Abstract
The world wars definitively changed the relations with the state of the peoples of India’s northeastern frontier. The wars were both fought on their terrain (with the invasion of the Japanese army) and led to the recruitment of people from the region to serve in the British Army. The contemporary Anglophone Indian novel documents the lingering effects of this militarization in the many insurgencies that have fragmented the region in the postcolonial era. Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006) depicts the Gorkhaland uprising of the 1980s in the Kalimpong district of West Bengal, which demanded a separate state, while Easterine Kire’s Bitter Wormwood (2011) describes the Naga peoples’ traditional way of life against the backdrop of attempts to declare independence from the Indian state. In this article I argue that these novels capture how these secessionist movements use the experience of the world wars to craft a political identity based on military brotherhood to claim independence from the Indian state. These movements thus undertake a complex reworking of the valences of the figure of the “soldier”, central to so many accounts of national integrity. At the same time, reproducing the nationalist logic of the Indian state, these novels more readily recognize an “indigenous” identity based on a claim to the land as the political basis of nationhood. Hence, these novels about secessionist struggles reveal how certain narratives of nation formation become the only legitimate means for making claims for political rights and independent statehood over the course of the twentieth century.
Claiming political modernity
India’s northeast frontier’s political existence as a unified entity in continuity with Southeast Asia (including Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Malaysia) is a result of the military history of the two world wars. The recruitment of the various peoples of the region, as well as the Japanese invasion of the northeastern frontier in 1940, led to the region’s decisive entry into world history. Since the independence of India, Burma, and Nepal, this region has seen myriad secessionist struggles and insurgencies, indicating the uneasy coherence of the various communities which reside here with the postcolonial narratives of nation formation. The centrality of the experience of service in the British Army to these contemporary postcolonial insurgencies has been elided in documentation of these movements. One venue where this narrative surfaces is in the contemporary Anglophone novel, including Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006), and Easterine Kire’s novels about the Naga movement for independence, including Bitter Wormwood (2011). These novels chart in detail the local insurgencies and their particular histories in the region. Desai’s novel depicts the Gorkhaland uprising of the 1980s in the Kalimpong district of West Bengal, which demanded a separate state, leading eventually to the district being granted autonomy under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution and then under the Gorkhaland Territorial Declaration in 2006. Kire’s various novels document the Naga peoples’ traditional way of life against the backdrop of the British invasion of their territory, the Japanese invasion during the Second World War, and the subsequent attempts to declare independence from the postcolonial Indian state. These Anglophone novels record how contemporary political movements engage the history of the world wars to produce an identity that allows them to make politically legible claims for independence. 1
While the Anglophone novel is often read as an allegory for the condition of the third world nation it represents (Jameson, 1986), the regional focus of these novels about insurgencies on the frontier has meant that their reworking of the criteria of statehood have been seen as peripheral and not examined at length. Foregrounding the history of the world wars in the secessionist struggles of the region, in this article I examine how collective military service becomes the basis for imagining an autonomous political identity in opposition to the dominant postcolonial state. Desai’s and Kire’s novels show how these revolutionary movements creatively rework narratives and experiences of service in the army to craft their minor nationalisms. Instead of passively accepting their definition as a martial race meant to serve the needs of the ruling powers, the descendants of soldiers build on their reminiscences of service in the British Army in order to make political claims for a separate state. I argue that while these novels register this claim made by the insurgents, they also juxtapose an “indigenous” identity to a collective notion of shared military service. The indigenous mode of identification provides a longer imagined past, a connection with the land, which aligns more neatly with Herderian ideas of a people animated by a common culture. 2 The Inheritance of Loss and Bitter Wormwood take a radical step in representing the continued significance of the history of the world wars, while ultimately preferring the more conservative position of a national identity based on narratives of an authentic indigeneity. This reading also departs from the focus on globalization and diasporic identities prevalent in criticism about The Inheritance of Loss, demonstrating that the comparative thrust of such analyses in fact occludes the regional politics that the novel represents.
