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An Identity Born Out of Shared Grief: The Account of Rambuai in the Contemporary Mizo Literary Texts

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Zothanchhingi Khiangte
Department of English, Bodoland University, Kokrajhar, Assam, India. ORCID: 0000-0001-8225-0326. Email: zothanikhiangte@yahoo.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages 1–15. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne11

First published: June 09, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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An Identity Born Out of Shared Grief: The Account of Rambuai in the Contemporary Mizo Literary Texts

Abstract:

Anthony David Stephen Smith’s definition of nationalism as a feeling of “intense bond of solidarity”, when applied to contemporary Mizo nationalist consciousness, is a bond born not out of pre-historic kinship but of shared grief and a spiritual anchor in Christianity. The MNF movement for self-determination, which began with half-hearted support from the people spiraled off into the most violent and darkest period in Mizo history known as Rambuai  (1966-1986) which, when translated into English, means ‘troubled land’. The human experience of this period has been a subject of Mizo literature. Three works of fiction— Nunna Kawngthuam Puiah (1989), Silaimu Ngaihawm (2012) and Zorami: A Redemption Song (2015) are among the best literary representations of human suffering in the troubled land. These works will be used as textual bases upon which the role of religion and spirituality in bringing about a reconciliation and healing can be studied. The paper examines how the rambuai memories construct the Mizo identity that relies on forging connections between religion and a heroic cultural past.

Keywords: Rambuai, Mizo, identity, reconciliation, memory

The Mizo National Front was formed in 1961 with sovereignty as its declared objective. The ‘call for independence’ against the Indian government was preceded by the Mautam1 Famine (1960). The MNF declaration has been commonly seen as the culmination of Mizo nationalist sentiment that had been in the making for long (Nibedon, 2013; J.V Hluna and Tochhawng, 2012). The Mizo political consciousness developed since the nineteenth century when the Mizos came into contact with the British Raj. Although the present study aims to focus on how the collective experience of pain during Mizo Movement, as recounted in literary texts, has shaped the Mizo consciousness in contemporary times, it seems pertinent to take a historical detour to arrive at a better understanding of the subject under study.

The British expedition of the Lushai Hills2 was a result of the regular raids conducted by the tribesmen on the plains of Assam and so the objective was to teach the raiders a lesson. It however proved to be a difficult task to bring the people who inhabited the Lushai Hills under control. It took more time than to conquer the subcontinent (Nibedon, 1980, p.171).  Therefore, it was thought wiser to bring in the missionaries who would ‘civilise’ them through religion and thereby enable the British administrator to conquer them culturally and morally (Sajal Nag, “Folk Intellectual Tradition for Resistance: Invention of Traditions and Lushai Counter to Cultural Colonialism in North East India, 1904-1911”, pp.1-2). And since the land was not considered to be economically very lucrative, as is obvious from the report of Major Anthony Gilchrist McCall, the colonial experience in the Lushai Hills was quite different from that in other parts of India. The colonial intent was to be seen as a paternal figure of authority rather than as an invader who must be resisted at all cost. Therefore the image of the white man as a self-sacrificing figure who has come to enlighten the people with his religion and education is more predominant in the Mizo perception of the British Raj. The British policy that “help must therefore be at a sacrifice, spiritual and financial, the latter at any rate in the beginning, from those who control its destiny” ensured that “control at such cost will be welcomed, not resisted as domination and exploitation” (Mc Call, 1977).

Although the British encounter may not be seen as the catalyst to the Mizo ethno-nationalist consciousness, it did initiate two necessary elements for the act of ‘becoming’ a Mizo and these were- religion and vernacular literature. These, according to Adrian Hastings, are the integral and determinative elements for the construction of nationhood (1997, p.3).   The British annexation of the territories inhabited by the Mizos was soon followed by the arrival of Christian missionaries who synchronized the gospels with education. The two missionaries, JH Lorraine and FW Savidge who arrived in the Lushai Hills on January 11, 1894 formulated the Lushai alphabet  “A Aw B Ch” and made possible the development of vernacular literature. The translation of the gospels in Duhlian dialect, first initiated in 1896, made possible the adoption of a common language for the Mizos, who till then did not have a lingua franca because each clan had a different dialect or language variation. Not only did each clan have different languages but also different sakhua (loosely translated now as religion) and it was only after the adoption of Christianity that it became possible to overcome distinctions made on the basis of clans: “Besides the linguistic barriers, Christianity also overcame the establishment of separate villages and communities based upon clanship divisions. As different families and clans strictly observed particular sakhua, changing one’s sakhua was akin to cutting off one’s identity and risking the wrath of the family deities” (Dingluaia, 2018,p. 246). Thus literature and the new religion became important determinants in fostering a sense of kinship amongst the different clans. However, the nationalist consciousness that was brewing in different parts of India against the British did not quite reach the Mizos because of the fact that Lushai Hills was governed under a different administrative policy as ‘Excluded Area’, which kept the region and its people remain secluded and sequestered.

Therefore, it was not until the twentieth century postcolonial context that the people actually became aware of their distinctive identity- an identity defined by common cultural traditions, folklore and linguistic affinities- different from other communities. Based on such similarities and commonalities, the varied groups of people, who were once at war with each other, decided to come together and carve out a common identity under the nomenclature ‘Mizo’ or ‘Zo-fate’. In fact, the generic name ‘Mizo’ by which the people inhabiting the mountainous regions that later came to be named as Lushai Hills (in 1890-92) are now known was adopted only by the turn of the 20th century. Lushai Hills became named as Mizo Hills District within the state of Assam on 25th April, 1952.3 With a change in the political scenario of the country, there began a growing consciousness amongst the Mizos as to the need to preserve their cultural identity as a group distinct from others. A certain sense of the ‘we’ and ‘them’ was becoming more pronounced when faced with a gradually looming threat to Mizo cultural identity. Mizo language and traditions were steadily being abandoned by the younger generations who were becoming more exposed to other cultural groups. With the objective to safeguard the ethnic identity of the Mizos, the Mizo Cultural Society was formed in 1950 under the leadership of Laldenga, which was rechristened as Mautam Famine Front during the mautam famine and finally became the Mizo National Front.

It may be said that the Mautam Famine of 1960 provided Laldenga and his supporters the opportunity to express the dissatisfaction of the people against the Assam government and gave birth to the Mizo National Front, formed in 1961, with sovereignty as its declared objective. Although the Mizo nationalist uprising,  that began with only half-hearted support from the people, may be seen as a catalyst to the Mizo ‘nationalist becoming’, it lacked the ‘intense bond of solidarity’ Anthony David Stephen Smith identifies as crucial to the spirit of nationalism. It is, in fact, the experience of indescribable pain endured as a result of the uprising which has formed the “bond of solidarity” in the Mizo consciousness.

 K.C Lalvunga, who writes under the pseudonym of Zikpuii Pa, points out the lack of enthusiasm to the nationalist call for sovereignty in his  Nunna Kawng Thuam Puiah (1989) when he narrates that the elders chose not to object too harshly to the idea of sovereignty because they did not want to hurt the sentiments of the young men : “tlangval ho rilru tih nat loh nan independent chu an do tak duh lova…” (p.73) and that there were also some sections of the populace, especially the supporters of Mizo Union, who were ridiculing not only the call for sovereignty but also the very idea of distinct Mizo identity (p.74) but among the youth, a self-consciousness was definitely growing as a result of being “othered” by the dominant Assamese community. The novel Nunna Kawngthuam Puiah (1989) shares instances of the processes of ‘othering’ through the recollections of the protoganist , Chhuanvawra Renthlei, about his college days in Shillong:

“Once during our football match, some Assamese boys, inspite of knowing fully well that we could not speak Assamese, were stubbornly speaking to us in Assamese and gave all the instructions about the match in Assamese. Angered, Thansavunga replied, ‘Stop your bloody Assamese. I can’t understand’… ‘Why can’t you understand Assamese? Don’t you know it is a state language, you bloody fool?’” (p. 49).

Such instances have the potential to ignite deep passions, when repeated over a long time. Sanjoy Hazarika’s account of a young Mizo whose father was a Brigadier in the Indian Army reaffirms this sense of ‘othering’ that was present within the postcolonial Indian context:

When narrating about the Indian Army brigadier musing about his son, Sangliana, “The young man ‘loved’, he said, the idea of a homeland, taking up arms for it, of fighting against India, the juggernaut. Even in his travels to New Delhi and Calcutta and elsewhere in the country, he had felt the sting of discrimination and racial slurs despite being an army officer’s son, his family being part of the elite of their people. That sting continues to be felt by countless others from his state and their region decades later when they are snubbed, teased, abused and the women molested and groped in New Delhi and other parts of the Hindi heartland.” (2018, p.83).

Much as such observations like those of Nirmal Nibedon that “…deep in the Mizo psyche there persisted a sense of unfulfilment, a silent and sincere search for their identity and an effort to bring tremendous latent energy of their people back to a level of dignity and equality they had known before the invaders  [the British] had come” (1980, p.311) cannot be said to be totally untrue, the view that the colonial rulers were seen more as paternal figures also seems to hold much ground, as reflected in statements of prominent Mizo figures like K.C Lalvunga,  “As we look back, we are able to discern more clearly the changes the colonial rule had brought about. It is easy to blame the colonialism but we must remember that colonialism had brought with it a civilizing factor and Mizos are the true beneficiaries” (2013,p.99). However, a sweeping observation of the colonial encounter as being ‘beneficial’ ignores the fact that  the colonial masters, for their administrative convenience, had drawn boundaries where there was none and clubbed together regions which had very different cultural and political structures and historically had never shared affinity, and finally left behind an impossible mess for the new rulers to clear. Having said that, it is also a truism that the ‘pain and humiliation’ that produced the ‘intense bond of solidarity’ among the Mizos— the quintessential of ethno-nationalism— came not from the foreign invader but from their own countrymen. Malsawmi Jacob, in her discussion about her book Zorami(2015) with Jaydeep Sarangi, succinctly states, “the way I see it, the real subordination of the Mizo people was what the Indian Army did to them in the aftermath of the uprising. The deprivation of power and voice was also most acute then. The air raids and Army atrocities were hushed up. The people of Mizoram became voiceless victims. Yes, Zorami has spoken out for the people whose voice was stifled.”4

            The MNF movement for self-determination, which began with half-hearted support from the people had spiraled off into the most violent and darkest period in Mizo history known as Rambuai (1966-1986) which, when translated into English, means ‘troubled land’. This was the period which witnessed the 1966 aerial bombing of Aizawl that remains a blight in the nation’s history. Sanjoy Hazarika gives an account of the aerial bombing:

Four days after the rebel assault erupted on 1 March 1966, fighter jets of the Indian Air Force came screaming over Aizawl…Indian bludgeoning was not wholly unexpected by the MNF. It had believed that there would be retaliation but not the scale of the counter-strike that followed, which smashed and burnt villages, molested and raped women, virtually displaced the district’s entire population, destroyed property and tortured elderly men and youth. The violence was unprecedented in the history of India and its already nascent struggle against the pro-freedom group in Nagaland which had erupted over a decade earlier….The Rambuai had begun in real earnest with a campaign that, fifty years down the line, should make every Indian ashamed of the government and what it did to a civilian population during a time of conflict. (2018, pp. 96-98)

It was this historical catastrophe of the aerial bombing of Aizawl, now the capital city of Mizoram, that Jacob is referring to when she describes the post-bombing scene. Aizawl lay in shambles and those houses that survived the air-raids were burnt down. The experience of distraught citizens who begged for mercy and yet were denied human compassion is lucidly expressed in Zorami:

“His home…escaped the fire and was still standing after the air-raids. The Assam Rifles men came and burned it down. He stood at the door begging them to spare his home, but they pushed him aside and torched it, laughing loudly as the flames rose.” (2015, p.155)

The Mizo District was declared a “disturbed area” by the Government of Assam under the Assam Disturbed Area Act of 1955. Law and order was entrusted to the Indian army and though martial law was not officially declared, the army was armed with the draconian Armed Forces Special Power Act (AFSPA), 19585 and vide Rule 32 of the Defence of India Rules, 1962, they also proclaimed emergency in the area under article 352 of Indian Constitution (V.L Hluna &Tochhawng, 2012, p. xviii). Thus, the juridical order that governed a democracy was no longer valid to a people who were still part of the democratic country. Within the framework of the law is created what Agamben calls a ‘state of exception’ that “gives power to eliminate certain categories of citizens” (2005,p.1).  Agamben’s idea is developed from Carl Schmitt’s conceptualization of sovereign power as possessing the monopoly on the ability to decide on what calls for a state of exception, on what it considers as a threat to its integrity.

 Agamben, in his State of Exception, explains this concept of a “state of exception” under which the juridical order becomes invalid as “the legal form of what cannot have legal form” (p.1).  His idea of modern totalitarianism is significant to an understanding of how the state mechanism works in contemporary politics to wield control: “modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system” (p.1). In the face of threats, the ‘state of exception’ is seen as the dominant paradigm of government.  Agamben’s study of the “state of exception” becomes relevant when it comes to the state of affairs in relation to the AFSPA.  Under the “disturbed area” tag, the people of Mizoram became a  “category of citizens” who were governed by a state of exception in the form of the AFSPA : “The AFSPA under which the Army was operating in the Mizo Hills empowered officers to shoot even unto death where it was considered needed, requiring only that due warning be given as deemed necessary” (V.L Hluna & Tochhawng, 2012, p.161).  The people’s pleas for help fell on deaf ears and their sufferings were seen as a necessary consequence. In his reply to the plea against military outrages on innocent Mizo civilians, the Home Minister of India, Y. B. Chavan, in Delhi is reported to have said: “I have to punish my children severely if they behave badly” (Nibedon, 1980, p.118). The horrendous suffering undergone by the people is brushed aside by callous and lackadaisical observations such as “There must have been some amount of psychological suffering and physical torture when the villagers were asked to shift from places where they lived for ages. But of course, this cannot be escaped. Security is far more important than the bodily sufferings of some people” [emphasis is mine] (V. Venkata Rao quoted in Pachuau & Schendel, 2015, p. 308). Unfortunately, “the bodily sufferings of some people” have far reaching consequences that affect beyond the physical to the psychological and has the potential to affect generations.

            With overall responsibility of army operations given to Major General Sanghat Singh, the first battalion of Indian soldiers (the 8th Sikh Bn.) made their way into the Mizo Hills on the 3rd of March, leaving behind a trail of tears and cries of women that rent the air. The 4th of March, the day this battalion entered Kolasib, is reported to have been the single day with the highest incident of rape in the entire history of the hills (Hluna & Tochhawng, 2012, p.163).  It is important to note here that the advance of the troops was marked by ‘rape’ of the enemy women. It is pertinent to distinguish what happened in Mizoram from what happened in other war-torn regions, where rape accompanies atrocities of the armies. In Mizoram, military aggression began with rape and the army posts that surrounded the villages continued to represent sites of sexual aggression (Hluna & Tochhawng, 2012, p. 162) and it was brought to the notice of the Assam Assembly that not even children or pregnant women were spared from the sexual atrocities (Hluna & Tochhawng, 2012, pp.170-71).

Rape as a concomitant of war violence has to do with the demonstration of power to have the desired effect of terror, used as a military strategy. Since the Second World War, the use of rape as a weapon of war had assumed strategic importance. Yasmin Saikia’s statement in the context of Bangladesh War in 1971 can be applied in the NEI context as well, “Raping women in Bangladesh was a rite to assert the power of men’s ability to destroy the vulnerable and make it impossible for a woman to find a whole self after the war. Rape was a tool to destroy women’s link with the past. They were doomed to live without their collective memory; their personal history became a secret that could not be disclosed.” (2011, pp. 60-61).

There can be no clearer example of the sexualized aspect of military conflict than when the advancing human machines are utilized by the state to discipline and punish. Since patriotic honour is often tied with women’s sexual respectability, enemy women are often seen as legitimate targets of rape. The horror of rape has been described in varied ways as an intent to depersonalize the victim (Mertzger, 1976); as an attack that affects the victim’s physical but also psychological and social identity (Weis and Borges, 1973); and as a weapon of terror (Sheffield, 1987).

Though rape as an aspect of militarized conflict is the most painful, it is at the same time the most silenced because “the memories survive only in the private sphere and are dealt with as private matters by the victims’ families and often solely by the victim who hides in ‘shame’ (Saikia, 2011, p. 63). The ordeal of a rape victim, whose suffering is doubled by her need to hide the truth, is seen in Zorami when the narrator tells us that Zorami “kept her mouth shut”, “she never spoke out” because “such a thing is not for telling”. (p.43)  Zorami, who according to the author, is drawn as the ‘prototype’ of all victims who suffered the same kind of fate, “learned to be ashamed. And to keep quiet. So, she did not tell anyone about the bully. Neither did she tell about the dirty man with the dirty touch”.   (p.42)  Therefore, this aspect of terror inhabits the silenced zone of the private sphere and much as it caused psychological injury to the Mizos, it has not been able to share the same space as the other forms of military aggression whose memory has formed the ‘bond of solidarity’ in the Mizo consciousness. In the nationalist “becoming” of Mizoness persists, borrowing Yasmin Saikia’s phrase, “the hierarchy of men’s truth and women’s silences” (2011, p.12).

What has impacted the Mizo consciousness most is the brutal experience of the village re-grouping. The village re-grouping that was carried out in Mizoram and Nagaland was a military strategy that was modeled on colonial counter-insurgency methods of the British in the Boer War in South Africa (1899–1902) and later against communist insurgents from 1948-1960 in the Malay Peninsula to crush a Communist insurgency (Hazarika, 2018, p. 98; Pachuau and Schendel, 2015, p. 306). In Mizoram, it was done in full vengeance with an objective to break the Mizo spirit. According to Joy Pachuau and Schendel, the forced resettlement directly affected 87 per cent of Mizoram’s rural population and 82 per cent of its total population (2015, p. 308).  Margaret Ch. Zama and Vanchiau give the human dimension of what happened:

Horrendous military action was initiated whereby the inhabitants of villages located throughout the length and breadth of Mizoram, were herded overnight with just only a few hours notice, to leave their all except what they could carry, and have their beloved homesteads burnt to the ground before their very eyes” that made even “the elderly [cling] to their doorposts, weeping openly. (2016, p. 68)

Brutalities inflicted on a population become memories not only of the victims but also of those who were tasked with the duty. V.S Jaffa, who had to carry out the village grouping in Mizo Hills as the Addl. District Magistrate, recollects with regret: “The grouping exercise carried out over 1967-70 has left a huge scar in the Mizo psyche. The romance of the Mizo village life disappeared forever” (Nag, 2012, p.12). The feeling of desolation and helplessness is best articulated in a song composed by Suakliana in 1968 titled as “Khaw Sawikhawm hla” which is said to be the saddest song that could make its listeners weep openly when it was aired on the All India Radio, sung by Siampuii Sailo. The poet compares the entire population of Mizoram to a faded cloth and a riakmaw bird, homeless and hungry (Zama &Vanchiau, 2016, p.65).

It is recorded that, as part of the army atrocities, the security forces engaged in different forms of punishments, from putting their prisoners into sacks filled with burning hot chilies, forcing villagers to kneel in confined spaces for endless hours in the scorching sun or rainy nights to tying them to a changel tree (a species of banana plant) to be burnt alive (Hluna &Tochhawng, 2012, p. 162). The Mizos were dispossessed of their rights not only in terms of their citizenship in a democratic nation but as human beings. In the Assam Assembly debates, Gaurishankar Bhattacharyya described the sufferings endured by the Mizos as a result of the re-groupings in metaphors of the Holocaust, referring to the village groupings as ‘concentration camps’6. To be able to comprehend such an experience by the human imagination, according to Mbembe (citing Hannah Arendt), is  never possible “for the very reason that it stands outside of life and death” (2019, p.66) because as Mbembe puts it, “its inhabitants have been divested of political status and reduced to bare life” (p.66) and therefore it is a life with no parallels. And this place, which is created by the state, is “the ultimate expression of sovereignty” by the power invested in it “to dictate who is able to live and who must die” (pp. 66-67).

Sexual violence was the order of the day and as disgusting as it may sound, there are some who, like a certain Major Pritam Singh, indulged in extremities in pursuance of the horrid act and he was known to have kept a list of all his victims (Hluna&Tochhawng, p.163). In her historical narrative, Zorami, Jacob perhaps draws the character of Major Kohli from this figure: “The Major had fallen across the bridge with a forefinger on his revolver trigger. When they searched his pockets, they found a diary among other things” (p.132). When it was suggested that the diary should be preserved as a “memorial of vai (Indian) army’s dirty deeds” (p.133), the leader of the ‘ambush party’, Dina replied that it was better to “wipe it out” (p.133) and so the pages were torn out and burnt. The phrase ‘wipe it out’, when understood in terms of memory, suggests erasure. Given the unwillingness to “preserve” it in memory, and also because, as is pointed out in The Mizo Uprising, “a lot of Literature written before and during the years of Insurgency was burnt either by the soldiers or by the writers themselves…” (Hluna and Tochhawng, 2012, p.xii), it is not surprising when Margaret Ch. Zama and Vanchiau argue that Mizo writers have been ‘reticent’ about memories of the period for subjects of literary works. They imply that it is perhaps because of the pain being so hurtful that it becomes “inexpressible”, quoting Easterine Kire— “In the worst of the war years, the horror has taken us beyond words into silence; the deep silence of inexpressible pain” (2016, p. 66).

Although the memory of the rambuai seems to have imposed what Tom Segev calls a “posthumous identity” (1993, p.11) that has formed part of the cultural memory, the memories are disjointed or sometimes incoherent recollections as survivors try to remember after twenty-five years. They have kept their stories suppressed for so long not only because of fear but also perhaps because they were too raw and painful. Stories of those years are fragmented memories that “cannot be substantiated by written records on most accounts” because “for twenty years, the Mizo people had lived in fear of being branded as rebels, and for twenty years, they refrained from writing diaries, creative outpourings or records of experiences because of the dreaded soldiers who could not read the language were wont to brand them as “MNF documents” (Hluna & Tochhawng, 2012, p. xi). Such experience is dramatized by James Dokhuma in his novel Silai Mu Ngaihawm (2012) when the love letter sent by Sanglura to Ramliani falls into the hands of the Security Forces. Since the Indian soldiers are unable to read and understand the contents in the letter, they immediately brand it as an MNF document which provokes them to escalate their atrocities.

The state commemoration of the aerial bombing of Aizawl on the 5th of March, observed as Zoram Ni (Zoram Day) to commemorate the fateful day on which many innocent lives had been lost, started only since 2008, forty-two years after the attainment of statehood.

The overlapping of forgetting and remembering is what proves to be an obstacle confronting especially women’s dimension in the reconstruction of coherent narratives. When one has for so long been reduced to silence, a sort of being in stasis, one is faced with the difficulty of regaining one’s voice and one’s subjectivity.  One way of looking at the cultural repression of women’s memories might be the fear, not so much as the lack, of empathizing with the victims. This phenomenon is best described in the words of Susan J. Brison when she speaks about the difficulty in recovering from the trauma of “Nazi death camps”: “Intense psychological pressures make it difficult…for others to listen to trauma narratives. Cultural repression of traumatic memories comes not only from an absence of empathy with victims but also out of an active fear of empathizing with those whose terrifying fate forces us to acknowledge that we are not in control of our own” (1999, pp. 48-49).

In Silaimu Ngaihawm, it is the ‘inexpressible’ pain of Ramliani that ultimately leads to her death. She internalizes the pain of losing her beloved who is killed by a bullet fired during an encounter and ironically, that very bullet becomes the only souvenir she has of her beloved. It was as if her grief consumed her whole until she gave up existing. Ramliani thus becomes reduced to an indistinct human form as a result of her inexpressible ‘memory’. The bullet becomes the symbol of pain and it is so deeply entrenched within the Mizo consciousness that it becomes part of the Mizo identity. Although it was the very bullet that killed her beloved, it becomes part of Ramliani and she is made to carry it to her grave. Likewise, the Mizoness that was produced after the Rambuai cannot be seen in isolation from the pain and humiliation suffered by the Mizos as a people. And it was this traumatic experience that left the people with a collective inability to tell their story. In the absence of collective response to the dehumanization experienced, individuals are left with what Rosenblum and Minow call either “too much memory” or “too much forgetting” (2002, pp. 1-13) and for the Mizos, it was the latter that produced, borrowing Paulo Freire’s phrase (and re-used by Sanjoy Hazarika in his introduction to After Decades of Silence (2016) in the Mizo context), a “culture of silence”.

The traumatic experience of the rambuai becomes part of the collective memory which affects not only those who were there to witness but even those who were not there. The idea of traumatic memory extending beyond the victims is not particular to the Mizos. Speaking of the Cherokee relocation, Woodward had recorded, “Alluded to as “the Trail of Tears” by Indians of all the Five Civilized Tribes, the journey west was a tragic event that could not easily be erased from the emigrants or their descendants”  (1982, p.218).

In order to understand the impact of the historical catastrophe undergone by the Mizos, it is important to take into consideration ways in which transgenerational trauma, or what Susan Sontag powerfully calls “the pain of others”, can shape a people’s identity. The phenomenon of what Marianne Hirsch calls “postmemory” (in the context of the children of the Holocaust victims) involves transgenerational transfer of catastrophic collective memories to what has been termed as the “postgeneration” (Hoffman, 2004) or “generation after” (Hirsch, 2012).  Toni Morrison uses the term “rememory” to describe the intergenerational transmission of traumatic experience: “Some things you forget. Other things you never do. . . . Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place— the picture of it— stays, and not just in my rememory but out there, in the world. . . . “Can other people see it?” asked Denver. “Oh yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Some day you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.” and the memory belongs as much to the witnesses as to those who came later “Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the whole farm— every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there— you who never was there— if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will” (2005, p.43).

Sajal Nag in his essay “A Gigantic Panopticon: Counter-Insurgency and Modes of Disciplining and Punishment in Northeast India” (2012) suggests that the contemporary phenomenon of trance-like dances in the church, very prominent among the Mizo women, may be the impact of women’s traumatic memory which has been repressed and unaddressed and in turn, produces an intergenerational transmission of trauma.

In reconstructing Mizo identity post-rambuai, it becomes important to facilitate the process of healing in ways that could help regain the ethno-nationalist pride of being Mizo. While it is agreed that it was the shared experience of pain and the memory of that pain that had been central to forming a collective Mizo identity, it is the ‘imperative to forget’ through spiritual reconciliation that aids in ‘becoming’ Mizo after the troubled years. Two factors play important roles in facilitating the “becoming” of a Mizo – religion, and recovery of the heroic and mythic past. While religion aids in “forgetting” a difficult past, the mythic past offers a form of collective memory that facilitates regaining nationalist pride.

Although celebrating a mythic and heroic past and ignoring “difficult pasts” holds less legitimacy in the contemporary mnemonic landscape (Vinitzky-Seroussi & Teeger, 2010), it is the ability to forget which is considered by Christian Meier to be considered the cultural achievement rather than the act of remembering and that the process of forgetting after civil wars is the only tried-and-tested solution for social peace.7 However, Assman and Shortt  challenge Meier’s “tried-and-tested solution” by questioning the validity of categorizing the two terms- forgetting and remembering- into rigid polarized concepts. For Assman and Shortt, ‘remembering’ or ‘forgetting’ are rarely mutually exclusive practices and therefore more attention must be paid to crossovers such as selective forgetting and partial or transitional remembering because that brings us to two crucial questions: “who profits, who suffers from forgetting? Can a fresh start really be achieved on an equal basis or is the price too high which one group has to pay?” (2012, p.68).

While the emotional charge of the collective memory of pain and humiliation during the rambuai is central to the construction of Mizo identity, the nationalist “becoming” of Mizoness builds its narrative through a masculinist imagination of the cultural past that glorifies masculine traits of a pasaltha.8 In fact, the Mizo National Army (MNA), which consisted of eight battalions were named after legendary heroes of the past: “The first four – Chawngbawla, Khuangchera, Saizahawla and Taitesena – formed the Lion Brigade, which operated in the northern half of Mizoram, and the other four – Joshua, Lalvunga, Vanapa and Zampui Manga – formed the Dagger Brigade, operating in the south” (Camera as Witness 318). The appropriation and glorification of cultural heroes continue to hold in the Mizo ethno-nationalist identity that may be discerned in contemporary politico-religious institutions like the Mizo Zirlai Pawl (MZP), Young Mizo Association (YMA) and the Kohhran Thalai Pawl (KTP) who were formed through missionary initiatives (Hluna, 2009, pp., 400-408) and continue to function as important bodies. The several sections of the YMA and the KTP are named after different pasaltha(s) like Chawngbawla, Taitesena, Vanapa, Khuangchera and so on.

Merged with cultural identity is the religious element. The religious dimension in constructing a new Mizo identity finds its best manifestation in the state anthem of Mizoram “Ro min rel sak ang che” (composed by Rokunga). The song is a prayer to the Christian God addressed as Pathian to guide and protect the people and the land against all enemies. The adoption of Rokunga’s poem as the state anthem not only forges connection with the Christian faith but also with the uprising. It was Rokunga’s poetry that stirred the revolutionary spirit and awakened the Mizos to rise up in defense of Zoram. R.L Thanmawia says that Rokunga was “responsible for the uprising of 1966” (1998, p.125) through his poem “Harh la, harh la” (Awake! Awake!) in which he exhorts the people to be brave and rise up to the call of Zoram (the land of the Mizos).

Forging connections with both the religious and the cultural dimensions, a new Mizo man, who inherits all the traits of the cultural heroes as well as those of the Christian faith, is constructed. This new Mizo man takes birth in one of the most popular literary works published after the rambuai, Nunna Kawngthuam Puiah (1989). In this novel, through the character of Chhuanvawra, K.C Lalvunga has been able to create a sense of masculine dignity and pride in being a Mizo for a generation who was yet to recover from the deepest humiliation as a people. According to Achebe, regaining the lost dignity and pride in his people was the most important role of a writer. The protagonist, Chhuanvawra (the nation’s pride), as the name suggests, is the quintessential of a Mizo man.  In strength of character as well as in intelligence, there is none to surpass Chhuanvawra, even among the vais (the plainsmen). While Chhuanvawra succeeds in becoming an IPS officer, the female protagonist, Ngurthansangi is forced into marriage with Colonel Ranade who sells her into prostitution. It was Chhuanvawra who later rescues her from the “depth of debauchery” (suahsualna khur).  When Chhuanvawra meets Sangi at the hotel where she was trapped as a sex slave, her first reaction was shame: “I am so ashamed. Oh why have you come here, U Chhuan?…I am unclean, I am undeserving of your love” and she repeats “I am no longer worth saving… I am unclean” (pp.176-77).  She is made to feel ashamed although she is a victim against her wishes. Sangi finds healing only when she comes in union with her homeland and God. Chhuanvawra is painted as the most honourable man as he takes Sangi to be his wife and becomes her protector.  The pastor, Pu Lianzuala prays for them at the altar, “Dear God…they have been through a great misfortune…we ask that they may forget these painful memories”. Therefore, healing comes through spiritual reconciliation and through ‘forgetting’.  Going by the observations of Siamkima Khawlhring, one of the first Mizo critics, Nunna Kawngthuam Puiah has been able to fill the Mizo heart with a sense of pride and dignity. Although the novel succeeded in restoring the lost pride and dignity in Mizo men, it failed to do the same when it comes to bequeathing a similar place to women in the reshaping of Mizo identity. While Chhuanvawra is painted as a flawless character, Ngurthansangi’s weakness and vulnerability is intended to remind women’s failings and therefore their need for protection by Mizo men.

The new Mizo Christian religio-ethnic identity is problematic because in it, the gendered paradigm does not find equal space. When the nationalist discourse relies on masculinist ideals and ignores the marginalized narratives, it faces the danger of privileging selective memories while silencing others and this issue is well articulated in Jacob’s re-telling of the rambuai experience from a gendered dimension. Zorami’s story is not only an individual trauma but is representative of the trauma faced by all rape victims during the Mizo conflict. Zorami’s inability to tell about her traumatic rape foregrounds the reason why there is no immediately accessible knowledge of violence: the victim is not allowed to speak of the crime against her. For Zorami, the experience of sexual violence is so traumatic that it is written on her body and she needs to come to terms with that. Zorami’s narrative takes us into the excruciating past, the memory of which is so painful that recalling that cannot but be a ‘bruising experience’,  borrowing the phrase Adichie used when she talked about her experience of writing  Half of a Yellow Sun, in which she recollects the traumatic memory of the Biafran War of 1966. For Adichie, the process is so painful that she “often wondered whether to stop or to scale back” because writing about her people’s experience of the war places a responsibility on her.

Either in the memorialisation of the humiliation endured or in the commemoration of the war heroes of the Mizo Movement, representation of women is markedly absent. As Mary Vanlalthanpuii asserts, “scholars dealing on [the] insurgency focus exclusively on male activities” although “female volunteers in the MNF Movement…fought alongside the men and suffered with the men” (2019,p.5). And despite the gendered nature of atrocities, how far the individual memories of the female victims are allowed to be written in the state sanctified commemoration of the uprising is an uncomfortable question. It is important to remember that “collective memory is an instrument and an objective of power,” which like history, is socially constructed, collectively shared, and selectively exploited. Thus, the politics of memory in contemporary Mizoram should be understood in relation to the social construction of Mizoness post-rambuai. The memory of atrocities and victimization during the troubled years forms the psychological bond which seeks spiritual consolation through religion while the valorization of a culturally “imagined past”, to use Benedict Anderson’s term, provides the ethno-nationalist consciousness. The reconstruction of Mizoness, however, seems to resist gender differentiations. Most of the recent literary works have also avoided to analyse how representational paradigms of Mizoness might be gendered and it might be because of the fear of being seen as divisive. However, to conclude, in the national becoming, recovering the silenced story of women is essential because, as Morrison, concludes in Beloved, “disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her” (p.323).

Declaration of Conflicts 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.

Acknowledgement
Feature image courtesy:

 Notes:

  1. Cyclical bamboo flowering in Mizoram that causes a boom in rat population. Food grains are attacked and exhausted by the rats, causing famine in the region.
  2. The first Lushai expedition of 1871-72 was led by General Bronlow and Brouchier. See T.H. Lewin (1912).
  3. On 18th April 1952, the Mizo Union leaders met with the Constituent Assembly Advisory Committee under Gopinath Bordoloi, they submitted a memorandum in favour of an autonomous district council with a change in the name of Lushai to the more inclusive Mizo).
  4. In Conversation with Malsawmi Jacob. Jaydeep Sarangi. Writers in Conversation Vol 4. No.1, February 2017. Retrieved December, 2021 from researchgate.net
  5. Armed Forces Powers Act, 1958 empowers security forces to open fire, conduct operations and arrest anyone without warrant in ‘disturbed areas’. See “AFSPA Factsheet: The Act and its Extension in India”. Outlook.8th Dec 2021. outlookindia.com
  6. Assam Assembly Debates, 7 June 1967, Vol II No.16. In Sanjoy Hazarika (2018), Strangers No More, p.103.
  7. 7. Christian Meier (2010), Das Gebot zu vergessen und die Unabweisbarkeit des Erinnerns (The Imperative to Forget and the Inescapability of Remember). Cited in Assman and Shortt, 2018.
  8. The word signifies all qualities that define manhood- being fearless, skilled in hunting and warfare and unflinching on the face of danger and pain. Simply translated, the word pasaltha stands for ‘a braveheart’.

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Hirsch, M. and Smith, V. (2002). Feminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduction.  Signs 28 (1), 1-19.

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Zothanchhingi Khiangte, PhD, is an Assistant Professor and the former Head of the Department of English, Bodoland University, Kokrajhar, Assam. She is also the Coordinator of the Centre for Women’s Studies of Bodoland University. She has been the Chief Editor of the International Journal of Literature &Cultural studies (Two volumes). Her most recent books are Orality: Quest for Meanings and Revisiting Orality in Northeast India. Four PhD and two MPhil scholars have been awarded their degrees under her guidance.

