Admin

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

Editorial/North East Literature & Culture

2.4K views

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)
Full-Text HTML Full-Text PDF Cite
PlumX Metrics

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

825 views

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)
Extract Full-Text PDF Cite
PlumX Metrics

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

557 views

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)
Extract Full-Text PDF Cite
PlumX Metrics

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

902 views

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)
Full-Text HTML Full-Text PDF Cite
PlumX Metrics

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

4.3K views

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)
Full-Text HTML Full-Text PDF Cite
PlumX Metrics

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.

The Politics of Cultural Homogenization and Territorialization: Representation of Northeast in Tinkle’s WingStar Series

Cultural Studies/North East Literature & Culture/V14N2

1K views

Renu Elizabeth Abraham

Dept of English and Cultural Studies, Christ University, Bengaluru, India. Email: renu.elizabeth@christuniversity.in

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022. Pages 1-12. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne33

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)
Full-Text HTML Full-Text PDF Cite
PlumX Metrics

Abstract

Tinkle, the children’s magazine in English in India has been instrumental in shaping the imagination of the young urban Indian child ever since its inception in 1980. No other magazine has the readership and reach that Tinkle enjoys with a circulation of more than 3 lakh. The fact that Tinkle has survived unlike many other magazines in India for 40 odd years is testimony (marketing strategies aside) of its reach and popularity. Tinkle, ever since the days of its founder-editor Anant Pai, has been instrumental in constructing “imagined communities” of national identities for children in India over the decades since the 1970s ever since the Amar Chitra Kathas. One such attempt in constructing children’s imaginaries is the addition of a series Wing Star in 2015, scripted by Sean D’mello and inked by Vineet Nair that features Mapui Kawlim, a 13-year-old superhero from Aizwal, Mizoram. While it is empowering that a national mainstream popular magazine for children would feature a female superhero from among the less represented Northeastern states, what is problematic, according to this study, is the manner in which there has been a conscious erasure of all markers of her ethnicity by appropriating her into the larger mainstream homogenised pan-Indian identity of a young female superhero with no specific markers to represent the culture she belongs to. This study will attempt to read this ‘sanitised’ representation of a Northeastern superhero in the light of the idea of cultural appropriation and deterritorialization and reterritorialization posited by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari that looks at the erasure of specific ethnic and other identities markers. This study will also engage with the implications of how ‘sanitised’ representations like this in popular narratives would construct and homogenise the imaginaries of the children of a country as they would grow up with erroneous notions of cultural ethnicities and diversity within the country adding to the problematics of marginalisation and hegemonic nationalities.

Keywords: Cultural appropriation, homogenization, WingStar, Tinkle, Northeast, reterritorialization, identity politics

Introduction

Children’s Literature in English in India is a domain that has been immensely popular. Children’s magazines have played a formative role in the development of indigenous narratives for children in India. Children’s magazines are periodicals published on a weekly, fortnightly, monthly, bi-annual, quarterly or bi-monthly basis and are important sources of education and entertainment for the intellectual development of a child. These publications are targeted at children and preteens around the ages of 4 to 16 years. Children’s magazines in India can be loosely classified as educational and edutainment magazines. About the educational magazines of children, R.E. Abraham writes:

(they focus on) developing the academic and professional skills of the children in terms of knowledge development, domain expertise, self-learning skills, current affairs and enhancing their global perspectives. They attempt to do it through fun and often concentrate on the academic development of the children….The second variety of children’s magazines were of the edutainment variety…. These magazines concentrated on the holistic development of the children through developing their creative skills, academic skills, personal, interpersonal and societal skills. (Abraham, 2018, Chapter 3, pp. 23-24)

Ever since the inception of Chandamama in 1947, the magazine made a niche for themselves within the Indian households. The English version of the magazine came out in 1955 followed by Children’s World from Children’s Book Trust in 1957. These magazines attempted to engage the children in India with indigenous mythologies and folk tales along with fables and other stories for children. These magazines were followed by Champak (1968), Amar Chitra Kathas (1969), Pran’s Comics, Lotpot, Target (1979), Tinkle and Gokulam (1980) and many others like Children’s Digest, Magic Pot, Chatterbox, Thinkling, Impulse Hoot and Toot, Heek, Mira, Active Kids, Dimdima, Young Bhaskar and Brain Tonic. Over the last few years, some scholarly interest has grown to locate children’s literature in India and its representational ethos but almost no research has emerged in the field of magazines for children in India, except for a very few articles on the subject such as “Acculturation and holistic development in children in India: Educative possibilities of children’s edutainment magazines in English” (2020) and a monograph on Children’s edutainment magazines in English in India: An overview (2018) both by R E Abraham. Scholarship has emerged around Hindi children’s magazines earlier through the works like Nandini Chandra’s Siting childhood: A study of children’s magazines in Hindi 1920-50 (2001).

Among these edutainment magazines, Tinkle: Where learning meets fun was the first all-comic children’s magazine to emerge in India and to this day it remains one of the most widely circulated, read and accepted magazines for children in India with content that is original and not traditional in nature. Original, here, denotes work that is written by Indian authors targeted at children and not based on pre-texts like mythologies, folk tales and bowdlerisations of classics or other existing literature. Tinkle was the culmination of Anant Pai’s vision of a magazine that would aid children’s development in terms of cultural and social capital (to borrow Pierre Bourdieu’s terms) and was the brainchild of Subbu Rao, who was Amar Chitra Katha’s Associate Editor at the time (Abraham, 2018, Chapter 3, p. 47). Through strategic marketing and word-of-mouth publicity Tinkle rose to an almost cult status among urban and semi-urban English-speaking children in the 1980s and 1990s. The magazine was for its time a massive 72-page comic meant to entertain and inform. The magazine targeted the whole-person development of a child through stories of informative and scientific content like the Anu Club series, fun and moral development through the Kalia series and the Tantri the Mantri series, comic and slapstick through the Suppandi series and the like. With the advent of the satellite television and consequent development of television content for children in India, Tinkle developed e-media strategies like developing e-content through video games and MUDS (Multi-user Domains) and MOOS (MUDS Object-Oriented) early in the late 2000s and has currently diversified into developing animated content on Youtube and the Tinkle Online Comics with their flagship characters like Shikhari Shambu, Tantri the Mantri, Suppandi and many others. Over a period of time Tinkle has diversified and revamped its characters and content to suit contemporary concerns and developments in society. One such development is the addition of the WingStar series to the array of stories stabled in Tinkle.

This study, as indicated earlier will examine the WingStar series collection, volumes 1 and 2 that were serialized as episodic narratives in Tinkle from 2015-2020. WingStar is the eponymous title of a female superhero comic series featuring Mapui Kawlim, a 13-year old preteen, as a superhero from Aizwa in Mizoram. The writer is Sean D’mello and the artist is Vineet Nair (who is also the Deputy Art Director of Tinkle). While the initiative was praised by the media as being an important move in representing voices from the North East, it also drew flak from a lone voice, in an online feature in The Caravan magazine by Sukruti Anah Staneley, “Looking East: Tinkle’s depiction of its new superhero from the Northeast has a long way to go” (2016). The article clearly pointed out the problematics of universalization, generalisation, lack of research to authenticate identities and information, and tokenism in the name of inclusion. In this study in order to understand the representational politics that is operational in the creation and dissemination of this narrative to the masses in India and why such consciously sanitised narratives could do untold damage in contemporary Indian society given the climate of exclusion and dissidence that is growing in the country, I will extend Staneley’s observation and locate it within the academic imperatives of understanding children’s literature in the Indian context. Homogenising an ethnic culture through the purposeful erasure of its identity markers will not be inclusive or cater to diversity but rather promote a culture of exclusion and stigmatisation that emerges out of a forgetting that does not recognise differences.

Theoretical Frameworks

While it is empowering that a national, mainstream popular magazine for children would feature a female superhero from among the less represented North-Eastern states, what is problematic is the manner in which there has been a conscious erasure of all markers of her ethnicity by appropriating her into the larger mainstream, homogenised pan-Indian identity of a young female superhero with no specific markers other than her name and facial features to represent her ethno-cultural context. This sanitization and appropriation is examined with the help of E. W. Holland’s reinterpretation of the frameworks of cultural appropriation and deterritorialization posited by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and also locating it within discourses of nationalism and nationhood as formulated by Michael Billig. The purposeful manner in which WingStar is constructed results in the erasure of specific ethnic, regional and other identity markers that reiterate and specify ethnic and regional identities alongside spatial orientations. This study will also engage with the implications of how conscious ‘sanitised’ representations like these in popular narratives would construct and homogenise the imaginaries of a nation of children who would then grow up with erroneous notions of cultural ethnicities and diversity within the country adding to the problematics of marginalisation and hegemonic nationalisms. In order to do so the study will also examine the frameworks of nation-building and othering as engaged with in the representational works of Sanjib Baruah and Udayon Misra that emerge from and are firmly rooted in the Northeastern region.

Homogenisation and Erasure: Nationalism in WingStar

Ideologies operate in constructing and restructuring lives and identities that seem natural and universal. Nations and nationalisms are also part of this ideological constructedness. Billig (1995) writes, “Nationalism is the ideology by which the world of nations has come to seem the natural world – as if there could not possibly be a world without nations.” (p. 184). He further adds that national identities are also natural to possess and to remember. Billig writes:

This remembering, nevertheless, involves a forgetting, or rather there is a complex dialectic of remembering and forgetting. …, this dialectic is important in the banal reproduction of nationalism in established nations….This remembering is simultaneously a collective forgetting: the nation, which celebrates its antiquity, forgets its historical recency. (1995, 185)

Billig points out that this collective and selective amnesia is a complex process where not just the past but the present is also subjective to this deletion. Quoting Langer, Billig gesticulates to the manner in which national identities get established over ages through daily routines that flag the idea of nationhood and that this is often routinized in that they are followed mindlessly to the extent that it becomes forgotten (1995, p. 185). According to Sanjib Baruah, (1999) “the apparent amnesia about identities that compete with official State nationalisms is the legacy of cultural standardisation particularly associated with successful State-building endeavours” (p. 4). One of the parts of this amnesia is also a creation by the intellectuals as Ernest Renan acknowledges in his work, “What is a nation?” (p.251).