The world wars meant a reconfiguration of the region’s inhabitants’ relations with the state. In their histories of the Second World War and its aftermath in South Asia, Chris Bayly and Tim Harper point out that the processes of their incorporation also provide the peoples of these regions with a militarized identity, skills, and arms that determine the terms of their opposition to being thus incorporated (2006, 2010). Although they were assimilated within the terrains of India and Burma, the military experience of these wars provided a template for a rethinking of the criteria on which claims to statehood gain legitimacy. The experience of being soldiers in the colonial army, and of being invaded by armies in pursuit of their imperial ambitions, reshaped how the people of these regions would make claims for independence in the era following the retreat of the armies and the British colonial presence. The Gorkhaland movement of the 1980s gained traction through the marshalling of the Gorkhas’ military experience. The Nagaland secessionist struggle took on an increasingly militarized character, moving from the writing of petitions to the Simon Commission in 1929, to the underground guerrilla resistance when they were made a part of the Indian nation in 1947.
Bayly and Harper’s account of the region’s fractured nationalisms relegates the peoples’ various claims to statehood to a mechanized imposition of the larger global history in which the region’s inhabitants are caught up. They do not adequately consider the imaginative claims to identity that are being made by secessionist movements in the region. For instance, despite the scope of their study, when Bayly and Harper describe the impact of the militant national identities that emerge, they write: “The uniforms, the marching, the drilling and the flag-waving of war time had indelibly imprinted themselves on the minds of the region’s youth” (2006: 464). Such a description subsumes any kind of creative agency in co-opting military identity for a secessionist movement to a suspicion of the ritualistic subject-formation that characterizes armies. Indeed, it is difficult to approach the figure of the soldier with anything other than suspicion, providing, as it does, the symbol of colonial modernity par excellence. The soldier is not only marked by Karl Marx as the model for industrial workers (“organized as soldiers […] the privates of the industrial army”; 1848: 479), but also the logistical basis of the colonial consolidation of empire (Omissi, 1994), and the symbol of the modern nation — in Anderson’s formulation, “No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers” (1991: 9). How is it possible, then, for secessionist movements to organize themselves around a military identity without falling prey to the various entrapments of modern statehood?
This dilemma points to a larger theoretical problem that all nations must grapple with. Secessionist movements and insurgencies that retain the form of the nation as their end goal have to simultaneously undermine and repurpose the institutions that provide the basis of the postcolonial nation state. Eric Hobsbawm’s analysis of the origins and fabrications integral to nationalism notes that criteria such as language, ethnicity, and religion do not correspond exactly with the modern idea of a nation, and need to be constructed and projected ex post facto. Indeed, he notes specifically that neither tribal/indigenous identity nor the “readiness to die for the fatherland” are necessarily measures of a modern nationalism (2012: 64–79). 3 For Hobsbawm this means that a genuine proto-nationalism of the people cannot be identified. However, as these novels about the Gorkhaland movement and Naga secessionism demonstrate, these past identities and histories can be actively remade into the basis for a modern nation. I show this in my reading, first, of The Inheritance of Loss’s depiction of the Gorkhaland movement, which records the identification that movements’ participants have with the military history of their forefathers. I turn then to Kire’s more sympathetic fictional account of the region’s militarization. Thus, the Anglophone novel shows how militancy provides a basis for collective history and identity that can be turned against the nationalism of the Indian state. Simultaneously, I also demonstrate that these novels draw on anthropological sources to posit a longer history that is juxtaposed to the emergence of a modernity instigated by warfare. In this way, they use the claim of an indigenous identity to undermine the legitimacy of the military. In their depiction of both these narratives, these novels implicitly accede to the concept of the nation state as structuring how political rights are claimed for modern citizens. In breaking away from the dominant national imaginary of the Indian state, however, the novels emerge as an active site of reimagining the basis of national identity.
