V14N2 - Page 4

Partition and its Afterlife: Tracing Home, Memory and Longing in the Imagination of the Displaced Sylhetis

////
1.9K views

Suranjana Choudhury
Department of English, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, India. ORCID: 0000-0002-3662-9252. Email: tushi.chou@gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022. Pages 1-11. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne26

First published: June 25, 2022 | AreaNortheast India | LicenseCC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
Full-Text HTML Full-Text PDF Cite
PlumX Metrics

Abstract:

As people had to choose between one nation and the other during and after the Partition of 1947, homes were lost and lives were altered forever. India’s northeast, despite continuously bearing the consequences of this historical experience, remains largely an unacknowledged area in Partition studies. Any cursory exploration of Partition scholarship would reveal that Punjab and Bengal remain the primary sites of investigation. Where does one locate specificities of Partition experience of India’s northeast? Creative writers and artists in this region have also engaged with Partition and its seminal impact on the society and culture of India’s northeast. Through a study of select Partition writings from India’s northeast, this paper will examine the different registers of public and personal memories of Partition and its afterlife in the literary imagination of the displaced Sylhetis to bring forth a better understanding of the perpetuity of dislocation, loss and anxiety in the spheres of everydayness. Drawing upon Memory Studies and discourses concerning home and identity, this paper aims to explore how literature becomes important vehicle for representing inscription and transmission of Partition memories and connected idea of a lost home.

Keywords: Partition, Northeast, Sylhet, Memory, Home

To Remember:

To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited. (Sontag, 2003, p. 115)

The act of remembering is compulsively tied up with the act of forgetting because one initiates the occurrence of the other. This phenomenon of simultaneity is symptomatic of various registers of remembering- collective and individual. Paul Ricoeur in his exploration of arsmemoriae observes if “a measured use of memorization also implies a measured use of forgetting” (Ricoeur, 2006, p. 68) and proceeds to further explicate issues concerning the relationship shared between remembering, forgetting and memory. Ricoeur, in his analysis of this complex and layered relationship, contends that it is the initiative to recall or remember that provides crucial scope to reframe forgetting. (Ricoeur,2006) The idea of ethics and aesthetics of memory and its working also assumes significance in our understanding of this connectedness between remembering and forgetting. As a conceptual framework for analyzing historical events, Memory Studies as a discipline offers useful insights and valuable interpretations. This subject of memory and its concomitant dimensions have attained crucial potency in the context of renewed interest invested in addressing and understanding the Partition of 1947 and its afterlife. As people had to choose between one nation and the other during and after Partition, homes were lost and lives were altered forever. Shelley Feldman (2004) while discussing the subject of displacement and its cascading effects in the context of Partition comments pertinently:

For those who chose to move from their place of residence after that date, they were no longer merely changing residence, as in shifting from one city to another for employment or education, but instead were risking immigrant or refugee status in a place that had been, only the day before, part of a shared national space, their home. (p. 113)

The tormenting process of displacement entailed devastation of lived space, cultural practice and social ties. It also signified violence of loss and the unsettling emergence of an immensely difficult life for the displaced. Appropriately noted by Ayesha Jalal (2013) as Partition being “a defining moment that is neither beginning nor end”, it continues to remind us that its perpetuity belongs to our time, to our everyday realities. (1) To this day, this historical episode which is more of an ongoing process significantly impacts discourses concerning identity formations, dynamics of nationhood and communal politics of entire South Asia. The chief engagement of this paper is with select Partition writings from India’s northeast to situate memories of this catastrophic event and the bearing of such memories on constructions of home and identity among Sylheti community residing in the northeast. Through an analysis of chosen narratives, this essay proposes to examine the different registers of public and personal memories of Partition and its afterlife to bring forth a better understanding of the perpetuity of dislocation, anxiety and longing for a lost homeland in the spheres of everydayness as shared by the displaced Sylhetis in different writings.

India’s northeast:

India’s northeast remained primarily an unacknowledged and unexplored site of analysis in Partition studies till very long. However, the story of Partition here, like many other marginalized narratives, has curiously entered the realm of visibility and scholarship only at the present times.  Any discussion of Partition experience has addressed Punjab and Bengal as two sites that suffered the violence and loss triggered by division and associated dislocation. It is important to note here that for a very long-time official projects and academic endeavours tended to overlook the primacy of Partition as a seminal occurrence altogether. Instead, one witnesses that maximum attention had been directed towards celebrating and marking 1947 as a glorious historical juncture of the end of oppressive, long-drawn colonial rule. Kavita Daiya (2008) in her discussion on Partition points out how after 1965, Partition violence largely disappeared from public discussion and how it was relegated to a remote past from the perspective of Indian nation-state. It was desirable that the past should be forgotten to maintain harmonious communal relationships within the nation. In his plea for an appropriate revision of historiography, Gyanendra Pandey (2004) has rightly argued that a very simplistic separation has been made between Partition and violence which in turn has led to omissions and erasures of important truths and insights pertaining to Partition experiences. David Gilmartin (1998) in his essay, “Partition, Pakistan and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative”, had pointed out that the primary issue is the apparent irreconcilable dissonance between articulating a history of ‘high politics’ and that of ‘popular violence’. However, over a phase of the last few decades, historians, ethnographers, anthropologists, and memoirists have directed their attention towards the duality of independence from British colonialism and the enormity of complexities that characterize refugee issues and idea of nationhood. As Tarun Saint (2010) argues in his study of alternative modes of representation and contends that “such counter-narratives allow for the voicing of alternative perspectives and a reckoning with some of the more unpalatable and even grotesque aspects of the Partition experience and its aftermath.” (2) Seeking to retrieve undisclosed gaps and silences, recent studies have initiated valuable discussions about what happened and how things happened. These findings have helped in mapping out the complex nature of Partition legacy and its connected ramifications.

It also remains true that these alternative trajectories of Partition studies have compellingly been centered around Punjab and Bengal experiences. Even today a major research gap in Partition scholarship is inadequate engagement with India’s northeastern region.  It is important to remember that Partition has not rendered uniform experience shared by those who crossed borders in the east and the west, it altered on the basis of ethnic, class, caste, gender differences. The case of India’s northeast reiterates the dimension of characteristic heterogeneity of Partition history. Because of the paucity of scholarship on this area, very little has been known to the rest. This contentious past rooted in individual historical constructions and notions has “produced and reproduced the kind of social and political milieu within which the North East region (NER) is situated at present.” (Yumnam,2016, p158) Sanjib Baruah’s contention that in the case of Assam, specifically, the meaning of Partition which has been opening slowly and gradually over time through a tortuous process renders important meaning in the context of understanding multiple truths about Partition in the northeast. (Baruah,2015) When Partition became a reality it impacted community lives, social fabric, and culture of northeast in more ways than one. The displaced communities had to negotiate with numerous problems in the aftermath of the division of the country and continue to remain affected because “India is yet to frame transparent policies linking rights and laws regarding them.” (Sengupta,2016, p. 192) It separated northeast India from the rest of newly formed India except for a slim passage commonly referred to as chicken’s neck. Udayon Mishra (2000) in The Periphery Strikes Back provides an assessment of how Partition made Assam a landlocked province because Chittagong port which was a major outlet for Assam tea became a part of East Pakistan due to Partition. It had an adverse impact on the socio-economic structure of this region. Not only that, it immensely affected societal compositions and everyday realities of various linguistic and ethnic communities who were part of the people of northeast. Binayak Dutta (2019) in his discussion on this aspect pertaining to the Partition experience in India’s northeast alerts us:

The Partition of Bengal and Assam in 1947, culminating in the Radcliffe Line of 1947 divided not only the Hindus and Muslims of this region on religious and ethnic lines, it also divided the smaller ethnic communities like the Khasis, Garos, Hajongs, Rabhas, Karbis Koch-Rajbongshis, the Reangs and the Chakmas, to name a few. (para.9)

This wide-scale diversity of cartographic ramifications and border alignments with altered realities of belonging and identity reminds us of the urgency to recognize Partition as a defining moment that has had far-reaching consequences in the larger scheme of South Asian politics and culture and which to date remains unscripted and unacknowledged.

Sylhet and its specificities:

“My heart cries for the islands on the river Padma, o my dear compassionate folk

My heart cries for the islands

Who shattered my peaceful home, my happy dreams- o my dear compassionate folk?”[i]

As in the case with many cultural and ethnic communities in the northeast, Sylhetis have also been crucial recipients of the Partition experience and its associated terrains of subject formations. The story of Sylhetis in the context of Partition is not the story of a moment, it is the narrative of a continued exile, movement, and resettlement. Sylhet Referendum that had happened around seventy-four years ago and which led to the Partition of Assam is a crucially significant episode that has not been told adequately in mainstream Partition histories. The subtext of Partition (Sylhet) is more absorbing than the dominant text of Bengal Partition because it offers an entirely new perspective to our understanding of Partition politics. (Hossain, 2013) In recent times, questions have started being asked about the reasons behind such absence of representation and inadequate visibility of this important chapter of Partition. It had in reality permanently changed the lives and futures of generations of Sylhetis who were displaced from their homeland to arrive as refugees in the newly formed nation-state. In the wake of the decision to hold the Sylhet Referendum, there was a sincere assumption that Referendum would initiate a proper, clear mandate on the issue of Partition. Unfortunately, the reality was otherwise, a great number of people were displaced, dispossessed and rendered homeless within a very short span of time. Subsequent to the Referendum, most of Sylhet, except the three and a half thanas of Patharkandi, Badarpur, Karimganj and Ratabari, was transferred to East Pakistan. Referring to the complex layers of contextual politics and machinations that shaped the orchestration of the referendum, Mousumi Dutta Pathak (2012) notes that it was the “shared responsibility of the two religious communities of East Pakistan- the Hindus and the Muslims and the two linguistic communities of Assam or specifically the Brahmaputra Valley- the Assamese and the Bengalis.” (159) Because a sense of unpreparedness prevailed around the event, the displaced community struggled hard to negotiate with the changed circumstances. This forced displacement of Sylhetis, as argued by Anindita Dasgupta, “created and erased the newly drawn national boundaries by building diasporas and ‘de-territorialized’ fractured identities across South Asia on the one hand, and by raising serious questions about the authenticity and citizenship of Partition migrants on the other.” (2014,p.15)Seven decades on, this specter of the past and contentions surrounding its materiality raise fundamental questions about memory, home, and identity.

In this context, it is useful to indicate the potential of literary representations of Sylhet chapter of Partition to understand the negotiations of the public as well as personal memories of this historical experience. Literature is perhaps one of the most potent means of properly expressing essential truths about human dilemmas and understanding the world around us. It is useful to recall what Svend Erik Larsen (2016) notes about the role of literature:

Human experience, broken or not, is always local; it takes place as it were. But literature is always invested with translocal motifs, genres, metaphors, symbols, plots; characters travel across cultural boundaries in order for any local literature to come into being and, hence, to suggest interpretations of a local life world. Literature makes possible a shared understanding of human experience, but it does so by turning it into memory in a translocal perspective. (514)

The issue of how and what to represent in the midst of loss and crisis of displacement was not easy to resolve, especially keeping in mind the fraught history of Referendum politics and its connected dissonances. Furthermore, people who were at the receiving end of Partition-induced displacement were intensely busy resettling and starting life anew. These groups of displaced Sylheti people were engaged in rebuilding lives and homes in different parts of northeast. Moreover, the experience of loss and pain was raw and fresh for many to be able to come up with meaningful articulations. A sense of reticence marked literary imagination of creative writers and artists who could have taken this up. This initial lack of literary responses, in the words of Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee and Dipendu Das, should be viewed as a failure of the writers to “distance themselves from their immediate context and explore the themes in literary productions.” (Bhattacharjee &Das,2012, p.xi)It is pertinent to note that Barak Valley of Assam, which is Bhattacharjee and Das’s point of reference, happens to be the primary locus of most discussions concerning Sylheti culture and society in a post Partition milieu. Speaking about this pall of silence surrounding Partition, Amitabha Dev Choudhury points towards the lack of any internal evidence which may bring any ready-made answer to the issue. He further contends that “there is not a single signifier anywhere that can tempt the reader to read this silence itself as a narrative.” (Dev Choudhury, 2013) Eventually, this silence was challenged and new voices emerged to embody different layers of issues signifying post Partition predicament. One witnesses how the experience of loss and pain, consequent to displacement, produced important reflections on exile and memories of a lost home. A popular folk song records this measure of dispossession and vulnerability poignantly:

“O dear kin, you have visited my home after a long time

What shall I offer you here at my place?

I have neither roof nor hearth, only endless woes

Selling off all my possessions, I am bereft of all savings

I left my homeland because of Partition….”[ii]

This song further tells us how home before Partition meant prosperity and availability, this lost world, described with markers of plentitude, is reflective of an intimate, endearing and everyday memory. Here, this powerful engagement with Partition through the lens of memory is suggestive of a larger issue predicated on emotions of longing, loss, and return. The evocation of a lost place and longing connected with it is central to the analysis of literature written about a home left behind by the Sylhetis. And while memory of a lost homeland is invariably imbued with a discourse of loss, the idea of return is something that remains deeply problematic. As Stephan Feuchtwang (2003) has posited that a home is a mappable place of shared memory, acts of remembering, grieving and yearning demonstrate avenues for multifold layers of understanding home and belonging. It is interesting to note here that quite a few fictional representations written about lost home in Sylhet and subsequent trauma play out in various ways this interconnectedness between territory and self. Jhumur Pandey’s short story “Lost and Found” (originally published as “Mokkhodasundorir Haranoprapti”) is an apt example of this. At one point, Mokkhoda, the central figure in the story, reflects how her life is “based on memories; on dreams; on pain.” (Pandey, 2017, p.283) In exploring the relationship between mapping of places and the functional aspect of nostalgia Elizabeth Wilson (1997) points out that romance of nostalgia is tied both to a place which is lost and that we tend to understand our present through the remote perspective of the past. A complex web of desire and memory through which homeland is constructed by the protagonist here is symptomatic of many such constructions by survivors of Partition. Lore Segal in her work “Memory: The Problems of Imagining the Past” (1998) claims how recollection is a double experience like a double exposure, the time frame in which one remembers superimposes itself on the remembered time and the two images fail to synchronize perfectly at any point. The short story is replete with a delirious outpouring of an individual about a spatial entity of the past that is defined through its plentitude, bountifulness, and a kind of emotional comfort that is completely absent in post Partition life. The fragmented, non-sequential narrative switching continuously between past and present is heavily invested on the production of a sheltered home which is profoundly connected with the identity of the speaker. Her desire for her village concentrates equally on objects and activities thereby representing an affective intensity for a world that was known, whole, and that also must be experienced as a lack in the present context. This compulsion, as explained by Halbwachs, (1950) is the reason for remembering places and objects. Focusing on an amalgamation of objects and activities, Mokkhoda remembers her land, the sky, the water, and the sports had she indulged in:

“Mokkhoda remembers playing prisoner in the rain. She remembers Bamacharan Bhattacharya’s little school. Steamed leaves of amrul, the soft flesh inside palm fruits, tall tamarind trees, Karimchacha, the banks of the river Manu, Nehru at Panchabati, Aminabibi, a sweet dish made of taro roots. Some patchy visions and memories assail her.” (Pandey,2017, p.283)

Her remembrance in terms of earth, water, plants and other elements of nature can be read as a layered lamentation of emotions she associates with the topography of her erstwhile home and it also serves as a reminder of an embodied experience of a territory with which she shares a deep sense of belonging. The noted author Amit Chaudhuri, discussing Ritwik Ghatak’s engagement with Partition in his films, records how air, water, and sky are invoked as properties available to the homeless to embark on the task of memory-making. Chaudhuri notes:

Ghatak’s images of Partition, thus, are the elemental ones of land, water, and sky, suggesting the composition of the universe in its original form, and belonging to mythology of creation. It’s not so much history-book Partition we have here as the world as an immigrant or exile or newcomer would see it, starting from scratch and reconstructing his life and his environment from nothing.” (Chaudhuri, 1997, p.95)

Mokkhoda with her lost son and husband seeks out an escape from a life that has turned topsy-turvy owing to Partition and which shall not offer her any relief from her immediate circumstances of destitution and denial. Ananya Jahanara Kabir (2013) in her analysis of Siddharth Deb’s novel demonstrates how this “spatio-temporal elsewhere” with its vivid description of “tempestuous rivers, fishes and snakes, its groves overflowing with mangoes, guavas and jackfruits” is lost to Dr. Dam’s mind. (111) Kabir further contends how that left behind place is “a knot around which swirls remembering and forgetting, narrating and silencing.” (77) The concluding part of the story foregrounds the need for connecting Mokkhoda’s personal narrative of loss and rumination with the larger narrative of country’s Partition and how she finds her lost husband and son not in the real sphere of existence , but in the realm of a fractured, dream-like sequence of narration .The final lines of the story which say, “the shower of memories and dreams are running in rivulets down her shrunken body”(Pandey,283)and also how “Mokkhoda spreads her arms out in deep and longing”(Pandey, 283) give a sense of the merger of the linguistic with the somatic to establish an illusory reconciliation.

In Amitabha Dev Choudhury’s short story “Wake Up Call” (originally published as Ghoombhanganiya), it is possible to discern an interweaving of the theme of memories sweeping across generations and the texture of longing for another time and place. This story told from the perspective of a second-generation recipient of the Partition experience represents the trope of interconnectedness and entanglement of impressions of homeland and mental cartography remembered, desired and articulated by different subject positions. Just as arbitrariness of political boundaries and new forms of belonging and citizenship had assailed Thamma in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, similar mode of affliction is conveyed through the character of Masi, an elderly woman in the neighbourhood of the narrator.

Alastair Bonnett, (2015) talking about the persistence of loss in the realm of migrant nostalgia, makes us aware about how loss and longing have different consequences. He states how this sense of loss and longing “range from and shift between creative attempts to re-script identity in new contexts to forms of exclusionary identity politics” (p. 97). Masi’s persistent yearning for home and concurrently her desire to return that remains unfulfilled imply a loss of personal wholeness and moral certainty which is examined as an important component in Bryan Turner’s discussion about the second level of nostalgia. (Turner, 1987) Masi’s mental map cataloguing “lush green fields; vast horizons, endless expanse of water, full-grown crops of corn bending downwards in the vast open golden fields; the archetypal dwelling places of rural Bengal; the big ponds; the clamouring fish; the village barns spilling over with the overflowing reserve of harvest…” (Dev Choudhury,2012, p.142) is indicative of a reflexive, interminable relationship that she shared with her village. Edward Said contends in “Invention, Memory and Place” that in recent years it is possible to witness an increasing interest in the interface between humanities and social sciences: memory and geography or, more specifically, the study of human space. (Said,2000) This aspect is evident in most of the stories discussed in this paper. Anjali Gera Roy in her essay, “Memories of lost homes” (2020) provides compelling insights into the ongoing debates surrounding notions of home, displacement and longing in the context of India’s Partition. She notes, “The choice of places and objects- a street, a terrace, a fruit, a snack, a sport or a melody- that evoke sentiments of longing in Partition refugees is inexplicable to those who have not partaken in the cultural memories of those shared pleasures” (Gera Roy, 2020, p.138). The overt source of pain and loss in “Wakeup Call” is a kind of irresolution that will forever affect generations of displaced community in the northeast because of Partition’s cartographic consequences. What Jahanara Kabir terms as “Cartographic Irresolution” (Kabir,2013,72) while contextualizing northeast’s marginalization and its consequent identity politics is powerfully evoked in the narrative through constant endeavours to arrive at an understanding of a settled home. The emotional anatomy of Masi in relation to the territory she is unable to go back to throws out the set of complications unleashed by political conundrum on individuals who must wrestle with multiple identities, pasts and presents. Masi’s chronic ‘out of place’ situation is set in parallel motion with the narrator’s own sense of exile and longing. Focusing on inter-generational dynamics of remembrance and forgetting, the story is structured around a complex encounter between two generations’ affective ties with their partitioned pasts. For the narrator, a historical event that had happened much before his birth continues to influence his identity formation and determines inscription of such formations within particular spaces. The author examines psychological effects of quest for a stable and settled home on a subjectivity that does not remain unified, it gets blurred between the narrator, his mother and the character of Masi, as he reflects, “I wonder, after all these years, why couldn’t this land become her own? The search for one’s homeland eventually becomes synonymous with the longing for one’s childhood. Isn’t it a familiar adage that in old age a man enters his second childhood?” (Dev Choudhury, 2012, p.144) Fragmentation of memory is the tenor of this short story and it is through this fragmented and oblique representation of memory that one discovers a concern with deeper patterns underlying everyday experience of dislocation and longing for an elsewhere.

Svetlana Boym (2001) talks about restorative nostalgia as something that involves a desire to “rebuild the lost home” and views the past with an eye towards reconstituting and recreating it, it also implies a desire to relive those special moments. Very often, for the displaced community, it is used as a kind of strategy to ameliorate struggles pertaining to the experience of dislocation. It becomes important to draw on the restorative potential of nostalgia for the native home to cope with their existing dilemmas. Anjali Gera Ray gives an insightful analysis of emotional affiliation and affective belonging to the homeland and its subsequent impact and in this regard, she comments that nostalgic recollections oftentimes in selecting the convivial “exhibit an exilic yearning for a lost home and are coloured with emotions of love, care, attachment, friendship, happiness and comfort for spaces, objects, practices and people.” (Gera Roy, 2020, p.132) Mukti Choudhury’s memory piece “Tale of Broken India” (originally published as “Bhanga Bharater Kotha”) is another reminder of the role of memory-work in which identity of the displaced is brought into being at the intersection of place and selective remembrance. The narrative conducts a motion towards a place and time, a journey back in time from the ruins in the present. Like many other Partition survivors, the narrator places an array of visual detailing to establish his affiliation with lost physical space with all its material features and also to underline the close connection between memory and displacement. As the author describes:

Who do I explain and how do I explain that a sense of Viraha[iii] plays through my entire being? Through a journey into that remote homeland, I derive a wonderful pleasure, I smell the earth of my motherland. I feel the soft touch of paddy grain and I affectionately embrace the fragrance of shiuli-rose-gandharaj flowers. I rest my on head on the shore of Manu listening to fairy tales, at midnight of Monsoon I hear the cacophony of the boatmen of Hakaluki, I listen to the tune of Bhatiali, I take a long walk amidst Surma Valley touching the tealeaves on my way to the villages of Baramchal, Samser Nagar, Sreemangal, Chhatak, Sayestaganj, Chunarughat, Habiganj and immerse myself…. (Choudhury, 2013, p.245)

The author clings on to his personal memories describing and evoking haptic, sonic, and visual dimensions of his own place in the midst of decreasing collective anchoring and attempts to bring forth a unified locality with an enshrined past that will activate a better understanding of his self. Raymond Williams (1985) noted that “landscape takes on a different quality if you are one of those who remember” (72) and the remembering agent here through his cognitive mapping brings alive distant Sylhet land with all its everyday splendors and that mapping is constitutive of his own sense of self. It is useful to note here that remembrance, time, place and loss are phenomenological realities and it clearly implies how echoes of past places might resonate with displaced people also it is easy to map how the loss of a particular place produces a keen sense of nostalgia. One finds a similar resonance in Margaret E Farrar’s essay, “Amnesia, Nostalgia and Place Memory” (2011) where she argues how “accounts of people’s experiences of displacement—whether as a migrant, exile, or refugee—repeatedly emphasize the interconnections between body, mind, and place.” (728) Choudhury’s narrative shows how investment in memory entails the opening of a repeated process of continuous and fragile negotiations that may always remain a risk and may never offer final reconciliation. This is an essential point of view that runs through most of the narratives written about Partition. Indeed, this study has attempted to demonstrate how forms of longing and mental cartography assume a new poignancy in the context of newer battles of identity politics. The canvas of representations produced by Sylheti imagination insists on the layered nature of memory and illuminates our understanding of how home might not be a palpable, tangible entity, it might just exist only in writing.

Declaration of Conflicts of Interests

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

Funding

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

Notes

[i]  Hemango Biswas, the noted singer, composer, poet and political activist composed these memorable lines to convey his pain and angst after experiencing dislocation in the wake of Partition. The composition, in a way, talks about collective sense of suffering and longing for homeland.

[ii] This widely sung Sylheti folk song brings forth the idea of dispossession and vulnerability that attends to it. The entire song echoes a kind of sadness for having lost everything due to Partition and it is sharply contrasted with prosperous life before the division had happened.

[iii] Viraha refers to an emotion of separation and realization of love through that phase of separation.  It is a common trope used in Partition fictions and reminiscences to express the intensity of longing for homeland on the other side of the border.

References

Barman, Prsaun,( Ed).( 2013) Deshbhag, Deshtyag: PrasangaUttarpurboBharat.Vicky    Publishers.

Baruah, Sanjib. (2015).Partition and the politics of citizenship in Assam. In Urvashi Butali  (Ed.)    Partition: The Long Shadow. Penguin Publications.

Bonnett, Alastair. (2015 ).The Geography of Nostalgia: Global and Local Perspectives on        Modernity and Loss. Routledge.

Boym, Svetlana. (2001). The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books.

Chaudhuri,Amit. (1997). Partition as exile. Index on Censorship, 26(6),92-96.

Daiya Kavita. (2008). Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender and National Culture in Postcolonial India. Temple University Press.

Dasgupta Anindita. (2014). Remembering Sylhet: Hindu Muslim voices from a nearly forgotten story of India’s Partition. Manohar

Dev Choudhury, Amitabha. (2012). Wake up Call. In Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee, and Dipendu Das (Eds.). Barbed Wire Fence: Stories of Displacement from the Barak Valley of Assam. Niyogi Books.

Dutta Binayak. (2019). Lest We Forget: The Many Partitions and its Legacies in Northeast India Partition Studies Quarterly.

Farrar, Margaret. (2011). Amnesia, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Place Memory. Political Research Quarterly,64 ( 4),723-735.

Feldman, Shelley. (2003). Bengali State and Nation Making: Partition and Displacement Revisited. International Social Science Journal, 55(175) 111-121.https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2451.5501019_10

Gera Roy, Anjali. (2020). Memories and Postmemories of the Partition of India. Routledge.

Gilmartin, David. (1998). Partition, Pakistan and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative. The Journal of Asian Studies, 57 ( 4),1068-1095.

Hossain, Ashfaque. (2013). The Making and Unmaking of Assam-Bengal Borders and the Sylhet Referendum. Modern Asian Studies,47(1),250-287.1017/S0026749X1200056X.

Jalil Rakshinda, Saint Tarun K, Sengupta Desbjani (Eds.). (2019). Looking Back : The 1947 Partition of India, 70 Years On. Orient Blackswan.

Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. (2013). Partitions’s Post-Amnesias. Women Unlimited.

Larsen Svend Erik. (2016).Memory,Migration and Literature. European Review, 24(4), 509-22. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.qmul.ac.uk/10.1017/S1062798716000053.

Misra, Udayon. (2000). The Periphery Strikes Back. Indian Institute of Advanced Studies

Pandey, Gyanendra. (2004). Remembering Partition. Cambridge University Press.

Ricoeur,Paul. 2006. Memory History Forgetting Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. University of Chicago Press

Said, Edward. (2000). Invention, Memory, and Place. Critical Inquiry 26(2), 175-192.

Saint,Tarun K. (2010). Witnessing Partition: Memory, History, Fiction. Routledge.

Segal, Lore. (1998). Problems of Imagining the Past. In BerelLang(Ed.) Writing and the Holocaust. Holmes &Meier,58-65.

Sengupta, Debjani. (2016).ThePartition of Bengal: Fragile Borders and New Identities. Cambridge University Press.

Sontag, Susan. (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. Picador.

Turner, Bryan S. (1987). A Note on Nostalgia. Theory Culture and Society 4(1), 147-156.

Williams, Raymond. (1985). The Country and the City. Hogarth Press

Wilson Elizabeth. (1997). Looking Backward, Nostalgia and the City. In Sallie Westwood & John Williams (Eds.) Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory. Routledge

Dr. Suranjana Choudhury teaches literature at North Eastern Hill University, Shillong.   Her areas of interest include Partition Studies, Women’s Writing and Cultural Studies. Her recently published books include A Reading of Violence in Partition Stories from Bengal published by Cambridge Scholars, UK, and a co-edited volume titled Understanding Women’s Experiences of Displacement: Literature, Culture and Society in South Asia published by Routledge.

The question of the ‘foreigners’ in select fictional narratives from Assam

/////
1.1K views

Rimi Nath
Department of English, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, India. ORCID ID 0000-0001-9366-5498. Email: riminath664@gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022. Pages 1-9. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne25

First published: June 25, 2022 | AreaNortheast India | LicenseCC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
Full-Text HTML Full-Text PDF Cite
PlumX Metrics

Abstract

In this age of metamorphosis of cultural transition and assimilation, in this age where everyone in one sense or the other is a migrant, the issue of identity can never be resolved. Iain Chambers (1994) holds that migrancy “calls for a dwelling in language, in histories, in identities that are constantly subject to mutation” (p. 5). ‘Home’ sometimes becomes a provisional location as it fails to provide assurance and security; and hence, in many instances, one witnesses an individual’s desire to break free, to migrate. Memory and narratives can be seen as symbolic ways of making homes, of negotiating different and competing allegiances. Jahnavi Barua’s novel, Undertow, Arupa Patangia Kalita’s novellas and stories like ‘Face in the Mirror’, ‘The Half-burnt Bus at Midnight’, stories from the Barak Valley of Assam like Moloy Kanti Dey’s ‘Ashraf Ali’s Homeland’, Amitabha Dev Choudhury’s ‘Wake Up Call’, Arijit Choudhury’s ‘Fire’, among others, provide multiple perspectives on the question of identity. The paper seeks to delve into select fictional narratives from Assam and analyse the question of ‘foreigners’, keeping in mind the current discourses on the issue of migration, especially the issue of illegal Bangladeshi migrants.

Keywords: Assam, identity, migration, Bangladeshi, foreigners

Introduction: The question of ‘foreigners’

Assam has been through different phases of ethnic nationalisms and the region has been through different phases of inclusion and exclusion geographically, ethnically and culturally. Assam has been grappling with the issue of ‘foreigners’ for a long time and the question of Bangladeshis, in particular, has become the most crucial factor in Assam’s politics. Terms that are used to describe Bangladeshis in Assam are: settlers, Bongal, bohiragoto (outsider), bideshi (foreigner), illegal migrants, illegal immigrants, invaders, Bengali peasantry, land-hungry Muslims, land grabbers, Mia Muslims, undocumented migrants, etc. (Shamshad, 2017, p. 59). In the book, Migrants, Refugees and the Stateless in South Asia (2016), Partha S. Ghosh highlights how the issue of illegal Bangladeshi migrants is a “subject on which everybody seems to be knowing so much, still they know so little, largely because of the unavailability of hard data” (p. xii). There are assumptions, fragmentations, doubts, fears and lost/ forgotten documents that heighten the confusion.

Nandana Dutta, in the introduction to Questions of Identity in Assam (2012), points out “that existing interpretations of migration and nation did not and could not do justice to the location” (p. xx). When Assam was made a part of the Bengal Presidency in 1905, the fear of loss of identity because of the demographic changes, crept up, and the Bengali speakers were seen as the ‘other’. Bodhisattva Kar (2011) highlights the forgotten history of Bengali racism, on the other hand, during the partition of Bengal in 1905 where the Bengalis saw the Assamese as the ‘other’ (p. 45). Assam’s position as a separate province was restored in 1911, with the unification of Bengal. The Muslim League demanded that Assam be a part of East Pakistan. Assam, as a British colonial province, included Sylhet while prior to 1874, Sylhet was a part of Bengal (Baruah, 2015, p. 82-83). In 1947, Sylhet became a part of East Pakistan (Bangladesh) except for a portion of it (a part of Karimganj subdivision in Barak Valley) which remained in India. Sanjib Baruah (2015) highlights that for Assam “the meaning of partition has been unfolding slowly over decades through a torturous process” (p. 81). The British colonial rule encouraged the settlement of Muslim East Bengali peasants in Assam while Partition instigated massive movements. Many people migrated to Assam in 1965, during Ayub Khan’s regime in Pakistan, and Assam also sheltered refugees during and after the Bangladeshi Liberation War of 1971.

Shamshad (2017) lists five distinct phases of the anti-Bengali and later anti-Bangladeshi discourse in Assam. “The Bengali officials presented the immediate face of colonialism” (p. 253) and the anti-colonial, anti-Bengali discourse ensued from the fear of the Assamese elite – of loss of power. The second phase started with the fear of territorial loss which crept up with the arrival of the Bengali cultivators brought in by the colonial officials. The potential loss of demographic dominance during Partition is listed as the third phase. The tussle for language supremacy in the 1960s/70s is the next phase and the fifth phase is the Assam movement (1979-85)” (p. 253). The language issue in Assam created riots during the 1960s and 70s, where “the Official Language Movement of 1960 and the Medium of Instruction Movement of 1972…were based on the ‘Assam for Assamese’ ideology. The Bengalis of Barak valley had protested against it” (Ghoshal, 2021, p. xv). Weiner (1983) highlights that during that time Bengali Muslims had much to gain by siding with the Assamese (in securing their stay) but with the Assam Movement, this alliance faltered, where the “Bengalis in Assam – both Hindus and Muslims – became ‘foreigners’ to the Assamese” (Shamshad, 2017, p. 77). Shamshad (2017) highlights how gradually the Nepali migrants completely fell out of discourse and the only migrants who were considered ‘illegal’ were from Bangladesh (p.101).

The difficulty of identifying illegal immigrants persists and the question of rehabilitation or granting citizenship becomes complex and ambiguous. Neither the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act (IMDT Act) nor the Assam Accord could bring any resolution to the ‘foreigners’ issue. The National Register of Citizens (NRC) also has its shortcomings and pitfalls. The detection and repatriation of ‘illegal foreigners’ is an ongoing process as a recent news report states that “till October 31, 2021, as many as 1,42,206 illegal foreigners have been detected in the State. Among them, altogether 29, 663 were pushed back till December 15 of this year”. (The Assam Tribune, 2021, p. 1)

Shamshad (2017) points out that with Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) entry into Assam’s politics “Assam’s anti-Bengali ethnic nationalist discourse” changed to “anti-Bengali Muslim ethno-religious discourse” (p. 254). The Asom Gana Parishad (AGP)-BJP coalition further strengthened it. In Chatterji’s Breaking Worlds: Religion, Law and Citizenship in Majoritarian India – The Story of Assam (2021), we find a strong criticism of the Hindutva ideology and the writers voice their fear about ‘absolute nationalism’. The agitation in Assam against illegal immigrants has targeted Hindus as well; but with the changing political scenario, largely the Muslim population begins to get targeted:

“In Assam, the NRC and Foreigners Tribunals have commenced the political segregation of “national subjects” and rights-bearing citizens from “invaders” without rights. A disproportionate number of persons who are alleged to be “foreigners” and “illegal persons” are Muslims. “Miya” Muslims, from marginalised social classes are the principal target.” (p. 56)

We have seen the state changing its response to changing political scenarios. The recent development, i.e., the fourth amendment of the Citizenship Act in which the intent has been to grant citizenship to people who have fled religious persecution from neighbouring countries (including Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Christians, Jains and Zoroastrians), the Hindutva orientation of the government came under scrutiny amidst mass agitation. The anti-CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) movement was based on the “Assamese” people’s “fear of demographic swamping…and raised, once again, questions about their citizenship rights” (Goswami, 2021, p. 1). While some saw NRC and CAA as discriminatory, especially against the Muslims, many saw CAA as discriminatory while they supported the NRC. The Hindus who have lived with the stigma of being illegal migrants in the region did not see the situation working in their favour either. The majority of the population did not seem to be aware of the historicity of the documents. NRC and CAA also saw opposite reactions from the general masses of the Brahmaputra and Barak valleys. The Bangladeshi issue has been a matter of much contestation heightening the difficulty of coming to any negotiable position.

