Indigenous Studies - Page 3

Shiv Kumar

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pfunuo returned to their room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What does that mean?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

Declaration of Conflict of Interests

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

Funding

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

End-notes

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

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

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

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

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

Gourab Chatterjee, Debanjali Roy & Tanmoy Putatunda

Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, (KIIT) Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India. Email: gou86rab@gmail.com.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022. Pages 1-13. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne34

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

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

The expression ‘North-East India’ invokes an ethnographic monolith in popular imagination without looking into its multilingual set-up, heterogeneous cultural locations and diverse literary traditions, most of which are unscripted, orally composed and community-specific. Orality, which appears to be a crucial tool to understand the nuances of the literary landscape of this region, assumes a dual role. On the one hand, it is stratified, textualised, homogenised and commodified by the global market. On the other hand, it becomes a tool to challenge anonymity and reclaim the roots of the people, who had been suffering from a rupture in identity since the advent of the colonial education system and the ever-growing dependence on written communication in the modern socio-economic structure. This paper, through a close reading of three women poets of North-East India – namely, Temsula Ao, Mamang Dai and Esther Syiem, explores the reclamation of identity through the use of traditional tales, formulaic composition and indigenised vocabulary in their poetry. It also argues how orality is constructed within the ambit of the written text using coloniser’s language thereby creating a space for cultural hybridity thus subverting the hierarchy between orality and writing.

Keywords: Orality, Writing, Identity, Culture, Cultural Hybridity.

Grandfather constantly warned
That forgetting the stories
Would be catastrophic:
We would lose our history,
Territory, and most certainly
Our intrinsic identity.
So I told stories…

(Temsula Ao; “The Old Story Teller”, 2017)

The stories, the poet is so desperate to tell, are not merely stories. Rather, these are integral parts of the “intrinsic identity” of the diverse communities living in Northeastern India, who have been categorically homogenised, objectified and marginalised by the national imagination since India was perceived as a Nation-State in the colonial period. In the Indian context, whenever the expression ‘North-East’ is used, apart from signifying a particular geo-political place, connected with the rest of the country only through the narrow Siliguri corridor, it calls forth a monolithic ethnographic identity, referred to either as the “hilly country inhabited by independent tribes” (Allen et al. p. 2), as mentioned by the Gazetteer of Bengal and North East India, published before 1947 or as “(t)he distant north-eastern part of the subcontinent” (my italics) (National Council of Educational Research and Training 93) as described by NCERT history textbook in Independent India. Samir Das opined that though “from within[,] it represents one of India’s most diverse and heterogeneous of all regions”, Northeastern India “viewed from outside, looks both homogeneous and distinct from the mainland” (Das, p. 2). This statement reaffirms the imposed outsiderness of this region and the homogenisation of its cultural diversity.

It is needless to say that this piece of land, as it is quite rightly pointed out by Das, houses more than a hundred nationalities of diverse literary and cultural heritage and more than two hundred languages, belonging to different linguistic groups and language families (North East India, n.d.). However, many of these languages did not have scripts and all verbal expressions, including art and information, were composed and transmitted orally. Orality had a significant role in the society to sustain social order, legal conventions and communal identities. It was, of course, difficult for the Europeans, for whom writing was regarded “as a vehicle of syllogistic reasoning and as an instrument for consolidation of state power” (Misra, “Speaking, Writing and Coming”, 2013, p. 14), to understand the importance of oral traditions among these “independent tribes”. Hence the diverse population of the Northeastern region became easy ‘subjects’ of their ethnographic ‘discoveries’ and was described without given any distinct identity. Unfortunately, things did not change much after independence. With the borders being drawn for the Independent nation, Northeast became the perennial frontier of the country, secluded from the rest of India, geographically as well as culturally. After globalisation, things took a completely new turn and brought even newer challenges. The orally composed verbal arts became the new signifier of the commodification of “(t)he distant north-eastern part of the subcontinent.” Temsula Ao wrote:

The cultures of North East India are already facing tremendous challenges from education and modernization. In the evolution of such cultures and the identities that they embody, the loss of distinctive identity markers does not bode well for the tribes of the region. If the trend is allowed to continue in an indiscriminate and mindless manner, globalization will create a market in which Naga, Khasi or Mizo communities will become mere brand names and commodity markers stripped of all human significance and which will definitely mutate the ethnic and symbolic identities of a proud people. Globalization in this sense will eventually reduce identity to anonymity. (Cited in Sarkar, 11-12)

But this process did not go unchecked without any resistance as is evident in contemporary artistic and literary expressions. In this context, the poem cited at the beginning of this article, maybe read as evidently invoking the ‘pre-modern’ storytellers and their art of creating distinct cultural repertoires for individual communities. It emphasises the instrumental role stories play to build identities and to reinstate the same. The cultural traditions, which were turned into mere “commodity markers” by the globalised market, are reclaimed not only by TemsulaAo, but also by other contemporary poets from the Northeast and are reused as powerful tools to assert their individual uniqueness and cultural and political agency. In this article, therefore, there has been an attempt to scrutinise how orality is used to reverse the process of “identity to anonymity” in the works of poets from the Northeast, specifically, TemsulaAo, Mamang Dai and Esther Syiem, respectively from Ao, Adi and Khasi community, who, even after having a ‘non-script’ mother tongue, are writing their poems in English which can be identified as a “grapholect” or  a “transdialectal language formed by deep commitment to writing” (Ong, 2002, p. 7). This paper studies the poems of Ao, Dai and Syiem as these three poets belong to three different cultural locations that signify the diversities of Northeastern region and at the same time, build a polysystemic network through the use of myths and oral tales and create a platform of shared experiences by assuming the role of traditional storytellers.

