailal which is apparently minimal but thematically potent and prophetic. The paper also discusses how Kanhailal’s theatre was influenced by Jerzy Grotowsky’s Poor Theatre, Badal Sircar’s Third Theatre, and how Kanhailal, in turn, made his impact on the next generation of theatre directors from the Northeast like Gunakar Dev Goswami and Sukracharya Rabha. Namrata Pathak discusses the poetics of theatre developed by a very promising theatre activist, Sukracharya Rabha (1977-2018) in her paper, “Under the Canopy of Sal Trees”. The paper looks at how Sukracharya Rabha, who obtained his theatre training from Kanhailal, evolved a new set of theatre idioms combining ecology, ethnicity, and culture as the syntax of ‘minimalist theatre’. Mohammad Rezaul Karim in his paper, “Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Plays into Assamese Farce: A Study on Historical Perspective”, looks at the Assamese translations and adaptations of Shakespearean comedies and examines the influence of Shakespeare on modern Assamese plays, especially the Assamese comedies.

Sib Sankar Majumder’s “Penology in Colonial Times: A Reading of Sangrami Jibonor Atmakatha”, looks at a very unusual text from Assam which is a prison notebook by Robin Kakati, a Gandhian freedom fighter. In the paper, the author analyses the anatomy of incarceration in colonial Assam with reference to Kakati’s memoir. Children’s literature has drawn major critical attention in recent times, but not so in the context of the Northeast but Himaxee Bordoloi and Rohini Mokashi have taken up a popular Assamese text for children in their paper, “Navakanta Barua’s Posthuman Wonderland in Siyali Palegoi Ratanpur. In the paper, the authors have looked at the celebrated text from the perspective of posthumanism and animality and tried to examine how, through the deployment of nonsense and fantasy, Barua had posed a challenge to the anthropocene paradigm of human centrality. Nizara Hazarika deals with a marginal territory of Assamese literature in her paper, “Transgressive Spatialities: Mapping Identity and Liminality in Contemporary Queer Narratives from Assam”. Hazarika argues that the queer narrative in Assam reflects a new direction for the nonheteronormative people towards claiming a distinct positionality against the hegemonic knowledge production determined by the dominance of heteronormative ideologies. Manashi Bora in her paper, “History, Memory and Trauma” takes up the select short stories of Arupa Patanagia Kalita of Assam and draws on the critical aspects of history, postcoloniality, memory, and trauma to examine how the author has problematised and interpreted her encounter with the social upheavals and the banalities of everyday experiences against those contexts. In her essay, “Anatomy of Peace: Reading How to Tell Story the Story of an Insurgency”, Avantika Debroy has closely analysed the collection of Assamese short stories to arrive at a deeper understanding of one of the most tumultuous junctures of Assam’s political history marked by the rise and the receding of the ULFA insurgency and the deepening of the discourses revolved around the idea of a swadhin Asom.

In the context of the Northeast, anxieties arising out of migration, displacement, and relocation of communities in the wake of India’s Partition, other forms of migration, and the insider-outsider binaries are some of the crucial issues that have gained critical attention. Suranjana Choudhury in her paper, “Partition and its afterlife”, draws upon memory studies to examine how personal memories of ‘Partition and its afterlife’ shaped the literary imaginations of the displaced Sylhetis in the Barak valley of Assam. Rimi Nath in her paper, “The question of the ‘foreigners’ in select fictional narratives from Assam”, addresses one of the most crucial aspects that has dominated the discourses in the Northeast for quite some time. She has made nuanced arguments by taking literary narratives from the two valleys of Assam—the Barak and the Brahmaputra. Liji Varghese in, “Narrating ‘Indias’: Liminal Narratives of Northeast and Assertion of Identity”, takes up three significant authors from the region—Anjum Hassan, Siddharth Deb and Zoe Lungkumer — and argues that it is imperative to envisage ‘Indias’ in order to open up and accommodate polyphonic narratives and in this the writings from Northeast can re-construct the idioms in order to re-define the Indian experience. Amanda B. Basaiawmoit and Paonam Sudeep Mangang, in their paper, “The Battle of Belonging: A Study of Contemporary Shillong Poets”, deal with the issue of ‘belonging’ and ‘unbelonging’ with reference to the select poems of non-tribal poets from Shillong to analyse their negotiation with their adopted spaces and the struggle to gain a sense of belonging.

There has been a significant proliferation of visual and graphic narratives in the context of the Northeast that has generated a great amount of critical attention. Amit Rahul Baishya in his paper, “The Animate Circuit of the Ordinary” attempts, as he says, to unearth the fugitive potentials immanent in every day, taking into account the photomontage of Niam/Faith/Hynñiewtrep by the Shillong filmmaker, Tarun Bhartiya. Renu Elizabeth Abraham in her paper, “The Politics of Cultural Homogenization and Territorialization” critically analyses the character of Mapui Kawlim as a superhero in Tinkle’s WingStar series and argues that the representation of Northeast in such mainstream popular comics has erased the ethnic markers of the character as an attempt at ‘sanitised representation’ of a character from the region affecting the national imagination on cultural ethnicities and diversities. Rolla Das and Abhaya N B in their paper, “Humanising History through Graphic Narratives: Exploring Stories of Home and Displacement from the North-East of India” take up select graphic novels to explore how these works have responded to the heterogeneity of the region to bring forth ‘the intersection of the performative of the text and image’ in order to create a unique oral poetics of the region.

Cinema is a very important and significant cultural medium in the Northeast, which is known for several offbeat and cerebral films acclaimed both nationally and internationally. Farddina Hussain in her paper, “Filming Folktales”, looks at the changing relationship between folktales and films in the context of Assamese cinema and analyses Bhaskar Hazarika’s Kothatnadi as a ‘dialectical simulation of images created by the auteur’ that turns a grandma’s bedtime story into an uncanny horror folktale. Alicia Jacob and Dishari Chattaraj have taken up one of the most complex Assamese films made in recent times—Aamis—by Bhaskar Hazarika in their paper, “Forbidden Cravings”, and they have argued that the film, apparently a dark love story, has dealt with multiple layers of significations turning meat into a metaphor of deeper cultural associations and resistance. Munmi Bora’s essay, “Cultural Differences, Racism and Trauma”, makes a critical analysis of Nicholas Kharkongor’s film, Axone: A Recipe for Disaster, to address the issues pertinent to the Northeast experience as an outsider in the mainland. She has also raised questions as to what might be the effective response against prejudices and hostilities to beat a retreat and resign into the shell or make efforts to find a way out to establish an informed relationship in a space where several cultures can converge and co-exist.

Besides the critical articles, the issue also features special interviews of Mamang Dai, the eminent writer and poet from Arunachal Pradesh and Ratan Thiyam, the eminent theatre Director from Manipur and one of the pioneers of the Theatre of Roots movement in India. In the Book Review section, the reviewers have taken up some of the recent creative and critical works from the Northeast for their perceptive reviews.

There was an overwhelming response to the CFP for the special themed issue of Rupkatha on Northeast literature and culture. Out of nearly about five hundred abstracts, only a handful of them was to be shortlisted, which was quite a daunting task by itself. I am particularly thankful to all the eminent academicians and colleagues who have spared their precious time to help shortlist the abstracts and review the papers with very valuable opinions, inputs and suggestions. Thanks to all the contributors and also to the authors who had responded to the CFP but we failed to accommodate them in this issue. What is heartening to see is that Northeast literature and culture as a category has generated academic interest among scholars and researchers not only in the region but also in the other parts of the country. The volume has also got contributions from the US and Africa, which indicates the growing reach of the literary works of the Northeast across boundaries.

That a special volume on Northeast literature has been facilitated by a major literary journal of the country, Rupkatha, is a significant intervention for Northeast studies as a discipline to grow. I am grateful to the Chief Editor of the journal, Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay, and the Managing Editor, Tarun Tapas Mukherjee for their trust in me to edit this special issue and for their constant guidance in the process.

Hopefully, this special issue would be able to generate further interest among the readers and scholars leading to more discourses and debates on Northeast literature and culture.

Note:

[¹] ’The big mountain’ in A·chik or Garo language. See L.M. Holbrook (1998).

References

Acharya, Pradip. (2017). In the northeast we celebrate doubt. Keynote Address (1-5) in the National Seminar on English Literature from North East India, Gauhati University Institute of North East Studies (GUINES), Gauhati University, 25 March. [Unpublished manuscript]

Baud, Michiel, and Willem Van Schendel. (1997). Toward a comparative history of borderlands.” Journal of World History 8(2): pp. 211-242. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20068594

Fabricant, Nicole and Nancy Postero. (2018). The indigenous studies turn. In Juan Poblote (Ed.), New approaches to Latin American studies (pp. 128-146). Routledge.

Ghosh Amitav, The living mountain: A fable of our times. Fourth Estate.

Holbrook, L.M. (1998). KU·RONGDIK: A·chikku into English dictionary. L.M. Holbrook.

Misra, Tilottoma. (2016). Literary cultures in northeast India shrinking frontiers. In Political and Economic Weekly, SEPTEMBER 17, vol LI, no. 38. (pp. 46-54).

Misra, Udayon. (2005). The margins strike back: echoes of sovereignty and the Indian state. India International Centre Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 2/3, (pp. 265-274) URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23006033

Ngangom, Robin S. (2018). Alternative poetry of the northeast. Sahapedia. (para2) https://www.sahapedia.org/alternative-poetry-of-the-northeast.a online

Prodhani, J. (2022). English as a social capital of north east India. The Shillong Times, 21 April. (para 6) https://theshillongtimes.com/2022/04/20/english-as-a-social-capital-of-

Sharma, Dwijen. (Ed.). (2019). Introduction. In Writing from India’s North-East: Recovering the small voices. (pp. 1-13). Aadi Publishers.

Jyotirmoy Prodhani is a Professor and Head of the Department of English at North-Eastern Hill University, (NEHU), Shillong, Meghalaya, India. His areas of research and teaching interests are Theatre and Performance, Translations, Indigenous Studies, Northeast Literature.

Posthumanism and Cross-species Becoming in Zhuang Zi

Southeast Asia/V14N2

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Quan Wang

Professor of English and Comparative Literature, English Department, Beihang University, Xueyuan Rd 37, Haidian District, Beijing, 100191, PR of China. Email: wangquanheming@126.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages 1-18. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.28

First published: June 30, 2022 | Area: Posthumanism | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Volume 14, Number 2, 2022)
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Abstract

Posthumanism offers a fresh perspective to reconstructing productive relationships between human and non-human beings, but the prospect of posthumanist egalitarianism has its deficiency. Zhuang Zi’s concept of “cross-species becoming” is an edifying alternative: its monistic ontology resolves the contradiction of binary oppositions, its transversal subject replaces the enfolded self, and its integration of “equality of things” with becoming paves the way for egalitarian existence. Diachronically, “cross-species becoming” reflects cosmic development, the existence of zero boundary and fluid boundary. Rigid boundary corresponds to different stages of becoming. Synchronically, “cross-species becoming” interacts with myriad things to produce a polymorphic existence that is analyzed from three aspects: its definition, conditions, and manifestations. Zhuang Zi’s concept of “cross-species becoming” and posthumanism theory complement each other; together, they aspire us to reconstruct relationships between human and non-human species.

Keywords: Posthumanism, Cross-species Becoming, Zhuang Zi, Equality, Animal Agency

Introduction

There is an affinity between Daoism and environmental protection. We are living in an anthropocentric world and consciously or unconsciously, we assume the centrality of human beings and employ human standards to evaluate everything. Nature, in this view, is considered meaningful only when it relates to human life. This anthropocentric exploitation of natural resources results in environmental deterioration and compels people to self-reflect. Daoism seems to be a promising solution to the environmental crisis. In 1998, scholars held an international conference to engage in serious discussions on the relationship between “Daoism and Ecology” at Harvard University. Roger Ames maintains that we should start building a Daoist world through our “full contribution at home in the local and the focal relationships,” then make gradual expansions (2001: 279). Russell Kirkland regards “responsible Non-action” as a salutary moral compass to restrain human activities and let nature unfold (2001: 289). Chi-Tim Lai (2001) argues that the cosmological interdependence of “Heaven, Earth and humanity” in Daoism could reorient our attitude toward nature (96). “Thinking Ecologically,” a special journal issue devoted to the topic, continues the discussion on “Daoism and Ecology.” Unlike anthropocentrism, eco-centrism, as an alternative, endeavors to remove human beings from “the center of the moral universe.” It asserts that “the natural world has intrinsic value independent of human existence and employment” (Yao 2017: 192). Eco-centrism claims nature’s own right and value, but it also produces a new question: “why are we humans morally responsible for protecting the environment?” (192) Scholars have responded with different answers. Gao Shan proposes “place-based environmental ethics” (Gao 2017: 232). However, individuals are often attached to a certain place and Gao’s provincial approach cannot provide the basis for global environmental ethics. Bo R. Meinertsen contends that “gratitude to nature” goes beyond local attachment and forms the foundation of “global environmental ethics” (2017: 216). Yang Tongjin reads environmental ethics as an identity crisis and recommends two interconnected approaches: “moral philosophy” to reorient human relationships with nature, and “applied ethics” to enhance people’s environmental awareness and take initiatives to protect nature (2017: 200). An examination of these eco-centric ethics, however, reveals their buried anthropocentric roots: human condescension and their projection of privilege onto things. Eric Sean Nelson advises us to shift our attention from the values of things to things themselves. “This listening and responding to the innumerable beings of this world constitutes an ‘ethics of things’” (Nelson 2009: 297). James Miller further consolidates these ideas. Unlike the biblical notion of the divine being who is responsible for the creation of all things, Daoism maintains that “the value of a thing consists in the process of transformation that is inherent in its own process of being” (Miller 2006: 6).

