Geographies of Difference: Explorations in Northeast Indian Studies 9781138290198, 9781315110295

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Geographies of Difference

This book rethinks Northeast India as a lived space, a centre of interconnections and unfolding histories, instead of an isolated periphery. Questioning dominant tropes and assumptions around the Northeast, it examines socio-political and historical processes, border issues, the role of the state, displacement and development, debates over natural resources, violence, notions of body and belonging, movements, tensions and relations, and strategies, struggles and narratives that frame discussions on the region. Drawing on current and emerging research in Northeast India studies, this work will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, human geography, sociology and social anthropology, history, cultural studies, media studies and South Asian studies. Mélanie Vandenhelsken is a researcher in anthropology at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research and Documentation of Inner and South Asian Cultural History (CIRDIS), University of Vienna, Austria, and was formerly at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences. Meenaxi Barkataki-Ruscheweyh is Research Fellow, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Bengt G. Karlsson is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University, Sweden.

Geographies of Difference Explorations in Northeast Indian Studies

Edited by Mélanie Vandenhelsken, Meenaxi Barkataki-Ruscheweyh and Bengt G. Karlsson

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Mélanie Vandenhelsken, Meenaxi Barkataki-Ruscheweyh and Bengt G. Karlsson; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Mélanie Vandenhelsken, Meenaxi BarkatakiRuscheweyh and Bengt G. Karlsson to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The international boundaries, coastlines, denominations, and other information shown in any map in this work do not necessarily imply any judgement concerning the legal status of any territory or the endorsement or acceptance of such information. For current boundaries, readers may refer to the Survey of India maps. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-29019-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-11029-5 (ebk) Typeset in Galliard by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figuresviii Contributorsx Prefacexv Acknowledgementsxxv Remembering Bianca Sonxxvii MICHAEL W. CHARNEY



Introduction: Northeastern research entanglements

1

BENGT G. KARLSSON

PART I

Historical and ethnographic encounters15   1 Reading Fürer-Haimendorf in Northeast India

17

SANJIB BARUAH

  2 The role of informants in the construction of the Zo as the Chin, Lushai and the Kuki of Burma and India

31

BIANCA SON

  3 Sutured landscapes: making of an imperial frontier in Tripura (1848–1854)

53

ANANDAROOP SEN

  4 Portrait of a place: reflections about fieldwork from the foothills of Northeast India DOLLY KIKON

72

vi  Contents   5 Ethnographic study and cultural production in Sikkim

89

MÉLANIE VANDENHELSKEN

PART II

Politics of land and material resources107   6 Hydro-dollar dreams: emergent local politics of large dams and small communities

109

MIBI ETE

  7 Violence, agrarian change and the politics of autonomy in Assam

128

SANJAY (XONZOI) BARBORA

  8 Naga art and their market through time: delocalisation, state control and globalisation

140

IRIS ODYUO

  9 Youth fashion and the identity of resistance in Northeast India

159

TEIBORLANG T. KHARSYNTIEW

PART III

In and out of the state175 10 Decades of ‘ethnic massacre’ in Bodoland: the state and the framing of conflict in India’s Northeast

177

KAUSTUBH DEKA

11 Diversity and difference: the art of electioneering in Meghalaya

196

CORNELIA GUENAUER

12 From the shackles of tradition: motherhood and women’s agitation in Manipur SOIBAM HARIPRIYA

215

Contents vii 13 Mizo identity: the role of the Young Mizo Association (YMA) in Mizoram

233

N. WILLIAM SINGH

14 Situating language, recognising multilingualism: linguistic identities and mother tongue attachment in Northeast India and the region

253

MARK TURIN



Afterword: contested, vertical, fragmenting: de-partitioning ‘Northeast India’ studies

272

WILLEM VAN SCHENDEL

Index289

Figures

1.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5

8.6 8.7

8.8

8.9

Map of Northeast India.  Company Man reflecting about Naginimora and coal.  Naga coal miners taking a break.  Nelson and his friend.  Sarah, Abraham and Enoch.  Ango with his basket.  Naga subsistence cultivators with their jhum produce at the Rajabari haat.  Map of the area. Warrior’s shield made of buffalo, rhinoceros or elephant hide and decorated with grass tassels and red-dyed goat’s hair.  Red- and black-dyed goat’s and dog’s hair is used in the decoration of feast-giver and warrior’s shawl. Khiamniungan warrior of note wears a spike brass armband called khiaptso. It is traded outside Naga villages.  Circles of cowry shells sewn to the surface of a black shawl and outline of human figures indicating the martial achievements of the wearer.  Boar’s tusk used as chest ornaments by Naga warriors. A distinctive warrior chest ornament worn by Nagas consists of a flat piece of wood covered with fine plaited work of red cane with border of cowries and a fringe of red-dyed goat’s hair at the ends and bottom. A conical ceremonial headgear made of bichromatic weave done in red-dyed cane with yellow orchid stem and red-dyed goat’s hair, Tuensang, 2007. Leg-guard made of a bichromatic weave done in dyed red cane with patterns woven in with yellow orchid stem worn by feast givers. 

xvi 80 81 82 83 85 86 141 144 145 146

147 148

149

150

153

Figures ix 12.1 Women in a sit-in protest, Ningthoukhong, 6 April, 2011.  15.1 Northeast India and its neighbours, 1947.  15.2 Some territorial visions spilling over the borders of Northeast India: Kamatapur, Nagalim and Greater Mizoram.  15.3 Administrative divisions in Northeast India, 1949: 1. Assam; 2. Manipur; 3. Tripura; 4. West Bengal. 15.4 Administrative divisions in Northeast India, 2016: 1. Assam; 2. Arunachal Pradesh; 3. Nagaland; 4. Manipur; 5. Mizoram; 6. Tripura; 7. Meghalaya; 8. West Bengal; 9. Sikkim.  15.5 Examples of homelands within states: Mizoram and Tripura: 1. Chakma; 2. Lai; 3. Mara; 4. ‘Tribal’.

225 274

277 281

282 283

Contributors

Sanjay (Xonzoi) Barbora is a sociologist and he teaches at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Guwahati, India. He has been associated with the human rights movement in Assam since the 1990s and worked on issues pertaining to agrarian change, trade unions and settler-indigenous conflicts in Northeast India. He is currently examining environmental conflicts arising out of human – animal relations in Assam’s wildlife parks. Meenaxi Barkataki-Ruscheweyh is Research Fellow, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her PhD work is on the relation between performance of ethnicity at festivals and the construction of ethnic identity, as well as the question of continued marginalisation of small ethnic groups, with special reference to the Tangsa community in Assam. Her work on the Tangsa has been recently published as a monograph Dancing to the State: Ethnic Compulsions of the Tangsa in Assam (OUP 2017). She has co-edited (with Andrea Lauser) a special volume of Asian ethnology entitled Performing Identity: Politics and Culture in Northeast India and Beyond (2013). She has also edited (with Jean Michaud and Margaret Swain) the second edition of the Historical Dictionary of the Peoples of the Southeast Asian Massif (2006/2016). Sanjib Baruah is Professor of Political Studies at Bard College, New York, USA. He holds concurrent appointments as Global Fellow, Peace Research Institute, Oslo [PRIO], Norway and Honorary Research Professor, Centre for Policy Research (CPR), New Delhi, India. He has authored a number of books and articles. His books include Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India (2005) and India against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (1999). Michael W. Charney is Professor of Asian and Military History at the Department of History at SOAS, University of London, UK. He is an expert on South East Asia in both the premodern and modern periods.

Contributors xi He has published monographs on warfare in the premodern South East Asian region, Southeast Asian Warfare, 1300–1900 (2004) and on the rise of monastic, military and ministerial elites and their impact on the religious and intellectual life of the precolonial Burmese kingdom, Powerful Learning: Buddhist Literati and the Throne in Burma’s Last Dynasty, 1752–1885 (2006) and A History of Modern Burma (2009). His most recent work focuses on the role of railways in war, premodern warfare across the Indian Ocean world, and South East Asia during the Cold War. Kaustubh Deka is Assistant Professor at the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research, Jamia Milia Islamia Central University, New Delhi. He received his doctorate from the Centre of Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in 2013 on the topic: “The Politics of Student’s Movements, Limits and Possibilities: With Special Reference to Assam, 1985–2010.” He has been a recipient of the Public Policy fellowship at the Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy, Chennai in 2013–2014. Formerly he taught at the Department of Political Science at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. He is associated with organisations like UNDP and DFID as research consultant and has written extensively on areas of identity politics, protest movements and trends of students and youth mobilisation, especially in the context of India’s Northeast. Mibi Ete is a development professional who has been working in the Indian non-profit sector since 2004. At present, she is a junior researcher at the Centre for Development Research (ZEF) at the University of Bonn, Germany. She is writing her dissertation on the local politics of hydropower development in Arunachal Pradesh. In research, she is interested in the intersections of changing rural livelihoods, development and environment in the Himalayas. Cornelia Guenauer is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Social Anthropology, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, and a scholar of the Heinrich Boell Foundation, India. Her doctoral thesis, ‘How to Make a Difference: Election Campaigning and Politics of Identity in India’, analyses the strategies implemented by campaign actors navigating between the different and partially contradictory requirements of national and local politics during electioneering in India. She has been Lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology in Mainz. Her research interests include politics of difference, political communication, democracy, sound studies and ethnomusicology. Soibam Haripriya is Assistant Professor, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Guwahati, India. She recently completed her doctoratal thesis from the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi, India. As a scholar of

xii  Contributors Sociology, she is interested in documenting and analysing changing meaning of ‘sites’ in the cultural landscape of Manipur. Bengt G. Karlsson is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University, Sweden. He has authored two monographs – Contested Belonging: An Indigenous People’s Struggle for Forest and Identity in Sub-Himalayan Bengal (2000) and Unruly Hills: A Political Ecology of India’s Northeast (2011), and two edited volumes – Human Rights: Anthropological Perspectives (2005) and Indigeneity in India (with Tanka B. Subba, 2006) besides scholarly articles in international journals. Karlsson’s main research comprises the politics of nature, nation and migration in India, especially Northeast India. Teiborlang T. Kharsyntiew is Assistant Professor in the Centre for European Studies, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Besides working on issues of the European Union, his research interests include culture and identity in the India’s Northeast region. His latest publication is ‘Nathu La and the Opportunities for Sino-Indian Economic Rapprochement’, in the book India, China and Sub-regional Connectivities in South Asia (2015). Dolly Kikon is a social anthropologist and teaches at Anthropology and Development Studies Program, Melbourne University, Australia. Her research engages with issues of gender, militarisation, extractive economy, migration and social change in Northeast India. She obtained her doctorate degree in Social Anthropology from Stanford University, USA, in 2013 and was a post-doctoral researcher at Stockholm University, Sweden until December 2015. Iris Odyuo is Associate Professor at the Department of History in Sao Chang College, in Tuensang, Nagaland, India, as well as a painter. She received her doctoral degree from the Department of History and Archaeology of Nagaland University, Kohima in 2014 for her dissertation titled ‘A Study of Naga Artisans and Their Craft: Continuity and Change’. Her research focuses on Naga arts and artisanal production in past and present. Her work as painter was the focus of the documentary film Ashes of Our Land. She recently authored the article ‘Impact of Globalization on Naga Art’ in Michael Heneise (ed.), Passing Things On: Ancestors and Genealogies in Northeast India (2014). Anandaroop Sen is Lecturer at the Department of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa. He was previously teaching as a guest lecturer at the Sociology Department, Presidency University, Kolkata, India. He received his doctorate in 2016 from the Centre for

Contributors xiii Historical Studies (CHS), Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His dissertation looks at the entangled histories of colonial law and violence in the eastern frontiers of British India. N. William Singh is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology of Pachhunga University College, Mizoram University, India. He graduated from University of Delhi and completed his PhD in Sociology on ‘Nature and Dynamics of Civil Society in Mizoram’ from Jawaharlal Nehru University. He was a 2012-Deutscher Akademischer Austauchdienst (German Academic Exchange Service) fellow at Freie Universitat, Berlin, for a research focused on civil society during the Weimer Republic. His current research covers Mizo networks across Myanmar and Mizoram borderlands, and on health, body and traditional healing in Northeast India. His recent articles have been published in Economic & Political Weekly and in Himal Southasian (2014). He has co-edited the volume Becoming Something Else: Society and Change in India’s North East (2015). Bianca Son was a historian and specialised on the ‘Chin’ (or Zo, Lushai, and Kuki) of Burma and India. She completed her doctorate from SOAS, Department of History, London, in 2013. In addition to her research work, she was involved in organisations and events in support of the Chin community, such as the Chin National Council. She was also the Director of the Dr Vumson Suantak Education Foundation, founded to continue her father’s work, Dr Vumson Suantak. She authored ‘Exclusive Memories: The Political Construction of the Zo’, Zomi National Convention Publication 2013. Bianca Son passed away at the age of 44 in June 2014. Mark Turin is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the First Nations and Endangered Languages Program at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He has worked as an anthropologist and linguist in Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan since 1995, and directs the Digital Himalaya Project. He served as the Founding Programme Director of the Yale Himalaya Initiative from 2011 to 2014, and co-edits Himalaya, the longest-running, open access, interdisciplinary and peer-reviewed journal of Himalayan studies. His research interests and publications range across language conservation, documentation and endangerment, archives, cultural heritage and technology. Mélanie Vandenhelsken is a researcher in anthropology at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research and Documentation of Inner and South Asian Cultural History (CIRDIS) of the University of Vienna, Austria,

xiv  Contributors and was formerly at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on the making of ethnicity in Sikkim, with special reference to the resident Bhutias, Gurungs and Limbus. Her research at CIRDIS views the cultural dynamics among Limbus in a trans-border perspective. She has recently authored ‘The Making of Gurung Cultural Identifications in Sikkim’ in Nepali Diaspora in a Globalised Era (co-edited by Tanka B. Subba and A. C. Sinha, 2016). Willem van Schendel works in the fields of history, anthropology and sociology of Asia. His recent publications include The Camera as Witness: A Social History of Mizoram, Northeast India (2015, with Joy L.K. Pachuau) and The Bangladesh Reader: History, Culture, Politics (2013, with Meghna Guhathakurta).

Preface

Geographies of Difference brings together new research on Northeast India focusing on key socio-political and historical processes that make the area what it is today. Following recent major reconfigurations of ‘area studies’ in South and Southeast Asia, ‘geographies’ in the title highlights our approach to Northeast India as an emerging ‘geo-historical entity’ (van Schendel 2002). By shedding light on ideas, topics and approaches that make the academic study of Northeast India today, we wish to contribute to, and also accompany and encourage, the construction of Northeast Indian Studies as a research field in its own right. It is high time for a new generation of scholarship that questions many of the taken-for-granted assumptions and truths about the region. We seek to turn around dominant tropes and, instead of an isolated periphery, rethink the Northeast as a lived space, a centre of interconnections and unfolding histories. If earlier scholarship often pointed to what was lacking in the Northeast, we suggest instead to focus on what is actually there. We especially seek to engage in the central question of what it entails to inhabit and belong to this part of the world, stressing contemporary flows and movements, ideas and aspirations, tensions and relations, strategies and struggles that constitute places and life-worlds in the region. Northeast India has rightly been described as a highly culturally diverse region with a multitude of languages, belief-systems, livelihoods and polities. And indeed, things can differ from valley to valley or even from one village to the next. Matrilineal decent is a key defining institution among the Khasis, Jaintias, Garos and Rabhas in Meghalaya and adjoining areas of Assam, but not so among the neighbouring indigenous communities that firmly follow patrilineal decent. For those who have a passion for difference, this is certainly the place to be. But along with differences, there are also important cultural commonalities across Northeast India. In the hills most communities depend historically on shifting cultivation and have a similar set of festivals relating to the agricultural cycle. Kingdoms and political centres have expanded and contracted over time, and the recent history

xvi  Preface with colonial and postcolonial intrusions and resistance has many similarities across the region. Christianity has, for example, taken on a particular strength in the hills, and is often a central dimension in modern ethnic politics as in the case of the Mizos and the Nagas. Christianity has also been a vehicle for English language education and for Western popular culture more generally, for example, the widespread attraction of jeans, rock music and football in the region. And now after seventy years since Indian independence, the entity Northeast India has in many ways become a social reality that has a bearing on peoples’ everyday lives. With the increased mobility of the youth, Northeast provides a sense of identity and belonging. Geographies also refer to how the Northeast is being known: the epistemological and methodological aspects of scholarly entanglements with this part of the world. The volume deals with a wide range of topics, like language, ethnic politics, violence, civil society organisations, electioneering, exploitation of natural resources, land ownership, trade in handicraft and negotiations and confrontations with different branches of the local and central state. Most of the contributions also address issues relating to categories, analytical frameworks and research methods. We have consciously sought out a plurality of perspectives and have especially been looking for grounded, empirical research and scholarship firmly based in the field or archive. We have contributions from historians, anthropologists, political scientists, linguists and sociologists.

Figure 1.0  Map of Northeast India Source: Prepared by Jayanta Laskar and Mélanie Vandenhelsken.

Preface xvii Too much of what has been written on Northeast India is based on the uncritical circulation of colonial scholarship, for example, the work by scholars-cum-administrators like Gait, Grierson and Hutton. While such work is still important, colonial texts have to be read against the grain, taking into consideration that they also served the ideological and political interests of the Empire. With this volume we seek a new beginning that opens fresh conversations and allows new voices to be heard, not least those from within the region itself. This again is part of a larger scholarly effort in establishing Northeast India Studies as a field in its own right. Here we follow the path of other similar projects. Anthropologist David Gellner (2013: 1) declares the birth of a new ‘subregion’, that of, Northern South Asia. This novel entity, as he puts it, consists of the border areas along India’s northern mountains, also including present-day Northeast India. Such territorialisation, Gellner suggests, is a means of unthinking the methodological nationalism that dominates conventional South Asian Studies (2013: 4–5). We sympathise with this move. And despite sticking to a territorial unit that was a consequence of the formation of the new nationstates of India, (then) Pakistan and Burma, Northeast Indian Studies builds on the recognition that Northeast India is and has always been part of wider circuits of trade, migration, warfare and friendship. Yet, the postcolonial period with state intrusion through military occupation, resource extraction, development interventions and neoliberal policy designs does bring forth particular histories that we believe can be productively explored under the common umbrella of Northeast Indian Studies.

The volume Geographies of Differences includes 16 chapters, some focusing on issues regarding all the north-eastern states (Karlsson, Baruah, Turin and van Schendel), while others are more localised: on the Zo of India and Burma (Son), Tripura (Sen), the foothill border region of Assam and Nagaland (Kikon), Sikkim (Vandenhelsken), Arunachal Pradesh (Ete), Assam (Barbora and Deka), Nagaland (Odyuo), the capital cities of Sikkim and Meghalaya (Kharsyntiew), Meghalaya (Guenauer), Manipur (Soibam) and Mizoram (Singh). Bengt G. Karlsson discusses in the introduction the emergence, transformation and future of Northeast Indian Studies and places the volume in the context of this emerging research field. Its starting point is the recent increase of scholarly interest in Northeast India which, although a welcome development, still calls for introspection. Karlsson suggests that the recent surge has to do with a shift ‘in how the world is being perceived’ where scholarly attention is gravitating from the ‘classical civilizational centres’ to

xviii  Preface the margins and ‘in-between spaces’. To liberate Northeast Indian Studies from the shackles of colonial categories and modes of thinking, Karlsson advocates a scholarship that pays closer attention to local voices as well as indigenous epistemologies and ontologies. He ends by pointing to a few areas that he thinks require further scholarly attention, such as mobility, class formation, urban life and human-nature relations. The exploration of the colonial categories that still informs social science research on the region is a concern shared by several other chapters. The opening chapter by Sanjib Baruah reflects on the work of the acclaimed anthropologist Christoph Fürer-Haimendorf. The latter is the author of several bestselling ethnographic monographs – such as Naked Nagas (1939) and Himalayan Barbary (1955) – and other influential publications on the people of Northeast India. As Baruah narrates, Fürer-Haimendorf came to these outer reaches of the then Province of Assam in search of pre-contact primitive societies. He was no doubt a skillful ethnographer, whose work continues to inspire and engage scholars as well as general readers, but as Baruah points out, there are disturbing silences or omissions, especially relating to the wider political landscape of the communities he studied. There is, for example, no mention of the violent forms of ‘colonial pacification’ of his ethnographic subjects, nor of the subsequent postcolonial turmoil. Baruah places his chapter in the context of knowledge and (colonial) power, a relationship that contemporary scholarship must also be reflexive about. The reflection on colonial categories is continued in Bianca Son’s chapter on the Zo highlanders of Burma and India. Son is concerned with how colonial officers constructed the people of these hill tracts as separate communities, as the Chin, Lushai and Kuki. The basis of such ethnic categorisation were early accounts by Westerners like the Italian priest Father Vincenzo Sangermano and Company officers who were touring those hills during late 18th and early 19th centuries. Through her close reading of such sources, Son seeks to pave the way for the writing of other, alternative histories, as she puts it, ‘for the Zo to discover their own histories’. While not directly positioning herself as an insider, Son obviously speaks from the position of a Zo historian herself. In the following chapter, Anandaroop Sen provides a rich history of a ‘border’ in the Northeast, initially separating the British District of Tippera and the Princely State of Hill Tippera. However insignificant the events in 1854 surrounding the formalisation of this boundary might seem, the story provides a wider template of thinking of how places and territories are being made. While we can say that Northeast India begins with Partition (see Schendel, this volume), there were, as Sen shows, ‘deeper, slower, structural shifts’ that made things unfold in a particular way. With Partition in 1947, the earlier boundary between the Princely State and the British District became the international border

Preface xix between India and Bangladesh. The 1854 boundary has also had other important after lives; it continues to haunt political life in today’s state of Tripura, especially in relation to demands for a separate state by the indigenous tribal communities who feel discriminated against by the Bengalispeaking majority population. With the remaining two chapters of Part I we move from the past and history to the present and ethnography. In Dolly Kikon’s chapter we learn about everyday life in the Assam-Nagaland foothills. Kikon is concerned with how relations unfold in this in-between space that is neither hills nor plains. As she shows there are intimate relations across ethnic communities where people trade, maintain friendships and fall in love with each other. Yet people are also obsessed with differences, sorting out who belongs and who does not to a particular place. Kikon’s account also engages her own position as a woman, a Naga and a scholar from an American university, being considered both an insider and an outsider at the same time. By being attentive to how personal biography is negotiated in the field, we get a richer understanding of the complex social realities in the foothills, Kikon suggests. The role and position of the scholar is also discussed in the subsequent chapter by Mélanie Vandenhelsken. In Vandenhelsken’s case the focus is on how ‘the ethnographic encounter’ influences or structures events and activities among the community she is studying. The Sikkimese Gurungs seek recognition as a scheduled tribe and for the ethnic activists the presence of a foreign ethnographer is hence of utmost importance. Vandenhelsken becomes a spectator of staged cultural performances, some of which are quite different from earlier forms of ritual practices. At play here is ‘cultural production’, to which dynamics, she argues, the interaction between the ethnographer and the local people contributes today. It is a real challenge for the scholar to grasp the goings-on which, according to Vandenhelsken, among other things requires prolonged periods of fieldwork. Part II, Politics of Land and Material Resources, addresses the more tangible aspects of life: land, natural resources and material things. Material aspects are essential for our survival but are also intimately related to our sense of self; they manifest as much as they nourish collective identifications. Mibi Ete takes us to one of the most challenging resource conflicts in Northeast India today, that is, the damming of rivers. Ete is interested in the micro-politics of dams in her home state of Arunachal Pradesh. Things are far from simple, not the typical story of state and capital pushing for the building of big dams and local, indigenous communities doing everything to resist them. As Ete elaborates, in some cases, local people have in fact actively been seeking participation in hydropower projects. To understand why this could be the case, one has to look at the socio-economic and

xx  Preface historical context of the particular community in question. Ete does this for the Ramo community in the Sii valley where as many as five large dams are supposed to be built which will submerge the entire valley under water. The following chapter by Sanjoy (Xonzoi) Barbora presents an equally complex situation of conflicts related to the use and ownership of land. These conflicts are often intermeshed with questions of belonging, locals and settlers, which keep producing violence, deaths and displacement. Barbora looks into the situation in western Assam and more particularly that of the semiautonomous part under the Bodo Territorial Areas District. As he suggests, changes in agrarian relations are key to unfolding tensions and violence in the area. Like Ete, Barbora urges us not to look at just that which immediately meets the eye, but to engage in the long-term changes that have come about as a result of colonial and postcolonial interventions. Handicraft has become one of the key signifiers of the different communities of Northeast India. As Iris Odyuo narrates in her chapter on handicraft in Nagaland, there has been a tremendous development during the last hundred years. If handicraft production earlier was complementary to subsistence farming, today, a large number of professional artisans live solely on the making of cloth, pottery, jewellery or traditional weaponry. The government is actively involved in encouraging such a change, not least by creating craft centres in urban areas and by offering sales channels through government emporiums. But as Odyuo points out, with the increased government involvement Naga handicraft is losing out in local variation and quality. Aspects of material culture are also central in the chapter by Teiborlang T. Kharsyntiew where he addresses the surprising adoption by Northeastern youths of Korean fashion. As Kharsyntiew argues, dressing up in Korean clothes, eating Korean food and listening to Korean pop is a form of resistance against the cultural and political domination of the Indian state and the majority population. Affirming their distinctiveness has become especially critical during the last two decades, as an increasing number of young people from Northeast India have started to migrate to Delhi and other major cities. Kharsyntiew’s chapter which demonstrates indirect forms of resistance to the state is the perfect bridge to move to Part III, In and Out of the State, which deals with issues that are more directly related the state, both at the local and national levels. With Kaustubh Deka’s chapter, we return to the Bodo areas in Assam that Barbora also focused on. In Deka’s account the focus is shifted to the character of the state, or more precisely the postcolonial Indian state, which he claims has a dominant influence on how ethnic politics and ethnic consciousness develop. Of particular interest here is how different social organisations negotiate with the state, often accompanied by violence or at least a threat of violence. Elections are especially

Preface xxi sensitive events, often being triggers of violence. ‘It is fairly established’, Deka writes, ‘that the bullet and the ballot live in a symbiotic relationship in Bodoland’. In the subsequent chapter by Cornelia Guenauer we stay with the topic of elections, but now through a close-up of the 2013 Legislative Assembly election in Meghalaya. Guenauer begins by noting that it is commonly assumed that electoral politics in Northeast India is all about tribal identity or ‘insider-outsider’ issues. Things are actually more complicated, she discovered. Tribal identity was not addressed directly in the official party documents, nor in the speeches during the election campaign, but it figured nevertheless in more elusive and subtle ways through aspects such as the choices of venue and the very aesthetics of the campaigning (through choice of dress and music). However, what Guenauer found more striking was the highly individualised nature of electoral politics in Meghalaya, which was often reduced to the question whether individual candidates had the capacity to deliver or fulfil their promises to their respective constituency. The two following chapters look at the political culture of the states of Manipur and Mizoram. Soibam Haripriya addresses various aspects of women’s agency within the Meitei community in Manipur. Soibam questions the commonplace notion of traditionally empowered Northeastern women, pointing instead to a longer history of social movements and struggles through which women assert themselves in society. This again is not a straightforward story of female emancipation. As Soibam argues, not all of the women’s organisations have a feminist agenda, but work instead with the archetypical role of women as mothers. Even so, these various organisations and local collectives of women are certainly a force to reckon with, like in the case of the nude protests after a young woman was taken away, raped and killed by a group of army personnel in Manipur. In the subsequent chapter by N. William Singh we are concerned with an equally powerful civil society organisation in Mizoram, the Young Mizo Association (YMA). Despite its official rhetoric of being a social, non-political organisation, Singh claims that an ethnic Mizo agenda runs through all its activities. YMA was founded in 1935 and has today more than 4,00,000 members. As a Mizo, not joining the organisation is – Singh claims – not really an option. The most problematic aspect of the promotion of ‘Mizo-ness’ by the YMA relates to the non-Mizo minority communities that reside in the state. For example, in the case of language, YMA has been most active in pressing for Mizo language as compulsory in school curriculums in Mizoram. Language issues is also the focus of the final chapter of the book, which is Mark Turin’s overview of linguistic classifications and state language policies concerning Northeast India and beyond. As Turin notes, there is a major shift away from many of the Tibeto-Burman

xxii  Preface vernaculars towards regional languages like Hindi, Assamese, Nepali and the international language of English. This obviously will have major consequences on how ethnic belonging is imagined and practised. Turin warns against the default position of laymen and scholars alike assuming a one-toone correlation between a community and a speech form. As with many of the other aspects that have been dealt with in this book, language is a far more complex and evasive phenomenon in Northeast India. The Afterword is written by Willem van Schendel. It is hard to think of a more suitable person for the job, as he is a pioneer in the field we seek to advance here. Van Schendel notes initially that the history of Northeast India begins with the Partition. Despite being so central, there are still few in-depth studies on how the Partition unfolded in this frontier zone of the former British colony. Van Schendel gives a dense version of such a history, and in so doing points to some of the alternative spatial imaginations that were around at the time. As we know, not all shared the aspiration of joining the Indian Union, but were instead hoping for sovereignty for their respective communities or nations. Van Schendel ends the Afterword by suggesting an academic ‘Look East Policy’ where future research needs to think beyond the confines of the region and concern themselves also with unfolding events in the neighbouring states of Bangladesh, Burma, Bhutan and Tibet/China. Such research of a ‘Greater Northeast’, van Schendel suggests, demands trans-border collaborations as well as interdisciplinary teamwork, something scholars within the social sciences and humanities have been surprisingly reluctant to engage in.

The conference Most chapters of this edited volume were first presented during the international conference ‘Negotiating Ethnicity: Politics and Display of Cultural identities in Northeast India’, held in Vienna in July 2013. The conference brought together forty-two papers from scholars coming in large part from India, as also from a number of other countries. The panels focused on a wide range of topics, including colonial history, ethnicity, religious conversion and ‘shifts’, rituals, migrations, performance of ethnic identities, narratives of origins, tourism, gender and relations to the state. This edited volume is the second and larger publication of the papers at this conference; a few other papers have already been published in a special issue of Asian Ethnicity, 17 (3), June 2016. This conference was part of, in what has now become, a series of conferences focusing on Northeast India, including the workshop ‘Towards an Understanding of the Changing Hill Societies of North-eastern India’, held in Spring 2006 at Leiden University; the workshop ‘Performing Identity:

Preface xxiii Ethnicity and Ethno-nationalism in the South-east Asian Borderland Region of North-east India’, held in December 2011, at Georg-AugustUniversity Göttingen, and the International Conference ‘Reimagining India’s North East: Networks, Narratives and Negotiations’, held at the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research, Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi in February 2015.1 This was followed by the conference ‘Reframing India’s North-East: People, Power and Perspectives’, which was organised by Sikkim University in Gangtok in November 2016. The next conference in these series, ‘Locating Northeast India: Human Mobility, Resource Flows, and Spatial Linkages’, will be held at Tezpur University in January 2018. All these conferences are characterised by the emphasis given to the participation and involvement of young and local scholars. The conference ‘Negotiating Ethnicity’ was organised by Mélanie Vandenhelsken (then at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences, and funded by the Austrian Science Fund), Jürgen Schöpf (Phonogrammarchiv, Austrian Academy of Sciences), Bianca Son (Department of History, SOAS, University of London) and Shahnaz Kimi Leblhuber (Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna). The conference was in large part funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, through the Institute of Social Anthropology, with additional funds from the Initiativkolleg (Doctoral School), ‘Cultural Transfers and Cross-Contacts in the Himalayan Borderlands’, the Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, University of Vienna, which also provided the venue, and the Indian Embassy in Austria.

Note 1 Another international conference focused on the area, though not with the specific Northeast India label, entitled ‘Origins and Migrations among Tibeto-Burman Speakers of the Extended Eastern Himalaya’, was held in Berlin in 2008.

References Gellner, David. (ed). 2013. ‘Introduction’, in Borderland Lives in Northern South Asia: Non-State Perspectives. Durham: Duke University Press, 1–23. van Schendel, Willem. 2002. ‘Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 20: 647–668. von Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph. 1939. The Naked Nagas: On the Naga Tribes of the Assam-Burma Frontier. London: Methuen & Co. ———. 1955. Himalayan Barbary. London: J. Murray.

Acknowledgements

We are deeply thankful to those who helped in the preparation of this volume, particularly Xonzoi Barbora, Sanjib Baruah, Pum Khan Pau, Tereza Kuldova, Joy Pachuau, Jan Seifert and Willem van Schendel. Most of the chapters in this edited volume were first presented in Vienna in June 2013 during the conference Negotiating Ethnicity: Politics and Display of Cultural Identities in Northeast India. We are grateful to all those who helped with the organisation of the conference, and to the participants. We wish to specially thank Prof. Andre Gingrich, director of the Institute of Social Anthropology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, whose intervention enabled the funding from the Austrian Academy of Sciences of the conference. We also thank Prof. Martin Gaenszle of the Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies of the University of Vienna for having co-organised the conference. We are also thankful to Mr P.R. Nayak, Second Secretary of the Embassy of India in Vienna, for his support. This volume is dedicated to the memory of Dr Bianca Son, who passed away at the age of 44 in June 2014. Bianca was one of the main organisers of the conference Negotiating Ethnicity in Vienna. She played a key role in its success we could overcome many obstacles and difficulties thanks to her close connections and friendships with many people, and her kindness. Her capacity to work was most impressive, managing to complete her PhD thesis – ‘The Construction of “Zo” Highlanders of Burma, India and Bangladesh through Colonial Narratives 1783–1914’ – just two weeks before the conference, in the midst of the turmoil of launching the Vienna event. We have included an obituary by her supervisor Dr Michael W. Charney at SOAS, University of London. Bianca was in the forefront of new scholarship on and in Northeast India that we seek to celebrate with this volume. During the later phase of preparation of this book, we were saddened to learn of the passing away in March 2016 of Shahnaz Kimi Leblhuber, who was also one of the four main organisers of the conference Negotiating

xxvi  Acknowledgements Ethnicity. Shahnaz had completed her MA in Indian history at the University of Delhi. She was working on her PhD at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna on ‘Reconstructing the Mizo Identity through Prevailing Customs and Traditions’. Life is a precious gift one cannot take for granted. It slips away so easily. We will miss them both. A word of thanks to all the contributors to this volume for their patient cooperation in getting this manuscript ready. Finally, we would like to thank the editorial team at Routledge for their help in getting this manuscript ready for publication. This work has been supported by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences (grant number P12-1342), and the Austrian Science Fund (project number P 21886-G17).

Remembering Bianca Son A brief overview of her scholarly life Michael W. Charney

Bianca Son Suantak (Mai Mang Khan Cing) received her BA in psychology from the University of Maryland, undertook a course in mass communications at the University of Arizona, and received her MA in Contemporary Asian Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She later undertook doctoral work at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of London, where she studied and worked closely with a number of members of the SOAS faculty, including me and Dr Mandy Sadan among others. Bianca’s research took her not just to the British Library, but also to Thailand, Japan, Mizoram and Yangon. Bianca was made Doctor of Philosophy in 2013 after successfully defending her doctoral thesis, ‘The Making of the Zo: The Chin of Burma and the Lushai and Kuki of India through Colonial and Local Narratives, 1826–1917 and 1947–1988’. At the time that Bianca passed away, she had just completed her first term of teaching, as a senior teaching fellow with the Department of History at SOAS. She had undertaken this as replacement teaching for the course entitled ‘The Creation of Modern Burma’ which examined the intellectual, cultural, social, economic and political formation of colonial Burma under British rule, a course that allowed Bianca to bring together her vast personal and scholarly experience of the country, adding to the normal lowland focus much new attention to the historical role of the highlands. Bianca’s research agenda focused on bringing to the Chin/Zo a deeper awareness and understanding of their own history and on explaining why the border between India and Burma divided this population group into different ethnic identities which were consciously presented as primordially exclusive of one another. This was both a personal and a family interest. Bianca’s personal life was one of migration to many different locations. At various points in her life she lived in Burma, East Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom and South Korea, giving her fluency not simply in Chin, but also in English and German. She wrote about these personal experiences with migration and about her deep personal relationship

xxviii  Michael W. Charney with her father, the late Dr Vumson Suantak and her younger sister in 2007, and how these personal experiences brought her into contact with the Chin/Zo diaspora and the challenges of their transnational existence.2 Bianca was also the latest in a family line of scholars. She saw in her dissertation the continuity of a path chartered by her father, who had authored Zo History (1986), and who had viewed the latter as the continuity of his own father’s (Dr Son’s grandfather’s) work on the Chin/Zo people.3 Bianca explained in interviews with the press that she also inherited from her father an interest in the plight of the Chin/Zo and their contemporary situation in Burma (Myanmar) and his belief that only education would empower the Chin/Zo and lead to self-development of what he saw as the Zo region. When he passed away, Bianca followed in his political footsteps and became a Chin/Zo activist and a member of the managing board of the Chin Forum. In the midst of these activities, she encountered the obstacles of the bifurcation of the Zo/Chin identity by outsiders into mutually exclusive ethnic categories. Trying to move beyond these constructions by outsiders led Bianca to embark on her doctoral work.4 During Bianca’s doctoral work she organised in collaboration with her peers, such as Dr Lifeng Han and Dr Matthew Phillips, a number of workshops, panels and seminars. Among those she prized most was the conference ‘Communicating Civilizations and Global Order’, held at SOAS in September 2011, which featured Professor Harry Harootunian, a major intellectual influence on her work, and Professor Prasenjit Duara. This workshop, a joint effort of the History Department of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, the Centre for Comparative Studies of World Civilisations of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), the Institute of Cultural Studies of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS) and the School of Foreign Languages and Cultures of Nanjing Normal University, became a major event in the scholarly world and brought Bianca to international prominence beyond Burma/Myanmar Studies. It also revealed Bianca’s immense ability to draw scholars from different fields together and foster trans-disciplinary communication on topics that were as important to the public sector as they were to scholars. Considering today’s focus in the UK on scholarly impact, Bianca revealed herself to be ahead of the field. Generally, Bianca’s work was influenced by a number of scholars, among them Dr Mandy Sadan, Professor James Scott, Professor Willem van Schendel, Professor F. K. Lehman and others, but she adds to them an original contribution. Bianca’s work remains one of the most important contributions to the study of the Chin/Zo in decades, following a classic study in the early 1960s by the late F. K. Lehman and her own father’s work in the

Remembering Bianca Son xxix mid-1980s. By contrast to these works and other work on the history of the Chin/Zo, her dissertation draws out the colonial period as a fundamental phase in the emergence of modern Chin/Zo identities and identifications. It also demonstrates that we can view formally pre-colonial sources, including those of the Tang dynasty and Catholic missionaries of the 18th century, through the same framework of understanding. Together, all external accounts reflected the perspectives of the states they represented (considering the Vatican-centred Catholic Church as a quasistate), leading ultimately to the division of the highlands into those that fell within British India proper and those that were seen administratively as part of British Burma and went with Burma upon separation from India in 1937. States shaped perspectives that shaped ethnic identifications and were responsible for disempowering the contemporary Chin/Zo through bifurcations that remained fixed in place after Burma went on the path of independence from 1948. In other words, the contemporary was shaped by the colonial. Future generations of scholars will produce work that will necessarily find new, more nuanced understandings of Chin/Zo history, but only because of the steps Bianca made in pushing the field further. Bianca passed away on 13 June 2014. But neither she nor her work will be forgotten. Bianca’s achievements were related at SOAS during a special session within the graduation ceremony in the summer of 2014. Subsequently, Bianca’s research was also honoured by her fellow doctoral students (Dr Thomas Richard Bruce, Dr Li Yi and Maung Bo Bo) with a panel, ‘Burma and Thailand in the 20th Century’, held in September 2014 at the ASEASUK Conference in Brighton, UK. The editors of the present volume also asked for this brief sketch of her scholarship to commemorate her role in shaping the workshop on which it is based. Her scholarship will certainly remain an important contribution to the historiography on the Chin/Zo.

Notes 1 Bianca Son, ‘Papi’, in Thanakha Team (ed), Burma – Women’s Voices for Hope (Bangkok: Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma, 2007), 37–42. 2 Vumson (Suantak). 1986. Zo History: With an introduction to Zo culture, economy, religion, and their status as an ethnic minority in India, Burma and Bangladesh. Aizawl: Published by the Author. www.burmalibrary.org/ docs12/Zo_History-Vumson.pdf [Accessed September 4, 2016]. 3 ‘We Are Divided by Outsiders: An Interview with Bianca Son’. Chinland Guardian, 11 April 2011. www.chinlandguardian.com/index.php/news/ item/555-we-are-divided-by-outsiders-interview-with-bianca-son [Accessed on September 4, 2016].

Introduction Northeastern research entanglements Bengt G. Karlsson*

It is quite remarkable to be at a major conference in Europe discussing a part of the world that, until recently, was beyond the radar of the international academic community. The Vienna conference, which is the basis for this volume, is one in a series of international conferences organised during the past couple of years focusing exclusively on the region known as the Northeast India. In addition to these ventures there have been a series of conferences under the umbrella of the Asian Borderlands initiative where the Northeast also figures prominently. Adding to this there are major research endeavours under way, like the recently completed SOAS project looking at the state of Arunachal Pradesh (cf. Blackburn 2008). In India, we also see new Northeast India research centres developing, for instance at Jawaharlal Nehru University and at the Jamia Millia Islamia University. Large numbers of PhD theses and research reports on Northeastern topics are being completed. Leading publishers like Oxford University Press and Routledge India have launched new book series on the Northeast. The richness and intensity of the research on Northeast India is, in other words, growing very fast. There is also a steady increase of publications internationally. This is a radical break from the situation only a decade ago. Northeast Indian Studies is certainly becoming a very vibrant scholarly field. This, certainly, a very welcome development but also one worth reflecting on. But the sudden surge of interest in the region by both foreign and Indian scholars also raises some qualms. In this introductory chapter I seek to take stock of the present context of research on and in Northeast India and in doing so begin by raising a few critical questions. First, why Northeast India and why now? Second, what does the internationalisation of the research imply for local scholarship and for the people of the region more generally? Lastly, I will dwell upon the most common themes of research, also central at the Vienna conference, namely, ‘cultural identity’ and ‘ethnic politics’. That scholars write about different aspects of collective identities is understandable considering

2  Bengt G. Karlsson the dominance of political movements seeking autonomy in one form or another, but this of course also draws attention away from other, possibly, equally important aspects of Northeastern social and environmental realities. I will end the chapter by suggesting a few other topics that require urgent research. Several of the contributions to this book also point to such critical repositionings of Northeast Indian Studies.

A region in its own right When asking other scholars about the increasing international interest in Northeast India, the most common response I received was to do with “geo-politics”, or, to be more precise, the region’s proximity to Burma” (or Myanmar). Northeast India is said to be a stepping-stone to Burma, and, most importantly, to China. Burma’s position in between the Asian giants of India and China does indeed make the region a highly strategic location. Here, we might see the two emerging super-powers joining hands or getting into heightened enmity and conflict.1 Either scenario would have repercussions globally, and there are certainly ample reasons for governments around the world to follow keenly how things develop on the ground in Burma and in the adjoining border areas of India and China. Towards the end of colonial rule, the British had anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf study and ‘develop friendly relations’ with the Apa Tanis in the uppermost northeastern frontier in present-day Arunachal Pradesh (Baruah, this volume). The Japanese invasion into the Naga Hills during the Second World War had been a wake-up call about the risks of leaving frontier areas open and unprotected. We could assume that even current research endeavours funded by Western and other governments might be motivated by these geopolitical interests, rather than simply academic ones. Yet geopolitics seems a bit of a catch-all explanation that can be applied to almost any situation or place in the world; there will always be some strategic interests lurking in the shadows, be it a valuable natural resource, an air base, a terrorist network or some high-tech industry to keep track of. Without dismissing the strategic or geopolitical argument, I would like to suggest that the heightened scholarly interest in Northeast India nevertheless relates more to developments within the world of academia itself. Nation-states and classical civilisational centres have lost a bit of their attraction for scholars, and earlier forgotten margins or hinterlands look increasingly more compelling. In the case of South Asia, fringes like Northeast India appear today much more exciting and rewarding sites to engage in research on social, cultural and historical processes rather than for example the much-studied Indo-Gangetic plain. Let me expand on this a bit.

Northeastern research entanglements 3 In the influential and much-quoted article ‘Geographies of knowing, geographies of ignorance: jumping scale in Southeast Asia’ (2002), historian Willem van Schendel points to how ‘areas studies’ came to structure knowledge production about the world after the Second World War. The division of the world into ‘areas’ was a European and North American project, which eventually also colonised research and higher learning elsewhere in the world. The ‘area studies’ approach came to concentrate on the perceived heartlands or centres of powers, leaving out much of that which took place in the ‘outer reaches’, van Schendel argues (2002: 661). But with an increasing stress on globalisation and transnational flows as well as hybridity and migration the powerful area studies grid has come to be questioned on several fronts. New more dynamic geographies are called for, and van Schendel (ibid.: 664) suggests that ‘emergent spatial configurations between the national and the global’ are especially critical to engage in. Such new areas or configurations need not be built on compact territories but can be of a more ephemeral nature (ibid.). It is here that he presents the idea of Zomia, which has been taken up and reformulated by James C. Scott in his much-discussed book The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009). Another such example is the pre-colonial ‘monastic geography’ that Indrani Chatterjee outlines in her recent book Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and Memories of Northeast India (2013). In the latter case, we are presented with criss-crossing networks and relations around Buddhist, Vaisnava and Sufi teachers and lineages that bind together Himalayan societies with the plains and coastal areas of eastern India. In this now almost-forgotten geography, women enjoyed a particular high status, not least through their role as producers of food and holders of land, and earning merits through donations to monks and spiritual heads, according to Chatterjee (2013: 11–17). The bottom-line here is that margins, backwaters, frontiers or different kinds of in-between spaces have proven to be much more productive sites of research than the much-discussed ‘heartlands’ and national centres. It is in this larger shift in how the world is being perceived that I place the increased prominence of a region like Northeast India. Earlier Northeast India did not properly belong to South Asian Studies, and neither did it qualify as Southeast Asian Studies as formally it was part of India (and hence was in South Asia). Contemporary scholarship seems less troubled by the region’s liminality, taking it rather as a challenge and an intellectual adventure (cf. de Maaker & Joshi 2007).2 But then what is in the name ‘Northeast India’? As a starting point we may say that it is a rather recent creation, an entity that came into being in its present form with the drawing of nation-state boundaries between India, Pakistan/Bangladesh, Burma and China (see van Schendel, this volume).

4  Bengt G. Karlsson There are, however, earlier configurations, more fuzzy entities, like the colonial ‘North-Eastern Frontier’ or the northeastern fringe of Bengal or perhaps the Ahom, Koch, Cachar, Manipur or some of the other kingdoms or polities that existed earlier and that go into making Northeast India a ‘geographical and historical entity’ (Zou & Kumar 2011: 158; cf. Saikia 2005; Cederlöf 2014; Son, van Schendel, this volume). With the recent inclusion of Sikkim there are now eight states making up the region; the others, the ‘seven sisters’, are Assam, Manipur, Tripura, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh.3 Together these have a population of about 45 million, the largest being Assam with as much as 31 million. The last four states mentioned have a significantly lower population with only a few million each.4 These states mainly constitute hill areas where the dominant form of agriculture traditionally has been shifting cultivation, known in the region as jhum. In the plains, in the first three mentioned, permanent paddy cultivation has similarly been the dominant form of agriculture. If the hill states have land regulations safeguarding indigenous landholdings, the plains areas have seen much more far reaching alienation of land, not least lands earlier belonging to indigenous or so-called scheduled tribe (ST) communities, like Tiwa, Rabha and Bodos (Barbora, this volume). This has created a tense situation in some areas often directed towards communities deemed as immigrants or outsiders (Deka, this volume). To prevent further ‘influx’ from Bangladesh, India is constructing a several thousand kilometres long barbed wired border fence. The project has been going on for more than a decade but is still not completed, not least due to problems with land acquisition and obstacles created by the physical terrain itself with hills, rivers and marshlands.5 Even commentators from within the state and security establishment question whether the fence will eventually achieve the objective of closing the border to ‘illegal’ migrants.6 Northeast India has in many ways also become a social fact, a reality not only in terms of state cartography and modes of governing, but also something that informs people’s actions, aspirations and sense of belonging. Affirming Northeast India as an enduring formation still allows for a processual and open-ended geography with unfolding histories of contact, travel and trade with today’s international neighbours Bhutan, Nepal, Burma, China/Tibet and Bangladesh.

Knowing the Northeast With the increasing political turmoil in Northeast India after independence, foreign scholars had been debarred from entering and carrying out field research in the region. There were some exceptions, for example Christoph

Northeastern research entanglements 5 von Fürer-Haimendorf, who was allowed to re-visit some of his field sites in the Northeast in 1962 and 1970. Another was Verrier Elwin, although he became an Indian citizen and advisor on tribal issues to Prime Minister Nehru (and hence no any longer a ‘foreigner’) (Guha 1999). There were also a few other scholars allowed into the region in the postcolonial period: American anthropologist Robbins Burling working with the Garos and the Japanese anthropologist Chie Nakane who carried out research on matriliny among both the Garos and Khasis. Both were able carry out substantial field research in the 1960s. In Assam, English anthropologist Audrey Cantlie also carried out long-term fieldwork in a village between 1969 and 1971, and American political scientist Myron Weiner conducted interviews in the 1970s in Assam for his classical study Sons of the Soil: Migration and Ethnic Conflict in India (1978). These are just some examples; there were also other foreign scholars working in Northeast India during the period between 1950 and late 1990s, but their numbers were nevertheless very limited. In principle, the region was off-limits for foreigners. Things have changed since then and in the early years of the 2000s we are seing more and more outside scholars being granted research permission to work in the region. As restrictions on travel have been relaxed, now allowing foreign tourists also into Nagaland and Manipur, several (especially younger) scholars have also carried out field research on a more informal basis, often on ordinary tourist visas (something which would not have been possible earlier). In addition to this, generous scholarships, external research collaborations and admission to foreign universities have facilitated local researchers to carry out substantial field research in the region.7 I suppose most people within the world of scholarship would welcome the proliferation of research on the region, this regardless of whether you are from the region or an outsider like me. Yet, I still believe there are reasons to reflect critically on this new development. On a personal note, I came to anthropology in the aftermath of Edward Said’s book Orientalism (1978) that seriously challenged Western scholars studying and representing subaltern others in the global south. Even if the scholar came with the purest of intent, he or she would nevertheless risk reproducing structures of power and inequalities between the West and the East/Rest: Field research came under attack and some Western anthropologists abstained from doing fieldwork in the global south. Even if the ‘reflexive turn’, as it was called within anthropology, had its excesses it nevertheless brought a new attentiveness to the power dynamics within research and in scholarly entanglements more generally. Who is speaking, from where, for whom, and why and who stands, eventually, to benefit? These are questions that are critical and that still remain pertinent today (see also Baruah, this volume).

6  Bengt G. Karlsson Scholars working on indigenous peoples that are involved in processes of cultural and political reawakening also had to face direct challenges to their presence and the very rationale of their research. This happened to those working with some communities who had too many outside researchers visiting and who instead wanted to begin to tell their own stories or to write their own histories. This fatigue with outside scholarship seems especially widespread among many of the Native American Indian communities in the United States who have been the subject of endless studies, not least by anthropologists. This has led some indigenous peoples to demand that outside scholars require prior approval from the tribal council or the elders before they are allowed to enter and carry out research on/ with their community. Such requirements challenge social sciences, ideals of scientific integrity, professional independence and more generally freedom of research. But this has to be put in the larger political context of longer histories of oppression where indigenous peoples today, in the margins of contemporary nation-states, struggle to free themselves from colonial hegemonies and develop their own scholarship and ways of knowing. Cherokee sociologist Eva Maria Garoutte (2003) puts this eloquently: In response to the questions just stated I have proposed that the academy make room for a new kind of scholarship, a uniquely American Indian scholarship, grounded in the perspective I call ‘Radical Indigenism’. It is intended not as a scholarship performed strictly by Indians, but as one in which Native peoples can see themselves and in which Natives – scholars and nonscholars alike – can participate. It is a scholarship in which questions are allowed to unfold within values, goals, categories of thought, and modes of inquiry that are embedded in the philosophies of knowledge generated by Indian people, rather than in ones imposed on them. (Garroutte 2003: 144) I have not come across similar, explicit calls for ‘radical indigenism’ in Northeast India, but there are certainly voices that gesture to something akin to this. For example, in the 2014 Hutton Lecture in Kohima, the capital of Nagaland, anthropologist and Catholic Father Abraham Lotha called for a new approach to the study of Naga Christianity, one that is grounded in the daily lives of people and that is attentive to the nuances of local practices. He referred to this as an ‘ethnotheology’ or, alternatively, an ‘indigenous theology’. Lotha does not make this an exclusive affair of indigenous scholars, but seems nevertheless to suggest that it requires sensitivity to ontological and epistemological differences. As part of this call, Lotha also warned against the still-ongoing tendencies among scholars to

Northeastern research entanglements 7 reproduce colonial stereotypes about the Nagas.8 In a similar manner, Naga scholar Arkotong Longkumer argues that there is a tendency in work on the Nagas to represent them as passive onlookers to change brought from the outside, and if some agency is noted on the part of the Nagas – like with the cultural displays in the Hornbill festival – this is dismissed as superficial creations by foreign scholars who are in search for (supposedly) genuine traditions (2015: 52). It might not come as a surprise that such cautions come from Naga scholars considering that their community remains one of the most studied indigenous peoples in the region. If it was initially their primitiveness, and savage practices like headhunting, that attracted interest, in the postcolonial period the Naga nationalist struggle and the violence that it generated came into focus. Despite the rather voluminous literature on these topics, as a general observation I claim that more in-depth, field-based, empirically rich studies still remain rare. To learn about, say, the precarious existence under the armed resistance in Nagaland, I still think an author like Temsula Ao – with her collection of short stories These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone (2009) – has much more to offer. But again, this is changing and we have a new generation of young scholars – like Arkotong Longkumer working on indigenous religious movements (2010), Dolly Kikon on the inter-community relations in the foothills, issues such as friendship and love (2014; this volume) and Jelle J.P. Wouters (2015) on vernacular electoral politics that, for example, stress consensus making – who bring out dense, reflexive ethnographic accounts of contemporary Naga social realities. Such work is also very much in line with the type of scholarship Garoutte is calling for in the case of American Indian scholarship.

What else? Cultural identity, ethnicity and the politics of territorial nationalism in its different guises are the most frequently discussed themes in contemporary social science research on Northeast India. And, rightly so. It is a critical dimension of contemporary Northeastern societies, a situation that the political scientist Sanjib Baruah aptly describes as a ‘durable disorder’ (2005), which remains highly elusive, requiring further scholarly elaborations (Guenauer, Singh, Vandenhelsken, this volume). Yet, as stated earlier, with all this emphasis on ethnicity and conflict, other, arguably equally important aspects have been side lined. I will end by pointing to a few themes that I think require further scholarly attention and in so doing give a few examples of current Northeastern research that open such new vistas. Mobility and migration is one such theme. Migration is not something new; several key studies have been carried out but then they are mainly on

8  Bengt G. Karlsson people moving into and settling in Northeast India. This is a critical issue and indeed subject to a lot of political controversies. But little investigation has been done into the mobility of the Northeasterners themselves, be it in terms of rural-urban migration within the region or more long-distance travels to the Indian mainland and abroad. Here I would like to draw attention to two path-breaking studies by Australian scholar Duncan McDuieRa, first his book on young Northeastern migrants in Delhi (2012) and second his most recent book on the Manipur capital Imphal (2016). Both these books draw attention to new forms of being and acting that question earlier understandings of rural, static, ethnically segmented Northeastern societies. Surprisingly little has been written on the everyday life of the fast-growing and diverse cities in the region. Many of the cities have common elements of popular culture, for example, football, rock music and fashion. The widespread interest in South-Korean youth culture is another example of contemporary urban popular culture in Northeast India (Kharsyntiew, this volume). People in the Northeast have always been on the move, but today there seems to be something of a ‘migratory moment’, especially among young people who leave their villages to seek a new life in the emerging Indian megacities like Bengaluru, Pune, Mumbai and Delhi. In most of these cities you find not only student organisations and churches that cater to specific ethnic communities, but also various social organisations and events that attract wider, multi-ethnic, Northeastern audiences. The new forms of being and dwelling that emerge in these urban, diasporic, spaces are bound to affect also those who stay put, back home. The cultural, social and economic consequences of the out-migration of the young require further research. As an example of the many unlikely ways movement and mobility might take is the case of the Bene Menashe; mainly Mizos, who from the 1950s onwards have been claiming Jewish descent (the lost tribes of Israel) and after being approved as such have started to migrate to the holy country (Egorova 2015). Here one would ask for more in-depth accounts of how this happened and why it makes sense to these people to be Jewish and leave their homes to settle in Israel. Class and the creation of new class differences is something that has been largely overlooked in the Northeastern context. Some researchers have noted the increasing inequalities and the establishment of new political and economic elites, not least through the control of resource extraction and appropriation of village lands, but this requires more in-depth, empirically grounded, analysis. The sociologist A. K. Nongkynrih (2002) noted that in the two Khasi villages he followed as many as 50 per cent of the people lacked access to land for cultivation. Other studies point to a similar trend of increasing landlessness in the region (Fernandes & Barbora

Northeastern research entanglements 9 2009).9 Here one would like to see further studies that follow up on this. Despite the overall importance of agriculture, there is also a growing middle class consisting of businessmen, government servants and professionals of various sorts. Their lifestyle, ambitions and orientation in life would be interesting to look into and compare with that of the growing middle class elsewhere in India (cf. Baviskar & Ray 2011). Here one could think of using untapped materials like the photographs that Joy L. K. Pachuau and William van Schendel use in their brilliant book The Camera as Witness: A Social History of Mizoram, Northeast India (2015). In the opening, they present the project in the following way, This book reveals a different world, little known outside the region. It highlights the remarkable transformations and multiple forms of modernity that have flourished here. It seeks to show how local people produce these, how they engage with them, and how they established and used links with the world beyond the region. In this book, we use visual sources largely created by local people, especially in the more recent period, to uncover unknown themes and trends. These images show local agency in the creation of vibrant contemporary societies that have little to do with obsolete ethnographies as they have to do with the security gaze. (Pachuau & van Schendel 2015: 4) As a final example of unexplored or understudied themes of the region I would like to point to the interface and interdependence of societies and the environment or nature, more generally. There are several new, empirically rich studies of the environmental history of Northeastern landscapes, for example relating to forests (Saikia 2011) and tea plantations (Sharma 2011), and also those looking into different types of resource extraction, for example, construction of large dams (Baruah 2012; Huber & Joshi 2015, Ete, this volume) and how different resource regimes interrelate with and prompt struggles for autonomy in the region (Vandekerckhove & Suykens 2008). But there are also underexplored connections to take note of. Here am thinking about the intersections of humans and other living organisms through which the extremely rich and highly diverse biotopes of the region have co-evolved. Anthropologists Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2015) applies the notion of ‘landscape-based assemblages’ in her research on the Matsutake mushroom to point to the interplay of many organisms’ actions. In new research on human-elephant relations, the New Zealand anthropologist Piers Locke (2013) presents a similar framework for ‘ethnoelephantology’ that addresses humans and elephants as mutually entangled species. Along similar lines Nicolas Lainé (2013) approaches what he calls

10  Bengt G. Karlsson ‘elephant-keeping cultures’ among tribal communities like the Khamptis of Arunachal Pradesh. Landscape-based assemblages and human-animal/ plant relations is a field that seems highly relevant to explore further in the Northeast Indian context. Just think of the bamboo species (Melocanna baccitera) in Mizoram that flowers and brings forth seeds every 48th year. When this happens the hills are invaded by black rats that feed on the seeds as well as on peoples’ crops, eventually causing starvation and social unrest.10 Despite the enormous consequences to humans, it is the agency of plants and animals that calls for particular attention here. The Himalayas and the lower hills of the southern outreach that form the Northeastern landscape are geologically young and active. Earthquakes are frequent, and landslides, powerful floods and rivers changing course are regular occurrences. With the massive extraction of resources and the wider processes of climate change in the world, we are bound to see more dramatic events linked to the environment. How to deal with such events is certainly one of the key political challenges for the decades to come. Some people call upon indigenous knowledge to foster more sentient modes of inhabiting the world and to restore ruined landscapes. While one can easily dismiss this as romantic talk, I would not foreclose the possibility that this can translate into action and struggles for a more sustainable future (Karlsson 2011). I write this in Nairobi, Kenya, where I presently live. Recently I visited one of the first tea plantations here in Kenya, located some 30 minutes’ drive outside the capital. The daughter of the original planter told us that most of the tea in Kenya is a variety of Assam tea. Planters from Assam brought seeds along with them when they moved to Kenya. I gasped. Stories of long-distance travels of seeds, plants, insects, animals, bacteria, fungus and viruses are perhaps nothing to be surprised about today, but it still struck me as astounding that more than 150,000 hectares of land in Kenya now holds tea that originates from wild bushes in the far-a way hill tracts of Northeast India. Such global or transnational connections are in fact critical as you set out to think in what ways regions and area studies matter in today’s world. Northeast Indian Studies is a flourishing field and as has been suggested here there are reasons to reflect upon the present state of affairs and think critically about what has been done before as well as the research one would like to see in the future. With this volume we, the editors and contributors, hope to contribute to that effort.

Notes * This chapter is based on the concluding remarks that I presented at the international conference, ‘Negotiating Ethnicity: Politics and Display of Cultural Identities in Northeast India’, held in Vienna in July 2013.

Northeastern research entanglements 11 1 See Thant Myint-U’s Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (2011) or Great Game East: India, China and the Struggle for Asia’s Most Volatile Frontier (2012) by acclaimed journalist Bertil Lintner. 2 See the special issue on Northeast India, edited by Erik de Maaker and Vibha Joshi, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2007, 30 (3). 3 The earlier notion of the ‘seven sisters’ has become obsolete with the inclusion of Sikkim. 4 Meghalaya 3.2 million, Nagaland 1.9 million, Arunachal Pradesh 1.4 million and Mizoram 1.1 million (2011 Census). Sikkim has the lowest population in the Northeast with only 620,000 people. 5 See, for example, ‘India plan big project along Bangladesh border’, The Hindu, 14 October , 2015. 6 See, for example, ‘Border fencing will not stop illegal migration’, Pushpita Das, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, 26 December 2014. www.idsa.in/idsacomments/BorderFencingWillNotStopIllegalMigration_ pdas_261214. 7 Long-term fieldwork has earlier been rather difficult to accommodate within Indian academic institutions. This is changing, but as many of my colleagues within anthropology keep telling me, they are still facing a lot of administrative and other obstacles in going to the field for longer periods. 8 The Hutton Lecture delivered by Father Abraham Lotha was entitled ‘Christianity and Ethnotheology: Remaking Social Worlds and the Naga People’, Kohima, 3 December 2014. 9 This was also the subject of a workshop entitled Marginal Lands? The Commodification and Re-appreciation of Upland Agriculture in the Borderlands of Northeast India, organized by Erik de Maaker and Sanjay Barbora at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Guwahati, 21–22 November, 2014. 10 See the interview with American ecologist Daniel Janzen, www.pbs.org/ wgbh/nova/nature/plant-vs-predator.html.

