DUST OFF - Grandma and our national pride : Stuti Goswami

Burhi Air Xadhu
Lakshminath Bezbaruah
Banalata, 1999 (1st ed. 1911)
`25, 124 pages

At some time or the other in our lives, we have all read his words. In subsequent times, those readings have inspired us. Especially in our younger days, his children’s books have played a significant role in shaping our thoughts. Burhi Air Xadhu – literally, Grandmother’s Tales – by Sahityarathi Lakshminath Bezbarua has been, for generations of Assamese readers, our first lessons in life. Written in a simple yet lucid style, the book is a collection of short tales, each with a moral woven into it. Yet this classic of Assamese literature is not just a few moral tales tied together. Burhi Air Xadhu is Bezbarua’s cudgel to purge the human foibles he saw in the Assamese society of his times. It is also his childhood memories concretised, and the reader’s memories crystallised. As a child, Bezbarua was fortunate to have been influenced by myriad experiences. When his family was in Barpeta, his father Dinanath Bezbarua engaged the services of an elderly relative, Rabinath, to look after the children. A virtual treasure trove of tales, Rabinath soon grew to be his closest companion. The many mythological stories and folktales that Rabinath spun every evening cast a deep impression on the young Bezbarua’s mind. Much later, when he was living far away from Assam, the memory of these tales, ‘recollected in tranquility’, took on a greater significance for the writer. Added to this was the influence on him of the developments in Bengali literature in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The urge to preserve the tales of rural traditional Assamese life took over and Bezbarua began to collate Assamese folktales in the form of three books – Burhi Air Xadhu, Kokadeuta aru Nati Lora and Junuka. In another book, Sadhukathar Kuki, we find two more of these tales incorporated. In all, there were seventy folktales collated by Bezbarua.

In the preface to Burhi Air Xadhu, Bezbarua writes that the inclination towards giving a written form to oral narratives and folktales is a relatively recent trend that started in 1778-79 with the famousCollection of Popular Songs by Johann Gottfried Herder followed in 1811-35 by the famous Brothers Grimm in Germany. In India, pioneers of such efforts include Lal Behari Dey and his Folktales of Bengal(1881), Rabindranath Tagore’s Bauler Gaan (1883), Swadeshi Samaj (1904), Dakhinaranjan Mitra Majumdar’s Thakurmar Jhuli (1907) and Thakurdadar Jhuli (1909). Lakshminath Bezbarua realised the significant influence such writings could have on the Assamese mindset. At the time, Assamese society was reeling under unjust British policies. In 1836, Bengali had been introduced as the official language of Assam and it became the medium of instruction in schools. Being an alien language, its sudden imposition gave students a difficult time. The self-respect of the Assamese was offended, while a sense of inferiority and ignorance also seeped into the minds of the masses regarding their own language and culture. The Bengali subordinates in the administrative machinery of British Assam were rumoured to have helped Henry Hopkinson, the then Commissioner of Assam, argue that Assamese was a mere variant of the Bengali language. Lakshminath himself had learnt his first lessons in the Bengali medium. He however realised the importance of reviving the sagging self-image of the Assamese language and culture. Through his almost single-handed efforts and the magic of his pen, he shaped its future.

Bezbarua’s loyalty to the
Assamese nation was exemplary,
yet he was never prejudiced
against any other culture or literature

In Burhi Air Xadhu, there are thirty tales in total, each set in a rural framework. The stories are taut and fast-paced, and the narrator is omniscient. The book is infused with a sardonic yet gentle humour. Bezbarua seeks to not merely highlight but rectify the weaknesses and shortcomings of men. Even birds, beasts and flowers are symbolic of men and their frailties. In tales like ‘Bandor aru Siyal’ (Monkey and Fox), ‘Mekurir Jiyekor Sadhu’ (Tale of the Cat’s Daughter) and ‘Dhorakauri aru Tiposi Sorai’ (Crow and Tiposi Bird), the characters speak like humans – reminding us of the beast fables of yore. Though told in a light-hearted tone, there are a few tales like ‘Tejimola’ which speak of tragic events.

