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POST script
JUNE 10, 2012

SEVEN SISTERS

NELit review

FIFTH WALL
UDDIPANA GOSWAMI
Literary Editor

Narratives of marginality
The creative force driving contemporary writing redefines identity and marginality, writes Kailash C Baral

FRONTIS PIECE
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I
A look within

HIS issue of NELit review has been in the pipeline for a long time now ever since we raised certain thoughts regarding Writing the Northeast with the second issue of our literary review in November 2011. That was mostly a view from outside the region, with Preeti Gill, commissioning editor of Zubaan, telling our readers what the voices from the region mean to her. Zubaan was the first mainland publisher of non-academic books to have a dedicated series on Northeast writings in academics, the distinction goes to SAGE perhaps. Other publishers have followed suit, and how! The interest in reading the Northeast is growing and we have, of late, become quite the rage, the fashion really. Between exploring diverse other themes, we wanted to follow up that second issue with selections from and overviews of writings from all the states of the region. With our 3 June focus on the literature of Arunachal Pradesh, we have wrapped up the first series of our state-wise spotlight. But what we discovered in the course of doing this series is that there seems to be a huge gap between the considerable body of literature being produced in the numerous local languages and their reach beyond a limited sphere, even within their own states. Garo literature from Meghalaya, for instance, has hardly any reach in the Khasi Hills. Even in Assam, how many of us do keep track of developments in Bodo or Mising or Karbi literatures? Given the immense linguistic diversity, the only way to ensure that these rich literatures do travel around is through translation between the various languages of the region and into English. Some publishing houses like Anwesha in Assam have taken up the task of translating between the Northeast languages, and many in the mainland are now showing keen interest in translating our oral and written literatures into English. But they are likely to face the same problems that we did at NELit review: of finding English translators for so many of the languages of the Northeast. Thus, very few titles in languages other than the ones dominant in the seven states have made it to their lists. On the one hand, this has promoted writers in English from being treated as an insignificant minority within the region till only a few years back, they have now become the representative voices from the region and are being read and widely heard. At the same time, it has also placed upon them the heavy responsibility whether they want it or not of being embedded in their roots. This issue of NELit review is a look at Northeast Indian writing from their point of view, a view from within. It is in a sense a foil to that second issue the view from without but it is in no way a comprehensive view. We would like to consider it as a significant pause, a thoughtful place from which to continue our assay into the various questions dogging those who fall under/deal with this new rubric of Northeast Indian Writing, for the present, in English. Two respected academics of the region address our concerns here, while two well-known writers from Assam take us along on personal journeys. We hope to go travelling with writers from other parts of the region soon. T

N contemporary critical-theoretical debates, the term margin has assumed crucial importance setting forth a string of questions: Who is the marginal and what are the conditions of marginality? Who marginalises whom and how? How does silence come to speech and what linguistic register does it select in providing depth and dimension to the tone and tenor of narratives of marginality? Does it seek a voice of its own in terms of difference alone, or is it always a voice of protest? Is marginality also a feature of literature? If so, in what way(s)? Does it underline the authors location, his/her identity and socio-cultural background, or does it connote a political conundrum identifying the relationship between the centre and its periphery, or is it about other differentiated markers such as ethnic or linguistic identities and the politics about them? In whatever way we look at marginality, as a fact of life and living, marginality was, is and will always be with us in diverse forms. It is part of similarity as well as difference; in overcoming marginality we create new marginals hence the process goes on. Issues of identity and difference are key components of the discourse on marginality. At a basic level, marginality, as a condition, is part of an individuals or a communitys experience under different socio-political and economic regimes. Such a condition necessitates looking at the self, its location, and the structures of power in which it is implicated. The Northeast, considered a marginal geographical space, is as diverse as India itself in terms of linguistic, cultural, and ethnic representation. The term Northeast is both a trope and a trap that requires a sustained effort to understand the diversity of representation of its people and their cultures. Identities in the Northeast are mostly constructed around ethnicity and ethno-nationalism. The politics of identity, therefore, centralises difference as the most important marker recognising cultural, racial and linguistic differences of which an identity is a product. In search of a voice of its own, the marginal resorts to many modes of articulation. Literature, as one of the modes of articulation, recovers and reconstructs identities in the context of the Northeast. For decades others have written about the people of Northeast, but now there are local voices who write about themselves and their cultures thereby marking their works with a deep sense of authenticity. The emerging authors from the Northeast have articulated their unique cultural experiences in many voices, a plurality that seeks to represent marginality as a socio-historical condition through literary representation. Although individualistic in their narrative styles, the emerging writers also collectively represent what could be called the ethos of the region that underscores their shared history and political destiny. The land mass of the Northeast has existed for centuries