References Ao, Temsula. 2009. These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Baruah, Sanjib. 2005. Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2012. ‘Whose River Is It Anyway: Political Economy of Hydropower in the Eastern Himalayas’, Economic and Political Weekly, July 21: 41–52. Baviskar, Amita and Raka Ray. (eds). 2011. Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes. New Delhi: Routledge. Blackburn, Stuart. 2008. Himalayan Tribal Tales: Oral Traditions and Culture in Apatani Valley. Leiden: Brill. Cederlöf, Gunnel. 2014. Founding an Empire on India’s North-Eastern Frontiers, 1790–1840: Climate, Commerce, Polity. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chatterjee, Indrani. 2013. Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and Memories of Northeast India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

12  Bengt G. Karlsson Egorova, Yulia. 2015. ‘Redefining the Converted Jewish Self: Race, Religion, and Israel’s Bene Menashe’, American Anthropologist, 117 (3): 493–505. Fernandes, Walter and Sanjay Barbora. (eds). 2009. Land, People and Politics: Contest over Tribal Land in Northeast India. Guwahati: Northeast Social Research Center and International Working Group on Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA). Garroutte, Eva Maria. 2003. Real Indians: Identity and Survival of Native America. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press. Guha, Ramchandra. 1999. Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Huber, Amelie and Deepa Joshi. 2015. ‘Hydro-Power, Anti-Politics, and the Opening of New Political Spaces in the Eastern Himalayas’, World Development, 76: 13–25. Karlsson, Bengt G. 2011. Unruly Hills: A Political Ecology of India’s Northeast. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books. Kikon, Dolly. (2014). Disturbed Area Acts: Intimacy, Anxiety and the State in Northeast India, unpublished PhD Thesis, Stanford University. Lainé, Nicolas. 2013. ‘Elephant-Keeping Cultures’, Seminar, November: 70–75. Lintner, Bertil. 2012. Great Game East: India, China and the Struggle for Asia’s Most Volatile Frontier. Noida: HarperCollins India. Locke, Piers. 2013. ‘Explorations in Ethnoelephantology: Social, Historical, and Ecological Intersections between Asian Elephants and Humans’, Environment and Society: Advances in Research, 4: 79–97. Longkumer, Arkotong. 2010. Reform, Identity and Narratives of Belonging: The Hearaka Movement in Northeast India. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. ———. 2015. ‘As Our Ancestors Once Lived’: Representation, Performance, and Constructing a National Culture amongst the Nagas of India’, Himalaya, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, 35 (1): 51–64. Maaker, Erik de and Vibha Joshi. 2007. ‘Introduction: The Northeast and Beyond: Region and Culture’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 30 (3): 381–390. McDuie-Ra, Duncan. 2012. Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, Refugee and Retail. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ———. 2016. Borderland City in New India: Frontier to Gateway. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Myint-U, Thant. 2011. Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia. London: Faber and Faber. Nongkynrih, Aurelius Kyrham. 2002. Khasi Society of Meghalaya: A Sociological Understanding. New Delhi: Indus Publishing Company. Pachuau, Joy L. K. and Willem van Schendel. 2015. The Camera as Witness: A Social History of Mizoram, Northeast India. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Random House.

Northeastern research entanglements 13 Saikia, Arupjyoti. 2011. Forests and Ecological History of Assam, 1826–2000. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Saikia, Yasmin. 2005. Assam and India: Fragmented Memories, Cultural Identity and the Thai-Ahom Struggle. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sharma, Jayeeta. 2011. Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India. Durham: Duke University Press. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press. Van Schendel, Willem. 2002. ‘Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 20: 647–668. Vandekerckhove, Nel and Bert Suykens. 2008. ‘The Liberation of Bodoland: Tea, Forestry and Tribal Entrapment in Western Assam’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 31 (3): 450–471. Weiner, Myron. 1978. Sons of the Soil: Migration and Ethnic Conflict in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wouters, Jelle J. P. 2015. ‘Polythetic Democracy: Tribal Elections, Bogus Votes, and Political Imagination in the Naga Uplands of Northeast India’, Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5 (2): 121–151. Zou, David Vumlallian and M. Satish Kumar. 2011. ‘Mapping a Colonial Borderland: Objectifying the Geo-Body of India’s Northeast’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 70 (1): 141–170.

Part I

Historical and ethnographic encounters

1 Reading Fürer-Haimendorf in Northeast India Sanjib Baruah*

‘Anthropology is political engagement, whether we want it to be or not’. – Laura Nader, The Life of the Law (2002: 230)

The late Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf (1909–1995) is a familiar name to most people interested in Northeast India. I was born in that region: in the hill city of Shillong, then the capital of Assam, a province that in Fürer Haimendorf’s time included much of what is called Northeast India today. Books like Naked Nagas, Himalayan Barbary and Apa Tani and Their Neighbours – or more accurately, the titles – made an impression on me at a fairly young age. That was well before the thought of becoming an academic ever crossed my mind. I knew that Fürer-Haimendorf was Austrian, and that he was from Vienna. That bit of information stayed on my mind probably because one’s hometown is an important part of a person’s identity in India. Long before I connected Vienna to Wittgenstein and Freud, I associated it with Fürer-Haimendorf. Fürer-Haimendorf was often asked how as a person born and brought up in sophisticated Vienna he managed to live among ‘primitive tribesmen in jungles and hills remote from all centres of western civilization’. He didn’t have a good answer, he said. But his response was that he was ‘happy just among such simple people’ (Fürer-Haimendorf 1990: 1). It is hard not to read an air of condescension in the use of the adjective ‘simple’. What makes certain peoples of the world ‘simple’? Fürer-Haimendorf didn’t think it was necessary to elaborate. He assumed that his interlocutors and readers would know the difference between simple and complex peoples and their cultures. Yet it can perhaps be said that in at least one unexpected way, Vienna had prepared Fürer-Haimendorf for life in the hills of Northeast India. While doing fieldwork during 1936–1937, when he lived in Wakching – in today’s Mon district of Nagaland – he said, he ‘was never bored and never longed for the pleasures of western civilization’. Yet once in a while

18  Sanjib Baruah he found himself singing ‘a Schubert or Hugo Wolf song, or even a passage from an opera’ (ibid.: 20). And he knew that music by heart, thanks to his early years in Vienna when he developed a passion for music and the opera. We live at a time when cultures, as Ashis Nandy puts it, have ‘begun the return, like Freud’s unconscious, to haunt the modern system of nationstates’ (Nandy 2003: 2). It may be productive at this juncture to reflect on Fürer-Haimendorf’s intellectual project – of finding, understanding, recording and collecting for posterity the specimens of what he viewed as archaic and isolated cultures that were sure to vanish, or at least to change beyond recognition, under the onslaught of industrial civilisation. I am not an anthropologist. But Fürer-Haimendorf’s books were not all anthropological texts; some were written with a wider readership in mind. Indeed the German translation of The Naked Nagas was published by a mass-market publisher, Brockhaus Verlag (Schicklgruber 2008: 359). This is his most famous work, and it is about a people now best known for their rejection of the postcolonial Indian political dispensation. The very moment of India’s independence in 1947 saw the beginnings of the Naga campaign for independence from India. And cultural arguments are central to the Naga movement. ‘[W]e have our own culture and civilization,’ declared Naga leader Angami Zapu Phizo, ‘which our forefathers developed centuries ago. . . . It has stood the test of time’ (Phizo 2002: 203). Naga nationalist assertion that they have their ‘own culture and civilisation’ underscores the restructuration, contestation and redefinition that cultural forms go through. The idea that all peoples have a right to self-determination emerged as ‘a principle of the highest order’(Anaya 1996: 75) in the international system that came into being after the imperial order unravelled at the end of the Second World War. That the idea of self-determination would inspire culturally empowered movements whose aspirations might collide against the statist logic of the world system of states and its ‘metrics of the possible’ (Appadurai 2007: 30) is hardly surprising. Anticolonial nationalists such as India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru were important in the crafting of this world order. Yet Nehru had only this to say in response to the demand for Naga independence: In the present context of affairs both in India and the world, it is impossible to consider, even for a moment, such an absurd demand for independence for the Nagas. It is doubtful whether the Nagas realize the consequences of what they are asking for. (Linter 2012: 70) Yet this supposedly absurd demand grew into one of the world’s oldest unresolved armed conflicts. Fortunately, this conflict appears to be finally heading towards a settlement. In August 2015 Prime Minister Narendra

Reading Fürer-Haimendorf in Northeast India 19 Modi announced that his government has signed ‘a historic peace accord’ with the major Naga rebel organisation, the Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah). It was his interest in so-called remote pre-contact primitive societies that took Fürer-Haimendorf to what was then the Naga Hills district of the colonial province of Assam, and later to the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) – today’s state of Arunachal Pradesh. It was ‘the relatively unknown parts’ of the Naga Hills that interested him (Fürer-Haimendorf 1962b: 2). That sitting in Vienna he could distinguish between the known and the unknown parts of those hills reflects the fact that by the time Fürer-Haimendorf entered the scene there was a long tradition of ethnographic studies of the Nagas by British colonial administrators and military officers. The second area of focus of his Northeast Indian work – the ‘Apa Tanis and their Neighbours’ – refers to peoples who live in what is now the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. This work was the result of an unexpected official assignment that he got from the British colonial state in 1944: to ‘establish friendly relations with the un-administered hill-tribes, collect data on general conditions and tribal customs and ultimately explore the upper reaches of the Subansiri River’ (cf. Fürer-Haimendorf 1955: x). Some of Fürer-Haimendorf’s accounts about peoples of Northeast India could easily have been the inspiration for anthropologist Bernard Cohn’s satire on ‘Anthropologyland’ – the model he says once existed in the practices and minds of anthropologists: The anthropologist posits a place where the natives are authentic, untouched and aboriginal and strives to deny the central historical fact that the people he or she studies are constituted in the historically significant colonial situation. . . . [In their model of change] with the onslaught of the new, the social structure, values and lifeways of the ‘happy’ natives crumble. The anthropologist follows in the wake of impacts caused by the Western agents of change, and then tries to recover what might have been. (Cohn 1980: 199) In his preface to the second revised Indian edition of Naked Nagas published in 1962, one encounters exactly that kind of ‘imagined nostalgia’ (Appadurai 1996: 77). What he observed in 1936 and 1937, said FürerHaimendorf in this new preface, ‘is now a page in India’s history, to be remembered and recorded but never to be observed again’. Like archaeologists unearthing ‘with infinite care the brittle remnants of past civilizations,’ he wrote, ‘the anthropologist contemplates with nostalgic affection the way of life of a people he was fortunate enough to know before their traditional world fell to pieces’ (Fürer-Haimendorf 1962b: Preface).

20  Sanjib Baruah A lot has been said about the history of anthropology’s complicity with empire. Indeed confronting that past – the intense questioning that occurred during the debate on the crisis of anthropology – led to a radical transformation of the discipline (Asad 1985). The lessons are relevant not just to anthropologists, but to all of us engaged in the study of so-called non-Western societies or developing countries. Fürer-Haimendorf was born in Vienna in 1909. His interest in the hills of Northeast India preceded his first visit to the region. In 1931 he completed his doctoral thesis at the University of Vienna on a comparative study of the social and political organisations of the ‘hill-tribes’ of Assam and Northwest Burma. This was before he had ever set foot in Assam or Burma. Following his doctoral work he had a research position at University of Vienna from 1931 to 1934. A Rockefeller Foundation grant to support European institutions impacted by the First World War enabled him to go to London. He attended Bronislaw Malinowski’s now-famous seminar at the London School of Economics in 1935 and 1936 and prepared for ‘anthropological work in Assam’. At that time the ethnographer and colonial administrator James Philip Mills, author of monographs on Ao and Lotha Nagas and deputy commissioner of the Naga Hills district, was on ‘home leave’ in England. When Fürer-Haimendorf met him, Mills took great interest in his plans and it was thanks to his encouragement that he decided to work on the Konyak Nagas (Fürer-Haimendorf 1962b: 2–3). A chance meeting with a woman at a ball in the Austrian Embassy in London proved helpful to Fürer-Haimendorf. When he told her that he was going to India, according to Fürer-Haimendorf’s account, she said: ‘Oh, I have got friends who are going too.’ The woman was friends with none other than the family of Victor Alexander John Hope, or Lord Linlithgow who was leaving for India to be viceroy and governor general (Fürer-Haimendorf 1983). Not surprisingly, during his fieldwork FürerHaimendorf was known in some circles as the Viceroy’s friend, probably an enviable reputation for a non-official anthropologist in a colonial frontier. When he arrived in the Naga Hills in 1936, Mills took him under his wing. ‘The day after tomorrow I am going on tour through some Eastern Angami villages. Would you like to come with me? We shall be away for a fortnight’ (Fürer-Haimendorf 1962b: 5–6). That invitation is the moment of origin of the Naked Nagas. In 1949 he began teaching at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He taught there for nearly three decades until he retired as professor of Asian Anthropology in 1976. Apart from his writings on Northeast India he is known for books and articles he wrote on certain peoples of central India and Nepal as well. Fürer-Haimendorf was also a collector who brought numerous artefacts to European museums including the Museum

Reading Fürer-Haimendorf in Northeast India 21 of Ethnology in Vienna. As recently as 2013, objects from that collection were on display at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City in an exhibition called ‘Fiercely Modern: Art of the Naga Warrior’. Austrian scholar Christian Schicklgruber has written about Fürer-Haimendorf’s contradictory intellectual legacy. He flirted with National Socialism in 1930s. His portrayal of an ethnic group as a barbaric culture that is inferior to Western civilisation, says Schicklgruber, served to legitimise the two oppressive systems he served one after the other: German (Austrian) National Socialism and British colonialism. Yet based on his writings and the ethnographic collection he painstakingly brought together, he can reasonably be described as a chronicler of Naga culture. Indeed Schicklgruber finds that many Nagas today use Fürer-Haimendorf’s words to represent their past (2008: 356, 366). Fürer-Haimendorf died in 1995 at the age of eighty-five.

In the service of Empire It has been said that anthropologists of Fürer-Haimendorf’s generation relied on the colonial infrastructure for their fieldwork, and ‘yet this facilitating bond between colonialism and anthropology is written out of most ethnographic texts’ (Chambers 2006: 15). To say that the ‘Viceroy’s friend’ had the help of the colonial governmental infrastructure during his fieldwork will be an understatement. But Fürer-Haimendorf cannot be accused of writing the role of colonial power out of his texts. ‘The circumstances of my work in the Subansiri region,’ he says frankly in his introduction to The Apa Tanis and their Neighbours, ‘was only partly anthropological’ (FürerHaimendorf 1962a: 3). He then points the reader to Himalayan Barbary for an account of those circumstances. That book describes an expedition into the North East Frontier Agency in 1944–1945 designed to extend colonial administrative control over that Indo-Tibetan borderland (FürerHaimendorf 1955). Fürer-Haimendorf was the head of that expedition, and he was appointed assistant political officer under the British colonial administration for that purpose. The assignment was more significant geopolitically than it might appear. To put it plainly, it was a late colonial campaign of pacification. The Japanese attack during the Second World War on British colonial India’s eastern border at the Naga Hills brought home the dangers of leaving that frontier region of British imperial India unprotected. The colonial government then decided to extend its control to the un-administered tribal areas of the North East Frontier Tracts in the eastern Himalayas – if possible, all the way to the vague line that was drawn as the border between India and Tibet at the Simla talks of 1913–1914. Until this day, the Chinese

22  Sanjib Baruah government views the Simla agreement as a British imperial attempt to encroach on Chinese territory. The border remains disputed. No government of China has ratified the Simla agreement, and China today likes to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as China’s southern Tibet. The task given to Fürer-Haimendorf during the last days of British Raj – to establish friendly relations with the Apatanis (also known as Apa Tani, the form used by Fürer-Haimendorf ) and their neighbours – was meant as the initial step to bring the North East Frontier Tracts under effective control. It was odd for an anthropologist – a non-official and a native of Austria – to be given this assignment. The poor state of imperial finances probably had something to do with it. It was Fürer-Haimendorf’s mentor the anthropologist and senior colonial administrator J. P. Mills’s idea to appoint him to that position. The Fürer-Haimendorf expedition was successful in achieving its political aims. Stuart Blackburn summarises the outcome as follows: A government outpost was established in the valley; warring groups negotiated settlements under government supervision; the surrounding regions were explored, although circumstances prevented [FürerHaimendorf] from fulfilling his and the government’s ultimate aim of reaching the snowline of the Himalayan range. (Blackburn 2003: 352) But there are important silences in Fürer-Haimendorf’s writings. Blackburn’s assessment of the effects of Fürer-Haimendorf’s arrival in the area is that it caused ‘a profound shock to local culture’ (ibid.: 355). In May 1948, after India’s independence, and three years after Fürer-Haimendorf left the Apatani valley, several hundred Apatani men, armed with spears and bows and arrows, attacked an Indian military outpost established by FürerHaimendorf’s successor who was charged with expanding the work that he had begun. A cycle of attacks and counter-attacks followed. The Apatanis suffered heavy casualties largely because of the huge gap in the technologies of war. While they were no strangers to warfare, writes Blackburn, ‘this level of violence and loss of life was unprecedented’. The event does not have a place in published histories of the region, but it is ‘the most prominent event in Apatani oral history’ (ibid.: 353–354). Ironically, Fürer-Haimendorf’s Himalayan Barbary turned out to be an important source for Blackburn in figuring out the causes of the uprising. The resentment of forced porterage was a key factor. ‘The problem of porterage’, writes Blackburn, ‘was unavoidable when an external power attempted to exercise control in the Arunachal region: no party could move through that terrain without local labour and the numbers required were in the hundreds’ (ibid.: 357). The porters were paid for their work, but

Reading Fürer-Haimendorf in Northeast India 23 working as porters in that hilly terrain was extremely demanding. Moreover, in certain times of the year, it could mean not working in one’s fields, and families facing starvation. But most importantly, forced porterage violated the Apatani sense of personal dignity. Recruiting porters was a significant enough problem for Fürer-Haimendorf to devote an entire chapter of Himalayan Barbary to the subject. He wrote about going with an armed escort and arresting people for not being forthcoming. The arrested men were released only after sufficient numbers of Apatani men had agreed to work as porters. When Fürer-Haimendorf’s party left the valley for the plains of Assam, crowds gathered to jeer at them: some shouting to the porters to get rid of the loads they were carrying, others threatening to fight the government. After completing his official assignment in 1945, Fürer-Haimendorf visited the Apatani valley a number of times, and he wrote about those visits. But nowhere did he mention the events of 1948 and their roots in Apatani resistance to forced labour of which he was a pioneer enforcer (Blackburn 2003: 352–358). Like Himalayan Barbary and Apa Tani and His Neighbours, The Naked Nagas also was the product of a colonial pacification campaign, but in this case Fürer-Haimendorf was not officially in charge. As I have indicated earlier, his mentor J.P. Mills, then the deputy commissioner of the Naga Hills district, invited Fürer-Haimendorf to join a punitive expedition into a territory where as he put it, ‘neither he nor any other British Officer, not to talk of anthropologists had ever been’. That in his own words was ‘a great piece of luck for any anthropologist’ (Fürer-Haimendorf 1983). Here is a passage from the Naked Nagas that speaks for itself: We enter the village, and one glance tells us that it has been abandoned; the people must have taken to their heels without so much as a thought for anything but their personal safety. . . . Smoke still rises from the hearth of the houses, and the inhabitants must have dropped everything and run for their lives, for everything is as if they had just left the village to work on the fields. Not so much as a piece of household furniture have they taken with them; . . . It is a pity that the beautiful carved posts of the men’s house must be sacrificed but to-day the regret of the ethnologist at the destruction of such works of art must once more give way; our dobhashi are already running from house to house with burning torches and soon the flames seize the dry roofs. (1962b: 164) In an interview years later, Fürer-Haimendorf was somewhat defensive. Setting fire to those villages, he said, ‘sounds worse than it is, because these houses are built of bamboo and thatch and they can be very easily rebuilt, it

24  Sanjib Baruah was not like burning a village with solid houses’ (Fürer-Haimendorf 1983). It is doubtful that it appeared that way to the people who lived in those houses.

Silence on the Naga conflict Fürer-Haimendorf maintained a life-long interest in the ‘tribes of India’, to use a title of his 1982 book. ‘Ever since 1936, when a study of the Konyak Nagas marked the beginning of my career as an anthropological field-worker,’ he said, ‘I have maintained contacts with Indian tribesmen’ (Fürer-Haimendorf 1982: xi). But there is nothing in the record to suggest that he took any interest in the political turmoil in the Naga Hills that began in the 1950s and continued through the rest of his life – and till this day. This was quite remarkable. Fürer-Haimendorf was in London’s School of Oriental and African Studies through most of this time, and the city was an important site in the Naga conflict. Angami Zapu Phizo, whom Nagas regard as the father of the Naga Nation, was an exile in London. In 1960, the London newspaper The Observer published reports on Indian army atrocities against Nagas that attracted global attention. The British-born radical Anglican clergyman, Michael Scott, well known for his activism in the South African struggle against apartheid, was persuaded by Phizo to join the failed Naga Peace Mission (1964–1966). In 1970 Fürer-Haimendorf visited the Naga areas where he had done his fieldwork more than three decades earlier. In 1976 he published a new edition of the Naked Nagas with the title Return to the Naked Nagas: An Anthropologist’s View of Nagaland 1936–1970. In its preface he wrote: I have refrained from including in this account . . . any comment on the political events which in recent years have disturbed the peace of Nagaland and attracted a good deal of attention both inside and outside India. In the absence of first hand knowledge of the course of events, no useful purpose could be served by expressing an opinion on the causes and the history of a movement which aimed at the establishment of an independent Naga state and resulted in a long drawn out struggle not only between insurgent Nagas and the Government of India but also among the Nagas themselves. (1976: vi) However he told his readers that observations in the book’s last chapter might allow them ‘to form their own opinion on the state of affairs prevailing in 1970,’ at least in the area where he ‘was able to move about unhindered and talk freely’ to people many of whom remembered and

Reading Fürer-Haimendorf in Northeast India 25 welcomed him ‘as an old friend’ (ibid.). The few references in that chapter to individuals with a history of involvement in the Naga struggle make clear that Fürer-Haimendorf viewed the Naga nationalists quite unfavourably. But that alone would not explain his lack of engagement. There are many individuals critical of the Naga rebels who spoke against the serious human rights violations that occurred during India’s counter-insurgency operations, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. It is possible that Fürer-Haimendorf viewed the issues raised by the Naga conflict as matters of high politics beyond the scope of anthropological advocacy. Such a view would not be unique among his contemporaries. Elie Kedourie in his classic book Nationalism published in 1960 wrote, ‘Frontiers are established by power, and maintained by the consent and known readiness to defend them by arms. It is absurd to think that professors of linguistics and collectors of folklore can do the work of statesmen and soldiers’ (Kedourie 1961: 125). And perhaps such a position came quite naturally to someone who had directly participated in colonial pacification drives. But irrespective of his attitude towards the Naga rebellion, FürerHaimendorf probably preferred not to risk incurring the displeasure of the Indian government. A letter he wrote to the king of Bhutan responding to the denial of a permit to enter Bhutan supports this hypothesis. ‘After thirty years of travel and anthropological research in various Asian countries,’ he wrote, ‘I am very conscious to avoid all political entanglements, and . . . on no occasion [have] I ever embarrassed a government which permitted me to work in its territory’ (Fürer-Haimendorf 1965). It would not be an exaggeration to say that Fürer-Haimendorf did not have an ear for what today we would call the politics of equal dignity. ‘We define our identity,’ as Charles Taylor puts it, ‘always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us’ (Taylor 1994: 32–33). Because of his preoccupation with the authenticity of cultures, Fürer-Haimendorf, like many of his contemporaries, could not relate to a significant site of cultural politics within the late colonial order that was opening up in front of them: the struggle for equal membership within a modern world society (Ferguson 2002). There is no evidence that Fürer-Haimendorf gave much thought to how the representation of Nagas in his books might have power over their lives. While in later editions of Naked Nagas he incorporated new material, the thought of using a different title didn’t seem to occur to him. On the other hand, the foregrounding of their nakedness might have bothered Nagas once, but it does not matter to many contemporary Nagas. Indeed Christian Schicklgruber found during his travels among Nagas that ‘time and again . . . a tattered copy of The Naked Nagas will be pulled out from under the table’ (2008: 366). Indeed the idea of the ‘Naked Nagas’ has

26  Sanjib Baruah now acquired a new political meaning that Fürer-Haimendorf could have hardly anticipated. As Naga scholar Dolly Kikon puts it, Nagas are no longer naked but they continue to shed their clothes as symbols of culture and resistance. . . . In many demonstrations and public gatherings . . . an increasing number of men. . . [dress] up as warriors with spears, and women with their sarongs wrapped around their chests. Once a sign of barbarism, these bare bodies have become political tools of protest. (2009: 95) Jamaican-born anthropologist David Scott says that European colonialism that made the anthropological journey possible ‘not only enabled, facilitated and authorized the specific anthropological problematic of difference (that is, of what counts as difference) but also established its epistemological standpoint’ (Scott 1989). Fürer-Haimendorf’s silences vis-à-vis the Naga conflict – and about the Apatani resistance to the pacification campaign he led – are perhaps ultimately related to what Johannes Fabian calls ‘anthropological time’ that denied coevalness to the ‘cultural and racialized other’ and the failure to recognise that ‘anthropology’s other is, ultimately, people who are our contemporaries’ (Fabian 2002: 11–12, 31, 143, 146).

Inscription of otherness: then and now Very little of what I have said about Fürer-Haimendorf and his work will surprise anthropologists today. Their discipline has long since recovered from its postcolonial crisis. But the nexus between knowledge and colonial power that comes out rather sharply in Fürer-Haimendorf’s work is more than just a matter of historical interest. In Fürer-Haimendorf’s time, the problematic of difference may have seemed self-evident. It was part of the European common sense that the ‘primitive’ or the ‘savage’ was outside modernity and that it was the domain of anthropology. But as David Scott puts it, interrogating the category ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ may have been far easier for anthropology and allied disciplines than to break away from the ‘location that privileges the social imaginary of the West’ (Scott 1989). In our times ‘the Savage has vanished,’ says Haitian-born anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot. [H]ordes of Savages have joined the slums of the Third World or touched the shores of the North Atlantic. We are far from the days when five Eskimos caused an uproar in London. The primitive has

Reading Fürer-Haimendorf in Northeast India 27 become terrorist, refugee, freedom fighter, opium or coca grower, or parasite. He can even play anthropologist, at times. (Trouillot 2003: 24) It may be worth reflecting on a concept of ‘the Other’ that sometimes appears to stand in for the category ‘primitive’ these days. The notion implicitly makes a distinction between what is ‘modern (the same) and the residue that is nonmodern (the other)’ (Young 2012: 36). The process of othering the so-called nonmodern, however, does not depend on the use of any particular term. It can occur quite independently of the language we use. It can sometimes even take the form of our fond wish of seeing a people or a place ‘develop’ or become ‘modern’. Northeast India’s postcolonial history is to a significant extent about the disenchantments of postcolonial sovereignty (to say this is not to deny the significance of postcolonial empowerment). To the discomfort of India’s national elites, many oppositional political projects in the region take the world, and not the territorial nation-state of India, as the political stage. It is not only the Naga and other independentists who imagine themselves as global subjects. Many ‘cosmopolitan tribal’ (McDuie-Ra 2012) activists in Northeast India find the hybrid global discourse of indigenous peoples (Baviskar 2006: 37) empowering because it defines their ‘tribes’ not only as citizens of India, but as global subjects. To the extent the oppositional political imagination in Northeast India looks beyond the territorial nationstate, the region’s postcolonial history destabilises one of modernity’s key constituent institutions: the nation-state. At the same time the political imagination of most identity activists in the region are firmly embedded within modernity. For instance, when it comes to lifestyle choices, the independentist militants of Northeast India are no radicals: many are unabashed about embracing the accoutrements of modern consumer society. Political demands are typically framed in developmentalist terms such as ‘closing the development gap’ or ‘catching up’ with more ‘developed’ areas. While the politics of indigeneity in some parts of the world is associated with powerful critiques of capitalist modernity, that is not the case in Northeast India. Yet ‘modernity’s ability to provide solutions to modern problems’ (Escobar 2004: 209) has never been more in doubt. The failure of the project of national development to deliver on its promise of expanding human wellbeing has become far too obvious. What sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls ‘the structural predominance of exclusion over inclusion’ (cf. Escobar 2004: 213) has made this disconnect very pronounced in recent years. Increasingly, those that are effectively excluded from the project of

28  Sanjib Baruah national development and citizenship, Santos suggests, outnumber those that are included. India’s much-touted economic growth of recent years has put extraordinary pressures on the livelihoods of many poor and underprivileged Indians, thanks to a surge in the demand for power – hydropower in the case of the Eastern Himalayas – and for minerals. In my work on the hydropower dams being built on the Subansiri River – the site of Fürer-Haimendorf’s The Apa Tanis and Their Neighbours and Himalayan Barbary – I have drawn attention to the potential destructive impact on the livelihoods of riverine communities living downstream (Baruah 2012). The logic of this phase of developmentalism seems to be that the people living by a river ‘may belong to the land but, within a Lockeian logic of private property, the land doesn’t belong to them’. They can therefore ‘readily be cast as uninhabitants, residual presences from a pre-capitalist era’ without the right to remain or to be compensated (Nixon 2010: 74). It has become more urgent today than ever before to think outside the imaginary of development. The task is both intellectual and political. Whether or not such a critical sensibility becomes part of the political imagination in Northeast India will depend partly on the epistemological standpoint of those of us who study the region.

Note * This chapter is based on a keynote address delivered at the conference on ‘Negotiating Ethnicity: Politics and Display of Cultural Identities in Northeast India’ at the University of Vienna, Austria, on 4 July 2013. The author gratefully acknowledges the comments and suggestions made by Mario Bick, Diana Brown, Zilkia Janer, Beppe Karlsson, David Kettler, Amrith Lal and Yuka Suzuki on previous versions of the paper. An earlier version was published as ‘Reading Fürer-Haimendorf in North-East India’, 50 (14), 4 April 2015 in Economic & Political Weekly (Mumbai).

References Anaya, S. James. 1996. Indigenous Peoples in International Law. New York: Oxford University Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2007. ‘Hope and Democracy’, Public Culture, 19 (1): 29–34. Asad, Talal. (ed) 1985. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press. Baruah, Sanjib. 2012. ‘Whose River Is It Anyway? The Political Economy of Hydropower in the Eastern Himalayas’, Economic and Political Weekly, 47 (29): 41–52.

Reading Fürer-Haimendorf in Northeast India 29 Baviskar, Amita. 2006. ‘The Politics of Being “Indigenous” ’, in Bengt G. Karlsson and Tanka B. Subba (eds), The Politics of Indigeneity in India. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 33–50. Blackburn, Stuart. 2003. ‘Colonial Contact in the “Hidden Land”: Oral History among the Apatanis of Arunachal Pradesh’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 40 (3): 335–365. Chambers, Claire. 2006. ‘Anthropology as Cultural Translation: Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land’, Postcolonial Text, 2 (3): 1–19. http:// postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/viewArticle/489 [Accessed on September 15, 2016]. Cohn, Bernard S. 1980. ‘History and Anthropology: The State of Play’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 22 (2): 198–221. Escobar, Arturo. 2004. ‘Beyond the Third World: Imperial Globality, Global Coloniality, and Anti-Globalization Social Movements’, Third World Quarterly, 25 (1): 207–230. Fabian, Johannes. 2002. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Ferguson, James. 2002. ‘Of Mimicry and Membership: Africans and the “New World Society” ’, Cultural Anthropology, 17 (4): 551–569. Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph von. 1955. Himalayan Barbary. London: John Murray. ———. 1962a. The Apa Tanis and Their Neighbours: A Primitive Civilization of the Eastern Himalayas. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. 1962b. The Naked Nagas. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co, 1962 [Second revised Indian edition]. ———. 1965. ‘Letter to Dr Tobgyel, for Presentation to the King of Bhutan’, 24 September. http://dart.columbia.edu/library/letter.xml [Accessed on June 22, 2013]. ———. 1976. Return to the Naked Nagas: An Anthropologist’s View of Nagaland 1936–1970. London: John Murray. ———. 1982. Tribes of India: The Struggle for Survival. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1983. Interview by Alan Macfarlane. Cambridge, 17 June 1983, Transcribed by Mark Turin. www.soas.ac.uk/furer-haimendorf/biography/inter view-with-christoph-von-frerhaimendorf.html [Accessed on September 15, 2016]. ———. 1990. Life among Indian Tribes: The Autobiography of an Anthropologist. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kedourie, Elie. 1961. Nationalism (2nd edition). New York: Praeger. Kikon, Dolly. 2009. ‘From Loin Cloth, Suits, to Battle Greens: Politics of Clothing the “Naked” Nagas’, in Sanjib Baruah (ed), Beyond Counterinsurgency: Breaking the Impasse in Northeast India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 81–100. Linter, Bertil. 2012. Great Game East: India, China and the Struggle for Asia’s Most Volatile Frontier. New Delhi: Harper Collins Linter.

30  Sanjib Baruah McDuie-Ra, Duncan. 2012. ‘Cosmopolitan Tribals: Frontier Migrants in Delhi’, South Asia Research, 32 (1): 39–55. Nader, Laura. 2002. Life of the Law: Anthropological Projects. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nandy, Ashis. 2003. The Romance of the State. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Nixon, Rob. 2010. ‘Unimagined Communities: Developmental Refugees, Megadams and Monumental Modernity’, New Formations, 69: 62–80. Phizo, A. Z. 2002. Letter to Frederick H. Boland, President of the United Nations General Assembly, 8 October 1960. Reproduced in Pieter Steyn, Zapuphizo: Voice of the Nagas. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Schicklgruber, Christian. 2008. ‘Christoph von Fürer Haimendorf – Collector and Chronicler of the Nagas between Two Fronts’, in Michael Oppitz, Thomas Kaiser, Alban von Stockhausen and Marion Wettstein (eds), Naga Identities: Changing Local Cultures in the Northeast of India. Gent: Snoeck Publishers, 355–366. Scott, David. 1989. ‘Locating the Anthropological Subject: Postcolonial Anthropologists in Other Places’, Inscriptions, 5: 75–85. http://culturalstudies.ucsc. edu/PUBS/Inscriptions/vol_5 /DavidScott.html [Accessed on June 22, 2013]. Taylor, Charles. 1994. ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Amy Gutman (ed), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 25–73. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Young, Robert J. C. 2012. ‘Postcolonial Remains’, New Literary History, 43 (1): 19–42.

2 The role of informants in the construction of the Zo as the Chin, Lushai and the Kuki of Burma and India Bianca Son* During 25–29 January 1892, at Fort William in Calcutta, the Chin-Lushai Conference was held to discuss the possible amalgamation of the Northern Arakan Yomas, home to many Zo highlanders.1 Managing the hills from three administrations, Bengal, Assam and Rangoon, was an unnecessary expenditure for the Secretary of State and an exhaustive duty for the officers posted in the three administrative posts of the hills.2 Debate arose between the officers of the Lushai and the Chin Hills. Bertram S. Carey, Political Officer posted in the Chin Hills, however, opposed amalgamation arguing that the Chin, historically, had always, ‘belonged’ to Burma. He argued that the Chin and the Lushai ought to be separated by a political border; the Chin belonged to Burma, whereas the Lushai belonged to Assam. Despite Carey’s objections for amalgamation, it was decided that the Hills be put under a single administration and be managed from Assam. Unable to accept the decision of the conference, in a confidential letter to the chief commissioner of Burma, Carey (1892) writes: The Chin has [sic] nothing to do with the Lushai or Assam, but belongs to Burma, whilst the Lushai tract can conveniently be placed under Assam. It is on record that as far back as 1871 ‘The Deputy Commissioner of Cachar is regarded throughout the country as the Burra Sahib.’3 His argument was based on his understanding that the Deputy Commissioner of Cachar had the Lushai firmly under control. He used Alexander Mackenzie’s 1871 report to support his claim. It must be noted, however, that 20 years had passed since the said report was published. Furthermore, frontier officers were not in communication with one another. Hence, unless there were devastating events occurring or were in some way related to the Chin Hills, Carey could not have been aware of the current rapport between the British and the highlanders beyond his jurisdiction (Soong

32  Bianca Son 2007: 25). He could not have known if, in fact, the Burra Sahib was in ‘firm control’ of the Lushai Hills. He also argued that the ‘Chin’ had a historical relationship with the Burmese. He tried to argue that the Shan of Burma and the Chin had some sort of alliance: The Northern and Central Chins border on Burma; they have always owed a nominal allegiance to the [Shan Chief of the] Kalè Sawbwa, and even after the British occupation in 1885 the [Zo] Tashon Chiefs and the [Shan] Sawbwa were on very good terms. The [Zo clan of] Siyins and [the Zo clan of] Kanhaws were tributary to Kalè and years ago were subjected to much harsh treatment at the hands of the Shans, but obtaining guns they got out of hand and harassed the valley; but their object was rather to loot and capture Shans to do their menial services than as warfare against the State. (Carey 1892) Carey makes it sound as though slave-taking and occasional harassment did not cause the Shan and the Chin to be adversaries. This sounds implausible. Carey grossly exaggerates the allegiance between the Chin and the Shan. To make his argument stronger, he refers to the map drawn by Colonel Robert Boileau Pemberton in 1834: From Captain Pemberton’s map published in 1835 and in a demiofficial letter to the Chief Secretary to Government, dated the 9th September 1828, he [Pemberton] believed that the Kanhaws were tributary to Kalè and had continued so for many years. (Carey 1892) Carey relies on the writings of early colonials (Reid 1893: 6; Mackenzie 2001: 160). However, he seems not to realise that much of this information was not credible or reliable. That is, Pemberton obtained information about this tributary relationship through informants. Once Pemberton published his report, the assertion that there was an alliance between the Chin and the Shan had become a ‘fact’. Carey’s argument is based on this ‘fact’ and his reading of history. He also relied on the already established borders for the Zo of the Northern Arakan Yomas, that is, that there are the Chin and that there are the Lushai (and that there are Kuki in the south of the Yomas and in the north in Manipur who were known as the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Kuki, respectively).4 Mackenzie, who wrote the 1871 report, had been promoted to the Chief Commissioner of Burma just two years earlier in 1890. He also attended the conference. Thus, he supported Carey’s

The role of informants in the construction of the Zo 33 assertions. After all, they were based on his very own report. Some six months after the conference, Mackenzie sent a telegram to the foreign secretary in Simla, asking, ‘Has it been decided that administration of Chin Hills is to remain with Burma as stated in newspapers? If so, I will prepare a fresh scheme for administration of the Chin Hill Tracts’.5 In response to this question, on 2 August 1892, the Government of India telegraphed Mackenzie in Mandalay, saying, ‘Chin Hills to remain under Burma for the present’.6 This decision marks the first official delineation of the Chin and the Lushai Hills into formal, and legally separate, administrative offices. The only change was to amalgamate the south Lushai Hills with the north Lushai Hills to be administered from Assam. The border was rationalised using the arguments of early Company men such as Pemberton and Mackenzie. In fact, Pemberton states in his report that he utilised the writings of Father Vincenzo Sangermano, Dr Francis Buchanan and their contemporaries in the late 18th to early 19th century, some years before Burma was conquered and the Zo highlands became the new frontier of the Bengal Presidency. The purpose of this conceptual chapter is to trace Zo construction back to its beginning in order to understand how Company men created the Chin and the Lushai, as well as the Kuki.7 As the above case at the ChinLushai conference of 1892 illustrates, just two years after the annexation of the Hills, these categories were already well formed and established. This chapter will show, in part, that much of the information used to construct the Zo was based on the early accounts of colonials and their informants. It illustrates that Company officials put a lot of credence into the informants’ reports. For example, one of the first accounts was by the Italian priest Father Vincenzo Sangermano, and at least one of his Italian contemporaries, another Barnebite priest. Both men wrote about the Zo in the late 18th century, nearly 50 years before the British began attending to the Zo highlands. They did not, however, write from first-hand experience. Both relied on informants whose identities neither of them disclosed.

Fan Cho of the Tang dynasty C.E. 862 The Zo occupied this area of the mountains long before the arrival of the British. The historical record is rich with Chinese sources that suggest that this area of the Northern Arakan Yomas was a dynamic theatre of activity that included a collection of traders, merchants, migrants, missionaries and surveyors, some travelling in caravans. The Tea-Horse Road, sometimes referred to as the Southern Silk Route, which links trading routes from

34  Bianca Son Yunnan, Tibet, Burma and India, travels through the Northern Arakan Yomas (Yang 2004). On this route, silver, horses, salt, tea and other items were traded and transported. Thus, the Northern Arakan Yomas were lively with people moving through them a thousand years before the arrival of the Company. Only one account of this period exists on record in present day. Fan Cho’s account, an official of the Tang dynasty, was unearthed in 1961. Like many to follow, Fan Cho surveyed the mountains and its inhabitants for military purposes. He was interested in the landscape, the rivers and lakes, the climate, the living conditions including areas that were disease-ridden, such as the ‘malaria valleys’ among the mountain ranges. For military purposes, this intelligence was essential. Fan Cho also described the people he encountered and referred to the existence of two ‘kingdoms’. He described the Mi-ch’ên kingdoms which were situated along the Mino-Chiang River (Fan 1961: 20–22). They called their chiefs ‘Shou’. The ‘Shou’ must have been the Zo. Gordon Luce, who translated Fan Cho in 1961, used ‘Sh’ for ‘Z’ which sounds very similar to Zo and has been accepted to refer to the Zo (Vumson 1986: 1). There are no known accounts between that of Fan Cho (862 C.E.) and the account of Sangermano, a thousand years later in 1783. There could also be accounts by the many traders and merchants that used the Southern Silk Trade Route. The Mongols and Tartans may also have encountered the Zo. Either way such records have not been discovered as of now. The absence in the historical records does not mean, however, that the Zo disappeared by leaving the Northern Arakan Yomas and migrated elsewhere. They also did not disperse to be subsumed by other groups of people. On the contrary, according to Sangermano’s account, the Zo did not migrate out of the hills. When they ‘reappear’ in the historical record, they still occupied the Northern Arakan Yomas, pretty much where Fan Cho had encountered them a thousand years earlier. What the absence in archives does indicate, however, is that scholars and historians were occupied with other events elsewhere in the world. Much occurred between the 9th and 18th centuries. Detailing even just the major events of this time period is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, some of the major events and eras are described illustrating some of the reasons historians, scholars, politicians and other researchers were engrossed with other histories, places, people and events.

A thousand years of world history Surely other accounts of the Zo exist in the world. The Northern Arakan Yomas are situated in the middle of Southeast Asia. Trading routes moved

The role of informants in the construction of the Zo 35 through the Yomas. People must have had to stop on their journeys. It is likely that the Zo provided services to people on the Southern Silk Route. Perhaps they offered them fresh water and food and traded whatever wares they were selling. If it was dangerous and those moving through the mountains feared the Zo, then surely we would have heard such stories as well. Furthermore, there was a lot going on in the region during that time. India was growing through a succession of empires into a unified country. China, also, was advancing, experimenting in all types of sciences and technology, while Europe was still largely nomadic. Thus, the reason that no other accounts exist, it is argued, is because they simply have not been discovered yet. It is unimaginable that the Zo were a people ignored since they were occupying such an important mountain range that sits on what is now the border of South and Southeast Asia as well as parts of China. Northern India was controlled by the Pratihara Empire from the 6th to the 11th centuries (6th century – C.E. 1036). The empire included areas in what is now known as Northeast India such as parts of Assam. By the late tenth century, however, the empire had reduced to a collection of small states (cf. Majumdar & Raychaudhuri 1950: 178–179, 185–186, 351–353 etc.). During the time of Fan Cho, it was at its peak in terms of power and prosperity. But again, no records of the Zo have been found in the Indian archives. During the 10th and 11th centuries, the Tamil Chola dynasty had risen to dominate much of southern India. This dynasty lasted for nearly a thousand years from 300 B.C.E. – C.E. 1279. It pioneered a centralised form of government and established a disciplined bureaucracy (Stein 2004: 26, 90, 120). Their rivals, the Chalukya Empire (C.E. 543–753), rose to power in the west and were a source of constant anxiety for the Tamil Chola dynasty. It launched many attacks against the dynasty (ibid.). Historians research this tension-filled relationship; the Zo are not part of this equation. The Chalukya Empire was followed by Krishna I (756–774) (Majumdar & Raychaudhuri 1950: 299–302). A series of other rulers came and declined. In 780, Dhruva Dharavarsha came to power. He is often referred to as the greatest leader of India and ruled much of it. North India was now controlled by Sultan Ali Gurshasp Khilji (1296–1316) who started paying tribute to their new masters of the south. Although Khilji bordered the Northern Arakan Yomas, most accounts refer to the south or to their position as tributaries. The defence against the invasions of the Mongols gave more importance to the north-western than to the north-eastern frontier (ibid.: 179, 251). Thus, there are no records of the Zo found during this era as well. It was also the beginning of the Islamic period in India (ibid.: 275–296). No records of the Zo have been discovered from that time either. Nor are there any accounts of the Zo from the tumultuous period of the Five Dynasties and Ten

36  Bianca Son Kingdoms era in Chinese history (10th century) and during the following dynasties until the 17th century (see Eberhard 1948). In Burma, the Pagan dynasty (C.E. 849–1297) unified much of the region now known as Burma. Surely they were also interested in the occupants of the Yomas. Pagan was one of the major kingdoms in Southeast Asia. It had its golden period during the reign of King Kyansittha (1084– 1112). It was during this time the inscription naming the ‘Khyan’ was chiselled. They had encountered some southern Zo whose word for people is ‘Khyan’. The people of Pagan misunderstood the word ‘Khyan’, believing it was an ethnic name. Thus, the term ‘Chin’ came into existence. However, it was constructed for the Zo on the Burma side. They learned the word ‘Chin’ (Khyan) from informants of the plains. Either way, clearly King Kyansittha was aware of the Zo existence; yet was it possible that he did not write anything else about them? This is rather hard to believe given that writing was flourishing in all of Asia during this time. That they wrote nothing of the Zo is however also plausible since they were not instrumental in any meaningful way for the king during this period.

Father Vincenzo Sangermano Italian priest Father Vincenzo Sangermano authored ambitious descriptions of the Burmese Empire in 1783 nearly a thousand years after the account of Fan Cho (Sangermano 1833). He was considered an expert on all aspects of Burma. Sangermano included everything ‘Burmese’, from its history, institutions, religions, to the description of the people themselves. He also wrote about the highlanders of the Northern Arakan Yomas. He was a learned man of his day, fluent in the Burmese language and Pali script. Sangermano spent much of his time studying ancient Burmese texts (Tandy 1966). This makes his work credible to anyone interested in learning about Burma. In terms of his information on the highlanders, however, the source of his knowledge is questionable. Sangermano was not the only Italian priest in Burma during that time. Gaetano Maria Mantegazza arrived in 1772 and, with the support of the Barnebite order in Italy, promptly opened a school in Chautyaywa (Schwartzberg 1994: 687–698). He also studied the Burmese language and Pali script spending the years between 1772 and 1784 in Burma. Mantegazza worked with a Burmese judge at Hluttaw Kyaungdago of Yedena who helped him with translations and most likely served as his informant, or as Harry Harootunian (2012) expresses about informants, as his ‘partner in the field’.8 According to historian Helen James, ‘[the Burmese judge and Mantegazza had] a noteworthy intercultural friendship’, working closely together to produce a number of publications (2005: 87–89). Thus, the

The role of informants in the construction of the Zo 37 judge has much influence on Mantegazza. Moreover, Mantegazza surely knew Sangermano and although we are unable to locate any co-authored texts, Mantegazza’s ‘Dialogue between a Chin and a Siamese’ (1996) most likely influenced Sangermano. The fictional dialogue features two characters who compare the merits of Catholicism to Buddhism. The highlanders’ reputation as being primitive and wild made them an ideal vehicle for a contrarian example the Catholic priest found useful to conjure up for the purpose of his arguments against Buddhism. Mantegazza, like Sangermano, did not travel to the highlands but relied on the accounts of informants – other Burmese elite or perhaps disenfranchised locals searching for favours. One of Mantegazza’s fictional characters is a ‘wild Chin’ while Sangermano refers to the highlanders as Zo. Thus, although these two men must have interacted with one another, it appears that they used different informants. One learned that the highlanders were known as Chin, the other understood that it was the Zo in the Northern Arakan Yomas. Unfortunately, the names of their informants were not divulged; we only know of the judge that worked with Mantegazza. The judge belonged to the elite in Burmese society who was most likely provided with all types of information by those seeking his favour or even just respect. Moreover, these informants, as well, may have relied on yet other informants or hearsay. Mantegazza uses the term ‘Khién’ instead of Zo. This is probably because ‘Chin’ was already adopted by the Burmese via the southern Chin who referred to the Zo highlanders as ‘people’ during the 11th century. That is, Sangermano’s informants must have been Burmese who had adopted, what they believed was an ethnic nomenclature, Chin. At the same time, Sangermano also refers to a kingdom named Zo. Thus, some of his informants were also aware that the highlanders referred to themselves as Zo. This illustrates the lack of consensus among informants whose information was neither credible nor reliable and must have been acquired through yet other informants and hearsay. The highlanders had a reputation for raiding the plains, for headhunting and carrying slaves back to the hills. It is entirely possible that these informants also got their stories from others, afraid to travel to the highlands themselves. That is, like Buchanan’s trip through Chittagong illustrated a few years later in 1798, the highlanders were shrouded in mystery (Van Schendel 1992: xx). There is more evidence that Sangermano as well as Mantegazza’s impression of the ‘wild’ highlanders was most likely obtained through informants since neither of the men was recorded as having taken the trip himself. One or both men may have also relied on additional texts not yet discovered in this research. Either way, both men were devout Catholics occupied with bringing salvation to Burma, not to the Zo of the Northern Arakan Yomas; they were not of serious interest.

38  Bianca Son Although Sangermano was a missionary to Ava, he spent a lot of his time, especially after his retirement, among the English in Rangoon (Sangermano 1833: Preface). His years in Burma totalled 25 from 1783 to 1808. According to Barnebite Father Jardine, Sangermano was a source of information for the ‘English’ in Burma.9 In fact, he was commissioned to create a chart of the port of Rangoon which so impressed the British, that the East India Company gave him a pension for life (ibid.: xxv). He was believed to be an authority of Burmese history as well as geography. However, he was part of the elite and not concerned with the ‘primitive’ men of the hills. After his death, a note was found among his things; it was not part of the main text and most likely intended for someone who would assist in compiling his work – it was not meant to be published. In it, he makes clear that his primary sources were the writings of elite sections of Burmese society and history. Sangermano fully admits: In what I have said of the superstitions, astrology, religion, constitutions of the Talapoins, and the sermons of Godama, I have not followed the tales and reports of the common people, but have carefully consulted the classical writings of the Burmese. (ibid.: xxxviii) Therefore, the information he gathered about the Northern Arakan Yomas must have been acquired through informants; apparently, the Burmese did not write about the Zo, or that Sangermano did not discover any accounts of the Zo. Thus, he mentions the Zo in only one of his chapters entitled, ‘Of the Inhabitants of the Burmese Empire’ (ibid.: 43). He lists 45 different ‘races’ dwelling in the British Raj. The Zo are ranked number 41 after the Arakanese and the southern Chin. Sangermano writes: To the east of the Chien mountains . . . is a petty nation called Jò [Yaw]. They have become Burmese, speaking their language, although very corruptly, and adopting all their customs. These Jò generally pass for necromancers and sorcerers, and are for this reason feared by the Burmese, who dare not ill-treat them for fear of their revenging themselves by some enchantment. This is clearly written from the perspective of the Burmese. It is also clear that Sangermano relied on the accounts of informants. The Zo may be a Tibeto-Burman linguistic group, but they do not speak Burmese. They also do not practise Burmese customs which generally were Buddhist in nature. Sangermano’s statement thus cannot be based on first-hand experience. In fact, the Burmese were afraid of the Zo. Hence, this is even

The role of informants in the construction of the Zo 39 more evidence that no one travelled up the Zo mountains to gain credible knowledge. These accounts must have been derived through conversations with informants, who themselves may have relied on yet other informants. Unlike Francis Buchanan some years later, Sangermano makes no mention of his informants; he presents the information with the same sort of authority as other aspects of his work.

Major Michael Symes, Dr Francis Buchanan and their informants During the time of Sangermano and Mantegazza, the Company began commissioning its own surveyors. One notable officer was Major Michael Symes who was Resident to the embassy at Ava in 1795 (Symes 1827). His primary role was to secure the safety and interests of English merchants in Burma. He wrote extensively about the areas in and around Ava, including of the highlanders in the Northern Arakan Yomas. According to Symes, their habitat ran contingent to Assam and lay between Arakan and Ava. His perspective, addressing several elements considered in this chapter, is best captured in his own words: [The Zo are] a harmless untaught race, that inhabit the lofty mountains which divide Arracan from Ava, and who, as children of nature, delighting in their wild and native freedom, are for the most part insuperably averse to hold any commerce with the people of the plains. (ibid.: 204) Symes’s quote exemplifies the general sentiment towards Zo highlanders in 1797 during a time before the Company waged war against Burma. This quote rings similar to later quotes made by other Company surveyors and officers. However, there is one very significant difference. Symes refers to the Zo as ‘harmless’. Clearly, the highlanders did not cause the Company serious problems until it moved towards and into the Northern Arakan Yomas. Another significant contributor to the making of the Chin and the Lushai (as well as the Kuki) was Dr Francis Buchanan. He gave at least three accounts of areas in and around the Arakan Yomas. Like Fan Cho, Sangermano, Mantegazza and Symes, Buchanan relied heavily on informants instead of solely on his own observations. Buchanan resided in Ava during 1795. Commissioned by the Company, he along with Symes and Ensign Thomas Wood mapped the unknown highlands. The drawing of maps was of the upmost importance to the Company. Maps were essential not only for security reasons but also for expansion. Maps were

40  Bianca Son necessary for the drawing of borders, for delineating the empire’s peripheries and for slicing up specific areas into manageable geographical units of administration. In this case, the Northern Arakan Yomas appeared almost insurmountable. They were difficult to negotiate and were known to be dangerous both in terms of the terrain and because of its ‘wild’ inhabitants. A map was eventually drawn, but not in Ava, rather elsewhere by a Mr Alexander Dalrymple relying on the information provided by Buchanan as well as by Wood. These two men, as it reads below, relied on ‘native’ information, that is, informants. However, here they question the reliability of these informants’ reports. Still, apparently, they did an excellent job. Symes quotes Dalrymple: This part of Indian geography has hitherto remained an inexplicable obscurity, and although much light has been thrown on the subject in consequence of the Embassy, of which this Work lays an account before the Public, not only from the astronomical observations by Ensign Thomas Wood, which do him the greatest credit, but from the great mass of native geography, which the assiduous pains of Dr Buchanan, who accompanied the Embassy in a medical capacity, have accumulated from various persons. (Dalrymple quoted in Symes [1827] 2006: 59) Dalrymple acknowledges Buchanan’s use of informants and even praises him and Wood for being able to utilise this information to help render a reasonably accurate map. It seemed to matter little that these informants had their own preconceived notions of the Zo. Yet, their information about the Zo is accepted in the same way as is information on rigid elements of the environment like rivers, lakes and mountains. Furthermore, Company men employed informants and unapologetically discussed the difficulty of ‘mapping’ the Zo. Like trying to map the terrain, Buchanan is unable to reconcile the plethora of nomenclatures. He dismisses them as being the product of the ‘vulgar’ tongues of the locals. Like many historians to follow, Buchanan remarked: ‘Nothing, indeed, can equal the confusion that arises in the study of this peninsula’s geography, from the variety of names given by different people to the same countries and places [and people]’ (1820: 93). With the dismissal of the idea that the complexity of nomenclatures actually relates to the nuanced reality of the area, the first justification for later categorising is evident. Buchanan further differentiates ‘the language of men’ from ‘the Pali language Mgadha or Sangskriat, that is, [in] the language of the gods, or first colonists in India (ibid.). He makes it clear that

The role of informants in the construction of the Zo 41 only the ‘language of the gods’ and first colonists in India are reliable. Buchanan had no intention to explore a more complex reality. Buchanan groups the highlanders into two groups, the Chin and the Zo. He must have been informed that both dwell in the hills. Sangermano, evidently, was under the impression that the mountains were called Chin, as were the Chindwin valley and the Chindwin river. So he referred to them as the Chin mountains. Buchanan calls them the ‘mountains of the Chin’.10 Yet Sangermano’s contemporary, Mantegazza, used a fictional ‘Chin’ character. There was no consensus on the proper nomenclature during this time. Some even used the terms interchangeably or contradictorily. Either way, Buchanan refers to two groups of people, the Zo and the Chin. Confusingly, later within the same text, he places all of the Chin into a single group, contradicting himself: ‘The Khiaen form one of the rude original tribes of the peninsula, and the greater part is entirely independent of any more cultivated race; but those who live towards the south are exposed to the inroads and commercial oppressions . . . and submit to a limited obedience’ (1820: 264). While this may be a rather small point, it is indicative of the larger issue which is that colonials were eager to make sense of the data they obtained whether through local informants or from each other. The explorative expedition of 1795 commissioned by the British embassy to the Kingdom of Ava, carried out by Major Symes, Dr Francis Buchanan and Ensign Wood, was deemed a great success. The group mapped the region, identified different ‘races’ and overall managed to gather the intelligence necessary for colonial expansion. By focusing on state relevant information, they also took further the construction of Zo highlanders. Buchanan grouped the ‘languages’ he encountered and explained that one of the four dialects existing in Burma was that of a Zo (Yo) language. He provided context for the people using this language: ‘There are four governments of this nation, situated on the east side of the Arakan mountains, governed by chiefs of their own, but tributary to the Burmans’ ([1799] 2003: 43). Buchanan, in all three of his Zo accounts, described Zo ‘tribes’ as well as ‘kingdoms’. He also used the terms ‘Chin’, ‘Lang-na’, ‘Kukie’ and ‘Maras’ at other times – they all appear interchangeable. That is, it is not clear whether he thought they were different groups of people, different clans or communities (Buchanan 1820; Van Schendel 1992: 97). Equally important, he stated that the highlanders are tributaries to the Burmans. Political officer Carey relied on this information and used it to justify the delineation separating the Zo into the Chin and the Lushai. Pemberton in his 1834 report on The Eastern Frontier of Bengal mentioned consulting Buchanan’s earlier work (Pemberton 1835: 121). Pemberton eventually drew the line between Manipur and the Sagaing Division

42  Bianca Son of Burma based on his belief that some Zo were tributaries to the Manipuri raj. Buchanan may have been referring to the southern Chin, at times referring to them as ‘Yo’, but it is not entirely clear whom he meant. The Langna could have been the Langmang of the Lushai Hills. The Mara and Kuki are also towards the north.11 Both Carey and Vumson indicate that there are other southern Zo sometimes transliterated as ‘Yo’. These were under the control of the northern Zo around the area of Haka (Carey & Tuck 1896: 162; Vumson 1986: 76). It appears that the information recorded was contingent on who the informants were that provided certain intelligence. Much of the information differed. Like Sangermano, but for different reasons, Buchanan did not travel to the highlands. He was ambitious and eager to do so, but was unable in 1795 or 1798 to find guides. Stories of Arakanese conflicts and raids drove fear into those Buchanan encountered, and they refused to take him up into the mountains (Van Schendel 1992: Introduction). Because travel to the Northern Hills was unfeasible, he relied on informants. Unlike Sangermano, however, he lists these informants. Some were commoners like wood cutters; others held governmental positions (ibid.: xv). Still, although he credits them, some of the information they provided caused confusion. Willem van Schendel explains that Buchanan had a difficult time separating legend from truth. For instance, he was told about a strange people, the ‘Langman’ of the Lushai Hills, who were said to sleep in trees like baboons (ibid.: xx). It is entirely plausible that informants embellished their reports about the ‘natives’. We know that highlanders victimised them during raids; some of their kin were carried off as slaves, or worse, murdered for their heads. Thus, the Zo were very much feared by the people of the plains. Buchanan was still interested in them, however. He wanted to at least see these people. According to van Schendel, the only other first-hand information he had of the Kuki was from a captive in the Chittagong District (ibid.: xv, Fn. 7). In fact, Buchanan is the first colonial official to record an encounter with a Kuki.12 In 1810, Buchanan, this time commissioned to gather a different type of intelligence, once again headed towards the Northern Arakan Yomas. The colonial state was now ready to expand. This time, more than ever, military intelligence was essential. Buchanan was to ascertain and predict the reactions of the highlanders, ‘in case of rupture’. The British, under the impression that the ‘ethnic’ divisions were robust, sent in Buchanan to ascertain their reactions to a war between the Burmans and the British. Michael Charney mentions that Buchanan exaggerated ethnic hostilities for political reasons. Thus, he used terminologies such as ‘kingdoms’ and ‘nations’ rather than ‘tribes’, groups or communities (2006: 125–128).

The role of informants in the construction of the Zo 43 During his trip to ascertain ethnic reactions, Buchanan gives an extensive survey of the people he encounters including the Zo highlanders. He listed five ‘nations’ including a Zo nation: . . . The last of the nations is named Yo. It inhabits the Westside of the Burmese kingdom, between it and the savage tribes bordering Tipurah. It also has a common origin with Burmese, has long been subject to them and . . . enjoys great privileges. (Buchanan 1810) This information differs little from Sangermano’s report 30 years earlier. The Zo were ‘savage’, originated from the Burmans and pay tributary to them. Clearly, Buchanan relied on the reports of other officials and accounts authored by foreigners such as Sangermano. Moreover, Buchanan not only exaggerated ethnic hostilities, but also their origins and erroneously conjectures that they shared a common ancestry with the Burmese. Furthermore, he indicates that the Burmans are their suzerain, as Sangermano had reported. As a result of unreliable information, at this point in history, Company men had begun separating the eastern and western Yomas and allotting them to administrative offices in either Bengal or Assam vs to the western and eastern sides of the Yomas.

Thomas Abercrombie Trant Thomas Abercrombie Trant was another colonial officer who reported on the Zo highlanders. He was a talented young soldier who quickly rose up through the ranks to obtain the position of captain in the British Army.13 Unlike Sangermano and Buchanan, however, he was not highly educated. Thomas Trant was just 19 years old in 1824 when he arrived in Ava with only a basic education.14 Yet, it would be his role to obtain essential intelligence on the highlands for the Company. Trant’s main purpose was to identify those aspects of the terrain which would be useful for moving armies through the mountains. There he encountered the ‘Zo’ of the southern hills. Like other intelligence gatherers, Trant did not travel all the way up to the Northern Arakan highlands himself, instead relying on the stories told by informants. He refers to a slave-taking, headhunting, raiding group of highlanders that dwell in the Northern Arakan Yomas known as the ‘Kuki’. We know that the word ‘Kuki’ is a Bengali word denoting ‘hill people or highlander’. Trant clearly obtained this intelligence from the informants with whom he had the most interactions – the Bengali of the plains (Soppitt 1893: 63). According to

44  Bianca Son these informants, the Kuki were just one reason that the Zo highlands were a place of great danger. Although Trant lacked formal higher education, he still postulates on Zo highlander history. He speculated: The original inhabitants of the plains, were the Kieaans, who now inhabit the mountains; and a party of emigrants from Hindostan, who, pleased with the appearance of the country, took up their residence at Chagain, where they built a town, and resided for some time unmolested. Many years had elapsed, when a horde of Tartars poured in from Thibet, and willingly exchanging their bleak, inhospitable plains for the more fertile valleys watered by the Irrawaddy, soon overran and conquered the whole country, except a small portion of Arracan. . . . In the course of time, the invaders intermarried with the original inhabitants, and became the founders of a new race, ancestors to the present Burmese. (Trant 1827: 240) Trant’s account of history is conjecture at best. Unlike the general notion that highlanders eventually descended to the plains to start civilisations, he contends that they were the first plains people. He does not explain, however, why he believes the Zo returned to the hills. He only states that the Tartars intermarried with the Burmese and created the Burmese ‘race’. It is unclear whether this information, as well, was obtained through informants. Perhaps Trant simply relied on the history books he read while a young student back in England. No one else before him argued that the Tartans intermarried with the Burmese to create a new ‘race’ of people. Moreover, this assumption, although on record, has never been repeated. It is so obviously invented by a young soldier attempting to make sense of highlanders with whom he had had no interactions or even encounters. Other Company men would repeat the Zo highlander and Burmese relationship as tributaries. According to a Lt. Bisset: The Kyanns are nominally tributary to the Burmese, who however, derive little benefit from their wild and untaught vassals, except from those who have been allowed to enter the plains and have there settled. I saw many who seemed very happy, and, to do the Burmese credit, were not at all oppressed. (1830: 89) If the Zo actually were tributaries to the Burmese, the statement that they are ‘not at all oppressed’ is still unlikely. Generally speaking, a people who

The role of informants in the construction of the Zo 45 are forced to pay tribute to yet another group of people would surely feel oppressed by them. It seems that Bisset uses this ‘observation’ to argue that the highlanders are easily subjugated and thus would also bow down to the British. Bisset continues to explain his informants’ perspectives as well as his own conviction that the Zo would enjoy being subjects of the British. He also grossly contradicts himself within the same text explaining that the Zo, after all, are oppressed by the Burmans and that only the British could protect them. He also makes clear that he relied on informants. In order to make this information appear credible, he adds that the informants insisted that they had ‘daily contact’ with the Zo over some 20 years. This also seems implausible, especially given that the Zo, as Bisset explains here, ‘have been taught to look upon strangers as enemies’: To speak generally of their character from what I have heard from those who have been in the habits of daily intercourse with them for these last 20 years, I would say that their civilization would be of much importance to us, and could be accomplished without much difficulty. Conciliation is the only means. The Kyanns among themselves, pleased with their natural freedom, are rather a social race: they have, from the strongest of reasons, been taught to look on strangers as enemies. The Burmese, the only people they ever knew, they have only known as their oppressors. But now within the territories and under the protection of a Government famed for its liberality, temper, and mildness, and whose policy is grounded upon the principle of moderation, the Kyanns will find protection, and, gradually gaining confidence, may become useful subjects, and worthy of our consideration. (1830: 89) Here, the Zo are like wild children in need of protection from the tyranny of the Burmese. He compels the government to consider the potential of Zo as subjects. Two years later in 1827, Company surveyor John Crawfurd, who was also on an assignment to Ava, reported on the ‘tribes’ of the Burman Empire including the Zo. Like Trant and Bisset, Crawfurd did not elaborate on the differences among northern highlanders; he simply clumped them together (Crawfurd 1829: 372). He groups the Shan and Arakanese together with the ‘Chin’ (whom he spells as Kheyns) and makes clear that these tribes are tributaries to the Burmans (ibid.: 493, 494). At this point in history, the primary objective appears to study the Burmans and, in relation to them, their neighbours and tributaries. These are the first cases of Company men separating the Zo of ‘Burma’ from those of ‘India’.

