INKPOT - To the roots of pain, poetry : Kaberi Kachari Rajkonwar

When we were in Dhaka, a girl
died in a grenade blast.
She was selling flowers. I was
overcome with grief after the
death of such a little girl

Many people ask me whether I wrote anything during the years I was underground. I do not have a correct answer to this question. I will be wrong if I say I wrote or I will not be right if I say I did not. Yes, I did pen some poems but I never sent them to the mainstream newspaper organisations. I knew that they would not be published. A few of my poems appeared in the souvenirs brought out in memory of the ULFA martyrs from time to time. There was a time when our very handwriting or names struck terror into the hearts of people. 

So, seeing my poems in print would have been a very brave act. Thanks to the efforts by some plucky colleagues of mine, the first edition of my poetry book Xonali Xuryar Xugandha (Fragrance of the Golden Sun), however, came out in 1996 and the second version after a long gap of ten years. Another collection of my poems, Xari Xari Mritodeh (Rows of Corpses), was published in 2006. Many advised me to contribute poems to mainstream magazines under a pen name. I did not like the idea. Under the pseudonym of Rubi Singha, I had written letters to various journals till 1996 or so, but I did not enjoy doing that either. Like many others, I then drifted away from the world of poetry in Assam as I lived sometimes in jungles and sometimes amidst a sea of humanity.

Kaberi Kachari Rajkonwar

I was in Bhutan till 1996-97. We once stayed in a rented house near a cemetery in Thimphu, the capital of Bhutan. On opening the window of the house, we would see wild flowers and the graveyard on the other side of a river. At that time, my hair was quite long, flowing down about a cubit below the waist. I had loved to wear my hair in plaits since my childhood. In Bhutan, except the queens, no woman is allowed to grow long hair. The family with whom I lived were apprehensive that it would be an extremely shameful matter if the king sent the 'tekela' (barber) to cut my locks. Six months earlier, I had already had my tresses pruned back by about half a cubit. That was what kept upsetting me. After coming to Thimphu, I became very angry, thinking that I, like the Nepali women living in Bhutan, would have to tie my hair tightly in the style of ‘ungalkopa’, if not ‘Bhutia chat’. I had sought refuge in Thimphu just to live with my only daughter. The very thought of getting my hair cropped just because I wanted to stay there made me feel extremely insulted, and I still feel so.  A strange country and strange laws! I decided not to stay in Thimphu and returned to our camp. I wrote several poems expressing the resentment I had felt in Thimphu. An unpublished one among them was ‘How many more days...’:

Golden childhood

Fading adolescence

Everlasting youth

Yellow future

One plus one, gave you two lips of mine

My long black hair

And all the moonlight

A clear morning, autumnal evening

A colourful kite of dreams on the banks of the Luit, cottony evenings

Gave you my breasts, sumptuous thighs, slim waist, vagina, all sensual organs

What more do you want, India?

Come and take away my identity, my selfhood if you dare...

The source of another poem comes to mind. I had almost lost the notebook containing my poems, including this one. Fortunately, one of my associates, who came back from Bangladesh, returned it to me. None of us wants to be implicated in the tragic incident in Dhemaji in 2008. Time will judge who were responsible for the political situation where children were pushed into a killing field. At that time, I wrote ‘The green burns in Dhemaji’:

For long now I have not seen

Night jasmines on the dew-drenched dubori grass

Nor have I seen an earthen lamp under a tulaxi plant

What warmth the winter sun brings

How pleasing a breath of summer wind

For long now, I have not seen small children

Walking to school in groups

In Russia’s Beslan or Assam’s Dhemaji

The green burns

The green burnt

Possibilities burn, young dreams burn down to ashes

When we were in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka, a girl died in a grenade blast. She was selling flowers.  Flowers bring one a good feeling during the famed traffic snarls in Dhaka city. Wherever there is a traffic jam, little children come scurrying to sell flowers to commuters. They sell all kinds of seasonal flowers – gulap, rajanigandha, podum, bhet, togor, krishnasura, xunaru and even the monsoon flower kadam. Garlands of bakul, xewali, beliphul and kharikajai are also popular in Dhaka. I was overcome with grief after the death of such a little girl.