This paper will first look into the homogenization of Northeastern culture and how its specific and distinct identity is stripped off by the global market by making it an “anonymous”^[i] (as it has been identified by TemsulaAo), standardized commodified product and then it will show, how this process is resisted by the three women poets from three distinct Northeastern states and community by creating a heterogeneous, hybrid and dynamic space through the use of “written oral poems.” (see Foley, 2004)

Orality and Commodity

As Temsula Ao observed, globalisation-induced modern media and digital space gave orality a new exposure. While talking about the growing market of tourism in the Northeastern part of the country, Erik de Maaker (2020) noticed a common trend among the travellers, photographers and filmmakers, both from inside and outside India, to visit “real”, “traditional” and “animist” culture of the people of the hills, without looking into the ethnic differences and varied literary expressions. To him, the stereotypical portrayal and the imposed homogeneity “fulfil a demand in a national and global market, where audiences want to locate ‘tribal’ or ‘indigenous’ people in nature, and in a timeless past” (Maaker, p. 16-17). This trend magnified after the emergence of new media and cyberculture and the young generation of this region, which “is quickly becoming one of the fastest-growing markets for online retailers” (Hasan, p. 135), contributed to this process in a significant manner. Urban musical bands of the Northeast, like Shillong Chamber Choir, who “performed at the Rashtrapati Bhavan for visiting US President Barak [sic] Obama and Michelle Obama during their state visit to India” (Shillong Chamber Choir), and was commissioned for a video to promote electoral participation among the people of Meghalaya during 2014 Parliamentary Election, used oral narratives and indigenous lyrical forms as one of the components of their musical creation. Founded in 2001, Shillong Chamber Choir, with its music videos often set in the Northeast, propagate certain markers of the culture that hardly represent the immense diversity of the region. The visuals they use to depict the culture of Northeast, are overtly aestheticised and picturesque, and eventually fall into the same trap of simplifying and objectifying the cultural nuances.^[ii] These videos, Hasan wrote, “blur(s) the distinction between different tribes and ethnicities, and presents young people from various parts of the Northeast region as a homogeneous, happy, purposeful, and trendy group” (Hasan 146) and by doing this turning the traditional oral verbal arts into a standardized consumerist product. This “systematic manipulation of signs” as Baudrillard would say, aims at “simulating a consumer totality” where diverse socio-cultural and linguistic identities could be contained within a grand narrative and be presented for collective cultural consumption (Baudrillard, p. 35).

The poets in discussion here are trying to create a counter-discourse to this homogenisation and commodification of oral narratives by the global market and media. The form of orality, represented by the urban bands or the contemporary photographers and film-makers, is essentially different from how orality is conceived by TemsulaAo, Mamang Dai or Esther Syiem, all of whom, as a part of their project, compiled, translated, transcreated and adapted Ao, Adi and Khasi oral tales, myths and legends.

Contesting Commodification

It has already been discussed how Ao wanted to resist the “mindless” use of oral tales, expropriated from their cultural roots, becoming a saleable product in the consumerist market. Her insistence on telling the stories, and reviving the oral tradition is completely an opposite and conscious endeavour. In her words:

But now a new era has dawned.
Insidiously displacing the old.
My own grandsons dismiss
Our stories as ancient gibberish
From the dark ages, outmoded
In the present times and ask
Who needs rambling stories
When books will do just fine?
The rejection from my own
Has stemmed the flow
And the stories seem to regress
Into un-reachable recesses
Of a mind once vibrant with stories
Now reduced to un-imaginable stillness.

       (Ao, “The Old Story Teller”, 2021)

This ‘new era’ undoubtedly refers to the era of “education and modernization” which marks the commodification of Northeastern cultural identities and the way it is turning them into “mere brand names”. However, the mention of books in the above-quoted stanza, implies the dual purpose of resuscitating orality. Orality is facing threats from two apparently opposite forces. On the one hand, its existence has been endangered (“un-reachable recesses”) owing to the advent of writing and print culture, and on the other hand, it is appropriated, commercialised and converted into an exotic, monolithic tourist attraction by the dominant culture. Theodore Adorno, while theorising Culture Industry, argued that “[c]ulture today is infecting everything with sameness” (Adorno and Horkheimer 94) and this standardised modes of production gives rise to “pseudoindividuality” where “[t]he peculiarity of the self is a socially conditioned monopoly commodity misrepresented as natural” (Adorno & Horkheimer 125). Hence any cultural element can easily be turned into a homogenised commodity, having an exchange value determined by the fetishism regulated by the dominant economy. According to him, any resistance to this mass culture is “radically individual” which has “residues not fully encompassed by the prevailing system and still happily surviving, and marks of the mutilation inflicted on its members by that system.” (Adorno and Horkheimer 200) It is interesting to note in this regard that Ao, Syiem and Dai chose the same tool of orality to subvert and resist the process of commodification of Naga, Khasi and Adi culture respectively.

Orality and Identity, Orality as Identity

EasterineIralu pointed out the challenges that authors of Northeast often face due to the dearth of major publishing houses in the region as a result of which they are often compelled to approach the big publishing houses of Delhi, and encounter “a stereotyped expectation that Naga writers are capable only of producing politically charged writing or exotic folk literature in mediocre language” (Iralu 2004). The poems of Ao, Dai and Syiem can be placed in opposition to this discourse. They are not simply imitating the oral tales as these were told in their distinct cultures, rather they are trying to assume the role of the traditional storyteller, who reminds people of their roots and customs, of their history and identity, which have been flattened and homogenised by the standardised format of printed texts. Syiem wrote:

The conceptual notion of what the oral is has received a severe beating at the hands of the practitioners of the written. This is but a natural consequence of the evolution of the written medium in which priorities change and societies are no longer the homogeneous entities that they once were. In such a situation, then, what is clearly needed is retrieval of a kind. Before any attempts are made to do this, however, it has to be understood that lest the exercise itself prove self-defeating, the oral has, to use a Khasi term, its own rngiew, the imperceptible aura that in Khasi thought permeates all things living, and which gives them being and identity. (Syiem, “Negotiating the Loss” 81)

Syiem’s attempt to “retrieve” orality neither refers to going back to the nostalgic past, nor is she trying to romanticise the oral tradition as an escapade from contemporary reality. Rather, to her, orality is an existing and living tradition [as she named her essay “Orality Alive” (Syiem, “Orality Alive” 38)], an organic part of the Khasi culture, constantly changing its form and has the potential to capture all the modern complexities. Her poems bring up the legends of Khasi creation stories and make them speak of the political, social and cultural reality of her time. She wrote:

Forlorn ancestress.
As a child I believed in you.
As a young woman
I wished to uphold you
 as my personal myth.
As of now,
I wish to preserve you
as a source of inspiration.

Shrewd historians
float theories about you;
and though you have been weighed
and found wanting,
I still chose to look upon you
as the source of my identity
from a distant time.