To consider the citizenship debate, reports that show Indians giving up citizenship provide another perspective. According to a report published in The Wire, from 2016-20 just 4,177 persons were granted Indian citizenship – where “for every one person who has been granted Indian citizenship in the past four years and more, 145 persons have forgone their citizenship” (Bhatnagar, 2021, para. 2). Also, the statistics that four out of ten applicants were granted citizenship and that maximum applications came from the citizens of Pakistan are also data that need to be considered and evaluated at the national and regional levels.

Analysing Select Fictional Narratives from Assam

Fictional narratives from Assam provide different perspectives on the question of ‘foreigners’. Telling or writing a story can, to a large extent, help in the process of negotiation. Narratives can be a form of travel, which can traverse the distance between communities or societies in their exploration of inner journeys. In Jahnavi Barua’s Undertow (2020), the question of foreigners and the agitation against them is highlighted as an overpowering consciousness. The novel touches upon the turbulent times of the Assam movement, of how “the state had been thrown into chaos” (p. 17). The central character, Rukmini, has marched on the streets too. Rukmini ponders upon the bandhs in Assam (which has been absolute) where everything “came to a grinding halt” (p. 19):

“No one challenged the protests because everyone supported them, understood the need for them. Nothing so complete was possible without deep feeling. The people were gripped with an urgent desire to fulfill what the Boys had begun: to make the government do its duty; to expel illegal aliens, instead of arming them with citizenship and voting rights.” (Barua, 2020, p. 19)

“Four years now and the Agitation – it was aptly named, the movement the students had launched in 1979 – showed no signs of abating. The people of Assam had not lost hope or courage or energy yet. They spilled out onto the streets in their thousands when summoned by the student leaders – the Boys, as they were affectionately called – to picket and demonstrate and protest, and stayed indoors with windows closed and lights out when ordered to by the same leaders.” (Barua, 2020, p. 17)

The question of illegal immigrants in Assam has been quite complex because of the political, historical, and geographical reasons, as highlighted in the introduction. There have also been cases of people acquiring documents illegally facilitated by communal sympathy, corruption or carelessness on the part of the officials. It is difficult to demarcate illegal immigrants from ‘original’ inhabitants and “as a result, neither the Assamese Bengalis nor the Assamese Muslims could fully identify themselves with the Assam agitation” (Ghosh, 2016, p. 224). What the character, Rukmini, refers to as “so complete” may not have actually been absolute. Through her research, Shamshad (2017) also studies how the Assamese and Bengali Muslims saw each other:

“The ethnic Assamese representatives of the civil society who were interviewed in this research did not express any hostile views or see the Bengali Muslims/ Bangladeshi migrants as an economic or security threat.” (p. 253)

Shamshad (2017) highlights how “the exercise of violence is a constant factor in the process of ‘Othering’” (p. 250) – violence that is state induced and also the ethnic flare.

In Jahnavi Barua’s novel Undertow (2020), when Rukmini decides to marry Alex (an outsider from Kerala) “she felt like a traitor” (p. 19) adhering to the insider-outsider tension in her consciousness. She has been a traitor even to her mother who accused Rukmini of betraying “state and race and family” (p. 19). Rukmini realises the pain of being treated as an outsider when she herself receives such treatment from Alex’s family. Rukmini’s daughter Loya, who is raised in Bangalore, is surprised to see how “strong a subject it (politics) was in life here” (p. 86). Loya comes to know that “the illegal migrants had been received with open arms by the government, which, sensing the opportunity for a vote bank, had even issued them with citizenship papers” (p. 86-87). Loya also comes to know about Robin Koka’s grandson, who, being fascinated by the revolution against foreigners, joins the insurgents, the ULFA (United Liberation Front of Assam). In Assam, the anti-colonial discourse surged with the ULFA, where India was seen as the coloniser (Shamshad, 2017, p. 254). Since its inception in 1979, the insurgent organisation emphasised on the national liberation of Assam. They maintained that “the question of ‘secession’ is a mistaken one since ‘historically’, Assam has never been a part of the Indian nation and its location within the political map of India has to be explained simply as a fact of ‘colonial occupation’” (Kar, 2011, p. 57).

It is interesting to note that in Barua’s Undertow (2020) Loya questions the idea of a ‘foreigner’. When her grandfather tells her about the Ahom dynasty – “a race of princes from the Shan state of Burma” (p. 148), she insists that they are migrants, to which her grandfather remarks: “Isn’t everyone, in the beginning?” (p. 148). Her grandfather tells her about their assimilation,

“Yes, but they settled down. Assimilated. Converted to Hinduism from Buddhism and married our local girls. Why, they even gave up their old Tai language” (p. 148).

The statement raises questions like if forsaking religion or language can be the only way an immigrant may be accepted? What are the grounds of assimilation? Can the ‘foreigners’ of Assam ever assimilate? Can assimilation not happen if cultural/ religious/ linguistic differences are respected? Will Kymlicka in Politics in the Vernacular (2001) highlights how minority nationalisms are not always illiberal, pre-modern or xenophobic and questions, “…is it permissible to adopt illiberal policies in order to create conditions under which civic forms of minority nationalism can emerge?” (p. 277). There are no definite answers. The sad disappearance of Loya towards the end of the novel, when a blast rocks the Bazaar in Guwahati, shows the futility of violence. Loya embodies both the elements of an insider and an outsider (her father being an outsider from Kerala and her mother from Assam). In her disappearance, both the insider and the outsider become victims, where symbolically violence consumes all.

The plight of the refugees, their lost homelands, their trouble and brutal torture – are mainly captured in the stories from the Barak Valley of Assam. The stories also highlight how threats to life and livelihood lead to migration from Bangladesh as “the migration of the uprooted refugee families was primarily for seeking refuge and a national identity” (Ghoshal, 2021, p. 37). In Arijit Choudhury’s ‘Fire’ (2012), the protagonist, Mahendra Das, faces the consequence of not supporting the Assam Movement, the “cruelty meted out to innocent people, be it murder or arson” (p. 63). According to Mahendra:

“Spotting a Bengali-Hindu or a Muslim or a Nepali, immediately branding him ‘foreigner’ and inflicting torture on him is inhuman and unjust. Even if one is a foreigner that does not mean that he should be driven away or his house and belongings should be burnt down – Mahendra would never support this.” (p. 56)

In the story, we see that the nearby villagers (who are Bengali-Muslims) are called Bangladeshis although they have never been to Bangladesh. Mahendra’s house is set on fire by the people of his own village, who consider him to be a traitor, “an agent of the Bengalis!” (p. 56). Within the imagined nation/state, battle lines are drawn, as Siddhartha Deb in his novel, The Point of Return (2004), describes the nation as a fortress where “new battle lines were being drawn and fresh groups of people were being defined as outsiders, borders bristling with barbed-wire teeth” (p. 221).

When Ashraf Ali moves to Assam (to Karimganj) from Bangladesh as a child, in Moloy Kanti Dey’s ‘Ashraf Ali’s Homeland’ (2012), he feels happy –

“When? When did they cross the border? Why was there no wall anywhere? It was merely like a stroll from one street to another. Is this how the two countries were divided then? Ashraf seemed to be in a trance. Hindustan, Bharatbarsha. It’s not a separate country – rather an assurance that promises supply of food.” (p. 119)

The ‘shadow lines’ that borders are highlighted in his sentiments. When Ashraf Ali is marked as a foreigner amidst the Bangladeshi row, the fate of his family becomes uncertain. They are deported and their destiny remains unknown.

Fear and discrimination incite the surfacing of nostalgia for a lost or ‘imaginary’ homeland. In another story ‘Wakeup Call’ by Amitabha Dev Choudhury (2012), the narrator’s family has had to flee Bangladesh in the 50’s in order to survive. The narrator struggles to come to terms with his own identity as a foreigner as he cannot think of any place as his home other than where he is, i.e., Assam –

“Yes! This is my homeland, my own soil. Eternal! Embodiment of my soul! My beloved nest of tranquility! My dream! My memory! My identity!” (p. 148).

The fond memories or stories of a lost homeland linger but that place is no longer home. In any tale of migration, there is always a contestation between humanitarian support and nativist backlash. Partha S. Ghosh (2016) asks the much-debated humanitarian questions, “Is not it, once again, the question of refugees’ rights, and not state doing a favour to them? Minorities in Pakistan or Bangladesh were not responsible for the Partition of India.” (p. 220)

During the Assam Movement, there were numerous attacks in places like Barpeta, Kokrajhar, Bongaigaon, among others. In the larger backdrop of the anti-foreigners protest, the Nellie massacre happened. Samrat in Insider Outsider(2018b) writes: “The danger in any tale of victimhood is the obverse: victims on the one hand and villains on the other” (p. ix). In her stories, Arupa Patangia Kalita (2015) highlights the communalisation of the Assam movement. In the story ‘Face in the Mirror’ Kalita writes:

“In August, a young girl took many bullets in her body, her body was perforated by gaping holes. She had come from outside the state, looking for the body of her husband, crying and beating her breasts in sorrow. In March, a talented professor had committed suicide. 1991. The killings that defied counting.” (p. 138).

The protagonist of the short story shows her displeasure when her cousin’s husband, “a leader of Assam’s andolon, agitation” (p. 142) becomes angry as she praises her Muslim house help, Zamila. He tells his wife, “I now know why your sister is so fond of Bangladeshis” and then addressing the protagonist, he says, “You know Baidew, don’t indulge these people. You were talking about cleaning the bedpan etc. If you allow them to enter the house, they will even lick your feet…Keep an eye, if nothing can be done about them we’ll kill them all” (p. 146). The protagonist ironically smiles and says, “We’ve heard that people of Assam should forget about humanity. This is the time to forget humanity.” (p. 146)

As a writer, Arupa Patangia Kalita, often gets targeted for her stand against the brutality of the movement. This resonates in another story, ‘Surabhi Barua and the Rhythm of Hooves’, where the protagonist Surabhi Barua –

“Became one of the few who stood against the Assam agitation. She wrote a few articles, saying again and again that this overwhelming sentimental outlook would stand in the way of constructing a strong Assamese national character.” (Kalita, 2015, p. 194)

Expressing her viewpoints calls for trouble as it calls for trouble for “a section of intellectuals who had to pay a heavy price for protesting against the unreasonable dictat of the so-called separatist leaders” (Biswas, 2015, p. 215). Kalita’s writings, thus, make a strong comment on the meaninglessness of jingoism, xenophobia and mindless killings.

The writers discussed above, both from the Brahmaputra and the Barak valleys of Assam, bring to light the humanitarian ground relating to the question of the ‘foreigners’ in Assam. They are able to transcend the ethno-religious boundaries in raising their voice against atrocities and mindless divisions. In a world where border lines are rigorously drawn, the writers highlight the necessity of preserving borders from encroachers while at the same time they talk about the futility of violence. There is empathy and perceptiveness regarding what it actually feels to be an ‘outsider’.

Conclusion: Between Memory and Forgetting

Citizenship continues to be a contested domain in Assam. There is a jostle between the ideas of nationalism and globalisation. Colonialism continues in the form of subjugation: “the domination and denigration of the Hills, the delegitimation and chastisement of Bhati, the inauthentication and vilification of the ‘settlers’” (Kar, 2011, p. 54). This subjugation leads to ‘othering’ that brings in the question of authenticity. The search for authenticity has been crucial in any societal formation (province/ state/ nation). However, we can question if there is anything called authentic identity or if authenticity is a desire. In Assam the question of foreigners versus authentic citizens has been the reason for the region’s political and social volatility. The definition of ‘Assamese’ still remains a matter of debate and contestation. A recent report states how a sub-committee formed by the State Government in 2006 to formulate the definition of ‘Assamese’ as per Clause 6 of the Assam Accord still could not come to a conclusion after seeking views from different organisations and bodies as only a few organisations could submit their views in this regard (The Assam Tribune, 2021, p. 1). It is difficult to resolve the politics surrounding migration. The Assam agitation while initially upholding the agenda of safeguarding Assamese identity in the face of the fear of ‘foreigners’ soon degenerated “from an anti-foreigner agitation to an anti-non-Assamese agitation by turning its wrath against even the domestic migrants from other parts of India, mostly Bihar” (Ghosh, 2016, p. 223-24). Kar rightly says, “territorial nationalism can never abolish its mythical other – colonialism – which always threatens to lodge itself within the very claims of nationalism” (Kar, 2011, p. 57). Memory and narratives, in this regard, can provide multiple perspectives while trying to negotiate different and competing allegiances.

“Memory is also about what you decide to remember, so that you can make sense of what has been irrevocably lost” (Deb, 2004, p. 192). Memory, which operates within the realm of forgetting, distortions, manipulations/ modifications, partial memory, selective memory, representation and narration, plays an important role in the process of negotiation. Memories help in reshaping boundaries and, hence, help in the process of negotiation. Collective memory, especially that of trauma, is difficult to erase. But then there are questions asking if amnesia will reduce the effects of trauma or if it is justified to forget the trauma, if it is necessary to carry the burden of trauma or if forgetting the history of violence will lead to its repetition and if acknowledging the memories will lead to a kind of resolution? In the book, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness (1998), Martha Minow writes – “To seek a path between vengeance and forgiveness is also to seek a route between too much memory and too much forgetting” (p. 118). Forgetting is also a very important part of memory and hence narratives play an important role in developing perspectives, as Benedict Anderson asserts, “all profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives” (Anderson, 1983, p. 204).

Any one kind of reading or interpretation will be grossly inadequate while dealing with such a sensitive issue and this paper does in no way want to preach or put across a one-sided view of the question under discussion. However, the paper wants to highlight the dangers of a lack of understanding and how across North-East India, as Samrat points out, “it will take only a little communal foolishness for a return to the bad old days” (Samrat, 2018a, p.171). Nationalism needs to be rethought and reinvented towards a more inclusive society where the aspirations of the masses are respected, the history of turmoil taken into consideration, where collective self-reflection, telling and re-telling of stories are encouraged. Most importantly, the political and media-hype that create fear-psychosis need to be regulated, systematic brain-washing that incites hatred needs to be avoided and the perspectives of “not only marginalised women but also other vulnerable segments like the indigenous and immigrant populations” (Goswami, 2021, p. 7) need to be heard and considered – where people are allowed to express their opinions without the fear of persecution, attack or marginalisation. Literary representations can help in negotiating different positions and standpoints – of memories, tales of loss, of place, of identities. They can be a means of cross-cultural travel, bringing revisions as well as a cultural revival and harmony.

Declaration of Conflicts of Interests

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

Funding

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

References

Anderson, Benedict. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso.

Barua, Jahnabi. (2020). Undertow. Penguin.

Baruah, Sanjib. (2015). Partition and the Politics of Citizenship in Assam. In Urvashi Butalia (Ed.), Partition: The Long Shadow (pp. 78-101). Viking Penguin.

Bhatnagar, Gaurav Vivek. (2021). Over 6 lakh Indians Gave Up Citizenship Since 2017: Union Home Ministry. The Wire. thewire.in/government/india-citizenship-relinquished-granted-home-ministry-data-parliament.

Biswas, Ranjita. (2015). “In Search of Peace” in Arupa Patangia Kalita,Written in Tears (Ranjita Biswas, Trans.). Harper Perennial.

Chambers, Iain. (1994). Migrancy, Culture, Identity. Routledge.

Chatterji, Angana P. (In collaboration with Mihir Desai, Harsh Mander, Abdul Kalam Azad). (2021). Breaking   Worlds: Religion, Law and Citizenship in Majoritarian India – The Story of Assam. University of California, Berkeley: Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Initiative, Center for Race and Gender.

Choudhury, Amitabha Dev. (2012). Wake Up Call (Subha Prasad Nandi Majumdar, Trans.). In Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee and Dipendu Das (Eds.), Barbed Wire Fence: Stories of Displacement from the Barak Valley of Assam. Niyogi Books.

Choudhury, Arijit. (2012). Fire (Rumi Rani Laskar, Trans.). In Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee and Dipendu Das (Eds.), Barbed Wire Fence: Stories of Displacement from the Barak Valley of Assam. Niyogi Books.

Deb, Siddhartha. (2004). The Point of Return. Picador.

Dey, Moloy Kanti. (2012). Ashraf Ali’s Homeland (Dipendu Das, Trans.). In Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee and Dipendu Das (Eds.), Barbed Wire Fence: Stories of Displacement from the Barak Valley of Assam. Niyogi   Books.

Dutta, Nandana. (2012). Questions of Identity in Assam: Location, Migration, Hybridity. Sage.

Ghosh, Partha S. (2016). Migrants, Refugees and the Stateless in South Asia. Sage.

Ghoshal, Anindita. (2021). Refugees, Borders and Identities: Rights and Habitat in East and Northeast India. Routledge.

Goswami, Uddipana, and Dutta, Abantee(Eds.). (2021). Making Peace Mutually: Perspectives from Assam. Bhabani Books.

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

Kar, Bodhisattva. (2011). Can the Postcolonial Begin? Deprovincializing Assam. In Saurabh Dube (Ed.), Oxford Handbook of Modernity in South Asia. Oxford University Press.

Kymlicka, Will. (2001). Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship. Oxford   University Press.

Minow, Martha. (1998). Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence. Beacon Press.

Samrat. (2018a). How We Got Here: A Brief history of Being Dkhar in Shillong. In Preeti Gill and Samrat (Eds.), Insider Outsider: Belonging and Unbelonging in North-East India. Amaryllis.

Samrat. (2018b). Preface. In Preeti Gill and Samrat (Eds.), Insider Outsider: Belonging and Unbelonging in North-East India. Amaryllis.

Shamshad, Rizwana. (2017).Bangladeshi Migrants in India: Foreigners, Refugees, or Infiltrators? Oxford   University Press.

The Assam Tribune. (2021, December 23). 1,42,206 illegal foreigners detected in State till Oct, p. 1 [Press Release].

Weiner, Myron. 1983. The Political Demography of Assam’s Anti-immigrant Movement. Population and   Development Review, 9(2), 279-92.

Dr Rimi Nath is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU), Shillong, Meghalaya, India. Her research interests include Indian Writing in English, South Asian Literature, Partition Studies and Diaspora/ Migration Studies. Her research papers have appeared in various journals and also as book chapters – the recent one is from Routledge, in the book Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature: Traversing Resistance, Margins and Extremism (2022). She has been a member of various review boards of books/ journals. She is also engaged in creative writing and writes poems, haiku and short fiction. Her collection of poetry, Kushiara and Other Poems, was published in June, 2021 (Dhauli Books).

Transgressive Spatialities: Mapping Identity and Liminality in Contemporary Queer Narratives from Assam

////
1.2K views

Nizara Hazarika

Department of English, Sonapur College, (Gauhati University) Sonapur, Assam. ORCID id:0000-0002-5152-7553. Email id: nhazarika04@gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022. Pages: 1-11. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne24

First published: June 24, 2022 | AreaNortheast India | LicenseCC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
Full-Text HTML Full-Text PDF Cite
PlumX Metrics

Abstract

From Descartes’ cogito to the postmodern fluidity, the notion of identity has acquired newer dimensions. Identity remains an important rhetorical resource for non-heterosexual people. Butler’s notion of gender as performative has been fundamental in this discourse on the queer people who debunk compulsory heterosexuality as a given. An exploration of the spaces that the non-heteronormative people occupy is pertinent to understanding the lived realities of these people. Using the Foucauldian notion of heterotopia, this study tries to understand the liminal and all kinds of alternative spaces that they inhabit which is intense and disruptive. They are also sites of resistance and transgression. In Assamese literature, the heterosexual ideology dominates the hegemonic knowledge production spaces. The non-heteronormative people occupy the spaces in crevices, and peripheries and cannot claim a distinct positionality. Queer narratives from Assam reflect a new direction in this regard. The Narratives under study by Moushumi Kandali, Aruni Kashyap and Panchanan Hazarika present how these narratives from Assam present the lived realities of the queer population and how they explicate the spatial dimension of the same-sex desire, and in the process how they negotiate the ontological authenticity of the non-heteronormative people to form their identity.

Key words: Spatiality, identity, queer, gender fluidity, narrative

With the proliferation of the discourses on identity, the postmodern stance on it as something ‘in flux’, and the Butlerian notion of gendered fluidity and performativity, the queers have emerged with a malleable identity that exists beyond the gendered binary. The term ‘Queer’ has been used as an umbrella term to denote a range of sexual and gender identities that are not “straight” and do not conform to the dominant heterosexual practices. Queer studies emerged as an academic discourse in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It brought in a political stand of both solidarity and defiance that challenged the mainstream heterosexual discourses and denied subjugation of the sexual minorities. In the initial years, the term ‘queer’ was used for the lesbian and gay populace; but over the years it has encompassed all the non-heterosexual people who expose and challenge normativity. The term ‘identity’ has been a rhetorical resource for these non-heterosexual people. Through these resources, they evoke some kind of discourse that questions the politics of power and dominance. As ‘queer’, each individual goes through different lived realities. However, recognition of one’s sexuality, coming out and making that sexual identity public, creating a bond with members of a similar community and facing societal pressure are some of the common experiences of the queer people. The queer identity is shaped by histories of rejection, abjection and subjugation by the dominant patriarchal power structure. Being pushed to the periphery, the queers prefer fluid possibilities of gender and sexuality by debunking the false notion of compulsory heterosexuality. They celebrate the fluidity of body and sexuality and challenge the hetero-patriarchal repression. However, the body of the queers becomes a potential site of negation of identity as per the norms imposed by the heterosexist society. Heteronormativity, with its repressive measures, forces the queer people to go through subjugation and exclusion. This in turn traumatises these marginalised people while negotiating their space within a homophobic society. Thus, for the queers, who inhabit outside the binary structure, their identity lies in the liminal space.

The liminal space provides its subjects opportunities to redefine their identity and also to subvert the dominant notions upheld by society. As the identity of the queers is not permeated with socially constructed norms, the liminal space provides them the necessary power to restructure and negotiate their identities. This brings forth the fluidity of the queer identity. Anzaldua (2002) posits, “This liminal space of identity can be ‘unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always-in-transition . . . lacking clear boundaries —the person is in a constant state of displacement” (p.1) Thus, the queer people feel a sense of estrangement when they enter the structured spaces of gendered binary. They navigate their identities and due to this perpetual navigation, a permanent space cannot be realised. However, this movement into new spaces opens up a new epistemological horizon before them that empowers the queers and this new knowledge and power are distinctly their own. But the pertinent question here is, how is a queer space defined? In the words of Ebmeier and Bovermann (2018),

A queer space is any space that enables its occupants to perform queerness. Such a space allows for the visibility of queerness. . . Instead of inverting hierarchies and enacting a reversal of the normative order, these places attempt to negotiate and perform alternatives. (2018, p.288)

 Thus, the queer space is engraved by the sexual minorities and it “purportedly enables the visibility of sexual subcultures that resist and rupture the hegemonic heterosexuality that is the source of their marginality and exclusion” (Oswin, 2008, p.90). Giving a new dimension to the spatial discourse on the use of space in society, Foucault introduced his concept of heterotopias. In his 1967 lecture “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”, Foucault described heterotopias as a space both ‘existing’ and ‘non-existing’ that fall between real and utopian spaces. These are spaces that are “othered”, places that are outside and yet connected to all other places. In his The Order of Things (1966), Foucault described heterotopias as discursive, a space thinkable only in language; but in “Of Other Spaces”, heterotopia has been presented as a physical space for bodies to dwell, as “counter sites” such as asylums, prisons, gardens, colonies, cemeteries, brothels and boats. Heterotopias encourage a reordering of the social structure which is an essential counter-hegemonic locus of resistance. Angela Jones (2009), in her essay titled “Queer Heterotopias: Homonormativity and the Future of Queerness” describes,

Queer heterotopias are material spaces where radical practices go unregulated. They are sites where actors, whether academics or activists, engage in what we might call a radical politics of subversion, where individuals attempt to dislocate the normative configurations of sex, gender, and sexuality through daily exploration and experimentation with crafting a queer identity. (p.2)

Thus, the queer heterotopias provide a space for the non-heteronormative individuals to create their own space where they can live, and walk about in an empowered state by being free from all kinds of marginalisation and dominance.

With the emergence of spatial literary studies, scholars have delved into the representation of spaces in the varied zones where fiction meets reality. Queer people have been denied representation and kept out of all kinds of documented space in history and literature. In most mainstream literature and other spaces like films, theatres etc, the queers are deliberately marginalised, made fun of, ridiculed and so on. Thus, these images of the queers dominate the mindset of the people of the heterosexist society. Through her notion of gender performativity, Butler subverts the ontological status of the heteronormative gendered regime and posits that such disciplinary power produces queerness as abnormal. But the pertinent question is what is normal or natural? Who decides what is normal or natural? This kind of idea needs to be addressed when we talk of queer people. And here comes the importance of the queer narratives, where issues on identity, spaces, and lived experiences are addressed. Therefore, an exploration of the spaces that the non-heteronormative people occupy and their literary representation is pertinent to understanding the lived realities of these people. Literature is nuanced and it can explore the complex experiential realities of queers and present the politics behind such experiences. But the point to ponder here is how are the queer spaces projected and reclaimed in the literary texts? Has there been any effort to construct alternative spaces for the queers as they are kept out of the ambit of the binary gendered spaces? To challenge the heteronormative construction of space, literary representation and reclamation of queer spaces are the need of the hour. In mainstream literature, the queer figure in the periphery, in the crevices. The naturalness of the dominant heteronormative discourses could be challenged by queer narratives by making spaces for a newer understanding of gender and sexuality. Queer narratives can bring these intangibilities into the social fabric and spread awareness for a positive change.

In Assamese literature, heterosexual ideology dominates the hegemonic knowledge production of spaces. The nonheteronormative people occupy the spaces in fissures and cannot claim a distinct positionality. Queer narratives from Assam are a timely intervention in this regard. They portray the lived realities of queer people. These narratives reflect a new direction in the process of an all-inclusive society. Thus, a proper study of these narratives is highly warranted. The queer narratives can challenge the heterosexual spatial deployment that is found in the mainstream narratives and prevalent dominant socio-cultural practices of a society. Instead of inverting hierarchies and enacting a reversal of the normative order, these places attempt to negotiate and perform alternatives. These narratives present how some kind of queer space and identity emerges as a site of contestation and resistance with an underlying awareness of divergence. The texts under study are the fictional narratives by Moushumi Kandali, Aruni Kashyap, and Panchanan Hazarika. In these narratives, the narrators project a queer dimension to one’s identity and the spaces that they occupy in society while presenting their experiential realities. The strife for visibility and societal acceptance is a perennial issue for these people living in the interstices of the social structure.

Moushumi Kandali’s story “Tritiyattar Golpo” (A Tale of Thirdness) published in 2007 is one of the finest narratives written with a queer theme. The story has a queer Professor as its protagonist and it narrates the trauma, the societal non-acceptance, the suffering, the loneliness that the protagonist goes through and the struggle he makes to challenge the societal norms and also his embarking on a journey to break the gender stereotype. All these issues are portrayed in a poignant tale where the professor is always attracted to the thirdness. This narrative presents how the queer persona is not accepted by society and is ridiculed, tortured, targeted, sidelined, marginalised and his very private space of a home is invaded. The narrator, narrating the living story, talks of the change in the Professor’s appearance when he internalises homophobia and behaves in a specific way desired by society and his face transforms:

. . . his face would look like the digital conversion of Tutankhamen’s death mask. Was it a face or death-in-wings? Faces change according to variations in context. And we have to wait for life to teach us this simple, common truth, practically known to everybody. (Phukan, 2021, p.284)

Through this facial transformation, the professor exposes the pain and humiliation that the queer folks undergo, and at the same time, it is also a kind of dissent at the overarching patriarchal metanarrative. It reflects how the non-heteronormative people are forced to follow the dictums of society. Butler’s notion of gender performativity, the “stylized repetition of acts”, that must be performed to achieve a particular gender is explored here. Specific socially constructed corporeal acts are to be performed continuously which create a certain gendered identity as per the socio-cultural norms. The Professor’s non-conformity has led to his wearing the metaphorical mask of Tutankhamen. This metaphorical mask of Tutankhamen that the Professor wears is a kind of resistance, a rigid blockage towards the multifarious norms prescribed by the heterosexual society. However, his inner being transformed him into his own self where he prefers to be a woman, a dancer, and a mother. His fluid identity gets reflected when the narrator finds him transformed into a seductress on stage and the narrator exclaims,

I saw a braid flow out of your head, two breasts bloom on your masculine chest, breasts firming in eager anticipation of touch. . . you had generated such an incredible phenomenon- three doors on three sides— on the right, door of the known, on the left, the door of the unknown, and in between, there was another door —  the door of perception- you had advanced, slowly, to the third door in the middle- on you walked—oh, that was the first time I had seen you — and on the same day, I had seen two of your faces….. (Phukan, 2021, p.285)

To this, the Professor replied, “One day you will see my third face”. This makes the narrator question his obsession with “thirdness”:

Third! Third again! Third —third— third— why was he so obsessed with the third number — the number three? He preferred a hotel room with the number 3. He was fond of cubism. His favourite story was “The Third Bank of the River”. Shivas’s third eye. The three dimensional representation — the reality of the third world. . .  (Phukan, 2021, p. 285)

Thus, the professor’s fluid self, transcending the societal space to a third space, is an act of transgression where he could perform his fluid gender. Chris Jenks has defined transgression as  “ to go beyond the bounds or limits set by commandment or law or convention, it is to violate or infringe…[a] reflexive act of denial and affirmation” (2003, p.2). Transgression, for the queers, is an act of challenging the heterosexual power structure and at the same time, reclaiming their own space. It is also a liminal space that encourages fundamental reordering.

Professing gender fluidity, the text critiques the stereotypical notions of gendered identity as per the patriarchal norms. The very notion of motherhood has been questioned. To be a mother, one does not need to be a woman. As the narrator opines,

Oh, how uselessly are we trapped in our stereotyped definitions— we think motherhood is only for women. But motherhood is only a concept— who says it is defined by gender, physicality? One does not require a womb to be a mother—all one needs is a womb of sensitivity and emotion. That is why that scrap of life sleeps in his lap—born to him—Mahadevi grows in his womb of emotion. (Phukan, 2021, p.289)

Here, the narrator projects mothering as an alternative to the oppressive institution of patriarchy. An intervention into the institution of motherhood needs to begin by questioning the very categories of experience and power (Kawash, 2011, p 979). Thus, the professor’s desire to conceive Akka Mahadevi and to have her as his child is fulfilled, albeit metaphorically.  And the last lines give the story its ultimate thrust,

One day, one day Mahadevi will tell the people around her–pour her heart out to the trees and earth and wind– “You see that man–sailing away in the boat in solitude on those deep water–he is my mother…. (Phukan, 2021, p.290)

The story tries to bring forth the very notion of gender fluidity and that through their performativity they can claim their own identity. Following Enders, Angella Okawa (2015) opines:

In a world that prefers binary identity, those whose identity lives in this in between space feel pressure to claim one end of polarity and reject the other. Rather than being a transitional space, the liminal is, for these individuals, a permanent home. (p.3)

Thus, the metaphor of sailing through the river towards the third bank is the protagonist’s journey to the queer space that is an emancipated, alternative space where the hegemonic heterosexist discourses cease to regulate bodies and identities. This is a queer heterotopia where individuals can explore and experiment with their desires. The boat, for Foucault, is the quintessential heterotopia as it is in a mobile state, it is real yet ephemeral and beyond surveillance. As Foucault (1986) postulates,

Boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea. . . The boat has been for our civilization the greatest reserve of the imagination. (p. 27)

Thus, Foucault indicates that heterotopia has the potential to generate alternatives to the existing spaces that regulate the societal structure. Only within the heterotopic space of the boat, the Professor can experience the imagined departure and the thrill of sailing away. Here, solitude is overlapped with a sense of companionship and the present becomes heterochronous with a projected future.      

Aruni Kashyap’s story “His Father’s Disease” (2019) narrates the tale of Anil, a gay persona who lives with his mother when the insurgency problems were at its height in Assam. At the beginning of the story, Anil is shown as indulging in a sexual union with his partner and when his mother Neerumoni comes to know about his gay identity, she could not accept it. She wept and thought that ‘he has acquired his father’s disease’. (p.118) She was a witness to this kind of gay sexual encounter of her bisexual husband Horokanto with her own brother Nilambor. Thus, she relates Anil’s gay sexual orientation to her husband’s bisexuality and opines that it is a disease. This is a common negative belief against the people of the queer community that affects their mental health to the extent that they isolate themselves and live within the closeted space. Anil’s construction of an outhouse for himself is some kind of architectural space, a heterotopia, that the queer people inhabit which is an intimate, comfortable space. Any kind of discrimination like homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, etc. is prohibited there. This is what Foucault talks of when he postulates that there is a transition from ‘heterotopia of crisis’ to ‘heterotopia of deviation’. (1986, p.25) Anil goes through a crisis situation within his home space where his mother nags him continuously and he finds the home space constricted and traumatised. Thus, he moves to the outhouse which stands for the heterotopia of deviation. The closeted space of the outhouse is an emancipated space for Anil. Home could be a place where they experience homophobia and this is evident when his mother does not accept his gay identity. Thus, this kind of narrative exposes the myth of a safe home. The queers experience the home space as a place of surveillance and discipline. Anil faces a dual paradigm, where he is familiar and close to the centre of power when he is politically involved and is going to be the future village headman. On the other hand, he is made to feel that he does not belong to the mainstream because of his sexual orientation. His gay identity has been exposed and made a weapon to force his absence within the public space. In the depiction of this queer space, the story explores the erotic dynamics, its potential for grappling with the mainstream spaces and the consequent liminality. Anil’s sexual relation with Promod, the effeminate young man and Anil’s sex partner, exhibits this erotic dynamics within the space of the outhouse. Again, Anil’s sexual experiences with Gurmail project his encounter with the mainstream space. The final burning of the outhouse and Anil’s suicide delineate the outhouse as a liminal space that is not fixed and a temporary abode. Anil carves a space for transaction in the context of his homoerotic desire played out within the enclosed locus of the outhouse. The outhouse becomes a metaphoric representation of the sexually hierarchized home space.

Anil’s straddling within these spaces makes his identity contingent, unfixed, and yet “there”. This societal non-acceptance comes in the way of the queer populace while they claim their queer identity. They feel alienated and strive for a positionality as they inhabit in the interstices. In the words of Shinsuke Eguchi (2011):

Prior to coming out, individuals must have access to information about homosexuality and gay identity. The social stigmatization of homosexuality is a barrier for individuals in the process of adopting homosexuality as a way of life.  (p. 40)

This social stigmatisation makes Anil hide his gay identity and he builds the outhouse as a space for liberation. This could be a strategy of resilience too at his disposal to cope with the challenge of heteronormativity and the social stigma attached to his gay identity. Though Anil never told his mother about his physical needs, towards the end he told her about it:

He had built that house to carve a space of his own. It had implicitly told his mother what his ‘male needs’ were. And now, in front of the burning house, he was telling her that he loved Gurmail. (2019, p.131)

Anil saw his mother howling and mumbling something he did not understand and at that spur of the moment he went inside the burning house and neighbours woke up to an unusual smell of burnt human flesh. This suicide or annihilation of the self under societal pressure is a sad yet harsh reality among the queers. Rod Cover (2012), citing the research carried out by various agencies like, Queer activist and medical professionals, opines that they

effectively re-figured sexuality-related suicide as a social fact in Durkheim’s terms by suggesting that social intolerance and homophobia were internalised, thereby leading to self-hatred and self-destructiveness . . . It brought an epistemic shift of opinion from the idea that homosexuality was essentially abnormal, instead introducing the ways in which a number of factors were causal in the suicides of gay men, including shame resulting from blackmail and exposure, pressures around coming out and closetedness, isolation and ostracism” (p. 38)

Thus, Anil’s suicide is a result of the social stigma associated with his gay identity. His revelation to his mother, who, as a representative of the heterosexual social structure, is never ready to accept his gay identity, and finally the burning down of the outhouse, an alternate space of all kinds of possibilities and experimentations. The outhouse is not a discursive site. Rather it is a physical one, a space both integral to and removed from the social order. And its demolition has crushed all his wishes to have his own space and his identity.

