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POST script
MAY 20, 2012

SEVEN SISTERS

NELit review

FIFTH WALL
UDDIPANA GOSWAMI
Literary Editor

Highway through governance hell

SUDEEP CHAKRAVARTI

Raring to go

EING situated at one of the most historically important migration routes in the world one that connected South with Southeast Asia we Northeasterners have songs and myths of origin that talk of migratory movements that brought us to the banks of our mighty rivers or to the peaks of our high hills. This huge repertoire of our travel lore needs to be studied deeply in order for us to place our current fears of demographic swamping and threats to our identity in proper perspective. Our written literature has also subsequently captured our peregrine spirits in words. Since medieval times, people from the region have travelled to various places far and near, and their experiences there have shaped our pre-modern and modern ethos. For instance, Sankardev, who laid the foundation of the Axamiya nation in many ways, travelled through large parts of the Indian sub-continent and came back to enrich our culture. Our indigenous accounts, however, have been overshadowed by the travel narratives of outsiders most significantly, by those of the colonial administratorscum-anthropologists-cum-travel writers who made a career out of rewriting the Orient. A rich repository of historical information, the colonial chronicles, though, are approached from two polar perspectives: one that uncritically accepts everything included in them as final and infallible, the other that reads the colonial design into every word inscribed therein. The middle path remains usually untrodden. The same immoderate reaction has been apparent in the post-colonial period towards writings about the Northeast by those in the mainland. As a result, even those who approach the region with empathy are often painted with the same brush as those who write about the region from brief acquaintance or with a sense of collective guilt, or worse still, with a semblance of it. I requested Sudeep Chakravarti to write about the compulsions behind his new book on travels in the Northeast because I felt our readers need to realise some writers are different. Today, writers from both within and without the region are making a career out of the Northeast. Which is not catastrophic per se, and among them are, in fact, a few who are not poseurs. It is this section of the writers who perhaps deserve and often get a wider readership. Siddhartha Sarma, who travelled along the same route as Chakravarti did, is one such voice from within. Colonial geo-politics drew arbitrary lines and isolated the Northeast, making it landlocked. Our travels were cut short as our travails multiplied. In Assam, there were many who had travelled around the word and confidently faced it. They wrote about their travels and experiences abroad and their travelogues introduced the Axamiya people to a world outside the region. After 1947, however, there seems to have set in a gradual sense of ennui and diffidence in the Axamiya psyche which made us inward-looking and parochial. A few travel writers have, however, kept us in touch with a world outside our own narrow universe and we carry a review of one such book by Gobinda Prasad Sarma. With more and more of our generations studying or settled outside the region now, and travelling in and out of the region and everywhere else in the world, of late, our writers seem to have rediscovered a lost aplomb. It is a very good sign. T

HE story of what led me to Highway 39: Journeys through a Fractured Land began when I was a young man, and Indias wars with itself were already old. These wars were, of course, the result of India blindsiding itself with what could be called attitudes of geography and demography. I encountered the angst derived from such administrative arrogance and apathy first-hand from friends and acquaintances from the Northeast at university in Delhi, in the mid-1980s. Such encounters continued through the 90s, the capital by then my place of work. It was an eye-opener to see several Naga, Manipuri and Mizo acquaintances, for instance, speak freely to foreigners but not to my Indian friends and me. It jolted the sense of Indian-ness that my generation, born a couple of decades after India became independent in 1947, was conditioned from our childhood to take for granted. I began to dig deeper and fell headlong into sordid recent history. I discovered from conversations, books and articles that soldiers from my country had for three decades killed, maimed, raped, tortured and scarred both physically and mentally tens of thousands across this region; most victims indiscriminately civilian, not armed rebels. (Here, I am not counting the to-mymind pointless deaths of several thousand police, paramilitary and military personnel.) I learnt that India has the dubious distinction of being a post-World War II country to strafe and bomb its own people as happened with the Mizoram rebellion in 1966, in addition to Xeroxing the brutal land campaign in Nagaland for Mizoram. My deconstruction of Indias immediate past and Indias political pantheon made me realise that Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Govind Ballabh Pant, and Indira Gandhi had done much wrong to many they claimed as fellow Indians, alongside their doing right dazzlingly right, as we were taught through school textbooks prepared by government agencies. Such things partly explained why many folk I met from the Northeast were so angry and hurt. Why many