Kanhailal’s ‘Theatre of the Earth’ as Political Allegory

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Pranjal Sharma Bashishtha1 & Goutam Sarmah2

1Department of Assamese, Gauhati University, Guwahati, Assam, India. ORCID: 0000-0001-8408-7008.  Email: psb@gauhati.ac.in

2Dr. Bhupen Hazarika Centre for Performing Arts, Dibrugarh University, Dibrugarh, Assam, India. ORCID: 0000-0002-6280-654X

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages 1–13. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne10

First published: June 09, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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Under the Canopy of Sal Trees: A New Vocabulary of Performance in Sukracharya Rabha’s Minimal Theatre

Abstract

Playwright and director, Heisnam Kanhailal (1941-2016) was an eminent theatre personality from Manipur. He began as one of the exponents of the ‘theatre of roots’ movement, like his compatriot, Ratan Thiyam. He was influenced by Badal Sircar’s politically motivated ‘Third Theatre’ in the early 1970s who had introduced him to the ‘Poor Theatre’ of the Polish director, Jerzy Grotowski (1933-99). However, Kanhailal gradually developed his unique concept of theatre, which he later called ‘The Theatre of the Earth’ with which he had tried resist the ideologies like aggressive nationalism, which was found to be rather oppressive. He retained deeper faith in art and restricted his theatre from becoming overtly propagandist by privileging its poetic, allegorical, and ‘transcendental’ appeals. The present paper is an attempt towards critical evaluation of Kanhailal’s ‘Theatre of the Earth’ and to compare his works with that of Grotowski, Sircar, and Thiyam as well as with two contemporary theatre directors from Assam, Gunakar Deva Goswami (b.1969) and Sukracharya Rabha (1977-2018). The paper also takes up his significant plays like Pebet and others in order to closely read his poetics of theatre.

Keywords: Poor theatre, resistance, theatre of rituals, theatre of the earth, the third theatre.

Introduction:

Modern Indian theatre, which was set in motion in the British colonial cities in India in the late eighteenth century, assumed a postcolonial stance in the fifth decade of the twentieth century. Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker (2008) point out that Nabanna, written by Bijon Bhattacharyya in 1943 and staged under the direction of Bijon Bhattacharyya and Shombhu Mitra for the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) in 1944, was the first postcolonial Indian play. She has regarded Nabanna to be so as it mounted stiff resistance to the British fiscal policies (Dharwadker, pp. 31-32). Earlier, Kiranmoy Raha (2001), in his book on Bengali theatre, brought out its anti-colonial stance while discussing how its first production resisted the European performance ideals (Raha, p. 155, p. 169). Bhattacharyya (2004) described the play in the following words:

As mass movements began in reaction to the imperialist power throughout Asia, India also got dispirited by it…. After ceremonial partition, insubstantial independence came with a curse of destruction…. The writing of Nabanna fell into the first phase of this blood-spattered history. (pp. 26-27; translated from the Bengali by the first author of the present paper).  

Postcolonial Theatre has two distinct features — one of them involves resistant cultural representations, which have become a means of asserting the richness of the indigenous culture by thwarting the dominant colonial cultural ideals, and the second is a tendency for highlighting the contemporary situation with the help of parallelism found in the indigenous histories and mythologies from pre-colonial period. Nabanna and the other productions of the IPTA in the fifth decade of the twentieth century, without doubt, looked for anti-European ideas of performance, but not so seriously. It emphasized content-related matters in the light of the leftist ideology, leaving artistry aside. Several theatre activists broke up with the IPTA towards the end of the decade with objections to this negligence of artistry. They formed individual theatre groups to begin a ‘Group Theatre Movement’ in India. These activists included Bijon Bhattacharyya, Shombhu Mitra, Habib Tanvir, Utpal Dutt, and Arun Mukherjee (Dharwadker, 2008, pp. 85-89). Consequently, the theatre groups began experiments on thematic novelty and artistic originality. A few independent playwrights like Dharamvir Bharti joined them from outside.

Two plays, both written ten years after the first performance of Nabanna, bear early evidence of such experiments. One is Agra Bazaar (“The Bazaar at Agra”; Urdu; 1954) by Habib Tanvir and the other play is Dharamvir Bharti’s Andha Yug (“Blind Age”; Hindi; 1954)). Agra Bazaar takes the audience back to eighteenth-century Agra and critiques the twentieth-century scenario of capitalist coercion on creativity while depicting the poetic achievements of the eighteenth-century Urdu poet, Nazeer Akbarabadi. It exposes the class difference between the elites and the plebeians of old Agra by using two variants of the Urdu language. The elite characters in the play speak the urban variant, whereas the plebeians use the rural one. Later, Tanvir established the ‘Naya Thatre’ group in Chhattisgarh in 1959 and experimented with improvisation and different dialogues to find a more reliable indigenous dramaturgy. Dharamvir Bharti’s Andha Yug is a critique of human violence (expressed during World War II and at the time of the partition of India in 1947) through the use of a mythological story that tells about the futility of violence in the Indian epic, the Mahabharata.

These plays demonstrated that stories from the histories and mythologies of the Indian past could help the playwrights and directors take critical stances against the ills of contemporary India. Plays like Mohan Rakesh’s Ashadh Ka Ek Din (“One Day in Ashadha”; Hindi; 1958) and Lehron Ke Rajhans (“The Swans of the Waves”; Hindi; 1963) Girish Karnad’s Yayati (Kannada; 1961) and Tughlaq (Kannada; 1964) took such experiments forward in the late 60s and the early 70s.

Indian theatre between 1970 and 1990 became so experimental that it seemed as if it had completely severed itself from the earlier tradition indicating the postcolonial epoch of Indian theatre that entered a new phase of theatre movement. Suresh Awasthi (1989) has called this experimentalist theatre the ‘theatre of roots’ (p. 48). Here is what Awasthi says in this regard:

I am taking the risk of giving a label— “theatre of roots”— to the unconventional theatre which has been evolving for some two decades in India as a result of modern theatre’s encounter with tradition. Theatre of roots has finally made its presence felt. It has compelling power, it thrills audiences, and it is receiving institutional recognition. It is deeply rooted in regional theatrical culture, but cuts across linguistic barriers, and has an all-India character in design. Never before during the past century and more has theatre been practiced in such diversified form, and at the same time with such unity in essential theatrical values. (p. 48). 

Erin B. Mee (2008) has observed that the ‘theatre of roots’ movement “challenged colonial culture by reclaiming the aesthetics of performance and by addressing the politics of aesthetics.” (p. 5). The movement determined a new theatre idiom, which has become a means of resisting the colonial theatre framework. For that purpose, it looked for extra-communicative traditional forms and novel visual aesthetics by exploring the ‘roots’ of the Indian people in the indigenous folk, traditional, and classical cultural heritage (Raut, “Indianizing”, p. 7). Thus, the new theatre emerged as a synchronization of modern contents and traditional folk forms. Playwrights and directors adapted forms and elements of folk tales, legends, myths, epics, and history to enhance the potentialities for visual representation. It looked like going back to the past, but it facilitated explorations of the contemporary Indian realities. It also contributed to the construction of an identity of modern Indian theatre. The playwrights and directors of this new experimental theatre included Habib Tanvir, Badal Sirkar, Girish Karnad, B.V. Karanth, K. N. Panicker, and others. This list was enriched from the north-eastern region of India by two legendary figures Manipuri playwrights-cum-directors Heisnam Kanhailal (1941-2016) and Ratan Thiyam (b. 1948).

Kanhailal’s Departure from the ‘Theatre of Roots’ Movement:

The ‘theatre of roots’ movement in modern Indian theatre by and large asserted a kind of ‘Indianness’ (“an all-India character in design”; Awasthi, 1989, p. 48) with its use of elements from the indigenous cultural traditions of India. The movement influenced young Kanhailal, and he began his theatre career as one of its exponents. However, he gradually evolved as a playwright and director with a unique ‘poetically political’ stance. He started to represent the socio-political realities of North-East India, especially Manipur, and more especially his Meitei community. However, he preferred not to be overtly political. He remained truthful to art and began to represent these realities poetically. As a result, his plays became politically resilient and poetically allegorical.

To represent these realities properly, Kanhailal enriched his plays with relevant folk (as in Pebet; 1975), mythological (as in Karna; 1997), and literary (as in Dakghar; 2006) elements. His plays have highlighted the pains and struggles of those communities in the North-East region that have been subjected to repressive nationalist paradigms of post-independent India. He drew attention, especially to the identity crisis of the traditional Meitei community of Manipur, which he belonged to. His plays also uphold the cultural strength and the associated spirit of the community for freedom from all kinds of nationalist oppression. It is evident in the following comment made by him:

I remember my meeting with Eugenio Barba in Calcutta in 1987. He asked me why the Manipuri productions demonstrate so much nationality. He was right, for he did not know that our national culture was fighting a struggle for existence between the dominant forces of a big culture and complicated politics. We do not have the objective of creating a national hullabaloo. But our theatre contains the happiness and sorrows of some people who are fighting for maintaining their identity. (Kanhailal, 2007, p. 30; translated from Hindi by the first author). 

The Formative Influences on the ‘Theatre of the Earth’:

In contrast to the ‘Theatre of Roots’, Kanhailal preferred to call his genre as the ‘Theatre of the Earth’. Three distinct factors played pivotal roles in shaping Kanhailal’s ‘Theatre of the Earth’. First, unlike his contemporaries, such as the Manipur University Professor Lokendra Arambam or the National School of Drama (NSD) product Ratan Thiyam, Kanhailal did not have any institutional affiliation. He was expelled from the NSD as he could not follow Hindi and English, its languages of instruction (Bharucha, 1998, p.  22; Ahuja, 2012, p. 276). He felt “humiliated and angry” (Bharucha, 1998, p. 22). The incident alienated him from mainstream urban theatre and inspired him to discover an alternative (Ahuja, 2012, p. 276). He also became resolute in upholding Manipuri culture to the whole world. The following words summarize the effects of the incident on Kanhailal’s mind and works:

My hopes of becoming a trained theatre activist evaporated when in 1968, I was expelled from the school before the classes began. I was psychologically affected but did not lose hope. I followed the way of self-education in my hometown Imphal. I established [the theatre group] ‘Kalakshetra Manipur’ in July 1969 with the love and assistance of my wife Sabitri and a few unfailing friends. We had the objective of studying, determining, and uplifting the Manipuri culture to such a standard level that would be regarded as the best not only in India but also in the drama scene of the whole world. (Kanhailal, 2007, p. 30; translated from Hindi by the first author). 

Sabitri Heisnam (b. 1946), Kanhailal’s leading actress since 1961 and wife since 1962 (Bharucha, 1998, p. 21) exerted the second significant formative influence on his works. Sabitri Heisnam was a rurally trained accomplished actress even before their first meeting. Yet, it is only in the folk-related productions of their theatre group ‘Kalakshetra Manipur’ (established in 1969) that the best in her came out. They had their own home in 1970 (Bharucha, 21), and after that, they became closer than ever before. She eventually became the body and voice for his folk-based theatre ideas (Ahuja, 2012, p. 276). In the words of Rustom Bharucha (1998),

It is only mandatory that any description of Kanhailal’s theatre should acknowledge the contribution of his wife. Sabitri is the centre of his work. Indeed, it is difficult not to idealize this diminutive, unpretentious, unfailingly cheerful woman, who happens to be one of the greatest actresses that I have ever seen. In her temperament, Sabitri exemplifies the resilience and commonsense of a peasant. And I use the word not in any derogatory sense, but after John Berger, in his viewing of the lives of agricultural communities. (p. 20). 

The third notable formative influence on Kanhailal came from the Polish playwright and director Jerzy Grotowski via the Bengali playwright and director Badal Sircar. Kanhailal met Sircar in a workshop in Imphal in 1973 (Katyal, 2015, p. 171), where Sircar shared his viewpoints about space and physicality in his ‘Third Theatre’ and Grotowski’s ‘Poor Theatre’. He “was very inspired by Badal Sircar’s work, but then he went another way.” (Singh, 1997, p. 22). In-depth discussions on the influences of Grotowski and Sircar on Kanhailal and the distance that Kanhailal maintained from them can make out several important features of the ‘Theatre of the Earth’.

Grotowski, Sircar, and Features of Kanhailal’s ‘Theatre of the Earth’:

The points of similarity and difference between Grotowski and Sircar are striking. Sircar negated any direct impact from Grotowski, but his rejection of the colonial theatre elements— such as the proscenium stage, costumes and make-up, lights, sounds, set property, and others— has a striking similarity with that of the ‘Poor Theatre’ of the Polish playwright and director (Ahuja, 2012, p. 251). According to Grotowski, these elements are not essential but supplementary. It means that theatre can exist without them. Grotowski, therefore, minimized the stage property to highlight the core ingredients of theatre. He held that the living relationship among the actor, audience, and space was the organic power that constituted the life of theatre (Grotowski, 1968, pp. 28-32).

In Grotowski’s ‘Poor Theatre’, the ‘holy actor’ communicates to the audience on a sensory level about his inner self by removing his outer self or ‘life mask’. He compels the audience to get rid of their masks also. Consequently, the actor and the audience confront a new truth, which inspires them to change individually (p. 37). The change is personal and spiritual, though this spirituality is not religious. It uplifts an individual to a higher level of humanity.

Like Grotowski, Sircar felt the need for “a harmonious union of the body with the mind” (Sircar quoted in Katyal, 2015, p. 170). In the 1973 workshop in Manipur, he “[began the morning class] with a series of psycho-physical exercises, not so much for muscle-building as for developing the strength and flexibility of the spinal system.” (p. 172). However, Sircar’s minimization of theatre elements, such as set property, costumes, make-up, and others, was not meant for deciphering the core ingredients of theatre. He had little to do with spirituality. He was interested in the political possibility of theatre, and this he did assert emphatically through overtly leftist subject matters and dialogues.

An actor in the Poor Theatre (“holy actor”) does not play a character in the way the actors of the conventional realistic theatre do. He disregards Stanislavsky’s theory of character-building, which tells of a definite motivation or recalling sense/ emotional memory in a given circumstance. He does not try to represent outer life as it is, nor does he try to manifest real-life actions in his movements. He moves inward: he sacrifices his persona to dissect his inner self and expose it before the audience. Grotowski (1968) puts it in the following words:

But the decisive factor in this process is the actor’s technique of psychic penetration. He must learn to use his role as if it were a surgeon’s scalpel, to dissect himself. It is not a question of portraying himself under certain ‘given circumstances’, or of ‘living’ a part; nor does it entail the distant sort of acting common to epic theatre and based on cold calculation. The important thing is to use the role as a trampoline, an instrument with which study what is hidden behind our everyday mask— the innermost core of our personality— in order to sacrifice it, expose it (p. 37).

Thus, it is like portraying his true deeper self rather than portraying an imaginary character. The sacrifice of his persona is painful, and to reach the self is no doubt a spiritual act. The actor expresses his deeper self through various body movements, gestures, postures, and vocal sounds. These expressions are some psycho-physical acts to communicate some emotion. Thus, finally, one can observe a series of impulsive body movements of the character:

The education of an actor in our theatre is not a matter of teaching him something; we attempt to eliminate his organism’s resistance to this psychic process. The result is freedom from the time-lapse between inner impulse and outer reaction in such a way that the impulse is already an outer reaction. Impulse and action are concurrent: the body vanishes, burns, and the spectator sees only a series of visible impulses. (Grotowski, 1968, p. 16)

Sircar experimented with this approach to ‘holy acting’ in his ‘Third Theatre’ productions, where the actor explored his present-day truth in place of the situation faced by the character. Yet, in his conception of theatre, Sircar stressed more on political content. As a leftist theatre activist, he made theatre more politically motivated after the fashion of Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht.

The unique stance that Kanhailal’s ‘Theatre of the Earth’ maintained compared to Grotowski and Sircar’s theatres is understandable from a close look at Sabitri Heisnam’s way of performance. Kanhailal felt that Sabitri Heisnam’s acting demonstrated her own experience, what she had perceived or realized in her society. Instead of doing any logical cause and effect characterization, she went on to transcend the situation and portray her experience. About the process of her acting Kanhailal said:

Sabitri’s process of acting is a way towards self-discovery, privileging herself over the character— the otherness…. Her way of controlling emotion and self-discovery is worked out by the inner action— a single vital force impregnated with a type of cathartic and psychic process, … [which] reveal[s], say, a Sabitri underneath— her true self. (Kanhailal, 2008, p. 3)

Like Grotowski, Kanhailal regarded the bodily movements of the actor as the core part of his theatre construction: “The idea of resistance in my theatre is incarnated by the body of the actor and represents a collective and communal vision” (p. 3). The inner journey to the self-found expressions in Grotowski and Kanhailal’s theatres through body movements and sounds made in a dream-like or trance-like situation, which is spiritual by nature.

An actor in Kanhailal’s theatre does not follow the conventional way of the ‘Actor-Text-Character’ journey. Rather, he/she takes the ‘Actor-Character-Text’ approach (p. 11). For such an actor, the character is an extended part of the actor’s body and mind. Thus, this process provides more artistic freedom instead of repeating or imitating the superficial day-to-day life. As in the holy actor of Grotowski’s theatre, here also one can observe impulsive body movements in a ‘transcended’ way. Here also, the actor’s body vanishes. The point can be highlighted with the example of the 70-year-old actress Sabitri Devi’s portrayal of the 9-year-old boy Amal’s character in the play Dakghar. Here, the spectators witnessed a journey to Amal’s dream world despite the point that the performer was an elderly lady. (Raut, 2019, p. 139).

A second point is notable here. Grotowski’s is “poor” theatre as it held on to theatre’s essential elements without which theatre could not exist. Kanhailal’s theatre was “poor” due to his financial scarcity in his early career. Therefore, instead of expensive sets and costumes, lights and sounds, and a decorated stage, he started his theatre only with a few actors, their bodies, voices, and minds. He gradually focused on the cultural materials, rituals, lifestyles, and behaviour of his native community and tried to derive his language of communication. Kanhailal also experimented with the actor’s body (p. 137). Besides, like K. N. Panicker, he developed some theatre exercises based on indigenous folk forms of martial art and dance. For example, he took up elements from Thang-Ta, a Manipuri martial art form, and Lai Haraoba, a type of Meitei dance. Thus, the actor’s body became the central element in his theatre experimentation. He even did not prioritize the written text or words of the playwrights (pp. 143-44). The minimization further intensified with influences from the ‘Third Theatre’ and ‘Poor Theatre’.

Thirdly, as in Grotowski’s ‘Poor Theatre’, Kanhailal’s actors also communicate with the audience at the spiritual level. Communication is comparable to the spiritual unification of the devotees in religious or cultural rituals (Raut, 2019, p. 144). Due to this similarity, Kanhailal’s theatre suits the label of ‘a Ritualistic Theatre’. One needs to remember that his spirituality and ritualism were also not religious. Here, the theatres of Grotowski and Kanhailal become closer, but still, Kanhailal’s theatre remains distinguishable for his altruism. His actor is different from that of Grotowski. Grotowski’s actor sacrifices himself to change morally or spiritually, while Kanhailal’s actor wants to induce the change on the societal level. He uses impulsive body movements to raise various socio-political issues (p. 144). Here lies the altruism that is the basis of Kanhailal’s plays.

At this point, a comparison between Badal Sircar and Kanhailal becomes obvious. Sircar’s Third Theatre also wanted change, but this was not a spiritual but social change. His theatre was more politically vibrant, as it hoped for a structured political revolt as per the leftist ideology. It advocated for the liberty of the common masses against all kinds of oppression. It aimed to eradicate illiteracy, poverty, and others in the post-independence scene. In this sense, Kanhailal’s theatre was also political but slightly different. It did not uphold any existing political ideology. It dealt with the same societal issues but suggestively and allegorically. Thus, he was different from both Sircar and Brecht (Kanhailal, 2008, p. 3).

There are more points of difference between the theatres of Sircar and Kanhailal. Like Sircar, Kanhailal rejected the dramatic text, though for a different reason. Sircar took the help of improvisation to enhance the realistic appeal of his productions. Kanhailal preferred to take up folk forms. He noticed that traditional folk theatre forms rarely demanded a written text. These forms were more flexible and mouldable. Therefore, with his anti-colonial and anti-nationalist position, during the early part of his career Kanhailal preferred simple Manipuri folk tales to readymade plays. He found that the Manipuri folk-tales had contemporary significance (Kanhailal, 2008, p. 2). He added additional/ allegorical meanings to these expressive folk tales to raise contemporary social issues. He gave his performance a poetic dimension by using other folk theatre elements, such as sound, movement, mime, dance, song, music, and stylization. The familiarity and the immediacy of these elements helped his Manipuri audience be aware of their crisis in terms of their identity, environment, colonial history and oppressive nationalism.

Thiyam’s ‘Theatre of Roots’ and Kanhailal’s ‘Theatre of the Earth’:

Being the two stalwarts of theatre from Manipur belong to the same period, comparisons between Kanhailal and Ratan Thiyam is quite inevitable. This is also helpful in understanding the similarities and the differences between the two. Thiyam, an exponent of the ‘Theatre of Roots’ movement, has brilliantly delineated a kind of ‘Indianness’ with his plays like Chakravyuha (“Army-Circle Formation”; 1984). The play uses episodes from the Mahabharata and evokes a sense of solidarity among the Indian audience. On the contrary, Kanhailal found the concept of ‘Indianness’ too comprehensively and dominantly ‘nationalist’ to accommodate the regional realities and issues. He, therefore, used episodes from the epic not to evoke a nationalist feeling but to highlight the socio-political issues of his immediate society. Kanhailal (2015) in his interview with Jyotirmoy Prodhani described his distinctiveness from Ratan Thiyam in the following way:

Ratan Thiyam’s plays are fantastic; they make majestic theatrical presence and are superbly spectacular. It is a mindboggling visual treat. But for me theatre is not only about copious extravaganza, it is essentially about the intimate nuances, the raw earthy immediacy of experiences. This is what “Theatre of the Earth” is all about. I strongly believe that theatre is essentially grounded with ideology and a deep-rooted social commitment. (para 2).  

The Legitimacy of Kanhailal’s Relation to ‘the Earth’:

Kanhailal was right to call his theatre the “Theatre of the Earth”, for it was down-to-earth. It was against the elaborate and decorative ‘nationalist’ theatre of his contemporary Manipuri playwright Ratan Thiyam. Kanhailal’s theatre was not ethereal; and it was not about fairies and farishtas. Rather, it was grounded on the ‘earth’. It was real, contemporary, and politically aware. It related the contemporary burning problems of his own people. He connected it to the contemporary North-Eastern, especially Manipuri, socio-political realities and cultural milieu. His theatre was deeply committed to the land and people of his Meitei community, their aspirations, pains, oppression, and frustrations. It took inspiration from their life and culture. According to him, this connection could make sense: “Even the social experiences of the individual and the community are actually solidified through its intimate linkages with the earth’’ (interview with Prodhani, para 1).

It is true that, had Kanhailal been direct while dealing with the bitter realities of the North-East, he could have become more successful in propagating his political ideas. Yet, he preferred to go with allegorical themes. Did it not limit the possibility of his theatre? The point remains that a direct delineation of the political themes would have made his theatre overtly propagandist. Kanhailal was a political playwright but never allowed his work to degenerate into artless propaganda. Theatre was art for him as ‘modern’ poetry is for a modern political poet. It is through art that he tried to raise his voice of resistance.

Elucidating Examples of the Plays of the ‘Theatre of the Earth’:

His Pebet (1975) exposes the ideological dominance of the Brahminical faith. For this purpose, it focuses on the indoctrination of the ethnic people of the Meitei community to Brahminism. The exposition occurs through the use of a Manipuri lullaby. Similarly, his ‘Memoirs of Africa’ (1985) is based on a poem that likens Manipur to the once colonized continent of Africa. Thus, Kanhailal’s theatre is political allegory. It does not make any direct statement on social issues. Sircar’s primary aim was to impart political lessons to the audience, as are the cases with the German playwrights-cum directors like Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht (Kanhailal, “H. Kanhailal and Sabitri” 4). Kanhailal believed in making them aware of their crises and inspiring them to bring in social change. He did so by evoking awareness and not by propagating any established political ideology. His theatre raises the voice and represents the pain and agony of the common masses under ideological oppression. The collective and communal vision gets expressed in his theatre through the actor’s movements and non-verbal sounds. His actor becomes the voice of the oppressed.

Kanhailal (2015) revealed that his Karna (1997) re-interpreted the consequence of Karna in the Mahabharata. Karna was abandoned by Kunti, his mother, soon after he was born. Kanhailal shows Kunti claiming his body after her younger son Arjuna kills him in the Kurukshetra war. However, she does not claim the body out of her motherly feeling. She claims it to save this ‘Aryaputra’ (“Son of the Aryans”) from being cremated by Radha, his non-Aryan (and therefore outcaste) foster mother. The re-interpretation, therefore, highlights the Aryan people’s negligence and oppression of the non-Aryan people. Kanhailal (2015) maintained that he had used this re-interpretation “to raise the question of social segregation and politics of caste and marginalisation.” (n. pag).

The resilient attitude of Kanhailal is reinstated very powerfully in his Draupadi (2000). Inspired by Maheswata Devi’s story, the play demonstrates its female protagonist, Dopdi, played by Sabitri Heisnam, challenging an oppressive army officer, the Senanayak,  by being starkly naked in front of him. Her acting disturbed the audience, but it was also lauded by critics as one of the boldest enactments on the Indian stage. After four years, an incident occurred in Manipur where women came out for public protest against the oppressive Indian army (Hariharan, 2017, p. 18). It is an example of inspiration taken by life from art. In this way, Kanhailal tried to awaken the fighting spirit of the common masses through his plays.

Kanhailal’s Later Experiments:

In the last two decades of his career, Kanhailal did more theatrical experiments. His concept of ‘The Ritual of Suffering’ further enriched his ‘Theatre of the Earth’. He explained the concept in his Theatre for the Ritual of Suffering (1997). It made his theatre more humane, poetic, and ‘transcendental’. Chaman Ahuja (2012) has explicated it in the following way:

All great plays display human misery and exploitation of man by man; it is this experience of suffering that provides one with a sense of sacrifice, or martyrdom, of heroism…. Being a proof of the human spirit, suffering is holy and that is what makes it a healing agency— a catalyst in lifting a finite human being to the higher realm of infinitude. Such being Kanhailal’s aim and assumptions, he regards actor as a medium. The way Sabitri goes into immediate trance is a ritualistic transformation. (p. 277).

Kanhailal’s group, ‘Kalakshetra Manipur’ took up ‘The Nature Lore Project’ in 2005. The project had the objectives of embarking on a new kind of theatre practice with cultural adventure and expedition, doing a collective search for indigenousness, removing racial and linguistic biases, giving up city-centric theatre, and addressing the rural audience (‘Kalakshetra Manipur’ 4). These objectives reflect a clear postcolonial standpoint with a more tuned form of his earlier ideas. These objectives were detectable in his productions like Sati and Dakghar (Kalakshetra Manipur, 3).

The nature-lore project emphasized a kind of community theatre of an ethnic group in a rural or remote environment. It tried to develop a naturalized and ritualized theatre. This theatre tries to find the original power that only live theatre possesses. It abandons the city-based rich conventional theatre tradition and negates ‘method acting’ or realism or the psychological approach of character building. On the contrary, it emphasizes the ‘physical-psychic’ approach of characterization. The actors create the theatre idiom with their instinct and intuition. The identity of a naturalized actor of a particular community reflects through their instinctive and intuitive body expression, which has its base in folk performances. The process of such a performance is thus a ‘renewal of ancestral tradition’ (p. 12). Naturalized actors learned this through their livelihood in a particular geo-ecological system:

For them ethnicity is a way of life and expression of an ancient tradition orally transmitted from generation to generation in case of a specific people live in a specific geo-ecological system. The ethnic identity is thus shaped by the body vocabulary which the people learn and evolve from the ecological system through generations. (p. 11). 

Multilingualism is another feature of this project. Under this project, Kanhailal’s theatre tries to break all the racial and linguistic barriers of various ethnic communities. It does so as it wants to challenge the supremacy of one ‘nationalist’ language and culture over these communities. In this way, the theatre tries to overcome the dominant politics of culture and identity. A real challenge lies in collaborating with artists from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Kanhailal solved this problem by accommodating multiple languages together. He reconstructs a conventional text like Dakghar into a multilingual Text. The process creates a language of images, impulsive body movements, and sounds (Kanhailal, 2008, p. 2).

An Analysis of Pebet:       

‘Pebet’ (1975) is a non-verbal play constructed from a Manipuri fireside folk story. It was performed without a dramatic text, i.e., in the same way as Kanhailal performed many of his plays. In it, Pebet, a bird of an almost extinct species, gives birth to her fledglings, nurtures them, and teaches them how to fly. A cunning cat comes to eat them up. The mother bird manipulates the cat and rescues the innocent ones.

This simple storyline of the Manipuri folk tale unfolds some allegorical meaning in Kanhailal’s theatre. It illustrates how the rulers of Delhi dominate the Manipuri people with their divide-and-rule policy. The cat, shown wearing a dhoti and holding a rosary in hand and bells around the neck, stands for the aggression of the Vaisnavite culture over the indigenous ethnic cultures of North East India (especially the Meitei culture of Manipur) (Bharucha, 1998, p. 34). The play has been regarded as “anti-Hindu” and “anti-Indian” (p. 34). The point that the bird is nearly extinct suggests that the traditional culture is under severe threat from Brahminical aggression.

The second author of the present paper had the privilege of watching ‘Pebet’, produced by Manipur Kalakshetra, at Nazira in the Sivasagar district of Assam on 06 February 2005. The play unfolded in a temporary auditorium lit by two halogen lights, but there was almost no stage property except a small platform on one side of the stage. The actors who played the roles of the fledglings wore light brown dresses, meaning that they were birds of the same feathers, i.e., similar sufferers unified by the ‘Ritual of Suffering’.

On the contrary, Mother Pebet, played by Sabitri Heisnam, wore a blue dress. The blue colour of her dress reminds one of Siva, who once drank poison benevolently to become blue-throated. In this light, the mother Pebet’s blue dress suggests centuries of torture on the indigenous communities. Again, the sky and the seas are blue. Therefore, despite her tiny appearance, her blue dress can suggest the grandeur of the indigenous cultures. Against the timidity and vulnerability of the birds are the aggression and violence of the cat. All these qualities found expressions through physical movements and non-verbal sounds. They held the audience spellbound. In December 2021, the authors sat together to study a few YouTube videos on different enactments of the play. The videos gave them the same semiotic suggestions and expressive emotions.

The challenges of the construction process lay in concretizing the dream-like images evoked by the lullaby-like story. The dramaturgy was constructed from point to point. Rhythmic body movements and non-verbal sounds like screams, wailing, hummings, and others added audio-visual splendour to the action. According to Sabitri, her inner journey evoked by the story took the form of dream-like impulsive physical actions and sounds. Sabitri termed the physical manifestation of her inner emotions as psychical. It was reflected even in her breathing pattern (Kanhailal, 2008, p. 8).

Legacies of the ‘Theatre of the Earth’: 

Kanhailal has been a strong influence on the next generation of playwrights and directors of India in general and the North-East in particular. Two such playwrights-cum-directors are Gunakar Dev Goswami and Sukracharyya Rabha from Assam. Dev Goswami, a disciple of Kanhailal, learned to use rare Assamese folk cultural elements, such as folk tales, myths, and historical episodes after the fashion of his Guru. He has also used folk and classical theatrical forms and elements from Oja-Pali, Ankia Bhaona, and others to construct his visual aesthetics, movements, and music. Moreover, like the plays of Kanhailal, his productions like Jerenga, Birangana, Sati, and many others have expressed strong protest against women’s oppression in contemporary society. His production of Santras, based on a Panchatantra story, took inspiration from Kanhailal’s Pebet. Its rigorous physical movements, ups and downs of voice and music, and the allegorical way to deal with a postcolonial subject matter strongly remind one of Kanhailal’s play.

Sukracharya Rabha, who met an untimely demise a few years ago, was one of the most brilliant young playwrights-cum-directors of the region. He recognized Kanhailal as his Guru and tried to grasp the actual essence of his theatre. He arranged the “Under the Sal Tree” theatre festival regularly in a completely natural environment. The productions of his group, Badungduppa, discard all artificial theatre elements, such as lights, sounds, heavy sets, costumes, and make-up. The plays are performed in daylight in front of the audience seated under the Sal Trees. As a talented playwright and director, he also constructed his theatre basically from the folk tales and myths of his community, with all folk actors. Through his theatre he tried to explore the cultural heritage of his own Rabha community. To Poidan, Rupalim, Tikhar, Changkoy, and Madaiah Muchi were some of his well-known productions.

Declaration of Conflicts 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.

Acknowledgement
Feature image courtesy: Indrakshi Chaudhury.

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Pranjal Sharma Bashishtha,, a PhD from Gauhati University who did his MA in English (Banaras Hindu University) and in Assamese literature (Gauhati University). He teaches World literature, Assamese Literature, Translations and Critical Theory at Gauhati University Institute of North-East India Studies (GUINES) and at the Department of Assamese at Gauhati University. Besides critical writings, he has published several collections of poems, and short stories in Assamese.

Goutam Sarmah is an MSc in Physics and MA in Performing Arts (Theatre Arts) from Dibrugarh University and has submitted his Ph.D. thesis on Shakespearean plays in Assamese at Dibrugarh University. He teaches Theatre Arts at the Dr. Bhupen Hazarika Centre for Studies in Performing Arts of Dibrugarh University. Besides his research articles, he has published several full-length and one-act plays. He is also an active theatre director and an actor trainer.

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Under the Canopy of Sal Trees: A New Vocabulary of Performance in Sukracharya Rabha’s Minimal Theatre

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Namrata Pathak
North-Eastern Hill University, Tura Campus, Meghalaya, India. ORCID id: 0000-0002-1193-6221. Email:

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages 1–12. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne09

First published: June 09, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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Under the Canopy of Sal Trees: A New Vocabulary of Performance in Sukracharya Rabha’s Minimal Theatre

Abstract

This paper would be structuring and documenting Rabha’s theories of performance which are heavily laced with ecological concerns, and also his penchant for body-centric performances that explore the contact point between man and nature, the given and made, public zones and biospheres. The paper aims to capture the nuances of his unique ensemble called “green theatre,” something that is akin to a search for roots, a drive to cultivate an “intrinsic rural mechanism”, in the words of H. Kanhailal, a renowned theatre exponent and Rabha’s mentor. There is an urge to capture the ebb and flow of country life, humankind’s vital affinity with nature. Rabha fuses lifeworlds, bio-forms, and landscapes. He gives birth to new grammar and vocabulary of “physical theatre” by weaving the synergy of life into the fabric of performance.

Keywords: Sukracharya Rabha, Theatre of the Sal, Badugduppa Kalakendra, Green Theatre, Body, Space, Ecology

Introduction

The act of situating the oeuvre of Sukracharya Rabha (1977-2018) on the map of contemporary theatre practices requires a thorough inspection of the relationship between theatre and nature. Rabha’s attempt at liberating the operations of theatre from the impact of media and its technological strangleholds leads to an interesting re-contouring of dramatic patterns and semiotic principles in regard to the performance text notwithstanding the challenges his unique theatre-aesthetics pose in terms of stage décor, the logic of display and audience-reception. In a world of post-truth, when drama and theatre “rely on the institutions of mass art and the media of mass communication, and examine the rituals of a society in which reality is crucially constructed via its media representation”, Rabha’s conscious dig at the possibilities of digital and electronic reproduction charts out an alternative grammar and vocabulary of theatre: his penchant for ecological balance further enables him to form a close association with nature, a move away from a world ruled by technology (Potter and Gann 2016, 135). Rabha’s theatrical language conjures up local and indigenous elements in favour of a site-specific performance. His plays are staged in the lap of nature and there is a total admonishment of the need for artificial light, sound, stage and technological aids in the mentioned province. Notwithstanding the entanglements and overlaps inherent in the process of representation itself, Rabha’s insistence on drawing a line of demarcation between theatre and media finds an echo in Pavis too. In this regard Pavice maintains:

The task would be an arduous one, however, and we will note only that theatre and media tend to move in opposite directions. Theatre tends towards simplification, minimalism and the fundamental reduction of the direct exchange between actor and audience. The media, on the other hand, tend to become more complicated and sophisticated through technological advances and are, by definition, reproducible and multipliable ad infinitum. Being part of technological, but also cultural and ideological practices, of a process of information and disinformation, the media can easily expand their audience to become accessible to a potentially infinite number of spectators (Pavis 1998, 207).

Sukracharya Rabha, the man behind the innovative Theatre of the Sal festival in Rampur, Goalpara, (Assam) is always seen interrogating the reliance of theatre on mass media and the latter’s nature of repeating and diversifying the ‘ready-made’, ‘immediate’ and ‘served-up’ ingredients of performance (Pavis 1998, 207). In the rural set-up where he performs, Rabha intends to do away with the influence of technology on audience tastes and expectations, not to mention his derision for ‘the artificial’. In his performances there is an urge to capture the ebb and flow of country life, humankind’s vital affinity with nature. Rabha fuses lifeworlds, bio-forms, and landscapes. He gives birth to a new kind of theatre by weaving the synergy of life into the fabric of performance. In his words, “This can be achieved only by aligning the make-believe world of theatre with the world of nature, by borrowing from the latter its music, rhythm, light, silence, darkness…its elements” (In a personal interview with the author). In the grove of Sal trees where Rabha performs, “theatre is a subsidiary of nature; it is a process of reflection that conjoins the external world with the inner sanctum of the soul, but with varying degrees of freedom and imagination” (In a personal interview with the author). His is a move away from mainstream Assamese theatre, which is more of a consumerist spectacle, an urban hodge-podge, “an unwanted noise, a piercing shriek, a cacophony” (In a personal interview with the author). In Rabha’s words:

Amidst the craziness of saleable entertainment, organic traditional media are hardly making sense to the people nowadays. Popular media are now affected by the idea of commerce. This notion of consumerism applies to all…the way processes of de-rooting are emerging in the new world through marketing strategies and consumerism, it is almost impossible for us to look back at the notion of ‘belongingness’ (Baruah 2019, 50).

