FIFTH WALL - The ambiguity of belonging : Uddipana Goswami

Geo-politics has played many nasty tricks on the region we now pride ourselves on belonging to – the Northeast of India. Within this region, there are places that have been subjected to the administrative vagaries of the colonisers with utmost disregard for history and community. Arbitrary borders created with little knowledge of – and even lesser respect for – the boundaries between languages and cultures have led to a sense of hostility between many communities of the region. In several cases, this hostility has translated into violent conflicts – the kind that has characterised most of the ‘post’-colonial history of the region. Barak Valley is one such place in the Northeast which amply illustrates the after-effects of capricious imperial administration. Imprudent policies – including those formulated in the ‘post’-colonial period – of land settlement, population movement, linguistic and cultural homogenisation, have shaped the valley as an ambiguous zone of belonging and not-belonging.

Uddipana Goswami, Literary Editor

On the one hand, although Barak Valley has remained a part of Assam, it has felt an equal, if not stronger, affinity to the whole of Surma Valley, and beyond – its sentiments being tied to ‘greater Bengal’, with Calcutta as the centre of their universe. On the other hand, what has added to this ambiguity of affinity is another redoubtable fact of history – the long cultural and communal association of the valley with Assam and the rest of the Northeast. The most outstanding instance of such association of course, is the pre-colonial presence of non-Aryan Dimasa and Kachari kings who ruled over much of the area.

In this issue of NELit review, we visit this area of overlapping influences of cultures and commonalities. Amitabha Dev Choudhury traces for us the fallout of this overlap upon the literature emanating from the region. He explores the angst of writers who are the progeny of a history laden with inherent dichotomies. He does this however, in relation to writers belonging to the dominant community of the valley. We, on the other hand, take our own exploration of equivocal identities a step further. In translation, we bring our readers the picture of one particular community from this valley which is far removed from the ‘mainstream’ – the story of their lives flows upstream and downstream with the river, they live and die on the river; and like the river, their belongingness is also on the flux. They are the marginalised among the marginalised, and Basanta Das’s evocative prose brings their story alive in his novel, Meleng.

And to end, our occasional section, Other Words, evaluates the Bengali poet, Joy Goswami, who recently visited Assam. He came here with very little knowledge of the people of the region and returned knowing that the people here already knew his poetry.