Crafting claims to statehood
Recent scholarship has foregrounded the multiethnic nature of the armies in the First World War, with soldiers supplied by Europe’s colonies. The troops engaged in the war included 1.4 million men from India, 1.3 millions from dominions such as Canada, South Africa, and Australia, as well as nearly 500,000 colonial troops from France (Olusoga, 2014). Scholars have undertaken the work of recovering the voices and experiences of the soldiers recruited throughout the British and French empires during the First World War, and the subsequent changes in identity that resulted from the confrontation of various races, classes, and nations at the sites of Europe’s political conflicts. Looking at recovered diaries and letters kept by some of these men from India, Santanu Das attempts to recover the men’s motivations and understandings of their experiences. He notes that service in the empire’s armies was often used by the nationalist movement to claim their equality as citizen–subjects within the empire. Das notes that while Indian middle-class national discourse seized upon wartime service in Europe as an opportunity for establishing racial equality and proving their courage and loyalty, the men who served, “largely from the semiliterate, peasant-warrior classes of northern India”, are marginalized within both European as well as nationalist historiographies. While “imperial war service […] becomes a way of salvaging national prestige” for those who do not have to face warfare themselves, Das notes that some letters by the soldiers begin to articulate a critique of an empire that is based on such violence (2011: 17–20). Trying to salvage a non-nationalist politics from the involvement of these men from the colonies in the war, Leela Gandhi argues that these subaltern soldiers were able to “evolve their own discourse of subtle solidarities with the empire”. Acknowledging the mercenary incentives and forced recruitment policies responsible for many of these men’s participation, she nevertheless argues for the emergence of a “militant cosmopolitanism” as a result of the lived realities and affective solidarities of warfare (2014: 107). The conditions created by the war led to “Indian nationalism increasingly express[ing] itself in a mix of anti-Western polemic and anticolonial unity” (2014: 107), as well as transnational, anti-colonial solidarity, as with the Khilafat movement.
The cosmopolitan scope of the war emerges in The Inheritance of Loss, in Gyan’s recounting of his grandfather’s experience of the war. 4 He tells Sai of his family’s service in the British army for over a hundred years, noting with pride the geographical expanse made available to him as a result of his services: “they sent him to Mesopotamia where Turkish bullets made a sieve of his heart […] Indian soldiers fought in Burma, in Gibraltar, in Egypt, in Italy” (2006: 158). 5 Although not explicitly stated, the two deaths in the service of the army that he recounts are from the two world wars — the first in Mesopotamia against the Turkish and the second in 1943 in Burma, in the battle against the Japanese Imperial Army. Gyan’s claim to a wider world beyond the confines of his everyday existence is related first amid his romantic confidences to Sai. He does not pretend it constitutes a political claim, merely a more fantastical family history than his family members’ current occupations of working in tea plantations and teaching. At the start of their teenage dalliance, Gyan, employed as Sai’s mathematics tutor, attempts to bridge the disparity in their class positions by asserting that this history provides evidence that he and Sai “had more in common than they thought […] his own family history also led overseas” (157). He thereby equates military service with the more elite access provided by Sai’s grandfather’s education at Cambridge.
However, a few pages later, this history becomes the basis of a political claim to statehood. The leaders agitating for the Gorkhaland movement embroider into their speeches the twin claims of time served and worlds seen: “We fought on behalf of the British for two hundred years. We fought in World War One. We went to East Africa, to Egypt, to the Persian Gulf […]. We fought in World War Two. In Europe, Syria, Persia, Malaya, and Burma” (174). 6 Here the military history is no longer personal family history, but a collective political identity. Importantly, this rhetoric is aimed, not at fostering a sense of identity with the Indian nation, but to mark a break from it. It is neither the cosmopolitan identity of solidarity with empire invoked by Leela Gandhi, nor in the service of the nationalist energies into which their military history is funnelled in the immediate aftermath of the wars. Rather, it is a demand for a separate state — seen as posing a threat to the integrity of the Indian nation — posited as a reward for military services rendered: “At that time, in April of 1947, the Communist Party of India demanded a Gorkhastan, but the request was ignored… We are laborers on the tea plantations, coolies dragging heavy loads, soldiers… We are soldiers, loyal, brave… But we are Gorkhas. We are soldiers… And have we been rewarded?” (174–175). Here there is also a threading together of their various positions as labourers — as “laborers […] coolies […] soldiers” — that Gyan’s account initially buries as lost glory versus present impoverishment. The Gorkhas’ claim to a separate state is intertwined with their sense of themselves as having an identity on the basis of past military service. This is an affiliation that Gyan feels despite not having served in the army himself. Their identity as soldiers takes on the status of founding myth for a separate state to which they envision themselves as having the right.