(Syiem, “Pahsyntiew”, 2006, p.  26)

The “ancestress” in this poem refers to the myth of Ka Pahsyntiew, the daughter of U-lei Shillong, who was tricked into marrying a human being and from whom the clan of Syiem sprang. It is said that she, after giving birth to her warrior sons, went back to the cave she came from and did not return. The myth does not only talk about the origin of Khasi people, but also, in Syiem’sutilisation,  locates the oral tale within the ambit of the politico-cultural environment of Meghalaya and connects the myth to her “identity” (“the source of my identity”).  It is worthwhile to note that in this poem, the word “jalyngkteng”, the yellow flower, with which Ka Pahsyntiew was tricked, which Syiem turned into a metaphor for political deception and exploitation happening with the people of her community, was not translated into English. In other poems too by the poet (“To Bemsynda”, “Ka Sohlyngngem’s Dirge”, “U Lymboit U Lymbiang”) similar Khasi words, laden with a multitude of cultural and historical significances and kept in the original language, are found. In the words of Ng?g? waThiong’o, language is the carrier of culture, consisting of cultural images that come down to us through the long passage of time. He wrote:

Our whole conception of ourselves as a people, individually and collectively, is based on those pictures and images which may or may not correctly correspond to the actual reality of the struggles with nature and nurture which produced them in the first place… Language as culture is thus mediating between me and my own self; between my own self and other selves; between me and nature. Language is mediating in my very being. (Thiong?o 15)

The use of Khasi words by Esther Syiem can therefore, be seen as a deliberate attempt on her part to indigenise the English she is using and make the language prepared to adapt the language of orality, which not only gives her an identity to reclaim but also connects her to her community.

Social identity theories contend that “the self is reflexive” and identities are formed through the individual’s conscious relation to “social categories or classifications” (Stets & Burke 224-225). Henri Tajfel, prominent social psychologist of the 1970s, noted that an individual’s social identity is conditioned by her/his association with a ‘group’ where the group serves two purposes. Firstly, it becomes the crucible where diversities in individual identities are subsumed to a noticeable, uniform pattern. Secondly, this sense of uniformity distinguishes the group (and the individual) from other categories and groups consequently creating a homogeneous idea about the group and resulting in the binaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Analysing the writings on and about Northeast in this light, it becomes clear how the narratives as well as the choice of the medium in which these narratives reach the consumers, underline conscious/unconscious attempts to carve out a group identity by virtue of deliberate “depersonalisation”. Considered as “[t]he central cognitive process in social identity formation”, depersonalisation regards the notion of the self as one that is blended with group characteristics “rather than as a unique individual” (Turner et al. 1987 cited in Stets & Burke, 231). This sense of depersonalisation, perpetuated by contemporary writings on Northeast, is contested by the counter-discourse of oral narratives that debunk easy categorisation and stereotypification.

Oral tradition, as seen by Sen and Kharmawphlang, does not only function as “a wealthy repository of mythical, legendary and historical past,” but also “articulates protest and dissent and simultaneously voices concerns of reform and redress.” (Sen &Kharmawphlangi) Mamang Dai said, apart from being “a simple recounting of tales for a young audience”, orality gives her “a sense of identity” (Singh, 2017). It is the knowledge of the oral tales, which are nothing but the “beliefs, determining way of life”, that “links the individual to a group” (Dai, “On Creation Myths” 4). While recounting the Khasi tale of the origin of U HynniewTrep, Esther Syiem echoed the same idea by saying that the tale gives a Khasi person an identity more complete “than the one that history has bestowed upon him” (Syiem, “Orality Alive” 44).

Reclaiming identity alludes to claiming back history. The contrast between legends and history, oral and written, indigenous perspective from within and the perspective of the “shrewd historians” from the outside, which becomes a recurring theme in the poems by Ao, Syiem and Dai, implies the proclamation of identity against the imposed generalization by the popular discourse. Ao wrote:

Then came a tribe of strangers
Into our primordial territories
Armed with only a Book and
Promises of a land called Heaven

Declaring that our Trees and Mountains
Rocks and Rivers were no Gods

And that our songs and stories
Nothing but tedious primitive nonsense.

(Ao, Book of Songs,  2013, p. 297)

Similarly, in Mamang Dai:

The history of our race
begins with the place of stories.
We do not know if the language we speak
belongs to a written past.
Nothing is certain.

(Dai, “An Obscure Place” 2021, p. 85)

The juxtaposition between “a Book” and “songs and stories” in Ao’s poem or the contradistinction between “history” and “stories” in Dai’s poem indicate the poets’ intention of replacing one with the other, and thus reverse and subvert the process of the official historiography.

Nevertheless, orality in the poems by these three poets were not only mere references. The poets imbibe Ao, Khasi and Adi tales, myths, legends, shamanic chants and other oral expressions into the poetic form as well as the content. Dai wrote:

Remember
the river’s voice,
Where else could we
be born, where else
could we belong,
if not of memory
divining life and form
out of silence,
Water and mist,
the twin gods
water and mist
And the cloud woman
always calling
from the sanctuary
of the gorge…

(Dai, “Missing Link” 2011, p. 65)

Apart from recalling the Adi myth of twin gods, the poem imitates the short-paced free flowing speech of an invocation chant. The first line of each stanza of this poem repeats the word “remember”, which refers to the significance of memory in oral traditions. Mary Carruthers observed that “valorisation” of memory is a “hallmark of orality” (Carruthers, 1990, p. 12). The dynamics between memory and the act of remembering in oral societies has a compelling connection with knowledge and experience and often manifests itself through the repetitive use of composite formulas. The word “remember” does not only act as a mnemonic call to the self and the readers to be aware of one’s identity, but also resembles the formulaic structure of an oral composition. The use of formulaic structure can be seen in Ao’s “Stone-people from Lungterok” (Ngangom&Nongkynrih, 2009, 1), which follows the structure of an oral praise poem, where each stanza starts with the word “stone-people.” Similarly, Syiem also refers to bird-chant in her “Ka Sohlyngngem’s Dirge” and reproduce the effect of an oral repetition in the following lines: “woman without means/ has no right to love,/ no right to love/ woman without means,/ has no right to love,…” (Syiem, “Ka Sohlyngngem’s “Dirge”, 2021, p. 44).

Even in the content Dai, Ao and Syiem recall the mythical and animistic past of pre-Christian Northeast, the legendary tales, the pastoral romances. “Ka Sohlyngngem’s Dirge” talks about a popular Khasi tale of lovers turning into birds, “Stone-people from Lungterok” refers to the myth of Ao Naga origin, Dai’s poems have numerous references to different Adi myths and popular tales. Wong observed that “Mamang Dai’s nature poetry is recognisably animistic in its messages” (Wong 74). She also noted that “[t]he incantatory rhythms of Dai’s poetry suggest hybridization with the vernacular chants of the peoples of the eastern Himalayas” (Wong, 2013, 74). Myths in the poems of Dai, Ao or Syiem, are not invoked to make their poetry more exotic and thus add materials to the process of commercialization of Northeastern culture, rather myth functions in a more personal and communal level, it revises the communal ties and calls for a collective identity.