Anil’s disinterest in the election process and his constant fear of being killed made him stay within the house. Through this rejection of his entering into the pubic space, Anil addresses his liminality and challenges the propriety of the dominant social order. All the traumatising experiences like Anil’s imprisonment, and the attack on his life, have a deep impact on his interior landscape. And he enters into a heterotopia of crisis. His suicide might be termed as a heterotopia of deviation where he embarks on a journey beyond life and all kinds of bindings. Thus, in a way, his death is a way of resistance too. Anil chooses to resort to a radical way of subversion of the dominant and in the process, he kills himself.

Panchanan Hazarika’s short story collection Andharotkoi Udaax Botahotkoi Swadhin (Depressed than darkness, liberated than the wind) has several stories that portray the experiential realities of queer people. He tries to expose the societal pressure, stigma, violence inflicted on the queers, the politics of exclusion, loneliness, rejection that the queer people experience. In “Sironton”, he shows how Violina, a Lesbian girl is not accepted by her peers. Being students of Gender Studies, researching 3rd Wave Feminism, these friends yet cannot accept her. This exposes the hypocrisy of heterosexual society. Queer people have to face the politics of exclusion and cannot claim an equal space in the mainstream discourses. Their visibility is ridiculed and thus critics have vouched for a shift of the politics of visibility to the politics of recognition which acknowledges identity on the basis of gender, sexuality, and other markers.

 Hazarika’s story “Joloj Jibon” (Fluid Life) presents the fluidity of one’s identity. The narrator speaks about his fluid existence, the multiple selves that we carry within us, the body’s needs and desires, and his search for the truth of life. He feels he floats in these nuanced paradigms. When his friend says that not being able to publicly express one’s sexuality could also be a reason for committing suicide, he protests. And then he longs for a living river where his fluid life could clasp him. The water body is represented as an alternative space that both forms and challenges the protagonist’s sense of identity and belongingness. Thus, the space that he longs for is a queer space that would provide him solace as it might be a safe refuge to explore his sexuality and fluid identity. This space is an indefinable space, a temporary and yet fluctuating zone governed by lawless forces, where the protagonist can be in his elements.  This kind of performance reveals a kind of convergence of spatial and fluid identity formation.

The title story from the collection Andharotkoi Udaax Botahotkoi Swadhin(2020) narrates the story of Chandrabala, the educated, progressive mother and her three children, Uddipta, Lopa, and Ujjiban. The mother is very much involved in her children’s lives and she tries to help them solve their problems, and takes their side when they face any problem from their father or society at large. But when she comes to know about her son Ujjiban’s sexuality, who declares that he is gay, it was like a storm for her. She had to go through many phases of tests and tribulations. The mother introspects:

Ujjibon is attracted only towards men— she possesses the required sensitivity and awareness to accept this truth. But Ujjiban is not a character from a story or a film. He is her son, the son of her own flesh and blood. He is the son of her and Uttam’s. (2020, p. 90)

Ujjiban’s gay identity is evident in his gait and his behaviour. He is ridiculed by his friends and teachers at school. The public space of school does not provide him with a sense of belongingness. Even, the home space is not conducive for him. Uttam, his father curses him and commands him, “to behave like a boy as he is born a boy”. Thus, Uddipan was bereft of any comforting space where he could perform his sexuality. He always lives within the restrictive, disciplinary space. But his association with the Art teacher provides him with a liberated space, where he can come out of his shell and become his own self. As his mother states,

Uddipan became very close to this man who is double his age. She found it surprising. Yet, Debaparasad, the Art teacher could bring him out of the cocoon of loneliness-depression-self-absorption. And she is ever grateful to him. (2020, p. 92)

Thus, Uddipan’s experience in the metro city of Delhi gives him the much-required space of freedom and his whole personality undergoes a transformation. From a naive individual, he becomes self-reliant and courageous. He has understood the heterosexual power politics and he realises that his gay identity is as natural as any other gendered identity. This socially constructed notion of heterosexuality is critiqued by Binnie (1997) and she postulates: “Space is not naturally authentically “straight”, but rather actively produced and (hetero) sexualised.” (p.223)

The very notion of inclusion and acceptance is something that queer people are denied by society. As they do not conform to heteropatriarchal norms, they are singled out and positioned in the margins. These liminal spaces could be re-appropriated and restructured by creating a space where the queers can perform their sexuality and gender. The experiences of Urban Delhi provide Ujjiban with the required acceptance and space and he comes out of his closeted space and declares his sexuality even to his mother. This creation of a heterotopia helps the queers force the heteronormative society to recognise the queer bodies and sexualities as viable on their own terms. And Ujjiban’s mother accepts his sexuality with élan. She tells him:

Ujjiban! I belong to a different era. You belong to a new era. But who will understand you if not me? I am your mother…. Is there anything that a mother does not understand? However free, rebellious emancipated a time could be, is not the time born out of a womb of old time? Doesn’t the hand holding the progressive light that herald the new time born from the darkness of the womb? (2020, p. 94)

And Chandrabala shivers with a yearning to be free from the clutch of the age-old conventions and a love for the future where there will be equality of sexes. In this kind of social change, a change of mindset of people is needed. Social change occurs slowly. Literature can play a pivotal role by bringing awareness and arousing empathy and sensitivity among people.  These existential realities bring forth the nuances of the lives of the queer people and we can envision that a day will come which will open up a new vista where people belonging to all sexualities bask under the same sky.

The spatial deployment of the queer people within the framework of mainstream society has changed its trajectory in the contemporary discourses on queer studies. Scholars have come up with new perspectives on the notions of queer identity and space. Kath Browne (2006) argues that queer is more than the LGBT population and it ought to consider how queer can be something other than “an overarching term that describes sexual ‘dissidents’” (p. 886). Brown postulates that the ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ spaces normally do not transgress the normative sexual identity politics. It should extend the norm and not transgress or challenge it. Thus, by queer Brown means “operating beyond powers and controls that enforce normativity”. (p. 889). She goes on to state that queer inquiries should question the ideals of inclusion and “entail radical (re)thinkings, (re)drawings, (re)conceptualisations, (re)mappings that could (re)make bodies, spaces, and geographies” (p. 888). Thus, Brown opines that queer geographies should transgress boundaries such as hetero/homo, man/woman in order to go beyond normativity that will render space fluid. This fluid notion of space would surely be a harbinger of a new world order where the dominant power structure would cease to operate and a new dawn will usher in where the queers will have their own subjectivities. The spaces that they occupy will transgress all prevalent spatial boundaries and provide them with the identities that they envision in the days to come.

Declaration of Conflicts of Interests

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

Funding

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

References and Work Cited:

Anzaldúa, G. E. (2002). (Un)natural bridges, (Un)safe places. In G. E. Anzaldúa, & A. Keating (Eds.), This bridge we call home: Radical visions for transformation (pp. 1-5).  Routledge.

Binnie, J. (1997). “Coming out of geography: Towards a queer epistemology”. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space,15. Pp.223-237.

Biswas, D. (2021). “Contesting homogeneity: Stereotypes and heteronormativity in Aruni Kashyap’s His Father’s Disease. English: Journal of the English Association. (pp.1–22). doi: 10.1093/english/efab007

Browne, K. (2006). “Challenging queer geographies”. Antipode 38, pp 885-893.

Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge.

—. (1993). Bodies that matter. Routledge.

Cover, R. (2012). “Queer youth suicide, culture and identity: Unlivable lives?”. Ashgate Publishing. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286225864/ Accessed on 20th December, 2021.

Deka, M. (2021). Queerscape. NEthing.

Ebmeier, K and C. Bovermann. (2018) “‘It’s a space shuttle!’ Opening up queer spaces through the performing arts”. In Olson Gretta et al. (Eds), Beyond gender: An advanced introduction to futures of feminist and sexuality studies. (pp. 277-290). Routledge.

Foucault, M. (1986). “Of other spaces”. [trans. Jay Miskowiec]. Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1986), pp.22-27.

—. (2001). The order of things (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Hazarika, P. (2020). Andharotkoi udax botahotkoi swadhin. B R Book Stall.

Hones, S. (2018). “Literary geography and spatial literary studies”. Literary Geographies, Vol. 4, No. 2 pp. 146-149

Jenks, C. (2003). Transgression, Routledge.

Jones, A. (Sept.2009). “Queer heterotopias: Homonormativity and the future of queerness. Interalia. (pp 1-20) DOI: 10.51897/interalia/PQBF4543.

Kandali, M. (2007). Trittiyattar galpa in M Kandali (author) Trittiyattar galpa: A collection of short stories. Lawyer’s Book Stall.

Kashyap, A. (2019). “His Father’s Disease” in A Kashyap (author). His Father’s Disease: Stories. (pp. 118-131).

Kawash, Samira. “New Directions in the Motherhood Studies”. Signs, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Summer 2011), pp. 969-1003.

Macharia, K. (2020). “Queer writing, queer politics: Working across difference”. In S. Somerville (Ed), The cambridge companion to queer studies (pp.30-47). Cambridge.

Okawa, A. (2015). “Liminal Identity: Fluidity in Multiplicity”. (pp-1-8). www.academia.edu/18619041/Liminal_Identity_Fluidity_in_Multiplicity/ Accessed on 5th December, 2021

Oswin, N. (2008). “Critical geographies and the uses of sexuality: Deconstructing queer spaces”. Progress in Human Geographies, Vol32, No-1, pp.89-103.

Phukan, M. (Ed), (2021). The greatest Assamese stories ever told. Aleph Book Company.

Shinsuke E. (2011). “Negotiating sissyphobia: A critical/interpretive analysis of one “femme” gay Asian body in the heteronormative world”. The Journal of Men’s Studies, 19.1, pp. 37–56.,

Somerville, S. (Ed). (2020). The cambridge companion to queer studies. Cambridge.

Tally, R. T, Jr. (ed). (2017). The routledge handbook of literature and space.Routledge.

Nizara Hazarika is an Associate Professor at the Post Graduate Department of English in  Sonapur College, (Gauhati University) Assam. She did her PhD on Colonial Assam and Women’s Writing’from English and Foreign Languages University, (EFLU) Hyderabad. She is the author of the book Colonial Assam and Women’s Writing. She has also edited several books on women writing and English language teaching. She was a recipient of a Fellowship by the US Department of State in 2013, UGC travel grants to participate in IAFOR International Conference at Osaka, Japan in 2013, and in the Fifteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities for a Knowledge Society” at Imperial College, London in 2017.

Penology in Colonial Times: A Reading of Sangrami Jibonor Atmakatha

//
587 views

Sib Sankar Majumder
Dept. of English, Assam University, Silchar, India. ORCID: 0000-0003-1389-8289. Email: ssmaus1980@gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages: 1-10. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne22

First published: June 24, 2022 | AreaNortheast India | LicenseCC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
Full-Text HTML Full-Text PDF Cite
PlumX Metrics

Abstract

Prison system in Assam owes its origin and structure to the British colonizers. Colonial administrator John M’Cosh mentions in Topography of Assam (1837) that by the year 1833 the East India Company had already established jails in prominent administrative sites like Guwahati and Goalpara. From the mid-twentieth century, one can witness an increasing concern in academic disciplines like psychiatry, psychology, sociology, criminology and philosophy with the notion and the praxis of incarceration in the colonies. This paper will attempt to foreground the unexplored dimensions of incarceration in colonial jails with a special focus on the frontier province of Assam through an analysis of Sangrami Jibonor Atmakatha (2011), the autobiography of Robin Kakati, an eminent freedom fighter, Gandhian who courted multiple arrests as a satyagrahi. His autobiography unravels some of the most intricate details of prison life in colonial Assam, especially in Jorhat Central Prison where he was confined with some of the most prominent freedom fighters of the time like Nilamoni Phukan, Bimala Prasad Chaliha, Kamala Miri, Gopinath Bardoloi and others. The primary objective of this paper is to study the evolution of the system of incarceration in Assam during the colonial period by highlighting critical perspectives on forms of punishment, humiliation, subjection, classification and reform within the gaol through testimonies of freedom fighters.

Keywords: incarceration, penology, resistance, autobiography, prison manual 

In the wee hours of 10th of October 1942, a railway train carrying soldiers of the Allied Forces towards the Burmese frontier was derailed near Sarupathar Railway Station in Upper Assam. It resulted in the death of hundreds of British-American soldiers (Hazorika, 2014, p.233). The derailment was orchestrated by Mrityu-Vahini [suicide squad], an extremist outfit inspired by Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and his Azad Hind Fauj, which had already executed a series of disruptive activities in Central and Upper Assam. Immediately after this incident, C.A. Humphrey, the District Magistrate of Jorhat, ordered a combined civilian-military operation to nab the perpetrators. He also ordered a simultaneous crackdown on the Congress volunteers and their sympathizers in the region. Robin Kakati, a Gandhian satyagrahi was arrested from the Congress Party office in Sibsagar on the same day. Months later, Kakati noted in his diary inside Ward no. 14 of Jorhat jail:

As security prisoners, we were lodged in a cell within a huge concrete building [i.e. ward no. 14]. In the meantime, a good number of leaders from Jorhat and Guwahati were placed in the female ward of the jail. Some others were kept among the non-political prisoners (Chutia,2011, p.109; my translation).

‘Security prisoner’ was a popular nomenclature to identify those prisoners who were “confined under Regulation III of 1818 or corresponding rules under Preventive Detention Act” for involvement in “terrorist crime” whereas ‘political prisoner/s’ belonged to another distinct category of convicts penalized under Section 153-A of the Indian Penal Code, 1862, who disobeyed colonial laws “on conscientious and political grounds” (Mohanty et al., 1990, p. 84). However, in colonial jurisprudence, particularly in matters of prison administration, in numerous instances, these nomenclatures overlapped with each other. Under the provisions of Section 153-A of the Indian Penal Code, political prisoners could not be subjected to more restraint than was necessary for their safe custody (85). Ironically, from Kakati’s account [serialized in seven neat diaries and later published as Sangrami Jibonor Atmakatha, 2011, his autobiography], it is evident that the Jorhat jail administration was violating the law by putting male ‘political’ prisoners in female wards.

During the last few decades, Anglophone academia has witnessed considerable interest in prison studies, especially complemented by critical concerns with prison life writings. The significance of Robin Kakati’s autobiography Sangrami Jibonor Atmakatha lies in its portrayal of British carceral and penological praxis during the late colonial period in Assam. It highlights abuses, tortures, and denial of rights to the ‘security/political prisoners’ by the colonial administration. The eminent freedom fighter, Robin Kakati was born on 3rd September 1910 in Boliaghat village of Sibsagar district. He joined the freedom movement during his early student life under the inspiration of Mahatma Gandhi. The last few chapters of Robin Kakati’s autobiography, Sangrami Jibonor Atmakatha, abound in recollections of events, anecdotes and conditions from Jorhat jail. It foregrounds the hopes, fears and apprehensions of prisoners jailed in a remote but strategically significant frontier region of the British Empire – an area that had recently become a theatre of War because of the Japanese invasion. British authority in the region was further challenged by a political mobilization called the Quit India Movement (1942). Kakati recollects an atmosphere of utter confusion among his compatriots in jail perpetuated by speculations about the possible defeat of Allied forces. Whereas the news of Subhas Chandra Bose’s appearance on the Burmese frontier with an audacious battle plan invigorated patriotic feelings of the prisoners, there were also genuine concerns about the future if the Britishers were to face defeat:

We were excitedly postulating the everyday events and we were convinced of the defeat of British Allied power. But what will happen to India after the defeat? Some opined that Japan and Germany will divide and share India. They will rule India more stringently with military power. We developed sympathy for the Britishers. Because we thought that irrespective of all its deficiencies, British were believers in democracy (Chutia, 2011, pp. 116-17; my translation).   

Among the most notable compatriots of Robin Kakati inside Jorhat jail was Kushal Konwar, an alleged activist of Mrityu-Vahini, in his mid-thirties, who was arrested on the suspicion of involvement in Sarupathar train derailment. Konwar was among the most active members of the Golaghat District Congress Committee. Soon after his arrest, Konwar was brought to Jorhat jail along with forty-two other accused. He spent the next seven months of his life in prison, which included four months of solitary confinement as an under-trial (Hazorika 234). In his autobiography, Robin Kakati has provided a vivid account of the last few days in the life of Kushal Konwar:

The news of the death sentence awarded to Kushal Konwar cast a pallor of gloom among the political prisoners (in Jorhat jail). Konwar maintained stoic behavior throughout his final few days in prison. Most of his time was spent reading passages from the Gita. As the date of hanging approached, there was no visible difference in his behavior. One could rather witness an illuminated expression in his eyes. The day before his hanging, the political prisoners were allowed to meet him and bid farewell with tearful eyes to the fearless soul. His sons were brought inside the jail for a final meeting with their father. On the evening before the hanging of Konwar, all the political prisoners in Jorhat jail observed a fast which continued till the afternoon of the next day. This fast was a homage to a brave son of Asomi Ai (Mother Assam), not merely a political gesture of anti-colonial resistance (Chutia, 2011, pp. 109-10; my translation).

Sangrami Jibonor Atmakatha, belongs to the genre of ‘prison literature’, ‘prison autobiography’ to be precise. This genre is characterized by writings which are primarily realist or confessional in nature since the author is either a convict in imprisonment or someone who has completed his term. As a literary genre, prison autobiography is neither new nor unique. It has been defined as “[P]ersonal accounts written while in prison or about one’s time of imprisonment” (Winslow, 1995, p. 52). One may cite examples as widely different from each other as Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to Hitler’s Mein Kampf as literary specimens of this genre. It may be about prison, the experience of imprisonment, or prison life where a part of the narrative might have been written within confinement (52). Kakati’s autobiography, parts of which were written during his imprisonment, provides a rare glimpse into the colonial carceral and phonological praxes during the late colonial. The struggles of Assamese political prisoners inside colonial jails of Assam have been recorded in various autobiographical writings like Prabhat Sarma’s Bilator Galpa Aru Jailor Jibon, SrimantaTalukdar’s Agor Din Aru Mor Kotha, Krishnanath Sarma’s Krishna Sarmar Diary, Amiya Kumar Das’ Jivan Smritietc.Prashanta Kumar Chutia, the editor of Sangrami Jibonor Atmakathasuggests that though the author finished his manuscript by late 1940’s,it was published as late as in 2011 due to certain unspecified reasons (4).

The objective of this paper is to concentrate on the experience of ‘security/political prisoners’ through an analysis of Sangrami Jibonor Atmakatha, a remarkable specimen of the genre of ‘prison autobiography’. While remaining conscious of the limitations of ‘recovery’ intent of the project, an attempt has been undertaken, nevertheless, to fill up the void of critical introspection into prison narratives pertaining to the freedom movement.  The following segment of this article is devoted towards unearthing different forms of punishment, humiliation, subjugation exercised by colonial prison administration and its impact on political prisoners through the analysis of an autobiography.

The modern penological system was introduced in the Indian subcontinent by the British East India Company during early eighteenth century. It was first introduced in India in 1773 and by 1860 it was practiced all over the subcontinent (Mohanty et al., 1990, p. 24). Up to 1857 the colonial rule continued to rest upon a patchwork of legal jurisdiction – an admixture of Mughal legal system and British ‘rule of law’. Till the third quarter of the eighteenth century, in British-India, jail was primarily conceived as a “holding place” where an accused could be confined before trial and subsequently, if s/he were sentenced with a jail term. That some of the East India Company executives were deeply perturbed by the state of affairs that prevailed within most Indian jails could be realized from a letter of T.B. Macaulay:

Whatever I hear about the Indian prisons satisfies me that their discipline is very defective…I do not imagine that in this country we can possibly establish a system of prison discipline so good as that which exists…[in the West]. We have not an unlimited command of European agency, and it is difficult to find good agents for such a purpose among our native subjects (Waits, 2014, p.1).

The following year i.e., in 1836 Macaulay appointed a Prison Discipline Committee to assess the condition of colonial prisons in India. In its report (submitted in 1838) the committee recommended a series of punitive mechanisms to be installed inside jails with the underlying presumption that “the best criminal code can be of little use to a community unless there is good machinery for the infliction of punishments” (Waits, 2014, p.113). Macaulay’s Prison Discipline Committee was followed by three more similar reformative committees which were subsequently formed in 1846, 1877 and 1888. From the recommendations of these committees, it appeared that the colonial administration was viewing the process of penology and incarceration as inseparable instruments of statecraft which could not be ignored any longer. However, with a rapid transformation in the functioning of penological institutions in the West during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century there were visible changes in prison administration in the colonies as well. Further enactments like Prisons Act, 1894 and the Prisoners Act 1900 facilitated the way for the formation of the Indian Jails Committee, 1919-20under the chairmanship of Sir Alexander G Cadrew. This committee effectively laid down the foundation for penological and carceral policies in the subcontinent through a series of recommendations on various aspects of prison administration. Certain prison historians, however, maintain that in spite of the best intention of Sir Cadrew and his committee, colonial prison system faltered in applying these recommendations because of its inability “to regard the prisoner as an individual” (Mohanty, 1990, p.26).

In the prison manuals the term ‘political prisoner’ remained ambiguous as a result of which it lacked uniformity in terms of application. Ujjwal Kumar Singh maintains that the entry of middle-class nationalists in colonial prisons accentuated a process of negotiation between the prisoners and prison governors which ultimately resulted in the construction of a new class of convicts called; political prisoners’ [or simply ‘politicals’] (81). The colonial government used different terms and nomenclatures to identify political prisoners. Having experimented with a plethora of terms like ‘seditionist’, ‘conspiracy case prisoners’, ‘raj kaidi/bandi’, ‘state prisoner’ and ‘political prisoner’ between late nineteenth to early twentieth century, apparently neutral termslike ‘detenue’ ‘security prisoner’, ‘superior class’ came into fashion towards the end of the colonial rule. Since the 1920s the popular practice was to classify prisoners into three grades – A, B and C. According to this classification ‘C’ class prisoners were to be treated like ordinary criminals, ‘A’ and ‘B’ class prisoners were to be given a little better treatment in terms of food, reading and writing facilities and a few other privileges. In Assam the usual practice was to classify prisoners into A, B and C category according to the state of their health, education and occupation before arrest but from the 1920s a new system was adopted whereby prisoners were categorized into these groups according to the nature of their offence (Das, 2016, p.126).  According to Assam Restriction and Detention Ordinance, 1920 any convict who was deemed to be a ‘political prisoner’ could be sentenced to a jail term or detention by the order of the central government or by any provincial government. These prisoners were subjected to a distinct routine from the non-political prisoners based on the nature of their ‘offence’ (Saraf, 1987, p.594). However, jail authorities applied dissimilar standards of treatment to prisoners for similar ‘offence’.

The authority of the colonial prison system, especially in remote frontier regions, operated on a complicated hierarchy, the nature of which was rather casually defined. Such a system could enforce a series of checks and obstructions at different levels of jail administration without having the onus to clearly define the rules for the convicts. From the first few decades of the twentieth century a palpable transformation could be discerned in the treatment of political prisoners. This transformation was partly affected by the rise of extremist activities in British-India around the time of World War I when political prisoners were increasingly deemed to be ‘dangerous’. Jail superintendents were instructed to keep a vigilant eye on the activities of political prisoners who “were not to be allowed to work together or given clerical work” (Purandare, 2019, p.130). Another instruction was that these prisoners should be compelled to do hard or “gang labour” (130). Most importantly political prisoners lost the “right of remission”, i.e. their sentences could no longer be “reduced on the grounds of good conduct in prison” (Das, 2016, p.130).

In the colonial jails of Assam Bengali Diet Scale was followed with two standards – one for the labouring prisoners and the other for non-labouring prisoners (which mostly included the political) (Das, 2020, p.106). The prisoners received jail diet as laid down under the provision of rule 369 of Assam Jail Manual Vol. I. Food given to the prisoners included sorghum (which had fewer amounts of protein than wheat), rice and lentils. High caste political prisoners were allowed to cook their own food at designated places within the jail compound. Rather surprisingly, on being transferred from one jail to another they could carry their feeding utensils and bedding with them to the receiving jail. Jail authorities supported such a system of separate cooking since it induced caste hierarchy among the prisoners. At the time of Quit India Movement most political detainees in Upper Assam belonging to ‘A’ and ‘B’ class, including Gopinath Bardoloi and Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, were consigned to Jorhat jail. Each of these prisoners was supplied with pieces of bread and butter but ‘C’ class politicals were deprived of this facility. Some of the ‘A’ class prisoners like Robin Kakati and others decided to compensate their ‘C’ class brethren by sharing the bread and butter supplied to them, thereby forging a sense of unity among the inmates (Chutia, 2011, p.110).

With the introduction of a series of prohibitory regulations like the Indian Press Act of 1910 and the Indian Press Emergency Powers Act of 1931, the British colonial administration supplied a substantially comprehensive list of banned books to the jail authorities which could not be allowed inside the jail premises. Through the Assam Jail Manual (1934) prison officials had the prerogative to decide the nature and content of reading materials to be allowed to the prisoners. Prison administrators often formulated their own rationale for restricting the entry of books on arbitrary ‘security concerns’ (Chutia, 2011, p.109). Ironically, Bhagwad Gita [usually found in the possession of extremists] was among books deemed to be ‘dangerous’ by prison administrators since it could “provoke unruly behavior” or encourage “disruption of law and order” (Kar, 2009, p.29). Detachment from public gaze and immunity from scrutiny of civil society enhance the opportunity for adoption of a stricter censorship policy inside jail than in the rest of the society. Political prisoners were provided loose papers for writing two personal letters a month (Chutia, 2011, p.116; Das, 2016, p.126). However, one or two extra letters could be smuggled by bribing the warders (Chutia, 2011, p.116). From Kakati’s autobiography it is evident that during the War years prisoners had better access to books and other reading materials than before in Assam as he observes

During 1930/32 newspapers were not allowed in jails. At times Jail warders and compounders smuggled in a few newspapers and letters from which the latest occurrences in the country could be fathomed. By 1942 newspapers were available in jail and we had no problem in getting information (Chutia 116).

For political prisoners, however, there were certain distinct arrangements in most colonial jails. There were certain “special instructions” for the treatment of political prisoners in the Assam Jail Manual, 1934 whereby they were allowed to communicate freely with each other (Saraf, 1987, p.7). They were entitled to get medical treatment in case of serious illness but only under specific instruction of the jail superintendent. At times jail authorities compromised on the health condition of the prisoners on grounds of security. In October 1942 Swami Satyananda was transported to Jorhat jail in critically injured condition but Tarak Das, the jail superintendent, denied permission for the treatment of the prisoner outside the jail premises. When Satyanand’s condition further deteriorated, he was shifted to Tezpur jail. Unfortunately, he succumbed to his injuries within a few days (Das, 2020, p.113). According to David Arnold,

Mortality tended to be highest among the newly-arrived prisoners who entered jail in a debilitated and demoralized state…from unfamiliarity with a confined and sedentary life, from abrupt changes of climate and diet, from neglect at the hands of their jailors, or from the ‘nostalgia’ and ‘peculiar despondency’ that overcame them (1994, pp.167-8). 

By the end of the nineteenth century, the prison population in Assam was in a deplorable state, and prisoners were regularly infected by infectious diseases (Das, 2020, p.110). Health facilities and medical facilities were woefully inadequate (Chutia, 2011, p.110). During the early 1930s, there was an outbreak of pneumonia in Tezpur jail as a result of which twenty-eight deaths were reported by the jail authorities (Chutia, p.110). Similar outbreaks of contagious diseases were reported from other jails of the province including Guwahati. There were times when the provincial government had to intervene and instruct “the jail authorities to improve the sanitary and hygienic conditions” in the prison wards (Das, 2016, p.129). The colonial government’s Home Department, Provincial Governors, and Chief Commissioners issued periodical assessment reports about security threats in jail and about the sympathizers of revolutionary activities among prison inmates. The response of the British Empire to such perceived ‘threats’ can be witnessed in a secret report dispatched to the jail superintendents in 1933:

Regarding security, prisoners who hunger strike [sic], every effort should be made to prevent the incidents being reported [in newspapers], no concessions to be given to the prisoners who must be kept alive. Manual methods of restraint are best, then the mechanical when the patient resists (Kar, 2009, p.67).

In Sangrami Jibonor Atmakatha, Robin Kakati provides a vivid description of the inhuman treatment accorded by the colonial administration to Kamala Miri, a Congress volunteer and satyagrahi who was brought to Jorhat jail on 13th October 1942. From mid-December 1942 Miri’s health started declining steadily because of his participation in an indefinite hunger strike. When he was admitted to the jail hospital for treatment the jail superintendent Tarak Das asked him to sign a letter that stated that he had agreed to refrain from political fasting and agitation in exchange for his treatment. Miri declined to sign the letter and consequently he was not allowed permission for treatment outside the jail. Gopinath Bardoloi and a few others tried to intervene on behalf of Miri. Bardoloi wrote a long letter to the provincial authority trying to draw its attention to the deplorable state of affairs in Jorhat jail (Das, 2020, p.112). He also reiterated the demand of political prisoners in detention for unconditional release of Miri from jail on grounds of poor health but the provincial government ignored the request. Finally, on the morning of April 23,1943 Kamala Miri breathed his last in the jail hospital. Miri’s sacrifice strengthened the resolve of political prisoners of Jorhat jail to continue their resistance through hunger strike. Even those prisoners who were favouring a moderate approach gave up all efforts of negotiation with the jail administration after the tragic death of Kamala Miri (Chutia, p.110).

In spite of such bleak episodes, there is an unmistakable sense of humour that characterizes Kakati’s autobiography. One may consider the following example which is rather typical of his narrative skill:

The Roroia Military Airport, strategically very important for the Allied Forces, was situated only a few kilometers away from the [Jorhat] jail. It maintained a very busy schedule during the War. The sound of constant descent and ascent of military aircraft was a source of annoyance for the prisoners. The news of Japanese advancement on the Burmese front convinced the prisoners about an imminent attack on Raroia Military Airport and the adjacent areas including the jail. On a certain evening, there was a huge sound, accompanied by news of the collapse of concrete structure which unleashed an atmosphere of panic in the prison wards. After ten minutes of great anxiety and fear, the warder finally informed that it was not an invasion but an earthquake (Chutia, 2011, p.111; my translation).

Prabhat Chandra Sarma, a political prisoner, narrates another similar incident. In 1944 a British airplane, flying from Roroia Airbase to China, faced trouble with its engine. Almost immediately the pilot started dropping bombs from the plane carelessly in order to save it from an accident. Incidentally, one of the bombs was dropped very close to the jail campus. The jail authorities instantly decided to run away putting the lives of all the prisoners at risk. A few prisoners were severely injured in the ensuing commotion (Das, 2020, p.119). Such incidents, although very rare, expose the indiscipline in colonial prison administration. Unlike the jails situated in centrally located regions, prison administration in far-off and frontier regions was very harsh. In such locations political captives could be flogged or subjected to other forms of punishments (if they did not complete their quota of work) or denied the facilities to which they were entitled.

During India’s more than a half-a-century long struggle for freedom against British rule, thousands of freedom fighters were imprisoned by the British colonial authorities; many also voluntarily courted imprisonments. Some of these freedom fighters recorded their impression of British carceral system through letters, memories, and diaries, however, only a few of them were fortunate enough to see these memoirs and autobiographies in published form. One common thread which characterizes these writings is the representation of colonial jails as an archetypal symbol of repression. According to historian Clare Anderson ‘jails’ and ‘penal colonies’ became central tropes of the political struggle for independence (2007, pp.19-20). It became customary among the nationalists to refer to India under colonial rule as “one vast prison” (Arnold, 2004, p.39). Since the jail chains symbolized colonial subjection, imprisonment itself became a metaphor for resistance. Voluntary imprisonment and peaceful fasting became the most favoured techniques of anti-colonial resistance (Arnold, 1994, pp.178-9). These techniques assumed immense significance because of the physical and emotional tortures sustained by political prisoners during protest fasts. Jail spaces became a kind of “mukti-tirth”, a site for pilgrimage for freedom fighters where the sons of Bharat Mata [Mother India] sacrificed their lives in the service of the nation. It is in this context that prison narratives, letters, memories, and autobiographies written within colonial jails occupy a significant space in the nationalist historiography of freedom struggle. It became as much a “nationalist convention” argues David Arnold, for political prisoners “to write their prison memories as it was a patriotic duty for newspaper editors and book publishers to put them in to print” (2004, p.30). While the autobiographical narratives of political prisoners may be viewed as a legitimate opportunity to register an intellectual response totorture in incarceration, it also provides a window to posterity to assess the nature of their anti-colonial resistance. Some of these writings like Gandhi’s My Experiments with Truth, Nehru’s An Autobiography, Savarkar’s My Transportation for Life, Bhai Paramanand’s The Story of My Life attained cult status with the passage of time. While, the desire to record experiences of suffering in writing might have been triggered by an effort to “seek empowerment” against the “official text of imprisonment” what distinguishes these autobiographies from numerous other specimens of this genre, is the transformation of individual experiences of suffering and resistance into accounts of broad social, historical and philosophical significance as Paul Gready suggests that “autobiographical prison writing” could be “the most comprehensive articulation” of the “oppositional” power of writing (1993, p.489). Gready also adds that prisoners wrote inside prison spaces to “restore a sense of self and world”, in order to “reclaim the ‘truth’” – a fact which has also been corroborated by Nehru in Glimpses of World History:

Long and lonely terms of exile and prison are hard to bear, and the mind of many brave person has given way and the body broken down under strain…one must have strength of mind, and inner depths which are calm and steady, and the courage to endure (2004, p.139).

However, we need to be on our guard about the nature of autobiographical prison writings as these texts can be ambiguous, subject to approximation, manipulation and appropriation because of their ‘oppositional’ character. Political prisoners of the colonial period were certainly not the kind of “docile bodies” which Foucault imagined in Discipline and Punish (1995). David Arnold cites “abundant evidence” of “resistance and evasion” in the Indian prison system and insists that political prisoners in colonial jails actively resisted and defied warders and orders. (1994, p.150)

While there has been a tendency in the past to see prison protests as essentially a mark of the period of nationalist incarceration, particularly from 1920 onwards, the more one explores the history of nineteenth-century prison in India the more frequent such episodes of resistance appear and the more significant they seem in the evolution of colonial penology (1994, p.150).  