Cultural artefacts, like literature, films and other material products, also enable the construction of identities including that of nation and nationalism. In case of children’s magazines like Tinkle, it has long carried the baton of homogenising ethnic and regional identities to create a pan-Indian identity. This has constructed narratives for children like Butter Fingers, Dental Diaries, Shikhari Shambhu, Tantri the Mantri, Suppandi and WingStar among others where regional and cultural markers are completely absent, or if present, they are non-representational, other than character names and reconstituted location names. Contextualising Billig’s idea to WingStar, it is interesting to note that this cultural artefact (that of a children’s magazine) plays an important role in the collective forgetting of identities and ideas within the nation, especially when it is perpetrated and perpetuated through childhood into adulthood. In the construction of this narrative of history through a children’s literary text, what is forgotten is the true nature of diversity, leading to the birth of a sanitised version of diversity that homogenises ethnic and regional identity indicators. This creates a “banal” (Baudrillard) diversity that subsumes the ethnic and regional variations into the realms of a dominant nationalism that prefers to erase and forget difference. Children growing up reading WingStar would understand that diversity is actually not so diverse and all cultures are quite like each other. This becomes problematic in the context of a multicultural, multireligious, multilinguistic and multiethnic nation like India.

In order, to be remembered and included in the national imaginary, the categories of its existence have to be reproduced and in the same manner, in order to be forgotten, the categories of erasure too have to be constantly reproduced, which is infinitely possible in an infinite series like that of WingStar which is periodised in the fortnightly Tinkle. In WingStar, all indices of difference except that of the names of people and the state are erased and the “female superhero from Mizoram”’ can be dislocated or relocated against the cultural locus of any state within the country as she is presented as generic or universal. She is a ‘female superhero’ who incidentally belongs to a state in India, Mizoram. There has been a conscious effort to equalise Mizoram and the Mizo character, Mapui Kawlim in the name of inclusivity and this inclusiveness operates through erasure and a certain elision. There seems to be an attempt to bring the Northeast into the consciousness of the ‘mainstream’ by representing it as any other state. This elides over ethnic and cultural heterogeneity and homogenises not just Northeastern identities as a whole but also situates it within a larger pan-Indian identity rubric. Throughout the series across various issues of Tinkle there is no mention of anything specific that would locate WingStar as quintessentially Mizo or as hailing from Mizoram, a state underrepresented in mainstream children’s literature. Other than the name of the central character, Mapui Kawlim, and the town she is located in as Aizwa, suitably changed from Aizawl to make it sound more generic, and which according to the writer of WingStar Sean D’mello is “just a city” (qtd in Staneley, 2016), young Kawlim is just any other female superhero from any part of the country, and for that matter from any part of the world. D’mello comments in an interview, “At Tinkle, we never use the original name of cities or towns. This is primarily because it gives us the freedom to do what we want in a story” (D’mello, 2022). With respect to the name of Mapui, in order to be a Mizo name, Mapui should be spelt Mapuii. Her father’s name Tashi and their last name Kawlim are not Mizo names, which in addition to the fact that most Mizos do not employ last names but second names that are indicative of clans, (qtd in Staneley, 2016) which point to a disjuncture. Later in “Strange sightings”, an episode from WingStar, the Reiek mountains, a tourist destination of Aizawl, is denoted as Relek mountains. This episode is also interesting in that, the identity of Mizoram as a state is established and reiterated through mythical creatures and Relek mountains, but their protection is dependent on the non-Mizo characters of the Tinkle Toons universe, along with Mapui, of course (Vol. 1, 2018, pp. 42-49). The only distinguishing feature that marks Mapui’s identity as a Mizo is her facial features or rather the representation of her eyes and the eyes of most characters in the narrative. But even this is done in the caricaturish style and not the realistic style, which brings with it the problematics of exaggeration (Fig 1 and Fig 2). Needless to say, every other distinguishing ethnic feature is erased while the eyes become the centre-point of the character’s features and identity, which gets further accentuated when she dons her WingStar power suit which then displays her eyes naturally and prominently. This seems to be a kind of “visual orientalism” (qtd in Baruah, 2021, p. 10) when taken in conjunction with the fact that there seems to be no other identity marker that distinguishes these characters from Mizoram.

Fig 1. WingStar: The reluctant superhero. Vol. 1, 2018, p.9. | Fig. 2. WingStar: The reluctant superhero. Vol. 1, 2018, p.5

In another instance of elision, the episode “Stranger sightings” (a metafictive narrative) features the pheiccham, a one-legged mythical forest being, belonging to Mizo folklore, that is purported to bring good fortune to those who seek and catch it (Pheiccham: The story, n.d.). But even in this instance of the WingStar narrative which is set in Mizoram, they get subsumed in the story under the other Tinkle Toon characters featured, such as Shikhari Shambhu, Tantri the Mantri and Billy the fangless vampire as it is they alongside Mapui who seek to rescue these mystical creatures from the clutches of the villain Rasha. There is no description of what a pheiccham is with respect to Mizo culture and lore and at one point, Mapui herself dismisses them as “the so-called pheicchams are just a new species” (WingStar, Vol.1, p. 46).

These interventions were purposeful, and according to D’mello and the editor of Tinkle at the time of WingStar’s inception, Rajni Thindiath, they “did not want to directly represent or misrepresent a particular clan” (qtd. in Staneley, 2016). When D’mello was asked why specific aspects of the Northeastern identity do not come through in WingStar, he indicates that while presenting a character from the Northeast was an aim, “WingStar is a superhero who doesn’t want to be a superhero. That was her fundamental purpose, to find a way to balance expectation and her own desires. It was this aspect of the storyline that we chose to focus on when writing her stories” (D’mello, 2022). D’mello also responds to why Mizoram was chosen for WingStar’s setting saying, “Tinkle Toons do not only live and have adventures in their place of birth. They travel the country and in WingStar’s case internationally to complete a variety of missions” (D’mello, 2022). All these strategic decisions by the makers of WingStar result in a cultural product where all specific ethnic identity markers are erased and elided over as if they do not matter or exist and will thus not introduce the children to anything specific to Mizoram or Mizo culture. It becomes a generic story of a superhero who incidentally is female, hails from India and more specifically Mizoram, a state in India. Erased in this process is the history of marginalisation and under-representation that Mizoram along with other Northeastern states are subjected to within the mainstream literature and media, particularly with respect to children’s literature, television and film in India.

To place this problematic of homogenisation and monolithic nationalism in perspective it is important to look at this issue through writers and political scientists who write about the centre-state politics in the Northeast. Udayon Misra, a writer and critic from Assam, while talking about the national imaginary about the North-East and its identities, states, “such monolithic conceptions about a region which stands out for its diversity of cultures and civilizations would only help to nourish the biases and prejudices…” (2013, p. 3). According to Misra in his book India’s North-East: Identity, movements, state and civil society (2014) such a construction of nationalism has a historic lineage that goes back to the immediate months and years in post-independence India. Misra writes:

Those who had taken over power from the British at Delhi and were immersed in the streams of Indian cultural nationalism, were, therefore, not in a position to acknowledge, let alone try to understand and appreciate the different strands of alternate nationalism that were present in the northeastern part of the country… (2014, p. 9)

He points out that the nascent Indian nation may have been ill-equipped and unwilling to tackle the “demands of pluralism and the multi-ethnic nature of our polity” due to their tendency to gauge things through “a highly centralised focal point” (Misra, 2014, p. 28). The tendency over the years, as a result, is to attempt to integrate the states in the Northeastern region of India into the ‘Indian mainstream’ or to make them part of the ‘great Indian tradition’ (Misra, 2014, p. 74), as can be seen in the attempt to situate certain communities from Northeast India within ancient scriptures (2014, p. 79). Tinkle through WingStar seems to fall prey to this politics of integration, not by situating it within the larger discourse of “Hindu cultural nationalism” (Baruah, 2021, pp. 16-17), but by ignoring all cultural and regional specificities in order to ‘integrate’ it into the larger national imaginary. Though it is to be noted that the magazine is egalitarian in erasing all markers of ethnicity or regional specificities within its pages, however, what is problematic, is that it seems to have for the first time posited a specific geographic and cultural marker for one of its series to mark the ‘inclusivity’ the editors have aimed at and then have proceeded ‘naturally’ to erase all identity and cultural markers of the region.

Sanjib Baruah in his evocative accounts of the history of the Northeast, refers to the ‘othering’ of the states in the Northeastern region of the country. He points out that the language of ‘other’ing that permeates the official central government documents, national media accounts about what happens in the Northeastern part of the nation and popular culture references that further otherises the states in the Northeast. Baurah points out the vocabulary in government documents that state that the region in time will “catch-up and become part of the ‘national mainstream’” (2021, p. 44) indicating that in the national imagination the states of the Northeast “appear as a periphery” that are to develop and “catch-up” with the ‘mainstream’ (2021, p. 188). Quoting Mrinal Miri, Baruah states that, “the metaphor of the mainstream is a powerful hindrance to the understanding of India” (2021, p. 180). The arrival of WingStar within the Tinkle Universe serves as a moment for the Northeast to ‘catch-up’, it has now arrived in the living-rooms of children and Tinkle has become an agent to facilitate that moment. This moment is important considering the three lakhs per issue (as in 2019) circulation of Tinkle across 400 towns in India. Therefore, arriving in the Tinkle Universe would metaphorically herald an arrival into the psyches of the young Indians, for many among whom this would be their first cultural introduction to Mizoram or any of the states in the Northeastern region for that matter. In contextualising the WingStar within the larger Tinkle Universe imaginary, the diversity, plurality, multilinguistic and multiethnic identities of the region are levelled out, appropriated and erased to serve the ‘national mainstream’ and a rhetoric is established that tells the young reader that the people of the Northeastern regions in India are the ‘same like you’. Extrapolating from Baruah and Misra’s histories of the Northeastern regions, it is interesting to note that WingStar does not touch upon themes of insurgency or separatist movements that are part of the dominant discourses and cultural history of the region. It is interesting to note that Mapui Kawlim as WingStar is a vigilante superhero in a state which has cracked down hard on vigilantism. But Mapui is redeemed in that she along with her father and mother, Tashi and Kyati Kawlim work hand-in-hand with the State, through the state agency of the police forces of the region. Effort is made by the makers of WingStar to situate and locate her identity within the boundaries of the state machinery, with the police time and again turning to her for help, which validates her position. It is reiterated that Tashi Kawlim is an innovator who refused to sell his inventions to the “private arms manufacturer” Baik Sailo (Vol. 2, 2020, p. 1) but at the same time assists the police through his inventions. The State, in this narrative, takes on a glorified and glorifying position.

The cultural forgetfulness that is generally associated with successful state-building seems to be receding (Baruah, 1999, p. 4) and this brings in its wake a resurgence of memories and the need to imprint them into the national consciousness. Tinkle via WingStar joins the bandwagon to culturally represent the nation and its diversity but it still constitutes Mizoram within the larger amnesiac history of nation-building. All constructions of nationhoods involve projects of cultural hegemony and a pan-Indian national identity that is achieved through differences being ‘assimilated or destroyed’ (Baruah, 1999, p. 9). In all this, we can observe the creation of a banal nationalism that subsumes all differences and seeks to establish a non-heterogenous notion of identities and nationhood and in which WingStar becomes a part of this project of nation-building.

