Land of Jade : Journey Through Uncharted Lands - Subir Bhaumik

Land of Jade

Bertil Linter

Spectrum, 2011

`1100, 440 pages

Hardcover/Non-fiction

An Indian edition of Land of Jade, Bertil Lintner’s classic, was long overdue. The fact that it took such a long time to arrive testifies to the mainland obsession of the Indian publishing industry. It is a mindset where an author can sell a title on Norway more easily than one of Myanmar (Burma), because the average in-the-street Indian reader is often expected to confuse Burma with the great Vermajis of Delhi or Punjab. That only a Guwahati-based publisher, Spectrum, should take the initiative to publish an Indian edition of Land of Jade proves the point that the appeal of Lintner’s epic journey and the book based on it has been largely restricted to the Northeast. It is through this region that Lintner entered Myanmar in 1985 with a wife who had just delivered a baby girl. For the next 18 months, the small family of three traversed this difficult region on foot, donkey, elephant, boat and what have you. Hopping from one rebel base to another, Lintner covered a huge tract where civil war had ravaged the land and dispossessed the people for close to four decades. This was the first real, on-ground insight into one of the world’s longest running civil wars. 

 A journey like this is
rare even for the most
intrepid journalist
– Bertil Lintner

Scattered accounts of this epic journey by Lintner through one of the world’s most merciless jungle-mountain terrains were carried in the Far Eastern Economic Review, of which I was a regular reader since my days as a university student of Southeast Asian studies. These accounts inspired the young journalist in me to do what no Indian journalist had done before – to reach the bases of the Northeast Indian rebel groups in Upper Burma which, until then, had only been accessed by Bertil Lintner.  A year later, and after some difficult negotiations with the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN), I was on my way to the elusive Oking – the mobile headquarters of the Naga underground based at Challam or Kesar Changlam. This same camp was called Challam Basti by the Assamese fighters of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA). I did not go beyond the NSCN headquarters where I also met ULFA and Manipuri rebel leaders, and my journey led to a cover story in the Calcutta-based Sunday magazine titled “Brothers in Arms”.  Bertil had gone much further. But his accounts of his journey were my inspiration. They led me to seek out why scores of my countrymen, unhappy with India’s grandiose nation-building project, were suffering in the mosquito-ridden jungles of Myanmar to fight a long protracted war against the State. 

The book is a must-read
for those interested in
India’s far frontier zone
– Subir Bhaumik

In recent years, the Indian State seems to have realised that a solution to its Northeastern insurgency problem lies as much in Myanmar or Bangladesh as in the region itself. As Delhi starts pressurising the Myanmarese government to act decisively against the ULFA, the NSCN and the Meitei rebel groups, Bertil Lintner’s Land of Jade emerges as a must-read for all those interested in India’s far frontier zone. It is great journalism because it takes the reader to a zone without motorable roads, where only a bold and courageous reporter can take his audience through the sheer power of limbs and great determination of mind.  

Bertil nearly lost one foot to the leeches near the swamps of Taga. He got caught in fighting at Challam and Kachin. Yet, he lived to tell the tale. The penning of Land of Jade has given us the legend that is Bertil Lintner.  It is by far his greatest book, greater than his other excellent books on Myanmar.