ACROSS the genres, in the emerging literature from the Northeast, there is an appeal for bonding in the shared experience of pain and loss
to trade, to bring home women to nurture their seed. Later came the British With gifts of bullets, blood money And religion. A steady conquest to the sound of Guns began. Quite suddenly, the British left. There was peace, the sweet Smell of wet leaves again. (The Conquest) In the absence of any authentic history of most of the communities in the Northeast, the creative writers have taken on themselves to be the cultural historians of their communities. Their works provide us with resources for writing alternative histories. Mamang Dais The Legends of Pensam is one such narrative. The British are alluded to in many ways in writings from the Northeast. But the most enduring feature of British colonialism is the spread of Christianity in the hills of the region, an important historical phase, as the missionaries were instrumental in giving the hill tribes their script besides educating them. If values of Christianity are valorised in many a writings, its contribution is also questioned, for the followers of this religion have paid a price. Ao writes: Then came a tribe of strangers Into our primal territories Armed with only a Book and Promises of a land called Heaven. Declaring that our Trees and Mountains Rocks and Rivers were no Gods And that our songs and stories Nothing but tedious primitive nonsense. We listened in confusion To the new stories and too soon Allowed our knowledge of other days To be trivialised into taboo. (Blood of Other Days) The hills have never remained the same since the British left the region. Even Christian piety, honesty and charity could not withstand the effects of corruption that has eaten into the very fabric of society. The lure of easy money in violence-ridden lands has promoted drug addiction and contributed to the spread of AIDS. Across the genres, in the emerging literature from the Northeast, there is an appeal for bonding in the shared experience of pain and loss. While Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih writes of the impossible dream of an indigenous tribe, ...to fight the unbeatable foe, to bear with unbearable sorrow, to run where the brave dare not go (Play of the Absurd) Echoing the motto of a hill tribe of one million, fearful of extinction, rising in insurrection against a nation of one billion; Robin Singh writes about the pain of that insurrection: First came the scream of the dying in a bad dream, then the radio report, and a newspaper: six shot dead, twenty-five houses razed, sixteen beheaded with hands tied behind their backs inside a church As the days crumbled, and the victors And their victims grew in numbers, I hardened inside my thickening hide, until I lost my tenuous humanity. (Native Land) Writers such as Keisham Priyokumar try to figure out the sorrow of innocent people who are yet to make any sense of the inter-group feuds in his story, One Night. Conflicts of all kinds throw up heroes and villains, creating new community lores, legends, and jokes. Most of Temsula Aos stories in her collection These Hills Called Home deal with Naga insurgency and its consequences. Stories such as The Jungle Major, The Curfew Man and An Old Man Remembers tellingly throw light on different shades of the conflict and how ordinary people have dealt with extraordinary situations. Ao maintains that in such conflicts, there are no winners, only victims. Bimal Singha asks poignantly in his story Basans Grandmother: what is the colour of blood in which the bodies of a tribal child and a non-tribal grandmother are smeared? Is the colour of their blood different? As violence breeds more violence, it seems there is hardly any escape from this. Besides the ethnocentric imagination and the politics of identity and marginality, themes such as nationhood, migration, exile and gender also prominently figure in the writings from the Northeast. As we move ahead, looking forward to a future, we need to pause and reflect on what that future is going to be like. I dont see a better way of visualising the future from the trauma and tragedy of the present than reposing my faith in the words of Temsula Ao: The inheritors of such a history have a tremendous responsibility to sift though the collective experience and make sense of the impact by the struggle in their lives. Our racial wisdom has always extolled the virtue of human beings living at peace with themselves and in harmony with nature and with our neighbours. T (The article is an abridged form of the keynote speech delivered by the writer at the international seminar on Narrativising the Margins: Northeast India and Beyond held at Assam University, Diphu Campus, 4-6 January 2012)