The Politics of Deterritorialization: Situating WingStar within the Tinkle Toons universe

Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their seminal works ranging from Anti-Oedipus (1972) to A thousand plateaus (1980) re-examines Lacanian notions of territorialization and extends its use from within the psychological milieu and register to the social. This discussion will adopt E. W. Holland’s response to Deleuze and Guattari’s work in the 1970s and ‘80s to examine WingStar. It will concentrate on the social deployment of the notion of territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization extending its use from the purview of the libidinal to human investment of energy in all kinds of activities ranging from the perceptual, cognitive, artistic, productive and physical (Holland, 1991, p. 57). According to Holland, Deleuze and Guattari, while examining the rhizomatic relations of power in society, argue that capitalism is not the only power that deterritorializes but that all operations of power in society do so. (Holland, 1991, p.57). In A thousand plateaus Deleuze and Guattari re-examine the notions of deterritorialization and reterritorialization not as binaries but as immanent structures within diverse semiotic processes (Holland, 1991, p. 59). Capitalism for Deleuze and Guattari is a prime agent for deterritorialization (Holland, 1991, p. 64). In the context of WingStar and Mizo ethnic identities for the establishment of a certain pan-Indian identity, one can argue that nationalism is an agent for deterritorialization and a problematic reterritorialization through a process of cultural erasure of ethnic markers, in that, all specific Mizo identities are deterritorialized and reterritorialized as an absence/presence in WingStar.

Northeast is often “imagined as an internal other” (Baruah, 2021, p. 12). This internal “othering” is evident in the manner in which the state machinery has designed policies for the Northeast. And as Baruah, mirroring Miri, points out, “human beings do not have a policy toward family members or friends (Baruah, 2021, p. 13). In WingStar one can see a duality at work, a recognition of the ‘other’ and a fear of the same ‘other’. This gets expressed in the recognition of the need for narratives from the Northeast. The fear is manifest in the attempt to homogenise ethnic and cultural differences into a “just like any other” structure. The desire to recognise the ‘other’ manifests itself in the fact that these narratives are written and illustrated by people who do not culturally belong, who invest in themselves the power to represent this ‘other’ they feel requires representation. But this recognition does not at the same time extend to representing the cultural and ethnic markers specific to Mizoram and the Mizo community in which the narratives and characters are set. There is a deliberate way in which racial discrimination against the people from Mizoram and other Northeastern states are glossed over in order to not “offend people” (Staneley, 2016). The narrative turns into another Enid Blytonesque adventure fantasy where Mapui fights against the modern-day crime using technological interventions that grant her an edge over all other characters. It is interesting how her superhero powers are all because of the power-suit and extensions her father customises for her and not because she has something inherent within herself that enables her to be a superhero. She is not represented as a character who has a sense of justice, but she is portrayed as a young girl who is frivolous and boastful, not in the least accommodating of other’s opinions and full of herself. In this sense, she seems not in the least a superhero material. The sense of heroism and valour that ideally characterises a superhero is constantly demystified by her representation as a young girl who can lie to get out of doing her homework, who does not want to save the world but would rather have sleepovers and watch a TV series. She seems to be full of false bravado as she faces a temperamental villain and declares, “Come at me! Let me show you what I can do” (Vol 1, 2018, p. 19). She is visualised in this scene with her arms folded across her chest and it is also striking that she has come to face this villain ignoring her father’s instructions to stay at home. She seems narcissistic when she tells her friends that they could pass their time during their sleepover by watching news reports documenting “all her heroic acts” (Vol. 1, 2018, p. 23). She is portrayed as unwilling to change and experiment when she attempts to persuade her dad to give her the same power-suit rather than a revamped version. Through these and other instances in the narrative we see that Mapui Kawlim is deterritorialized from the normative superheroes of fictional worlds and reterritorialised in peculiar ways within the Tinkle Toons universe.

Within the Tinkle Toons universe, all ethnic and cultural markers and differences are wiped out, nothing differentiates the characters in terms of specific cultural or regional identities. Within this Universe the characters are reduced to a pan-Indian Tinkle toon character with idiosyncrasies and not so likeable traits. This is symptomatic of the Tinkle Toons universe, take for example Tinkle Toon characters like Shikhari Shambu, Tantri the Mantri, Suppandi and others. None of them have any specific identity or cultural markers and neither are they like the conventional heroes or central characters of children’s narratives. Shambu wins against villains through sheer force of circumstances and not through his intelligence or efforts, Tantri fails in all endeavours not for want of intelligence or cunning but through a set of circumstances, Suppandi is a hero for his witticisms that are more stupid than witty and there is Mapui Kawlim who wins only because of her power-suit, without which often than not and even despite it many a time her friends have to step in to save her from the clutches of the villains (Vol.1 & 2). The reterritorialization of Mapui Kawlim within the Tinkle Toons universe becomes apparent in the episode titled “Strange sightings” (Vol. 1, 2018, pp. 42-49) where Mapui is situated within the Tinkle Toon universe as a foil to Shikhari Shambu, Tantri the Mantri and Billy, the Fangless Vampire. All of these Tinkle Toons characters are involved, in their own bizarre and slapstick styles, in solving the case of the pheicchams. In the regular schema, this homogenisation then would not seem problematic unless one examines the avowed reason for the introduction of a narrative based in the Northeast. According to D’mello, the major reason for introducing WingStar set in Mizoram was “to showcase Northeastern culture, backgrounds, people—how they talk, how they look, they behave” (qtd in Staneley, 2016).

In WingStar we see deterritorialization and reterritorialization at work. Mizoram, as a state from the Northeastern region, which is under-represented in literature and children’s literature, is problematically ‘redeemed’ from this under-representation in a quintessential Tinkle manner through its appropriation into the Tinkle Toons universe. Aizawl is reterritoritorialised in this process as Aizwa, Mapuii as Mapui, Kawlim, a non Mizo surname attributed to her and all other social, cultural, ethnic and geographical markers which are obliterated in the process of this reterritorialization. According to D’mello, “Tinkle Toons are written with a universal narrative in mind. We want every reader to see themselves in the characters” (D’mello, 2022). In this process of recontextualization the narrative loses credibility with respect to its avowal to represent and showcase the Northeast and privileges a certain homogenisation that is the dominant ideology of nationalism. Mapui and her world gets recoded in this process into “just a female superhero from the Northeast” and her specific locale as “just a city”, both now almost ahistorical entities that exist ‘harmoniously’ within the Tinkle Toons universe.

Conclusion

One of the major problems that could possibly arise from this scenario would be an indigenization that is pan-Indian, an Indianization over Mizoization, that could lead to the erasure of ethnic and cultural specificities of Northeastern states and identities among children who read and engage with only mainstream media. The banal nationalism that gets enacted in the pages of WingStar is just another in a long chain of cultural and political hegemony enacted upon the body of a state located in the Northeastern region. In the case of Tinkle, Mizoram joins the long list of such homogenisation and cultural decluttering that guides the editorial policy of the magazine, which is to represent diversity but to not make it seem very diverse. In WingStar, Tinkle continues its history of recognising unity as a subsumption of identities into a pan-Indian and ubiquitous entity and generalising differences as present in every state and not touching upon specifics, in order to not disengage its readership. This positionality mirrors what Misra talks about when he says that the Indian middle class are yet to change from their narrow equations into a “truly liberal urban space. … Therefore, old mindsets and perceptions continue to hold sway and there seems to be little space for plurality of cultures and alternate nationalisms” (2014, p.6). In this process, a breed of young minds would develop who do not recognise differences and would confront differences with suspicion and fear. But, “social, linguistic, and regional plurality must be seen as essential to the task of nation-building.… The perception of India as a country must be broadened to include nationalities which have been at the periphery, culturally, politically, and economically (Misra, 2014, pp. 82-23). What is important is not an ethnic nationalism which is a “commodified surplus” (Billig, 1995, p. 195) but an inclusive nationalism that acknowledges and respects differences of culture and ethnicities “without being integrated” (Misra, 2014, p.6) that can be built in the minds of children through inclusive narrativization that does not purposefully erase differences and ethnic markers.

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.

References

Abraham, R. E. (2018). Children’s edutainment magazines in English in India: An overview. Centre for Publications, Christ University.

—. (2020). Acculturation and holistic development in children in India: Educative possibilities of children’s edutainment magazines in English, New Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship, 26(1-2), pp. 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/13614541.2021.1972751

Baruah, Sanjib. (2021). Introduction. In In the name of the Nation: India and its Northeast (pp. 1-24). Navayana.

—. (1999). India against itself: Assam and the politics of nationality. Oxford University Press.

Billig, M. (2005). Banal nationalism. In P. Spencer & H. Wollman (eds.), Nations and nationalism: A reader, (pp. 184–196). Edinburgh University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvxcrmwf.17

D’mello, S. (2022, January 12). Personal communication [Email].

Holland, E. W. (1991). Deterritorializing “deterritorialization”: From the “Anti-Oedipus” to “A Thousand Plateaus.” SubStance, 20(3), 55–65. https://doi.org/10.2307/3685179

Misra, Udayon. (2013). India’s North-East: An illusive construct. In The periphery stikes back: Challenges to the Nation-State in Assam and Nagaland (pp. 1-14). Indian Institute of Advanced Study.

Misra Udayon. (2014). Northeast India: Roots of alienation. Introduction. In India’s North-East: Identities, movements, state, and civil society (pp. 1-7). Oxford University Press.

Pheiccham: Lead for change. (n.d.). Pheiccham: The story. https://pheichham.com/

Renan, E., & Giglioli, M. F. N. (2018). ‘What is a nation?’: (Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?, 1882). In What is a nation? and Other political Writings (pp. 247–263). Columbia University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/rena17430.15

Staneley, S. A. (2016, January 18). Looking East: Tinkle’s depiction of its new superhero from the Northeast has a long way to go. The Caravan, Delhi Press.

https://caravanmagazine.in/vantage/looking-east-tinkle-superhero-wingstar-long-way-to-go

Thindiath, Rajani, ed. (January, 2018). WingStar: The reluctant superhero (Vol. 1) [Comic]. In Tinkle Mumbai: Amar Chitra Katha Pvt. Ltd.

Thindiath, Rajani, ed. (June, 2020). WingStar: Dangers unseen (Vol. 2) [Comic]. In Tinkle Mumbai: Amar Chitra Katha Pvt. Ltd.

Renu Elizabeth Abraham is an Assistant Professor of English with the Department of English and Cultural Studies, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bannerghatta Road Campus, Bengaluru, India. Her academic interests lie in Children’s Literatures in India, Fandom Studies, Comics Studies and Popular Culture Studies in India and she has recently published a monograph on Children’s magazines in English in India along with research articles on Fandoms and children’s magazines for acculturation in India.