46  Bianca Son Like Sangermano, Symes, Buchanan and Trant, Crawfurd draws information about the ‘tribes’ from informants. He does take a short trek towards the foothills near Falam but fails to acquire much useful information about the Zo on this expedition (ibid.: 765). On his excursions around Ava, Crawfurd reports that the mountains are only scantily inhabited having come across just two villages: an odd assessment given that the hills were quite populated according to other historical records, including that of Trant. The only actual encounter Crawfurd has with a Zo is that with a slave at the court of Ava who would spend the rest of his life as a slave, having been captured and tried for the murder of a Burmese (ibid.: 766). Although he had not travelled to the highlands, Crawfurd lists some of the tribes and authoritatively states, ‘These [tribes] are numerous and civilized, nearly in the order in which I have enumerated them’ (ibid.: 93). This contradicts his earlier statement indicating the Zo mountains are only ‘scantily inhabited’. Either way, it is obvious that the same sort of construction occurred later when Colonel Pemberton went to the Northern Arakan Yomas and drew the border based on the accounts of Sangermano, Buchanan, Trant and Crawfurd. Thus, the information provided by informants, which was then shared with colonial officers, eventually took on an element of ‘truth’ after having been repeated and reiterated in numerous reports.15 The source of the first intelligence — informants — was not cited. More Company officers surveyed the hills after the First and then the Second Anglo-Burmese War of 1824 and 1852, respectively. They came to believe and imagine that the highlands were populated by a collection of different clans and groups, many of whom were at war with one another. At the same time, they also compared highlanders to lowland Burmese and Indians. In these cases, these different clans and groups of highlanders were referred to as a single entity. As Symes indicated, the hill people did not wish to engage in commerce with the plains, deducing two types of people, highlanders and lowlanders. Thus, constructions of the Zo are evident as early as the 18th century. These ‘truths’, after the tenacious repetition and reiteration of conjectures derived through unreliable informants, were considered ‘truths’ decades later in the 19th century. These were simply passed on and handed to the next generation of Company men who, in their diaries and official reports, recorded the existence of numerous clans including the Chin and the Lushai (as well as the Kuki). By the time the massive punitive expedition of 1889–1890 was carried out, the Chin and the Lushai were officially denoted to occupy either the eastern or the western Arakan Yomas. The all-encompassing nomenclature of Zo was dismissed since it caused administrative confusion. As Reid made clear: I believe the Lushais call themselves ‘Zao’. ‘Chin’ is a Burmese term, and . . . synonymous with Khyen (pronounced ‘Chin’) . . . I think

The role of informants in the construction of the Zo 47 it would therefore be better to [drop confusing nomenclatures] and divide the people with whom I am going to deal . . . into the two broad classes of Lushais and Chins . . . there can be little doubt that the Chins and Lushais are practically one race. (Reid 1893: 4–6)

Conclusion The purpose of this chapter was to illustrate the process of categorisation and construction, as well as to trace the process to its beginning. Zo highlanders were ordered and clumped into two groups of people on two sides of a colonial-drawn border. The Zo known as the (new) Kuki, which was also derived from informants, were resettled beyond the eventual Manipur border. In this chapter, for want of space, only a handful of primary sources are utilised to demonstrate early perceptions of Zo highlanders. These accounts were forwarded by an Italian missionary priest, Father Vincenzo Sangermano; by Dr Francis Buchanan in his three accounts of 1799, 1810 and 1820, and by Captain Thomas Trant as well as by Lt. Bisset, participants in the First Anglo-Burmese War. Colonel Pemberton cites all these early accounts in his 1834 report. It was Pemberton’s report that eventually led to the legal separation of the Zo highlands into the Chin-Lushai Hills with some of the Kuki being allotted to Manipur. That is, Pemberton cites early Company accounts which all relied on precarious sources, that is, informants. One very early, pre-colonial narrative is also included. Fan Cho’s account of 862 C.E., however, did not influence colonial writings. His account was not translated and published until 1961; thus it did not influence Pemberton’s decision to delineate the Chin and the Lushai Hills as well as the southern border of Manipur. Its inclusion here is to show that the highlands were a dynamic theatre of highlanders including ones that referred to the princes as Zo. Given this particular account, others surely exist within the archives of China and of India, if not elsewhere, produced by traders and travellers moving through the Southern Silk trading route as early as the 9th century. The Zo were not isolated in the hills; they must have been exposed to others before the arrival of the Company. Fan Cho is also included because at the point of modernity, in the mid-20th century, when native Zo began writing their own histories, Fan Cho is usually cited. His account has become a significant primary source for the argument that the Zo did have a history long before the colonial era and that at that time, the nomenclatures of ‘Chin’, ‘Kuki’ and ‘Lushai’ among others did not exist; they were constructed by colonials who obtained these terms from Bengali and Burmese informants. Furthermore, reasons for the absence of other records on the Zo are speculated upon. Others must have encountered

48  Bianca Son Zo highlanders too between the accounts of Fan Cho and Sangermano. These accounts, however, are yet to be discovered in the archives of former empires or in the personal collections of travellers and traders. Either way, these accounts illustrate the early survey takers relied heavily upon the hearsay furnished to them by informants who, in turn, may have relied on their own informants. Although Buchanan lists several of his informants, most Company men did not include this information in official reports. Furthermore, Company men relied on each other’s reports. In this way, ‘truth’ was created through the sheer tenacity of repetition and reiteration. Thus, Carey, Political Officer of the Chin Hills of Burma, argued that the Chin simply ‘belongs’ to Burma. In any case, Company men wrote with authority about the Zo. However, given the growing number of Zo scholars including anthropologist L. Lam Khan Piang and historians like Pum Khan Pau as well as David Zou, there is now, more than ever before, the opportunity for the Zo to discover their own histories even in the absence of tangible records by relying on oral histories, language structures and the existing colonial and missionary records. Moreover, as Piang and others have argued, including non-trained historians such as T. Gougin, Kup Za Go, Hau Go and Vum Son (Suantak), there exists a primordial nuance in the usage of the nomenclature Zo across all the highlanders of the Northern Arakan Yomas from the Chin Hills of Burma, the former Lushai Hills as well as to the highlands of areas within Manipur and the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. Moreover, this primordial nuance reaches beyond terms and assignments; rather it emphasises a shared culture with similar rituals, languages, practices and customs that have endured a relatively short separate past of just a hundred and fifty years. In short, by deconstructing the histories written through colonial accounts, the Zo have the opportunity to entertain and research alternative histories. That is, through the use of informants, the Zo highlanders were constructed to be the Chin, Lushai and the Kuki. Colonial officers simply ignored the overarching nomenclature of Zo. They did so simply for the ease of administration. However, these terms have now become fixed in the parlance of scholars, especially those coming from the West, who relied on colonial accounts. Others, however, have now adopted these terms as their true and correct nomenclatures. For instance, the Zo known as the Chin in Burma reject the term Zo. They are occupied not with history, rather with their present position as one of the ‘ethnic races’ of Burma. Adopting ‘Chin’ as a proper nomenclature is advantageous for them in that they are now part of the pro-democracy movement of Burma and are recognised as an ethnic minority much like the Shan, the Karen and the Kachin.

The role of informants in the construction of the Zo 49 There are other groups of Zo that reject the notion that the term Zo encompasses many of the peoples of the Chin and Lushai Hills (later Mizoram) including the ‘Kuki’ now in Manipur. Given the lack of a writing system before the arrival of missionaries, it is imperative that we consider oral histories and learn from these about another past existent before the arrival of the British. After all, it was the British and their reliance on, at times, unreliable informants that first made legal the constructed terms of Chin, Lushai and Kuki.

Notes * Editors’ note: This chapter is adapted from a chapter of Bianca Son’s Ph.D. dissertation (Son-Doerschel 2013). Bianca Son passed away in June 2014. With the agreement of her family, we publish this chapter that she presented during the conference ‘Negotiating Ethnicity: Politics and Display of Cultural Identities in Northeast India’, held in Vienna in July 2013. The process of publication usually entails editing and revising papers, which is done in discussion with the authors. In this case, this work was done in the absence of the author. Some attributions and references needed to be clarified, which we have strived to attempt to the best of our abilities, while respecting the content and the specific style of the chapter. 1 ‘Yomas’ is a Burmese word meaning ‘mountains’. 2 A second administrative office was located in Mandalay. 3 Carey actually cites Mackenzie’s 1871 report, ‘last two lines . . . on page 160’. 4 Kuki is a Bengali word for ‘highlander’. Thus, this word, also, must have come from informants, this time from the people of Bengal. The Zo, themselves, were not encountered. 5 FDR on Chin Lushai Hills, Telegram No. 57. 6 FDR on Chin Lushai Hills, Telegraph No. 59. 7 In a large migratory wave, a group of highlanders who are Thado-speaking people were called the ‘new’ Kuki. They were resettled in Manipur by the Raj along with colonial officers, north of the Lushai Hills. The ‘old’ Kuki, many of whom are of the Bawm clan, remained around the Chittagong Hill Tracts, hence ‘old’ and ‘new’ Kuki. 8 Hluttaw Kyaungdago of Yedena refers to a house of legislature or a group of lawyers and judges working for the king of Burma. 9 Jardine refers to the ‘English’ which implied Company officials, who could also have been Scottish or Irish. Furthermore, there were others in and around Burma during his stay for 25 years; thus, he may have shared information with others such as merchants and traders from Europe or the Middle East, as well. 10 He writes: ‘[the] country of the Io or Yo . . . between two chains of highlands, the mountains of the Khiaen on the west’ (1820: 263). 11 The old Kuki can also be found in Bangladesh. 12 His informant was a chief named Kaung-la with whom Buchanan stayed during his 1810 journey in the southern part of Bengal.

50  Bianca Son 13 Frade Fortunato Monge Cisterciense, Doutor Theologo 1811; Wellington 1834, vols. Iv–x.; Napier 1873. 14 ‘Basic’ education refers to a military education he received at the military academic at Croyden. Literacy rates for the Britain were still rather low during this time at around 50 per cent. 15 Numerous texts deal with the tenacity of beliefs or truths. Read for instance Schimmel (2008: 4).

References Bisset, Lt. W. 1830. ‘Narrative of the Route Marched by the 18th Regt. M.N.I. from Pekang-yeh on the Irrawadi River, to Aeng’, Aracan in Baptist Mission Press, Gleanings in Science, 2: 83–89. Buchanan, Francis. [1799] 2003. ‘A comparative Vocabulary of Some of the Languages Spoken in the Burman Empire’ [Asiatic Researches, 5: 219–240] SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research, 1(1): 40–57. Buchanan, Francis. 1810. ‘Account of Burma and Pegu and the Steps Necessary in Case of a Rupture, HM 388, no. 21. Ff. 599–613. Oriental and India Office. British Library. London. Buchanan, Francis (AKA Francis Hamilton) 1820. ‘An Account of a Map of the Countries Subject to the King of Ava, Drawn by the Slave of the King’s Eldest Son’, The Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, II: 203–210. Carey, Bertram S. 1892. ‘Demi-Official Letter to the Chief Secretary to the Chief Commissioner Burma’, dated the 4th February, in FDR on Chin Lushai Hills, September. Aizawl Tribal Research Institute, Department of Arts and Culture, Government of Mizoram: India, Confidential letter. Carey, Bertram S. and Henry N. Tuck. 1896. The Chin Hills: A History of the People, Our Dealings with Them, Their Customs and Manners, and a Gazetteer of Their Country, Vol. I and II. Aizawl, Mizoram: Tribal Research Institute. Charney, Michael W. 2006. Powerful Learning: Buddhist Literati and the Throne in Burma’s Last Dynasty, 1752–1885. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan, Centers for South and Southeast Asian Studies. Crawfurd, John. 1829. Journal of an Embassy from the Governor-General of India to the Court of Ava. Edinburgh: Bentley, Bell and Bradfute. Eberhard, Wolfram. 1948. A History of China. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Fan, Cho. 1961. The Man shu, Book of the Southern Barbarians. Translated by Gordon H. Luce. Edited by G. P. Oey. Cornell Data Paper Number 144, Ithaca, New York: Southeast Asia Program, Department of Far Eastern Studies, Cornel University. Foreign Department Report (FDR) on Chin Lushai Hills. 1892. Firms KLM Private Ltd. On Behalf of the Tribal Research Institute, September. Aizawl: Govt. of Mizoram. http://dli.ernet.in/handle/2015/461711. Frade Fortunato Monge Cisterciense Doutor Theologo. 1811. Noticias Biograficas do Coronel Trant. Lisbon: Na Impressão regia. Harootunian, Harry. 2012. ‘Memories of Underdevelopment after Area Studies: The Desire Called Area Studies’, Positions: Asia Critique, 20 (1): 7–35.

The role of informants in the construction of the Zo 51 James, Helen. 2005. Governance and Civil Society in Myanmar: Education, Health and Environment. New York: Routledge Curzon Press. Mackenzie, Adrian. [1884] 2001. The North East Frontier of India. New Delhi: Mittal. Majumdar, R. C. and H. C. Raychaudhuri. 1950 and 1974 (Vols. 1. and 2.) An Advanced History of India. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mantegazza, G. M. 1996. Dialoghi tra un Khien Selvaggio e un Siamese ExTalapoino. Roma: Il Mondo 3 Edizioni. Napier, William Francis Patrick, Sir. 1873. History of the War in the Peninsula and the South of France, From the Year 1807 to the Year 1814. New York: D. & J. Sadlier. Pemberton, R. Boileau. 1835. Report on the Eastern Frontier of British-India with an Appendix and Maps. Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press. Reid, Adam Scott. 1893. Chin-Lushai Land, Including a Description of the Various Expeditions into the Chin-Lushai Hills and the Final Annexation of the Country. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co. Sangermano, Vincenzo. [1833] 1966. A Description of the Burmese Empire Compiled Chiefly from Burmese Documents by Father Sangermano. London: Susil Gupta. Schimmel, Solomon. 2008. The Tenacity of Beliefs: Fundamentalism and the Fear of Truth. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Schwartzberg, Joseph E. 1994. ‘Cosmography in Southeast Asia’, in J. B. Harley and David Woodward (eds), The History of Cartography, Volume 2, Book 2, Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 701–740. Son-Doerschel, Bianca. 2013. ‘The Making of the Zo: The Chin of Burma and the Lushai and Kuki of India through Colonial and Local Narratives 1826– 1917 and 1947–1988’, Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, SOAS, University of London. http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/17365. Soong, Chu Ro. 2007. ‘Naming a People: British Frontier Management in Eastern Bengal and the Ethnic Categories of the Kuki-Chin: 1760–1860’, Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of History, University of Hull, UK. Soppitt, C. A. [1893] 1978. An Outline Grammar of the Rangkhol-Lushai Language. Aizawl: Tribal Research Institute, Firma KLM for the Tribal Research Institute. Stein, Burton. 2004. A History of India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Symes, Michael. [1827] 2006. An Account of an Embassy to the Kingdom of Ava Sent by the Governor-General of India, in the Year 1795. SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research, 4 (1): 59–208. Tandy, W. (1966). A Description of the Burmese Empire Compiled Chiefly from Burmese Documents by Father Sangermano (translated, 5th edition). Susil Gupta: London. [The same work has been published also under the title. The Burmese Empire a Hundred Years Ago.] Trant, T. Abercromby. [1827] 2006. Two Years in Ava from May 1824, to May 1826. London: Adamant Media Corporation.

52  Bianca Son van Schendel, Willem. 1992. Francis Buchanan in Southeast Bengal (1798): His Journey to Chittagong, the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Noakhali and Comilla. Dhaka: University Press Limited. Vumson. 1986. Zo History: With an Introduction to Zo Culture, Economy, Religion, and Their Status as an Ethnic Minority in India, Burma and Bangladesh. Aizawl: Published by the Author. Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of. 1834. The Dispatches of Field Marshall the Duke of Wellington, K.G. During His Various Campaigns in India, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, the Low Countries, and France: From 1799 to 1818. Compiled from official and authentic documents by John Gurwood. London: J. Murray. Vol. iv–x. Yang, Bin. 2004. ‘Horses, Silver, and Cowries: Yunnan in Global Perspective’, Journal of World History, 15 (3): 281–322.

3 Sutured landscapes Making of an imperial frontier in Tripura (1848–1854) Anandaroop Sen

In 1854 a formal boundary was drawn between the British District of Tippera and the princely state Hill Tippera. William Wilson Hunter in his Statistical Account of the District of Tippera would, in 20 or so years, call it an ‘imperial frontier’ (Hunter 1877: 356). This grandiose naming belied the contemporary, ‘provincial’ din around the boundary (Mbembe 2001: 11; Sartori 2008).1 This ‘imperial frontier’, to become one, had to exceed its prosaic and provincial existence as a boundary. The telling of this boundary story is one of a local morphing into an imperial; an administrative boundary transforming into an imperial frontier; a punching above the weight, of mutations that allows forgettable ‘locals’ to enter into the depths of an imperial archive. There it is nestled as a ‘local problem’ at hand in the early 1850s: at least it begins that way.2 A princely state in the sylvan depths of an unknown, surrounded by and amid hills, and a British District3 organised within the legal-administrative frame of permanent settlement, both called ‘Tippera’, had been crafted in the late 18th century (Islam 2000).4 Yet for a good 60 odd years there was no clear demarcation between the British District and the princely state. The sparse historiography of this region, almost mimicking the 19thcentury nebula, fails to note the dual and linked histories of a district and a princely state buried in the shared name. This chapter probes the formal moment of boundary marking that allowed these two spatial entities to stand forth as separate: An after life of a divide located in the 18th century. This after life appears in the archives as a problem of ‘borders’ (cf. Mezzadra & Nielson 2013). What was this border between the British District and the native princely state? How was it formulated? What were the priorities that led to its arrival? What did it say about these two spaces 60 odd years after this split was introduced in the early eras of East India Company governance (Stern 2011)?5 How did these units exist before this border was thrust upon this landscape? And finally what did it mean for an administrative boundary to be perceived as an ‘imperial frontier’ within 20 years of its inception? By addressing these

54  Anandaroop Sen questions the chapter interrogates the carefully cultivated and curated distinctions between boundary, borders and frontiers, a set of distinctions that are ultimately undergirded by an idea of the bounded modern nation state. Put simply, it is our inherited nation state borders and boundaries that are projected back into history and determine how we understand a region. The chapter questions some of such certainties. The questions resonate in the contemporary. The princely state has through the violence of partition morphed into a state within the Indian Union, while the British District, known as Comilla, is a part of Bangladesh. Within what has become the state of Tripura there are lines that separate a larger tribal area known as the ‘Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council’ from the western plains (Bhaumik 2009). Instead of coming together under a larger generic category like that of the ‘Naga’ or ‘Mizo’, people here have retained distinct ethnic categories but cohered around a broader tribal identity vis-à-vis the Bengali domination of executive powers (from the late 1970s under the Communist Party of India Marxists). The political formation of the Indigenous Peoples Front of Tripura (IPFT), among others, has articulated this strand since the last decade or so. The recent disturbances in Agartala where the IPFT clashed with the state police demanding separate statehood for the tribal region is the latest chapter in a long and protracted struggle loosely based on a Tripura tribal identity.6 These pitched battles around newer boundaries have often obscured the historical question of how in the first place the princely state of Tippera or Tripura, now the state within the Indian Union, came to be organised as a distinct spatial unit separated from its neighbouring regions. There has been hardly any inquiry around the provenance of this sequestration (Van Schendel 2005).7 This neatness, legitimated violently through national histories, has surprisingly engendered very few enquiries regarding the history of this separation. When one starts reading the colonial settlement of this region both these disparate histories, of the princely state and the British District, are called forth simultaneously; the histories of the Hill state and the plains cannot remain divorced from each other. One can no longer write in a ‘histories of’ (Chakravarty 2000) mode where the British District and the princely state reside in their encrusted historical insularities. It is to thaw such insularities I try to look at genealogies of separations: Hence a story of a boundary that doubles up as a frontier. The British District of Tippera acquired a particular form in 1790. In this new fangled geography borne in the mix of myriad revenue experiments of the East India Company in Bengal the raja of Tippera, Rajdhur Manikya, emerged as a significant landholder in the district.8 He held a large estate

Sutured landscapes in Tripura 55 known as Chakla Roshnabad. Chakla Roshnabad was spread over Sylhet, Tippera and Noakhali. This zamindari marked the limits of the British District. Administratively it was within the British District of Tippera. In 1854 a definitive line was drawn across this site overlaid with different form of claims; this line sought to separate formally the District of Tippera and the Hill state. This chapter recounts how the boundary came into being; the contemporary discussions around it. It looks at the possible links between local boundary markings and imperial frontier constructions. There are four sections in this chapter. In the first I provide a brief introduction to the 18th-century provenance of the production of the British District of Tippera and the princely state. The following section delves directly into the ‘drawing’ of the 1854 boundary: the modalities, the forms, the discussions hewn around the material practice of drawing it. The final two sections deal with questions of property and law congealed in the 1854 boundary.

The 18th-century-provenance of two Tipperas East India Company revenue experiments in the early colonial period (18th century) had re-inscribed or produced the Tippera landscape in a particular way. This was not unique to Tippera. The geography of eastern Bengal, or what was then loosely termed the Eastern frontiers, was largely refigured in these experiments (Benton 2002; Cederlöf 2013). A complex interaction with and translation of the older Mughal, Nawabi political categories into a language of a frenetic revenue extraction system of East India Company had carved up different parts of the region (T. R. Travers 2004; R. Travers 2007).9 As it stood in 1790 on the eve of the permanent settlement, there was an ‘independent’ princely state in the eastern hill parts, a tract called the Chakla Roshnabad, administratively an estate within the British District of Tippera. It was a complex mesh of landscapes built of different components of governance. British Tippera, a district, made sense within the world of ‘districts’ introduced in 1790 (Ascoli 1917; Ray 1979). The native state, politically and administratively, was washed with this shift in the agrarian frame. The princely court was relegated to the hills (Ludden 2003). A formal legal relationship between the zamindari and the Hill state was established in the early years of the 19th century where the Sudder Dewany Adalut gave a judgement ‘declaring the zamindari an integral portion of the impartible raj’ (Archives 1809). In the future, whatever be the nature of dispute, one could not have possession of hills without also having the rights to the zamindari.

56  Anandaroop Sen The shape it would hence take would have to negotiate with this reality. The British District and the Hill state, still retaining the same name, were connected by this strip of land with serrated borders called Chakla Roshnabad – the zamindari of the raja. It was technically an estate within the new-fangled District of Tippera. As the Company sought to consolidate its revenue mechanisms, it was in effect producing an entirely new agrarian and sealing it off from its purported outside (Gidwani 2008; Iqbal 2010).10 The different Tipperas, so to speak, calibrated different moments of this complex enterprise in the late 18th century; the District of British Tippera was cobbled together from different parts of Mymensingh, Dacca, Noakhali (Bhullua) and portions of what would be later known as Hill Tippera. This governmental bricolage, as it were, was a part of delimiting an agrarian. The princely state as it appeared henceforth was a direct product of such operations of incision. The 1854 boundary formalised this profounder governmental severing of contiguous, adjacent places into spaces of agrarian and beyond. The next section follows this moment of formalisation.

Formalising a separation In 1846 an East India Company official, Mr Henry Rickett was deputed to decide upon a dispute regarding some government khas land in pargana Dandra contiguous to pargana Ameerabad and abutting on Independent Tippera. Both these parganas were in the British District of Tippera (the district was created in 1790). H. Rickett was a veteran in these parts. He had been in charge of a Chittagong settlement in 1848, and his report remains an important document in the study of Chittagong agrarian history (Iqbal 2010: 22; Chowdhury 2016). Being somewhat of an ‘expert’ on the region he was given the initial responsibility to mark out the Tippera boundary. In 1848 a couple of surveys were ordered by H. Rickett to look into a possible clear boundary. The initial blue print drawn up for the project read something like: 1 Object is to ascertain exactly the boundary between pergunnah Roshnabad and Independent Tippera. 2 The raja should send his men to attend the survey and point out the boundary of independent Tippera. Also the ryots and talookdars holding land on the frontier are to be called upon to assist demarcation of the boundary. 3 The scale should be eight inches to a mile, if that is too small then one foot to a mile.

Sutured landscapes in Tripura 57 4 Boundary to be marked by a red line. The country for 100 yards on either side of the line will be entered in the map with all tanks, houses, large trees and other conspicuous objects and mounds of earth, raised 200 yards apart where there are no objects by means of which the boundary may be at a future recognised. 5 Should the people on the raja’s part not attend the surveyors will proceed to lay down the boundary pointed out to them by the chowkeedars and talookdars of Roshnabad (Archives 1855). Despite these clear directions it took five long years before any of the settlements were even close to completion. In the next five years during the modalities of drawing the boundary, the boundary itself altered significantly. The maps that were produced embraced the country around the River Fenny, the hydraulic border between Chittagong and Tippera,11 till pargana Muntollah where the jurisdiction of the Tippera magistrate adjoined that of Sylhet.12 And the maps had their own problems. Leycester, the British officer, who took over the boundary work after Rickett, in one of his reports wrote [because of] immeasurable tortuosities [it is] not possible to follow . . . if one was to have a boundary at all as it would lead to immense difficulties and litigations, because there were real or feigned pleas about the ignorance of an existence of any boundary in these places. I use real because there are very few of the thirty maps we have comprised in which the parties who accompanied us have not failed in pointing out correctly the line plotted in the maps. In more instances than I can tell the parties who preceded us to point out the boundary followed the line of sight of the theodolite between the surveyors station and not the boundary plotted on the map which had it been so well known could hardly have been the case. (Archives 1855) The gap between the map and the world is also the way map condenses, mutates, transforms the world and devours it (Edny 1997).13 If one has to go by Leycester’s report, there seems to have been no recognisable boundary acknowledged by the ‘locals’. If they responded to the survey party, they did so on the terms of the objects brought in by them. These objects demanded a map, a line. The responses of the ‘locals’ were accordingly imputed within these objects: the theodolite, the line of sight of theodolites between the surveyor stations. The survey establishment, the concrete practices of survey in a sense, created the language of boundary.

58  Anandaroop Sen The boundary surveyed was on the basis of the line provided by these local farmers, talookdars; after torturous negotiations, at the end the boundary’s length stood at about 400 miles: four times of what was thought to be the initial length of the proposed boundary. Henry Rickett’s initial project had calculated the extent to be 80 or 90 miles, but with each passing year the length kept increasing. Total miles fixed, disputed or not, at the end of 1852 stood at 394.5 miles. And this expansion was not incidental, for it would be almost impossible to draw isolated ‘local’ boundaries between one pargana of British Tippera, the estate of Chakla Roshnabad and the Hill Tipperah (Michael 2007). If Roshnabad was to be mapped it would appear as lumps around the native state; chunks of land hobbled together, remnants and products of the way different landscapes were sutured in the late 18th century. Such jagged edges belied attempts of easy localised solutions. The maps in J. G. Cumming’s late 19th-century Report on the Settlement of Chakla Roshnabad bear cartographic testimony to this (Cummings 1997 [1899]).14 What started out initially as a demarcation to be drawn between Chakla Roshnabad, the raja’s zamindari estate and the ‘independent’ territory ended as an all-encompassing line that would separate the hill from the plain, all British Districts from the princely native state; draw limits to the agrarian governance of Bengal; mark out a legal limit; and generate what Hunter in 1872 would call the ‘imperial frontier of Bengal’. Let me here dwell on the category of pargana. Chakla Roshnabad was a pargana within the British District of Tippera. The category of pargana takes us right to the heart of the boundary question – boundary between what? What were the spatial units that were being separated? Was it an intradistrict division? Since Roshnabad was within the British District, would boundaries pertaining to it be in the domain of intra pargana demarcations within the British District? Or would it also be inter-district boundaries marking Roshnabad’s boundary with other neighbouring districts like Sylhet for instance? Or would the pargana boundary lend and exceed itself and become a demarcation between a princely state and a British District? The reader will not be unaware of the import of these distinctions – the separation of different legal-administrative spheres. Drawing marks within the agrarian fabric sewn in together within administrative-legislative world of permanent settlement is one thing. Defining limits of jurisdiction and separate legal spheres is another (Benton 2002). The moment the pargana boundary threatened to bring the princely state into play it involved another matter altogether.15 Parganas in themselves were hardly clear-cut defined units. This only provides grist to the mill of entanglements. Bernardo Michael in an essay discusses this fuzziness of the concept of pargana. It floated around the

Sutured landscapes in Tripura 59 revenue governance of British East India Company from the late 18th century. According to Michael, the act of translation of the ‘ancient’ division of pargana to the ostensible compactness of bounded British revenue and judicial units found some coherence only in the latter half of the 19th century. Prior to that, parganas with their scattered, mutated, dismembered forms belied British cadastral mapping. Parganas refused to fit in with the projected contiguity and compactness of revenue space plans. Roshnabad was a typical example of this. The Tripura raja was the zamindar here, settled by the permanent settlement. Most of pargana Roshnabad was in the Tippera District, the British District being beaten into shape in 1790 after a series of landscape operations. (This was not unique to Tippera. Districts were being carved out all over Bengal through such engineering, cf. Ascoli 1917.) Parts of it were in Sylhet and Chittagong. The disjointed borders followed the parganas as they overlapped into different districts. One should mention here that the relationship between parganas and districts was generated in the frame of early Company conquest of Bengal, particularly its eastern frontiers. Gunnel Cederlöf’s recent work (2014) demonstrates how conquest was never very distant from the ordering of land relations in these parts. Thus the political role of conquest in organising the revenue mechanisms and units of Bengal should be reiterated; in other words parganas and districts themselves, in their benign representations as problems of calculation, also embody the reality of conquest (Govind 2011). It is within such a context one has to read the emergence of this ‘imperial’ frontier. It provides us a layer of understanding of the pargana boundaries. Some of the fuzzy pargana boundaries it would seem could and would morph into ‘imperial’ frontiers. The stubborn pargana boundaries, often intractable to British maps of property, in this instance also doubled up as the imperial frontier. It was the frontier of a certain form of property signalled by the agrarian. The exigency of drawing a boundary in the mid-19th century emerged within such a legal-property regime. Two connected issues were at work: the limit and extent of British courts and possible complications in transactions of property in the district. Let me take up the latter first.

Property and land The property problem was articulated as one that might arise in the near future. If the Tippera raja’s zamindari, Chakla Roshnabad, turned insolvent at any time in the near future, teething complications would ensue in absence of a clear recognisable line. What was one to do then? There was an entire ‘independent’ territory that marked the ‘outside’ of this estate. If

60  Anandaroop Sen one did not have a clear notion of where the district ended and the ‘independent’ territory began it would be difficult to define property itself. The official version of it went like this: This estate Chakla Roshnabad abutted for nearly its whole length on the boundary of the independent territory and in the event of its being sold, great perplexity was apprehended in the attempt to ascertain the eastern boundary of the purchase unless it should have been previously laid down by survey. (Archives 1855) It was only through a demarcated boundary a property regime and transactions in property could be stabilised, a regime that would be propped and distributed through the British civil courts. We will discuss the courts in the following section here. Let me briefly flag the problems congealing around property. How was one to handle the distribution of the Roshnabad zamindari if the Tippera royal court failed financially? To answer this, one needs to look at a related question: How did the region work before this heightened din around the boundary? What were the lines of division or practices of movement between the District Tippera and the native state? A glimpse of this is borne out from a report made by Leycester, the British official who took over the boundary work after Rickett. It is a long quote but I think it is significant: There was no recognized boundary, [emphasis mine] though it was generally recognized [emphasis mine] that the hills belonged to the raja and the plains to the British. The absence of any distinct line was thus conceptualized. The zamindaree (sic) amlah of the raja, or the talookdars and farmers were the persons through whom matters of leases, grants of lands adjacent to the villages were transacted. They were probably the only people who knew anything about it or were available for the purpose. The designations or situation of the lands, as given by the applicant for the lease or the pottah was probably admitted without question. It suited the one to get an increase in his rent roll, the other to get more land for cultivation. . . . since the territorial and property rights were both vested in the same individual and the properties being contiguous, no distinction as to which lands belonged where had been made (that is whether in the individual hill territory (khanaband) or to the zamindaree (sic) lands). The question of demarcating the boundary had not been raised. (ibid.)

Sutured landscapes in Tripura 61 The fact that the question of demarcation hadn’t been raised pointed to something else as well: it signalled the fact that this was an area where the hills shaded into the plains and vice versa. The general idea of the division between the hill and plain was ambiguous. Chakla Roshnabad was in a sense built up of attributes of both the hill polity and the relatively newer dynamic of the British District of Tippera. Some forms of tenure that existed in the region were embodiments of the kind of space Chakla Roshnabad was: an in-between patch between a space organised under the sign of agrarian (through district formation and permanent settlement) and a frontier ‘hill polity’. But this difference itself was a product of practices of colonial governance that redistributed lands through district construction. By looking at the ‘minor’ history of this ‘border-ing’, one opens up this process of difference making: a constitution of difference that then gets naturalised and marks uplands and lowlands (Scott 2009). This essentially goes against James Scott’s argument that looks at uplands as isolated zones existing outside state practices. On the contrary as evidenced here, such insulation is produced through practices of state. Certain form of tenures that existed in Roshnabad embodied this shading of the hill and plains. With regard to the particular form of tenure prevalent in Chakla Roshnabad, Leycester wrote, The more frequent disputes however were connected with certain holdings called Chuklabustahr. These were granted from time to time to favourite or influential officials of the Tippera Court, many of which later had been the subject of suits in British courts and passed into the hands of others. The boundaries of these talooks were ill defined and extra ordinary. One of these I am told has its northern boundary at the Deeyty river its southern most limit at the Fenny or 70 miles distant. The western side is generally up to the confines of some village or villages in the pargana, the eastern side marked by the hills. The intention probably was to give leases for lands skirting of the hills and not appertaining to any particular village with a view to increase cultivation. (Archives 1855) The Chuklabustahr lands were granted by the raja of Tippera from time to time to influential officials.16 And they changed hands. This engendered directly from the way Chakla Roshnabad was inserted into the nascent District of Tippera in the latter half of the 18th century. After Roshnabad emerged as a peculiar member of the District Tippera, the practices that defined the larger agrarian space – litigation over rights to property – striated this spatial unit. The landholders who had any grievances against the raja of Tippera now could turn these into legislative exercises. If the raja

62  Anandaroop Sen had to participate or articulate his claims, he could take recourse only in these legislative forms. The raja’s right to alienation of property was mapped through a series of legal disputes through the 19th century (Cummings 1997 [1899]: 79).17 The Chuklabustahr tenures were a compression of a set of practices: the gritty and throbbing connections across the purported divide of princely state and the zamindari. Such practices impeded smooth surgical operations. Through these tenures, the princely court extended into the Bengal agrarian district and district in turn folded into the native state. What were perhaps older practices of the Tippera court politics and patronage royalty now found new meanings in the altered world of Company revenue system. The in-between character of this area as marked by tenures like Chuklabustahr became more and more evident as the boundary work progressed. For instance, after the first few years where the boundary work was repeatedly stalled for local specifications it was decided for the portion of the work remaining to be executed that no other lands than those of pargana Roshnabad would constitute the boundary, or if they did, it would be only to an insignificant extent. In execution, things were at serious odds with this assumption. On the extreme north, the lands of some private zamindaris of government properties in Sylhet intermingled with the lands of District Tipperah, and were parts of the prospective boundary. Here some of the lands were claimed by the raja as belonging to his hill territory (Archives 1855). At such a juncture, the first expansion was ordered and thus the boundary was no longer one between Roshnabad and independent territory but one that would demarcate the entire District of Tippera from the Hill Tippera. Surveyors from the next season got instructions that boundary was to be laid not only between independent Tippera and the zamindari of Roshnabad, but between the independent territory and the lands of any zamindari which might be found to constitute the boundary (ibid.). As the prerogatives started to change, the modus operandi of the boundary-making altered. The government pushed for arbitration. The commissioner of Chittagong pencilled in an interesting conundrum here: A problem of naming lands and how, through the act of naming, such lands moved in and out between categories of hill and plain. He remarked, [For] reasons of reclamation of jungle or pushing forward of cultivation into the hills, names similar to those of Decennially settled lands/ villages have been arbitrarily given in the maps to parcels of plots of land, notwithstanding that they are partially or entirely separated from the campaign by a hill or hills, and are situated within the general range of them. The question naturally arises what are the confines and limits

Sutured landscapes in Tripura 63 of such villages. How far do they extend towards the independent territory in effect where do they terminate? (Archives 1855) No one knew for sure. These strips of land called Loongas ran into the hills. These strips were bridges of conflict. They were used by farmers of the Tippera District to extend the pargana into the hills or in other words the district into the hills. And the measurement of such movement was cultivation. The Loonga strips compressed within them the duality of hill and plains. The difficulty in severing this inhered duality was evident to Leycester. Writing about it Leycester said, As you proceed along the boundary passing over a hill or hills through the jungle more or less thick find detached parcels cultivation or as you diverge from the open plain into a loonga between two hills and are led on from one strip of land to another, either running into each other or separately similar hills until you are completely surrounded by them – and ask how such are claimed as pargana? The only tangible answer vouchsafed is because they are cultivated, all such strips of loongas are brought under the plough are in pargana all the jungle or hill is in the khanabaree of independent Tippera – my diary is replete with answers involving such contradictions . . . in numerous places in the map it will be seen that a long circuitous route over hills has been taken and the obvious and sometimes avowed object is that the scattered patches of the intervening cultivation might be included within the boundary. (ibid.) The decennially settled lands organised under permanent settlement were moving into the hills through plough cultivation. Practices of cultivation, in this instance, created a ‘field’ of possibilities by the act of retaining same names for different lands and villages. The district could move into the independent territory on the back of plough cultivation. The pargana folded into the hill territory through this semantic manoeuvre. This was similar to how Chuklabustahr tenures pleated into the district but in the opposite direction. This folding produced certain metonymical associations. As Leycester noted, all plough cultivated land appeared to stand in for the pargana even if geographically they were in the independent territory, while the jungles and the hills were placed as an attribute of the independent territory. Thus metonyms (cultivation for district and jungles for the princely state) were placed next to each other constituting difference. They marked the serrated edges of separations (or lack of them). Leycester

64  Anandaroop Sen found this phenomenon or this semantic field ‘contradictory’ but that was perhaps the point. The difference between the pargana and the independent territory was introduced through the boundary discourse that Leycester was presiding over. The administrative-geographical difference was a product of this boundary drawing rather than a line separating alreadyexisting territories. This is of course not to make the facetious point that these places did not exist before the boundary. But it is only through the formal separation brought in by the 1854 boundary that the legal administrative form of these territories and their relationship with each other came to be established in a particular way. In the archive, this ingenious act of naming provides a fleeting glimpse of the production of this difference. The hills and the plains, the cultivated and the ‘to be’ cultivated, the princely state and the British District, the present and the past are suddenly visible as a complex: a complex generated and comprehensible within a discourse of borders.

Law In this section, I will briefly outline the related jurisdictional issues inherent in the 1854 boundary. The very basic question that framed the discussion was: Could the Tippera district courts sit on judgement on cases of encroachments that involved an ‘independent’ territory? A number of cases, both of civil and of criminal variety, had cropped up around this time. It lent force to the question of how far and in what form would British court travel and adjudicate cases that involved ‘independent’ territories (Mawani & Hussin 2014).18 In fact later when arbitration was decided upon as the mode of settling disputed parts of the boundary and the boundary in general, it was reiterated that the recourse to arbitration was necessary because the ordinary British courts could not function properly for the want of a proper idea of limit. The opting for arbitration in this sense signalled the limits of conventional British jurisdictional apparatus. How was this idea of limit arrived at? An instance of the kind of disputes that marked the border-marking process will perhaps make it clear. The Tippera royal court had a long-standing feud with the zamindar of Gunga Mundle located in the British District of Tippera. This feud intensified during the time the boundary was being laid. The zamindars of Gunga Mundle, Sheeb Kishen and Kali Kishen, claimed a certain portion and complained that the raja had encroached into their zamindari. The raja, Krishna Kishore Manikya, insisted that the said portion was within his ‘independent’ territory. The lands in dispute had been awarded to Gunga Mundle zamindari by the district court. On an appeal

Sutured landscapes in Tripura 65 by the raja of Tippera to the Court of Revenue (Sudder Dewany), the initial verdict was overturned. It was declared that the disputed portion was within the independent territory. What was interesting was after this new decision the zamindar of Gunga Mundle had no recourse to move to any appellate court. He could only intervene, as far as the portion claimed by the raja within his hill territory was concerned, after a settlement of the boundary by the two governments was completed through arbitration. It was as if the legal skein that held the agrarian together stumbled to a halt at the edges. The actors in this situation responded to this caesura; the legal rights of the Gunga Mundle zamindar would remain suspended at this point, inadmissible as it was ‘non-suited for want of specification’ (Archives 1855). In fact most boundary issues ‘independent’ or Hill Tippera had with neighbouring districts were referred to arbitration. There were niggling disputes with Sylhet that began from the early 19th century. These were fanned by a survey of the region by one Lieutenant Fisher in 1821, and continued through the first half of the 19th century. Fisher had mapped out the perimeter of the disputed land when he wrote, ‘generally the tract in dispute is bounded on the north by Koosea river, on the south by the mountains of Tippera, on the east by the independent state of Cachar and on the west by the Comillah District’ (Fisher 1821–1825). In 1832 the Tippera king instituted four suits in the Sylhet court. The cases were left pending for a number of years. The local court announced that it could not try the case, for to claim jurisdiction here would be to assume the case against the plaintiff at the very outset (Mackenzie 1989 [1884]: 283). The Sudder Dewany, hearing the appeal, came to a conclusion that since there was no question of sovereignty and jurisdiction raised, the cases should be decided on their merit. In 1846, 14 years after the initial appeal, and 24 years after Fisher had laid his boundary, it was decided that the whole matter was to be referred to arbitration. The effect of the 1854 boundary on criminal jurisdiction would become clearer only in the next few decades. In the early 1870s, with the Lushai raids from the east becoming a serious menace to the government, the issue of criminal justice assumed a sharper quality. There were a series of discussion carried out under the larger template of extradition: how was one to try fugitives from the British Districts who took refuge in the independent territory? Could British subjects be tried in the independent territory for crimes they committed there? What would be the modalities of handing over prisoners? For lack of space we cannot delve into the details of this fascinating discussion. Suffice to say the legal incommensurability between the hill and the districts was established sharply through the 1854 boundary – an imperial frontier.

66  Anandaroop Sen

Conclusion Some concluding thoughts are in order. I will very briefly outline some methodological and empirical questions that have emerged through the analytic of boundary. First: recent scholarship on the ‘Northeast’ has critically looked at the question of boundary. Van Schendel’s work has addressed the problem through the central seismic changes brought in by partition (Van Schendel 2005). While recognising the importance of this in reorienting both partition studies and the political geography of Northeast, this chapter pans out to a broader historical scope. It is more tuned into the changes colonialism brought in over a longer period of time (Kar 2009; Misra 2011). In that sense, it looks for deeper, slower, structural shifts that allowed the ‘Northeast’ to emerge in the way it did at the moment of partition. In this particular instance the chapter through the ‘event’ of the 1854 boundary provides a synoptic analysis of how the princely state (the basis of what the state of Tripura is today) was produced as a separated category of administration within the eastern frontier. Chittagong Hill Tracts was separated from the Chittagong districts around the same time and in Henry Rickett there was a British officer who at some point in time was in charge of both these operations of incisions. In case of Chittagong, an entirely different administrative arrangement, that is, the non-regulation district, was put in use. It is important thus to be attentive to the generation of different forms of governance embedded within the act of drawing boundaries. Second: as an extension of the preceding point, the chapter, through boundary-marking, looks at colonial governing practices in the eastern frontier. The argument in short is: practices of boundary-marking produced the binary of outside and inside that organised the eastern frontier at large. Hills and plains, princely state and British Districts, uplands and lowlands, civilisation and progress, there were numerous registers at which this dialectic of outside and inside played itself out. As Timothy Mitchell has argued, this sense of outside and inside, state against society, were effects of governing practices rather than actually extant categories (Mitchell 1991, 2002). Thus we see that even though the actual process of the 1854 boundary-marking was tortuous and Sisyphean, consequences that it ushered in never referred to the intractability of the task that was at hand. In other words, even if the act of drawing the boundary floundered with each passing year, the final form it took never seemed to refer to this intractability, this messiness. Historiography and state geographies reproduce this ‘effect’ where there is selective amnesia regarding the provenance of what is taken for granted: the separate insulated existence of the princely state hurtling to its future as a unit within the Indian nation.

Sutured landscapes in Tripura 67 Finally, being attentive to the practices of governance, the role of arbitration as a legal device all over the Northeast, for boundary markings, is something that demands more attention. What kind of legal practice is arbitration? How is it a part of the legal oeuvre in colonial conquests? What kind of dispute-resolution mechanism is arbitration? It seems to be significant as for the few cases studied in this chapter arbitration begins where law ends. Is arbitration the outside of law that produces legally legible territories which in turn then allows law to function? In other words, does it mark the momentary suspension of law without which legal difference or incommensurability, something that organises this frontier at large, cannot be established? Through this particular form of colonial legal operation the nature of colonial governance at the frontiers can be further explored. A history of such legal governance awaits its historians.

Notes 1 Here I refer to the idea of ‘provincial’ as articulated by Achilles Mbembe as corrective to certain critiques of Western modernity that always place the burden of the ‘provincial’ to the non-Western past while claiming for it a self-proclaimed universal. Mbembe writes, ‘By defining itself both as an accurate portrayal of Western modernity – that is, by starting from conventions that are purely local – and as universal grammar, social theory has condemned itself always to make generalizations from idioms of a provincialism that no longer requires demonstration since it proves extremely difficult to understand non-Western objects within its dominant paradigms’ (2001: 11).   For a recent ‘brusque critique’ of such an idea of difference dominating post-colonial studies, see Sartori 2008. For an informed critique and resituating of the importance of difference as a category of analysis in colonial and post-colonial studies, see Ajay Skaria’s 2011 review of Sartori’s work. 2 For an interesting argument regarding discursive production of the ‘local’ within the political economy of the empire, see Chakrabarty 2013. 3 I write District in capital letters to mark the crucial role this spatial unit had in the Company revenue governance, a role which has perhaps not got the necessary scholarly attention it deserves. 4 Sirajul Islam in his introduction to the District Records of Tippera points to the confusion surrounding the name ‘Tippera’. He writes, ‘Although the greater part of Tippera was not part of the Tippera zamindari, the District was officially called Tippera and the name was by and large accepted by the people. But with the partition of 1947 and with the other Tippera included in India the name became quite a misnomer and misleading. Hence we have chosen to call the District Comilla though at the time of selection it was officially known as Tippera’ (Islam 2000: 3). I have tried to write a history ‘production’ of Tippera on the axes of a princely state and a British District in the first two chapters of my dissertation (Sen 2015).

68  Anandaroop Sen 5 By East India Company Governance I refer to the scholarship that views the Company as an early modern state. 6 Press Trust of India, ‘Section 144 Imposed in Agartala, Many Injured in Clashes over Demand for Separate “Twipra Land”, http://indianexpress. com/article/india/india-news-india/tripura-section-144-gartala-curfewtwipra-land/ [Accessed on August 23, 2016]. 7 I should qualify this historiographical oversight. Van Schendel’s Bengal Borderlands deals with the politics of territorial division within a frame of partition. My work is to situate such a conversation in a longer history. 8 For the story of this division in the early East India Company era, see Sen (2015: Chapters I and II). 9 To get an idea of this ‘translation’ see R. Travers 2007. For an overview of shifts in revenue systems in the early Company era, see Travers 2004. 10 There isn’t an unequivocal agreement on this. For instance, Gunnel Cederlöf (2014) has shown how certain boundaries established in Sylhet went on mutating much well into the 19th century, while Ludden argues that the basic blue print of a hill and plain separation was set up by the late 18th century. At the same time, one should be careful to lump a non-existent homogeneity within permanent settled lands post 1793. Iftekhar Iqbal’s recent work in 2010 has quite compellingly demonstrated how within Bengal vast swathes of land remained outside the purview of permanent settlement legislations as ‘waste’. For further studies on the idea of ‘waste’ see Gidwani 1992, 2008, 2013. 11 There was a protracted boundary drawing process under way in the 1850s that sought to separate Chittagong from independent Tippera. This took the River Fenny as the hydraulic boundary that separated the two spatial entities. Judicial Proceedings, 29 May 1850, Nos 83–89, WBSA, Kolkata. 12 Similar disputes were witnessed when the East India Company tried to draw boundaries between the district of Sylhet and independent Tippera. Revenue Proceedings 23 September 1846, No. 37–43 also see 17 March 1847, No. 12–40 and 31 October 1849, No. 62–73 WBSA, Kolkata. 13 The Politics of Colonial Cartography has been much commented upon. 14 For the concerned maps please refer to J. G. Cummings Survey and Settlement of the Chakla Roshnabad Estate in the District of Tippera and Noakhali 1892–1899. 15 This would be articulated in a language of incommensurable legal spheres where Hill Tippera would be nominally and formally in a sense ‘outside’ British legal structures. The legal transactions between the independent territories and British districts then would be ordered in case of criminal justice through the category of ‘extraditions’, something I touch upon at the end of this chapter. 16 The native state organised the land relations without the category of zamindars. In other words the king or the raja was a ruler and not a landlord; ijaradaris and talukdaris circulated and these were the forms of land relations propped by the cultivators or the jotedars/raiyats. A few distinguishing characteristics – the ijaras were taken up by thakurs or people close to the royal family, who in turn employed Manipuris and other groups from Tripura as dar-ijaradrs who leased it out to Bengalis from the neighbouring districts. This was one model. The other was jhum or swidden. Since jhum refused to settle down in the language of the larger Bengal agrarian, it

Sutured landscapes in Tripura 69 seemed outside the language of zamidar, taluqdar, ijaradar, jotedar, raiyat and so on. The jhum in administrative revenue governance appeared in the form of house tax. The ‘tribal’ identity was linked to this taxation. The mobility, an agrarian practice that seemed too distinct from the bustling complex of British Bengal, was condensed in a tax of the house, a form of enumerating the body rather than marking the land or the practices of growing on land. The third model was the cultivators of the plains – they were of two kinds, ones who resided in the native state had ‘dakhal satva’ and the other ‘ziratiya’ peasants – they came from neighbouring districts of Bengal, attracted by the low rates of taxation. For an introduction to princely state economy, see Chowdhury 2003. 17 These legal disputes reveal how ‘customs’ of the royal court and legal definitions of property were defined in conversation with each other. 18 Renisa Mawani and Iza Hussin write, ‘The moments in which law can be seen in motion offer deeper insight into the ways in which different laws are performed and require performance; how law’s uncertainties and contradictions generate its authority, omnipresence, and proliferation; the ways in which law’s agents and actors draw law out into the world beyond texts and courts; and how the world, in its many registers, finds its way back into legal spheres’ (2014: 747).

References Archives 1809. Judicial (Criminal), Department, 11 February, 1809, No. 11 and 12, West Bengal State Archives. Archives 1855. Revenue Proceedings of Lieutenant Governor General of Bengal, 15 March 1855, West Bengal State Archives (WBSA), Kolkata. Ascoli, Frank A. 1917. Early Revenue History of Bengal and the Fifth Report 1812. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Benton, Lauren. 2002. Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bhaumik, Subir. 2009. The Troubled Periphery: Crisis of the India’s North-East. Los Angeles: Sage. Cederlöf, Gunnel. 2014. Founding and Empire in India’s North Eastern Frontiers 1790–1840: Climate, Commerce, Polity. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chakrabarty, Upal. 2013. ‘Interconnections of the Political: British Political Economy, Agrarian Governance, and Early-Nineteenth Century Cuttack’, Unpublished Dissertation, School of Oriental and African Studies. Chakravarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Post-Colonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chowdhury, Dipak K. 2003. Tripurar Arthanaitik Itihash: Unobingsho Shatabdir Ditiyardhe [An Economic History of Tripura: Second Half of the Nineteenth Century]. Agartala: Bhasha Publications. Chowdhury, Tamina M. 2016. ‘Raids, Annexation and Plough: Transformation through Territorialisation in Nineteenth-Century Chittagong Hill Tracts’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 53 (2): 183–224.

70  Anandaroop Sen Cummings, J. G. 1899. Survey and Settlement of the Chakla Roshnabad in the District of Tippera and Noakhali 1892–1899. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press [Reprint 1997. Agartala: Tripura State Tribal Cultural Research Institute and Museum, Government of Tripura]. Edney, Mathew. 1997. Mapping and Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fisher, Thomas. Survey of India, Memoirs, Sylhet Frontier Survey, 1821–1825, Part 2, Section 1, National Archives of India, New Delhi. Govind, Rahul. 2011. ‘Revenue, Rent . . . Profit? Early British Imperialism, Political Economy and the Search for a differentia specifica (inter se)’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 48 (2): 177–213. Gidwani, Vinay Krishin. 1992. ‘Waste and Permanent Settlement’, Economic and Political Review, 27 (4): 39–46. ———. 2008. Capital Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, p. 70. ———. 2013. ‘Six Theses on Waste, Value, and Commons’, Social & Cultural Geography, 14 (7): 773–783. Hunter, W.W. 1877. ‘Statistical Account of the District of Tippera’, http:// dspace.wbpublibnet.gov.in:8080/jspui/ [Accessed on October 14, 2012]. Iqbal, Iftekhar. 2010. The Bengal Delta: Ecology, State and Social Change, 1840–1943. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Islam, Sirajul. (ed). 2000. Comilla District Records, Volume 1. Dhaka: The Institute of Liberation Bangabandhu and Bangladesh. Kar, Boddhisattva. 2009. ‘When Was the Postcolonial? A History of Policing Impossible Lines’, in Sanjib Baruah (ed), Beyond Counterinsurgency: Breaking the Impasse in Northeast India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 49–79. Ludden, David. 2003. ‘The First Boundary of Bangladesh on Sylhet’s Northern Frontier’, www.sas.upenn.edu/~dludden/JASB-Boundary.pdf [Accessed on November 11, 2012]. Mackenzie, Alexander. 1989 [1884]. History of the Relations of the Government with the Hill Tribes of the North-East Frontier of Bengal. New Delhi: Mittal 1989 (Reprint). Mawani, Renisa and Iza Hussin. 2014. ‘The Travels of Law: Indian Ocean and Itineraries’, Law and History Review, 32 (4): 733–747. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the PostColony. Berkley: University of California Press. Mezzadra, Sandro and Brett Neilson. 2013. ‘Border as Method or: Multiplication of Labour. Durham: Duke University Press. Michael, Bernardo. 2007. ‘Making Territory Visible: The Revenue Surveys of Colonial South Asia’, Imago Mundi, 59 (1): 78–95. Misra, Sanghamitra. 2011. Becoming a Borderland: The Politics of Space and Identity in Colonial North Eastern India. New Delhi: Sage. Mitchell, Timothy. 1991. ‘The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics’, The American Political Science Review, 85 (1): 77–96.

Sutured landscapes in Tripura 71 ———. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ray, Ratnalekha. 1979. Change in Bengal Agrarian Society, c1760–1850. New Delhi: Manohar. Sartori, Andrew. 2008. Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of the Upland South East Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sen, Anandaroop. 2015. ‘Tales of Territoriality, Practices of Region Making: North Eastern Frontier of Colonial India, c.1761–1895’, Unpublished Dissertation, Submitted at Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Skaria, Ajay. 2011. ‘Review (of Sartori 2008)’, Journal of World History, 22 (1): 181–185. Stern, Philip J. 2011. The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and Early Modern Foundations of British Empire in India. New York: Oxford University Press. Travers, Robert. 2007. Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India: The British in Bengal. New York: Cambridge University Press. Travers, T. R. 2004. ‘The Real Value of the Lands: The Nawabs, the British and the Land Tax in Eighteenth-Century’, Modern Asian Studies, 38 (3): 517–558. Van Schendel, Willem. 2005. Bengal Borderlands: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia. London: Anthem.

4 Portrait of a place Reflections about fieldwork from the foothills of Northeast India Dolly Kikon

During my fieldwork in the foothill border of Assam and Nagaland between 2007 and 2011, many people invited me to their homes and villages. I sat in Naga villages listening to conversations about spirits and black magic, drank sweet tea in Adivasi homes recording the history of their villages and ate tenga maas (sour fish curry) with Assamese coal traders in Gelekey as they reminisced about friendships and seasons. Initially, I often asked them about the Assam-Nagaland border conflict, but gradually realised how such questions appeared to be ‘out of place’ in the social conversations we were having. Why was locating the border in the foothills challenging in our everyday conversations? Many Nepali, Naga, Adivasi, Assamese and Ahom households insisted that their villages did not fall in the disputed zone. Since the formation of Nagaland in 1963, a sizable area of the foothills was marked as the official border between the states of Assam and Nagaland. However, the formation of Nagaland as an ethnic state solely for the Naga people, as opposed to the demography of Assam which consisted of numerous ethnic and religious groups, including the Naga people (in Karbi Anglong, Jorhat and Sibsagar) created complications. Identity politics was intertwined with the new power structures centred on the territorial sovereignty of Assam and Nagaland. In this context, customary agreements regarding demarcation of boundaries and resource-sharing agreements among ethnic groups like the Nagas and the Ahoms were disregarded. In cases where foothill communities opposed the interpretation of the official boundary by the state authorities, such areas were brought within the purview of the court and defined as a disputed zone. Many foothills in Northeast India function as official borders between the state of Assam and its neighbours including Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Nagaland, Manipur and Tripura. However, they are not ‘melting pots’ of different ethnic groups, religions and cultural practices. Instead, as I experienced during my fieldwork in the foothill border

Portrait of a place 73 of Assam and Nagaland, residents from an Assamese village could quickly feel out of place in a Naga village and vice versa. Therefore, while people mingled with one another and entered into various trading and business alliances, they also strongly articulated how they were different from their neighbours and maintained that their traditions and culture were unique. In addition, there were conversations about who was ‘local’ to the foothills and the struggle to keep ‘outsiders’ away from the foothills. While border conflicts are routine in many places around Northeast India, the foothill border between the states of Assam and Nagaland is exceptional. To begin with, this is a regular inter-state border but the everyday military operations project this place as an international border in this frontier region. For instance, during a public gathering on 9 August 2015, Hiyithung Kikon, the chairman of the Ralan Area Lotha Hoho, a tribal council of the Lotha Nagas villages along the foothill border of Assam and Nagaland, described their lives as follows: Yanpha village itself has been a zone of conflict with the Ralan area of Wokha district acing extreme situations of conflict. The more interior you go (into Ralan Area), the more you know of the life of indigenous people in a disputed area belt – with extreme security presence, it looks like an international border. (Morung Express 2015) The Disputed Area Belt (DAB) is an administrative name given to the 10 km stretch that connects the hills and the plains. It is officially recognised as a neutral zone where the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) monitors the movement of people, vehicles and resources between the hills and the plains. These DAB areas are populated with villages, paddy fields, schools, temples, churches, mosques and tea plantations. During my fieldwork in this zone, security check gates in the DAB stopped vehicles and made an official entry, which included noting down the registration number of the vehicles, the number of people travelling in the vehicles and their names, the purpose of entering the DAB, the final destination and the address of the family who was hosting the travellers entering the DAB. It was a routine that appeared as though one was crossing an international border. Some of the Yanpha village lands and the Ralan area of Wokha district are marked as DAB. The DAB was created after the Assam police and the Nagaland armed police exchanged fire at the foothill border in 1985. Today, the rival states of Assam and Nagaland have overlapping claims of the foothills, but often fail to acknowledge the experiences of the people who negotiate this complex place. Cases of violence, deaths and destruction of crops and property from the DAB routinely appear on the regional

74  Dolly Kikon media in Northeast India. In Assam, such news from the foothill border becomes the basis to reiterate the stereotyped perception of the Naga people as blood thirsty barbarians, marauders and encroachers. While in Nagaland, these violent clashes portray the people from Assam as aggressive land hungry communities and untrustworthy groups to create alliances or make any business deals. For instance, in 2014, a squabble between two individuals quickly escalated into a violent conflict. It set off a chain of violent clashes between Naga villages and the Adivasi villages in the foothill border. Hundreds of foothill residents lost their homes, crops and cattle and arrived in rehabilitation camps. Al Jazeera reported the incident as follows: At the disputed foothill border between the Indian states of Assam and Nagaland, a local skirmish over a plot of land was all it took to reignite tensions. Now 18 people are dead and 10,000 are without homes as thousands remain in unsanitary relief camps hoping for a longterm solution to the border crisis . . . the government of Assam says Nagaland has been encroaching upon over 255 square miles within Assam . . . Nagaland, on the other hand, says these areas historically belonged to the Naga tribes, and the British annexed them into the Assam administrative districts while dividing what was once the Naga Hills. The disputed stretch is called the Disturbed Area Belt. (Al Jazeera America 2014) The farms, community reserves, roads and rivers in the DAB of the foothills are often contested among various communities. If we link the causes of the routine violence, it is the struggle for land and resources that emerges as a central issue. However, when we look at the foothills closely, the heightened presence of the security installations such as check gates, garrisons and barricades also opens up a peculiar character of the state in this frontier region. As the security forces guard the extractive resource activities like the tea plantations, oil-drilling sites and coal mines, they inform us about the interconnections between the state and the extractive resource regime. Therefore, the statement of Mr Hayithung Kikon, the chairman of the Ralan Area Lotha Hoho in 2015, is tied to the larger contestations and complexities about land as a potential for extractive regimes, history and identity. Contrary to the new economic development across Northeast India where prices of real estate are escalating, land in the foothills is considered valuable for other reasons. Large tracts of land are bought and sold for relatively less in comparison to the neighbouring villages in the hills of Nagaland and the plains of the Brahmaputra valley. Thus, it is not solely

Portrait of a place 75 monetary value that determines the value of land here. In many ways, the sense of belongingness and the freedom to validate certain histories and memories constitutes an extraordinary aspect about people’s connection with land in the foothill border of Assam and Nagaland. Today, many villages in the foothills lack basic amenities like electricity, primary health centres, water and primary schools. Instead of identifying against the place, foothill residents are more determined to situate their histories and identities in the contested and hostile environment. In this context, foothill communities perceive land as the custodians of tradition and history. Similar to the Western Apaches’ connections with their lands as Keith Basso notes, losing the land in the foothills is equal to losing one’s history. The foothill residents like the Nagas, Ahoms and many other communities consider their land as the ‘agency of historical tales’ and also a ‘repository of distilled wisdom’ (Basso 1996: 62–63). Drawing from Gillian Rose’s concept about lived experiences and the role of collective identities in shaping a sense of place, I present the portrait of the foothills as one that is produced by the everyday lives and practices of the people who live here. By portrait of a place, I mean the ways in which residents in the Assam-Nagaland foothills establish connections with the land by travelling across the land and developing various social relations with their neighbours. As such, I focus on the everyday intersections that are highly charged with moral and social meanings, thereby becoming the symbols of the everyday social world in the foothills. Although it is impossible to avoid the large-scale extractive resource regimes like tea plantations and oil-drilling sites that dominate the Assam-Nagaland foothill border, I assert personal accounts and the emotions of people play a significant role in informing us how complex places are produced. As Rose states: Much writings on senses of place which emphasizes the intersection of place and power tends to offer a structural analysis of the relationship between the two; that is, it looks for the structures of power which underlie a particular sense of place . . . this in turn may produce one of two problems; either the experiential aspects of place get neglected; or the analyst may simply assume he or she knows what the experiential consequences of particular representations of places are. In both cases, the feelings and emotions with which senses of place are infused are not explored. (Rose 1995: 103) By presenting the portrait of the foothills and my reflections about fieldwork, I emphasise two points: First, the process of place-making and the significance of understanding the everyday lives of residents in the foothills.