through its lege n d s , myths, stories, songs and dances, arts and crafts, and its conflicting history and moribund politics. This territory is ancient and modern, mythic and contemporary. As Temsula Ao writes in the epigraph to her work Songs from the Other Life: To all Who can still Sense the earth Touch the wind Talk to the rain And embrace the sun In every rainbow Her words carry the indelible mark of the peoples belief in natural elements that order their lives. Nature becomes the central trope, a life-giving force in the tribal epistemology that underscores the connectedness of the triad: the human, the nature and the divine. It is not a dedication to humanity in general but to the people with whom she shares every bit of her existence. Similarly, Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih ruminates: This land is old, too old and withered for life to be easy. (The Ancient Rocks of Cherra) And Esther Syiem echoes the sentiments: Mylliem of my ancestors, Need I affiliate to you all over again? As in your men and in your women I find an answering call in the aroma of smoked earth in them and the unbeaten slant of a life that writes itself back into my present. (Mylliem) The past is defined in terms of the present mixing memory with myth and history in order to recover a particular ethnic identity. In the reprocessing of cultural memory,

invocation to ancestors makes the land a place of longing and belonging. The writers, who call this territory home, define their uniqueness and write about the diversity of their cultures, customs and social practices. In spite of the contradictions and ambivalences, the creative force that energises contemporary writing, primarily moves in rewriting identity and redefining marginality. Ao offers the best example of this reinvented cultural identity: STONE-PEOPLE The worshippers Of unknown, unseen Spirits Of trees and forests, Of stones and rivers, Believers of souls And its varied forms, Its sojourn here and passage across the water Into the hereafter. STONE-PEOPLE, Savage and sage Who sprang out of LUNGTEROK, Was the birth adult when the stone broke? Or are the Stone-People yet to come of age? (Stone-People from Lungterok) Origin myths and belief systems continue to dominate even fictional works. Adi creation myths, ritual journeys and shamans in Mamang Dais The Legends of Pensam come alive taking us to a world that once was. The stone-people certainly have come of age to express themselves in words. We know that a creative writer is a witness, one with the seeing eyes who connects the past to the present. In the circulation of cultural energy, the poet self-fashions his/her poetry intersecting history, memory and identity. Desmond Kharmawphalang sings of the past and connects it to the present: Long ago, the men went beyond the Surma

Assuming identities: the writer from the Northeast


iNKPOT
JAHNAVI BARUA

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VERY time the word writer is qualified by another word, one that seeks to explain what kind of writer is being referred to, an intense reaction is elicited from writers, readers, editors, publishers and everyone else remotely connected with the world of the written word. Understandably too, for a writer is just a writer. A writers gender, age, religion, place of origin and the place where the writer chooses to write from should have no bearing on the quality of his or her work. While these parameters do not affect the quality of a writers work, what they do influence is the writers voice: the issues a writer chooses to explore, the perspective he or she works from, even the style of the writing, the heart with which the writer writes. All this definitely stems from the place, literally and otherwise, a writer comes from. It has been said that a woman writes with more sensitivity, more intuitively than a man and that is very often true; a womans role, for so long, has been the nurturer, the care-giver, that her learned experience sensitises her to the suffering and pain of others in a way that is instinctive, not some-