Both Nelson and Miller make great progress in shifting the focus from human beings to things, yet they have left some crucial questions unanswered: do things have agency? If they do, what are the manifestations of nonhuman agency? How does the will of human beings interact with (the agency of) things? Scholars have answered the latter question in different ways. Nelson contends that human beings should adopt “non-activity” or “non-coercive activity” to accommodate things.[i] Joanna Guzowska goes a step further and accentuates the importance of the spatiality of cognition in Zhuang Zi. Spatial cognition “allows the agent to orient him or herself in an environment” and bestows on the self a “radical openness and infinite fecundity” (416-7). Instead of “fullness,” Joanna Guzowska also maintains, that one should choose “emptiness” to be open to “the impact of the environment, novelty, and change” (Guzowska 2015: 422). In fact, Guzowaska’s productive idea of space turns out merely to be a metaphor. James Miller goes beyond current constraints and emphasizes the “fluid interchange between the body and its environment,” such as qi, saliva, semen, and menstrual blood (10), while water is the connecting medium of “three life-forms: humans, animals, plants” (Miller 2006: 11). Despite their insightful foci, these scholars maintain the binary opposition between self and other, humans and things. Can we cross the boundary between humans and things? How do species’ boundaries come into existence in the first place? What is Zhuang Zi’s philosophy regarding these issues?

To provide tentative answers to the above-mentioned questions, the present study adopts a posthumanist perspective to examine The Zhuang Zi. Posthumanism, a recent intellectual trend in the 21^st century, comprises three main branches: “becoming-animals, becoming-earth, and becoming-machine” (Braidotti 2013: 66). Despite their different emphases, these share certain posthumanist tenets: the decentering of anthropocentrism, species equality, and non-human agency. According to Philip Armstrong, one of the missions of posthumanism is to establish “a complex and widely dispersed network of actants, both human and other-than-human” (Armstrong 2008: 196). Posthumanism not only becomes an effective methodology to investigate nonhuman agency in The Zhuang Zi systematically; it also suggests an enlightening concept of “becoming” in its elusive description, which unfortunately stops short of further development. Given this deficiency, Zhuang Zi’s idea of “wuhua” (cross-species becoming) becomes a useful supplement to posthumanism. But cross-species becoming is more than just a supplement: it constitutes the underlying philosophy of posthumanism. If we regard anthropocentric decentering, the parity of things, and nonhuman agency as manifest content, then cross-species becoming is latent content. Some critics might argue against applying a new theory to the interpretation of ancient Chinese texts. Posthumanism is a new theory of the 21^st century; however, the question posthumanism aims to address is nothing new. It is “a continuation of a long tradition of reflection … on the relationship between nature and culture” and “a rethinking of the human position in nature” (Yao 2017: 191). Posthumanism provides a systematic methodology with which to explore The Zhuang Zi and to illuminate many neglected ideas in this Daoist masterpiece, especially nonhuman agency. At the same time, Zhuang Zi’s cross-species becoming provides an ontological foundation for posthumanism. In the cosmos of Zhuang Zi, things have undergone three stages, namely, zero boundary, fluid boundary and rigid boundary, and they are connected by cross-species becoming. Therefore, cross-species becoming and posthumanism complement each other and represent a unified whole. The present study argues (1) that Zhuang Zi’s idea of wuhua (??), translated as “cross-species becoming,” can be interpreted as a form of environmental ethics with distinctive cosmology and epistemology, and (2) that the ethics in (1) can serve as a supplement or even foundation to posthumanism. The first section of the paper situates cross-species becoming within the broad framework of Zhuang Zi’s cosmos. This is followed by an examination of the relationship between posthumanism and cross-species becoming in terms of definition, conditions, and manifestations.

The Cosmos in Zhuang Zi

A preliminary investigation of Zhuang’s concept of cosmos is indispensable for comprehending “cross-species becoming.” For Zhuang Zi, there are three stages of cosmic development, the first being the creation of things: “some of them [the men of ancient times] believed that things have never existed.” Zhuang Zi continues to elaborate on the process from nothingness to the appearance of things: “Those at the next stage thought that things exist but recognized no boundaries among them” (Zhuang 1968: 41). At this initial phase, things come into existence, however, they refuse fixed demarcations and embrace the fluidity of constant becoming. The second stage is the emergence of human beings. “Those at the next stage thought there were boundaries but recognized no right and wrong” (41). The assessment criteria of “right and wrong” indicate the arrival of humans in the world, when men join myriads of things and become equal members of plural species on the earth. Without the procrustean bed of “right and wrong,” each species, including human beings, gradually formulates its own boundary, enjoys equal status with others, and keeps open the potential of becoming. The third stage is anthropocentric domination. “Because right and wrong appeared, the Way was injured, and because the Way was injured, love became complete. But do such things as completion and injury really exist, or do they not?” (41). With evaluation standards of “right and wrong,” human beings have established a hierarchy of the world and occupy the central place on the earth. Their likes and dislikes further categorize things into various divisions and consolidate ranking systems.

The three stages, in the philosophy of Zhuang Zi, are a factual report of cosmic development, but they also refer to levels of human cognition.[ii] Despite the sagaciousness of the ancient sages, there are variations in their intellectual cultivation. “Some of them” believed in the original nonexistence of things, “those at the next stage” recognized the existence of things without separating boundaries, and other masters acknowledged boundaries but denied intrinsic attributes of “right and wrong” (Zhuang 1968: 41). Zhuang Zi skillfully integrates external cosmos with the human world and leaves ample room for intellectual advancement.

The inaugural chapter of The Zhuang Zi illustrates the cosmic development with attractive stories. The title of the chapter, “Free and Easy Wandering,” captures an unobstructed flow of becoming. The beginning tale of “fish-bird transformation” exemplifies a constant process of changing:

In the Northern Darkness there exists a fish and his name is K’un. The K’un is so huge there is no knowing how many li he measures. He changes and becomes a bird whose name is P’eng. The back of P’eng measures there is no knowing how many thousand li across and, when he rises up and flies off, his wings are like clouds all over the sky. (Zhuang 1968: 29)

Unlike its English counterpart, the original Chinese verb, “?” (exist) in “????,” has no specific tense. The original story omits the time dimension, unlike the record in The Universal Harmony which refers to figures in history (T’ang the first emperor of the Shang dynasty and his minister Chi). The fish in the Northern Darkness is ceaselessly becoming, not only in the usual sense of homeomorphic growth but also in the sense of heteromorphic transformation. As mentioned previously, the absence of categorical boundaries is a feature of the first phase. The tiniest roe first metamorphoses into a gigantic fish, then the fish transforms itself into an enormous bird, and the bird is launching a journey to the Southern Lake: “When the sea begins to move, the bird sets off for the southern darkness, which is the lake of Heaven” (29). The fish-bird transformation concretizes Zhuang Zi’s idea of becoming: since everything is the process of cross-species becoming, all things in nature are interconnecting with each other, formulating a symbiotic existence. In a vertical manner, the fish/bird entangles itself with the storming ocean tides, soars from the bottom of the sea into the empyrean, and clouds the land with its immense wings. If the fish/bird links together the ocean, land and sky on a vertical dimension, its flight from the Northern Darkness to the Southern Darkness connect two polar regions on a horizontal level. The Northern Lake and Southern Lake symbolize polarized geographical spaces in Chinese philosophy; therefore, the arduous journey connects these two extremes and unifies the incompatible into a symbiotic existence.

The recording of The Universal Harmony delineates three characteristics of the second stage: wonder, plurality, and transformation. First, human beings are open-minded to the wonder of nature. Long before the appearance of mankind, there had been a world of animals, trees, and oceans on the earth. When human beings came into the world, they became a member of the things on the earth. The Universal Harmony is an account of initial human encounters with the “marvelous world.” Although “marvelous” is used to indicate phenomena that go beyond the ambit of human comprehension, human beings acknowledge their ignorance and remain open-minded to appreciate and admire natural wonders. “South of Ch’u there is a caterpillar which counts five hundred years as one spring and five hundred years as one autumn” (Zhuang 1968: 30). If the lifespan of the magic animal astonishes mankind, the longevity of an incredible rose completely transcends human comprehensibility: “Long, long ago there was a great rose of Sharon that counted eight thousand years as one spring and eight thousand years as one autumn” (30). In contrast, the longest human lifespan is eight hundred years: “Now Progenitor P’eng is famous for his more than seven hundred years of longevity.” If mankind chooses human criterion as the universal standard to measure other species, or as the solo valid yardstick, it would be “pathetic” (30). This naturally leads to our discussion of the next point.

Another trait of the second stage is the plurality of species criteria: each species has unique organs to perceive the world, and therefore each of them experiences reality in a special way. The absence of “right and wrong” legitimizes the validity of multiple species standards. Mankind looks up to the sky and perceives its color to be blue; however, a bird that perceives the empyrean with aviary organs might have a different impression. As Zhuang Zi writes, “The sky looks very blue” to human beings, but “is azure the true color of the sky?” Zhuang Zi’s thought-provoking question compels us to detach ourselves from the monopoly of human experience and re-examine the simple fact from an aviary perspective. The following considerations consolidate this interpretation: if mankind could only look up to the sky from the ground, what is the possible view for a gigantic bird who is soaring at the “height of ninety thousand li” in space? “When the P’eng looks down at the sky from above, it must appear just the same as when we look up” (Zhuang 1994: 4). The speculative mood of “must appear” evinces human eagerness to experience the world from the bird’s vision and embraces the plurality of species criteria. Zhuang Zi artistically employs polarized perspectives of up and down to accentuate the disparity between species and then celebrates the richness of the world brought about by species diversity.

The third attribute is “cross-species becoming.” The Universal Harmony retains the fish-bird transformation and keeps open the potential of cross-species becoming. In the previous stage, “there is no knowing how many thousand li” the huge bird measures. Now, mankind endeavors to comprehend the unknown creature: “When the P’eng journeys to the southern darkness, the waters are roiled for three thousand li. He beats the whirlwind and rises ninety thousand li, setting off the sixth-month gale” (Zhuang 1968: 29). Three in Zhuang Zi’s cosmology symbolizes the perfect order of the primordial world. In chapter seven, before the creation of the world, there are three emperors who live in great harmony. The emperor of the Central Region, Chaos, unifies the emperors of two polarized areas (the South Sea and North Sea) into the primordial oneness, which resembles the Southern and Northern Lake in the current situation. The number three links the duality together and simultaneously preconditions the creation of the world and the multiplication of myriad things. This is an accurate depiction of things with boundaries: things have formulated their categorical perimeters yet their propensity for cross-species becoming remains open. If three represents a perfect order, three?three, nine,[iii] symbolizes the perfection of perfection. Nine indicates “completion or wholeness — in a sense, a return to the primordial condition of one” (Girardot 1978: 33). In this specific context, the bird’s soaring distance of ninety thousand li connects ocean, land and sky into a unity, and mobilizes all surrounding things into a dynamic whole. The “galloping gusts and motes of dust” as well as “the breath of living organisms,” all become interconnected and formulate a symbiotic existence (Zhuang 1994: 3). The vacancy of the ethical judgment of “right and wrong” enables myriad things to coexist in an equal and peaceful way, as indicated by the title of the book, The Universal Harmony. However, the situation gradually changes as men move into political society.

The third stage is anthropocentric domination. In the evolutionary process, human beings learn to organize themselves to hunt animals and divide labor for agriculture. These social organizations allow them not only to become more competitive in nature and occupy the centrality of the earth but also to establish civilized societies with political systems that guarantee human superiority to nonhuman counterparts. Anthropocene, according to Paul Crutzen, comes after “the Holocene” and refers to the “human-dominated, geological epoch” (Crutzen 2002: 23). Scholars have since expanded the meaning of Anthropocene to embrace a series of cultural clusters in which human beings play a pivotal role in their escalating influence on surrounding things. “A question put by T’ang, the first emperor of the Shang dynasty, to his wise minister Chi is similar.” Zhuang Zi synchronizes anthropocentrism with political society. In the anthropocentric account, the fish-bird story undergoes a significant alteration:

“In the barren north, there is a dark sea, the Lake of Heaven. In the sea, there is a fish named K’un that is several thousand li in breadth, but no one knows its length. There is also a bird named P’eng, whose back is like Mount T’ai” (Zhuang 1994: 4).

In this version of the story, the fish’s cross-species becoming into the bird has been blocked or deliberately eliminated. Instead, we have two separate and distinctive species: “there is a fish” and “there is also a bird.” In addition, the enormous bird is anthropomorphized into familiar human terms “whose back is like Mount T’ai.”

The miraculous bird is being contained unperceivably into human knowledge. In previous stages, the P’eng bird had its volition to travel to the southern lake: it beat the water, rose to the sky, and initialized a series of actions to achieve the goal. The animal had agency and its marvelous deed paralyzed even human comprehension. In contrast, the independent bird in the anthropocentric account loses agency and becomes a metaphor to illustrate human life.

“A marsh sparrow laughs at the P’eng, saying, ‘Where does he think he’s going? I spring up into the air and come back down after not much more than a few yards. Flitting about amidst the bushes and brambles is the ultimate in flying! So where does he think he’s going?”

The gigantic P’eng now becomes a foil, or even a laughing stock, to the little sparrow. The beginning of “where does he think he’s going” reverberates the end of the monologue and shifts the tone from respect to that of disdain. The sublimity of animal feat fades away and the animal becomes a fable to teach human lessons. The allegory of the P’eng and the sparrow “shows the difference between the great and the small” (Zhuang 1994: 5). Animal metaphors are anthropocentric in nature, for they deprive animals of agency and renders non-human species into empty vessels for human imagination.[iv]

The establishment of evaluative measures (“the great and small”), along with the acknowledgement of “right and wrong,” naturally leads to the institution of ranking systems. “Thus there are those whose knowledge qualifies them for an office, those whose conduct is suitable for overseeing a village, and those whose virtue befits them for rulership and who can win the confidence of an entire country” (Zhuang 1994: 5). Indeed, men build up a system of rating in almost every scenario. Within human society, the king represents the Olympic height; within species on the earth, mankind occupies the centrality of the world. Human beings become the center and human standard becomes universal. Things in nature become “objects” whose solo value is judged by their object-subject relationship with mankind. That is, if things satisfy human needs, they will be considered worthy; otherwise, they are useless. Hui Tzu concretizes such an anthropocentric attitude: “I have a big tree of the kind men call Shu. Its trunk is too gnarled and bumpy to apply a measuring line to, its branches too bent and twisty to match up a compass or square” (Zhuang 1968: 35). The “measuring line” and the “compass or square” exemplify human yardsticks which are designed to serve human needs. This gnarled tree is “big and useless” because it is not able to yield appropriate timber for carpenters: “You could stand it by the road and no carpenter would look at it twice” (35).