76  Dolly Kikon Second, how a sense of community and locality is produced in militarised resource hubs like the foothills. After I had wrapped up my fieldwork in 2011, I returned to the foothills a number of times to meet with families and my field informants. Tragic events like the 2014 violence in the AssamNagaland foothill border that witnessed large-scale displacement, death and destruction of property motivated me to go back to my field notes and stress the importance of portraying the social connections and the fragile relationships in the backdrop of a hostile and unstable political milieu.

About fieldwork (2007–2011) When I started research in the foothill border in 2007, I travelled across the districts of Sibsagar, Jorhat and Golaghat (in Assam), and the districts of Mon, Longleng, Mokokchung and Wokha (in Nagaland). A year earlier, during the winter of 2006, I arrived in the foothills in search of a research topic and was strongly drawn towards the weekly markets. Thousands of buyers and sellers from Assam and Nagaland assemble in these weekly markets known as haats. I learned how these weekly markets were not only economic and trading sites but also vibrant social spaces for foothill residents. I expanded the focus of the project during my fieldwork period of 2009–2011. I met people from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, and I started following traders, business people, cultivators, travellers and officials. From the village halls, jhum fields, coal mines, tea plantations, agricultural expositions, workshops and classrooms, my field site constantly shifted. Here, my anthropological field no longer remained a geographical location alone, but one that was being produced through an intersection of power, authority and politics (Gupta & Ferguson 1997). As the central focus of my research developed, I became interested to examine the interconnected social worlds of the foothill border. My position as an anthropologist and a tribal woman put me in a unique position to experience the everyday lives in the foothills. As a Naga woman doing research on the disputed foothill border, my topic often roused curiosity and suspicion. Residents from Assamese and Naga villages constantly quizzed me: ‘Do you represent the government of Nagaland? Which department? Are you a journalist?’ These uncomfortable and awkward moments opened up the foothill border not only as a geographical location, but also through sensory perceptions like smell, touch, taste, sight and sound. This ethnographic approach to embrace the dynamics of senses emerged from my personal experiences of various emotions ranging from humiliation to rage. For example, during one July weekend in a foothill village, I sat on the veranda of an Assamese Brahmin family as I waited for the Naga women traders to arrive in the weekly market. My Brahmin host was

Portrait of a place 77 confused as to why a tribal woman, educated and studying in ‘America’, should spend time with the unhygienic Naga cultivators. Later that day, he explained it was a Brahmin niyom (practice) to prohibit non-Brahmins from entering the kitchen, and served me lunch in utensils distinctly marked for lower castes and tribal people. In the same manner, when I visited Naga villages, especially the Lotha villages in the foothill border (the tribe I belong to), my hosts enquired about my parents and immediately placed me within a particular kin genealogy. I was quickly classified as an abandoned daughter (referring to my parents’ divorce). Some members of the household took immense pride and joy in connecting my genealogy to a disgraced family. A few members of the community, often regarded and referred to as elders in the village, also asked me, sometimes quite rudely, how children from ‘such’ families could become an oyum (someone), a figure of speech to denote people who ‘made it’ in life. In addition, my marital status created confusion. As a Naga woman from Nagaland married to an Assamese from Assam, I became an outsider and an insider at the same time. In the sight of several Naga residents, the ‘purity of (my) identity’ (Malkki 1995: 197) was compromised through my marriage, and they categorised me as an outsider. Toi toh plain manuh hoisha, (you have become a plains person), they frequently commented and sneered at me. In their view, my body was solely a reproductive organ to preserve existing ethnic or religious categories tied to territoriality of Assam and Nagaland. My body became a site where the essence of Naganess and Assamese-ness was made and unmade constantly. If Naga villagers reminded me of my status as a maiki/eloi or a woman and said that I no longer remained a Naga, those in the Assamese households constantly asked me why I did not have a phut or the red vermillion on my forehead, a symbol of marriage for Hindu women since I was an Oxyimia Buari or an Assamese daughter-in-law. These conversations constantly questioned my agency as a woman. My experiences about fieldwork in the foothill border in Northeast India were anything but native. The reactions about my disposition as an anthropologist oscillated with categories that were grounded on specific identities as I described earlier. I was treated as insider, outsider, Naga, non-Naga, Christian and a Hindu, all at once. As an anthropologist, it was these moments of strangeness and familiarity that helped me to understand the complex social relations about human societies. My ethnographic work was grounded within feminist objectivity. Following Donna Haraway I understood feminist, objectivity as ‘(the) limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting the subject and object. It allows us to become answerable for what we

78  Dolly Kikon learn how to see’ (Haraway 1988: 583). Thus, I paid close attention to the informants and residents in the foothill towns and villages as they articulated their views about love, friendships, aspirations and hostilities. I conducted my fieldwork in multiple languages. I spoke Assamese, Lotha, English, Hindi, Sadri and Nepali, some fluently and others not so well. But it was Nagamese, the lingua franca of the foothill border of Assam and Nagaland, that helped me greatly to carry out my fieldwork. Nagamese is predominantly spoken along the foothill border and around the city of Dimapur, the biggest commercial hub in Nagaland. Although it is Nagamese that allows foothill residents across the AssamNagaland border to communicate with one another, this language is often called a bastard or an alien language. In Nagaland there are campaigns to abolish it since it is perceived as a language that makes the younger generation of Nagas forget their mother tongue. In Assam, Nagamese is considered as a broken version of Assamese, and considered as an inferior language spoken by illiterate and uncultured people. This exercise of constantly labelling languages, geographies and people in the foothills, it occurred to me, took place within a broad framework of purity, taboos and transgressions. I encountered how this social and moral cosmology in the foothills influenced the Naga villages in the higher elevations of Nagaland and the Assamese people living in the Brahmaputra valley as well. Many non-foothill residents in Assam and Nagaland considered the foothill border as a physical and an ethnic boundary as well. For instance, the Naga people in the hilltop villages considered the foothills as the demarcation where everything that was Naga ended. It was the same story in the Brahmaputra valley of Assam as well. Many Assamese people who lived in the heart of the valley were cautious of the foothills because it was a place where outsiders and ‘illegal Bangladeshi people’ lived. As I noted earlier, this perception was inevitably linked to a moral framework of viewing the world. In this context, it was challenging and confusing at times to work in the foothills. I realised early on that the distinctions and boundaries of the outsider/insider or the territorial demarcation of hill/valley played a significant role in constructing the social world in the foothills. For example, when I visited the hilltop villages in Nagaland the distinction about the hill and valley became more rigid. At higher elevations, Naga residents became more intolerant towards their own Naga fellowmen and condemned the ‘unholy’ socialisation of the Naga villages with the non-Naga groups in the foothill border. A Naga pastor from a hilltop village who was posted in a foothill church said that the trading practices and social lives of the Naga villages in the foothills were unacceptable. According to the pastor, on Sundays, the Naga villagers were not interested in attending church but rushed off to the weekly markets to satisfy their worldly desires. Such

Portrait of a place 79 practices would never be tolerated in the hilltop Naga villages. The pastor said that he was helpless since the foothill villages had become accustomed to the markets and picked up the culture of the non-Christians from the Assam valley. In a similar fashion, the Assamese villages located deep in the Brahmaputra valley perceived the Naga people living in the hills of Nagaland as dirty and uncivilised tribal people. It was not surprising that a sizable number of Assamese villagers in the Brahmaputra valley who had never visited a Naga village spoke with certainty about the unsophisticated and uncultured ways of the tribal people. Assamese people refused to acknowledge that many villages in the foothills like the Ahom and Mishing households had similar food practices like the Nagas from the hills. River snails, red ant nests, beehives and meat including pork and beef were considered a delicacy in the foothills. Such an array of foothill cuisine, in the eyes of the caste Hindu groups across the Brahmaputra valley, was abominable. In addition, Assamese commentators frequently noted that only illegal migrants from Bangladesh, Adivasi people and the Nepali people lived in the foothill border. They told me that all the pure Assamese lived in the proper villages and stayed away from the foothills. So, who were the foothill people? In the following section, I present an account of the foothill residents.

Portrait of a place Company Man in Naginimora Naginimora is a coalmining town located in the foothill border of Assam and Nagaland. I met Koloung Konyak, an 86-year old coal miner who was also known as the Company Man. The British companies had opened the coal mines here in the early part of the 20th century. Today, the Company Man was the sole surviving coal miner who had worked for them. One morning in April 2010 I headed to his house to listen to his story. It had rained the previous night, and the ground was still wet. He lived in a bamboo hut with mud floors, and the walls were pasted with old newspapers. As the Company Man shared his reflections about his relationship with the coalmining town of Naginimora, it appeared as though hundreds of faces, printed words and advertisements from the walls were listening to his story as well. He fixed his gaze outside as he spoke to me. I was not sure if he was watching the rain, but it appeared as though he had decided to speak to me about his life pretending that I was not present in the room. It was a quiet morning. Only the chickens clacked and tiptoed outside the doorway looking for food, and a dog slept at his feet as he began to describe how he came down to the foothills.

80  Dolly Kikon

Figure 4.1  Company Man reflecting about Naginimora and coal Source: Photograph by the author.

Before the town of Naginimora came up, the coal company was there. It was the coal miners who cleared the forest and settled down there. Gradually, people from the hilltop Konyak villages came down and started to cultivate rice and vegetables farms. Tracing his roots to Wakching village, the Company Man said he ran away from the village to come down to the foothills. He described his experiences as follows: They told me not to go down, but I stole some food and came to the coalmines. There were many Nepali and Bengali labourers who were working for the company. There was a huge structure here (referring to Naginimora) – that is where the company stood. There were two wires suspended in the air, which pulled the coal carts. All the coal mines around the village today used to belong to the coal company. As workers, the company gave us food and ration. We were paid 1.50 paisa as wage.

Portrait of a place 81 When I was working in the coalmines, people died in accidents. One day, the company sent me to prison in Sibsagar, but soon the trouble (referring to the Indo-Naga armed conflict) started in the hills. I was still in prison when coalmines closed down. When the Naga movement started, there were rumours that the Naga insurgents attack the coalmines. Many workers were from Assam, so they ran away to the plains. There was nobody to work in the mines anymore, so they had to shut it down. After I came out of jail, I became a jhum cultivator. During my initial years as a cultivator I saw tigers, bears and pythons across the foothills. Gradually, we cleared the forests here and settled down here. I still remember the huge trees that stood here. They were all sold off as timber. The Company Man became silent after sometime. The skies had cleared, and town was coming alive. I had plans to head up to the coal mines. Later that day, as I walked around the coal mines in the upper elevations of the foothills, I met three workers. They said they were from Wakching, the same village the Company Man had fled in his youth to come down

Figure 4.2  Naga coal miners taking a break Source: Photograph by the author.

82  Dolly Kikon to Naginimora. The British coal company was long gone and in its place were numerous companies from Assam, Bihar and other parts of India with new technology and money. They continued to dig up the mountains and employ scores of workers. The coal miners I met that morning were reminders how the cycle of poverty, loss and labour continued to operate in this frontier region long after India’s independence.

Nelson’s friend and family Nelson was born in the foothills and was excited about the opportunities there. He said he was 25 years old, but perhaps, it was his knowledge about the landscape that made him appear much older. Nelson’s parents used to work in a tea plantation in Assam, but they arrived in the foothills and became sharecroppers. Nelson, however, was multi-tasked. He was a sharecropper and also worked in the coal mines. On that particular morning, Nelson volunteered to take me to the coal mines to visit his friends. We walked for some time and crossed a small stream and a jhum field until we came to a clearing. Around ten young men were digging the hills. Beside

Figure 4.3  Nelson and his friend Source: Photograph by the author.

Portrait of a place 83

Figure 4.4  Sarah, Abraham and Enoch Source: Photograph by the author.

them lay a pile of logs and bamboos to reinforce the muddy caves. After we watched workers carrying grey wet mud on their baskets coming out of the cave, curious to explore what was happening inside, Nelson followed me as I entered the narrow wet cave. A foul smell inside the cave burnt our eyes and noses, but Nelson said that the stench was a good sign. It was an indication that they had found coal or were close to the source. Once we came outside, Nelson’s co-workers laughed and smoked cigarettes, planning out the next coal operation, and interjecting the conversations about the harvest, family matters and the weather. As we returned from the coal mines and were crossing a small stream, we met a young man from a Naga village. I learnt that he was Nelson’s friend. They began to talk about matters which I did not register. In the middle of their conversation, Nelson smiled and took out a mobile phone from his pocket. I sat at some distance looking at Nelson and his friend, and for some reason took a picture. Much later, did I realise that such meetings, which appeared as ephemeral moments of bonding between people in the foothills, significantly shaped the foundation of my ethnographic approach.

84  Dolly Kikon It was such moments that forced me to recognise the warmth of the human spirit in difficult and violent places. ‘It’s a new one’, Nelson said, and his friend reached out to hold the mobile phone on his palm. He admired the new phone, turned it off, turned it on and then returned the handset to Nelson. After sometime, they patted each other on the shoulder and said jabo de (leaving okay) in Nagamese. Nelson and I walked down to the foothills, while his friend hiked up to the upper elevations. When we arrived in the foothills, we met Nelson’s children. They were returning from school early since the teachers were absent. They ran towards their father and hugged him, and then turned their attention towards me. The twins, Sarah and Abraham, quickly overcame their inhibitions and started playing with me. It took time for the youngest one, but Enoch also came around eventually. By this time, the traders from Assam arrived on their bicycles across the stream and headed towards an area covered with a cloth and some sacks. After a while, a group of Naga cultivators carrying baskets of brinjals on their head walked towards the spot covered with cloth and sacks and emptied their baskets. It was a hot day, and we sat beneath the shades of a teak tree and watched the traders from Assam and the brinjal cultivators.

The last one On 28 August 2009, Aka and I headed toward the Rajabari weekly market. Located 5 km from the Bhorallah Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) refinery, the Rajabari market is the main centre of trade for many villages in the area. The market was not there when we arrived. The hatkhawa (tax collector) of Rajabari informed us, ‘The market sits on Thursdays. Some Naga traders come to the edge of the neighbouring village. Go there, you might be lucky!’ When Aka and I arrived at the edge of the Assamese village, we saw three vegetable agents from Titabor (in Assam) sitting beside a mini-truck waiting for the last batch of Naga traders to come down from the hills. The sun was setting, and the agents were discussing the retail vegetable markets in Jorhat and Golaghat. ‘Come to the markets there’, they invited me, and then began to complain about the current state of affairs. One of the agents said: The vegetables from the hills do not fetch good prices because the Brahmaputra valley is flooded with food and produce from other parts of India. The entire region is saturated with food from outside. This is a reason why prices have depreciated both for hill produce and other local produce from the valley as well.

Portrait of a place 85

Figure 4.5  Ango with his basket Source: Photograph by the author.

At a distance, we saw a person approaching the mini-truck. ‘He is the last one’, one of the agents said and threw away his cigarette as he prepared to load the produce. Ango was the last cultivator who arrived with his basket of gourds on his back. He put down the load and leaned on a bamboo fence. His body was drenched in sweat, and he nibbled a tender coconut quietly. He appeared surprised to see a new face. What was I doing there sitting with agents? Why would someone be interested about the journey he had just made, and the produce from his jhum field? He did not speak much but nodded his head frequently. I just managed to ask him about his travel and the name of his village. It would have been absurd to ask Ango about his ‘sufferings’ and the ‘hardships’ he faced. The threadbare shirt, his sunken cheeks, the heat rashes on his hands and neck and his weary eyes stood as a testimony to the extraordinary adversities that subsistence cultivators and the poor endured every day. He looked exhausted but was eager to head back to his village. He said he was going to sell his basket of papayas for 50 rupees.

86  Dolly Kikon

Figure 4.6 Naga subsistence cultivators with their jhum produce at the Rajabari haat Source: Photograph by the author.

The following Thursday, I visited the Rajabari weekly market and met a group of cultivators from Ango’s village. They were standing at the centre of the market and watching the activities around them. It was monsoon and the market ground was muddy and slippery. Those who came on bicycles got stuck. A group of vendors and butchers manoeuvred the muddy entrance to the market with chickens and roasted pigs tied on their bicycles. Nearby, ducks assembled in the small puddles created by the monsoon rain and watched the activities. Every time a truck entered the market area, the ducks flattered their wings and quacked. The Naga traders standing at the Rajabari market came from a village that had been in the news. Around a decade ago, geologists exploring hydrocarbon in the foothills declared that Ango’s village sat on top of a rich oil deposit. While the scramble for land and resources between the powerful tribal elites, the government of Nagaland and the oil companies had been going on, the subsistence cultivators from the village routinely walked down to the Rajabari market to sell their produce. Their subsistence existence on top of a rich oil deposit seemed anything but rich. Before heading back

Portrait of a place 87 to the village, the papaya cultivators entered the market and bought salt, sugar, milk powder, batteries and biscuits. On that Thursday morning in August 2009, the old man (wearing the eye glasses in the preceding photo) who had carried a basket of papaya said his eyesight was deteriorating. He wondered if his produce would fetch enough for a new pair of glasses. Later on I learnt that he sold the basket of papayas for 45 rupees.

Conclusion Today, people have mixed reactions about the overlapping territorial claims in the foothill border of Assam and Nagaland. Some groups want a permanent border demarcation to resolve the dispute, while others say that the dispute is about resources and different property ownership laws in the plains and hills. Unlike the Brahmaputra plains of Assam where resources such as forests, coal and oil belong to the state (with the exception of the autonomous areas), in Nagaland communities have right over natural resources including land according to Article 371 (A) of the Indian Constitution. By presenting the everyday lives in the foothill border between Assam and Nagaland, I illustrated how people carry the weight of multiple histories and different imaginations that fuel connections and contestations. From validating stereotypes about civility and hostility all the ways to notions of barbarism and civilisations are reinforced every day. As such, the foothills operate as a prism that refracts the lives of the hills and the valley in Northeast India, and offer new perspectives about places that are erased by dominant frameworks like the hill/valley distinctions. In this context, the coal mines, vegetable farms and the weekly markets display the desires and secrets of the foothills allowing us to ask new questions about sovereignty, extractive resource regimes, dispossession, hopes, belonging and contested histories. My fieldwork reflections in this chapter provide an insight into the everyday practices in the foothills and the social relations that are established in the process. Here, as I noted earlier, the process of creating boundaries – social, moral and physical – emerges out of social actions that are established to regulate certain practices. Therefore, the heightened violence and militarisation of the place is intimately connected, among other things, with land, the extractive resource regime. In addition, the exceptional nature of the foothill border between Assam and Nagaland also draws our attention towards the dual face of the state. The everyday tensions show us how the Indian state operates as a military entity and an extractive economic force as well. The description of the villages along the DAB underlines how the perception of the foothills as a rich resource hub makes land a prized

88  Dolly Kikon possession. A linear chronology, I argue, does not capture the story of the foothills and the people. It is a zone where binaries about hill/valley distinctions become blurred and practices of purity/pollution are disrupted. Under such circumstances, a personal account about notions of belonging, friendship and family and commerce presented in this chapter might offer new frameworks for engaging with everyday lives and connections in the militarised foothills of Northeast India.

References Al Jazeera America. 2014. ‘In India, State Border Dispute Leaves 18 Dead, Displaces 10,000’, by Rohini Mohan, 24 August 2014. http://america.aljazeera.com/ articles/2014/8/24/india-assam-nagaland.html [Accessed on September 23, 2015]. Basso, Keith H. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson. (eds) 1997. Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. Berkeley: University of California Press. Haraway, Donna. 1988. ‘Situated Knowledge: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14 (3): 575–599. Malkki, Liisa H. 1995. Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Morung Express. 2015. ‘Celebrating and Rebuilding Age Old Relationships’. 9 August 2015. http://morungexpress.com/celebrating-rebuilding-ageold-relationships/ [Accessed on September 23, 2015]. Rose, Gillian. 1995. ‘Place and Identity: A Sense of Place’, in Doreen Massey and Pat Jess (eds), A Place in the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 87–132.

5 Ethnographic study and cultural production in Sikkim Mélanie Vandenhelsken*

Extensive use is made of ethnographic knowledge in the struggle for classification as a scheduled tribe in Sikkim. Such knowledge is involved in the procedures leading to the recognition of ethnic groups through the reservation policy; official recognition as tribal depends on cultural criteria, and anthropologists are appointed by the government to assess the conformity of the ‘cultural characteristics’ of ethnic groups to the official criteria determining tribal status. Procedures of tribal identification then become spaces for negotiating the required conformity, as well as spaces for the composition and objectification of culture, arising from the interactions between the various social actors involved – members of ethnic groups, ethnic ‘entrepreneurs’ (locally called ‘ethnic leaders’ or ‘activists’) and state anthropologists – and their subjectivities, assignments and strategies.1 Tribal identity is not only negotiated through the relation with anthropologists in charge of recognising groups as tribal, but also with foreign anthropologists, who benefit from representing an ‘authority’ which is able to play a significant role in the fate of the collective projects launched by leaders of ethnic groups. The relation between the field researcher and his/ her interlocutors is thus part of the mechanisms of cultural differentiation in the area today; understanding these mechanisms therefore entails studying this relation. In this chapter, I will clarify these propositions based on field data collected in Sikkim between 2010 and 2012 during a research project focused on the struggle of the Sikkimese Gurungs for recognition as tribal. In the first section, I will present the context of the Gurung struggle for government recognition as a scheduled tribe, which they view as a means to do away with their status as ‘Nepalese’, and to obtain equal rights with the ‘Sikkimese’. In the second section, I show that the control of ethnic activists over ethnographical observation underpins their endeavour to introduce their cultural productions – arising from their interpretation of the

90  Mélanie Vandenhelsken state criteria determining tribal recognition – into the cultural practices of the group. In the last section, I show how crosschecking data permits an understanding of the points of reference and the stakes of the cultural production framed by ethnic activists. The analysis that emerges enables me to identify current mechanisms of production of cultural differentiation, and to highlight the central role of ethnographic knowledge in the construction of ethnicity in Sikkim today.

Socio-historical context of the study The Gurungs are one of the 20 ethnic groups enumerated in Sikkim.2 They speak a language of Tibetan affinity and are the ninth-largest ethnic group in the state.3 Despite most of them descending from migrants from Nepal settled in Sikkim more than a century ago, Gurungs are still included in the common language category of ‘Nepalese’ (recently renamed ‘Sikkimese Nepalese’), opposed to that of ‘Sikkimese’ – assigned to the groups of the former ruling elite, that is, the Bhutias and Lepchas.4 More than being a division between recent and old settlers, this dichotomous categorisation (whose history can be traced, see Vandenhelsken 2016b) reflects a division between groups recognised as components of the former kingdom – subjects and vassal – and ‘others’, often perceived as a threat to the local political order and to the local culture, in a context where the sovereignty of Sikkim was challenged by neighbouring foreign powers.5 The distinction between ‘Sikkimese’ and ‘Nepalese’ was manifest until 1979 through the ‘parity system’, which reserved an equal number of seats in the Sikkim state legislative assembly for these two categories (Grover 1974: 46). The antagonism between ‘Sikkimese’ and ‘Nepalese’ continued to structure political divisions after the annexation of Sikkim by India in 1975. However, the parity system was dissolved in 1979, and the category of Nepalese then lost its capacity to organise the claim for recognition of the ‘Sikkimese Nepalese’ as full-fledged citizens (then, also in India). Seats formerly reserved to Nepalese were opened to ‘general’, that is to say to all non-Bhutia-Lepchas residents in Sikkim, including newcomers from other Indian regions. This led to a ‘son of the soil’ movement for the protection of old Sikkimese settlers (then including Nepalese) against ‘outsiders’, and for the recognition of a distinct Indian-Nepali identity.6 This movement joined the struggle of the Nepalese of India (also called Gurkhas) for recognition of both their Indian citizenship and their distinct culture.7 The recommendation by the Mandal commission to include tribal Nepalese in the list of other backward classes (OBC) overturned the century-old balance of power in Sikkim. After a period of blockage of the recommendations in Sikkim, as in other parts of India, the actual implementation of the

Ethnographic study and cultural production in Sikkim 91 recommendations from the early 1990s provided a means for tribal Nepalese to access new political rights as culturally defined, discrete entities, freed from the tutelage of high-status Hindus and Newars. The ‘pro-tribal’ Sikkim government, elected in 1994, reinforced this by its ‘politics of tribalization’8 aiming at providing government support for the re-ranking of the new OBC as ST. For Sikkimese Nepalese, ST status is more advantageous not only for material reasons – such as a larger quota of reservations (Galanter [1984] 1991: xvii, 122) and the absence of different treatment for the ‘creamy layer’ (Subba 2013: 4) – but also because remaining as OBC would bring them back into a situation of competition with advanced castes like Bahun, Chhetri and Newar (ibid.), while becoming ST would enable their political representation through reservations in the state legislative assembly, and concretise the long-coveted status of ‘indigenous’ in Sikkim.9 Bhutias and Lepchas were recognised as ST in 1978, and the addition of Limbus and Tamang to the list in 2003 reinforced the hope of other ‘Sikkimese-Nepalese tribals’ such as the Gurungs, who had started raising their claim as early as 1993. The project of obtaining tribal recognition has an important cultural impact; applicants must demonstrate that their ethnic group matches the ‘essential characteristics’ defined by the state to be recognised as tribal.10 In Sikkim, the state support for the re-ranking of groups as ST was accompanied by the official recognition of distinctive ethno-cultural productions (languages, rituals, material production, etc.). The ‘politics of tribalization’ additionally led to a re-composition of hierarchies and power relations within groups (Vandenhelsken 2016a). The appointment of ethnic organisations as political representatives of their groups introduced a view of the tribe as culturally united and politically centralised, different from the socio-cultural forms of ethnic groups found in the state up to that point. Sikkimese ethnic groups had no political and economic organisations distinct from those of the state (with the exception of Bhutias in the villages of Lachen and Lachung in North Sikkim).11 From the 19th century, all regional estates led by ‘landlords’ (zamindars) implemented a unified (to a certain degree) political and judicial system under the centralised power of the royal (and colonial, for a period of time) government. After the abolition of this system from the 1940s, political centralisation was reinforced. The ethnic groups of Sikkim are internally historically, sociologically and culturally more diverse than the tribes of central India. They arise from individual or family migrations with diverse geographical origins, while the migration itself gave rise to cultural and statutory reorganisations. Today, except in the northern district where Bhutias and Lepchas are in a majority, every village of Sikkim is multi-ethnic, and it is only in village sub-divisions that a particular group is in a majority. A few groups have

92  Mélanie Vandenhelsken a distinct language, but all know the lingua franca of the region, Nepali, which is increasingly replacing indigenous languages (Turin, this volume). Sikkimese ethnic groups share numerous common cultural forms and practices, and cultural forms are produced through inter-ethnic relations; distinctive socio-cultural forms can also be found, however, such as kinship systems and religious practices. In order to be recognised as ST, leaders of ethnic groups highlight these specificities.

Temporality of procedures of tribal evaluation and cultural composition The fieldwork took place in the village of Yangang, in the southern district of Sikkim. The Gurungs live mainly in two ‘blocks’ (village sub-divisions) of 700 inhabitants each, and account for 50 per cent of the population in one case and 63 per cent in the other. The village was deeply involved in the political life of the state, in particular because it was the chief minister’s birthplace; it was also the ground of several major development projects, which gave it a greater visibility in state politics and also caused tensions and conflicts. When I began my fieldwork in Yangang in 2010, I conducted interviews with local elected officials in order to study the interactions between political and cultural practices. I soon met a high-ranking district official who was a Gurung; I will call him Mr Gurung.12 He lived in the village, was close to the head of government and was a member of the ruling party; he was also an eminent member of the Gurung Gompa committee, that is to say, the village Gurung Buddhist temple committee.13 Mr Gurung was absent from the village when I arrived, but called me on the phone upon his return to organise our interview, to which he eventually devoted all the time I asked for. His availability contrasted with the reluctance of people to talk to anthropologists, as experienced during my previous fieldwork in Sikkim (which focused on a different topic). This availability was not limited to representatives of the Gurungs, and during my stay in Yangang I received a growing number of invitations from members of ‘cultural organisations’ (representatives of ethnic groups or castes) to witness cultural practices. Mr Gurung offered to invite all the representatives of all the ethnic groups of the village to a single meeting to answer my questions; this would allow me, he explained, ‘to quickly learn every culture in the village’. He proposed to organise traditional dances of the various ethnic groups, still arguing that it would be more practical for me to observe these practices at a single time and place.14 I chose to rather observe them in their customary context. However, the ethnic leaders closely controlled the ethnographic observations I later

Ethnographic study and cultural production in Sikkim 93 engaged in. I returned to Yangang in 2012 to further study the ritual practices of traditional Gurung ritual specialists, called ponjyo, in Sikkim.15 I settled in the sole guesthouse of the village, owned by the chairman of the Gurung Gompa committee – then a branch of the state Gurung organisation – and learned only later that ritual practices of the ponjyo were deemed non-compliant to the official criteria determining tribal recognition by members of the state Gurung organisation and the local Gompa committee; this will be discussed in more detail later. Shortly after my arrival, I informed my host – who questioned me about the organisation of my fieldwork – that the next day I was going to observe a funeral ritual practiced by one of the village ponjyos in a neighbouring house. When I arrived at the house where the ritual was taking place, the ponjyo was not the only ritual specialist present; the Buddhist lama, appointed as head of the temple by the committee, was also there.16 The lama led the ritual and had the ponjyo sit in the second position. Whereas ponjyos emphasise the Buddhist origin of their ritual texts, the parallel recitations of the two priests clearly highlighted differences in rhythm and text content between them. Furthermore, the lama had come with two young students, and the loudness of their recitation (usual for young Buddhist students) forced the ponjyo to adapt his recitation to them, and constantly interrupt it. The ponjyo priest later explained to me that the presence of the lama was not initially planned, but that my host had asked the family to call him because I was going to be present. This reorganisation of a practice at the observer’s attention recalls the display of cultural practices carried out by ethnic leaders for anthropologists in charge of evaluating the conformity of these practices to the official criteria of tribal recognition. Middleton (2016 especially Ch. IV) analysed such a meeting in a village of the Darjeeling region organised by anthropologists appointed by the government of West Bengal.17 He shows that the anthropologists’ evaluation was based on observations made during fieldwork which lasted only a few days during which several groups were assessed. The anthropologists’ visit was carefully prepared by ethnic activists who, based on their knowledge and interpretation of the official criteria of ‘tribalism’, indicated to the other members of the ethnic groups which cultural practices they should exhibit to anthropologists, such as ‘primitive habitats’, shamanic rituals involving decapitation of goats and chickens and consumption of blood by the priest. Based on his fieldwork, Middleton considers not only the criteria of tribal recognition, but also its procedure as ‘hyper-prescriptive’ and analyses it as a form of ‘certification’ that takes in this situation the sense of confirmation of pre-determined criteria (2016: 115, 125–128). The temporality of the ethnographic enquiry is a highly determining factor. For Middleton, the validity of the certification process depends on the

94  Mélanie Vandenhelsken reliance on ethnographic immediacy (2016: 107–140) – that of the faceto-face encounter between state anthropologists and applicants for tribal status, which is supposedly ‘truth revealing’ for the former, while enabling the latter to demonstrate their conformity to the official criteria determining tribal recognition. In Kilani’s words, this value given to immediacy is based on the premise of the ‘simultaneity between the object “being seen” and the act of seeing’ (1994: 41). Clifford’s famous comment (1983: 118) on the cover photo of Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (‘You are there because I was there’) – as the predominant mode of authority of modern fieldwork – translates in the context of Darjeeling and Sikkim as ‘you are tribal because I was there’. This ‘politics of immediation’ – which, ‘in the name of immediacy and transparency, occludes the potentialities and contingencies embedded in the mediations that comprise and enable social life’ (Mazzarella 2006: 476) – ultimately determines the certification. Middleton (op. cit.) highlights the ‘ethnographic relation’ as a space (as he calls it, an ‘interface’) where the ‘cultural material’ is made to conform to state criteria of tribal recognition, and as a space of construction of a particular form of ethnographic knowledge, negotiated between the various social actors involved. Regarding the position of anthropologists engaged in longer fieldwork projects, my experience in Sikkim simply shows that the centrality given to ethnography in tribal evaluation influences ethnographic fieldwork, and that the forms of fieldwork and relations linked to tribal evaluation also shape ethnographic fieldwork that is not directly and willingly related to tribal evaluation. The supposed distinction between, on one hand, shortterm fieldwork enabling the production of new cultural forms conceived by ethnic activists in agreement with official classifications, and, on the other hand, long-term fieldwork enabling access to ‘authentic’ – in the sense of older – cultural practices does not enable an understanding of ethnographic research in contemporary Sikkim and Darjeeling. All ethnographers are necessarily involved in the project of recognition as tribal. In Sikkim, like in Darjeeling, anthropology is thus not only given the role of ‘truth-producing’, but also carries a power to change the position of social actors in society. As Middleton again explains (2016: 27–55), forms of anthropological representations constructed in the interaction between ethnic activists and state anthropologists have great ‘political efficacy’ since the state bases its decision to rank groups as ST on the state anthropologists’ reports. By organising ‘cultural performances’ for state anthropologists, such as by inviting lamas to a ponjyo ritual attended by a foreign anthropologist, ethnic activists seize the ‘ethnographic authority’ (Clifford 1983: 42) linked to anthropological observations to influence the process of tribal evaluation. In the same manner as some political actors in

Ethnographic study and cultural production in Sikkim 95 Sri Lanka (Okely 1992), Gurung ethnic activists treat the ‘anthropologists’ power of textual production’ as a resource (ibid.: 22). Moreover, in Yangang, my presence as an ethnographer provided the opportunity to replace the practices that villagers had chosen (the ponjyo ritual) by those selected by ethnic activists (the lama’s ritual). It is the transformation of the ritual into an ethnographic ‘object’ and of the ritual space into a space of ethnographic inquiry that triggered and enabled this replacement. This replacement is not an easy process, and all religious changes in the region are far from being simple and smooth processes. As Shneiderman has shown, people in the area draw a distinction between ‘original’, ‘real’ practices, and ‘copies’ or ‘imitation’ (respectively sakali and nakali in Nepali) (2011: 219). Shneiderman analyses this view as a distinction between ‘practice’ and ‘performance’.18 She shows that for the Thangmi (a group whose members live in Nepal, Darjeeling and Sikkim), ‘practice’ and ‘performance’ are two modes of cultural production that differ in their purpose and audience. The audience is, in the former case, the assembly of deities worshipped in the private space of the household and the village, and in the latter case, state representatives for whom ‘cultural authenticity’ is displayed in a public space and as part of the practices organised by ethnic leaders to obtain tribal recognition for their group. Shneiderman shows that the Thangmi choose one or the other register depending on the form of recognition they seek. Gurungs of Yangang also make this distinction, and in some cases bring it down to a difference between what can and what cannot be shown and said to outsiders. For example, during an interview with a former specialist on the cults of Gurung ancestors, the interviewee first explained that he did not practise this cult any more because the villagers and he himself had become Buddhists. But, since my questions turned to the extinct cult, he finally showed me his ecumenical altar in a room of the house, and began to recite all the incantations to the Hindu gods he remembered. His son arrived home at that moment and firmly asked his father (in Nepali) while explaining to me (in English) that Gurungs were now Buddhists. Schneiderman argues that ‘performances’ emerge from ‘practices’, and are added to them rather than replacing them. Both forms coexist and inform each other. The field data I gathered in Sikkim highlight the ethnographic encounter as a space of possible transformation of ‘performance’ into ‘practice’, highlighting one form of interaction between both. My ethnographic fieldwork enabled the bringing of cultural practices supported by ethnic activists – deemed in conformity to the criteria required for recognition as tribal – into the private space of the household: for the ethnographer, the ‘stage’ itself was brought into a private space. In this case, the

96  Mélanie Vandenhelsken fieldwork enabled a change of status of cultural productions from ‘copies’ to ‘original’. Ethnographic observation thus can contribute to providing these cultural productions with a form of ‘authenticity’, in the sense locally given to this concept. In this case, the fieldwork does not focus on cultural productions that are supposedly ‘already there’, but rather is a key element of a process of their authentication. What and how do we learn as anthropologists, then, when the knowledge we contribute to producing is so highly politicised?

Triangulation19 as a tool of analysis The founding story of the Yangang Buddhist temple: a narrative of Gurung indigeneity During our first meeting, Mr Gurung narrated to me the founding story of the village Gurung gompa. He explained that the temple had been founded before 1945 and that Barmiok Rinpoche – a Gurung lama, he said – had meditated there. He then gave a list of successive ‘abbots’ (head lamas) of the temple, several times asking his father – who attended the interview with other inhabitants of the house – to correct a name or the order of succession. He explained that the land on which the temple had been built had been given to Gurungs by a Buddhist monk named C. Dorje. Mr Gurung finished his story by saying: ‘Madam, you have to say that Gurung Yangang monastery is the oldest Gurung gompa in Sikkim, and that it dates from before 1940, and you can give the names of abbots that have succeeded as evidence’. Triangulation enables understanding the referents Mr Gurung uses to construct the founding narrative of the temple, alongside his interpretation of state ethnographic categorisations and procedures of tribal evaluation. Let’s look first at how this story highlights an adaptation in Sikkim of the project of the ‘return to Buddhism’ developed in Nepal in the 1980s as part of the political struggle of the ‘indigenous nationalities’ (Nep. Janaja ¯ti).20 Mr Gurung’s account draws in several ways on the history of the old Sikkimese nobility. Barmiok Rinpoche was the elder brother of the Sikkimese king Tashi Namgyal’s personal secretary (in the first half of the 20th century), and a member of one of the families of the highest nobility among the Sikkimese Lepcha, which was called Densapa. Members of this family were ‘landlords’ (‘zamindar’) of landed estates, and they were given charge of the Yangang estate in the early 20th century, following the rupture of the line of the local landed gentry. C. Dorje, the owner of the land on which the Gurung temple was built, was also part of the local nobility. In his childhood, he was enrolled in the Royal Monastery of Pemayangtse,

Ethnographic study and cultural production in Sikkim 97 reserved for members of the Bhutia nobility. Mr Gurung implemented the project of ‘returning to Buddhism’ by introducing elements of the religious history of the former ruling elite in his narrative. Bhutias and Lepchas are furthermore the first groups to have been declared ST in Sikkim (in 1978); Mr Gurung’s borrowings also highlight the competition with Bhutias and Lepchas for state resources linked to ST status. The main claim of Gurung activists at the time of my fieldwork was for an additional ‘sangha seat’ in the legislative assembly (reserved for a representative of the Buddhist religious community) for the Limbus, Tamang and Gurungs, while the already-existing sangha seat was de facto reserved for Bhutias. Thus, religious transformations initiated by Gurung activists were, like in Nepal, connected to democracy (Hangen 2010: 132– 133) in the sense of taking place within a project of accessing political representation. However, in contrast with Nepal, Buddhism was not a different religion from that of the rulers since it was the state religion until 1975, and was still supported by the state through its Ecclesiastical Affairs department (also called in common language the ‘Gompa department’); by claiming to be Buddhists, Gurungs did not propose new political institutions, but demanded to be represented in the existing ones. From 1994 – when the newly elected government officially supported claims for tribal recognition of various Sikkimese ethnic groups – the Gurung project of ‘returning to Buddhism’ became narrowly connected to the claim for tribal recognition.21 The All Sikkim Gurung [Tamu] Buddhist Association (ASGBA) was founded in February 1994 as a means to obtain tribal recognition for the Sikkimese Gurungs and to develop Buddhism in the group. In 2006, 67 per cent of the Sikkimese Gurungs declared themselves to be Buddhists (Department of Economics, Statistics, Monitoring and Evaluation 2006: 362). Mr Gurung’s narrative of the founding story of Yangang Gompa also highlights another claim connected to the Buddhisation of the Gurungs: the claim for a form of indigeneity. Indeed, whereas C. Dorje actually gave the land for the Gurung Buddhist temple in 1956, Mr Gurung dates the gift of the land to 1945, and refers to the existence of the temple ‘before 1940’. C. Dorje had no doubt about the date of 1956, because his father died in that year and he donated the land to the Gurungs to gain merits on behalf of his father’s soul. Furthermore, government archives show that the Yangang Gurung Gompa was actually registered in 1982.22 The date – 1945 or before 1940 – is thus of great importance for Mr Gurung. It is actually a key date for obtaining identity documents in Sikkim. Indeed, the first Sikkimese law regulating access to citizenship – the Sikkim Subject Regulation 1961 – stipulates that an individual must have settled in Sikkim before 1946 to obtain Sikkimese ‘subject-hood’. Since

98  Mélanie Vandenhelsken 1975, some rights still depend on the possession of the Sikkim Subject certificate, including Indian citizenship, the exemption from income tax and the right to the informal status of ‘old settler’ in Sikkim. In some documents Gurung activists claim that Gurungs are indigenous inhabitants of Sikkim, such as in the letter addressed by the ASGBA to the minister of state of the Government of India on 31 March 1994. Officials from the Indian Ministry of Tribal Affairs take indigeneity as a necessary prerequisite for tribal recognition, which is reflected by the common assimilation in India of Adivasi with tribal.23 In the case of the Gurungs, the demonstration of their indigeneity in Sikkim is a difficult task, in particular since until recently they were categorised as Nepalese, and thus considered as recent migrants in Sikkim. Taking the Bhutia case as an example and precedent,24 by stating that the Yangang Gompa was founded before 1945, Mr Gurung uses Buddhism as a factor of indigenisation. In the same line, during fieldwork I carried out later, an eminent representative of the Gurung community reported to me that the last Sikkimese king told his grandfather: You Gurungs are Tibetan, so you should be Buddhists. This came as a preamble to his main point: It is quite difficult to say that the Gurung have directly come from Nepal, because the shorter route is from Tibet. Gurung might as well have travelled directly from Tibet.25 Here, the monarch’s statement proves that Gurungs should be or were Buddhists, which in turn demonstrates the Tibetan origins of the Gurungs, and thus that they are as ‘indigenous’ as the Bhutias.

Cultural productions in confrontation My presence as ethnographer also highlighted the confrontation between the cultural production of the ethnic activists and previously authoritative ritual specialists, the ponjyo; it actually provided one occasion to place the ponjyo in a secondary position behind Buddhist lamas. Yangang ponjyos started highlighting and developing the Buddhist aspects of their practice in the early 1980s mainly as part of the janaja ¯ti movement in Nepal, where they had strong ties. Sikkim was offering the possibility to actually realise the ‘return to Buddhism’ forbidden in Nepal. Their aim was not, however, to adopt Sikkimese Buddhism and way of life – this would have probably been incompatible with people’s ritual needs – and their

Ethnographic study and cultural production in Sikkim 99 ritual practices remained as eclectic as most ritual practices in the Himalayas, blending elements of Buddhism, Hinduism and shamanism. They started the construction of Yangang Gurung Gompa after they received government subsidies. However, when the project of ‘Buddhisation’ of the Gurungs was launched, the rumour spread that the sacred texts of the ponjyos were not written in a secret language, but actually did not make any sense. This point was clarified by the temple head lama during my fieldwork: according to him, these texts were incomprehensible because they were the outcome of successive copies made by people who ignored Tibetan grammar and spelling. He added that the ponjyo ritual practices were ‘mixed with Hinduism’, and that he was now trying to extract that part of Hinduism to ‘go back’ to ‘pure Buddhism’.26 However, the successive abbots of the temple Mr Gurung mentioned to me – taking inspiration from the genealogies of abbots of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, which are a distinct literary genre27 – were actually the successive Yangang ponjyo priests; Mr Gurung thus used the genealogies of the ponjyos as a resource to legitimate the ancestry of the temple while simultaneously being part of the group that undermined the credibility of the ponjyos’ authority. By giving a place to the ponjyos in the temple history, members of the Gompa committee also very likely intended to root Buddhism in the village, which was not an easy process. Conveniently, the granddaughter of the first village ponjyo – who came from Nepal in the early 1940s – has been recognised as a ‘reincarnation’ – Kandroma in Tibetan,28 D akinı¯ .¯ in sanskrit – and is settled in the Gompa as a sacred figure that people can come to worship. By his narrative, Mr Gurung thus projected the ‘pure form of Buddhism’ as an ‘ethnographic reality’, and concealed the ‘eclectism’ or ‘polytropy’ of the ritual practices of the ponjyos and of the villagers, which were deemed non-compliant to the recognition of the group as tribal.29 He also concealed the fact that the introduction of Buddhism in the village was an ongoing process related to political choices and struggles, involving power relations between different factions and individuals. In contrast, he enacted the cultural and religious unity of the group and posited its indigeneity as existing outside history and politics. Triangulation thus highlighted the struggles for positions of authority in the new hierarchical organisations produced by religious changes, rather than a disagreement on a common political project. Gaining authority is far from easy for ethnic activists, whose lifestyle provides little opportunity to get in touch with the ‘practices’ of the group. As for ponjyos, the eldest son of the last Yangang practising ponyo is now being trained as a Buddhist lama in a south Indian Nyingma Buddhist monastery. In this way, Yangang ponjyos manage to maintain religious authority within their lineage.

100  Mélanie Vandenhelsken

Conclusion In the main example analysed earlier, the replacement of the village practices by the cultural production of ethnic activists in the favourable circumstance of an ethnographer’s presence comes down to claiming the higher power of ethnographic authority over traditional religious authority. Tacitly, other and multifarious forms of interactions between ‘practices’ and ‘performances’ were highlighted: Buddhism has not replaced village practices but has added to the complexity of the village religious life; in other cases, villages practices are re-interpreted for ethnographers, and thus their aim and audience is transformed; we have also seen the cultural production of ethnic activists strengthened by references to the genealogies of the village ritual specialists. In the case of ponjyos becoming lamas, the distinction between ‘practices’ and ‘performances’ disappears and current cultural practices become the product of both old practices and those recently framed that social actors have chosen for themselves. The mutual influence between various forms of cultural production ultimately reflects social actors’ takeover of ethnographic knowledge that determines the recognition of their group as tribal as a means to take control of the decisions determining their collective political and social future. Conducting an analysis in line with the methodological landmarks previously developed by anthropologists30 – in particular, long-term field study, taking into account the various points of view, the combination of observation and interviews as well as reflexive work on the ethnographic encounter – allows us to see the mutual influence of ‘practices’ and ‘performances’, the possibility of passage between these forms and the instrumental role given to ethnographic knowledge and ethnographers in these key processes of cultural production in contemporary Sikkim.

Notes * This work is an outcome of the research funded by the Austrian Science Fund (project number P 21886-G17), and hosted by the Institute for Social Anthropology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The author is deeply thankful to these institutions for their support. The first version of this text in French is in press: 2016, ‘La relation enquêteur-enquêtés face aux usages politiques de l’ethnographie, Sikkim (Himalaya oriental, Inde)’, in JeanMarc de Grave and Ghislaine Gallenga (eds), La ‘Méthode Condo’: Héritages et Actualités de l’expérience ethnographique. Paris: Indes Savantes, 103–125. 1 This approach is in line with Brubaker (2004: 10), and, following Bourdieu (1980: 65), I use the term ‘entrepreneurs’ to highlight the capacity of these ‘specialists of ethnicity’ to produce what they claim to describe. The term can be criticised for its instrumentalist connotations. I maintain that recognising these people’s ‘entrepreneurial’ skills also allows seeing them as fully fledged social and political agents. Cf. also Middleton (2016), who analyses

Ethnographic study and cultural production in Sikkim 101 tribal ‘certification’ in India as an ‘interface’, ‘a meeting-place of various subjects, subjectivities, epistemic practices, and tactical logics’. 2 Department of Economics, Statistics, Monitoring and Evaluation 2006: 33 (census organised by the Sikkim government, which enumerated ethnicity, unlike the Indian central government’s censuses). I use the term ‘ethnic group’ in a broader sense than ‘tribe’, not restricted to ST. Only Bhutias, Lepchas, Limbus and Tamangs are officially recognised as ST in Sikkim, while several other groups considered as tribes in Nepal (where they are originally from) are not recognised as ST in India. ‘Ethnic group’ refers here to all these groups, whether they are ST or not. 3 In 2006, there were 34,344 Gurungs in Sikkim out of a total population of 581,546 persons (Department of Economics, Statistics, Monitoring and Evaluation 2006: 32). 4 Bhutias speak a Tibetan language and are mainly Buddhist; they founded the kingdom of Sikkim in the 17th century by including, in particular, the indigenous Lepchas and Limbus. Among recent historical and anthropological works on Sikkim, see in particular Nakane 1966; Siiger 1967; Sinha 1975; Datta-Ray 1980; Subba 1989; Steinmann 1996; Arora 2007; Balikci 2008; Mullard 2011; and Shneiderman 2011. 5 See Datta-Ray 1980; Rustomji 1987; Sinha 2006. 6 See Kazi 1993; Arora 2007. 7 See Hutt 1997; Chalmers 2003. 8 Here I take inspiration from Sinha’s 2006 concept of the ‘process of tribalisation’. 9 See Tawa-Lama Rewal 2005 regarding the Indian reservation policy, and Shneiderman 2015 for the reasons behind Darjeeling OBCs’ claim for ST status. Regarding the construction of indigeneity in Sikkim, see Vandenhelsken 2014. 10 See Xaxa 1999, and the works of Shneiderman and Middleton mentioned in the references. 11 Led by an assembly of householders, the Dzumsa (Sabatier-Bourdet 2004). 12 All names are pseudonyms. 13 Tib. dgon pa, literally, ‘isolated place’; in Sikkim, this term refers to Buddhist temples and monasteries. Tibetan words are transliterated with the Wylie system (1959) at first occurrence; they are preceded by ‘Tib’. 14 Interview of 21 October 2010. While a conflict divided the state Gurung association, the All Sikkim Gurung [Tamu] Buddhist Association, into two parts (see Vandenhelsken 2016a), Mr Gurung also demonstrated here that the faction of the organisation he supported was competent to complete the project of recognition of the Gurungs as ST thanks to his ability to monopolise ethnic leaders and to certify the existence of ethnic distinctive cultural practices. 15 In Nepal, they are called paju or poju (see among others Pignède 1966; Messerschmidt 1976; Macfarlane 1989; Mumford 1990; Macfarlane & Gurung 1990; Pettigrew 1995). 16 ‘Lama’ (tib. bla ma) is a common term used in Sikkim for Buddhist ritual specialists. 17 Other authors have analysed the attribution of a place or role to anthropologists by the people they study, and the construction of this place based on

102  Mélanie Vandenhelsken these people’s former relational experiences, among others (Leservoisier & Vidal 2007). 18 She pushes her analysis further in a recent article (2014). 19 In the sense given to this word by De Sardan (1995: 12), which understands triangulation as accessing and reporting the multiplicity of viewpoints, rather than as crosschecking data. 20 Nepali words are transcribed following Turner 1980 [1931]. Regarding the Janaja¯ti movement and religious changes that occurred in its frame, see among others Macfarlane 1989 and 1997; Gellner, Pfaff-Czarnecka & Whelpton 1997; McHugh 2006; Hangen 2010; Letizia 2011. 21 I discuss more in detail this religious change among Sikkimese Gurungs, including the background of the view that becoming Buddhist is necessary for being recognised as ST, in Vandenhelsken 2016a. 22 Members of the Yangang Gompa Comittee do not claim that a temple was built before 1940, but rather a meditation hut; this hut can still be seen in front of the Gompa today. 23 See Xaxa 1999. Xaxa critically examines this connection made between indigenous people and tribal in India. Among the reasons he gives that challenge the assimilation between both, Xaxa highlights the difficulty in identifying indigenous people in India due to the great mobility of people throughout the history of the region. 24 In his narrative, Mr. Gurung endeavoured to build bridges between the category of old settlers and that of the indigenous, thus reproducing what has been done for the Bhutias; the foreign origins of the Bhutias (from Tibet and Bhutan), often recalled in the debates over tribal recognition in Sikkim, did not prevent them from getting tribal status in 1978. 25 B. B. Gooroong, interview on 3 December 2011. See Vandenhelsken 2014 where I present other forms of construction of Gurung indigeneity in Sikkim. 26 Interview on 22 March 2012. 27 Tib. gdan rabs. 28 Tib. mkha’ ‘gro ma. 29 On polytropy, see Gellner 2005. 30 For example, Condominas 1952; de Sardan 1995.

References Arora, Vibha. 2007. ‘Assertive Identities, Indigeneity, and the Politics of Recognition as a Tribe: The Bhutias, the Lepchas and the Limbus of Sikkim’, Sociological Bulletin, 56 (2): 195–220. Balikci, Anna. 2008. Lamas, Shamans and Ancestors: Village Religion in Sikkim. Leiden; Boston: Brill. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1980. ‘L’identité et la Représentation’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 35: 63–72. Brubaker, Rogers. 2004. Ethnicity without Groups. Cambridge; London: Harvard University Press. Chalmers, Rhoderick. 2003. ‘The Quest for Ekrupata: Unity, Uniformity, and Delineation of the Nepali Community in Darjeeling’, in Awadhesh Coomar

Ethnographic study and cultural production in Sikkim 103 Sinha and Tanka Subba (eds), The Nepalis of Northeast India. New Delhi: Indus Publishing Co, 339–359. Clifford, James. 1983. ‘On Ethnographic Authority’, Representations, 2: 118–146. Condominas, Georges. 1952. ‘Rapport d’une mission ethnologique en pays Mnong Gar (Pays montagnards du sud-indochinois)’, Bulletin de l’Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient, 46 (1): 303–313. Datta-Ray, Sunanda K. 1980. Smash and Grab: Annexation of Sikkim. NewDelhi: Vikas Publications. De Sardan, Jean-Pierre Olivier. 1995. ‘La politique du terrain’, Enquête, 1: 71–109. http://enquete.revues.org/263. Department of Economics, Statistics, Monitoring and Evaluation. 2006. State Socio Economic Census. Gangtok: Government of Sikkim. Galanter, M. [1984] 1991. Competing Equalities. Law and the Backward Classes in India. Berkley: University of California Press. Gellner, David. 2005. ‘The Emergence of Conversion in a Hindu-Buddhist Polytropy: The Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, c. 1600–1995’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 47 (4): 755–780. Gellner, David, Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka and John Whelpton. (eds) 1997. Nationalism and Ethnicity in a Hindu Kingdom: The Politics of Culture in Contemporary Nepal. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. Grover, B. S. K. 1974. Sikkim and India: Storm and Consolidation. New-Delhi: Jain Brothers. Hangen, Susan. 2010. The Rise of Ethnic Politics in Nepal: Democracy in the Margins. New York: Routledge. Hutt, Michael. 1997. ‘Being Nepali without Nepal: Reflection on a South Asian Diaspora’, in David Gellner, Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka and John Whelpton (eds), Nationalism and Ethnicity in a Hindu Kingdom. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 101–144. Kazi, Jigme N. 1993. Inside Sikkim against the Tide. Gangtok: Hill Media Publications. Kilani, Mondher. 1994. L’invention de l’autre: essais sur le discours anthropologique. Lausanne: Payot, Sciences humaines. Leservoisier, Olivier and Laurent Vidal. (eds). 2007. L’anthropologie face à ses Objets: Nouveaux Contextes Ethnologiques. Paris: Éditions des Archives contemporaines. Letizia, Chiara. 2011. ‘Buddhist Activism, New Sanghas and the Politics of Belonging among Some Tharu and Magar Communities of Southern Nepal’, in Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka and Gérard Toffin (eds), Facing Globalization in the Himalayas: Belonging and the Politics of the Self. New Delhi: Sage, 289–325. Macfarlane, Alan. 1989. ‘Some Background Notes on Gurung Identity in a Period of Rapid Change’, Kailash: A Journal of Himalayan Studies, 15 (3–4): 179–190. ———. 1997. ‘Identity and Change among the Gurungs (Tamu-mai) of Central Nepal’, in David N. Gellner, Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka and John Whelpton

104  Mélanie Vandenhelsken (eds), Nationalism and Ethnicity in a Hindu Kingdom: The Politics of Culture in Contemporary Nepal. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 185–204. Macfarlane, Alan and Indrabahadur Gurung. 1990. Gurungs of Nepal (A Guide to the Gurungs). Kathmandu: Ratna Pustak Bhandar. Mazzarella, William. 2006. ‘Internet X-Ray: E-Governance, Transparency, and the Politics of Immediation in India’, Public Culture, 18 (3): 473–505. McHugh, Ernestine. 2006. ‘From Margin to Center: “Tibet” as a Feature of Gurung Identity’, in Christiaan Klieger (ed), Tibetan Borderlands: Proceedings of the 10th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies. Leiden: Brill, 115–126. Messerschmidt, Donald. 1976. The Gurungs of Nepal: Conflict and Change in a Village Society. Warminster: Aris and Phillips. Middleton, Christopher Townsend. 2016. The Demands of Recognition: State Anthropology and Ethnopolitics in Darjeeling. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mullard, Saul. 2011. Opening the Hidden Land: State Formation and the Construction of Sikkimese History. Leiden, Boston: Brill. Mumford, Stan Royal. 1990. Himalayan Dialogue: Tibetan Lamas and Gurung Shamans in Nepal. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Nakane, Chie. 1966. ‘A Plural Society in Sikkim: A Study of the Interrelations of Lepchas, Bhotias and Nepalis’, in Christoph Von Furer-Haimendorf (ed), Caste and Kin in Nepal, India and Ceylon: Anthropological studies in HinduBuddhist Contact Zones. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 213–263. Okely, Judith. 1992. ‘Anthropology and Autobiography: Participatory Experience and Embodied Knowledge’, in Judith Okely and Helen Callaway (eds), Anthropology and Autobiography. London: Routledge, 1–28. Pettigrew, Judith. 1995. ‘Shamanic Dialogues: History, Representation, and Landscape in Nepal’, Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Cambridge University. Pignède, Bernard. 1966. Les Gurung: Une Population Himalayenne du Népal. Paris: La Haye, Mouton. Rustomji, Nari. 1987. Sikkim. A Himalayan Tragedy. Ahmedabad: Allied Publishers Private Ltd. Sabatier-Bourdet, Sophie. 2004. ‘The Dzumsa (‘dzoms sa) of Lachen: An Example of a Sikkimese Political Institution’, Bulletin of Tibetology, 40 (1): 93–104. Shneiderman, Sara. 2011. ‘Synthesising Practice and Performance, Securing Recognition: Thangmi Cultural Heritage in Nepal and India’, in Christiane Brosius and Karin M. Polit (eds), Ritual, Heritage and Identity: The Politics of Culture and Performance in a Globalised World. London, New York, New Delhi: Routledge, 202–245. ———. 2014. ‘Reframing Ethnicity: Academic Tropes, Recognition beyond Politics, and Ritualized Action between Nepal and India’, American Anthropologist, 116 (2): 279–295. ———. 2015. Rituals of Ethnicity: Thangmi Identities between Nepal and India. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Ethnographic study and cultural production in Sikkim 105 Shneiderman, Sara and Christopher Townsend Middleton. 2008. ‘Reservations, Federalism and the Politics of Recognition in Nepal’, Economic and Political Weekly, May 10: 39–45. Siiger, Halfdan. 1967. The Lepchas: Culture and Religion of a Himalayan People. Copenhagen: The National Museum, coll. Ethnographical Series XI(I). Sinha, Awadhesh Coomar. 1975. Politics of Sikkim: A Sociological Study. New Delhi: Thomson Press. ———. 2006. ‘Search for Kirat Identity: Trends of De-Sankritization among Nepalmul Sikkimese’, Peace and Democracy in South Asia, 2 (1 and 2), http://himalaya.socanth.cam.ac.uk/collections/journals/pdsa/pdf/ pdsa_02_01_01.pdf. Steinmann, Brigitte 1996. ‘Territoire et frontières politiques, royaume et divinités montagnardes: l’usage des stéréotypes dans la construction d’une identité nationale (Sikkim)’, in Anne-Marie Blondeau (ed), Tibetan Mountain Deities, Their Cults and Representations. Vienne: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 115–128. Subba, Tanka Bahadur. 1989. Dynamics of a Hill Society. New Delhi: Mittal. ———. 2013. ‘Legitimacy through Procedures: Making Sikkim More Inclusive through Commissions/Committees’, in U. Skoda, K. B. Nielsen and M. Qvortrup Fibiger (eds), Navigating Exclusion, Engineering Inclusion: Processes and Practices in Contemporary India and Beyond. London: Anthem Press, 135–148. Tawa-Lama Rewal, Stéphanie. (ed) 2005. Electoral Reservations, Political Representation and Social Change in India: A Comparative Perspective. New Delhi: Manohar – Centre des Sciences Humaines. Turner, Ralph Lilley. 1980 [1931]. A Comparative and Etymological Dictionary of the Nepali Language. New Delhi: Allied. Vandenhelsken, Mélanie. 2014. ‘Parcours migratoires et construction d’une “autochtonie” au Sikkim (Himalaya Oriental, Inde)’, in L.S. Fournier et al. (eds), Les cultures du déplacement. Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires d’Aix-Marseille, 189–210. ———. 2016a. ‘The Making of Gurung Cultural Identifications in Sikkim’, in Tanka B. Subba and S. C. Sinha (eds), Nepali Diaspora in Globalised Era. New Delhi, London, New York: Routledge, 153–169. ———. 2016b. ‘Reification of Ethnicity in Sikkim: “Tribalism” in Progress’, in Saul Mullard (ed), The Dragon and the Hidden Land: Social and Historical Studies on Sikkim and Bhutan (Bhutan-Sikkim panel, 12th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Vancouver 2010), Special issue of the Bulletin of Tibetology, 45 (2)/46 (1), Namgyal Institute of Tibetology, Gangtok, 161–194. Wylie, Turrell. 1959. ‘A Standard System of Tibetan Transcription’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 22: 261–267. Xaxa, Virginius. 1999. ‘Tribes as Indigenous People of India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 18–24 December 34 (51): 3589–3595.

Part II

Politics of land and material resources

6 Hydro-dollar dreams Emergent local politics of large dams and small communities Mibi Ete*

In June 2005, the mood of environmental activists who had gathered in Nirjuli, a small town 20 km south of the capital of Arunachal Pradesh, was one of exasperation and agitation. A couple of years previously, the Central Electrical Authority (CEA) had brought out a ranked list of 162 priority projects to be taken up under the prime minister’s 50,000 MW Hydropower Initiative to boost hydropower production in the country by 2012. Memories of the heroic grassroots resistance against the Sardar Sarovar Project in Narmada valley1 were still fresh, when it seemed as if the Government of India had callously opened a new theatre of destructive development against marginalised tribal peoples and their vulnerable environments in Arunachal Pradesh where 42 of these projects were located (Central Electricity Authority 2003). In response to this emerging challenge, the Third South Asian Forum on Rivers and Peoples made the following declaration: We have gathered here at Nirjuli, to express our deepest concerns and strongest solidarity with the peoples of Arunachal Pradesh because of the unacceptably large numbers of hydroelectric dam projects that have been identified to be installed in this tiny ecologically fragile eastern Himalayan State and the rest of the North East region of India. Such a development option, imposed by the government of India upon the indigenous peoples of Arunachal Pradesh and their traditional lands will definitely spell total annihilation of their peaceful livelihoods, and irreversible destruction of all cultural and social fabrics, histories and traditions. (IRN 2005) This statement of the activists reflected the assumption that the tribal communities of Arunachal Pradesh would also read the proposed hydropower development as annihilation and destruction and therefore resist this

110  Mibi Ete as others had done before. In the decade that followed, local resistance movements against a few hydropower projects did emerge; a good indicator of their will was their success in thwarting the state government from conducting public hearings for these projects.2 However, the anticipated groundswell of state-wide resistance did not materialise. In fact, the handful of projects that faced resistance represent only a tiny exception among 150-plus projects which are under way.3 If one uses the same yardstick of the conduct of public hearings, more than 20 such hearings for large hydro-projects have been conducted successfully without contestation from the local communities. This is not to say that there have been no local contestations against the projects. However, as seen in the case of the 1,750 MW Demwe Lower Project in Lohit district which was subject to numerous local protests until the public hearing was allowed in 2009, these contestations appear to be used as a means of negotiation, and they tend to subside after concessions have been gained from the project company. However, this facet of the local politics of hydropower development in Arunachal Pradesh, which allows for negotiation or even cooperation, gets overlooked in popular discourse as well as academic debates. This chapter has two interrelated objectives – one, to explore the socio-political context in which the process of hydropower development has unfolded at the local level, and thereby to understand why some local communities do not resist hydropower projects, and two, to reflect more generally on how this emergent aspect of local politics tends to get ignored. It is based on qualitative data collected during fieldwork in 2012–2013 in the Sii valley in West Siang district of Arunachal Pradesh.