Towards a Minimalist Theatre

Sukracharjya Rabha’s Badungduppa Kalakendra founded in 1998 in Rampur, Goalpara, creates a performance space out of a lush green Sal grove, leaves, tree trunks, stems, branches and roots. In Badungduppa Kalakendra we are ushered into a world of theatre that is pared down to the core. His is a space of minimal propensities, and it is a kind of theatre that “seeks to reduce its effects, representations and actions to minimum” by dispensing away with exaggerated and excessive modes of presentation, verbal overplay, spectacular visual effects and extraneous layers in the plot (Pavis 1998, 215). Roland Barthes traces the origins of theatrical matter to “atoms of meaning” that can be reduced to “the smallest sign transmitted in time” (Barthes 1964, 258, as cited in Pavis 1998, 214). On one hand we have the distinctiveness of sign and its implications in the constitution of overall meaning, and on the other hand there is a relativity of absorption and segmentation that wholly depends on the changing meanings as per the eclectic reception of the audience. However, Rabha’s conceptualization of minimalist theatre is neither akin to Beckett’s adherence to what is “ontologically unsayable” nor Vinaver’s chamber theatre whose signature styles are “montage, the spaces in between, silence, the unspoken” (Pavis 1998, 215). Rather Rabha’s strategy is to turn the autonomy of ‘the artificial’ (light, sound, and stage) upside down. The stillness of the performance space is occasionally and rarely penetrated by music, that too when there is an extreme necessity, “otherwise a loaded silence pervades the air” (“A Tribute to a Progenitor of New Ideas”, Pathak 2018).

He dispenses away with the proscenium arch by vouching for a rural, idyllic setting— a modest clearing in the middle of a grove. According to Rabha, there is no need for artificial light. He prefers “the intrinsic, regulatory time of nature with the sun as the only source of light” — accordingly “the performance is attuned to a specific time of a day, be it a warm, scorching afternoon or a not so well-lit evening” (“A Tribute to a Progenitor of New Ideas”, Pathak 2018):

There is an occasional play of light and shadow with the canopy of the Sal trees acting as a natural sieve that filters light. The sky acts as the roof on the head. The twitter of a bird, the rustle of the wind-caressed Sal leaves, a clap here and a footfall there—all add to the rhythmic sound that we get to hear, occasionally spiced up by songs with the accompaniment of musical instruments (“A Tribute to a Progenitor of New Ideas”, Pathak 2018).

Rabha’s site-specific performance creates a kind of “displacement through a wedding of artwork to a particular environment” (Crimp 1993, 16-17, as cited in Collins and Nisbet 2012, 103). As an effect, Rabha not only articulates “an exchange between the work of art and the place in which its meanings are defined” but also underlines “its positioning in relation to the political, aesthetic, geographical, and institutional” (Collins and Nisbet 2012, 102).

There is a close affiliation to Japanese theatre, especially in Rabha’s precision and clarity, his employment of pauses, stillness, and silence in his performance. Moreover, the influence of Barong in Balinese is hard to miss in Rabha’s creation of trance-like moments in which a man is momentarily sucked by the instantaneity of the occurrence. Moreover, the fusion of opera with dramatic arts, popularized by Richard Wagner, the preference of shifting tonal centres, chromaticism and Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”) found a way to Rabha’s theatre too.

Community Building and the Theatre of the Sal

Sukracharya Rabha’s theatre resists politico-cultural indoctrination by circumventing the stereotypical and accepted. Deeply entrenched in the community-life of his people, his theatre carries at its heart indigenous philosophy, aesthetics and traditions. Usham Rojio, his close aide who happened to witness the genesis of many of his plays, talks about Rabha’s affiliation to the concept of rasong, which means ‘the being of existence’. By attaching rasong to the precepts of ‘live theatre’ Rabha foregrounds a deep understanding of the ‘lived-world’ or the experiential realm in which he is steeped. In the words of Rojio:

What is important concerning the rich concept of rasong is the safeguarding of the community participation and Nature-Human symbiosis. The insistence on performance as a way of creation and being as opposed to the long-held notion of performance as entertainment has brought forth a movement to seek and articulate the phenomenon of performance in its multiple manifestations and imaginings. The concept of rasong was more of bringing closer the celebration of life to nature. We share the idea that this concept has a close affinity with the concept of noiba in our Meitei tradition… (“Together We Heal: Remembering Sukracharya Rabha (1977-2018)”, Rojio 2020).

Rojio further dwells on an interesting intersection of two cultures, Manipuri and Assamese, and this he does by harping on the Meitei equivalence of noiba. The word noiba translates to ‘movement’, and its philosophical meaning is “embedded in the cultural practices and day to day lived-world” of the Meitei (“Together We Heal: Remembering Sukracharya Rabha (1977-2018)”, Rojio 2020). According to Usham Rojio:

It is believed that just as noiba (movement) of the foetus within the mother’s womb gives her the joyous anticipation of a new life; the Meitei believe that they are immersed in a womb-like Universe, so god and goddess are pleased when they perform dance. Therefore, body movement is life and thus we celebrate life through dancing in Lai Haraoba (“Together We Heal: Remembering Sukracharya Rabha (1977-2018)”, Rojio 2020).

Community participation and a peaceful coexistence with the objects of nature, therefore, form the pulsating life force in both Kanhailal and Rabha’s performances. However, alluding to Rabha’s initiation of and commitment to a huge cultural movement in Rampur, H S Shiva Prakash mentions that,“…he (Rabha) has realized over the years that theatre institutions have to be self-supporting to grow in a desired direction. He had hit upon the idea of setting up small-scale industries in the village. This would ensure jobs for the local people, sustenance for the artists and funding for activities” (Baruah 2019, 91). Rabha maps the aesthetics of rural life in his performances. He also incorporates local ingredients into his theatrical mold by taking resort to folk forms of the Rabha community.

Rampur, near Agia, is a small village, economically backward and far away from nearby urban centres in Goalpara. Even though Rabhas and Bodos chiefly populate this place, the social fabric is multihued because of the ongoing cultural assimilation and harmonious co-existence of micro-communities. In the words of Aparna Sharma, Rabha’s theatre has a deep connection with the Rabha community as his theatrical explorations hinge on a balanced representation of the community’s textile, architecture, music and cultural heritage. Moreover, the ownership of resources like the Sal groves obliquely teaches the practitioners the essence of performance that is efficacious and ritualistic, and that revolves round the everyday tasks and activities of the Rabha community which is chiefly agrarian in nature:

Specific movements were first studied. For instance, how the body moves while working in a rice field flooded with water; or, how does the body traverse distance while climbing a Sal tree; or, indeed, how we rise from a lying position, say when we wake up at dawn…there is an emphasis on the breath that changes in every step with the movement (of the body). Finally, the studied movement was considered for its narrative potential and then applied to theatrical performances (Baruah 2019, 384).

Rabha’s theatre is a consciousness-raising project based on the ethics of harmony, social responsibility and an allegiance to certain forms of community expressions. Moreover, his yearly theatre festival, Under the Sal Tree, attracts audience from all over the world. In Rabha’s words, the practitioners pick up bits and parts from everyday life, from the synchronized vocabulary of rural life and in the process cleanse and purify these forms and constructions to implant them in a new terrain or locale. This transference is an intrinsic part of his theatrical process as “Badungduppa’s attempt is to inherit, interpret and evolve through immediate contexts, mother nature and village life” (Baruah 2019, 152). Such a unique synthesis paves way for an alternative model that maintains a distance from “the ultra-commercial and cheap entertainment gimmicks” (Baruah 2019, 153). Rabha is also against publicity of any sort. In his words, “We have never been anywhere to sell tickets; we have never announced anything loudly. Nor we pasted any banner, poster elsewhere” (Baruah 2019, 153-4). Nevertheless, every year thousands of people from both India and abroad, ranging from scholars, practitioners, theatre exponents to common people, throng Rampur to partake of the spectacle under the Sal trees.

It would not be wrong to say that Rabha envisages theatre as a community exercise, a collective enterprise that takes in its fold the whole village or the entire area. He involves “the whole community— the Rabha community that he belongs to, by giving them back what was their—the theatre” (Baruah 2019, 180). As a performance maker Rabha is adept in creating passageways that help in negotiating, appropriating and admixing multifarious cultural forms. He also slashes the taut line of demarcation between mainstream theatre and regional practices by drawing upon the raw materials and resources of a community’s collective memory. Interestingly, he moulds and chisels these ingredients and segments, oral lores and narratives, through a special act of “concentrating” on “the (bodily), mythical and ritual” axes (Baruah 2019, 182). Rabha explores:

their delicate relationship with nature and finally this relationship underlies how a text is developed. It is this particular attention to break down the text into infinitesimal bits and to blend it with the type of existences mentioned above, and the act of giving it back to the audience with the energy of the soil, and leave the audience susceptible to a performance (to borrow Clifford Geertz’s expression) that is “deep” and “thick”…(Baruah 2019, 182)

Therefore, the performance text is made up of basic units borrowed from the rich repertoire of community life and also, from the narrative of the everyday which, then, undergoes “tangible manifestations of the intangible experience” in the performance space (Baruah 2019, 182-83).

The Performance Space in Badungduppa

On a small mound of earth Rabha created his stage. It is created on the ground level and the use of wood or iron is discouraged. As intended, the audience and the performers stand on the same level as there is no elevation of the proscenium to draw a line of division between the two. The purpose behind this technique is a conscious debunking of the idea of theatre as a mechanism to create illusion and fantasy. Right from the beginning, Rabha makes an effort not to weigh the audience down with tricks to sustain illusion, an unnecessary endeavour as per his theatre tactics. Rabha narrates how the surreal environment of the Sal grove adds a special charm and ambience to his performance. Of course, the sieved light filtering through the canopy of Sal trees and the southern winds whistling and rustling the Sal leaves create natural light and sound. There is, “A sudden dappled light. A sudden flight of an unseen bird. A faint echo of the jili in the distance” that add to, supplant and blend with Rabha’s performances (Baruah 2019, 188). Due to this strange concoction of natural elements there is an infusion of a layered semantics in his performances. Rabha reminiscences:

A narrow path passes through the jungle. There was a small open area on the side. We cleared that area, prepared benches and space for the stage. The idea of a gallery made of bamboo was implemented to preserve the ecological balance and it is in tandem with the idea of theatre close to nature. The gallery benches were thus prepared from bamboo and betel nut trees… The cyclorama was prepared with hay. The wings too (Baruah 2019, 188-89).

Sangeeta Barooh Pisharoty in her article, “Under the Sal Tree, A Unique Theatre Festival that Unites the Villages of Assam” (2017), discusses the ingenious stage arrangement, décor and style of Rabha’s theatre:

Every December, young volunteers gather to erect a mud stage under the Sal trees. The backdrop is delicately arched with a fence of straws. Bamboo planks are placed around the stage in an ascending order to seat the gathering, like in any open air auditorium.

Besides being located inside a forest, what makes the venue unique is that the performers don’t make use of mics or artificial lights – features commonly associated with proscenium theatre.

The actors typically modulate their voices so their dialogues reach the audience. The Sal grove also acts as a natural receptacle for trapping the sound. The background music is played live and the stage is set up in a way use the sun rays filtering through the trees as the natural spotlight (“Under the Sal Tree, A Unique Theatre Festival that Unites the Villages of Assam”, Pisharoty 2017).

Under the Tutelage of Heinsam Kanhailal

In Rabha’s theories of performance which are heavily laced with ecological concerns, there is a penchant for body-centric performance that explores the contact point between man and nature, the given and made, public zones and biospheres. His unique ensemble called “green theatre” is akin to a search for roots. It can be termed as a drive to cultivate an “intrinsic rural mechanism”, in the words of H. Kanhailal, a renowned theatre exponent and Rabha’s mentor. Kanhailal’s Kalakshetra Manipur is situated at the outer-most limits of Imphal, precisely at the foothills of the valley of Manipur. It seems “to have quietly celebrated, over the many years since its inception, this position of silence and liminality as a source of strength, creativity and resilience” (“The Lost Wor(l)dsof Heisnam Kanhailal”, Banerjee 2016). In “Ritual Theatre: Theatre of Transition” (2004), Kanhailal elaborates on his art of performance as such:

Believing in the autonomy of theatre, we swallowed the text and absorbed it into our body instead of speaking out the lines through lip movement, facial and finger gestures. We shattered the whole network of illusion on the stage. We were no longer burdened with the heavy light, costume and make-up. We cleaned the stage as an empty space where we began to unfold the autonomy of theatre…(Krasner 2008, 550)

Kanhailal has been a strong influence on Rabha. The latter’s definition of theatre as an “inward churning of emotions and feelings”, “…a glance at one’s own soul and body” has intersections with his mentor’s theories of performance (In a personal interview with the author). The methodical minimalism culminating in novel experiments by Kanhailal, especially in the late 1970s and early 1980s are noteworthy. Like his mentor who trained the villagers and the market women of the famous Nupi Keithel of Imphal, Rabha too worked with the rustic lot, the villagers of Rampur. Both shunned the Western proscenium and the “spatial politics of the city” for community spaces which are more specifically, sites of interactions for the spectators and actors (“The Lost Wor(l)dsof Heisnam Kanhailal”, Banerjee 2016). In this regard, Kanhailal’s Nupi Lan is noteworthy which, in the words of Rustom Bharucha, is “an open-air production involving approximately 70 working women from the Women’s Bazaar in Imphal” (Bharucha 1992, 66). Also:

The production created, through improvisations with the ‘market women’, simultaneously juxtaposed images of women in the festival of Lai Haraoba (perhaps especially the maibis) and the imas of the market, followed by a theatrical representation of the historical Nupi Lans. Distinctions between spectator and actor were strangely blurred during performance of this theatre event in the open public space of the city (“The Lost Wor(l)dsof Heisnam Kanhailal”, Banerjee 2016).

The aesthetics behind Nupi Lan grew out of his disenchantment with the draconian AFSPA, an Act that is much criticized for catalyzing bloody sagas of communitarian suffering. Without any obvious slant towards any ideology, his performance subtly touches upon the hidden, regulatory political force running at the underbelly of Manipur and the regimes of control of the military on the public spaces. The politico-linguistic domination of the India that Manipur battles every day, and also, a lopsided and partial Meitei nationalism that is raising its head slowly in the state creep into the fabric of Kanhailal’s performance, thereby impregnating it with issues of identity and citizenship. The complexities of resistance movements and the authoritarian position of the Indian state as a “military-legal killing machine” are not to be ignored:

After Nupi Lan, Kanhailal continued his career with similar projects that sought to break down the schism between political theatre and the people it claimed to represent. He worked in a village called Umatheili or the Valley of Durga to produce a play called Sanjennaha (Cowherd) from a community of rural non-actors, followed by a production that emerged from extensive work with the young men and women of the Paitei tribe of Churachandrapur (“The Lost Wor(l)dsof Heisnam Kanhailal”, Banerjee 2016).

The overlaps between Kanhialal’s and Rabha’s theatre are hinted at by Richard Gough when he maintained that the “enchantment” and “bewilderment” that we discern in their art stem from a common place, the magical woods: in Rabha’s case, it is the “Macbeth jungle” (the term was first coined by Rabha’s ally and a famous theatre exponent HS Shiva Prakash) in which “identities are lost and changed”, where there is a “possibility to affect change” (Baruah 2019, 72-74). Richard Gough, artistic director, Centre for Performance Research, Wales, used five words to describe the theatre of Sukracharya Rabha:

Disorientation, Bewilderment, Interruption, Turbulence and Contagion or Infection. These might all seem rather negative concepts but I want to think through the positive implication and provocations that lie behind these words…Three images, so you all see I’m following a sort of classical structure of three acts and five acts but that actually make it eight which is not a good number in some cultures, too symmetrical, too balanced and so to follow the Japanese aesthetics I must add one, another one which will operate as a sort of sub-terranean theme and that is transformation, not just as a theoretical separation but practical realisation with an apparatus to affect change which I am feeling, seeing here (Baruah 2019, 73).

Gough has first-hand experience of watching 20 minutes of Rabha’s performance at Goalpara. In a letter to Kanhailal, he mentions Rabha’s act of mobilizing the village women to participate in the theatre movement— he calls it “the power of women combined with a political edge” (Baruah 2019, 75). :

I like the sense that what is happening here is that we have all been infected, that we have all been contaminated and that we take this disease, so much like Auto’s vision of theatre, that now we take this disease, this viral infection with us to other parts of India and as for me, I will take it back to the UK. But through that it begins to spread and I think that is what I am seeing, I think what I am seeing is the political- with a small ‘p’- a project that is happening here. Your (Kanhailal’s) work needs to be distributed and diffused and needs to find other emanations, other forms of it. I very much enjoyed the production of Sukra. It was very different from your work but he is clearly taking the inspiration (from you) (Baruah 2019, 75).

The power of the collective in Rabha’s theatre lies in the presence of women’s bodies on stage— both Rabha and Kanhailal draw upon women’s embodied resistance, and thus, negotiates the binaries between inner/outer and private/public to propagate progressive notions of femininity. By moving away from the urban metropolis, Rabha reevaluates the “nation-state’s systemic legacy of failure to address issues surrounding women’s “visibility” in civil and political spaces” (Purkayastha 2015, 519). How does a woman utilize theatre space is a matter of concern for both Rabha and Kanhailal. Does this space give a woman a possibility to reassess her representation in history? The village women of Rampur whom Rabha ropes in for his performance can see the emergence of a new logic of retaliation; the structural limitations of patriarchal thoughts are exposed and tampered with. Theatre in this way can be an answer to what the Indian nation-state fails to recognize: women’s labor or granting her “equal access to civil liberty” (Purkayastha 2015, 519).

The Body that Elongates, Constricts, Moves and Stays Still

When the borderlines between the body and its technological mediations are inflected, how do we frame the immediacy of agency in a site-specific performance? If Rabha’s creation of an alternative corporeality hinges on the location and reliance of human conditions on a special spatio-temporal configuration, how do we look at “ontological exhaustion” which is aesthetically linked to “the modern or postmodern age of simulations” (McMullan 2001, 167)? Taking account of the proclivities of self-willed bodies that slip away from the director’s hands, and also the bodies-in-performance that are ever “dissolving, redefining or establishing identity”, Paula Cooey draws our attention to “the ambiguity of the body as both site for and artefact of human imagination” (1994: 42, 110). Cooey connects “the phenomenological concept of the lived experience of the body (the body as site) with the body as an agent of its own symbolic creation”, contending that we should keep an eye on how a body is normalized, mediated and reproduced in a historical moment (1994:42). Therefore it is impossible to do way with the “corporeal labour of performance, in terms of the physical discipline which has produced this sign / spectacle” and the body’s sustained engagement with the ever changing norms of perception, truth, and beauty (McMullan 2000, 111).  On stage, a body is more than a material, aesthetic and political sign.

Rabha’s framing of the embodied experience of a community, chiefly his discourse that extends beyond the material limits of a body, can also be read as a commentary on the connections between theatre space and the bodily ‘other’. The systemic assaults on those who are denied entry into mainstream spaces and the larger praxis of life, in Gautam Bhadra’s words, point out the “curious complicity” inherent in perceptual modes of representation and  historiography. This does not deride the body’s vehement resistance to the “signifying economy inscribed upon it” and regimes of political order and ideology by its act of forging webs of instantaneous connections with audience and theatre-environments.

In the plays of Badungduppa, “the body is a prop. A utensil. Something that is elastic, and can be moulded and filled” (Baruah 2019, 236).  The regular long walk of the theatre artists in the early morning to the heart of the groves, hills and rivers is necessary to understand the language of nature, to know its soul. Such expeditions coupled with numerous breathing exercises and meditation, “open the doors of our corporeal frames” to the bounty of nature and help mirror it, which eventually leads to a transcendence “beyond our own selves” (Baruah 2019, 236). Rabha is interested in a state that is reached when “the corporeal frame, of flesh and blood, formed out of cosmological happenings cease to exist and we become a part of nature” (Baruah 2019, 236). Every day after the morning walk, Rabha’s artists and workers practise “yoga, maati-aakhora, Manipuri martial arts, Kalaripayattu of Kerela”, and various European forms to make the body flexible (Baruah 2019, 237). In Badungduppa, more than the expressive potential of words, an extra emphasis is given on the responses and reactions of the body, its gestures, distinctive movements and the embodiment of “each rasa, each emotion, each stimulus” (Baruah 2019, 237). Rabha describes this process as such:

Most significantly, the objective is to make the body capable and strong enough to elicit any kind of reaction or impulse in a way that leaves an impression on the audience. So that we are able to bury in the depths of our minds waves of thoughts, that when mulled upon, are emitted at once as vibrations transferred, transfused, and transmitted to the audience. The more immediate this process, the greater intensity and pervasiveness of the play. The reverse would mean a weak statement of the play conveyed or weak acting performances (Baruah 2019, 237).

Along with the semiotics of the body, body-art and body-painting, certain formulae and symbols are devised for the special purpose of replacing dialogues and at times, these are either used as add-ons or alternatives to dialogues. More than an abundance of words, a meaningful silence pervades which is loaded with layers of signification at a different level. Linguistic assemblages and verbal excess are sacrificed for distinctive bodily gestures and movements— the power of the non-verbal is foregrounded. By resisting the spectacular and gaudy, Rabha’s theories of the body aim at unmasking and denuding the body by stripping off the extraneous, artificial layers. In this regard H S Shiva Prakash makes an apt comparison between Rabha’s practices and his mentor Kanhailal’s style, “The theatre expression that Badungduppa developed was no doubt inspired by Kanhailal’s ‘Theatre of the Earth’, which is an orchestration of the movements of the body, breath, mind and rhythms of nature” (Baruah 2019, 89). However, we can rope in both Sabitri and Kanhailal in this regard who as theatre exponents share and disseminate a common belief that “bodies, when stripped bare of urban affectations (inhibitions that restricted the expression of vulnerability, for example) and sharpened by processes of psychophysical training, could release narratives of collective pain in a way that was unmitigatedly political” (“The Lost Wor(l)ds of Heisnam Kanhailal”, Banerjee 2016). Both of them speak about the role of the body in the cultivation of empathy, it being a resonator that catches “the reverberations of pain” which is not their own (“The Lost Wor(l)ds of Heisnam Kanhailal”, Banerjee 2016). Partly, Sabitri’s adept imitation of the sounds and movements of animals stem from a need to “withdraw from the soul-killing noises of the city” and to know “how to become animal, in order that she may not shrink from encountering the horror of the human body in a state of absolute violation” (“The Lost Wor(l)ds of Heisnam Kanhailal”, Banerjee 2016). Both Sabitri and Kanhailal quip, “How to embody, and not simply express, another’s pain?” (“The Lost Wor(l)ds of Heisnam Kanhailal”, Banerjee 2016). This question takes on a totally different colour in the wake of insurgency and counter-insurgency movements in Manipur when communitarian violence has torn the social fabric of the state. The Indian government’s employment of repressive tools to silence the entire valley is another example of apathy towards the state. However, the expressive potential of the body is highlighted by Kanhailal in an interview with Naveen Kishore and Biren Das Sharma for the Seagull Theatre Quarterly in January, 1996. He states, “The child, I looked at the new born child crying. I noticed that the whole body of the child cries. But actors only use a certain resonator. Actors do this because we are socially and culturally conditioned. […] what we need is the creation of a new body culture…” (Katyal 1997, 46).

Creating New Permutations and Combinations

Evelien Pullens, theatre director and puppeteer from Netherlands, after an intensive workshop in Badungduppa, co-created a play with Rabha named Bijuli in which she explored the possibilities of physical theatre, music and puppetry. She laced the play with images from Western theatre, but the mould given by Rabha to Bijuli was noteworthy, “Sukra showed me how you can express emotions and messages by the body. Body language went hand in hand with the puppets and objects, partly made of natural materials. We used rice bags, leaves, seeds, jute, bamboo and traditional cotton” (Baruah, 2019, 97). Also, her Soul Tree theatre-research-workshop which she did for Netherlands Theatre Embassy is based on a special communication and communion with the trees, like singing from a distance and singing near the trees, calling out commands while climbing trees, “hiding and acting in the middle of the dense green vegetation” (Baruah 2019, 209). The participants explored natural environments like “fields…rocks, hills”, fish ponds too and honed “theatre skills such as timing, group-balance, and action-reaction” (Baruah 2019, 209-210).  The outcome is quite interesting:

In the second half of the workshop we started to extend our research to natural objects in theatre. We mainly focused on leaves, sticks, seeds, vegetables and mud. We concentrated on the world of insects. We started to make them out of natural materials without the use of any glue, pins or other artificial help. So we moved into puppetry as we let the insects come to life (Baruah 2019, 209-210).

Some of the unique experimentations by Badungduppa are carried out in the heart of the forest, amidst the lush Sal trees. It is noteworthy that the grove extends an interesting acoustics to the soundscape of the performance and provides scopes for “disparate aural tones, textures and affects” (Baruah 2019, 385). An optimal place for forging “intimacies with other beings” and life-forms, his theatre has a deep ecological understanding of the physical environment and shared materiality (Arons 2012, 567). The democratizing impulse stems from the belief that to a great extent both the human and the non human are “enmeshed in a dense network of relations” with no “firm, bright boundaries between inside and outside, male and female, life and nonlife, or between and within species” (Arons 2012, 567, 569). Rabha’s act of imagining and imaging permeable world/s of nature in theatrical spaces is noteworthy as this leads to an “open-ended concatenation of interrelations that blur and confound boundaries at practically any level: between species, between the living and the nonliving, between organism and environment” (Morton 2010, 275-76).

References:

Arons, Wendy. (2012). Queer Ecology/Contemporary Plays (QUEER RESEARCH IN PERFORMANCE). Theatre Journal, Vol. 64, No. 4, pp. 565-582.

Banerjee, Trina Nileena. (2016, October 7). “The Lost Wor(l)ds of Heisnam Kanhailal”. Raiot, Retrieved from https://raiot.in/the-lost-of-worlds-of-heisnam-kanhailal/#_ftn1

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Namrata Pathak is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU) Tura campus, Meghalaya. An MPhil and PhD from English and Foreign Languages University (formerly, CIEFL), Hyderabad, she is an academic, poet, and a critic. Her latest books are Indira Goswami: Margins and Beyond (2022, Routledge) and an upcoming Reader on Arun Sarma (Sahitya Akademi, 2022). Her debut collection of poems, That’s How Mirai Eats a Pomegranate was brought out in 2018 by Red River. Her poems are included in the Sangam House Monsoon Issue (July, 2019) and anthologies forthcoming from Aleph and other publishing houses.

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Resistance and Ungendering: Poetry of Mona Zote and Monalisa Changkija

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Debajyoti Biswas1 & Pratyusha Pramanik2

1Associate Professor of English; Bodoland University, Kokrajhar, Assam, India. ORCID: 0000-0001-5041-8171. Email: deb61594@gmail.com.

2Senior Research Fellow; Department of Humanistic Studies, Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi, India. ORCID:0000-0001-8854-5504. Email: praty1995@gmail.com.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages 1–12. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne08

First published: June 09, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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Resistance and Ungendering: Poetry of Mona Zote and Monalisa Changkija

Abstract

While the academic world talks of different waves of feminism that have emerged in Europe and the US in the past few centuries, the feminists from the third world countries have reservations on the use of a western framework of feminism in investigating the challenges faced by the women from third world countries.  The structural discrimination that permeates the gender divide in India is so variegated that a homogenous reprisal will be inadequate to understand the problems that persist among several ethnic communities in a postcolonial context. Neither religion nor education could erase the structural discrimination that continues to exist in these ethnic societies because of the persistence of regressive “customary laws” that allow male domination. This essay argues that the emerging feminist voices like Monalisa Chankija and Mona Zote from India’s north-east have used “performativity” as a tool to counter these gendered societies on one hand, and on the other hand it has also un-gendered the “essence” of cultural constructs putting it under suspension. However, the success of this effort seems limited only to the literary world as efforts are still underway to bring substantial changes into the political world.

Keywords: Monalisa Changkija, Mona Zote, North East India, Performativity, Third-world Feminism.  

Introduction: Feminist voices from Northeast

For a very long time, the literary and intellectual world has been dominated by male authority. This is why the corpus of knowledge relating to philosophy, history, theology, literature, and even science was not only androcentric but was also misogynistic in its tone and language. Meeta Deka (2013) points out, “Historiography, in general, suffers from an amnesia in respect to several categories that include women, peasants, workers and other marginalized voices […] This Historical amnesia was diagnosed by the growth of feminism and feminist movements since the 1960s” (p. xvii). Texts related to women or about women were also produced mostly by men and the female experiences were hardly recorded and they tended to exist in the periphery or the footnotes (Ray, 2001, p. 1; Eagleton, 2007, p. 106). Consequently, women read about themselves through the perception of men, and later on, when they wrote about themselves, they conformed to the plastic image of women created by men. Mary Eagleton writes that “these feminists are as guilty as the most misogynistic men of marginalizing women and not representing them at all” (p. 105).

This image of women as conceived of by the creative and sexual imaginary of men produced a model which was to be appropriated and internalized by women. The “second wave” of feminism found the male linguistic artifice suffocating their feminine voices. This is because the phallocentric matrix of vocabulary and subsequent cultural production were devoid of lexicon that could accommodate feminine expressions (Jones, 1981).  Writing played a pivotal role in the emancipation of women not only from patriarchal domination but also from themselves, which had so long been entrenched into the matrixes of patriarchy. This functions well in educated and elite societies where women’s movements have support from civil society. But this option remains inconsequential in peripheral ethnic societies marred by violence and remoteness. The tribal societies in North East India are a case in hand, which according to Temsula Ao are “still engaged in solitary activity” (2010, p. 171). The two women poets dealt with here come from Naga and Mizo ethnic groups living in India’s North East. While relating to their poetic work, this chapter will contextualize their experiences with the socio-political history of the places from where they write. Drawing on Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s (2011) idea of writing as resistance, this chapter argues that the women poets from North East India use writing not as a tool of self-expression, but also as a “performance” through which they ungender the cultural constructs by putting those under suspension. These cultural artifacts are then stripped of the constructed essence and eventually re-invested with a new essence through their poetic expression.

Double resistance through verse

Mohanty (2011) asserts that “questions of political consciousness and self-identity are a crucial aspect of defining Third World women’s engagement with feminism” (p. 286). The scenario in North East India is different from the rest of India in this matter. North East India is the home to several ethnic communities (Biswas, 2021) and many of these communities have been converted to Christianity after 1826 (Karotempral, 2009). Christianity was seen as a way of liberating these ethnic communities from their “savage” practices by making them “civilized” (Guha, 1996). These civilizing missions not only disrobed the indigenous communities of their tradition, identity, and heritage, they also distanced them from their past, from themselves. Charles Grant argued in favour of proselytizing the various communities in India so that their lives, habits, and customs could be changed and brought to par with western civilization (Ghosh, 2013, p. 14). This vision was finally realized with the coming of Bentinck and T.B. Macaulay who introduced a modern education system built on the western Christian guiding principle (Ghosh, 2013; U. Deka, 1989; Mukherjee, 2000). Whereas this transformation appeared liberating, in reality, it only brought a new kind of colonial domination and subordination. The ethnic social structures and traditional knowledge systems were destroyed by this interference which complicated matters further. On one hand, religion outlined the objectives of the converted communities clubbing them as a separate identity and nation different from pan-Indian identity; on the other hand, the Church became a powerful medium of domination and subjugation as articulated in the poems by Mona Zote and Desmond Kharmawphlang (Kharmawphlang, 2011). Women also became victims of the political turmoil that rocked the North Eastern states since 1947 (Banerjee, 2014). They were caught in the conflict between the state and the militants. These experiences are visible in the poetic works of Mona Zote and Monalisa Changkija. The double resistance that flows from the feminist poets is not only directed against the conflict situation but is also directed against the patriarchal domination.

Most of the tribal communities in North East India follow customary laws which allow them to carry on their ethnic practices with a legal sanction (Buongpui, 2013). Although some of the practices like marriage or divorce laws may be a contravention to the Indian constitution, yet the ethnic space is given a scope to continue with those practices (Borah, 2015). On examining the folk literature of these communities, one may find that these customary practices and the social structure that scaffold these practices are inherently patriarchal. For example, the Mizo story of Pi HmuakiZaitells us about the persecution of a female vocalist because of her extraordinary skills. She was killed and buried along with her gong by the menfolk of her community (Zama, 2011, p. 207). Among the Khasis a sexist proverb is in circulation- “Haba la kynih ka iarkynthei la wai ka pyrthei,” meaning “when the hen crows, it will be the end of the world or world will be in ruin” (Borah, 2015, 45). Among the Manipuri Meiteis, the women were denied the right to property (Basanti 164) because ownership of a property is a marker of social status. Among the Arunachalis too, women live in a marginalized position (Misra, 2011b, 230). The Idu Mishmi has a proverb that tells us of the deep-seated misogynistic practices: “Aru Pe Gu Noyu-Mbo Mi.” This means “women are like anchorless boats which move easily, even with the slightest stir. It is this logic that projects women as unsuitable in positions of power (Aich, 2015).” All these proverbs narrate the subordinate position of women in the tribal societies in North East India. The discourse on women’s empowerment is too good to be true in societies dominated by customary practices. The grand narrative that is created through such mythical discourses or proverbs in the tribal society contributes largely to the subordination of women. Such discourses enter the storytelling and decide the role assigned to women, which is then iterated in all kinds of cultural and political discourses assuming the cloak of truth. Temsula Ao (2006) writing about the plight of women in North East India states that “In actual reality, in this society, women are considered to be of little or no significance in matters relating to the origin, history and civil life of the people. But in fictive reality of these narratives, women have been portrayed as re-appropriating the powers that men actually wield in real life” (pp.23). Therefore, the task of women writers is not only to confront the patriarchal domination but also to portray the struggles through their writings. Talpade Mohanty points out the role of publishing houses and university curriculum in bringing about this revolutionary change in this struggle. The two poets discussed in this chapter illustrate this.