What is astounding about the book’s treatment of this claim, especially given how plainly it is writ large in the speeches made by the agitators and in Gyan’s account of himself, is its complete refusal to take it seriously. The historical specificity of the narrative that the agitators construct for themselves is undercut by the plethora of historical contexts against which the novel juxtaposes the locality of the valley, so that globalization emerges as a confusing hum of competing alliances, rather than a specific world history against which to read one’s place. In this, the novel manifests its contempt for subaltern understandings of history, except perhaps in the space of brief personal anecdote. Within the novel’s narrative, the unrest created by the Gorkhaland movement is merely one of a series of events at various scales that disrupt the lives of its characters. Many readings of the novel have focused on the overabundance of comparative frameworks that the novel provides — a paranoia about the region’s global imbrication that serves to evacuate any political urgency or meaning from the movement itself. 7 The novel compares the Gorkhaland insurgency to the situations in Kashmir and Tibet. Sai echoes the disparaging tones in which her middle-class aunts discuss the movement: “Separatist movements here, separatist movements there, terrorists, guerrillas, insurgents, rebels, agitators, instigators, and they all learn from one another of course — the Neps have been encouraged by the Sikhs and their Khalistan, by ULFA, NEFA, PLA; Jharkhand, Bodoland, Gorkhaland; Tripura, Mizoram, Manipur, Kashmir, Punjab, Assam” (143).
The novel’s capacious frame of reference provides a spatial and temporal backdrop that makes it hard to retain a view of the specifics of the Gorkhaland movement. On the one hand, the expanded canvas of a globalized world allows the novel to posit a link between immigration to New York, colonial education in Cambridge, various secessionist movements throughout India, and the Gorkhaland uprising in Kalimpong and Darjeeling. On the other, the novel foregrounds the longer, more immutable, temporality of the Himalayan landscape. The superimposition of various historical sensibilities allows competing claims to the land to be imagined. In part, this is a result of the novel centring Sai’s perspective on the region she finds herself shipped to. She relates to her surroundings through the various representations of the land that clutter the houses and libraries of her middle-class and essentially displaced grandfather and friends. These books and paintings veer from seeing the land as a holdover from colonial exploration and the recreation of a Scottish sensibility, to considering it against a geological timescale beginning with the retreat of the oceans, to a set of names that mark out indigenous belonging. Sai’s reading materials point to the continuities between the colonial framing of the land and the structures of feeling which shape the main characters in the novel. So, for instance, the bound collection of National Geographics are mocked for representing outdated middle-class taste, marked by a reverence for the tacky. But they also provide the opening image of a giant squid that is juxtaposed with the “wizard phosphorescence” (1) of the Kanchenjunga, the knowledge that “[t]he Himalayas were once underwater […]. There are ammonite fossils on Mt. Everest” (77). They thus afford a concept of deep time for Sai against which to imagine her relationship to the land. Viewed from Sai’s perspective, rather than being transformed by the insurgency the landscape proffers a timeless beauty, a reprieve from the ephemeral political sphere, held separate from the temporal struggles in the region. 8
This is important because it is only through Sai that the reader hears — twice, fleetingly — of the original tribes and their claims to the land. Once, “[b]rowsing the shelves here, Sai had not only located herself but read My Vanishing Tribe, revealing to her that she meanwhile knew nothing of the people who had belonged here first. Lepchas, the Rong pa, people of the ravine who followed Bon and believed the original Lepchas, Fodongthing, and Nuzongnyue were created from sacred Kanchenjunga snow” (217–218). Later in the novel, Sai recalls reading in My Vanishing Tribe that the Lepchas “called Zolugming, ‘world of rice’” (345). In emphasizing their “belonging” to the land and their rights as the original inhabitants, Sai echoes the terms of the “United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples”. The Declaration emphasizes the “colonization and dispossession of their lands, territories and resources” and the need to contribute to the “demilitarization of the lands and territories of indigenous peoples to peace, economic and social progress and development” (2007: 2–3). This, indeed, is the framework for the imposition of the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution, for the administration of autonomous regions in the tribal areas of the states of Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Tripura.