Severe Acute Hepatitis in Children: An Analysis from Philosophy of Science Using the Concept of Reduction

Health Humanities/Scientific Philosophy/V14N2

529 views

Miguel López-Astorga
Institute of Humanistic Studies, University of Talca, Talca Campus (Chile). Email: milopez@utalca.cl.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages 1-9. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.30

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

(This article is published under Volume 14, Number 2, 2022)
Extract Full-Text PDF Cite
PlumX Metrics

Abstract

The present paper uses Carnap’s reduction concept to address the problem of new severe acute hepatitis in children. First, it tries to show how that concept can help understand why some previous hypotheses of causality on the new hepatitis in children should be rejected. Second, Carnap’s reduction concept is used to explain a complex hypothesis about the causes of that disease proposed in The Lancet in 2022. The latter hypothesis combines several factors: infection by SARS-CoV-2, a build-up of this virus in the bowel that comes in contact with blood circulation, and another infection by adenovirus. One of the points of the paper is to argue that a hypothesis can be described by means of a bilateral reduction sentence, which in turn would allow empirical comparison of the hypothesis in an easy way. Finally, the author considers a current cognitive framework, namely, the theory of mental models, to propose that bilateral reduction sentences should not be hard to handle for physicians or scientists.

Keywords: adenovirus; reduction; SARS-CoV-2; severe acute hepatitis in children; theory of mental models

Introduction

Several cases of a new ‘severe acute hepatitis in children were reported around the world in 2022 (e.g., Brodin & Arditi, 2022). Physicians and researchers tried to find, by all means, an explanation and the causes of those cases (see also, e.g., Cañelles, 2022). In the process, some hypotheses were ruled out. Some of them were, for example, to deem the new hepatitis as a disease equivalent to one of the five kinds of hepatitis already known, or an adenovirus (Brodin & Artidi, 2022; Cañelles, 2022).

After rejecting other hypotheses as well, one more hypothesis was proposed. This new hypothesis, in principle, seemed difficult to verify. It claimed that several elements acting at the same time cause the severe acute hepatitis in children. The new hepatitis would appear when there is a SARS-CoV-2 infection and, as a result, the virus accumulates in the intestine. Then, the virus would enter the blood and flow throughout the body. At once, the liver would be inflamed because of an adenovirus infection (Brodin & Artidi, 2022; Cañelles, 2022).

This hypothesis appears to be hard to contrast. However, the main goal of the present paper is to show otherwise. If the procedure Carnap (1936, 1937) offered to relate properties or predicates, that is, his reduction process is assumed, the task of empirical confirmation may not be so difficult. The literature reveals that, if it is accepted that the human mind follows, in its inferential processes, what the theory of mental models (e.g., Khemlani, Byrne, & Johnson-Laird, 2018) indicates, that procedure is not difficult at all (e.g., López-Astorga, 2021).

To achieve that goal, the present paper will have three sections. In the first section, some of the previous hypotheses about the causes of the new hepatitis in children will be taken as examples. The aim will be to explain how Carnap’s reduction processes can help reveal the reasons why those hypotheses are not admissible. The second section will describe the complex hypothesis pointed out above. It will be argued that, despite what may be thought, Carnap’s concept of reduction can lead to simple confirmations of that hypothesis. Based on the literature, the final section will show that to apply Carnap’s reduction procedure to that hypothesis is not hard for people, at least, if the theses of the theory of mental models are right… Full-Text PDF

Humanising History through Graphic Narratives: Exploring Stories of Home and Displacement from the North-East of India

Film & Media Studies/North East Literature & Culture/V14N2

2.2K views

Rolla Das¹ & Abhaya N B²

Christ (Deemed to be University), Bangalore, India. Email: rolla.das@christuniversity.in. Email: abhaya.nb@christuniversity.in.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022. Pages 1-18. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne32

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)
Full-Text HTML Full-Text PDF Cite
PlumX Metrics

Abstract

Literature from the North-East has responded to national, global and local issues, including questions on immigration and ethnic violence. They have resisted the colonial framework of representation and have invoked a sense of “cultural and ethnic particularity” (Sarma, 2013). This literature has adopted a multilingual register to respond to 1) patriarchal and 2) ethnonationalist discourses that have a forced and overbearing presence in the everyday lives of people and their stories. These writings evoke an ethno-critical approach that “engages otherness and difference in such a way as to provoke an interrogation of and a challenge” to our familiar realms of experience and is “consistent with a recognition and legitimation of heterogeneity” (Sarma, 2013). Select stories from First Hand (Volume II, 2018) – The Lonely Courtyard (2018), My Name is Jahanara (2018), and A Market Story (2019) by Kumdo Yumnam provide the heterogeneity that is characteristic of the works of literature emerging from the North-East, thereby resisting the homogeneity often indicative of the term ‘North-East’. The analysis will explore how the selected texts negotiate textuality and visuality in a specific manner to present an archive of everyday life that humanises history.

Keywords: Humanising Narratives, Graphic Novels of North-East.

Graphic Narratives

The Indian graphic novel is a relatively new literary form compared to its counterparts in the world (Debroy, 2011). However, it has made a significant impact in the world of Indian Writing in English. The graphic novel is a medium that includes a range of semiotic systems— iconic, symbolic and indexicals (Nayar, 2016). Given its form that negotiates textuality and visuality in a distinct manner, it can tackle subtle issues such as expressions and identities of varied kinds. It adapts itself to the emerging, contemporary concerns while retaining its lineage to its humble yet politically assertive beginnings in articulating questions of power, migration, gender, colonial onslaughts and nationhood (Giddens & Evans, 2013). Contrary to popular notions, the emergence of the comic culture in India drew inspiration from the comic culture of the West starting out as “reproductions or translated versions of comic strips such as Tarzan, Phantom, and Mandrake” (Debroy, 2011). However, Amar Chitra Katha transformed the reach and impact of Indian graphic narratives significantly. Further, Indian graphical novels witnessed a change in their critical engagement when narratives by Sarnath Banerjee, Orijit Sen, Amrita Patil, Appupen, and Viswajyoti Ghosh, to name a few, reached a diverse audience. The narratives catered to a range of social, cultural and political issues of nationalism, partition, gender, non-binary articulations of experience, the retelling of myths, and feminist readings of fables and fairytales.

We use the term graphic narrative in accordance with Chute (2008) and Nayar (2016). Chute claims that graphic narrative, as a term, is more apt to refer to narratives that have “reproducibility” and “mass circulation” as well as a “rigorous, experimental attention to form as a mode of political intervention” (p.462). She further argues that graphic narratives are able to create

their own historicity even as they work to destabilize standard narratives of history. Particularly, there is a significant yet diverse body of nonfiction graphic work that engages with the subject either in extremis or facing brutal experience. (2008, p. 92)

Nayar (2009) argues that “graphic narrative is a ‘medium’ within which we have ‘genres’ like graphic fiction, graphic reportage and graphic memoirs” (Nayar, 2009, p. 58) and this medium “is more inclusive and representative of an essentially hybrid genre“ and “is largely an offshoot of the country’s economic liberalization and its discontents” (Krätli, 2018). Inspired by political cartoons and journalistic narratives, this form, historically, has been always considered a political enterprise. Sankar and Changmai (2019) argue:

The graphic novel as we define it is not merely a novel by other means, despite its use of the book-length elaboration of plot and character typical of the novel; it is also an assertion of the form’s proclivity for political engagement. To a certain extent, therefore, the invention of the graphic novel in the work of artists like Will Eisner and Spiegelman is the rediscovery of the medium’s potential for extended performances that overcome the spatio-temporal limits of the political cartoon but remain overtly political and/or satirical, and non-fictional or (more commonly) partially fictive. (p. 113)

Political commentary in graphic narratives of the world and of India

Graphic narratives use diverse story-telling strategies and insist “on tackling more social commentary and cultural critique of the nation’s lacunae of flaws” (Nayar, 2016, p. 8). Madan (2018) asserts that the Indian graphic novel is “a cultural form; it champions the Indian graphic narrative as “a new representational mode that re-invigorates the canon” of Indian writing in English because of its multivalent representational strategies, and its insistence on offering a cultural critique of the Indian nation (7–8)” (p. 259). Graphic narratives across the world have challenged canonical historical representations and presented a critique of the ideas of nation and citizenship (Speiegelman, 1991; Sacco, 2012; Nayar 2016).

Employing mimetic and diegetic narrative styles, the narratives foreground “the silent actors” (Nayar, 2016 b). By highlighting the silences, the positioning of the texts in association with the images, and other allied strategies, the novels reflect a distinct semiotic strategy (Madan, 2017). Unlike photographs, visual narratives in graphic novels allow “personal recall and sentimental narratives” (Nayar, 2016 a, p.22) which allows the readers to locate the alternate histories (alternate, in this case, refers to the visualising of a history that is avoided, or omitted or forgotten in the canonical writings). Nayar claims that contemporary history is visualised through these everyday used mediums such as graphic narratives and presents to us a ‘visual turn’ in recording, in particular, historical horrors like genocide, ethnocide, war, and collective trauma. The narratives allow local contexts, issues, and experiences to be presented in an accessible and recognisable format, thereby opening them for a world readership. It builds critical literacy by letting the readers “see popular forms and their demotic registers as enabling the culturalisation of the public sphere, opening it up to concerns, debates and campaigns about rights, historical wrongs and emancipator possibilities” (Nayar, 2016, p. 198).

Orijit Sen’s River of Stories (1994), articulates the experiences and material conditions of the tribal population in the aftermath of the construction of a dam which is bound to have dire environmental implications, Viswajyoti Ghosh’s Delhi Calm revisits the narratives from India’s emergency 1975-77 (2010), Malik Sajad’s autobiographical narrative Munnu (2015) presents the fractured sense of being and growing up in Kashmir’s political turmoil (Mitra, 2019), and Appupen’s narratives in Legends of Halahala satirises the modern society in the cusp of capitalism and raises arguments against environmental degradation, urban degradation and sexual violence (Mondal & Banerjee, 2021). These publications are significant as they created and transformed how graphic narratives present critical notions of nationality in the context of India (Debroy, 2011; Nayar, 2016).

While there is a plethora of writing that is ‘emerging’ from the North-East, graphic novels or graphic subculture in the region is limited and is in its formative stage. Particularly, since publications by women writers in this genre from the region are quite limited, it becomes important to address the thematic focus and form of the available ones. The article through the analysis of the three selected narratives responds to this lacuna. The Lonely Courtyard and My Name is Jahanara by Amrapali Basumatary from First Hand (Volume II) (2018) and A Market Story (2019) by Kumdo Yumnam are analysed to bring forth the narratives, their textuality and visuality to explore how they represent the experiences of people from diverse ethnic communities from the North-East and enable writing of history/ies through the personal recounting of the impact of events on their personal lives.