Mona Zote, through her poems, challenges the stereotypes created in society against women. She challenges these cultural stereotypes on one hand and also on the other hand, questions the demonization of women in patriarchal societies. In “The Whores of August”Zotetries to humanize the “fallen women.” She speaks of prostitution in the Mizo society where Christian missionaries are in charge of the law of the land. Not only are sex workers marginalized in these societies they are viewed with contempt. Zote (2003) speaking of these prostitutes notes-

And in the Madonnic embrace find
What no perfect daughters would deny
Sweetness in all their ways ( 201)

By using the imagery of Madonna, Zote offers a critique of the Christian missionaries who have subverted the existence of these women. Thus, they may not have become the “perfect daughter” as the patriarchal society would expect them to, but they manage to retain their individuality. On one hand, she critiques the authoritarian Church for the inhumane treatment it lays down for these sex workers, and on the other hand, she also highlights the subordinate status of the perfect daughters or perfect wives who have bartered their individuality for a rightful place in the society. The sex workers are women who cannot legitimately be mothers or wives. Patriarchy derides and relegates them to subaltern position, and even when visible they are simply confined to defined spaces (Geetha, 2007, p. 6). Patriarchy only sanctions women who could give birth to children and act as active parents bringing them up as future citizens (Geetha, 2007, p. 48). Neither the Church nor the tribal society accepted women who broke these stereotypes. Monalisa Chankija too while writing about sex workers wonders-

If Prostitutes and other
“Morally-loose women”
are social evils,
so are “God-fearing
Chaste women”
who have mothered
wife-battering sons. (Weapons of Words on Pages of Pain 6)

Here, Chankija tries to redefine what the patriarchal agents have culturally constructed as the idea of “Morally-loose women”. In a way she advocates decriminalization of sex work and consider it as being a source of livelihood (Pillai et.al 313-326; Kotiswaran). Much like Nivedita Menon she draws a parallel between marriage and prostitution; while marriage can be “arduous, undignified, and inescapable as sex work…-and unpaid on top of it all! But we try to empower women within marriages not demand the abolition of marriage itself” (184). The poem also notes, how, in patriarchy, women themselves become agents of repressing other women.  By questioning the culturally constructed essence of social roles, Chankija destabilizes the social matrix. Here, the illusion of social identities is being questioned and juxtaposed with each other. The power nexus between married women and “loose women” have been pitted against each other, only to highlight how there is power struggles even among married women. In marriages that are virilocal, that is the wife moving to the husband’s home after the marriage, women “derive their power solely from men” and “they are put into positions that are pitted against one another” (Menon, 2012, p. 44). The poet does not intend to further increase the tension among women, rather she intends to unify women against the patriarchal structures which represses women alike. Such patriarchal structures treat them like “second class citizenry” (Chankija, 1993, Foreword)

In the poems of Monalisa Changkija, we note this to be a recurrent theme- women caught in unequal marriages, sacrificing their dreams, desires, and individuality. Changkija counters the patriarchal norms of the tribal society and questions these unwritten rules set down for women. She writes-

I see it nowhere written
that your unironed shirts
deserve my attention
more than my flying lessons (Chankija, 1993, p.27)

Here, Changkija not only draws our attention towards the gender prescribed roles, but she also subverts them by speaking of a woman’s desire for flying lessons. While flying or driving has been mostly associated with masculinity, the act of flight is also associated with freedom and liberation. So, a woman’s desire to prioritize her flying lessons over domesticity would mean that she is breaking free by ungendering her roles. Butler (1988) observed that-“The authors of gender become entranced by their own fictions whereby the construction compels one’s belief in its necessity and naturalness. The historical possibilities materialized through various corporeal styles are nothing other than those punitively regulated cultural fictions that are alternatively embodied and disguised under duress” (p. 522). Women across cultures have been repressed and culturally constructed for their marginalized existence. This performance of gender is often so inbuilt, that women do not recognize their suppression. They themselves start negotiating a position for themselves, which would be suitable for them after fulfilling their primary responsibility of being the ‘domestic labour’. They start taking up jobs which are tagged as female professions like nursing and teaching, and even when they take up other jobs, they need to limit their ambition at the very onset. Like most of India, even in the North East, this sexual division of labour is so normalized that women do not consider their domestic responsibilities as work. Women’s labor remained invisible until the 1991 Indian census- the state did not recognize such works because they are not performed for any wage. However, in rural areas, the domestic work includes collection of fuel, fodder and water, animal husbandry, livestock maintenance, post-harvest processing and kitchen gardening. These jobs demand considerable physical strength and yet remain unpaid. If women choose not to perform these domestic responsibilities, the men of the house would have to hire someone to perform these jobs and pay them wage, or the goods are to be purchased from the market. (M.K. Raj ,1990, pp. 1-8; M. K. Raj and V. Patel ,1982, pp.16-19). Chankija (1993) writes-

I have discovered……
your life isn’t more precious
your time isn’t more valuable
your profession isn’t more noble
your pay-cheque isn’t heavier
your status isn’t more important
than mine. (p. 21)

With this realization the poet not only breaks out of her gender prescribed role of being the care-giver, she also prioritizes her own profession and her pay-cheque. This is not a personal act of rebellion, as she recognizes her worth as a domestic labour, women start questioning the economy which benefits from this unpaid labour. If the mothers and wives do not perform their assigned gender roles, then either the husband or the state has to pay someone to get this work done (Menon, 2012, p. 15). Women then could become equal contenders in any career of their choice-politics, warfare, sports or any other fields which until now had been dominated by men. They would no longer require to limit their desires.

Chankija’s aspiration for the sky intends to break free of gender stereotypes in more ways than one. She wishes to break free of the cultural fiction which limits her individualism, and this breaking free of cultural constructions, also has punitive repercussions. The women, of whom Changkija speaks of, are not only marginalized and denied of their rights and desires; they are also subjected to domestic violence. The men of these societies resort to masculine aggression to keep intact the gender matrix. Women are reduced to their reproductive and caregiving functions as the men batter and bruise them by “raining blows” with their “masculine hands”- the domestic sphere of the Naga women is as conflictual as the social scene. Violence against women has been normalized and is common in most households. Women are caught in relationships where they find neither solace nor security. The institution of marriage is used to deny women their basic rights. Changkija (2014) writes regarding the Naga marriage that it is a “totally unequal one, where the role of the wife is taken for granted as subservient” (p. 77). They are not only dominated in the household sphere but they are also denied the political rights guaranteed to them by the constitution of India. The patriarchally structured civil societies continue opposing the thirty-three percent reservation for women in Urban Local Bodies (ULB) in Nagaland (Saikia, 2017).  Caught in these unequal marriages the women suffer silently, go through miscarriages and other oppressions. They continue being resilient mothers and wives who continue to fulfill their duties as mothers and wives. Chankija (1993) writes-

Violence-induced miscarriages,
black-eyes and bloodied-lips 
blue-bruises and broken ribs
within the sanctity of marriages
and security of homes,
are unrecorded indexes
of man’s “progress and growth”
on this planet’s unwritten
Pages of Pain (p. 7)

The personal over here becomes political (Hanisch, 1970). The experience of a Naga woman remains no longer restricted to the four walls of her household, her marginalization and the systematic process of otherizing and silencing her is being written and recorded by Changkija here. These untitled poems are extracted from an anthology which she has titled Weapon of Words on Pages of Pain. Changkija has been a reporter by profession who understands the power of words and the need to record the narratives of pain to locate them historically, and further read and theorize them. Her poems do not follow the conventional norms of poetry; with rhyme schemes she suspends the rhythm and conventions to question the prevailing socio-cultural norms and roles. Chankija (1993) writes-

When my verses
do not rhyme
nor conform to
traditional norm,
to you, they are
just words,
not poetry. (p.39)

She is well aware that the society may not acknowledge them as verses, but as mere words and phrases, but this too is an attempt to break free of “sedimented expectations of gendered existence” (Butler, 1988, p.524) Thus, she politicizes the personal not only through her words, but also by breaking free of conventional poetic structures. These poets are trying to rewrite the history of the culture by highlighting the marginalized conditions of women.

Ungendering Culture

These poems become tools of resistance when the patriarchal agents of the society continuously try to silence them; these poems also create political consciousness among Naga women with shared experiences. In the introduction to her book on “life stories of Jamaican women,” Honor Ford-Smith (1987) writes: “These tales encode what is overtly threatening to the powerful into covert images of resistance so that they can live on in times when overt struggles are impossible or build courage in moments when it is. To create such tales is a collective process accomplished within a community bound by a historical process…” (pp. 3-4). As the Naga underground army engaged in a battle with the Indian state, the “Naga way of life” had been turned into a battleground where one could hear the blaring machine guns and revolutionary ideals (Misra, 2011a) – this turmoil finds a parallel in the households of these women, which turned into battles and wars neither lost nor won. Being women, they suffered double oppression in the hands of their men as well as the insurgency. For them, an overt struggle is not possible, so these poems act as a means to unify and record their dissent. Changkija (2003) vents her anguish against the use of brute masculine force to silence them-

“Don’t waste your time
Laying out diktats
And guidelines
On how to conduct my life
On matters personal and political” (pp. 200-201)

Both these poets are vocal about the violence and neglect that the people of the North East have suffered over the years- “the cultural genocide, the attempting to erase tribal heritage, the ravages of insurgency, the authoritarian reign of the church, and so forth” (Bordoloi, 2019, p. 95). The women of these regions have used their words to counter the brutality. In Zote’s “What Poetry Means to Ernestina in Peril” (2005)we are taken into the world of a woman living in a male-dominated society. The evening star tells her that “Ignoring the problems will not make it go away,” and the music reminds her of the “dusty slaughter”, “epidermal crunch” and “sudden bullet to the head” (pp. 66-67). Speaking of the insurgency Mona Zote said in an interview- “People simply shut it out, they don’t think of it on an active level yet the trauma filters through in small ways. And while religion supposedly heals or consoles, it can also inflict cultural damage that is difficult to diagnose or even acknowledge” (Tellis, 2011) The world of Zote at once induces discomfort among the audience, the banality and yet the nonchalance with which she speaks of the violence in her world shows that Ernestina is not a demure voiceless woman. The “third eye” is the poetic imagination which the society or the Repressive State Apparatuses (Althusser, 1971) have cut out of her. With the very act of speaking and thinking as a woman, she breaks out of her gender role of being the silenced woman and reclaims her voice in the patriarchal state. She challenges the historical idea of being a woman in peril. She undoes the process of becoming the woman and ungenders herself as she steps into a violent and grotesque world. In her poetic world, we see Zote reverse the historical and cultural construction of becoming the woman (Beauvoir, 1956, p. 273). She unlearns the authoritarian rule of the church, the violence of the insurgency, and the subordination she has faced as a woman growing up in a patriarchal society. She is not the perfect daughter or wife who would shy away from speaking about the foeticide, miscarriages, the illegitimate children born, and the failed marriages; she blames the church and the state for the peril. Butler in Gender Trouble (1999) problematises the “cultural compulsion” to become a woman; however, in the North East we see a compulsion to be a man. The body becomes a passive battle ground where through determinism or free will cultural meanings are inscribed on the body or meanings are interpreted with the body as the means (p. 12). It is fear, insecurity and anger which pushes them out of their conventional roles and makes them thinkers and critics. Zote (2005) writes, Ernestina would smile and say-

I like a land where babies
are ripped out of their graves, where the church
leads to practical results like illegitimate children and bad marriages
quite out of proportion to the current population, and your neighbour
is kidnapped by demons and the young wither without complaint
and pious women know the sexual ecstasy of dance and peace is kept
by short men with a Bible and five big knuckles on their righteous hands.
Religion has made drunks of us all. The old goat bleats.
We are killing ourselves. I like an incestuous land. (p. 67)

Using both the repressive and ideological state apparatuses (Althusser, 1971), the Mizo people have been “bombed silly out of our minds” (ibid). Here, the very act of thinking or speaking is an act of empowerment, especially when it is done by a woman. The bombing is also an allusion to the bombing of Aizwal by Indira Gandhi in March 1966 (Buhril, 2016).  In Changkija’s “Shoot,” (2011a) she writes “Shoot, after all, we are only an inconvenience of a few lakh souls” (p. 90). The poem addresses the threat of genocide; however, she affirms that they will not move from their dream of a unified brotherhood. “One of these Decades” (2011b) is also a poem addressing the socio-political context of the North East (p. 89). Here, she speaks of living a nightmare and the past mistakes of their forefathers. She believes that this time they will not be lured by “riches and glory”, this time they will not be enslaved by the strangers who have wanted to tame them. The poem alludes to the Christian missionaries who have tried to tame the tribal heritage and enslaved them. The “date with destiny” refers to Nehru’s Tryst with Destiny speech (p. 89). Although India achieved independence in 1947 from the British, the North East continues to be caught in a struggle between the insurgent groups, the armed forces, and Christian missionaries. Changkija participates in this collective dream and unified brotherhood, she breaks the society’s gender norms through her social performance of participating in a historical and cultural process, which she is otherwise deprived of, on account of being a woman (Butler, 1988).

The ungendering process of these poets is also performed through the images, myths, and idioms employed in their poetry. Changkija in “Mist over Brahmaputra” (2011c) wishes to be like the Brahma’s son. The name Brahmaputra means Brahma’s sons, the river in the North East is considered a masculine river because of its ferocious currents and it also has a mythical connotation. She wishes to embody the “human inadequacies” and the “spiritual serenity” of the river. The identity of being Brahma’s son lends it shapes, colours, and volume to travel across time and space. She seeks the strength to heal from her “self-destructive tendencies” (pp. 87-88). She suspends the idea of the masculine image of the Brahmaputra as she humanizes it and draws parallels between herself and the river. The Brahmaputra, which is a cultural artefact and has a history of cultural essence associated with it, is being offered a renewed significance. We see a similar instance in Mona Zote’s “Girl, with Black Guitar and Blue Hibiscus” (2005) when she draws a parallel between the subterranean gong and the black guitar in one hand and the computer on the other (pp. 67-68). The subterranean gong alludes to Pi Hmuaki, the vocalist, who was buried alive because of her skills. Hmuaki’s perfection is compared to the flawless computer, which is a machine and has a masculine connotation. The gong after being buried becomes the guitar, which too is considered masculine. For the gong, or Hmuaki to be accepted by her society she needs to ungender herself and becomes a man. These poets write intending to critique the cultural constructs and ungender the prevalent narratives by suspending them. These poems then become the site of performance where the stereotypical essence of cultural artifacts is challenged and redefined by these women. The poems, therefore, no longer remain mere sites of resistance, they become cultural fields, where renewed gender acts are performed “invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure” (Butler, 1988, p. 531).

Conclusion

The journey of the women in social, political, and literary life is fraught with deprivation, suppression, and violence perpetrated by the patriarchal hegemonic structures. Not only constitutional amendments failed to rescue women of this plight, but religious conversion also failed miserably to emancipate women. Rather, religion with its inherent misogynistic scaffolding could not offer the restructuring of the social order for women. A cursory inquest into the life of the North Eastern women will at once reveal the participation of women in the economic and cultural front. Despite their active participation, they are relegated to a secondary subject under the patriarchal gaze. The opposition of civil society in women’s participation in the political sphere hints at the fact that women will not be allowed to make any changes to the social structure politically. Under these circumstances, a critique of such domination and also altering the cultural constructs through literary practices could play a major role. Mona Zote and Monalisa Chenkija, both working women, have not only subverted the hegemonic structures through their writing; they have also ungendered the cultural icons through performance in daily life and re-appropriated those to exemplify the participation of women in every sphere of social life. On one hand, they have exposed the inherent misogynistic social structure in tribal society; on the other hand, they have re-signified the cultural elements by ungendering those. While it has been witnessed that religion has failed to guarantee emancipation for women in the North East tribal society, the panacea lies in political participation and cultural re-signification through writings.

Acknowledgement

Photo by Susan Wilkinson: https://www.pexels.com/photo/acrylic-paint-on-black-background-12203448/

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Debajyoti Biswas is an Associate Professor& Head of English Department at Bodoland University, Kokrajhar. He did his MA at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in 2003 and received his PhD from Gauhati University in 2017. He has co-edited two books- Nationalism in India: Texts and Contexts (Routledge 2021) and Global Perspectives on Nationalism: Political and Literary Discourses (Forthcoming from Routledge). He has published his research papers in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, and English: Journal of the English Association; Corvinus Journal of Sociology and Social Policy; RUDN Journal of Studies in Literature and Journalism & Postcolonial Studies.

Pratyusha Pramanik is currently a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Humanistic Studies, Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi, India. She did her MA in English Literature from Banaras Hindu University; and her graduation from Bethune College, University of Calcutta. Her works have appeared on various online portals like Feminism in India, Borderless Journal, and Café Dissensus.

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Yemapoetics: Towards a Theory of Healing in Indigenous Poetry from Sikkim

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Swarnim Subba1 and Namrata Chaturvedi2

1Research Scholar, Department of English Literature and Cultural Studies at SRM University, Sikkim. ORCID: 0000-0003-1808-628X. Email subba.swarnim06@gmail.com

2Department of English, Zakir Husain Delhi College, (University of Delhi). ORCID: 0000-0001-9186-7651. Email: namrata.chaturvedi@gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages 1–13. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne07

First published: June 09, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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Yemapoetics: Towards a Theory of Healing in Indigenous Poetry from Sikkim

Abstract

Literature that is being composed from or about the politico-geographical category of Northeast India focuses on violence and ethnic movements in major ways (Hazarika, 1996; Barpujari, 1998; Baruah, 2005; Paula, 2008). While Weberian understanding of indigenous cosmology has led to archiving, documenting and research on ethnic epistemologies from Northeast India, in the absence of indigenous literary theories, literature from this region faces the challenges of homogenisation or becoming case studies for ethnographic documentation and anthropological inquiry (Karlsson & Subba, 2006; Subba, 2009; Lepcha et al, 2020 in the context of Sikkim). This paper intends to propose a theory of reading that upholds the role and participation of the poet(ess) as a shaman- a transforming agent and a transformed individual herself. This theory is being named Yemapoetics, deriving its epistemic framework from the figure of shamaness or Yema in the Limboo healing tradition in Sikkim. Yemapoetics is an attempt to propose a new indigenous paradigm for indigenous literary expression around the world.  This theory identifies stages of poetic composition as well as reception, ranging from purification, possession, communication to catharsis. An indigenous literary theory like this will provide contexts for locating the poet(ess), examining her/his role as community healer who connects the modern, urban psyche of individuals with communal, archetypal symbols. This enables a process of retracing and re-membering through the poetic act that is essential to healing and recovery. Just as Limboo cosmology recognises women as first humans to be created, this paper argues that women’s psychospiritual agency should be at the centre for poetic theories to accord validity and applicability of feminist spirituality to indigenous literary theorisation. For the purpose, an illustration of the proposed theory will be made with reference to select indigenous poets from Sikkim.

Keywords: Limboo-Literary Theory-Feminist Spirituality- Northeast-Sikkim.

Introduction

In northeast India, the topographical contours are intrinsically linked to similar yet distinctive epistemologies that shape the ethnic diversity and indigenous identities of the inhabitants. The eight states that are identified as belonging to the political category of Northeast India possess a range of indigenous worldviews (?div?s?dar?an) that are distinctive in symbolisms and rituals yet connected by shared cosmological structures and ceremonial significations. In Northeast India: A Place of Relations (2017), Saikia and Baishya (Eds.) argue for continuities, intersectionalities and solidarities in the political, cultural and lived traditions in the geopolitical category of Northeast India. In Oral Traditions, Continuities and Transformations in Northeast Indian and Beyond (2021),  Sarkar and Modwel (Eds.) argue for the need to reassess the continuities, exchanges, interdependence and influences between lived cultures of ‘Asian Highlands’ to recontextualise the folk knowledge systems and their relevance in the wake of modernity, to understand the frontier geopolitical challenges and richness of the ‘shatter zone’ called India’s Northeast and to locate the political and cultural history of the region in its negotiation with external as well as internal colonialism and rapid globalisation. Recent studies as these are incorporating newer methodologies of interpretative politics, cultural geography, material culture studies, ecoethnography and transindigenous comparative frameworks to revisit the cultural and literary knowledge traditions of Northeast India. As the indigenous philosophies of Northeast India do not possess a textual or metaphysical nature, they are evolutions out of lived experiences and oral knowledge transmission. These communication models are largely based on intergenerational preservation and distribution of knowledge. The nature of this knowledge is transpersonal and environmental involving the participation of human and transhuman entities in the nature of elemental deities, spirits, ancestor personas, animal and plant spirits, and the relationships of reciprocity and interdependence between them. The ‘indigenous religion paradigm’ (Maarif, 2019) necessarily involves a web-like relationality between these participants that is epistemologically different from a hierarchical paradigm of divine-human-nature in Western religion. This paper incorporates an ethnopoetic approach that aims to locate indigenous poetics in ethnospiritual terms of reference by focusing on a specific healing ritual in the Limboo spiritual tradition in Sikkim.

In Indian Adivasi literary and cultural discourse, concerns of sovereignty, knowledge of orature, and archiving and documenting ethno literature are major concerns as reflected in the work of critics and scholars such as GN Devy, Anand Mahananda, Ganga Sahay Meena, Ramdayal Munda, Ramanika Gupta and Ruby Hembrom and others. In contemporary Adivasi literary discourse, there is space left for exploring dimensions of human and nature interdependence, communal identity formation through participation and trans-indigenous philosophical and political solidarities are being highlighted as counter-narratives of sustainable development and ecofeminist activism (Chaturvedi, 2021). As northeast India is home to indigenous communities varying in ethnic and spiritual identities, the literary discourse can gain much from such theoretical investment in trans-indigenous solidarities and spiritual poetics. The development of research and its directions in Northeast India became visible only after late 1980’s when some scholars started probing into the diverse contemporary issues of ethnicity, identity, conflict, inclusion, violence, political inequality, cultural imagination and nation-state as represented in the literature composed from or about the politico-geographical and ethno-political categories of Northeast India. Scholars such as Udayon Mishra (1988) and Apurba Baruah (1991) examine the ethnicity and identity-based conflicts; Geeti Sen (2005) and Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih (2005) reflect on the conflict between states and the country, the brutality of political oppression, violence, cultures in transition, psychological and social difficulties in the contemporary poetries etc. Otojit Kshetrimayum (2009) critical analysis on the role of shamanism in establishing women’s power and autonomy and also provides trans-ethnic, trans- indigenous reading. Tilottoma Misra (2011) explores the dimensions of the multi-ethnic and multilingual cultures reflected in the Northeast literature; Mark Bender (2012) employs ecocritical theory to ethnographic poems of Northeast India and Southwest China. Watitula Longkumer & Nirmala Menon (2017) seeks to understand the multicultural aesthetics in the literary works of the region and Amit R. Baishya (2019) on political terror and survival in contemporary literature of the Northeast. Populated by numerous and distinctive ethnic groups that share international borders with China, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Nepal, this landlocked Northeast Himalayan belt of Indian subcontinent has witnessed and withstood all kinds of inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic clashes and conflicts. Therefore, the focus of research on Northeast Indian studies has been located mostly in the issues of terrorism, ethnic clash, ecological degradation, historical and socio-political issues, insurgencies, and related others (Baruah, 2005; Nongkynrih, 2005; Sen, 2006; Mishra, 2011; Ray, 2015; Baishya, 2019). However, the abundant narratives of “indigeneity” and “ethnicity” in the contemporary texts are often overlooked or side-lined in a complex history of migration, colonization, conflicts and unrest (Menon &Longkumer, 2017). In this view, this paper attempts to sketch a theoretical framework for the literary criticism of Northeast Indian poetry through the paradigm of indigenous poetics. It is developed to study and understand the indigenous existence and realities by linking it to the Mundhum narratives (Limboo ritual oral narratives) that are foundational to Limboo culture and tradition. As Neal Mcleod asserts ‘Indigenous poetics is the embodiment of Indigenous consciousness’(Mcleod 2014, p.4) just as the oral narratives of the Mundhum that are the source of inspiration, information and enlightenment for ‘Limbus’ and guidance of the way of life, customs and rites-de-passage. (Chaitanya Subba, 1995)

This paradigm emerges from the ground-up by deriving its conceptual structures and vocabulary from indigenous spiritual ritual practices of women, specifically that of the Yemas who are women healers of the Limboo community of Sikkim. The stages of the spiritual experiences, the links between language, sound, rhythm and poetry, and the centrality of their spiritual experiences are the foundations of the theoretical propositions in this paper. In seeing the Yemas perform their social roles bearing responsibility and sacrifice as mediums, one can revisit the social and cultural roles that poets of Northeast India perform in the context of transition from oral to written literature, preserving oral knowledge traditions and undertaking writing to counter underrepresentation in history as being similar. The poets can be seen as undertaking the roles of community healers and channels for communication between the ancient realms of ancestral wisdom and present layers of modern experience.

A predilection for images and motifs drawn from nature is proof that Northeast poetry in English is deeply rooted in the land. ‘Nature’ is not an impassive witness to the existential despair of men and women as in the contemporary wasteland of modernist poets, but a living presence for the Northeast poets, where hills and rivers are also deities…and the fates of natives are inevitably intertwined with them. Thus, in spite of the trappings of modernity, the life of most communities of the Northeast is defined by their folk origins. The mythic world still survives at the frontiers of the civilised world, and the ‘folk’ still continues to assume the ‘intensity of reality’ for many. Myths provide a key to the cultural behaviour of a people, but when communities seem to be losing their way in the midst of cultural colonisation, mythopoeic poets, out of a deep-seated desire, step in and try to emulate the traditional storytellers and shamans by recalling the lore of the tribe.

 For elaborating on this role and experience, the experiential knowledge and expressions of women have been focused upon with the intention to highlight feminine epistemology as being capable of encompassing the range of human experience, much as masculine epistemology has been recognised for years. While shaman, yogi, jogi, jhankri, yeba, phedangma, ojha, medicine-man, magician and many other terms have used a masculine gender vocabulary to designate and reflect on the spiritual agency of the healers, the feminine healers have either been subsumed within a masculine vocabulary or been relegated to a position on the margins. It is either argued that the word ‘shaman’ naturally includes a shamaness too, or that shamaness is a rarity hence the word must not be used to denote a generalised designation or role. While interviewing a yema, when this question was posed, she concurred that a yema (woman healer) is also a yeba (male healer) to indicate that even in spiritual vocabulary, the masculine denotative is all-encompassing while the feminine is used to denote the spiritual agency of women which is not distinctive but can be easily subsumed within the masculine.   As observed, women’s spiritual agencies and the complexities of their experiential language are often assimilated into a universalised masculine vocabulary or even ignored in cultural and literary discourses. It is possible and desirable to locate the poetic structures of writing as well as reading in women’s spiritual experiences and language matrices thereby facilitating a feminine poetics that recognises the psychoemotional vocabulary of women’s lives and words and paves the way for seeing the poet as “a mad shaman(ess), a Yema”. The recognition of validity of women’s spiritual experiences can serve two purposes which may not be mutually exclusive. Firstly, the vocabulary that emerges from this, such as Yemapoetics, will point to the significance and range of women’s spiritual lives, and secondly, it will enable a feminine-centered grammar of psychopoetics that will counter the marginalisation of women’s psychological and literary lives. The Yema will stand as a model for all indigenous poets who are trying to be healers and mediums for their ethnic communities, for their land and for all women (and men) who share in the collective spirit of a place.

Who Is Yema and What is Yemapoetics?

In Sikkim, Limboos is one of the indigenous tribes who have inhabited the region even before the Namgyal dynasty was established in 1642 (Sinha, 2005).   Though they are considered the earliest settler of Sikkim, having a distinctive linguistic and cultural identity, they have been denied and deprived of Indigenous rights and justice over centuries (Khamdhak, 2019). ‘Straddled between the two countries of Nepal and India, this fringe tribe has sustained fluid identity under the changing history. The flexibility of the geographical boundaries, battles of conquest, conspiracies and acquisition, and the theories of their originality have confused this community and has caused them to search for their identity. The onset of democracy has further marginalized them. The Limboos have been classified as Nepali linking this community with the later Nepali migrants in Sikkim, which the Limboos consider as a threat to their distinct identity’ (Subba, 2013).

Limboos are traditionally nature worshippers, animist and have their own religion – Yumaism and their literature in oral form – Mundhum. Mundhum is a broad umbrella term that incorporates legends, myths, folklore, prehistoric accounts, sermons and moral and philosophical exhortations in poetic language (Limbu, 2010). It encircles and enriches Limboo ontology, customs and rites are recited during rituals and ceremonies by the Limboo shamans/ shamanesses that are known as Phedangma, Samba, Yeba, Yema, Mangba or Ongsi.

‘Yemapoetics’ derives its epistemic framework from the figure of Yema, a Limboo shamaness who recites Mundhum while performing shamanic rituals to heal an individual or a community from certain diseases and the spells of evil spirits to restore health and harmony. This paradigm makes an attempt to reorient the study of indigenous literature with the intention to restore the poetic and philosophical dimensions of the writings themselves.  It is developed for the non-western analysis of indigenous poetry, spirituality and worldviews for putting our indigenous realities into perspective. As a new paradigm of reading poetry by indigenous poets, this approach sees the indigenous poet/poetess as a shamaness who acts as a transforming agent for her community and a transformed individual herself.

In 1964, Mircea Eliade published Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, a work that brought into academic focus the figure of the shaman as a healing spirit, a medium between this world and the other. Many poetic theories have since looked at the figure of the shaman as being similar to the figure of the poet, and have identified patterns of similarities in their roles and powers of communicating with the unseen, as it were (Henighan, 1979; Synder 1985; Rothenberg, 1985; Chung, 2005; Mortuza, 2013; Lima, 2014; Paneka, 2018). Referring to ‘late-modernist poetics’ as essentially curative, Shamsad Mortuza quotes Anthony Mellors:

The late modernist poets …write on the brink of the postmodernist abyss. Distinct, if not entirely separate from mid- to late twentieth-century poetries which are indebted to modernism but which return to highly, individualised, bardic modes of expressions, such as the neo-romantics of the 1940s, the Beats of the 1950s, and the counter-cultural visionaries of the 1960s, they continue to affirm a redemptive aesthetic that links poesis with the occult power while disowning the reactionary politics of high modernists such as Yeats, Eliot and Pound. Art remains the alternative order to rationalising and inevitably c-omprised political systems. (Mortuza, 2013, p. 7)

In this book A More Beautiful Question: The Spiritual in Poetry and Art (2011), Glen Hughes, drawing inspiration from the philosophies of Lonergan and Eric Voegelin, identifies the problem of modern times as a case of “imbalance in consciousness”. According to him, the fact that for many people, art continues to hold meaning because it is capable of keeping alive a sense of mystery, “an invitation to feel the unbounded surplus of meaning in the depths of reality in an age when both institutional religions and their materialist and atheist critics have become less and less effective in doing so” (p.130) Hughes categorizes kinds of imbalances, and points to the need of contemporary times to a balanced consciousness, one that retains the intimations of childhood along with the maturity of adulthood. Like Gadamer, Hughes also stresses the curative, balancing power of art, in taking individual consciousness closer to the realm of knowing the unknowable, of apprehending the infinite and supreme principle of consciousness. Indigenous literature and philosophy reorient us to recognizing the role of women’s spirituality as therapeutic, balancing and restorative. From the work of Paula Gunn Allen (1986) to that of Molly McGlennen (2014), indigenist feminist scholarship has recognized indigenous philosophies and trans-indigenous feminist solidarities as offering balancing epistemological discourses to the global urban and capitalist discourses. Native American, Aboriginal, Adivasi, African and other indigenous traditions are inviting us to locate feminist spirituality in literature, especially in poetry and associated rhythms and sound-based therapies that are also finding a place in the emerging field of narrative medicine. In the context of northeast India, there lies promising scope in exploring the spiritual-poetic contours of oral, ritualistic and even written audio-visual signs for identifying models of reconnection, restoration and regeneration that these texts provide. The Yema is an archetypal poet- one who has mastered the art of distancing, reconnecting, transcending and restoring the self with contemporary realities. This paper presents Yema as an archetypal figure of poetry and her specificities of spiritual experience outline a model for structured therapy, one that can be naturally applied to indigenous poetries from Northeast India. In this proposed theory, the poet(ess) is seen as a Yema, a medium through which ancestors communicate, a leader through whom the individual is able to retrace her/his steps to reconnecting with the ancestral traditions, to receive wisdom and to locate oneself in the community. Poets like Joy Harjo, Louise Erdrich, Jacinta Kerketta, Mamang Dai, Joram Yalam Nabam and many others who see their contemporary identities as primarily located in their indigeneity, have talked about the need to retrace one’s steps to one’s ancestral spirits. This retracing is also a reclaiming of history and identity, a healing of the wounds of colonial history. As a poetic framework, Yemapoetics identifies stages of poetic composition as well as reception, ranging from purification, possession, communication to catharsis. These stages encapsulate the spiritual journey of the poets as well as that of the readers, whose own fractured modern selves find ways of healing in the act of reading. The Yema, though specific, is being presented as a generic figure- an archetype of feminine spirituality, upholding a tradition wherein a woman becomes a community leader, keeper of memories, speaker for ancestors, and healer for the young. Yemapoetics is therefore a generic theory that can aid in recognising and situating the role of poets in any community by upholding the woman as a representative of the mediumship and catharsis as a challenge to the universalising vocabulary of men’s roles and experiences.

Purification

When Yema prepares herself to transpose from this world to the worlds of spirits, she detaches herself from the contemporary realities with the help of meditation, ritual objects and paraphernalia such as brass plates, Ya- Gay (small drums), Wasang (head dress decorated with bird feathers that acts a weapon to fight evil spirits), pona (necklace made of stones, beads, bones of birds and animals), Kaplak (Shell) and chanting of mundhums (Subba, 2021). The language of the Mundhum recited by Yema helps her to symbolically dislocate herself with a violent shivering of the body, her eyes closed and going into a trance. There is a fundamental link between the rhythm of language and the state of depersonalization: “The very language of the shaman, the music or the melody of it, can alone have healing properties. The music can put listeners, as poetry can put readers, into a state of trance, which is a pre-requisite for healing” (Panecka, 2018).

Similarly, a poet in the process of creating her poetic work dissociates from the contemporary, modern realities of this world and goes into a trance like state into the creative world that is her unconscious mind. She is symbolically displaced from this physical world and enters into an imaginative world. T.S Eliot’s theory of poetic creation asserts this process of displacement or depersonalisation of a poet.  To create poetry, a poet dissociates from this world- ‘continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality’ and journeys back to the past (tradition) to modify (heal) the present. A poet thus remains merely as a medium between poets’ present personal feelings and emotions and the impersonal elements i.e. knowledge and wisdom of the past in order to create a new thing i.e. a poem. Yishey Doma, an indigenous English language poet from Sikkim disconnects from this modern world of realities for “it only takes a whiff to get me there as I love climbing amidst your tranquillity” in her poem ‘Tashiding’. Tashiding also known as “Heart of Sikkim/ Denzong” is one of the oldest monasteries of Sikkim built in the mid seventeenth century known for its Bhumchu Ceremony that prophesize the events for Sikkim every year. “Every stone, every corner/ Every soul, everything, from your/ Four saintly course reflect gods/ The gods of Tashiding has come to me/ I want to proclaim it to all.”

Possession

Yema symbolically dissociates herself from this world and enters into a state of possession after chanting, dancing and beating drums and brass plates. R. L. Jones (1976) describes this spirit possession in Limboo shamans as altered state of consciousness where the spirit may be the soul of the departed individual, gods and goddesses, natural divinity, household or clan divinity or even souls of animal kingdom as the master spirit. She can communicate with spirits and ancestors retreating into the prophetic vision or ancestral calling.  She asks help from seven generations of ancestor spirits to fight against the evil spirits. The poets can be seen like the shamaness who with the help of their creative powers and poetic language help to transform us to greater conscious and integration, help us to go on an inner journey. They, like shamaness, can help the reader establish a contact with the spirits that are connected to the power of inner senses – a spiritual world that lies within us. Thus in the hands of shaman(ess)-poets, the oral text becomes the tool of prophecy and mediation (Dana, 2004) who use ancestor spirits, indigenous worldviews and cosmovision by transcribing them in her poems that play a significant role in the healing process in this present-day crisis.  With reference to Robin Ngangom’s views on the role of indigenous poets from Northeast India shared earlier in this essay, we can think about the poetry of Temsula Ao, an indigenous poet from Nagaland. Writing in English, Ao evokes ancestor spirits often in her poems: “Stone-people/ The worshippers/ Of unknown, unseen/ Spirits/ Of trees and forests, / Of stones and rivers, / Believers of soul/ And its varied forms, / Its sojourn here/ And passage across the water/ Into the hereafter” (‘Stone People from Lungterok’).

Sanjay Sawaden Subba is a young emerging indigenous poet from Sikkim who writes both in English and Limboo. His poem ‘Last Talk with Grandpa’, recalls his last conversation with his grandfather that ‘brought vigour to (his) sleepless eyes’ which he considers ‘the most precious frozen memories’ that gives ‘leisure to (his) stressful mind’. The indigenous poets composing poetry in different literary and linguistic traditions in Northeast India show that by reconnecting to one’s ancestors, tradition, culture and spiritual values can play an important role in the healing process.

Communication

The Mundhum contains rhythm, incantation, versification that is similar to poetry: “It is composed of couplets; the two lines having an identical rhythm with same number of syllables” (Khamdhak, 2021). Yema recites sogha (evil spirits of unnatural death) myth from the Mundhum (Limbu, 2010) along with her ritual instruments during a séance or shamanic rituals to ward off the evils/ diseases. The effect of rhythm and movement marked by the beating of brass plates, small drums, dancing, and chanting leads up to the state of trance or spirit possession to intercede with the spirit world on behalf of her community.

The poet too with her special language, metaphor, rhythm and imagery records the prophetic dreams/ visions in her poetry and transmits this knowledge to the readers through her poems. Therefore, we see how this special knowledge of healing is expanded from individuated consciousness to communal consciousness. Manprasad Subba, a well-known indigenous poet from Darjeeling writes how talking about our indigenous self and our way of life is vital because our thoughts and voices ‘Are colonized by wild cockroaches’ in ‘A Talk of Self’, a poem translated into English by the poet himself. He adds that now it’s time that we rise with our own voices by ‘overcoming others’ noises’ and finally ‘Self’s endless offspring sprout and spread/ From the earth’s womb wet with the heart’s fluid/ The oppressed self has now realized-/ Save self/ To save others.’