The demand for ‘recognition’ as “special class of prisoners” by Kakati and his compatriots was rejected by jail authorities as per the recommendation of the Indian Jails Committee, 1920 (Chutia, 2011, p.110). However, they continued to claim immunity from jail rules and demanded privileges in terms of food and other facilities (2011, p.110). Unlike most prison autobiographies which originated in colonial jails and earned notoriety for inflicting torture and hardship on political prisoners, life in Jorhat jail, as narrated by Kakati, seemed to have been relatively easier. When Kakati was brought to that jail during the winter of 1942 [eventually it turned out to be his longest tenure in British prison] he witnessed certain systemic transformations in its administration compared to the previous decade (between 1930 and 1932 he spent more than two years in that jail). Unlike the autobiographies of political prisoners, who were jailed in the Andaman Islands, Robin Kakati’s Sangrami Jibonor Atmakatha provides few surprises. Nevertheless, it is a rich testimony to the turbulent times of freedom struggle in Assam. By placing the history of incarnation and torture to which the Assamese political prisoners were subjected at the heart of his narrative, Kakati’s autobiography showcases the distinctiveness of the freedom movement in the region. By conflating the case of Assam, a frontier region, with the activities of Congress throughout the subcontinent he engenders a nationalist spirit. Sangrami Jibonor Atmakatha challenges “the colonial assumption” that Indians were “unwarlike’ and a people without the capability of writing history in a rational manner (Durba Ghosh 61). As an eminent Gandhian Kakati’s autobiography is a metaphor for non-violent resistance to the colonial rule.

Declaration of Conflicts of Interests

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

Funding

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

References:

Anderson, C. (2007). The Indian Uprising of 1857-58: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion. Anthem Press.

Arnold, D. (1994). “The Colonial Prison: Power, Knowledge and Penology in Nineteenth-Century India”. David Arnold and David Hardiman (Eds.), Subaltern Studies (Vol. VIII): Essays in Honour of Ranajit Guha (pp.148-87). OUP.

___. (2004). “The Self and the Cell – Indian Prison Narratives as Life Histories”. David Arnold& S. Blackburn (Eds.), Telling Lives in India – Biography, Autobiography
and Life History
(pp. 29-53) Permanent Black. 

Chutia, Prashanta Kumar Ed. (2011). Sangrami Jibonor Atmakatha by Robin Kakati. Muktijoddha Robin Kakati Janma Shatabarsha Udjapan Samiti.

Das, Dimpy. (2016). “Political Prisoners of Assam with Special Reference to Civil Disobedience Movement”. International Journal of Interdisciplinary Research in Science Society and Culture 2(1), 124-31. http://ijirssc.in/pdf/1464788846.pdf

___. (2020).Prisons in Colonial Assam (1826-1947). [Doctoral Dissertation, University of Gauhati] Shodh Ganga (INFLIBNET). http://hdl.handle.net/10603/325456

Foucault, Michel. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books.

Ghosh, D. (2017). Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919-1947. CUP.  

Gready, P. (1993). “Autobiography and the ‘Power of Writing’: Political Prison Wring in the Apartheid Era”. Journal of South African Studies 19(3), 489-523. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2636913

Hazorika, R. D. (2014). “Train Derailment Activities of Assam in 1942”. Pratidhhwani: The Echo: A Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 2(3), 230-39. https://www.academia.edu/6742233/Train_Derailment_Activities_of_Assam_In_1942

Kar, Sisir. 2009. British Shashane Bajeyapta Bangla Boi. Ananda Publishers.

Mohanty, A., & Hazary, N. (1990). Indian Prison System. Ashish Publishing House.

Nehru, J. (2004). The Glimpses of World History. Penguin.

Norman, D. (1965). Nehru, The First Sixty Years. John Day Company. 

Purandare, V. (2019). Savarkar: The True Story of the Father of Hindutva. Juggernaut Books.

Saraf. B.P. & Saraf, A. K. (1987). Assam Jail Manual: Complete Law Relating to Jail Administration in Assam. GLR Publishing House. 

Singh, U. K. (1996). Political Prisoners in India 1920-77. [Doctoral Dissertation, University of London]. ProQuest Dissertations. https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/29435/1/10731591.pdf

Waits, Mira Rai. (2014). The Spatial Economy of British Colonial Penology in India, 1858-1911. [Doctoral Dissertation, University of California]. ProQuest Dissertations.https://www.proquest.com/docview/1615847577

Winslow, D. J. (1995). A Glossary of Terms in Biography, Autobiography and Related Forms (2nd Ed.). University of Hawaii Press.

Dr. Sib Sankar Majumder is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Assam University, Silchar. He did his PhD from Gauhati University in 2016 on Political Theatre in Kolkata: Bertolt Brecht in Context. He has edited Anthology of American Poetry (2009) published by Eastern Book House, Guwahati.

Understanding Cultural Nationalism in Assam: Perspectives from the Plays of Jyotiprasad Agarwala and Bishnuprasad Rava

//
1.5K views

Parismita Hazarika1 & Debarshi Prasad Nath2
1Department of Cultural Studies, Assam Women’s University, Jorhat Assam. ORCID id: 0000-0002-4717-6690.
2Department of Cultural Studies, Tezpur University, Assam. ORCID id: 0000-0002-6028-6341

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages: 1-17. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne21

First published: June 24, 2022 | AreaNortheast India | LicenseCC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
Full-Text HTML Full-Text PDF Cite
PlumX Metrics

Abstract

In a contemporary phase of competing ethnonationalism, Jyotiprasad Agarwala and Bishnuprasad Rava continue to remain relevant to Assamese society. This is proven by the simple fact that every artist from Assam never let go of   the opportunity to establish their allegiance to Rava and Agarwala. Unquestionably, the two most revered cultural heroes of Assam provided a way forward for a more inclusive Assamese society. The fertile contexts provided by the Indian Freedom Movement, the world wars, the Russian Revolution, and the Chinese Revolution and the cultural heritage of Assam shaped their vision and understanding of nationalism and their eclecticism. Music and theatre were two of the most powerful mediums through which they chose to communicate with the masses. This paper aims at critically assessing the concept of nationalism in select plays of Agarwala and Rava. The plays Khanikar, Lobhita and Kanaklata by Jyotiprasad Agarwala and, Krishak and Sapon Kuwali by Bishnuprasad Rava have been selected to understand the context of the then Assamese society and the rise of Assamese cultural nationalism. The plays of Agarwala gave a new impetus to Assamese nationalism by celebrating the cultural heritage of the Assamese. This was done more or less in the manner and tradition of Lakshminath Bezbaroa. On the other hand, in Rava’s ideology, the unique heritages of each of the ethnic communities of Assam should find a reflection in the greater collective of the Assamese society, where all the communities would have the same sense of dignity. Though the names of these two artists are very often rightly uttered in the same breath, there is a need to separate and understand the important differences that mark their viewpoints. These cultural icons were not the proponents of chauvinism and ultra-nationalism, rather their cultural nationalism celebrated inclusivity and secularism. The paper concludes by contextualizing Rava and Agarwala’s views in the backdrop of the rising tide of cultural nationalism in different parts of the country at that time.

Keywords: Nationalism, ethnonationalism, cultural nationalism, nationality.

  1. Introduction

Assamese nationalism is a contentious issue in the contemporary socio-cultural life of Assam. Two of the most popular cultural icons who are often used to evoke an inclusive sense of Assamese nationalism are Bishnuprasad Rava and Jyotiprasad Agarwala. The fertile contexts provided by the Indian Freedom Movement, the world wars, the Russian Revolution, and the Chinese Revolution and the cultural heritage of Assam shaped their vision and understanding of nationalism and their eclecticism.

Jyotiprasad Agarwala (1903-1951), born to a wealthy and illustrious Marwari family in Tezpur and Bishnuprasad Rava (1909-1969), born in Dhaka when his father, Raibahadur Gopal Chandra Rava was posted there in the British Police, are considered two of the greatest icons of Assamese nationalism. The form of nationalism encouraged by Agarwala focused on highlighting the past glory of Assam. Therefore, Sankaradeva, the reformer of Assamese society and the propagator of the 16th– Neo-Vaisnavism in Assam and his indelible mark on the land, inspired Agarwala to propose a sort of inclusive nationalism based on Assam’s history. Bishnuprasad Rava too was inspired by the cultural and ideological zeal of Sankaradeva. Rava experienced the real condition of his native society and this inspired him to be dedicated to Indian culture as he saw the strong linkages that connected different cultures and societies of the country. Readers and critics belonging to different ideological leanings have all attempted to appropriate Rava and Agarwala in their own discourses of nationalism. The creations of Jyotiprasad Agarwala and Bishnuprasad Rava lend themselves quite easily to a reading of nationalism at two levels – nationalism inspired through the Indian Freedom Movement and a brand of cultural nationalism that was unique to Assam. This paper aims to critically assess the concept of nationalism in select plays of Agarwala and Rava. The plays Khanikar, Lobhita and Kanaklata by Jyotiprasad Agarwala, and Krishak and Sapon Kuwali by Bishnuprasad Rava have been selected to understand the context of the then Assamese society and the rise of Assamese cultural nationalism. Though the names of these two artists are very often rightly uttered in the same breath, there is a need to separate and understand the important differences that mark their viewpoints. We will attempt to historicize Rava and Agarwala’s views in the backdrop of the rising tide of cultural nationalism in different parts of the country at that time.

  1. Nationalism in Assam: the historical context

Jyotiprasad Agarwala and Bishnuprasad Rava were born at a critical time in the beginning of the twentieth century and experienced the political instability of their times which shaped their ideologies in exceptional ways as reflected in their creations and activities.

The political instability of Assam intensified after the establishment of British rule in 1826 through the Yandaboo Treaty, following the Anglo-Burman War. The independent status of Assam has often been claimed since pre-historic ages; in fact, this had always been a matter of pride. But British colonialism subjected the Assamese to humiliation. In fact, “Assam was largely unknown to the outside world until the British arrived in 1826” (Saikia, 2006, p. 38). Consequently, the Assamese society underwent several important political, economic and cultural changes under the rule of the British which eventually and indirectly led to the emergence of Assamese nationalism.

British colonialism was responsible for introducing the system of monetization in Assam and this widened social and economic inequity by creating two sections – the privileged and the under-privileged. “Those who had money became the owners of means of production. Whoever possessed more money acquired more wealth and thereby occupied a higher position in society” (Nessa, 1985, p. 62). Therefore, the educational and other facilities provided by the British entertained the privileged section in Assam and this privileged section emerged as the new middle class of Assamese society. The class of Assam consisted of tea garden owners, lawyers, teachers, owners of business establishments and service holders. However, until 1850s they stayed away from being involved in the contemporary issues of colonial Assam. It was only in the later part of the nineteenth century that they entered the socio-political scene of Assam (ibid, pp. 59-76).

Initially the newly emerged middle-class was either ignorant or chose to remain blind to the impact of colonial domination in Assam and the hardship faced by the farmers due to the taxation system, monopoly over business establishments, and extraction of land for setting up tea gardens. Rather, they played it safe by appealing to the British for necessary changes. At the same time, the farmers of Assam rebelled against the British because of their hardships. The native elites were quite disappointed about the fact that their social and economic supremacy was now in decline.  However, as in other parts of India, a sense of distrust gradually seeped into the middle-class of Assam, forcing them to reconsider their uncritical belief in colonial rulers subsequently to spur them to rebel against the British and this forced the middle class enter the socio-political scene of Assam.

In the nineteenth century the British rulers showed great dependence on the Bengali and middle-class people for government service and collection of tax respectively. The migrant Bengali middle class was seen as an appendix of the colonial administrator and emerged as a competitor to the Assamese middle class for jobs and professions. Eminent author Hiren Gohain writes:

From the 1840s onwards the middle-class had led a revolt against the Bengali domination of the administration and culture of Assam. They had looked forward to an assured, gradual transformation of Assam into an Assamese-speaking state under their leadership, and to the enjoyment of the fruits of their hegemony. (Gohain, 1983, p. 633)

Though the domination of the Bengali middle class posed a threat for the Assamese, it is at the same time mainly because of the Bengalis that the Assamese were introduced to a sense of nationalism. The Assamese youths who went to Kolkata for higher studies were influenced by the Bengal Renaissance of the nineteenth century. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Bengali educated elites raised a voice against the conservativeness of the Bengali Hindu society. At the same time, a part of the Bengali elites in Kolkata reinforced a form of conservative Hinduism and a reaffirmation of some orthodox traditional practices who were mainly mobilized under the leadership of Raja Radhakanta Dev. The modern worldview and English education were appreciated by them, but they could not think of any change in their orthodox religious faith (Gohain, 2014, p. 657). This same conservativeness was reflected in the writings of Ratneswar Mahanta and Bolinarayan Bora of Assam. In the writings of Ratneswar Mahanta, one can notice for instance that he would encourage women for education within the family while at the same time, compelling them to keep on with their household responsibilities (ibid).

Cultural nationalism is often marked by the vision of a national identity based on the history and cultural heritage of a particular community or a group of people. Jelena Petkovic (2011) opines these cultural theories understand the formation of a nation based on cultural continuity and thus they perceive national identity as almost inseparable from the issue of cultural identity of a people. About the role of intellectuals in cultural nationalism, E.T. Woods points out:

The key agents of cultural nationalism are intellectuals and artists, who seek to convey their vision of the nation to the wider community. The need to articulate and express this vision tends to be felt most acutely during times of social, cultural and political upheaval resulting from encounter with modernity (Woods, 2016, p. 1).

 In the nineteenth century, Assamese cultural nationalism was distinct and different from other variants of cultural nationalism that were in vogue in other parts of the country. Through his comparative study of Bengali cultural nationalism and Assamese nationalism, Debarshi Prasad Nath (2014) argues that Assamese cultural nationalism was not exclusivist. Referring to Sajal Nag’s identification of the three trends of Bengal Renaissance in 19th century as the Rammohan, the Hindu College and the Ramakrishna tradition, Nath said that though the Rammohan tradition was reformative one, “the cultural renaissance of this group remained confined within the framework of Hindu upper class and the agenda of change permitted by colonialism” (2014, p.155). Noted intellectuals, Hiren Gohain and Amalendu Guha, were critical about the cultural nationalism of Assam under the influence of the Bengal Renaissance. Amalendu Guha (2006) makes the colonial state responsible for the growth of a sense of deprivation among the Assamese by encouraging the dominance of Bengali immigrants whereby the Bengali language became the official language of Assam.  Like Guha, Hiren Gohain (2014) also holds the colonial masters responsible for Assamese nationalism, but slightly differently. He argues that newly educated Assamese youths realized the need to value their mother tongue through the assertion of the Bengalis for their own language. In the first part of the nineteenth century, there was a crisis faced by the Bengali language because of the dominance of English and this had scared the Bengali elites. The European nation was determined to eliminate all traditional knowledge and values from India. The Bengali intelligentsia feared that the English language would soon be imposed on the Bengalis as their national language. This kind of fear was expressed in the speeches delivered by Akshay Kumar Datta in 1834, Ramnarayan Tarkaratna in 1853, Kaliprasanna Singha in 1860 and so on. Akshay Kumar Datta expressed his fear in the speech delivered at a meeting of Basberiya village on 30 April in 1834. He said:

Amra porer sasoner adhin rohitesi, porer bhasai sikhita hoitesi, porer atyachar sajya kortesi…tahardiger bhasai edesher jatiyo bhasa hoibek…(qtd. in Gohain, 2014, p. 660).

(We are ruled by other nations, we are educated by other language, we are tolerating the dominance of others…. the language of the dominant country will be our national language.)

Their concerns inspired the newly educated Assamese youths of Kolkata to articulate and assert a similar sense of nationalistic feeling in nineteenth century Assam (ibid). At the crucial time of the dominance of Bengali as the official language, the American Baptist Missionaries came to Assam as a savior of the Assamese language. Tilottoma Misra perceptively observes on the contribution of the American Baptist Missionaries:

The efforts of the American Baptist Missionaries in the spread of education among the masses and in establishment of a vernacular press cleared the way for the development of a revitalized Assamese literature which, despite its five-hundred-year-old heritage, lay in a state of stupor during the days of the Burmese invasion (1816-24) and in the early years of British rule in Assam (Misra, 1987, p. 3).

With the interest of the propagation of Christianity, the Missionaries epitomised a revolution of literary formation of the Assamese language and that played a significant role in influencing a number of enthusiastic western educated young intellectuals of Assam. These young intellectuals contributed to the foundation of modern Assamese literature starting with the publication of Arunodoi[1] (in 1846 by the Christian Missionaries) to the publication of Jonaki[2] in 1889. “One young Assamese youth Anandaram Dhekial Phukan who claimed to be the harbinger of the Modern Age, in his polemical work ‘A Few Remarks on the Assamese Language’ had fervently opposed the imposition of the Bengali language in place of Assamese” (Saikia, 2007, p. 5). Despite his loyalty to the colonial administration, Anandaram Dhekial Phukan made relentless efforts with the constant support of the American Baptist Missionaries for reinstatement of the official position of the Assamese language in 1873. The formation of Asomiya Bhasha Unnati Sadhini Sabha in 1888 further promoted a sense of cultural nationalism in Assam.

People respond to an adverse cultural situation in two different ways. By an adverse situation we refer to a state of affairs when one feels that one’s identity as a cultural group is under serious threat. Either one may choose to rigidify one’s views and become fastidious about maintaining differences and uniqueness. On the other hand, one may choose to respond to the same situation by practicing greater inclusivity in thought and practice. It is remarkable that Agarwala and Rava responded to this crisis in Assam’s cultural life by positing the idea of a more comprehensive and inclusive Assamese society. As against a parochial sense of caste and religion specific nationalism of some contemporary thinkers of their times, Jyotiprasad Agarwala and Bishnuprasad Rava posited a secular and progressive view of Assamese nationalism.

The advent of the British, the onset of colonial modernity, the language crisis and the incessant flow of people from outside the region meant that the Assamese felt that they were faced with two kinds of problems. Firstly, there was a fear and dread of the ‘outsider’, the quintessential other who was going to take over the lands and resources of the indigenous populace. The other being the fear and anxiety faced by the communities of Assam, particularly the tribal communities of Assam, was the feeling of being deprived of their rights and entitlements.

Assam’s history has been about a series of migrations of one community after the other. The Ahoms, because of whom Assam has been projected to have a glorious past, is a migrant group. Edward Gait states that the Ahoms belonged to the great Tai or Shan race who entered the land of Assam in the thirteenth century (2005, p.66). As Lusome and Bhagat (2020) say, “… Northeast has been known for in-migration and the conflicts arising from the influx of migrants”. However, the speed of migration induced by the British was scary for the middle class, to say the least. At a point in time, when the Assamese would have had justifiable reason to turn hostile to the foreign ‘other’, Jyotiprasad Agarwala reminded the Assamese of the strong cultural connection between Assam and the rest of the country that had existed from ancient times. This was a remarkable feat without doubt. Agarwala reminded the Assamese about their great cultural heritage and dreamt of taking it to the world stage. His approach was to assimilate the best of elements from around the world with select elements from Assamese society to ensure that there was a healthy and creative exchange, leading to the enrichment of Assamese culture. This is reflected powerfully in Agarwala’s Joymoti, (1935) the first Assamese film ever made. On the other hand, Bishnuprasad Rava emphasized the need to allay the fears and anxieties of the tribal communities. In Rava’s ideology, the unique heritage of each of the myriad communities of Assam should find a reflection in the greater collective of the Assamese society, where all the communities would have the same dignity. One can notice this aspect in his poem ‘Tribal! Jag Tribal!’ (Tribal! Wake up Tribal!)-

Tribal! Jag tribal! 

Tiyagi ghumoti tor koutikoliya…

Jagibo lagibo toi Kachari Mikir,

Khasi, Rava, Garo, Miri, Kuki, Naga, Bir…

Jagibo lagibo, toi jag

Lo-so ag vag;

Patibo lagibo nawa-mel

            Jag tribal…(2008, 161).

(Tribal! Wake up tribal! You have to compromise your old sleep. The Kachari, Mikir, Khasi, Rava, Garo, Miri, Kuki, Naga and others have to wake up. You have to be there in the forefront and create a new horizon.)

 Unified, they would have their unique heritage come to life in the greater collective. This greater collective would not bulldoze over the cultures of the ethnic minorities but make them feel wanted. The prerogative for accommodating the numerically smaller ethnic minorities in the greater collective would be that of the ethnic majority. And this should be done without effacing the identity of the minorities.

Imperialism and capitalism helped to widen the already existing fissures in society. Thus, Rava felt that there was a need to explain to the people the reason behind their pitiable state and to make them understand the exploitative machinations of capitalism. Unless they were made to understand these, it was possible that they would turn their anger towards other communities in the region, seeing them as potential competitors for limited resources. Assamese nationalism could only survive by including the concerns of all sections of people living in Assam. This exploitation that was so widely rampant in Assamese society needed to be talked about in a simple language that the common man could appreciate. For Rava, literature and the arts were mainly meant to serve to spread this message amongst the common masses. Agarwala, in contrast, emphasized the importance of the ideal of beauty as a precondition for a healthy society. However, we would do well to remember that for Agarwala, the ideals of beauty and aesthetics could never be divorced from the real challenges facing society. It should be pointed out that all of these ideas associated with the two icons’ concerns were not mutually exclusive. Without fail, both of them alternately highlighted all these aspects at different stages and through different art forms. But our contention is that they were predominantly concerned with these issues that we have mentioned.

Jyotiprasad Agarwala’s creative writing turned consciously political from the time of the Non-Cooperation Movement. He states in the preface of Sonit Kuwari (1925) about the inspiration he derived from the Non-Cooperation Movement which motivated him to express distinctive features of Assamese culture in Assamese literature, art, and music (2013, p. 3). Regarding the politics and ideology of Jyotiprasad Agarwala, Dhiren Bhagawati has said, “Like Orpheus, Jyotiprasad Agarwala with his musical and poetic skills ignited the fire of patriotism among the masses and enchanted them to throng the freedom movement” (2012, pp. 40-41). Sonit Kuwari, of course, was not about the representation of fiery patriotism. It definitely introduced the idea of national identity glorified by a uniquely Assamese tune in the music. Though Bishnu Rava experienced the Non-Corporation Movement at the young age of eleven, the impact of the movement is discernible in his social play, Krishak, where Rava highlighted the emerging national consciousness among the youths of Assam.

The Civil-Disobedience movement inspired both Agarwala and Rava. During this phase, Rava warned the exploited masses against the exploiters through his poetic and lyrical compositions. Jyotiprasad Agarwala actively took part in the freedom movement of Assam since the time of the Civil-Disobedience movement. At the time of the Quit India Movement (1942), Agarwala was at the forefront of the movement. In this period, Jyotiprasad Agarwala emerged as a mass leader who could enthuse the people with fiery speeches for absolute sacrifice for the cause of freedom (Dutta, 2012, p. 3).

  1. Jyotiprasad Agarwala and Bishnuprasad Rava on Cultural Nationalism

The socio-cultural and political context shaped by the dominance of the Bengali middle class in Assam helped Jyotiprasad Agarwala to understand the growing tensions in his motherland. On the other hand, the migration and gradual assimilation of Agarwala’s forefathers to Assam itself was a great example of harmony and integration. That was also a time when there was rising enthusiasm among the masses of Assam towards liberation from colonial power. All these provided a fertile space for Agarwala to form his perspective on Assamese nationalism. The inspiration that was responsible for arousing Bishnu Rava’s sense of nationalism is somewhat different from Agarwala’s. Of course, the same instability afflicting the socio-political life of Assam motivated Rava also to be dedicated to the nation, but the consciousness of the Assamese middle class and the rise and gradual growth of the communist movement in India inspired Rava to form his ideological foundations. In spite of his birth in a rich family, Rava preferred to live a life among the common masses. One malady that he saw that afflicted the Assamese society was the ever-widening gap between the tribal and non-tribal ethnic communities of Assam. He was devoted to bridging this gap, teaching both groups to be self-critical. The essence of Assamese nationalism for Rava was based on the assimilation of elements from both tribal and non-tribal cultures. The progress of both these groups was dependent on the progress of the other. As long as both these groups understood that their destinies were intertwined, there was hope for the Assamese society.  Agarwala went abroad for higher education and his sojourn in the West helped him to visualize a new shape for Assamese culture. On the other hand, Bishnu Rava’s deep understanding of rural life in Assam helped him to visualize Assamese culture in a new light of intercultural harmony. Therefore, their unique experiences of life influenced their respective visions of nationalism.

Rava’s involvement in communism changed his nationalist consciousness. The revolutionary philosophy, views and thoughts of Marxism revolutionized his nationalist consciousness. He made an unwavering attempt to arouse the marginalized and the oppressed Assamese masses with the ideology of class revolution through his passionate speeches and literary creations. He saw that modern Assamese literature did not have references to the lived experiences of the working class. The aristocratic life of the elite classes and their conflict in day-to-day life was what mostly occupied the space of literature. Rava’s interest was in the emancipatory dimensions of literature and cultural texts. He considered Sankaradeva’s literary creations as reflecting a deep concern for the common masses. This inspired him to propose a cultural nationalism based on Sankaradeva. The philosophy of non-violence and equality proposed by Gandhi and the ideology of communism, Rava found to have been already introduced to the Assamese masses by Sankaradeva back in the 16th century.

Jyotiprasad Agarwala too envisaged a bridge between the culture promoted by Sankaradeva (Mahapurusiya Sanskriti) and the larger identity of the Assamese. The new vision to appropriate Sankaradeva as an icon of Assam was led by Lakshminath Bezbaroa who underlined the immense contributions of Sankaradeva towards social, spiritual and cultural reforms. The foundation of Sankaradeva’s Neo-Vaishnavism was essentially the Ek Sarana Nam Dharma (a monotheistic spiritual order), but Agarwala emphasized the consciousness of Indianness in Sankaradeva’s thought without its religious dimensions. He understood the necessity of the integration of the non-Assamese Indian migrants in Assamese culture by attracting them to Assamese art, literature, music and culture.

  1. Nationalism in Jyotiprasad Agarwala’s Plays

Jyotiprasad Agrwala’s plays are a distinctive reflection of his views of nationalism. In this regard, his plays like Lobhita, Kanaklata and Khanikar can be referred to. Jyotiprasad Agarwala’s realistic play, Lobhita, was written in the latter part of his life. Hiren Gohain is critical of the context of the play where the playwright has depicted Lobhita and her villagers as being aware of the communist activities. But during 1941-42 communism had yet to find its way into the remote villages of Assam (Gohain, 2013, p.  .32). Regardless of Gohain’s observations, it can still be stated that the play does well to expose the role of imperialism in the exploitation of the masses.  Significantly, one unique feature of the play was the absence of a definite story as the playwright had turned the Assamese nation and society as the central characters of the play in the context of colonial India as well as World War II.

Indian national sentiment was fostered with the transformation of agriculture with land ownership systems of Zamindari, Ryotwari and Mahalwari systems. This material transformation of Indian society had profound social, political, cultural, and psychological consequences for Indian society. The dominant section of the society was not concerned about the problems of the common masses as they were working on behalf of the interests of the colonial masters. During this period the life of the common people became difficult and turned worse in the wake of World War II and imperialism. To save their lives, the helpless poor took shelter in the houses of Mauzadars. The play Lobhita depicts the plight of the poor people from the Phulaguri village of Golaghat district. Lobhita, a common village girl, young and sympathetic, took shelter in the house of the Mauzadar who was subjected to ill-treatment meted out to her by the Mauzadarni, the wife of the Mauzadar. The cruelty of the Mauzadarani forced Lobhita to leave the Mauzadar’s house and the experience made her aware of her social condition and the nationalist consciousness as means for social emancipation.

Being inspired by Gandhi’s ideology of secularism, Agarwala did not encourage conservativeness and opposed religious chauvinism. This is reflected in the character of Golap Baruah, the Congress volunteer and Elahi Bakhsh, a common Muslim man who offered shelter to Lobhita after she was brutalised by the military men whereas Gopal denied doing the same for fear of societal rules.

During the World War II, Lobhita served the injured soldiers as a nurse. She also became a member of the Azad Hind Fauj led by Lieutenant Baruah in Assam and stood against the British who finally sacrificed her life for the nation. Jyotiprasad was inspired by the real-life incidents of martyrdom of Kanaklata Barua and Bhogeswari Phukanani while developing the character of Lobhita. Lobhita is depicted as a character with modern temperaments but she is equally respectful to her traditional values, yet not orthodox. She has been presented as a singer of Bangeet who would aspire to leave this world by hearing a song glorifying Assam on her death bed. In the character of Lobhita the ethos of Indian and Assamese nationalism was never in conflict.

Agarwala’s incomplete play, Kanaklata, based on the historic event of Kanaklata’s supreme sacrifice for India’s freedom could have been a milestone for the modern Assamese drama (Baruah, 2015, p. 145). The play begins with a detailed description of the stage set at Kalangpur in Tezpur where the Assamese youths are getting ready to perform Huchari on the occasion of Bohag Bihu[3]. The gloom of colonial rule has not been able to ruin the enthusiasm of the youths. Their preparation gains momentum with the active collaboration of a group of Mishing youths which highlights the multi-ethnic ethos of Assam. The protagonist of the play, Kanaklata, who had already been a part of the Association of Peace (Santi Bahini), was equally enthusiastic about the celebration of Bihu and was offended by the Congress volunteers’ decision not to celebrate Bihu showing her deeply rooted cultural associations. The whole narrative of the play depicts that nationalism evolved in the context of the Indian Freedom Movement took the turn of cultural nationalism.

Khanikar by Agarwala is a play set against the critical times of 1929 to 1940. The play depicts the conflict among the Assamese middle-class over traditional Assamese values and the Western mode of life and exposure. The Eurocentric attitude hindered the middle-class from understanding and appreciating their own art, culture and tradition objectively. In such circumstances, Nabin, a character from Khanikar, is discouraged by his family to go abroad to learn art and architecture. But he managed to make it after a lot of struggles and achieved international recognition. Nabin was equally dedicated to Indian art who would complete the statue of Sita of the Ramayana which drew great appreciation and praise in Europe. Nabin’s nationalism is based on a convergence of Western and Indian artistic inheritances. His cultural nationalism sees Assam’s past as being intimately and intricately connected to India’s cultural past where his exposure to the West enriched his artistic self.

Jyotiprasad presents another set of characters who had a fallacious understanding of Indian art and philosophy such as Kalpana Kumar Baruah who is a pretentious and vain artistic philosopher and Mr. Bhayin (Mr. Bhuyan) who is a blind follower of Western life to the extent of changing his Assamese surname from Bhuyan to Bhayin. He is so much impressed by anything Western that he would dismiss the value of Indian art and culture causing a conflict with Nabin. Bhayin, however, is not a flat character in the play. As stated by Satyendranath Sarmah, Jyotiprasad Agarwala leaves a space of sympathy for the character of Mr. Bhayin as well (Sarmah, 2013, p. 69). Mr. Bhayin stands by Nabin till the end despite his strong disagreement with Nabin’s decision of pursuing art instead of other subjects. It is important to note that Jyotiprasad has created a character like Bhayin to show how it was never too late to instil a sense of cultural pride in oneself. The play has has the objective to promote cultural nationalism through the Assamese language, literature, art, and heritage of the native land.

  1. Bishnuprasad Rava on Nationalism

Bishnuprasad Rava’s contributions to Assamese nationalism have been legendary. H come was deeply influenced by the Communist ideology which had its impact on his writings. His aspiration to form a classless and inclusive society with all the ethnic communities as a unified force provoked many critics like Arun Sarmah to term Bishnuprasad Rava a “revolutionary artist” (Sarmah, 2007, p. 22). The period of political exile[4] provided a great opportunity for him to understand the lives of the common masses and thus he shaped the artist in him with lived experiences.

Being associated with the political movements, it was natural to reflect his nationalist thought through the plays (Das, 2008, p. ?). Rava’s plays have depicted the Indian Freedom Movement as well as the rural realities of Assam (Sarmah, 2007, p. 23). Krishak and Sapon Kuwali are two of his significant plays.

Set against the backdrop of 1942 and the post-independent period of Assam, the play Krishak depicts the life of Madhab Chandra Choudhury who takes active part in the Freedom Movement from his student days and tries to unite people from his village against the colonial rulers once he was suspended from the college for taking part in the Quit India Movement. His activities were declared unlawful by the British which forced him to flee. He continued his anti-British activities secretly and got caught and imprisoned. Getting released, he resumed his studies and completed his I.Sc and then M.B.B.S. The play depicts the suffering of the villagers who were encouraged to think critically through the interventions of Madhab. However, the play ends not with melodramatic triumph but with the compulsions of ideological compromises on the part of the protagonist.

One can find an ideological resemblance of Madhab with that of Bishnuprasad Rava himself, though Rava never compromised with his ideological stand. This apart, Rava’s vision for an independent Assam after India gets her freedom is directly reflected through the character of Madhab. At the same time, Rava depicts the social and economic pressure on the individual in post-independent Assam which can compel one to give up one’s ideology.

The play Sapon Kuwali is devoted to the freedom movement of India. Here an urban aristocratic family’s determination to maintain the ideology of their family-head shapes the story of the play who had died following police torture as he had participated in the procession of the Quit India Movement. Sewali, a budding singer whose songs reflect the vision for independence who depicts the miseries of the poor people in society. Deuti, a thirteen-year-old boy, along with his friends are also inspired by the ideals of nationalism and freedom. Deuti even leads a procession chanting “Vande Mataram”, “Mahatma Gandhiji ki Jay” (Victory to Mahatma Gandhi), “Congress Zindabad” etc., because they believed that freedom would bring “Rama Rajya” (rule of justice and happiness) to the country.

Portrayal of Deuti’s dream in the play is significant in many ways. Deuti dreams that several women labourers in the paddy fields would mobilise themselves to take revenge against the British for killing Kanaklata, Bhogeswari Aideu and Phehuli Kuwari. The women who would dance with Deuti belong to various ethnic tribe Miri, Rava, Bodo, Deuri, Mikir, Kamrupi, and the ethic Assamese from upper Assam.

Bishnuprasad Rava’s cultural nationalism is about the joyous celebration of ethnic diversity; which is adequately reflected through Deuti’s dream. Therefore, the critic Arun Sarmah opines that the scene of Deuti’s dream expresses Rava’s urge of imprinting an image of a vibrant multi-ethnic Assam that formed the greater identity of Assamese society.  (Sarmah, 2007, pp. 23-24).

Though Assam apparently presented a rosy picture of multiculturalism, objective analysis enables us to see the domination of one community over the rest. The Assamese middle class became a hegemonic class in the nineteenth century and the entire phenomenon of Assamese nationalism started to be dominated by this group of people. On the other hand, there was the emergence of new middle classes among the ethnic communities of Assam. The Assamese middle class was relatively an “advanced” middle class of the region; therefore, they played the role of a dominant nationality in the region. The tribal communities of the region obviously wanted to be a part of the Assamese nation while maintaining and preserving their cultural uniqueness. But the unsympathetic exercise of power and imposition of ideas, values, and culture over ethnic minorities by the Assamese nationality came in the way of realizing Rava’s dream of a unified Assam. The ethnic elite minorities protested against this, yet at the same time, they did not demand separation. But it was overlooked by the Assamese nationality. Bishnuprasad Rava’s contextual understanding of such issues motivated him to propagate multicultural ethos, rather than absorption or dominance. He emphasized the interdependence of the communities to ensure a stronger foundation for Assamese nationalism. He believed, rather, together all the communities should direct their anger against imperialism and capitalism. This is the innate message conveyed through the dream of Deuti in Sapun Kuwali.

Both Agarwala and Rava introduced a sense of cultural nationalism emerging in the wake of the Indian Freedom Movement. Highlighting the pride of Indian culture and tradition in general and of the Assamese in particular, both of them used these plays as means to enthuse nationalist feelings among the Assamese.