hesitated to call themselves Indian even as they could not deny Indias proximity and the gradual, impelling even compelling mesh of the modern day in which Indian politics and the Indian economy offered their undeniable attractions. It took effort and time for my northeastern friends to accept that mainland Indians werent the enemies of the Northeast. As I grew into my profession, I promised myself as I did to some friends that someday I would try to add to the telling of the their stories, bring more of these stories to the mainland and beyond, so that people would understand more, misunderstand less. I realised much later that it was as much to know those stories, as to come to terms with yet another dark side of the country I love and am also exasperated and horrified by in equal measure. Of course, I realised the Northeast was a complicated place, made more complicated by the quite haphazard division of British-ruled India into India, Pakistan and Burma that further fractured homelands. But it seemed entirely too complicated to pay attention to at that time. I realised only much later that I was displaying the time-worn forget it, too complicated brush that mainlanders apply to any Indian territory east of Darjeeling; and Darjeeling already seems plenty east. Perhaps I was at the time consumed by what was happening in the hubs of Delhi, Mumbai and other metropolitan areas, as I worked my way into journalism. My chosen profession opened my eyes to both the magic and maelstrom of India. There was progress. But there was also Punjab. Mayhem ensued after Indira Gandhi ordered an attack on Sikhisms holiest shrine, the Golden Temple, in Amritsar. It was to cleanse the temple of proseparatist rebels, but the damage to the shrine cost that prime minister her life. That was in 1984. Just as that was winding down, mayhem ensued in Jammu & Kashmir in 1989. In those charged times, the goings-on of the so-called Northeast were muted to us elsewhere in India. Attention would only be drawn by the grossest of events as with the butchery at Nellie in Assam in 1983. Largely, the Northeast re-

HIGHWAY 39: JOURNEYS THROUGH A FRACTURED LAND

Sudeep Chakravarti 4th Estate (an imprint of HarperCollins), 2012 `450, 420 pages Paperback/ Non-fiction
mained Outland, a kind of region I described in my book on Indias ongoing Maoist rebellion, Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country. To me, Outland is out of sight of the majority of Indians in Inland and, therefore, outside of any easily digestible construct. Like the poor of India in the heart of India, the identity-conscious in the countrys eastern periphery too have been both pushed to the limit. Very simply: there were stories to be told. Stories that had to continually confront Indias grand conceit of being the largest democracy by also pointing out that it needed to be a good democracy, an effective democracy; a place where people didnt need to take to arms, or be butchered for asking for simple rights to identity, livelihood and respect mandated by the Constitution of India. I did not manage to carve enough mind space, as it were, to pursue independent research and writing till I took a sabbatical in 2004. I planned to write some novels and short stories but also pursue narrative non-fiction telling stories

that can do with all the telling. Red Sun... came of this space: what I gauged as an urgent need to break through the mall-stupor of Middle India and tell it how poverty, corruption, displacement and denial were creating vast pools of negative energy across India. And with the publishing of Red Sun..., I had the required space, the bandwidth to pursue the stories I had for long wanted to, stories of neglect and conflict from the Northeast. During a road trip in Manipur and Nagaland along Highway 39 in 2008, the approach and the title of the book fell into place. This highway, through its routing through a thin slice of Assam, and the bulk of Nagaland and Manipur, offered itself as a broad sutra for storytelling about both conflict and emergence from conflict. Its not much if you look at the distance, 436 kilometres, from Numaligarh along the southern bank of the Brahmaputra in Assam, near Kaziranga to the border with Myanmar, at Moreh, in Manipur. But Highway 39 appeared to me like few others: a living, festering snake of a lifeline and deathline that winds through a landscape of both romantic and brutal history, continuing bloodshed, immense rage, and desperate hope. If you will, a sort of highway through governance hell. And there was dual irony, as I also learnt in the years prior to beginning the book. As much as the administration that rebel groups reviled across the Northeast, they too indulged in forms of extortion and corruption, putting the squeeze on common people they had sworn to protect. And the other: rebel groups who claimed to fight a particular cause could sometimes be fighting themselves most visibly among the Naga rebel groups. In the same summer of 2008 that my book took shape, two major factions indulged in a kind of fratricide not seen for two decades. (These shambolic displays of cause and effect are also part of my story.) The more I travelled and researched, the more I was convinced of a story to tell. An assertive China at its borders, and prospects of trade and business with Southeast Asia have in the past decade or so compelled official India towards greater interaction with these parts. It is essentially a soothe-the-natives approach that geopolitics has made imperative: cool conflicts; provide play to aspirations, offer hope or we lose the empire sort of thing. And, even with a rampaging economy of conflict that lives almost entirely on central government dole and one that survives and thrives on the absence of firm peace: security deployment, security-mandated contracts, skimming off development funds meant to uplift broken zones and people there