thing that is acquired or taught. So, while, the term woman writer is not one that is necessary, desirable or even fair her gender does not make her an inferior writer as one eminent writer seems to think so a woman will, perhaps, choose to write in a certain way about certain things, that a man may not. In that sense, there may be commonalities in womens writings our concerns are similar, sometimes that show up from time to time. In recent times, the term northeastern writer or writing from the Northeast, has been cropping up frequently in the world of fiction, especially in that of English writing. Under this sweeping term,

all writers (in English and vernacular languages) from all the seven states of the Northeast are included, rather peremptorily. Again, an unfair and inaccurate categorisation, for every state in this ethnically disparate region is different from the other; indeed, sometimes contiguous valleys are ethnically, linguistically different from each other. Yet, when pondering the usage of this term, especially from the physical vantage point of a city in the middle of the so-called mainland of the country, certain points become clear. Even though people of the northeastern states differ from each other, they do have some shared history and many com-

ONCE writers from the seven states become widely known, more familiar and loved once the whole region becomes familiar through its fiction one hopes and believes they will no longer have to be known as writers from anywhere; they will simply be writers
mon cultural linkages. It is also clear that there is a certain manner, a set of values, that the people here possess that come into sharp focus as one arrives from the mainland as a visitor. The question that arises then is that even if this is true that the people here are different from others farther away in the sub-continent and similar to each other does it justify the labelling of all its fiction as northeastern? The people of regions in the mainland also differ from each other, yet

there are no such entities as North Indian or South Indian writing. On further reflection, another aspect reveals itself and an answer, of sorts, is found. For someone gazing at the northeastern corner of the country from its middle, the region is sometimes incomprehensible, so far away is it, in every sense not just distance, which is the least of it from the mainstream. The differences between this region and the rest of the country are so sharp, so much more than the differences between others on the mainland that the entire region has been put into the other category. Thus, it is not difficult to understand one may not agree with it, but it can be understood why the term Northeast writing or writer has come into

common usage. The fiction that arises from this different place is, naturally, different from fiction from elsewhere in the concerns it addresses and the manner in which it does so. Sometimes, the concerns are universal issues of family, relationships, nature, the environment are written about but even that is informed by the place the writer comes from. After this moment of realisation, where one had reflexively chafed at the term Northeast writer in the beginning, one slowly acquires a more pragmatic perhaps not the most popular view. In recent years, there has been an astonishing number of books published, written by writers from the states of the Northeast; books both written in English and translations from the vernacular into English. The publishing world and the reading public have had more fiction from the region to choose from than ever before. This fiction is, perhaps, not what they have seen or read in the past, something they are unused to, and this new stream of writing has been called northeastern to distinguish it from what already exists. As long as the term is not used to denigrate the writing, to ever say it is inferior, one can live with it for a while. In fact, there is even a tiny, tiny advantage to be had from all this; there is a heightened interest in fiction from the region and that can only help to disperse

it farther. Of course, any categorisation runs an inherent risk of ghettoisation, one is aware of that and hopes that this labelling will die a natural death. Once writers from the seven states become widely known, more familiar and loved once the whole region becomes familiar through its fiction one hopes and believes they will no longer have to be known as writers from anywhere; they will simply be writers. This day will soon come judging from the very favourable reaction readers outside the region have accorded this writer. Ones personal experience has been that of unexpected and gratifying acceptance by both fellow writers and readers; one has been accepted first as a writer and then the Northeast connection remarked upon, very positively. Fiction will become the bridge that joins the margins to the centre; it will make the unfamiliar familiar, and dispel the fear and anxiety the periphery now elicits. It is thus, perhaps, only a question of time; writers from the Northeast will become writers and additional identities will not have to be assumed. What has to be assumed now along with the northeastern identity is the responsibility of building that bridge to the centre of things. T Jahnavi Baruas novel Rebirth has been nominated for the Commonwealth Book Prize 2012.

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