Then I wrote ‘Flower’:

Come and give me a gulap,

A red gulap rupees five, rajanigandha rupees two; so much fragrance for rupees seven

Come give me a child, I will give you motherhood

Give me a home, I will give you two hands

Give me a country, a country of children

I will give you my life

The girl selling flowers died when the grenade burst

So many young girls die like her

In Iraq, Beslan, in the foothills of Bhutan, in Dhemaji

Somewhere they protest, somewhere they don’t

In the political bargain, gets lost

Every child’s delicate flesh

In Dhemaji, they protest against the sky

Against freedom

We do not need a freedom where the children don’t speak

After many deaths, the smell of freedom in the young girl’s flowers

In the arithmetic book of the school going boy…

The flowers have turned to ashes in the grenade blast

The arithmetic book is still on fire!

DUST OFF - No separatist treatise - Revisiting Parag Das’s Sanglot Fenla : Aruni Kashyap

 The novel is not an apologia for violence. It attempts to show how the Assamese had to take the course of armed resistance after all democratic means had been exhausted. 

Sanglot Fenla

Parag Kumar Das

Udangshri Prakashan,1993

`50, 212 pages

Paperback/Novel

I have heard many people in Delhi and Guwahati, in Golaghat, Mayong and Nagaon, tell me that they had struggled with a strong desire to go to the forests of Burma after reading Parag Das’s Sanglot Fenla. While I was growing up, I was never denied a book but in 1993 or ‘94, when I had asked for a copy of the novel after seeing a poster hung in the Guwahati Book Fair, my father had instead bought me a young-adult novel. Forbidden stuff has a strange allure and many years later, I spent an entire day scanning the length and breadth of Guwahati looking for it.

Sanglot Fenla, which roughly translates as Revolution’s Army, captured the minds of an entire generation. During my undergrad years, reading Manoram Gogoi’s memoirs Paragdar Xannidhyat (In Paragda’s Company), I was amazed reading about its popularity. When was the last time the publication of a book became an event in itself, a cultural moment? In the world, I could only think of the release of the Harry Potter novels and recently, Haruki Murakami’s 108Q. Sanglot Fenla was serially published from July 1992 in the pages of Budhbar, the newspaper Das edited. Its first edition was over at the Guwahati Book Fair that had started on January 20 and the next edition was printed for the Asom Sahitya Sabha’s 59th session at Sibasagar. Due to some tiff between the organisers and the publishers, the book shops were shut in protest during the Sabha. Gogoi narrates that even during this phase, hundreds of people thronged Budhbar’s stall only to buy Sanglot Fenla and Rastrodrohir Dinalipi (A Seditioner’s Diary, 1992). One old woman demanded a copy immediately despite being told that they were not selling as a mark of protest. “I came all the way from Lakhimpur only to buy these two books, you better give them to me,” she said. Has anyone heard of an old lady travelling 415 kilometers only to buy two books?

Sanglot Fenla is no more in print, but has left an enduring legacy. In the early ‘90s, after the counter insurgency operations, many ULFA cadres had surrendered. The ones still underground nurtured a romantic idea of the separatist insurgency. Away from the hunger, diseases and death in the valleys of Burma, they were leading a life of luxury in Guwahati and Dibrugarh, earning a bad name for the organisation. But there were many more cadres who were still committed and took their goal seriously. Parag Das wanted to celebrate the struggle of these committed cadres, who according to him had not yet been co-opted into the system.

Parag Kumar Das

Actually, there is no single narrative thread in the novel. It is about Digonto, his training in Burma, where he had seen the hard work of many of his comrades. It is about how various sections of the society such as the Assamese tribals and migrant Muslims were excluded from the movement and the immense potential these groups had to contribute to it was left untapped by the mainly upper-caste ULFA leadership. In many ways, Sanglot Fenla reworks the picaresque novel. It rests in the tradition of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling or Kim by Rudyard Kipling by following the escapades of a hero over a range of experiences. But Sanglot Fenla is not comic from any angle. It is the search for an alternative: what happens when all attempts of democratic means to achieve justice get exhausted? What happens when you are betrayed by your own comrade-in-arms? What happens when decadence and luxury and arrogance traps the rebel? How does one deal with the irony of running a rebellion under the indulgence of the same government you want to overthrow – everyone in Assam has speculated about the nexus between the AGP government led by Prafulla 

Mahanta and ULFA – something which Parag Das was very critical of and rightly so.