As in the plays, Agarwala and Rava’s notion of cultural nationalism found similar expressions in their songs and poems as well. Their songs and poems, some of which were used in his plays became popular among the masses as protest songs and songs of resolve to fight for freedom. The songs of the play Lobhita by Jyotiprasad Agarwala powerfully reflected nationalistic passions-

Biswabijoyi nawa jowan

                                    Biswabijoyi nawa jowan

Saktisalini Bharatar

                                    Olai aha, olai aha

                                                Santan tumi biplabar .

Samukh samar samukhate

                                    Mukti junjaru husiar

Mrityu bijoy karibo lagibo

                                    Swadhinatar khuli duwar… (2013, p. 196)

(O world conquering youths! You are the sons of the revolution of powerful Mother India. Be prepared, for the war is close! Freedom fighters, you have to overcome death to open the doors of freedom!)

Another song ‘Luitar akasat torar torawoli’ motivates one with the same spirit –

Luitar akasat torar torawoli

                        Parat deepawalee tejere mor-

Ai nakandibi,

                        Thapana tejere banti dilehi

                        Lora-sowalie tor.

Lachitar dinare jola juyekora

                        Ai o’ numuwa nai…(ibid, p. 209)

(The stars twinkle in the sky of the river Luit. The bank of the river is soaked in my blood. O’ Mother, stop crying! Your children have lit the lamp in your altar with their blood. The fire ignited in the days of Lachit Borphukan[5] is yet to be extinguished.)

He tried to ignite patriotic zeal among the youths by citing the examples of Lachit Borphukan, the great Ahom warrior who had defeated the Mughals. Jyotiprasad felt that the Assamese youths inherited a great legacy of heroism to fight against colonialism. His inspiring song would soon become part of the revolutionary anthem:

Saju ho, saju ho, nawa jowan!

Saju ho, saju ho, nawa jowan!

Toi koribo lagibo agnisnan!

                        Jiwan jouwan

                        Kori pranpon

                        Rangoli kori de ronangan…(ibid, p. 175)

(Be ready, youths of the day! The time is nigh when you must take a fire bath. Lay down your life and redden the battlefield with your blood.)

Bishnuprasad Rava also composed powerful songs of patriotism to revolt against the oppression by colonialism. One such poem is recited by Arun in the play Krishak.

Utha bir kotodin thaka

Aru kola ghumotit

Utha bir kotodin enedore

Thaka aru

Kola ghumotit.

Hoise samay mohariboloi

Poradhinatar gos ubhaliboloi. (2008, p. 305)

(Wake up, o brave! How long will you continue to sleep? Wake up, o brave! How many days will you sleep in this way? The time has come to uproot and destroy the tree of domination.)

Like Agarwala, Bishnuprasad Rava, considered the youth power in the villages of Assam as the source of the greatest strength and therefore, he would try to inspire them through his songs. The marching song used by Rava in the play Krishak is one such example:

Mukti junjar soinik ami

            Moriboloi bhoy nai-

Morim morim pran boli dim

            Bola sawe aguwai

                        Mukti junjar soinik ami (2008, p. 307)

(We are the soldiers of freedom. We do not fear death. We will sacrifice our life. Let us move together. We are the soldiers of freedom.)

As against Rava’s dream of a complete political overhaul of the system, Agarwala supported the idea of a cultural revolution emerging from the villages of Assam. His songs represent this sense-

O’ amar gaon.

Amar gaonr man rakhi

Moriboloi jao ami

Moriboloi jao.

Bharpur tamolere

Seujiya patharere

Durate jiliki thaka

O’ amar gaon.

Deshar hoke moribo para

Amar gaonr deka lora

Dekeri nahay pas para

                        O’ amar gao… (2013, p. 194)

(O’ our village, we are ready to die protecting the prestige of our village. The abundance of betel nut and the greenery of the paddy fields enhance the beauty of our village. The youths of our village can sacrifice their lives for the nation.) 

Being well-acclaimed music composers and lyricists, both Jyotiprasad Aagrwala and Bishnuprasad Rava intended to give an indigenous flavour to the Assamese modern music. The old, traditional folk tunes of Assam got a facelift through the modern songs of Agarwala and Rava without losing their spirit and essence. Sankaradeva’s borgeet ‘Suno suno re suro’ was transformed into the marching rhythm of ‘Luitor Parare Ami Deka Lora’ by Jyotiprasad Agarwala. Moreover, the music of the cultural icons reflected their sense of pride in the musical heritage of Assam.

Conclusion

The medium and idioms in which Jyotiprasad Agarwala and Bishnuprasad Rava tried to articulate their perspectives on Assamese nationalism were very close to the common masses. Their experiments in the field of theatre and music were genuine attempts to make every resource of the nation available for the Assamese in a manner that could help the common masses identify with the nation. They highlighted almost all the themes of their philosophy- love for the motherland, the need for cultural assimilation, unity and brotherhood among the people through these cultural tools.

The absence of a common language, culture, and identity was felt by the Indians when faced with colonialism. This awareness has caused the emergence of many forms of cultural nationalism. There was Hindu nationalism as part of the revivalist movements of the colonial period that saw the formation of Arya Samaj, and the Brahmo Samaj, and their refashioning and redefining of Hinduism as a religious tradition, is an example of a form of nationalism at that time (Athreya, 2016, p. 4). Hindu nationalism thought of the diversity of India as a great hindrance to creating a unified nation. Therefore, Appadurai (1996) has opined that Hindu Nationalism is a middle-class, high caste project of cultural homogenisation. As against this form of cultural nationalism, Agarwala and Rava’s advocating of cultural nationalism is quite unique. The exceptional experiences of Jyotiprasad Agarwala in the west and the experiences of Bishnuprasad Rava in the villages of Assam are responsible for forming their understanding of a unique model of cultural nationalism, with subtle differences from each other. They are on the same ground regarding the ideology of harmony and assimilation. Rava wholeheartedly urged for inter-regional integrity. Agarwala aspired for inter-regional integration as the outcome of extensive cultural, intellectual, and national progress that would inspire people to accept the larger identity of India as a nation. They were not the proponents of chauvinism and ultra-nationalism, rather their cultural nationalism celebrates inclusivity and secularism. These are the unique perspectives of Jyotiprasad Agarwala and Bishnuprasad Rava that have provided key foundations for the formation of Assamese nationalism.

Declaration of Conflicts of Interests

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

Funding

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

Notes

[1]Arunodoi is an Assamese periodical published in 1846. The journal signalled the advent of an era. In fact, the era marked by this magazine paved the way of Assamese literature towards modernity.

[2]Jonaki era is the age of romanticism in Assamese literature, coinciding with the publication of the Assamese magazine Jonaki in 1889.

[3]Bihu is the national festival of Assam. Among the three Bihus of Assam Bohag Bihu is observed in mid-April. It is the celebration of the Assamese New Year. Huchari is performed in this festival. Huchari is a kind of group performance which is performed in the courtyards of the villagers.

[4] Bishnuprasad Rava disguised himself from 1948 to 1952. He coined this phase of life as ‘agyatobash’ (exile) in his essay ‘Agyatobashar Katha’ (The Experiences of Exile). He went to exile in order to experience the lives of the common masses. This was probably inspired by the Long March of Mao.

[5] Lachit Borphukan was one of the chiefs of the Ahom military in the days of the Ahom king Udayaditya Singha. Lachit Borphukan is known as a great patriot of Assam because he thwarted the attempts of the Mughals to invade Assam even though he had to make huge sacrifices in the process.

References

Agarwala, J. (2013). Sonit Kuwari. In H. Gohain (Ed.), Jyoti Prasad Rasanawali (pp.1-52). Publication Board Assam.

_______. (2013). Lobhita. In H. Gohain (Ed.), Jyoti Prasad Rasanawali, (pp.167-209). Publication Board Assam.

_______. (2013). Khanikar. In H. Gohain (Ed.), Jyoti Prasad Rasanawali, (pp. 211-253). Publication Board Assam.

_______. (2013). Kanaklata. In H. Gohain (Ed.), Jyoti Prasad Rasanawali, (pp. 254-257). Publication Board Assam.

Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large. Minnesota Press.

Athreya, A. (2016). Cultural Nationalism in India. Anthropolgy Perspective, 4(2), 1-5.

Baruah, A. K. and Sharma, M. (1991). Nationality Question in Assam: Some Conceptual Issues. In U. Mishra (Ed.), Nation Building and Development in North-East India, (pp. 14-24). Purbachal Prakash.

Baruah, P. K. (2015). Jyoti Manisha. Banalata.

Bhagawati, D.(2012).Jyotiprasad Agarwala’s Poltics and Ideology. In A. R. Dutta (Ed.), Culture Ideology Politics: Jyotiprasad Agarwala and his Vision for Social Transformation, (pp. 36-47). DVS Publishers.

Das, J. (2008). Bhumika. In J. Das and S. Borah (Eds.), Bishnuprasad Rava Rachana Samagra Dwittiyo Khanda (pp. ??). Rava Rachanawali Prakashan Sangha.

Dutta, A.R. (2012). Introduction: Jyotiprasad Agarwala a Revolutionary Humanist. In A. R. Dutta, A.R. (Ed.), Culture Ideology Politics: Jyotiprasad Agarwala and his Vision for Social Transformation (pp. 1-18). DVS Publishers.

Gait, E. (2005). A History of Assam. LBS.

Gohain, H. (1980). Cudgel of Chauvinism. Economic and Political Weekly, 15(8), 418-420.

Gohain, H. (1983). The Labyrinth of Chauvinism. Economic and Political Weekly, 18(16-17), 632-635.

Gohain, H.(2013). Natun Parimarjito Sangsakaranar Mukhya Sampadakar Bhumika. In H. Gohain, (Ed), Jyoti Prasad Rasanawali (pp .11-.54). Publication Board Assam.

Gohain, H. (2014). Adi Unnabingsa Satabdir Asomar Nawa Jugar Oparat Bengali Prabhab. In S. B. Das and M. Bayan. (Eds.), Hiren Gohain Rachanawali: Society-Culture-Politics,Vol.II (pp. 656-660). Katha.

Guha, A. (2006). Planter Raj to Swaraj: Freedom Struggle and Electoral Politics in Assam. Tulika Books.

Lusome, R and R.B. Bhagat. (2020). Migration in Northeast India: Inflows, Ouflows and Reverse Flows during Pandemic. Indian Society of Labour Economics

Misra, T. (1987). Literature and Society in Assam: A Study of the Assamese Renaissance 1826-1926. Omsons Publications.

Nath, D. P. (2014). Intellectual Life in Kolkata in the Nineteenth Century: Bezbaroa and the Trajectory of Assamese Modernity. In M. M. Sarma and D.P. Nath, (Eds.), Lakshminath

Bezbaroa: The Architect of Modern Assamese Literature, Issues of Nationalism and Beyond (pp147-163). Perfect Imagers.

Nessa, S. (1985). Emergence and Role of the Assamese Middle Class. [doctoral dissertation]. North-Eastern Hill University.

Petkovic, J (2011). Cultures in Nations and Nationalism. Nis: Center for Sociological Research of the Faculty of Philosophy. 10, 141-152.

Rava, B.P.(2008). Geet aru kabita. In J. Das and S. Borah (Ed.), Bishnuprasad Rava Rachana

Sambhar Pratham Khanda (pp. 129-190). Rava Rachanawali Prakashan Sangha.

___. (2008). Krishak. In J. Das and S. Borah (Ed.), Bishnuprasad Rava Rachana Sambhar Pratham Khanda (pp. 302-319). Rava Rachanawali Prakashan Sangha.

____. (2008). Sapon Kuwali. In J. Das and S. Borah (Eds.), Bishnuprasad Rava Rachana

Sambhar Pratham Khanda (pp. 3020-3030). Rava Rachanawali Prakashan Sangha.

Saikia, Y. (2006). Religion, Nostalgia and Memory: Making an Ancient and Recent Tai-Ahom Identity in Assam and Thailand. The Journal of Asian Studies, 65(1), 33–60.

Saikia, P. (2007). Language Question in Assam. Retrieved on 16 June. 2016 from paperroom.ipsa.org.

Sarmah, A. (2007). Bishnuprasad Rava aru Tewr Natak. Gariyoshi, 12, 22-24.

Sarmah, S. (2013). Purba Sanskaranar Mukhya Sampadakar Bhumika. In H. Gohain (Ed.), Jyoti Prasad Rasanawali (pp. .55-.84). Publication Board Assam.

Sharma, C. K.(2014). Contemporary Social Milieu and Bezbaroa’s Works. In M. M. Sarma and D. P. Nath (Eds.), Lakshminath Bezbaroa: The Architect of Modern Assamese Literature, Issues of Nationalism and Beyond (pp. 69-87). Perfect Imagers.

Woods, E. T. (2015). Cultural Nationalism. The State of Nationalism: An International Review. Retrieved from https://stateofnationalism.eu/article/cultural-nationalism.

Dr. Parismita Hazarika is an Assistant Professor, Department of Cultural Studies at Assam Women’s University. Her research areas include, Saurabh Kumar Chaliha, Jyotiprasad Agarwala and Bishnuprasad Rava, Cultural Icon, Fandom Studies and North-East India.

Prof. Debarshi Prasad Nath is a Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at Tezpur University. His research interests are spread over Translation, Culture, Films, Media, Literature, and Cultural Theory. He is presently working on the documentation, preservation and archiving of rare cultural resources of North East India and has set up a museum of cultural memory and an archival centre in the department as the Chief Coordinator of UGC’s ‘Centre with Potential for Excellence in Particular Areas’ at Tezpur University apart from a museum of modern art. He was granted a Faculty Enrichment Fellowship to the Department of English, University of Toronto in 2009. He has published eight books so far (edited 4, translated 3, and authored 1). He was one of the Editors/Translators of the volume titled The Call of the Pherengadao: Translation of Select Writings of Bishnuprasad Rava.

Ecofeminist Consciousness in Select Folktales from Northeast India

///
2.6K views

Pronami Bhattacharyya
Royal Global University, Guwahati, Assam. ORCID: 0000-0002-2249-8212. Email: pronami.bhattacharyya@gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages: 1-12. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne20

First published: June 24, 2022 | AreaNortheast India | LicenseCC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
Full-Text HTML Full-Text PDF Cite
PlumX Metrics

Abstract

Radical green theory proclaims that the origins of environmental catastrophe lie in the anthropocentrism of modern capitalism. This necessitates the formation of healthier societies wherein humans perceive their selves ‘in relation’ to nature. The theory of deep ecology (Naess, 1972) calls for reinforcing our sense of empathy with all life forms and brings about the philosophy of “Gaia” (James Lovelock, 1979). This idea of Earth as a living entity can also be found in The Atharva Veda, ancient Indian Vedic text (10th c. BCE) that perceives nature as ‘earth-spirit’ or a living organism. The theory of ecofeminism advocates the cessation of all kinds of coercion. In this Karen Warren (Ecofeminist Philosophy 2000), Mary Vidya Porselvi (Nature, Culture and Gender, 2016) are among the key figures to have given a new direction to the tenets of ecofeminism. Notably, folk ontology provides templates for living well based on reverence, reciprocity and responsibility which are close to ecofeminist ideologies. Through select folktales from Chandrica Barua’s Stories by the Fire on a Winter Evening (2020), Pallabi Baruas Grandmas Tales. (in translation (2011), Fresh Fictions: Folk Tales, Plays, Novellas From the Northeast by Katha(2005) and Fungari Singbul (in translation) (2012), and Funga Wari, Vol. 3 (in translation) (1999), K.U. Rafy’s Folk-Tales of the Khasis (2011), and D.K. Tyagi’s Tribal Folktales of Tripura (2020) this paper attempts to examine the legends of the (silenced) women and their relationship with nature that might offer possible solutions to a sustainable and peaceful life while propagating ecological spiritualism.

Keywords: Ecofeminism, Gaia, Folktales, Northeast Literature

Introduction

…the type of interspecies and ecological awareness that is evident within traditional and indigenous life-ways was normal before the rise of the west, and a functional and reverent way of living respectfully in place. (Sepie, 2017, p. 12)

In 2000, Paul Crutzen affirmed that currently we are in the age of the ‘Anthropocene’, an age of unprecedented human impact on earth’s ecosystem. In the race to ‘progress’, humans have almost obliterated the connection and semblance with the non-human world. This paper attempts to trace the roots of ecofeminism in the folk ontology of select folktales from Northeast India that could pose a viable solution to the current quandary that mankind is in. To this end, the chapter analyzes the folktales from the lens of ecofeminist theory/ideas as postulated by Goethe (1797), Paulo Freire’s (1972), Lovelock, James. (1979), Greta Garrd (1993), M. Mellor (1996), A.K. Ramanujan (1997), Karren J Warren (2000), Arnaes Ness (2005) and Mary Vidya Porselvi (2011).

In Facing Gaia (2013) Bruno Latour contends that cognizance of the Anthropocene writes off the modern theory of the infinite universe, pulling us back to the idea of a provincial, restricted, and fatigued earth. Around 10,000 years ago humans began tilling the land and set on the journey of ‘civilization and progress’. Post Industrial Revolution (the 1800s) there has been a manifold intensification of the negative human imprint on the earth. Hence, ‘mankind’ with its power-based association with the pastoral landscape, identifies the latter as ‘out there, to be used/exploited to satiate its own inexhaustible capitalist agenda.

This threat of the swelling ‘ecological imperialism’ was addressed by Goethe (1797) way back in the 18th century, where he deliberated on how the plenteous materiality of the ideal pastoral hid the threat of the imminent modernity of capitalism. The existing global crisis is not resultant of the ways in which ecosystems function, but because of the ways of conduct of our ethical systems. As C. Tan (2020) opines:

Salvation from this order of oppression will and must come through the resistance of women. Women are the ones who must organize and engage in action so as to make a difference and gradually alter the system which has been imposed on people and often claimed to be pertaining to the natural order. (p. 633)

The assertion of the Green theorists that anthropocentrism is the crux of the degradation of environment and human-nature cohesiveness, compels us to look for prototypes of healthier societies that existed prior to the commencement of humankind’s “progress”. In the Indian context, the idea of the earth as a single-organic-living-spirit can be traced back to The Atharva Veda (10th c. BCE). It promotes the sense of human identification with all life forms, thereby almost bringing about the philosophy of “Gaia” (Lovelock, 1979). Drawing on indigenous sources of knowledge, and valuing people, women and the non-human world alike, it is what ecofeminist Karren J. Warren (2000) claims—all connected. Hence, exploitation of any component of the structure renders the entire system ruptured. Greta Gaard (1993) rightly opines that “ecofeminism’s basic premise is that the ideology which authorizes oppressions such as those based on race, class, gender, sexuality, physical abilities, and species is the same ideology which sanctions the oppression of nature” (p. 1). Resonating the philosophy of deep ecology, ecofeminism accentuates “principles of diversity and of symbiosis” which is vital as “diversity enhances the potentialities of survival, the chances of new modes of life, the richness of forms” (Naess, 2005, p. 2).

As early as 1854, Henry David Thoreau illustrates an ideal living condition by renouncing modern life and renewing the self by retreating into nature. Suresh Frederick (2012) calls this an exemplification of an unadulterated ecology “in which plants, animals, birds and human beings live in such harmony that none dominates or destroys the other” (p. 147). Broadening on this framework, Daniel Christian Wahl (2016) writes:

What we are actually trying to sustain is the underlying pattern of health, resilience and adaptability that maintain the planet in a condition where life as a whole can flourish. Design for sustainability is, ultimately, design for human and planetary health (p. 43).

This serves as a worthy utilitarian reason for looking into how traditional communities have lived while propagating eco-spiritual contemplation on nature, and utilitarian principles that are reciprocal. Thus, ecofeminism is instrumental in synthesizing the human with the non-human world while contending that environmental issues are intimately connected with women’s experience/s. It argues that “the battle for ecological survival is intrinsically intertwined with the struggles for women’s liberation and other forms of social justice” (Buell, 2011, p.424). Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy (1998) further illustrates the interweaving of these factors as an intersection of class “exploitation, racism, colonialism, and neocolonialism” (p.3). In matters of ecofeminism in ‘Third world’ countries, Warren (2000) specifically argues that “women are more dependent than men on tree and forest products” (p.5). She alludes to the archetypal case of ‘Chipko Movement’ from India, and says that it is:

…ostensibly about saving trees, especially indigenous forests. But it is also about important women-nature connections: trees and forests are inextricably connected to rural and household economies governed by women, especially in Third World countries, so tree shortages are about women, too. (p.5)

The act of “hugging the trees” mirrors a deep association and interdependence of the human and non-human world. She also cites the case of Sierra Leone: “Women in a Sierra Leone village were able to identify thirty one products from nearby bushes and trees, whereas men could identify only eight” (p.6).

This shows not just a reciprocation of benefits, but almost akin to Paulo Freire’s (1972) idea of ‘conscientizacao’— harmonized consciousness, sense, knowledge, and feeling. Ecofeminism encompasses this standpoint as “an interconnected sense of self is more common in women” (Gaard, 1993, p.2). It is worth discerning that “before patriarchal domination of human societies, woman-centred societies existed that were more egalitarian and ecologically benign” (Mellor, 1996, p.151). Hence, the common possibilities and motifs shared by women and nature cannot remain unheeded.

Right from the days of the Vedas, Indian philosophical thought has been rich in the sense of eco-consciousness. As a land of rich biodiversity, India has looked at Ecofeminism as the philosophy of ‘Mother Earth’ (similar to Greek ‘Gaia’). Vandana Shiva (2010), elucidates, “Nature, both animate and inanimate, is thus an expression of Shakthi, the feminine and creative principle of the cosmos; in conjunction with the masculine principle (Purusha), Prakriti creates the world” (Staying Alive, p.38). Prakriti is the omnipresent, all-inclusive, and spiritually elevating natural code that binds together all living forms.

The non-human natural world— “singing pines. Undulating lands. Mighty Rivers” (Preface, Fresh Fictions, 2005) — finds an animate and equal space in folktales across cultures. Acting as windows to one’s heritage and other cultures, folktales are carriers of values and traditions while preserving and propagating the awareness of ecological spiritualism. They carry fundamental messages and morals for the primal cognizance of humankind. In an era of ecological and commercial changes, folktales disseminate legends of women and their liaison with nature and have solutions to a sustainable and peaceful life. Folktales disseminate the perspective of the womenfolk who have stories to tell of care, abundance, and concern for human and non-human world alike.

Since ancient times, nature and women have been revered as mothers, however, this idea became degenerative and exploitative with time. This ecofeminist study aims at identifying and locating patterns of amalgamation of the human with the non-human world and nature as the ever-present life-affirming and a sustaining source to turn to at moments when the anthropocentric world fails. The select folktales can be categorised into the themes of Creation, Isis Panthea (creation motif), woody Women (women and trees) and women and animals.

Northeast India and Indigenous Epistemologies

Their stories, said the Imperial Gazette in 1908, are “superstition.” Today, the world calls this “ecological wisdom.” (Preface, Fresh Fictions– on Northeast Folktales). Folktales of Northeast India, like most folktales, “move with grace and felicity from concerns that are larger than life, encompassing the nuanced relationships between stars and fishes, humans and land spaces, to those between parents and siblings, families and strangers” (Preface, Fresh Fictions). Indigenous ways of storytelling “enables us to make meaning out of a chaotic world” (Bal, 2002, p.10). The eight states of Northeast India embody an important fragment of the Indo-Myanmar biodiversity hotspot, one of the twenty-five global biodiversity hotspots acknowledged presently (Baruah and Dey, 2005). Hence, “owing to its nearness to nature, the folk tales are entwined with nature” (Dey, 2015, p.15). Such ‘folk ontologies’ inspire our moral commitment, or lack of it, towards the non-human world, one that tends to relate “the pre-scientific” ideas (see Sepie, 2017).

The indigenous narratives from different states Northeast India showcase an intrinsic association that involves a kaleidoscope of shifting impressions of personhood as well as identity as appropriate to the ‘characters’, mostly non-human. This comprehensive sensibility of the folk ontologies run parallel to feminist concerns and are tied to a concern for a natural world that has been imperiled by similar exploitation and ambivalent conduct as have the womenfolk.

Creation

Folktales across cultures seem to have analogous plotlines when it comes to the motif of creation. Four main motifs seem to recur in these tales: one creator, the fact that humans are made from organic elements, that human beings have appeared on earth for a purpose, and that it is a prerequisite for humans to respect the laws of nature. From this outlook, such tales of creation tend to have more secular implication in modern cultures. G.N. Devy (2002) says:

The tribal imagination…is still to a large extent dreamlike and hallucinatory. It admits fusion between various planes of existence and levels of time…oceans fly in the sky as birds, mountains swim in water as fish, animals speak as humans and stars grow like plants…they admit the principle of association between emotion and the narrative motif. (pp. x-xi)

In “The Seven Clan” (Fresh Fiction, 2005), a folktale from Meghalaya, the Khasi God U-blei (master lord) first created “‘Ramew, the mother earth” (p.15) and her husband, “the patron god of villages” (p.15). They begot five children—eldest was a daughter, sun; the other three daughters being water, wind and fire. Moon, their son, was the youngest of the five. Sun, being the eldest (female) child, is replete with maternal disposition and takes care of the family as against the wilful brother, the moon:

The sun, their first born, began to flood earth with light and warmth. She would rise early every morning, go out to work without fail, and come back only after accomplishing her day’s work…the moon would go out to replace her. He was a little naughty and at time would sleep in… (pp. 15-16)

The rest of the three daughters, water, wind and fire, did their duties diligently, and kept “reshaping the world into a pleasant land, giving life to tall trees and beautiful flowers everywhere” (p.16). Ramew then called seven clans from heaven to “descend to till the earth, to populate the wilderness, to rule and govern and be the crown of all creation” (p.16). However, nature had to be respected; hence, U-Blei makes a covenant of the seven clans and instructs:

So long as man led a virtuous life, so long as he lived righteously on earth to earn merit…he would never be abandoned…. His life on earth was one long tale of happiness. (pp. 16-17)

But it is “not in man to be content with happiness alone” and hence soon he went out of the “god’s dictates” (p.17). God, vexed with man’s ways, made the tree Diengiei grow to block the sun which resulted in a “perpetual darkness” (p.17) on earth. All forms of life were threatened. But man decided to cut down the tree, and did so with the help of a little wren called Phreit. Grieved by man’s wilful ways God closed the golden gate to heaven and tore all ties with mankind. This led to a new kind of darkness to descend on earth “that bred all kinds of evil in the minds of men” (p.20). This folkloric message stands tall in today’s times when paying heed to divinity in nature is least of human’s concerns.

An Apatani (Arunachal Pradesh) folktale Reru Subansiri” (pasighat.wordpress, 2011) imagines earth as a woman, Kujum-Chant. The tribe believes that the first humans to walk the earth lived on the “surface of her belly”. One day, Kujum-Chantu thought that if she gets up and walks, humans would fall off, hence,

she herself died of her own accord. Her head became the snow-covered mountains; the bones of her back turned into smaller hills. Her chest was the valley where the Apa-Tanis live. From her neck came the north country of the Tagins. Her buttocks turned into the Assam plain. For just as the buttocks are full of fat, Assam has fat rich soil. Kujum-Chantu’s eyes became the Sun and Moon. From her mouth was born Kujum-Popi, who sent the Sun and Moon to shine in the sky… (para.1)

Evoking nature as a woman, this folktale, like others, enables humans to empathize with the non-human world. As Warren and Jim Cheney opine, “As a methodological and epistemological stance, all ecofeminists centralize, in one way or another, the ‘voices’ and experiences of women (and others) with regard to an understanding of the nonhuman world” (Gaard, 1993, p.53).

In a Hrusso or Aka (Arunachal Pradesh) folktale, “Buragaon, Kameng” (pasighat.wordpress, 2011), the Earth (wife) and Sky (husband) were formed out of two great eggs. However, the husband was smaller than the wife (earth/nature) and the latter readily adapts to his request and made herself “pliable and the mountains and valleys were formed, and she became small” (para.3). Presenting an alternative way of looking at the world, here nature, like the womenfolk, exemplifies the characteristics of adaptation and inclusion.

“The Formation of the Earth” (Rafy, 2011), a Khasi (Meghalaya) folktale, also shows the first entities as women/feminine. Ka Ding, Ka Um, and Ka Sngi were three Goddesses, and when their mother died, three elder sisters, Ka Ding undertook the responsibility:

She spread forth great flames which swept over the forests and caused the earth to burn and to crumble…Ever since then the earth has remained as the fire left it, full of mountains and valleys and gorges. It became a much more beautiful place, and in time mankind came here from heaven to dwell. (pp. 25-27)

In a Lupho (tribe of Manipur) folktale, “The Daughter of Lupho” (e-pao.net, 2011), talks about the Great Flood, and a daughter from a leading family had to be sacrificed as tradition. Lhangeineng, the daughter of Lupho, was chosen. And “Lhangaineng gave herself up to the god’s of the sea” (para.4) and saved humanity.

Folktales centering on the feminine principle have a different perception of the environment than a man’s perception. Mary Vidya Porselvi (2011) observes that women’s compassion towards environment and every being in it finds genuine representations in Indian folktales. In such tales, the non-human do not exist simply to satiate human needs; it is a world where the human and non-human entities stand as transcendent comrades. It is a horizontal society where the human and non-human are on equal grounds, rather than a vertical arrangement of mere exploitation.

Trees

Trees hold a spiritual significance in Indian history, mythology and folklife. They came to be associated with knowledge, wisdom, or even hidden secrets. In Rigveda there is a prayer for the growth of Trees:

Vanaspati mount up with a hundred branches that

We may mount with a thousand, thou whom the

Sharpened hatchet has brought for great auspiciousness.

[Lal, Singh & Mishra, (2014), Rig-Veda 3.8.11]

In ancient India, the concept of the tree as a living universe was projected unto Asvattha, an upside-down tree with its roots in heaven and branches enveloping the earth. It is seen as an actual living universe, part of Brahmand, the world spirit. In folktales, flora is ideally perceived in two forms: physical and metaphysical. In physical form, the plants or trees are seen as a providing means for humans in day-to-day use, while in metaphysical form they are respected and even prayed to. A protagonist (mostly a female) is either aided by or benefitted from trees in some way from the persecutions of the human world. Such tales validate the folk belief that death is simply a metamorphosis into an afterlife. Thus, human beings (mostly females), in their afterlives, get mutated into fruits, flowers, and trees. In most folktales across cultures, the motif of “girl becomes tree becomes girl” reflects the synchronized consciousness of conscientizacao. ‘Oikos’[1] (home), for women, is presented in two forms— anarchic or integrative. The non-human world in the form of trees allows the victimized womenfolk to travel from anarchic oikos (chaotic) to integrative oikos (peaceful).

“Sandrembi and Chaisra” (e-pao.net, 2009) is a Manipuri folktale of two stepsisters brought up by their mothers alone. Chairsa was a single child while Sadrembi had a brother. Chairsa’s mother always carried evil intentions to harm the other two children. Chairsa’s mother finally hatched her plan when she killed the mother of Sandrembi one day when both of them were fishing and Chaisra’s mother throws the body into the water. The victim turns into turtle, eventually into a sparrow and flies away.

After some time, the desolate Sandrembi captures the heart of a King and is married to him. The jealous stepmother is perturbed by Sandrembi’s sudden integrative oikos and decides to rob her of it. One day Sandrembi is invited home for lunch and is killed by the stepmother and Chairsa is sent back as the Queen instead. Sandrembi, on her part, turns into a dove and lives with the King until Chairsa kills her. The metamorphosis continues and she turns into a mango. The gardener discovers Sandrembi in her human form and takes her to the King. Angered and pained, he organizes a duel between the two sisters. Chairsa is slayed and Sandrembi regains her integrative oikos.

Endorsing an anti-class template, the folktales with this motif show a fluid mobility of a female human- self turning to various kinds of flora or even fauna. This also reflects the chronotope of harmonized consciousness in narrative time-space of folktales. Such dimensions in women-centered stories are marked by interchanges of interior (domestic) and exterior (public) planes of existence.

“Tejeemola” (Bezbaroa 1911/2020) (Assam), is a parallel to the story of “Cinderella” and also to various other folktales from India. In one of the long absences of the sailor father, Tejeemola is tormented and finally killed by her stepmother. Tejeemola then transforms herself into myriad forms— gourd, plum, lotus, dove. Each time somebody wants to pluck or catch hold her mutated forms, she exclaims the story of her murder. Finally, she is brought back into her integrative oikos by her father. As he tries to pluck a lotus, he is startled by a voice coming out of it:

Don’t extend your hand, don’t pluck a flower.

Where from have you come boat-man?

Along with silk-clothes, my step-mother pounded me,

I am only Tejeemola. (Barua, 2020, p.40)

Shocked, the father entreats her to turn into a dove and accompany him home. The evil stepmother was thrown out of the house, and Tejeemola turns back to her human form. It is noteworthy that Tejeemola never articulates her state of existence or speaks back until she is dead and transmutes into numerous plant forms. The world of flora may not have a code of language like the human world, but ironically, Tejeemola, speaks out as one. This is indicative of the fact that trees or plants may have much more agency than a (human) woman.

In a Manipuri variation of the Tejeemola story, “Mama Potkabi” (Oinam, 2018) the protagonist is killed by her stepmother, who, then takes the forms of pepper plant, a bottle gourd, and a lotus. She speaks to her father when he finds her in the lotus form: “Please do not hurt me. I have not done anything wrong” (para. 26). She comes back into her human form and together they drive the evil stepmother (wife) away. A.K. Ramanujan, in the folktale “A Flowering Tree” (1997) puts forth three distinct phases in women’s life categorized by integrated, hierarchic and anarchic oikos. The protagonists in both the Assamese and Manipuri versions go through the phases taking a full circle.

In a folktale from Tripura, “Chethuang” (Tyagi, 2020), the brother falls in love with his sister and the family finally decides to hold the marriage. Helpless, the sister has a visitation by an old man in her dream: “You poor girl, find out the seedling of Chethuang tree and plant it. Workshop it and you will be free from all the agonies” (p. 4). In sometime the tree grew and she sat on it and started singing a song: “O Chethuang tree, they want to get me married to my brother. You grow more and more” (p. 4). There were several attempts to bring her down by cutting the tree and its root off. When everything else failed, the father tried to trick the daughter by professing that the son has been killed. However, she saw through the fabrication and prayed to the South wind to take her away forever. She disappeared into the clouds; her oikos integrated.

This motif recurs in “Kelchawgni” (Fresh Fictions, 2005), a Mizo folktale. Kelchawgni, the obedient daughter, misinterpreting parent’s instructions, cooks her younger sister for dinner. To punish her, the parents leave her on the rooftop and refuse to bring her down. Finally, she “looked up to the sky and Pleaded with Pu Vana, the god of the heavens” (p.34). She went away to heavens and lived happily forever.

Indian philosophy claims that Prakriti is the power of creation as well as destruction, and that all originates from her, and melts into her. The select folktales reveal the silent yet definitive power of nature, trees in this case, to give the final refuge to all persecuted.

Animals

An Assamese folktale “The Kite’s Daughter” (Bezbaroah 1911/2020) states the abandonment of a daughter for the desire of a son. A rich potter had several daughters, so warns his wife against begetting any more daughters. As fate would have it, she begot another daughter and before the husband could find out, she covered the child in rags, put in a tumbler, and set her adrift on the river. Left to her fate, the child was found by a kite who adopted her. She grew up on the branches of a tree; the kite mother would steal from humans and provided her with all the essentials to her human daughter. She grew up into a beautiful young woman and captured the heart of a merchant. The kite mother, considering the human-daughter’s safe future, married her off to the merchant.