Another feature of anthropocentric domination is humans’ deafness to the voices of nonhuman species. At the initial stage, things defy rigid boundaries and are in the fluid process of cross-species becoming, as exemplified by the fish-bird transformation. The next phase inherits the potential of transformation. Human beings in primitive societies are open to spectacular wonders of nature: the magnificent bird roused itself into the sky of “ninety thousand li,” and launched its imposing journey from the Northern Lake to the Southern Lake. After the establishment of anthropocentric superiority at the third stage, mankind blocks the potential of cross-species becoming, refutes species equality, and inserts myriad things into hierarchical systems to serve human needs. The more humans practice anthropocentrism, the more arrogant men feel about their centrality on the earth. It is this entrenched hallucination of mastery that makes humans unwilling to recognize the sovereignty of other species. “And blindness and deafness are not confined to the body alone—the understanding has them too” (Zhuang 1968: 33). Human beings are too myopic to pay attention to the existence of non-human species unless they are “useful” for human purposes. Moreover, they are deliberately deaf to the voices of nonhuman counterparts that would consternate their snug psychology. Chieh Yu, a Taoist sage who is in unison with the myriad things, becomes a mouth-speaker of nature and his “wild, flippant” words are confusing to our comprehension:

“I was listening to Chieh Yu’s talk—big and nothing to back it up, going on and on without turning around. I was completely dumbfounded at his words—no more end than the Milky Way, wild and wide of the mark, never coming near human affairs” (33).

The “insane” discourse of Chieh Yu, goes beyond anthropocentric monopoly and examines the world from non-human species, which confuses and even horrifies mankind. To mollify their terrified psychology and to restore their sense of illusionary mastery, human beings decide to become deaf to the voices of nonhuman species and blind to their existence.

Posthumanism and the Definition of Cross-Species Becoming

Zhuang Zi urges us to descend from anthropocentrism and build an egalitarian relationship with the numerous things in nature. Because anthropocentrism is pernicious to human relationship with other species, we should return to the second stage of development in which men and their counterpart species have a harmonious coexistence. Zhuang Zi’s philosophy contains the seeds of posthumanism. Posthumanism came into existence at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It repositions mankind as a part rather than the center of nature. Cary Wolfe locates posthumanism during the periods both “before” and “after” humanism. “Before in the sense that it names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being not just in its biological but also its technological world, the prosthetic coevolution of the human animal with the technicity of tools and external archival mechanisms (such as language and culture)” (Wolfe 2010: xv). The “before” version of posthumanism significantly resembles Zhuang Zi’s second stage of cosmic development: it is chronologically irretrievable, but it functions as a blueprint for humankind to live up to. “But it comes after in the sense that posthumanism names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore” (xv). The “after” version of posthumanism finds an intellectual reverberation in Zhuang Zi’s philosophy of restoring “the equality of things.”

To achieve egalitarian existence, Zhuang Zi proposes human confrontation with anthropocentric insufficiency. The story of raising a bird exposes a deficiency of human criteria. The Marquis of Lu loves an exotic bird so he employs luxurious treatments to greet the aviary creature. The marquis “welcomed the seabird” in his ancestral temple, performed the most popular music (“The Ninefold Splendors”), and “offered it beef, mutton, and pork as sacrificial victuals” (Zhuang 1994: 171). The bird demonstrated no interest and starved to death after a couple of days. The marquis’ mistake is nourishing the bird in a human way rather than adopting “the nourishment suitable for a bird” (171). The tragic end of the bird exposes the deficiency of a human approach and compels us to acknowledge differences across species. When the music of “The Ninefold Splendors” is played in nature, different species have drastically different responses: “Birds fly away upon hearing it, beasts run away upon hearing it, and fish dive into the depths upon hearing it, but when the masses of men hear it, they circle around and look” (171). Classics such as “The Ninefold Splendors” symbolize the anthropocentric standard and its universal implementation leads to terrifying responses from nonhuman species. This obliges us to go beyond the monopoly of human standards and accept the validity of plural species standards. The flying birds, running beasts and diving fish come from the sky, land, and water, and together they represent a vast spectrum of nonhuman agents: “They are decidedly different from each other, so their likes and dislikes are different.” Zhuang Zi even reverses the situation to deepen our contemplation. If we adopt an animal standard to measure human beings, we would come to realize the absurdity of the universal application of the human yardstick: “Fish dwell in the water and live; if men were to dwell in the water they would die” (Zhuang 1994: 172).

This essay examines “cross-species becoming” from three interconnected aspects: its definition, conditions and manifestations. Zhuang Zi’s concept of “cross-species becoming” possesses three distinctive features: equal, transversal and heteromorphic. The initial appearance of the idea occurs at the end of the second chapter, titled “Equality of Things.”[v] Zhuang Zi dreamt he became a butterfly. Upon his awakening, Zhuang Zi was confused about his identity: was he “Zhuang Zi who had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zi?” Unlike a traditional interpretation of human dreams, Zhuang Zi attaches equal importance to the second part: is he “a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zi?” Therefore, in the world of Zhuang Zi, the butterfly has achieved agency and even possessed the unconsciousness of dreaming, which is regarded as an exclusive human privilege. The parallel structure of the two questions, in reverberation with the chapter title, rhetorically underwrites the metaphysical frame of species equality. Zhuang Zi then moves on to his definition of “cross-species becoming”: “Between Zhuang Zi and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called cross-species becoming” (Zhuang 1968: 49). Apart from species equality, the second feature is the transversal subject.[vi] Things have developed their boundaries; however, the demarcations are not completely sealed. Things still retain the potential of overcoming borderlines and transforming into other species. “Cross-species becoming” superimposes the first cosmic stage on the second one and accentuates the connecting fluidity of the myriad things. At the first stage, things have no boundaries and are in the constant process of becoming; this potential flow of becoming is then passed on to the second phase where things have categorical ambits yet enjoy equal status.

The third trait of “cross-species becoming” is heteromorphic orientation. The majority of the renowned translators of The Zhuang Zi, including A.C. Graham, Burton Watson, Victor H. Mair, and Paul Kjellberg, render “??” as “transformation.” In this article, however, the translation of the term as “cross-species becoming” has two salient advantages. One merit is its indication of a continuous and unperceivable process of becoming. According to Longman Dictionary, “to transform” is “to change completely in form, appearance, or nature” (1988: 1511). Transformation gives the impression that the mutation is sudden, radical, and complete, disconnecting itself from the previous existence. This idea contradicts the Taoist doctrine that everything is in a gradual and dynamic process of changing, and nothing stays static. Becoming accommodates both the unperceivable process of changing and the accumulated result of transformation. This leads to the second advantage: cross-species metamorphosis. Transformation primarily refers to external alterations of the same species. For example, butterflies undergo a series of transformations: from eggs and caterpillars, through chrysalis, and finally to butterflies. Despite the variations of outward forms, the creature beneath the appearances remains within the same species. This differs from the story of Zhuang Zi, who undergoes a cross-species becoming from mankind into a butterfly, which belongs to the class Insecta of kingdom Animalia.

Conditions of “Cross-Species Becoming”

To initiate “cross-species becoming” requires some basic conditions. Mankind uses human organs to perceive the world and experience reality in a unique way, formulating an anthropocentric understanding of nature. Unfortunately, mankind regards that knowledge as the universal yardstick to gauge all species, including both human and non-human counterparts and forgets the anthropocentric prejudice. Zhuang Zi anatomizes the interactive relationship between human organs and knowledge:

“The hundred joints, the nine openings, the six organs, all come together and exist here as my body. But which part should I feel closest to?”

Do we have preference over certain corporeal organs? Or are they simply the servants of our body?

“If they are all servants, then how can they keep order among themselves? Or do they take turns being lord and servant? It would seem as though there must be some True Lord among them” (Zhuang 1968: 49).

Different human organs perceive the world in different ways. Ears can discern acoustic sounds of nature, noses can detect olfactory dimensions of the world, and mouths can distinguish delicate tastes. These organs, as well as their unique perceptions of the world, are supposed to be on an equal footing; however, human preference and cultural values have ranked them into an arbitrary hierarchy, at the top of which is “some True Lord.” Zhuang Zi’s insightful hypothesis of organs’ “taking a turn into the lord and servant” depicts the interpellation process of social subjects. An infant feels closest to his mouth and regards it as the “True Lord” because the oral organ enables him to suck nutrition and build the first social network with his mother. As the infant grows up, ears gradually occupy the position of the Lord since linguistic syllables become omnipresent in his social life. When the child becomes an adult, the eyes become the dominant organ for human beings to perceive and comprehend the world.

Ocularcentric perception then begins to stabilize its position as the “True Lord” among corporeal organs as the individual gradually builds up an anthropocentric knowledge of the world. Confucius concretizes this ocular-centric view:

“The Master said, ‘see what a man does.’/ ‘Observe his motives.’ / ‘Examine in what things he rests.’ / ‘How can a man conceal his character?’ / ‘How can a man conceal his character?’” (Confucius 2009, 10.1-5).

To know a person, Confucius recommends three interconnected ways of seeing. To see one’s behaviors and actions is the preliminary way of obtaining basic information. Then, “to observe” integrates seeing with thinking and goes beyond external behavior to discover the underlying motives. However, because motives often vary in different circumstances, Confucius advises us to penetrate into the root of the matter: “to examine in what things he rests.” Seeing, along with observing and examining, implies a visionary penetration from the surface into the depth and consequently establishes our knowledge of the observed object. And the purpose of human observation is to establish control over the world. “How can a man conceal his character?” The repetitions of the final sentence in the text convey an unmistakable message: a rigid implementation of the recommended observatory procedure is bound to produce the expected result of mastery.

Zhuang Zi’s rigorous analysis reveals the arbitrary nature of human perception, and his series of questions place a critical distance from our inveterate anthropocentric thoughts. To transcend anthropocentrism, Zhuang Zi recommends the practice of forgetting as an effective remedy, which also constitutes the conditions of cross-species becoming. This is exemplified by Yen Hui, who makes progress in his practice of forgetting. First, he has “forgotten benevolence and righteousness,” then “rites and music.” Finally, he arrived at the last phase: “I can sit and forget” (Zhuang 1968: 90). Yen Hui continues to elaborate on this epiphany:

“I smash up my limbs and body, drive out perception and intellect, cast off form, do away with understanding, and make myself identical with the Great Thorough-fare. This is what I mean by sitting down and forgetting everything” (90).

Forgetting the knowledge of the external world enables Yen Hui to get closer to the myriad things in nature. Knowledge, to some degree, is a stereotype of the world. What unconsciously occurs in the process of observation is that we endeavor to identify typical features of the observed thing, then classify the object into a certain category and insert it into the hierarchy of human knowledge. Knowledge tends to act as pre-existing structures to discipline things into manoeuvrable systems. If we unlearn knowledge and deculturize ourselves from our entrenched perspectives, we could look at things from fresh perspectives. It is for this reason that Yen Hui recommends us to “drive out perception and intellect” and “do away with understanding” (90).

If forgetting knowledge facilitates our descent from anthropocentrism, then forgetting our bodily form assists our transcendence over the monolithic perspective of the human species. Human organs have a unique way of perceiving the world and human bodies have special cognitive methods of organizing these inputs. After suspending his intellectual understanding, Yen Hui arrives at a more advanced phase: “I slough off up my limbs and trunk” and “depart from my form” (Zhuang 1994: 64). The realization of deficient human perception and desire to move beyond species confinement paves the path to initiate “cross-species becoming.” The Taoist concept of “sloughing off” corporeal parts has inspired the modern concept of “the Body without Organs:” “A great Japanese compilation of Chinese Taoist treatises was made in A.D. 982-984. We see in it the formation of a circuit of intensities between female and male energy.” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari acknowledge their intellectual indebtedness to the Taoist principle of “Yin-Yang”; however, we find more philosophical affinity between “the Body without Organs” (BwO) and Zhuang Zi’s “discarding bodily parts.” “The BwO: it is already under way the moment the body has had enough of organs and wants to slough them off, or loses them” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 157). The purpose is to produce “a disorganized body” and liberate “molecular multiplicities” (151). Therefore, the BwO defies “the organization of the organs insofar as it composes an organism,” sabotages “significances and subjectifcations as a whole,” and mobilizes “a movement of generalized deterritorialization” (157). The “Body without Organs” has explicitly spelt out the conditions of Zhuang Zi’s “cross-species becoming”: we should abandon the hierarchical organization of human organs and entitle “the hundred joints, the nine openings, and the six organs” with equal opportunities to “take turns being lord and servant” (Zhuang 1968: 38).

Manifestations of “Cross-Species Becoming”

The story of Sir South Wall not only concertizes the conditions of cross-species becoming, but also manifests the possible forms of transformation: “Tzu-Ch’i of South Wall, sat leaning on his armrest, staring up at the sky and breathing, vacant and far away, as though he’d lost companion” (Zhuang 1968: 36). The Taoist master forgets his earthly existence, cuts himself off from worldly companion, and becomes a vacant vessel to embrace things in nature. His disciple makes a penetrating observation of the transformation:

“Can you really make the body like a withered tree and the mind like dead ashes? The man leaning on the armrest now is not he one who leaned on it before” (36).

The image of “dead ashes” visualizes his abandonment of intellectual acumen while the “withered tree” portrays his obliteration of bodily perception; together they constitute the conditions of cross-species becoming. “I have lost myself,” Sir South Wall informs his disciple. Quan Wang contends that the “myself” (me) consists of the “Social I” and the “Corporeal I” and the loss of self suggests the removal of obstacles to the equality of things (Wang 2017: 257).