However, the novel is not an apologia for violence. Rather, it attempts to show how the Assamese had to take the course of armed resistance after all democratic means had been exhausted. It is also not a separatist treatise for youths who read the book unguided. In fact, to understand the novel properly, one must read Parag Das’s non-fiction and Manorom Gogoi’s memoirs. What Das narrates in the novel is merely an extension of his narrative non-fiction retold with characters and situations.

Throughout his career, Parag Das dreamt of a multi-hued Assam, bound by unity because he knew that breaking down into small groups would not help and would only appease the central government’s imperial design that has always feared the common cultural thread binding different communities in Assam. He also tried to raise awareness on human rights abuses by the Indian Army in Assam. Sanglot Fenla fits into this larger project: but what redeems the novel from the clutches of narrow, jingoistic nationalism is his depiction of the inhuman brutality of the ULFA cadres on their “traitors”, their decadence. Chillingly, the torture scenes at the Indian Army camp and the ULFA camps are very similar and successfully (sadly) compete with torture scenes of Chilean testimonios under Augusto Pinochet’s regime.

FRONTISPIECE - Zombies in no-man’s land : Amit R Baishya

Amit R Baishya takes us to the no-man’s zone between India and Bhutan through the testimonio-fiction of former rebel Raktim Sarma. 

Sarma reveals the existential
fears of the guerrilla that
his personal destiny may
have become unmoored from the
collective context of the revolution

Former United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) rebel, Raktim Sarma, is the author of Borangar Ngang and Kafila. Both are fictional accounts loosely based on his experiences as a guerrilla. While the former represents life in the underground camps in Bhutan (up to Operation All Clear in 2003), the latter narrates events occurring after Pratyush, the protagonist of both novels and a fictional alter-ego of Sarma, is released from prison. 

Borangar Ngang represents Sarma’s strongest literary achievement and is comparable with some of the best examples from the genre of guerrillero testimonio emerging from Latin America. Well known books from this genre include Che Guevara’s Bolivian Diaries and the former Sandinista Omar Cabezas’ Fire on the Mountain. Sarma insists in his introduction that his novel should be read as a fictional account based on his experiences. I will therefore, refer to it by an awkward neologism of my own: testimonio-fiction.   

Sarma’s testimonio-fiction has to be located first within a genre in Assamese literature dealing with the experiences of guerrilleros in “no-man’s zones” between the boundaries of India, China, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Bhutan. Probably the best example of this is Parag Das’s novel Sanglot Fenla which shares some notable features of the guerrillero testimonio. The second genre with which it shows an affinity possesses a distinct narrative structure characterised by two main features. First, although these texts are non-fictional testimonials in the first person, they resemble the structure of the literary bildungsroman – the narrative of gradual individual growth into a particular form of consciousness. However, the difference between the bildungsroman and the testimonio, as the literary critic John Beverley points out, is that in the former, a collective social situation is experienced as personal destiny while in the latter, the narrator speaks in the “name of a community or group, approximating in this way the symbolic function of the epic hero...”  

Amit R Baishya

Ball State University, Indiana

Second, we can say that guerrillero testimonios reveal an epical or epochal notion of the everyday with the figure of the male guerrillero at its center. A similar sensibility permeates Sanglot Fenla. For instance, in the closing scene, Diganta, the protagonist of the novel, and another guerrilla, Probin, walk out “like courageous soldiers”. They reject the lucrative incentives that former militant, Ranjit, and other “traitors” to the cause offer them in return for their surrender. At this point, Diganta is released after prolonged incarceration and excruciating torture by security forces. The last lines of the novel are revealing – “Dawn was a long way off.” The first part of Sanglot Fenla concludes here. As a literary trope, Barbara Harlow notes, such inconclusive endings play with the symbolism of dawn and darkness and signal a “commitment to the future.”  

