Abstract
North-Eastern Researchers Turn the Spotlight Within
One of the most encouraging developments in academic research on and about the area known as the north-east of India is the emergence of a growing number of young scholars who have increasingly gravitated to work in their own regions, communities, cultures and specialisations. Such a trend is also visible, of course, in other parts of the country. In addition, international scholars, though a handful, are also reviewing the issues of the region from not just a borderlands lens but also from sociological, political, economic and literary perspectives.
Even if one moves away from the prism of academic writing, one finds a surge of new writers in fiction and non-fiction from the region whose books are picked up by major publishers and who figure regularly at the many LitFests, which are happening everywhere from Jaipur to Kohima, Lucknow to Bangalore and beyond. They win awards and draw crowds. Their range covers folk tales with a dark twist, detective fiction, love of different hues, stories of insurgency and conflict, solid historical tomes and travelogues.
A new collection of scholarly essays edited by Hoineilhing Sitlhou of the University of Hyderabad, ‘Identity and Marginality in North East India, Challenges for Social Science Research’ (published by Orient BlackSwan, Hyderabad), brings academic focus and rigour to issues and sheds light on the concerns of people from the region. The editor has stitched together 13 articles by diverse authors, which are further divided into six sections.
In his foreword, Purendra Prasad aptly points to the disjoint in scholarship when he says that at the ‘core of the subject of marginality lies the issue of identity’. He further elaborates that ‘the volume explains how the region expresses incompleteness and how contradictions are inbuilt here … (and) argues that the communities of Northeast India have ideas of alternate nationalism and demand equal citizenship’.
Sithlou briefly explains the focus of the different essays in her introduction, which spans issues of spatial marginality, colonial administrations, boundary lines and the construction of the ‘other’ in the process of marginalisation. However, it is left to each scholar to make compelling arguments, or otherwise, for her/his area of interest, with theoretical framing and analytical approaches. It is a matter of more than academic interest that 7 of the 13 chapters are related in a significant way to Mizoram as well as to issues of the Kukis and Chins.
One of the most influential and respected historians of the region, Sajal Nag, is the first contributor. Nag’s many books on the nation-state, on margins and conflicts and on threatened environments and nationalism are a must-read to get a better understanding of the complex issues facing the region.
At the beginning of his chapter, Nag refers to the fierce independence shown by the Nagas, especially when they demanded to be left alone after the British left and not placed at the mercy of ‘those people who had never conquered us themselves’, a reference to Assam. However, at the end, he notes that a century of Christianity, colonialism, detribalisation and exclusion has transformed them, and yet the ‘tribals’ were not accepted as equals. Indeed, he points out that the postcolonial predicament of the tribes of the region is their metamorphosis from the ‘community that was once far more powerful than the plains people had to seek protection and mercy from the same plains people who became the arbiters of their destiny’.
Papori Bora reviews the north-east through the lens of ‘knowledge production’, referring to the times and methods of Edward Gait and other pre-independence historians as well as the debate between the need for assimilation and integration as propounded by two schools of thought among Indian anthropologists. While Bora speaks of different academic approaches that have emerged at different times, she also refers to new scholarship emerging through various universities outside of the North Eastern Region (NER), where Centres for the teaching and study of issues have been set up. These have been established now for over 14 years and are evolving with a growing number of students, though still limited. When I was the founder director of the first such Centre at a Central University (Jamia Millia Islamia), a priority was to draw academic interest, focus and build a pool of knowledge. Researchers from different streams were encouraged to interrogate issues and approach areas of study innovatively and critically, for example, issues of targeted racism (and examine why, despite the widespread knowledge of and experiences with discrimination, more people from the region chose to come to the metros) and the link between public policy, performance and lived realities.
Sithlou herself and Sarah Pulathil wade into the discrimination issue in their chapter, where they provide the background of in-migration from the region to Delhi and other metros and build on the phenotype of what an Indian should look like, the basis for the way those from the region are often ‘othered’. Using the tool of a survey they had conducted, the authors consider the impact of the MP Bezbaruah Committee, which was set up after the death of an Arunachali student following a beating he had suffered in a New Delhi market, to look into issues of discrimination and make recommendations to deal with the problems.