Sir South Wall becomes his breathing and mingles itself with the wandering wind. “The Great Clod belches out breath and its name is wind” (Zhuang 1968: 36). Wind equalizes things in nature. Wind has no discrimination against anything, and all species in nature, ranging from plants to animals, have an equal opportunity to interact with air. The elaborate depiction of the blowing wind at the beginning of chapter two highlights the title of “Equality of Things.” When the wind blows, “ten thousand hollows begin crying wildly. Can’t you hear them, long drawn out?” Besides, wind, without its own concrete form, metamorphosizes itself with interactive objects: “There are huge trees a hundred spans around with hollows and openings like noses, like mouths, like ears, like jugs, like cups, like mortars, like rifts, like ruts.” The wind blows over huge trees with different shapes of cavities and produces various sounds: “They roar like waves, whistle like arrows, screech, gasp, cry, wail, moan, and howl” (36). Metaphorically, wind exemplifies an inchoate self. Taoist sages often claim that an infant is an idealized self because it has not formulated a corporeal boundary and is in the fluid process of cross-species becoming. This Taoist speculation has solid support from modern science. Within the first six months, an infant has no concept of self, and it identifies itself with any adjacent thing that offers pleasure stimuli. The infant might identify itself with a warm blanket, a milk bottle, or even a toy. The law of this primordial world of fantasy is “universal equivalence,” and things become “a series of equivalences” (Lacan 1988: 86). Gradually, the infant prioritizes the mother’s breast as its primary identity due to frequent maternal feedings. The progression from “heteromorphic identification” to “homeomorphic identification” suggests the child’s growth into the “Mirror Stage” (Lacan 2001: 4).

Philosophically, wind represents Zhuang Zi’s metaphysical exploration into the root of things. For Zhuang Zi, all things originate from air:

“Man’s life is a coming-together of breath. If it comes together, there is life; if it scatters, there is death” (Zhuang 1968: 235).

In addition to man, all species in nature are fundamentally constituted by air: “The ten thousand things are really one.” The “one” in the quote refers to the same constituting material of the world: air. Air follows various categorical principles and is consequently condensed into the myriad things in nature, such as men, animals, and plants. Despite categorical distinctions, the primordial connection among species remains latent. This potential of cross-species becoming has its manifestations; for example, human commiseration with a dog’s suffering or human perception of a flower’s bliss evinces this primordial connection.

Apart from air, another form of cross-species becoming is animal-becoming. The King of Ch’u sent two officials to invite Zhuang Zi to administrate the country. A scared tortoise, after its death, has been “wrapped in cloth and boxed, and store[d] in the ancestral temple” (Zhuang 1968, 188). Zhuang Zi asked the visiting officials: “Now would this tortoise rather be dead and have its bones left behind and honored? Or would it rather be alive and dragging its tail in the mud?” The first tortoise has been assimilated into human culture and it has become a sacred symbol in an anthropocentric system, and the price is the death of animal agency: it becomes an empty vessel for human projections. On the contrary, the second tortoise in the mud refuses human assimilation and endeavors to maintain species autonomy in its familiar habitat. Therefore, Zhuang Zi informs the visitors: “Go away! I’ll drag my tail in the mud!” Zhuang Zi’s becoming animal is an effective approach to relinquishing anthropocentrism. Language is not neutral nor transparent but rather loaded with cultural connotations. The omnipresence of language in the human world has long-lasting and unperceivable influences on our thinking and formation of identity. For Zhuang Zi, these pernicious influences erode our original harmonious connection with the myriad things in nature and insulate us within anthropocentric arrogance. Thus, it is compulsory to escape from linguistic networks and depart from political society. How could it be possible for humans to escape ubiquitous linguistic signifiers which completely envelope our life? Animal-becoming is a possible method. Animals know nothing about human language and live in a world independent of linguistic penetration. Without cultural contamination, animals maintain their primordial connection with the myriad things in nature. Therefore animal-becoming can facilitate humans to descend from anthropocentrism and embrace a horizon-expanding world of multiple species. Taoist sages, who often equalize animals with the unfolding of the Way and urge us to learn from animals, understand this: “The true sage is a quail at rest, a little fledgling at its meal, a bird in flight who leaves no trail behind. When the world has the Way, he joins the chorus with all other things” (Zhuang 1968: 130). Irving Goh reads animal-becoming as “a disavowal of politics” (Goh 2011: 117). “The animal is the disappeared in politics,” and provides a valuable lesson for men “to escape the capture of life by politics, to reclaim life as it is without the demands and limits imposed by politics” (Goh 2011: 118). Goh offers an insightful analysis of the political dimensions of animal-becoming; however, he confines the wide spectrum of cross-species becoming only to animal becoming.

Cross-species becoming is not only a privilege for human beings: animals also have the capacity to metamorphose into other species. The transformation of the huge fish into a bird is featured at the beginning of The Zhuang Zi.

“In the Northern darkness there is a fish and his name is K’un. The K’un is so huge there is no knowing how many thousand li he measures. He changes and becomes a bird whose name is P’eng” (Zhuang 1968: 29).

Zhuang Zi deliberately locates the Northern darkness in “the bald and barren” territory and insulates this geography from mankind. As mentioned in the first part of the essay, the initial stage of creation is prior to the birth of humankind, when things have not formulated rigid boundaries and are in the fluid process of becoming. In other words, human absence means the withdrawal of anthropocentric interference so that things follow their own rhythms and unfold their natural bent. The advent of mankind gradually disrupts the natural balance and builds up human superiority.

In addition to humans and animals, other species in nature are in the fluid process of cross-species becoming. “The seeds of things have mysterious workings” (Zhuang 1968: 195). Things harmonize with adjacent space and change themselves into the surrounding environment. “In the water they become Break Vine, on the edges of the water they become Frog’s Robe. If they sprout on the slopes they become Hill Slippers. If Hill Slippers get rich soil, they turn into Crow’s Feet. The roots of Crow’s Feet turn into maggots and their leaves turn into butterflies” (195). Identity is never an enclosed entity: it is porous of becoming. Then, the butterflies undergo a series of heteromorphic transformations: insects, birds, spray, vinegar, wine, plants, etc. Becoming is endless. Toward the end of this long paragraph, Zhuang Zi deliberately includes humans in the process of species transformation. “Green Peace plants produce leopards and leopards produce horses and horses produce men. Men in time return again to the mysterious workings. So all creatures come out of the mysterious workings and go back into them again” (196). The becoming of species in the passage might not be convincing in terms of modern science, yet it capitulates ancient Chinese nature lore and epitomizes Zhuang Zi’s concept of “cross-species becoming.”

Conclusion

Posthumanism endeavors to remove the centrality of human beings and facilitate an egalitarian relationship with other species. However, it fails to justify the parity of things. In this aspect, Zhuang Zi’s “cross-species becoming” becomes both a supplement to and an ontological foundation for posthumanism. Zhuang Zi examines species relationships from a monistic perspective and provides us with an edifying alternative. For Zhuang Zi, all things in nature, including humans, animals, and plants, originate from a monistic material: air. When air receives different principles, it will be condensed into myriads of things in accordance with the category of the object. “You have only to comprehend the one breath that is the world” (Zhuang 1968: 236). The condensation of air gradually stabilizes the boundaries of things and obscures the original connection among things. As humans integrate themselves into society and become fully-fledged members, they become obsessed with earthly pursuits of wealth and reputations. Zhuang Zi urges us to forget social contaminations to de-obscure our primordial cord with things in nature. Forgetting enables humans to descend from anthropocentrism and to re-establish egalitarian relationships with non-human species. Another related idea derived from the monistic view is the transversal self. For Zhuang Zi, the self is not an enclosed entity, but rather becomes “coextensive with,” to borrow Roger Ames’ term, with the myriad things in the environment (Ames 1984: 124). Transcendence over the egoist self enables one to redefine his sense of interconnection with nonhuman species in nature, which in turn enlarges his self and intensifies his existence. Zhuang Zi’s philosophy of “cross-species becoming” complements posthumanism and together they comprehensively illuminate the intertwined relationships between human and non-human species.

Declaration of Conflict of Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest.

Funding

This work is supported by The National Social Science Fund of China under Grant No. 19BWW005 [Project Title: A Posthumanist Reading of Zhuang Zi and Jacques Lacan].

Notes

[i] Many scholars have similar views, as can be seen in the titles of their articles. For example, Liu Xiaogan’s “Non-action and the Environment Today” in Daoism and Ecology, eds., N.J. Girardot et al, (Cambridge: Harvard UP): 315—340, and Lisa Raphals’ “Metic Intelligence or Responsible Non-Action?” in Daoism and Ecology: 305—31.

[ii] Critics have a controversy over the separation of humankind from things. Deep ecologists and ecofeminists, according to Joanne Birdwhistell, exemplify the polarization of the debate. The former accentuates “the interrelatedness of all things” and denies the separation of the human from the cosmos. In contrast, the latter emphasizes the distinction between humans “as biological organisms and as members of a social community” (Birdwhistell 2001: 39). This article introduces the concept of development to solve the dilemma: initially they are interrelated, then separated, but the separation of things could not conceal their underlying interconnection.

[iii] There is a linguistic difference in expressing the idea of “ninety thousand li.” In Chinese, “ten thousand” is regarded as an essential measuring unit, written as “wan (?).” Therefore, the original text in The Zhuang Zi is “nine wan,” with a salient accentuation on the numerical figure nine rather than ninety.

[iv] Animals in literature and philosophy often function as metaphoric substitutes for human subjects. “Metaphor provides a strong defence for poetics in the service of anthropocentrism, for communicating messages about our essential humanity” (McHugh 2009: 488-9).

[v] Scholars might dispute the translation of “??” (wuhua) as “cross-species becoming.” Some critics tend to regard “equality of things” (??) and its closely related concept of “??” (transformation of things) as the Daoist way to challenge the Confucian stratification of social classes and classification of human values. Other scholars often hold an allegorical or symbolic reading of wuhua in a very literalistic sense. I concede the validity of these readings because The Zhuang Zi does contain rich interpretative possibilities; however, this essay endeavors to reveal another much-neglected meaning of the term: wuhua constitutes the underlying cosmos of Zhuang Zi’s philosophy. Statistic appearances of wuhua in The Zhuang Zi further consolidate this translation. Out of 8 appearances, 5 occasions discuss heteromorphic transformations, and others depict the dynamic status of things.

[vi] Rosi Braidotti first proposes the term “the transversal subject” in her discussion of posthumanism. She defines the subject as “a transversal entity encompassing the human, our genetic neighbours the animals and the earth as a whole, and to do so within an understandable language” (Braidotti 2013: 82). Braidotti is revolutionary in expanding the concept of the human subject to include the non-human species. This essay, however, reserves the term but accentuates the dynamic dimensions of cross-species becoming.

References

Ames, Roger T. (1984). “Coextending Arising, TE, and Will to Power: Two Doctrines of Self-Transformation.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 11(2): 113-138.

Ames, Roger T. (2001). “The Local and the Focal in Realizing a Daoist World” in N. J. Girardot et al (Eds.), Daoism and Ecology (pp.265-282). Cambridge: Harvard UP.

Armstrong, Philip. (2008). What Animals Mean in the Fictions of Modernity. New York: Routledge.

Birdwhistell, Joanne D. (2001). “Ecological Questions for Daoist Thought: Contemporary Issues and Ancient Text” in N. J. Girardot et al (Eds.), Daoism and Ecology (pp.23-44). Cambridge: Harvard UP.

Braidotti, Rosi. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity.

Confucius. (2009). Confucian Analects, trans. James Legge. The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Chinese Classics.

Crutzen, Paul. (2002). “Geology of Mankind,” Nature Jan. 3: 23.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.

Gao, Shan. (2017). “‘Xujing’ (Emptiness and Stillness) in Daoism, Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature, and Environmental Ethics.” Frontiers of Philosophy in China 12 (2): 224-236.

Girardot, N.J. (1978). “‘Returning to the Beginning’ and The Arts of Mr. Hun-Tun in The Chuang Tzu.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 5:21-69.

Goh, Irving. (2011). “Chuang Tzu’s Becoming-Animal.” Philosophy East and West 61(1):110-133.

Guzowska, Joanna. (2015). “The Spatiality of Cognition in the ‘Zhuangzi.’” Frontiers of Philosophy in China 10 (3): 415-429.

Kirkland, Russell. (2001). “‘Responsible Non-Action’ in a Natural World” in Daoism and Ecology, 283-304.

Lacan, Jacques. (1988). Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953-1954, trans. J. Forrester. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Lacan, Jacques. (2001). “Mirror stage” in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Routledge.

Lai, Chi-Tim. (2001). “The Daoist Concept of Central Harmony in the Scripture of Great Peace” in Daoism and Ecology: 95-112.

Liu, Xiaogan. (2001). “Non-Action and the Environment Today” in Daoism and Ecology: 315-340.

McHugh, Susan. (2009). “Literary Animal Agents.” PMLA, 124 (2): 487-495.

Meinertsen, Bo R. (2017). “Towards Gratitude to Nature: Global Environmental Ethics for China and the World.” Frontiers of Philosophy in China 12(2): 207-223.

Miller, James. (2006/2009). “Daoism and Nature” in Oxford Handbook of Religion and Ecology, ed., Roger Gottlieb. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Nelson, Eric Sean. (2009). “Responding with Dao: Early Daoist Ethics and the Environment.” Philosophy East and West 59(3): 294-316.

Raphals, Lisa. (2001). “Metic Intelligence or Responsible Non-Action?” in Daoism and Ecology : 305-314.

“Transform.” (1988). Longman Cotemporary English-Chinese Dictionary, ed. Paul Procter. Hong Kong: Longman.

Wang, Quan. (2017). “A Comparative Study of the Subject in Jacques Lacan and Zhuangzi.” Asian Philosophy 27(3): 248-262.

Wolfe, Cary. (2009). “Human, All Too Human,” PMLA 124 (2): 564-575.

Wolfe, Cary. (2010). What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.

Yang, Tongjin. (2017). “Is There an Identity Crisis in Environmental Ethics?” Frontiers of Philosophy in China 12 (2): 195-206.

Yao, Xinzhong. (2017). “Thinking Environmentally: Introduction to the Special Issue on Environmental Ethics.” Frontiers of Philosophy in China 12 (2): 191-194.

Zhuang Zi. (1968). The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, trans. Burton Watson. Columbia UP.

Zhuang Zi. (1994). Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu, trans. Victor H. Mair. U of Hawai’i P.