Writing the North-East

The North-East of India offers perspectives of postcolonial experiences that challenge the depiction of a homogeneous nation-state. It deserves attention as a region that brings forth and questions the ideas of nationhood, citizenship and democracy, especially due to its critical history of colonial and postcolonial existence and its location as a region between South, Southeast and East Asia (Matta, 2017). North-East became a frontier sharing its borders with not one but multiple nations and due to the arbitrary severance of connection with the rest of the land and other trade routes it became a standalone entity and an excuse for policing and control. The nomenclature of the region contributed to the artificial superimposition of homogeneity which in reality was and is a region of ‘a multi-ethnic mosaic’ (Sarma, 2013, p. 37). The mainstream discourses validated by the army, by the nation and by the larger majoritarian imagination promoted the sense of alienation and homogeneous representation through narratives that fuelled ‘racialisation’ and increased profiling (Baruah, 2005, p. 166). Representationally, the region, therefore, was pushed towards the very margins of the national imagination with a mythic homogeneity that functioned as an artificial cohesive device. Typical discourses resting on secondary sources either conformed to such imagination and if at all they resisted the hegemonic forces of articulation, they did so quite superficially.

The scholarship from the North-East can, must and has challenged this “androcentric discursive regime” (Matta, 2017, p.200). The absence of writers from the North-East in mainstream literary discussions or panels, classrooms and everyday discourse does indeed continue an obliterating tendency. This remains a matter of concern because the North-East has a long tradition of writing and scholarship nationally and internationally, the writings have received critical acclaim and “has been accompanied by the appreciation of a progressively growing readership”(Matta, 2017, p. 200). In recent years, however, increased attention to the specific forms of production of literature from the North-East indicates five significant issues. The writings from this polyglot region are aiming at presenting an alternative to the ahistorical and touristic perceptions often circulated across mainstream media. The writings aim to debunk the perception of North-East, on one hand, as an exotic utopia and on the other, as the imagination of a dystopic land marred with guerrilla warfare (Matta, 2017). Secondly, the writings resist the colonial framework of representation and invoke a sense of “cultural and ethnic particularity” (Sarma, 2013). They speak of survival, and resistance and offer moments of crafting identities (through their narrators, protagonists, and characters). Hence, the writings evoke an ethno-critical approach which “engages otherness and difference in such a way as to provoke an interrogation of and a challenge” to our familiar realms of experience and is “consistent with a recognition and legitimation of heterogeneity” (Krupat, 1992, p. 3). Thirdly, through their works of literature, they have responded to national, global and local issues, including questions on immigration and ethnic violence. Additionally, “in particular, the novels that have been published in the last few years bear witness to the effort of creating an alternative archive of memories of cultural history that takes the form of polyphonic narratives, or ‘narratives of communities’” (Sarma, 2013, p. 41). Fifthly, while Manjeet Baruah asserts that in recent decades, ‘one can see an emerging and growing genre of “political” literature based precisely on the issue of the frontier’ (2013, p. 30), “novels by north-eastern authors, far from dealing only with the idea of the North-East as a conflict zone, appear more concerned with discourses that range from the question of identity formation in the borderlands to the performance of indigeneity as ‘frontier people’ (2013, p. 40), from the question of the language to the reconceptualization of the mantra ‘the personal is political’” (Matta, 2017).

The present paper analyses three graphic narratives: The Lonely Courtyard and My Name is Jahanara by Amrapali Basumatary and A Market Story by Kumdo Yumnam. Using the framework of ‘humanising history’ (Nayar, 2016), the form and intent of the narratives will be explored.

A Market Story, The Lonely Courtyard and My Name is Jahanara

A Market Story narrates the life of a married Meitei woman and her everyday experiences where she is negotiating her identity, here, a particular tribal identity, Meitei vis-a-vis an ‘other’. It is a short graphic narrative included in the anthology, Crafting the World – writings from Manipur (2019), edited and compiled by Thingnam Anjulika Samom. This anthology includes writings by 27 women from Manipur—a visual artist and 26 writers to represent the idea of the Manipuri woman, “to share the experiences of being a woman in a patriarchal order, and to tell us about the conditions, trials, tribulations and jubilation of their lives” (Samom, 2019). While some of them regularly write in Meiteilon (Manipuri), for this anthology, they present their narratives in English.

The other two narratives chosen for analysis are from First Hand Volume II (2018). This is an anthology of graphic narratives about conflict and resistance in India and is edited by Vidyun Sabhaney. The second volume focuses on narratives of exclusion and was published by Yoda Press in collaboration with the Centre for Equity Studies based on the 2015 edition of the Indian Exclusion Report (Kirpal, 2018). The themes included in this volume range from narratives of single women in India, the Muzaffarnagar riots, ethnic violence in Bodoland, experiences of the Jarwa tribe in the Andamans and the chronicles of the lives of Devadasis. Vidyun also points out that this anthology is a polyphonic exercise as it brought forth work by authors who have worked closely with “images, graphic narratives and research-based comics (such as Priya Kuriyan, Bhagwati Prasad, Shohei Emura, Mohit Kant Misra, Anupam Arunachalam, Vipin Yadav and myself) and those who have a long history with the subject matter (Neha Dixit, Amrapali Basumatary and Challapalli Swaroopa Rani)” (Kirpal, 2018). He asserts that the narratives by Basumatary are based on research and documentary evidence and reflect the conflict in Bodoland and the role of the State, and its impact on people.

The first narrative, The Lonely Courtyard (2018) is based on field research in 2006. This was part of a project on women affected by the Bodo-Santhali riots of the 1990s. My Name is Jahanara is however a fictional account. The narratives are real and are based on the actual interviews whereas the names of people and places are fictional. The account is of a Muslim woman during the 2012 Bodo-Muslim riot. It is argued to be a displacement comparable to the Partition in 1947. Jahanara recounts the experiences of Bengali speaking Muslim women as part of the author-researcher’s interviews in the aftermath of the riots through various organisations. Albeit academic in design, using oral histories and interviews, the author visited Santhali relief camps operating in Gossaigaon sub-division in 2006. Women from both communities were spoken to. Particular emphasis was placed on the narratives of elderly women who were witnesses. A short encounter with the women in the midst of their daily work brings forth the fissures, material conditions and significance of stories that ‘must’ be recounted to remember what happened and what lives on in their memories, albeit trailing.

My Name is Jahanara (2018) by Amrapali Basumatary narrates the experience of a Muslim woman during the 2012 Bodo-Muslim riot. Through Jahanara, the text brings forth questions of citizenship when the villages inhabited by the Muslims were attacked by Bodos and Muslims from these areas had to relocate and survive with meagre resources. Jahanara talks about her experience of the day of horror, the struggles in the aftermath and the continued threats to relocate to Bangladesh on account of not having documents to prove citizenship.

Humanising archives

Apart from cultivating narrative empathy, by “sharing of feeling and perspective-taking induced by reading, viewing or imagining narratives of another’s situation and condition” (Keen, 2006; quoted in Mondal & Banerjee, 2021, p. 2), these three narratives humanise archives through their “attention to a textualization of historical processes and a visual schema by which we might locate the individual participant or spectator’s ‘view’ of this history as it unfolds” (Nayar, 2016 a, p. 14). Lander had argued that the narratives bring together public and private events (for example, in Satrapi’s Persepolis) and “tend to revel in the minute personal details of everyday life, which receive their due respect because of their personal or symbolic weight within the lives of the characters and the narrative that is being constructed’ (p. 117). These narratives foreground the speech of the witnesses and remain silent in specific contexts; they include personal narrations, recollections and aspirations. They, however, do not overtly satirise (see Mondal & Banerjee, 2021). Instead, they present a representation of history that brings forth personal details and experiences, thereby, allowing the readers to envision the social and individual dimensions of representing histories.

A Market Story narrates the experience of a married Meitei Mou who goes to the keithel to buy groceries and is confronted by the women shopkeepers regarding her identity. The questions raised by the women in the marketplace seem to stem from the protagonist’s appearance and behaviour. They persistently enquire about her ethnic identity. Her ‘being’ challenges their expected schemas. Mundane inquiries about the price of vegetables quickly escalate to assertions made about her ethnic identity owing to her choice of food, attire and how she cares for her child. Throughout their transactional encounter, the questions become more personal and intimate. Kundo does not add panels as commentaries, instead, focuses mostly on the conversational exchanges, providing us with the indices (using speech bubbles that demonstrate the speaker) to understand the interrogator and responder. We remain a witness to this encounter. Seemingly trivial as a theme that provides a way to encounter different perspectives in a marketplace, the narrative goes beyond and brings forth everyday contestations of ethnic identity, community membership and othering. In the assertions, persistently made by the shopkeeper (p. 183-185), the protagonist is asked repeatedly, “Are you Meitei”, “So, you are a Christian”, and “Meitei?”, “We thought that you were a Kabui or some other…”.

Instead of focusing on the inter-ethnic conflicts at a macro level, the narrative positions the contestations through the everyday lives of people. It presents an alternative narrative of inter-ethnic encounters. Secondly, Kundo demonstrates how women negotiate contested community membership. This is in contrast to how “the violence of men’s worlds, where mostly male protagonists struggle to find a new balance amidst the chaotic turmoil of global conflicts, counternational insurgencies, and interethnic fights…overlook a more gendered dimension of history” (Matta, 2013, p. 212). Matta (2013) notes that literature from Nagaland are reclaiming neglected stories of Naga women who negotiate traditional values and their individual aspirations that operate on two ends of a spectrum. She asserts, “caught between different kinds of expectations, indigenous women often find themselves in an identity crisis” (Matta, 2013, p. 212). The statement, however, resonates with stories from Manipur as well. This narrative also presents a moment of critical literacy by foregrounding the inter-ethnic identities of the North-East and resisting the imposition of a mythic sense of homogeneity.

Historical events are often narrated at a macro level ignoring the ‘mundane’ everyday events by omitting the representation of the diversity of individual experiences. Articulating the representational forms of humanising history, Nayar (2016 a) asserts,

The graphic novel’s representation of humanization demands both, its attention to a textualization of historical processes and a visual schema by which we might locate the individual participant or spectator’s ‘view’ of this history as it unfolds. If the textual dimension delivers one aspect of the story, the expressions of characters and their location in the panels nudge us to paying attention to how individuals perceive and receive events as these happen. (p.14)

In A Market Story, the image panels provide close-up shots of people and objects that would have been relegated to the background. Close-up shots, instead of wider panels, magnify objects, expressions and events visually and weave them into the visual narrative.