However, though all three poets are using orality as a tool to reclaim identity and resist the process of standardisation and commodification of Northeastern culture, the uniqueness and distinct nature of choosing their literary forms are very evident in their poems. They are very cautious about not echoing each other and falling into the same trap of subscribing to the process of homogenisation.

Scripting Orality

Can oral poems be written? Temsula Ao asked, “how have the literate, educated inheritors of such traditions dealt with their inheritance?” (Ao, “Writing Orality”, 2007, p. 100). To answer this question, we may cite the example of the Nigerian poet Niyi Osundare, one of the pioneers of the AlterNative Poetry Movement, who wanted to capture orality in its truest form and published poems along with audio CDs. To him “the word as print can no longer carry the full burden of my voice” (cited in Newell, 130). The Canadian author Thomas King can also be referred to in this context. King wrote short stories mimicking the sentence structure of recorded interview clips of the aboriginal people of Canada published by the ethnographers (see King, 2013). Both of the authors wrote in English, and tried to capture the essence of orality in a scripted language. These attempts, nevertheless, do not take the readers to the oral sources, rather it create a hybrid space, or “fusion of elements” as suggested by Ao (Ao, “Writing Orality”, 2007, p. 103), where the oral and the written interact. This interaction, she observed, “has helped such writers to move away from western, euro-centric models and has enabled them to create a totally new literature deeply immersed in traditional sensibilities but at the same time imbued with contemporary perceptions” (Ao, “Writing Orality”, 2007, p. 103). The poets are well aware of the fact that oral tradition, a tradition so deeply rooted in the culture it originated from, can hardly be taken into another language, without risking its social, political and cultural values it embodies. Whenever orality is scripted, it immediately loses its performatory aspects, collaborative and interpolative nature, improvisation, audience participation, impact on auditory perceptions and so on. Writing orality calls for an aporia.

John Miles Foley, while discussing oral poems, proposed a “less centralized, more openended” (Foley, 2004, p. 12) model which included “written oral poems.” Written oral poems, Foley argued, may seem “a contradiction in terms” but as important as other forms of orality. Being “topical and locally situated” these poems have “their language and style came from one world and their subjects from another” (Foley 26-27). This idea echoes with the notion of “secondary orality” as theorised by Walter J. Ong  (Ong, 2002, pp. 10-11). Though the northeastern poets are writing in English, their way of indigenising the language by incorporating Naga, Khasi and Adi words, the use and reinterpretation of myths and legends, the inclusion of oral formulaic structure in their poems, the influence of indigenous cultural and religious expressions locate them in the canon of “written oral poems.” Earlier it has been stated that Dai, Syiem and Ao actively participated in translations of different Adi, Khasi and Ao oral tales. These engagements with orality influence their writing to a great extent.  Misra wrote:

When Mamang Dai records the ancient legends of the Adis preserved in the collective memory of the people, she uses the English language with the lyrical softness of an Adi rhapsodist chanting his songs amidst the hidden mountains. Her rich and vibrant language may not be her mother tongue, but she has made it her own in the most convincing manner. (Misra, “Crossing Linguistics Boundaries”, 2021, p. 3653)

Mamang Dai’s attempt to make the language “her own”, indicates the reclamation of identity, which has become a negotiated space of cultural hybridity due to colonisation and the cultural imperialism propagated by the globalised market. Bhabha argued:

Terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced performatively. The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation. (Bhabha, 1994, p. 2)

In the context of cultural expressions of the Northeast, orality thus serves the dual purpose of commodifying the culture in a homogenous “fixed tablet of tradition”, while simultaneously engendering a non-stratified, dynamic, heterogeneous hybrid space. This ‘space’, as appropriated in the poems by Ao, Dai and Syiem, not only resists and problematises this process of turning the diversified oral traditions into a singular, monolithic and anonymous estimation but also reinstates the individual agencies of Northeastern communities and celebrates their cultural identity.

Declaration of Conflict of Interests

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

Funding

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

Notes

^[i] In this discussion, the notion of anonymity is not synonymous with non-identity. Rather, it is treated as a distinct ontological category which makes identity lose its specificity and definiteness and thus turns it into an obscure existence.

^[ii] Moral described the achievements of Shillong Chamber Choir as a marriage between “the folk from the northeast” and “the classical traditions of pan Indian songs and lyrics from its national anthem.” She wrote: “As the crystal clear notes of the Khasi folksong spill into the silence of the country’s impressive halls and theatres, members of the SCC’s band in traditional clothing and jewellery, in their native kynjri ksiar and the regal dhara stand before a mesmerised metropolitan audience donning the material objects of the land they belong to while their music evokes the deep gorges and pristine valleys of the distant Khasi Hills in the country’s borderlands.” (Moral, 2021, 194-195) It is the showcasing of “deep gorges and pristine valleys” which led Hasan to opine that “(i)t… ultimately lapses into a clichéd representation of Khasi youth as Westernised and presents a highly simplistic depiction of political choice and empowerment.” (Hasan 146)

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¹Gourab Chatterjee is an assistant professor in School of Languages, KIIT, Deemed to be University who did his PhD in Arts from the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University. His research interests include Comparative Literature, African Literature, Orality, Reception Theory and so on.

²Debanjali Roy is working as an Assistant Professor in the School of Languages, KIIT Deemed to be University. She is pursuing her Ph.D. in the Department of English, University of Calcutta. Her research interests include Sociolinguistics and English Language Teaching, Gender Studies, Modern Art and Literature and Popular Literature

³Tanmoy Putatunda is working as an Assistant Professor in the School of Languages, KIIT Deemed to be University. He is also pursuing his Ph.D. in the Department of English, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. His research interests include Urban Studies, Representation of City in Literature, Indian Literature in English, Popular Literature, Culture Studies, Postmodern and Postcolonial Literature.