Their findings are unsurprising: The Bezbaruah Committee promised much, and some positive impacts are seen in Delhi. This is to be expected as Delhi is a high-profile city, and incidents there tend to be magnified and amplified through social media, as well as other online and offline media. However, they do not say (as their survey covering a small group of 95 respondents was limited to Delhi) whether this improvement was visible in other metros, both large and small.
What is truly needed is a sustained, repeated and combined effort by sociologists and researchers in the various Centres of NE studies across the country to work with other universities and assess the state and scale of discrimination. Occasional efforts and surveys will not do the job. A regular annual assessment that looks at the State of Discrimination faced by people from the North-east is the key and the centres should come together to plan this in a time of ‘Azaadi ki amrit mohatasav’ and take a good hard look at the issues and the allied concerns.
Related to this chapter is Thanggoulen Kipen’s piece on Kuki migration to Delhi, which looks at supply and demand issues and the myriad factors playing into the exodus, including the disastrous bandhs and blockages that disrupted Manipur’s economy. The push factors of ‘poverty, unemployment and socio-economic instability’ have ‘pushed’ people to migrate great distance and take up jobs in the service sector like restaurants and hotels, nursing, and call centres to support their families. One assumes that publication deadlines have meant that there can be no reference in Kipgen’s essay to the violence that erupted in Manipur in May this year and continues stutteringly with tens of thousands displaced. However, the unfolding tragedy without end in the state in which all of Manipur has suffered, not just Kukis or Meiteis, is pushing greater outmigration to places within the region and as far as Delhi.
An important essay in this collection is that of alternative sexuality and the huge challenges it faces in Mizoram. Lalmingmawii’s chapter follows research on men who have sex with men in the state. It traces the first reported mention of alternative sexuality and the stern efforts by British officials to penalise and criminalise it. This approach seeped through the church to the extent that Mizo churches sought a review of the now-famous 2009 judgement by the Delhi High Court striking down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). The author dwells also on the vigilante approaches of various powerful civil society groups in the state that victimise sex workers and gays, resorting to public shaming, beatings, cutting their hair and detaining. The detailed interviews are most revealing of the challenges faced by these groups, which live in fear of intimidation and with little support from others for their constitutional rights. Although the LBGTQ community in Mizoram has taken some steps forward, Lalmingmawii provides a telling commentary on its condition: It is ‘still looking forward to the day when community members will gain the courage to step out with pride under the rainbow flag’.
There are revealing reflections on the lives of women in another chapter on Mizoram, which considers the status of Christianity and gender among Protestant Mizo women. V. Sawmvelli, who looks not just at the majority Mizoram Presbyterian Church Synod but also the Baptist Church of Mizoram and the Evangelical Church of Mizoram of Maraland (an area under the Sixth Schedule with its own autonomous district council). The study was carried out across three districts of this spectacularly beautiful and rugged hill state bordering Myanmar. What emerges are the limitations placed on women who can become elders but are not ordained in the Presbyterian Synod, despite the issue being raised not less than three times; the Baptists had 18 women elders and only one Assistant Pastor but no Pastor. The Evangelical Church of Mizoram had one woman deacon, and the main opposition, the writer said, came from women themselves! In daily life, women told the interviewer that they accepted gender inequality as a matter of course and that it persisted in the ‘patriarchal social system’.
An in-depth analysis is shared of the tragic and extremely violent Kuki–Naga clashes in Manipur in 1992 in which more than 1,000 people were killed and extensive internal displacement occurred. The key issues behind the violence were described as ethnic mobilisation, land disputes and the responses of the state. What is not stressed enough here and in other literature on such events is that ethnic identity mobilisation grows around land disputes. The latter fuels confrontation. The state comes in as a later player with an ad hoc response or playing a specific game, having mapped and charted its own course before the tragic trajectory began. Taking three study sites, Ruth Nengneilhung shares stories of the experiences of marginalisation of displaced Kuki women in the state. The scale of the violence was such that in one village, three-fourths of the Kuki families became women-headed households after a majority of men were killed and the women widowed. The women who were interviewed indicated that they often run their businesses ‘in the open enduring cold, heat and rain’. She underlines the criticality of land saying that it is ‘a highly valued and sacred entity for Kukis’.
Suryasikha Pathak, looking at census and identity politics among the Plains Tribes in colonial Assam, provides a fascinating deep dive into the construction of communities in the 1901 census and the differences between animists and Hindus. Ambiguities gave rise, Pathak says, to complexities and fluidities, especially as new converts to Hinduism from the ‘tribes’ ‘cling to their old habits of eating and drinking’.