The world depicted in Borangar Ngang is different. It would not be incorrect to call it an anti-epic. The life-worlds of guerrilleros are simultaneously death-worlds which, to quote the postcolonial thinker Achille Mbembe, are “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.” Usually, the persistence of revolutionary hope sustains the guerrillero’s belief that inhabiting the death-world in the present presages a passage into a life-world. However, in Borangar Ngang, the death-world is experienced as a world bereft of possibilities. Doubts about the failure to hope for the final culmination of the “people’s” revolution are constantly expressed. These doubts reveal the existential fears besetting the guerrilla that his personal destiny may now have become unmoored from the collective context of the revolution. 

Given the anti-epic nature of this novel and the subtle departure from recognisable forms of anticolonial and revolutionary political action, does the narrative gesture towards a different space of the ethico-political? The form of the political that the text gestures towards is different from arguments presented by literary works on revolutions in colonial or neocolonial areas – namely, the growth of an individual revolutionary consciousness and the gradual immersion in the cause through a “love” for the people. Central to this different ethics and politics is what Mbembe terms “the generalised instrumentalisation of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations.”    

Thus, in Borangar Ngang, we notice a relentless focus on the dying and decaying body of the defeated, isolated guerrilla abandoned in “wild zones.” At the beginning of the novel, Pratyush feels at home in the bucolic pleasures of nature. However, as the guerrilla band disintegrates from lack of organisational support, internal dissension and acts of betrayal, the natural environment is represented as anything but bucolic. The guerrillas regularly cross the heavily forested zones in the Indo-Bhutan border into Assam and back. The lack of water in the densely forested areas often force the guerrillero to lap the water that collects in the footmarks left by elephants. The army’s techniques to capture guerrillas also resemble those used for trapping animals. The narrator recounts an episode where a guerrilla contingent is ambushed by the army. While many guerrillas are killed, an injured guerrilla named Bonojit Deka falls into the hands of the armed forces. His eyes are gouged out, acid is poured on his face and his corpse is strung on a tree while the army lies in wait for the guerrillas to come and claim it, much like a hunter strings up bait.  

However, the potential of being reduced to the level of zombies in no-man’s zones has an antidote: love. The affect of love is best illustrated in a lengthy incident in the novel that involves one of Pratyush’s closest comrades, Anurag.  Anurag’s band is ambushed by the army on a reconnaissance mission across the no-man’s land in Bhutan and four of them including Anurag go missing. They are given up for dead, until one, Deepkon, messages via radio that he is stranded in the forest and badly injured. When the army finally withdraws, the guerrilla band sends out a search party that includes Pratyush, to retrieve the (presumed) dead bodies. After two days of searching, they hear someone crying out weakly in the distance. They come across Deepkon lying hidden within some tall elephant grass: 

(Deepkon’s) bullet-ridden leg had swollen considerably and resembled a bloated banana tree… They had never imagined that Deepkon would be alive like this. The sight before them horrified Pratyush and his troop. The smell of rotting flesh was wafting in the air. Kamal examined Deepkon’s bullet-ridden leg by lifting it carefully and saw, to his horror, that hundreds of insects came crawling out of the holes that had been bored into the flesh by the bullets. Deepkon screamed in intense agony. The horrifying sight of insects crawling out of the body of a living person filled Pratyush with so much disgust that he was forced to close his eyes. 

Somehow clinging on to life, the body called Deepkon resembles a form of death-in-life. We notice an absolute disjunction between the speaking and the living being here. Pratyush cannot bear to look at this sight. Sarma shows us the gruesome scene for a split second before telling us to turn our eyes away. This recurrent showing of the disjunction between the speaking and the living being and then enjoining us to turn the eyes away undercuts the epic, heroic tonality of the classical form of the guerrillero testimonio and instead enjoins us to focus on the reduction of the human body to the level of thinghood in a no-man’s zone that is outside the reach of law.

Sarma’s testimonio-fiction shows how “ordinary” feelings like love, friendship and trust can still sustain horizons of hope and orientations towards futurity, even when any semblance of a recognizable form of life, as in the instance narrated above, dissipates in zones of emergency. More than anything else, the exploration of the ordinary dimensions of human existence in states of emergency in Borangar Ngang remains Sarma’s most enduring achievement.