The merchant had seven other wives who created an anarchic oikos for her. However, the kite mother continues helping the daughter in times of need. The evil wives discover this and kill the Kite by treachery. Finally, one day, in the absence of the husband, they sold her off to a peddler who came to vend stationery items. Surprisingly, the peddler treated her well, so much so that, when one day the merchant nearly finds her, she tries not to be found by him to avoid going back to the past anarchic oikos. Meanwhile, she learns pottery from the peddler and becomes a renowned potter herself. Thus, because of the kite she is endowed with an integrative oikos from which she was thrown out by her potter father’s desire for a male child.

Such folk tales produce alternative perspectives upholding concern, abundance, and care for all living beings. Assamese folktale “Tula and Teja” (Bezbaroa 1911/2020), shows how the elaagi, or the alienated wife, is killed by the laagi, favourite wife. Elaagi turns into a turtle and feeds her children Kanai (son) and Teja (daughter). Laagi finds out from her daughter Tula about this arrangement. She gets the turtle killed and “two trees bearing fruits and flowers” (p.21) grow at her burial spot. The fruit and flower bearing tree also stands as a symbol of the maternal instincts of nature who is ‘giving’ rather than ‘receiving’. Attracted by fruits and flowers, one day a king comes to the place and spots the beautiful Teja. He eventually marries her, turning her into a queen, all by the blessings of the dead human-mother who metamorphosed into several non-human forms. However, the evil designs of Laagi don’t end. She invites Teja home and turns her into a sparrow and sends Tula in her place as the queen. However, the truth unveils and the King orders Tula to be killed and Teja is reinstated as the Queen in her human form. Tales like this are suggestive of exploitation of nature (animals and trees) vis-a-vis women. The oikos keep mutating until they are integrative which might be a suggestive of a hopeful future for the world if humans identify the concept of conscientizacao. The constant transmutation of forms also upholds an “anti-class posture” of deep ecology that thrives on “principles of ecological egalitarianism and of symbiosis” (Naess, 2005, p. 2).

Another recurring animal motif in folktales is that of snakes. In a typical male-centered tale, a snake is usually seen as a rival phallus and hence meant to be killed. Alternately, in women-centered tales, snakes are seen as husbands, lovers, helpers etc. (see Ramanujan, 1991). In “Champavati” (Bezbaroah 1911/2011), a python falls in love with Champavati, the daughter of the abandoned wife, Elaagi, and is married off to it.  The perceived terror of the mother-daughter turns into good fortune when the snake-husband treats Champavati like a princess and clads her in riches. Seeing this Laagi, the favourite wife, forces the husband to find a python-husband for her daughter as well. Their evil plan hatched out of greed results in disaster as the python devours his wife. Such tales reflect the necessity of communion with nature while focusing on raising consciousness. If humans ‘use’ nature for fulfilling their material needs alone without paying heed to the reciprocity of the relation, disasters are bound to happen.

The ability to mutate into non-human a form is also seen in “Taibang Meena Harinongnang Onba” (e-pao.net, 2012), a Manipuri folktale. The father left the family and on his return several years later, he, unknowingly, gets attracted towards his own daughter, now a beautiful young woman. Ashamed and feeling defiled by the thought, the daughter first turns into a fish and eventually into a parrot and flies away to hills far away—a symbolic and literal flight away from her life of shame.

A Tripuri folktale titled “The Hornbill” (Tyagi, 2020) relates the transmutation of a woman into a Hornbill. Sampari, the wife, worked hard to make two ends meet while Kachak, the husband, wiled always his days in alcohol. One day a bear comes out of the jungle and takes the baby away as Kachak is engrossed in playing flute. Sampari returns from the field only to realize the irresponsibility of Kachak and the resultant disaster.  She curses Kachak:

…in the next birth you will be a bird and your beak will be as long as your flute. Your voice will be coarse and harsh. Your wife will watch her eggs without moving till the young birds can fly. You will have to feed the mother bird all throughout the day. You alone will have to do all the work and there will be no one to help you. (p.14)

Mellor (1996) puts it, “before patriarchal domination of human societies, woman-centred societies existed that were more egalitarian and ecologically benign” (p.151). The folktale displays a non-human world in which the females would lead a life exemplifying that of the men’s (human) world.

A folktale from Manipur, “Sakhi Darlong” (Tyagi, 2020), presents a classic case of exploitation of Mother Nature and transmutation of living forms. A Jhumia named Shyamacharan hunted a deer and took it home only to find a human spirit coming out of it. They eventually get married on the agreement that he will never reveal her true (deer) self. One day, years later, the intoxicated Shyama reveals the secret to their children and the wife turns into a deer and goes away to the forest. She continues feeding her children nonetheless. In the meantime, the new wife of Shyama entreats him to kill the deer which then takes the form of a Simul tree to feed her children. Shyama cuts off the tree and she finally transmutes into a fish and takes away her children in search of an integrative oikos in the sea. This tale replicates the philosophy of “Gaia” which postulates a sense of transcendence between all life forms. The non-human spirit goes through an extended event of persecution even as she takes care of her human children. The tale reiterates that nature is magnanimous and ‘giving’.

The fish and water are in themselves connected to the idea of life and birth. The symbolic meaning of fish differs from culture to culture, but by and large, it represents good luck, and prosperity and is also connected to the idea of the sacred feminine (Clifford 2021). The medium in which it travels freely is water, which is itself considered to be a metaphor for higher level of awareness, thought-process, intelligence and esoteric knowledge (Clifford 2021). The mother turning into a fish and and taking her children along into her water kingdom is symbolic of a hopeful, happier and meaningful future.

Likewise, in “The Stork Girl” (Tyagi, 2020), a flock of Storks lend one feather each to the protagonist, Arti, to fly away to find her integrative oikos far from the anarchic oikos created by her aunt. Thus, the folk story-telling method could be the best way to address environmental ills while asserting on the requisite to be an involved listener.

Conclusion

That the earth has itself intervened to revise those habits of thought that are based on the Cartesian dualism that arrogates all intelligence and agency to the human while denying them to every other kind of being? (Amitav Ghosh 2016, para. 14.8).

A woman’s culturally fashioned life-forms, her perspectives, are different from a man’s and hence the meanings of elements change. The reading of the select folktales from Northeast India illustrate that “genders are genres” and that “the world of women is not the world of men” (Dharwadker, 2004, p.446). Thus, the gender of the genre becomes imperative in interpretation.

Human history has frequently romanticized interpretations of Utopia, the unspoiled world, where people live in harmony and in sync with nature. With no signs of natural calamity or crisis of human desires, such Utopias solemnize happier human experiences and designs of ‘orderliness’ for human cultures to practice. Along with respecting nature, the select folktales foreground values like cooperation, reciprocity, and nurturing. The tales also emulate woman-nature propinquity and locate and uphold women’s voices in the domain of ‘nature-culture’ as well as “counter and complement the attitudes of the male-centred tales” (Ramanujan, 1991, xxxi). This culminates in the Ecofeminist perception of (logically) challenging binaries like humans/animals, culture/nature, man/woman, self/other, etc., while decreeing that human identity is neither fixed nor predefined, rather it is sculpted by the seamless associations or differences of human-nature interface.

Declaration of Conflicts of Interests

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

Funding

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

Note

[1] The term ‘ecology’ has Greek etymology and is derived from two words ‘oikos’, meaning ‘home’ or ‘household’ or ‘habitation’ or ‘place to live’ and ‘logos’ meaning ‘study’ or ‘discourse’. (Verma, P. S. and V. K. Aganval. (1989). Principles of Ecology. p. 4.)

References

Bal, Mieke. (2002). Travelling concepts in the humanities: A rough guide. Toronto University Press

Buell, Lawrence, Ursula K. Heise, and Karen Thornber. (2011). Literature and environment. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 36 (1), 417–440. doi:10.1146/annurev-environ-111109-144855.

Baruah, H. & Dey, T. (2005). Environmental studies. Divya Prakashan.

Bezboroah, Lakhshminath. (2011). Grandmas tales. (Pallabi Barua, Trans.). Hornbill Publications. Originally published 1911.

Clifford, Garth C. (2021). “Fish Symbolism & Meaning (+Totem, Spirit & Omen). Retrieved from https://worldbirds.com/fish-symbolism/

Debray, Régis. (2000). Transmitting culture: European perspectives. Columbia University Press.

Davies, Roger J., and Osamu Ikeno. (Eds). (2002). The Japanese mind: understanding contemporary Japanese culture. Tuttle.

Devy. G.N, ed. (2002). Painted words- An anthology of tribal literature. Penguin.

Dey, T. (2015). Folk tales of north east India: A relook for environmental studies classroom transaction. Pedagogy of Learning, 3(2), 14-27.

Dharwadker, Vinay, ed. (2004). The collected essays of A.K. Ramanujan. Oxford University Press.

Frederick, Suresh. (2012). Contemporary contemplation on ecoliterature. Authorpress.

Freire, P. (1972). “Conscientizing as a way of liberating.” Anonymous (Ed). Washington:  USCC Division for Latin America.

Gaard, Greta (ed.) (1993). Ecofeminism: women, animals, nature. Temple University Press.

Gaard G, P.D. Murphy. (Ed.s). (1998). Ecofeminist literary criticism: theory, interpretation, pedagogy. Univ. Illinois Press.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. (1797/2008). Hermann and Dorothea. Dodo Press.

Lal, Hari Shankar, Sanjay Singh, P.K. Mishra. (2014). Trees in Indian mythology. Discovery 12 (29), 16-32.

Latour, Bruno. (2013). Facing gaia: six lectures on the political theology of

nature. Gifford lectures on natural religion. http://www.bruno-latour.fr.

Lupho, Lal. (2009, July 20). Some selected folklore of Lupho. Retrieved from http://www.e-pao.net/epSubPageExtractor.asp?src=manipur.Folks.Folk_Tales.Lupho_Folklores

Lovelock, James. (1979/2000). Gaia: A new look at life on earth. Oxford University Press.

Mellor, M. (1996). The politics of women and nature: Affinity, contingency or material relation? Journal of Political Ideologies, 1 (2), 147-164.

Naess, A. (2005). The shallow and the deep, long-range ecology movement: A summary. In A. Drengson & H. Glasser (Eds.), Selected Works of Arne Naess. Springer.

Northeast Writers’ Forum. (2005). Fresh fictions. Katha.

Oinam, James. Mama potkabi: The wicked stepmother. (2018, May 13). Retrived from http://www.e-pao.net/epSubPageExtractor.asp?src=manipur.Folks.Folk_Tales.Mama_Poktabi_The_Stepmother_Folktale_By_James_Oinam

Porselvi, Mary Vidya. (2011). Mother earth discourse as conscientizacao: An ecofeminist approach to select folktales from India. [Doctoral Dissertation. Univ of Madras].

Rafy, K.U. (2011). Folk-tales of the khasis. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37884/37884-h/37884-h.htm#ch4

Ramanujan, A. K. (1997). “A flowering Tree”: A woman’s tale. Oral Tradition Journal, 12 (1), 226-243.

Ramanujan, A. K. (1991). Folktales from India: Oral Tales from Twenty Indian Languages. Pantheon.

Sandrembi and Chairsa. (2009, Dec. 7). Retrieved from http://www.e-pao.net/epSubPageExtractor.asp?src=manipur.Folks.Folk_Tales.Sandrembi_and_Chaisra

Sepie, Amba J. (2017). More than stories, more than myths: animal/human/nature(s) in traditional ecological worldviews. Humanities, 6(78); doi:10.3390/h6040078

Shiva, Vandana. (2010). Staying alive- women, ecology and development. South End Press.

Taibang Meena Harinongnang Onba. (2012, July 23). Retrieved from http://www.e-pao.net/epSubPageExtractor.asp?src=manipur.Folks.Folk_Tales.A_Human_turning_into_Harinongnang_Taibang_Meena_Harinongnang_Onba

Tan, C. (2020). An ecofeminist study of the anthropocene age in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Ara?t?rmalar? Dergisi, 19, 628-649.

Tyagi, D.K. (2020). Tribal folktales of tripura. Tribal Research and Cultural Institute, Govt. of Tripura.

Verma, P. S. and V. K. Aganval. (1989). Principles of Ecology. S. Chand & Company.

Wahl, Daniel Christian. (2016). Designing regenerative cultures. Traiarchy Press.

Warren J., Karen. (1997). Ecofeminism: women, culture, nature. Indian University Press. 

Zephyretta. (2011, May 23). Four folktales from Arunachla Pradesh. Retrieved from https://pasighat.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/four-folktales-from-arunachal-pradesh/

Dr. Pronami Bhattacharyya is an Assistant Professor in English at Royal Global University, Guwahati, Assam. She did her PhD on African American Literature from Tezpur Central University. Apart from being an academician, she is a passionate birder and nature enthusiast who has covered more than 400 species of rare birds all over the Northeast, Rajasthan and West-Bengal till date, some of which are on the verge of extinction. She is also in the process of publishing a book on Species Extinction focusing on 17 select species on the IUCN Red list from all over the world.

Vernacular Historiography and North-East Literature: A Critical Reading of the Kachari Buranji

//
1.6K views

Dhurjjati Sarma
Dept of Modern Indian Languages & Literary Studies, Gauhati University. ORCID: 0000-0002-3808-0152

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages: 1-13. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne19

First published: June 24, 2022 | AreaNortheast India | LicenseCC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
Full-Text HTML Full-Text PDF Cite
PlumX Metrics

Abstract

This paper proposes to undertake an analysis of the Kachari Buranji (1936), a chronicle, collated from old Assamese manuscripts, documenting the Ahom–Kachari relations from the end of the fourteenth to the beginning of the eighteenth century. This buranji comes under the sub-genre called kataki buranjis (the others being Jayantia Buranji and Tripura Buranji), which have dealt with the political and other correspondences between the Ahoms and the adjoining kingdoms. Throughout the period of medieval history of Assam, the Ahom–Kachari relations went through the complex and alternating phases of friendship and animosity, which affected the territorial as well as demographic dynamics of precolonial “north-eastern” geography. Since the buranji was compiled in the early twentieth century by putting together relevant materials from a number of Assam Buranjis, the collated information throws light on the strategic importance of the Kacharis, both as a community and as a political entity, to the Ahom rulers and their expansionist ambitions. This study also endeavours to examine the Kachari Buranji as a vernacular historiographical enterprise undertaken by the Department of Historical & Antiquarian Studies, Government of Assam, during the 1930s, to compile a buranji specifically dedicated to a historically and culturally significant community of Assam.

Keywords: Assamese buranji literature, Kachari Buranji, Ahom, Kachari, vernacular historiography

Introduction

The medieval period in the history of Assam, from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, involves frequent and often drastic reconfigurations within the political geography of the region. From the thirteenth century onwards, Assam was ruled by the Ahoms who belonged to the Shan tribe of Upper Burma and came to Assam in 1228 and established an empire in the style of a “monarchical oligarchy” which ruled the state for about 600 years, and, subsequently, gave their name to the region. Around the same time, a new kingdom known as Kamata came into being with its capital at Kamatapur, at a distance of some eighteen miles from present-day Cooch Behar. While the Ahoms ruled over what is now the central and eastern parts of Assam, the western part of the state as well as certain areas on the northern part of present-day West Bengal comprised the Kamatapura kingdom. In this regard, noted colonial administrator and historian, Edward Gait (1906) notes,

“[T]he western part of the Brahmaputra valley, … in former times, … was included in the ancient kingdom of Kamarupa, whose western boundary was the Karatoya. At the period with which we are now dealing [thirteenth to fifteenth centuries], the whole tract up to the Karatoya seems still, as a rule, to have formed a single kingdom, but the name had been changed from Kamarupa to Kamata” (pp. 40–41).

However, apart from these two dominant political formations of medieval Assam, there were other significant “peripheral” social–political communities which exercised considerable impact upon the transformations brought about in the political geography in Assam during the medieval period.

The royal chronicles of the Ahom dynasty, called the buranjis, have been the major source of information on the changing social–political and cultural dynamics of medieval Assam, not only with respect to the dynasty in particular but also with regard to its encounter, since its inception, with the local communities, namely, the Chutiyas and the Kacharis. Both these communities belong to the Tibeto-Burman family of languages and were historically concentrated in and around Sadiya in the thirteenth century (Buragohain, 2016, p. 61; Bhattacharjee, 2016, p. 391; Shin, 2020, p. 51). It is possible that the Kacharis consolidated their identity as a community first at Sadiya, a place located in the easternmost part of Assam, the very place which is also associated with the rise of the Chutiya kingdom. The association of Sadiya with the Kacharis is also attested by the location of the shrine of the goddess Kechai Khaiti (also known as Dikkaravasini or Tamreswari), who is the tutelary deity of both the Kacharis and the Chutiyas. The origins of the Kacharis, as a community, could also be traced to Dimapur where they ruled from circa AD 1150 to 1536, before being overcome by the Ahoms (Bhattacharjee, 2016, p. 393­­­­–394; Guha, 2019, p. 51;). Within a few years’ time, the Kachari kingdom was re-founded with its capital at Maibong, and, despite a few years of servitude under the Koch kingdom, it soon recovered its position of strength and independence. The capital of the Kachari kingdom was shifted from Maibong to Khaspur in 1750 following its merger with the Khaspur state (Bhattacharjee, 2016,p. 397; Guha, 2019, p. 76). The Kachari kingdom was finally annexed by the British in 1832, thereby putting an end to its royal history which spanned close to 700 years, though often punctuated by periods of vassalage under the dominant Ahom and Koch kingdoms.

Objectives of Analysis

On the basis of this historical background, the present essay attempts to analyse the Kachari Buranji, a chronicle, collated from old Assamese manuscripts, both as a window to the complex political and cultural encounters between the Kachari kingdom on the one hand, and the dominant Ahom and Koch kingdoms on the other, and as a text-in-itself collated and created amidst the nationalistic fervour of the early twentieth century under the institutional enterprise of the Department of Historical & Antiquarian Studies, Government of Assam. The buranjis epitomise the pivotal role played by the Ahom kingdom during the precolonial period of Assam’s history, and thereby provide a major source of historical documentation signifying the region’s unique identity and position of strength vis-à-vis the pan-Indian political formations like the Mughal kingdom, on the one hand, and the “border kingdoms” of the Kachari, Jayantia, and Tripura on the other hand. These chronicles were refashioned in the early twentieth century as part of concerted efforts directed towards the framing of a cohesive Assamese nationality by bringing together the major ethnic communities of the region within the larger conception of Indian nationhood. Apart from briefly exploring these twin processes of regional and pan-Indian identity-formation, this essay will also cite and analyse specific responses emanating from the modern Kachari intelligentsia to counter the hegemonising impulses embedded within the nationality-formation process.

The “Vernacular” in Historiography: Setting the Framework for Analysis

With reference to the pertinence of the “vernacular” within the study of “historiography,” Matthew Fisher (2019) notes that the “[v]ernacular texts play with the anticipated accessibility and familiarity implied by the choice of language. Additionally, the seeming intimacy of the vernaculars can make visible the strangeness of political, cultural, and ecclesiastical politics” (p. 340). Writing about “historiography,” Fisher, in the same chapter, states that, “like confession, [it] is a peculiarly mediated genre of an accessible experience: everyone lives in and through history. The scope of writing about this fundamental commonality extends from the familiar immediacy of the recent and the local, to the strangeness of distant lands and distant pasts” (2019, p. 344). The Kachari Buranji tells a story that has its origin, we shall see, in the mythical past thereby underscoring the “locatedness/rootedness” of the community within the spatial-temporal context of Assam-Kamarupa and its “unbroken” continuation through the annals of recorded history to a moment of relative “familiar immediacy” in the eighteenth century. Partha Chatterjee (2008) draws attention towards the position of vernacular histories as “vehicles for a range of critiques of modern academic history” (p. 21). He further remarks that, “[b]y indulging in the fabulous and the enchanted, they mock the scientific rationality that is the ideology of the academic historian” (Chatterjee, 2008, p. 21). However, as we shall see, Suryya Kumar Bhuyan, in the capacity of an academic and official historian, did manage to combine the “rational” and “fictional” within the critical–interpretive apparatus he developed for the study of buranjis in early twentieth-century Assam. As a kataki buranji, the Kachari Buranji, along with Jayantia Buranji and Tripura Buranji, signifies a significant endeavour on the part of Bhuyan, as the editor-historian, to be mindful regarding the “interactive” and “dialectical” nature of its engagement with the connected histories of the Ahom and Kachari kingdoms during the precolonial period, and also the possible implications of such an engagement for the ethnic communities in their respective struggles for identity and self-determination in the twentieth century.

Analysis of the Text

The Kachari Buranji (1936) bears a sub-title that goes as follows: “A Chronicle of the Kachari Rajas from the earliest times to the Eighteenth Century A.D. with Special Reference to Assam–Cachar Political Relations.” At the outset, it needs to be clarified that this is not a chronicle with a singular and consolidated identity, but a putting together of information gleaned from “original sources” comprising eight Assam Buranjis, belonging to the medieval period, under the editorship of Suryya Kumar Bhuyan. In this connection, J.N. Phukan (1981) makes note of the two types of Assamese buranjis: (i) original Assamese buranjis, and (ii) translated or compiled Assamese buranjis (p. 41). The buranji under discussion in the present study falls under the second category. Moreover, while suspecting that the title of the said buranji could have been coined by the editor himself, Bhattacharjee (1986) goes a step further to question its very dependability as a historical source (pp. 37–39). While recognising and appreciating the concern and misgivings of Bhattacharjee vis-à-vis the position of the Kachari Buranji within the historical scholarship of Assam, it is well worth noting his own admission that the “original sources” are no longer available for further scrutiny and verification in this regard (Bhattacharjee, 1986, p. 38). In the preface to the fifth bulletin of the Department of Historical & Antiquarian Studies, published in December 1951, it is mentioned that “[t]he three chronicles Kachari Buranji, Jayantia Buranji, and Tripura Buranji are practically the only extant contemporary accounts of these three border kingdoms” (Bhuyan, 1951, p. 2). Suryya Kumar Bhuyan, the editor/compiler of the Kachari Buranji, does note in the preface to the first edition that, “[t]he main bulk of the present publication has been reproduced from an old Assamese manuscript chronicle recovered from the family of the late Srijut Hemchandra Goswami” (Bhuyan, 2010, p. g). However, the editor also mentions the fact that the said manuscript is an incomplete one, and, therefore, the lost/omitted/missing portions have been recovered from other chronicles on Ahom–Kachari relations collected from the Ahom Juvak Sanmilani, the American Baptist Mission Office at Guwahati, the India Office Library of London, and also from personal collections (Bhuyan, 2010, p. g). Considering the position of the Ahom/Assam chronicles as a major and trustworthy source of information regarding the Kachari community (Shin, 2020, p. 62) and the relative paucity of other written accounts regarding its history (Saikia, 2019), the importance of the Kachari Buranji as a precolonial written source documenting an important phase in the political and cultural evolution of the community, cannot be denied or underestimated.

Recognising the twin historical locations of the Kacharis, the first two chapters of the buranji are respectively entitled “Sadiyal Kachari’r Adikatha” (Origin-myth of the Sadiya Kacharis) and “Herambiyal Kachari’r Adikatha” (Origin-myth of the Heramba Kacharis). The Sadiya Kacharis have a brief history, for the reason that they were soon expelled from the place. As conjectured by Bhattacharjee (2016), they possibly came into conflict with Arimatta and his son, Jongal Balahu, and with also the Bhuyan chiefs, who combined forces to oust them from Sadiya (p. 393). On the other hand, the Heramba Kacharis came to be so called because of their settlement in Dimapur and on the North Cachar Hills. They also came to be known as the Dimasa Kacharis, where the word “Dimasa” meant “sons of the great river.” There are differing opinions as to the provenance of the word “Kachari”, though a possible meaning could be a reference to an inhabitant from “the deep bank of a river or a tract of land between a river and a hill” (Bhattacharjee, 2016, p. 392). Chapter 1 of the buranji makes reference to the settlement of twelve Kachari families in and around the Sadiya hills, without however mentioning their place of origin (Kachari Buranji, 2010, p. 1). On the other hand, the Heramba Kacharis are shown to have descended from the mythical figure of Ghatotkach, son of Bhima and demoness Hirimba/Heramba (Kachari Buranji, 2010, p. 3), and, hence, the Kachari kings came to be referred to as “Herambeswar.” With respect to tracing the founder of a royal line of kings to a mythical persona, Chattopadhyaya (2019) provides an interesting observation that

“[t]he emergence of a royal lineage is usually marked by distancing it from the region and community over which it comes to rule by locating the ancestral origins geographically away from it in some purer land, …, and by associating the lineage with an exalted origin: either the solar or the lunar lineage, or a divinity, or a holy person” (pp. 125–126).

Within the local lore, the buranji recounts the stories of two kings, both of whom are variously regarded as the first king of the Heramba Kacharis, namely, Sasempha and Birahas. In the second story, it is narrated that, within the kingdom of Birahas, there lived a Kachari Deodhani (a woman possessed or endowed with the power of divination) with whom Shiva or Mahadeva had an amorous relationship in the guise of her husband, as a result of which, a son was born to her (Kachari Buranji, 2010, p. 7–8). The child was brought up by Birahas who named him Bicharpati and subsequently installed him on his throne (Kachari Buranji, 2010, p. 9). The identification with Shiva as the progenitor of a royal lineage could also be found in the genealogical treatise of the Koch kings, the Darrang Rajvamshavali, where it is recorded that Vishu or Vishwasingha, the founder-king of the Koch kingdom, was born out of a union between Shiva, who had assumed the form of Haria Mandala (a Mech/Koch), and Heera (wife of the real Mandala).[1] Therefore, in the Kachari and the Koch contexts alike, the identification with Shiva, while attesting to the affiliation of the god with the communities outside the caste-Hindu paradigm, also serves to provide them a divinely ordained sanction towards kingship. In a similar vein, the Ahom kings traced their origins to Indra, the king of the devas in heaven, and the Chutiya kings to Kubera, the lord of treasure (Shin, 2020, p. 59–60).[2]

The Kachari king Bicharpati was followed by Bikramaditya-pha (-pha being the customary suffix to the initial line of the Kachari kings), Mahamani-pha, Mani-pha, Larh–pha, Khora-pha, and Dersong-pha. The third chapter of the Kachari Buranji moves into the recorded historical time, and describes the initial encounters between the Ahom and the Kachari kings between AD 1493–1603, during which Supimpha, the Ahom king, first conquered Namchang and Mahang, which were Kachari territories under Khora-pha (Kachari Buranji, 2010,p. 11). Another battle ensued during the reign of Suhungmung Dihingia Raja, when his commander Kancheng Barpatra Gohain engaged with the Kachari and Chutiya kingdoms, and extended the boundary of the Ahom kingdom till the Dikhow river (Kachari Buranji, 2010, p. 11). Dersong-pha made an attempt to conciliate the Ahom king; however, the mission failed and the hostilities continued between the warring kingdoms. With Phrasengmung Bargohain as the commander of the Ahom army and Dersong-pha himself leading the Kachari side, a protracted battle was waged between them leading finally to the defeat and death of the Kachari king (Kachari Buranji, 2010, p. 15). The subdued Kacharis requested the victorious Ahom king to install Madan Konwar, the boy-prince, as the next king of the dependent Kachari kingdom. In response to this entreaty, the Ahom king appointed Madan Konwar as the “thapita-sanchita” (established and preserved) king of the Kachari kingdom, with the new name Nirbhayanarayan, and under the obligation to pay annual tributes to the former (Kachari Buranji, 2010, pp. 19–20).

It must be remembered that the Kachari Buranji is part of the sub-genre called kataki buranjis (the others being Jayantia Buranji and Tripura Buranji), which have dealt with the political and other relations and correspondences between the Ahoms and the adjoining kingdoms. At times, the scramble for power and territory between the Ahoms on the one hand and either one of the remaining local powers on the other hand also ended up involving a third power. Added to that, the frequent incursions of the Mughal army from the west, particularly during the seventeenth century, added another participant in the bloody theatre of events unfolding along the Brahmaputra valley. During the initial years of the seventeenth century, the Kachari king Jasanarayan invaded the Jayantia kingdom, and forced the defeated king Dhan Manik to pay tribute and also part with his nephew Jasa Manik as hostage to the former. After the death of Dhan Manik, the Kachari king delegated the young Jasa Manik as the king of Jayantapura. As noted by Kalita (2021), the Kacharis had become a “powerful nation in the seventeenth century by conquering a greater part of the Nowgong district and the North Kachar Hills and [extending] their reign into the plains of Kachar” (p. 27). Unable to assert his independence from the Kachari stranglehold, Jasa Manik of Jayantapura conceived an ingenious plan to thwart the expansionist ambitions of the Kachari king. He sent messengers to the court of Pratap Singha, the then Ahom king, proposing to form a strategic alliance with his kingdom by offering his daughter in marriage to him. However, he laid one condition that the Jayantia princess would travel through the Kachari kingdom en route to the Ahom kingdom (Kachari Buranji, 2010,p. 22). Naturally, such an arrangement did not please the Kachari king, who refused to facilitate the journey of the Jayantia princess across his kingdom, thereby embittering his relationship with the Ahom king. This led again to a series of battles between the Ahoms and Kacharis after a sustained period of peace and mutual settlement.

The Ahom army, led by Sundar Gohain, made deep incursions into the Kachari territory and conquered several villages up to Demera located in the upper Kopili valley. The Kachari king Jasanarayan made efforts to strike a peace deal with the Ahoms. However, the resistance on the part of the Kacharis continued under the command of a valiant leader called Bhimbal Konwar, and it was by means of a pre-planned night attack that Sundar Gohain is killed thereby signalling the victory of the Kacharis over the Ahoms (Kachari Buranji, 2010, pp. 24–25). This event was a significant milestone in the history of the Kachari kingdom — Jasanarayan celebrated this victory by adopting the name Pratapnarayan and renaming his capital Maibang as Kirtipur. He also stopped paying tribute to the Ahom king and fashioned himself as an independent king. This is corroborated by J.B. Bhattacharjee (1986) when he notes that, “a portion of the Barak Valley had [also] passed under the rulers of Maibong during the reign of Pratapnarayan (1583–1613) who claimed himself as Srihattavijayina in one of his coins” (p. 35). There follows a period of about 80 years till about the end of the seventeenth century when both the Ahom and Kachari kingdoms make attempts to reconcile and make peace with each other. Also, the fact that, during this period, there were frequent incursions of the Mughal army into the Ahom territory necessitated the maintenance of cordial relations, especially on the part of the Ahoms, with the neighbouring kingdoms.

A crucial phase in Ahom–Kachari relations ensued during the reign of the Ahom king, Rudra Singha (1696–1714), when he decided once and for all to subjugate the Kacharis in order to immortalise his military prowess and legacy. He commanded his generals with the said prospect through these words, as noted in the tenth chapter of the Kachari Buranji:

“Kachari rajkhani mari joxosya lobo khujo, tohote ki bola?” (I wish to earn eternal renown by conquering the Kachari kingdom; what do you all say? [my translation]) (p. 68).

It can possibly be argued that, by this time, the Kachari kingdom had acquired much power and relevance vis-a-vis the geo-political dynamics of the larger precolonial “north-eastern” region. This is attested by the fact that the “Cachar expedition”, as it came to be known, of Rudra Singha finds mention not only in the Kachari Buranji, but also in the Jayantia Buranji (2012, p. 80) and the Tungkhungia Buranji (1990, p. 35). As Suryya Kumar Bhuyan (2010) notes in the Introduction to the Kachari Buranji, “In 1706 Rudra Singha … despatched two divisions to Cachar, one under Kamal Lochan Dihingia Barbarua through the Dhansiri route, and another under the Paniphukan, grandson of the general Phul Barua of Saraighat fame, through the Kapili route. The Barbarua’s forces captured one fort after another, and succeeded in ultimately occupying Maibong the Kachari capital” (p. xii). Tamradhawaj, the Kachari king, fled from the capital and took refuge at Khaspur. The rampaging Ahom army charged towards Khaspur in hot pursuit of the absconding king and camped at a place called Shyampani on the way, and sent a warning message to Tamradhawaj thereby exhorting him to honour the principle of “thapita-sanchita,” as his forefathers had done under the orders of the Ahom king (Kachari Buranji, 2010, pp. 80–81). However, the Ahom army had to retreat following the outbreak of a severe epidemic within the camp. In the meantime, the Jayantia king hatched a treacherous plan, under the guise of friendship, to imprison the fugitive Kachari king and succeeded in capturing the latter along with his wife. The Kachari queen, though in captivity, still managed to convey the news of their imprisonment to the Ahom king. Hearing this, Rudra Singha launched another expedition under the command of Surath Singha Barbarua, this time against the Jayantia king. The commander devised a stratagem of enticing the Jayantia king to visit the Ahom camp under the pretext of marriage with an Ahom princess, and, in the process, captured him along with the Kachari king. Both the kings were presented before the Ahom king, and made to take the oath of allegiance to him (Kachari Buranji, 2010, pp. 86–87). With respect to the Cachar expedition of Rudra Singha and his subsequent foray into the Jayantia kingdom, Bhuyan notices a wider plan on the Ahom king’s part to extend his domination into the Mughal territories towards the west (Kachari Buranji, 2010, p. xv). However, as fate would have it, he passed away in July 1714 before he could actually launch the expedition in person.

The death of Rudra Singha also marks the end of Kachari Buranji proper; the subsequent portion of the edited text presents snippets from other buranjis collected from various sources. Interestingly, a significant part of the Kachari Buranji has as its source certain “retranslated” extracts from Dr. J.P. Wade’s An Account of Assam. Furthermore, the episode concerning the capture of the Ram Singha Jayantia Raja and Tamradhawaj Kachari Raja by Rudra Singha was also recorded in a note compiled by Col. Adam White in 1834, and the same has been appended to the Kachari Buranji (2010, pp. 144–149). A significant number of sources, both precolonial and colonial, have been utilised in the “making” of the Kachari Buranji and its publication under the auspices of the Department of Historical & Antiquarian Studies, Assam, in 1936. In addition to it, two buranjis, namely, the Jayantia Buranji and the Tripura Buranji were published respectively in 1937 and 1938. It may, however, be noted that like Kachari Buranji, the Jayantia Buranji also has been compiled with reference to materials gleaned from various chronicles belonging to the Ahom period. Only the Tripura Buranji had existed in the form of a singular manuscript—preserved in the British Museum—bearing the title Tripura Desar Kathar Lekha and chronicling “the friendly missions sent by Maharaja Rudra Singha to Ratna Manikya, Raja of Tripura” (Tripura Buranji, 1990, p. III). Therefore, the special efforts invested in the compilation of the other two buranjis point towards an engagement with the mutually conflicting processes of Assamese nationality formation, on the one hand, and the articulation of indigenous ethnic identities in Assam, on the other hand, during the 1930s.