Healing

After the shamanic ritual/ séance are over, there is a sense of consolation and tranquillity that persists among the people of her community.  The evil spirits are warded off to restore health and harmony among the people of her community. Yema’s use of evocative language of the Mundhum during rituals and ceremonies to cure or heal her community can be compared to poets who with their creative power of language bring about new awareness among the readers.

The contemporary Native American poet Joy Harjo, a member of Muscogee Creek Nation writes for survival and continuance for her people, repairing and re-establishing their lost identity and redefining political, cultural and spiritual spaces for the restoration of the whole. In a transcript recorded by Jim Lehrer in PBS NEWS HOUR, Harjo asserts, “So when I began to listen to poetry, it’s when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to others. And I think most importantly for all of us, and then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else”. This kind of awareness/ consciousness gives rise to a deep confidence that we will survive any crisis we are facing in this modern world.

In the context of indigenous literature from this region, the poetry of Mamang Dai, an Adi poet from Arunachal Pradesh also reflects the trauma and negative experiences of historical and political influences and restrictions in the Northeast parts of India. By voicing her thoughts through her poetry, her writing acts as a healing process not only for herself but for her community as a whole. She provides an excellent example of this understanding in her poem ‘The Wind and the Rain’: “And our dreams have been stolen/ by the hunger of men travelling long distance,/ like bats in the dark./ Soft fruit, flesh, blood./ There is a war and directly now/ it must be about guns, metal, dust/ and the fear that climbs the trees every night/ when our names are written/ without will or favour in the present,/ watching the frailty of our lives/ spilled in the blood of these hills/ right before our disbelieving eyes”.

Manprasad Subba emphasizes the importance of re-establishing our indigenous selves in his poem ‘Mainstream and Me’. He makes an effort to give voice to his community who are still struggling for identity in one’s own land. He writes: “Now/ I don’t want to sing what the/Mainstream wants me to/ Until my own melody is not given/ A chord in its composition/ I won’t be mesmerized by its glittering words/ That usually come/ To benumb my own words”. This poem functions as healing object as it accentuates the strengths of his community. Further, the readers are transformed with this new awareness of no longer submitting to the ‘Mainstream’ but to strive for one’s own voice and identity.  He concludes the poem by saying, “No/ I no longer crave for mainstream/ Instead, mainstream should come/ Out of its own whirlpool/ To know and feel my face/ And heartbeat”.

Conclusion

In the context of indigenous literature in India, indigenous poetics offers an engagement with narrative and poetic complexities and a historiographical focus on literary criticism which can be a complimenting approach to ethnographic and archivist approaches. From Northeast India, numerous studies of ethnographic mapping, archival documentation and socio-political discourses of marginalization and violence have emerged. In these discourses, the intrinsic quality of writing, the philosophical and aesthetic dimensions of creative art, the psychoemotive dimensions of writing and reading and the deep links between spirituality, ritual, aesthetics and the written word do not find the adequate discussion. Literature tends to become case studies and social/political documents presented through ethnographic, folk and ecocritical lens while fundamental questions of poetic inspiration, metaphorical metaverse, transethnic dialogue, multigeneric intersections, aesthetic processes, affective stages of cognition and behaviour get sidelined or ignored. A major reason for this is the absence of a comprehensive and consolidated indigenous literary critical tradition. Yemapoetics is an intervention in indigenous literary criticism that aims to cover some of these lacunae by locating poetry in ethnopoetic paradigms with a psychospiritual feminist framework. In this paradigm, the ethnic knowledge traditions of the women shamans are recognised for the poetic coordinates of rhythm, chanting and transpersonal experiences leading ultimately to recovery and healing. In mapping spiritual experiences with poetry, understanding the stages of this process becomes significant to uphold the experiential episteme of the feminine and to understand the emotional, spiritual and psychological nuances of the process itself-both for the healer and the healed.

Further, Indigenous Spirituality offers a dynamic and progressive space for women. For instance, in the Mundhum Creation of Universe myth known as the Yehang Se:ma, the first human to come to life was the female idol named Tungutlisa Simbumasa created by various creator gods with the blessings of the Supreme Goddess Tagera Ningwaphuma. After the creation of the first woman, she was weighed by the god of faith and destiny on a weighing balance known as ‘ninduli pasanga’. When she weighed lesser than the first man that was created after her, the gods decked and decorated her with various gold, silver and other precious ornaments so that she weighed equal to the man (Subba, 2012). This myth validates that the indigenous women’s experiences are distinct from t the western feminist construction of universal female experiences. The western feminist contesting that woman are treated unjustly in the man-centred and dominant world is debunked in the Limboo creation mythology. Yemapoetics that emerge from this indigenous feminist spiritual cosmovision enables us to re-imagine the role of contemporary women as being vital and central in their community. It also upholds women’s psychospiritual agency keeping it at the centre for poetic theories in order to accord validity and applicability of feminist spirituality to indigenous literary theorisation. Further, this paradigm presents a model derived from engagement with Yemas as well as other indigenous shamans in the Rai community in Sikkim. The purification-possession-communication-healing model has been conceptualised from ground-up as an attempt to create indigenous poetic frameworks based on lived experiences of spirituality that are participatory, communal and integrated with everyday living, including the transitory processes of illness, death and other traumatic ruptures. This framework is not being theorised as exclusive to the Limboo or any other ethnic community, but is being presented as a theorisational model for indigenous and even non-indigenous poetry if it be of the nature of reconnection, regeneration and restoration. This model may serve to inspire other models of indigenous poetics in different parts of northeast India as well as other Adivasi regions in pedagogy in literature classrooms, research and deliberations at the University levels. This is in recognition of urgency in enlivening indigenist literary criticism so that students, scholars and researchers from northeast India do not continue to rely on borrowed and disjointed poetics when reading literature from the region itself. Such models as Yemapoetics should pave the way for integrating the poetic vocabularies of storytellers, clowns, riddle masters, magic women, trickster men, spirits, man-beasts, highland deities, herbologists, seers, fortune tellers and other spiritual role players in the communities inhabiting the mountains, hills, forests, plains and even the cities in Northeast India.  Finally, this paper concludes with the hope that the grammar of indigenous poetics will find its rightful place in the discourses on poetry and may even generate models for the reading of mainstream, non-indigenous, non-tribal poetry that has exhausted and transcended organised, compartmentalised and sanitised vocabularies of poetry itself.

Postscript[1]

As a Limboo indigenous woman scholar, exploring the paradigm of healing in indigenous poetry enabled me to contextualize my indigenous perspectives and experiences from my location- Sikkim. By reading and researching about the Mundhum and Limboo myths, I could reconnect with the ancestral tradition of my community that enabled me to understand my roots and cultural identity. It was a therapeutic experience for me to be cognizant of Limboo myths that acknowledge feminine goddess as the Supreme and recognize the role of women as equal to men. Yemapoetics apply this indigenous epistemology in the literary discourse of healing and recovery. The study of the non-western perception of female spirituality helped me re-establish and reassert my own indigenous spirituality.

To trace the psychospiritual process a Yema goes through, I got an opportunity to witness a community healing séance very recently on 27.11.2021 at Lingding, Gangtok, Sikkim.  I interviewed a Yema and Yeba (Limboo Shamans of the female and male gender respectively) to map their spiritual experiences with poetry that corroborated with the Yemapoetic theory proposed in this paper.

Declaration of Conflicts 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.

Acknowledgement 

Featured Image: “A waterfall in Sikkim” – Wikimedia Commons by Sujay25.

 Note

[1] This note is written by Swarnim Subba, the first author of this paper.

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Interviews and Community Participation:

Witnessed a séance (Community Healing) at Lingding (Gangtok, Sikkim) on 27.11.2021.

Interview with a Mangpa(name withheld) (Rai Shaman) at Lingding community healing and driving away the evil spirits on 27.11.2021 at 10.00 pm.

Interview with a Yema (name withheld) (LimbooShamaness) at Daragoan, Tadong, East Sikkim on 09.12.2021 at 4.00pm

Interview with Yeba (name withheld) on 16.12.2021 at 10 am at NurBahadur Bhandari College, Gangtok, Sikkim.

Swarnim Subba is a research scholar in the Department of English Literature and Cultural Studies at SRM University, Sikkim, and is an Assistant Professor, in the Departmetn of English at Sikkim Government College, Burtuk, Sikkim.  Presently she is working on a translation of Limboo book of poetry into English.  Her current research interests focus on Trans indigenous studies, Shamanistic poetics, indigenous spirituality and healing, and native poetics.

Dr. Namrata Chaturvedi teaches in the Department of English, Zakir Husain Delhi College, (University of Delhi). She has edited the book, Memory, Metaphor and Mysticism in K?lid?sa’s Abhijñ?na S?kuntalam London: Anthem Press, 2020). She is currently working on a book on the spiritual writings of women from north and north-eastern literary traditions in India. Her forthcoming book is a translation of an Indian Nepali novel into Hindi.

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Interview: Critical Dialogue with Mamang Dai

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In conversation with Jyotirmoy Prodhani1 & Urvashi Kuhad2

1Professor and Head of the Department of English at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong. Email: rajaprodhani@gmail.com

2Assistant Professor at Ram Lal Anand College, University of Delhi. Email: urvashikuhad09@gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022. Pages 1-10. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne44

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

(This interview is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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Jyotirmoy Prodhani (JP): We have amidst us one of the most versatile and charismatic writers from the Northeast known for her deeply nuanced poems and lyrical stories. Mamang Dai is one of the first and the finest writers writing in English from India’s Northeast. Born in Pasighat in Arunachal Pradesh, she did her schooling in Pine Mount, Shillong (Meghalaya) and did her graduation from Gauhati University. From Arunachal Pradesh, described as the ‘land of the rising sun’, she was the first woman from her state to become an IAS in 1979, the coveted civil service position in India. But she would leave the job to dedicate herself fully to her passion —writing. She had also worked for the major national dailies like The Hindustan Times, The Telegraph, The Sentinel and others. Recipient of one of the highest civilian awards of India, Padmashree in 2011, her first major work of fiction, The Legends of Pensam published in 2006 made an audacious entry into the world of letters where the unique way of telling stories would come to be known in the academy as the quintessential literary discourse from Northeast. Her novel The Black Hill (2014) where history, myths and memories merge into a narrative totality got her the prestigious Sahitya Akademi award in 2017, the first from Northeast to get the award for an English novel. Earlier Dr Temsula Ao got the award in 2013 for her collection of English short stories, Laburnum for My Head (2009). Mamang Dai has also received the Verrier Elwin award (2013) for her book Arunachal Pradesh: The Hidden Land. She is a poet, a novelist, and also a folklorist. Her collections of poetry include River Poems and Midsummer Survival Lyrics (2014) and also the novel Stupid Cupid (2008) as well as her other works like Mountain Harvest on the food of Arunachal Pradesh, Hambreelmai’s Loom, The Sky Queen, Once Upon a Moon time are collections of folklore for the young readers. She has recently edited a collection of women’s writings from Arunachal Pradesh: Inheritance of Words.

The magical lyricism is one of the hallmarks of her abiding prose. Pensam, the place in between, is described by her as “the small world where anything can happen and everything can be lived. With the narrow boat that we call life sails along somehow in calm or stormy weather where the life of man can be measured in the span of a song.” For her “all that matters is love and that memory gives life, and life never ends.”

 We welcome Mamang Dai, to this session of Critical Dialogue as part of the second Rupkatha International Online Conference. Also, I welcome my co-host, Urvashi Kuhad to the session. Welcome, Madam!

Mamang Dai (MD): Thank you so much, Professor Jyotirmoy Prodhani. You have been very very kind in your introduction. (And I am very sorry, you know, the network is so slow here. In fact it is non-existent.) So I was looking forward to this chat and hearing from you giving me such a kind introduction and putting so much attention to what you were saying, I really feel quite humbled. So thank you Rupkatha, and thank you also Dr Urvashi for being with us. Really! I don’t know where to start. I think Prof Jyotirmoy had said…

Jyotirmoy Prodhani (JP): Let’s begin with a small sort of a query just to get the ball rolling. In the history of Northeast fiction in English, of course, we can take the name of Temsula Ao as one of the pioneers of Northeast fiction in English, especially her books, These Hill Called Home, Laburnum for my Head. She is an important name. However, Legends of Pensam is a landmark achievement not only for you as a writer but also for the whole idea of Northeast fiction in English as a whole, for this happens to be one of the most significant works which characterize as typical Northeast story in terms of its unique narrative style, landscape it has depicted and the ethical worldview it is delineated. How did this whole idea of Pensam come to your mind and how did you plan this book, especially the structure of the work? It is quite unique in fact.

MD: Actually, Pensam started, you know, through a kind of journalistic notes. You must remember I was also a journalist at that time. And I have always been interested in the concept of myth, memory, time, myth, memory, meaning. ‘What is the meaning? myth, memory or imagination?’ ‘Is imagination greater than knowledge?’ You know, when you listen to some of the stories, which I was hearing firsthand, it’s unique, you have to pay a lot of attention and you have to pay a lot time. So, coming back after so many years of having been abroad and then rediscovering the land and the people (and also their stories). So, I was always interested in stories and I have my mother tongue this became like my journalistic notes. We have something called the Abang, this is the classical Adi literature, I am talking about the Adi tribe, which is the tribe I belong to in the Siang valley in the Pasighat area; so the Abang I found was really fascinating because it has all the aspirations, the spiritual longings, in the life of man and what it means to be a human person. Now the Abang is quite complex because in every Abang there are several Abangs-  and this is the epic narrative and every Abang begins with the same kind of introduction, let’s say a prelude, starting from the beginning which was very dark, and it’s like the creation myths and then it branches out. After that, the person who is reciting, the performer, who is the shaman, can take any of the branches of the big tree as it were. So, these stories fascinated me, and I found the whole world-view of people. If you are travelling in Arunachal Pradesh and you speak the language and you can really enter villages and sit with people, you can ask them about the forest, jungle lore, superstitions and we’ll find they always speak about the land in a kind of hesitant, cautious way and not as if they are trying to promote something which they think you might be interested in listening to. It’s as if they are talking about some relatives, quietly and calmly. So this was the basis of all my notes. That’s how the structure of the book came to my mind, set itself and then I had a little problem with the narrative, chronological the chronology not being linear, etc. style, because my publishers and editors also were saying this was waving back and forth, you know, but that’s the way I like to deal with time and memory.

Urvashi Kuhad (UK): Those are very very interesting thoughts Ma’am, and I have been holding a question inside me for a while and this is also an area of research that I have undertaken after coming across a couple of writers from the Northeast. I am teaching a paper on Indian Writing in English which has poetry from Robin Singh Ngangom. But Ma’am when you say you belong to the Adi tribe and you talked about classical Adi literature, how relevant do you think it is to keep our oral tradition alive? I am talking about folk literature, folk narrative and to what extent have these influenced your style of writing or the themes of your writing?

MD: I think the oral tradition because it’s so open to interpretation, even in one village we have various sub-clans, so they will be narrating it in a slightly different way. But the thread of the story, what I was saying this big tree, we all know the stories, so, that kind of gives us our sense of community and thereby our sense of identity in one form or the other and that binds us together. Oh, you know this story of how the goat got its horns? So, this is the folk culture that was transmitted orally. Now, of course, so many things are changing. I often think about an ecological term they use that – the predicament of the ‘place ‘faithful,’ see if you are going to save the tiger, for example, but the habitat is lost it is going to be a real uphill battle. Similarly, it’s something like that with our traditions. If you are losing habitat or the place is changing so much, people are travelling out, so all the things, that that becomes something to consider. Nevertheless, I think because we are doing this translation, and appropriating the myths and putting them into print, a kind of transcription work that is going on, I think that is important because they hold a lot of ethical views as well, which I think, are important for us. Personally, for me, I find great consolation. Professor Jyotirmoy was reading about the word Pensam and what it means, the last line, ‘where the life of a man can be measured in the span of a song’, that is my interpretation of one of the portions of Abang. There is something called pengey which is an elegy; when a person dies, you can call a special shaman to perform this song, it is sung all night, and the person has to be well-versed in the life of the deceased and he starts on this very long journey recounting, ‘Do you remember that place where your mother gave you that packet of rice?’ And they are travelling, travelling through all the childhood memories, and they are travelling up towards that destination where they have to part. And the singer will leave the person there, the soul of the person there and say, ‘You take care and we will be on our way, and you’ll be counted, and all your friends know where you are going.’ And then he takes the form of a bird, a hawk, and flies back in case the soul tries to follow him and that kind of thing. But I think the concept, the imagination is quite beautiful, even though it was only orally chanted.

JP: Madam, when it comes to narrative, what we call the Northeastern literary narrative, though this is a fiction and, of course, we know fiction is a western import here, but what makes literature of Northeast (unique) is its whole mode of presentation which departs in a very significant way from other modes of writing happening in the same language in other parts of India. What do you think are the quintessential elements/ components that together compose the typical Northeast ethos in the writing from this particular region? Which might have also been in resonance in your writings as well.

MD: Northeast ethos…I think Prof Jyotirmoy is throwing such hard questions at me. But I think there’s a sense of, with people at least I meet, especially in rural parts of Northeast, of being truthful. Great attention and great importance is given to being truthful. The truth matters and I think this also, if somewhere along the way, when you are writing, you kind of discover a more authentic part of yourself then I think this gives it a kind of the ethical view. Because, if you’re truthful and we have the worship of the sun and moon, not exactly the worship, but the belief of sun and moon, so this has also to do with the idea of justice, with being true to yourself. We have a saying in Adi which says  ‘agii a:pii em gesilangka,’ which means, ‘Please (delete ‘please’)  ‘wear your own heart. Don’t try to be something you are not.’ And I think in the present many writers in the Northeast are trying to take this body of lost or forgotten histories, bringing it out but with a degree of being authentic.

JP: Madam, in the famous novel The Black Hill for which you have received the Sahitya Akademi Award, history is one of the focal points there which is one a major inspiration for this work of fiction but also you’ve used the mythologies, the memories that you have spoken about, and also ecology. How do you allow these elements to converge into the totality of a narrative? What is your treatment of history from the perspective of a native position?

MD: When I started The Black Hill, I stumbled upon it by chance. The story of Father Nicolas Krick because I was doing research for another work. Then I found someone called Father Krick had come up to this village, not very far from Pasighat which is my hometown, so I tried to find out a bit more and it was not easy because people remembered the British when they had come up in the early 19th century but nobody seemed to remember Father Krick. He had been there for five days and the report of his stay at that time was in the Calcutta Archives (which was published in the journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal).  So, I got that translated version into English by Father Rev. A Gille.

Then that’s how the story began. I could kind of see this image of this young priest, you know, striding through the forest and then suddenly emerging. He was so keen on his mission to Tibet. He wasn’t looking for Arunachal or convert here but he was on his route to Tibet. And that’s how things happened but I felt history actually is a meeting place, there are so many possibilities that we don’t really know what happened. Even in The Black Hill the character of Gimur, right at the end I had put, ‘they didn’t know what the history books would say about them,’ maybe so and so died in the village war and she herself disappeared from history. So that was my way of being authentic, because Gimur is just a fictional character, the priest is true, the tribal chief is true but Gimur was just there as a narrator but I thought I should put in some truth and say she no longer exists. So that was my way of being a little bit true to possibilities. Maybe there was such a person, who knows, but at this point, I had just created her. And I was also interested in the nature of spirituality. I felt if the priest and the tribal chief could have interacted for a bit more time, if things had been a little bit different, because he was beginning to see also that ultimately it was not about conversion or preaching, it was just speaking the language of the hearts. And the life they believed in, what they believed and that gives them the reason for being honoured, that gives their life’s meaning. So that kind of thing I was trying to propose.

JP: You also brought in a lot of memories, mythologies, and the creation of the character against a historical backdrop which is a real story. Did you have some hesitations so as to deal with (them), how you negotiate with the possible contour of it?

MD: I did think because a priest coming from the Paris foreign missions NB- Paris Foreign Missions, and a French Jesuit priest, I can’t make him think and feel, you know, the way I wanted someone to think and feel because he knows his theology, he was an ordained priest, he was giving mass. I delved into the history of Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola, then I dragged my parents even on a trip from Guwahati to Shillong to the Don Bosco Mission there, I went to a Jesuit house in Guwahati but nobody knew very much about Father Krick. It was the time of martyrs when the far east was far more important. People were being killed in Japan. Recently all kinds of films were also made about that period. Father Krick and his assistant Father Augustin Bourry both of them were just struggling on. I can’t imagine how they travelled from Guwahati, right up on elephant, on boat, on foot, you know. I thought it was really quite remarkable the passion these people had. Even now it was easier for me to go to Paris, to the foreign Missions, rather than to go where Father Krick had been on foot in my own home state in Anjaw district, because there was a landslide, I had to wait for the right time, then I had to enlist the help of the local politicians to give me a car and some help. The language is also different there, from that of Adi. So that kind of thing. I was careful to look at his notes and some things I imagined what he might have felt from the little things he left. He was an anthropologist actually, he became fascinated with the forest, the swing rope bridge, the Tibetan beads, prayer wheels and so that was how the book was written. And then when I actually went to that spot and met with people some village elders remembered from his father’s father that ‘Oh, yes!’. I said, ‘Did no one claim Kajinsha’s body, the Mishmi Chief?’ I went to Dibrugarh jail also to look up how he might have felt there, so suffocated after having lived so openly in the mountains. The first tribal man may be to be hung in the Dibrugarh jail. What rage, what frustration he might have felt but this man told me, ‘No, how could we go? How would anyone go to claim his body?’ At that time, it was impossible but still, I made Gimur to go (smiling) and do a few things in the prison because there is a record in the British Archives in the history books that two guards were killed and the French foreign Missions had pleaded for mercy, for the killer, but they had hung him because of the death of the prison guard. So, one of the prison guards I made Gimur kill and that was how this story went.

JP: We have a little bit of time left. Before that Urvashi might be having a question, but I would like to know, that many of the audience here would also like to know that, your location, that is Arunachal Pradesh, when it comes to the pan-Indian imagination of this particular place, there seems to be a geographic duality. In our imagination, it is the frontier but it is also geographically the first place in India where the sun rises first, i.e., in your place. So from that place, you are the beginning but for the (so-called) mainstream, you are the ending, sort of, that is the paradox of this location. How do you look at your own place from the point of view of the mainstream back to your own place and how it might have had reflected in your writings as well?

MD: About my writings, Professor, I don’t know, it’s just that okay I am here and these are the stories or I was able to transcribe them or set them into a different alphabet or language. But…

UK: Ma’am I wanted to ask you about women characters, the women that are present in your tales. What I observed is that women occupied central spaces in your tales and how do you see their sense of construction, their expressions basically? You also, through these women, these characters, you also at a point have often tried to make a subtle critique of both the native tribal society as well as the typical patriarchal and racial urban mainland. So how do you see these two kinds of womanhood, a kind of paradox that comes up? On one hand, the woman emerging or present rather in the native tribal society as well as women who are part of the urban mainland and how they assert themselves in society?

MD: I think I have always felt women are the more enduring. Throughout history we have seen there are a lot of wild, wonderful, warrior women, right from Biblical times or Cleopatra, Dido, Queen of Carthage, the Amazons, and even in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, things like that. But I have a close connection with my sisters, cousins, kith and kin, so I find them the most fascinating to look at womanhood who do things, who endure, who fulfil obligations, who want more but can still laugh about not having it. That is a kind of lesson. You don’t always have to be in the forefront for rights. You can take it any time you want in your own little circle. And we have a patriarchal society and it is very tough on child marriage, and forced marriage. But things are changing. But within that context, if you take womanhood, what it means to be a woman, I think many women are happy also. If the men in the villages are in a similar situation when both are leaning on each other. So, that’s how I look at it. Maybe there is not so much need to come and talk about women’s rights where it is not in that environment where they can acquire or have it. But I think women are much more flexible and resilient.

Reactions from the audience:

John R. Baker (JRB): yes, Ma’am. I was very impressed, very, very heartfelt impressed. Listening to you talk about this area, I didn’t know about this area in your part of the world. It just impressed me in very very solid ways. I have some background in epic literature, strong women characters are there in that literary tradition. Forgive me if this is off-topic and not connected, but I’m curious. Do you see any connections between the older epic literature and the type of oral tradition, and the oral tradition of the epic literature (the oral retelling of our earliest epic works) that was eventually written down and the oral retelling that you have explained today and where it’s going? Do you see any connections here? Any similarities, any differences? The Green Knight, Homer and the Iliad.

MD: I think that’s the great adventure of epic narratives. We are lucky the whole world has these stories. Look at the Icelandic sagas, we are all watching them. They’ve been made into films. Even when I saw Avatar, I thought this could be one of our stories; this huge big tree we worship, you know that kind of thing. So in the retelling maybe it even evolves, but what is the core of that story, I think, that stays. In the end, we have to win maybe but at what cost? And we have to look at the environment around us; we may need wolves to help us, maybe a polar bear will come out of the snow, so that kind of thing. So I think that is very fascinating, that is the wonderment of living, seeing this continuity of human life and all other lives.

JRB: Thank you so much, Ma’am.

MD: Thank you, John.

UK: There is a question in the chatbox where it says, an anonymous id. He or she wants to know the category of Northeast writing. Is there something that commonly ties writers from the Northeast or how do we categorize Northeast writing? Is it a permissible category? Or is it narrowing down the categories way too much to call everything as Northeast literature?

MD: Thank you for your question. I think we have reached this point Dr Kuhad, Professor Jyotirmoy was also talking about Arunachal at the edge, a kind of liminal space or what is beyond. At the moment, at least among my friends, the writers, and the Northeast Writers Forum, we know we share the geographical affinities of the area. And because it is quite new, the writings coming out in English altogether, so there will be similarities of land, the landscape but I think this is going to change or it will change because another generation of writers will see things differently. Already people are writing about so many other things. Even just the simple image of a rain cloud or mist on your shoulder that is becoming almost like science fiction. So, we don’t know where it will go; but that is fine also, it goes where it will. It .depends on the feeling of the author and being aware of what you are trying to do, because writing, after all, is the juxtaposition of what you are and what you’re trying to say, what you feel, and what you want to share. You want to be left alone but there is something you want to share so that the other person comes in. But I am not like this with my relatives, let’s say, I am totally different as a writer and as a person talking to them. But they are patient with me. That is how things happen. But I think in the future there will be other writings. The land is not here for us to promote, delineate with a lot of romance or love all the time. Things will change and there will be other stories, I think.

JP: Just to have a cue from Mamang Dai about Northeast. Northeast as terminology is not accidental. It has come from a historical terrain, historical trajectories, geo-ethnic factors involved. Northeast also is an official terminology in our Constitution and besides, because of Northeast we have rather become visible. Literature of every state is there, like Manipur literature is there which is very rich, Assamese literature is there, very rich, Tripura, they have their literature. But Northeast as a kind of common platform for creative expression has happened in a huge way and in a very significant way which has helped our writers, and our voices to be heard as a collective entity. It has really helped to gain visibility all across. It has helped us to gain the kind of attention that we wanted to draw. Otherwise, we have disparate literary traditions, Assamese writing tradition, Manipuri writing tradition. But when it comes to the Northeast then it becomes a formidable body of literary articulations. Is there any other question?

UK: Ma’am has been so patient and kind throughout. Thank you, Ma’am. To put in between, you mentioned a couple of keywords which got me so alert. You talked about folk culture and folk studies. I am working on that and it really interests me. In fact, science fiction is one of my areas of work. My PhD is in Indian science fiction and that intrigues me. It was so nice to hear from you even though you are talking about classical literature. Of course, you talked about a lot many things, but there is an all-rounded view which inspires people like me, you know I am in the academic field and I teach and this enthuses me with more confidence and energy to be working more on such ideas.

JP: Thanks to Mamang Mai Madam for being here, and thanks to Tarun Tapas for having facilitated the session. We are concluding the session. Thank you so much for being here. Hope you are here for longer sessions as well.

The Video of the Session

Acknowledgements

This is the transcription of the Critical Dialogue Session (hosted on 28 August 2021 as part of the Rupkatha International Open Conference 2021 (RIOC 2021). The session was coordinated by Dr Deepanjali Misra, KIIT, Bhubaneshwar and Pragati Das, Bhatter College, Dantan.

Transcription from the video has been done by Bondita Baruah, Research Scholar, Dept. of English, NEHU, Shillong.

Jyotirmoy Prodhani is a Professor and Head of the Department of English at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong. His teaching and research interests include, inter alia, Theatre and Performance Studies, Translation, and Northeast Literature. ORCID i/d 0000-0002-3420-4322   Email: rajaprodhani@gmail.com

Urvashi Kuhad is an Assistant Professor at Ram Lal Anand College, University of Delhi, She did her PhD in Indian Science Fiction and is a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. She was also at the University of Western Ontario, Canada as a fellow. She is widely published and her teaching interests include Northeast Literature. Email: urvashikuhad09@gmail.com

Art, Ecology and Affective Encounters: An Ecosophical Study of Folk Tales from Tripura

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Partha Sarathi Gupta
Associate Professor, Dept. of English, Tripura University, Tripura, India. ORCID: 0000-0002-5629-0436. Email: parthasarathi[at]tripurauniv.ac.in, parthasarathigupta15[at]gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages 1–9. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.06

First published: June 09, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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Art, Ecology and Affective Encounters: An Ecosophical Study of Folk Tales from Tripura

Abstract

This paper promotes an anti-anthropomorphic approach to the study of folk oratures of India’s Northeast with special reference to select motifs in the folk tales of the Bongcher and Chakma communities of Tripura (in English translation). The tales are replete with strange transformations from humans to beasts and birds, and vice versa. This motif of metamorphosis serves to situate the folk tales of this region in a paradigm which explores and accommodates a literally symbiotic kinship between art and nature. Timothy Morton’s observations on  “ecological thought”, and the “mesh” resting on the pillars of inter-human and inter-elemental relationships which they foreground, offer a methodological premise to this study. This paper pursues an ecosophical study of select folk tales like – Rulrengtenu Retape (Bongcher), translated as “The Story of the Snake-Queen” and Bucya buri a Egpal Bandar (Chakma), translated as “The Old Man and the Band of Monkeys”. Besides, this study may also be situated at a crucial juncture in human history, when concerns of late capitalism and its consequent ecological collapse have begun to threaten life on this planet. Hence, this study also draws on Guattari’s notion of ecosophy engaged upon in his work The Three Ecologies, and explores how folk tales of India’s Northeast encompass the material, social, and perceptual realms of ecology in all its diverse life-affirming varieties.

Keywords: ecosophy, becomings, ecological thought, interconnectedness, mesh, affects. 

Last Christmas, holiday hunters in the Eastern part of India thronging the Sundarbans, along with some channels on National Television, like paparazzi, pursued a certain “Dakhinroy” – the folk pseudonym of the big Bengal cat – an endangered species of the region, who was out to hunt flesh, having trespassed the fragile fortification of its habitat, deep in the estuaries. TV channels turned obese feeding on the sensational spectacle of a tiger put to sleep by foresters in order to ensure the protection of the lives of the inhabitants of a village in Kultali, in the South 24 Parganas of West Bengal. As the pseudonym of “Dakhinroy” flashed on the television screens, folklore enthusiasts must have felt the goosebumps, and environmentalists must have frowned to witness the audacious invincibility of human agencies in a war with a predator on the prowl, right at the apex of our food chain. The incident created ripples in the electronic media and must have stirred the minds of folk enthusiasts. But a dark shadow was cast on our ticking ecological clock. The various versions of the tale of Dakhinroy in the tiger territory may have faded away from the mouths of the residents of the region, but the vestiges of them in popular culture annals still continue to speak volumes on the pantheistic interconnectedness between man and the wild, and the thin porous line separating their territories. A few days later, a similar incident drove the residents of a village in Gosaba (District South 24 Parganas, West Bengal) to spend sleepless nights fortifying their territories from the advances of another Dakhinroy. Occasionally, folk suddenly juts its neck upward from the sands of time to peep into the corridors of the present, propelling us to revisit narratives of ancient wisdom. Perhaps this is what Raymond Williams called “residual” elements of culture (Williams, 1977, p. 122). The present study engages with the concerted attempts of Sahitya Akademi North East Centre for Oral Literature, Agartala, at retrieving the rich tapestry of oratures from the minefield of folk from India’s Northeast, a region which is home to distinct ethnic communities and cultures that proudly boast of a treasure trove of folktales. Translation of all these tales into English under the aegis of the Centre, has facilitated not just a revival of ancient wisdom; it also opens up new perspectives to the understanding of ecosophy as an approach to non-anthropocentric versions of culture. This study narrows down its corpus further to only engage with select folktales from Tripura.

The study of folk tales deserves a true renaissance. To use the analogy of the English metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell, we have wasted hours in marveling upon their morphology, days in ethnographical pursuits, and years in anthropological debates on nature, culture and civilization. It is time we resist the “ecology of bad ideas” (Bateson, 1972, as cited in Guattari, 2000). The academic territory we ought to create in our revaluation of the folk, ought to be first fortified by sound ideas and frameworks which are both sustainable and enriching at the same time. Richard Schechner in his book Performance Theory traces the roots of performance to ancient rituals which were participatory in nature, involving man’s relationship with the elemental and cosmic forces. Folk too goes back to early man’s aesthetic representation of the human body’s kinship with the elements, which included bestial and vegetative properties. Given this truth, it makes no sense to engage academic discourses of folk with the currents of high theory and the fashionable critical turns of post-humanism, historical and cultural materialism, and race and ethnicity studies. Studies of folk have been clogged by the centripetalism of critical theory, which seemed to respect and reiterate the same crises with more and more anthropocentric modes of analysis.

The present paper proposes to read into select folk tales from Tripura (in English translation) which engage with the metaphysics of transversality: a notion which describes how spaces may intersect – spaces separating earth’s varied species – animals, birds, insects and other invertebrates and even microorganisms, that inhabit their respective niches. We may replace the word “transversality” with the word “intersectionality” to describe this approach which snatches away the focus with vengeance from man and man only, and his associated discrete authorized epistemes which have been legitimized in history. Moreover, this study shall also attempt to explore such intersections and connections found in these folk tales, and study how the currents of global crises may groom and condition our reading of the same tales today.

The tales are replete with motifs of transversality between humans, animals, birds, and microorganisms. In them, the representation of kinships between different species, like man and beast, or man and bird, are often built on the pillars of trust, accommodation and acceptance, and sometimes on malice, enmity and connivance, leading to gory violence. While we read them, the teller keeps deflecting the focalizer’s position from that of the human narrator to that of the bestial, voiceless creatures of the green or the waters. Such an approach on the part of the teller naturally reveals an intersubjective switching over from one state of being to the other, abjuring all sense of anthropomorphic hierarchy. A particular folktale from the Mraima (Mog) community of Tripura may be cited here, popularly called the “the tale of Dewa”. Its principal protagonist is an invisible forest deity or dewa (Chaudhury, 2012, pp.123-126) who is both dreaded and revered. The tale may be read as an archetypal narrative that symbolically erases the boundaries between the animal and the human, and the hunter and the hunted. The tale begins with the journey of two princes, who lose their way in the forest and unconsciously cross the borders of their realm (Chaudhury, 2012, p.123). They decide to spend the night in the forest below in the valley. One of the brothers declares that he fears neither the bear nor the tiger, but is mortally scared of dewa – the spirit. Coincidentally, the younger prince is overheard by a tiger from behind the bushes, who decides to teach him a lesson on mortal fear. The turn in this seemingly flat tale appears when the same tiger, out to hunt the princes, spots the duo sleeping intertwined with each other with the head of each facing opposite directions. An optical illusion is created when the tiger mistakes the prince for a spirit with two heads. The foolish tiger suspects that he had seen dewa, a spirit with two heads, and slips away. Coincidentally, the lives of both the princes are saved. The tale does not have any credible narrative evidence to suggest the identity of dewa; whether he is a benevolent spirit or an evil one, is not clear. Yet there is an insinuation that the apparition might have been that of the invisible deity who may have had swallowed the princes and was sleeping over a meal. The tiger, in mortal fear, flees the spot, and later dozes off on the forest floor.  The next morning, the brothers – bleary-eyed after a good night’s sleep – mistake the sleeping tiger for their lost horse, and in a daze, mount upon its back. The tiger, on the other hand, in mortal fear of being possessed, runs amuck and bangs himself in a net of wild bushes. The chain of events in this tale evokes an elemental connection between the human and bestial worlds. This interconnection is represented in two ways, first, through a purgatorial ritual by which the tiger promises to ward off the evil influence of the ghost; he beckons all the animals and birds in the forest and announces the performance of the ritual. A cow, a goat, and a hen are hunted and killed by the tiger, jackal and a cat respectively – all three carrying out their individual predatory roles – in order to propitiate the alleged evil spirit. All these events occur in a chain, as, one by one the animals devise new strategies to ward off the evil. At certain junctures in the tale, the intersections between the two worlds – human and animal – take the tale forward to the next step in the narrative scheme. However, the tale ends with the triumph of man over the animals; only the tiger manages to swim safely ashore after the two princes dupe all the animals and drown them to death. Ironically, the faith, which the beasts repose on the humans, is rudely snapped by the human duo as they engage themselves in a game of deception. The survival of the tiger is a silent acknowledgment of the chief predator at the apex of the food chain. The tale is a grim prophetic reminder of the future of a human-centered civilization dedicated to assert the supremacy of man, and at the same time asserts the importance of acknowledging the interconnectedness of being on this ecologically challenged planet.