Quan Wang is Professor of English at Beihang University, Beijing. He has published 26 articles in A&HCI journals. His recent publications include “Narrative Disruption” (Journal of Literary Studies), “A Posthumanist Reading of Knowledge in Zhuangzi and Lacan” (Asian Philosophy), “A Comparative Study of the Subject in Lacan and Zhuangzi” (Asian Philosophy), “A Lacanian Reading of RIP” (Explicator), “The Movement of the Letter in A Doll House” (Journal of European Studies), “The Lack of Lack” (Women’s Studies). Professor Wang specializes in critical theories and American novels, especially Edgar Allan Poe, Toni Morrison, and posthumanism. He was also a US-Sino Fulbright Research Scholar at Yale University (2015-2016).

Book Review: Transient by Tapati Gupta

Book Review/V14N2

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Bolpur: Birutjatio Sahitya Sammiloni, 2021. 150 pp. Rs. 375. ISBN: 978-81-953067-3-2

Reviewed by
Somdatta Mandal
Former Professor of English, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. Email: somdattam@gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages 1-3. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.27

First published: June 27, 2022 | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This review is published under Volume 14, Number 2, 2022)
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For a literary, art critic, as well as a painter who has specialized in drama criticism, Tapati Gupta dons many hats. Her latest contribution is a wonderfully rich collection of poems that she had been writing over time across decades, and after being confined at home for a long period of time, especially during the lock-down months, they have at last seen the light of day. These poems, according to the Foreword written by the renowned poet Bashabi Fraser, “have moved from the private notebook to the public sphere” and have provided her readers with different emotions that according to Gupta’s own words played “hide and seek between the inside and the outside that rattled our lives all through the lockdown months.” Though including many pre-pandemic poems as well, the poems in this collection overall provides release “from micro-time in micro space” and along with several paintings, “enabled her to remain positive throughout those dark days” (iv).

There is no particular order in which Gupta presents her poems to the readers. They evoke different emotions ranging from anger and anguish to love and peace. But as readers, we find several categories under which they can be broadly classified. The first and foremost group is on familial relationships. In ‘Ma’, she evokes her mother by remembering the all-encompassing affinity with her as a true friend – “You give me company still wherever I am.” Similar feelings come out for her father where she longs for him in his absence, remembering “a long-cherished bondage” (‘To My Father’). In another poem she specifically remembers the details of her daughter’s birth in Ashar, June 16, 1980 and in ‘Pain,’ after remembering different kinds of pain, she admits, “one pain that makes me endure is the pain of missing you in my arms, my daughter.”

As an English teacher specializing in drama, it is expected that some of her poems will discuss or mention this genre. Referring to the story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra in a long poem titled, ‘Agamemnon,’ she begins by addressing him directly, “When last in Greece I met you Agamemnon/ looking at the ruins of your own estate,” and then goes on to state” “The curse over your dynasty Agamemnon/ has done a good deed.” Explaining the reason for it she succinctly adds —

“We prefer drama and art and poetry

and think it is politically and intellectually correct

to think like this.

You made great art to happen,

so better to live and do and die as you did

and still be Agamemnon.”

There are several poems which Gupta wrote while touring different places of Europe and the Middle East. The titles of these poems are self-explanatory – ‘Istanbul Memories,’ ‘Ultramarine Istanbul’ (“Why did you squeeze that tube of ultramarine/onto that line of land?”), ‘Dolphins in the Bosphorous,’ ‘Rider on the Waves,’ ‘The Ottoman Hamam,’ where “the whiteness struck with its moon-haze.” In Europe she is moved by ‘Da Vinci by the Loire,’ ‘Piraeus in the Twilight,’ ‘Eiffel Tower,’ ‘Notre Dame,’ ‘Paris at Night,’ she remembers Vienna and the Danube, the ‘Night Train to Barcelona,’ and in ‘Tagore in Mykonos’ she narrates the story of an old woman and Greek men who are enamoured by the poet’s music though they could not understand the song’s meanings. Along with touring different places, she also writes about the birds, animals and nature she witnessed there. Thus, we get a long poem on the seagull obviously inspired by Jonathan Livingstone Seagull by Richard Bach and says, “You are ready to take off/with your wings coloured by golden dreams” (‘The Young Seagull’) and another one where she praises the lifestyle of the condor which she saw while driving down from the skiing resort in Valle Nevado in Chile (‘Condor in the Andes’). She even invites the reader, “Come I will take you into the desert.” Willunga, Adelaide in Australia also finds a place in the anthology. Closer home she even records her experiences after visiting the crematorium at Tarapith.

Personal emotions also play a significant role in many of Gupta’s poems. In ‘Twenty Years From Now,’ she feels “the world may be a little better because/ I was important in the life of a student.” In ‘The Identity Card,’ she states, “Today I lost my identity/and found my many selves” and then she goes to a dream world. Later she gets out of it and says, “When morning dawned I was back again/in the old worn world of cold rationality/ My lost identity lay there beside my first cup of tea.” In another interesting poem called ‘Elusive,’ she declares –“Elusive poetry, do not elude me” and then states, “Poetry I have no time for you/but do not go away/ wait till I finish watching the grand show.” In ‘Birthday Thoughts,’ she exclaims, “Thank you! My friends for making the day so different.” She longs for all the lost things from her life, “When will be the day that will/bring back all the lost times” (‘Lost’).

Towards the end of her collection comes a series of poems based on experiences of being cloistered at home during the pandemic situation. These poems are very moving and express real-life situations as poetically as possible. A couple of poems had been inspired by the death of the veteran actor Soumitra Chatterjee. In ‘The Other Room’ she mentions people going in but not coming out at all. The poem on the hundreds of miles that the migrant workers had to walk to reach home after the lock-down was declared, is extremely moving, especially as it is accompanied by a pencil sketch (‘The Walk.’) In ‘Bodies Everywhere,’ we read about harsh reality where “instead of melodies and flowers/he finds blood stench everywhere.” In the long poem entitled ‘Monologue 2020’ the poet begins with a question, “Who am I?/Just a unit in time”. Her soul searching goes on throughout the poem and she blames mankind for neglecting nature too much and “covidising the world” and ends with these lines – “May you re-achieve the zenith of perfection/ but do not forget me, the dauntless 2020 /build me a memorial with grass flowers and thorns.” In the last poem in this collection, the poet watches three birds circling and playing with each other outside and then writes, “From my window I watch/ till they enter and peck me urging me /to make the distant near/ nearer and nearer till I become one /with those who want to remember me” (“Epilogue”).

Dedicated to her husband Swapan Gupta, who was always the first listener of her poetic musings, the multifarious nature of subjects and styles of the poems makes this book interesting to read. The world is brought alive through the different kinds of poems which are often stylistically quite different from one another. The aesthetically pleasing cover image titled “Inspiration” done in oil on canvas and along with several other poems that are accompanied by illustrations from her own repertoire of paintings, the book is a must read for everyone as the poems evoke the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ as well as the Wordsworthian dictum of ‘emotions recollected in tranquility.’ Fraser rightly compares Gupta’s poems with Wordsworth Lucy poems, content to hide behind a mossy stone undiscovered but brimming with truth, life and colour. After this first book of poems the reader will expectantly wait for the next volume.

Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is Former Professor of English, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan.

“Theatre is not a casual engagement, it is a daily ritual”: Imphal and the Chorus Repertory Theatre as the Sites of Performance

North East Literature & Culture/Performance Studies

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Subhash Chandra Das¹ & Jyotirmoy Prodhani²
¹Associate Professor, Department of English, B.H. College, Assam (Gauhati University).
Email: dassubhashc@gmail.com. ORCID: 0000-0002-4346-5444
²Professor, Department of English at North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU), Shillong, Meghalaya.
Email: rajaprodhani@gmail.com. ORCID: 0000-0002-3420-4322

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022. Pages 1-16. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne46

First published: June 30, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This editorial is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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Abstract:

The paper contains an exclusive interview of Ratan Thiyam (1948), the famous theatre director from the Northeast and one of the major protagonists of the Theatre of Roots movement in India. The paper also provides the authors’ experience with the place, Imphal, (capital of Manipur state), its people, and its milieu which intimately informed the creative self of Thiyam and his theatre abode—the Chorus Repertory Theatre (CRT). Manipur is a state of an enigma for many outside the state, not only in the mainland but even in other parts of the Northeast as well because Manipur is seen as a place that has been a theatre of political turmoil and unrest following protracted militancy, ethnic anxieties and the tumults of identity assertions besides being subjected to the draconian AFSPA for the longest period of time. Against such a backdrop life continues to thrive in Imphal which provides elaborate nuances and contradictions turning the cityscape itself into a space of performance. The interview was taken on the sidelines of the National Theatre Festival 2017, at the CRT where some of the significant contemporary Indian plays were also performed including Thiyam’s Urubhangam. The paper attempts to look at Thiyam’s theatre against the cultural and spatial context of Manipur and to see how theatre can evolve as an organic form of artistic expression.

Keywords: Performance, Ratan Thiyam, CRT, Theatre of Roots, Urubhangam

Richard Schechner (2006) says ‘anything’ and ‘everything’ can be part of ‘performance’ (p.1). He describes performance as a “broad spectrum” or “continuum of human actions” (p.2) ranging from sports, popular entertainment, performing arts (theatre, dance, music) media as well as everyday activities like the enactment of social, professional, gender, race, and class roles, and even the acts of healing —from shamanism to surgery. The range of performance has further expanded now with the proliferation of digital platforms. Notably, performance is determined not only by the performers but also by its surroundings, its social milieu and also by the history of the place. Therefore, the same play by two different directors from two different locales would differ from each other. K.N. Panikkar and Ratan Thiyam’s productions of Bhasa’s Urubhangam are completely different from each other in terms of their performative forms and theatrical executions, as they have designed their performances based on their respective cultural as well as historical contexts.

Thus, performance is not only a composition implemented through the conscious acts of the actors on stage and the accompanying musicians in the background alone; the passive aspects of performance are equally important without which performance cannot be complete, not even possible. Such aspects would include the lights, settings, props, audience, and also the whole space, for they together form the syntax of semiotic totality of a performance. Performance space is generally understood as the space where the actual performance takes place. However, this space has a culture-specific dimension which is informed and determined by the cultural geography of the place giving it its distinctive character, historicity, and also its identity. Therefore, every culture has its own exclusive performance tradition and modes that are distinct and different from the other. Ankia Naat, developed by Srimanta Sankardeva in the 16^th century Assam, could only be possible against the geographic, cultural and historical context of the place and time that it belonged. The same is true for other traditions such as Kutiattyam of Kerala, Yakshagana of Karnataka, Kuchipudi of Andhra Pradesh or Jatra of Bengal.

Time is another key aspect that plays a seminal role in providing a connotative dimension to performance as it is time that assigns fresh significations and meanings to a performance. The Off-Off-Broadway theatre movement of America could emerge as a reaction against the robust capitalist exigencies of postmodern America, it could have never happened at any other time. Similarly, the Theatre of Roots movement of India could only emerge in the aftermath of India’s independence as a result of its desperate search for a form that was quintessentially Indian to assert a claim for a modern theatrical form of its own, free from the colonial cultural baggage. The evolution of a theatre tradition cannot be in an empty space, rather it invariably happens in the wake of the cultural, political, historical as well as day-to-day exigencies of a given place and time.

The Setting: Imphal and CRT

When we reached Imphal on 29 March 2017, by an Indigo flight from Guwahati, we were actually clueless about the place. The image and ideas about Imphal that we carried were mostly shaped by the media, hence we anticipated a war-ravaged town with the gun-trotting armed personnel patrolling the streets against heaps of ruins. The few things we knew about Imphal were that there was an all-women market, Ima Keithel¹ (Mother’s market) where all the shops were owned by women and that it was a dry state². Manipur is known for the dance tradition of Raas Leela as well as Lai Haraoba and also the indigenous martial art, thang ta. Quite significantly these traditions are integral to the theatre productions of Ratan Thiyam. However, Manipur has always been there in the news as a militancy hotbed, known all over as the state having the uncanny distinction of being under the longest imposition of one of India’s deadliest anti-terrorism Acts called the AFSPA or the Armed Forces (Special Power) Act³ which turned citizens of Manipur, in the age group from nineteen to ninety, as they say, into potential candidates to be halted, questioned, picked up or even killed at will by the armed forces virtually whenever they wished to. It reached a flashpoint with the alleged brutal killing of Thangjam Manorama by the Armed forces in 2004 which led 12 Imas (mothers) to disrobe and carry out the historic protest in front of the Kangla Fort⁴which was the Headquarters of the Assam Rifles. Significantly, the protest turned into almost a live enactment of the famous sequence of H. Kanhailal’s play, Draupadi (2000), based on Mahasweta Devi’s Dopdi, where the protagonist, Draupadi, subjected to sexual threats and mutilation, vanquished the aggressive masculinity of the Senanayak with the banal power of her naked body by challenging him to rape her. Kanhailal once said that following the KAngla Fort protest, people used to call him a seer as if he had foreseen almost with a prophetic vision what was to come four years later (in his interview with Prodhani, 2015). Life in Manipur against such backdrops seemed like a tightrope walk holding a precarious pole of faith that keeps oscillating between hope and a mess.

In 2017 Manipur was yet to come under the ILP (Inner Line Permit)⁵ regime unlike Mizoram, Nagaland, and Arunachal Pradesh in the Northeast. Therefore, after having arrived at the small but well-decorated airport, we came out of the lounge without having to show our permits and credentials. Coming out we saw several taxi drivers standing in front of the gate expecting passengers. In the Northeast, there are at least three similar airports – Aizawl, Agartala and Imphal— the three state capitals with small airports of similar sizes. The arrival lounges of these small airports would typically feature the billboards of the state tourism departments showcasing the picture-perfect scenes of the landscape and some historic monuments of the states, dancers in gorgeous ethnic costumes and also stalls selling exquisite ethnic wares at high prices for the travellers to pick up their souvenirs as the last-minute picks. But Imphal airport has one difference—it is an international airport, which we did not know until we had arrived there. Bir Tikendrajit International Airport. The borders of Manipur are the final lines of India’s map in the Eastern extreme, hence Imphal in the common imagination in the mainland is the end of the world, a Shangrila, beyond that exists a frontier with fading horizons and a void.