Dams, development and small communities In the last decade, the contentions in hydropower development in Northeast India have received attention both in popular discourse and in academic research. The resistance movements have been written about extensively in state, national as well as international media (Overdorf 2012; Mazoomdaar 2013a, 2013b; Mimi 2013; Pertin 2011, 2013). Besides the ‘traditional’ issues of land alienation (Menon 2008), and displacement and resettlement risks associated with large dams (Vagholikar & Das 2010), scholars have highlighted the emergent risk politics of large-scale intervention in an unpredictable ecosystem (Arora 2008; Baruah 2012a) and related human security concerns (Mahanta 2010). By and large, scholarship has focused on resistance struggles against hydropower projects in the states of Sikkim, Manipur and Assam (Arora 2007, 2008; Arora & Kipgen 2012; Chowdhury & Kipgen 2013; Huber & Joshi 2015).

Hydro-dollar dreams 111 The focus on resistance movements may be seen as a legacy of the last decades of the 20th century wherein the ‘scholarly love of resisting subjects’ has insistently portrayed people’s protests ‘against state or market led appropriation of traditional lands and resources’ (Karlsson 2016). This can be read as a logical outcome of the people’s movements that emerged in response to the destructive large dams and similar development interventions. In the second half of the 20th century, large dams in India were responsible for the direct displacement of millions of people (Fernandes 2004) many of whom belonged to marginal tribal communities, which in the absence of proper rehabilitation strategies led to their impoverishment and further marginalisation. This unprecedented scale of dam-induced displacement, along with social movements that arose to protest it, became the entry point for scholars to engage with the topic of dams-and-development (Kothari 1996; Cernea 1997; Dwivedi 1997, 1999; Judge 1997; World Commission on Dams 2000; Mohanty 2005). Two interlinked intellectual axioms emerged out of this. The first axiom, simply put, posited that large dams were inherently destructive for small marginal communities and the lands they inhabited. This position, along with similar analyses of other large-scale interventions, crystallised into the much wider critique of development itself, that is, post-development (Rahnema & Bawtree 1997; Sachs 1992). The second axiom, a corollary to the first position, posited that in fact these marginalised communities, as ‘ecosystem peoples’, held the alternative to the destructive dominant paradigm (see, for example, the sections on ‘The Vernacular World’ and ‘Towards the Post-development Age’ in Rahnema and Bawtree 1997). Both axioms – of adversarial relationship of marginal communities’ vis-àvis development interventions as well as marginal as alternative paradigm – have been contested. Dwivedi (1999) points out that local populations affected by large dam projects are heterogeneous and not everyone chooses to resist. While elaborating on the various reasons why people choose differently, he pointed out that in Narmada, the most marginal are expected to benefit by shifting out of the valley. Baviskar (1995), while providing a nuanced portrait of the Bhilalas amid a heroic struggle against the Narmada valley project, noted that they were not in possession of a special conservationist ethos and problematised the notion of the tribals as bastions of resistance against development. A similar case was made by Rangan (2004) through an exploration of the disjuncture between the valorising framing of the Chipko movement as an alternative to mainstream destructive development, which demonstrated that far from being the native guardians of nature as they came to be portrayed, the Chipko movement had initially demanded more development, not less.

112  Mibi Ete Even so, with the re-engagement of scholarship with hydropower development, the attention, as noted earlier, is overwhelmingly on resistance. Although there is a substantial body of literature on the complex and often ambivalent relationship of local communities with resource extraction, especially mining in the Pacific, that extends beyond resistance, similar studies in the context of large dams are only a few. Karlsson (2016) identifies the absence of resistance against the long-drawn out Mapithel Project, and while questioning the unhelpful resistance-versus-passivity dichotomy, posits endurance as an aspect of agency. Huber and Joshi (2015), on the other hand, explain the absence of consolidated resistance ‘despite the controversial experience with the first hydropower projects’ in Sikkim, as a result of the long-standing practice of political clientelism, whereby dissent is managed through the threat of withdrawal of access to valuable government resources such as jobs, contracts and development assistance. They also point to the ‘significant presence of pro-hydro actors within many affected communities’ who undermine community activism (Huber & Joshi 2015: 16). However, McDuie Ra’s (2011) account of the pro-development actors offers a much more sympathetic view of motivations of those who choose to support hydropower projects in their valley, based on a long-term experience of development. Similarly, Rest (2012), in his examination of the long-delayed Arun Project in Upper Nepal, takes cognizance of the ‘desire for development’ among the project-affected communities.

Shifting policy contexts Since the last large-dam epoch that culminated with the World Commission on Dams process in the late 1990s, the arena of large dams in India has undergone many changes that have influenced the local perceptions and politics. First, there has been a sharp technological and geographic shift from multipurpose projects to single-purpose hydropower projects, and from the low-gradient central Indian valleys to the Himalayas. While this throws up new environmental concerns and risks such as land destabilisation due to tunnelling, and fragmented riverine systems due to channelling of rivers into long stretches of tunnels, the better-known social impacts such as displacement and submergence have been reduced, thus transcending the heretofore well-understood socio-environmental costs. Second, the policy regime circumscribing large dam development in India has also evolved. For one, the hydropower policy of Arunachal Pradesh explicitly appended socio-economic development goals such as ‘to create job opportunities for local tribal people especially project affected people’ onto hydropower development. Further, it stipulated the creation of local area development fund for affected areas, and preferential employment for

Hydro-dollar dreams 113 project-affected eligible candidates and local contractors, creating the hope that the affected people would benefit directly from the presence of a project in their region. Besides the hydropower policy, a National Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy 2007 was framed in a belated acknowledgement of the negative social impacts of displacement due to large infrastructure projects, and the imperative to mitigate these impacts.4 In 2008, the Government of Arunachal Pradesh developed a state-level policy based on it, and amended it with alacrity when affected populations criticised the suggested measures as inadequate.5 Cumulatively, these shifts have altered both the context and the calculus of costs and benefits. At the same time, there have been long-term changes in the socioeconomic contexts of the affected communities that have shifted the grounds for the hydropower politics to play out. These changes will be discussed in the next section.

Development and its absence at the margins The Ramos, one of the many small tribes that make up the population of Arunachal Pradesh, are considered indigenous to the Sii valley in Menchukha subdivision of West Siang district.6 The Sii valley, not more than 12 km in length from Gapo to Karte, is segmented by 11 Ramo settlements clinging onto the steep and thickly forested mountains that are their customary lands. These lands are at a distance of a day’s travel from the district headquarters of Aalo, and yet another day from the state capital. Until the 2000s, the distance was even farther due to absence of roads. The Ramos live quite close to the geographical margins and, with a negligible population relative to the state’s demography, are marginal to the politics too. Six large hydropower projects were designated in the Ramo territory through government Memorandums of Agreement (MoAs) in 2007. In 2013, the public hearings for these four projects were allowed to be conducted smoothly, with conditional endorsements from the ‘public leaders’ as well as broad-based community-based organisations created specially to negotiate with the company on matters of hydropower.7 Not only that, long before the public hearings were proposed, the community leaders had negotiated an agreement with the companies. In fact, the permission to conduct the public hearings was made conditional to the signing of the agreement between the companies and the community members. While the advent of hydropower development in the valley triggered conflicts, these were related to the distribution of opportunities and resources, rather than against the projects per se. The pro-project attitude in the Sii valley can be best understood vis-àvis their perceptions of development and their diagnosis of their current

114  Mibi Ete economic and political status. This in turn is an outcome of six decades of state-led development in the valley. The lone ethnographic account of the Ramos provided by Dhasmana (1979) provides an insight into the context in which state-led development unfolded in the valley. At the time of the arrival of NEFA administration in 1953, the Ramos of Sii valley had lived there for at least eight generations.8 Their subsistence economy comprised swidden agriculture of maize and millet, the staple crops, supplemented with hunting. According to Dhasmana, agriculture ‘keeps them busy throughout the year, though it is never paid back in terms of the effort put in it’ (1979: 159). Still, the harsh agro-ecology was made to yield enough for subsistence with extra labour provided by slaves.9 Besides agriculture, the Ramos conducted barter trade with the Membas: the Ramos traded forest produce such as madder (a vegetable dye), and fur and grains, and some dairy products for luxury goods such as Tibetan wool fabrics, metal equipment as well as vessels and ornaments. These luxury goods were further traded southwards with other neighbouring tribes. They practised strict tribe exogamy, and had marriage relations mainly with two other neighbouring tribes – the Bokars of the Yomi valley and the Libos who inhabited the area below the confluence of Sii and Yomi.10 With Tagins of Subansiri, the Ramos participated occasionally in martial alliances as well as slave trade. In 1953, a contingent of Kotokis, political interpreters who were the footsoldiers of the incipient Indian administration in NEFA recruited from the southern tribes, made the first foray into the valley on behalf of the Government of India.11 The brief but sincere resistance offered by Lipo Kotin, the last important Gembo of the Ramos, capitulated quickly in face of the superior weaponry of the visitors.12 This visit marked the start of the intended and unintended development processes of the Ramos and their integration into the modern Indian polity and economy (Cowen & Shenton 1996). At first, development initiatives moved slowly due to lack of accessibility:13 the Ramo area lay at least a week’s foot march across difficult terrain from Aalo, the district headquarters. A school was established in Menchukha, and ‘free food, free books and free lodging are provided’ (Dhasmana 1979: 267) to encourage attendance of young children. GaonBurahs (village headmen), and later Kotokis, were appointed from among the Ramos. Meant to be the grassroots agents of the NEFA administration, they wielded considerable judicial and administrative influence, and eventually superseded the Gembo in importance.14 After the Chinese aggression in 1962, development efforts were redoubled. Feeder primary schools were established in Rapum in 1966 and Rego in 1987, two of the biggest villages. The young educated in turn started

Hydro-dollar dreams 115 moving out of the villages and seeking salaried employment. Due to their proximity to the border, the Armed Border Force was a ready employer. Others joined the state police department. A few gravitated towards the urban centres of Tato and Menchukha to become entrepreneurs. In 1969, the Panchayati Raj bodies were introduced, and quickly taken over by the educated youth. As the Anchal Samiti became the conduit of government development schemes, the Panchayat leaders quickly overtook the Gaon Burah and Kotokis in influence. Soon after, the Panchayati institutions were in turn rendered less important by the introduction of the electoral political system. At the same time, the government attempted to introduce wet rice cultivation and non-native horticultural crops such as apples and citrus fruits. A block development office of the national extension scheme, an instrument of rural development, was established in Menchukha, and villagelevel workers were dispatched to the Ramo villages. However, these efforts could not succeed against agro-ecology. The efforts made by ‘villagers of Gapo Inko and Rapum to convert their terraces into permanent wet rice cultivations’ (Dhasmana 1979: 163) were abandoned soon after. Two other events following 1962 impacted the Ramo economic life: the closure of the border with China, and the abolition of slavery. Due to border closure, trade with the Tibetans shut down. The area of Ramos went from being a link in the international trade route to a cul-de-sac, stranded between Aalo, the district headquarters, and Menchukha, the sub-divisional headquarters. At the same time, money was beginning to replace the barter economy. Second, abolition of slavery decimated the pool of labour needed to make the tough agro-ecology productive. On the one hand, the labour arrangements necessary to support agriculture in the valley were disrupted by abolition of slavery; on the other, the food system was slowly altered through the provision of subsidised rice. By the mid-1970s, fair price shops, an instrument of food security, had been introduced in the region. The incredibly cheap availability of rice was intended to improve food security, but it also ended up alienating the communities from their traditional staples of corn and millet. This was in part responsible for the eventual abandonment of swidden farming. Six decades of development starting from the 1950s caused profound changes in the Ramo ways of life. Old villages have disappeared, new ones have come into existence and yet others have moved from their old location to be closer to the road when it was laid out in the 1990s. There have been demographic changes too. The 2011 Census says that the valley between Karte and Gapo is home to 565 souls of the Ramo tribe. More Ramos live outside of the villages today than within. Those who secured government employment live in their places of posting. Others moved

116  Mibi Ete either to Tato, the circle headquarters located in the Libo area, or further down to Aalo, the district headquarters in search of livelihoods and better quality of life. In the past ten years, with the completion of the road, Menchukha has also become a migration destination. Many who remain in the villages today wish to leave. Today, the Ramo village life is deeply enmeshed in the market. Almost every basic necessity is purchased from the market, including food. As the state government has been unable to provide quality education and health services, children’s education and health care costs are two major expenses. With the hope to give the best possible education to their children, parents try their utmost to enrol them in missionary-run or private schools in Tato, Kaying, Menchukha or Aalo. Illness can be a huge financial drain. Anything more severe than common cold requires a trip to Aalo, 182 km away, where the government-run district hospital is better-equipped than the nearest health centre in Menchukha. Costs of transport and accommodation in Aalo quickly add up on top of the medical expenses. Very often, the quest for treatment does not end here, and the patient must be taken down further to Itanagar, or if the condition is severe, as far as Delhi or Tamil Nadu. More importantly, people do not just want a subsistenceoriented life – they aspire for a lifestyle that is available to their counterparts in the urban areas, replete with access to electricity, modern entertainment beamed through satellite and gadgets that play the latest Bollywood music that can be downloaded from the Internet shops in Menchukha or Aalo. However, income opportunities have not kept up with expense obligations. In the past ten years, the governmental Border Roads Organisation has become the biggest employer in the region. Almost every household in the Ramo villages has at least one member employed with the organisation. Six days a week, they work at road maintenance or on hard-topping the road. The work is hard, and the income is low at around Rs 7,000 per month, but it is assured and steady. Many have recently taken up a new practice of weekend-commuting: they stay in rented accommodation in Menchukha during the weekdays in order to be close to their work areas, and are trucked back to the villages on Saturday evening, to be picked up again on Monday morning. The younger people who went to school and university would prefer to have government jobs and join the urban middle class. But as the pool of available government jobs shrinks, political patronage and/or purchasing power have become crucial for securing jobs,15 and are often cornered by the elite groups in Itanagar (Harriss-White et al. 2009). Many young Ramos thus find themselves edged out of many possible opportunities. Unable to find a foothold in the towns, these young men (mostly) reluctantly return to the village. Here they try to secure livelihoods as

Hydro-dollar dreams 117 petty contractors in government schemes such as construction of office buildings or village roads. This too requires political patronage – contracts may be received only as a reward for delivering a vote bank during the elections. Democratic politics thus gets intertwined with the local economy.16 However, here too, the competition in the state capital for government funds and schemes is intense, and it becomes hard for the average MLA to get resources directed to his constituency. There was a popular consensus that the previous MLA, although well liked and respected, had been useless at hustling up government schemes for his constituency and supporters. All this has led to a self-perception among the Ramos of marginality, powerlessness and backwardness vis-à-vis other tribes of the district and state. This self-perception has been reinforced by their experiences in places of power such as Aalo, the district headquarters, or Itanagar, the state capital, where many Ramos have spent some time either for health care or for their own education or the education of their children or for job-hunting. For instance, in Aalo, members of the Galo tribe, a numerically populous and dominant group, tend to be disrespectful and dismissive of the smaller groups. The Ramos were lumped together with the other tribes of this area as ‘Bori-Bokar’, the term itself used pejoratively. This sense of marginality and backwardness was evident in the proceedings of the third general meeting of the Boh Ramo Bokar (Adi) Elite Society that was held in Monigong in November 2012. Speaker after speaker lamented the fact that the three tribes together had produced only a handful of high-ranking government officials, a sure sign of lack of development, and said that the lack of livelihood opportunities only perpetuated this underdevelopment. A speaker complained of injustices such as cancellation of land allotments in the urban areas of Menchukha and Aalo, because they lacked power. The Ramos see themselves caught in a situation of increased basic needs on the one hand, and shrinking opportunities on the other. They look at their surroundings and notice the absence of amenities and infrastructure associated with development. Due to their geographical marginality, as well as their lack of political power, the Ramos perceive themselves to be doubly marginalised. These perceptions of absence of development and their own marginality relative to other tribes/groups reinforce one another.

Enter hydropower In 2007, five proposed projects in the Sii valley were granted to private power developers. Of these, I focused on a three-project cascade to be developed by Velcan Energy. The MoAs for the Pauk-Heo-Tato-I cascade

118  Mibi Ete series were signed by the Government of Arunachal Pradesh with Velcan Energy, a French company founded in 2005.17 The MoAs were signed in such secrecy that it is believed that the MLA of Menchukha at that time, a Bokar from Manigong area, was not aware of the development. As per the MoA, the company will develop the project on a Build-OwnOperate-Transfer basis, and run it for 40 years. The project in entirety is a cascade of three run-of-river schemes – Pauk, Heo and Tato-I, with a cumulative capacity of 570 MW. Pauk, situated at the highest point upstream, is the ‘master’ plant with a 105 m high dam, and has a submergence of 25.3 Hectare (Ha) of surface land. It is designed to store water for diurnal usage for all three projects. The other two projects in the cascade do not store any water themselves, but depend on the tailrace discharge of Pauk to run their generators. Further, the electricity is produced by making use of the natural gradient difference of the area and channelling the water through a penstock inside the mountain, between the intake and exit. Thus, with these particular projects, the issue of displacement due to submergence is minimised to a great degree. In fact, in case of these projects, the amount of land required for other project components is much higher than that under submergence. Pauk, Heo and Tato-I require 91.7 Ha, 55.7 Ha and 52.8 Ha, respectively. No village will be directly submerged. Only Purying village will have to be resettled due to location of project ancillary components. The land requirement of the three projects covers almost the entire Sii valley. When the survey and investigation works of the projects started in earnest, the company set up its field office and guesthouse in Tato, the circle headquarters of Tato circle, which was at the tail end of the third project in the Velcan cascade. In Tato, the company officials made early acquaintance with one of the families who were the owners of some land where the lowest project was to be set up. The family was quite influential in the area, as the patriarch was a long-standing politician. The immediate family including children and nephews ended up profiting significantly from the arrival of the company, to the tune of Rs 2,67,000 per month in the form of direct ‘welfare’ employment and lease of real estate and vehicles.18 Because of this, the company was soon perceived to be acting in tandem with one particular family there. As the Ramos became aware of the windfall being received by one single family, that too from another tribe which had a minor stake in the cascade project of Velcan, they grew resentful. While the last project, Tato-I, also affects some Libo lands, the larger percentage of affected land belongs to the Ramos. For the Ramos, it was also a matter of proportionality. They demanded that the company office be shifted from Tato to the Ramo areas, and to Menchukha, and that more employment be given to people from the Ramo tribe.

Hydro-dollar dreams 119 In this phase, hydrological data needed to be collected and geological investigations had to be conducted. This led to the creation of a number of jobs for local people where previously there had been none. In addition, in the absence of road access to places where drilling and drifting for geological data had to be conducted, the company had to depend on the local villagers for making access paths, and for shifting heavy drilling machinery to the sites. As the expat managers ‘tended to think in Euros’ and were willing to spend money as long as the job was done,19 these contract opportunities turned out to be lucrative for the community members. Soon, disagreements arose over who should have access to these contract and employment opportunities. Once the issue of compensation for land acquisition under the Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy was thrown into the mix, the contestations over land ownership gained greater potency. According to the Land Revenue and Settlement Officer of West Siang district, who led the cadastral survey of the project-affected properties, more than 70 per cent of the land required by the project had disputed ownership issues. In addition, there were instances where community members resorted to pressurising the company to rearrange the layout of the project facilities to have some of their land included in the affected zone in order to be eligible for compensation.20 Further, the nomenclature of the projects became another major issue because it signalled who could make claims on the company. For instance, the components of the Pauk project were on the lands of the Rapum, Rego, Chengrung and Purying territories, nowhere close to Pauk. For this reason, the other villagers resented the attempts of descendants of Pauk for making claims for employment and contracts, and wanted the name of the project to clearly reflect its location, in order to legitimise their own claims. The purpose of the previous discussion is to illustrate that while the proposed hydropower projects gave rise to contestations at the local level, they were over the distribution of the resources, and not against the project per se as I had initially been led to understand by a state-level politician from the region. Rather, there was a broad consensus that ‘if anything has to happen in this area, it can only be through the private companies. The government has had its chance and it failed’.21 Not everybody sees the flood of opportunities in a positive light. Following a cousin-fratricide in Tagur, a Libo village downstream, over land ownership conflicts, some Ramos articulated unease over the growing conflicts over land ownership in the Ramo area too. They said that coexistence was being endangered and perhaps it would be better if the company left – after all, it was better to live in harmonious poverty than in contentious affluence. But this voice was certainly a minority. By 2010–2011, the number of conflicts over land ownership had multiplied to a degree that the survey and investigation works of Velcan was

120  Mibi Ete paralysed. In February 2012, a new general manager with previous experience in Arunachali hydropower sector initiated an all-community meeting with the Ramos and began a process of resolution. Soon after, an all-clan group called Ramo Land Owners’ Committee was formed with representatives from all land-owning clans. In July 2012, a 14-point memorandum was submitted by the committee to the Velcan management. This included demands for assurance of employment and contract opportunities in the future, as well as other benefit-sharing mechanisms. The company was then allowed to resume its survey and investigation work. In 2013, the company signed a ‘Benefits Policy’ with the Ramos. Finally, in November 2013, the communities consented to allowing the public hearings for the Velcan projects in the valley. At the public hearings, more social welfare demands such as implementation of drinking water facilities and a community health centre were raised.

Discussion: viewing hydropower development from the margins Before the arrival of hydropower projects in the Sii valley, the fear of the activists of ‘the total annihilation of their peaceful livelihoods, and irreversible destruction of all cultural and social fabrics, histories and traditions’ quoted in the beginning of the chapter had already come to pass. The failed development projects of the 20th century had imbued in the communities a sense of underdevelopment. The Ramos had already had the experience of being politically marginalised, and thus were unable to access the limited state resources that were cornered by the so-called elite tribes. Their desire for development was only reinforced by a sense of relative deprivation. In this scenario, the arrival of the hydropower companies with their seemingly unlimited resources came to be seen as an alternative to the government with which their desire for development could be fulfilled. Many community members have some awareness of the environmental impacts and the risks posed by the project, at least those mentioned in the Environmental Impact Assessment Report. To a large extent, due to the nature of the run-of-river technology as well as due to the topography of the location of the projects, the concern of displacement has been minimised; however, other concerns such as land destabilisation remain. The impacts of the project itself are viewed with ambivalence by the villagers themselves. As one individual said, ‘There is a risk in everything. But we have to take this risk (of hydropower projects) right now’. The formulation of the State Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy (2008) contributed in no small measure to weigh the scale towards benefits against costs for the community.

Hydro-dollar dreams 121 Claims of indigeneity and land ownership gave the community members leverage to negotiate access to company resources in exchange for access to their land. Cooperation is conditional. The threat of conflict and suspension of cooperation, especially since the administration is physically not at hand to ensure order, hangs over every negotiation between the company and community members. Underlying this is the need of the community members to be recognised by the company as sovereign owners of the land that it needs to set up its facility. In the context of the Sikkimese hydropower scenario, Huber and Joshi note the easy acceptance by communities of the Sikkimese government’s decision to offload ‘the logistical and financial challenge of servicing more remote areas of the state into a corporate social responsibility’ which are in fact ‘public entitlements, which accrue to local communities with or without a hydropower project’ (2015: 19). In contrast to their findings, my research showed that rather than acquiescence to the state-capital ambitions, the local communities were actively seeking participation in the hydropower development process. While Huber and Joshi suggest that the acquiescence could be due to ‘long-standing clientelism, where rural development provision is presented as ruling party largesse and only a few citizens question how welfare is provided and by whom’ (ibid.), the experience of the Ramos shows that it is rather the failure of clientelism to deliver on its promises that moved them to urge the private companies to take on the task of welfare service provision which the government had failed to deliver.

Conclusion The findings described earlier are by no means the last word in hydropower politics. Conflict and cooperation are characteristic of ongoing processes rather than being outcomes in themselves. The success or failure of hydropower will depend on whether local communities will continue to be recognised as stakeholders once the projects receive the necessary clearances and the construction phase starts. So, has the story of large dams turned a corner? Perhaps, but it is far from over yet. Indeed, the intrinsic socio-economic changes among some communities, and wider contextual shifts such as policy changes, have helped reshape large dams as a pot of gold for the affected communities in the immediate proximity of projects. However, many others, downstream communities in particular, who bear the risks without the gains, have not been acknowledged as project-affected (Baruah 2012b). Whether or not they are acknowledged will have a bearing on the outcomes of hydropower development. Moreover, emerging environmental concerns such as minimum ecological flows and river deaths, and even the feasibility of hydropower in

122  Mibi Ete climate change regime, are not being addressed either by the power developers or by the governmental regulatory authorities. Although the purpose of this chapter was not to celebrate large dams as socially benign, it tries to bring a nuanced understanding to the singular portrayal of the local community responses to hydropower development. It challenges the strong strand of valorisation of resistance movements in the current literature being produced on large hydropower. Certainly, speaking truth to power requires moral courage which definitely must be celebrated and amplified. Moreover, there are indeed valid concerns that many more communities who will be affected by the project, especially the downstream communities, remain unacknowledged as vulnerable to risk. However, at the same time, affected marginal communities who seek to leverage their indigeneity claims to access valuable resources should not be dismissed as ‘anti-political’. Their strategic use of contestation in order to get a place at the table alongside the state and private capital is very much political. Their agency and the context in which they choose particular courses of action have to be acknowledged. Finally, my research shows that examining the minutiae of the local politics early on in the hydropower development affords us a different view of hydropower politics that shows the ambivalence and negotiation, than one gained towards the end when the positions have hardened. Besides, looking at large hydropower dams as extractives can also give us a new frame for looking at social phenomena at the local level which may not necessarily come within the rubric of environmental movements.22

Notes * This chapter is based on graduate research that was supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) through a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) scholarship. 1 The grassroots resistance against the Narmada valley projects, fronted by the Narmada Bachao Andolan, was instrumental in forcing the international development community to take note of the social and environmental costs of so-called development projects. In what came to be seen as one of the biggest victories for the transnational coalition against large dams, the World Bank was forced to withdraw funding for the Sardar Sarovar Project, and to institute the Inspection Panel. 2 Public hearings are crucial for obtaining environmental clearance of a project; without it a project cannot receive the clearance for construction. Knowing this, communities make all efforts to prevent hearings either by identifying procedural loopholes or, in some cases, by physically blocking access to the designated venue.   As of 2015, only the 2,700 MW Lower Siang Project continues to face consistent opposition from local activists. Although popular protests against

Hydro-dollar dreams 123 the 3,000 MW Dibang Project led to the cancellation of public hearings a record number of ten times, the hearing was finally allowed to take place in March 2013. The local opposition to the 780 MW Nyamjangchu Project emerged much after the conduct of the public hearing. Some observers critical of the movement suggest that the resistance emerged as part of political struggle after the death of an important political leader of the area, who was also a proponent of hydropower development in the state. 3 This number far exceeds the initial 42 projects proposed by CEA. Many of these were what came to be known as ‘self-identified projects’ – projects not ranked by CEA, but designed by enterprising companies themselves with the encouragement of the state government. As per the government of Arunachal Pradesh policy, projects with installed capacity more than 25 MW are called large projects. Thus, based on this definition, two-thirds of all projects are technically large projects. 4 This policy was updated in 2013 as Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013. 5 Take, for instance, Clause 7.2.1 on compensation that stated in the 2008 version, ‘The minimum price for one hectare of land is fixed at Rs. 1.75 lakh for whole of Arunachal Pradesh as on 01.04.2008’ (1 lakh = 100,000), which was amended to ‘The minimum price for land shall be fixed by the respective Deputy Commissioner of District and which shall not be in any case less than Rs. 1.75 lakh for barren/uncultivable steep slope land for whole Arunachal Pradesh as on 01.04.2008. In case of irrigated land this compensation award will be suitably enhanced by the State Government’ (Land Management Department, Government of Arunachal Pradesh 2008, emphasis mine). 6 The name Ramo is said to refer to the group who derive their descent from an ancestor called Ramgo. By that token, some Ramo villages exist in the Bokar area along the Siyom valley. Similarly, there are two Ramo villages ensconced in the Menchukha valley among Memba villages. However, since I was examining the community responses to hydropower, and as the community itself limited its mobilisation within this valley, I limited my research to the Ramos of the Sii valley. 7 ‘Public leader’ is an emic term used to identify individuals in the community who take it upon themselves to be its representatives. It seems to be a carryover from the early days of the Indian government’s community development projects where some village members were designated as ‘leaders’. Today very often, these are people who have political ambitions. 8 The descendants of Ramgo in the Sii valley are mainly the descendants of Yorko, who are said to have migrated while on a hunt. There is a sizeable proportion of other small groups such as ex-slaves, Tagins who migrated from Subansiri valley, as well as a few Padu people, who were the previous residents of the valley. The administration designates all as Ramos, and does not distinguish descent. However, in the valley, descent is an important criterion of identity. 9 Slave labour was such an economic necessity that raids were conducted in the Tagin area for slave acquisition. In addition, the Tagins themselves gifted fellow-tribesmen to the Ramos in exchange for their assistance in intra-tribal conflicts. For more details, see Dhasmana 1979: 185–190.

124  Mibi Ete 10 Today, they are known together as the Adis of Menchukha, to distinguish them from the Buddhist Membas, the other important tribe of Menchukha. The boundaries of tribe and group are being renegotiated today. Community-based organisations such as the Adi Baane Kebang or the Supreme Council of Adis are attempting to draw small tribes into onefold as Adis. However, in daily conversations, the Ramos still tend to selfidentify as Ramos or Adi-Ramos, and not Adis. In this chapter, I fall in line with this consensus on self-identification. 11 Until this point, the tribe members lived outside of the dominion of nationstates. The villages had existed as a loose confederation led by charismatic/ powerful individuals known as Gembos. Though a Tibetan governor of Menchukha/Pachaksiri attempted to impose taxation over the Ramo villagers, this was thwarted by a successful assassination carried out by the Ramos in collaboration with the neighbouring Libos. 12 Gembo is a title akin to a ‘big man’: not a direct equivalent of a chief, but more of a charismatic orator and military leader. 13 The earliest efforts remembered by the Ramos are of social welfare measures such as the distribution of soaps and garments. Old-timers humorously recall being given an unidentified cube of something which did not taste appetising at all, and so was promptly tossed away. The cube turned out to be soap. 14 In the early days, the independent-minded Ramos suspected the government of trying to enslave them through these new-fangled positions. So, instead of the ‘big men’ volunteering for these positions, they nominated their slaves to these positions. With the passage of a few years, once they grasped the prestige and power of being part of the ‘Sorkali’, the government, they became more eager to accept the ‘lal kot’, a red woollen coat gifted by the government to Gaon Burahs, which came to signify authority. 15 In the monsoon months of 2012, a rumour swept through Menchukha that the private brokers in Aalo were accepting money on behalf of the officials responsible for the job allotment in the police department. This led to much chatter for a few weeks regarding how to raise money to pay the cost, and whether a police constable’s lowly job was worth so much money anyway. 16 For an engaging elucidation of the shadow economy in case of Jharkhand, see Alpa Shah’s In the Shadows of the State (2010). 17 Incidentally, Velcan Energy is an international independent power producer, and the only international company in the Arunachali hydropower sector. 18 Letter to the government from Velcan Energy, 2011. 19 Interview, anon. 2012. 20 Letter from anon. to Company, March 2012. 21 Conversation with a community leader, anon. 2012. 22 Extractive industry conventionally refers to sectors such as hydrocarbons, mining that involve removing raw materials from the lithosphere which is then transported elsewhere to be processed and added to the value chain as fuel or primary commodity. A similar logic of extraction can be discerned in the hydropower development scheme of the Himalayas, wherein electricity derived from water will be taken away from the point of production for consumption in other regions of the country.

Hydro-dollar dreams 125

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126  Mibi Ete Huber, T. 2011. ‘Pushing South: Tibetan Economic and Political Activities in the Far Eastern Himalaya, ca. 1900–1950’, in A. McKay and A. BalickiDenjongpa (eds), Buddhist Himalaya: Studies in Religion, History and Culture. Proceedings of the Golden Jubilee Conference of the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology, 2008. Gangtok: Namgyal Institute of Tibetology, 259–276. International Rivers Network (IRN). 2005. ‘Third South Asian Forum on Rivers, Wetlands and Peoples, South Asian Solidarity for Rivers and Peoples, Nirjuli, 13–16 June’, https://web.archive.org/web/20060629232101/ http://irn.org/programs/india/index.php?id=050705solidarity.html [Accessed on August 31, 2016]. Judge, Paramjit S. 1997. ‘Response to Dams and Displacement in Two Indian States’, Asian Survey, 37 (9): 840–851. Karlsson, B. G. 2016. ‘Into the Grid: Hydropower and Subaltern Politics in Northeast India’, in U. Chandra and D. Taghioff (eds), Staking Claims: The Politics of Social Movements in Contemporary Rural India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kothari, S. 1996. ‘Whose Nation? The Displaced as Victims of Development’, Economic and Political Weekly, 31 (24): 1476–1485. Mahanta, Chandan. 2010. ‘India’s North East and Hydropower Development: Future Security Challenges’, South Asian Survey, 17 (1): 131–146. Mazoomdaar, J. 2013a. ‘Another Disaster in the Making’, Tehelka, 10 (28): 1–10. www.tehelka.com/another-disaster-in-the-making/ [Accessed on July 8, 2013]. ———. 2013b. ‘Losing the Best Cropland to Dams’, Tehelka, 10 (23): 3–7. www.tehelka.com/losing-the-best-cropland-to-dams/ [Accessed on July 4, 2013]. McDuie-Ra, Duncan. 2011. ‘The Dilemmas of Pro-Development Actors: Viewing State-Ethnic Minority Relations and Intra-Ethnic Dynamics through Contentious Development Projects’, Asian Ethnicity, 12 (1): 77–100. Menon, M. 2008. ‘Land Alienation due to Large Hydro-Power Projects in Arunachal Pradesh’, in W. Fernandes and S. Barbora (eds), Land, People and Politics : Contest over Tribal Land in Northeast India. Guwahati: North Eastern Social Research Centre, 128–141. Mimi, R. 2013. ‘The Dibang Multipurpose Project: Resistance of the Idu Mishmi’, in P. J. Das et al. (eds), Water Conflicts in Northeast India: A Compendium of Case Studies: A Compendium of Case Studies. Pune: Forum for Policy Dialogue on Water Conflicts in India, 111–120. Mohanty, B. 2005. ‘Displacement and Rehabilitation of Tribals’, Economic and Political Weekly, 40 (13): 1318–1320. Overdorf, J. 2012. ‘GreenTalk: Activists to Protest Public Hearing for Dam on Arunachal’s Lower Siang River’, Global Post. www.globalpost.com/ dispatches/globalpost-blogs/india/public-hearing-dam-arunachal-siang [Accessed on January 13, 2016]. Pertin, A. 2011. ‘Hydropower from Siang – A Cost to Pay?’ Echo of Arunachal. www.echoofarunachal.com/?p=4027 [Accessed on June 20, 2014].

Hydro-dollar dreams 127 ———. 2013. ‘The Lower Siang Hydropower Project: A Peaceful Valley Erupts’, in P. J. Das et al. (eds), Water Conflicts in Northeast India: A Compendium of Case Studies. Pune: Forum for Policy Dialogue on Water Conflicts in India, 134–138. Rahnema, M. and V. Bawtree. (eds). 1997. The Post-Development Reader. London: Zed Books. Rangan, H. 2004. ‘From Chipko to Uttaranchal: The Environment of Protest and Development in the Indian Himalaya’, in Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements. London: Routledge. 371–393. Rest, Matthaus. 2012. ‘Generating Power : Debates on Development around the Nepalese Arun-3 Hydropower Project’, Contemporary South Asia, 20 (1): 105–117. Sachs, W. (ed) 1992. The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London, New York: Zed Books. Shah, Alpa. 2010. In the Shadows of the State : Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism, and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India. Durham; London: Duke University Press. Sinclair, A. J. and A. P. Diduck. 2000. ‘Public Involvement in Environmental Impact Assessment: A Case Study of Hydro Development in Kullu District, Himachal Pradesh, India’, Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal, 18(1): 63–75. Vagholikar, N. and P. J. Das. 2010. Damming Northeast India. Pune; Guwahati; New Delhi: Kalpavriksh, Aaranyak and ActionAid India. World Commission on Dams. 2000. Dams and Development: A New Framework for Decision-Making. London: Earthscan.

7 Violence, agrarian change and the politics of autonomy in Assam Sanjay (Xonzoi) Barbora

Journeys into silence On 16 February 2013, two senior journalists and I were driven from Assam’s capital city, Guwahati, to the headquarters of the Bodoland Territorial Area District (BTAD), Kokrajhar, to speak at a function organised by the National Institute of Bodology the following day. It was also a day when the Joint Action Committee for Bodoland Movement had called for a 100-hour bandh (civil strike) to press the Government of India to show more urgency in creating a separate state of Bodoland. Coincidentally, the All Assam Tribal Students Organisation and the All Assam Students Union (AASU) endorsed a strike call by Rabha organisations protesting against non-Rabha voters – mainly Bengali-speaking Muslims – being allowed to vote for local government elections in their autonomous council area. The journey from Guwahati to Kokrajhar, therefore, was an eerie one, with our jeep being the only vehicle on a highway that otherwise bustled with traffic. Fearing that we would be stopped by one of the many student organisations that had called for a strike, the organisers of the conference requested a young activist of the All Bodo Students Union (ABSU) to accompany us. He put up an ABSU flag in front of the jeep and our vehicle drove along the recently renovated highway, past tarpaulin sheet shelters of persons displaced by conflict and vast expanses of dry winter fields. Almost all the displaced, and those calling for civil strikes, lived in an area that each claimed as their own. Bengali, Assamese and other groups within the caste-Hindu and Muslim fold vociferously challenged demands for autonomous territories and councils by indigenous communities like the Bodo and Rabha. Political representatives of various groups invoked the past and warned of dire consequences for the future, if the present state of affairs was left to fester for long. In Kokrajhar, the strike had almost led to the cancellation of the conference that had been organised to initiate a dialogue between Bodo and Muslim intellectuals, where the senior journalists and I were supposed to

Violence and agrarian change 129 be observers.1 Though the meeting was free of rancour and conducted in the spirit of reconciliation, it was difficult to miss the weight of the conflict that the people had been subjected to in the summer of 2012. Every conversation that involved groups of three or more was hesitant and restrained. When the Bodo people left the room, some of the others – Assamese, Bengali, Nepali and whichever ethnicity that shared the contentious space – would quickly allude to the hardships that they were likely to face in the event of the Bodo demands for statehood becoming a possibility. Likewise, when non-Bodos left the room, the Bodos present would quickly bring up the justness of their demands for a state that would at least protect their rights and resources, which, given the demographic changes in Assam, were likely to be eroded further under the present dispensation of ambivalence and prevarication. Both positions were borne out of real-lived experiences and grievances. The fears emerged as the foundations of a precarious political condition that did not allow for meaningful conversations about how people would organise their lives and those of their children. For the briefest moment, conversations would show some spark of anger and frustration. Then, as the absent member returned to join the group, the discussion would slip back, just as quickly, to a tenor of resignation and indifference. The aggregation of half-completed stories could be read as political metaphor for social commentaries about violence in Assam. Ever since the late 1970s, questions of belonging, claims to land, resources and political demands have been part of an incendiary amalgam that has resulted in thousands of deaths and many more displaced in the state. In 2012 alone, more than 300,000 persons were displaced from their homes due to ethnic violence in western Assam’s BTAD. Over the last decade, the autonomous territorial councils of Assam have witnessed largescale violence between different ethnic groups, following contests over land and resources. Although there is a tendency to see ethnic differences and quest for political representation as the triggers of violent confrontation, this chapter argues that there is more to the recurring violence in Assam. Ethnic differences are not causes, but emerge as contested identities in the course of the conflict. In the following sections, I focus on the changing agrarian relations in Assam (in districts that are part of ethnic autonomous territories, as well as those outside such arrangements), to understand how different communities are forced into competitive politics. Each of these issues, belonging, land and politics, is in turn steeped in an epistemic closure that further adds to causes for conflict between different ethnic groups (Vandekerkchove 2009). These issues have their roots in the colonial moment of contact between a predominantly European administration and local communities. The pre-colonial landmass of Assam was an interesting ecological landscape of paddy fields, forests, marshes

130  Sanjay (Xonzoi) Barbora and highlands. My intention here is not to go over the merits of colonial descriptions of the region. I endorse the robust critiques of colonial ethnography (that often doubles as historical truth) that have emerged from political anthropology and other branches of social sciences, mainly in the African context, but increasingly in the Northeast as well (Baruah 2005; Comaroff & Comaroff 2003; Mamdani 2009; Yengkhom 2015). These critiques are very useful in framing the contemporary milieu in western Assam, where political processes have had to deal with the intellectual paucity of critical thinking around issues of past, identity and knowledge production about peoples’ histories in the region. This is in no way meant to reduce the impact of the colonial encounter. The landscape, economy and society changed dramatically, as cash crops like jute and tea, as well as minerals like oil and coal, were grown or extracted in abundance from the area in the 19th century and continue to have an impact on politics and society today (Saikia 2014). This transformation also entailed a radical change in the demography of the region, as peasants and indentured workers from different parts of British controlled areas of the Indian subcontinent were brought to Assam. It is through this 19thcentury encounter that the political, social and economic structures of region were to be transformed radically (Baruah 1999). However, it is the selective reading of history in post-colonial policy-making for the region that has contributed to the persistence of conflicts over the past four decades (Fernandes & Barbora 2009). Such a reading of history and its frequent appearance as tragic fait accompli in contemporary politics is responsible for the silence that surrounds causes of conflicts in western Assam. There are other social determinants of conflict, such as overall impoverishment of the peasantry in the Brahmaputra valley, ill-conceived civil engineering projects (that) have caused large-scale flooding and erosion in the valley, ethnic autonomy arrangements (that) do not go far enough in either (a) allowing for indigenous communities to exercise substantive control over resources and wealth-producing capacities of their territory, or (b) assuaging the fears of non-Bodos who fear they will be disenfranchised in the new autonomous councils and proposed Bodoland state. These conflicts, in turn, create a world of closed communities where dialogue and engagement is difficult. Why does the past play such an important role in defining the contours of present-day conflicts in western Assam’s BTAD and other autonomous areas? Is the past, with its incessant claims for validation, an appropriate place to begin an arduous journey out of the silence that surrounds ethnic violence in Assam? Since this question does not have an obvious answer, it would be useful to lay out the dominant tropes that are used to construct different political narratives of belonging in Assam. It is in the varying renditions of the past that one can see the beginnings of distinct community

Violence and agrarian change 131 histories: each seemingly divorced from the other and at times contradicting themselves in their quest for primacy.

Politics, belonging and claims to land The idea of closed ethnic communities is a convenient political fabrication in a world dominated by claims to belonging and control over land. In western Assam, these narratives collide in a manner that makes violence almost inevitable. The high Himalayan foothills that pass through Bhutan and the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh in the north and the Garo Hills of Meghalaya to the south hem the expanse of land in question. It is divided almost in half by the Brahmaputra River. Prior to colonisation in the 19th century, the area was home to several shifting agricultural communities, many of whom paid some form of tribute to retain their autonomy from rulers in the hills (Bhutanese) and plains (Mughal Bengal, Koch and Ahom). Historians and linguists have mapped people, place and pasts into this area in a manner that lends itself to contestations and conflicts. This mapping has rested on a finite set of beliefs and ideas that appear with predictable frequency. Hence, indentured workers and immigrant peasant communities were invested with a particular narrative of movement and identity that they find it difficult to shake off even now. For all practical purposes, western Assam – like other parts of the Northeast – is peopled by two kinds of communities: (a) those who claim a pre-colonial presence and (b) those who came during the colonial period. Clearly, certain communities like the Bodos fit neatly into the first, while Bengali-speaking Muslims would occupy the second category. Mining through secondary literature on both sets of communities leads researchers to familiar narratives of conflicts. The most common narrative begins with the onset of migration of peasants from the deltaic areas of Bengal, which in turn leads to displacement of pre-existing shifting agriculturalists. When translated into contemporary politics, it immediately creates grounds for separating Bengali-speaking Muslims and Hindus, Hindi and Nepali-speaking Hindus, Santhal and Mundari-speaking Christians and Hindus, from the Bodo, Rabha, Garo, Goalparia and Kamrupia-speaking communities, at least for political matters. In this schema, social groups are then tied to particular forms of land use: Bengali, Nepali and Hindi speakers are always present as revenue-earning, surplus-producing agriculturalists, the Munda and Santhal speakers are present as indentured workers, who also live on the fringes of settled agriculture by clearing forests. The second category of people, who in reality comprise a very differentiated section of society, are presented as semi-settled, semi-shifting agriculturalists, with strong ties to the forest and the land.

132  Sanjay (Xonzoi) Barbora This particular permutation of land use is an important part of the political vocabulary and vision in contemporary times. The truncated conversations that I referred to earlier are perfect examples of this predicament. Non-Bodos, especially those belonging to the first category of people, expressed their fear of being thrown out of a land that they had had claims to for over four generations. They lacked power within the new administrative architecture of the BTAD, since most of the members were Bodos affiliated to the Bodo Peoples Front (BPF), a political body comprised almost entirely of Bodo activists associated with an armed Bodo militia that was known for its bombing campaigns in the 1990s. In most parts of the BTAD, non-Bodos were scrambling for old notifications from the Assam government, dating back to the 1960s. These notifications, with their typical administrative restraint, specified exactly which category of people were to be temporarily displaced from designated areas and then allowed usufruct rights over government forests and grazing lands. Back in the 1960s, the government could afford to not name the communities in question. A typical notification would detail the area that was to be declared a permanent grazing reserve, even going to the extent of acknowledging that there were existing villages in those areas. The notification would then announce the emptying out of the area, in order to allow the state to take control and regulate the new allocation of rights to communities. These communities would then be allowed to settle (or graze) on the land for specific periods of time. In 2012, Bodos would challenge this administrative nonchalance as yet another reason why their struggle for a separate state is just and inevitable. In the five long decades of political mobilisation and internecine conflicts, BTAD might not have been the most representative culmination of their layered demands, but it was one small measure of success to preserve their territory and reclaim a past. The demand for a separate, autonomous homeland for the tribal communities in the plains of Assam is an old one. It began with the demands for Udayachal and was articulated by representatives of most plains tribes of Assam.2 Their reasoning was based on the fact that land use regulations that were introduced in the colonial period were unfavourable to tribal communities that lived in the plains. The indigenous groups categorised as ‘hill tribes’ were offered a modicum of protection under colonial acts – like the Excluded and Partially Excluded Areas Acts – that allowed for hill communities to retain their control over land in their areas. Indigenous communities in the plains were not offered such legal protection, and their descendants perceived that this forced an unfair competition upon them. They had to share their lands with immigrant peasants, capitalist tea planters and various government agencies (especially the forest department).

Violence and agrarian change 133 Following the transfer of power in 1947, the interim government of India appointed a sub-committee of the constituent assembly, called the North-East Frontier (Assam) Tribal and Excluded Areas Sub-committee under the chairmanship of the Assamese political leader, Gopinath Bordoloi. Ostensibly, this came about, as the leaders of the anti-colonial struggle were sensitive to the need for adequate understanding of the situation in the Northeast, especially with regard to the growing aspirations of the tribal people. The sub-committee, also known as the Bordoloi Committee, sought to ‘reconcile the aspirations of the hill people for political autonomy with the Assam government’s drive to integrate them with the plains’ (Sarmah 2002: 91).3 The instrument of this integrative devolution of powers was embodied in the concept of the ‘Autonomous District Councils’ designed by the committee. This instrument was thereafter passed by the constituent assembly with certain modifications, and it now constitutes the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution of India. Originally, the Sixth Schedule was to apply to the ‘tribal’, essentially hill areas of Assam. On 25 January 1950, the Indian Constitution came into force. As would be expected from such an ambitious nation-building project, the constitution tried to build in some safeguards for the marginalised and oppressed groups in the country. For the people of the Northeast frontier, this safeguard came in the form of the Sixth Schedule of the constitution. The provisions in the Sixth Schedule dealt mainly with the issue of safeguarding the land and customs of the hill tribes of the region. It drew upon the erstwhile ‘excluded and partially excluded areas’ legislation of the colonial state. The plains tribe communities felt that they were left outside the ambit of constitutional protection yet again. As early as 1933, when the All Assam Plains Tribal League was formed under the initiative of the Bodo leader Rupnath Brahma and his counterpart Bhimbor Deori, the need to reassess the condition of the Bodospeaking people in the region was of utmost importance. Continuing with the formation of a consolidated political collective, the Bodo Sahitya Sabha (BSS) (Bodo Literary Forum) was formed in 1952. The Forum’s main activities were to promote and protect Bodo culture and identity within what they perceived was the growing threat to their survival as a people. It also aimed to devise a ‘standard Bodo language’, which could be a link for all the Bodo-speaking peoples in the region. Some years later, in 1967, the educated Bodo youth also formed a student body known as the ABSU. In the years to come, these civic organisations would try to steer Bodo political discourse against severe odds – both from within and from external forces. In 1963, the government of Assam recognised the use of Bodo language in the Bodo-dominated areas, albeit with a catch that after a particular age

134  Sanjay (Xonzoi) Barbora Bodo would give way to Assamese as the medium of instruction for primary school students. In a play of positions, the BSS demanded that Bodo be taught at least to the middle school level. In 1968, the state government recognised Bodo as a medium of instruction at the secondary (middle) school level. As if occurring on a parallel stage, the political movement also underwent a split with a dissident Plains Tribal Council of Assam (PTCA) leader announcing the formation of a militant political organisation that would speak for the Bodo community but also represent a wider nonBodo, tribal outlook. It was called the United Tribal Nationalist Liberation Front (Roy 1995: 61). However, despite the ‘tribal’ nomenclature in the acronym of the political formation, it actually accepted the idea of a separate state that would be called Bodoland. The vicissitudes of the autonomy movement in western Assam took a radical turn in the 1980s and 1990s, leading to the formation of armed groups who would then be subjected to the predictable fractious splits (Barbora 2005). Despite the violence that claimed the lives of several intellectuals and leaders from within the Bodo community in western Assam, a large cross-section of society also participated in the processes that were aimed at reviving cultural traditions. The Bodo Territorial Council (BTC) was created in 2003, following an agreement between the Government of Assam and Bodo Liberation Tiger Force (BLTF) led by the current leader of the BTC, Hagrama Mohilary. This contentious agreement also resulted in the consolidation of the disparate non-Bodo communities, who felt that they would be short-changed in the new deal.4 The violent struggle also led to a parallel revival of Bodo literature, culture and identity. Part of the renaissance involved celebrating the political history of Bodoland and those that toiled for the creation of a separate state. Near Kokrajhar, the authorities of the BTAD have commissioned the construction of a park that celebrates the martyrs of the struggle for a separate state.5 There are no non-Bodos in the park. The notion that outsiders have expropriated Bodo peoples’ lands is built into the political struggle, as the Bodo leadership is forced time and again to prove that they constitute a demographic majority in the area. In doing so, the Bodo leadership of the BTAD is willing to push the limits of the powers that have been promised to them. Denying people the right to return to their villages after the conflict because they (the villages) happen to be on grazing reserves, or designated forest areas, is but one way to exercise this power.

Ties of blood; tales of toil Yet there is very little difference in the material conditions of the Bodospeaking people and their non-Bodo neighbours. There is a remarkable

Violence and agrarian change 135 congruence in the working lives of people in small towns like Kumarikatta and Darranga and surrounding villages, where I conducted fieldwork (between 2012 and 2015). The pattern and history of settlement in this area actually acts like a code for larger changes in the agrarian structure. Groups of people were induced to settle in the area – before, during and after the peak of the Bodo movement – by the state government. In the 1950s and 1960s, large groups of Assamese and Bengali-speaking Hindus were settled in the area. The former had lost their land to raging floods, while the latter were displaced from erstwhile East Pakistan. In the 1970s and 1980s, large groups of Bodo and Adivasi people were settled around the fringes of forests, as they were displaced by conflicts along the AssamNagaland border, or (as in the case of some Adivasis) had chosen to leave the plantations. In the late 1980s and 1990s, violent clashes occurred between different communities, thereby adding to the complex ethnic landscape of people who depended upon cultivating the land and foraging around the forests. Today, agriculture is no longer the main source of income for many, though the need to acquire land would make it seem otherwise. Instead, short-term and long-term seasonal migration has replaced agriculture as the primary livelihood in such rural and semi-urban areas. In Darranga, this reality is exemplified by the large crowds of young men who pour out of the gates at Bhutan’s Samdrup Jhonkar, six days a week in the winter months. The gates shut at five every evening, and all Indian residents who do not have a permit to stay on have to leave. The young men – who speak several languages among themselves – work at the stone quarries, road construction sites and other hubs of economic activity inside the country of Bhutan. This change of occupational preference also has an effect on the village economy. In most Bodo villages around Kumarikatta and Darranga, older people complain that there are no young men left to do the harvest. Hence, they have to rely on the labour services provided by young Bengali-speaking Muslim men to ensure that the harvesting can take place at the end of the season. Even then, there is a distinct sense of order and tradition, for many older Bodo inhabitants talk of a time when they did not have to depend on labour from outside the district during the harvest season. Instead, they spoke of the generous and respectful behaviour that was accorded to them by older Muslim (and Adivasi) sharecroppers who lived in their neighbourhood. Most people said that the 1990s were years of change in western Assam and in the BTAD areas. The old narratives, of local people living in relative harmony with second and third generation immigrants, were put to the test by the fact that many marginalised communities had found alternate sources of employment. Ironically, it was the violence against Adivasi and Muslim communities, perpetrated by the Bodo militia (in the 1990s), that

136  Sanjay (Xonzoi) Barbora had sent non-Bodo communities away from the BTAD areas in search of work. Over a few years of being wage labourers outside the districts of their birth and residence, they were capable of remitting enough money back to their families to buy land so that their parents and elder siblings would no longer have to be sharecroppers. This had radically altered existing relations between them and their landlords in the BTAD areas. For the Bodo people, this was another proof that they were being sequestered off their own homeland by people who did not belong there. Despite these stand-offs there are still windows of opportunity for reconciliation in the BTAD areas. There are efforts being undertaken to enable social change in the area by a few non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Most of them work on the twin issues of livelihoods and disasters, since both are of concern in BTAD. For the various Bodo, Santhal, Bengali and Assamese villages in the area, the needs to secure land rights, to ensure minimum price for their agricultural produce and most importantly, to have some claims to belonging to the area, are of paramount significance. What they do with the land – cultivate, lease or sell – is another matter altogether, but for now, it is this claim for property rights that sets one community against the other. It is these inchoate sets of practices around land that political commentators and social scientists need to take cognizance of. It is difficult to compute an average for the extent of land that is owned by farmers in the BTAD. In districts that border the erstwhile-undivided Kamrup, land-ceiling acts did not allow for the growth of large landowners. The scramble for land and the need to hold on to whatever piece one can claim are impulses that are common in western Assam. A typical situation may be found around Baksa district, where local villagers around Tamulpur town have been engaged in a struggle to secure their lands and prevent being evicted by various government agencies, especially the forest department. The area has Bengali, Santhal, Nepali, Bodo and Assamese communities sharing space in several villages located in the gradual upward sprawl from the Brahmaputra River to the hills of Bhutan. In the 1960s, Gandhian activists from other parts of India set up gramdan villages (i.e. village-gift) in the area. Land continues to be collectively owned in these villages, and therefore individuals are unable to sell to others, especially outsiders. Transactions are relatively simpler for their neighbours who have settled in villages along the fringes of forests. The forest department had issued land users’ certificates (LUC) to many villagers who had come to this area in phases, escaping conflicts and natural disasters in other parts of Assam. Residents of these villages are engaged in a constant struggle to secure the right to continue to live in their homes and access the forests and grazing reserves that have been brought under the control of the BTC. It is therefore not surprising to find uncanny slogans on the walls and lampposts

Violence and agrarian change 137 around the area. For a place where consolidation of ethnic groups is supposed to be final and unbending, it is counterintuitive to find Bengali representatives and Muslim student supporters of a supposedly Bodo party. Yet, their support for Bodo parties remains tied to the security of their lives and livelihoods. In response to these vulnerability-inducing circumstances, villagers around the area had started various land rights committees almost immediately after the signing of the BTC agreement between the BLTF and the government in 2003. These committees continue to lobby with the functionaries of the BTC. They also conduct surveys of the permanent grazing reserves (PGR), village-level census and social surveys. These are almost like wishful attempts to lend an official quality to their activities. It seems to add some weight to their claims for land, especially when officials from the various departments that control land use are dismissive of the presence of people around the forest areas. One of the main activities therefore becomes the constant negotiation with political authorities that control the BTC. This adds a surreal quality to the lived realities of the various communities that live in the area. On the one hand, their lives revolve around decisions that are made by the Council. On the other hand, they feel as though they lack adequate representation within the Council itself. It is perhaps for this reason that a non-Bodo front has emerged in the area. Various left-leaning groups had been in the forefront of the demand for clarity on land-rights and land tenures in the BTAD, especially for non-Bodo small and marginal farmers. Today, these voices have coalesced around the figure of a former insurgent commander – Hira Xarania (whose real name is Naba Sarania) – of the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), who is the Member of Parliament for the area. All nuances about livelihoods, class formation and autonomy arrangements seem to have given way to the prevalence of strong-man politics of the kind that is visible in Myanmar (Lintner & Black 2009). It is almost as if Sarania was elected as a foil to counter another powerful former insurgent who had become a government-supported politician (Hagrama Mohilary). There is a Bodo song that is sung in villages that have been adopted by NGO groups. A listener does not have to know the language to know that the song is a symbolic gesture of peace and solidarity. It mentions every known community that lives in the area and then proceeds to plead for Bodoland to be a homeland for all. Thereafter, it calls upon the inhabitants of Bodoland to believe in the emancipatory capacity of statehood, where all communities can live in peace and with dignity. This, of course, is a politically loaded song that must have had some significance in framing the contours of political mobilisation among a section, the armed Bodo militia. As the Government of Assam transfers various departments to the BTAD

138  Sanjay (Xonzoi) Barbora authorities, it is the transfer of the department of land and revenue that is cause for concern for many non-Bodo communities. It is impossible to ignore the connections between the changes in administrative structures and transformation of the rural economy in western Assam autonomous districts. This chapter has been my first attempt at connecting the complex dots that have accompanied the formation of BTAD. In doing so, I concede to presenting a very condensed version of reality. However, in pursuing the links between the changing rural economy and the formulaic political efforts to transfer power to the BTAD, I hope to find some answers to the manner in which different communities are pushed into competitive politics in western Assam.

Notes 1 For a place that had seen much violence between different communities, the presence of only Muslim and Bodo local representatives was explained as a necessity arising from the immediate conflict that had taken place in 2012. 2 Udayachal was the name of the territorial unit that was demanded by the political party PTCA in 1966. PTCA sought the consolidation of the lands belonging to tribal people in the plains of Assam, so that they too could enjoy the kind of autonomy and control over land transfers as the tribal people of the hills. 3 Sarmah’s assessment of the constitutional safeguards and the context in which they evolved are comprehensive, but they do not deal with the dynamics of social movements within such regimes. 4 Homeland struggles in Northeast India have drawn upon support from ethnic kin who live across federal and international boundaries. This was most pronounced in the case of the Mizo and Naga peoples. The Mizo struggle ended with a peace accord, where the Government of India gave more powers and pecuniary benefits to the federal unit of Mizoram. However, this had the effect of dissimulation of the aspirations of other Mizo-speaking communities that participated in the struggle. Similarly, the Bodo movement has had to contend with the aspirations of a wider cross-section of Bodo-speaking people, who do not necessarily live in the BTAD. They have very little to contribute to political discourse on autonomy in the current milieu. Their contributions to Bodo culture and the struggle for autonomy seem to have given way to hard political calculations about electoral issues with the BTC. 5 The demand for a separate state is a contentious one, even within the Bodo political community. Leaders like Hagrama Mohilary, who heads the BTC, are willing to let the demands slide when it suits them and settle for more fiscal autonomy. Student groups like the ABSU are consistent in their demand for a separate state and see themselves as the inheritors of the struggle that was begun by Rupnath Brahma and carried forward by Upendra Brahma. Armed groups like the National Democratic Front of Bodoland are currently split vertically into three factions, at least one of which continues to call for a sovereign Bodoland, free from Indian rule.

Violence and agrarian change 139

References Barbora, Sanjay. 2005. ‘Autonomy in the Northeast: The Frontiers of Centralised Politics’, in Ranabir Samaddar (ed), The Politics of Autonomy: Indian Experiences. New Delhi: Sage, 196–215. Baruah, Sanjib. 1999. India against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2005. Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff. 2003. ‘Ethnography on a Colonial Scale: Postcolonial Anthropology and the Violence of Abstraction’, Ethnography, 4 (2): 147–179. Fernandes, Walter and Sanjay Barbora. 2009. ‘Introduction’, in Walter Fernandes and Sanjay Barbora (eds), Land, People and Politics: Contest over Tribal Land in Northeast India. Guwahati: North Eastern Social Research Centre and International Working Group on Indigenous Affairs, 1–15. Jilangamba, Yengkhom. 2015. ‘Beyond the Ethno-Territorial Binary: Evidencing the Hill and Valley Peoples in Manipur’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 38 (2): 276–289. Lintner, Bertil and Michael Black. 2009. Merchants of Madness: The Methamphetamine Explosion in the Golden Triangle. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books. Mamdani, Mahmood. 2009. Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror. Cape Town: HSRC Press. Roy, Ajay. 1995. The Bodo Imbroglio. Guwahati: Spectrum Publishers. Saikia, Arupjyoti. 2014. A Century of Protests: Peasant Politics in Assam since 1900. New Delhi: Routledge. Sarmah, Bhupen. 2002. ‘The Question of Autonomy for the Plains Tribes of Assam’, in Social Change and Development (October), Guwahati: Omeo Kumar Das Institute of Social Change and Development, 86–103. Vandekerkchove, Nel. 2009. ‘ “We Are Sons of This Soil”: The Endless Battle over Indigenous Homelands in Assam, India’, Critical Asian Studies, 41 (4): 523–548.

8 Naga art and their market through time Delocalisation, state control and globalisation Iris Odyuo This study concerns the changes and continuities in the systems of distribution and other processes used by Naga artisans in order to make their products available to their consumers, over a period stretching from the 18th century through today.1 The study is based on fieldwork done in the Khiamniungan villages of Choklongan and Wei (both villages have about 900 inhabitants each) near the Myanmar border, and in an Angami village called Khonoma (with a population of 2,095 people) in Kohima district. The Khiamniungan villages are remote and were chosen as research areas because even though they are far from the easily accessible parts of Nagaland and do not have the benefit of paved roads, transport system and commercial institutions, their products still find their way to almost all parts of Nagaland and beyond. Choklongan village produces basketry and Wei village produces metalwork.2 Khonoma, on the other hand, has easy access to the market and is renowned for its trade in ornaments. This study shows that the Naga ‘tribes’ under consideration exchanged women for marriage, contracted friendship treaties and carried out trade even before the arrival of the British. It thus challenges the assumptions about social relations in the area in that period – based on colonial records – as merely determined by ethnicity and ethnic warfare, and shows that intertribal warfare did not entail an absence of relations between the Naga tribes. The research methodology for the study is mostly drawn from participant observation, formal and informal interviews, recording life histories of individual artisans and photography. Data collected through fieldwork illustrate the daily life of the Naga artisans and the stories surrounding their arts. To supplement this information, the researcher consulted archival resources from libraries, unpublished articles and seminar research papers, as well as published chapters, essays and reviews in journals and newspapers on ethnic art. The researcher visited Choklongan village during the annual Khiamniungan Women Church conference in October 2006. It was a mega event organised by the Church, which was attended by Khiamniungans from

Naga art and their market through time 141

KILOMETRES 10

0

10

20

30

MON

MOKOKCHUNG

LONGLENG

TUENSANG Choklangan Wei

WOKHA

ZUNHEBOTO

KIPHIRE DIMAPUR

KOHIMA PHEK Khonoma

PEREN

Source: Administrative Atlas of India, Census 2011

Figure 8.1  Map of the area Source: Administrative Atlas, Census 2011, adapted by Jan Seifert.