The other significant aspect of Burhi Air Xadhu is the presence of women characters. Not only is the narrator (in the frame narrative) a woman, a significant number of stories centre around women. In most of the stories, we find significant female characters with an interesting variety in their presentations. While Tejimola is a classic tragic character, Sutibai (in the story ‘Tikhor aru Sutibai’) is an orphan who, along with her brother, must find her way through distressing times.

In the preface to the book, Bezbarua writes: “Folktales are of two broad kinds: one that instructs, and the other that enables men – old and young – to free their thoughts and imaginations in the boundless skies of possibilities.”

In Burhi Air Xadhu, we find a fusion of both. In the same preface, he also writes: “Readers might find similarities between some of the tales in this book and tales from other parts of India, especially Bengal. Owing to this, if they think that these tales are written under the shadow of those foreign tales, then they are wrong. There might be several reasons why folktales of one society match or are similar to those of others. Firstly, these tales are so old that they can be traced to the ancient times when the Aryan race was together… Of course, with time and with different influences, modifications have crept in, even though the skeleton has remained the same. And they cannot change… Secondly, many tales spread from country to another by word of mouth… especially between neighbours…”

These words actually give us a peek into the mind behind the thoughts. Lakshminath Bezbarua was a patriot – his unflinching loyalty to Assamese culture and language and the Assamese nation in general is exemplary, yet he was never prejudiced against any other culture or literature. The tales in Burhi Air Xadhu could easily be relevant to any other community or culture. Bezbarua not only concretized oral tales that had come down to him, he also derived inspiration from non-Assamese literary oeuvres. To the influences of these different cultures he added the hues of Assamese life, so much so that when we, as children or as young adults, read this work we are made to feel as though Burhi Air Xadhu is a crystallisation of our own individual grandmother’s tales.

FRONTISPIECE - Writing the Northeast : Preeti Gill

"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

Through much of its post-colonial history, insurgencies and counter-insurgency operations have been part of the fabric of everyday life in the Northeast. Militarisation has become a way of life in the region with “the deficits of democracy, development and peace best explained by Northeast India’s history as a frontier,” says The Oxford Anthology of Writings from North East India. To the people of the Northeast, their world is central to themselves, to ‘mainland India’ it is a borderland, but the pattern of political violence in the region cannot be seen as temporary or aberrant.

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.

War and the Silencing of Naga Narratives : Easterine Kire

 "The folktale lost its setting during the war years. The peace that is essential to the continuation of oral narratives was also lost. Folk narratives were further silenced in the premature deaths of their carriers.”

Easterine Kire

Of the many narratives silenced by war, the oral narratives of the Nagas suffered a long period of being silenced. Folktales require certain settings in order to be told. The Naga war with India after military operations began in 1956 destroyed these settings besides disrupting the ritual of folk narratives. The setting of the folktale is the hearth and its ancestral home is the village-world. Oral narratives belong to eras of relative peace in the village community where the ceremony of the folktale takes place: After the evening meal, children gather round the hearth of a grandparent who narrates stories to them. It requires mutual participation. The children need to listen attentively and the grandparent-narrator will tell the stories with the air of an entertainer, frequently using stock phrases or ideophones in the course of the dramatised narration.  

In the 1950s and 1960s many Naga families were displaced by the freedom struggle. People in the villages were the worst affected. They abandoned their homes to hide in rough shelters in the forests. They moved in small groups for fear of detection. Two or three families sheltered together and the number of children in some groups was higher than the number of adults. Hiding in rough camps in the forests and frequently moving camp, these families survived on the meagre food rations they carried with them. They took from the forests what food it offered. Since the forests were infiltrated by the Indian army, these refugee families held very little conversation amongst themselves. The children were discouraged from playing or talking loudly. The grandmother's hearth in the village-world was destroyed, the villages burnt and their inhabitants tortured and killed or forced into evacuation. The folktale lost its setting. Its narrative was silenced throughout the period of displacement during the Indo-Naga war. The peace that is essential to the continuation of oral narratives was lost. The war years also killed many oral narrators and folk narratives were further silenced in the premature deaths of their carriers.  