LOOKING GLASS

is a momentum of progressive thinking and economic aspiration that is gradually spreading outward from cities like Guwahati, Shillong, Dimapur, Kohima and, even, scarred Imphal. There is growing recognition of the fact that, as an economy of conflict is seductive for those who live by it, peace must therefore be fought for; the vultures of war must be subdued, or more generations will be lost. And there is growing official recognition that, if these regions are not reclaimed, they will be utterly lost to India. The story of the Northeast is still the story of our times, the unfinished story of Indias integrity. And so, Highway 39 seemed to me like the region it travelled through. Broken, but not dispirited; corrupted but fiercely hopeful; so not-India, and yet, tied to its future. (Sections of Highway 39 have been renumbered. And yet, for me, there was no better name for the book. To delete Highway 39 would be to delete a tormented history, a seething present, and an uncertain future.) Besides, it became clear to me early on that to attempt an omnibus book on the Northeast would for my purpose be impractical. If the world often had difficulty grasping the enormity of India, both on account of its geographic and ethnic variety, that logic extended to the mini-universe of its Northeast. And, while protest icons like Irom Sharmila are widely known in the Indian mainland, driven by reportage in print, on the Internet and television, there generally isnt much news or views beyond what is occasioned by a news spike the killing of a VIP; violent protests; fighting among rebels groups; the suspension of operations against one rebel group or the other, or the ongoing grosser human rights violations by police, paramilitaries and the army. And, there is still not enough writing and discourse about what drives the dynamics of protest and hurt in these parts. And, as with much in the Indian subcontinent, there is still space to humanise a story. To tell it from the points of view of the players and participants often, reluctant players and participants. As a storyteller, that is what I set out to do. This may not be the perfect approach, but, to my mind, there really isnt a perfect approach, only practical ones that attempt to bring untold stories or humanised versions of told stories to audiences that are not otherwise accessed. My travels took me to these everyday situations, everyday truths. In the course of several visits over some years, I met rebel leaders, and security and government officials. I met everyday people living everyday lives, whether these lives were shattered by incomprehensible death or shuttered by equally incomprehensible policy. I attempted to follow the thread of some histories of conflict and, equally, the thread of some histories of conflict resolution. Each layer, each step of the journey brought me closer to these truths and realities. As I learnt, there are many truths and realities in these parts. I sincerely hope Highway 39 acquaints readers with some of these. T and its aftermath, the history of Naga insurgency, and the current situation in Manipur, which I had to because any travel account, or indeed any other account, of todays Manipur has to include the role of the underground organisations. But wherever I could, I stayed away from it. The feedback I have received has been somewhat gratifying. Some of my friends have even carried the book around when they visited the Northeast later, as have some strangers who got in touch with me afterwards. I have received some incisive questions from the latter as well. One gentleman asked me why I had not talked much about the Brahmaputra, to which I replied that the river deserves his own book. Not surprisingly, most of the criticism centres around this: why did I use humour and informal language while talking about such a serious place like the Northeast? To which my answer has always been, if the mainland makes the effort to look at us divorced from the prism of state policy, separatism, political violence and the other mainstays of journalistic coverage, it will realise that we have, as metropolitan writers persist in claiming about themselves, a life. We have our way of looking at things, our heritage, our lifestyle, and not all of it involves dreaming of one day being free from the rest of the country or of dancing in colourful costumes on a hillside. If travel, as any of the great travellers I admire intensely from Gemelli Careri to Ibn Battuta feel, is one of simple discovery and retelling to the rest of the world, then the Northeast does deserve a fair share of loving irreverent re-acquaintance, and we, who are from here and therefore return like diffident pilgrims from time to time, are the best suited to narrate such re-discovery to those who might want to follow. T