Figure 1 Panel from A Market Story, Kundo Yumnam, 2019, p. 188

Visually, representation of expressions are significant in narrating historical events and their impact on individual lives. Expressions inform “that history had witnesses who responded in different ways to the events, whose emotions writ large on their faces should convey to us the scope and nature of the events and thus alert us to the subjects of that history, the social and individual dimensions of the larger historical process” (Nayar, 2016, p. 14). This humanises the archives or history. During one of the verbal exchanges (Figure 1) between Kundo and the woman shopkeeper of Nupi Keithel (women market), Kundo asks the seller, “Are you Meitei or tribal, Ine?”. The latter remarks, “Why, I am Meitei of course! What did you think?” (p.88). This is presented visually through a closeup of two faces. The face on the top right of the panel has the shopkeeper’s face with lines drawn around her face indicative of surprise and indignance, visibly reflecting a poise against Kundo’s statement. She is a Meitei of course. She cannot be asked to confirm her ethnic identity. The multisemiotic visuality, therefore, presents the contestation both textually and visually.

The panel below (Figure 2) presents another visual register: the difference in the attires of Kundo and the shopkeeper. The latter wears an attire commonly worn by Meitei women whereas Kundo wears a shirt and a pair of trousers. Kundo’s shoes are presented in closeup. The shopkeeper’s presumptions are based on a problematic and unilinear semiotic register that connects performatives such as attires with religious and ethnic labelling.

Figure 2 Panel from A Market Story, Kundo Yumnam, 2019, p. 185

While the text of graphic narratives moves the plot and the images provide the details of objects, events, emotions and expressions, the visuality of the text, specifically in terms of lettering, indicates “graphic voice” (Medhurst & Desousa, 1981, p. 227). In this text, small fonts, hand-lettered and mostly speech bubbles are used to retain the foregrounding of personal encounters and emphasis has been marked by larger fonts, capital letters and repeated punctuation marks. For example, the shopkeeper enquires, “Just one child? He seems to be VERY attached to his father” (Yumnam, 2019, p. 185) when she observes that Kundo’s child was being engaged by the father. In another encounter, when Kundo states that she might have bought boar meat from her, the shopkeeper vehemently disagrees and says she doesn’t “sell such things”, expressing her shock and disbelief and asks Kundo whether she eats “Beef too?!!”

Kundo uses an important visual metaphor as well. The closeup panel of the meat cutting board is presented along with the currency notes along with other images of vegetables in the lower-left panels. The right panel includes Kundo with her back towards us. Kundo shares our vision here, she is also looking on, both as a participant and as a witness, possibly reflecting on the contestations of her identity.

Figure 3 Panel from A Market Story, Kundo Yumnam, p. 189

It is a marketplace and a place of transaction where materials are weighed, transacted and consumed. This marketplace, however, becomes the site of a conflict— the knife put inside the wooden bark typically used for cutting meat, — simultaneously reflects the grotesque and the othering. The bean seeds scattered through the right side of the page challenge the presence of beef, iconised through the cutting board. The page layout (Figure 3) brings forth food as a visual idiom to articulate community membership and the excluded. To be a true Meitei, the seller is to speak about, consume and sell specific food. To eat meat, especially pork and beef, is a marker of defiance and hence relegates the consumers to the position of an ‘other’.

In these moments, the textuality and visuality of the narrative intersect deeply. The communities, individuals, their being and their coexistence remind us of the assertion made earlier about the heterogeneity of communities who coexist, in volatile conditions, poised for a contestation at any moment, yet occupying the same marketplace. While A Market Story reflects the narratives of the contestations of belonging, A Lonely Courtyard and My Name is Jahanara recounts a traumatic history of displacement. Inhabiting two spectrums of the conflict, beyond the narrations of public and official history, we encounter stories of Birola and Thwisri who are in conversation with each other in A Lonely Courtyard and Jahanara in My Name is Jahanara. Amrapali mentions at the beginning of the narrative that the stories are narrated in Korajhar and adjoining areas. She points out that one important reason for the selection of the region is because the region is inhabited by people from a mixed demographic profile who differ in terms of linguistic, ethnic and religious affiliations and has witnessed large-scale violence since the 1990s. She mentions that fictionalising of the narratives has been done to protect the real identities of the people and “to create an emotional, political and humanitarian connect with people who are some of the most marginalised and oppressed communities in the country” (Basumatary, 2018, p. 183).

The Lonely Courtyard is a visual idiom. It is about personal, geographical and political alienation. Its liminal space indicates both belonging and not belonging to a place of settlement. The emptiness, interior-exteriority, and expanse are reflected in the narrative through the textual and visual elements. This narrative brings forth the conversations in an afternoon in a seemingly calm village, where, everyday life is both familiar and yet distant. The narrative begins with the text in an open panel that merges with the images of the page. The pages provide a glimpse of a topographic and panoramic view of the village with texts in open panels floating through the page. Andrei Molotiu, as a strategy for reading abstract comics, invokes the term “‘iconostasis’: the perception of the layout of a comics page as a unified composition; perception which prompts us not so much to scan the comic from panel to panel in the accepted direction of reading but to take it at a glance, the way we take in an abstract painting” (Nayar, 2016 a). Nayar (2016 a), elaborating on humanising archives and public histories, claims that “more than the literary texts on traumatic events such as the Partition or complicated histories of colonial India, the graphic novel helps us see through the macro-stories and locate the individual anguish, distress and sadness” (p. 46). Birola, a respondent in the narrative asserts,

We are refugeees here. The villagers call us that. They call this village where we live a colony. Our homes stand on the land of a person from the village. We do not know how long we will be allowed to live here. We haven‘t built anything solid. It is not our home, not our land. We have already shifted so many locations in this same village. They keep moving us from here and there. The landowners fear we will settle down here and usurp their land. (Basumatary, 2018, The Lonely Courtyard, p. 188)

This substantiates the feeling of alienation, discomfort and a yearning for return which is rendered impossible because of the sheer destruction of the village, spatially, in imagination and culturally by the riots. These narratives also focus on the differential experience of the woman. A woman recounts how she as a 25-year-old fled the village and tried to survive along with her other friends, elders whereas the men of the villages stayed back only to follow suit soon after. The alienation that the state forces on is also pertinent in the patriarchal order. The Lonely Courtyards have the men relax, rest and prepare for work whereas the women return from work and return to work again after recounting their trials and tribulations and a moment of self-reflection of who they are and where they belong.

Figure 4 Panel from A Lonely Courtyard, A Basumatary, 2018, p. 190

Thwisri (Figure 4), recounts how the riots happened when she was pregnant and lost her child in the relief camp, witnessed largescale deaths due to diseases that spread in the absence of proper sanitation, terrible living conditions in the temporary settlements, and lack of basic amenities, including ration and hygienic toilets. These personal recollections reframe the events in a different manner than an impersonal, public record of memory.

The courtyard provides a space for recollection, and becomes a witness to intangible micro-histories, personal narratives and memories; it exists as an entry and exit point to their temporary ‘homes’ forever retaining the anxiety of ‘homelessness’. The lack of spatial belonging is being overcome by social belonging and these women, working together in farmlands, create new friendships on the basis of the shared histories of struggle, the trauma of losing homes, and in certain cases, even family members to the riots. It is in these moments of recollection, that the protagonists cease to be strangers but rather become neighbours, allies, and companions—a relationship built on the idea of togetherness. It is these temporary spaces that must be reinvented by them as ‘home’, both socially and spatially to not only overcome their feeling of alienation but also to comfort themselves from the disturbing yet persistent reminders of the othering.

Figure 5 Panel from A Lonely Courtyard, A Basumatary, 2018, p.191

The last page (Figure 5) does not have separate panels. It is a splash panel, with an image in the centre in grayscale. With the courtyard in the centre, the imagery feels like a photograph with inverted colours, wherein the source of light and darkness are reversed. The dark, monsoon clouds hover around the courtyard. The blackness of the background permeates the greyish undertones of the page. It works as a frame for the lives, experiences, anxiety, volatility and anguish of the inhabitants of the place. The courtyard stands as a symbol of persistence, etched with trauma, nevertheless, standing testimony to survival and stories.

Figure 6 Panel from A Lonely Courtyard, A Basumatary, 2018, p.193

Incidentally, the strategy is repeated in My Name is Jahanara. The family stands with a background (Figure 6) that is pitch black, located in the centre wherein the rest of the frame is engulfed in bleeding grayscale. Her family’s future is entrapped in the darkness, the inversion of the source of light indicating the faint possibilities of a stable life. The images if analysed further reflects another interpretation—it seems that the foggy frame that is allowing temporary visual access to the people could engulf them in time.

Figure 7 Panel from My Name is Jahanara by A Basumatary, 2018, p. 206

My Name is Jahanara is an assertive story. Clark argued that history is humanised in graphic narratives when they reflect the implications of historical events on people and their lives, reflecting changes in their agencies and experiences (Nayar, 2016 a, p. 14). The narrative is presented in the form of a recounting of a Muslim woman about her experience of the Bodo-Muslim riot, 2012. Drawn from first-hand narratives of Bengali-speaking Muslim women, Jahanara represents the voices of women who witnessed the violence, largescale destruction, and a complete change in their lives in the aftermath of the riots. She begins her narrative by introducing us to her family and then providing us with directions to reach her ‘home’. She says, “our house is one of those with tin walls and broken fences. But before the trouble it was not like this. It was like the other homes that you see” (Basumatary, 2018, p. 194). This allows the readers to note how ‘homes’ have become markers of history, few abandoned, as witnessed in The Lonely Courtyard, few existing in an uncanny relationship with others as witnessed in My Name is Jahanara, wherein different homes inhabit a past that is marked by trauma, displacement and ‘othering’.

The narration progresses with her recounting the day of the riot. She remembers how villages were burnt down and only Muslim houses were targeted. Recounting the trauma of the event, she said that it made her feel “dizzy” and added, “I had never seen our men like that” (Basumatary, 197). Even in recollecting the traumatic past, she mentions, “our men”; years of living together, the experiences and the relationships stand in dissonance with the mad frenzy of rioters. She then recounted her time in relief camps, the temporary arrangement turning into a semi-permanent home, their constant relocations and inhabitable conditions of these settlements. She asserted that government relief funds and assistance never matched the material necessities. The trauma exists and retains its emotional veracity. She says, “I still feel scared”, “my child sometimes cries in his sleep” (Basumatary, 2018, p. 203), she recounts how her husband after visiting the ravished villages broke down unable to acknowledge that all that was familiar was gutted. Their ‘homes’ became empty spaces. Continued harrowing experiences resulted from neighbours, even non-Bodos who refused cooperation and support.

The narrative does not include allegorical devices or symbolic references in many contexts. However, a persistent visual register is used throughout the narrative—a stylised representation of fire is introduced in the opening pages from the bottom right corner and covers the top part of the next page. It reoccurs in a subsequent page where the entire upper part of the page includes a tin/thatched house that seems to be breaking, dismantled and appears as a free-floating object (Figure 8). The fire rages from the roofs. The fire becomes the anchor for the traumatic past. It is, indeed, presented stylistically, with sharp lines, clear boundaries, and darker colours as a way to navigate what happened around it. The displacement began with the advent of fire.