Publishing Kachari Buranji in the Twentieth Century: An Institutional and Identitarian Enterprise towards Reimagining and Reconstructing Precolonial History

By the 1920s, a number of associations emerged in order to articulate the voices and aspirations of the Bodo-Kachari community, notable among them being the Bodo Chatra Sanmilan (Bodo Students’ Association), Kachari Chatra Sanmilan (Kachari Students’ Association), and Bodo Maha Sanmilan (Greater Bodo Association) (Sharma, 2012, p. 212). These associations aimed to carve a distinct identity for the community, and a crucial component of this process was the reclamation of their past glory, as evidenced by the assertion of Rupnath Brahma, an influential Bodo politician of the time, that the ancestors of the Kachari community were “the most influential people in the whole of the Brahmaputra valley” and, throughout history, the community “never allowed their tribal peculiarities to be merged into the Hindu society” (“Note by Rupnath Brahma,” Census of India, 1921, vol. 3, Assam, part I; quoted in Sharma, 2012,pp. 211–212). At the same time, however, there were also attempts to reintegrate these communities into the larger fabric of the Assamese society, particularly under the auspices of the then newly instituted pan-Assam associations like the Asom Sahitya Sabha. Around 1930, in an article entitled “Kachari Bhratrixakal aru Cachar Zila” (Kachari Brethren and the Cachar District), published in the Assamese periodical Awahon, the writer Hiteswar Borborua recounts the pre-Ahom history of the Kachari community, its mythical–historical origins and subsequent interface with the Koch community, and, more importantly, the twentieth-century manifestation of its racial and cultural identity vis-à-vis the caste-based dynamics of the ongoing larger Assamese nationality-formation process. He exhorts the Kachari brethren to adopt the behavioural codes and practices of the Hindi religion and thereby rectify the so-called corrupt ways that have crept into their social–cultural life (Borborua, 1930–31, p. 1345).[3] These assertions on the part of Borborua echo the predominant sentiment of the contemporary Assamese intelligentsia with regards to social–cultural fashioning of a modern Assamese identity. As Kar (2008) notes, “From the end of the 1930s, a campaign for ‘Greater Assam’ (bahal asam) … began to gain force in the middle-class circuit of the Brahmaputra Valley” (p. 71). In the seventeenth convention of the Asom Sahitya Sabha held at Guwahati in 1937, Krishna Kanta Handiqui stated that, “[i]t should be considered a major responsibility of Assam Sahitya Sabha to preach the Assamese language among [the] tribes” (quoted in Kar, 2008, p. 71).

Considering these statements from either side, it could be argued that the process of compiling and publishing the three kataki buranjis in the twentieth century was a means to grapple with the question of defining and consolidating the Assamese nationality by reemphasising the centrality of the Ahom kingdom in the precolonial period vis-à-vis the “border kingdoms” like that of the Kachari, Jayantia, and Tripura. However, in response to the larger process of political–cultural appropriation, Jadunath Khakhlari sought to infuse pride in the usage of the word “Kachari” to define the community, and, went to the extent of claiming in his book Kacharir Kotha, published in 1927, that, “the Kachari language [was the one] from whose roots sprang the present Asomiya language, whose king was the first patron of the religion and its books” (quoted in Sharma, 2012, p. 213), referring most likely to the patronage extended by the Kachari king Mahamanikya to Madhav Kandali for the composition of the Saptakanda Ramayana (Ramayana in Seven Cantos) during the first half of the fourteenth century. The possible reference to the Kandali Ramayana is crucial vis-à-vis its significance as one of the earliest poetic works in the Assamese language, and, also for the fact that the text addressed an interface between maintaining the “propriety” of a pan-Indian Sanskrit epic and localising the same in the vernacular for the benefit of the “uninitiated” masses.[4] The active interest shown by the Kachari royal lineage in the promotion of Assamese language and literature is also emphasised by Suryya Kumar Bhuyan in his introduction to the Kachari Buranji.[5]It may be noted in this regard that various dynasties like the Kachari, the Kamata, the Koch, and, for that matter, also the Ahoms, which had traditionally existed outside the “varna/jati” order and which ruled over different parts of Assam-Kamarupa since the fourteenth century, actively contributed to the development of Assamese as a well-developed literary language by the sixteenth century. The patronage accorded to poets like Hem Saraswati, Harivara Vipra, Kaviratna Saraswati, and Rudra Kandali by king Durlabhnarayana of Kamata and his immediate successors around the fourteenth–fifteenth centuries clearly imply the development of a “scripto-centric culture” (term borrowed from Professor T.S. Satyanath) within the Assamese language at that time. The increasing use of Assamese as a literary as well as an administrative language is also associated with the gradual adoption of Hinduism (or rather one of its sectarian orders) by the royal households of the Ahoms and the Kacharis. As noted by Jose Kuruvachira SDB (2013), “[t]he more recent of the buranjis are written in Assamese which was gradually adopted by the Ahoms after their conversion to Hinduism.”With Jayadhvaj Singha (1648–1665) becoming the first Ahom king to formally adopt Hinduism, the “hinduisation” of the Ahoms became a significant factor in the increasingly mediatory role played by the kings in the monastic–missionary enterprise of neo-Vaishnavism known as the Sattra institution. On the other hand, in 1642 saka (AD 1720), Suradarpa, the Kachari king and son of Tamradhawaj, commissioned Bhubaneswar Bachaspati to undertake the translation of Shri Naradiya Kathamrita in the vernacular payara metre (Bhattacharjee, 1986, p. 36; Guha, 2019, p. 67).

Therefore, the compilation of the kataki buranjis, apart from emphasising the centrality of the Ahom kingdom during the medieval period, also enabled the reimagining of Kachari, Jayantia, or Tripuri community-histories within the emergent ideas of regional and pan-Indian identities in the early twentieth century. The presentation of these histories, according to Bhuyan (2010), went beyond mere chronicling of political events and presented, according to him, “a drama of human passions, of accomplished hopes and frustrated ambitions, of triumphs and failures, of defiance and humility … couched in [a] language racy, appropriate, unsophisticated and dignified, in perfect harmony between the spirit of the age and the character of the events described” (p. ii). A representative format of this nature was part of the native-vernacular historiographical model developed by historians like Suryya Kumar Bhuyan, which attempted to “reconstruct the Assamese past by fusing the Western spirit of rationalism with pre-colonial Assamese resources of history” (Purkayastha, 2008,p. 182). While stressing upon the importance of a rationalist-positivist methodology of history-writing, he was equally mindful of at times retaining the fictional narratives which formed part of a community’s oral-literate and performative history. And this explains his espousal of the Kachari Buranji as not only documenting the Ahom–Kachari political relations from the end of the fourteenth to the beginning of the eighteenth century, but also reflecting upon the individual heroic characters or the collective social consciousness of the communities in question within the text. In his introduction to the text, Bhuyan (2010) claims that, “[t]here arose in Cachar a great leader in the person of prince Bhimbal Konwar” (p. x). The heroism and valour of the Kachari prince Bhimbal Konwar in his guerrilla warfare tactics against Sondar Gohain’s Ahom army was a major instance in history of the kingdom’s military success against its more powerful neighbour.

Conclusion and Implications for Further Study

The study of a text like the Kachari Buranji is significant from the fact that it often provides alternative perspectives on events and personages usually seen and analysed from the point of view of the centrist/dominant narratives. Even though gleaned from the Ahom chronicles and colonial documents, the structure of text is so contrived to enable a continuous political history of the Kachari community, encompassing the mythical–legendary, documented, and geographical accounts of its existence from the beginning till the eighteenth century. Together with the two other kataki buranjis, it also facilitates and enhances our knowledge on politics, society, and the culture of north-east India in the precolonial period, and, more importantly, before the region actually became the “north-east” of India and, by extension, a frontier region of the larger colonial, and later postcolonial Indian state machinery. The story of the Kachari community, as we have seen, had begun from their settlement upon the Sadiya hills, which subsequently became the easternmost frontier outpost of the British kingdom. However, in the precolonial period, apart from being the homeland of the Sadiyal Kacharis, Sadiya was also the political seat of the Chutiya kingdom till the year 1523, when it was overrun by the invading Ahom army under Suhungmung (1497–1539),As community identities get crystallised over a period of time, thereby emphasising more and more upon the differential aspects of one community-identity in the relation to the other, it is crucial to recognise the double-edged nature of essentially precolonial texts like the Kachari Buranji which engages, on the one hand, with the objective of consolidating the history of an ethnic community based on extant information regarding its racial origins and demographic patterns, and, on the other hand, also draws attention towards the contingent nature of this very engagement with community-identity formation.

            The genre of kataki buranjis as such had acquired considerable importance during the 1930s and 1940s, and efforts were in full swing to bring to light more of such texts and preserve them for posterity. In the preface to the first edition of the Kachari Buranji, Suryya Kumar Bhuyan records the existence of one Bardhamanor Buranji, which chronicled the testimonials of the messengers sent by the Ahom king Rudra Singha to the Burdwan court. The manuscript was in possession of Hemchandra Goswami, and, unfortunately, got misplaced when it was sent for exhibition to a literary conference. Despite the loss, Bhuyan remains hopeful, as evident from his futuristic vision in this regard, which incidentally also emphasises upon the significance of the kataki buranjis vis-à-vis the history of precolonial Assam and the larger “north-east” of India. He writes, “[w]ith the progress of investigation more Kataki Buranjis will, we are sure, be discovered in Assam; and we shall not be surprised if Kataki Buranjis dealing with Amber in Rujputana, Delhi, Bihar, Nadiya, Barnagar, Rungpoor, Pangia, Morung and Bana-vishnupur, which were visited by King Rudra Singha’s agents and emissaries, be discovered in the near future proving to the world that the interests of the Assamese of yore transcended the limits of their own territories” (Bhuyan, 2010, p. i). Writing in the year 1936 during the heydays of the freedom movement and also negotiating with the twin coordinates of regional and national identities, Bhuyan’s attitude towards the past exhibits a progressive orientation towards locating/positioning the Ahom kingdom (and by extension, Assam) as an active polity participating in political, diplomatic and cultural exchange within the wider network of precolonial Indian kingdoms and principalities. However, the mission of discovering and publishing more kataki buranjis, as envisioned by him, could not make any further progress, and the publication record of the Department of Historical & Antiquarian Studies, as collected from their website (https://dhas.assam.gov.in/portlets/publication-0), mentions only the three kataki buranjis which have been discovered so far, along with other buranjis published by the department, including those in Assamese and in English translation. The Kachari Buranji has gone through four editions (1936, 1951, 1984, and 2010); the Jayantia Buranji through four (1937, 1964, and 2012), and Tripura Buranji through three (1938, 1962, and 1990).

While carrying on the study of these buranjis through the methodology of comparative historiography, it is also necessary to relaunch the search for more kataki buranjis and related narratives, if at all they were composed as imagined by Bhuyan, and thereby critically examine the dynamics of vernacular historical documentation as a process involving a series of sustained activities undertaken during the precolonial and early colonial periods of Assamese and Indian history. The importance and relevance of the kataki buranjis (or rather the buranjis in general) even at the present time could be realised from the fact that as recently as February 2022, the English translations of Kachari Buranji, Jayantia Buranji,Deodhai Asam Buranji, and Harakanta Barua Sadar Amin’s Assam Buranji were published under the auspices of Dr. Suryya Kumar Bhuyan Memorial Trust based in Guwahati, Assam. A renewed focus on the critical study of the buranjis and their place within vernacular historiography in Assam is, as all would agree, the need of the hour, and the translations of the aforementioned works could possibly be the right step in that direction.

Declaration of Conflicts of Interests

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

Funding

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

Notes

[1]           Sadashive bole moyee tora rup dhori/…

               Chala kori tora bharjya korilo romon/… 66

(Sadashiva says, “I assumed your form … and, with guile, dallied with your wife”, Darrang Rajvamshavali, 2013, pp. 11–12)

[2]Interestingly, among the Chutiyas too, there is a prevalent narrative, according to which, Kubera took the form of a Chutiya chief called Birpal and engaged in the sexual act with the chief’s wife Rupavati (Shin, 2020, p. 59).

[3]Borborua (1930–31) was also reacting against the then prevalent tendency on the part of the newly educated Bodo-Kacharis to adopt an increasingly Hinduised identity signified by the use of the surname “Brahma” (p. 1344). As Sharma (2012) also notes, “[b]y 1921 the census reported that many Kacharis had abandoned tribal names and were describing themselves as Bara by caste and language, and Brahma by religion” (p. 211). Kalicharan Brahma was the prime founding force behind the Brahma movement amongst the Kacharis.

[4]With respect to Saptakanda Ramayana, Manjeet Baruah (2012) remarks that, the “[t]wo notable features about Kandali’s text are that it was aimed at/for royal clientele, i.e., the ‘tribal’ monarchy, and that the text has a social base which is ‘tribal-peasant’ in nature. Both were as much linked to the geographical location of the [Brahmaputra] Valley” (p. 68).

[5]Bhuyan (2010) notes that, “One king of Cachar was the patron of Madhab Kandali, who flourished before the age of Sankar Deva and who translated the Ramayana into Assamese” (p. vii).

References

Baruah, Manjeet (2012). Frontier cultures: A social history of Assamese Literature. Routledge.

Bhattacharjee, J.B. (1986). ‘Kachari Buranji’: Myth of a chronicler source of the history of Cachar. Proceedings of the North East India History Association (NEIHA), seventh session, Shillong, pp. 33–40.

Bhattacharjee, J.B. (2016). Kachari (Dimasa) state formation. Appendix – E. In H.K. Barpujari (Ed.), The comprehensive history of Assam, volume two: medieval period – political (pp. 391–397). Publication Board Assam.

Bhuyan, Suryya Kumar (Comp &Ed.). (2012).Jayantia Buranji(3rd edition). DHAS.

Bhuyan, Suryya Kumar (Comp &Ed.). (2010).Kachari Buranji(4th edition). DHAS.

Bhuyan, Suryya Kumar (Comp.). (1951). Bulletin No.5, Department of Historical & Antiquarian Studies, Government of Assam. DHAS.

Bhuyan, Suryya Kumar (Ed.). (1990). Tripura Buranji(3rd edition). DHAS.

Bhuyan, Suryya Kumar (Ed.). (1990).Tungkhungia Buranji(3rd edition). DHAS.

Borborua, Hiteswar (1930–31). Kachari bhratrixakal aru Cachar Zila. Awahon,2(12), 1341–1345.

Buragohain, R.C. (2016). A note on the Morans, the Borahis and the Chutiyas. Appendix – A. In H.K. Barpujari (Ed.),The comprehensive history of Assam, volume two: medieval period – political (pp. 60–62). Publication Board Assam.

Chatterjee, Partha (2008). Introduction: History in the vernacular. In Raziuddin Aquil and Partha Chatterjee (Eds.), History in the vernacular (pp. 1–24). Permanent Black.

Chattopadhyaya, B.D. (2019). Local and beyond: The story of Asura Naraka and society, state and religion in early Assam. The concept of Bharatavarsha and other essays. Permanent Black.

Daivajna, Suryakhadi (2013).Darrang Rajvamshavali(Biswanarayan Shastri and Bhaba Prasad Chaliha, Eds., 2nd edition). Lawyer’s Book Stall.

Department of Historical & Antiquarian Studies, Government of Assam. Publication. https://dhas.assam.gov.in/portlets/publication-0. Accessed on 20 February 2022.

Fisher, M. (2019). Vernacular historiography. In J. Jahner, E. Steiner, & E. Tyler (Eds.), Medieval historical writing: Britain and Ireland, 500–1500 (pp. 339–355). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316681299.020.

Gait, Edward (1906). A history of Assam. Thacker, Spink & Co.

Guha, Upendra Chandra (2019).Kacharer itibritta: A socio-historical analysis of Cachar district of Assam (3rd edition). Publication Board Assam.

Kalita, Bharat (2021). Military activities in medieval Assam (3rd edition).

Kar, Bodhisattva (2008). ‘Tongue has no bone’: Fixing the Assamese language, c. 1800–c. 1930. Studies in History, 24(1), February, 27–76. doi:10.1177/025764300702400102.

Kuruvachira SDB, Jose (2013). The Hinduisation of the Tai-Ahoms. Neptune18. Retrieved March 07, 2022, from https://neptune18.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/the-hinduisation-of-the-ahoms/

Phukan, J.N. (1981) Some observations on the nature of the Assamese buranjis. Proceedings of the North East India History Association (NEIHA), second session, Dibrugarh, p. 41.

Purkayastha, Sudeshna (2008). Restructuring the past in early-twentieth-century Assam: Historiography and Surya Kumar Bhuyan. In Raziuddin Aquil and Partha Chatterjee (Eds.), History in the vernacular (pp. 172–208). Permanent Black.

Saikia, Chandraprasad (2019). Bhumika (Introduction). InUpendra Chandra Guha (author),Kacharer Itibritta, 1971 (3rd edition). Publication Board Assam.

Sharma, Jayeeta. (2012). Empire’s garden: Assam and the making of India. Permanent Black.

Shin, Jae-Eun (2020). Descending from demons, ascending to kshatriyas: Genealogical claims and political process in pre-modern Northeast India, the Chutiyas and the Dimasas. The Indian Economic and Social History Review,57(1), 49–75. doi: 10.1177/0019464619894134.

Dhurjjati Sarma is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies, Gauhati University, Assam. He was earlier a Production Editor at SAGE Publications, New Delhi, and, before that, a Research Fellow in North East India Studies at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), New Delhi. He is presently engaged in studying the early and modern literatures of Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu from a comparative-cultural perspective. His writings have been published under Sahitya Akademi, Routledge, and Palgrave Macmillan and in various journals.

“The forest is my wife”: The Ethno-political and Gendered Relationship of Land and the Indigene

///
850 views

Karyir Riba
Department of English, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, India. ORCID: 0000-0001-8408-4464. Email: karyir.riba.ap@gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages: 1-9. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne18

First published: June 24, 2022 | AreaNortheast India | LicenseCC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
Full-Text HTML Full-Text PDF Cite
PlumX Metrics

Abstract

The imperative presence of land as a personified being in Indigenous Literatures asserts the crucial connection between land and the native ‘self’ in defining ‘indigeneity’. While this ‘self’ is often reclaimed in a wrestle against the geo-political confines of the nation-state; an indigenous woman, however, navigates ‘self’ in ways non-identical. Women’s connection to land, as opposed to indigenous men, shapes ethno-political struggle of proprietorship and rather builds upon shared feminine traits of fertility, nurture, and service. Focusing on the integration of gender and ecology as an important aspect of ecological critique on power and progress, this paper attempts to delineate the gendered relationship between the indigene and land. It delves into two important areas of study: firstly, probing the distinct ways the indigene ‘self’ unifies itself with the land, and secondly, critiquing the gendered dynamics involved in this merger. The study focuses on the emancipatory impediments of indigenous women by analysing select works of Easterine Kire and Mamang Dai, also, tangentially referring to a few other indigenous women’s writings from North East India.

Keywords: Land, Gender, Ethno-politics, Ecocriticism

When god-like Odysseus returned from the wars in Troy, he hanged all on one rope a dozen slave-girls…The girls were property, the disposal of property was then, as now, a matter of expediency, not of right and wrong… The ethical structure of that day covered wives, but had not yet been extended to human chattels. During the three thousand years which have since elapsed, ethical criteria have been extended to many fields of conduct, with corresponding shrinkages in those judged by expediency only. (Leopold, 1949, p. 201)

One may look at Aldo Leopold’s reference to Homer’s Odyssey in The Land Ethics (1949), and immediately recognize how Leopold set in motion reflective criticism of the position of ‘Man’ by critiquing Homer’s “god-like Odysseus” (p. 201), and attempted to redefine ‘community’ by problematizing the narrative of man as “conqueror of the land community” to “member and citizen of it”. Leopold stressed the necessity to see land and everything on it (both human and non-human) as a unified community, urging that “when we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect” (p. 204).  This renewed meaning of community, in his words, could aid nurture an “ethic of care” (p. 204) that is organically fostered through ‘experience’ and ‘connection’ with the land. However, this inspiration of the “ethic of care” becomes the very site of inquiry and debate in this paper, in order to realize the gendered relationship of land and Indigene. In the discourse of ecofeminism, the vocabulary of care has been aggressively scrutinized upon the currency of care, for care is inspired chiefly by connected ‘experience’ of nature, “that reflect” as argued by Roger. J. H. King (1991), only and “typically male set of experiences of the world” and “aspects of Patriarchal thinking” (p. 76).

While land ethic of care has been a defining code of indigenous ontology, even before its academic acknowledgment through Leopold, this paper reflects on the limitations of the vocabulary of ‘care’ in insufficiently delineating heterogeneity of gendered experiences. Also, by occasionally subscribing to ecofeminist ideology that seeks resonance between women and land, the study focuses on the emancipation of Indigenous women whose identity is often caught or neglected in the hierarchy of larger structures of violence. As pointed out by Dai in her introductory note to the edited anthology, The Inheritance of Words, Writings from Arunachal Pradesh (2021) that “while the joys of motherhood, love of land and questions of the self are evoked…poignant with the anguish of love, they are also fierce with resistance against what it means to be a woman in a traditional society where inherent customary laws dictate how women live their lives, something that often results in untold suffering” (p. 3).

With special reference to Kire and Dai, and few references to other indigenous women writers from North East India, the paper wields on an interdisciplinary approach to explore natural and socio-cultural histories that have been governing and continues to govern the gendered heterogeneous experiences of native subjects – men and women. Pertinent to indigenous women’s writings that idiomatically juggle between feministic discourse and the issues of nation-state, tribal nationalism and nativity, the paper proposes that literary scholarship concerning native cultures requires a striding movement from post-colonial criticism to ‘native’ feminism. Kate Shanley, argues, in the context of Native Indian experience, that “the word ‘feminism’ has special meanings to Indian women, including the idea of promoting the continuity of tradition, and consequently, pursuing the recognition of tribal sovereignty” (1984, p. 215). In the impetus of decolonization and revival of roots movement, the recent decades in indigenous studies have seen a shift from mere political and spatial recognition of the otherwise historically contingent idea of indigeneity to acknowledging the intricacies of indigenous cultural histories from the native perspective. This according to Fabricant and Poestero (2018) is “perhaps the most provocative turn in indigenous studies” (p.137) which has been mobilizing scholars to exfoliate indigenous ontologies that had gone almost extinct in the hegemony of the western knowledge system. This turn in indigenous studies aims to shake intellectual terrains that have been building on the inherited binaries of European philosophy, by focusing on Indigenous knowledge and practices as “new modes of thought” (Cameron, 2014, p.19). Based on various indigenous practices, it lays careful attention to ontological pluralism (worldviews) and stresses reconsideration of epistemology by challenging euro-centric approach to meaning, knowledge, and power. However, in lieu of this development, arbitrating the intersection of gender and nativity continues to remain complex, as more than often feminist discourse is seen as antithetical or foreign to the codes of native epistemology. Arguing upon native women’s question of belonging, Ramirez argues that “too often the assumption in Native communities is that we as indigenous women should defend a tribal nationalism that ignores sexism as part of our very survival as women as well as our liberation from colonization” (2007, p. 22). This perplexity is pronounced in the select texts, for instance, the very usage of the word Adi word ‘Pensam’ (implying in-between, middle, belonging to both) in Dai’s (2006) The Legends of Pensam may be seen as an attempt to emphasize on the spatial complexity of contemporary native identity – an attempt to locate the appropriate bargain between the past and the future, and an attempt to gain agency over what needs to be continued or repudiated in the tide of change.

Hence, to recognize the intersection of gender and nativity in the context of Indigenous communities from North East India, ‘native-feminism/s’ that is ideologically quintessential to native experience is essentially requisite. The idiosyncratic illustration of native women’s renditions, for instance, reveals in depiction of Kirhupfumia in Kire’s When the River Sleeps (2014), with “vast store of knowledge” to answer “questions about spirit encounters” or to instruct if “what was to be done if a relative had touched stones that were taboo to touch” or to be consulted “on cures for fevers contracted in the forest… to disclose names of herbs in special areas, and how to use these to cure the fevers” (p, 146). It explains an indigenous woman’s rendition, not only as an active storyteller but also as a custodian of knowledge connected to nature, as the feminine resonance of women and non-human, that extends from the physical to the spiritual realm (feminine guardian spirits of rivers and forests). Or even the silent appraisals in indigenous women’s writings from Arunachal Pradesh, critiquing among others, the practice of polygamy sanctioned by customary norms – to be “traded for few mithuns to my father” (Reena, 2021, p. 44) and “when the children are grown, he decides to take another wife” (Dai, 2006, p. 77), highlighting the instrumental equivalency of women to the natural world coded in customary sanctions. Consequently, experiences of an indigenous woman traverse along multiple dimensions and the ‘self’ melds dual structures of enunciation – ‘indigeneity’ and ‘womanhood’. This then creates a spatial agency that is a combination of multifaceted voices. On the one hand, there are the concerns for representation – importance of native ontology in reasserting the connection of land and indigene, geo-political histories, tribal nationalism, etc. – and on the other, the emancipation of the feminine ‘self’. What makes this emancipation even more difficult is the calculated negotiation of self in the hierarchy of tribal nationalism, ecology, and gender.

With natives’ proximity to land, one of the first underlining issues, voiced in Indigenous women’s writings, is concerned with the various parameters of indigeneity and land-related ethnopolitics that differ for women and men. The heterogeneity of gendered participation, especially in land-related policies, materializes in matters of protection, ownership, and custody, which range from concerns of proprietorship to ethno-political concerns of instrumental subjugation of land. Whence, indigenous women are placed oust the value hierarchy of decision making. It is pertinent, however, to realize that penetration of the colonial idea of ‘ownership’ in native ethno-politics today, stands in contrast to a native ontology that revered safekeeping of the land. Dai (2006) calls it “tribal modified” (p. 175), indicating metamorphosis into modernity that prioritizes economic health over eco-centric indigenous practices. Dai’s The Legends of Pensam (2006) serves as a silent satire on this ironic shift in the meaning of indigeneity and its connection to the land. The recurrent presence of land as a personified being, in most of her works, distances land from being a mere geo-political entity, often nurturing the very consciousness and memory of its people. It taps on reviving the indigenous philosophy of ‘community’ that one shares with others, which is found in interdependency. (Kwaymullina, 2005, p. 2) As Ambelin Kwaymullina (2005) explains:

For Aboriginal peoples, country is much more than a place. Rock, tree, river, hill, animal, human – all were formed of the same substance by the Ancestors who continue to live in land, water, sky. Country is filled with relations speaking language and following Law, no matter whether the shape of that relation is human, rock, crow, wattle. Country is loved, needed, and cared for, and country loves, needs, and cares for her peoples in turn. Country is family, culture, identity. Country is self. (para. 2)

Dai draws on the Adi ontological credence of the interdependency of nature and man, both defending each other, by crafting the narrative of her historical fiction around the personified depiction of nature – river, forest, mountains, etc.  River and Mountains hold deep agency in Adi Abangs (oral histories/folk songs), serving as a crucial blueprint in trailing migratory routes and oral histories of the first Adi settlements. The river as a guiding agent in The Black Hill (2017) to direct Gimur’s destiny and the eminence of high mountain ranges standing as a barricade against the British invasion symbolizes the interdependent relationship of guidance and protection. Dai taps on the Adi folk philosophy of the river being alive, possessing a soul, a path through which the spirits of the ancestors travel. Contamination of the river is thus reflective of the end of cultural memory– “Our river must not be interrupted” (Dai, 2009, p. 45).  This philosophy of ‘personification of nature’ and interdependency of land and human, charges most of her works. It finds relevance in the deepening awareness of the fragility of the earth’s ecology and its grave implications for human survival.

Korff Jens (2021) stresses specifically the importance of studying the aboriginal perspective/worldview relating to Land. In his article “Meaning of land to Aboriginal people”, he argues that the key difference in the relationships people share with the land is rooted in the treatment of land as a ‘source’, which according to him is found in the dependency of a non-indigenous to ‘live off’ the land (land as capital) and the interdependency of the aboriginals to ‘live with’ the land (land as being).

“The latter has a spiritual, physical, social and cultural connection… and a profound spiritual connection to land. Aboriginal law and spirituality are intertwined with the land, the people and creation, and this forms their culture and sovereignty” (para. 1,5).

Obstinately, the two opposing ideas of ‘interdependency’ vs ‘ownership’ have assimilated to form a crude territorial ethno-politics that serve as power politics over eco-centric indigeneity. The gradually shifting matrix of native ‘land ethics’ from eco-centric ontology to a neo-colonial capitalist niche for control and possession are of the few concerns that Dai portrays in her works, in a wrestle to strike a balance between Land as community vs Land as capital. “Tribal modified” (p.175) as expressed in Dai’s Legends of Pensam, points at the change in social order and practices that differ from traditional forms, especially one that relates to concerns of land-human interaction. Referring to the pan-Maori ethnification in Newzealand, Elizabeth Rata (1999), in “Theory of Neotribal Captalism”, points at the various ways in which Maori natives attained legal ownership of land but consequently succumbed to its susceptible capitalization and commodification in strategic ways. Though different in terms of geo-political history, this susceptibility can be understood in the context of the indigenous lands in the Northeast India as well, particularly in the ongoing capitalization and commodification of tribal lands for resource extraction. The seemingly sustainable eco-political modules that aims to hybridize different land ontologies by merging indigenous land-based practices to settler based legal institutions – a situation argued by Burow (2018) as “conceiving of and relating to land, through their own practices and those created by settlers and settler-state institutions” (p.57) – is only begetting a new set of class structure within the indigenous populace. The gradual development of neo-tribal capitalism, that benefits a select few, may be seen as the most violent shift in tribal land ethics. In the wake of the neo-capitalist propagations, as revealed by Binita Kakati (2021), there have been constant alterations to the landscape in the aftermath of the so-called developments:

the valley rang with the sound of explosions – to make new roads into the valley. As we sat listening to birdsong and people’s stories, the deafening explosion felt even louder in the knowledge that nature seems to exist only to be taken. (Kakat, 2021, para 13)

Critiquing the connection between domination of nature and domination of women, Roger King argues that “the failures of moral perception and thought that can be found in the human relation to nature are symptomatic of similar failures to be found in the relations between women and men” (King, 1991, p. 75). While Dai’s The Legends of Pensam traverses towards the agency of ‘change’, Kire actively engages in critiquing the liminalities in this transition. Often invoking gendered codes hidden within the narratives of tribal culture, especially those that deal with the integration of women and nature, tied to their “umbilical chords” (p. 88). Women’s body and the physical manifestation of nature continue to be a recurrent site of resistance to essentialized feminine biologism. This integration is manifested under the traits of procreation and nurture as feminine strength versus feminine ‘essentialism’. In When the River Sleeps (2014) Ville lingers in the comfort of Earth as “mother” (p. 102), “the forest” his “wife” while at the same time the Kirhupfumia stands as antithetical to the conventional notion of motherhood, destined to “never have children” (p. 147) and the “widow-women” (p. 101) guards the river “shouting curses on the two men” (p. 104) for violating the sleeping river. Kire, thus, challenges the notions of feminine essentialism and attempts to break down the essentialized connection of women and nature, affixed in feminine biologism of reproduction and nurture, de-aligning biology as the overseer of women’s lives but social relations (Beauvoir, 2011). Indigenous women’s writings, as also in the works of Dai, tussle against biologic instrumentality of women “like a fermented bean/ left to procreate” (Reena, 2021, p. 45) and the replicating capitalized treatment of nature as an instrumental resource than an inherent being. This idiomatic interconnection of women’s experience to nature and species has been infamously criticized as anti-feminist by feminist scholars, for further grounding the assumed subsidiary position of women and nature to men.

Questioning the pan-cultural tendencies of women’s association to nature, in her article “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture”, Sherry B. Ortner (1974) highlights three ideological categories/tendencies that strengthen the supposed connection of nature and women: 1. Woman’s physiology, seen as closer to nature, 2. Woman’s social role, seen as closer to nature, 3. Woman’s psyche, seen as closer to nature (p. 74-81). Ortner critiques this logic of culture” (p.76) that places women as subordinate to men due to their assumed closeness to nature. However, in the context of Native women’s experience, the association between nature and humans cannot be negated. Nativity is innately linked to land, and indigenous ontologies are derived from and for it. This focus is crucial to dissect as well as identify normative regulations governing indigenous experiences that need to be reevaluated, not with the seee purpose of drawing a relationship between the two but to critique and understand its socio-cultural implications. In her photo-essay-poetry, “No Questions, No Comparisons”, Padu (2021) engages in this dialogue of dissimilarity in women’s experience through her inability to “compare myself with the women who have fought for equal rights and equal wages around the world” (p. 112), explaining women’s emancipatory hurdles arising in different cultural expressions – “I am weighed in numbers of cattle rather than gold” (p. 114). This difference in cultural expression may or may not be a dividing factor in universal concerns about womanhood, but acknowledging indigenous women’s experience is essential to their liberation.

Indigenous Women’s writings echo the ethnopolitical and ecological questions that oust women’s participation in decision making. Karry Padu’s (2021) “I am Property, A Photo essay”, published in Dai’s edited anthology The Inheritance of Words raises questions relevant to Galo women’s political and domestic experience. As it is scarce for women to participate in the public sphere of decision-making, it questions women’s involvement in their “rights under the guidance of a man” (p. 108). Padu confesses her existential ethos on being a “tribal woman” that binds her to “customs and tales of the ancestors” and her expected demeanor as a Galo woman, a “daughter” that “belongs to this land… (who is) its property!” (p.109). This question of ‘belonging to the land as a property’ may take us back to the initial reference made to Leopold’s (1949) criticism of Odysseus who “hanged all on one rope a dozen slave-girls…The girls were property, the disposal of property was then, as now, a matter of expediency, not of right and wrong” (p. 201). The locus of Leopold’s argument is in understanding the expediency of human ethics that he argues should begin to extend its ethical periphery to nature. The viability of this reference strikes the most important question, particularly, in the wake of hybridized tribal nationalism, as to how far has women’s identification with land been altered, both in terms of subjectivity and instrumentality. It taps on the inflexibility of tribal hybridized movement, that seems to be melding the best of both worlds – sustainability of indigenous episteme to the progressiveness of transnationalism yet fails to recognize how indigenous women’s emancipatory issues have been placed at the bottom of the various political expediencies of power and policies of land ownership.

One cannot trace to segregate how social narratives of gendered socio-political dynamics came to existence in indigenous communities. Whether colonial capitalism continues to penetrate tribal ethno-politics or has cultural narratives inherently sanctioned men to be leaders and women, like nature, compliant followers. Both Dai and Kire unceasingly borrow from folk narratives and customs to critique these gender relations, synthesizing cultural histories to critique “The laws of birth, life and death …fixed and unchangeable” (Dai, 2006, p. 77). Traditional narratives navigating women’s rendition are thus embedded in archetypal evidence (universal symbols) as a means of identity construction and are redefined for a rational identification with the modern world.

In Gender and Folk Narratives: Theory and Practice (2013), Neelakshi Goswami talks about three areas of concern in the folkloristic literature; firstly, how women have been portrayed, the second one relates to the questions of women’s aesthetics and the third involves how women have been recognized as artists. Folk narratives connected to the heroic tales of clan-heads revolve around legends of warriors who sacrificed their lives for the protection of their clan. These heroes were projected as symbols of protection, bravery, and authority. The feminine traits, however, projected in the tales of goddesses and fairies as deities of harvest, are symbolic of fertility and prosperity. On cultural identity, philosopher William James argues that identity comprises two modes of thoughts—the ‘paradigmatic mode’ (present) and the ‘narrative mode’. And narratives as ‘modes’ constructing identities “provides models of the world” (qted.in Burner, 1986, p. 25).