Kimthianvak Vaiphei
Department of English, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, Meghalaya. ORCID: 0000-0002-4363-771X. Email: kimthianvakvaiphei@gmail.com

Rupktha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages: 1-10. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne17

First published: June 24, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

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

This paper is an exploration of Indigenous ontologies and ways of thinking and worldview that deviates from the Eurocentric critical frameworks that often insufficiently portray or interpret the nature of specific indigenous cultures and native epistemology. The focal point of this study is to explore the indigenous ontology and knowledge found in the folktales and oral narratives of the Zo tribes of Southern Manipur. The Zo’s geo-political state of existence has been in a muddle since colonial times. The territorial demarcation that was done for administrative purposes had caused permanent displacement and obscurity of the Zo Indigenous identity. Colonial ethnographical records that have been perceived as infallible evidences, fall short of impartial facts and accounts. The series of under and misrepresentation of their socio-cultural and political history has narrowed the general interest and scope for the discursive study of Zo indigeneity, whose relevance to the modern world is only confined to their conflict-ridden state of political affairs. Therefore, this study will be carried out in the hope of decolonising and re-aligning the ‘Zo-ness’ through the exploration of the lesser-known indigenous ways of knowledge, philosophies, and worldview found in the reservoir of their oral literature. Zo orality is accentuated by certain indigenous concepts and philosophies that find expression in proverbs, aphorisms, allegorical tales, customary laws, rituals and the folksongs. The paper argues that these concepts are not adequately represented by ethnocentric appreciation, but are elements of indigeneity that deserve specialized set of conceptual introspections

Keywords: indigenous ontology, Zo, folklore, decolonising          

The recent decades have witnessed an emerging consciousness of concerns related to the preservation of indigenous rights in the geo-political sphere, where the scientific world’s perpetual onward movement has frequently been challenged to accommodate and prioritise the maintenance of harmony in man’s relationship with the environment. From such perspectives, this prospective rekindling of the two worlds further opens different pathways for deeper explorations into the very essence of the relationship itself that can be justly appreciated by the indigenous theories of knowledge and pedagogy. Indigeneity is known to be rooted in the land and the ecological realm. It is also tied to the entity of identity that is inextricably linked to worldviews that provide meaning to one’s existence and purpose in the entire cosmos. Indigenous ontology explores the system of indigenous knowledge that shapes the indigenous identity and consciousness and provides a more authentic understanding of the essence of a people unaltered by secular analyses, while also discovering more intricate worlds, abundantly rich in conceptual systems and ideologies that question the validity of terms such as ‘savage’ and ‘uncivilized’ as sensational descriptors of the indigenous population.

To accurately describe the geo-political identity of the Zo people continues to be a challenge considering their lack of definite territorial and political representation if one needs to be extremely attentive to the detail with respect to diaspora. The early Zos lived in the contiguous land areas between Burma and India. Now collectively inhabiting mainly the Northeast Indian state of Manipur, they are a people who have been subjected to the dispersal of their homeland by colonial remapping and territorial demarcation. The Zos can be better described as an ethnic group comprised of tribes variously known as the ‘Chins’, ‘Kukis’ or ‘Zomis’. The Kuki-Chin-Mizos, in addition to sharing common ethnic history and sociological foundations, also share mutually intelligible languages that are recognised under the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family that includes Vaiphei, Paite, Simte, Thadou, Gangte, Hmar, Zou and Lushai – spoken at large by the inhabitants of present-day Mizoram. The Zomi languages are spoken by a section of people in India and Burma. While tracing the Zo identity as a representative of a well-defined territorial boundary, it may prove to be futile and cumbersome. However, a cultural unity recollected in the form of shared ethos, folklore, language, and tradition may appear to be a more reliable source for extensive study. Khup Za Go (2008) in the prologue to Zo Chronicles addresses the arbitrariness of political boundaries in Zo ethnic studies:

Until quite recent times, the political frontiers of the Ava kings of Myanmar and that of Manipur kept shifting according to the changing fortunes of these native imperialist principalities. But the deeper cultural boundary of the Zo tribe had remained relatively resistant to the erratic political climate outside its own cultural world. (Go 2008, p. 15)

The persistence of an abstract unity marks Zo ethnic spaces as a culturally contiguous area that must be comparatively analysed with the metaphysical forces of orality. This orality in Zo culture is manifested in the form of folktales, folksongs, aphorisms, and social and religious beliefs that align their moral compass with that of their worldview; a perspective that can be better comprehended by an exploration of the Zo cosmovision that can foster a deeper understanding of the Zo indigenous ontology. Indigenous hermeneutics becomes the most viable method of understanding the Zo indigeneity in accordance with the cultural specifications that such a study demands. It is a step towards achieving a more accurate understanding of Indigenous concepts that closely follows the original intent behind the oral narratives. Indigenous hermeneutics, especially has gained fresh momentum all across, especially in the global south.  Leanne B. Simpson’s Dancing on our Turtles Back (2011) heralds a call for indigenous retrospection, concepts such as Samir Amin’s ‘decolonisation’, Arturo Escobar’s exploration of the ‘Pluriverse’ and Mignolo’s ‘delinking’ and idealisation of cultural and cerebral decolonisation provide a way out from our dependence on the buoyancy of Ethnocentricism. A theoretical shift in perspective from a centralised one towards a subjective, culture-centric focus can allow a more justified interpretation and a better understanding of an indigenous people’s connection with the world around and beyond them. Although Indigenous ontology is often linked to relations with land and its tangible resources, its allegiance may not necessarily be thus limited, where connections can be possibly made to the radical changes in indigenous experiences such as dislocation, colonialization, violence and dispossession. Sarah de Leeuw gives an example of the apprehension of Indigenous children through the child-welfare system in British Columbia, Canada, and questions how a romanticized relation between Indigeneity and land relates to assessments of Indigenous families and parenting within child-welfare institutions and policies (Cameron, Leeuw and Desbiens, 2014, p. 23 ). This observation allows a relational ontological exploration which might appear more appropriate in the study of Zo ethnic dislocation as an area for discursive study, where traditional approaches of Indigeneity strictly affiliated to the backdrop of a defined geographical premise may not be accurate or viable. However, addressing the dislocation of Zo indigenous identity can begin with exploring its innate ontological systems that speak of a distinct collective experience in an attempt towards unification by relocating their cultural mores.