Baideo and our peace efforts : Lachit Bordoloi

PCG member Lachit Bordoloi conjectures how hurt Indira Goswami would be if she knew today that the ULFA is a divided force

Dr Indira Goswami, popularly known as Mamoni Raisom Goswami, is no more. It sounds strange that a personality, who had overcome many a suicide attempt and faced numerous odds in her life, should have to fight such a long battle with death before succumbing.

It is very difficult to say whether the life of Mamoni baideo is a success or a failure. However, it is beyond doubt that she accepted all odds that came her way with her usual smile, which is why her creative pen could spread love and the message of humanity. Like many other writers and litterateurs of Assam, she continued her creative works distancing herself from cheap politics or a mad rush for recognition. That was why when baideo had taken an initiative to hold peace talks between the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) and the central government in order to put an end to the bloodbath in the state, the commoners, who have to bear the brunt of the ULFA-government conflict, saw a ray of hope. The reaction of writers and litterateurs of the state to the peace initiative taken by baideo was, however, mixed.

According to revelations made by baideo herself, she had gone to an ULFA camp in the course of researching for a novel. Touched by the hardship that the ULFA boys are subjected to and egged on by her humanity, baideo began to think of a solution to the problem that would not involve a bloodbath. She was hopeful that the peace process with the ULFA would be carried forward during the tenure of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, her one-time university colleague.

She did get the right response both from the government and the ULFA. The peace process started formally after Mamoni baideo handed over the ULFA’s letter stating its willingness for peace talks to the PM, and thereafter, the response letter from the PM’s Office (PMO) to the ULFA. With a view to translating into reality the possibilities generated by baideo’s efforts, the ULFA constituted the People’s Consultative Group (PCG) in 2005 with Mamoni baideo as the chief coordinator. Subsequently though, the PCG-led peace process reached a stalemate and it could not be revived despite repeated efforts by Mamoni baideo. Throughout the process, she had had to walk on a tightrope with every possibility of her being branded either as pro-ULFA or pro-New Delhi.

More recently, the pro-talks ULFA leaders have announced during the peace process initiated by the Hiren Gohain-led Sanmilita Jatiya Abhibartan that the PCG was not in conformity with the organisation’s constitution. Mamoni baideo, who was a stakeholder in both the PCG and the Sanmilita Jatiya Abhivartan, might have been troubled by such a political twist, but she was neither interested nor familiar with this kind of politics. That she had no inclination towards politics was a boon for her as it meant that she could easily overcome the criticism by and negative publicity in the media at the initial stage of her peace efforts. Because of her popularity, the high command of the ruling party also had invited her to join the party. The writer, however, rejected the offer in her characteristic mild manner.

Now, a section of the ULFA, led by Arabinda Rajkhowa, is holding talks with the Centre while the Paresh Baruah-led faction stays away. Had she been able to speak today, she would have said: “Paresh and Arabinda, both of you should take part in the peace talks, or else I will feel hurt, and the people of the state will feel bad.”

Mamoni, the peacemaker : Hiranya Kumar Bhattacharyya

Sanmilita Jatiya Abhibartan leader Hiranya Kumar Bhattacharyya speaks to Uddipana Goswami about the pioneering efforts of Indira Goswami in the peace process between GoI and ULFA

Her presence always had a sobering effect on the recalcitrant elements, people did listen to her

Mamoni Goswami had a human approach to the major problems of Assam, especially the ULFA problem. This is what motivated her to become mediator between the government and the ULFA boys. She had visited the camps of the ULFA boys also and interacted with them earlier. She certainly developed a soft corner for them. An additional advantage for her was that she was known to the Prime Minister of India very well as both of them have been teachers in the Delhi University. So, when the People’s Consultative Group (PCG) was formed, she became the bridge between Delhi and the ULFA boys. But she was too simple a person to understand the intricacies of such negotiations. She could not convey the urgency of the matter to the government but credit goes to her that she was the forerunner of any such peace talks. She was the one who broke the ice. However, she could not adopt a diplomatic approach and the government took advantage of the fact. She was a simple person and when the talks entered a crucial stage, there were many unforeseen circumstances that cropped up. Finally, the whole process was stopped. Weeks and months and years passed and the central government continued to ignore the dialogue with the ULFA. 

