North East Literature & Culture

The Ecology of Body Memory in Heisnam Kanhailal’s Theatre

North East Literature & Culture/Vol16N12024

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Anannya Nath
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya Adarsha Mahavidyalaya, Behali, India.

^{Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 16, Issue 1, 2024. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v16n1.15

[Article History: Received: 31 December 2023. Revised: 18 February 2024. Accepted: 19 March 2024. Published: 21 March 2024]}

^{Full-Text PDF Issue Access}

Abstract

Performance arts provide an ontological framework that enables memory to be performed in ways that make private memory public. ‘Public’ here refers to the spatial component where groups meet and share memory. Theatre, a component of performance arts, is a cultural practice carried out in public arenas. Heisnam Kanhailal’s theatre, popularly known as the “Theatre of the Earth,” rooted in a culture empowered by the earth questions the edifice of Indian dramaturgy and revolutionises performance through the enactment of suffering on stage. The actor in his theatre becomes an embodiment of ‘organic memory,’ the medium through which ancestral teachings of a community and sensory knowledge of being find an outlet. The focus on the actor’s body rather than the conventional emphasis on the psyche suggests that acting is sustained and relayed as an active force. This paper aims to understand how the physical body in Kanhailal’s theatre transforms into a collation of communal memory which creates a space for communication between the deliverer (actor) and the receiver (spectator). By studying the body dynamics shown in his plays, Pebet, Memoirs of Africa, Dakghar and Draupadi, the assessment traces the affective as well as discursive modes of sustaining identity codified in the ecology of the community. Therefore, by making theatre evocative of their history of powerlessness and the bodies of actors representative of these sensitivities, theatre rooted in the community’s ecology creates sites of remembrance, the mental loci of which could be imaginatively accessed and explored.

Keywords: Theatre, Ecology, Actor, Catharsis, Sustainability.

Sustainable Development Goals: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

Citation: Nath, A. (2024). The Ecology of Body Memory in Heisnam Kanhailal’s Theatre. Rupkatha Journal 16:1. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v16n1.15

Racial Prejudice and Gender Discrimination against Northeast Indians amidst COVID-19

Human Rights Studies/North East Literature & Culture/Pandemic Studies/V14N4

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Debbie Lalrinawmi¹ & Shuchi²
¹Research Scholar, Department of Basic Sciences & Humanities Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Mizoram. Email id: debbierinawmi91@gmail.com
²Assistant Professor, Department of Basic Sciences & Humanities Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Mizoram. Email id: shuchi.hss@nitmz.ac.in

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 4, December, 2022. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n4.32
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Abstract

The outburst of the COVID-19 pandemic has been largely racialized. With its origin rooted in China, Asians across the globe experienced labelling to be responsible for the pandemic. Asians or mongoloid looking individuals suffered discrimination, and contempt worldwide. In India, the pandemic restored and re-established the social problem i.e. racialism against the Northeast Indians which has been tackled over the years. While most of the Indians have non-mongoloid looks, the Northeast Indians are mainly Asiatic race. As such, they have Asian looks though Indian in blood. The fight of the Northeast Indians has been double. They have to fight against the virus as everyone, and against the negative mindset of their fellow Indians against them. The Indian government, as such, promptly established a committee to look into the matter. But there has been no law against it which makes it hard to act accordingly. Besides the racial affliction, there existed gender discrimination which doubled the affliction of the women of northeast Indians.

Keywords: Racism; gender discrimination; Covid-19; Northeast Indian

The Battle of Belonging: A Study of Contemporary Shillong Poets

North East Literature & Culture/V14N2

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¹Amanda B. Basaiawmoit & Dr. Paonam Sudeep Mangang²

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction:

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

Theoretical framework

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

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

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

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

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

Shillong: A background

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

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

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

Depiction of Othering and Belonging in Shillong Poetry

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

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

“In the park I saw

Those strange flowers again

That I have seen bossing around

[…]

Like flowers, only strangers

And strange ways have come

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

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

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

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

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

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

Warm, hospitable people and

Endless avenues to lead to prosperity

Today, they say apprehensive stares have replaced the smiles

And they claim to have diagnosed the disease

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

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

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

“But wouldn’t you suffer from this same malady

If you also belonged to a people who comprise

A grain of rice

In a bagful of India

A grain that could simply slither away

And be forgotten

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

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

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

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

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

“But wait, my friend.