Figure 8 Panel from My Name is Jahanara by A Basumatary, 2018, p. 196-197

In one of the pages that depict the school used as a temporary shelter, a single frame presents CRPF men with clear markers of uniform. Though located at the lower end of the page and in the courtyard of the school, by virtue of iconicity, literally and metaphorically, as will be obvious in the textual narrative, they gain centrality. The next panel presents the image of the other people moving to distant areas, carrying their belongings, figures drooping with the weight of the luggage they are carrying. The sky is overcast with monsoon winds. The reader remains unsure of the temporality of the events. This page is her recollection of the experience during the monsoon, presenting visually and textually the narrative about the inhospitable conditions in the camps. Thick, sharp lines indicating rain run across the page, jarring the visual scape and indicating the force, impact and persistence of its occurrence in their lives. They had to negotiate the harsh natural realities with meagre resources. The inescapability of the situation can be inferred from the netting and grid-like form of the rain, entrapping individuals in the face of riots, inter-ethnic conflicts, lack of adequate governmental assistance and impending threats of the monsoon. In the narrative, there is a page that documents the hurried and frenzied movements of people who are seen running clasping their children and holding their belongings. On another page, small images of humans, albeit hazy, are located in space, little beyond the centre of the page and in the distant horizon; the mosque, albeit small in scale, stands as a metonymic device to articulate the identity of people running that underline the violent history and its massive scale. The iconostasis makes us focus on the small images of the humans, in their hurried disposition to run and move, locating the victims and their situation in the larger narrative of the riots and displacement.

Figure 9 Panel from My Name is Jahanara by A Basumatary, 2018, p. 205

In another page, an image of a document, indicative of an official document with the state emblem of India validating the citizenship of people is located in the centre of the page with nothing else permeating the entire frame. The text below has Jahanara’s narration, “My husband told me that the BTC government was asking our people for land papers. Otherwise, they will kick us out of the country. They tell us to go to Bangladesh. They think we are all Bangladeshis. I have never been to Bangladesh. Neither has my husband. Where will we find our documents? They burnt down everything. I wish I had known” (Basumatary, 2018, p. 205). She adds, “they also say people who do not have land are all Bangladeshis. Does everyone possess land?” (Basumatary, 2018, p. 205). These narratives challenge the “fictions of equality and citizenship predicated by the postcolonial state” (Marino, 2017). It is the uncertainty centring citizenship that is brought forth effectively in the image of the document that does not reveal any details. The image is emblematic. The document erases human presence. In this narrative, the contested and volatile relationship between the nation and the ethnic communities become explicit. She recounts how CRPF told them, “You better go away from here. We won’t be able to protect you” (Basumatary, 2018, p. 205). While A Market Story uses the first-person pronoun, both A lonely Courtyard and My Name is Jahanara uses the term, “we”, possibly referring to the fact that while the narrative is emerging from an individual, the experiences are shared by people who witnessed and survived the trauma. It is the individual in a community and the community at large whose stories are being told through the first-person narrations. Both these narratives make assertions and raise questions. They ask, “Where will we go?” (My Name is Jahanara) and in The Lonely Courtyard, Birola says, “If you give us more time, we will talk all night long. There are so many stories”.

Conclusion

History is archived in different ways. Personal narratives reclaim the erasures in the official histories. Graphic narratives are a powerful medium that uncovers the affective discourses underlying such narratives. This article demonstrates how these narratives humanise the archives through textualization and visualisation; it examines how, in contrast to the archives that store and emplot data from surveys and interviews, especially of the communities that have witnessed trauma and ethnic violence, the graphic narratives bring forth a sense of orality, restoring the voice to the dislocated. These narratives, using polyphonic speech registers, invocation of the testimonies, choice of panelling and framing, use of visual idioms, textual indices, present a mode of rewriting of history that is indicative of “individual dimensions of the larger social process” (Nayar, 2016 a, p. 14). The narratives through textualization and visualisation help us understand how communities remember their past, survive the traumatic present and negotiate their volatile existence vis-à-vis the nation-state through everyday encounters.

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.

References

Basumatary, A. (2018). My Name is Jahanara. In V. Sabhaney (ed.), First Hand: Graphic narratives from India (Vol. II) (pp. 194-205). New Delhi: Yoda Press.

Basumatray, A. (2018). The Lonely Courtyard. In V. Sabhaney (ed.), First Hand: Graphic narratives from India (Vol. II) (pp. 184-192). New Delhi: Yoda Press.

Chute, H. (2008). “Comics as literature? Reading graphic narrative”. PMLA, 452-465.

Debroy, D. (2011). Graphic novels in India: East transforms West. Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature, 33-39.

Evans, J. C., & Giddens, T. (Eds.) (2013). Cultural excavation and formal expression in the graphic novel. Inter-Disciplinary Press: Witney.

Krätli, G. (2018). The Indian graphic novel: Nation, history and critique. In Pramod Nayar. Postcolonial Text, 13(2), 1-3.

Madan, A. (2018). The Indian graphic novel: Nation, history and critique. South Asian Review, 39(1-2), 259-263.

Madan, A. (2017). Sita’s Ramayana’s negotiation with an Indian epic picture storytelling tradition. In M.A. Abate & G.A.Tarbox (Eds.), Graphic novels for children and young adults: A collection of critical essays (312-331). Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.

Marino, (2017). Resisting slow violence: Writing, activism, and environmentalism. In N. S. R.Ciocca (ed.), Indian literature and the world: Multilingualism, translation and the public sphere (pp. 177-199). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Matta, M. (2017). The novel and the North-East: Indigenous narratives in Indian literatures. In N. S. R.Ciocca (ed.), Indian literature and the world: Multilingualism, translation and the public sphere (pp. 177-199). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Medhurst, M. J., & Desousa, M.A. (1981). Political cartoons as rhetorical form: A taxonomy of graphic discourse. In Communication Monographs, 48, 197-236.

Mitra, K. (2020). Graphic novels as literary journalism: An analysis of aesthetics and authenticity in the narratives of select Indian graphic novels. (Unpublished Mphil Dissertation). Christ University, Bangalore.

Mondal, K., & Banerjee, J. (2021). Silence, satire and empathy: Reading Appupen’s topoi in his wordless graphic narratives. Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 13(4), 1-11.

Nayar, P. K. (2009). The visual turn: Affect, autobiography, history, and the graphic narrative. IUP Journal of American Literature, 2(3-4), 58-72.

Nayar, P. K. (2016 a). The Indian graphic novel: Nation, history and critique. Routledge India.

Nayar, P. K. (2016 b). The forms of history: This Side, That Side, graphic narrative and the partitions of the Indian subcontinent. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 481-493.

Kirpal, N. (2018, June 30). First Hand 2: Second Volume of non-fiction graphic novel tells stories of exclusion, struggle in India, Firstpost.

Samam, T. A. (2019). Introduction. In T. A. Samom (ed.), Crafting the word: writings from Manipur (pp. 1-17). New Delhi: Zubaan Books.

Sarma, P. M. (2013). Towards an appreciative paradigm for literatures of the Northeast. In M. C. Zama, Emerging literatures from Northeast India: The dynamics of culture, society and identity (pp. 37-46). New Delhi: Sage.

Shankar, N. R., & Changmai, D. (2019). Word, image and alienated literacies in the graphic novels of Orijit Sen. Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, 112-125.

Sharma, I. (2017). Negotiations of home and belonging in the Indian graphic novels Corridor by Sarnath Banerjee and Kari by Amruta Patil. South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 1-23.

Yumnam, K. (2019). A Market Story. In T. A. Samom (ed.), Crafting the word: Writings from Manipur (pp. 181-189). New Delhi: Zubaan Books.

¹Dr Rolla Das teaches in CHRIST (Deemed to be University) Bangalore. Her areas of interests are language studies, graphic novels, feminist writing, pedagogy and cinema.

²Dr Abhaya N.B. teaches in CHRIST (Deemed to be University) Bangalore. She is interested in women’s writing across the world, pedagogy and higher education administration.

Book Review: Wari: A Collection of Manipuri Short Stories by Linthoi Chanu

North East Literature & Culture/V14N2

6.5K views

Publisher: Notion Press. Date of Publication: November, 2019. Language: English. Pages: 143, Price: INR 299/-. ISBN 978-1-64661-788-3.

Reviewed by

Adiba Faiyaz

Department of English at Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India. Email: adiba.english@gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022. Pages 1-3. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne43

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)
Full-Text HTML Full-Text PDF Cite
PlumX Metrics

Short Stories, as a genre, has remained popular among academics for their brevity and for their hard-hitting precise themes. Manipuri Short stories in recent times have drawn the attention of the readers even outside Manipur which has emerged as a more mature and powerful form of writing with its close association with Manipuri cultures and traditions. These stories dealt mainly with issues of class, caste, community, discrimination, dominance, hardships, and exclusion. Often these writings concentrate on the societal pattern of life depicting the struggle for survival. In the current trend of Manipuri Short stories, one would notice a clear and blunt depiction of every social and lived reality of the people of the region. All such crises and pressure that emerge in the realm of socio-politico-economic turmoil of the place find recognition in these works. The earlier depiction of the spirit of romanticism in Manipuri short stories soon got replaced by themes abounding in everyday fear and anxiety.

Wari: A Collection of Manipuri Short Stories by Linthoi Chanu is a collection of eight unique stories that introduce readers to the rich cultural traditions and nuances of Manipur. In her other book, The Tales of Kanglei Throne, (2020) she writes about the mythological stories of Manipur. “Wari” in Manipuri means Story. The stories presented by Chanu are contemporary yet historical in taste, which is blended with tales of black magic, superstitions, and other cultural beliefs of the people of the region. For first-time readers, Wari offers a good insight into the socio-cultural fabric of the state. All eight stories are unusually driven and very different from one another. The stories are carefully handpicked to open a window into the terrains of the life situations that have been or are in practice.

The author opens her book with the first story titled, “Near Immortal”. It is a story of an old woman, Tharo, who outlives her younger generation. The story points towards the ancient belief of older citizens living life longer than they are expected to. The story has two different perspectives to offer— the voice of science and logic as advocated by the young doctor and the belief of the society in black magic and superstitions. The story has an open-ended dimension leaving it to the choice of readers to interpret. Khoidouwa, the theme of this story, is an urban legend based on a foul practice of black magic. This short story is also a tale of people across generations and their beliefs.

The second story on the list is called “The Hound.” Just like its title, the story revolves around two characters, Pirel, the young college student, and the dog. The story tells us about the harmonious relationship between humans and animals. It revolves around the occasion of ‘Ekoukhatpa’ ceremony. The story restores the age-old faith in the security and beliefs in ancestral deity worship. The divine guardian reappearing to protect their children in “the happy form of a hound…” (p. 33) talks about an integral faith of the Meitei community.