As we drove in a Maruti 800 towards the Manipur University Guest House, we were in for a big surprise. Contrary to our premonition of frequent halt by the armed personnel in combat fatigue, there were hardly any in the street and more surprisingly, unlike the streets from the airport to the city in the other similar airports of the Northeast, the road to Imphal from the airport was unexpectedly wide and straight like an arrow, running through the assured stretches of the plains on either side dotted with well-appointed showrooms of premium cars and bikes that included TATA, Mahindra, Honda, Toyota and several other billboards including that of the Sangai Festival. The festival was over last winter, but the boards were still there. The driver, an enthusiastic and stylish man in his early thirties, informed us that the Sangai Festival was one of the biggest annual festivals of Manipur and the sangai, an endangered antler and the mascot of the event, was found only in Manipur. As we drove down, he informed us that it was Tiddim Road, the Indo-Myanmar international road that went right into Tiddim in Myanmar. This road seemed one of the widest in any city in the Northeast. Manipur has a sense of space. Wide and vast, plain and fertile. No wonder when, just before India’s Independence in 1947, a section of the British officials proposed a Crown Colony⁶ comprising the Northeastern states including the Chittagong hill tracts (now in Bangladesh), and also parts of Burma, they wanted to develop Imphal with an international airport as the capital of that dream, to turn the city into the gateway to South East Asia. Imphal might well have turned into the Hong Kong of Northeast had the plan for the Crown Colony materialised. Being so close to Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and Laos and the other South East Asian countries, Imphal, in fact, still has the geographical edge to become, with the right policy and planning, a major economic hub, a veritable ‘Mumbai of the Northeast’.

At the university we were the guests of Prof. Gambhir Singh of Manipur University who had arranged a three-wheeler tempo, a popular mode of transport in Imphal, to take us to CRT situated on the outskirts of the city. Our vehicle would take us to the CRT and bring us back after the show at around 8 pm at night, which was, by Imphal standards, rather quite late at night. The tempo rickshaw drove us through Imphal town. Our driver, Ranjit, a Meitei boy, who was also on a contractual job at the university, showed us the gate of the famed Kangla Fort. The roads in the central junction of the city had fancy cast iron railings like the ones one comes across in some parts of Calcutta. Contrary to our anticipation, downtown Imphal was not a sleepy pad, but rather a bustling city with a busy throng.

But as we proceeded, one thing struck us—the residential buildings had some common characteristics. Most of the multi-storied buildings were large, straight, and in terms of visual appeal quite banal, and noticeably, they mostly looked incomplete for most of them were not coloured as the outer walls were left without the final coat of plaster and the red bricks of the walls were left bare to tackle abrasion of weather by their own. Could it be the impact of protracted militancy that none wanted to be too visible in the vicinity? Coming from Shillong, where exquisitely designed houses are a common feature, Imphal looked rather plain in this respect. As we left behind the main city and entered the outskirts of Imphal, the landscape looked familiar, quite like that of the small towns in Assam—full of greenery, sprawling household campuses, betel nut groves and a pleasant but a bit humid climate. From the main road, our vehicle diverted to a gravel path that ran through the green fields on either side. Right at the junction, there was a Gate welcoming visitors to the All India Theatre Festival at the Chorus Repertory Theatre (CRT), one of Northeast India’s most legendary abodes of theatre. They call it the CRT Shrine. CRT is spread over a sprawling campus fortified by walls and many of the structures were still under construction. Entering through the first gate of the compound one comes across the first CRT building, an Assam-type, single-storeyed long structure. The compound was well-curated with several artistically designed artefacts and wood crafts including the publicity boards of the earlier productions of the CRT which were painted on the iron sheet boards signed by Ratan Thiyam. One could see the great artistic skill of the legendary theatre Director. There were boards of Macbeth, Chakravyuha and also of Chinglon Mapan, Tampak Ama (Nine Hills One Valley). The last play is the part of the Manipur Trilogy along with Wahoudok (Prologue) and Hey Nongshibi Pritihivi (My Earth, My Love), which were competently translated by our friend Bijoykumar Tayenjam which is also part of the course that we teach in our university.

Before coming to Imphal we were constantly in touch with Mr. Dolendra, the Manager of CRT. He took us to his office and gave us the brochures and cards to watch the plays. When enquired about the possibility of meeting Ratan Thiyam, Mr. Dolendra, a thin bespectacled gentleman, was not quite sure when ‘Oja’ would come to the venue. He had introduced us to his son instead, Thawai—a handsome, energetic man with a smile. He showed us the compound, the CRT shrine where the festival was underway and also showed the tea stall if we wanted a break. When we asked him how to meet Ratan Thiyam, he was also a little evasive. He advised us to watch the play first and assured us of a possible appointment. He got busy with the arrangements. Suddenly there was a spell of rain, so we took shelter under the Shrine. But the CRT people were moving about with the usual pace from one building to another with their hats on without at all bothering about the rain. None even took an umbrella.

Just before the show began, Ratan Thiyam, the legend of Indian theatre, entered the venue. He came in a dark suit with a red silk square on his breast pocket. He was the most distinctive presence in the venue. Everybody approached him with veneration and greeted him with namaskar to which he responded just by his nodding head. He went toward the open tea stall and sat under a shed. Dolendra hastily went to him with a bunch of files and papers and they discussed for quite some time when we were cooling our heels to get a chance to introduce ourselves. But before we could go near him, he got up and moved towards the Shrine. He went in and disappeared. We noticed that somehow everybody maintained a respectable distance from him, everybody would become self-conscious if happened to cross his path, after all, he was such a towering presence in the theatre shrine.

We went inside the hall. It was an amphitheatre where the audience was to sit in the permanent gallery and the play was to be performed on the floor down below. The entire hall was covered with screens in Thiyam’s favourite colour—black. One of the major creative ambitions of Thiyam, as he said once, was to create the colour black in his productions (see Das, 2018). The scheduled play that evening was Panchajanya, a production by Nandikar of Rudraprasad Sengupta, another legendary figure of contemporary Indian theatre from Kolkata. In the play, Sohini Sengupta, daughter of Rudrapradad, was in the lead role to enact the role of Radha. Indian theatre in Eastern India is slowly making a transition from one generation to another. The play reinterpreted Krishna and his evolution from a pastoral hero to a major protagonist of grand politics and his subsequent entanglement with a devastating moral crisis. Here, Krishna is a humanised individual rather than a divine figure. This was an energetic, vibrant performance with a lot of interplay of colour and lights.

Sohni Sengupta, while speaking about the play confided that when they were preparing the play for the theatre festival at CRT, they were particularly attentive to infusing a lot of energy into the play, therefore they had improvised their performance with several elements from Ratan Thiyam’s poetics of theatre. The inclusion of the martial arts based on Manipuri thang ta to enact the fight sequences was one such improvisation.

After the show, we could meet Ratan Thiyam, who advised us to come the next day in the evening for the interview.

Image 1: The Chorus Repertory Theatre (CRT) at Imphal

We also met Thawai before leaving CRT for that evening. He was happy that we could get an appointment with his father. He also informed us that the closing play of the festival would be a CRT production; it could be either Urubhangam, one of the legendary productions directed by the Master, Ratan Thiyam or a new production, Dumb Waiter of Harold Pinter, directed by Thawai. But our preference was Urubhangam. He also told us that he had got his theatre training in Japan under the legendary theatre director of Asia, Tadashi Suzuki.

Image 2: On the entrance of CRT the boards of two famous plays are on display- Nine Hills One Valley and Chakravyuha

Coming out of the CRT we saw the tempo rickshaw of Ranjit waiting for us in front of the gate. It was about 8 pm at night and the roads were deserted. As we entered the city thoroughfare, most of the shutters were down barring a few medicine stores and other odd shops. But the empty roads looked fully decked up. In many places, they put up barricades on one side of the road and lit up the venue with bright lights, played loud music and the young boys and girls in their gorgeous phanek and traditional wear overtook the streets to dance. We stopped our vehicle and got down to watch the programmes. Ranjit informed us that the soiree would be on for long because it was a special time; it was time for the Sajibu Cheiraoba or the Sajibbu Nongma Panba festival. In between March and April, they celebrate the Manipuri or the Meitei New Year festival and organise programmes of dance and music in their respective localities. The overall mood all around was like that of Rongali Bihu in Assam when thousands throng the venues to celebrate the spring festival. Given the festive mood and the spontaneous community participation in the cultural programmes, it was difficult to imagine that this was one of the most ‘disturbed states’ of the country. Sajibu Cheiraoba is part of the indigenous faith of the Meiteis, the Sanamahi religion though Vaishnavism is the main religious order in Manipur. But in recent times there have been serious efforts to revive the rites and rituals of Sanamhai among the new generation. The cultural revival in Manipur has its impact on the script of Manipuri language too. The king of Manipur, Garib Nawaz (King Pamheiba) adopted Gaudiya Vaishnavism in the early 18^th century under the influence of Shanti Das Gosain. This was the time when a large number of Puyas written in Manipuri script were burnt and the Bengali script was adopted for the language. However, the ancient script of Manipur, the Meitei Mayek, has been retrieved and restored in recent times.

The next morning, we went to the famous Ima Keithel—the Mother’s Market- also called the Nupi keithel or the Women’s Market. It was literally an all-women market. The huge market had only women shopkeepers who were selling an assortment of stuff and wares, from household implements to attractive Manipuri dresses, ornate puja items, exotic handicraft pieces, imported blankets, T-shirts, jackets and also the famous Manipuri mosquito nets. Most of the tourists while browsing through the market would get stuck with the mosquito nets as an unexpected discovery. Those shops were crowded with tourists and also families of army officials who were on a spree binge buying the mosquito nets. Some even called home to get the right count to pick up nets for each bed, as it were. Those mosquito nets were not ordinary ones; they looked straight from a royal bedroom. Those were so rich and luxuriant that it was almost impossible to avoid them. In fact, we saw such mosquito nets mostly in interior decoration magazines. Prices ranged from rupees one thousand to five thousand apiece and even more if it was customised for special occasions like weddings etc. We also ended up buying a couple of nets for ourselves. Manipur is also famous for blankets and many other foreign brands which were directly imported from Myanmar through the Moreh market at the Indo-Myanmar border. No wonder, the Manipuri youths are known as the brand-conscious fashionistas flaunting their imported haute couture.

Image 3: Ima Keithel (Mother’s market) or Nupi Keithel (Women’s market) in Imphal

Imphal is also the place where everything related to Govinda puja and Krishna samkirtan is greatly available. In fact, Imphal looks like a temple town where devotion to Krishna is quite evident in public spaces as women and young girls would sport tilak neatly drawn from the foreheads reaching to the tips of their noses. This was not meant only for some religious occasions but it was a part of the everyday formal dress code. One can feel that in public places without that tilak they might well feel a little awkward. There were plenty of shops selling high-quality brass wares. That part of the market looked like an extension of a temple compound where one could pick up assortments of puja items—ornate dresses for idols, brass lamps, bells, mandiras and so on. The city of Imphal has its own rhythm as an abiding site performing life.

The Interview

As we reached the CRT a little early that day. Ratan Thiyam arrived at the venue in his trademark black suit and sat in his usual spot under a cottage-like shed when Mr. Dolendra came to him with files and papers. In the midst of their conversation, we proceeded to him. As Mr. Dolendra made room for us, we set up our camera and switched on the recorder to go ahead with the session.

Image 4: Ratan Thiyam at CRT (2017)

Subhash Das: Indian theatre has come a long way. There have been major experiments in contemporary Indian theatre, especially in the form of Theatre of Roots,⁸ a movement of which you have been one of the major pioneers. How do you look at the contemporary theatre in India, including your own theatrical repertoire?

Ratan Thiyam: Well, I believe theatre is a continuous process; it is a laboratory where we as individuals, associated with theatre, keep exploring varied dimensions of the art form which, of course, keep evolving with the change of time. Therefore, you see, it cannot get stuck anywhere, it cannot be like stagnant water; it has to be always fresh and flowing.

Jyotirmoy Prodhani: How do you accomplish that?

RT: Theatre is not a casual engagement; it is a daily ritual. In order to keep theatre fresh, to bring in that fresh dimension and attitude, one needs to make it happen from within—one needs to keep the very thought process associated with theatre ever alive and dynamic. Theatre evolves through our sustained attachment to it, which does not get over at one particular juncture. One thing or one production, or one kind of exposition is not really enough to depict my ideas or can really portray my notion of theatre. So, you have to keep renewing your mode of engagement, you must have the agility to adopt and adapt to the changes. And I firmly believe in the changing dimensions of theatre. After all, theatre by nature is a medium of constant experimentation.

SD: How do you think the other components of theatre have led to the changing dimensions of its form?

RT: Theatre is a composite art form; a composite totality and every component here has its own modes of evolution and changes. You can see how, throughout the world, various art forms are undergoing changes and transformations. Theatre by default becomes a part of that dynamism, that mode of transformation. In fact, many other composite art forms are changing the world over, and theatre, as one of the composite art forms, is no exception. So, naturally, theatre reflects and will reflect, or any art form for that matter, those dynamics of changes. I mean, it strives to reach out to the elements of aesthetics all the time. For me, it is not really one kind of exposition or description that one should think of in terms of theatre. At least I don’t think so.

JP: Sir, how do you look at the Indian theatre now? After all, you Panikkar, Habib Tanvir, Badal Sircar, and others have been the pioneers in evolving a new kind of experiment in Indian theatre.

RT: I think technology has really come into Indian theatre though it has come very slowly, gradually; but now it is a sudden kind of advent of technology. And it has affected us in a big way. It is, I would say, a good thing, you know, and also a bad thing. I mean, merits and demerits of it, because, so far as the creativity in theatre is concerned, there may be technological advent with creativity; but at the same time, I believe, there should be a balance; there we need to work out to draw a balance between technology and human(e) qualities. That’s very important in order to understand art because art is all about, particularly in theatre and performance by human beings. It cannot be overshadowed by technology.