Archetypal male figures have often been projected as protectors with the burden of social relations and welfare. In Dai’s The Black Hill (2017) this accounts for the public and political participation of Kajinsha and the male heads of other tribes in their fight against the British to protect their land, while Gimur is found to have been actively involved in settling the trajectories of her private life, as her quest being more domestic than political. Kajinsha becomes a martyr of the clan and Gimur’s misery is manifested through the loss of a child and spouse. The matter of concern here is to understand the public-private dichotomy and the traits of bravery and fertility attached to the concerned ‘subjects’. Evidently, the narratives surrounding gender can control resultant ‘gender performativity’, but more importantly, what remains implicit is the interplay of absent narratives in shaping the symbol of the ‘female subject’. Commenting on the importance of “the public/private debate” as an important trajectory of feminist folklore, Margaret Mill argues that “Women genres can be less public and dramatic and hence less visible compared to male genres…especially personal experiences narratives, tend to flourish in the private domain” (qtd. in Goswami, 2013, p. 7).  The lack of ethnographic narratives that would articulate the possibility of juxtaposing traits of bravery, protection, or public participation to ‘female subject’, makes it nearly impossible for Gimur to be projected as equal to Kajinsha in the public arrangement. What governs Gimur’s character is not evident in what was present in an ancestral past but in the absences and lapses in feminine representation that continue to control and govern the ‘feminine subject’. The “subject” of gender as sites of inquiry ignites numerous questions pertaining to identifying what the subjects signify. “The idea of ‘process’ or ‘becoming’” (Salih, 2007, p. 3) is significantly crucial in understanding subject formation which situates key importance on history to recognize the synthesizers that regulate it (Butler, 2006). Dai’s writings investigate how elements of culture operate and regulate the functioning of the social structure.

The significance of narratives in identity formation as asserted by Burner, is in understanding how “human being achieves (or realizes) the ability not only to mark what is culturally canonical but to account for deviations that can be incorporated in narratives” (Burner, 1987, p. 68). This deviation, found in the critique of fixed cultural edifices, forms an important agency in Indigenous Women’s Writings. The emancipation of ‘self’ combines elements of cultural memory, and socio-political resistance while attempting to identify the codified cultural fetters. This posits, as mentioned earlier, the urgency to theorize a native-feminist discourse that acknowledges ‘experiences’ shaped in lieu of traditional ontologies. Indigenous women’s emancipation can only be achieved by rethinking ‘community’. To rethink the gendered connection to the land and the indigene towards formulating a tribal nationalism, can effectively mark the possibility of distancing from the western notion of tribal sovereignty. This would require building on the “native philosophical concept” of interdependency, as argued by Ramirez, “rather than creating a hierarchy between the group and individual rights, that a respectful interchange between the two can be established” (2007, p. 31).

Declaration of Conflicts of Interests

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

Funding

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

References:

Beauvoir, D. S., Borde, C., & Malovany-Chevallier, S. (2011). The Second Sex (1st ed.). Vintage.

Bruner, J. (1987). Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Harvard University Press.

Burow, P. B., Brock, S., & Dove, M. R. (2018). Unsettling the Land. Environment and Society, 9(1), 57–74. https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2018.090105

Butler, J. (2006). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge Classics) (1st ed.). Routledge.

Cameron, E., de Leeuw, S., & Desbiens, C. (2014). Indigeneity and ontology. Cultural Geographies, 21(1), 19–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474013500229

Dai, M. (2006). Legends of Pensam. Penguin.

Dai, M. (2009). Stupid Cupid. Penguin Random House India.

Dai, M. (2017). Black Hill. Aleph Book Company.

Dai, M. (2021). The Inheritance of Words: Writings from Arunachal Pradesh. Zubaan Books.

Fabricant, N. (2018). The Indigenous Studies Turn. In J. Poblete (Ed.), New Approaches to Latin American Studies (pp. 128–143). Routledge.

Goswami, N., & Sarma, P. M. (2013). Gender in Folk Narratives. Macmillan Publishers.

Kakati, Binita. (2021, September 7). Conflict and development in Northeast India. Transnational

Institute. Retrieved February 20, 2022, from https://www.tni.org/en/article/conflict-and-

development-in-northeast-india

King, R. J. (1991). Caring about Nature: Feminist Ethics and the Environment. Hypatia, 6(1), 75–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1991.tb00210.x

Kire, E. (2014). When the River Sleeps. Zubaan Books.

Korff, J. C. S. (2021, September 2). Meaning of land to Aboriginal people. Creative Spirits. https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/land/meaning-of-land-to-aboriginal-people#fnref2

Kwaymullina, A. (2005). Seeing the Light: Aboriginal Law, Learning and Sustainable Living in Country. Indigenous Law Bulletin, 6(11). http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/IndigLawB/2005/27.html

Leopold, A. (1949). The Land Ethics. In A Sand County Almanac AND SKETCHES HERE AND THERE (pp. 201–204). Oxford University Press.

Ortner, S. B. (1974). Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture? In M. Z. Rosaldo & L. Lamphere (Eds.), Woman, culture, and society (pp. 74–81). CA: Standford University Press.

Padu, K. (2021). I Am Property: A Photo Essay. In M. Dai (Ed.), The Inheritance of Words: Writings

from Arunachal Pradesh (pp. 108–116). Zubaan Publishers.

Ramirez, R. (2007). Race, Tribal Nation, and Gender: A Native Feminist Approach to Belonging. Meridians, 7(2), 22–40. https://doi.org/10.2979/mer.2007.7.2.22

Rata, E. (1999). The Theory of Neotribal Capitalism. Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 22(3), 231–288. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40241459

Reena, N. (2021). My Ane’s Tribal Love Affair. In M. Dai (Ed.), The Inheritance of Words: Writings from Arunachal Pradesh (pp. 43–48). Zubaan Publishers.

Salih, S. (2007). Judith Butler (Routledge Critical Thinkers) (1st ed.). Routledge.

Shanley, K. (1984). Thoughts on Indian Feminism. In B. Brant (Ed.), In a Gathering of Spirit: Writing and Art by North American Indian Women (p. 215). ME: Sinister Wisdom Books.

Karyir Riba is a Research Scholar in the Department of English at the North-eastern Hill University, Shillong, Meghalaya. She specialises in interdisciplinary and comparative literary studies. Her area of research and interest include Folk Literature, Indigenous Women’s Writings, and contemporary discourses on Indigenous Studies.

Indigenous Ontology in Zo Oral Narratives: A Study of the Zo Indigenous Cosmovision

//
722 views

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

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

First published: June 24, 2022 | AreaNortheast India | LicenseCC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
Full-Text HTML Full-Text PDF Cite
PlumX Metrics

Abstract

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

Keywords: indigenous ontology, Zo, folklore, decolonising          

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zo Cosmovision

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

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

Man as a Spiritual Being

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

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

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

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

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

Thuaiting leh Ngambawm

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

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

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

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

Concept of Power and the Love of Less

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Declaration of Conflicts of Interests

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

Funding

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

References

Amin, Samir. (1988). Eurocentricism: Modernity, Religion, and Democracy: A Critique of Eurocentricism and Culturalism. Monthly Review Press. New York.

Carey, Bertram S and Tuck, H.N. (1896). The Chin Hills. Cultural Publishing House.

Cameron, E., de Leeuw and Desbiens, C. (2014). Indigeneity and ontology. Cultural Geographies, 21(1), 19-26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26168538

Devy, G.N. (2002). Painted Words: Anthology of Tribal Literature. Penguin Books.

Escobar, A. (2007). The “Ontological Turn” in Social Theory. A Commentary on “Human Geography without Scale”, by Sallie Marston, John Paul Jones II and Keith Woodward.   Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32(1), 106-111. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4640003

Go, Khup Za. (2008). Zo Chronicles: A Documentary Study of History and Culture of the Kuki-Chin-Lushai Tribes. New Delhi. Mittal Publications.

Mignolo, Walter P. (2007). ‘Delinking’. Cultural Studies. 21:2, 449-514 Routledge.

Park, G. Kerlin (2020, October 29). animism. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/animism

Peterson, Jordan B (1999). Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. Canada. Routledge

Sharma, Ram Nath (1981). Philosophy of Religion. Meerut. Kedar Nath Ram Nath Publishers.

Simpson, B Leanne. (2011). Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re- Creation. Arbister Ring Publishing.

Singkhawkai (1995). Zo People and their culture: A historical, cultural study and critical analysis of Zo and its ethnic tribes. Manipur, India. Khampu Hatzaw.

Tedim, n.d. Omniglot. https://omniglot.com/writing/tedim.htm

Tylor, B. Edward (1889). Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom. New York. Henry and Holt Company.

Thanmawia, R.L and Ralte, Rualzakhumi. (2017). Mizo Folktales. 3-2, 28-29. Sahitya Akademi

Vaiphei, Kamminlun. (2015). Folktales of the Vaiphei. Partridge India

Vumzon, Zo. (1986). Zo History. Self- Published      

Wales, Horace Geoffrey Quatritch (1953). The Mountain of God: A Study in Early Religion and Kingship. Indiana University, B. Quatritch

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

Topophrenia and Indigenous Belonging: Spatial Memory in Rajbanshi Poetry

/
865 views

Gunajeet Mazumdar

Manikpur Anchalik College (Gauhati University), Assam. ORCID: 0000-0003-4711-4825. Email: mazumdargunajeet@gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages: 1-11. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne16

First published: June 23, 2022 | AreaNortheast India | LicenseCC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
Extract Full-Text PDF Cite
PlumX Metrics

Abstract

Space and Memory are co-related as memory imbibes historical roots to a space with the process of recreation. Arguing the concept of Spatiality, Geocritc Robert Tally coins the word ‘Topophrenia’ to locate “the subjective engagement with a given place and with the possible projection of alternative spaces” (Chap. 1). Here, Tally argues the idea of subjectivity both with the ontological and imaginary places. These dialectics of space are imbibed in the individual and collective memory of the Koch Rajbanshi people with historical consciousness. With this historical consciousness, Koch Rajbanshi Poets from the undivided Koch Kamata Kingdom write poems imbibing strong memory associated with the spaces- both real and imaginary. Koch Rajbanshi Poetry has a profound legacy of the glorious history and culture of the community in South East Asian nations. Due to Geo-political bifurcations of the nations, the greater Koch Kingdom was merged with the other states and nations. Consequently, liminal political boundaries displaced and scattered people giving different identities and marginalizing their own indigenous epistemology. As Rajbanshi is a major community of the modern states of Assam and Meghalaya, the canon of Rajbanshi literature with its own identity also comes under the purview of North East Literature. The colonial knowledge system in the new geopolitical space subjugates their rich epistemological and ontological presence. This paper attempts to argue that Rajbanshi Poetry shares a collective memory to assert their historical consciousness by reclaiming their right to the lost land and epistemology. While upholding the argument, Robert Tally’s idea of spatiality, Walter Mignolo’s concept of colonial knowledge system and Leanne Simpson’s argument of Land as pedagogy will be problematised.

Keywords– Spatial, Memory, Koch Rajbanshi, Epistemology, Ontology, Land.

Introduction:

Space and Memory are co-related as memory imbibes historical roots to a space with the process of recreation. Geocritic Robert Tally (2019) coins the word ‘Topophrenia’ to locate “the subjective engagement with a given place and with the possible projection of alternative spaces” (Chap. 1). Here, Tally argues the idea of subjectivity both with the ontological and imaginary places. This subjective engagement, however, occurs through mnemonic representation. Memory as a process of recreation has thus subjective occupation over both the real and imaginary spaces. According to Susannah and Hodgkin (2003), “Memory that is like subjectivity means different things and is understood in different ways of different times” (p. 2). The contemporary mode of memory studies however extends its periphery “not only on individual, private memory but on historical, social, cultural and popular too” (Susannah and Hodgkin, 2003, p. 2). Richard Terdiman (2003) configures memory with space as “memory is so constitutive, so indispensable to our intellectual and practical activity to begin with that every cognitive and discursive act or fact is already tangled up in the memories of realm” (p. 186). This entanglement of memory with space acts as means to look back historical root. As Tally observes the dialectics of ontological and imaginary places, these dialectics of spaces are also imbibed in the individual and collective memory of Koch Rajbanshi people with a historical consciousness. With this historical consciousness, Koch Rajbanshi poets from undivided Koch Kamata Kingdom which comprises parts of Assam, North Bengal, parts of Eastern Bihra, Southern districts of Nepal (Jhapa, Morang and Sunsari districts and Rangpur / present Bangladesh, write poems imbibing strong memory associated with the spaces — both real and imaginary. Koch Rajbanshi poetry has a profound legacy of the glorious history and culture of the community in South East Asian nations. Due to the geo-political bifurcations of the erstwhile Kamata kingdom, the greater Koch Kingdom was merged with other states and nations. Consequently, liminal political boundaries displaced and scattered people giving different identities and marginalizing their own indigenous epistemology. These unwanted political bifurcations disfigured the cartography of Kamata kingdom by dehistoricising their rich historical, political and cultural configurations. Noted author Arup Jyoti Das (2011) writes:

The Kamata Kingdom of the 16th century, which has been referred to as Koch Kingdom in most of the history books and also as Koch Kamata by a few local scholars, went through various names and settled as Cooch Behar (Koch Bihar) and became princely state of British India in the 18th century, Cooch Behar was merged with West Bengal in   1950as a district against the will of the local people of Cooch Behar. (p. 24).

In this way, the rich historical map of Koch Kamata Kingdom was disfigured into only some liminal spaces and the reason was the hegemony and tactics of some newly decolonized agencies which further resulted in the unprecedented geopolitical changes in the landscape of Kamatapur. In this context, Gautam Chandra Roy writes:

The territorialisation of the landscape in the line with requirements of the modern nation state in the colonial period followed by the partition of the Indian subcontinent in1947 scattered and reduced the ‘traditional home’ of the community into the peripheries of three independent countries of South Asia, namely India, Bangladesh and Nepal. (Para.1).

Accordingly, if one looks at the transformation in the conditions of Rajbanshis in these new geopolitical spaces the presence of the Rajbanshi community has been subjugated and disfigured. Jyotirmoy Prodhani (2021) in fact calls this disfiguration as “culturally disabled collective” (p. 225).  The bifurcation of Kamata Kingdom between Assam and West Bengal also subjugates the positions of Rajbanshi people as marginalized subjects of border space. The Rajbanshis in the postcolonial space of Assam and West Bengal, have been subjected to a process of dehistoricisation “through discursive strategies of dislocations” (Prodhani, p.242). He cites the burning of the Royal Records room and the records of Land Reform office on 28th August, 1974 at Coochbehar in West Bengal as some of the physical modes of historical annihilation. In the states of West Bengal and Assam, it is also seen that the history of Kamata Kingdom is not given much importance as well as in the mainstream socio-political and cultural discourses; rather, the historical traditions of Rajbanshi community were subjugated to the epistemic dominance of monolithic histories. What is more striking is that in Assam, according to Prodhani (2021), “history has been adopted as a ‘historicist’1 tool as well to accomplish the task of “displacing the Koch Rajbanshis from the spaces of legitimations” (p. 242).

Rajbanshi poetry has its root in the folk and oral traditions of the community but modern Rajbanshi Poetry evolves as a result of the historical consciousness of the community. Along with the lure of folk traditions, modern Rajbanshi Poetry imbibes strong memory associated with the cultural and historical geography of the Kamata Kingdom. Panchanan Barma, the precursor of the Khastriya movement of the Rajbanshis, is regarded as the first modern and realist poet of Rajbanshi literature. His poem “Dangdhari Mao” was a protest poem against the frequent incidents of atrocities faced by Rajbanshi women in Rangpur district of present Bangladesh. Thus, modern Rajbanshi poetry contests against their lost spaces and epistemology in the new geo-political locations of the postcolonial map, such as the modern Rangpur district of Bangladesh, Nepal, Bihar, West Bengal and Assam where the community share a common memory of the aspiration to reclaim their lost land and history.

Topophrenic Memory:

‘Topophrenic Memory’ can be understood in terms of mnemonic representation of ontological and imaginary places as ‘topophrenia’ means “subjective engagement with a given place and the possibility projection of alternative spaces” (Tally, 2019, Chap. 1). This subjective engagement takes place through the interplay between ‘lived space’ and ‘abstract space’ and according to Tally, “topophrenia remains with humanity at all times: a constant and uneasy ‘placemindedness’ that characterizes a subject’s interactions with his or her environment… (Tally, Intro). Tally’s engaging with the idea of ‘lived space’ explores the subject’s entanglement and encounter with the spaces. In this interrelation of space and memory, ‘topophrenia’ also propels the idea of a sense of belongingness to a place and defines the matters of “displacement and replacement, of movement between places and over spaces, and of the multifarious relations among place, space, individuals, collectiveness, events and so on…” (Tally, Intro). These entanglements among the place and persons are mappable through the process of re-creational memory associated with the lived experience of place. Tally (2019) also speaks about ‘effects of place on persons’ (Chap. 1) and according to him, “Mapping makes visible places, and, is what might seem to be a circular logic, being mapped in what in many respects establishes a place as a place” (Chap. 1). This idea of mapping a place in the literary domain undergoes the process of rejuvenation of lived memory as well as the literalization of speculative alternative memory.

The component of spatial memory is a vital lens to approach Rajbanshi poetry it imbibes strong memories rooted in the indigenous spaces that poems transgress through the subjective entanglement with the places. The regimes of memory associated with these spaces again confront the dialectics of real and imaginary places. This binary of real and imaginary spatial memory however transforms from the subjective to the objective affiliation, that is the sense of collective consciousness and belongingness for the spaces. Tally (2019) also argues that “a place is apprehended by subjectivity”, but it can also be understood “in reference to a non-or suprasubjective ensemble of spatial relations” (Chap.1). It suggests that spatial relations transform from subjectivity to objectivity and this subjective vis-a-vis objective entanglement of place with the individual is mappable in literary texts through the medium of re-creational memory. The modern Rajbanshi poetry also engrosses with this politics of drawing ontological and imaginary places of Rajbanshi consciousness through the linkages of spatial memory.

Dwijendra Nath Bhakat, a prominent scholar and poet from Dhubri in Assam, draws on the strong memory of subjective entanglement with the places which transform from being individual to collective memories. To start with his poem “Gauripur Madhupur”, one can visualize the co-relation between space and memory. The poem converges two places from two different political maps of modern India with poetical retention of the historic linkages of these locales. Despite having the modern political boundary between these two places, they are still culturally aligned to each other and people from both sides feel a sense of belongingness to the space on the other side. While explaining the concept of ‘topophrenia’, Tally points out how it propels the idea of a ‘sense of belongingness to a place’ and comments on the existential notion of displacement and replacement (Chap. Intro). The political dislocations of these two spaces in terms of liminal political boundaries also give the subjects the experience of pain and agonies. Decolonial critic Walter Mignolo’s (2000) proposition on ‘border epistemology’ (p. 52) can be brought here to substantiate the argument. Mignolo, while dealing with the idea of border epistemology, argues that indigenous stories can be located in the border spaces which are often the ‘forgotten stories’ because of the ‘global design’ that are the histories of the dominant groups (p. 52).  It is seen that Rajbanshi poetry also vindicates the memory of lived experience of these forgotten spaces. Bhakat recreates the memory of the spaces associated with the cultural and historical legacy of Koch Kamata Kingdom. His poem “Gauripur” shows affiliations with memories of the historical spaces such as Gauripur, Gadadhar, Lau Khowa, Rajbari, Matibagh. In fact, the poet glorifies ‘Gauripur’ as a site of history with the process of re-creational memory which is a collective spatial consciousness of the community itself:

Hail O Gauripur

At the Vehemence

Of the roaring thunder

                 (Trans.  J. Prodhani, 2021, p. 53)

The re-creational process of spatial memory of the places of Rajbanshi historical consciousness subsumes Tally’s idea of ‘Topophelia’ as an offshoot of ‘Topophrenia’.  which suggests the sense of belongingness to and fondness of a place. ‘Topophilia’ and ‘Topophobia’ are two paradigms of topophrenic memory. Whereas Topophilia suggests love for a place, Topophobia means fear for a place (Tally, 2019, Chap. 1). The present poem, “Gauripur”, similarly, incorporates both this topophilic and topophobic memories associated with the historic place of Gauripur as the poem visualizes Rajbnshi people’s intense love for the place and at the same time fear of its disfiguration. The poem concludes with an expression of agony and crisis as the poet has a serious fear of Gauripur’s degeneration:

Is the new age of Gauripur

Full of turncoats

Watch the show

As mute spectators

(Trans.  Prodhani, 2021,p 53)

In a similar note, ‘Topophrenia’ which locates subjective engagement with the real and imaginary places, Rajbanshi poems also encounter both the real and imaginary locales. However, in the case of Rajbanshi poetry, it can be argued that there is a contestation of the same space with the changes in the semantics of time. For example, the cartographic map of Cooch Behar was earlier a real phenomenon but the same map is now only in the consciousness and imagination of the Rajbanshi people. However, Rajbanshi poetry also takes a political stance through this contestation between the real and the imagined in order to get back to the real. Jatin Barma’s poem “The Coochbehar Palace” reflects this anxiety:

The majestic Coochbehar Palace

Stares vacantly like an abandoned orphan

      (Trans. Prodhani,  p. 71)

The stanza is important in terms of interrogation of the real and the imagined space. The poet begins it with the glory of the historic monument of Koch Kamata kingdom by calling Coochbehar Palace as ‘majestic’, but at the same moment, the poet is able to visualize the present reality of the same Palace and accentuates the term majestic by lamenting that it is just his imagined subjectivity which compels him to exclaims with sorrow that the palace now ‘stares vacantly like an abandoned orphan’.  Similarly, in the poem “For You O My Love-I”, Jatin Barma mentions historic city Cooch Behar as a ‘manicured’ and ‘forgotten city’ of “Madhupur” (p. 73). The city, being the capital of historic Koch Kamata Kingdom, has a profound sense of association with the Rajbanshi consciousness but strikingly, this place is forgotten and abandoned as a frontier space bifurcated and truncated. Due to its frontier re-location, the city now lies in an ‘in-between space’, what Edward Soja would call the ‘Trialectical’ (qtd. in Tally, 2019 ).

The idea of ‘Trialectical’ can be understood in terms of “conception, perception and experience of space that posited real and imagined space” (qtd. in Tally, 2019). While defining the production of space, French philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1991) propounds the idea of the ‘spatial triad’ which comprises three categories of spatial dynamics—spatial practice, representations of space, and representational space (pp. 38-39). These three categories of space can be visualised as perceived, abstract, and lived spaces. Spatial critic Soja later, while developing these spatial offshoots, brings out the proposition of ‘Trialectical’  by putting forward another notion of space what he called the ‘Thirdspace’  which argues about the existence of a middle space thereby dismantling the binary of “subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete , the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconsciousness, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history” (qtd. in Tally, 2019). The cartographic disfiguration of Koch Kamata Kingdom also compels the Rajbanshi community to confront these multilayered spaces and to live in the void of the middle space — the ‘third space’. Rajbanshi poetry brings on the memory of these experiences of living in this intermediate empty space.

The periphery of space cannot be defined as a fixed location as it also extends its boundaries to other forms of spaces such as buildings, monuments, rooms, landscapes etc. Gaston Bachelard (2014) defines a house as “a privileged entity for a phenomenological study of the intimate values of inside space” (p. 25) and also associates it with a “community of memory and image” (p. 27). The faculty of memory related to space incorporates these material objects of space. Rajbanshi poetry also engages this kind of spatial memory in their writing process. In this context, the reign of Kamata Kingdom, especially the reign of Koch King Naranarayan, can be revisited as a remarkable juncture for the vibrant royal patronage and affiliations provided to the institutes of culture and learning. His patronage of Sankardeva for the promotion of the Neo-Vaishnavite faith and culture of learning marked his greatness as a King and a lover of knowledge. This Neo-Vaishnavite culture later played a crucial role in the formation of the greater Assamese society and identity, which also made a strong presence in the Rajbanshi consciousness. However, the Madhupur Satra, established by Sankardev with the royal grants from Maharaj Naranarayan in the Koch capital of Cooch Behar was a major centre of learning and production of several vaishnavite and cultural texts, is now a neglected abode both by the Bengal and Assam Governments. Ironically, the Koch Rajbanshis whose king was the most important patron of the Vaishnavite tradition, once in the famous Barpeta Satra was a very painful humiliation for the Rajbanshis as it was the king of the Koches, Maharaj Naranaryan who had patronised Sankardeva (See Das, 2011, p. 72). As structural and cultural spaces, the Vaishnavite Satras and the Namghars made great contributions to the socio-cultural milieu of Kamatapur, The Satras and Namghars are part of the cultural history and also have mnemonic associations with the community that is reflected in one of the poems by Dwijendranath Bhakat:

The howling of the fox, Na Satra

Rajahuwa Satra Reverred Bapus

And Ais

Nagara Thiyo Naam Kushan Dotora Sonarai, Padma Puran

The fair of Dol jatra Ashtami snan

                                             (“Shattered by Many a Moon”, Trans.  J. Prodhani,  2021, p. 54)

Land and Memory:

Land is the most important space for indigenous community in which their own civilization and culture grows. The notion of indigeneity is always associated with the land where the history of that indigenous community lies. For this reason, land as a spatial entity has an intimate association with the memories of a community. The concept of land should be looked at from more comprehensive perspectives­ that would include language, culture, nationality and historical legacies rooted in the ‘Land’. The scattered and displaced people of Rajbanshi community also carry forward the memories associated with their native land which include both pleasant and haunting experiences. Whereas pleasant memories bring about the glorious historical and cultural legacy of the community, haunting memories strike with the bitter experience of unwanted bifurcations and the experience of subjugation in their native land.

Walter Mignolo (2007) defines ‘modernity’ “as a European narrative that hides its darker side of ‘coloniality’ (p. 39). Against this notion of modernity along with the coloniality which are seemingly pointed out as ‘European agenda’ (Mignolo, 2007, p. 39), the process of decolonization started aiming at the formation of one’s own national identity. Mignolo (2007) also calls it ‘decolonial modernity’ (p. 42). But, the striking point is that within the formation of nationalistic identity in the decolonial process, the newly transferred centres of powers with the discourse of modernity exclude and marginalize various indigenous entities with a fresh process of homogenization and appropriation. After the bifurcation of the political geography of Kamatapur, the Rajbanshis have been encountering politics of exclusion in the wake of the rapid process of postcolonial modernity. This process of exclusion within their geopolitical space brings ontological and existential threats as their right to their land begins to dislodge. Rajbanshi poetry manifests an eager urgency to act for an assertive reclamation:

We want to proclaim our identity

To proclaim as denizens called Kamatapuri

Kamatapur, the name of the country

Kamatapur, the name of our land

                    (“As We Search for Our Roots”, Ramola Ray Sarkar.  Trans. Prodhani, p. 168)

The Rajbanshi community had a primordial bonding with the soil of their belonging. Before the political dislocation of the Koch Kamata Kingdom, the community facilitated an original form of belonging to their land which was later dismantled through colonial strategies; however, the land of historic Kamatapur continues to be in the memory of the Rajbanshi community. Ramola Ray Sarkar’s poem asserts this autochthonous claim for their lost land of ‘Kamatapur’ and identity as ‘Kamatapuri’ through the re/creational process of memory. Similarly, Ramkanta Ray’s poem “This Land, this People” metaphorically expresses this sense of dislocation off their native land and at the same time attempts to recuperate from this trauma of loss:

No, I don’t want anything else

The fecund field of my adolescence

The green expanse of emptiness

                                                                                (Trans. P. Acharya, 2021, p. 78)

 In Rajbanshi epistemology, the concept of land is not taken simply as a place to live; rather their land as a native entity that absorbs a significant space. Not only does it have the forest, the rivers and even wetlands as components of the landscape, it also occupies an important place in the indigenous knowledge system of the community. The Rajbanshi socio-cultural legacy includes all forms of human and non-human entities of lives within the same enclosure of Rajbanshi epistemology which can be seen from a posthumanist perspective. Prodhani, in his poem, “Gadadhar”, draws on spatial memory associated with his ancestral place, the people and the native lore and depicts how the river ‘Gangadhar’ occupies as important a space as the other human entities in their lives. Here, it is important to note that despite the river Gangadhar’s grandeur, the river does not figure in the mainstream narratives on river of Assam for it is at the frontier of both geography and imagination of Assam. The poet’s recollection of memory associated with the river Gangadhar is also a kind of an attempt to reclaim the receding history and culture of the community. Rajbanshi poet D. N.  Bhakat also brings his personal memory associated with some wetlands such as ‘Ekshia’ and ‘Singimari Beel’. These wetlands of their native land intertwined and entangled with the collective memory of the Rajbanshi folk.

The poetical body of Rajbanshi poetry also entangles memory of their native land as a medium of preservation and reclamation of indigenous epistemology. The poets understand that in order to reclaim identity and right to their lost land, the reinvention of indigenous epistemology (rooted in land) is important. Decolonial critic Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2014) argues that for dismantling settler colonialism, academia should make conscious decision to introduce intellectual lives of the indigenous people protecting the source of knowledge which is the indigenous land (p. 22). In this regard, Simpson (2014) also mentions critic Deloria’s comment, “Indigenous education is not indigenous or education from within our intellectual traditions unless it comes through land, unless it occurs in an indigenous context using indigenous process” (p. 9).

Simpson’s argument that indigenous education comes through land can be argued by showing the historic link of land with indigeneity. In order to sustain and reclaim indigenous epistemology, indigenous pedagogy should be land based and there should be serious endeavour to bring it in the academic system of the nation. Rajbanshi poetry also delineates the epistemological traditions of the community rooted in their native land. The colonial knowledge system in the new geopolitical space subjugated the rich epistemology of the community. Therefore, modern Rajbanshi poetry can be seen as an attempt to retrace the indigenous epistemological traditions of the community in retrospect through the intertwining of memory with that of the native land. A poem by Santosh Sinha expresses that urge of cultural epistemology:

Go near the land

The land can unravel you the secret roots of real raptures

                                               (“Go Near the Land”,  Santosh Sinha. Trans. Prodhani,  p. 108)

This retrospection through memory in connection with land in Rajbanshi poetry explores indigenous root of the community located in the pre-bifurcated Koch Kamata Kingdom. For the community, their native land is the source of their indigenous epistemology as their land bears the memory of the ancestors for generations:

This land is nothing but gold

Its dust is nurtured by ancestor’s grail,

Seven generations old

               (“Splashing Tales of Flowing Water”, Kamalesh Sarkar. Trans. Prodhani, p. 67)

The rich land based indigenous knowledge system of Koch Rajbanshi community is passing through generations and Rajbanshi poetry imbibes such mnemonic representation to uphold the identity of the community:

My father gave me the plough

And asked to hold it tight

                              (“The Plough and the Saplings”, J. Prodhani. Trans. Self, 2021. p. 207)

This conceptualization of memory is not simply an individual experience; rather, it can be seen as a collective memory of the community as this conceptualization focuses on the idea of holding ‘land’ handed down by the forebears.

The indigenous language of a community has a profound sense of bonding with the native land. The Rajbanshi language along with its literature and culture has its roots in the native land of the community. But, the colonial policies in the new geopolitical space also vanquished their linguistic and cultural identity by homogenizing the language as a sub-standard dialect of other major languages. In modern India, the language is not constitutionally recognized and it is taken as a dialect or a sub-standard language despite its own independency and rich philology. There were scholars like Khan Choudhury Amanatullah Ahmed, Panchanan Barma, Gauri Nath Shastri, Australian scholar, Matthew Toulman and many others who argued in favour of the independency of Rajbanshi language and script (see Prodhani, p. 231). The practice of writing modern Rajbanshi poetry can also be regarded as an act of protest against this linguistic imperialism as well as an appeal to get back to their epistemological heritage. Hence, Rajbanshi poetry also imbibes the memory of their linguistic and cultural heritage:

We have our own heritage

Script, words and language

Literature and culture, so much great

                              (“As We Search for Our Roots”,  Ramola Ray Sarkar. Trans. Prodhani, p. 167)

The indigenous knowledge system of a community generally lies in the oral and folk tradition and the Koch Rajbanshi community has a rich and vast treasure of oral traditions such as folk songs and performances. The views of Ivanna Yi (2016) on Native American oral tradition are pertinent here:

Storying the land by the indigenous people of the Americas works against the geographical and linguistic violence that began with Columbus. This practice traverses the pre-colonial past and the present…. ( Para. 3).

As discussed, Rajbanshi poetry has its origin in the folk traditions of the community and modern Rajbanshi poetry also draws on those folk legacies. Many Rajbanshi poems carry forward these nuances of oral traditions in terms of mnemonic representation by indulging in the exercise of reviving the receding landscape by retrieving the folk figures like ‘Mahut Bondhu’ and the folk ritualistic performance, ‘Hudum Deo’.  Kumar Sauvik’s poem “Sobhalata’s Letter” attempts to retrace the markers of such a landscape and its turmoils. While arguing the land based pedagogical concept, L Simpson (2014) also exemplifies Nisshnaabeg oral stories which are passed down to new generations who have learnt from parents and grandparents (p. 19). Phoolti Abo, the traditional shaitol singer, (an oral folk narrative) has been a custodian of such folk pedagogy (see Acharaya & Prodhani,  p. 258). She also underlines the changing dimensions of land:

Since then

There are so many changes in this land

(“Phoolti Abo’s Tale-II”, Phoolti Gidali. Trans. Prodhani,  p. 92)

Tally describes ‘topophrenia’ as the subjective engagement with space. Rajbanshi poetry, in a significant way, delineates subjective interactions, entanglement, and encounters with the lived experience of geo-historical and geopolitical spaces essentially linked with land which is not only a source of their sense of belonging and source but also a part of their cultural pedagogy.

Declaration of Conflicts of Interests

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

Funding

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

Note

  1. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2007) in his Provincialisng Europe refers to John Stuart Mill’s essays, “On Liberty” and “On Representative Government” where Mill made the ‘historicist’ argument that the Indians and the Africans were not yet civilized enough to rule themselves justifying to keep them in the ‘waiting room of history’. (see Prodhani, 2021, p 234-235)

References:                

Acharaya, Pradip and Prodhani, Jyotirmoy (2021). This Land This People: Rajbanshi Poems in Translation. MRB Publishers.

Bachelard, Gaston (2014). The Poetics of Space. (M, Jolas, Trans.). Penguin Books.

Das, Arup Jyoti (2011). Kamatapur and Koch Rajbanshi imagination. Montage Media.

Lefebvre, Henri (1991). The Production of Space. (DN Smith, Trans.). Blackwell.

Mignolo, Walter D (2000). Local Histories/ Global Designs. Princeton University Press.

Mignolo, Walter D (2007). “Coloniality: The Darker Side of Modernity”. In Cultural Studies, Vol-21, No-2-3.

Prodhani, Jyotirmoy (2021). “Resonance of Liminal Identity in Rajbanshi Poetry”.  In Acharaya   and Prodhani’s This Land This People: Rajbanshi Poems in Translation. MRB Publishers.

Radston, Susannah & Hodgkin, Katharine (Eds.). (2003). Regimes of Memory. Routledge.

Roy, Gautam Chandra (2020). “Negotiating with the Changing landscape: The Case of the    Rajbanshi Community”. In Economic and Political Weekly (online). Vol-55, Issue No-39, 26th September.

Simpson, L Betasamosake (2014). “Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation”. In Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Vol-3, pp-1-25.

Tally, Jr Robert T (2019). TOPOPHRENIA: Place, Narrative and the Spatial Imagination. Indiana University. Ebook, Kindle edition.

  DO1-4417580-6053436.https://amzn.in/czupt26

Terdiman, Richard (2003). “Given Memory”. In Radstone & Hodgkin (Eds.). Regimes of    Memory. Routledge.

Yi, Ivanna (2016). “Cartographies of the Voice: Storying the Land as Survivance in Native American Oral Traditions”. In MDPI Journal (Online), Vol-5, Issue-3.mdpi.com.

Gunajeet Mazumdar is an Assistant Professor of English at Manikpur Anchalik College, Asssam He completed his M.Phil on Eco-consciousness studies in the poetry of Mamang Dai and currently he is pursuing his doctoral research in the area of Afghan-American Fiction. He is also a teacher member of the Academic Council of Gauhati University. His area of research interest includes Green Studies, American Literature, Performance Studies and Writings from Northeast India.