SIDDHARTHA SARMA

SUPPOSE a travelogue is a medium to accommodate just about any theme you want to pursue: just travel or the sights, social studies or politics. There might not exist any set parameters to define the treatment of a travelogue, which means the writer is left to her own devices. So the final work will depend on the circumstances behind the writer setting out in the first place. East of the Sun, my travelogue on the Northeast, and one of the two travel-related books I have written (the other is a compendium of interesting facts about some travellers through history), began when I was setting out from Delhi, where I was based in 2008, to research for a novel I was writing based on the Northeast. In discussing some of my itinerary with friends, I realised that as far as the Northeast was concerned, there are two kinds of non-acquaintance. The first is of people from what we call the mainland, who have never been to the region and whose views are limited to what they have read of the place or what they have had the willingness to find out, and since we know that whatever we learn of other places is determined by the extent of our interest in it, this fund of knowledge is not much. The second kind of non-acquaintance has to do with the peculiar relationships of the people of this region among themselves. Very few of my friends in the mainland who are originally from the Northeast have travelled in the states not their own. Therefore, I reasoned, I had to introduce both these sets of friends to the region and strike a kind of balance between complete non-familiarity (of those from the mainland) and a little knowledge (of those from the Northeast). My research took me through Guwahati to Upper Assam, and then through Dimapur, Kohima,

EAST OF THE SUN

Siddhartha Sarma Tranquebar, 2010 `295, 249 pages Paperback / Travel
Senapati, Imphal, Thoubal and Moreh into Tamu in western Myanmar. On returning to Delhi, I sent a series of five emails to a select few of these friends, under the title The Narrow Road to the Deep East, taking the name from a haibun travelogue, or combination of haiku and straight prose, by Matsuo Basho, substituting his North for my East. This eventually reached the mail inbox of a senior editor at Tranquebar India and she asked me to expand it into a book proper. Once again, the format and medium of my writing determined the treatment. Because it was in the form of an email, I decided to use some internetese which had acquired general usage by that year (2008). The thing with internetese is it changes constantly, but in the 22-odd years since it crept off the Net discussion threads into everyday usage, it has acquired a degree of uniformity and universality. Here I drew a distinction

To each her own road

between word constructions used only on the Internet and those which are used by text messagers. I do not subscribe much to the latter, because such constructions (wat instead of what, sry instead of sorry, 2 instead of to) were originally devised for nonqwerty keypads in first-generation mobile phones and had to be short because the length of the message determined the cost. Today such usage is not necessary because of full-qwerty keypads and their continued use is merely lazy writing. Internetese, however, is a cultural phenomenon. I sprinkled some of them in the text, therefore, as a kind of reference. I also decided to use humour. I have for long been uncomfortable with the mainlands callous concept that the Northeast is mainly a bunch of extremists angry over issues they, the readers, will not be bothered to investigate properly. The other image is of the region as a kind of geographical/botanical/cultural paradise, an exotic place to be treated much as a tourist would treat a brochure of a land she might just decide to visit someday. Instead, I chose to talk about those aspects of the region which a tourist, particularly in India, does not care to look at history, how the indigenous people came to be who they are, and what imperatives led to their thought processes. Humour, therefore, was a great tool in presenting these aspects in an easy, conversational and friendly way to my readers (after all, they were my friends and I wrote in the same way I would have told them the story verbally). I have also felt for a while that many of the particular issues and hang-ups of society that I have witnessed and covered as a reporter could be better talked about if the stakeholders possessed the ability to laugh at themselves. In the Northeast, we are compelled by necessity to take sides based on our identities. Much as I like being objective, there are certain fundamental issues where I have to think like an Assamese and not as a completely objective identity. But a little self-deprecation is a sign of strength, I have always felt, so I have injected such doses at various places. For instance, I have given the name of city sport to a particular unreplicable feature of a city or town in the region, whether such a feature is a quality or a defect: Shillong and the rest of Meghalaya has teer, Guwahatis city sport is falling into storm drains, Dimapurs is the Great Crappy Restaurant Food Game and Imphals is the Great Imphal ATM Trick. Within the book itself I have expressed a wish for state epithets, like the states of the US have, defining each constituent unit of India and also why this might not be possible because self-deprecation is not one of our strong suits. The parts that I travelled through, I have described as a journey in progress, combining straight narratives with observations. The original emails were about 13,000 words long. The book, eventually, was to be 80,000, so I got the space to expand on the story, and was therefore able to talk about all the other states with varying degrees of detail (the book was, after all, meant to be an introduction and not a magnum opus). These other states and parts of the region, which I had travelled through earlier but not just then, I have described in standard travelogue format, with the relevant backgrounds, observations and anecdotes and an equal dose of humour and some internetese. There is very little politics I have gone into, although there is a bit on the student agitation