In the 1970s, the Art and Culture department of Nagaland made a collection of Naga folktales from the four districts of Kohima, Mokokchung, Tuensang and Wokha. The crudely illustrated and coarsely told 109 stories in the collection are nevertheless an admirable first effort at folktale collection. Stories that would have died along with their narrators have been preserved by this effort. In 2008, Roots: A Collection of Zeliang Folktales, was published by Kangzangding Thou. In 2009, the Art and Culture department authorised the publication of another volume of Naga folktales. Sadly it was rewritten by a non-Naga and lacked the authenticity or cultural knowledge that only an insider can bring to such an ingrained art form.  

Barkweaver publications began its first volume of Naga Folktales Retold in 2009. The publishing house aims to retrieve Naga folktales in several volumes along with illustrations by young Naga artists. Volume Two will be published in 2012. The project encourages young children to spend time with their grandparents, collecting folktales and peoplestories. Barkweaver hopes that the children will not only collect stories but imbibe the rich teachings of culture that is passed on in folk narration. 

One form of oral narrative silenced by the war was the many and varied peoplestories. These are not mythical tales but the accounts of ordinary people and their lives. Yet people need to tell their stories and they deserve the opportunity to share their stories. A second Barkweaver project is a series of peoplestories, the first of which is being published this winter. Among the Nagas, peoplestories popularly deal with spirit encounters. But Barkweaver is also interested in stories that people want to tell of themselves, their childhoods, the memories of their lives and events that had a big impact on them.  

Barkweaver recognises the narratives of children and women as silenced narratives. These were never voiced and were suppressed under the meta-narrative of war which is a narrative of men. In my novel,A Terrible Matriarchy, the little girl-narrator begins her account candidly: 

My grandmother never liked me. I knew this when I was about four and a half. I was sitting in her kitchen with my brother Bulie, older to me by two years, when she served us food. Hot rice and chicken broth.

”What meat do you want?” she simpered sweetly as she ladled out gravy and meat.

I quickly piped up, ”I want the leg, Grandmother, give me the leg.”

”I wasn't asking you silly girl,” she said, as she swiftly put the chicken leg into my brother's plate, ”That portion is always for boys. Girls must eat the other portions” .

(p.1) 

The author's book, Naga Folktales Retold

In this novel the silence of the girl child is finally broken. Likewise, in its forthcoming volume of peoplestories, Forest Song, Barkweaver focuses on stories that have not been voiced before.

Folktales and peoplestories are part of collective memory and recording them in print is important because of their literary relevance especially in terms of a national literature. Folktales provide readers common reference points. At the same time, peoplestories are significant because they have psychological value. Sharing is healing. For the elderly, sharing their stories and discovering they are being listened to gives meaning to their lives. Peoplestories make the statement that ordinary people and their lives and destinies have value. This is something the machinery of war completely disregards.  

Another kind of imposed silence that the Naga people have suffered is the silencing of their voices in the academic world. The Nagas have been written about in colonial anthropological accounts by British political officers like R.G. Woodthorpe, J.H. Hutton, J.P. Mills, Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, Ursula Graham Bower and W.G. Archer. The voices of these colonisers, though informative, were not free of racism and exoticising of cultures they did not fully understand. The result was that some cultural practices which yielded meaning in the pre-Christian era were dismissed as barbaric. Only since the 1970s did Naga scholars begin to write about Naga customs, culture and village polity providing insider narratives for the first time. These alone can be considered authentic. 

Barkweaver wants to continue encouraging such indsider narratives by focusing on Naga folktales. By doing this it will try to address the silences imposed by the voices that claimed authority. Folk narratives after all, still have their relevance in today's fast moving world. This fact was brought home to me at a September conference in Frankfurt-Oder where I performed stories from Naga Folktales Retold. My storytelling was complemented by a French dancer who danced to the rhythm of the stories and an Italian singer who spontaneously burst into a Berber song at the end of a telling. The singer also joined in the refrain of the folksong that accompanied the tale of The Fig-tree and the Zeliang Man. Culture lives on if its practitioners can reinvent it.  

Folktales are common property. The best use of common property is to share it in appropriate ways. The setting has changed as there are few hearths around which the listeners can gather. But the listening circle has widened and perhaps it is time to take our oral narratives to an international audience. The time feels ready for it.