There are collections of folktales shared amongst the Zo ethnic groups that echo common sentiments; mere reiterations of the same tales with minute variations that generically incline towards an articulation of a common cultural ethos. There are tales of the popular comic hero known by many names such as Chhura (Mizo), Sura (Hmar), Benglam (Vaiphei), Venglam (Paite); the ephemeral but enduring love story of Khupting leh Ngambawm; the emblematic tale of kindness and familial love shared between the brother Thanghou and Liandou and the extraordinary feats of Galngam, the epic hero; to name a few. These are tales that hold a favourable position in the Zo collective memory. There are also a variety of folksongs — songs in celebration of love, marriage, harvest, and funerals that hint at particular patterns of the metaphysics behind Zo socio-religious structure, and certain aphorisms that are definitive of their social morale and indigenous identity. To understand the essence of these folktales and oral narratives, it is necessary to delve into the nature of Zo indigenous ontology; in order to navigate the location of such concepts that are constructed behind the oral narratives within the Zo cosmovision.

Understanding Zo indigenous ontology requires an exploration of their system of religion as a source that explains the nature of their being and existence. It is a step into the world of Zo indigenous consciousness; an exploration of the pluriversal terrain of beliefs, myths, and legends and also within the religious structure that accommodates diversity in the concept of God. Animism as a common religion among tribal societies is not a new observation and is in fact, inarguably common to most Indian tribal communities prior to mass conversion. First competently surveyed by Sir Edward Burnett Tylor in Primitive Culture (1871), Animism is the ancient belief in the presence of a spiritual aspect in all living and non-living things. Encyclopaedia Britannica defines it as a “belief in innumerable spiritual beings concerned with human affairs and capable of helping or harming human interests.” (Kerlin, 2020). It can be perceived as the most natural and authentic form of religion that ever existed in the history of cultural evolution. Zo indigenous religion is another form of animism where the concept of ‘soul’ is attributed to the natural environment. Dr. Ram Nath Sharma enlists two basic principles on which the belief is based; that “there are powerful souls besides powerful gods. The souls are connected with men and feel pleasure and pain through them. They influence the events in this world and also control them.” And that “the soul of man survives even after death.” (Sharma 1981, p.160). The Zo religious structure fulfills these two principles with the presence of a polytheistic system of belief in the power of not one but of various gods and spirits that influence the entire cosmic order, and also in the ephemeral nature of the human body that is survived by the soul after death.

Zo Cosmovision

Delving into the universe of Zo cosmology is a step towards comprehending the position of mankind according to the early Zo’s consciousness, and to recognise that fear was the driving force behind the ideas for law, order and morality. This fear was essentially directed towards the divine forces that had been established as the epicentre that pulled the gravity of the entire Zo cosmic order. Deification in Zo cosmovision consists of duality in order that it corresponds to the duality of light and darkness. The universe, according to Zo concept is comprised of three realms; the realm beyond the sky where the heavens lay, the realm of land above the ground and the realm of the underworld. Singkhawkai in his book Zo People and their Culture (2008) mentions the Tedim terms for these realms as Vantung, Leitung and Leinuai respectively (Van-sky, tung– above, lei– land, and nuai- below).  Khuavak and khuazing are Tedim terms denoting light and darkness; khua means society or human civilization, vak means light and zing, darkness. The Tedim language, one of the Zomi languages is spoken in the Chin state of Myanmar. It is also spoken in the Indian states of Assam, Manipur and Mizoram. With over 189,000 speakers in 1990 in Burma and about 155,000 in India, the language is also known as Hai-Dim, Tiddim, Zomi or Tedim Chin (“Tedim”). Tedim language is widely used as the foundational source of knowledge in Zomi Ethnic studies owing to Pau Cin Hau’s development of the lopographical Tedim script, also known as the Tual Lai script (local script), however, tedim is now written in the Latin alphabet (Tedim .n.d). Khua holds a more elaborate concept that is not limited to signifying human settlement; it also has connotations of weather or climatic conditions where khuapha would mean good weather and khuasia, bad weather. ‘Khua’ is a versatile concept which is also connected to the spiritual world, where the word is attached to the identity of their deities.  Khuazing is a Tedim term to address the god of earth, or “the controller of earthly things” and as zing is a term for darkness, or the state of being free of light to induce sight, he is also known as the god of invisibility (Zo People and their Culture 106). In Mizo folklore, Khuazing is attributed with a female persona and is called Khuazingnu or Khuanu where the suffix nu denotes the feminine gender with motherly attributes. With the coming of the Christian religion, the concept of Khuazing may have been compressed into the Lushai word Pathian to denote the Christian God. Singkhawkai records that Khuazing is believed to be more benevolent than its counterpart, Khuasia which is a deified concept of ‘bad weather. The anthropological records of Carey and Tuck report that the idea of a Supreme Being was non-existent in Zo societies; that their world was infested by these deities and spirits that did not necessarily provide them with good luck or salvation but constantly needed to be propitiated through offerings and sacrifices (Carey and Tuck 196). However, Cary and Tuck’s observations fall short of a closer interpretation of the concept of Zo religion; of the exact object and nature of worship. Although the idea of veneration for a singular deity may have been absent, there was an allegiance towards an ethical force that assumed the role of a benefactor and protector— the spiritual energy called Sha that manifests itself as a moral and superhuman force that resembles the Christian ‘Spirit’. This force is also connected to their concept of ancestor worship portrayed in the rites of sacrifice to the spirit of the ancestor Pu-Sha or Pa-Sha (Singkhawkai 1995, p. 121). Further, attaching their identity to that of their progenitor ‘Zo’ is an extension of ancestral worship. In The Mountain of God, Quartich Wales has also conjectured on the possibility of linking Zo as a celestial ancestor who was transferred to the sky and identified with some star in the circumpolar region (Wales 1953, p. 40).

What is also peculiar about the Zo system of knowledge is their manner of engagement with the internal world of imagination to carve out a distinct identity and source of creativity. Having been nomadic tribes, the idea of territorial expansion was never much of a priority. Logic was more governed by the internal, psychic forces that predominantly revolved around memories and dreams than by sensory articulations of external structures. Dreams have been an influential part of Zo society, whose significance has seeped into colloquial uses in everyday speech. Dreams were regarded as prophetic revelations of the future course of events (Singkhawkai 1995, p.123). The term “mangpha” or “mangtha”, which translates to “may you have a good dream”, is used as a gesture of goodwill; of wishing someone a good night or farewell. Further, what bound the communities together throughout history was a unity in their oral tradition and this orality is what signified their identity and vice versa. G.N Devy (2002) attributes this to the aspect of tribal creativity that is more attuned to sensory memory; which explains the tribal’s need to indulge in ancestor worship (p. 6). In connection to Devy’s observation, there are pieces of evidence of the Zos being innately connected to spirituality within a contiguous time frame; the living was never completely detached from the dead, thus, causing them to believe in the temporality of death. Death is treated merely as a transitional phase that the spirit of a living man passes through to arrive at the mystical world of the spirits. Even in death, a man’s connection to the spirit of the deceased was not absolved if the cause of death was an unnatural one; for instance, if the victim had been murdered. In such cases, the soul of the deceased who had been murdered would continue to haunt his relatives and would not find peace until he had been avenged.