Naga areas both in India and in Myanmar. The conference not only discussed matters related to the Church but also showcased many traditional handicrafts. It also enabled the researcher to explore, mingle and get to know the local culture and build up a rapport with artisans of Choklongan and Wei villages, and of the neighbouring Myanmar villages. Fieldwork in Khonoma was carried out between 2010 and 2012.

Handicrafts in the areas of study today Unlike the rest of Nagaland, Christianity was introduced in these areas only in the early 1960s by the Ao Naga Baptist Church, and the first lower primary school was started at Choklongan village in 1966 by the Government

142  Iris Odyuo of Nagaland. Today, the village boasts of having a relatively high standard of living among the Khiamniungan villages. Compared to Choklongan, Khonoma village lies within the easy reach of Kohima – the state capital – only 20 kms away, and Dimapur, 53 kms away. Christianity was introduced in Khonoma in the 1890s, and the village has good access to modern amenities. There is a post office as well as telephone, television, mobile phone and Internet connection in the village. Some of the artisans, such as those from the Cato Angami tribe, have started using the Internet to sell their products (Interview with Kevisekho Chucha, Khonoma village, 21 July 2010). For the artisans in these villages, making handicrafts is a secondary source of income, as they are mainly agriculturalists doing dry swidden cultivation (jhum in Assamese; this word is used by all the Naga tribes) on terraces yearround. It is only after the planting and harvesting in the fields is over that the villagers have time for handicraft production. Carruthers, in Politics and Ecology of Indigenous Folk Art in Mexico, explains, ‘Most arts and crafts are identified not just with a particular ethnic group or region, but with a specific village or community . . . each form is an expression of a unique cultural identity and local heritage. As much as language, dress or religion, art reinforces ethnic identity’ (2001: 357). Similarly, most Naga villages are identified with specific handicraft and art items, and this reinforces ethnic identity since all villagers in a village normally belong to the same ethnic group. For example, Choklongan artisans practise both pottery and metalwork but specialise in the production of traditional and contemporary Naga basketry. Wei villagers produce a large variety of traditional Naga pottery but specialise in Naga weaponry such as the machete (dao), spearheads, bows and the arrows and a host of other agricultural implements. Khonoma village, once famous for trade ‘in shells and beads’ (Hutton 1921a: 67), is known now for the production of a traditional ritual basket called khophi since the domestic market demand for ornaments has declined. In this manner, Choklongan, Wei and Khonoma villages have over time become hotspots for both traditional and commercial Naga art. Compared to other Naga villages the artisans in these villages earn enough to live comfortably. This echoes Narasaiah and Naidu’s analysis, ‘While globalization is often portrayed as undermining livelihoods in rural areas, particularly in lower-income countries, numerous artisan communities around the world have managed to improve their standard of living’ (Medina & Esmeralda de los Santos 2008: 3).

Traditional marketing practices within Naga villages in the 18th century During the 18th century, Nagas built their own houses, wove and carved functional household articles such as baskets for storing and carrying, mats,

Naga art and their market through time 143 beds, stools, vats, pounding tables, wooden dishes. The art of tattooing, pottery and textile weaving were crafts of women, while metalwork, basketry and woodcarving were mostly done by men. Each Naga village was self-sufficient, producing what its inhabitants needed for food and other utilitarian objects. Barter system of trading was the most important means for acquiring goods not available in the area.3 It was undertaken by both men and women, before the advent of the British and the use of money. Among the Nagas, the standard units of barter were the fowl, pig, cow, gayal (bos frontalis or mithun), baskets of rice, packets of salt, strings of beads, shells, cowries, even honey and beeswax. Certain items such as iron and conch shells were recognised as having a higher value because they could only be found outside Naga areas. Surplus goods such as rice, salt, cotton and other utilitarian objects such as earthen pots, bamboo cups, baskets, wooden dishes, agricultural implements and even decorated weapons, ornaments and textiles were used as exchange commodities that provided basic subsistence. In the past, even before British colonisation, ‘relationships between villages were always poised on the verge of violence’ (Jacobs 1990: 137). Violence took mainly the form of headhunting and inter-tribal warfare, but according to Lotha (2009), the existence of hostilities did not mean the different Naga tribes were totally unrelated. The relations between villages were punctuated by war and peaceful times, exchanges of women in marriage, trade and friendship treaties. People undertook trading activities to other villages and trade routes, and traders were ‘jealously protected’ (Hutton 1921b: 167); traders were armed as they travelled and were protected by their host, even in enemy villages. Among the Lothas, the hosts from other villages were called akhummo, that is to say ‘friend’ or the ‘one who shelters me’, and were protected even if their villages were at war. Historically, trades in arts such as textiles, ornaments and weapons in Naga villages were mainly for ritual usages. Decorated cloths were much admired, and a successful warrior or a man who had given a feast of merit was entitled to wear a particular shawl denoting his status. The wife usually wove the ceremonially important cloth herself, but there are cases where these cloths were bought from another village. Not all Nagas were adept at weaving. Hutton writing about the Sema Nagas mentions that ‘wives who can weave are often sought after, but, when taken to a village where the other women do not weave, usually abandon the practice themselves’ (1921b: 51). Mills also states, ‘Phoms and Konyaks are poor weavers and buy a large number of cloths from Ao villages on the Langbangkong’ (1926: 104). There are also instances of Nagas buying decorated shawls from neighbouring villages. For example, the Tangkhul, Mao, Maram and Chakhesang warriors and feast-givers used to buy their ‘elephant cloth’ (thipikhu) – worn exclusively by feast-givers and successful head-hunters – from the Meitei of Manipur who wove them.

144  Iris Odyuo Ornaments such as headdresses, hip baskets, tails, necklaces, armlet, chin straps and waist ornaments made of tiger’s teeth and claws, boar’s tusk, bear fur, cowries, ivory, red-dyed goat’s hair, human hair and hornbill feathers restricted to feast-givers and warriors were popular items of trade. Some ornaments made of boar’s tusks, tiger’s teeth, ivory and even crystals were believed to possess certain supernatural power that required careful handling involving ritual treatment. Among the Nagas, the tiger was both feared and revered at the same time. When buying the pendant of a pair of tiger’s canine teeth decorated with brass spiral, much coveted by the Yimchungrü, Chang, Sangtam, Phom and Khiamniungan Nagas, the buyer had to observe five days ‘genna’ (taboo) before he could put it on (Mills 1937: 30).

Figure 8.2 Warrior’s shield made of buffalo, rhinoceros or elephant hide and decorated with grass tassels and red-dyed goat’s hair Source: Copyright © Weltmuseum, Vienna. Reproduced with permission.

Naga art and their market through time 145

Figure 8.3 Red- and black-dyed goat’s and dog’s hair is used in the decoration of feast-giver and warrior’s shawl Source: Copyright © Weltmuseum, Vienna. Reproduced with permission.

Ceremonial conical hats, leg-guards and wristlets of red cane ornamented with yellow orchid (worn during festivals), popular among all the Naga tribes, were bought in Khiamniungan villages in Tuensang district. Villages without their own blacksmiths bought machetes (daos), chisels, agricultural implements such as axes, sickles and spear blades from other villages such as the Konyak village of Wakching, which was a centre for iron tools (Jacobs 1990: 39). Another popular item was the spear-shaft made of the sago palm (Caryota urens) – one of the hardest materials known to the Nagas – and decorated with red-dyed goat’s hair. The Sangtam village of Lazare, as well as the Chang villages of Longtang and Chengdang, produced these ‘decorated spear-shafts and sold it to the Rengma, Lotha and Ao villages’ (Mills 1937: 38–39). Even today the village still makes these spear-shafts for trade and although the craftsmanship is still excellent, dyed goat’s hair has been replaced by synthetic hair, which has greatly diminished its aesthetic appeal. Chendang, Chingmei and Yangpi are famous for the ceremonial bamboo cups called dobü thong – used during feasts of merit and when enemy’s

146  Iris Odyuo

Figure 8.4 Khiamniungan warrior of note wears a spike brass armband called khiaptso. It is traded outside Naga villages. Source: Copyright © Weltmuseum, Vienna. Reproduced with permission.

heads had been taken – which was traded over a large area. Still today, the dobü thong are made and sold.4 According to L. L. Yaden, the Ahom chronicles (Ahom Buranjis) mention that the Nagas had contact with the Ahom dynasty that ruled Assam from the 13th to the 19th centuries. These contacts were in the initial stage ‘diplomatic gambits on the part of the Ahom, which brought an end to the often bloody conflicts with the villages of the hill regions’ (Oppitz et al. 2008: 59). It was only in the early 18th century that the number of economic contacts increased. Naga groups such as Ao, Angami, Lotha, Phom and Konyak traded cotton, pan-leaves, chillies, ginger, cane, palmleaf mats and salt to the Ahoms in the plains in exchange for dried fish, salt, enamel plates and cups, brass wire, metal sheets, cowrie, shells and beads and cotton-seeding machine. Another important item of import from Assam was cattle, vital for sacrifices and ceremonial feasts. The Lotha supplied cattle from the plains to Ao villages and the Konyak to Naga villages in Burma. The Khiamniungan village of Pangsa was also an important staging post where cattle and buffalo from the plains of Assam and Burma were brought and sold. Another important trade route to Burma and Shan villages ‘was through the Yimchungrü village of Mimi to Yawpami and Tamanthi in Burma’ (Saul 2005: 134). The chief items of exchange through these routes were cane and bamboo mats, cloths, dao, spears, ivory, sesame seeds, cattle and buffalo, pigs, poultry, hornbill feathers and beeswax. Traditional ornaments such as

Naga art and their market through time 147

Figure 8.5 Circles of cowry shells sewn to the surface of a black shawl and outline of human figures indicating the martial achievements of the wearer Source: Copyright © Weltmuseum, Vienna. Reproduced with permission.

the heavy brass armlets with knobs and spikes, considered as heirlooms by the Khiamniungan, Chang, Yimchungrü, Ao and Konyak, are said to ‘have originated from Maibong, the 16th century Kachari capital in the North Cachar Hills’ (Jacobs 1990: 264). Besides Assam and Burma, Nagas also traded with Manipur for woven cloth, guns, iron for spearheads, daos and other agricultural implements as well as yeast for making rice beer.5 Brass and aluminium armlets found in wide areas of the Naga region ‘were manufactured by Meitei brass smiths, for sale to the surrounding hill peoples’ (Saul 2005: 67). By the 1870s the British had gradually expanded their empire into the Naga territory, and the introduction of roads and coins led to expansion of trade not only among the different Naga tribes but also between the Naga and British-occupied areas. By the early part of the 20th century, Hutton (1921a) notes that the Angami traders from the village of Khonoma went to Calcutta to trade and came back through Burma and Manipur. Hutton, while on a tour in 1923 in the un-administered areas of Mon and Tuensang, writes that the Konyak village of Angfang was renowned for its trade in cowries from Burma. Ayinla Shilu Ao also notes, ‘Carnelian beads were

148  Iris Odyuo

Figure 8.6  Boar’s tusk used as chest ornaments by Naga warriors Source: Copyright © Weltmuseum, Vienna. Reproduced with permission.

imported from as far as Cambay in Gujarat, red wool from Ludhiana in Punjab and cowries from Orissa’ (Kunz & Joshi 2008: 99–100).

The dynamics of marketing practices in Naga arts today Based on Steiner’s theoretical approach (1994), this study on the marketing practices used by the Naga for their handicrafts has identified three channels through which handicrafts are traded in Nagaland; exploring these channels in greater detail will reveal the complexity, diversity and dynamics of this trade. Steiner uses the ethnographic approach to study the supply and distribution of African art objects in West Africa. His study identifies market places, galleries, roadside stalls and beach vendors as commodity outlets that facilitate the sale of art in the Abidjan region. In Nagaland, the first channel goes directly from the producer to the consumer. The second connects rural middlemen to independent retailers, and then to consumers, and the third goes from producers to wholesalers, then to retailers and to customers.

Producer to consumer There are two kinds of artisans who sell directly to the customer, those who work on their crafts independently at home and conduct their business

Naga art and their market through time 149

Figure 8.7 A distinctive warrior chest ornament worn by Nagas consists of a flat piece of wood covered with fine plaited work of red cane with border of cowries and a fringe of red-dyed goat’s hair at the ends and bottom Source: Copyright © Weltmuseum, Vienna. Reproduced with permission.

through word of mouth, and those who take their crafts to the daily vegetable market. They purchase their own yarns for weaving and produce textiles for sale directly to customers. An independent artisan typically operates with the help of his family members. For example, Tsemsang is a village guard at Choklongan village and a well-known expert basket maker. It was only in the 1990s after he got married that he seriously took up basketry to generate extra income to feed his growing family. He does not have a shop to sell his crafts, but his traditional and innovative carry-baskets and containers, ceremonial headgears, wristlets, arm and leg guards are in demand even among the local people themselves; however, being a farmer at the same time prevents him from spending too much of his time on basket weaving. He gets the raw materials such as bamboo, orchid stems and natural dyes from his fields, buys cane from villagers and goats’ hair from his father-in-law and nearby villages. It is only during the lean agricultural season that he concentrates on his craft. His wife helps in dyeing goat’s hair and in collecting and drying yellow orchid stem needed for decorating traditional headgears, wristlets and leg guards. His innovative baskets include flower vases, miniature trays with cups and kettle, Western-type hats and bamboo screens. Because most of his buyers prefer traditional objects such as headgears, wristlets and leg guards, and the ceremonial wedding basket (yatso), he now specialises in traditional baskets which is more labour intensive but fetches him a good price (Interview with Tsemsang, Choklongan village 2006).

150  Iris Odyuo

Figure 8.8 A conical ceremonial headgear made of bichromatic weave done in red-dyed cane with yellow orchid stem and red-dyed goat’s hair, Tuensang, 2007 Source: Copyright © Alban von Stockhausen. Reproduced with permission.

Selie, a 50-year-old basketmaker in Khonoma village, is an expert weaver of a fine ritual basket called khophi, which is used by the Angami Nagas only in festivals such as the Purification (sekrenyi) festival. Anyone wishing to buy his baskets (which are sold in the range of Rs 12,000–14,000) can simply drop in at his house or leave a note so that he can be contacted. Unlike other artisans in the village, Selie is a full-time basketmaker (Interview with Selie, Khonoma village, 21 July 2010). Thezavilie, an 85-years old man, weaves rough baskets called khodi, used for carrying food grains or firewood according to the weave, and sells them at home. Khodi finds an easy market among the villagers (Interview with Visie, son of Thezavilie,

Naga art and their market through time 151 Khonoma village, 21 July 2010). Zasilie, a metalworker, makes and sells daos and other agricultural implements in Khonoma village. He also repairs used daos, sickles and hoes for free during the planting and harvesting season for the villagers. These artisans are economically welloff and are wellrespected in the village. Some rural artisans take advantage of the daily vegetable market to sell their crafts. Vegetable markets in Tuensang and Kiphiri occupy one of the best locations in the area. Each day, men and women carrying their goods arrive in the market on foot or by bus. Women mostly sell local vegetables and fruits, chicken, beehives, fish, snails and crabs, while men sell their craft items such as daos, hoe, sickle, rat-traps and varieties of bamboo and cane baskets. For example, Tangmong, a twenty-five-year-old full-time expert metalworker at Wei village, takes his craft items such as hoes, sickle, spearheads and daos, and sells them at the local market in Tuensang and Kiphiri. Tokpan, a mother of two, along with five other mothers, buys spanned nettle fibre and cotton yarn from individual houses at Choklongan village and weaves them at Noklak, her husband’s village. These women sell their hand-woven shawls and jackets in the vegetable market at Tuensang during the winter seasons (Interview with Tokpan, textile weaver, Noklak village 2009).

Producer to rural middlemen to retailers to customers Rural middlemen Some rural artisans act as middlemen in the trade of handicrafts. They purchase textiles, woodcarvings, potteries, ornaments, traditional weapons, cane and bamboo mats and baskets from individual artisans and sell them directly to craft shops in urban areas, to tourists and to exporters. For example, Liang often travels to remote Naga villages on the Myanmar border where he buys ornaments and weapons; he then sells them to urban middlemen such as gifts and curio shopowners in Kohima and Dimapur. When this researcher visited Liang’s house at Noklak in May 2009, she saw good collections of traditional Naga baskets, wooden mugs and plates, ceremonial headgears and ornaments such as armbands made of elephant tusk, hornbill feathers and beaks, tiger’s teeth and claws, brass head chest pendants and even handmade rifles. When she asked Liang who his customers were, he gave her the names of some of the curio shops at Dimapur and Kohima but omitted to mention others who buy his more expensive goods, most probably to conceal the high profit he was making from these objects.

152  Iris Odyuo Souchie is an artisan as well as the owner of Bamboo and Cane Craft Centre at Tuensang. Sales from his shop declines during the rainy season from May to August every year, so with the profit he earns during the tourist season (September to April), he purchases decorated textiles, cane and bamboo trays and containers, mithun-horn drinking mugs and daos from independent producers who usually seek him out to sell their crafts. He sells his collections to Naga handicrafts shopowners and exporters at Dimapur. He has been in the trade for almost two decades and knows the changing taste and styles preferred by his buyers. Unlike other middlemen and agents who travel to Tuensang to collect hand-woven textiles and crafts, Souchie is in a better position to dictate designs and size requirements to independent local artisans who do not have access to markets (Personal communication with Souchie, 12 December 2009). Neiman Konyak is an independent beadmaker. She increases the variety of her merchandise by purchasing glass beads, cowries, shells, brass bells and chains, imitation crystals, turquoise and carnelian beads from Nepal, Myanmar, Assam, Gujarat, Delhi and Kolkata. She, with the help of her husband and two other hired helpers, strings the colourful beads in the form of necklaces, earrings, bracelets, as well as handphone covers, and sells them to curios and gift shops in and outside Nagaland. She also consistently purchases ornaments, textiles and woodcarvings made by other local artisans. She has built a good rapport with some successful urban middlemen at Dimapur and Kohima. When large transactions are involved, she even provides the transport to ferry her goods to the shops (Personal communication with Neiman Konyak, 4 October 2010). These stories illustrate the dynamics of the Naga art market. Some Naga artisans are directly in contact with the global market through the Internet. Even rural artisans who are not in direct contact with the global market export their products indirectly through tourism. The rural middlemen create the market for Naga handicrafts. Middlemen even travel to the interiors and have access to artisans. They are also in a position to raise market prices and also to profit from the interaction. Similar to African traders (Steiner 1994), Naga middlemen are cultural brokers, and are at the core of an elaborate process of cross-cultural information exchange that facilitates commodification. For example, Bukhaio Khiamniungan, an artisan and a rural middleman, knows the taste of his local customers and of the tourists in the metropolitan areas. Through experience, he has learned that Naga artefacts accompanied by stories about its uses and origin fetches him good profit; he thus buys traditional woodcarvings, ornaments, weapons and textiles and when he cannot find the objects he is looking for, he commissions artisans to re-create traditional pieces and collects stories (sometimes exaggerated) around the object. Similar to what Steiner (1994) had observed

Naga art and their market through time 153

Figure 8.9 Leg-guard made of a bichromatic weave done in dyed red cane with patterns woven in with yellow orchid stem worn by feast-givers Source: Copyright © Weltmuseum, Vienna. Reproduced with permission.

about the African trader, the Naga middlemen are not only moving goods through the world economic system, but are also exchanging information, mediating, modifying and commenting on a broad spectrum of cultural knowledge.

Producers to wholesalers to retailers to customers Independent local producers, middlemen and retailers, who work on limited budgets, cannot meet the demand of tourists and exporters. Largescale production of souvenirs in the form of textiles, ornaments, weapons and other utilitarian objects made of cane, bamboo, wood and cane, as well as miniatures of traditional objects such as the men’s ceremonial house (morung), log-drum and village gate are usually undertaken by the Nagaland Handloom and Handicrafts Development Corporation Limited (NHHDC). This is a state-owned corporation attached to the office of Ministry of Textiles, Government of India. NHHDC promotes and markets handloom and handicraft products of ‘craft clusters’ – which are settlements where artisans are provided with housing and a workshop with raw materials by the government, such as Diezephe Craft Cluster and the

154  Iris Odyuo Heritage Craft Cluster – through sales emporiums located in the various districts of Nagaland as well as in the metropolitan cities of Delhi and Kolkata. Artisans at these government-sponsored centres are often from rural areas and have moved their families out of subsistence agriculture into the craft clusters in urban areas. However, the monthly wages they receive do not adequately recompense the amount of labour and time the artisans invest in the various crafts; as a result the artisans can barely sustain their families. Furthermore, even though raw materials such as yarn, wood, cane and bamboo are still used, different tools along with new design-specifications and training provided by the officers-in-charge at the centres suppress the creativity of the artisans since they have to reproduce the specified designs repeatedly. This situation creates stockpiling of mediocre textiles and other crafts, which limits access to export markets (Personal communication with Neikhozoto Savino, President, Craft Council of Nagaland 2006). On the other hand, numerous independent weavers’ societies – with considerable official encouragements and financial assistance – such as the Aonglenden Weavers Society at Ungma village, the Khreimenuo Weavers Society at Ghaspani, Dimapur, and Belho Weavers at Kohima were formed by groups of women to augment their household income. These women do not weave themselves but employ both rural and urban artisans. The artisans are given the material and training in producing some specified designs, which are based on traditional designs that are modified according to the wishes of the customers in special cases; these modifications include changes in the size of the patterns, fusion of one or two different patterns and change of colours. Most of the woven textiles, consisting of both traditional and modern designs, are woven using both the fly-shuttle loom and the traditional back-strap loom. Most of the textiles, thus produced, are then sold to wholesalers who in turn sell it to either local or national retailers; the latter sell them to customers. Men and women artisans working for these societies work in the weaving centre for a limited number of hours per day, thereby supplementing their income from agricultural work. Projects initiated by the state government which require the participation of rural artisans to promote the sale of Naga crafts outside the state often overlook the time and effort put in by the artisans who participate in such exhibitions. For instance, in 2009, government agencies such as the North Eastern Zone Cultural Centre sponsored P. Sune, a twenty-nine-year-old master craftsman along with 14 other basket weavers from Choklongan and Chendang village to travel to Delhi to exhibit their handicrafts. The artisans were told to bring finished products as well as raw materials for the exhibition. They were made to demonstrate the art of basket-making to visitors; even though they were able to sell some of their products they were paid

Naga art and their market through time 155 only a fixed amount of Rs 5,000 each for the entire duration of the one month stay at the exhibition (Personal communication with P. Sune, 10 October 2010). Given such a situation, participation of rural craftsmen in government-sponsored exhibitions outside the state has declined. Some Naga entrepreneurs such as Jasmina and Ghotoli Sema from Dimapur invest in their own projects without the help of governmental funding. They also reinvest their profits into their business and also into promoting sale of their handicrafts. Jasmina employs a number of women and men to weave textiles and baskets, and carve wood at her workshop. She also runs sales outlets of her crafts at Dimapur and Kohima. Ghotoli Sema owns a chain of boutiques called ‘Gurtel’ at Kohima and Dimapur. Both are educated and business-savvy women. They not only train weavers in the use of modern looms and machines but provide them with housing, education and basic health care. They advertise and sell their textile products created using designs that they select from among traditional designs, sometimes fusing several traditional designs to make new ones. The textiles thus produced are then sold as modern home furnishings such as curtains, bedspreads and cushion covers, as well as tote bags, hats, stoles and scarves, through retailers in the metropolitan cities such as Kolkata, Mumbai, New Delhi, and through the Internet (Personal communication with Jasmina, Dimapur 2008). As for Akhole Angami, who is based in Kohima, she comes from a family who has been trading ornaments for more than a century. She deals with the artisans and middlemen of Mon, Tuensang, Wokha and Mokokchung who come to her place to sell antique wood items such as beds, stools, ornaments and weapons. Akhole Angami showcases and sells the items to buyers in the living room of her house at Kohima. Most of the items she sells find their way to international markets through antique shops selling Naga arts in Delhi and Kolkata (Personal communication with Akhole Angami, Kohima 2006).

Conclusion Naga art formerly mainly connected people within Nagaland and focused on objects that were necessary in the religious economy and the economy of social relations and social status; with the opening of Naga markets to the global economy and more importantly with the takeover of the production and trade by state agencies, the Naga art market started to face various challenges. Various governmental policies exist for the protection and benefit of Naga artisans, but they have not been properly implemented. For example, the impact of the NHHDC and the International Border Area People’s Welfare Organization (IBAPWO) – set up to boost craft-based

156  Iris Odyuo economy in Nagaland – as well as the Nagaland Bamboo Development Agency (NBDA) – founded to revitalise and develop handicraft and provide training on design, quality and productivity in order to facilitate markets for handicraft – have been disappointing. Moreover, craft clusters have compromised the quality of handicrafts because of mass production, which has made knowledgeable buyers wary of products sold at the Naga Emporiums. Besides, according to Neikhozoto Savino, president of Crafts Council of Nagaland, handicrafts production in Nagaland lack good organisation. Craftsmen have been trained in many aspects to promote the sale of handicrafts but lack proper tools and machiney, marketing strategies and managerial skills, which have actually hampered the production of handicrafts. Moreover, artisans attached to government-sponsored institutions such as craft clusters have lost their creativity (Interview with Neikhozoto Savino, Dimapur 2006). Additionally, the government’s take-over of the organisation of production and trade of Naga handicrafts has resulted in the change in status of the artisans, who were respected and wealthy in their villages, but were underpaid as government employees. Instead of encouraging rural artisans to congregate at Dimapur for training, workshops and employment, craft clusters should be replicated on a larger scale in the rural areas by encouraging the production of handicrafts, unique to the village. Finally, today, more innovative and durable forms of market strategies have been created instead by independent artisans, who have been successful in finding new uses for Naga handicrafts and Naga designs.

Notes 1 Nagas are indigenous people, living in the north east Indian states of Nagaland, Assam, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, and northwest Myanmar (Burma). 2 The high quality of the basketry and metalwork produced in the two villages attracted the attention of both Mills (1937: 29) and Hutton (1921a: 383). 3 According to Appadurai, ‘Barter is the exchange of objects for one another without reference to money and with maximum feasible reduction of social, cultural, political or personal transaction costs. . . . The determination of what may be bartered, where, when and by whom, as well as of what drives the demand for the goods of the “other”, is a social affair’ (1986: 9–11). 4 Chang oral history tells about the origins of the dobü thong. Every day children and old people coming from the fields would get lost and so Nasset Mongo, the bravest man from the village of Chendang, covered his body in soot and tobacco water, and lay near the field path pretending to be dead. The jungle spirits carried him to their cave, but the man stretched his hands and legs so wide that they could not pull him inside and left him outside. On getting up, he saw an old woman spirit coming out of the cave carrying a big basket full of human heads. On killing her, he discovered tattoo designs on her thighs and started copying the design on bamboo mugs. The tattoo design on the mug signifies that the owner has taken a head and so only

Naga art and their market through time 157 a warrior could drink from the dobü thong (Personal communication with Imlong Chaba, Tuensang, 23 November 2010). The guns were known as Manipuri guns or tower muskets; they found their way 5 into the Naga Hills after the Manipur rebellion of 1891 (Hutton 1921a: 84).

References Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3–63. Carruthers, David V. 2001. ‘The Politics and Ecology of Indigenous Folk Art in Mexico’, Human Organization, 60 (4): 356–366. Hutton, John Henry. 1921a. The Angami Nagas. London: Palgrave Macmillan and Co. Ltd. ———. 1921b. The Sema Nagas. London: Palgrave Macmillan and Co. Ltd. Jacobs, Julian. 1990. The Nagas: Hill Peoples of North East India. London: Thames and Hudson. Kunz, Richard and Vibha Joshi. 2008. ‘Agricultural Cycle Associated Rituals and the Role of Women’, in Richard Kunz and Vibha Joshi (eds), Naga – A Forgotten Mountain Region Rediscovered. Basel: Christoph MerianVerlag and Museum der Kulturen, 122–129. Lotha, Abraham. 2009. ‘Articulating Naga Nationalism’, Unpublished PhD dissertation, The City University of New York. Medina, Jose F. and Esmeralda de los Santos. 2008. ‘The Globalization of Indigenous Art: The Case of Mata Ortiz Pottery’. Fostering Indigenous Business and Enterpreneurship in the Americas Conference. Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil. Electronic Document. http://fibea.mgt.unm.edu/fibea amanaus/ papers/. . . . /medinadelossantos paper.pdf [Accessed on May 24, 2010]. Mills, James Philip. 1926. The Ao Nagas. London: Palgrave Macmillan and Co. Ltd. ———. 1937. The Rengma Nagas. London: Palgrave Macmillan and Co. Ltd. Oppitz, Michael, Thomas Kaiser, Alban von Stockhausen, Rebekka Sutter and Marion Wettstein. 2008. Naga Identities: Changing Local Cultures in the Northeast of India. Gent: Snoeck Publishers. Saul, Jamie. 2005. The Naga of Burma: Their Festivals, Customs and Way of Life. Thailand: Orchid Press. Steiner, Christopher B. 1994. ‘Introduction: The Anthropology of African Art in a Transnational Market’, in African Art in Transit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–15.

Field Research Interviews

Akhole Angami, 49-Year-Old, Business Women and Naga Art Collector, Kohima, September 6, 2006. Avino, 45-Year-Old, Textile Weaver, Kohima, 2009, 2011. Bümütyano, 78-Year-Old, gaonbura, Tuensang Village 2006, 2010, 2011.

158  Iris Odyuo Cato Angami, 45-Year-Old, Artisan, Kisama, December 5, 2010. Hempao, 80-Year-Old Metalworker, Tsonkhao Village, October 4, 2011. Imlong Chaba, 65-Year-Old, Artisan, Dimapur 2009, 2010, 2011. Impongso Chang, 70-Year-Old, Artisan, Tuensang village 2005, 2009, 2010. Jakpao, Choklongan Village, March 12, 2006. Jasmina, Business Women and Naga Art Collector, Dimapur 2009. K. Bukhaio, 60-Year-Old, Artisan, Sanglao Multi Purpose handicraft Unit, Noklak 2009, 2010. Kevisekho Chucha, Khonoma Village, 2010, 2011. Liang, 44-Year-Old, Artisan, Noklak village, 2009. Neikhozoto Savino, President, Craft Council of Nagaland 2005, 2009. Neiman Yonyak, 47-Year-Old, Artisan, Longwa village, October 4, 2010. Mharoni, 52-Year-Old, Textile Weaver, Dimapur, 2009, 2011. Sune, 27-Year-Old, Master Craftsman, Choklongan village, October 10, 2010. Selei, 50-Year-Old, baskeweaver, Khonoma, 2010, 2011. Souchie Khiamniungan, 51-Year-Old, Artisan and Proprietor of Bamboo and Cane Craft Centre, Tuensang 2008, 2009, 2011. Tangmong, 25-Year-Old, Metal Worker, Wei Village, 2009. Thezavilie, 85-Year-Old, Basketweaver, Khonoma village, 2010. Tokpan, 42-Year-Old, Textile Weaver, Noklak village 2009, 2010. Tsemsang, 44-Year-Old, Basketweaver, Choklongan village 2006, 2009, 2011. Visie, 44-Year-Old Basketweaver,, Khonoma, 2010, 2011. Zasilie, 60-Year-Old, Metal Worker, Khonoma, 2010, 2011.

Museums and art collectors Abraham Lotha, Chumpo Museum, Sovima, Dimapur 2008. Akhole Angami, Kohima 2006, 2010. Francis Belho, Naga Art Collector, Kohima 2006. Directorate of Art and Culture, Kohima, 2005, 2009. Museum der Kulturen, Basel, 2009. Ethnographic Museum of Zürich University 2009. Road Show, Noklak, 2008, 2010.

Souvenir shops and craft centres Aonglenden Weavers Society, Ungma village, Mokochung, 2009, 2010. Heritage Museum and Crafts Centre, Khonoma, July 21–23, 2011. Belho Weavers, Kohima, October 12, 2009 and December 12, 2011. Khreimenuo Weavers Society, Ghaspani, Dimapur, 2009, 2011. Gurtel shop, Kohima, 2006, 2007. Diezephe Craft Village, Dimapur, December 9, 2009. Bukhaio, Naga Cane and Bamboo Craft, Tuensang, 2006, 2008, 2011. Tribal Link, Dimapur, December 13, 2009. United Craft, Nagarjan Sector-C, Dimapur, December 7, 2009. Yason Atelier, Fine Arts, Kohima, December 4, 2007.

9 Youth fashion and the identity of resistance in Northeast India Teiborlang T. Kharsyntiew

In the last decade, the influence of Korean street fashion on the youth of Northeast India has become a phenomenon that cannot be ignored. The grammar of street fashion, hip-hop, emo and rock-metal among the youth in Northeast India has been borrowed and disseminated through the virtual reality of our age and in this, the influence of an especially definable Korean ethos remains paramount. This phenomenon is made even more evident when one scrolls the pages of Facebook and Instagram accounts belonging to the youth of Northeast India. Some of these accounts even sell clothes, shoes and other paraphernalia pertaining to Korean fashion, while others advertise and share the opening of Korean restaurants in Shillong and Gangtok. In this chapter, I will show that while armed struggle is a direct form of protest, material manifestations reflected in dress fashion, music and food are other types of latent protests used in Northeast India. These cultural representations that differ from the established ‘mainstream’ Indian cultural norms, although seemingly minor and inconsequential, challenge the political and cultural domination of the Indian state over the region. The aim of this chapter is to show that youth in Northeast India use fashion in order to affirm a distinct sense of cultural identity that is often in conflict or running parallel to identities and norms that are prevailing in other parts of India. Furthermore, I argue that fashion is an act of political protest (Tarlo 1996; Allman 2004) against the political domination and influence of ‘mainstream’ Indian culture in Northeast India; and this resistance is being aided by global culture transmitted through transnational media that form points of alternative references (Crane 2000; Crane et al. 2002; Luvaas 2010, 2013) – a central element in this process of resistance. In viewing fashion as a non-verbal expression, this chapter emphasises the importance of global media and technology as primary agents in facilitating the use of fashion as an identity marker (Wolbers 2009; Luvaas 2010). Understanding the medium for fashion trends and styles that youth receive or disperse enables us to see more clearly the role of fashion in identity

160  Teiborlang T. Kharsyntiew formation. Here, the creation, manipulation, up date and ultimately the expression of fashion by the youth – both within and across social groups – inform us about social and political identity-making in Northeast India.

Dress as resistance Clothing, dress, garment and fashion are often overlapping in common parlance; yet, conceptually they convey different meanings (Eicher & Roach-Higgins 1992). However, for the purpose of this chapter, I have used the term ‘fashion’ interchangeably with ‘clothing’ and ‘dress’ to refer to them as material manifestations through which one’s identity can be expressed. Fashion here is taken as a communicating agent that is nonverbal yet assertive. The significance of fashion as a communicating agent is not restricted to a particular genre or style, and it is considered to be a site of power (Mamoun 1998; Wendy 2000; Katrina 2010). Historically, besides functioning as a body modifier and a communicating agent (Eicher & Roach-Higgins 1992: 4), dress conveyed deep social and political meanings by acting as a signifier to individual or group identity. When a group is identified with the way its members dress, the latter express their identity by adding meanings to their dress. And in certain moments of history, dress was used as a symbol of political protest and resistance. The history of Khadi in India’s anti-colonial movement, the hippie movement of the 1960s and the punk rock movement of the 1980s highlighted the social and cultural dimensions of dress and demonstrated the translation of its symbolic qualities into agents of political resistance (Weiner & Schneider 1989; Davis 1992; Eicher & Roach-Higgins 1992; Tarlo 1996; Allman 2004). The representation of the ‘political’ in dress is particularly clearly shown in historian Jean Allman’s (2004) edited volume Fashioning Power: Clothing, Politics and African Identities and Ema Tarlo’s (1996) Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India; both books construct dress as a site where power is represented, constituted, articulated and contested. Here, the authority of dress as a communicating agent informs us about its role as an indicator of group identity and a means of developing and strengthening ethnic, religious and political solidarity. This ability of fashion to transform itself from a ‘bodily praxis’ into ‘political praxis’ highlights it not only as a key social maker that differentiates individuality, but also as an apparatus to achieve social equalisation and coherence (Simmel 1957; Allman 2004). In India, this representation of dress as a ‘political’ symbol that is limited to a small audience took an unprecedented turn with the proliferation of transnational satellite television from the 1990s onwards where

Youth fashion and the identity of resistance 161 visuals of wars, protests and popular culture also became mediums of information. This process is further speeded up in the present Internet age where visuals of underground and pop culture are equally appropriated and shared seamlessly as symbols of political expression. For example, the proliferation of hip-hop music as symbols of protest is gaining ground among the underground music scene in India. Hip-hop artistes like Naved Shaikh who goes by the name Naezy, and brothers Navdeep and Harsimran Singh’s Kru172 address issues of social injustice and poverty in Mumbai and problems of drug abuse in Punjab. Other hip-hop artistes like Borkung Hrangkhawl from Tripura and Cryptographik street poets from Meghalaya use their music to protest against racism and uranium mining in Meghalaya, respectively. This shows that the transnational dimensions of identity construction now permeate from the global to the local. Here I examine the impact of the transnational television at the local level where global symbols are appropriated and merged to form a distinct local identity. The key role of MTV in popularising pop culture is a specific example. Brent Luvaas’s work on the Do It Yourself (DIY) and Cut ‘n’ Paste fashion culture in Indonesia (2010, 2013) deals with this transnational influence of pop culture on Indonesian youth. Luvaas’s (2010) research shows that the ‘do it yourself youth fashion’ – which re-interprets mainstream designers’ labels such as Nike, Adidas and others to suit local consumption – is a visible form of transnational influence that expresses Indonesian youth’s attempt to demarginalise, deterritorialise and assert themselves in the world economy (Luvaas 2010: 1). Contextualising this in India’s Northeast, transnational fashion is crucial to convey multiple meanings where dress is not just a mere body adornment but a symbol and image to communicate political participation and protest (Wendy 2000). Or to put it succinctly, when dress becomes a collective or self-expression of identity, it transforms into what Judith Butler termed as ‘body politics’ (Butler 1993). In Northeast India, dress as a signifier of ‘body politics’ is used to reinforce social relations and lay claim to a political space that is often dominated by mainstream discourse. In Northeast India, Korean fashion is not used by people to assert their place in the world economy unlike DIY and ‘cut ‘n’ paste’ are used by the Indonesian Indie middleclass youth (Luvaas 2010). I argue that Korean fashion in the Northeast has both the transnational characteristics that Luvaas mentions (2010, 2013) and is also a marker of political resistance as Tarlo (1996) demonstrates in her argument of the political symbolism of Gandhi’s Khadi. Furthermore, the transnational influence conveyed by transnational channels like MTV, Fashion TV and so forth, as well as global social media, reinforces fashion as body politics.

162  Teiborlang T. Kharsyntiew

Clothing and politics in Northeast India The Northeast region is composed of eight states straddled between the high Tibetan plateau in the north and the plains of Bangladesh in the south with Myanmar in the east. It is connected to the rest of India by mere 20 km of land near Siliguri, known as the ‘chicken neck’ corridor. The region, prior to the advent of the British colonial power, was composed of independent kingdoms, small states and principalities whose ethnicities were culturally and linguistically closer to those found in South East Asia and regions of Southwest China (De Maaker and Joshi 2007: 382). However, after India’s independence, the region was merged with the Indian Union through various instruments of accession; in many cases indigenous people of the region continue to contest the legality of these instruments. Since then, the region has witnessed numerous movements that either took the form of armed struggle or of peaceful protests and bandhs. Today, six decades after the region’s accession to the Indian Union, these movements continue to challenge the legitimacy of the Indian state. In each of these movements, symbols and images emerged and were taken as important markers directed against the state. Dress is one such symbol. This region of India is considered as one of the most culturally diverse regions of the world inhabited by more than 200 ‘tribes’. Hence, even in traditional dress and clothing, each tribe’s attire – traditionally woven and produced – varies from that of another in terms of its colours, meanings and representation. To mention a few examples, in Meghalaya, the tribal Khasi women’s traditional dress is a two-piece silk cloth draped around the shoulder known as jainsem or dhara. In Manipur, the common traditional dress consists of a shawl known as innaphi, a wrap-around cloth known as phanek and a stiff skirt-type clothing called sarong. In Mizoram, the most common traditional dress is the puanchei which is a wrap-around skirt. The most prominent as well as popular traditional clothing of all the tribes of Nagaland is the shawl that is intricately woven and designed. In Sikkim, the Bhutia traditional dress is called bakhu, which is a loose cloak-type garment that is fastened at the neck on one side and near the waist with a cotton belt. Lepchas men wear the thokro-dum, which consists of a white pyjama that reaches up to the calf, a shirt, yenthatse, and a cap, shambo. Lepcha women’s dress – dumdyam or dumvum – is an ankle-length flowing dress, the tago, with a belt called nyamrek and a cap, taro. They also adorn themselves with traditional ornaments: earrings (namchok), necklace (lyak) and bracelet (gyar). With the advent of the British administration and the Christian missionaries in the hills of Darjeeling, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Mizoram from the latter part of the 19th century, people began to slowly adapt to the Western

Youth fashion and the identity of resistance 163 dress sense. With the stationing of the Allied troops during the Second World War, the Northeast region was further exposed to popular Western culture. Western music, movies and dress became popular among the urban and educated elite of the region and over time became part of their everyday life. By the late 1970s, Western rather than Indian popular culture became the reference point (Pachuau & Schendel 2015). Such an impact of Western culture can be seen even today during Sunday church services attended by well-dressed churchgoers either in tailored Western clothes or in traditional dresses. Apart from the early onset of English education, music and movies, sustained influence of Western culture was also made possible by the fact that the region was isolated from the Indian mainland both physically and culturally for more than half a century after 1947, which left a deep impact upon the way people in the region constructed their identity. In the 1990s, the politics of dress in the Northeast was highlighted by restrictions on certain dresses and styles. Dresses, that earlier came under no restriction and were used to exhibit the cosmopolitanism of the city, were prohibited as they were deemed foreign and vulgar. In Shillong, Meghalaya, during the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, two powerful organisations – the Khasi Students Union (KSU) and the Hynñiewtrep National Liberation Council (HNLC) – focused their struggle on issues of illegal immigrants and outsiders.1 While the target of these movements were the Bengali, Nepali and other ‘non tribal’ communities, the protest could also be interpreted as a protest against the central government’s failure to safeguard indigenous people’s interests.2 While forms of protest such as road blockades, bandhs, strikes and armed violence were common during that period, a subterranean protest through dress and clothing took shape, which subsequently came to be viewed as markers of differentiation between the indigenous people and the ‘mainstream’ Indian population. Various diktats on dress codes on girls of Shillong city and other urban areas were issued, and wearing of mini-skirts and Indian dresses such as salwar kameez, which was considered to be clothes worn by Indians women of low caste, and saris was deemed inappropriate to Khasi culture (Mukhim 2014). Similarly, in Manipur, school uniforms stitched in Western or Indian style, jeans for girls, T-shirt and salwar kameez were strictly prohibited by various militant groups. Instead, girls were instructed to wear the traditional wraparound skirt known as phanek. In Manipur, from the early 1990s onwards, the prohibition was not confined only to dress and clothing, but extended to the Hindi cable channels. In Darjeeling (West Bengal), the injunction of the leaders of the Gorkhaland movement to wear traditional dress on certain days during the agitation for Gorkhaland in 2007 was seen as a form of assertion of Gorkha identity. Dress became a symbol of resistance against

164  Teiborlang T. Kharsyntiew the dominant Bengali culture that the people of the Darjeeling hills wanted to separate from. Emma Tarlo (1996) has pointed out the symbolic power of Mahatma Gandhi’s call for boycott of Western clothing and adoption of Khadi clothes during the anti-colonial movement; this resonates with regard to the dress code imposed by various groups in the Northeast. The dress code and ban on Hindi movies through cable television networks became symbols of political resistance against the repressive policy of the Indian state. While one might assume that the resistance against the Indian state took mostly the form of coercion of people and armed rebellion organised by local militant groups, which disrupted normal life, the daily life of the people was actually also affected by various other restrictions imposed by the Indian laws like the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Acts (AFSPA). The AFSPA, introduced in 1958, empowered the Indian armed forces to operate its counter insurgency with an impunity that created a psyche of insecurity among citizens, who were often caught in-between the security agencies of the state and the militant groups. Years of restrictions imposed on Northeastern people’s lives have prompted the youth of the region to open up to alternative channels of protest that are non-violent, yet effective, for they operate despite the militant groups’ diktat and against the Indian state. This became possible when liberalisation of the media became a reality in India. As television programmes shifted from cable distributors to direct-to-home satellite, access to both national and transnational channels became free from the scrutiny of militant organisations, and youth began to look towards East Asian popular culture as reference points for their own identity. Shaped by global information provided by the newly liberalised media, Korean popular culture such as Korean movies, food, music, dresses, make-up and language gained a foothold in the region. Similarly, the promises of the newly liberalised Indian economy of the 1990s led to the migration of educated youth from the Northeast to cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Pune for better opportunities (Reimeingam 2012). However, decades of armed conflicts and isolation that the region underwent have left an impression on the mainland Indians that migrants from the Northeast have an alien culture and belong to a region that is prone to violence. Thus for new migrants from the Northeast who have made it to the big cities, integration in the local communities has become difficult since they are perceived as foreigners and their food and dress are considered to be alien. Their daily lives are filled with negotiations of cultural differences that often take the form of discrimination, racism and violence. Their life, as Rajni George (2011: 30) describes, ‘are lives of self-styled non-belongers, non-Indians or perhaps, just another group of

Youth fashion and the identity of resistance 165 disfranchised living somewhat uneasily, and if there is some semblance of a truce that the community seems to make, it is often only a temporary one’ (George 2011: 30). These experiences of conflict at home and discrimination in cities that youth faced in their daily lives moulded their sense of belonging. This struggle for acceptance has often led the youth to use symbols and images to express their distinct social identity. In the Northeast, Korean dress, hairstyle, make-up and accessories are not just mere forms of mimicry but also expressions of a collective protest through the idiom of dress. Similarly, the diktat on non-local dress by an organisation like the KSU highlights the strength of dress as a symbol of protest and mass mobiliser (even though it was also used by the KSU to remind the people of their power and thereby to pressurise them to support their political agenda).

Cloth and identity Cloth as a signifier of group identity and as a means of developing and strengthening ethnic, religious or political solidarity is also often conceptualised as a site of power. During India’s independence movement under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, dress was used as a symbol of political resistance against British colonialism. Susan Bean (1989) and Ema Tarlo (1996) highlight dress as an ideological and political tool by pointing out the boycott of foreign clothes and the adoption of homespun cotton (khadi) by Gandhi, which successfully caught the collective imagination of Indians in their struggle against British colonial rule. Hence, clothes as a mode of communication can also unleash strong social and cultural forces, which gives to them a political dimension (Weiner & Schneider 1989; Davis 1992). During the field study,3 a girl respondent remarked: ‘I don’t like wearing salwar kameez as they don’t suit me’; she added, ‘it is un-cool to wear it’ (Fieldwork, February 2013). On a cursory look, this statement may seem nothing but a personal choice of the wearer. However, on a closer look, such a choice reveals meanings. In Shillong, the salwar kameez is still referred to as the dress of the dkhar, that is to say, of ‘outsiders’ or non-Khasi. This ‘un-coolness’ stems from the fact that today despite the popularity of the Indian ethnic wear, the salwar kameez carries the stigma that the ‘anti-outsiders movement’ gave it. During the ‘anti-influx movement’ in Meghalaya, the salwar kameez was tagged as a dress of the sanitation workers employed with the urban department of the Government of Meghalaya and who mostly belonged to low-caste non-tribal Hindus. Hence, the refusal to wear the salwar kameez can be seen as a key mechanism in making a concept such as ‘real’ and felt ethnic identity (Wettstein

166  Teiborlang T. Kharsyntiew 2016). The dress conveys an experience of the ‘anti-outsider movement’ that is being played on and off in the state; it is associated with a profession that the Khasi, till recently, considered below their dignity; and finally it is a dress that carries an undertone of caste identity – hence it is regarded as something that is best avoided. The male youth I encountered in Shillong narrated their experience of having been looked down upon by the other Indian communities who termed their dresses that recalled Korean pop stars in skinny fit trousers and coloured-spiky hair as deviant and ‘nonIndian’ (Fieldwork February 2013). This attempt to construct or differentiate identity through visible symbols like dress brings forth the underlying identity-based challenge between the region and the mainstream; most Northeasterners feel that they are being sidelined and dominated, culturally, politically and economically, by the mainland India groups. Here I suggest that, during my fieldwork, the substitution of dominant Indian ethnic dress by Western or Korean fashion was a form of construction of differentiation or identity distinct from the one representing the dominant Indian culture. Taking a leaf out of Bean’s (1989) and Tarlo’s (1996) work, I posit that in the present context of Northeast India, the adoption of Korean fashion among the youth of the region has become a symbol of an identity struggle that the region is trying to assert. In the Northeast, as Wettstein (2016) argues, dress as a permanent identity marker is problematic as there is no fixed relationship between dress and identity, especially when dress as forms of aesthetic expression is prone to change, reinterpretation and instrumentalisation. However, in this chapter I argue that since the early 1950s, Northeasterners also used dress to identify with transnational material culture and to differentiate themselves from the dominant mainstream culture of India. Fashion and jazz music of the early 1950s, hippie and rock cultures of the 1960s and 1980s, punk and metal of the 1980s and 1990s and hip hop and K-pop of the 2000s were all embedded in deep political meanings that echo the region’s relationship with India. This struggle is more visible when one considers contemporary youth fashion in the towns of Kohima and Dimapur in the light of the history of Nagaland and of the tumultuous relationship that Nagaland shared with India (Merelli 2011: 19). Over the last 70 years, the canvas of the Naga people’s struggle against the Indian state was painted mostly in the form of armed struggle, but over these years, elements of clothing have also become part of that canvas. This appeared more clearly in the 1950s and 1960s when tension between Nagaland and the Indian government grew, and the Naga people used dress as a way to express not only a distinct identity, but also an identity separate from the Indian one (Merelli 2011: 19).

Youth fashion and the identity of resistance 167 Display of ethnic material culture such as dress, dance, food, music and games is one way to claim and negotiate a group’s identity. Cultural festivals like the Hornbill festival in Nagaland, Monolith festival in Meghalaya, the Sangai festival in Manipur and Tawang festival in Arunachal Pradesh are projected as festivals where tourists can experience an ‘exotic’ culture that is different from the mainstream one (Longkumer 2015). The endeavour to construct cultural differentiation from mainstream was pursued not only through the display of the ‘ethnic material culture’ but also through the adoption of popular transnational rock and pop culture. The latter became an additional means of the politics of culture of marginalised identities, through which identity is asserted by subverting the hegemonic space of the dominant Indian culture not only by popularising or re-inventing images and symbols of ethnic identity but also through consumption of other global cultural products that are legitimised by their affiliation to local markets (Swain 1996). By the late 1990s and early 2000s, the expression of solidarity among the Northeast youth was not restricted to towns and cities within Northeast but extended to cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune and others where young people were flocking to benefit from the newly liberalised Indian economy. In these cities, while the divide between the Northeasterners and the local communities persists, Northeasterners seek to differentiate themselves from the Indian mainstream and express a sense of regional belonging by asserting what McDuie-Ra (2015) calls ‘adjacent identities’ based on a ‘shared cosmopolitanism’ and shared cultural practices (McDuie-Ra 2015). Similarly, food items such as bamboo shoot, fermented fish and beans, beef and pork, common to almost all communities in the region, Western music and dress and lately Korean pop culture are now cultural products that symbolise shared identities among the various Northeast communities that are living away from home.

Transnational media and transnational identity During the early 1990s, certain innovative programming caught the imagination and consciousness of Indian television viewers. Hindu mythological epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata were adapted to the small screen; so were TV soaps and serials that showcased a typical Hindu family (representing an Indian ethos, itself problematic) with moral obligations. These TV shows nourished the nationalist Hindu party’s ideology, the BJP, which appropriated the images and symbols they displayed, and repackaged these as markers of an ‘Indian identity’ – as they depicted it – in the run-up to the national general elections of 1998. This strategy

168  Teiborlang T. Kharsyntiew contributed to bring the party to power in 1998. In Northeast India, the impact of such programmes was different. While the older generations were glued to the Hindi soaps and serials, the young ones were attuned to Western, Southeast and East Asian programmes and processed them as a reference point in understanding themselves and developing their social and cultural identities. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, Korean, Japanese and South-East Asian movies, songs and fashion began to gain popularity in the region. Even in towns like Gangtok and Shillong which did not face any ban on Hindi programmes and movies unlike Manipur, Southeast and East Asian programmes gained popularity and became trendy.4 Today, passing through the market towns of Kohima, Dimapur, Gangtok, Shillong, Darjeeling, Imphal and Kalimpong, one can observe that shops selling pirated CDs/DVDs of Korean and English music; movies and serials abound in plenty. Trinkets and posters of Korean movies stars, Western hip-hop, metal and movie stars adorn the shops in these markets. This ability of young people to communicate about the latest trend and styles and the medium they use to communicate are central to identity formation. This is more evident in a globalised and networked society that is dominated by transnational and global media and where the dynamic and pace of identity transformation is erratic and volatile (Crane et al. 2002). Reproduction of images and symbols from national, transnational, and global media has facilitated, first, a culture of transnational identity that can accommodate a broad range of social struggles and, second, the emergence of new types of political citizenry (Sassen 2003: 13). Similarly, fashion as a non-verbal communication is made easily available and conveyed by a great variety of intervening mediums, including mass media (Wolbers 2009). Luvaas (2010) points out this use of available materials from transnational media and the Internet to construct a diverse, or even contradictory, set of associations and imagery that have become representative of a youth culture where youth position themselves as producers of that culture, active participants in an ongoing project of differentiation and distinction (Luvaas 2010: 2). Moreover, he sees the way youth assemble these transnational images as a bricolage where individuals ‘makes do with “whatever is at hand” ’ (Levi-Strauss 1966: 17; Luvaas 2010: 5). Straddling Dick Hebdige (1979) and Fredric Jameson (1992), Luvaas’s analysis of Cut ‘n’ Paste culture in Indonesian Indie fashion explains how bricolage served as a potent mechanism for Indonesian youth to rework on dominant meanings of global cultural symbols (e.g. those of Nike) and give them local meanings (Luvaas 2010). This, he argued, challenges the hegemony of the dominant, bourgeoise culture not through explicit acts of resistance, but ‘obliquely’ through style (Hebdige 1979; Luvaas 2010: 5). Bricolage is therefore a method of aesthetic subversion, an act of visual resistance

Youth fashion and the identity of resistance 169 for which appropriated materials come to signify group solidarity, rebellion against the ‘mainstream’ and self-imposed marginality (Luvaas 2010: 5). This challenge to the dominant culture does not stand alone but in fact is helped by the modes of production of the global market. Furthermore, aesthetic production of ‘cut ‘n’ paste’ culture is all but a ‘neutral practice of mimicry’ without allegiance and meaning, but it is irretrievably integrated into commodity production (Jameson 1992; Luvaas 2010). For Luvaas, bricolage is complex for it is not only a means of resistance but also an apparatus that operates both as ambivalent and ‘in-between’ trope (Luvaas 2010: 6). This ambivalence and ‘in-betweeness’ is more apparent in cultures such as that in Indonesia that are still caught up in the consumerist modes of social distinction, and when national and transnational corporations benefit from a strong power in our era of globalisation of the economy (ibid.). In India’s Northeast as well, the use of Korean fashion by the youth is an act of political resistance; the use of transnational images has become an act of resistance through the visual and the appropriated materials came to signify group’s solidarity, rebellion and a subaltern position. This positionality is straddled between market forces and global media. During my field study, I asked young people about their source and medium of information on fashion. Television programmes such as Fashion TV, Korean channels and music channels such as MTV, fashion magazines and the Internet (applications such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat) were their main sources of information about the latest styles and trends for both girls and boys (Fieldwork 2012, 2013). Arirang TV, MTV and Fashion TV stand as examples of how transnational programming can be conveyed and eventually shape individual and group identity. While in the Northeast, particularly in Manipur, the popularity of Korean fashion coincided with the ban of screening of Hindi movies in movie halls and local cable channel by various militant groups, the influence of Korean fashion in Gangtok, Darjeeling and Kalimpong came from Nepal. Similar to the popularity of Arirang TV in Manipur, in Nepal, the wave of Korean fashion began in the early 2000s with the introduction of Arirang TV into Nepal cable network and cemented with the return of Nepali labourer from Korea who began introducing Korean popular culture in Nepal (Tuladhar 2013; Report 2014).5 From Nepal, Korean fashion among the youth was transported to the hills of Gangtok, Darjeeling and Kalimpong by the Nepali diaspora who freely travelled to and from Darjeeling, Kalimpong and Sikkim bringing along with them Korean dress, movies and music (Fieldwork February 2012). The trend of Korean pop culture in these towns is an attempt by the youth to fit within the largest physical identity and attributes of Korean people. To the youth of the Northeast, similarity of physiology between the

170  Teiborlang T. Kharsyntiew majority Tibetan-Mongoloid people of Northeast with that of the Koreans provides a channel to relate to this transnational identity. This became even more so from the mid-1990s onwards when Korea’s electronic giants such as Samsung and LG electronics began to invest directly in India; then, awareness of Korean economy and culture began to take root in the region; also due to the presence of Korean TV channel Arirang TV, Korean pop culture gained more popularity. Thus, in todays world of globalised market and mass production, fashion is easily available to be renewed and revised and can be easily adapted to convey political significance. Otojit Kshetrimayum and Ningombam Victoria Chanu (2008) attribute the proliferation of Korean fashion in the state of Manipur to ‘cultural proximity’ as conceptualised by Straubhaar (1991). Taking a leaf from J. D. Straubhaar’s theory, Kshetrimayum and Chanu argue that ‘cultural proximity’ between Manipuri and Korean societies can be discerned in their common ancestral origin, the uses of family name in both Korean and Meiteis societies and the similarity of practice of Sanamahism6 in Manipur and shamanism in Korea (Kshetrimayum & Chanu 2008). The easy adaptability of this region to transnational symbols that flow from different mediums of communication may also stem from the fact that this region is less caste conscious than other parts of India which allows more responsiveness of the social system to outside influence. Today identifying with Korean actors such as Lee Min Hoo, Kim Bum and Kim So Yeon among others is common among the youth of this region. Even clothing stores, showrooms and beauty parlours use prominently postcards and posters of Korean actors and models as an advertising tool. While influence of media culture and free flow of digital information have introduced transnational symbols in the region, in Northeast India, the acceptance and use of transnational symbols can be related to the cultural background and life experiences that the region underwent.

Conclusion In today’s world, fashion is an important marker in shaping group and individual identities despite – or, more accurately, due to – its fluid nature that changes according to circumstances. Fashion has always been an identity marker that differentiates or binds class, caste or group affiliation. In the context of defining a ‘self’ and its ‘other’, it also constitutes a powerful identity marker. In the case of Northeast India, the trope of fashion has become the language of resistance – a resistance that is not recent but as old as the foundation of the Indian state itself. The identification with transnational images of hippie fashion in the 1970s, Korean street fashion and pop in the 2000s can be connected

Youth fashion and the identity of resistance 171 to the social history of the region. Whether at home or away, struggle is what the youth of Northeast India are familiar with. Integration of India’s economy in the global economy contrasted further the relationship between the region and the rest of India. While the youth seek opportunities opened by this new economy, the massive outburst of mass communication through satellite television and Internet has provided them with additional means from outside the region to express a distinct identity and sense of belongingness, often ‘non-’ or ‘anti-Indian’. Transnational rather than national images and symbols are appropriated to identify with Korean or Japanese culture and express a rejection of the dominant Indian culture. The availability of transnational images and the awareness of the local histories and identities have been combined to support the protest of the people in the Northeast; this serves as a powerful reminder of the region’s plea for acceptability within the pan-Indian societies as well as of their demand for recognition of their unique history, dating back to the pre-colonial period.

Notes The term ‘outsider’ generally refers to Indians from the mainland. 1 2 The Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution provides safeguards for the indigenous people residing in the hills of Northeast region. Recognition of customary laws and protection of indigenous lands are fundamental to the protection of indigenous culture; also see Barbora (this volume). 3 The field study was conducted between 2012 and 2013 with a group of 20 students of Sikkim University in Kalimpong, Darjeeling and Shillong for a winter project on the theme ‘Fashion and Youth Communication’. 4 For the impact of Korean media and acculturation to Korean culture in Manipur, also see Marchang Reimeigam 2015. 5 In 2007 the Republic of Korea and Nepal signed a ministerial agreement to facilitate labour migration from Nepal to Korea on a regular basis. For details on Nepal Labour Migration to South Korea, see Report 2014. 6 Sanamahism is a pre-Hindu religion of the Manipuris. It does not have a systematic structure but permeates the daily lives of the people through folklore and customs.

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172  Teiborlang T. Kharsyntiew Crane, Diane. 2000. Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Crane, Diane, Nobuko Kawashima and Ken’ichi Kawasaki. (eds) 2002. Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy, and Globalization. New York: Routledge. Davis, Fred. 1992. Fashion, Culture, and Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. De Maaker, Erik and Vibha Joshi. 2007. ‘Introduction: The Northeast and Beyond: Region and Culture’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 30 (3): 381–390. Eicher, Joanne B. and Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins. 1992. ‘Definition and Classification of Dress: Implications for Analysis of Gender Roles’, in Ruth Barnes and Joanne B. Eicher (eds), Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning. New York: Berg, 8–28. Fandy, Mamoun. 1998. ‘Political Science without Clothes: The Politics of Dress or Contesting the Spatiality of the State in Egypt’, Arab Studies Quarterly, 20 (2): 87–104. George, Rajni. 2011. ‘North by Northeast’, Motherland, 2 (4): 30–32. Government of Nepal. Report. 2014. ‘Labour Migration for Employment: A Status Report for Nepal: 2013/14’, Ministry of Labour and Employment, Government of Nepal. https://asiafoundation.org/resources/pdfs/MigrationReportbyGovernmentofNepal.pdf [Accessed on April 4, 2015]. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge. Jameson, Fredric. 1992. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Kshetrimayum, Otojit and Ningombam Victoria Chanu. 2008. ‘Mapping Cultural Diffusion: The Case of “Korean Wave” in North East India’, in Sushila Narsimhan and Kim Do Young (eds), India and Korea: Bridging the Gaps. New Delhi: Manak Publications, 181–195. Levi-Strauss, C. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Longkumer, Arkotong. 2015. ‘ “As Our Ancestors Once Lived”: Representation, Performance, and Constructing a National Culture amongst the Nagas of India’, Himalaya, 35 (1): 51–64. Luvaas, Brent. 2010. ‘Designer Vandalism: Indonesian Indie Fashion and the Cultural Practice of Cut ’n’ Paste’, Visual Anthropology Review, 26 (1): 1–16. ———. 2013. ‘Material Interventions: Indonesian DIY Fashion and the Regime of the Global Brand’, Cultural Anthropology, 28 (1): 127–143. McDuie-Ra, Duncan. 2015. ‘Adjacent Identities in Northeast India’, Asian Ethnicity, 17 (3): 400–413. Merelli, Annalisa. 2011. ‘Paris, Milan, Dimapur’, Motherland, April, 14–23. Mukhim, Patricia. 2014. ‘Politics of Identity and Location’, The Hindu, 26 April. Navickas, Katrina. 2010. ‘ “That Sash Will Hang You”: Political Clothing and Adornment in England, 1780–1840’, Journal of British Studies, 49 (3): 540–565. Pachua, Joy L. K. and Willem van Schendel. 2015. The Camera as Witness: A Social History of Mizoram, Northeast India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Youth fashion and the identity of resistance 173 Parkins, Wendy. (ed) 2000. Fashioning the Body Politic: Dress, Gender, Citizenship. Oxford, New York: Berg. Reimeingam, Marchang. 2012. ‘Migration from North Eastern Region to the Rest of the Country: A Recent Patterns and Trends’, in Sakarama Somayaji and Vimal Khawas (eds), Environment Development and Social Change in Himalayan Region. New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House, 148–168. ———. 2015. ‘Korean Media: A Catalyst of Acculturation to Korean Culture in Manipur’, Journal of North East India Studies, 5 (2): 1–17. Sassen, Sakia. 2003. ‘Globalization or Denationalization?’ Review of International Political Economy, 10 (1): 1–22. Schneider, Jane and Annette Weiner. 1989. Cloth and Human Experience. New York: Smithsonian Institution Press. Simmel, Georg. 1957. ‘Fashion’, American Journal of Sociology, 62 (6): 541–558. Straubhaar, Joseph D. 1991. ‘Beyond Media Imperialism: Assymetrical Interdependence and Cultural Proximity’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 8: 39–59. Swain, Nirmal Kumar. 1996. ‘The Post-Colonial Indian State: A Paradigm for Emergence of New Identities’, in M. M. Agrawal (ed), Ethnicity, Culture and Nationalism in North East India. New Delhi: Indus Publishing Company, 77–83. Tarlo, Emma. 1996. Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India. London: C. Hurst & Co. Tuladhar, Shayasta. 2013. ‘Korea in Nepal’. http://beed.com.np/beedinsights/article.php?id=59 [Accessed on August 20, 2016]. Wettstein, Marion. 2016. ‘How Ethnic Identity Becomes Real: The Enactment of Identity Roles and the Material Manifestation of Shifting Identities among the Nagas’, Asian Ethnicity, 17 (3): 384–399. Wolbers, Marian Frances. 2009. Uncovering Fashion: Fashion Communication across the Media. New York: Fairchild Books. ———. ‘Fashion and Media’. www.bergfashionlibrary.com/page/Fashion$0020 and$0020Media/fashion-and-media [Accessed on November 15, 2015].