Pathak refers to the critical decades of the 1930s and 1940s, where he speaks of the ‘communalisation of numbers’ and the rapid increase of the Muslim population as a result of migration from East Bengal, when CS Mullen, the Superintendent of Census for the state, penned his famous lines comparing the immigrants with their hunger for land to vultures attracted to a carcass. But far more interesting is Pathak’s work on data, where the census divided Assam’s backward tribes into hill groups and plains groups like the Rabhas, Bodos, Mishings, Tiwas, Deoris and the Hajongs. That classification has continued to stay over a century later.
Venusa Tinyi, who describes herself as a member of the Chokri sub-clan of the Chakesang tribe of Nagaland, elaborates on the megalithic culture of the Chakesang Nagas. She describes the journey of the great monoliths and their link to the Feast of Merit, which is an elaborate process that involves a consultation with the village chief priest. Tinyi positions the essay on seeking to refute the formidable J. B. Hutton, colonial administrator and social scientist, on his approach to the moonlights, their meaning and their role in the culture of the Chakesangs. This thoughtful riposte needs to be seen in the light of how scholars from and of the community observe and analyse their culture and history, not through a colonial lens.
Rekha M. Shangliang writes on the marginalisation of land and forest rights of rural Khasi women. In her field work, she found that in a village of Ri-Bhoi district in Meghalaya, women spent 80% of their time on drudgery, meeting basic needs such as foraging for herbs, edible roots and tubers, fetching firewood and water and non-traditional forest produce.
The author has a belief in the deep connection between community and nature in the state. However, the destruction of the commons and forests, hillsides for extraction and illegal mining of coal and stinging judicial comments fly in the face of this. This angle needs sharper analysis, including the extensive illegal timber and coal trade in which many income groups are involved for different reasons. The author, however, correctly stresses the ‘invisibility of women’s role in forest management and decision-making’ and lack of agency despite their huge investment in time, resources and energy.
Two essays on Mizoram close this book: One on daily life on the Indo-Myanmar border by N. William Singh and a study of cancer-affected persons in the state by Lalhmangaihi Chhakchhuak. Mizoram’s relations with Myanmar are dominated by its relationship with the Chins of that country, who are regarded as fraternal by the Mizos. Indeed, the Chins are part of the Kuki-Zo-Chin ethic group that spans Manipur, Mizoram and Chin state of Myanmar. Indeed, Mizoram has repeatedly given shelter to Chinese refugees who flee Myanmar army brutalities as well as acute poverty. Today, some 45,000 Chins are living in refugee camps in eastern Mizoram on the Indo-Myanmar border. Singh correctly points out the inequalities that Chins face in daily life, ranging from breaking stones for road construction to working as farmhands and service staff in hotels and restaurants. However, everywhere, he notes, they appear to lack agency. In earlier years, the powerful Young Mizo Association and other groups, as well as the government, launched crackdowns against the Chins.
Yet today, this is not the case. They have found strong support in the Mizoram government at the top level, especially since the first wave of refugees came in 2021 and most recently, resulting in a confrontation between Chief Minister Zoramthanga, who stood by the Chins, and the Centre, which wanted a tougher stand on the refugees. While Zoramthanga’s position may be seen as related to the elections in the state, the general view in Mizoram predates this.
While Chhakchhuak provides detail in his backgrounding of the local Mizo economy (one British official noted in his tenure that there were no shopkeepers in the district), he refers to the geographical isolation of the area, which was a main hurdle to growth. Chhakchhuak moves to the high incidence of tobacco use in the state, looks at diet and suggests that new food habits, including imported, cheaper food, are a reason for health problems of HIV/AIDS and cancer. However, the writer does not back up these statements with data to substantiate them. As a result, the connection appears rather weak. Indeed, the author does not look at the one commodity that is imported all the way from Indonesia and brought across sea and land through Thailand, Malaysia, war-torn Myanmar, and into Mizoram before being extensively distributed at high prices in other parts of the NER and the country: areca nut. That, more than cigarettes or any other commodity, is what connects the Mizo economy to the world.
This is an important effort by a number of younger academics to look afresh at some issues—what is significant is that they are rooted in their communities and in their states. Many of the chapters could have been more cogent in their analysis. The authors are insiders, looking within and speaking out, and that gives this volume—despite its shortcomings—its strength.