This is where ecosophy may intervene. Instead of being judgmental about the history of anthropocentric attitudes to civilization and culture, ecosophy may be practiced as an activity that encourages transversality. Anthropocentric attitudes to life have too long dominated our planet, led on by the megalomania of late capitalism. The time perhaps has come to subject man to what Guattari calls a “schizo-therapy”. Such a practice, to Guattari, may draw from principles of psychoanalytic schizo-therapy that can “decenter the singular, dominant and brutal psyche of capitalism, which is currently considered the only mind of the Earth” (Gardner and MacCormack, 2018, p.5). Folk tales are first hand instances of ecosophic practices which engage in affective encounters between human and non-human elements in the cosmos, through which reciprocity is generated. Gardner and MacCormack, in their commentary on Guattari observe:

Ecosophy manifests itself as a science of ecosystems encompassing the three ecologies: the material (ecology, biophysical), the social (cultural and human); and the perceptual (human subjectivity articulated through images, sounds and hapticity). In short, ecosophy is politically regenerative, ethical, aesthetic, analytical and life-affirming – embracing but also generating difference (11).

The present essay is more concerned with the chosen folktales’ engagement with perceptual ecology, the third of Guattari’s “three ecologies” – an engagement with subjectivities from a non-hierarchical and non-anthropocentric vantage point of the teller whose sole function is to circulate and pass on the baton of the orature to his/her posterity. Moreover, in the words of Timothy Morton, it is extremely difficult to rationally explain this interconnectedness, which, perhaps, only may be partially perceived or sensed. The promise of complete scientific knowledge of such interconnectedness is frustrated soon, as we find ourselves disoriented in our pursuit of this metaphysics. The infinitude of this interconnectedness is chiefly responsible for this disorientation; the reality of not being able to discern the logical wholeness of it all. Morton observes:

We can’t see everywhere. We can’t see everywhere all at once (not even with Google Earth). When we look at x, we can’t look at y. Cognitive science suggests that our perception is quantized – it comes in little packets, not a continuous flow. Our perception is full of holes. The nothingness in perception -we can’t plumb the depths of space…the infinite is not an object to be seen (22).

A folktale belonging to the Bongcher community of Tripura “The Story of Chemchhawrmanpa” (Bongcher and Bongcher, 2011, pp. 115-18) narrates a chain of chaotic events piercing through the lives and habitats of birds, beasts, insects, vertebrates and invertebrates, and even ends up disturbing the equilibrium of inanimate objects. The folktales of the Bongcher community have raised enough anthropological curiosity with respect to the community’s fast fading census data – its dwindling population and its endangered tongue – as recorded in a few indigenous treatises, including the “Introduction” to the Sahitya Akademi anthology of Bongcher Literature of the oral tradition: Echoes From Lungleng Tang (2011). But, the focus of the present study does not concern itself on the anthropological question. Instead, ecosophical vistas open out, once the reader delinks herself/himself from locus of the Anthropocene and embraces the immanence of the “mesh” (Morton, 28) – the infinitude of interconnectedness of multiple threads of the animate and inanimate worlds. What the folktale reveals in its apparent chaotic multiplicity, is what Timothy Morton calls “mesh”.

By extension, “mesh” can mean “a complex situation or series of events in which a person is entangled; a concatenation of constraining or restricting forces or circumstances; a snare.”… Since everything is interconnected, there is no background and therefore no definite foreground. (Morton, 2018, p.28)

Drawing on Darwin’s theory of the “Great Tree of Life”, Morton explains, “All life forms are the mesh, and so are all dead ones, as are their habitats, which are also made up of living and nonliving beings” (Morton, 2018, p.29). Moreover, Morton observes that the mesh does not offer any privileged central position to any particular species, contrary to the theoretical stance of humanist thought, post Renaissance and the era of the Enlightenment. Morton observes:

In contrast, mesh doesn’t suggest a clear starting point…Each point of the mesh is both the centre and the edge of a system of points, so there is no absolute centre or edge…All life forms are the mesh, and so are all dead ones, as are their habitats, which are also made up of living and nonliving beings. (Morton, 2018, p.29)

Folk wisdom in the oratures of Tripura and other regions of India’s Northeast possessed the ancient wisdom of this mesh, reiterated in tale after tale. But what is particularly unique to these tales is their utter disregard for what we understand as codes of narrative propriety. What is generally rarefied in the discursive parlance of urban storytelling, is spontaneously absent; with elements of the bawdy and the scatological, happily scattered and mixed with other elements of narrative. With the lack of a central core, the narrative admits infinite play of events and tropes which “rhizomatically” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2005, p.8) roll up into a narrative mesh, opening up infinite possibilities of becoming. The folktales of the Bongchers of Tripura are archives of this notion of mesh. “The Story of Chemchhawrmanpa” (Bongcher, and Bongcher, 2011. pp. 115-118) involving a cascading sequence of events, seemingly generates a never-ending inertia of motion, had it not been for the teller’s overarching role to bring the narrative to its desired telos. It all begins with Chemchhawrmanpa’s squatting posture while fishing, which reveals his dangling testicles to a hungry lobster in the shallow waters, who mistakes the dangling object for food. The bite of the shrimp begins a sequence of violent motions. The man jumps up in agony and plunges his axe into the bark of a bamboo tree, which bangs into the scrotum of a squirrel. The squirrel in pain tore apart a soft tendril, in which nested a poisonous ant. The ant vents its ire on the abdomen of a wild boar, and the cascading effects of the chain of events finally fell upon the hovel of an old woman who was just about to attend to nature’s call. The chain continues unabetted. The artful game of toppling over one another in a mad jostle for space may evoke comical affective responses in the listener/reader. However, within the sequence of events lies the folk-world’s sensitive understanding of deep ecology – that the human is just a component in the long and huge paradigmatic pole of an eco-system replete with multiple genera and species. The non-privileged position of humans recurs again and again as an underlined motif in almost all the folktales from the hills of Tripura.

Another interesting tale from the Bongcher orature of Tripura The Story of Rulrengtenu or “The Snake Queen) (Bongcher, and Bongcher, 2011, pp. 122-127) may be considered for a case study. In the first part of the tale, there ae no human characters. Members from the world of mammals, reptiles, amphibians and birds dominate the story-world, like the land-tortoise, deer, python, pheasant, kite, and frog. They often form an entire narrative unit in such tales, often resembling a beast fable. However, as this tale proceeds, we find that the next unit foregrounds humans as simply an additional element, and nothing more, in the chain of events. The first unit ends with the archetypal war between the snake and the kite, in which the kite tears the body of the python in meaty shreds, a large chunk of which falls into a jum field nearby. The jumia collects the chunk, brings the meat home, cooks a portion of it, and leaves the remaining portion to dry over a fire.  He then forgets all about it. Between fits of a strange amnesia over the meat, as he is about to decide on preparing the next meal with it, the strange amnesia grips him again and again, and the meat remains untouched. As he gets suspicious about his own recurrent amnesia, he begins to note another strange daily occurrence. Some deft hand seemed to be smartly performing all the regular household chores, much to the amusement of the jumia. The strange occurrence which recurs each day, is silently watched by the jumia’s neighbour – an old lady, who, one day, sees the strangest sight. Each day, after the jumia leaves for the hills, a beautiful damsel emanates from within the meat chunk and “meticulously performed all the household chores, including cooking, serving, and even collecting water. After everything, she quietly slipped into the meat chunk again. (Bongcher, and Boncher, 2011, p. 124).

The second section of the story marks a sharp departure from the world predominated by the beasts to a world where animal flesh metamorphoses into the human form of a lady, and begins to cohabit with a human, and even gives birth to two human children after a matrimonial union. The climax of the story is centered upon a marital vow; in which the snake lady extracts a pledge from her husband that he would never reveal her true identity to anybody ever. The pledge is soon forgotten at a vulnerable moment when the jumia is in an inebriated condition. He reveals the secret to their sons, who are shocked at being snubbed as the generation of snake children, by their own father. When the lady learns of this breach of trust, she disappears after performing her last chores. But before she departs, she promises to reveal herself to her children at a designated spot at the sea-side. The snake-queen metamorphoses into a fish and begins to oversee her children henceforth. Later, when her husband discovers the secret, he hires fishermen to trap her in the shallow waters when she is spotted playing with her children. However, the tale ends abruptly, as do most of such tales, with the fish mother jumping into the air with her children, high above the reach of invasive powers of the human world, and plunges into the deeper waters nearby.

If we deem the tales to be carriers of ancient wisdom, one might even detect in them prophetic forebodings about humans as invaders and trespassers. Through centuries, they have occupied territories of other species only to fulfill their own needs. There are other tales which have resonances of mistrust between humans and other species. A Chakma tale popularly known as Bucya Buri a Egpal Bandar or “The Old Man, the Old Woman and the Band of Monkeys” (Chakma, and Chaudhuri, 2013, pp., 95-102) is a lore studded with doubt, connivance, malice residualand violence inflicted upon each other by humans and the band of monkeys.  The tale ends with the human couple resorting to a malicious plot to drown all the monkeys to death. Only one of the animals survives the catastrophe. A Mraima (Mog) folktale almost on the same motif “The Tale of the Old Couple and the Monkey” (Chaudhury and Chaudhuri, 2012, pp. 118-122), with minor alterations, presents the human couple as victims of the beastly menace of monkey fury. Despite the couple’s kind gesture of parenting a monkey-child, the monkey child ultimately betrays his foster parents to ultimately kill the whole family. The tale is loaded with gruesome violence and cruelty. The lack of empathy between humans and the monkeys resonates through these ancient narratives of the oral tradition. Two of them have already been referred to above. A third one from the Bongcher orature Zongkhak tepu or “Tale of Chimpanzee” (Bongcher, and Bongcher, 2011, pp. 84-86) is replete with gruesome violence, once again reinforcing premonitions of a conflict-ridden future in which prospects of cohabitation may be questioned.  In this story the chimpanzee marries the youngest sister, and a son Taitari is born to them. The chimpanzee husband takes good care of his family, but to no avail. He fails to impress his human bride, who is in search of an opportunity to escape. She is successful, much to the disappointment of her beast husband, who begins to frantically search for her. In his anguish, he kills a neighbouring dog “and made a champreng with its intestines” (Bongcher, and Bongcher, p.85). He then plays the champreng whenever he goes in search of his lost wife. Finally, when he finds her, she refuses to acknowledge him as her husband. She even abandons her son, born of her chimpanzee-husband. In the end, she scalds him to death by pouring boiling water on him. The child escapes into the forest to live with other chimpanzees, but the others do not accept him as one of their own and kill him. The tale may be interpreted as having prophetic resonances of a future that does not augur well for any prospect of cohabitation between species. Such doomsday echoes embedded in folk traditions may need fresh critical revaluations in ecosophical analyses of oral narratives. Hence, translation of these tales becomes ethically necessary.

The revival of the folktales of Tripura through transcriptions and translation into a commonly intelligible language is no mean a task. It has an ethical function which gradually might become indispensable to the realization of a global ecological objective. It is this function which Raymond Williams called residual:

By residual I mean something different from the ‘archaic’, though in practice they are often very difficult to distinguish. Any culture includes available elements of its past, but their place in the contemporary cultural process is profoundly visible…the ‘residual’, by definition, has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present. (Williams, 1977, p.122).

Our journey towards more and more sophisticated and digitally equipped culture of late capitalism is a one-way movement, the costs of which have compelled us to seek refuge in the residual. Folk offers us a path adjacent to that highway, a path to an ecosophical understanding of life – the same building block of the organic world which we are desperately seeking in interstellar space. It is in this context that the folktales chosen for study from the oratures of Tripura, and by extension, other regions of India’s Northeast, may be read as ecosophies in practice. They inspire new ecological thoughts and inspire “affective encounters” through which reciprocity is activated between man and his surroundings on this planet (MacCormack, and Gardner, 2018, p.11). Besides, Aranye Fradenburg Joy’s concept of “care” as a transformative practice can also be encouraged as a therapeutic strategy to heal the sores and scars that humans have perpetrated on both themselves as well as the entire ecology by extension. In her essay “Care of the Wild: A Primer,” Fradenburg provides a radical reassessment of the function of art and aesthetics, weaning all of us away from the conditional world of critical theory – heavily and parasitically dependent upon late capitalist terms of reference. Her proposition of the true function of art once again ignites the flames of affect-centric critical practices, and is of particular relevance to non-anthropomorphic studies of folk literatures across the globe. “Care” becomes in the hands of the literary critic, a tool for new becomings and embodiments. She observes:

All artfulness requires, and aims to design and sustain attention. It therefore has the potential to modify sensation and the functional architecture of the brain. The art’s striking and broad ranging use of sense perception (of synesthesia, ekphrasis, energeia) suggests that the arts heal because they transmit and amplify sentient experience, within and without the organism…the arts practice ecological thought, because they invite, focus on and potentially sustain shifts in awareness and perspective and new (material) connectivity. The arts ‘care’ in part by changing embodied minds (Fradenburg, 2018, p. 72).

It may be mentioned here that Fradenburg’s analysis of care is heavily drawn from Gregory Bateson (1972, as cited in Fradenburg, 2018) who proposes a new “ecology of the mind”. Fradenburg’s theory of care may open up new vistas for the understanding of folk literatures in the twenty-first century, initiating a paradigm shift from all anthropological interpretations of the subject; in that, new connections may be rebuilt to sensitize folk researchers on the power of affective encounters between humans and their eikos. Aesthetics of folk may hence be studied through “embodied, extended and distributed cognition” (Fradenburg, 2018, p. 71). Old binaries of mind-body, organism-environment, and matter-thought, may hence be done away with, looking forward to a new psychoanalytic practice in which “mind is now understood to be ‘distributed’ well past the brain, the nervous system and even the body…” (Fradenburg, 2018, p.71).

Fradenburg further observes that among the great apes, human beings are particularly good at pro-social acts like food-sharing, child-care, care for the sick, injured and elderly, and teaching. “We are cooperative breeders, meaning that the responsibility for child care does not fall exclusively on the mother but is spread out to husbands, siblings, grandparents, friends, and so on, with, of course, significant variations in the ways responsibility is shared (Fradenburg, 2018, p.73). This, as she suggests, may be extended further to include the eikos, if we at all look forward to a progressive vision of civilization.  The folktales analyzed in this study may open up new encounters of care in which expressivity may be reconceived as a “dynamic and transformative movement, so that thinking, acting and caring can function as co-constitutive forces and powers for the sustenance of a healthy territorial life” (MacCormack, and Gardner, 2018, pp. 12-13).

A spate of recent events reported on the media, with which the present study begins, on the territorial encroachments of wild animals from their habitats and enclosures, poses uncanny and menacing questions on the way we have trespassed the prospects of a healthy territorial life. Within a span of not less than a week after the events mentioned in the introduction to this study, another set of bizarre incidents of aggressive monkey revenge unleashed upon street-dogs and human infants in a Maharashtra village, grabbed headlines in the print and electronic media. Once again, territoriality came into question, invoking action on the part of civil and forest authorities. Folktales and their ecosophical subtexts often remind us of the need to connect once again to the residual elements of culture. They remind man of the importance of co-habiting with other species in a world which is staring at an impending ecological holocaust.

Declaration of Conflicts 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.

Acknowledgement 

Featured Image: “Cloud train in the jungle valley” – Wikimedia Commons by Barunghosh.

References:

Bateson, Gregory. (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Ballantine.

Bongcher, Zohming Thanga, & Bongcher, Kamal. (Eds). (2011). Echoes from Lungleng Tang: Bongcher Literature of Oral Tradition. Sahitya Akademi.

Chakma, Niranjan. (Ed). (2013). Chakma Folk and Modern Literature. Sahitya Akademi.

Chaudhury, Kriari Mog., & Chaudhuri Saroj. (Eds). (2012). Mraima Folk Tales and Folklores. Sahitya Akademi.

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix. (2005). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (Brian Massumi, Ed. & Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980)

Fradenburg, Aranye Joy. (2018). Care of the Wild: A Primer. In P. MacCormack & C. Gardner (Eds.), Ecosophical aesthetics: art, ethics and ecology with Guattari. (pp. 65-94). Bloomsbury Academic. 

Guattari, Felix. The Three Ecologies. (2017). (Ian Pindar & Paul Sutton, Trans.). Bloomsbury. (Original work published 1989)

McCormack, Patricia & Gardner, Colin. (Eds). (2018). Ecosophical Aesthetics: Art, Ethics and Ecology with Guattari. Bloomsbury Academic.  

Morton, Timothy. (2010). The Ecological Thought. Harvard University Press.

Schechner, Richard. (1988). Performance Theory. Routledge.

Williams, Raymond. (1977). Marxism and Literature. Oxford.

Partha Sarathi Gupta, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of English,Tripura University. His areas of specialization are Drama, Theatre Studies, Indian English Theatre, and Translation Studies. He has worked extensively with the Sahitya Akademi North East Centre for Oral Literature and Culture, Agartala, in translating folktales of ethnic communities of the region, viz. Bongcher, Mraima (Mog), Chakma and Tripura. His translations have all been published by the Sahitya Akademi in anthologies dedicated to each respective ethnic community.

The Rise of Yawol Poetry in Manipuri Literature

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Kshetrimayum Premchandra
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Tripura University, Tripura, India. ORCID ID: 0000-0002-9387-422X. Email: kshprem@gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages 1–11. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne05

First published: June 09, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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The Rise of Yawol Poetry in Manipuri Literature

Abstract

The Manipuri term yawol or ya-ol means ‘a new awakening or beginning’. It is a term primarily associated with the Manipuri insurgency movement known locally as yawol eehou. Apart from the impending political turmoil and the polarising nature of this movement, there was a passionate, phenomenal boom of literary products in the Manipuri language since the 70s issuing from this insurgency movement. Yawol poetry is both a poetic movement and a literary period, much like the Mizo literature ‘Rambuai’ and Naga literature of the ‘troubled times’. The urge to adopt a new style of writing based on lived experiences rather than some poetic fancy or nostalgia for a bygone era by the Manipuri writers, especially in poetry, coincided with the rise of the insurgency movement in the state. Names such as ‘violent literature’ or ‘blood literature’ that have characterised Manipuri literature sometimes overshadow the ‘non-violent’ yet rich poetic expressions intrinsic to the state. However, not addressing the widespread prevalence of violence and anarchy in Manipuri literature will be historically and aesthetically incorrect. In this paper, the author shall explore the rise of such a distinct poetic style adopted by scores of Manipuri poets across four decades and explain why the poetics of blood and violence have been a significant mainstay in Manipuri poetry.

Keywords: Yawol, insurgency, violence, Manipur, Manipuri literature

Introduction

Nothing could be more banal than the role of violence in initiating a school of poetry that solely focuses on violence itself. However, the perception and expression of violence in Manipuri poetry since the 70s has to do with the prevalence of excessive violence in the state where the general population considers themselves scapegoats. Therefore, Manipuri poetry can be treated as an honest effort to voice dissidence and restore natural order within the community. Needless to say that the turmoil of anarchism in a small state like Manipur has long been acknowledged and mainstreamed, but there is a sense of a general repudiation of literature as a by-product of that same anarchism. It is a common perception that Manipuri literature depicts excessive blood and is monotonous due to the absence of softness of diction and lack of range. It is to say that Manipuri literature is regarded as a monolithic entity, a metaphor for blood and violence, and literature devoid of hope or optimism. There is truth in these assumptions and descriptions. However, Manipuri literature is above and beyond these gross generalisations. I am reminded of Robin S. Ngangom’s concerns regarding some recurring images in contemporary Manipuri poetry in an article titled “Poetry in the Time of Terror” in which he wrote:

In contemporary Manipuri poetry, there is a predominance of images of ‘bul lets’, ‘blood’, ‘mother’, ‘the colour red’ and, paradoxically, ‘flowers’ too. […] This has resulted in criticism that contemporary Manipuri poetry is hemmed in by extreme realism. There is, of course, a danger of the images mentioned above becoming hackneyed. And maybe poets should try to strike that fine balance between realism and reflection. (2005, p. 172)

 In defence of Manipuri poesie, I can say that the poetics of violence found in Manipuri poetry is not poetics wedded to glorifying excessive blood and brutishness but one that has walked past strictly literary concerns into the political and social spheres. Highlighting a few vital socio-political developments in Manipur would be appropriate at this juncture.

 After the end of the British Raj and the accession of the kingdom of Manipur to the Union of India in 1949, the national character of its literature was reduced to that of provincial literature. Kingship was abolished with the end of the British Raj, and a democratic arrangement was introduced in 1949. The transition from kingship (within British colonial rule) to democracy meant that the Manipuri writers could freely express themselves with their explicitly political texts without any political censure or pressure. Besides that, educated youths got exposed to Western ideas and philosophies, and there was an intense realisation of Manipuri identity based on its physical features, language, culture, political ideology, and geography. From the 50s to the 70s, fear, anxiety, helplessness, the futility of existence, aimlessness in life, and other similar states of mind loomed large in the minds of Manipuri youths and poets. It was a time of pessimism, cynical views of self-scrutiny, and uncertainty of life. These mindsets and worldviews set off a new sensibility in Manipuri poetry, gradually taking its form and style. The tone of frustration and anxiety that characterises the post-war poetry took a beating paving the way for the tone of defiance and rebellion in the 70s. The new poets who started publishing in the 70s embraced poetry as a medium of attacking whatever they thought was hampering the growth of Manipur. Their everyday experiences became modes of poetic expressions; their every word sounded authentic yet very distressing.

 So, keeping their distress on their minds, the young poets launched a new poetics which was never encountered in Manipuri literature before. Their writings coincided with the violence and bloodshed set off by the launch of a self-determination movement in the valley of Manipur in 1964. The poets, and more specifically the general public, were left with no choice but to deal with the horrific results of this daily armed struggle. What follows is for everyone to see. Death, destruction, violence, abduction, extortion, custodial deaths, rights violations, and many more similar issues became everyday routines. There was a severe undermining of social values and customs. There was a general sense among the intelligentsia that the state and its machinery had failed the citizens of Manipur. These happenstances crept up in Manipuri literature; images as heinous as scattered dead bodies, destroyed and devastated villages, and violence-filled streets became poetic fodder. The grotesque imagery that crept into Manipuri poetry can be found in Thangjam Ibopishak’s poem “Pratima of Kongba Bazaar” written in 1962:

From the other side of the mosquito net,
Watching us, Pratima of Kongba Bazaar said –
“The dharma of a woman
Was wrecked and snatched away.
I am a leftover of them animals
I don’t have any value now.”
And she showed
Without any shame and reticence, her intimate parts
Bruised and bloodied
Breasts and thighs;
The horrendous pain of the animals’ torture
On them the soft petals of a withered flower. (Ibopishak, 1962) [own tr.]

Yawol Poetry: The need for a fresh poetic idiom

 The movement for self-determination that began in the early 60s got accelerated in the 80s in terms of intensity and violent confrontations. Poets such as Ibopishak, Ibomcha, Ranjit, Bhubansana felt that Manipuri literature, and more importantly poetry, needed a complete overhaul, an avatar of sorts to cater to the intellectual and psychological needs of the people. These needs were expressed in three publications; namely, Shingnaba (Defiance), 1974 (Ibopishak, Ranjit and Ibomcha), Atoppa Khonjel (The Other Voice), 1975 (An anthology of modern Manipuri poetry edited by Tombi, Joychandra Ibopishak, and Ibomcha), and Humfutarada Humalakpa Nonglei (The storm that came to the 70s), edited by Hemchandra, 1979. These three books, along with other individual collections of poems, had two principal objectives. They are, as pointed out in the ‘Introduction’ to The storm that came to the 70s (Humfutarada Humalakpa Nonglei); i) poetry must tackle the corrupt system, and ii) Manipuri poetry should avoid Eurocentric poetic traditions adopted by the post-war poets (Hemachandra, 1979, p. 4).

For political and historical correctness, the period between the 70s to the 2010s in Manipuri Literature may be referred to as Yawol Literature. The Manipuri term yawol or ya-ol means ‘a new awakening or beginning’. The yawol eehou (revolutionary movement/movement for self-determination) occupies a key moment in the history of Manipur and Manipuri literature. It is also a crucial period in Manipuri literature because it interrogates the magnitude of violence experienced by individuals and social groups and inexplicably persistent in the collective memory of the Manipuris. Hence, the term Yawol Poetry is derived from two specific propositions; i) the conscious stance by the poets in the 70s to adopt a new poetic idiom in Manipuri poetry, and ii) the impact of yawol eehou that turned violent in the 80s. Yumlembam Ibomcha’s “The Princess and Young Birds” is an example of the idea of yawol that got entrenched in Manipuri poetry where the alleged freedom fighters are compared to young and inexperienced birds who are meant to sacrifice themselves for ‘a bright new morning’;

Drenched in their own blood
The young red birds
Are falling and scattering on the ground
Like the falling blooming buds
They are on their journey
Of courage and sacrifice
Of a bright new morning. (Ibomcha, 1992, p. 51-52) [own tr.]

 The poets of this period do not just express impediments but rather offer hopes for future generations, the precise imagery of ‘a bright new day’ they instil in the readers’ minds functions as a post-violence reconstruction effort. As to the interpretative crux of poetry in Manipuri from the 70s to the 2010s, one must rely on the texts themselves to locate meaning/s rather than the author’s intention or the experience as a reader. It is to say that the aesthetic fineness of Manipuri literature should be taken as self-contained and self-referential. Above all these, the period and the movement are specific and historically located, and its style of writing will continue to appear even after the end of the violence and return to normalcy.

The critical concerns of the poets are the issues of identity, culture, and authority. However, the ongoing trust deficit between the common masses and those running the troubled state is plunging the state into further chaos. I am reminded of the journalist and political commentator Pradip Phanjoubam’s take on this issue. He contends:

It would be a safe bet to say that nobody anymore trusts the government, not any particular government, but the institution of government as such, is capable of doing anything honestly or with the larger interest of the people as intent. This is the general psychology that the generation after generation of state’s leaders [have] left as a residual effect of their selfishness. A terrible mutation of the collective social reasoning process has taken place and the frustrating difficulty of dealing with his mutated psychology is what the place is condemned to live with. Manipur’s salvation can dawn only when this trust and faith in the authority and intent of the democratically elected government. (Phanjoubam, 2006, pp. 286-7)

Why was there a trust deficit, and why did the poets call for a new beginning? The answer lies in three contentious areas which emerged in the post-World War II Manipur; rise in ethno/nationalism, identity formation, and cultural nationalism or revivalism. The nostalgic past or romanticism imported from Britain could no longer cater to people’s intellectual and aesthetic needs. Therefore, these primary concerns were vociferously expressed so that the readers knew where they stand as a community. Therefore, the poets peddled an old tradition rooted in the ancient literary culture where every writing or literary product belonged to the state and was written for the state. The rootedness of the poets to their land and people is amply highlighted in their poems. It shows the rootedness of these poets to “their beloved land; the roots of their people’s culture; the roots of their times; and most of all, the roots of the past that is “lost” to them, [which] have sunk deep in their psyche” (Nongkynrih, 2006, p. 4).

One of the significant thematical concerns of Yawol poetry is violence. Many critical postulations of violence in literature reveal that it is difficult to approach and investigate. The existential questions of Manipuris as a community regarding identity, culture, and nationalism widened in scope and deepened in intensity in the late 60s. The following poem written by Shri Biren (“Chafadraba Laigi Yen”, “The Sacrificial Rooster Which Shall not be Eaten”) is one example of many such poems that underlines the sombre mood among the Manipuris regarding their worth as a social group or community in a conflict-ridden Manipur.

In a dark, decrepit corner
Of a crowded eatery
In the middle of the city
A sacrificial rooster which shall not be eaten
Whose sheen and splendour have vanished
Wishes to leave a mark
In this eclectic world; (Tombi et al., 1975, p. 41-42)  [own tr.]

Sri Biren equates the circumstances of a Manipuri man with the ill-fated rooster to be sacrificed by a shaman to please a particular deity through a sacrificial ritual. He questions if the people of Manipur were sacrificed for the convenience of some mightier forces, and in the process, they are subjugated and not allowed to grow and develop. The poet seems to suggest the plight of the common masses in the new political setup where violence and injustice are widespread.

Yawol poetry as movement and period can be divided into four generations, and each generation is discussed in the subsequent paragraphs.

The first-generation Yawol poets

Hannah Arendt opines that “The Second World War was not followed by peace but by a cold war and the establishment of the military·industrial·labor complex” (1970, p. 9). Thangjam Ibopishak, Yumlembam Ibomcha, and R. K. Bhubonsana who grew up in World War II ravaged Manipur, became the major poets in the first-generation of poets in the Yawol movement. The trademark of the first-generation poets is satire with complementary raw humour and unmatched wit. Besides, their poetry takes a little less apolitical stance while critiquing social flaws or political impasses. For these poets, also for the subsequent poets, the function of literature was no longer to soothe and calm the body and mind but as a tool to empower themselves with their grievances, indictments, and propaganda.

They challenged the existing status quo of poetic expressions and deviated from the romantic nostalgia of the past glory of Manipur, which still lingered in the worldview and expression of the poets. The separation from the past with the sole aim to focus on the predicaments of the present no longer found poetry to be means of complaints, accusations, and utterances of the frustrated mind. Instead, poetry became a battle cry for justice and the right to life. Using sarcasm Thangjam Ibopishak encapsulates his desire to live in a state where life is cheap and worthless in his poem “I want to be killed by an Indian bullet” :

‘Whatever it may be, if you shoot me please shoot me with a gun made in India. I don’t want to die from a foreign bullet. You see, I love India very much.’

‘That can never be. Your wish cannot be granted. Don’t ever mention Bharat to us.’

(Misra, 2011, p. 57) [tr. Ngangom]

The imagery of blood and violence is bound to traverse along with the myriad and often less deceptive depiction of death and decay in the state. Whereas Ibopishak would use wit to survive, Bhubonsana would see his body split into two as nobody wants him alive anymore. So he devises a way to split his body into two by himself (more than a suicide) and witnesses his dismembered body in his poem “Jarashandha” published in Indian Literature. Bhubonsana encapsulates the actual situation of Manipur with gripping imagery of a man who just split himself into two halves:

In front lies abandoned
My lifeless body split into two
The torn, disjointed lumps.
On bright red chunks of meat
Throb my eager-to-live
Unfulfilled pulse.

The sight is quite gory and repulsive. Nevertheless, that is how the poet sees the condition of every Manipuri living under the constant fear of deprivation and intimidation. The psychological harm caused to the common masses comes from stories they hear or events in which they were involved. In the last part of “Jarashandha”, the poet’s language becomes more irrational and obscene as if there was a transgression of sorts:

In confusion and torn against their will
My angry intestines
Emerge slowly reluctantly
Outside
Piece by piece.
I cry I shout I try to stop
Tears falling from my eyes I plead.
Angry by now I defy them
Blood rising to my eyes, my entire body shaking

Who killed me
Come outside if you dare
For what reason was I killed? (1997, p. 39) [tr. Ngangom, Robin S.]

The second-generation

As the insurgency movement gained momentum in the state, a new, more vigorous poetic sensibility entered Manipuri poetry in the early 80s. It also coincided with the demand for the Manipuri to be included in the 8th Schedule of the Indian Constitution. It was a long and perilous movement. The general public felt that the linguistic aspiration of the people of Manipur was undermined by the insensitive Govt. for a long time. On the other hand, The Armed Forces Special Powers Act, 1958, which was extended to Manipur through an Amendment in 1972, was beginning to show its true colours in terms of lethality and being undemocratic in the 80s. Manipuris were no longer concerned by luxuries such as ‘freedom of speech’ or ‘right to property.’ Their main concern became ‘right to life’ as they were caught in the ‘damned if you do, damned if you do not do’ situation. They more or less appeared as sitting ducks in the crossfire between the Armed Forces and the insurgent groups. Poetry, hence, took a radical turn in terms of its objectivity and style. There was more than frustration and anger in their expressions; seemingly innocent words became overtly political. It was agitprop at its best. The second-generation poets (Memchoubi, Borkanya, Birendrajit, and Saratachand as major poets) emerged with these added challenges.

Not just these, the second-generation poets infused in Manipuri literature the ideas of cultural revivalism, nativistic outlooks, women issues, and matured expressions of loss and deprivation. The finest example would be Memchoubi’s “The Fire of Andro” which is part eulogy, part lament;

The two dead bodies of
The wise Thangal General
And the gallant Koireng Yuvraj
Dangled from each a hangman’s noose
At Pheidapung;
Their necks fractured
Their eyes doleful.
In the vicinity, in heavy silence
Meitei women stood stunned
Their heads covered in white
Girdles tightened around their waists
And their bellies stirred and impregnated
With a volcano inside
With a volcano inside. (1990, p.1) [own tr.]

Memchoubi here uses the historical event of the British occupation of Manipur and the subsequent hanging of Yubaraj Tikendrajit and General of the Manipur Army Thangal in 1891 to remind every woman of the loss of freedom and what it entails for Manipuri women. Memchoubi echoes Slavoj Žižek’s theories are gathered from the ideas already espoused by Karl Marx, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and other thinkers. He further adds that systemic/objective violence includes “the more subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation, including the threat of violence” (2009, p. 8). Memchoubi is aware of the systemic violence which has spread like cancer in the Manipuri society. The allegations of ‘state-sponsored terrorism’ that has gained currency in Manipuri lingo reflect all the three types of violence Žižek postulates in his thesis. The hanging of Yubaraj Tikendrajit and General Thangal is a lesson taught to the Manipuris to dare not think of any revolt in future. Such vindictive incidents or examples are set in the post-AFSPA Manipur too. Here, Memchoubi calls out to every woman to muster the courage hidden within them to pull out Manipur from the abject state of anarchy it is in.

The Yawol movement also ushered in feminist writings in Manipuri literature. And Memchoubi is the harbinger of Manipuri écriture féminine. Following Hélène Cixous’s call for adoption of female-centric views and worldviews in literature and other forms of writing, Memchoubi initiated a style of writing in Manipuri literature where the ‘female’ tells her side of the story. Her poetry collections such as Androgee Mei, Tuiphai O Ningthibi, Edu Ningthou, etc. are all examples of écriture féminine in Manipuri literature. Over and above this, her poem “The Goddess of Lighning” can be considered a feminist manifesto in Manipuri discourse and literature. In the poem she uses the mythic character Nongthangleima (literally the Goddess of Lightning), responsible for completing the creation of space and earth in Manipuri cosmogony. But she uses Nongthangleima as a metaphor for achieving peace and tranquillity in the state if the menfolk had failed to do so. The poet is convinced that Manipuri men are not prepared for such a turn of events (both past and present), as they still cannot fathom the collective strength women can exert in a society. As for the poet, Manipuri woman still can shoot “with the thousand-fold sparks/Reflected from my [women] eyes/I shall burn them,/The mouldering burden of ideas/You [men] have carried for centuries” (Ngangom and Nongkynrih, 2009, pp. 177-78).

Among the poets of the second generation, Birendrajit Naorem stands out for his fiery diction and radical views. He is perhaps the most political among these poets. We may consider “Churanthaba Has Come”[i] as an example (2004, p. 25). He writes, “Beware, folks of the land beware, /Beat the yaipung[ii] of the Kangla/Burn the chilli-torches/Send out the king’s riders/Spread the message.” Without naming any person or a group, he cautions the people of the land of the impending dangers of the terror some people can bring. He calls upon the “Defunct house of justice” to resurrect again;

Otherwise, the woman who was hanged
After raping in front of her husband
Will never rise from her death again.
Otherwise, the innocent youth
Who was arrested in front of his mother
And murdered after hurling a load-full of charges
Will never come back again. (2004, p. 36) [own tr.]

The same call for caution and measures to avoid misfortunes is reflected in Saratchand Thiyam’s poem “Sister”. The poet echoes the plight of women under the spell of AFSPA in Manipur. He writes:

Sister, I won’t allow you to go
Every road is reverberating
With the defeaning utterance of boots.
Hide inside the house, sister
Don’t you go at all. (Ngangom and Nongkynrih, 2009, pp. 284-5) [tr. Robin S. Ngangom].