Man as a Spiritual Being

Singkhawkai in his book, Zo People and their Culture provides a detailed elucidation on the ontological concepts of the Tedim terms hin’na denoting the noun ‘life’, Tha or Kha or the ‘spirit’ and the Si-kha for spirit of the dead (where the prefix Si denotes ‘dead’) (Singkhawkai 125-126). There is, however, a difference between the spirit of the dead (Si-kha) and the spirit of man which in Sihzang and Khuano dialects is called Ci-Tha, where the prefix Ci denotes the physical body of the worldly man. This perspective points to a duality in the spirituality of man where both entities dwell in different realms. While the Ci-tha or the spirit of man is constantly in need if an attachment to a living source:

It is the force that keeps once alive and well. K’la (‘tha’) comes from a previous existence to inhabit the body at the time of birth and departs into a new existence at death; so also it leaves the body for brief periods and at frequent intervals, as during sleep… Whenever Tha goes out of his body, the man suffers bodily illness and when it re-enters, he is well again… the life and death of man are virtually determined by the life and death of his spirit” (Singkhawkai 1995, p.126-127).   

Si-kha on the other hand, represents the immortal ‘soul’ of man that detaches itself from the time of death and proceeds to dwell in the afterlife of Mithikhua or the ‘land of the dead’. The mythscape of Mithikhua is the abode where the spirits of the dead manifest their lives that have been lived in the physical world; a continuation of their lives on earth:

… he would drink and eat; he would grow and marry there, and so on. So the life of man after death is conjectured as the continuation of the worldly life in the other realm. Whether a man is honest or dishonest is of no consequence in the next world… In his life after death, one is still what he has been in his human life. (Singkhawkai 1995, p. 131).

This concept of man’s spirituality and the afterlife is encapsulated in the tale of Khupting leh Ngambawm:

Thuaiting leh Ngambawm

Theirs was a story of forbidden love due to class conflicts between their families, even though they were betrothed before their birth, for their mothers had declared it as a promise to each other as good friends. As they grew older, Thuaiting’s family refused to carry on with the pledge as Ngambawm’s economic condition began to degrade after the death of his father, and Thuaiting’s family resented him for not being able to afford the minimum customary requirement of bringing Zu or rice beer for his marriage proposal. The lovers eloped and married, but were separated by Thuaiting’s parents when they returned. Desperate for his beloved, Ngambawm resorted to the practice of the occult to achieve his ends; taking a strand of hair from Thuaiting’s head which he bound around a clay figurine, and placing it on the banks of the Ngajam river. This made Thuaiting gravely ill, compelling her family to announce a reward for her hand in marriage to anyone who succeeded in curing her. Ngambawm took this opportunity to win the favour of Thuaiting’s family and replaced the strand of hair back on her head, curing her of her illness. But his endeavour proved unfruitful, for her parents still refused him. He placed the figurine with the strand of Thuaiting’s hair wrapped around it once again on the banks of the Ngajam; however, this time, the figurine was washed away by the pouring rain, which ended her life.  Distraught and grief-stricken, Ngambawm followed a jackal who led him to Thuaiting’s spirit in the land of Mithikhua or the land of the dead. His spirit was broken when he learned that the soul of the living and the dead could never merge there and he had to die to truly be united with his wife. On Thuaiting’s request, Ngambawm returned home and made preparations for his death. He arranged a feast of the finest meat as a token of farewell, hung a spear above his bed, and waited in silence. A restless fowl flew into his room and stepped on the spear that hung above him, which pierced his heart and ended his life. And thus, Ngambawm  could finally reunite with his beloved wife in Mithikhua. (Vaiphei 2015, p. 66-72 )

In the tale, the two lovers are able to proceed with their love affair in the land of death as spiritual beings. Moreover, Thuaiting’s cause of illness and eventual death was because Ngambawm had taken a strand of her hair; a part of her natural body that was attached to her living spirit. Her health and life were thus, carried away by the river (Singkhawkai 1995, p. 129).

The spiritual realm occupied an integral part in Zo culture considering that the well-being of the spirit determined the condition of the human body. Man’s life could last only as long as his spirit willed it so. The strength of the man mirrored the strength of the spirit and its significance superseded the former. Singkhawkai explicates this relationship where the Tedim term for death is ‘Kha-Kia’ or ‘fallen spirit’ (Singkhawkai 1995, p. 130). The cycle of life and death, then, revolved around the supremacy of the spirit where death itself did not merely mean the cessation of life but denoted a spiritual retraction. The spirit was not subjected to extinction but predominantly revolved around and influenced the forces of all things living and natural. This concept elaborates why all the natural occurrences were seen as a result of supernatural intervention. The spiritual realm made a source for their entire system of logical inference. It was both destroyer and deliverer. When it is held responsible for bringing misfortune, it needs, at the same time, appeasement in the form of charms, sacrifices and offerings in order to provide a kind of salvation from suffering. Relating to this intense attachment to the spiritual world, it comes with no surprise that occultism occupied a large space in the myth and urban legends that have persisted in the modern ages. There are myths of Pheisam, a one-legged spirit; Chom-nu, a female supernatural being, one of whose characteristic traits include extremely long, dishevelled hair and feet that face backward and Zomi-sang, a giant who could stride across peaks of hills; the spiritual entities who are mostly responsible for a specific domain.

 There is within this feared practice of the occult called ‘dawi’, a looming dread against a spirit that could be called upon to possess or inhabit the physical body of a person. This was successful after a part of the victim’s belongings, for instance, a lock of hair or a piece of his clothing was offered to the spirit prior to the intended period of infestation, a practice which is to an extent, similar to the Haitian Voudon religion.  This spiritual invasion is generically known as kau-pe, which can simply be translated as the ‘bite of the spirit’. Following this ‘bitten’ phase, the victims were believed to have undergone bouts of intense illness or insanity, gradually degrading to an extremely weakened physical and mental state. This practice is still feared in the modern age and various accounts of such incidents have been known to occur; only that it is now preferable to attribute this to the effect of demonic possession as has been the case with the explanation of most supernatural events post proselytisation.