Sai’s references to indigenous claims to the land establish a connection with global movements for the rights of indigenous people. This is especially evident since the second reference to My Vanishing Tribe comes in the chapter immediately after Biju, in New York, has been accosted by a homeless man who provides an impromptu lesson in the colonial naming of that city: “You know what the name of this river really is? […] Muhheakunnuk. Muhheakunnuk — the river that flows both ways”, he added with significant eyebrows, “both ways. That is the real fucking name” (292; emphasis in original). In this slurred enunciation of the Lenape name of the river, evoking an indigenous cartography that predates settler colonialism, the novel makes a comparative claim for understanding indigeneity. Gayatri Spivak draws a similar connection between tribal communities in India as representing “the world’s aboriginal people who were literally pushed to the margins for the contemporary history and geography of the world’s civilizations to be established” and Native American communities, thus establishing between them a kinship “through land grabbing and deforestation practiced against the First Nations of the Americas” (1994: 198). If one reads the renaming of geographical markers, and the parallel invoked in the naming of a heavenly constellation and a river as standing in for this historical dispossession, then by extension it makes a claim for the prior rights that these communities should have to political sovereignty against the forces of the contemporary state. However, as the anthropologist André Béteille notes, there has been much historical confusion in the application of “indigenous” as a category. He notes that the term has acquired a global applicability only starting in the 1980s, when it comes to be deployed as a political category designating oppression, such as by Dalits, since “the designation of certain groups as ‘indigenous’ gives greater force to the rights claimed on their behalf in national as well as international forums” (2006: 21). The global resonance of the term should not exclude other avenues of political identification or action. As Spivak herself points out, in relation to Dopdi, a tribal woman in one of Mahesweta Devi’s short stories, her involvement in the Marxist-based Maoist movement indicates her own capacity to reconcile these conflicting political frameworks without disavowing either claim (1981). This reconciliation is precisely what is foreclosed in The Inheritance of Loss, because the two different political frameworks are juxtaposed indirectly and then only through Sai.
These references serve to undermine the legitimacy of the Gorkhaland insurgency, with its reliance on military identity to establish the Gorkhas’ right to self-administration. These allusions replicate the prior claim of indigenous tribes to the land. This preference for a prior indigeneity that a cosmopolitan identity cannot encompass and necessarily displaces echoes the terms of a bureaucratic critique in government documents that the Gorkhaland movement fails to be adequately representative of the local population. A document entitled “Gorkhaland Agitation” produced by the state of West Bengal, argues that the GNLF is not only anti-nationalist, but also threatens the “Lepchas, the original inhabitants of the Hills” (Government of West Bengal, 1987: 3). The West Bengal state government therefore twins the two threats to the security of the nation and the integrity of the indigenous population. Further, the government disputes the Gorkhaland movement’s construction of a “Gorkha” identity. “Gorkha” no longer functions as a useful ethnic marker, since it is a category that goes beyond the confines of a single, self-identified ethnic group, through the recruitment practices of the British army. Since the British Army recruited various groups such as the Magar, Gurung, Rai, Limbu, and others into the Gorkha Regiment, it became a marker signifying colonial military service (Hutt, 2012: 11–27). But the West Bengal government insists that identities have only one historical meaning, and any expansion in their definition in the light of global and local shifts in how populations are structured are merely “inaccuracies”. They write: The expression “Gorkha” correctly applies to a small section of the Nepali-speaking population originally coming from one particular area of Nepal. Since a high proportion of Nepali-speaking soldiers were recruited by the British during their colonial regime from that area, the latter wrongly termed all recruits from Nepal as “Gorkhas” […]. GNLF is now attempting to project the Nepali-speaking Indians as Gorkhas, as distinct from Nepalis from Nepal; thus using a label wrongly given by the imperial rulers to all the Nepali speaking people, and then further wrongly assuming that this would help to distinguish the Indian citizens of Nepali origin from the citizens of Nepal. (1987: 3–4)