Part III

In and out of the state

10 Decades of ‘ethnic massacre’ in Bodoland The state and the framing of conflict in India’s Northeast Kaustubh Deka For an area of 8,795 km2, which is only about one-tenth of the state of Assam, the special autonomous zone of the Bodoland Territorial Area District (BTAD) known popularly as Bodoland has acquired the dubious distinction of being one of the most conflict-torn areas of India.1 Almost since its inauguration in 2003 the area has been besieged by never-ending spirals of violence mobilised over claims to identity, territory and resources. In December 2014, suspected Bodo militants attacked some Adivasi villages along the BTAD areas resulting in the death of over 70 people, some in retaliatory violence.2 Few months before this in May 2014 suspected Bodo militants had attacked Muslim villages in the area killing over 50 people and resulting in substantial displacement. However, what has stood out in the conflict narratives in the region is the large-scale sectarian violence between sections of Bodos and Muslims in Kokrajhar and Chirang districts of BTAD in July 2012, which resulted in the death of over 100 people and which left at least 350,000 people involving both Muslims and Bodos displaced. This was described as one of the most severe humanitarian crises in post-independence India. With all these episodes of violence, Assam, as per a report prepared by the Asian Centre for Human Rights, had the ill reputation in 2014 of having the highest number of internally displaced population (IDP) in the world.3 Not surprising, since the area known as Bodoland has a long legacy of violence, starting with the agitation from the mid-1980s for a separate state for the Bodos with the radical call to ‘divide Assam fifty-fifty’; consequently the region has witnessed more violent conflicts than most other parts of the country. Significantly, Bodoland also has been a site of some unique political experiments in the Indian political system. The BTAD was formed in 2003 under the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, a constitutional provision that is often viewed as ‘the result of delicate negotiations between the tribals and the post independence government in India’ (Sonntag 1999: 418). Seen as fine examples of ‘asymmetrical federalism’, the Sixth Schedule

178  Kaustubh Deka provides for the creation of autonomous councils that are expected to be institutional devices to accommodate cultural pluralism by providing a modicum of self-government4 to the ‘tribes’ who are considered to be at the geographical, cultural and linguistic periphery of the Indian nation-state. But is the measure of the periphery a fixed one? This is the question that seems to have been thrown open with the extension of the Sixth Schedule to the Bodos. The formation of Bodoland under the Sixth Schedule marked a significant normative departure from the colonial lineage of this clause of going back to the ‘frontiers’ and ‘excluded areas’ of British colonial administrative rule. Baruah points out the early constitutional consensus of keeping tribes like Bodos in Assam outside the purview of Sixth Schedule provisions as they were not considered ‘aborigine’ enough and not indigenous to the colonial ‘excluded’ and ‘partially excluded’ areas (Baruah 2003: 1625). What then prompted this policy departure? Does this special arrangement incentivise conflict or encourage democratic competition? Enquiry into these questions will be a central theme of this chapter. It is fairly established that the bullet and the ballot live in a symbiotic relationship in Bodoland. Elections in the region, be it for the council, the state assembly or the parliament, have seen extensive mobilisation of people and multiplicity of parties and candidates. Often these elections witness violence. Attacks targeted at specific groups of individuals have taken place either to influence a verdict or to avenge one. There each verdict with the ballot usually has its consequences with the bullets. Thus, another aspect of the Bodoland conflicts that this chapter would like to examine is the ways in which electoral incentives are related to the possible culmination of ethnic conflicts either in the form of resolution or in aggravation. The larger theoretical premise this chapter draws from is the argument that the character of the state constitutes the dominant influence upon the character of ethnic politics, ethnic consciousness being ‘an emotionally powerful ideological response to the pattern of insecurities generated by the power structure of the state’ (Brown 1994: 258). This chapter substantiates this point by looking into some important developments in the evolution of two prominent student-youth organisations that have been the most active ‘social movement organisations’ (SMO) in the region claiming to represent the ‘aspirations’ of the Bodos and the Muslim minorities by spearheading the ‘ethnic’ and ‘identity’ movements of these two communities.5 These are the All Bodo Students Union (ABSU) and All Assam Minority Students Union (AAMSU), respectively. The ways in which these organisations negotiate with the policies and practices of the state are explored in the light of the three basic reasons that Jenkins provides for bringing back the state into the study of social movements: (1) social movements are political by nature; (2) the state provides the environment in which movements operate and that environment can provide opportunities

Decades of ‘ethnic massacre’ in Bodoland 179 as well as obstacles for the mobilisation; and (3) all modern states provide some system to address social interest (Jenkins 2005: 5). This chapter therefore is an exploration to understand the phenomena of continuing violence in Bodoland with the emphasis that one needs to focus more on the ways in which the post-colonial state in India conditions and engages with conflicts in its ‘troubled peripheries’ of Northeast India.6 It argues that the study of Bodoland can add to the research on the region that interrogates the post-colonial state agenda towards its northeast which is underpinned by considerations of ‘national security’ from above and ‘ethno-nationalism’ from below (Mcduie-Ra 2008). The first section looks into the intertwined history of the two youth organisations as it develops their forays into the electoral arena through critical engagements with the state. The second section attempts to categorise the nature of the state strategies in Bodoland into few specific patterns. The concluding section looks into the recent phase of electoral activism and conflicts in the area to understand the interlinkages between the two.

Social movement organisations in negotiations with the state: looking at ABSU and AAMSU An analysis of the life course of organisations like the ABSU and AAMSU that have been involved in the development of the ethnic agenda of the Bodo and the Muslim communities in Assam becomes crucial as it ‘challenges the boundary between institutionalised and non- institutionalised politics (McAdam et al. 2001: 2), something very relevant in contexts such as Bodoland. Besides I argue that it is crucial to study the evolution of the social movement organisations in Bodoland as it is in the mobilising course of different social movements that the mutually conditioning interactions occur between segments of state and society. Trying to understand the violence through an analysis of the antagonistic movement narratives of the two conflicting youth organisations will re-emphasise the issue of the predominant role played by the state in the course of social movements.

ABSU: from leadership to relative marginalisation Formation of ABSU in 1967 was indicative of the growing radicalisation of the aspirations of Bodo nationalism as ABSU grew in strength with battle cries of ‘no Bodoland, no rest’ sidelining organisations like the Plain Tribals Council of Assam and eventually elbowing them out of the movement and accusing them to be ‘sell outs’ and ‘reactionaries’ in the cause of a separate state. The radical turn to the Bodo movement however has to be understood in view of the preceding developments especially in the state government’s

180  Kaustubh Deka indifference to the ABSU’s previous ‘less radical’ demands. It is pertinent to remember that a perennial anxiety and fear about loss of land has been a running narrative around which the discourse of Bodo nationalism has been woven. Some of the early ‘ethnic’ clashes involving the Bodos were in essence a politicisation of local land disputes. The repeated land-related conflicts throughout the decade of the 1980s between the Bodo and Assamese speakers in reserved forests areas of Gohpur in Sonitpur district are well documented (Goswami 2009; Das 2010). But a memorandum submitted to the then chief minister of Assam, Hiteswar Saikia, on 2 January 1984 listing ABSU’s ‘long-standing grievances’ did not mention separation from Assam or even political and administrative autonomy. The 46-point memorandum deals almost entirely with educational and cultural matters. However the quick disenchantment with the outcome of the Assam Movement7 turned out to be a crucial development for the Bodos. During the Assam Movement, both the AASU8 and ABSU demanded the eviction of all non-tribals from tribal belts. Consequently, Clause 10 of the Assam Accord stipulated that ‘it will be ensured that relevant laws for prevention of encroachment of government lands and lands in tribal belts and blocks are strictly enforced and unauthorised encroachers evicted as laid down under such laws’. However, the newly formed Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) government in 1985 (after the end of Assam Movement) was soon accused of using the Clause 10 of the Assam Accord only to evict poor tribal farmers en masse from the government land and reserved forests. The same clause allegedly was never utilised when it came to evicting the illegal nontribal encroachers from the various tribal belts and blocks (Baruah 1999: 187). It is in this context that the popular slogan by the ABSU ‘divide Assam fifty-fifty’ captured the radical and expansionist counter-streak of Bodo politics. The organisation came out with a territorial blueprint of the Bodo-populated areas of Assam, which was then ‘projected’ by them as one largely contiguous area covering almost the entire stretch of the northern bank of the Brahmaputra river in Assam. Thus if one takes a look at the map of Assam, one would see that the scissors of Bodo ‘nationalistic’ demands would cut it almost into half horizontally. Thus by 1987 ABSU launched a new phase of the movement on the basis of a 92-point charter of demands which it submitted to the Assam government. The original charter of demands was soon to be reduced to three ‘political’ demands: (a) the creation of a separate state of ‘Bodoland’; (b) the setting up of district councils in the tribal areas on the south bank of Brahmaputra; and (c) the inclusion of the Bodo Kacharis9 of Karbi Anglong district of Assam in to the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution. On 20 February 1993, a memorandum of settlement was signed between the representatives of the Assam government, ABSU and the Bodo People’s

Decades of ‘ethnic massacre’ in Bodoland 181 Action Committee (BPAC) resulting in the creation of an ‘administrative authority within the State of Assam’, called the Bodoland Autonomous Council (BAC), a measure that was seen to be much lesser than the demand for the separate state to be carved out of Assam that was to be called ‘Bodoland’. Additionally the BAC could never exercise whatsoever limited autonomy was provided by the act mainly because of insufficient financial powers and overwhelming domination of the state government over most of the transferred subjects. The Government of Assam unilaterally demarcated and declared the boundary of the BAC in the later part of 1993, which was rejected by the ABSU and BPAC and this resulted in large-scale violence in different parts of Bongaigaon and Kokrajhar areas of BAC. In July 1994, ABSU launched an agitation against the non-implementation of the Accord and in 1996 revived its demand for a separate state. July 1994 had already witnessed riots in the northern parts of the Barpeta district in lower Assam where, according to some sources, Muslim peasants of immigrant descent, an estimated 1,000 of them mostly women and children, were killed, thousands injured and about 60 villages burnt down to ashes (Hussain 1995: 1155). Thus BAC was an experiment that failed to achieve its objectives and led to further complications for the state. Instead it initiated a politics premised on a sense of ‘ethno-pathology’, hinged on the delineation of the ethnic other as the enemy, a tendency to ‘perceive other communities to be the source of suffering in political, psychological and cultural terms, against which an emergence becomes necessary’ (Biswas & Suklabaidya 2008: 239). The next landmark in political negotiation came exactly a decade later in 2003, when negotiations between the Government of Assam, the central government and the insurgent group Bodoland Liberation Tigers (BLT) created the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC). BLT was one of the early armed groups operating in the Bodo-dominated regions demanding a separate state for the Bodos to be carved out of Assam. The organisation was founded in 1996 under the leadership of Prem Singh Brahma, and after seven years of its formation the BLT disbanded and it entered the political conglomeration, the Bodoland People’s Forum (BPF) of which former ABSU officials and other activists of Bodo politics were also a part. The centre’s choice to negotiate with the BLT bilaterally and its inaction in the face of BLT ceasefire violations seem to have been intended to allow the BLT to consolidate local power; significantly the interim body created to oversee the first elections to the BTC was headed by ex-militants of the BLT (Lacina 2009). The main statement of the Accord was explicit in stating that the objective in setting up the BTC is to ‘fulfil economic, educational and linguistic aspirations and the preservation of land rights, socio-cultural and ethnic identity of the Bodos’.10 Interestingly in 2004, the outgoing president

182  Kaustubh Deka of ABSU, U. G. Brahma, was elected to the Rajya Sabha soon after the signing of the BTC Accord. In an interview with me in December 2012 Mr Brahma recalled, This [the signing of the Bodo accord] was a strategic decision as per the need of the time. Every body in the Bodo society in that time felt that someone was needed to oversee the satisfactory closure of the crucial talks between the Government and BLT, to advance the whole process of negotiation from being inside parliamentary politics. So my election was a decision of the community. However, soon ABSU lost some mileage in the turf war of control over its new found political arena. In the face of the impending first elections of the BTC in May 2005, BPF got split into ABSU and BLT camps. BLT under the leadership of its chief, Hagrama Mahilary, spilt BPF and formed its own political party Bodoland Progressive People’s Front (Hagrama fraction or BPPF-H). Against ABSU-supported ‘Rabiram section’ (or BPPFR) ex-BLT chief Hagrama Mahilary had put up his candidates who swept the poll. Since then BPPF had cornered ABSU in the battle of electoral politics at least. Often resulting in intimidation and violence, this competition between Bodo political groups and elites has radicalised Bodo politics. According to some activists of ABSU, in places like Kokrajhar, during the days of elections, the intimidation and pressure are often so high that openly moving about becomes a tough task and electoral campaigning is a distant question.11 Therefore it is significant that in the volatile clashes of BTAD in 2012 between sections of the Bodos and the Muslims of East Bengal descent, it was more the people and groups belonging to different fractions of insurgents that were the ‘triggering participants’. In fact it is the conspicuous absence of ABSU in the initial phase that is worth examining. ABSU’s role, however, remains crucial for its consistent role as a movement organisation in keeping the issue of the separate state alive. ‘The Bodoland Territorial Autonomous District is nothing but a transformation of the former tribal belts and blocks area into a clearly demarcated scheduled area with a bigger contiguity’, explained U. G. Brahma, in his interview mentioned earlier. He was responding to my question on the often-heard allegation that Bodos are being placed in a position of dominance within the BTAD despite being a numerical minority. ABSU leaders in fact accuse the government of pursuing a systematic and methodological marginalisation of the tribals by abdicating the responsibility of the protection of the tribal belts and blocks that constituted ‘a moral and legal responsibility of the government’. After many acts of violence in BTAD it was often alleged that Bodos

Decades of ‘ethnic massacre’ in Bodoland 183 have become a dominant minority in the region as they constitute only 26 per cent of the population in the region but yet absorb most of the political privileges and power.12 Thus, this perennial fear of losing the land, which, as we discussed, continued to haunt the tribals of Assam since the early decades of independence and through the decades of the Assam Movement, remains one of the key narratives that influences much of the contentious politics taking place with the formation of BTAD.

The emergence of AAMSU: as the ‘lone voice of the minorities’ In many ways AAMSU as an organisation sits at the other end of the narrative of the politicisation of the ‘minorities’ in Assam. The organisation had given a call for participation in the election in 1983 as it was seen as an occasion to prove the patriotism of the Muslims in Assam by boycotting the anti-election call given by the anti-national elements (Ahmed 2006). The government was quick to tap on these ‘fault-lines’ in the evolving Assamese nationality discourse. AAMSU founding president, Abdul Haidar Nagri, was given a ticket from the Congress Party to contest the election from the North Abhyapuri Lok Sabha constituency. The most severe violent retribution of this act of defiance however came in a nondescript locality in Moriagon district called Nellie (in undivided Nagaon district then). On 18 February 1983, immediately after the state legislative assembly election of Assam, a strong mob of allegedly ‘local’ people, including Assamese caste Hindus along with members of tribes such as the Tiwas, the Karbis, the Mishings and the Rabhas, attacked and killed around 1,600 people belonging to the Muslim immigrants of East Bengal descent who had settled in the area (Baruah 1999: 134; Hazarika 2001: 155; Kimura 2003). The scars of this massacre were to translate into bigger insecurity for the community soon in the form of the Assam Accord and the installation of a new government who promised swift detection and expulsion of ‘illegal voters’ in the state. The fear and insecurity of the minorities of Bangladeshi descent was thus near-institutionalised post 1985. The emergence of AAMSU as the voice of the minority especially in the districts of western Assam, where the issue of deportation was a threatening possibility for many, can be understood better in the context of the ethnicised political landscape of Assam. This new leadership role emerged in a context where different tribal and religious minority organisations began challenging the ‘assumed’ authority of the Assamese speakers to speak for Assam and its people. In fact as it has been observed that the very term ‘ethnic Assamese’, which was either non-existent or in extremely rare use before the Assam Movement, had become common in discussions of Assam politics only since the Assam

184  Kaustubh Deka Movement (Baruah 1999: 125). This loss for the caste Hindu Assamese speakers was a gain for organisations like the AAMSU at least in the initial years following the Assam Movement. Especially interesting is the gradual opening up of the sections of the Muslim community regarding the trauma and sorrow inflicted by the Nellie massacre and an acknowledgement of the collective wounds that never healed. It took the community a substantial time to speak up and seek answers. This gradual feeling of empowerment needs to be put in the context of political assertions by organisations such as the AAMSU. Politics around Muslim rights and grievances in Assam has evolved substantially at least in terms of mobilisation capacity since the days of Nellie and Barpeta massacres. It was a significant development that the All India United Democratic Front (AIDUF), widely considered to be a party with strong clout among the Muslims of Bengali descent, had become the principal opposition party in the assembly in the recent times (during the 13th Assam legislative assembly 2011–2016), replacing the self-declared proponent of ‘Assamese nationalism’, the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) Party. In this context, it is important to look into the formation of a new body called All Bodo Minority Students Union (ABMSU), supposed to be a Bodoland version of AAMSU. The formation of this body was conceived as a tactic strategised by BPPF to tap into the Muslim youth in BTAD. It was thought to be a manoeuvre that would have gained them the organisational strength of AAMSU while also emphasising the distinct political identity of Bodoland. But admittedly they were outsmarted by the AAMSU leadership on this and soon after the formation of ABMSU, it was ‘hijacked’ by AAMSU.13 In fact, in the 2010 elections in BTC the organisation had demanded of the BPF Party to accord at least three seats for the minorities in those constituencies where they have absolute majority. When it was not accepted, the AAMSU and ABMSU jointly formed ‘Sankhyalagu Aikya Mancha’ (Minorities United Front) to contest in the ensuing BTC election from constituencies comprising highest number of minority votes (Assam Tribune, 18 March 2010, p. 2). On 6 June 2013, AAMSU organised a large-scale road blockage at 16 places in Assam, mostly confined to western Assam demanding action on a seven-point demand that included, prominently among others, scrapping the names of the non-Bodo majority villages from the BTAD areas and renewal of the NRC with 25 March 1971 as the base year. Significantly some of the interesting refrains of the day were, ‘we, the people of Assam have to fight for the Assamese language even in the lands of Assam’ (Asomiya Pratidin, 7 June 2013, p. 1.). Therefore with this heightened politicisation and a new language of assertion, ABMSU/AAMSU activists were in the forefront of the events that

Decades of ‘ethnic massacre’ in Bodoland 185 unfolded in BTAD in 2012. As various reports suggest, they were one of the most vocal and visible actors in the initial phase of the events. AAMSU continues to demand the scrapping of the BTAD Accord and clamping of president’s rule in BTAD claiming that ‘Hagrama’s gun-totting gang is going on a spree of killing the minorities’ (Amar Asom, 8 August 2012, p. 1). All these led to a significant political culmination when in 2014 Lok Sabha election independent candidate Naba Saraniya (who significantly happens to be a former militant leader of the ULFA supported by AAMSU and ABMSU along with 18 other ‘non-Bodo’ groups under the umbrella Sanmilita Janagostiya Aikkya Mancha (SJA), an amalgamation of ‘nonBodo’ ethnic and linguistic groups based in BTAD) won the elections defeating the closest rival from the ruling BPF Party. Thus for the first time in the history of the constituency a non-Bodo candidate won the parliamentary seat with an unprecedented 51 per cent of the vote share. One year later in 2015, the election to the Bodoland Territorial Council saw significant erosion of the clout of the ruling BPF as the hold of the party declined to 20 seats from the previous number of 36 seats in a Council of total 40 elected seats. Thus Bodoland is witnessing some remarkable political mobilisation around negotiations over identities that has led to a political flux in recent times. The changing role of ABSU and AAMSU in this political discourse reflects the evolution of a ‘constitutive contention’, a situation in the conflict where previously excluded or new actors are making claims and are making use of new, and often unauthorised, forms of action (McAdam et al. 2001: 2), developments that ‘can be understood in the context of a society coming to terms with historical social change’ (Baruah 2009: 952). These observations pertain to the important question, whether ethnicity is becoming a near-absolute frame of political reference in the region, to what extent it is an outcome of the positions the state has adopted? In what manner is the state situated in the articulation of this ‘contentious’ politics in Bodoland? The next section explores these questions.

The state and the management of the ‘ethnic’ question: the contentious framework of the Sixth Schedule Commenting on the Indian situation, Paul Brass mentions that ‘ethnicity and nationalism are modern phenomena inseparably connected with the activities of the modern centralising state’ (Brass 1991: 8). However, he is quick to clarify that ‘we do not build up a case here for an absolute “statist” view of ethnicity which would mean that the ethnic agenda is but a response to external stimuli and as such fully determined and shaped by situational

186  Kaustubh Deka factors alone’ (ibid.). This chapter argues, however, that while discussing cases like Bodoland, the role of the state in ethnic politics assumes central importance. David Brown calls it the need to examine the ‘state promulgated national identity, the ideological parameters within which ethnic consciousness develops and operates’ (Brown 1994: 1). As briefly mentioned in the introduction of the chapter, the foundation of Bodoland in 2003 under the provision of Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution earmarked some significant policy shifts for the Government of India. It was an instance of the state exploring and modifying the constitutional tools in negotiating with social movements as well as with groups that espoused insurgency. It was a political experiment. Two years later in 2005, a similar attempt was made in the case of ‘Gorkha’ agitation by converting the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGHC) into a Sixth Schedule entity. The failure to push the plan through points at the complexities involved with such experiments and policy measures. The implications of this constitutional-policy framework of the Sixth Schedule for Bodoland have been approached variously. While some call it an instance of ‘the policy-makers displaying a remarkable lack of historical memory’ (Baruah 2003: 1625), some others call it as an institutionalisation of a politics of difference and ‘an instrument that incentivises conflict’ (Baruah & Rouleau 2011: 178). Some again look at it as an ‘innovative model of ethnofederalism and political autonomy’ that often has unintended consequences of propelling renewed conflict and violence (Saikia et al. 2016: 137). We will approach the issue from the narrative of negotiations between the state and the ethnic social groups. In the light of case studies of the two organisations in the previous section, we will try to point out the primary ways in which the institution of the state critically influences the setting of the agenda of conflict in Bodoland.

Conditioning local autocracy: a safety valve measure? Bodoland is an example where institutions like the autonomous council under the Sixth Schedule have become de-facto tools of political management used to defuse possible dissent against the state. The government invests in group leaders by distributing substantial financial and coercive resources and allowing some form of local autocracy to consolidate power which is aimed at minimising threats to ‘national security’ and ‘anti-state’ violence, even while creating the conditions for the rise of localised violence and corruption. A way to understand much of this ethnic violence is to comprehend the centre’s strategy for the creation of the localised autocracy for maintaining stability in the areas of Northeast, even when it comes at the cost of

Decades of ‘ethnic massacre’ in Bodoland 187 substantial erosion of democracy and the rule of law in the region (Lacina 2009; Borbora 2012). When successful, this strategy is a means for the Indian state to minimise pressing national security threats at relatively little cost to itself. Sanjoy Barbora calls it ‘an example of how principles of autonomy for indigenous communities can go wrong when the political guarantees of security – both political and fiscal – are missing from the political vocabulary of those who seek, as well as those who grant autonomy’ (Barbora 2012: 42). There is, of course, the larger ‘policy legacy’ of New Delhi’s Northeast approach where by privileging separate statehood as the preferred outcome, it creates the context for ethnic violence and disincentivises a politics of accommodation (Baruah 1999: 200–201). As mentioned in the previous section, gradual sidelining of the ABSU as an influential force in Bodo politics vis-à-vis the strong emergence of BPF is a point worth recalling here. The radicalisation of competition among Bodo social groups and elites is one significant consequence of the formation of Bodoland in its present form that has often seen the sidelining and even the elimination of the ‘moderate’ section of the Bodo leadership. Elsewhere in other contexts of political autonomy it has been observed that special provisions that have perpetuated local oligarchies, have not exactly strengthened democracy in those areas, and have often weakened the links between the people and political power. The real tension lies between legal-constitutional advances and lack of political will (Yadav & Palsekhar 2008: 5). However, the additional critical adage of ‘national security’ makes the instances like BTAD even more volatile. It is worth reiterating Paul Brass here again as he points out that ‘ethnic identity and modern nationalism arise out of specific types of interactions between the leadership of centralising states and elites from non-dominant ethnic groups, especially but not exclusively on the peripheries of those states’ (Brass 1991: 9). And in these peripheries, the institutions like the autonomous council as per the Sixth Schedule have become de-facto tools of political managements as the bargaining floor between the state and the elites. Besides, the Bodo militant groups who remained outside ceasefire agreement for a long time such as the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) remained closely involved with political events in the region, including engaging with the electoral process. ‘We were never away from elections or politics here, whether we were in the jungles or on foreign soil. Individuals or political parties would approach us and we would do our bit to help them. We could never escape the elections’, confessed NDFB chief Ranjan Daimary on the eve of state assembly elections in Assam (Telegraph 2016). It is a peculiar arrangement forged between the ‘interest of the state’ and that of the ‘dominant coalition’ that works towards entrapping the different communities from each other at the local level. We explore the idea next.

188  Kaustubh Deka

The entrapment argument: the politics of ‘wastelands’ and ‘enclave economy’ Looking at conflicts through lenses of history reveals the silent march of labour and capital through which history in post-colonial societies unfolds. It also shows the special relationship that the post-colonial state has inherited from the colonial one in terms of a resource extraction regime when it comes to the resource-rich peripheries like Assam. In the interest of colonialism, new reservation policies and structures were introduced to restrain native access to valuable forests and to stimulate the clearance of fertile lands. Thus the communities in Assam who had once enjoyed full access to land and forest became ensnared by a strangling dichotomy of restrictive forestry structures, policies and processes, and the rising livelihood demands of an expanding population (Vandekerckhove & Suykens 2008: 450–451). This entrapment of the people from its resources continued by and large under the post-colonial decades with two significant implications. First, the tribal groups like the Bodos utilised the opportunities to ensnare the fringe and forest villages. Subsequently, as forest department came under the purview of BTAD as per the BTC Accord, afforestation began to be emphasised as a possible way to escape the entrapments of resources and employment opportunities (ibid.: 468). Second, it led to the development of an unchecked industry as elements of warlord politics became embedded in the Bodo conflict as illegal timber logging and trade in endangered species grew (ibid.: 461). Now this point is highly crucial as in a situation charged with ethnic tension any conflict can take ethnic proportions. Not surprisingly, there are versions going around linking the very beginning of the recent BTAD clashes to some dispute and murder arising out of illegal timber-trading dealings.14 Here it is worth pointing out the allegation of the illegal brick-kiln factories established at places like Tintilla and Alurbhui that fall under the contiguous area of the Chakrasila Wildlife Sanctuary attracting huge migrant labourers. According to my discussion with some ABSU members at Kokrajhar, the complaints by villagers of Anthaibari and Muthupura about the brick kilns as well as the growing illegal timber trade in the area failed to get positive response from the administration due to the ‘political nexus’. These same findings are corroborated by a fact-finding team from the Bodo-English magazine Bibungthi (The Opinion) visiting and talking to the villagers of these areas in the aftermath of the conflict in September 2012 (Bibungthi 2012: 18). Indeed, in the logic of the post-colonial state, entrapment is required not only of the community from the resources but also of the communities from one another or worst entrapment of one at the cost of the other.

Decades of ‘ethnic massacre’ in Bodoland 189

Incentivising the autochthony banner Another way the state influences the situations of conflict in Bodoland is by providing an institutional impetus to the doctrine of the son of soil, a doctrine that is the result of the enduring but highly selective reaffirmation of geo-cultural links, often deemed ‘natural’ and ‘indigenous’, between ethnic groups and territory. The BTC Accord justifies that every community with perceived historical roots in a particular place has a right to delineate that ‘imagined place’ and to protect it from perceived ‘outsiders’. This creates a binary of belonging between the ones considered as autochthones, the ‘sons of the soil’, and the ones who are not. In this context of institutionalised ambiguity, in which a communalised paranoia towards fake autochthones is fomented, indigenous people begin to ‘identify relative “insiders” as their principal enemies . . . reclassified as simply different to dangerous, and are at risk of elimination by a pre-emptive strike’ (Li 2002: 362). The son of the soil doctrine further gets incentivised as the politicisation of citizenship and the ethnicisation of the local sphere represent powerful strategies to mobilise constituents, and given the uncertainty and high stakes surrounding elections, the instrumentalisation of grievances can often collapse into ‘sons of the soil’ conflicts (Vandekerckhove 2009; Côté & Mitchell 2016).

Elections as structures of conflict and reconciliation Another significant way through which the state practices influence ethnic politics is through the phenomena of elections. Observations on Bodoland add to the understanding that, one, elections in India are increasingly becoming occasions where identities are forged, negotiated and realigned (Yadav & Palshikar 2008: 15). Two, there exists a fine link between electoral incentives and possible course of ethnic equations towards resolution or conflicts. As seen through the evolving political trends, one argues that in situations of special political autonomy like BTAD, the state policies and modus operandi become critical in influencing the transformation of an ethnic (analytical) category into an ethnic (active) group. The political developments and the politics predicated on ‘ethnic identity’ in Bodoland show that ethnic appeal and ethnic equations lead to varied social consequences depending on the larger ‘organisational, demographic and institutional variables’ present in the social system (Chandra 2004). Thus the overwhelming collective mobilisation of the non-Bodos that resulted in the winning of non-Bodo candidate polling more votes in 2014 general elections than the combined votes of the two prominent Bodo candidates can be seen as a strong message of counter ethnic solidarity. However, quite significantly the non-Bodo conglomeration SJA performed much

190  Kaustubh Deka less effectively in the subsequent BTC election as the non-Bodo votes got divided in a multi-party and multi-cornered contest, only indicating the fluidity and contingent nature of ethnic appeal. At least one significant reason behind this poor show can be traced to the structure of council itself. Since as per the Sixth Schedule provisions, 30 seats out of 40 seats of the council are reserved for the ST, it becomes difficult for a largely ‘non-tribal’ conglomerate like SJA to field ‘eligible’ candidates. In this connection, I remember my conversation with the president of ABSU, Promod Boro, in March 2013, who had remarked in a lighter vein that a day will not be far when there will be a separate ethnic group in Assam called ‘Oboro’ (non-Bodos) and perhaps they will seek tribal status too!15 Indeed given the electoral compulsions and induced ambiguities in the system, ironies can turn to truth sooner than one can imagine.

Conclusion: trappings of the manipulated ambiguities The study on Bodoland shows that given the complexity and irreducibility of social identification, absolute ethnic solutions merely expound identity fetishism. Reinforcing or creating exclusivist antagonisms fragments local coalitions and sets the stage for more violence. Old timers in Bodo politics do admit that negotiations with the Indian state had induced a majoritarian rhetoric into the movement and gradually stifled the pluralistic coalitions into exclusivist ones.16 In fact the issue of land, finance and regulation of property remains highly contentiou within Bodoland, and the provisions of the Sixth Schedule continue to be in the centre of controversy. In 2015, just before the elections, the government had proposed some amendments to the Schedule aiming greater financial regulation of the councils by bringing the Sixth Schedule areas under the purview of the Finance Commission and instituting village councils in these areas’.17 The proposal, however, is being opposed by the autonomous councils on the ground of possible dilution of powers for the autonomous bodies at the district and regional levels. What makes the councils apprehensive of the undermining of their autonomy are the provisions of the amendments that propose that money will be released by the state government only after the authorities are satisfied that the work has been started in a phase-wise manner. Besides, the councils will also be required to submit a completion certificate for the release of final payment. The negotiation between the state and social movements through measures such as the Sixth Schedule is an ongoing one. Although there has been much talk about the need to expand the democratic ambit of the BTC by making it more accommodative with a greater and proportionate representation to different communities residing in BTAD, the state has to initiate the process by altering its primary methods of dealing with conflicts

Decades of ‘ethnic massacre’ in Bodoland 191 in the Northeast some of which have been discussed in this paper. For this, however, one also needs to pay attention on ‘the more subtle processes of community formation that take place in the other, subaltern domain tied to peoples’ everyday struggle for survival’ (Karlsson 2001: 34) and emphasise the ‘need to devise strategies to privilege everyday forms of engagement over associational forms’ (Varshney 2001: 265). The continuing violence in the region needs to be understood through a social construction of the violence, through representations of conflict by local stakeholders, focusing on the discursive framing of political violence. This requires a tracing of the violence all the way to the very pattern of interaction between the post-colonial state and a society modelled as ‘peripheral’ and ‘multi-ethnic’. Thus this chapter discussed three aspects. One, high levels of electoral competition can reduce as well as precipitate ethnic violence. Second, political processes and institutional structures, specially discussed in the context of Sixth Schedule areas like Bodoland, impact on the potential role of the phenomena of ethnicity within a democratic set-up. It is the nature of the institutional incentives that largely decides whether ethnicity as a functional variable becomes an obstacle or resource for democracy in contexts of plurality of identities. And finally that identity shifts are often tactical, fluid and temporary, and ethnic identities, besides causing conflict, at times, also emerges out conflict. Viewed from the conflict zones of Bodoland it is the state in India through its interaction with the social actors that emerges as the strategic manipulator of these ambiguities.

Notes 1 However, a section of the Bodos resents the legitimisation of the BTAD as the ‘whole of Bodoland’ and considers the present size and contours of Bodoland as a defeat of the collective political imagination of the Bodos whose ‘original’ territorial demand covered half of Assam’s geography. To represent the demands of the Bodos living in other parts of Assam outside the area of BTAD, a group called United Bodo People’s Organisation (UPBO) was formed in 2014. 2 These are villages set up by former indentured labourers brought by British colonial authority to work in the tea gardens of Assam. Thus the Adivasi people are also referred to as ‘tea tribe’ in Assam; earlier they belonged to different tribal/Adivasi groups from Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal, Telangana and Chhattisgarh. It is estimated that the Adivasis make up around 20 per cent of Assam’s population, and in BTAD they are about 17 per cent of the inhabitants. 3 ‘Displaced Adivasis of Assam, The Largest Conflict Induced IDPs of the World in 2014, Are Being Denied Access to Humanitarian Crisis’, Asian Centre for Human Rights, www.achrweb.org/press/2015/IND01-2015. html [Accessed on July 20, 2016]. 4 As per the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution autonomous district councils can be created within the federal states of the Northeast region.

192  Kaustubh Deka Their territorial jurisdiction can be expanded through amendment to the act. These units are to have their own elected bodies that have the power to make laws on a range of subjects such as the allotment of land, use of water course and inheritance of property besides others. 5 Social movement organisations are defined as those that play an important role in keeping movements ‘moving’ by maintaining debates, supporting events, nurturing leaders during ebbs in movement activity and more generally in helping produce submerged networks or latent social movements (Townsend et al. 2004: 871). 6 Political scientist, Sanjib Baruah, describes this as a condition of ‘durable disorder’ where the Northeast region is being treated as a special fraction of the Indian state, as a frontier region, due to the Indian state’s obsession with conflict and insurgency in the region. He refers to a situation where insurgency and counter-insurgency operations have caused human and material losses, eroded the region’s democratic fabric and institutionalised authoritarianism (Baruah 2005). 7 The movement that started in Assam with allegations of illegal migrants being entered in the electoral rolls in 1979 and formally ended with the signing of the Assam Accord in 1985 between government and the agitators came to be known as the Assam Movement in popular as well as academic parlance. Also known as the ‘anti-foreigners’ movement, the agitators called it as Assam’s last struggle for survival against the cultural, political and demographic transformation of Assam by the onslaught of unchecked immigrants that threatened to reduce the indigenous communities to minorities in their own land. The critic of the movement, however, called it an occasion by petty bourgeoisie upper-caste Assamese-speaking sections trying to monopolise absolute political power. Thus the movement has been variously analysed as the articulation of middle-class hegemony in Assam (Baruah 2002), a polysonic movement bringing together different sections of society (Das 2002), as the growing assertion of Assamese subnationalism (Baruah 1999), as an upper-caste, upper-class ideological movement to sideline the religious, linguistic minorities within Assam (Hussain 1993). There is a wide consensus, however, that the Assam Movement ethnicised the socio-political landscape of Assam with deep consequences for later years and also marked an important turning point for regionalism in India (Ahmed 2006). 8 All Assam Students’ Union is a student’s organisation in Assam that has been at the forefront of participation in different social movements from its formation in late 1960s (Deka 1996). AASU’s role in influencing state politics became most prominent during the years of Assam Movement which is described as the biggest student movement in post-emergency India (Shah 2004). AASU was a signatory of the Assam Accord in 1985, and leaders of AASU formed the bulk of political leadership in the newly formed political party Asom Gana Parishad that contested and won the state assembly election held after the signing of the Accord. AASU does not claim to be affiliated to any political party and claims to have an apolitical character. Leaders of AASU continue to join political parties across the spectrum once they leave the union. AASU’s position on different matters has been linked to its organic connections to the aspirations of the ‘Assamese speaking’ middleclass aspirations in Assam (Baruah 2002).

Decades of ‘ethnic massacre’ in Bodoland 193 9 The term ‘Bodo Kachari’ is used often to denote that Bodos are a part of a larger identity, which is Kachari, and Bodos are considered to be one of the largest of the 18 ethnic sub-groups within the Kachari group. 10 ‘Bodoland Territorial Council and Accord’, published by Centre for envelopment and Peace Studies http://cdpsindia.org/btc_accord.asp [Accessed on August 8, 2016]. 11 Field notes, Kokrajhar, October 2012. 12 According to the latest figures, the Bodo consist of only 29 per cent of the population in BTAD. The remainder is made up of non-Bodos – Asomiya Hindus (27 per cent), Muslims (14 per cent), Adivasis (9 per cent) and others such as Koch-Rajbanshis, Bengali Hindus, Nepalis and Marwaris making up 21 per cent. www.epw.in/node/145617/pdf [Accessed on August 10, 2016]. 13 Interview with BPPF and ABSU officials, field notes, Kokrajhar, October 2012. 14 Field notes, interview with Senior ABSU leaders, Kokrajhar, October 2012. 15 Field Notes, Guwahati, March 2013. 16 Conversation with officials of Bodo Literary Association (Bodo Sahitya Sabha/Bodo Thunlai Afad), Field Notes, Guwahati, April 2013. 17 ‘Centre Proposes Amendment to Sixth Schedule with Eye on Assam Election’, Rahul Tripathi, http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-0717/news/64535537_1_autonomous-council-sixth-schedule-village-council [Accessed on September 4, 2016].

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194  Kaustubh Deka Bibungthi. 2012. ‘(The Opinion): A Quarterly English Magazine’, December, Kokrajhar. Biswas, Prasenjit and Chandan Suklabaidya. 2008. Ethnic Life-Worlds in NorthEast India: An Analysis. New Delhi, Sage. Brass, Paul R. 1991. Ethnicity and Nationalism: Theory and Comparison. Newbury Park: Sage. Brown, David. 1994. The State and Ethnic Politics in Southeast Asia. London: Routledge. Chandra, Kanchan. 2004. Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India. New York: Cambridge University Press. Côté, Isabelle and Matthew I. Mitchell. 2016. ‘Elections and “Sons of the Soil” Conflict Dynamics in Africa and Asia’, Democratization, 23 (4): 657–677. Das Samir Kumar. 2002. ‘On the Question of Students’ Hegemony: A Study of the Assam Movement (1979–1985)’, in Apurba Kr. Baruah (eds), Student Power in North-East India: Understanding Student Movements. New Delhi: Regency, 132–148. ———. 2010. India: Democracy, Nation and the Spirals of Insecurity: State Responses to Ethnic Separatism in India’s Northeast’, in Robert Wirsing and Ehsan Ahrari (eds), Fixing Fractured Nations: The Challenge of Ethnic Separatism in the Asia-Pacific. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 216–239. Deka, Meeta. 1996. Student Movements in Assam. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing house. Goswami, Sabita. 2009. Mon Gangare Tirot: Orchid: Guwahati. Hazarika, Sanjoy. 2001. Rites of Passage: Border Crossings, Imagined Homelands, India’s East and Bangladesh. New Delhi: Penguin. Hussain, Monirul. 1993. The Assam Movement: Class, Ideology and Identity. New Delhi: Manak Publication. ———. 1995. ‘Ethnicity, Communalism and State Barpeta Massacre’, Economic and Political Weekly, 30 (20): 1154–1155. Jenkins, Craig J. and Bert Klandermans (eds). 2005. The Politics of Social Protest, Comparative Perspectives on States and Social Movements. London: UCL Press. Karlsson, B. G. 2001. ‘Indigenous Politics: Community Formation and Indigenous Peoples’ Struggle for Self-Determination in North-East India’, Identities, 8 (1): 7–45. Kimura, Makiko. 2003. ‘Memories of the Massacre: Violence and Collective Identity in the Narratives on the Nellie Incident’, Asian Ethnicity, 4 (2): 225–259. Lacina, Bethany. 2009. ‘The Problem of Political Stability in Northeast India: Local Ethnic Autocracy and the Rule of Law’, Asian Survey, 49 (6): 998–1020. McAdam, Douglas, S. Tarrow and C. Tilly. 2001. Dynamics of Contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McDuie-Ra, Duncan. 2008. ‘Between National Security and EthnoNationalism’, Journal of South Asian Development, 3 (2): 185–210. Saikia, Pahi, Jugdep S. Chima and Aniruddha Kumar Baro. 2016. ‘Limits of Ethnofederalism and Local Political Autonomy Arrangements: Continuing

Decades of ‘ethnic massacre’ in Bodoland 195 Violence in the Bodoland Territorial Area Districts of Assam’, India Review, 15 (1): 136–162. Shah Ghanshyam. 2004. Social Movements in India: A Review of Literature. New Delhi: Sage. Sonntag, Selma K. 1999. ‘Autonomous Councils in India: Contesting the Liberal Nation-State’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 24 (4): 415–434. Srikanth, H. 2000. ‘Militancy and Identity Politics in Assam’, Economic and Political Weekly, 35 (47): 4117–4119. Telegraph, 2016 (News Paper). ‘We Never Escaped Elections’, www.tele graphindia.com/1160401/jsp/northeast/story_77596.jsp [Accessed on August 1, 2016]. Townsend, Janet, Gina Porter and Emma Mawdesley. 2004. ‘Creating Spaces of Resistance: Development NGOs and Their Clients in Ghana, India and Mexico’, Antipode, 36 (5): 871–889. Vandekerckhove, Nel. 2009. ‘We Are Sons of the Soil, the Endless Battle over Indigenous Homelands in Assam, India’, Critical Asian Studies, 41 (4): 523–548. Vandekerckhove, Nel and Bert Suykens. 2008. ‘The Liberation of Bodoland’: Tea, Forestry and Tribal Entrapment in Western Assam’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 31 (3): 450–471. Varshney, Ashutosh. 2001. ‘Ethnic Conflict and Civil Society India and Beyond’, World Politics, 53: 362. Yadav, Yogendra and Suhas Palshikar. 2008. ‘Ten Theses on State Politics in India’, Seminar, 591: 14–22.

11 Diversity and difference The art of electioneering in Meghalaya Cornelia Guenauer

Scholars repeatedly point out that insider-outsider narratives circling around tribal identity are a key factor in the social, political and economic spheres of Meghalaya (Baruah 2005: 186; McDuie-Ra 2007: 93; Karlsson 2013: 37). The founding of a new ‘tribal-centric’ political party just prior to the 2013 legislative assembly elections in Meghalaya – the National People’s Party (NPP) – appeared to prove this right. Nevertheless, political actors and observers whom I met in the region during my research on the 2013 election campaign objected, stating that issues based on tribal identity have ceased to play a role in politics. Party manifestos free of any invocation of difference along tribal lines, the election victory of the Indian National Congress (INC) and the defeat of P. A. Sangma, the once-strongest man in regional politics, underpinned their statements. However, the upsurge of violent agitations for a regulation to control the influx of outsiders into the state, which soon after the elections paralyzed the state for several months, questions how far topics circling around tribal identity and politics of difference have indeed ceased to be important. So the question arises, what role do particularistic identity concepts such as tribal identity and politics of difference play after all in Meghalaya politics, and how far have they changed their form or even lost their significance? The chapter approaches this question by focusing on election campaigns, analysing the characteristics and strategies of campaigning during the 2013 legislative assembly elections. After sketching the historical trajectories which turned tribal identity into a key denominator for invoking difference in Meghalaya, the chapter will (a) indicate that political parties in Meghalaya can be best understood as clientelistic parties or as what James Scott describes as ‘political machines’, who mobilise their support by facilitating particularistic favours to their electorate, (b) suggest that tribal identity still matters, but it is revealed in the aesthetics and practices of campaigning rather than in official statements and (c) propose that election campaigns can be understood as negotiation processes reflecting the social

Diversity and difference in Meghalaya 197 and political context in which they arise. Bringing these points together, the chapter concludes that elections in Meghalaya take place in a highly complex context, deeply entangled with internationally flowing discourses which not only establish and confirm but also conceal that tribal identity still plays a central role as a category, which political actors use to mobilise support in Meghalaya.

Becoming a tribal state Compared to other conflict-loaded regions in India, the literature on the Northeastern states is surprisingly thin. This can be seen as a reflection of the relations between the Northeast and the rest of the Indian subcontinent, which is almost oblivious of the region.1 Historically, large parts of the area today known as the Northeast have been isolated from the rest of India due to different geographical and political factors. After independence, the geographical insulation of the area, its status as a strategic region for national security and the continuing politics of protective discrimination fostered feelings of estrangement and created problems for national integration, which still prevail. Studies dealing with politics and elections in Meghalaya largely focus on topics related to this failure of national integration of the region: secessionist movements, legislative instability, insurgency movements and frequently resurfacing conflicts between so-called tribals and non-tribals (Dev 1999; Baruah 2003; Lyngdoh & Gassah 2003; Baruah & Malngiang 2006; Bhaumik 2011).2 Politics in Meghalaya parallels certain developments of the Indian political system but also constitutes a factor distinguishing the state from the rest of India. Just as Indian politics in general (Wagner 2006; Guha 2007: 660–672; Jaffrelot & Verniers 2011), the politics of Meghalaya has been characterised by (a) a growing number of parties becoming electorally important leading to a diversification of the party system and (b) the increase in fragmented election results causing coalition governments and problems of governance. Regional parties in different parts of India lay emphasis on diverse socio-economic variables and cleavages according to their specific context (Sen Gupta 2005: 16). While in much of India, such cleavages are drawn along lines of religion, caste or class, tribal identity constitutes a key determinant for social, political and economic cleavages in Meghalaya (Dev 1999: 2482; McDuieRa 2007: 93). This dominance of tribal identity can be best understood as an outcome of the interlocking effects of colonial and post-colonial political practices specific to the region. In the late 19th century, the British had brought the area of today’s Northeast India under their control. To administer the area more effectively, the colonial authorities introduced an ‘Inner Line’ separating the

198  Cornelia Guenauer plains of Assam, where they had large tea gardens, from the densely forested hills, which appeared not to be profitable for investments. While the plains became part of the colonial economy and infrastructure, the new regulation restricted access to the hills, simultaneously exempting the area beyond the line from the colonial laws applicable to the rest of British India. The population living beyond the line was left alone to manage their own affairs provided that they did not interfere with British interests in the plains. Drawing on colonial writings, Patricia Mukhim emphasises that the Inner Line was primarily meant to protect colonial economic interests and served as ‘an instrument to fence what the British called the savage tribes within their territories so that they do not harass or ambush the plains people who work for the British in their tea gardens’ (Mukhim 2012). Accordingly, colonial narratives justified the line by depicting the hill areas, especially the Naga Hills, as inhabited by savages, wild warriors and primitive tribes constituting a threat to the British subjects in the villages and tea plantations of the plains. In the following decades, this narrative legitimating the line changed. It got increasingly characterised by a more romantic and paternalistic tone depicting the inner line as ‘protecting these primitive peoples [beyond the line] from the onslaught of more advanced groups in the plains’ (Karlsson 2011: 33).3 Thus, the basis for legitimacy got actually turned upside down. From being a border restricting the movement of an ungovernable people and preventing attacks on defenceless plains people, the inner line became a protectionist tool safeguarding the endangered hill people from the movement of the plain population. While the immediate effect of the line remained the same, cutting of the hills from infrastructural developments linked to the colonial economy, the long-term effect of the line fundamentally changed. The narrative confirmed the construction of the people living in the hills as profoundly different to the plains people and generated an understanding of the hill population whose legacy can be felt until today.

Colonial legacies and modern politics The understanding of the people living in the hills as being endangered and in need of protection was expressed in the movement for a separate Hill state, which ultimately led to the creation of Meghalaya in 1972.4 Although the movement for a separate Hill state was mainly based on broader categories distinguishing between hill- and plains-people, the mode of political mobilisation in Meghalaya soon changed, invoking more differentiated and narrowly defined dichotomous categories, such as tribal vs. non-tribal, indigenous tribal vs. non-indigenous tribal or even Garo vs. Khasi (Sen

Diversity and difference in Meghalaya 199 Gupta 2005: 49–50; Karlsson 2013). Since the formation of the state, the resistance against the influx of outsiders into Meghalaya and the alleged danger of being outnumbered by them has become a dominant discourse within the state. In this context, influx in contrast to (illegal) migration also subsumes people from other parts of India, often denoted as nontribals or non-indigenous people allegedly endangering local culture and tradition as well as taking the jobs of the locals. Sanjoy Hazarika describes how in neighbouring Assam the ‘movement of people for economic environmental reasons reshaping and transforming the demographic, ethnic, linguistic and religious profile of large parts of the population stirred a potent brew of hatred, suspicion and fear’ (Hazarika 2000: 7). Because the British had established a hill station and military cantonment at Shillong, today’s capital of Meghalaya, the area had not been as isolated as the rest of the hills. Shillong experienced a large-scale migration of clerks, merchants, labourers, soldiers and plantation owners from Nepal, Assam, Bihar and Rajasthan, increasing and diversifying the population of the once small settlement and having similar effects as those described by Hazarika (McDuieRa 2007: 84). Against the background of such a diffused feeling of threat and insecurity, different civil society actors – such as the KSU, whose slogan ‘Khasi by blood, Indian by accident’ indicates their essentialist approach to identity – have opposed migration. This opposition was often expressed through violence and intimidation directed at non-tribal residents – regardless of the fact that some of them belonged to families who have lived in Meghalaya for generations. Violent anti-outsider riots, which repeatedly took place since the 1970s, and continuing calls to make it obligatory for people from outside – Indians as well as non-Indians – to obtain a special permit to enter the state, illustrate the lingering anxiety over demographics (McDuie-Ra 2007: 99). However, census data from the last 20 years show that the STs are far from becoming a minority. Instead they constitute a clear majority (over 86%) which is growing faster in number than the general population in Meghalaya (Census 2011). Different ‘non-tribal’ minorities, registered in the ‘General Category’, have settled mainly in Shillong and in a few other tracts of the state. Among these are people from other Indian states, like Bengalis, Assamese or Biharis, and migrants from neighbouring countries, especially from Nepal and Bangladesh, who have settled in the state at different points in history and in many cases have been living in the state for generations (Karlsson 2011: 28). Looking closer at the call for the implementation of the Inner Line Permit (ILP) may actually help to understand this apparent discrepancy implied in the description of a de-facto majority as minority.

200  Cornelia Guenauer The pressure groups behind the call for implementing the ILP to control influx into the state actually draw their claim on the line introduced by the British under the Bengal Eastern Frontiers Regulations in 1873. The reference to such a measure originally introduced by an outside force to control the local population and to safeguard colonial commercial interests becomes acceptable as the pressure groups invoke the later protectionist narrative to legitimise the line. In fact, post-independence politics of affirmative action has incorporated this protectionist narrative along with colonial administrative categories into the language of political discourse of the state. Duncan McDuie-Ra shows that the numerous affirmative action measures implemented in the state ‘embedded the category of “hill tribe” into the political and economic institutions of the Northeast, and made tribal identity the key determinant of social, political, and economic status’ (McDuie-Ra 2007: 93).5 Against this background, it can be argued that the continuing system of affirmative action implemented in the state – the reservation of 55 out of 60 seats in the legislative assembly for members of STs or the reservation quota regarding government jobs (40% Garo, 40% Khasi and Jaintia, 5% other STs and SCs) – has deepened the differentiation along specific lines providing incentives to invoke an even narrower identity.6 Accordingly, a large number of regional parties claim to feel the need to protect the identity and rights of the tribal population against the threat of non-tribal domination posed by migrants to the region. However, in this context it is often omitted that some of these migrant families have lived for generations in the region which today constitutes Meghalaya and have arrived at different point of history from different regions and in different contexts. Regional parties like the United Democratic Party (UDP) have gained bargaining power, as Meghalaya politics has been characterised by the predominance of coalition governments. Yet, the Congress is quite powerful, holding the Shillong Lok Sabha seat since 1999 and forming the state government. However, due to political fragmentation, leading to legislative instability with regularly failing coalition governments, Meghalaya has earned the reputation of being one of India’s most unstable states (Bhaumik 2011: 220).

The politics of diversity and difference The process of political diversification and fragmentation is not unique to Meghalaya, but has been characteristic for a certain phase in Indian party politics in general, following the decline of the INC as the alldominating party from 1977 onwards. Two different lines of arguments have been forwarded with regard to the politics of regionalisation. On the

Diversity and difference in Meghalaya 201 one hand, regionalism is judged as a tool to encourage popular participation at the regional level and to safe-guard the interests of different parts of the population; it has been welcomed, thus, as a necessary and important instrument of political development and national integration. On the other hand, regionalism is seen as a threat to national unity and governability; it is condemned as a divisive force that supports conflicts along regional lines, divides the electorate even further and advances parochialism, isolationism and secessionism (Sen Gupta 2005: 55–56). These conflicting arguments on Indian electoral politics can best be understood in the framework of wider debates on the politics of difference, which focuses on the ‘(re) new(ed) politics of identity’ (Comaroff 1996: 167), the crisis of the nationstate and, in more general terms, the conflicting theories of assimilation and separation (Young 1990). Scholars seem to agree that there is a rise of a ‘global passion for difference’ (Becker 2010: 77), challenging democracies all over the world by the apparent paradox that the invocation of egalitarianism leads to the increasing evocation of difference rather than to the assertion of sameness. Be that as it may, differences are neither specific for a certain historical time nor a geographic location. Looking back in history, there have been more than enough accounts of differences providing the basis for violence and conflict (Goswami 2015: xxi). The impression of a rise of such politics can be ascribed on the one hand to the increasing awareness of the ubiquity of such politics, fostered by faster ways of communication which provide scholars with examples from around the world. On the other hand, different anti-discrimination measures and concepts implying relativist principles have changed the form of politics of difference, making it not less real but harder to analytically disclose. Concepts such as diversity have been used to depict difference as a cultural resource and, thus, as a basis to legitimate affirmative action measures, such as reservation quotas for certain neglected groups in need of empowerment. The crux of the matter can be found in the connotation of diversity emphasising unity and communitarian values while blurring individual agency. While the language behind diversity concepts emphasises difference as a resource for a larger community, the actual practices and measures derived from diversity concepts turn differences into a powerful tool for individuals and groups to claim certain resources. Therefore, it could be suggested that politics of differences has not increased but merely changed their form as a result of the spread of relativist principles and that it is the rising academic deconstruction of these new forms that gives the impression of rising difference thinking. So, while politicians, managers and officials of all hues are busy speaking about diversity, attentively avoiding the word difference, this does not change the fact that reward packages are still

202  Cornelia Guenauer linked to the evocation of certain differences. In Meghalaya, relativist ideas have been central in institutionalising colonial categories as key denominators for access to preferred economic, political and social positions and resources. As an effect everyone recognised as ST has not only higher chances of getting a place in the education system or of being employed by the state but also is exempted from paying taxes – regardless of his or her actual financial background.

The 2013 legislative assembly elections During the legislative assembly elections in Meghalaya, which took place on 28 February 2013, a total of 345 candidates contested the 60 seats, out of which 55 are reserved for STs. There had been two major changes in the party landscape of Meghalaya leading to a shift in the balance of regional parties in the state. First, Paul Lyngdoh, a former activist of the KSU and (co)founder of the Khun Hynniewtrip National Awakening Movement (KHNAM), an explicit Khasi centric party, had joined the United Democratic Party (UDP), the strongest regional party, in 2010. Since Lyngdoh is known as a strong regional leader, people expected that he would give the UDP an additional boost, threatening the political strength of the INC. Second, P. A. Sangma, a strong leader from the Garo Hills and former Lok Sabha speaker, launched the NPP as a new tribal centric party in Meghalaya only two months prior to the elections (Assam Tribune 2012a). Earlier, he had left the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), an ally of the INC, because they did not support his candidacy in the 2012 elections to become the next president of India. Due to his status as a Garo strongman and with his whole family being deeply entangled in Meghalaya politics, this shift was also expected to bite into the vote share of other parties. Apart from the INC, the UDP and the NPP, 11 parties contested the elections, but as most of them nominated only around a dozen candidates they had a very limited regional reach.7 Campaigns in Meghalaya were mainly based on well-proven forms of electioneering: door-to-door campaigning, car and motorcycle rallies in the streets, processions with bandwagons, staged mass events with speeches and music, public debates between candidates hosted by the local councils and so on Electioneering was highly person-centric, with campaigns being organised by the individual candidates, who followed strategies of localisation rather than a uniform centrally planned campaign structure. This can be seen not only in the large number of successful independent candidates but also in the party politics. Most obviously, the Congress attached more importance to the potential of individual candidates to mobilise people through their local networks and by using locally adjusted campaign strategies than

Diversity and difference in Meghalaya 203 to party alliance or ideological backgrounds of the candidates. Accordingly, the party dropped a large number of former Congress candidates in favour of handing out party tickets to formerly successful non-INC candidates. Conversely, party-switching is a common practice among candidates who defect and join parties according to their individual aspirations. The focus of public attention during campaigning also reflected the idea that individuals mattered more than ideology. Huge rallies of supporters accompanying individual candidates on their way to the Election Commission to file their nomination, blocking the streets and bringing the traffic in Shillong to a standstill were the most obvious signs for the start of campaigning. The question of who did or did not get a party ticket evoked much more public interest and debate than the release of the election manifestos. Compared to the nomination rallies, which were marked by music, flags and shouting, the release of the manifestos came with less noise and public attention. In addition, the parties released their manifestos quite late – between one and two weeks before the polling date. Political observers and political actors – such as P. A. Sangma’s son Conrad Sangma, who acted as a campaign manager for the NPP – did not attribute much importance to the manifestos, even describing them as insignificant. They based their argument on the observation that the party manifestos were all very similar and lacked any clear ideological statements. In fact, the manifesto of the NPP, which P. A. Sangma had launched deliberately as a tribal centric party, did not reflect any of the former rhetoric of strengthening and safeguarding the ST but dwelt on the more general topics of development and projected their position with the fuzzy catchwords of change and growth (NPP 2013). The narrative of the Congress manifesto followed the standard script of asserting past achievements and, consequently, projecting future programmes as ‘the way forward’, centred on development and growth (MPCC 2013). In contrast, competing parties referred to a lack of development and to the bad current situation, emphasising lack of economic opportunities, bad infrastructure, environmental pollution and the deteriorating law and order situation. Subsequently, they mapped out their promised measures for future development and growth. While the INC and its national ally NCP took the need for a strong government as the main topic – arguing for continuity and warning of a fractured mandate by emphasising the need for unity, the UDP and NPP declared the fight against corruption among their main priorities, evoking the need for change. The manifestos had in common that they lacked any clear ideology and instead dwelt on the vague mantra of development and growth as a solution for all existing problems including militancy. The lack of clear ideology and the centrality of individual actors suggests that party politics in Meghalaya bears central characteristics of ‘machine

204  Cornelia Guenauer politics’ as framed by James Scott (Scott 1969). Outlining the machine model in a comparative perspective, Scott shows that the social context that fostered the emergence of machine politics in the United States in the early 20th century is present in many of the post-colonial states in Africa and Asia. The setting described by Scott as fostering machine politics – competitive electoral system, rapid social change, fragmentation of political power, widespread ethnic cleavages and poor population majority – corresponds in many ways to the political and social context found in Meghalaya (Scott 1969: 1149). In such a context, [t]he machine is not the disciplined, ideological party held together by class ties and common programs . . . neither a charismatic party, depending on a belief in almost superhuman qualities of its leader to insure internal cohesion. The machine is rather a non-ideological organization interested less in political principle than in securing and holding office for its leaders and distributing income to those who run it and work for it relies on what it accomplishes in a concrete way for its supporters, not on what it stands for [ideologically]. (Scott 1969: 1144) Against the background of machine politics, the question arises as in how far manifestos matter at all. Why do political actors in such a nonideological setting who themselves acknowledge the insignificance of manifestos still bother to release them? This question can also be asked in regard to large-scale campaign events, which are organised by parties sending buses full of supporters from villages to the campaign venue. Drawing on Banerjee’s observations on Indian elections, these events can be interpreted as a means to boost the perceived popularity of a candidate and his or her strength, manifested in the mass of people attending; not as a forum to discuss political principles but as a performance that signifies the influence and popularity of a party. Analysing the 2009 parliament elections in India from a comparative perspective, Banerjee observes that: What the unread pamphlets and empty speeches had in common was . . . their sheer materiality and visibility. Political parties needed to be seen as distributing the pieces of paper and holding the meetings, as they were ultimately the most effective way of communicating their presence and capacity for organisation to vast numbers of voters. (Banerjee 2014: 72) The manifestos, the large-scale campaign events and the nomination parades in Meghalaya communicated a statement about organisational

Diversity and difference in Meghalaya 205 strength and popularity, projecting the apparent potential of the candidate to be voted to power. This is relevant for the machine politics at work in Meghalaya, where parties are rather platforms for individual aspirations than of ideology formulation. Scott points out that machine politics relies on distribution of particularistic, material rewards as the central means of gaining support, more metaphorically, ‘the cement binding leaders and followers’ (Scott 1969: 1144). Besides money, such rewards can also be the exemption of taxes for a certain group, access to education, to government jobs or to licenses. Therefore, election campaigns, with all their noise, empty phrases and lacking ideology, are important because they perform and signify the potential of a leader to be voted into a position which give him or her power over the allocation of such rewards and, thus, to ultimately deliver such rewards to his or her supporters.