Concept of Power and the Love of Less

Zo myth strongly upholds the power of the spoken word, particularly in the verbal curse and the magnitude that it carries. A gesture of ill-wishing is not taken lightly, more so if it is delivered by parents as it is believed to have the ability to materialise into real events. Singkhawkai traces the ontological roots of the word ‘curse’ to the Tedim terms ‘Sam-sia’, ‘Ham-sia’ and ‘Tom-lawh’ (Singkhawkai 1995, p.138). In Zo mythology, the efficacy of verbal curses was highly regarded and incorporated in arguments between rivals; verbal dissensions are usually followed by a curse that was intended to befit the folly of the victim. There are numerous folktales that try to explain existential dilemmas as a consequence of the effects of such curses inflicted upon a subject. For instance, in the Chemtatrawta myth, the lobster’s lips became rough and brittle as a result of being poked and prodded by the Hnathial plant, hence the lobster curses the plant: “From now on whenever you are pregnant with child, you shall die of childbirth”, the curse that explains the reason why when the Hnathial plant (monocot plant) becomes pregnant with the fresh shoot, it always dies (Thanmawia and Ralte 2017, p. 135-137). The Galngam myth also portrays an exchange of curses between Galngam and Dawi Kungpu engaged in a battle of wits:

Galngam may your eyes become blind, may your legs be broken, and may your hands be trapped on the bull rope. Hearing this curse, Galngam cursed back “Alright even if I become blind, my legs get broken, and my hands get trapped in the bull rope, at least the bull will drag me to some village where I will find someone to help me out. As for you, may the flesh of your buttocks be permanently stuck on the rock on which you sit, may the rising floods of the monsoon season submerge you, and may you bear the heat of the summer sun all your life. Unable to bear Galngam’s curse, Dawikungpu took back his curse on Galngam who did likewise. However, a small piece of flesh from Dawikungpu’s buttocks remained stuck on the rock where he sat and the mark can be seen on the rocks even to this day. ( Vaiphei 2015, p. 15).

In Mizo folklore, there are a number of stories in creation myths that underscores the importance of selflessness in times of great difficulty. This usually is portrayed in the form of extending a helping hand with any resource one is capable of giving. This act of selfless service in times of need is perceived as the concept of Tawm-ngaina or Tlawmngaihna which translates to ‘love of less’. It is the love of less in times of servitude to the old and needy; a collective moral code imbibed within Zo societies and is usually expected from the younger generations. The myth, “How Land Acquired Soil” narrates a cooperative interaction between the human and animal world in arriving at a solution to bring soil to their rock-laden, parched land on the other side of the river (Thanmawia and Ralte 2017, p. 3). The brothers Thanghou and Liandou, who were left destitute by their mother are admired for their selfless love for each other; their sharing of a single millet seed is an act of tawm-ngaina that has resonated across households and instilled upon young minds as an exemplary act of kindness and generosity. Explicating this distinct ancestral code of conduct, Vumson records Samuelson’s clarification of what the concept entails:

Tlawmngaihna implies the capacity for hard work, bravery, endurance, generosity, kindness, and selflessness. The forefathers emphasized this value of the action to their progeny. In days of both happiness and misfortune, the concept of Tlawmngaihna was a stabilizing force. If a person grew sick or died in a village other than his own, the youth of that village would carry the dead body or sick person back to his own village. When the Mizo people traveled in a group, the youngest man’s duty would be to obtain firewood to cook food for the rest of the company. If an older man’s basket became too heavy a younger man would help relieve the load. Later on, the elders would honour the man who had the greatest Tlawmngaihna by letting him drink rice beer first in the get-together… this … code of morals made it obligatory for every Mizo to be courteous, considerate, unselfish, courageous, industrious and willing to help others, even at considerable inconvenience to oneself. When everybody was hungry, a man would eat very little, leaving the bigger portion of food for friends… walking one whole day over rough terrain in order to give important news … a man risks his life to save his friends… These are all Tlawmngaihna or ‘to need less’. It might be called “self-denial and acceptance of pain.” (Vumson 1986, p. 10).

Oral narratives are the culmination of a people’s collective ethos, trademark, and a doorway to understanding and manifesting their subjective realities told in the most authentic manner possible. Similarly, indigenous ontological interpretations are acts of resistance that liberates us from all forms of colonial distortions that offer only to analytically expose the supposed structures of our systems without reverence for the meaning that they carry. Nonetheless, while it would be only spiteful to claim that the objective interpretations of colonial scrutiny have wronged us completely, considering the extent to which we have been added and exposed to the fields of cultural, socio-political, or anthropological interest in the global sphere, there are gaps between such progressive analyses. However, there are need to reinvent a new set of conceptual lexicons to evolve the tradition of indigenous hermeneutics that is undeniably lacking in Western vocabulary. Such indigenous concepts that have been discussed have acted as guidelines and moral codes for the Zos before the existence of any prescribed examples, hence, what may be more important is the meaning attached to such codes, rites and traditions than their mere perception as objective data. In Maps of Meaning, (1999) Jordan Peterson clarifies how this process defines the consciousness of the indigenous man:

The natural, pre-experimental or mythical mind is in fact primarily concerned with meaning- which is essentially implication for action – and not with “objective” nature… For the pre-experimentalist, the thing is most truly the significance of its sensory properties, as they are experienced in subjective experience – in affect or emotion” (Peterson 1999, p. 16).  

Ontological interpretation is also a means to free ourselves from what Leanne B. Simpson calls, “cognitive imperialism” that invalidates the capacity of the Indigenous people to think of and for themselves (Simpson 2011). This is evidently politically relevant to the Zo people today considering their disarrayed state of existence that only leans on a reminiscent idea of a homeland that once tangibly stood before the colonial interruption, thus, disrupting their sense of a unified identity that is rooted now only in their oral tradition. A substantial amount of autonomy must be cultivated, at the least in matters of indigenous culture to shift away from the vices of cultural hegemony. A resurgence of indigenous knowledge is an opportunity to redirect one’s route of comprehension and reflect on what the idea of indigenous means to the indigenous, rather than what s/he used to mean to the West.

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.

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Kimthianvak Vaiphei is a doctoral research scholar at the Department of English, North Eastern-Hill University, Shillong. Her research interest focuses on Indigenous theoretical approaches and Zomi Oral Literature.