SD: In your plays violence is a recurring motif that keeps coming back to your plays, to your interpretations of experiences where Manipur is also one of the major recurring images. How do you think, over the years, your plays could affect this very consciousness, i.e., the Manipuri consciousness vis-à-vis the lived realities of the place and the people…

RT: It is not really only Manipur; it is about the entire human race, you see. The turmoil is everywhere, in any portion of this world, which is really violent. And one has to think about it because it is not something that is happening far away from us, at a distance, somewhere in another country. It is not. It affects us with its impact, the kind of vibration, the violent vibration, that we are getting around is very dangerous. So, one has to be very much aware and alert (and) which would naturally find reflections in various productions, in various art forms, and in cultural expressions. In fact, everywhere. If it is not, it is not like the time when entire Europe or even the oriental factor in the Orient had expressed common concerns. The impressionist or expressionist painters were coming up. The kind of paintings that artists like Pablo Picasso did were something to protest against the war. They reflected the time in their paintings irrespective of whether something was good or not very good at that point in time but they tried to reflect their anxieties and experiences in their art, in their paintings, in various expressions of culture. They also came to the theatre, opera…., in everything, you see. Therefore, it is very natural that it automatically finds its reflections in our minds which is also an expression of the time.

JP: Epic is one of the most powerful and profound metaphors in your plays as you keep reinterpreting the epics, the epic motifs. How do you relate your experiences of the epic to that of modern theatre?

RT: See, epic is a very big thing It carries many dimensions. So, when you work with an epic that means you can work with the multifaceted dimensions that unfold layers after layers. Therefore, it is exciting and you try to portray its varied nuances and aspects through the portrayal of its characters. These characters are really very, very strong. They are a powerful lot of characters that emerge in the epics, whether it is in the Mahabharata or in the Ramayana. All these aspects are enormously interesting. Human beings or human civilizations though often thought to have changed a lot, I don’t think the human mind has travelled that far. It remains a kind of mind that dwells in many aspects of the epics. Therefore, we enjoy the epics; they make such an impact upon us. It talks about morality, high moral values, it talks about philosophy, it talks about arts, it talks about everything. So, it becomes an important imperative to explore the idea of an epic. If one is exploring that, I think it’s a beautiful thing.

He stood up as one of the CRT guys came and informed that the play was about to start. He politely took leave, “I think I have to leave now. The play is about to begin. Don’t forget to watch our play tomorrow, if you are around.”

***

The play that evening was Tumhara Vincent directed by Satyabrata Rout of Rangakalpa from Hyderabad. The highlight of the play was the recreation of the yellow sunflowers of Vincent van Gogh all over the stage through the use of light and cloth props that depicted not only the creations of Van Gogh but also the artist’s intense struggles against the dehumanising tentacles of capitalism. After the play, Prof. Rout informed the audience that there was a major glitch as one of their actors could not come beyond Guwahati and failed to arrive at Imphal that morning. Therefore, her part was enacted by one of the actors from CRT who was prepared barely a few hours before the show and she acted impeccably. Prof. Rout praised the rigorous training regime in the CRT developed by Ratan Thiyam.

As we came out of the show, Thawai informed us that the next day, as the closing act, it would be Urubhangam and not his play, The Dumb Waiter, as he was too busy to be with the team to prepare for the play next evening. So, they had settled for Urubhangam, which the actors knew by heart, like the back of their hands to pull off the play at any time.

Urubhangam

It was the sixth and the last day of the Theatre Festival. We were inside the packed CRT Shrine. The thespian arrived. It was his play today. Bhasha’s Urubhangam. This play by Thiyam is an iconic play in the history of modern Indian theatre. This is one of the major plays often cited as an example of what the theatre critics Suresh Awasthi and Richard Schechner defined as the Theatre of Roots – post-independent India’s most significant theatre movement. Ratan Thiyam, Ebrahim Alkazi, K.N. Panikkar, Habib Tanvir, B.V. Karanth and others were the major exponents of this movement that had picked up in the ‘70s. This was a movement in search of a form of its own as the Indian theatre was in an urgent need to invent an indigenous theatrical form by liberating itself from the dominant Western mode of theatrical representation. Theatre could have been one of the most effective discourses to achieve post-independent India’s cultural goal of decolonisation.

The last show of the festival was dedicated to another legendary theatre director from Manipur, H. Kanhailal, who had expired the previous year in 2016. The opening play of the festival was Kanhailal’s one of the most celebrated plays, Pebet. The play was one of his early productions, first performed in 1975. Theatre critic Rustom Bharucha (1999) had described the plays of Kanhailal as ‘Poor Theatre’ However, Kanhailal preferred to call his theatre the ‘Theatre of the Earth’ (qtd. in Prodhani, 2014). Pebet is a rare bird found in Manipur, smaller than a sparrow. The director used the bird as a metaphor to depict the contemporary social and political crisis of his state. The most striking aspect of the play was the unique mode of theatrical narrative that Kanhailal had developed through this play which eventually turned out to be the hallmark of his theatre. Kanhailal was everything what Ratan Thiyam is not. Though intense and evocative, unlike Thiyam, Kanhailal’s plays are stark and spartan, distinctively marked by the conspicuous absence of the luxurious play of lights or elaborate costumes. His theatre abode, Kalakshetra Manipur, is another important theatre school of contemporary theatre in Imphal.

Urubhangam of Thiyam, on the other hand, represents the quintessential creative vigour of Ratan Thiyam. The classical Sanskrit play by Bhasha depicted the last few days of Duryodhana after he was defeated by Bhima through an unfair battle. The invincible Duryodhana was hit below the belt by Bhima at the instigation of Krishna, violating the rule of the game. In the duel with maces, at the instigation of Krishna, Bhima had hit Duryodhana on his thighs, which was against the basic principles of war. Unprepared for such an enormous violation of the fundamental ethics of battle by his adversary, Duryodhana fell to the ground. With broken thighs, he was lying in a remote corner of the vast Kurukshetra battleground. His young son, Durjaya, his wives and his parents, Gandhari and Dhritarashtra, would come looking for their father, husband and son. Every dramatic moment was intensified by the beating of the drum, the only musical instrument used to complement the moods of the scenes as the background score, be it the fights, moments of melancholy, despair, anger and also joy and divine solace. The actors not only used the traditional costume but extensively incorporated the mudras and gestures from the classical Manipuri dance, Raas Leela. The fight sequences were enacted through the prolific display of thang ta, an indigenous martial art tradition of Manipur. This is one of the signature plays of Ratan Thiyam in terms of its stylistics—particularly the use of light, colour and costume. As opposed to Kanhailal, the productions of Ratan Thiyam are visual extravaganzas, which he achieved not by using opulent settings but through its poetic plasticity—subtle manipulations of lights. In fact, his son Thawai had confided that he had learnt the art and trick of using light from his father. From him, he had learnt to be audacious enough to break ‘the grammar of lighting’. The last scene of the play, when Duryodhana, along with his other brothers, would travel to heaven in a chariot flown by swans, was a visual treat, superbly enduring; it looked like an VFX illusion of a film, though Thiyam had used just blue shades and the arms of the actors. The performance constantly underlined its innate recalcitrance to be re-created in another location without the cultural hinterland of Manipur. This is one of the fundamental achievements of the Theatre of Roots movement that could attain an essentially Indian identity by incorporating its roots as an integral component of the poetics of performance.

Image 5: A scene from Thiyam’s Urubhangam (2017)

After the play, when we met Ratan Thiyam, he asked us how the play was. We told we lost our words when we watched the final scene of the play, it was mesmerising, like a dream. Ratan Thiyam smiled in response and quipped, “This play I had designed thirty years ago. The play is still fresh. This is the magic of an epic.”

Image 6: The last scene of Thiyam’s Urubhangam (2017)

When we left Imphal the next day, we felt like just having completed a pilgrimage. As our flight took off, we looked down from above and was wondering how this land of nine hills and one valley nurtured such great cultural figures who were so renowned all over the world yet so rooted in their native land.

Notes:

¹Ima Keithel (mother’s market) or Nupi Keithel (women’s market) is a unique market in Imphal where all the shop owners are women. This market has been there since the 16^th century when it was mandatory for the male members to serve in the royal army. Since the husbands were away for months on the battlefields, the women had to take over the economic activity to keep their hearth burning. This is ironic in the present context that following militancy and the repressive regime of the armed forces, the male folks are away when the women are taking charge of their households. The market has a symbolic significance in the present context as well.

² In several states in India alcohol is prohibited which are known as the ‘dry states’ where consumption of alcohol is seen as an ‘immoral’ act. But in the Northeastern states, prohibitions are mainly imposed to curtail alcohol abuse. However, in states like Manipur substance abuse has become a major concern now.

³The Armed Forces (Special Power) Act is an Act promulgated in 1958 in the form of an ordinance and was imposed in Manipur on 22 May 1958. Later it was passed as an Act by the Indian parliament. As per the provisions of the Act the armed forces are equipped with extraordinary power to maintain order in the areas designated as ‘disturbed areas’ without being accountable to any state authority including the state governments. There were several allegations of massive human rights violations. One of the most controversial incidents was the alleged rape and killing of Thanjam Manorama by the Indian Armed forces on 11 July, 2004 on the sheer suspicion of being a cadre of a banned militant outfit, People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

⁴ On 14 July 2004, 12 imas (mothers) disrobed themselves in front of the Kangla Fort, which was the Assam Rifles headquarters, holding banners that screamed “Indian Army Rape Us” as a desperate protest against the alleged killing of Thangjam Manorama and atrocities on other women by the armed forces, which Simrin Sirur described as the incident that “shook India and transformed the state forever”. (https://theprint.in/india/17-years-since-their-naked-protest-against-army-mothers-of-manipur-say-fight-not-over-yet/700093.)

⁵Inner Line Permit (ILP) is a special permit required by an Indian citizen to travel to the protected areas within India. It is required for three Northeastern states- Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland and Mizoram. The ILP for Manipur was introduced in 2018 and became duly operational in 2020. Another Northeastern state, Meghalaya, is also demanding ILP protection.

⁶In around 1941, just about six years before India’s Independence in 1947, four top British Indian Civil Service officials proposed at the highest level the formation of a Crown Colony after India’s Independence. The colony was proposed to comprise the tribal states of Northeast India including Arunachal Pradesh (which was then known as North Eastern Frontier Agency or NEFA), Nagaland, Mizoram (Lushai Hills) and also Manipur, Tripura, Chittagong as well as the tribal areas of Burma or present Myanmar. They proposed to make Imphal, the capital of Manipur, the capital of the colony with an international airport. (see On the Edge of Empire: Four British Plans for North East India, 1941–1947 by David Siyemlieh, 2013)

⁷Chorus Repertory Theatre (CRT) was established by Ratan Thiyam in the year 1976 at Imphal on a two-acre sprawling campus. CRT is known for having developed a specific theatre tradition that has incorporated several indigenous elements including native Manipuri dance forms (Lao Haraoba, Raas Leela, Mridhangam et al) Manipuri martial arts (Thang ta), several aspects of the Sanamahi, the indigenous spiritual order of Manipur and so on. The theatre tradition developed by Ratan Thiyma has become one of the abiding examples of the Theatre of Roots movement.

⁸The term Theatre of Roots was first introduced by the drama critic Suresh Awasthi in his celebrated essay published in the TDR, “Theatre of Roots: Encounter with Tradition” (1989). About the movement, the noted theatre critic Erin B. Mee writes, “After Independence in 1947, in their efforts to create an ‘Indian’ theatre that would be aesthetically different from the Westernized theatre established during the colonial era and prevalent in urban areas at the time, Indian theatre practitioners ‘returned’ to their ‘roots’ in classical dance, religious ritual, martial arts, popular entertainment and Sanskrit aesthetic theory.” (see her essay, “The Theatre of Roots: Redirecting the Modern Indian Stage”) The theatre directors associated with the movement were Ebrahim Alkazi, K.M. Panikkar, Habib Tanvir, Badal Sircar et al. (see Awasthi, 1989)

References

Awasthi, Suresh. (1989) ‘“Theatre of Roots” Encounter with tradition. The Drama Review, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Winter, 1989), pp. 48-69 (22 pages), MIT Press DOI: 10.2307/1145965. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1145965.

Bharucha, Rustom. (1992). The theatre of Kanhailal: Pebet & Memoirs of Africa. Seagull Books.

Das, Subhash, C. (2018). History, Myth, Violence and Hope: A Critical Study of the Select Plays of Ratan Thiyam. PhD Thesis, NEHU, Shillong, 2018. Unpublished.

Das, Subhash, C. (2016). “Reinventing identity: Theatre of roots and Ratan Thiyam”. The NEHU Journal, Vol XIV, No. 1, January – June 2016, pp. 105-116. ISSN. 0972 – 8406

Kanhailal, H. (2015). “I call my theatre as the ‘Theatre of the Earth’”. An interview by J. Prodhani in NEZine. https://www.nezine.com

Prodhani, J. (2014). “Theatre of the Earth” in Shillong Times, 27 July.

Siyemlieh, David. (2013). On the Edge of Empire: Four British Plans for North East India, 1941–1947. Sage.

Thiyam, Ratan. (2008). Manipur Trilogy. Tr. T. Bijoykumar Singh. Wordsmith.

Thiyam, Ratan. (1999). “Ratan Thiyam: A man with a peace mission” (Interview) with North East News Agency (NENA) in Oriental Times, Vol. 1, Issue 42-43, 22 March-6 April. http://www.nenanews.com. (12.5.2012).

Thiyam, Ratan. (2009). “Art has always been surrounded by strife”. Interview with Nirmala Ravindran and Sujay Saple in Infochange India. 2009, http://infochangeindia.org. (02.09.2012).

Subhash Chandra Das is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at B.H. College, Assam (Gauhati University). He teaches modern drama, poetry, classical theory and American literature. He did PhD on the plays of Ratan Thiyam from NEHU, Shillong, India.

Jyotirmoy Prodhani is Professor and Head of the Department of English at North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU), Shillong, Meghalaya, (India). His published books include Creativity and Conflict in the Plays of Sam Shepard, Culture, Ethnicity and Identity: A Reader (Ed), Madhupur Bohudoor (Translation of Assamese short stories of Sheelahadra), This Land This People (Translation of Rajbanshi poetry).

Book Review: The Inheritance of Words: Writing from Arunachal Pradesh by Mamang Dai (ed.)

