"Writers across Assam, Manipur, Nagaland and Tripura are deeply concerned about the brutalisation of their societies and have been confronting these issues upfront. "
Literature, like other art forms, shares a dialectical relationship with society and with history and geography. This is particularly true in the case of the Northeast where recent histories have had such a major impact on the writing that has emerged from the different states. ‘Terror lore’, a term coined by poet Desmond Kharmawphlang to describe the stories that emerge from societies besieged by collective fear and insecurity, works very well to describe the dominant thread that colours much of the literature from the Northeast. The first time I travelled to the region was in search of creative writers for an issue of The Book Review, a New Delhi-based journal. As I read and researched, and interviewed writers in Guwahati, Shillong and Kohima, I heard stories that astounded me, for the Northeast does not get much attention in the English-language ‘national’ press or in the national consciousness.
As I learned the little-known histories of peoples here, it became important to me to engage with these histories, with these ‘voices’ from the margins, to look at the writing pouring out from these ‘troubled frontiers’ and to question how writers represent the violence that surrounds them without falling into the trap of creating merely a pornography of violence.
 |
| Writers across Assam, Manipur, Nagaland and Tripura are deeply concerned about the brutalisation of their societies and have been confronting these issues upfront |
Most communities here can pride themselves on possessing a vibrant storytelling tradition, says Tilottoma Misra who has edited The Oxford Anthology. People whose history and civilisation had been pushed into the margins took up the task of recreating their past and reinventing tradition as part of the nationalist agenda of identity assertion. Writers across Assam, Manipur, Nagaland and Tripura are deeply concerned about the brutalisation of their societies and have been confronting these issues upfront. Among the most significant novels in recent times to do this are Rita Chaudhury’s Abirata Jatraand Arupa Patangia Kalita’s Felanee. While the first is based on the author’s experience as a student activist during the Assam Movement, Felanee is a subtle analysis of the impact of organised violence against a group of dispossessed and marginalised women.
This thread runs through the novels, short stories and poetry of some of the best-known writers from the region like Indira Goswami’s Jatra, Arupa Patangia Kalita’s many powerful, true-to-life short stories and novels, Uddipana Goswami’s poetry, Bijoya Sawian’s Shadow Men, to name only a handful. Temsula Ao’s realistic depiction of what happened in Nagaland in the 1960s and 1970s in These Hills Called Home: Stories From a War Zone is one of the strongest collections in recent times to document the violent history of the state.
A number of younger writers have continued in this tradition. A case in point is young author Aruni Kashyap, who says that in the decade after the Assam Agitation of the 1980s, as a generation of young intellectuals took up arms alongside the ULFA, school students like Uddipana Goswami (now a published poet and short story writer) wrote fiery poems supporting the organisation. For them it became important to decipher why so many educated young men took up guns against the Indian state. Many of the insurgents are now themselves writing novels and memoirs. A former ULFA cadre’s collection of poems, Melodies and Guns, generated immense interest and controversy in 2006.
In Manipur, modern fiction emerged in the first half of the twentieth century. The events of the World War II changed the psyche of Manipuri writers, who started to concentrate on their changing realities and social milieu. Post the 1970s, Manipuri writing started to reflect the spiral of political violence that engulfed their state. An example is the recent publication of a collection of poems by Irom Sharmila Chanu titled Fragrance of Peace.
The Mizo insurgency spearheaded by the MNF took up arms against the Indian state and the security forces sent in by the Indian government worked methodically: they burned large tracts of land and regrouped villages into new administrative units. Local people lived in this kind of limbo for twenty years. The terror they underwent gave voice to a whole new body of writing. Cherrie L Chhangre, poet and writer, explains: “When the movement was at its peak in the ’60s and ’70s, the act of writing itself posed innumerable risks”. There was a sudden deafening silence when many diaries, journals and creative writings were burnt by the security forces or by the writers themselves for fear of reprisals.
Where earlier writers were engaged with stories of trauma and conflict, today they write of the overwhelming influence of the Church. In ‘What poetry means to Earnestina in peril’, Mona Zote writes about the excessive influence and ‘interference’ of the Church and the desire among the younger group of writers and poets to go back to the pre-insurgency and pre-Christian days to explore their roots. “I like a land where babies/are ripped out of their graves, where the church/leads to practical results like illegitimate children and bad marriages/quite out of proportion to the current population, and your neighbour/is kidnapped by demons and the young wither without complaint...”
The new literature of the region, mostly in English, has “sprung from the staccato cry of machine guns” and reflects the changes sweeping across the landscape. As Easterine Iralu writes in biographical pieces, curfews and gunfire were part of her growing up years in Nagaland. Temsula Ao too, sees conflict as a major trend in the writing from the Northeast, the others being identity and the idea of the nation. Younger voices from Meghalaya, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh are much more Westernised compared to an earlier generation, and they have lost touch with their roots, says Ao. The older writers are moored in their tradition and culture, and she talks about Esther Syiem’s Oral Scriptings where Syiem uses a lot of characters from mythology and folk stories. Mamang Dai does the same thing in her Legends of Pensam. Ao also writes about her own people and uses their myths for her arresting collection Songs of the Other Life.
An interesting insight into diaspora writing by young writers living in Bangalore and Delhi is provided by Mitra Phukan, a well-known Assamese writer, columnist and classical vocalist. She says they write of a ‘remembered Assam’, about their memories of home, of life in joint families, of their reactions to what is happening in their beloved homeland.
Despite the literature reviewed above, life in the Northeast (as elsewhere) is not all bleak, tragic or violent. There is love and hope in the indomitable human spirit. In much of the writing there is the serenity and mysticism that is so much a part of the landscape of the region. Each writer from the region is closely rooted within his/her own culture, tradition and history and this is something that provides depth and substance to their writing.
No comments:
Post a Comment