Moreover, this dismissal of the terms of the Gorkhaland movement’s politics is reflected in the novel, in how the narrator depicts Gyan’s political engagement: As he floated through the market, Gyan had a feeling of history being wrought, its wheels churning under him, for the men were behaving as if they were being featured in a documentary of war, and Gyan could not help but look on the scene already from the angle of nostalgia, the position of a revolutionary. But then he was pulled out of that feeling, by the ancient and usual scene, the worried shopkeepers watching from their monsoon-stained grottos. Then he shouted along with the crow, and the very mingling of his voice with largeness and lustiness seemed to create a relevancy, an affirmation he’d never felt before, and he was pulled back into the making of history. Then, looking at the hills, he fell out of the experience again. How can the ordinary be changed? […]. But the men were shouting, and he saw from their faces that they didn’t have his cynicism. They meant what they were saying; they felt a lack of justice. (173–74)
There is an inability here for the narrator to enter into the absorption into the present that Gyan experiences — he experiences the protest as a “documentary of war”, a “scene” from the “making of history”, replete with the tropes of what it means to play “a revolutionary”. In keeping with Desai’s tacit argument that “the hills” encode a more direct and authentic access to history, Gyan’s moments of discomposure arise from “looking at the hills”. The mountains seem incapable of coexisting with a military identity forged outside their confines. This odd critique voiced both by the novel and state documents overlooks the fact that all national identities are necessarily constructed and contingent on the claims that one wishes to project. As such, the criteria for evaluating their validity are not complete historical accuracy, but the way in which they are able to provide an alternative to the contemporary political arrangement.
While Desai’s novel does not provide any utopian or even alternative political community, it does recognize the different lenses through which the characters attempt to give their political aspirations form. Although it refuses to take any active political involvement in good faith, the novel does identify the contours of a discourse premised on the military, and centred on the figure of the soldier, as the basis for theorizing the failure of the nation. It is telling that criticism on the novel reproduces the novel’s own tendency to elide the terms by which the agitators define their own call to arms. The criticism focuses instead on the more accessible critiques of globalization, continuations of colonial patterns in the aftermath of Independence, and the emergence of a global proletariat as a result of postcolonial migration patterns. Even as the critics cited here find Desai’s engagement with these intersecting fields limited, they do not turn to a serious engagement with the problematics of a commitment to a militancy — itself conditioned by colonial recruitment and conscripted imperial solidarity — as the agitators’ chosen mode of outlining a postcolonial revolutionary stand against the nation state.
Easterine Kire’s novels about the Naga peoples provides the perspective that is elided in Desai’s novel — that of the indigenous inhabitant of the land, threatened by modernity and military invasion. As the first Naga writer to publish novels in English, Kire possesses the kind of native knowledge that A. R. Foning enables an access to in his self-anthropologizing work, Lepcha: My Vanishing Tribe (1987). Since her first novel, A Naga Village Remembered, published in 2003, Kire has gone on to write a number of novels about the impact of the Japanese invasion on the everyday lives of the Nagas. These include Mari (2007), A Terrible Matriarchy (2010), and A Respectable Woman (2019), which have achieved widespread recognition through national prizes such as the Hindu Prize, and an international audience by being translated into various languages. In addition, Kire has also edited a collection of poems and folktales translated from Tenyidie into English, Naga Folktales Retold (2009). Like Foning, Kire can be seen to represent the traditional ways of life, beliefs, and organizing principles of her people, besieged as they are by the forces of the contemporary world. Unlike Foning, she draws a connection between the impact of militarization under Japanese invasion and the Naga peoples’ current struggles for independence. 9 Rather than holding an indigenous identity and a military history at odds with each other, Kire’s novels show a contingent negotiation of these intertwined histories, both of which play a role in how the Naga peoples understand their position vis-à-vis the postcolonial state.