The resonance of this poem can be felt and heard when one Thangjam Manorama was killed by the Assam Rifles after, allegedly, raping her in 2004. The year 2004 was a turning point in Manipuri political and social history because Manipur has never witnessed such a sustained protest against ‘state-sponsored terrorism. There was a steep rise in violent public protests as if the people had had enough. In a way, Manipur started fighting violence with violence, and the streets of Manipur resembled battle zones. In this regard, eminent theatre personality and historian Lokendra Arambam observed that “The deliberate withdrawal of the Indian security forces from public visibility in the wake of massive anti-AFSPA agitation in 2004 was substituted by a new form of intervention through development funding by the Centre (Arambam, 2015, 117-8).” The change in the policy to deal with the insurgency issue in the state seemed to have worked for all the parties. The seemingly quiet and violence-free streets restored normalcy in Manipur but there was something else going on despite the change of heart among the security forces after introducing the doctrine of the ‘iron fist in the velvet glove’. Arambam continues to tell us why violence persists in the region and especially in Manipur:

The complexity and intensity of violent relations between the Indian state and non-state actors of Manipur which have witnessed being acted out for the last four decades in an environment of rapidly transforming ethnic societies within the ‘hegemonic’ political structure of an advancing South Asian power within a fast globalising universe, and the new geopolitical dimensions of intense global rivalry between India and China, and the underlying vulnerability of the Indian state’s hold over Northeast India’s population had signaled grave unease on issues of peace and human security of this strategic region. (2015, pp. 118-19)

The third-generation Yawol poets

Young poets such as Imojit, Netrajit, Abdul Hamid, Sorokhaibam Gambhini, Bidyasagar, etc., appeared in the literary scene of Manipur with a new vision and aesthetics which has the potential of starting a new school of poetry. They are poets born in the early 70s and began publishing in the late 90s. They are poets born in the early 70s and began publishing in the late 90s. While some poets of this generation are influenced by the first-generation, some have allegiance with the second generation. Abdul Hamid, Sorokhaibam Gambhini, Bidyasagar, who are from outside the state, broaden the spectrum of Manipuri poetry with their experiences in their home states.

Interestingly, leading poets of this generation are from Assam and Tripura who closely follow Manipur’s poetic trends and enrich them enormously with new sensibilities and techniques from their experiences gathered from trends in other languages. This group of young writers who have appeared in the literary scene at the most crucial juncture of yawol movement vis-à-vis violence and bloodbath in Manipur has the potential of starting a new school of poetry or a new trend with their fresh outlooks and aesthetics. Here is an example of how Bidyasagar looks at the violence in Manipur from Assam in “Blood-smeared Dawn” in which he demonstrates his anger and exasperation regarding the turmoil in Manipur;

I see
A blood-smeared dawn
Entering the courtyard
After getting up from a grave. (Ngaangom & Kynpham, 2009, p. 63) [tr. Tayenjam Bijoykumar]

For Imojit Ningombam and Thoudam Netrajit, Manipur is like a slaughterhouse where men and women are in the news as collateral damages. They are the ones trying to escape death both physically and metaphorically. Some of their poems evoke a sense of deja-vu. The extreme views adopted by their predecessors are reflected in their poetry. However, the difference is that the poetry of Imojit and Netrajit gives us the vibe of defiance and rebellion. Are the poets of this generation upbeat and hopeful about any peaceful end to the present impasse? Can they foresee a progressive Manipur? It is difficult to answer. Because the war is still on as expressed by Imojit in his poem “War Boys”;

Amidst the wild storm of the war
Mothers dress up their children with combat uniforms.
Swords, spears, and shields
Are placed on their hands.
They are allowed to play with guns and bombs
So that they do not get tired on the battlefield. [own tr.]

The devastating psychological impacts of gunfights, bomb blasts, combing operations, detentions, third-degree torture, etc., on the children are manifold. In an atmosphere created to fear the state children grow up harbouring hatred and alienation. However, the atmosphere is changing. The state policy towards the insurgency movement in Manipur seems to have changed after the 2004 mass movement against the alleged state-sponsored terrorism.

However, despite the ‘promised future’, there is a thematic monotony in Manipuri poetry which poses a challenge to its aesthetics and reception. The poets of this generation are aware of the challenges they must face as the future torchbearers of Manipuri poetry. Also, finding a new poetic path is going to be even harder given the circumstances (perennial social and political deadlock).

The fourth-generation Yawol poets

The fourth-generation poets are poets who were born in the 80s and started publishing in the 2010s. They are Naorem Romina, Haobijam Chanu Prema, Angom Sarita, Tongbram Amarjit, Wangthoi Khuman, Jiten Oinamba, Yandibala, Prashuram Thingnam, Lenin Khumancha, etc. Without a doubt, these young poets have shown incredible talent and sparks of brilliance in some poems. It would be premature to put a poetic value on their poetry as they are still exploring poetic possibilities in a changed atmosphere.

The murky residuals of almost half a century-long blood and violence persist in one form or the other in Manipur. Moreover, young poets in this generation are victims of that fallout. It is probably, for this reason, the young female poet Yandibal evokes the image of Mahatama Gandhi, who is the messiah of the poor and downtrodden, to be prepared for the whips of the might and powerful himself in her poem “Furit Litlu Gandhi” (“Wear a Shirt Gandhi”):

The time has spent
For your non-violence
For the trap of violence
Has ensnared it
It’s useless to yell out
The acuity of non-violence […]

You are also innocent
But, your turn is evident
For the whip of the mighty and powerful
Is sure to lash on the shirtless
Bareback of yours
Therefore, put on a shirt Gandhi
Make sure you wear one. (2011, p. 38) [own tr.]

Conclusion

It is generally perceived that the clamour and chaos that characterised Manipur has subsided over the years. There is a semblance of peace and sanity in the state. Yet, the problem persists in one form or the other. Apprehensions are still intact, the dangers of violence flaring up again still loom large. Cultural and psychological trauma in the people’s collective memory is still visible and will not evaporate anytime soon. Manipur needs “collective catharsis” that Farnz Fanon talks about (2008, p. 112). Fanon’s idea also finds its echo in the ancient Meitei Lai Haraoba (propitiating festival with offerings to the tutelary deities) tradition, in which every individual prays for the welfare of the community. I want to be optimistic and claim that the community healing or the ritual of the healing process has already begun in Manipuri art and literature because the politics of fear and deprivation that got entrenched in the psyche of Manipuris, individually and collectively, has already gone through the process of undoing. However, the apprehension is that those who commit violence will continue to commit it in the name of the state despite violence being “neither aesthetic, nor ethical, nor religious” (Žižek, 2009, 168).

Declaration of Conflicts 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.

Acknowledgement 

Picture Above: Landscape of Valley.jpg – Wikimedia Commons by Ritezh Thoudam.

Notes:

[i] Someone scary and heinous who abducts and kills young children as a form of sacrifice for dam or bridge constructions in the Meitei legend.

[ii] The big drum which is sounded when there is any calamity such as war or major happenstances in the palace called Kangla.

Works Cited:

Arambam, Lokendra. (2015). “Narratives of Self-Determination Struggles in Manipur”. In Self-Determination Movement in Manipur. Singh, Aheibam Koireng, Hanjabam, Sukhdeba Sharma, Thangjam, Homen (eds.). Concept Publishing Company Pvt. Ltd.

Arendt, Hannah. (1970). On Violence. A Harvest/HJB Books.

Bhubansana. RK. (1997). “Jarashandha”. Tr. Robin S. Ngangom. Indian Literature. No. 179: May – June, Vol. XL, No. 3.

Biren, Shri (1975). Tollaba Sadugi Wakhal. Self.

Hemachandra, Konjengbam. Humfutarada da Humlakpa Nonglei (Storm that came to the 70s). Ayibasingee Singlup, 1979.

Ibomcha, Yumlembam. (1992). Rajkumari Amasung Uchek Machasing. VI Publications.

Ibopishak, Thangjam, Ibomcha, Yumlembam, and Ranjit W. (1975). Shingnaba: Vol. I. Self.

Ibopishak, Thangjam, Joychandra, Longjam. Et al. (1975). Atoppa Khonjel. Naharol Sahitya Premi Samiti.

Ibopishak, Thangjam. (1962). “Kongba Bazaargee Pratima”. Unpublished.

Memchoubi. (1999). Androgee Mei (The Fire of Andro). Imphal: Arambam Samarendra.

Misra, Tillotama. (2010). The Oxford Anthology of Writings from North-East India – Poetry and Essays: Volume II. OUP. 

Naorem, Birendrajit. (2004). Lanthengnariba Lanmee (The Warring Worrior). Self.

Ngangom, Robin S. (2005). “Poetry in the Time of Terror”. Indian Literature ,  May-June 2005,  Vol. 49, No. 3 (227) (May-June 2005), pp. 168-174, Sahitya Akademi Stable URL:  https://www.jstor.org/stable/23341046, Accessed on 15/01/2021.

Ngangom, Robin S. and Nongkynrih, Kynpham S. (2009). Dancing Earth. Penguin Books.

Nongkynrih, Kynpham Sing. (2006). “Hard-edged Modernism: Contemporary Poetry in North-east India”. In Geeti Sen (Ed.) Where the Sun Rises and Shadows Fall: The North-east. OUP.

Phanjoubam, Pradip. (2006). “Manipur: fractured land”. In Geeti Sen (ed.) Where the Sun Rises and Shadows Fall: The North-east. OUP.

Schinkel, Willem. (2010). Violence: A Critical Theory. Palgrave Macmillan.

World Health Organization (2002). World report on violence and health: Summary. Geneva. https://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/world_report/en/introduction.pdf.

Yandibala, Akhom. (2011). Lai Matha Shari (The God is Tensed). Imphal: Manipuri Literary Society.

Žižek, Slavoj (2009). Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. Profile Books

Kshetrimayum Premchandra, a Ph.D in early modern British novels, is a Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Tripura University. He is the author of the book, Hijan Hirao: Text, Context, and Translation. His edited anthology of post-independence Manipuri poetry is tunder publication by Sahitya Akademy. He can be reached at <kshetrisingh@tripurauniv.ac.in>.

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The Animate Circuit of the Ordinary: The Everyday as Unfolding in Tarun Bhartiya’s Niam/Faith/Hynñiewtrep

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Amit Rahul Baishya
University of Oklahoma, USA. ORCID: 0000-0001-5146-5957. https://ou.academia.edu/amitbaishya. Email: arbaishya1@ou.edu

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages 1-17. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne04

First published: June 09, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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The Animate Circuit of the Ordinary: The Everyday as Unfolding in Tarun Bhartiya’s Niam/Faith/Hynñiewtrep

Abstract

Drawing on anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s description of the ordinary as an “animate circuit that conducts force and maps connections, routes and disjunctures,” this article reads the representations of the fugitive potentials of the quotidian in Shillong-based artist Tarun Bhartiya’s photomontage/postcard collection Niam/Faith/Hynñiewtrep (2021). Focusing on Bhartiya’s utilization of the technique of montage and the poetic juxtaposition of text and images, I consider the pluriversal narratives of pasts, presents and futures in his representations of the ordinary and the quotidian in a frontier/borderland space like Northeast India as a contribution to the nascent field of visual studies and the photographic archive in the region. This essay evaluates the significance of avant-garde visual practices, like those of Bhartiya’s, in probing the minutiae of ordinary life and its fugitive and unpredictable potentialities.

Keywords: Ordinary, Quotidian, Montage, Frontier/Borderland, Photographs.

The critical discourse on photography in Northeast Indian Studies is in its nascent phases. An exception is Joy L.K. Pachuau and Willem van Schendel’s social history of Mizoram, The Camera as Witness (2015). Discussing their photographic archive, the authors write that they focus on “everyday, ordinary photographs with no claim to originality, iconoclasm, technical virtuosity or the creative spark” (p. 13). They look at photography as a “vernacular practice” and zoom in on “common genres…family snapshots, identification pictures, and documentary photographs” (p. 15). The images they study are “common and unexceptional” and analyzed in a chronological manner presenting a fascinating developmental story of Mizo modernity. What interests me is the recurrence of terms such as “ordinary,” “vernacular,” “common,” and “unexceptional.” While the authors use these terms to distinguish their archive from modernist art historical discourses that privilege the artistic and the avant-garde, a particular theory of the everyday undergirds their work. For them, while the everyday is constituted by forms of unbracketed existence associated with the habitual, the repetitive and the commonplace, photographs also capture moments that illustrate the seepage of modernity into private spaces and the concomitant adjustments and resistances that such descents into the ordinary necessarily entail.

Pachuau and van Schendel are social historians; I am a literary critic. I operate with different inflectional variants of the everyday and the ordinary. My concern is not to describe the common and the unexceptional to plot a chronological history of modernity or to analyze how macro discourses descend into the quotidian. I am interested, rather, in unearthing fugitive potentials immanent in the everyday. Ordinary life, as anthropologist Kathleen Stewart (2007) writes, “draws its charge from rhythms of flow and arrest” (p. 19). They are “fragments of experience that pull at awareness but rarely come into full frame” (p. 19). Instituting a comparison with a postcard, Stewart continues:

So still, like a postcard…A still life is a static state filled with vibratory motion, or resonance. A quivering in the stability of a category or a trajectory, it gives the ordinary the charge of an unfolding. It is intensity born of a momentary suspension of narrative, or a glitch in the projects we call things like the self, agency, home, a life. Or a simple stopping. (p. 19)

At play here is a different figuration of the everyday and ordinary which is at the core of my analysis of Shillong-based artist and filmmaker Tarun Bhartiya’s photomontage of hundred black and white postcards Niam/Faith/Hynñiewtrep (henceforth Niam, 2021).[1] (Bhartiya’s photomontage was recently exhibited in an exhibition in Cardiff in October 2021 and got a fair amount of attention in the Indian press). If “unexceptional” suggests something that is too ready at hand to call attention to itself, Stewart’s juxtaposition of “static” with “vibratory,” “quivering” with “stability” and things that pull at awareness without coming into the full-frame introduces the question of becoming into the ordinary. The arrested moment, like a still life, a photograph or a postcard, pulsates with movement and intensity, open to both pasts and futures. Taken by itself, a photograph or a postcard may be a momentary suspension in a narrative (or even a simple stopping); but it could also be a multiperspectival opening to multiple pasts and futures. It enables the self to be, to cite Stewart again, a “dreaming scene, if only for a minute” (p. 19).

Such conceptualizations of the everyday and the ordinary refers to the—

…vague constellations of spaces and times outside what was organized and institutionalized around work, conformity, and consumerism. It was all the daily habits that were beneath notice, where one remained anonymous. Because it evaded capture and could not be useful, it was seen by some to have a core of revolutionary potential…its dangerous essence was that it was without event, and was both unconcealed and unperceived. (Sterne, 2013, p. 70)

Unfolding gestures towards questions of becoming and alternative potentialities inhering in fleeting, unexceptional moments. These heterotemporalities lurking under the surface make the shimmering surfaces of grand discourses like modernity fissure and fork in multiple, unpredictable pathways. I argue that Bhartiya’s arresting photomontage captures these immanent potentialities in the everyday. Indeed, Bhartiya mentions the potentiality of the ephemeral in his ninth epigram which functions as the introduction to the postcard collection: “So how does one locate the signs and meanings of this transformative encounter between Gwalia and Khasia?[2] Through biographies? A chronology of events? Through resistance to the majoritarian impulses of the Indian Nation State? Or through the circulation of picture postcards which the Welsh Calvinist-Methodist working-class missionaries were fond of?” Multiple histories plotted multiperspectivally and kaleidoscopally via the ephemeral: it would not be amiss to use this as a tagline to describe Niam.

Through a juxtaposition of photographs, both archival and contemporary, and written text (like discontinuous snippets from Uttar Pradesh’s notorious anti-conversion law from 2020) on the postcards, Bhartiya’s photomontage delves into colonial history, the presence of Christianity in Meghalaya, the coexistence, oftentimes uneasy, of Christian denominations and nativist groups that resisted conversions like the Seng Khasi, and the steady encroachment of Hindu fundamentalist discourses and movements into the region. Two aspects become fundamental for an analysis of Niam. The first is the technique of montage. Montage is a critique of the idea that reality is out there for the camera to capture meticulously or the viewer to perceive passively; instead, it calls for an active stance from the viewer to make meaning. In the process of cutting, reassembling and juxtaposing, montage impels the viewers to institute connections poetically via transversal, nonlinear modalities. Discussing Eisensteinian montage, Laura Marks (2015) writes:

Eisenstein did not trust cinema to produce truth even by observing the world long and patiently, but argued that it must cut into the observable world. These ideas inspire filmmakers to elicit those moments of flashing, where an unbidden artifact cuts into the present: that is montage, a skeptical manner of unfolding. Montage should produce contrasts…whose rhythm releases energy that the spectator’s body absorbs. (p.e 116)

While Marks is talking about cinematic practice, her invocation of “skeptical manner of unfolding” and the production of contrasts is applicable to an analysis of a multimodal combination like Niam. The affective impact of Niam emerges from the poetic correspondences between image and image and text and image. Three levels of meaning-making emerge via montage in Niam: 1) the nonlinear poetic correspondences between images, 2) the contrast between text and image, and 3) fleeting, immanent possibilities inhering in a single image that unfold transversally across the work when put in combination with others. While the first two levels call for critical capacities of synthesis, the last one necessitates “depth” readings that call for focused contemplation of a singular image.

The second issue is the question of visual style, both at the level of printed word and image. While Bhartiya uses a few archival photographs to delve into colonial history, most of the pictures are images of the contemporary in black and white. As in the Mizo case in The Camera as Witness, the archival photographs were primarily taken by missionaries. These photographs, meant primarily for private usage, proselytization or informing audiences elsewhere about missionary activities “reveal the interplay of visions of common humanity and visions of inequality” (Pachuau and van Schendel 2015, 2015, p. 12). Thus, Bhartiya’s images like “Missionaries with the Khasi Porters” (p. 6) show the stark inequalities between the leisurely walk of formally dressed colonizers and the hard labor undertaken by Khasi porters.

Figure 1

Similarly, the picture from 1861 of U Larsing (1838–63) (Figure 1; p. 30),[3] the Khasi evangelist, dressed in Western attire and standing between the Welsh missionary couple, William and Mary Lewis, shows the insertion of the converted native “son” into the “civilizational” ambit of what Anne McClintock (1994) calls the “national family of man”:

…the family offers a natural figure for sanctioning social hierarchy within a putative organic unity of interests. Second, it offers a natural trope for figuring historical time… The family offered an indispensable metaphoric figure by which hierarchical (and, one might add, often contradictory) social distinctions could be shaped into a single historical genesis narrative. (p. 63)

U Larsing, born in Mawsmai, was taken to the UK as a “trophy” (May, 2012, p. 248) by Rev. Thomas Lewis and his wife, Mary Lewis. He died in Chester in 1863 and was interred there (a picture of his grave in Chester also appears in Niam [p. 31]). Native preachers like him had “ambiguous insider/outsider relationships to their own communities as well as to their mission brethren” (May, 2012, p. 232). But this ambiguous status and U Larsing’s mimicry of the colonizers also offered opportunities for agency (Bhabha 1994), an aspect underscored in Niam where he appears twice later. The same photograph of U Larsing and the Lewises appears as a faded stamp allied with the following lines from the poem “On Occasion of Seeing the Cassian Native Evangelist U Larsing” in the 1861 edition of the Welsh religious journal Trysorfa Y Plant: “Then let him go to Cassia/Imbued with British taste/And turn the skirts of India/From being a moral Waste…” (p. 88). The ghost of the civilizing mission alluded to here is counterpointed with his image (Figure 2, p. 11), where dressed in traditional Khasi attire, U Larsing walks through a forest and gazes slant at the camera.

Figure 2

If in the 1861 photograph, the native “son,” the mimic man, is sought to be incorporated into the national family of man, in the latter photograph, the native agentially nativizes the world religion. Indeed, Bhartiya alludes to this process of nativization in the fourth, fifth and sixth epigrams that preface his photomontage:

4.
Thomas Jones would manage to baptize nobody.[4] And translate only a part of the Gospel. They say he taught the locals how to brew alcohol, use a saw, purify lime. And then got involved in defending the Khasis from exploitation by the British East India company. Under pressure, Mission headquarters threw him out of the church and cancelled his missionary license. Attacked and chased by company soldiers out of the Khasi-Jaintia hills, Jones died a lonely death in Calcutta.

5.
The faith which TJ brought would sweep through these hills of North-eastern India, nativizing itself.
But not without indigenous challenges and reworkings. There were many who chose the new book and there were those who kept their ancient faith alive.

6.
I joke. Christianity was a Khasi religion accidently discovered in Wales.[5] (np)

These archival images that demonstrate glimpses of shared humanity and the agency of the colonized, snapshots of the colonial quotidian and the ethnographic gaze that consolidates the noncoeval positions of colonizers and colonized are juxtaposed with images drawn from contemporary life which shows the afterlives of these tectonic historical changes in the present. These contemporary images can be both “horizontal”—in the sense of “capturing a fluid geography…that constantly negates and transcends matters of a map”—and “vertical”—allowing “access to an inside, an interior…” (de Boeck and Baloji, 2016, p. 24). Indeed, incorporating a map of the mission field from the 1870s as the third postcard of the collection (p. 4), and then zooming in to smaller, ephemeral details from the past and the present illustrates that the map does not define the territory in Niam. Correspondingly, the choice to represent contemporary images in stylized black and white plays with light and shadow, illumination and darkness and adds depth to the images. Shooting contemporary images in black and white also reduces the distractions introduced by color while heightening the affective component of the pictures. While colors can direct our gaze somewhere specific, black and white has the potential of enhancing depth of field which can accentuate contemplation. Verticality is also present in the historical palimpsests that structure the contemporary—“different times convert into the space of the now” (de Boeck and Baloji, 2016, p. 25). We will notice some of these palimpsestic overlays and “depth” readings in my analyses of photographs later.

Allied with these images, both archival and contemporary, are the typescripts used in the postcards. Words often emulate ink-stamps or the text used is quite often faded. Consider, for instance, the postcard titled “View of Pandua where the First Khasi was Baptised Khasi Hills Bangla Border (2006)” (p. 7) which is juxtaposed with a fading typescript of the Adityanath government’s anti-conversion law. The picture is a pastoral one of a distant landscape shrouded by clouds, recalling the Sanskritized name of Meghalaya—“abode of the clouds.” This image, at once romantic and remote, signals the spatial distance of this frontier space from the mainland Indian imagination. It is as if the viewer has to literally pierce through the layer of clouds to gaze at the borderland scene. But the mention of the first baptism with the graffiti-like juxtaposition of faded official typescript shows the steady and violent incursion of national time into “remote” borderland spaces.

The tension between suspension and unfolding, national time and other times, emerges best in still shots of stones. The key to unlocking the potential of this tension lies in one of Bhartiya’s (couplets in Hindi translated thus: “Should we undress these graves/From behind the spectacles of knowledge should we read these stones” (2021, p. 76).  The lithic invokes both “surface” and “depth” readings.[6] The interrogations in Bhartiya’s couplet play with this interface between surfaces and depths through the deployment of the verbs “undress” and “read.” While images of stones abound (monoliths, ruins, structures hewn from stone like gravestones), a contrast between two images again illustrates the rebus-like character of the photomontage. Consider the interplay between image and text in the second postcard from the collection (Figure 3):

Figure 3

Ancient stone monoliths like the one in the photograph performed ritualistic and memorial functions. Cecile Mawlong (2020) writes that:

Khasi-Jaintia megaliths are collectively called mawbynna or maw­pynbna (literally ‘stones of proclamation’). These terms suggest that the stone monuments are primarily commemorative in nature, their main function being that of conservation of social memories. As collective referents the monuments played an important role in the maintenance of institutional facts. (pp. 55–6)

Some of these institutional facts include both the commemoration of funerary rituals and keeping alive “significant socio-economic­political events such as setting up of markets, noteworthy or unfamiliar happenings or as in many cases, as memorials in honour of ancestors/ancestresses of a lineage or clan” (p. 56). The text on the postcard in Niam that accompanies this image above is the concluding quartet translated by the novelist Bijoya Sawian (2016) from a 1902 publication—“Ka Jingsneng Tymmen” (The Teachings of Elders) by U Radhon Singh Berry Kharwanlang. U Radhon Singh is a central figure in the institutionalization of the modern Khasi script, as he made the Roman script disseminated by the Welsh missionaries receptive to the modulations of Khasi speech patterns. He was also a member of the Seng Khasi, a revivalist movement that began in 1899, and a protector of the Niam Tynrai (traditional faith).[7] The quartet is introduced by the title “Conclusion” (mirroring the “Conclusion” of Ka Jingsneng Tymmen) and reads: “O! Wondrous Khasi Culture, /Where are you now? /In the people’s hearts and souls /Or where you are listened to no more?” Much like Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s epigraph by William Ralph Inge to Chapter 3 of his epic novel Funeral Nights—“The future of a country is safe only in the hands of those to whom her past is dear” (p. 141)—this quartet plays on the dialectic between remembrance and forgetting. But what is being forgotten and what needs to be remembered? In “5 Questions on Khasi Identity” (2016), Wanphrang Diengdoh lauds the Seng Khasi as “the greatest cultural movement the Khasis have ever had” (np), while being simultaneously critical of its claims towards purity and non-contamination by other faiths. Suffice it to add that revivalist movements like the Seng Khasi, while instituting essentialist claims for cultural purity and continuity as a reaction against the steady incursions and violent discontinuities instituted by colonial modernity, also gesture towards elements of a precolonial past that slowly gets forgotten or steadily recedes like a line drawn in sand. The monumental presence of the lithic memorials is an invitation to “listen” to this receding past which is steadily subsumed by the colonial and the national modern.

This injunction to listen to the forgotten past becomes especially important now, as Hindutva discourse makes its own colonizing incursions into the region. Hindutva is a fundamentally monotheistic ideology (Basu 2020). While Hindutva is monotheistic, actual Hindutva proselytizing practices are defined by shape-shifting and flexible positionalities as it tries to draw the divergent cosmologies of “tribal” religions within its fold. Of particular interest here is how Hindutva actors in Northeast India deploy the language of global indigeneity, polytheism and paganism to show connections between indigenous religions in the region and Hinduism. Arkotong Longkumer (2020) writes that a 2005 BJP party document titled “Evolution of the BJP”, draws on the works of anthropologists on local and global aspects of indigeneity to argue that:

…paganism relates, crucially, to local gods and ancestors of the land, based on ideas of polytheism…In summing up the basic overlap between paganism and Hinduism, the BJP text says: ‘In a sense at the basic level Hinduism is a pagan religion. As Paganism allows for evolution Hinduism too allows for evolution. Since Paganism is the belief in many Gods there is generally no fight over Gods. This is the greatest virtue of Polytheism…Once Hinduism is expressed along these lines, then, it has the potential to relate with other native traditions that are intimately connected to land. (pp. 115–16)

While Hindutva proselytization in Northeast India is still an ongoing and contested process, such sentiments about polytheism are often invoked by Hindutva activists on the field to contest the animosity that monotheistic faiths like Christianity display against “pagan” and animist belief systems. This has also been the Hindutva strategy of attempting to subsume local faith systems like the Seng Khasi within its fold, as Longkumer illustrates with his vignette about “Neil’s” ambivalent relationship with the RSS (pp. 37-8).

 The reverberations of this image-text combination of the ritualistic monolith at Sohra in Niam echo later with the concluding image of the photomontage (Figure 4):

Figure 4

The caste Hindu icons inscribed on the surface of tribal monoliths are another example of the inscription of nation(alistic) time into “frontierized” space. As mentioned, the attempt to subsume indigenous belief systems into Hindutva worldviews is an ongoing project in the region and this image is a visual representation of that process. Contrast this with Radhon Sing’s injunction to “listen.” Does the monumental stillness of stone enjoin us to listen to other stories and other times enclosed in the depths of the deep historical time of lithic material? The conclusion of Niam is hinted at the beginning while the actual conclusion may be less of a closure than the stirrings of something ominously unpredictable and open-ended. Photographs may be still, a representation of “embalmed time” (Bazin, 1960, p. 8), just like the lithic petrifies time (Cohen, 2015). But immanent in them is the possibility of unpredictable and multiple unfoldings in the ordinary.

What then of Christianity and its role in Meghalaya and the Northeast region writ large? On the one hand, Christianity is definitely a religion brought by the colonizer; on the other hand, as scholars like Sanjib Baruah (2020) have written, Christianity also functions as a powerful discourse of alternative/oppositional modernity in the region (p. 16). This aspect is clearly mentioned in the seventh, eighth and tenth epigrams that preface Niam.

7.
But being a Christian (or for that matter Muslim) in India these days is not a joke. India is being remade. Once celebrated as a great pluralist success of decolonized nation-building, many of its postcolonial benchmarks like secularism and religious freedom are being quickly reworked, erased, made redundant in an authoritarian imagination of a monochromatic decolonized Hindu India.
State after state legislates laws that criminalize ‘foreign’ faith.

8.
For the minuscule indigenous population in India’s North-eastern hills, where Christianity is the primary mode of its faith community, mainland India seems increasingly a foreign land. A foreign land whose masters can once again hound Rev. Thomas Jones out of their imagination.
…

10.
Niam/Faith/Hynñiewtrep. 100 picture post cards. 100 memories. 100 ephemeral ways of thinking about faith, colonialism and history. (np)

While Bhartiya’s “ephemeral” method when taken as a whole makes us ponder large questions about “faith, colonialism and history,” the role of Christianity as a nativized religion and the ideological and emotional distance between mainland and borderland, transversal readings of text and image also reveals how a world religion enters quotidian lifeworlds. Here’s one illustration of a transversal contrast. The nostalgic feel, monumental solidity and aura of old, bound and translated Bibles in an archive in “First Four Bible Translations in Khasi Serampore College Library, Bengal 2018” (Figure 5; p. 27) and “Translated Bibles, Serampore College Bengal (2016)” (p. 89) contrast with the image of cheap, mechanically reproduced religious literature or religious images displayed in “Books for Sale at a Church Meeting Kynshi, Khasi Hills (2016)” (Figure 6; p. 80) and “Madanryting, Shillong (2014”) (p. 100).

Figure 5

Figure 6

Walter Benjamin (1969) says that the aura of an artwork is predicated on the unique position it occupies in space and time. The uniqueness of the auratic art object engenders distance and attitudes of awe and veneration. The object assumes a sovereign position. Mechanical reproduction shatters that distance and renders aura unexceptional as multiple copies can be made of that same artwork. The artwork becomes quotidian, easily accessible. Sovereignty is rendered demotic. The nostalgia evoked by the archived, bound Bibles in Serampore and their old-world and vulnerable materiality (bound in leather and resin, tied with twine) can only be experienced in one place at specific times. Contrast this with easily available and distributable mechanically reproduced religious literature and images as in Figure 6—this is one of the myriad ways through which religious discourse is vernacularized, and the aura of the book rendered common and unexceptional.

Niam also contrasts various states of aliveness and tending towards death, especially in shots of natural landscapes. Consider two images here that allude to activities of extraction in a resource frontier and counterpoint each other. Scholars like Baruah, Bengt Karlsson (2012) and Dolly Kikon (2019) discuss the complexities of discourses on resource extraction like coal, oil and uranium in the region. I would not go into a detailed explication of these complex discourses but will consider the impact of what Kikon calls “carbon fantasies” in the region through a consideration of two photographs. Consider first the denuded landscape in “Presbyterian Church in Coal Country Shallang, Khasi Hills (2015)” (Figure 7; p. 62)

Figure 7

The dry, dusty and denuded landscape depicted here is an expression of a form of being towards death. The Presbyterian Church in the small hillock seems to stand like a melancholy sentinel watching over the denuded landscape in the foreground of the image. Bhartiya’s montage, however, also facilitates a contemplation of the function of photography as speculative fiction, as the image above echoes uncomfortably with the natural plenitude on offer in “New Church Uranium Country Khasi Hills (2006)” (Figure 8, p. 96). If carbon fantasies and their extractive practices proliferate in the region, we cannot help speculating that the image from 2015 could very well be the future of the image from 2006. The Presbyterian Church is a melancholy sentinel in a dusty landscape; the new thatched church could be a witness to extraction and denudation in the future. This futural projection merges like a palimpsest with the past as Bhartiya splits one of Thomas Jones’ pronouncements, culled from Andrew May’s book (p. 215), into two prefacing and bookending Figure 8: ““If I kept silent,” Thomas Jones wrote in his 1849 manifesto to the Government of India before he was hounded to his death by the British authorities…“I would be a partaker of the sins of their oppressors” (pp. 95–6).[8]

Figure 8

Paradoxically, spaces of death and commemoration could very well be heralds of new life. Roughly towards the middle of the photomontage, we come across a triptych of images of ruins—“Clan Cromlech, Ummat, Khasi-Hills, Assam Border” (2018), “Christian Cemetery, Mawsynram, Khasi Hills (2015)” and “Missionary Graves, Sohra, Khasi Hills (2015)” (pp. 54-6). This triptych merges with a later image titled—“Remnants of an Early Church Shella, Khasi-Bangla Border (2017)” (p. 95)—which incidentally is the image immediately preceding “New Church, Uranium Country, Khasi Hills (2006)” (p. 96), accentuating the palimpsestic nature of the past, present and the future again. In the earlier trifecta of images, the text on the postcards emphasizes the strictures and restrictions on marriage in the UP anti-conversion act, while the first part of Jones’ pronouncements quoted earlier bookends “Remnants of an Early Church…” The draconian incursion of sovereign law into the realm of the private (that of marriage) is counterpointed by Jones’ incomplete assertion “If I stay silent…” In terms of the images, two readings are possible. First image of graves and ruins are signifiers of how the past haunts the present. These images are of “places stained by time” where “time can only be experienced as broken…” (Fisher, 2012, p. 21). The juxtaposition of image and text here is an injunction to act in these chasms opened up by broken time—“If I stay silent…” On the other hand, the proliferation of vegetal life in these pictures remind us of Georg Simmel’s (1959) pronouncement on the duality of the ruin—“The ruin of a building…means that where the work of art is dying, other forces and forms, those of nature, have grown, and that out of what of art still lives in the ruin and what of nature already lives in it, there has emerged a new whole, a characteristic unity” (p. 260). Ruins are a form of “sinking from life but still the settings of life” (Raffles, 2020; p. 148). The sheer luxuriousness of nature endows the images with a strange beauty—out of the putrefaction of death, as Georges Bataille (1985) reminds us, emerges blooms of new life. Death here is not a limit condition, but the very source of life and living. Natural growth and the ruins of human infrastructure create a new whole.

Thus far, I have been talking about the first two levels of meaning-making in Bhartiya’s photomontage. What of the third level—the immanent possibilities of the everyday that emerge from the contemplation of an image? I develop this point via a thematic contrast emerging from contrapuntal images of ecstasy with those of sleeping. Achille Mbembe (2003) writes that in ecstatic temporality: “The future, here, can be authentically anticipated, but not in the present. The present itself is but a moment of vision—vision of the freedom not yet come” (p. 39). We notice this temporality in an image titled “Revival Service Shillong (2006)” (Figure 9; p. 24).  The believer’s face is intense, his eyes shut tight, as he seems to sway to a rhythm that propels him towards the otherness that resides in his self. He is in this place but seems to be transported ecstatically to an-other space and time altogether.

Figure 9

Contrast representations of ecstatic temporality with moments where narratives suspend themselves and glitches in narratives of self or home unfold surreptitiously. A striking moment arises in the postcard titled “Prayers in a New Church, Domkhomen, Khasi Hills (2017)” (Figure 10; p. 17).

Figure 10

While most of the congregation is absorbed in prayer, three boys in the front row sleep, bend low or look awry. A young man in the third row seems to have fallen asleep leaning on the wall. This image resonates with an earlier one—“Praying before Baptism Khasi Hills (2015)” (p. 5)—a frontal shot of a group of people on a single bench praying. While everyone else has their necks slightly bent in postures of supplication, a young lady holding a swaddled infant bends her neck slightly to the left. Is she praying or has she nodded off to sleep? Sleep or distraction is a “simple stopping,” an irruption in a community project predicated on the seriousness and discipline of prayer. Sleep is also a portal to “layers of unadministered life, life at least partially detached from disciplinary imperatives” (Sterne, 2013, p. 68). If in ecstatic temporality, the self is taken over by an otherness within itself, inadvertent sleep or the detemporalization engendered by daydream or reverie (Bachelard, 1960, p. 116) represents fugitive moments stolen away right under the gaze of projects of pastoral care. A project of religious piety is momentarily suspended, and gets entangled with a host of alternative speculations: What was that young boy gazing at when he stares at the wall? Was the woman dreaming about something in her state that teeters ambiguously between a suspension of attention (the somnolence of prayer) and an inadvertent nodding off to sleep and inattention?  These moments captured in an unscripted manner by the camera are instances of “ordinary affect”—what Stewart calls “an animate circuit that conducts force and maps connections, routes and disjunctures” (p. 3). These ephemeral moments illustrate the fugitive element of the quotidian. We can begin plotting alternative pathways to the present during the sudden, unanticipated irruption of such contingent moments.