We will break bread with you, for sure,

but only when you

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

to be in your midst,

stop insisting on passports when we identify ourselves

or leering at our womenfolk just because

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

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

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

“[…] I learnt the vocabulary

of hate and placed my preadolescent signature

on a certificate that declared my neighbour

and friend Abhijit, his family, had become

our enemy. So, we grew up drinking xenophobic

wine and transitioned seasons in communal stupor,

bullying Bengalis, questioning our Indianness.

[…]

Those were the days we walked perpetually

stoned on the marijuana of blaming settlers

for all our problems, washed our parched throats

with the scotch of ethnocentric justification

to prevent our extinction” (Almond Syiem, 2020)

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

“While curiously blind

To our own decadence, excusing our politicians

For their predictable theatre of well-rehearsed lies

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

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

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

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

“I’d rather die

than see these

hills decapitated

they are cutting down forests

suppose they behead these

hills with their neat chop

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

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

“When a child, mother said

these are not dogs barking

but hyenas or wolves

as Laitumkhrah, somnambulist

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

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

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

“my mind sinks into horizons

of a hill town which I ask

to love,

Me.” (Guha, 2019, p. 106)

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

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

“There were reasons for which we had it painfully uprooted

And now the gap of the missing tooth

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

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

“But the tongue is a child,

Habitually searching for a world

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

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

“I will carry this helpless bridge

[…]

and each time, from anywhere in the world

one is enabled to sniff the way back

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

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

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

“How distant we have grown. How possibilities

Of good days are finally coming to an end.

Like I often hear my mother

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

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

“they’d call us out for our religion

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

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

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

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

“The pain of

Becoming homeless, of being an unwelcome prowler

The pain of

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

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

“….The hills

preoccupied with war talks. There’ll be massacre again

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

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

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

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

Conclusion:

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

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

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

Declaration of Conflict of Interests

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

Funding

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

Notes:

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

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

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

⁴biskot is the Khasi name for Squash

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

⁶kong is the local word for a Khasi lady.

⁷ktung is the khasi name for fermented fish

⁸soh baingon dieng is a Khasi name for tree tomato

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

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

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

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

1.4K views

Manashi Bora

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

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

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

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

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

Keywords: agitation, militancy, poststructuralism, postcolonial feminism

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

Declaration of Conflict of Interests

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

Funding

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

Notes:

¹See Bedabrat Bora’s interview with ArupaPatangiaKalita, June 10,2017.youtube.

References:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Work Consulted:

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

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

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

Indigenous Studies/North East Literature & Culture/V14N2

1.3K views

Shiv Kumar

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pfunuo returned to their room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What does that mean?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

Declaration of Conflict of Interests

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

Funding

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

End-notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editorial/North East Literature & Culture

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Jyotirmoy Prodhani

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note:

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

North East Literature & Culture/Performance Studies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Setting: Imphal and CRT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Interview

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

Image 4: Ratan Thiyam at CRT (2017)

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

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

Jyotirmoy Prodhani: How do you accomplish that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

Urubhangam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Review/North East Literature & Culture/V14N2

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

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

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

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

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

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

He puts on a mask when asked of his day

And talks of everything but himself

He calls himself evil but acts like a human

Confusing himself and all others. (p. 12)

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

Before you dismiss me as a mere being

Someone you could trample crush and kill

I just want you to know

That I was a candle in the woods

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

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

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

There you show up again redhead huh?

Blossoming on my sheets

Like a barrel of red wine

Between my leg

……………………..

My stomach bloats

My head throbs

My limbs ache

The cry of my body

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

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

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

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

I am a tree

I’m strong. I’m steady.

So what if autumn turns my leaves yellow?

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

I’m still alive from inside,

and I possess the strength

to spread greenery again. (p.43)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Figure 1: The Wrap

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

As the dawn breaks over and the darkness dies

Things are easy but nothing ever lasts

Oh the love, the strength and our enduring will

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

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

Reference

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

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

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

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

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

Cultural Studies/North East Literature & Culture/V14N2

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Renu Elizabeth Abraham

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

Theoretical Frameworks

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

Homogenisation and Erasure: Nationalism in WingStar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

Declaration of Conflict of Interests

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

Funding

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Rolla Das¹ & Abhaya N B²

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

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

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

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

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

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

Graphic Narratives

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

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

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

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

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

Political commentary in graphic narratives of the world and of India

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

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

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

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

Writing the North-East

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Humanising archives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

Declaration of Conflict of Interests

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

Funding

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

References

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

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

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