Meanwhile, the people of Assam were fed up. They wanted a solution to the long standing problem. Finally, some of us got together under the banner of the Sanmilito Jatiya Abhibartan. Hiren Gohain persuaded me and Dr. Nirmal Kumar Choudhury to associate ourselves with this process. The PCG had failed to carry the dialogue process to a logical end despite the charisma of Mamoni Goswami. She tried her best but the whole process was delayed. When we got together, we associated Mamoni with us. She had already been interacting with the ULFA boys and she had insight into the whole problem. She participated in quite a few of our meetings but she was not keeping well. Her presence and past experience in negotiation, however, were of great help to us.

Mamoni Goswami had great mass appeal as well. She occupied a very high position in the cultural world of Assam, just like Bhupen Hazarika. That was another asset as far as we were concerned. But as a matter of policy, we have decided that unlike the PCG, we will keep away from the media. We do interact with them from time to time, but we do not disclose the specifics. Therefore, I am not authorized to talk about the details but I can say that we are making good progress compared to the previous discussions with the PCG. This time, the negotiations seem to be taking a positive turn. The signs are all there that the government is taking notice. Unfortunately, Mamoni could not be around to take part in the ultimate discussions.

Any rational person – which Mamoni was – would approve of the path we have undertaken. Her presence could have cautioned us about the hurdles lying ahead in our path. We have been deprived of her experience. Her presence always had a sobering effect on the recalcitrant elements, people did listen to her. And that was a great advantage.

May her soul rest in eternal peace. 

What we missed out on : Arabinda Rajkhowa

Arabinda Rajkhowa, leader of the pro-talks faction of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), speaks to Rashmi Sarma about his awe of Mamoni baideo

Mamoni baideo felt that any kind of violation of human rights cannot be allowed to continue and no innocent person should lose their life

Mamoni baideo will always remain special and very important to me. I have known her as a person, as a peacemaker and as a writer. Just like Bhupen Hazarika, Mamoni baideo’s contribution to Assam is immense. We owe her a lot. 

It is Mamoni baideo who actually deserves the credit of bringing us into the peace process. It was she who, through her sincere efforts, initiated the peace talks in 2005-06. The Sanmilita Jatiya Abhibartan came much later. Bhupen da also, while he was the chairman of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, had approached us and wanted us to come forward for the peace talks in the late 1990s. But we could not take the process forward then or even later, in 2002, during Nibaran Bora’s time.

Mamoni baideo felt strongly for the people and worked for the cause of humanity. She observed very closely the sufferings of our people and she saw how many of our innocent cadres were tortured to death, how the women in our villages felt totally unsafe during Army operations. In the name of security and protection, what was being promoted was lawlessness. Mamoni baideo felt that any kind of violation of human rights cannot be allowed to continue and no innocent person should lose their life. Hence she initiated the peace process. There were many intellectuals in Assam who felt the same way and wanted the peace talks, but baideo gave it a concrete shape. She wanted to create an environment in Assam where people lived without fear and in harmony. She told us that you need to come out of the jungles and reach out to the people.

As a human being, she is very kind and as a writer, I have no words to explain how I feel about her writings. I am in awe of her works like most other people of Assam. Her command over language and the depth in her writings cannot be comprehended by ordinary people like us. We can only feel it. The entire world is aware of the treasure trove of her literary creations. She has taken our culture and our literature to the world. The high honours and the innumerable awards that she has been graced with are proof enough of how her work is adored across the globe.

I feel very sad today that we spent most of our years in hiding in the jungles, away from the people, though we were there fighting for the same people. Assam has produced some great personalities in different fields but living as we did, we missed out on interacting with them closely. When we came back, many of these people were either gone or not in a position to talk and express themselves due to failing health and other circumstances. I wish we could have spent more quality time with these great souls, especially with Mamoni baideo.

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.