Book Review/North East Literature & Culture/V14N2

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Publishers: Zubaan. Date of Publication: 2021. Language: English. Number of pages: 186. Price: Rs 495/- $20. ISBN No. 978 81 94760 53 5

Reviewed by
Preetinicha Barman
Women’s College (NEHU), Shillong, India. Email: preetinichabarman@gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022. Pages 1-7. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne45

First published: June 30, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This review is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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Mamang Dai, one of the most eminent literary voices from Northeast India, compiles a unique collection of writings and creative expressions exclusively by women authors and artists from Arunachal Pradesh. The collection, aptly titled Inheritance of Words, includes short fiction, poetry, essays, artworks, and graphic narratives by women belonging to various ethnic communities of Arunachal Pradesh which is home to many indigenous tribes like Adi, Apataini, Galo, Nyishi, Monpa, Mishmi, Aka and so on. Some of the authors included are well-known and a number of them are quite young, still struggling with the trepidation to bring out their first volume. The rich and diverse land of Arunachal is also a land of many indigenous languages which are primarily oral but vibrant and at the same time, some of them stare at the steady shrinking and receding of their languages. As Yater Nyokir points out in an essay of the book, there are 25 tribes and 90 languages spoken in Arunachal. Nyokir also points out that despite such plurality, there is one ‘common feature’, that is they are ‘great storytellers’ (p.158). The orality of the indigenous language has provided deeper and intense linkages with their folkways and native mores and, in a very significant way, it is the ethereal nuances of sounds of their words, and not necessarily the visuals of the graphemes as in the case of the written languages, are what the communities have inherited as part of their cultural heirloom; hence this is an ‘inheritance of words’. In the absence of a written script, the literary writing from Arunachal, in its early years, used to be primarily in Assamese, which used to be the lingua franca following long geo-historical proximities between Assam and the northern valleys, the territory which the colonial administrators described as the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) and later became Arunachal Pradesh. Two of the famous writers emerged from Arunachal telling the tales of their land and people are Lummer Dai and Yeshe Dorjee Thongshi who used to write in Assamese and have won several prestigious literary awards and honours. Later, this frontier state produced some of the most powerful authors who have chosen English as the preferred language of their literary expressions. Sahitya Akademi award-winning author Mamang Dai is the most prominent among them. Hindi is relatively a recent phenomenon in the state when the Indian government initiated the move to spread the language in a frontier state of the country apparently to bring the region closer to the mainland. A number of authors have come up now who write in this newly introduced language. In her introduction, Mamang Dai writes, “This is a story of story, one of many to explain the absence of a script among the Arunachal tribes” (p. 1). She describes the book as the “first of its kind because it brings together the diverse voices of Arunachali women writing in English and Hindi” (p.2). Though the authors belong to various tribal categories, with indigenous languages of their own, their writing in English and Hindi, two of the acquired languages, quite efficiently represent the native cultural realities.

The diversity of their ethnic identities has not necessarily made the writings effectively distant from each other, rather there are resonances of similarities in their writings and expressions. The poems included are by poets belonging to various tribal identities, yet they reflect similar emotive nuances and intensity. There are celebrations and disquiets of womanhood and at the same time, the poems also go beyond the limits of gender boundaries to peek into the psychic realms of men as well. The first poem of the volume, “A Man I Know” by Samy Moyong speaks of a man’s efforts to conceal his heart amidst sorrows:

He puts on a mask when asked of his day

And talks of everything but himself

He calls himself evil but acts like a human

Confusing himself and all others. (p. 12)

Her next poem, “I Am”, is a bold assertion of a woman against turmoil and brutal repression that she resists with powerful idioms:

Before you dismiss me as a mere being

Someone you could trample crush and kill

I just want you to know

That I was a candle in the woods

Burning bright in an aura of my own. (p. 13)

Moyong asserts to turn her body into a site of amorous freedom as well as into a badge of preservation, “When all you can think of is about the pleasure/ Of that extended flesh hanging between your thighs/ I wish the vagina could bite” (p. 15)

While speaking about the body, Toril Moi writes, “The body is at once what we are and the medium through which we are able to have a world” (p.5). Moi refers to Simone de Beauvoir where she rejects the Cartesian ‘body/ mind split’ (p. 4). Tolum Chumchum positions herself beyond this range of Cartesian solipsism and speaks of her body to unravel it as a site of her unabashed self by enunciating the affinities between her feminity and her biological body. Therefore, in her poem, “The Darkest 5 days”, she candidly confides in one of the intimate pains that she suffers every month following menstruation. Both the physical discomfort and the social taboos make those five ‘5 days’ more poignant and acute:

There you show up again redhead huh?

Blossoming on my sheets

Like a barrel of red wine

Between my leg

……………………..

My stomach bloats

My head throbs

My limbs ache

The cry of my body

Like a cooking show going, on my belly (p. 89)

Doirangsi Kri’s “Little Life” presents the joy of childbirth which is universal and personal at the same time, uniquely experienced only by a woman. Compared to this “Offspring” written by Ayinam Ering is rather a critique of the social expectation of at least one male child. There are short poems like Kolpi Dai’s “Which Part of Me” that presents two contradictory images of universal womanhood — one introvert and the other extrovert. Long poems like Ngurang Reena’s “My Ane’s Tribal Love Affair” portrays the ‘first wife’ of a patriarch, who is pushed to the margins by her society. The poetic persona asks her ‘Ane’ (mother) after the death of her father to start thinking about herself and finding a partner to grow old together with, instead of cursing her ‘God Donyi Polo’ (p. 43).

The poems of Rebom Belo, Ponung Ering Angu, Nomi Maga Gumro, Omili Borang, Tunung Tabing are deeply personal, and reflective of the psychic state against specific junctures of moments haunted by the nostalgia for home, its ‘hearth’, customs and rituals, landscape and seasons. Such metaphors also recur in the poems of Jamuna Bini (translated from Hindi), Gyati T.M. Ampi, Mishimbu Miri and Chasoom Bosai. As in Hélèn Cixous’ Medusa (“The Laugh of Medusa”), from whose head snakes dangle symbolizing the different forms of the female self, the feminine images deflect off these scripted texts. They are vivid, self-assured, and yet bogged down by social codes.

Ayinam Ering’s “I Am a Tree” is perhaps one of the most powerful eco-feminist poems ever written, the poem gains further significance and power since it is written by one whose authentic intimacy with nature is more immediate and deeper. She writes:

I am a tree

I’m strong. I’m steady.

So what if autumn turns my leaves yellow?

So what if the assailant wind strips all my branches bare?

I’m still alive from inside,

and I possess the strength

to spread greenery again. (p.43)

The prose pieces of this volume vary from tales to memoirs to critical essays. The essays, “Indigenous Tribal Languages of North East India: Strategies for Revitalization” by Toku Anu and “Linguistic Transitions” by Yaniam Chukhu express the concern at the growing disappearance of the indigenous languages of Arunachal Pradesh. Toku Anu expresses a premonition that the Bugu and Sherdukpen languages with just about 3000 speakers left might as well disappear soon with the last generation of speakers still holding on to it. Yaniam Chuku, a native Nyishi speaker, finds himself in an ironic situation when even to complete a Nyishi sentence she has to depend on English or Hindi as a ‘desperate crutch’ (p. 120). She also points out how the speakers of Hrusso Aka language are fast dwindling. A similar view is expressed in the story “The Spectre Dentist” by Millo Ankha where the protagonist ponders over the disharmony between the spatial and linguistic identity of an Arunachali. Ironically, this is one crucial issue that the book encounters as it itself is a compilation of writings in English and Hindi translated into English, though composed by the native Arunachalis having distinctive tribal languages of their own. Referring to Ng?g? wa Thing’o’s concept of ‘orature’, Toku Anu has brought in a number of references to certain other linguists who insist on the importance of oral literature. Like Ng?g? wa Thing’o, they also feel that the imposition of non-native languages is hegemonic and detrimental to the native languages. Yaniam Chukhu laments, “Unlike Nagamese, an increasing number of families in Arunachal are resorting to this Arunachali Hindi over their mother tongue, even in private spaces. Amongst the young generation it has taken over as the preferred language over one’s indigenous tongue even within the same community” (p. 125). However, Anu looks forward to the prospects of the newly developed Wancho script and hopes that the emergence of such new scripts would suit the languages and literature of different tribes of Arunachal. In a similar optimistic tone Yater Nyokir in her “Bards from Dawn-lit Mountains” gives an account of literature produced by the Arunachalis and underlines the importance of literature written by the Arunachali author n Assamese, English and now in Hindi which is, as she points out, is just a 20th-century phenomenon with a handful of writers. But they have been able to draw great attention and recognition through awards and honours which speak of their ‘versatility’ (p. 162).

Orature has a strong presence in the narrative imagination of Arunachal Pradesh. Mishimbu Miri’s memoir “Revelations from Idu Mishmi Hymns” narrates ancient lore of the Idu Mishmis that the author learnt from her father who was a shaman himself; so is in Tongam Rina’s “The Interpreter of Dreams” which records the reminiscences of her grandmother who could interpret dreams. When Leki Thungon’s “Doused Flames” refers to the sleepwalkers called Zekumus, Ing Perme’s “A Ballad of the Adi Tribe” refers to the dirges and the world of the spirits. The closing text of the book, an interview (“The Summit”) conducted by Mamang Dai with Tine Mena, the first woman from Arunachal Pradesh to have climbed Mount Everest, reflects the same kind of beliefs on the spirit world from the point of view of a mountaineer.

Significantly, the tales and the memoirs tend to present themes quite similar to those of the poems. “Night and I” presents very personal reflections of the author Nellie N. Manpoong when the question of feminism emerges through the stories of Ronnie Nido’s “The Tina Ceiling” and Ponung Ering Angu’s “Among the Voices in the Dark”. While the need for a female space in the socio-political sphere is highlighted in “The Tina Ceiling”; the image of the oppressed womanhood crushed by the age-old patriarchal customs is poignantly depicted in “Among the Voices in the Dark”. “The Spirit of the Forest” by Subi Taba tells the tale of how nature, in the form of thunder, avenges the perpetrators who had set the forest on fire in order to plunder the resources. This reminds one of similar wildfire caused by men that spread in the Amazon forests which generated huge concern over environmental sustainability throughout the world.

The artworks and the photographs featured in the book are an exquisite juxtaposition of art and written texts reminding one of the ancient Chinese poetry-paintings, the Medieval Persian miniatures, Japanese Haiga-Haiku combinations, as well as the arts of the Pre-Raphaelites, especially the intricate pencil works of Bahnu Tatak. Bhanu Tatak’s art is a celebration of details that reflect the extraordinary mastery of the artist to confidently freak out with ink. “Home is This and Much More” is Stuti Mamen Lowang’s collage of sketches that evocatively captures the oscillation between the warmth of hearths and the hopes for the familiar homes interspersed with the uncanny visitations of terror and violence. After a brief introduction to her sketches, “Tradition: An Illusion of Continuance”, Rinchin Choden presents her artworks accompanied by commentaries on the intrusive challenges of modernity to the settled landscape of tradition.

The silver lining in the dark cloud of modernity. The mother, the home and the solace where we first learn about tradition. We need to respect her and learn from her about the outside world. Her warm embrace teaches us not to falter in the face of adversity. (Rinchin Choden, p. 27)

The photo essay of Karry Padu under the title, “I Am Property” critiques the concept of the patriarchal imperatives imposed on a woman to be a living mannequin of exotica to deck herself up with the material markers of tradition. Significantly, in the images where the woman figure is seen embellished with traditional costume and ornaments, her face is conspicuously outside the frame of the composition underlining the process of reducing a woman into an impersonal display unit where her individual self is redundant. This gets more evident from one of the accompanying verses that run as “When I was young, I had no idea how important it was to be a tribal woman…/ I am its daughter, this land owns me. / I am its property” (p.109).

Figure 1: The Wrap

The book is unique in its structural planning which is a celebration of womanhood in totality as it is a collection of writings and art by women, edited by a woman, translators are women, and published by a publication house dedicated to providing the much-needed platform to the women who want their voices to be heard. The captivating editorial introduction by Mamang Dai is followed by the assorted texts, images, and notes on contributors and a glossary as the postscripts. The varied genres assume individual spaces but they reflect a thematic coherence letting the readers an assured transition from one genre to another exploring the plurality of the land flowing through the works of the women of Arunachal. Despite being by only women, the collection never devolves into tedious overlapping of perspectives. However, one limitation of the book might be the reticence in the ‘Notes on the Contributors’ section to provide the ethnic affiliations of the individual authors, which might well have been deliberate obfuscation on the part of the editor, nevertheless, one is sure that many might have this anthropological curiosity to know little more about the authors though, in a number of texts, the specific tribal identity of the writers is rater explicitly visible. However, Ponung Ering Angu’s “Dying Lights” provides a metaphoric lead to summarise the collective longing of the poets who, against the certainty of changes aspire to nurture their belongings in the assured horizons of the past:

As the dawn breaks over and the darkness dies

Things are easy but nothing ever lasts

Oh the love, the strength and our enduring will

Are struck somewhere in the walls of a past. (p. 33)

A book from Northeast featuring poems, essays, memoirs, art and photos all by women from one state, is the only one of its kind. Mamang Dai has made a historic contribution to help the women’s writings from her state achieve a new level of distinctive visibility to reach out to readers not only across India but also all over the world. This is a book one must possess.

Reference

Beauvoir, Simone de. (2015). The second sex. Vintage Classics.

Cixous, Hélène. (1976). The Laugh of the Medusa. Tr. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs. Summer. Vol. 1, No. 4 (Summer, 1976), pp. 875-893. University of Chicago Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3173239.

Moi, Toil. (1999). “I am a Woman”: The body as background in the second sex. Journal Paroles gelées, 17(2) ISSN 1094-7264. DOI 10.5070/PG7172003099

Preetinicha Barman is an Assistant Professor of English at Women’s College (NEHU), Shillong who did her Ph.D. on the works on Orhan Pamuk. Apart from research articles, she has also published her poems in English and Rajbanshi languages. Her published books include Orhan Pamuk: A Critical Reading and Aiyor Photok, a collection of her Rajbanshi poems. She is also a classical Manipuri Dancer.

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