The political representation that her novels aim at is evident in the paratexts to two of Kire’s books, A Naga Village Remembered (2003) and Bitter Wormwood (2011). 10 She provides anthropological and legal documentation of the Nagas’ attempts to translate their existence into legible terms for the state and for an Anglophone audience. The framing paratexts point to the two discourses of indigenous identity and prolonged insurgency which are evoked to legitimate their claim to political statehood. A Naga Village Remembered relates the history of Khonoma village. Appendices to the text include “Glossary of Angami Words”, “Place Names” (including the “native” names of various villages as well as landmarks such as mountain peaks and rivers), “Oral Narratives of the Mehru Clan” (transcribed into English), “Oral Narratives” of the Thevo Clan, the Semo clan, and the Khwunomia. This documentation of oral narratives and place names, aimed at preservation and dissemination of the tribes’ traditions, echoes the anthropological framework adopted by Foning in relating the traditions of the Lepchas, as a counter to the encroaching erasures of modernity. As such, the conflict is between the timeless traditions of the Nagas and the disastrous modernity inaugurated by the encounter with the British in the nineteenth century.
For Bitter Wormwood, on the other hand, the narrative starts in the twentieth century. Although the novel provides dates for the births of characters, these track with historical events which are not consistent with the narrative and chronology of the Indian nation-state. Mose is born in 1937, a few years before the Japanese invasion, and his daughter in 1964, a year after the disappointing culmination of the secessionist struggle with the creation of Nagaland as a separate state within India. If these dates of birth are meant to resonate allegorically, the resonance is not with the formation of the Indian state, but with the events that led to the forced assimilation of the Nagas into the postcolonial nation. The contemporary struggle for recognition as an independent state therefore begins with the Japanese invasion, which functions as the prototype for military invasions into northeastern territory. This invasion provides a point of comparison with continued invasions by the Indian Army in the aftermath of the Second World War. Kire prefaces the story with a history of the Nagas’ demands for statehood and the coercive measures deployed by the Indian state in their refusal of this demand. The appendices to the narrative are “Some Important Dates of Naga Political History” (starting with the 1832 British occupation of the Naga Hills and documenting the various claims to independence made by the Naga clan throughout independent India’s history, up to the “Declaration of Commitment” signed in September 2009 for Naga reconciliation), the letter to the Simon Commission written in 1929, A. Z. Phizo’s letter to the President of India in 1951, the “Nine Point Agreement” between the Governor of Assam and Naga leaders reached in 1947, and a speech by Niketu Iralu on the “Historical Rights of the Nagas and their Quest for Integration”. This extensive collection of paratextual material, along with the narrative of the novel itself closely tracking historical events, resistance movements, and Acts passed to justify military occupation, indicates a more circumscribed narrative of the quest for political recognition. This is inevitably a quest paralleled by the militarization and factionalization of the native population.
Unlike The Inheritance of Loss, the novel does not treat the taking up of arms for independence as a spontaneous enactment of frustration with everyday irrelevancy. Instead, it documents the steady infiltration of the Indian army into the region — the burning of Ao and Sema villages, the unprovoked shooting of civilians. It notes how this normalization of violence receives legal sanction through the passing of acts such as the Assam Maintenance of Public Order Act in 1953 and the Armed Forces Special Powers Act of 1996. The legalized atrocities that are given free rein compel young men to slowly flee to the Underground Naga army, taking what weapons they can — “Old shotguns, rusty Japanese guns […] or just crude daos” (68). The range of weaponry shows how crucial militarization has been in the Nagas’ encounter with modernity. It also indicates the rapidity with which they have been brought into the ambit of modernity, a modernity in which different ways of life persist. Clearly outmatched by the numbers and modern weaponry of the Indian Army, the men’s tenacity registers in their continuing to lead the demanding life of guerrillas in shifting camps in the jungle. As the struggle becomes increasingly futile, the men reaffirm their attachment to the land as motivating their militancy: “This is our ancestral land to which we are bonded. The Indian soldier does not feel for the land as we do. Sooner or later we will defeat them” (95). It is their right to the land which makes their militarization a righteous movement, and the Indian Army’s actions illegitimate.