The third short story, “When in War”, starts with the depiction of a boat race festival on the shore of Kanglapat where the boat wailed as a sign of warning for any catastrophe. The protagonist, Kunjabihari being ignorant of the reason why he had to participate in this war is a reflection upon many innocent lives, adversely affected by war and its aftermath because of the political motifs of the powerful Kunjbihari taking care of the war captive, talks about human relationship based on empathy and respect. The captive is not just an enemy soldier but also a guest. Years later, when his grandson sings the same lullaby that the soldier used to sing while staying at his place, Kunjbihari finds ultimate solace. The reference to war is to the Second World War and to Imphal being the fierce battleground for the Japanese and the Allied Forces.

“Amity in Queue”, the fourth short story in the series, is an extremely sensitive story. Behind the landlocked state, sister bonding is starkly visible. Sakhi and her new acquaintance, Thabalei, struggling really hard to fill the petrol tank of their Activa, give us an insight into the life and happenings of the people of Manipur. Essential commodities were often brought by trucks and they would get over very soon. Chanu goes on to depict one such typical scene of the road blockades. Surviving with such limited means with hiked prices throws light on the everyday struggle. The story ends with Sakhi returning home with no petrol and with the thought that she might not be able to meet her newfound friend ever again.

The story “Hags of Mountain” uses the technique of story within a story to talk about a popular mythological creature, Loudraobi, from the legends of Manipur. This story about deep forest dwellers helps us understand the belief and system related to forest dwellers. Unlike the previous generation, the modern generation considers the myth of Loudraobi as a story of forest mammals only. “Forbidden Passion”, the next short story addresses the problem of drug abuse as prevalent in Manipur during the 1980s. Young college students, going to study away from home, often became victims of consuming drugs and getting addicted to it. This social crisis still persists.

“The Scarlet Haophi” and “Floating Dreams” are the last two stories in the book. The former highlights the indigenous faith of the Meiteis. In Manipur, water bodies such as canals, and lakes are considered to be the dwelling places of ancient Gods and hence, they are to be treated with love and respect. The last short story revolves around the lives of three children Senyenbi, Sarif, and Phajabi earnestly waiting for their teachers to keep their dreams floating.

Both chapter illustrations and cover illustrations have been skillfully done by Kaniska Mutum. Her pictorial representation at the beginning of each chapter raises the curiosity of the readers and leads us to hastily dive into the story. It also serves as a picture book where the book and the picture both seem to convey the stories. Thus, the book provides a polyphony of words and images. The eight short stories in Wari are a combination of written texts and visual images together juxtaposed together, a kind of representation that effectively delineates the nuances of Manipuri culture and traditions. How a picture is interpreted largely depends on cultural assumptions and hence a book like this demands a different degree of attention and observation on the part of the reader. This intersection of verbal and visual signs helps us imbibe a response that is an amalgamation of critical and creative perspectives.

The hallmark of Chanu’s work rests on her understanding and sensitivity in using the Manipuri words in her short stories just to maintain close proximity with the larger body of Manipuri literature. Interestingly, the author’s research on Manipuri literary traditions and concerns gets reflected in the vast array of subjects that ranges from the mythological to the contemporary themes. To me, these are the two different paths around which Chanu largely frames her arguments around.

In conclusion, it can be said that Chanu’s stories would be of interest to the general readers as well as to scholars on Manipuri literature and culture, for her stories provide fresh insights into Manipuri society. The stories are easy to comprehend, written in a language that has ample use of the local terms adding to its charm. The terms are then well explained in the glossary provided at the end of the stories. The glossary is detailed and well explained. The book takes you on a ride to get introduced to the folklore and mythical stories of Manipur. This is also a book for those who are interested in the traditional folktales of the region. Significantly, Linthoi Chanu dedicates her book to “the seekers” (Wari, Chanu). Indeed, in her stories, the seekers are likely to find what they are looking for. In Chanu’s own words from the author’s note, “…we all carry the naïve wonders of our cultural and traditional credence in our heart as a part of our identity” (Wari, Chanu). The book faithfully captures the stories and beliefs that Chanu wants to showcase. The book is fairly priced and keeps our interest intact till the very end. One of the most popular Manipuri sayings tells us to give a watch to the one that tells stories. I would be happy to hand over the watch to Chanu, the storyteller, to enchant the listeners with her next ‘wari’.

Adiba Faiyaz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh

Book Review: Name, Place Animal Thing by Daribha Lyndem

North East Literature & Culture/V14N2

652 views

Publisher: Zubaan Books. Date of Publication: 20 April 2021. Language: English. Price. No. pages 208. Price: INR 329/- ISBN 10: ? 819476050X

Reviewed by

Sandhya Tiwari

Palamuru University, Telangana, India. Email: drstpu@gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022. Pages 1-4. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne42

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)
Full-Text HTML Full-Text PDF Cite
PlumX Metrics

Name, Place, Animal, Thing is an engrossing debut by Daribha Lyndem, a civil servant from Shillong, Meghalaya. Shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature 2021, it is a collection of ten chapters with a young Khasi girl from Shillong, named D, as the narrator who takes us through the memories of her childhood and teenage days, interspersed with depictions that many may easily relate to as D’s life revolves around her family, teachers, and school friends. She captures with adorable simplicity childhood fantasies like greeting card shops, glitters, colour pencils, games, friends, adventure etc. Her innocent curiosity is overpowered because of her surroundings. The conflicts that are largely internal, though insignificant, are universal in their appeal and it is also important to note that these stories are narrated through the eyes of a child who captures and transmits these experiences with microscopic precision. These coming-of-age stories set during the early 2000s are fascinating that give us a peep into the intricacies of race, class, religion, and politics in the capital city of Shillong. While going through the narrator’s account of the changes in her city that now barely holds the traces of what it previously was, readers may relate to having experienced similar situations that quickly establish an undercurrent of ‘mutuality’ and nostalgia.

The vignettes in Name, Place, Animal, Thing are objective depictions where the narrator witnesses everything but remains a mute onlooker. She brings in bits and pieces of the lives of a few people around and in doing so, we get a glimpse of their predicaments and conflicts, but never their relevance to the narrative – except a haze of nostalgia that recollections often are.

We were the only house in the neighbourhood to have pretty white picket fences. They did not last very long. In time the rain seeped through the wood, damaging it, and the white paint cracked and turned grey like wrinkles on skin. They were soon replaced with a brick-and-mortar wall topped with spikes. At first it was just a brick wall, but the spikes were installed after Mr. Roy was attacked outside. (NPAT. p. 52)

Each chapter is focused on one character and through that character, readers are introduced to one more aspect of Shillong. Unfortunately, the narrator maneuvers the course and takes us through the happenings that cloud the ‘concern’ established at the beginning of the story. Owing to this, though all the individual depictions form the backdrop, the cultural and social intricacies and the volatility in Shillong are not embedded into the narrative or in the thematic development. “Except for the odd tussle between a non-tribal and the Khasis, in my young mind I felt hardly anything interesting went on in our town,” (NPAT, p. 34) she says, referring to the antagonism between the Khasis that form the majority as one of the three major indigenous ethnic tribes of Meghalaya, and the Dkhars, the colloquial word to refer (often derogatory) to the non-tribals.

The author presents gripping narrations that depict the attitude of the Khasis towards the migrants from other communities such as Nepalis, Chinese, Biharis, and Bengalis; the violence against the ‘outsiders’ or the Dkhars; the political movements, and the religious dynamics of the city. The narrator captures the antipathy between Khasis and the Dkhars during her growing up years and skillfully interlaces them in the vignettes. In one such vignette, she records her helplessness. Bahadur, a kind Nepali who always assisted the entire housing community by sacrificing even his sleep and family time.

Bahadur worked as the guard, gardener, driver and caretaker all rolled into one. The place would be in shambles if not for him. He made life comfortable for everyone around him. (NPAT, p.10)

But, when an unfortunate event struck his family, he was left stranded as no one came forward to help him.

On hearing the noise, other neighbours came to their windows to ascertain what had happened but, as I watched, they did nothing to help. Mrs. Kharsyntiew, who lived with her three sons, peeked through the window while all this transpired. I saw the ruffle of the lace curtain being pulled back abruptly by someone in that house. They did not bother to come out. …..The Purkhayatas and the Lyngwas also watched from their windows. (NPAT, p. 22)

It is only her parents who went to help him, withstand the horrific incident. This incident makes her realize that it is not only the differences between the Dkhars and Khasis that are the causes of conflicts but something that goes much beyond that. This indifference is reintegrated when Tommy Lu, a Chinese immigrant from Kolkata who moves to her City to run a successful Chinese restaurant was forced to shut down his business because he failed to pay Saw Dak, an insurgent group. As the narrator grows up, the focus in her stories also changes like her newfound emotional bond with her Hindi teacher. Throughout these stories, one aspect remains constant and it is how D always ruminates on the happenings around her. Albeit few stories that have a somber tone, Daribha dexterously weaves the stories and spruces them, making it easier for the readers to not feel too overwhelmed.

D’s life, like the book, is a collection of memories that define and shape not only her ideas and thoughts but also opinions and emotions. The Khasi girl is constantly introspecting and questioning the world around her. The entire narrative becomes a mosaic etched in tales of living with differences, learning about inequalities, experiencing the odds and evens, and the unconditional exchanges in friendships all from the eyes of the narrator. This is a classic representation to exhort the role that memory plays in the life of an individual. While reading the novel, a reader can feel the poignant compassion that is evoked by the narrator’s accounts. It is as if the narrator is looking into the eyes and talking. The book does come together very well in the end where all the threads, each representing a story, join to strengthen the theme and present a picture of childhood and friendship of the Khasi girl, D.

When it comes to writing style readers can feel the semblance in style and language of Daribha Lyndem with the likes of RK Narayan and Ruskin Bond. The imageries paint the picturesque locale of the hill station with its beauty and bounty of Shillong. While reading this book one can fantasize about one of the wettest spots in India when the narration sharpens its focus on the luxuriant verdurous hills; the rain-soaked bridges; cold air that turns breath into fog; rows of eucalyptus shooting up in the heaven from roadsides; the Wah Umkhrah river that meanders through Shillong; houses fenced by bamboo sticks covered with creepers; women in beautiful jaiñsems, the traditional attire of the Khasis; and the sporadic hailstones. The editorial exercises could have been sharper to take care of some of the typos etc. On the whole, Name Place Animal Thing comes with a unique appeal. Though it is a thin volume, the impact lasts longer in the mind of a reader.

Dr. Sandhya Tiwari is an Assistant Professor, Department of English, Palamuru University, Telangana, India.

Previous 1 … 29 30 31 32 33 … 164 Next

Cookie	Duration	Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional	11 months	The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy	11 months	The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.

You might be interested in

You might be interested in

You might be interested in