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

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

Notes

[1]Hynñiewtrep is a cognate name for different tribes in Meghalaya.

[2] Gwalia in Khasia (1994) is a book written by the Welsh poet, Nigel Jenkins. Kynpham Sing Nongkyrih fictionalizes his encounters with Jenkins in the first chapter of Funeral Nights (2021).

[3] This picture also appears in May (p. 232).

[4] Thomas Jones (1810–49) was a controversial Welsh missionary who worked in Meghalaya and is credited with recording Khasi in Roman script. For an account of his short and troubled life, see Chapters 1-2 and 8-11 of May (2012).

[5] This agential nativization of Christianity is also emphasized by Bhartiya in a conversation with Paramita Ghosh (2022): “In the Hinduised notion of faith, conversion is seen as an encounter between ignorant people and powerful missionaries…In the Khasi hills, however, converting to Christianity was a difficult proposition. Converts risked breaking traditional kinship and family ties. But even when they converted, they did not automatically accept the western Christian worldview. They could challenge even the missionaries if they saw that the missionaries did not hold up to the Christian values. Khasis want to be Christians on their own terms.”

[6] For “surface” and “depth” readings of stone, see Williams (2018).

[7] For more details on Radhon Sing and the context surrounding the publication of The Teachings of Elders, see Diengdoh’s “Politics of Religion in Khasi-Jaintia Hills” (2016).

[8] It must be kept in mind though that Jones’ 1848 petition listing the grievances of the “Kassias” was not a claim to recognize the coeval status of the colonized. Mays writes: “Jones’ petition was not a general ideological plea for native rights under colonialism, but a critique of the specific application of the rule of law” (p. 215).

References:

Bachelard, Gaston. (1960). The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language and the Cosmos. Trans. Daniel Russell. Beacon Books.

Baruah, Sanjib. (2020). In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast. Stanford University Press.

Basu, Anustup. (2020). Hindutva as Political Monotheism. Duke University Press.

Bataille, Georges (1985). “The Language of Flowers.” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Ed. Allan Stoekl. Trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr. University of Minnesota Press, pp. 10–15.           

Bazin, Andre. (1960). “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” Trans. Hugh Gray. Film Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Summer 1960), pp. 4–9.

Benjamin, Walter. (1969). “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Trans. Harry Zohn. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Schocken Books, pp. 166–95.

Bhabha, Homi K. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” The Location of Culture (2nd Edition). Routledge, 1994. pp. 121–31.

Bhartiya, Tarun. (2021). Niam/Faith/Hynñiewtrep. Unpublished manuscript.

Cohen, Jeffrey J. (2015). Stone: An Inhuman History. University of Minnesota Press.

de Boeck, Filip and Sammy Baloji. (2016). Suturing the City: Living Together in Congo’s Urban  Worlds. Autograph ABP.

Diengdoh, Wangphrang. (2016). “5 Questions about Khasi Identity.” https://raiot.in/5-questions-about-khasi-identity/

—. (2016). “Politics of Religion in Khasi-Jaintia Hills.” https://raiot.in/politics-of-religion-in-khasi-jaintia-hills 

Fisher, Mark. (2012). “What is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly, 66 (1), pp. 16–24.

Ghosh, Paramita. (2022). “Missionary is not a Popular Word in India. But in the Khasi Hills it Holds a Different Meaning.” https://theprint.in/features/missionary-is-not-a-popular- word-in-india-but-in-the-khasi-hills-it-holds-a-different-meaning/751501/

Jenkins, Nigel. (1994). Gwalia in Khasia: A Visit to the Site, in India, of the Biggest Overseas Venture Ever Sustained by the Welsh. Gomer.

Karlsson, Bengt. G. (2011). Unruly Hills: A Political Ecology of India’s Northeast. Berghahn Books.

Kharwanlang, Radhon Sing Berry. (2016). The Teaching of Elders: Ka Jingsneng Tymmen. T Trans. Bijoya Sawian. VKIC.

Kikon, Dolly. (2019). Living with Coal and Oil: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India. University of Washington Press.

Longkumer, Arkotong. (2020). The Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast. Stanford University Press.

Marks, Laura U. (2015). “Monad, Database, Remix: Manners of Unfolding in The Last Angel of  History.” Vol. 6, No. 2, Spring 2015, pp. 112–34.

Mawlong, Cecile. (2020). “History Etched in Stone: A Study of the Khasi-Jaintia Megalithic       Tradition.” The Cultural Heritage of Meghalaya. Ed. Queenbala Marak and Sarit K. Chaudhury. Routledge, pp. 47–68.

May, Andrew J. (2012). Welsh Missionaries and British Imperialism: The Empire of Clouds in Northeast India. Manchester University Press.

Mbembe, J. Achille. (2003). “Necropolitics.” Trans. Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15.1, pp. 11–   40.

McClintock, Anne. (1993). “Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family.” Feminist Review, No. 44, Summer 1993, pp. 61–80.

Nongkynrih, Kynpham Sing. (2021). Funeral Nights. Westland Publications Limited.

Pachuau, Joy L.K. and Willem van Schendel. (2015). The Camera as Witness: A Social History of Mizoram, Northeast India. Cambridge University Press.

Raffles, Hugh. (2020). The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time. Pantheon Books.

Simmel, Georg. (1959). “The Ruin.” Georg Simmel: 1858-1918. Ed. K. Wolff. Ohio State    University Press, pp. 259–66.

Sterne, Jonathan. (2013). 24/7. Verso.

Stewart, Kathleen. (2007). Ordinary Affects. Duke University Press.

Williams, Daniel. (2018). “Coetzee’s Stones: Dusklands and the Nonhuman Witness.” Safundi. http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/17533171.2018.14728   29.

Amit Rahul Baishya is the Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Oklahoma, USA. He has recently published his book, Contemporary Literature from Northeast India: Deathworlds, Terror and Survival (Routledge). He has also edited, Postcolonial Animalities (Routledge)

Internal Instabilities: Nationalism in the Context of Nagaland with reference to Select Novels

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Anjali Daimari
Dept of English, Gauhati University, Guwahati, Assam. Email: anjalidaimari@gauhati.ac.in

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages 1–10. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne03

First published: June 09, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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Internal Instabilities: Nationalism in the Context of Nagaland with reference to Select Novels

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to explore the internal instabilities within the idea of nationalism through a reading of Birendra Bhattacharyya’s Yaruingam and Easterine Kire’s Bitter Wormwood. It would look into Nationalism in the context of Nagaland which offers an alternative idiom in so far as any discussion on the idea of nation is concerned. Any discourse on nationalism in India would have to take into account the discursive contradictions of ideas inherent in it. Taking into consideration the views of Gandhi, Tagore and Ambedkar, the paper strives to begin with the premise that the idea of nationalism in the Indian context is inherent in its internal instabilities and inherent contradictions. As such, years after independence, India continues to deal with its effects as there have been autonomy movements as diverse groups within Northeast India find itself absent in the narrative of the nation. Nagaland, the focus of this paper, for instance, wanted secessionism. The Naga case through a reading of the texts taken for the study offers insights into this vexed Naga crises.

Key Words: Nation, Nationalism, Nagaland, History, Representation

This paper would look into nationalism in the context of Northeast India which offers an alternative idiom in any discussion on the idea of nation is concerned. Any discourse on nationalism in India would take into account the discursive contradictions of ideas inherent in it. In their essay “The Nationalism Debate, Concerns and Constitutional Response” Luthra and Mukhija rightly point out how “in India, nationalism was once synonymous with the freedom struggle” (2018, p. 1). They write:

For a colonized people, for whom unity was needed to weave together different peoples and regions with diverse cultures to obtain freedom from British rule, nationalism was a liberating force, a promise of equality and freedom from colonial subjugation. (Luthra & Mukhija, 2018, p. 1)

While Gandhi and Tagore’s views on Nationalism were subtly different from each other, they both felt the need to unite the people against the throes of British colonialism. In Hind Swaraj Gandhi writes: “The Congress brought together Indians from different parts of India, and enthused us with the idea of nationality” (1933, p. 22).  While the Indian National Congress floated the idea of a homogenous nationalism taking into its fold all Indians, Tagore critically problematised the idea of homogenous nationalism as evident in his book Nationalism.  To Tagore the basis of unity is not ‘political’, he calls for “spiritual unity of all human beings” (2015, p. 25). At a point he almost speaks of nationalism as a “great menace” and is cognizant of the contradictions in the idea of nationalism, especially in the context of the emerging nation. B.R. Ambedkar, after Tagore, in a more concrete manner posed the issues of internal instability within that idea of nationalism. He brought in the question of caste which was inherent in Indian society. His demand for reservations in elections for the lower castes brought him in direct conflict with Gandhi. Therefore, from the very beginning, in India the idea of nation is inherent with its internal instabilities and contradictions.

The idea of nation undergoes periodic interventions contingent upon the political climate. After Independence, more so, this idea of nation has been questioned from multiple sites. Many groups within Northeast India found themselves absent in the narrative of the nation. Many groups in Nagaland for instance, wanted secession. As mentioned by Udayon Mishra in his essay, “The Margin Strikes Back” the Nagas “seemed psychologically unprepared to enter the Indian Union in 1947” (2005, p. 267). They were not ready to accede to the Indian union maintaining that since “the Nagas were never a part of India, the question of their secession from India did not arise” (2005, p. 267). To the Nagas “theirs was a national struggle for independence, and not a secessionist movement” (2005, p. 267). There was tentativeness on the part of the Indian nation to identify her own people as her citizens. The Naga case opened up possibilities of reconstructing the idea of nation with an alternative idiom. The Nagas did not conform to any one idea of Indian nation. As such they offered crises for the emerging nation and a new narrative of nation emerged, which is multivalent and decentred. This paper is an attempt to explore the internal instabilities within the idea of nation and nationalism as represented in fictions through a reading of Birendra Bhattacharyya’s Yaruingam and Easterine Kire’s Bitter Wormwood (2011). For an understanding of the nationalism debate in the Naga context, Udayon Misra’s The Periphery Strikes Back (2000) as well as Sanjib Baruah’s understanding of the entire Naga imbroglio as discussed in his works In the Name of the Nation (2021) have been referred to. Homen Borgohain’s and Pradipta Borgohain’s work Scrolls of Strife also offers a nuanced understanding of this entire Naga Nationalism issue taking us through the accounts of people whose reflections on the issue become pertinent. Charle Chasie’s chapters on nationalism in his book The Naga Imbroglio (A Personal Perspective) also provide critical inputs and perspectives into the current reading.

I

As I write this paper, a particular region in Nagaland, Mon District is reeling in protests over the firing at innocent mine labourers by the Assam Rifles which has resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians. The Hindu, December 12, 2021 reported “at least 14 civilians and one soldier were killed in a botched ambush and retaliatory violence in Nagaland’s Mon district on December 4 and December 5”. The news report further states that “following the incident, protests erupted across Nagaland”. The chequered normalcy prevailing in the region has once again been disturbed which brings back to reference the trust deficit the Nagas always had so far as being a part of the Indian Nation was concerned. To place my paper in the context of this internal instability I refer to Udayon Misra’s The Periphery Strikes Back (2000) where he points out the fact that “the Indian nation-state is today facing some of its gravest challenges, with the entire process of nation-building being questioned.” (p10) He observes that the idea of the ‘mainstream’ is constantly being re-defined.  The question of mainstream always brings into reference the question of the ‘other’. And as Misra observes, this binary has for long fractured the Indian nation. He writes time and again the Indian nation-state has had to work out new strategies and adjustments to deal with the issues raised by different autonomist and “secessionist” movements of the northeast region. To quote him: “the idea of ‘one nation’ which gathered strength during the country’s freedom struggle and which was buttressed up during the years immediately following the partition of the country and its independence, received its first jolt in the hills of the northeastern region” (2000, p. 10).

The Northeast was virtually untouched by the freedom struggle and historically it was ‘outside the pale of Indian civilisation’. The Indian authorities failed to understand and appreciate the demands for autonomy that were raised in the Naga hills and other areas soon after independence (Misra, 2000, p.10). The Nagas challenged the nation-state by claiming independence even before the Indian independence. Charles Chasie’s book The Naga Imbroglio (A Personal Perspective) offers an insider’s perspective into the question of Naga nationhood albeit from a very personal point of view. In a chapter “Naga Nationalism”, Chasie goes into the root of the Naga imbroglio tracing it to the Treaty of Yandaboo in 1826 as “the first British action that affected the Naga people” and “which, while demarcating the boundary between India and Burma, caused the vivisection of Naga country’ (1999, p. 23). He goes on to add that “the people who would be so brutally affected and balkanized were given no opportunity of a say when the so-called boundaries were first demarcated from the drawing boards in distant places” (1999, p. 23). Misra observes that the Indian nationalist leaders never understood the Naga demand that since they were outside the ambit of Indian nationalism, they be allowed to shape their own destiny (2000, p.15). The authors of Scrolls of Strife capture in the “Introduction” to their work how the Northeast India has always been at the receiving end of misinformation that surrounds the people here: “Widespread ignorance and indifference has almost shut out the strategically crucial border regions from the mainstream consciousness with telling – and often tragic – consequences” (2011, p. 3). In the chapter “Mediators, Meddlers and Muddlers”, the book takes into account the many parties that were at work to bring a resolution to the Naga crisis over time. The interventions of Gandhi, Nehru, Jayprakash Narayan, Rajagopalachari, Indira Gandhi, all have been analyzed to show their equations in finding a solution to the Naga deadlock. The authors observe that, if some like Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan, and to some extent Indira Gandhi, still stay in the hearts of the Nagas for their openness, the stubbornness of some of the leaders seems to have stood in the way for any kind of negotiations for a considerable period of time. They write and rightly so that “the Nagas have had to contend with the intrusion of outside forces. In fact, the ‘endlessness’ of the history of the Nagas is precisely because they have still not managed to come to terms with such outside forces” (2011, p. 5).

All too often there was a tendency to dismiss the Naga struggle as a secessionist movement inspired and abetted by foreign missionaries who had been exploiting the fierce feeling of independence of the hill tribes to break up the Indian nation (Misra, 2000, p. 16). Sanjib Baruah (2021) in his book In the Name of the Nation makes a similar point when he says that “there is ample expression in contemporary Indian popular culture of the Northeast as a place of danger located outside the effective boundaries of the nation” (p. 13). He goes on to reason the “commonly used phrase “Northeast policy” which is itself quite telling” and in this context he quotes Mrinal Miri, who once asked “To whom, or for whom do you have a policy? The Northeast is a part of this country and at the same time we think that the people of the Northeast should be made the object of a policy” (Baruah, 2021, p.13).” Baruah goes on to further reiterate that “to be made an object of policy implies that the peoples of the region are not in a relationship of” what Mrinal Miri calls “human concerns such as love, friendship, understanding of the other” but what  is actually to be “in a relationship of manager and managed” (Baruah, 2021, p. 13).

The national leadership did not respond positively to the Naga apprehensions about their future identity in spite of their consistent demands of being separate from the Indian imagination of the nation. Right from the beginning of the Naga struggle, the Naga National Council, the political wing of the underground Naga Federal government, had been consistently maintaining that the Nagas form an independent nationality (Misra, 2000, p. 17).

In his book, Sanjib Baruah (2021) in his book, In the Name of the Nation, traces the history of the Naga movement very closely also insinuating an idea about the role that the missionaries could have had in fostering a “pan-Naga identity” (p. 106). He writes: “The idea of a Naga nation developed hand in hand with the process of conversion to Baptist Christianity….Christian proselytization is a key theme in the campaign for Naga nationhood” (p. 106). This is reinforced in the slogan “Nagas for Christ”, a fact that has been stated in the novels under study as well by the authors of Scrolls of Strife (2011). Therefore, in the project of nationhood, it becomes important for the Naga nationalists to promote a contingent Naga identity that is all-inclusive rendering the “tribal loyalties as residues of a premodern past and an obstacle to Naga solidarity” (Baruah, 2021, p. 107). Baruah observes that “the ‘enlightened and modern’ world of Christianity is inseparable from the idea of the Naga Nation” (2021, p. 107).

The narrative of Naga nationalism began way back in 1929 with the Naga Club’s petition to the Simon Commission and the Naga’s declared Independence on 14 August 1947, a day before the Indian Independence Day. However, the Naga demand for recognition as an independent country still is caught up in a deadlock, and as Baruah observes “neither the Indian government is willing to accept its sovereignty clause nor do the Naga groups leave it aside in discussion tables” (2021, p. 125). In the 75 years since the beginning of the Naga imbroglio, the parties involved seem “ill-equipped to resolve this complex conflict with multiple stake-holders” (Baruah, p. 125). As this ‘endlessness’ continues, the fictional representations of the Naga struggle and their aspirations for an independent nation offer rich sites for critical scrutiny.

 II

We find in Birendra Kumar Bhattacharyya’s Yaruingam as one of the first takes on the issue of Naga nationalism as far as fictional representation is concerned. Having worked as a teacher among the Nagas in the late fifties in the Venture Christian High School at Ukhrul in Manipur, his attempt at understanding the complex Naga problem offers an insider/outsider perspective to an issue that remains to be solved even today. Published in 2011, in the novel Bitter Wormwood, Easterine Kire once again enters this terrain to offer a perspective from within the community which to a reader appears to end almost on the same conciliatory note that Yaruingam ends in suggesting the need to move on but through writing, also suggesting the importance of remembering those struggles and what fighting for a nation means.

Yaruingam, first written in Assamese and published in 1960, was translated and published in English in 1984. As an early work, the novel gives the readers a sense of the movement that was to unfold years later as it became more violent and could muster up large-scale support towards a separate Nagalim. The author presents in his fiction the tension at play even as India was on the cusp of Independence fighting to throw the British rule. The novel is set just after the Second World War when the Indians were a part of the Allied forces and how the Naga villages also came in contact with the Allied and the Japanese army. As Bhattacharyya writes in the “Preface” to the English translation: “The scars of the great Imphal battle were visible on the hilly land mass in and around Ukhrul. The war affected people’s minds greatly, and changed their lifestyles. Their physical and moral sufferings were considerable” (Bhattacharyya, 1984, para 2).

The novel is, on the one hand, about the young people like Rishang, Phanitphang, Khating, Khaiko, Jivan, Sharengla and Khutingla who are trapped between tradition and modernity, between struggle and Independence, between community and the idea of a nation   which is again extended to the rift between the old faith and Christianity which many Nagas had embraced. On the other hand, we have old guards like Ngathingkhui and Yengmaso who cannot stand each other although their son and daughter are betrothed to each other. The leadership of the movement is led by Videssilie who stands as sharp contrast to Rishang who is a Gandhian in the novel speaking for peace, harmony and understanding and who believes in non-violence.

Easterine Kire wrote Bitter Wormwood in 2011 soon after Mari which was published in 2010. While Mari was written in the backdrop of World War II in Kohima, Bitter Wormwood chronicles the Naga struggle for Independence. The preoccupation of Kire in war and violence in two consecutive novels itself speaks of the impact these events had in the lives of the people. In the early 20th century, the thought of nation and nationalism was nascent in the Naga community as the people were too happy to ally with the British in fighting the Japanese. In the Author’s note to Mari Kire writes, “the Battle of Kohima came to be called ‘the forgotten battle’ and its veterans the ‘forgotten heroes’ (2010, p. x). She writes:

For Mari and the others of her generation, World War II and the Japanese invasion of our lands was the most momentous period of their lives. Everything happened at the same time. Growing up, falling in love, war, homelessness, starvation, death and parting and finally, peace. All my oral narrators told me this about the war: ‘It altered our lives completely’. (2010, p. viii).

Kire further writes what was remarkable about the War by the Nagas, was “that people have very little memory of what they were doing before the war years” (2010, p. viii). Assessing peoples participation in both the wars Kire writes: “The Naga freedom struggle that followed upon the heels of the war cast a dark shadow over our lands. In retrospect, there are many who continue to see the war years as the best years of their lives” (2010, p. ix). So, writing in 2011, Kire, in Bitter Wormwood, tries to make sense of Naga freedom struggle which she wrote “cast a dark shadow over our lands”. A reading of Bitter Wormwood clearly shows that the novelist is attempting to write the history of Naga freedom struggle through her fictional text. It is more about the movement than about the characters and it reveals the amount of research involved for this kind of writing. The Author’s Introduction to Bitter Wormwood is a statement of her intention in recovering “a story hidden for several decades” (2011, p. 2). The novelist demands a knowing reader to understand “the struggle for independence from India by the Naga people” (2011, p. 2). Though she gives a detail of the facts of the movement beginning from 1956 and what the struggle meant for the Nagas through available records, she maintains that the “book is not meant to be read as a history textbook” (2011, p. 6). She writes that the “book is not about the leaders and heroes of the Naga struggle” but it is about the ordinary people whose lives were completely overturned by the freedom struggle” (2011, p. 6) She writes, “the conflict is not more important than the people who are its victims” (2011, p. 6). The Appendix at the end of the novel details some of the relevant documents crucial to finding a solution to the Naga deadlock ending with a very moving speech by Niketu Iralu where he seems to voice the growing uncertainty to the Naga crisis hoping for some change for the better for the generation of Nagas to follow.

In this paper, the attempt is to see how this idea of nation and nationalism is played in the Naga imagination through a depiction of the lives of the people during the World War II and the Naga freedom struggle as represented in the fictional texts under study. The Naga involvement in the Second World War is one of the central themes in Yaruingam. As noted by the authors of Scrolls of Strife, “Kohima and a few other parts of Nagaland were almost the only parts of India which became theatres of the World War” (2011, p. 76). Referring to Bhattacharyya’s novel they observe:

Serving as a teacher in the troubled decade of the 1950’s Bhattacharyya had an opportunity to study Naga life, first hand. He was also a member of the goodwill visit to the Naga Hills in the early 1950s, along with the then President of the Assam Congress Party and later chief minister of Assam, Bimala Prasad Chaliha, as well as other political leaders. (2011, p. 61)

Bhattacharyya, as they write, “was fascinated by the philosophies, customs, and habits of this proud and intrepid race. He attempts to deconstruct the notion of the unthinking, spontaneous tribal, leading ‘a barbaric yet innocent and idyllic life’ far from ‘mad civilization’” (2011, p. 61). The authors note that though Bhattachayya may seem nationalistic prescribing to Gandhian agenda still the very fact that “he makes many of the principal Naga characters contemplative, perceptive, and articulate, is in itself already an important achievement” and further “it succeeds in combating the stereotypes of either the bloodthirsty insurgent or the noble savage” (2011, p. 61). They go on to add, “In the novel, insurgency is depicted as only one aspect of a larger composite canvas of Naga aspirations and identity formation” (2011, p. 61). As we read in Yaruingam, when Rishang goes to Kolkota, this feeling of alienation from the majority is not so apparent but in Kire’s novel Bitter Wormwood this estrangement from the mainland and the sense of otherness of the Nagas is much more obvious in the character of Neibou.

The challenges to the idea of nation are reflected very poignantly in Kire’s Bitter Wormwood. The setting of the novel in the specific timeframe and the continued struggle of the Nagas for an Independent Nagaland makes such a reading possible. The perspective of the author/narrator becomes instrumental in destabilizing the otherwise grand rhetoric of the nation. In the novel the narrator exposes the factionalism among the Nagas that leads to killings and Neituo, Mose’s friend in the novel, rues the fact that the main cause of the movement gets lost: “Don’t you see that factionalism would fight India’s war for her, simply pit Naga against Naga” (Kire, 2011, p. 120). It is a known fact that the “identity categories which the tribes hold dear… more often than not divides rather than unites” (Baruah, 2021, p. 107). The homogenizing attempt by the nation becomes a lost cause in the midst of diversities that it tries to divide and rule. In the novel we have rational voices like Neilhounuo, Mose’s wife, who argues with Mose about how long the fight would go on. She squarely puts the blame on the British: “After all, it was them that gave our land to India…Oh, this conflict is eating us alive” (Kire, 2011, p. 122). The same is echoed by Neituo towards the end of Part Two which mentions the birth of NSCN that takes the Naga struggle to a different level. The two friends see the emergence of factions among the Nagas as complicated and how it destroys the Naga cause. As Neituo thoughtfully observes: “I am quite sure it’s the end of our Naga cause…When you begin to kill each other, you no longer have a cause left, do you? You have as good as destroyed your own cause” (Kire, 2011, p. 148).

The concept of nation and its definition has been conceived by various theorists. G. Aloysius in his book Nationalism without a Nation describes a nation as “an entity forming part of the compound concept nation-state, or to a linguistic ethnic community struggling for its own statehood” (1997, p. 11). He further extends the definition to “refer to a relationship that exists or is presumed to exist between individuals and groups with either equality or common cultural bond as the  basis of  common political  consciousness” (1997, p. 11). He further observes:

“Both as ideology and movement the concept could be used either in speaking of a state, a group of ethnic communities or  a single  ethnic community (1997, p. 11). In Who Sings  the Nation-State?   Judith Butler  states that  one of  the pre-suppositions of  the nation-state  in  the  expression  of  national  identity  rests  on  the  understanding  of  the  nation  as  a  homogeneous  and  singular  entity.  She writes that “the  nation-state  assumes  that  the  nation  expresses  a  certain  national  identity,  is  founded  through  the  concerted  consensus  of  a  nation,  and  that  a  certain  correspondence  exists  between  the  state  and  the  nation” (Spivak & Butler, 2007, p. 30).  In this view, according to her, nation  is  ‘singular  and  homogeneous’,  that “it  becomes  so  in  order  to  comply  with  the  requirements  of  the  state” (Spivak  &  Butler,  2007, p. 30).

So for Butler the nation derives its legitimacy  from  the  state  based  on  this  very  criteria  of  homogeneity.  Aloysius and Butler and many others have as such pointed out some of the features that characterise functioning of a nation and that which brings the nation into existence, such as the premises of homogeneity  and  commonness, the condition  of  equality — to name a few.  It is this idea of homogeneity as characteristic of a nation that is being contested by Kire in her fiction. Notwithstanding the feelings of independence that the Nagas harboured as a consequence of their chequered history, through the character of Neibou and his friendship with Rakesh, the author seems to be looking for a solution to the vexed Naga question. In the last chapter of Bitter Wormwood Neibou says:

We have to learn to let the past remain where it is. The trouble with us Nagas is that we have allowed the conflict to define us for too long. It has overtaken our lives so much that we have been colonised by it and its demands on us. But we do not have to let it continue to define us and limit us. It only otherises us again and again. (Kire, 2011, p. 236)

Here Kire does not talk about forgetting the past but it’s more about “pushing history” as the chapter is titled. The younger generation like Neibou do not want to be ‘othered’ as they go to other places in India to pursue education and face what Neibou experienced during his early days in Delhi. The nation-state promoting the idea of homogeneity refuses to accommodate differences as seen in the case of Neibou in Delhi. The author very candidly brings in the character of Himmat who served in the army in Nagaland to bring about a sense of equilibrium and a sense of understanding of the Nagas. The author emphasizes the unique friendship between Neibou and Rakesh and tries to show how this kind of friendship can bridge a sense of alienation.

Salman Rushdie in his  essay  “The Riddle of Midnight: India, August 1987” points  to  the  fact  that  there  never  existed  any  homogeneous  political  entity  that  can  be  claimed  as  the  nation  of  India  before  the  formal  hour  of  Independence. He writes;

Does  India  exist? …It’s  when  you  start  thinking  about  the  political  entity,  the  nation  of  India,  the  thing  whose  fortieth  anniversary  it  is,  that  the  question  starts  making  sense.  After all,  in  all  the  thousands  of  years  of  Indian  history,  there  never  was  such  a  creature  as  a  united  India.  Nobody  ever  managed  to  rule  the  whole  place,  not  the  Mughals,  not  the  British.  And  then,  that  midnight,  the  thing  that  never  existed  was  suddenly  ‘free’.  But  what  on  earth  was  it?  On  what  common  ground  (if  any)  did  it,  does  it  stand?  (Rushdie, 1991, p. 27)

Rushdie  seems to suggest that there never was any homogenous idea of India. It is pertinent to mention what Rabindranath  Tagore  had to say much  before Rushdie on nationalism. To Tagore  the  concept  of  nation  was  borrowed  from  the  West. Noting the dangers of nationalism, Tagore warned against what Luthra and Mukhija observe as “excessive fetishisation of the nation, where any insult against the nation threaten our sentiments” (2018, p. 2). Tagore wrote: “In my country, we have been seeking to find out something common to all races, which will prove their real unity. No nation looking for a mere political or commercial basis of unity will find such a solution sufficient (2015, p. 26). What Tagore was advocating was a spiritual unity and a human solution. The view expressed by Tagore and Rushdie much later seems to be in place when we consider the internal instabilities in the idea of nationhood in the context of Northeast India, especially Nagaland.

Yaruingam and Bitter Wormwood can be read as novels that engage in finding human solutions to the never ending Naga struggle for independence. The divisions among the Nagas are made prominent in Bhattacharyya’s Yaruingam as Rishang stands opposite to Videsselie’s ideology. Rishang and Jivan in the novel follow Gandhi’s ideology of non-violence. It needs to be mentioned here that Gandhi was a figure acceptable to the Nagas and this finds mention in both the novels. Many Nagas see Gandhi’s assassination as something that derailed the Naga peace process. Jivan’s death in Yaruingam in a way marks the beginning of violence. He stood for peace but that seems to be rejected. The novel ends with more news of death as Phanitphang’s killing at the hands of Videsselie’s men is announced to Sharengla. The birth of Rishang and Khutingla’s son almost towards the end of the novel and he being named ‘Yaruingam’ meaning ‘people’s rule’ is symbolic. Bhattacharyya leaves the novel open-ended with a birth and a death leaving the novel inconclusive just as the Naga situation itself at that point in the 1960s. In a way, it was at the threshold of the imbroglio that was to follow. In Bitter Wormwood, on the other hand, written many decades later, we find a chronicling of the Naga struggle for independence with the author giving myriad perspectives through her characters offering a tangent critique of the very idea of nation  and  nationalism  in  a  profound  manner.  The novel posits questions like – ‘What is India? Where is India? Who is an Indian?’ The  novelist  exploits  the  complexity involved in a state like Nagaland  to  challenge  and  analyse  different  meanings  of  nationalism and  nation.  As  a  child,  Mose  observes  and  experiences  varied  understandings  related  to  these  concepts, as a youth he joins the Naga underground with patriotic zeal and  as  an  adult  he  keeps  looking  back  at  his  childhood  experiences  and  his  perceptions  over  such  issues: “The freedom struggle that Mose had been part of, the struggle that the dead-eyed young man of today claimed to be a part of, had not always been like that. Memories flooded Mose’s mind as he sat on the porch. No it had not been like that at all” (Kire, 2011, p. 12).

Neitou and Mose like many Nagas do not have answers to the myriad questions that every Naga person poses. Has their giving up the underground solved the problems? What is seen in the novel is the shape the movement takes — for the worse — in Neitou’s and Mose’s lifetime. Mose dies in tragic circumstances trying to save a Bihari boy from the emergent Naga militants. The values which they stood for and joined the movement for have taken a different turn. Ironically, he becomes a victim of a movement that he himself was a part of. Neitou and Mose were fighting for a Naga nation and so is the purpose of those that killed him. His  death  is  symbolic  of  the  arbitrariness  and  contradictions  that  characterise  such  notions  of  nation  and  nationalism.  The author  evokes  scepticism  regarding  the  unifying  and  homogenizing  grand  rhetoric  of  the  nation  and  reflects  multiple  possibilities  of  reading  it  in  alternative  ways.

Through Neitou’s grandson Neibou’s friendship with Rakesh, Kire seems to desperately offer a ray of hope to the young generation of the Nagas who are trapped in between the past and the present in the Naga dream of an independent Nagalim. Distance provides Neibou the emotional detachment to see the struggle from an objective perspective. He talks of debrutalizing “those who are trapped in the conflict”, “of rebuilding” lives of the cadres (Kire, 2011, p. 235). It appears from a reading of Bitter Wormwood that what people are looking for is peace in the land and to that end perhaps a solution needs to be sought keeping in mind the human factor while ‘deferring the contentious issue of independence’. Homen Borgohain and Padipta Borgohajn in  Scrolls of Strife  note, quoting a leader, “The Nagas are content to defer the issue of Nagalim” (2011, p. 196).

The idea of a nation is thus nascent with internal instabilities, making it almost impossible to come up with a conclusive definition of a nation. The novels taken for study address the inherent complexities in defining a nation and turning such  terms  into  neat  categories.  Through  the  voice of Khreinou, Vilau, Neitou, Mose and Neibou, Kire  attempts  to  reveal the contradictions inherent in the idea of  nationhood.  In her interview with Swati Daftuar, Kire speaks of the importance of ‘telling’ ‘people stories’ which according to her is part of ‘his or her healing’, especially ‘people who have stories of deep pain and also wonder’. With respect to Bitter Wormwood she says that it is “about real people and their lives”. She said that she “wanted to write a non-stereotypical book about Naga political history, and the story of the two grandsons of the two soldiers meeting up and striking up a deep friendship is not untrue”. To her it is “a book that questions political ideologies, and their solutions and offers a human solution instead” (Daftuar, Interview with Kire, 2013). Kire’s take on the issues that concern every Naga can also be seen as an authorial position on the changes that have happened in Nagaland and Neibou’s articulation towards the end of the novel in Bitter Wormwood seems to be a reflection of that authorial stance too.

Declaration of Conflicts 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:

Aloysius,  G. (1997)  Nationalism  without  a  Nation  in  India. New Delhi: Oxford University  Press.

Baruah, S. (2021). In the Name of the Nation. New Delhi: Stanford University Press.

Bhabha,  Homi  K.  (Ed.). (1990). Nation  and  Narration. New York: Routledge.

Bhattacharyya. B. K. (1984). Yaruingam (People’s Rule). Guwahati: Christian Literature Centre.

Borgohain, H. and Borgohain P. (2011). Scrolls of Strife: The endless history of the Nagas. New Delhi: Rupa Publications.

Butler,  J  and  Spivak, G. C. (2007) Who  Sings  the  Nation-State?  language, politics, belonging.  Calcutta:  Seagull  Books.

Charles Chasie. (1999). The Naga Imbroglio (A Personal Perspective). Kohima: Standard Printers and Publishers.

Daftuar, S. (2013, February 11). For Easterine Kire, Bitter Wormwood is an exercise in catharsis. Interview with Eastrine Kire. Retrieved from https://www.thehindu.com/books/for-easterine-kire-bitter-wormwood-is-an-exercise-in-catharsis/article4401019.ece

Gandhi, M.K. (1933). Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House.

Kire, E. (2010). Mari. London: Harper Collins.

———. (2011). Bitter Wormwood. New Delhi: Zubaan.

Luthra, S and Mukhija, N. (2018) The Nationalism Debate, Concerns and Constitutional Response. Mukhija. National Law School of India Review , Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 1-10. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2674392

Misra, U. (2000). The Periphery Strikes Back. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Studies.

———-. (2005). The Margins Strike Back: Echoes of Sovereignty and the Indian State. India International Centre Quarterly. Vol. 32, No. 2/3, pp. 265-274

Rushdie, Salman (1991). The Riddle of Midnight: India, August 1987. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism1981-1991. London: Vintage Books. pp. 26-33.

Tagore, R. (2015). Nationalism. New Delhi: Fingerprint Classics.

The Hindu Bureau. What is Happening in Nagaland?. (2021, December 12). The Hindu. Retrieved from https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/what-is-happening-in-nagaland/article37937503.ece

Anjali Daimari is a Professor in the Department of English, Gauhati University. Her areas of interest areas are Fiction, South Asian Literature, Life writing and Writings from India’s Northeast. Some of her recent publications include translations of Bishnuprasad Rava’s Bodo folk tale ‘Maoriyasrwn Jwhwlao’ in The Call of the Pherengadao: Select Writings of Bishnuprasad Rava (Ed. M. Sarma, Katha),  “From Legend to Fiction, The Politics of Representation: A Study of Indira Goswami’s Thengphakhri Tahsilarar Taamar Toruwal and Bidyasagar Narzary’s Birgwsrini Thungri in Literatures from Northeast India: Beyond the Centre-Periphery Debate (ed. K M Baharul Islam, Routledge). She is currently the editor of English Forum: Journal of the Department of English, Gauhati University (a UGC-CARE listed journal).

 

 

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