The militarization of the Nagas is thus shown to be defined by the long history of their life on the land, so that indigeneity and military identity inform each other. This is evident when a retired soldier of the Indian Army recalls his posting in the Naga Hills: They also make fine soldiers and guerrilla fighters. Even though we were fighting on opposite sides, we could not help admiring their skill in fighting. They moved like shadows, how else could we explain a small band of men holding off large battalions of the Indian Army and the Armed Forces at the same time? There is something in their culture that produces great tenacity in them as fighters. (201)
Although this echoes the racist British discourse around martial races to a certain extent, it also ties the Nagas’ military prowess to their “feeling for the land”, rather than to ideas of descent from certain ethnicities or superior intelligence. It also elides a distinction between arms taken up for the sake of resistance and the potential to be “good soldiers” by equating soldiers with “guerrilla fighters”. Coming from a former Commandant of the Indian Army, this praise is supposed to bestow legitimacy to the claims of the Nagas, providing an alternative to the classification of the Nagas as “insurgents” (200). It is only by reclassifying them as “soldiers” working for another people that their militarized struggles can be recognized.
This intertwining of the claims of an indigenous population and the martial valour that enables their continued relationship to the land indicates that the highlighting of one aspect over the other can be seen as a strategic choice aimed at the Anglophone, “Indian” readership of the novel. As the first Naga writer to write about the region in English, Kire’s works can be read as an act of deliberate political representation for her people. While their literary aspects might be important, they are framed first and foremost as a political intervention. They present a narrative that is effaced by the documents and representations of the Indian government.
As acts of political representation, these two novels provide different narratives that might yield political recognition — one based on indigenous inhabitation of the land, the other on a political modernity forged under military occupation and invasion. Towards the end of Kire’s novel, however, there is an increasing disillusionment with the taking up of arms as a method for claiming independence: “The trouble with us Nagas is that we have allowed the conflict to define us for too long. It has overtaken our lives so much that we have been colonized by it and its demands on us” (236). Giving up the military struggle effectively means taking a more assimilationist approach to the Indian state. Thus, while foregrounding the military invasions of the Nagas that provides the backdrop to their struggle for independence, the novel ultimately ends with the motif of the “bitter wormwood” plant — native knowledge of the herbs in the territory posited as therapeutic remedy to the ills of warfare. In other terms, the reclamation of traditional, indigenous knowledge functions as the counter to a corrosive, militarized modernity.
Conclusion
These novels about secessionist movements in the northeastern frontier of the Indian state — The Inheritance of Loss and Bitter Wormwood — document how the world wars bequeath a particular trajectory in how the peoples of the region make claims for statehood in the post-independence era. Even if the possibilities of a military brotherhood ultimately register as limited, the Anglophone novel is the one place that records the hold of the world wars in contemporary secessionist struggles, and the novelty of the movements’ reconceiving participation in them in order to make a political claim premised on military brotherhood. The militarization of the peoples’ identity undermines the ability of the Indian state to establish a hegemonic discourse of national identity, often achieved by positing the primacy of the indigenous to the exigencies of the contemporary. Nevertheless, these novels, while recognizing the discourses surrounding the figure of the soldier, ultimately do not find this a pragmatic way of furthering revolution, as it produces a stagnant temporality of protracted insurgency that is constantly looking to the past.
At the same time, the novels differ significantly in how they view this invocation of military brotherhood. For The Inheritance of Loss, indigeneity and military identity remain opposed identities, with the former affording a more authentic attachment to the land. In this, it echoes the West Bengal government’s stance, and the state’s eventual recognition of indigeneity as the criteria for according autonomy to the region. Kire, however, deploys these two identities as contingent frameworks for claiming recognition from modern nation states. As the colonial history of ethnic classification and military recruitment makes evident, these two narratives are inevitably bound up in each other. As Kire astutely understands, untangling them is not an attempt to access an “original” or “authentic” state, but a political claim that works in the context of recognizable discourses that legitimate political community and enable nation formation.