The art of campaigning This already indicates that messages during campaigning were communicated on a semiotic level of practices or aesthetics. Observations from the campaign trail emphasise this. Music, for instance, was omnipresent during campaigning, with every party and every candidate releasing CDs and a wide range of different campaign songs (Guenauer 2012). The music used during campaigning ranged from rock music over Khasi phawars (a Khasi poetic form often employed in story-telling and sung on various themes ranging from social and political issues to general everyday topics) to K-pop tunes, such as the 2012 hit song Gangnam Style. Bollywood music, which is central during campaigning in other parts of India, was strikingly absent. The absence of mainstream Indian culture also figured in the clothing style of campaigners, who did not sport any khadi or white kurtas, the typical dress of Indian politicians in ‘mainland India’. Neither did candidates put on attire connected to local culture such as the jymphong, a longish sleeveless coat. Apart from the few female campaigners dressed in the Khasi jainsem or dhara, the traditional Khasi dress made of two long pieces of cloth, most campaigners and candidates addressed their audience wearing ties and suits. Only national party leaders, for instance of the INC or the BJP, put on parts of the local attire when campaigning in the state. Music and clothing can be seen as a means to connect to different frameworks. Phawars were especially useful for indicating closeness with the local electorate and their cultural systems of meaning. Simultaneously, rock songs and K-pop tunes referred to the popularity of rock culture and the increasing importance of Korean pop culture in Meghalaya. Candidates used music to connect themselves to a larger international flow of alternatives to Indian mainstream culture of Bollywood and to indicate their

206  Cornelia Guenauer connectedness to local culture. While regional parties did not use any Bollywood songs, the INC restricted this to the song Jai Ho, which has been part of their highly successful 2009 parliamentary election campaign. They used it to welcome national leaders of the INC during mass-scale election campaigns and as a signifier of their influence on a national level. Clothing, on the other hand, positioned national leaders in a regional framework and regional leaders in an international framework. The suit communicated the notion of an urbane, wide-travelled, well-connected politician or even – and in Meghalaya most politicians are ultimately both – businessman, reaching beyond the limitations of the politics of the Indian mainland. Thus, the aesthetics were central to communicate messages on a semiotic and elusive level of campaigning. While the messages communicated through aesthetics were in line with the analysis of campaigns as performance which signifies strength, they also indicated differences, invoking particular ideas about regional identity. This was also indicated by practices related to the handling of manifestos. The UDP did not release their manifesto in their party central office or in the Shillong Press Club, which is the common place for press conferences and similar events. Instead, they launched the manifesto in the Khasi National Dorbar Hall, a place central for the organisation of the traditional political institutions.8 The site selected for the release of the manifesto referred much more strongly to the connection between the UDP and tribalcentric, or more specifically Khasi-centric, politics than the reading of the manifesto. This suggests that topics connected to tribal identity still mattered during electioneering – not in the content of official manifestos but in the strategic practices and aesthetics of campaigning, which can be described as semiotic registers of campaigning. Accordingly, the exemption of Indian mainstream culture in music and clothing style can be seen as a reference to the widespread feeling of being estranged from ‘the mainland’ resulting in a perceived status as ‘reluctant Indians’ (Karlsson 2007: 50): being Indian more by accident, than by heart. Nevertheless, this does not mean that there is a hidden ideological agenda of campaigning. Instead, I suggest that the idea of a specific tribal identity is still central to campaigning in Meghalaya, because of a specific constellation of machine politics and institutionalised significance of tribal identity. As noted earlier, particularistic rewards, such as access to government jobs or exemption from taxes, constitute the central means to generate support. Analysing the history of Meghalaya has shown that reward packages are linked to the evocation of certain differences, which in Meghalaya, due to inter-linkages between colonial and post-independence policies, is mosteffectively formulated in the rhetoric of tribal identity. Thus, to follow this language and to uphold the discourse that legitimates affirmative action

Diversity and difference in Meghalaya 207 programmes is central for maintaining the supply of reward packages, which political actors allocate to their supporters. Accordingly, Scott points out that in the United States, machine politics failed when ‘the protective and defensive function of the machine had simply ceased to be important political incentives [ . . . and that] the machine simply destroyed its own social base’ (Scott 1969: 1156–1157). To break up the discourse confirming the need to continue affirmative action in the region would endanger the benefits brought by these programmes and, thus, jeopardise support.9 In Meghalaya, cleavages resulting from historical trajectories were not only a context giving rise to machine politics but are now a central factor which has to be maintained in order to, metaphorically speaking, keep the machine running. Therefore, political actors are well advised to connect to and uphold the minority discourse. But then, why do politicians not openly speak about these issues? Why are they not busy emphasising their commitment to protect and enforce tribal rights during campaigning but instead appear to shy away from speaking about such topics? In fact, during my research, political actors of all hues told me about the condemnable practice of other parties using emotional issues for campaigning as opposed to campaigns based on rational arguments and hard facts. The examples they cited when referring to emotional issues, for instance the ILP, demarcation of borders, the issue of influx, were all connected to the insider-outsider discourse and tribal identity. Journalists and political actors agreed that these modes of political mobilisation could be easily disguised as propaganda used by a political elite to manipulate an uneducated electorate who ‘vote with their hearts and not with their heads’. Subsequently, elections were often projected as a mere rigmarole performed as symbolic practice. Two debates resonate in this understanding of elections and politics. On the one hand, it reflects an opinion on power in post-colonial states that was established by scholars, who argued from an Euro- and American-centric perspective that constitutional democracy in these states can be seen as a facade hiding the fact that they lack the essentials of Western constitutional governance, such as strict rules of accountability.10 On the other hand, the narrative is in line with an understanding of campaign communication as being composed of empty phrases to manipulate the electorate. This understanding can be traced back to debates initiated by Murray Edelman who states that political messages are ‘nothing more than emotional appeals for public support’, hiding actual intentions and conflicts of interests (Edelman 1985: 137). Both academic debates have found their way into public discussions offering explanations for the failure of states, rising conflicts and disenchantments with politics. The point here is not to discuss the validity of these debates but to understand their reach and influence. I suggest that political actors are aware of these discourses and their

208  Cornelia Guenauer presence in the public debates of Meghalaya. Consequently, they are keen to distance themselves from such emotional politics connected to speaking about tribal identity. Instead they follow the approved language of development and growth and of diversity and unity. The art of campaigning describes this capacity of political actors to use different semantic register to navigate in the complex setting influenced and constantly changed by different discourses, demands and expectations of voters. The role of campaigners and candidates has a striking resemblance to the role of advertising agencies, which are continuously attempting to negotiate between consumers, clients and their respective ideas of the product. Anthropological studies dealing with advertisement as conducted by Moeran (1996), Kemper (2001) and Marzarella (2003) show that advertising agents take the role of cultural brokers, seeking to decode the working of societies and at the same time receiving ‘regular feedback about their ability to recognise affinities between certain commodities and certain consumers’ (Kemper 2001: 132). Thus, advertisement itself can be understood as an outcome of multiple negotiating processes in which different interest groups are participating, telling us much more about the social context than the product itself (Röschenthaler 2009: 217). Following Jarren and Donges’s open definition of political communication as social practice allows transferring these considerations to electioneering (Jarren & Donges 2011: 15–21, 217). Consequently, election campaigns can be approached as an expression of a larger negotiation process, in which campaign actors become brokers between different and partly contradictory expectations of society. I suggest that the process of campaigning should not be understood as a one-way process, communicating certain narratives and aspirations from above. Political actors link their campaigns to ongoing discourses which are produced, reproduced and changed in the everyday life of the electorate. Thus, the process of campaigning reflects the social and political context from which it arises. Analysing the election campaign can tell us more about the current social and political state in Meghalaya than the election verdict. In the end, the Congress Party won 29 of the 60 seats, while the NPP and UDP both had to face a debacle. The clear verdict in favour of the Congress and the harsh defeat of the strong man of Meghalaya politics, P. A. Sangma, surprised political observers. The result was interpreted as the voter’s confirmation of the status quo, their wish for continuity and as reflecting ‘the decision of the people putting their faith in bigger national political organizations’ (Sawain 2013). This interpretation simply translated the campaign message of the Congress – vote for unity and stability – into voters’ opinion. Reflecting on the election campaign discloses that the elections indeed confirmed the status quo, but in a different way. Politics

Diversity and difference in Meghalaya 209 in Meghalaya is, still or perhaps even more, individualised and characterised by micro-politics circulating around individual candidates, who have to prove their capacity to deliver to the individual voter. Accordingly, the success of the Congress could be ascribed to the involvement of individuals, who were perceived by voters as being able to deliver. The construction and/or upholding of difference linked to concepts of tribal identity is still important to mobilise political support in Meghalaya. Nevertheless, speaking on such topics outside the legitimate discourse of diversity is perceived as being condemnable, as normative debates on politics and political communication have found their way into the public discourse of Meghalaya.

Conclusion Although the legislative assembly elections of 2013 in Meghalaya may have appeared to be centralised in their official content and verdict, the subtexts of election practices indicate the highly complex political set-up in the state, which has been shaped by a multitude of debates. The interlocking effects of colonial and post-colonial political practices in the region established tribal identity as a key denominator of social, political and economic status in Meghalaya. The paternalistic narrative linked these two practices and constitutes a constant in the reshaping of politics of difference in the state. The influence of relativistic theories, manifested in concepts of diversity and affirmative action, made it acceptable that reward packages are continuously linked to the evocation of certain differences. Set in this framework, the machine politics in Meghalaya – being highly individualised with a particularistic and materialistic reward system which provides the basis for support – depends on the continuation of the politics of difference that generates reward packages. Simultaneously, normative discourses on democracy and political communication have influenced the public discourse on politics in Meghalaya, making it difficult for political actors to openly refer to tribal identity without risking loss of their credibility. Thus, tribal identity is notably absent from official campaign documents, such as manifestos, but appears in more subtle and elusive forms of campaigning, such as in the choice of the venue for central campaign events. Meanwhile, the official narrative of campaigns follows the legitimate language of development, growth and diversity, carefully sparing references to difference. Both levels of campaigning – the ‘official’ level of manifestos and the more elusive level of aesthetics and practices – tell us something about the political and social state in Meghalaya. The official level indicates the local awareness and adoption of different discourses that are circulating internationally. The more elusive methods of campaigning refer to the everpresent feeling of being estranged from the Indian state. Campaigners use

210  Cornelia Guenauer music and clothing to connect to local and international frameworks and to signify strength and influence. The Indian state as a frame of reference is strikingly absent. In fact, the ease with which regional campaigners use aesthetics which in many parts of India would easily be attacked as symbols of Westernisation corrupting Indian culture is perhaps even more remarkable. However, bringing the two levels together indicates that changing language practices do not necessarily change institutionalised structures at work in a society. Instead they can conceal unwanted realities, such as the importance of identity politics based on tribal identity. The evocation of tribal identity discourses through different registers of campaigning should not only be understood as playing along the emotions of voters. Political actors seek to legitimise their doing so by invoking affirmative action policies of the state which allow for the invocation of difference. If we neglect tribal identity as a mere emotional issue used by political actors to mobilise support among an uneducated electorate, this will obstruct the view of much deeper interdependencies which could help us to understand the emergence of conflicts and violence.

Notes 1 The habit of describing the area comprising eight states with the generic term ‘Northeast’ actually demonstrates the widespread unawareness of the heterogeneous set-up and historical trajectories existing side by side in the region (Haokip 2011). 2 In this chapter the terms ‘tribal/non-tribal’ as well as ‘ethnicity’ are understood from a constructive perspective and are considered as political resources (compare Lentz 1995; Büschges & Pfaff-Czarnecka 2007). Regarding the official definition of the STs by the Indian Ministry of Tribal Affairs states: ‘Scheduled Tribes are the tribes . . . which have been declared as such by the President through a public notification. . . . The essential characteristics of these communities are: primitive traits, geographical isolation, distinct culture, shy of contact with community at large, economically backward’ (MTA 2009). Emic usage of the term tribe often echoes the essentialist approach implied in this definition of a bureaucratic category, used to legitimise claims for power and resources (Dev 2004: 4751). 3 This change can at least partly be ascribed to the influence of anthropological theories of social evolutionism, establishing ideas that societies could be understood as survival artefacts of an earlier stage of human development. Interlinked with existing ideas of the noble savage or romantic primitivism, such theories gave rise to a public opinion which would accept paternalistic legitimation logics much more easily than mere bureaucratic or economic justifications. 4 After independence, the Garo, Khasi and Jaintia Hills, constituting today’s Meghalaya, initially, became part of the much larger state of Assam. 5 A central means of affirmative action is the Sixth Schedule, a provision for tribals ‘to enable them to maintain their distinctiveness, rather than encourage

Diversity and difference in Meghalaya 211 their assimilation with the rest of society’ (Deshpande 2013: 65–66) through the establishment of district councils, having the power to allocate funds, regulate customary law, succession rules and land rights. Notably, this schedule does not cover all tribal areas or all tribal groups, but applies only to the hill areas of Assam, drawing on the colonial differentiation between hilltribes and other tribes of Assam and India. 6 Karlsson points out that ‘since the majority of people in Meghalaya are recognised as STs, this category is no longer particularly helpful in differentiating people’ (Karlsson 2013: 37). New categories of distinction within the tribal polity, such as indigenous tribe, became useful to differentiate and to claim certain rights (for detailed analysis see Karlsson 2013). While acknowledging the importance of multiplicity of categories in order to trace the different connotations implied, the chapter will use ‘tribal identity’ as a cover term for the wide range of particularistic identity concepts which are connected to the category of tribal identity in one or the other form (e.g. indigenous tribal or Khasi). 7 The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) could not make any significant inroads into Meghalaya politics. This can be attributed to the Christian majority in the state where the Hindu nationalist agenda does not find many takers but rather evokes fears over forced conversions to Hinduism. 8 Dorbar or Durbar is a council and decision-making institution in the Khasi Hills. It was established in 1923 by J. M. Nichols-Roy, drawing on the concept of Dorbars, which existed in different forms and on different levels in the individual Khasi kingdoms (Nongkynrih 2002: 70–88; Chaube 2012: 66). Besides certain similarities there were also differences in the political set-up of those 25 independent kingdoms and only through the National Dorbar they were brought together under one banner of a Khasi nation. The National Dorbar consists of the syiems (the Khasi kings) and other aristocrats and has been crucial for codifying some Khasi customary laws. Today it officially acts under the name ‘Federation of the Khasi States’ and continues to lead a movement to revive the traditional political institutions (Karlsson 2007: 250–254). In this context, the Dorbar Hall still holds an important position. 9 In addition, most political actors directly benefit from this system as they do not have to pay taxes although some of the richest candidates have assets worth several billion US dollars. 10 This discourse is, for instance, highlighted in regard to African countries in Lentz (1998: 46).

References The Assam Tribune. 2012a. ‘PA Sangma to Launch Tribal-Centric Party Today’, 24 August 2012. www.assamtribune.com/scripts/detailsnew.asp?id=aug2412/ oth05. [Accessed on April 1, 2013]. The Assam Tribune. 2012b. ‘Regional Conference of NPP Held in Tura’, 9 December 2012. www.assamtribune.com/scripts/detailsnew.asp?id=dec0912/oth06 [Accessed on April 1, 2013]. Banerjee, Mukulika. 2014. Why India Votes? New Delhi: Routledge. Baruah, Apurba K. 2003. Tribal Traditions and Crises of Governance in North East India, with Special Reference to Meghalaya. London: Crisis States Programme,

212  Cornelia Guenauer Development Research Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science. (Crisis States Programme Working Paper 22). http://eprints.lse. ac.uk/28269/1/WP22AB.pdf [Accessed on September 10, 2012]. Baruah, Apurba K. and Pascal Malngiang. 2006. ‘Electoral Politics in Meghalaya: Tribal Loyalties and Interest Articulation’, in Apurba K. Baruah and Rajesh Dev (eds), Ethnic Identities and Democracy: Electoral Politics in North-East India. New Delhi: Regency Publications, 49–67. Baruah, Sanjib. 2005. Durable Disorder? Understanding the Politics of Northeast India. New Delhi: Oxford: Oxford University Press. Becker, Heike. 2010. ‘Introduction to Anthropology Southern Africa Special Issues on “Engaging Difference: Perspectives on Belonging and Exclusion in Contemporary Southern and East Africa”’, Anthropology Southern Africa, 33 (3/4): 75–80. Bhaumik, Subir. 2011. Troubled Periphery: Crisis of India’s North East. Los Angeles: Sage. Büschges, Christian and Johanna Pfaff-Czarnecka. 2007. ‘Einleitung: Ethnizität als politische Ressource’, in Christian Büschges and Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka (eds), Die Ethnisierung des Politischen: Identitätspolitiken in Lateinamerika, Asien und den USA. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 9–18. Census, 2011. ‘Provisional Population Totals Paper 2, Volume 2 of 2011 (India & States/UTs)’. www.censusindia.gov.in/2011-prov-results/paper2vol2/census2011 _paper2.html [Accessed on September 10, 2012]. Chaube, S. K. 2012. Hill Politics in Northeast India. New Delhi: Orient Black Swan. Comaroff, J. L. 1996. ‘Ethnicity Nationalism and the Politics of Difference in an Age of Revolution’, in Edwin N. Wilmsen (ed), The Politics of Difference: Ethnic Premises in a World of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 162–183. Deshpande, Ashwini. 2013. Affirmative Action in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Dev, Rajesh. 1999. ‘General Elections 1996, 1998: Community Loyalties and Regional Outlook’, Economic and Political Weekly, 34 (34/35): 2481–2485. ———. 2004. ‘Human Rights, Relativism and Minorities in North-East India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 39 (43): 4747–4752. Edelman, M. J. 1985. The Symbolic Uses of Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Goswami, Sandhya. (ed). 2015. Troubled Diversity: The Political Process in Northeast India. Shimla; New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press. Guenauer, Cornelia. 2012. ‘The Whole Idea Is to Entertain Them’, Musik im indischen Wahlkampf. www.ifeas.unimainz.de/workingpapers/AP132.pdf. Mainz: Institut für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien, Johannes GutenbergUniversität Mainz. (Working Papers of the Department of Anthropology and African Studies of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz 132). [Accessed September, 10 2012]. Guha, Ramachandra. 2007. India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. New York: Ecco.

Diversity and difference in Meghalaya 213 Haokip, Thongkholal. 2011. ‘Conceptualising Northeast India: A Discursive Analysis on Diversity’, Bangladesh e-Journal of Sociology, 8 (2): 109–120. www.bangladeshsociology.org/BEJS%208.2%20Conceptualising%20Northeast%20India.pdf [Accessed on October 12, 2012]. Hazarika, Sanjoy. 2000. Rites of Passage: Border Crossings, Imagined Homelands, India’s East and Bangladesh. New Delhi, New York: Penguin Books. Jaffrelot, Christophe and Gilles Verniers. 2011. ‘Re-Nationalization of India’s Political Party System or Continued Prevalence of Regionalism and Ethnicity?’ Asian Survey, 51 (6): 1090–1112. Jarren, Otfried and Patrick Donges. 2011. Politische Kommunikation in der Mediengesellschaft. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Karlsson, Bengt G. 2007. Unruly Hills: Nature and Nation in India’s Northeast. New Delhi: Orient Black Swan. ———. 2011. ‘Sovereignity through Indigenous Governance: Reviving “Traditional Political Institutions”, Northeast’, in Daniel J. Rycroft and Sangeeta Dasgupta (eds), The Politics of Belonging in India: Becoming Adivasi. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 141–154. ———. 2013 ‘The Social Life of Categories. Affirmative Actions and the Trajectories of the Indigenous’, Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 65: 33–41. Kemper, Steven. 2001. Buying and Believing: Sri Lankan Advertising and Consumers in a Transnational World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lentz, Carola. 1995. ‘ “Tribalism” and Ethnicity in Africa. A Review of Four Decades of Anglophon Research’, Cahiers des Sciences Humaines, 31 (2): 303–328. ———. 1998. ‘The Chief, the Mine Captain and the Politician: Legitimating Power in Northern Ghana’, Africa, 68 (1): 46–67. Lyngdoh, Reuben C. and L. S. Gassah. 2003. ‘Decades of Inter-Ethnic Tension’, Economic and Political Weekly, 38 (48): 5024–5026. Mazzarella, William. 2003. Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India. Durham: Duke University Press. McDuie-Ra, Duncan. 2007. ‘Civil Society and Human Security in Meghalaya: Identity, Power and Inequalities’, Unpublished PhD dissertation. University of New South and Wales. School of Social Sciences and International Studies. Moeran, Brian. 1996. A Japanese Advertising Agency: An Anthropology of Media and Markets. Consum Asia Book Series. Richmond: Curzon. MPCC. 2013. Manifesto of the Meghalaya Pradesh Congress Committee for the Meghalaya Legislative Assembly Elections. Shillong: The MPCC. MTA, Ministry of Tribal Affairs. 2009. ‘Introduction’, www.tribal.nic.in/ index2.asp?sublinkid=542&langid=1 [Accessed on September 10, 2012]. Mukhim, Patricia. 2012. ‘Other Side of the Inner Line Permit’, The Shillong Times, 5 October 2012. www.theshillongtimes.com/2012/10/05/otherside-of-the-inner-line-permit/. [Accessed on September 9, 2015]. Nongkynrih, Aurelius Kyrham. 2002. Khasi Society of Meghalaya: A Sociological Understanding. New Delhi: Indus Publ. Co.

214  Cornelia Guenauer NPP. 2013. Manifesto of the National People’s Party, Meghalaya Legislative Assembly Elections, February. Shillong: The National People’s Party of Meghalaya. Röschenthaler, Ute. 2009. ‘Werbung im Kontext: Perspektiven auf ein neues ethnologisches Forschungsfeld’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 134: 213–251. Sawain, Sumar Singh. 2013. ‘Meghalaya Elections: A Responsive and Responsible Verdict’. Eastern Panorama. www.easternpanorama.in/index.php?option= com_content&view=article&id=2319:meghalaya-elections&catid=102:march& Itemid=25 [Accessed on April 29, 2015]. Scott, James C. 1969. ‘Corruption, Machine Politics, and Political Change’, The American Political Science Review, 63 (4): 1142–1158. Sen Gupta, Susmita. 2005. Regionalism in Meghalaya. New Delhi: South Asian Publishers. Wagner, Christian. 2006. Das politische System Indien: Eine Einführung. Wiesbaden: VS. Young, Iris. 1990. ‘Social Movements and the Politics of Difference’, in Iris Young (ed), Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 156–191.

12 From the shackles of tradition Motherhood and women’s agitation in Manipur Soibam Haripriya Ema/ Ebenshingthokpirak pa yadabra? Why didn’t you mothers come out for us?1

Popular discourse maintains that ‘women in Northeast India’ have a significantly higher status as compared to their counterparts in the rest of the country, to the extent of it being erroneously stated that some societies in Northeast India are ‘matriarchal’. There are some matrilineal communities in India; however, one can safely comment that there are no matriarchal communities in the world today. A more nuanced deliberation on the status of women has more often than not been rendered impossible due to the prevalence of all-pervading myths, sometimes propagated by the communities themselves. This chapter is an exploration of the nature of women’s agency; I attempt to do so through personal interviews, newspaper reports and secondary texts. I look at a variety of stances taken by ‘women’s collectives’ to present the various ways in which women’s political agency comes to be depicted.2 A previous version of this chapter has been published (Soibam 2012); however, that chapter has been considerably reworked to focus on the nature of women’s agency and the use of the motherhood motif in agitations. I begin by introducing briefly the genesis of women’s movements in Manipur to understand its trajectory in order to trace the significant differences in the representation of Meitei women and the ‘real’ status and power these women possess in Manipur.3 I complicate the discussion by bringing in the concept of ‘civil society’ and ask whether this concept can be applied to women’s collectives/groups/organisations. The celebratory representation of women in India as mothers, goddesses or ‘mother goddesses’ contradicts the low status that women occupy in their real lives. The women of the Manipur valley organising themselves into collectives have been celebrated as an exemplar of contemporary women’s movements in

216  Soibam Haripriya India (Karna 1998; Paratt 2005). The Meira Paibis (variously translated as torch-bearing women activists) as well as the historical two Nupi Lan agitations against the administrative policies of the British political agent have come to occupy an iconic status in discourses of women’s movements in India.4 In the first section titled ‘Women’s collective or civil society’, I lay out the contestations in the naming, thereby categorising the organisations that fall under the rubric of civil society, women’s movements and women’s collectives. Women’s movement is understood as an uprising of women around a certain event or agenda. The kind of texts available on women’s movements in India tends to be descriptive and does not critically distinguish between feminist movements and women’s movements. The historical texts on women’s movements examine the experience in the Indian pre-independence era as a crucial feature in mobilising women. For some, the simple fact of women coming together would constitute as women’s movement. The two Nupi Lans in Manipur are also described as women’s movements using the above framework. Various women groups are seen as part of the women’s movements in Manipur. Some are spontaneous, locality-based voluntary mobilisation of women and are informal. Others are registered under the Manipur Societies Registration Act, 1989. Thus, both the women’s movement and women’s collective could also be termed civil body organisations. The larger question for me however is the nature of the agenda of the collective. Some of the Meira Paibis exist as civil body organisations and have become an important symbol of marking a distinction between empowered Meitei women and oppressed women elsewhere in the country. In the second section titled ‘Three symbols’ I look at three such symbols that have contributed to the above distinction viz. Nupi Lan I (The First Women’s War, 1904), Nupi Lan II (The Second Women’s War, 1939) and Meira Paibis. I look at the reconstruction of a linear history of the women’s movements from the Nupi Lan I to the Nupi Lan II, thereby presenting these two events as a chronological history of the political achievement of the Meira Paibis. Women’s movements elsewhere in the country had a strong emphasis on the anti-alcohol campaigns. Such a posturing in Manipur is problematic since a distinction is made between communities that traditionally brew alcohol and communities who abhor it, thereby creating hierarchies. Related to this are acts of chastisement of individuals by the same collectives of women. In the next section, ‘The threat of immorality’ I trace such interventions through the frame of morality. This section is critical in the argument I make about why I choose to make a distinction between women’s collectives that are part of the women’s movements, and I claim that women’s

From the shackles of tradition in Manipur 217 collectives cannot be assumed to be feminist as the tropes through which the collectives work posits the fabric of community as important to the extent of sacrificing the cause of women. Women become the entities on whom the onus of upholding morality and the responsibility of preserving the cultural and social fabric of the community is placed. One can draw a similarity between the idea of women as keepers of culture and Sherry Ortner’s (1972) argument about a culture/nature divide where men are seen as analogous with culture and women with nature. However, women are also seen as the intermediary, that is, hierarchically between nature and culture and also mediating between the two. Ortner’s argument that women occupy a space of symbolic ambiguity is important here. The women’s collective seems to have bought a similar logic – the logic of patriarchy wherein the woman has to play the role of preserving culture but at the same time the woman is herself a threat to culture because she might fall prey to her innate nature. I refer to select newspaper reports to substantiate my argument. In the subsequent section, ‘The exemplary protest and the space of the Keithel’, I look at another frequently mentioned symbol of women and agitation in Manipur. I trace the story behind the incident now commonly referred to as the nude protest. I argue that the success of the vocabulary of motherhood used by the women’s collectives also has its limitations. In the last section of the chapter, ‘The protest and the play’ I juxtapose the nude protest with the Kalashetra play – Draupadi, performed a decade before the protest, and the audience reception of the play to point to the problematic ways in which the body and attire of women gets articulated as untouchable. I argue that while the articulation has always been on the absence of caste system among the Hindu Meiteis of Manipur, however, the ideology of caste is still present in the ways in which women, the Muslim and other ethnic communities stand in for the caste other. A more nuanced way in which one looks at the women’s collectives could be achieved by analysing the various issues that they choose to engage with.

Women’s collective or civil society ‘Civil society’ is thought of as ‘the space of “organized life that is voluntary, self generating, self supporting, autonomous from the state, and bound by legal order or set of shared rules” ’ (Diamond 1999: 221). Some scholars had defined the women’s collective as a civil society. There is a possibility that one can look at the collective as a part of a movement which is still struggling with a stated agenda. The manner of functioning of the women’s collectives involves intervening politically and socially at the leikai (locality) level through public meetings and demonstrations. They

218  Soibam Haripriya uphold traditional cultural values through chastisement of individuals who (they think) are a threat to it. Women stepping out in the streets during the Indian nationalist or independence movement were seen as women’s empowerment. Chaudhuri states, ‘By extolling an ideology that apparently rested on a show of empowering of women, it was ultimately a way of reinforcing a social philosophy of deprivation of women. It was a signal to women to sacrifice everything for their men folk’ (Chaudhuri 1993: 103). Women’s participation in the nationalist movement was subsumed in the larger narratives of the freedom struggle. Similarly I examine the role of the Meira Paibis in the Meitei community and contemporary Manipuri society. Sharma has described the Meira Paibis as a civil body organisation playing the role of vigilantes: ‘These organizations try to achieve certain levels of “social good” by collectively deciding what is good for the society. These bodies take collective decision making and setting of political agenda [sic]’(Sharma 2010: 106). It is essential to ask how the group defines ‘social good’? One thing is clear though, that is, equality between men and women is not a stated aim of the organisations. Rather one might even say (looking at their statements and press releases) that these organisations reinforce existing hierarchies. The visibility of women in public spaces such as in markets has been used to illustrate the empowered nature of Meitei women. Meira Paibis thus represents the empowered Meitei women.

Three symbols The genesis of the Meira Paibis, in what one might call a selective reading of the past, is traced to the two Nupi Lans. There is an attempt to connect the two separate events into a seamless narrative of Meitei women’s movements currently represented by the Meira Paibis. The first Nupi Lan was an agitation against the orders of the political agent of the British colonial administration to rebuild a bungalow of the assistant political agent supposedly burnt down in an incendiary act by the inhabitants of Imphal. People were ordered to contribute both material and labour. The women resisted by demonstrating in the compound of the political agent as well as the women’s market. Nupi Lan I is taken as the genesis of all other subsequent political protests by women. Paratt and Paratt say, ‘ “The First Nupi Lal” or “Women’s War” in 1904 had effectively forced a former Political Agent to rescind onerous demands he had imposed on the population and this set in train a tradition of women’s political protest which remains to this day’ (Paratt & Paratt 2001: 906). The Nupi Lan II was an agitation of women against the discriminatory economic policies of the king (Maharaj Churachand) and the Marwari business class demanding ban on rice exports. What began as a mass protest against the economic exploitation by traders (that was endorsed by the

From the shackles of tradition in Manipur 219 king) slowly transformed into a movement for democratic reforms. Paratt and Paratt refers to the Nupi Lan as ‘a popular platform which underpinned the political activism of the elites who eventually overthrow the feudal order’ (Paratt & Paratt 2010: 114). The Nupi Lan II should be read in the context of the nationalist movement that was brewing in Manipur and which it helped foment. It served as a catalyst for political awareness and mobilisation. To remove it from this context would mean that this event is evoked only when discussing the status of women. In an article discussing the Second Women’s War, Paratt and Paratt conclude the essay as follows: But the tradition of the nupilal [sic] continued to live on. Mass women’s protest against atrocities committed by the Indian army in Manipur have taken place from time to time, while the women’s groups known as Meira Paibi may still be seen patrolling the streets and lanes at night with flaming torches, ready to protect those whom the security forces seek to abuse or detain. (Paratt & Paratt 2010: 114) The third symbol is that of the Meira Paibis. The genesis of the Meira Paibis from a prohibition Nishabandhi (Nisha – intoxicants, Bandhi/Bandh – ban) movement throws light on the nature of the women’s movement. The relationship between prohibition and various women’s movements in India is well documented. Kumar (1993) has highlighted some of the antialcohol movements, especially in Uttarakhand, in the years between 1965 and 1971. However, I argue that the reason for the prohibition activities of Meira Paibis was quite distinct from the anti-alcohol movements elsewhere. ‘In Jharkhand, for example, anti-alcoholism was seen as a major part of reform, since liquor consumption had played an important role in tribal acquiescence to land alienation’ (Kumar 1993: 187). The Meira Paibis anti-alcohol agitation was not merely confined to the Meitei localities but in the words of a veteran Nishabandhi, ‘In other places, in the tribal Christian areas also, Nishabhandhi work started’ (Gill 2010, emphasis mine). Thus, there is a moral gaze through which other ethnic communities who traditionally brew alcohol are viewed. This is in spite of the fact some Meitei communities also continue to brew alcohol. However, the actions of the Nishabandhi are not to be looked at as working through the idea of morality alone. There were many real instances of violence against women by alcoholic husbands which led to the Nishabandhi work. The nature of the prohibition work started having a separate extra-legal aspect when the women’s groups, rather than handing over the ‘culprits’ to the state, started chastising them and destroying seized alcohol and breweries.

220  Soibam Haripriya On the one end of the spectrum lie such acts of chastisement of individuals by women’s groups that have tacit support of community members. On the other end of the spectrum lie various non-state groups/organisations (armed and unarmed) who dictate the actions of the people. Moral censorship by both kinds of groups is widely accepted in the valley to the extent that various individuals and groups send out appeals to such groups to intervene in case of family disputes or otherwise. The media too works in tandem with them and participates in being the facilitator of such appeals and gives reportage to such acts of censorship and chastisement uncritically. The lack of criticism on the part of the people on this manner of functioning is perhaps due to fear of further harassment. There is no space for critiquing the actions of the various organisations, civil societies including the Meira Paibis and state and non-state groups.

The threat of immorality It is bad enough that the two had physical relations. What makes it worse is that the man was a non-Manipuri and therefore it was so much more difficult to make him accountable for our society . . . our intervention was maternal. – (The Indian Express 10 April 2012)

Ningol Khongchat Lup is one of the many organisations described as ‘women’s organisation’ functioning in the Imphal valley of Manipur that falls under the category of Meira Paibis.5 The organisation came into the news in 2007 for its vigilante activism. The main work of such organisations is to raid restaurants frequented by youngsters, take pictures and publish them in local newspapers with the intention of revealing the identity of the young women. Keithel Fambi Apunba Lup, a powerful group whose members are women from the various keithels (markets), is another organisation which is part of the campaign to ensure that ‘the moral and social fabric of the community is not eroded’ (The Indian Express 10 April 2012). A newspaper article that carried the news of a girl being raped in a restaurant reports the act as immoral and the rapist as ‘lover boy’. In another instance of reportage of a girl being drugged and raped in a restaurant in Imphal on the 8th of June 2012, the article ends with the organisation proclaiming that women are ‘no longer safe to move around alone’. The notion of morality is also informed by the identity of those involved. There seems to be an understanding of women being unsafe if she is a Manipuri (which often means Meitei) in an ‘illicit relationship’ with a non-Manipuri man. In fact

From the shackles of tradition in Manipur 221 neither of the organisations mentioned earlier had offered any statements on rapes and violence. They make no distinction between consensual relationships and rape and are complicit in blaming and shaming the victim. It would be erroneous to look at such movements, activists and selfproclaimed vigilantes, as feminist solely due to the fact that these groups consist exclusively of women members. There is no critical examination of the existing set of patriarchal values that operates when one looks at women’s sexuality and the set of values that underpins sexual violence. The secretary of the Lup says, ‘We have found scores of young people at these seedy restaurants doing what they shouldn’t be doing. After we locate them, we first give them a warning and then call in their parents. We ensure that the families agree to the couple being married. Pre-marital sex is not acceptable’ (The Indian Express 10 April 2012). In fact, this is the same lens which is used while dealing with the practice of elopement where even girls who have not reached the legal age for marriage are preferably married off rather than have the tag of being a chelluraba nupi (a woman who had eloped). Such women are usually referred to by the term aremkhak (which translates as leftover). The stigma is such that many prefer to get married even if the elopement had not been consensual. There is no word colloquially in Meiteilon to signify rape; the word namja namthekpa is not in usage; nupi chenba the word used for elopement does not qualify whether the act is consensual or not. Nupi chingba on the other hand points to the fact that the act of abduction of women existed as a practice. Such a nexus of abduction/elopement hides within its fold both acts of coercion and consensus. Language sustains and reifies codes of purity, honour, shame and reproduces more stringent ways of oppressing women. While a word not existing or fallen into disuse in a language does not necessarily mean condemnation or social sanction of the act, it does point to a certain discomfort in dealing with it. Moreover the absence of words that signifies violence on women cannot be thought of as innocuous. If such an act of abduction/elopement does not lead to a marital alliance within families, there is a practice of asking for izzat dabbi. This is monetary compensation to be given to the woman’s family for the lost izzat (honour) of the women alluding to the potentiality of lost virginity during abduction/elopement. This argument also points to the preoccupation with the sexuality of Meitei women. Opposed to the image of a woman with problematic sexuality is the figure of the mother. The ideology of motherhood points to the essentialist notion of collapsing woman to her biology, reducing her to her biological function. Strangely however the mother is presented as a non-sexual/asexual body. One sees this being employed during the Indian nationalist movement as well as in the symbol of the sacrificing mothers providing sons for

222  Soibam Haripriya the freedom movement or the country itself symbolised as ‘Mother India’. There is no doubt about the fact that many of the Meira Paibi organisations are based on the ideology of motherhood. However, motherhood is privileged only when it meets the stringent rules of patriarchal society and the organisations are worried about many possible transgressions. The projected image of empowered women seems to be starkly different from the treatment they receive in their own families and communities. This can be seen in the statistics of violence against women in Manipur which has the second highest rate of domestic violence in India.6 The National Crimes Records Bureau puts the rate of total cognisable crime committed against women (including domestic violence and other forms of violence) in 2014 for Manipur at 26.7 per cent. The frequent incidences of violence against women (though this is not the only prism through which one can look at this issue) and the responses to them beg to tell a story different from the rhetoric of egalitarian Meitei civilisation. Motherhood is used as a tool by the women’s movements and all women in the various women’s groups are referred to as ‘Ema’ (mother) regardless of the age of the woman. Meira Paibi members are usually married or if unmarried have attained the so-called age where they could have mothered a child. Is the ‘problematic sexuality of women’ managed by putting her in the mould of the archetypal mother? This chapter attempts to posit the idea of motherhood separate from the celebratory overtones to imagine an alternative frame of organisation and agitation wherein women come out of debilitating and constricting ways of imagining themselves and in which they are imagined. Admittedly, the chapter suffers on account of using narratives from only one community (Meitei) as a way of understanding the issue; a more nuanced analysis can be arrived at only by studying the other communities that make up Manipuri society.

The exemplary protest and the space of the keithel On the intervening night between the 10th and 11th of July 2004, about seven to eight army personnel picked up Thangjam Manorama from her house at 3 a.m. She was gagged, slapped, beaten up before being taken away. The following day her corpse was found in Yairipok Road with multiple torture and bullet marks. A nude protest was organised on 15 July 2004 against the rape and killing of Thangjam Manorama. The government imposed indefinite curfew.7 The women in the nude protest and those supporting the agitation were the keithel (market) women mostly from Khwairamband Keithel popularly known as Ema (mother) keithel. Images of nupi (woman) keithels located across the state cater to the romanticised notion of empowered Manipuri women. The Ema keithel was previously

From the shackles of tradition in Manipur 223 known as nupi keithel (women’s market). The change in the name to Ema keithel though difficult to trace does contribute to the archetypal image of the mother nurturing and sustaining her offspring both through economic contribution to the household and also through the act of agitation and resistance. One could however look at the changing meaning of the space of the keithel. Ema keithel has become a highly urbanised space offering very little space to people of other ethnic communities and Meiteis from rural areas. It is from this space that the women who were a part of the nude protest had come out to agitate against the rape, torture, mutilation and killing of Thangjam Manorama with slogans of ‘Rape us, kill us, we are all Manorama’s mother’ at the gate of the Kangla Fort where the Assam Rifles were stationed in the year 2004 where the incident happened. It was the disrobed, de-sexualised body of elderly women that could be seen as a sign of agitation and protest. It is the same de-sexualised body that maintains midnight vigils in the streets at night. ‘Motherhood has often been used as a space for protest’, argues Maithreyi Krishnaraj (2010: 24), with no space for any articulation outside of conventional heterosexual motherhood.8 Using motherhood as the only space of protest is limiting. The status-quo is neither changed nor challenged. Krishnaraj in trying to look at the instrumental use of motherhood offers a brief outline of the formation of the Mother’s Front in Sri Lanka. The Front gave an ultimatum to the government, saying, ‘We want a climate where we can raise our sons to manhood, have our husbands with us and lead normal lives’ (ibid.). This emotive vocabulary of motherhood was more successful than the citizen’s appeal. It is no surprise that the day women in Imphal valley took up the meira (torches) is observed as Pari kanba (rescuing of sons). That day also marks the transition from Nishabandhi to Meira Paibis. The effectivity of the appeal of the idea of motherhood should not surprise us. After all, one needs to engage with the patriarchal state in their own language. However, the usage of the patriarchal language extends beyond the state; it is the language of the everyday. The usage of the archetype mother appeals to both the everyday and the state. The usage of this mother archetype limits the space for working specifically on women’s agenda. The idea seems not very different from Spivak’s analysis of Mahasweta Devi’s short story ‘The Breast Giver’ (Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Stanandayini’, translated by Spivak). The protagonist, Jashoda,9 is a professional mother who was a wet nurse to 30 children of her master’s household and 20 of her own. She dies alone consumed by breast cancer with none of the 50 odd children by her side. In her last days she sees her children in the doctor and the nurses tending her. The doctor remarked, ‘She sees her milk-sons all over the world’ (Spivak 1987: 240). For Spivak, the parable

224  Soibam Haripriya shows the ‘hegemonic cultural self-representation of India as a Goddessmother (dissimulating the possibility that this mother is a slave) she will collapse under the burden of the immense expectation that such selfrepresentation permits’ (ibid.: 244). What would happen in a scenario where the women refused to be mothers – biological or otherwise – and began to claim a space solely of their own? This is illustrated through another women’s agitation discussed as follows. There was an agitation of women from the Ema market in May 2011 asking for their space in the newly built (three) market complexes in Imphal. Newspaper editorials termed them as uncouth, vulgar and undignified. It challenged the perception of the Emas in the market as empowered and respected. One newspaper editorial went to the extent of calling the keithel nupi as ‘noise some [sic] and foul’ (Hueiyen Lanpao 4 May 2011a).10 The turn in language from calling keithel women as mothers to nupi (woman) is interesting. Another editorial referred to the women as ‘errant women who are set to derail accepted social norms’ whom self-respecting married males would rather run away from (Hueiyen Lanpao, 4 May 2011b).11 The contradiction however is that the keithel women are the same keithel women who had supported and were a part of the agitation that culminated in the nude protest. What is the prevalent perception of keithel women? How are they hailed as mothers of the whole society in one act of agitation, and how are they completely stereotyped and misrepresented in another act of agitation? Thus the type of agitations that women can take up also needs to be informally ratified by the society or the community for it to be regarded as ‘acceptable’. Also the splintering in the keithel agitations shows the appropriation of various keithel-based organisations by the state with many such organisation choosing to remain silent as they have got their ‘seats’ in the newly built market complex (Imphal Free Press 14 May 2011a).12 Thus the market agitation was not endorsed by the major keithel lups. Women are not a homogenous entity: class, clans, ethnic and spatial location therefore fracture notions of homogenous identities.13 The more vocal of the lups are the urban-based organisations. These lups, due to accessibility to the power centres, were the first to negotiate and enter into a Memorandum of Understanding with the state. The two Nupi Lan (women’s war) are juxtaposed with other images including the image of Ema keithel and the women of the keithel in a seamless narrative and are reproduced in writings related to women in Manipur wrenching them out of context. The images are also rampantly used in feminist discourses in India failing to recognise the distinct and discontinuous nature of events. The image of the latter is that of the sacrificing, stereotypical mother negating her ‘self’ for the contentment of the progeny as well as the family. The above examples illustrate the fragility of such a reading.

From the shackles of tradition in Manipur 225

Figure 12.1  Women in a sit-in protest, Ningthoukhong, 6 April, 2011 Source: Photograph by the author.

The photograph of the sit-in protest attests to the iconic image of Meitei women in protest meetings, demonstration and so forth.14 This is taken as a sign of her empowerment. The women are mostly in traditional attire of mourning which is also symbolic of widowhood.

The protest and the play The nude protest of July 2004 shares a relationship with a theatre play performed some years before the protest. The play Draupadi performed by Kalashetra, Manipur (a theatre group in Manipur) is an adaptation of Mahasveta Devi’s play of the same name. The play and the subsequent nude protest is an ironic appropriation of the figure of Draupadi rescued by Lord Krishna in the Mahabharata.15 According to Mahasveta Devi’s story, Draupadi (Dopdi) is left to fend for herself. In this enactment, Dopdi (both in the text and in the performance) approaches general Senanayak, disrobes herself and flings her clothes at the general. Dopdi asks ‘What’s the use of clothes? You can strip me, but how can you clothe me again? Are you a man?’(Spivak 1987: 196). The act of assaulting and raping her

226  Soibam Haripriya has emasculated the men. The humiliation shifted from the woman who is raped to the man who has raped. This strongly assertive moment was received with shock and awe with comments like – Manipuri women should not be shameless enough to disrobe in public (in the year when the play was first performed). The first time Draupadi was performed the actor protagonist Sabitri Devi and director Heishnam Kanhailal were attacked viciously by many ‘social’ and ‘women’s’ organisations as well as feminists questioning the need for Meitei women to appear nude on stage. The audience seems to be unable to go beyond the immediate image of a nude body to see the body as a text where violence is inscribed. The moment of disrobing provides a powerful inversion to the Draupadi of the epic Mahabharata. Nakedness as a confrontation and not as a titillation as discussed by Sabitri Devi also points to the humiliation of the other through the nakedness of the self. The larger question however is the use of such a device in agitations. While the play itself was attacked for simply having a naked body as a part of the performance, the naked protest of the 12 Emas in front of Kangla fort in Imphal led to a rethinking of the play Draupadi. The acts are dissimilar and are at various different registers. In the play the dramatic inversion when Dopdi approaches Senanayak, disrobes herself of the phanek and flings the phanek at the general saying ‘Come, (en)counter me’ cannot be seen merely as an act of defiance.16 Rather she removes the trope of shame from the disrobed body and transfers it to the onlooker. It was only after the nude protest that the play itself was looked at as an aesthetic representation of ‘reality’. It is however disturbing that many have reflected on the protest as some sort of a dramatic emotionally charged moment and as a spectacular display as no other protest has ever seen. The protest is thought of as a display of empowered women rather than a call to engage with the issues of violence and the repeal of AFSPA that were raised through the medium of this particular protest. The play when shown at the National School of Drama festival in 2010 had a young woman (Radhika Rabha) playing the role of Dopdi replaced by an older woman (Savitri Heisnam) before the scene of Dopdi’s disrobing.17 A personal conversation with Savitri Heisnam suggests that there were problems depicting the scene with the young Rabha and so it was decided that the older Savitri Heisnam should essay that scene. This is not surprising considering that the actor Savitri is always prefixed with an Ema, her nude body less amenable to sexualisation and hence able to depict the transgression of the act rather than the viewer concentrating on the body. This play also acquires another layer of meaning altogether considering that the phanek is viewed as attire that is taboo for men. Men are not supposed to touch the phanek. In fact the ‘untouchable’ phanek is used as a

From the shackles of tradition in Manipur 227 barrier against armed men;18 similarly using the phanek to block the road is commonly seen as a mode of protest in the valley. The act of putting a barricade of phanek, brassieres and petticoats has been viewed by many (men) as acts of women disrespecting their own attire. The inner clothes which are to be hidden away from view when displayed in protest are an obvious sign of defiance; the sense of defiance is exaggerated as the women’s attire (phanek) is ‘untouchable’, since regardless of religious affiliation, Meitei men regard the phanek as untouchable. Thus, one can see the consequent ironic situation where men with guns are not able to cross a barricade of phaneks. Such a belief in the untouchability of the phanek has not in the least protected the wearer from being disrobed and raped. Dopdi disrobing herself in the play and covering Senanayak with the phanek could be understood as an ultimate act of humiliation and emasculation of men as here in one fluid moment is embedded two acts: the woman taking off her phanek and the men being lashed/covered by the phanek. The woman disrobes herself which would allude to the man being not man enough and hence the woman does not fear being nude in his presence and then in the act of whipping the man which reverses the usual act of being a recipient of violence to the woman becoming the perpetrator of it. In another incident mimicking the nude protest, in December 2011 a naked protest by male members of a regional party – Manipur People’s Party – was received with a media blackout and people felt that it trivialised the 15 July 2004 landmark naked protest. They were protesting the visit of the prime minister. An editorial reported – ‘Unlike the women protestors in 2004, who were defying the law, shouldering the responsibility of taking forward the near universal outrage in the state at the manner in which Manorama was found murdered after arrest, we are certain this group of shameless men protestors were merely interested in attracting cheap attention and not challenging the law’ (Imphal Free Press, 4 December 2011).19 One could speculate that act of seven men disrobing on the terrace of a private property boomeranged not only because of the perceived triviality of the issue but also disrobed men do not defy anything. A man’s body is neither embedded nor burdened with values of virginity, chastity and modesty as compared to a woman’s body. Conversely this mode of protest by men comes disturbingly close to ‘flashing’ and therefore could be construed as visual violence to onlookers though fortunately there were none due to the site selected for the protest.20

Conclusion Situations of conflict work with hegemonic ideas of masculinity/ femininity; protector/ protected and produce and re-produce themes

228  Soibam Haripriya always within the framework of patriarchy and the patriarchal state. The body of the 12 mothers is no doubt a de-sexualised body; it is a body of a mother first and the body of a woman last. The body of a mother and the body of a young woman occupy very different categories in the politics of agitation, and it is the idea of (de)sexualisation that plays a role in deciding who can agitate and who cannot and also who could be part of the Meira Paibis. How does one weave an understanding of empowerment and status of women in the presence of highly disturbing notions of women and morality expressed and practised by women’s organisation working under the ideology of motherhood? The potential role envisaged for women in conflict situations is that of a negotiator. While it is not untrue that women in the valley have ably played the role of negotiators in peace-building processes and have demonstrated their resourcefulness in protests and agitations against violence, her complete invisibility in formal peace negotiations is still a matter of concern. The visibility of women in grass-root protests and agitations to the extent that only women seem to be protesting therefore is a cause of concern rather than a fact to be celebrated. One also needs to see the causes behind the high visibility of women in grass-roots peace processes and its absolute reversal as one goes up to the formal processes and negotiations. I am not construing women’s groups/ organisations to be completely unaffected and untouched by the hierarchies and struggles that affect the society from where they have emanated, neither am I expecting that the gender relations that exist in society will not be reproduced in the groups. However, not all women whether in groups or individuals work for the cause of women. One must caution against such an understanding which would construe or suggest all such groups and their acts to be feminist because their membership comprises exclusively of women or by individual women activists, writers and others. One should also caution against the idea of motherhood being an empowering trope to work from; such a notion may dissuade the emergence of alternatives. The legitimacy derived by women’s groups by placing themselves under the fictive kinship frame of motherhood usually means that issues of their own rights are sidelined. After all, the archetypal mother is selfsacrificing to the extent of effacing the self. Thus agitations by women and women’s organisations to generate entitlements for themselves are rarely seen. On the rare occasion when such agitations happen, they do not draw any support. The pervasive idea of motherhood as essential and not optional has thus penetrated organisations – as Judith Butler (1986) put it, ‘In an effort to naturalise and universalise the institution of motherhood, it seems that the optional character of motherhood is denied; in effect, motherhood is actually being promoted as the only option, i.e. as a compulsory social

From the shackles of tradition in Manipur 229 institution’. It seems rather late in the day to begin discussing the idea of motherhood as a free choice exercised by the Meitei women as with women elsewhere. However, a suggestion of motherhood neither as natural nor an organic necessity and certainly not the only trope to leverage one’s agitation from would invoke terror, fear and necessary resistance.

Notes 1 Thingnam Anjulika Samom, writer and independent researcher based in Imphal speaking on ‘Women and Political Violence’ at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, August 2009. She narrates an incident where men were chiding women for not coming out to intervene when military personnel had threatened them during a roadblock as a part of a protest. 2 By ‘women’s collective’ I mean any group of women who have organised themselves either formally as a registered society (under the Societies Registration Act) or informally as a leikai (locality)-based group. 3 For a detailed account of the women’s movements in India, see Kumar (1993). 4 The members of Meira Paibis belong to the Meitei community only. The women in other communities too are similarly organised. 5 Loosely translated as Ningol-Women, Khongchat-journey/travels, Lup organisation is one of the many groups described as a women’s organisation. It is interesting to note that these vigilante organisations as well as the restaurants where they conduct their raids are all registered under the Manipur Societies Registration Act, 1989. 6 Current statistics in Manipur, though not segregated by ethnicities, reveal the preponderance of violence against women (VAW). VAW is increasing in Manipur. Two hundred and sixty-nine cases of VAW were reported during the period between January and October 2012. They include 21 rape cases, 2 rape and murder cases, 16 suicide cases, 7 molestation cases, 4 kidnapping cases, 56 missing cases and 78 trafficking cases. The steep rise in VAW is along with the simultaneous increase in women’s groups, vigil groups and civil bodies and higher recruitment in the police department. Violence at homes – physical and verbal – is also on the increase. Along with this is the ongoing political conflict and violence that also affect women. Women in Manipur face all the three types of violence. The data have been sourced from Kanglaonline ‘Manipur Women Rises to End Violence against Women and Girls in State’, 13 February 2013. 7 K. Taruni, president of All Manipur Social Reformation and Development Samaj, was one of the 12 Emas who took part in the historic nude protest. The other 11 Emas were Kh. Ramani, Jamini, S. Momonleima, M. Ibemhal, Sorojini, Ibetombi, Mema, Nganbi, Tombi, Jibanmala and Gyaneswari. 8 Krishnaraj, however, represents the ‘nude protest’ as supporting the insurgency movement whereas the protest was sparked by the rape and murder of Manorama Devi. ‘Likewise in Manipur (also in the north-east), women held a demonstration by marching nude as a protest against the actions of the Indian army which was suppressing insurgency in the area’ (Krishnaraj 2010: 24). The blatant factual error misrepresents the cause

230  Soibam Haripriya of the momentous protest which also shows that the Northeast is indeed marginal in people’s imagination and erroneous representation abounds. 9 Jashoda is also the mother of Krishna, the Hindu God. 10 Hueiyen Lanpao, ‘Unlicensed Street Vendors Pick an Unfair Fight’, 4 May 2011. Other editorials and media reports too sided with the state. At least the media reception of the keithel agitation had brought to the forefront the faulty perception and romanticisation of Ima keithel as an illustration of empowerment. Instead, these editorials and reports bring out the superficiality of understanding or rather misunderstanding the idea of empowerment. Most media have joined in the chorus with the state government crying itself hoarse that no number of keithels can placate the street vendors presenting the agitating women as if they all are an insatiable animal without giving a chance for the other voice to be heard. 11 Hueiyen Lanpao, ‘Unlicensed Street Vendors in an Unlicensed Screaming Act’, 9 May 2011. 12 Imphal Free Press, ‘Ima Keithel: Withering Sense and Spirit’, 14 May 2011. I had developed this article through interviews with keithel Imas at Lamphel and new keithels and facilitated by Human Rights Alert tried to bring to light the issues of poor governance that was shielded. It was interesting to note the sense of moral and ideological bankruptcy creeping into the workings of various organisations, (in this case the keithel lups) and the effective appropriation of all such fragmented agitation by the state which is not to say that it is limited to the keithel lup or women’s organisations but however to point to the fact that women are not an undifferentiated universal category but rather are to be looked at as an intesect by caste, class, ethinicity, race and so on. 13 The problems of positing the idea of women as a universal stable based on a generalised notion of their subordination have been pointed out by the postcolonial feminist Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1984) in her article ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’. 14 The photo was taken during a one-day discussion on the Manipur Loktak Lake (Protection) Act 2006, which was held at Ningthoukhong Bazaar on 6 April 2011. The discussion was organised by the following groups: All Loktak Lake Floating Hut Dwellers Hut Dwellers & Fishermen Progressive Committee (Apunba Lup), All Loktak Fishing Workers Assn., the All Manipur Thanga People Welfare Assn., the Loktak Peoples Forum and All Loktak Lake Floating Hut Dwellers & Fishermen Progressive Committee (Nupi Apunba Lup). There were more than 700 people in the meeting, and approximately 90 per cent of those gathered were women. 15 Draupadi of the epic Mahabharata is the wife of five Pandavas. The eldest of the five siblings – Yudhisthira – loses her in a game of dice to the hundred siblings – the Kauravas. After she has been lost along with the kingdom and all that the Pandavas owned, she was brought to the assembly and disrobed in public. Her prayer to Krishna was answered, and it turns out that she is infinitely clothed and could not be disrobed. The fact of her being married to five brothers also plays a role in her being brought to the assembly for a public disrobing. This story is radically rewritten by Mahasveta Devi wherein no God or man comes to Dopdi’s (Draupadi) rescue. She chooses to remain naked. 16 In the short story ‘Draupadi’ by Mahasveta Devi, Draupadi is the name given to the protagonist by the upper-caste feudal lords where her mother worked. Dopdi is the tribalised form of the Sanskrit name Draupadi. The

From the shackles of tradition in Manipur 231 shift in the name is to point to the larger question of the meaning and usage of words. In the translator’s foreword Spivak writes with reference to the word ‘counter’ used to refer to ‘encounters in the story’ – ‘What is it to “use” a language “correctly” without “knowing” it’ (Spivak 1981: 391)? The crux of this being is poignantly shown in the end of the story wherein Draupadi/Dopdi challenges the Senanayak – ‘What more can you do? Come on, counter me-come on, counter me-?’ (ibid.: 402). Definitions of words can shift over time, and the original meaning gets changed through its use. The meaning of the word encounter has definitely shifted in the conflict areas that I write about here. To encounter is to get killed, to get violated. 17 At the fourth edition of South Asian Women’s Theatre Festival 2010, on 12 March 2010, the play Draupadi (80 mins), adapted from Mahasweta Devi’s story, directed by H. Kanhailal and presented by Kalakshetra, Manipur, Shri Ram Centre, New Delhi. The play has undergone changes since the first time it has been performed and so has the reception to it. It is surprising, however, that the play was hailed as an oracle of sorts after the nude protest with the arresting statement of the power of the state. The play was performed on stage in Manipur after more than a decade of its first performance. It was performed as a part of a four-day theatre workshop organised by Kalakshetra Manipur in collaboration with Manipur University, Jawaharlal Nehru Manipur Dance Academy, Art and Culture (Govt. of Manipur), Central Sangeet Natak Academi and supported by various theatre groups of Manipur in 2014. 18 The concept of ‘untouchability’ is a part of the study of the caste system in India based on hierarchy of purity and pollution. As defined by Louis Dumont the caste system in India is a purity-pollution barrier. The literal meaning of untouchable, that is, not-to-be touched signify the absent presence of caste in Meitei community. The Meitei Hindus claim that the practice of Hinduism has reached Manipur after the reform movement within Hinduism and therefore do not have the practice of caste. However, I argue that in the absence of an untouchable caste within Hinduism designated as the caste ‘other’, women begin to be seen with the notions of purity/ pollution and the practice of exclusion. The practice regarding the attire of women as polluting and therefore not to be touched is certainly a practice that mirrors the ideology of caste. The Manipuri Muslims (Meitei Pangal) are also similarly treated as untouchable, thus reflecting the ideology of caste even while claiming a non-caste practice of Hinduism. 19 Imphal Free Press, ‘Uncouth and Distasteful’, 4 December 2011. Many other local newspapers chose not to carry the reportage of the event for the same reasons. 20 Displaying of private parts (especially by men) to another person is called flashing. This act is meant to disturb the onlooker.

References Butler, Judith. 1986. ‘Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex’, Yale French Studies, 72, Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century, 35–49. Chaudhuri, Maitrayee. 1993. Indian Women’s Movement: Reform and Revival. New Delhi: Radiant Publishers.

232  Soibam Haripriya Department of Cooperation, Government of Manipur. The Manipur Societies Registration Act, 1989. Development in India. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 71–85. Diamond, Larry. 1999. Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Gill, Preeti. (ed) 2010. ‘Mosaic: Four Interviews’, in The Peripheral Centre: Voices from India’s North East. New Delhi: Zubaan, 404–475. Hueiyen Lanpao. 2011a. (Newspaper) ‘Unlicensed Street Vendors Pick an Unfair Fight’, 4 May 2011. Hueiyen Lanpao. 2011b. (Newspaper) ‘Unlicensed Street Vendors in an Unlicensed Screaming Act’, 9 May 2011. Imphal Free Press. 2011a. (Newspaper). ‘Ima Keithel: Withering Sense and Spirit’, 4 May 2011. Imphal Free Press. 2011b. (Newspaper). ‘Uncouth and Distasteful’, 4 December 2011. Indian Express. 2012. (Newspaper) ‘Mothers’ Group Dishes Out Instant Morality in Manipur Restaurants’, 10 April 2012. Kanglaonline. 2013. (Newspaper). ‘Manipur Women Rises to End Violence Against Women and Girls in State’, 13 February 2013. Krishnaraj, Maithreyi. (ed) 2010. Motherhood in India: Glorification without Empowerment. New Delhi: Routledge. Kumar, Radha. 1993. The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India 1800–1900. New Delhi: Zubaan. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1984. ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’, Boundary, 2: 333–358. Ortner, Sherry. 1972. ‘Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture’, Feminist Studies, 1 (2): 5–31. Paratt, John. 2005. Wounded Land: Politics and Identity in Modern Manipur. New Delhi: Mittal Publications. Parratt, Saroj N. Arambam and John Parratt. 2001. ‘The Second Women’s War and the Emergence of Democratic Givernment in Manipur’, Modern Asian Studies, 35 (4): 905–919. –——. 2010. Collected Papers on the History and Culture of Manipur. Imphal: Patriotic Writers’ Forum. Sharma, Kakchingtabam Naresh. 2010. ‘Civil Society and Democracy: Absence of the Sovereign in Northeast India’, Eastern Quarterly, 6: 106–115. Soibam, Haripriya. 2012. ‘Agitating Women, Disrobed Mothers’, Eastern Quarterly, 8 (I & II): 18–34. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1981. ‘"Draupadi" by Mahasveta Devi’, Critical Inquiry, 8(2): 381–402. –——. 1987. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Methuen.

13 Mizo identity The role of the Young Mizo Association (YMA) in Mizoram N. William Singh

Young Mizo Association or YMA (hereafter called simply the Association) is the largest NGO in Mizoram with a membership of more than 400,000 members.1 Although calling itself a social organisation that exists to serve the needy, its activities promote the awareness of Mizo identity through notions of shared history, shared religion, shared culture and shared rituals. It organises community services and cultural events on a regular basis, which it utilises effectively to impart a sense of ‘Mizo-ness’ to its members. A particular feature of the YMA in contrast to associations in other communities or other parts of India is that membership is compulsory for all Mizos. This chapter aims at analysing the central role of the YMA in promoting awareness and moulding ethnic identity through everyday social activities. This first shows that the activities of the YMA are not limited to the declared aims of the association; this further demonstrates that although the leaders of the association claim that it is a purely non-political organisation, some of its activities have explicit political overtones. The differences between the written rules of the YMA constitution and the actual practices of the association will be detailed in the first section. The second section explores both the positive aspects and the problematic roles of the Association as regards the other communities in the state of Mizoram. First, the promotion of volunteerism through community service, linked to the traditional Mizo practices of Tlawmgaihna and Hnatlang, and the significant roles of Central Young Mizo Association (CYMA),2 especially regarding the promotion of traditional dress and festivals, will be discussed. Members of the YMA also seek to develop an awareness of a distinct ethnic identity among Mizos through the promotion or organisation of everyday practices as well as events bearing social and cultural significance. This section also examines the problematic role of CYMA in supporting compulsory Mizo language, besides English and Hindi, in the school curriculum since Mizoram became a full-fledged state of the Indian Union in 1987. This policy of promoting the dominant language

234  N. William Singh by silencing other minority languages within Mizoram is criticised by other communities also living in the state. This shows, in particular, that the Association also promotes non-religious traditional markers of identity such as the Mizo language and traditional dress codes. The third and the last section examines more closely the political and religious engagements of the YMA, looking at some of its recent activities which have political overtones and exploring some recent events which reveal the Association’s problematic relationship with other ethnic groups in Mizoram. This point will be substantiated on the basis of fieldwork data and by examining the themes adopted as the Association’s annual agenda during the CYMA General Conference3 and published by the CYMA Press.4 This chapter examines the variety of roles and the manifold activities of the Association in the light of everyday facts and events central to the marking of ethnic boundaries. Categories such as history, territory, language and territory are used in particular to understand Mizo identity. This chapter also continues Pachuau and van Schendel’s analysis of identity making in Mizoram as the outcome of Christianity and modernity (Pachuau 2009; Pachuau & van Schendel 2014).

Written and non-written rules in the YMA The birth of the YMA In earlier times, Mizo society had bachelors’ dormitories known as Zawlbuk. According to tradition, it was considered to be a centre of socialisation for the male youth. All the adolescent boys would reside in it until they got married. It was a space where they learnt respect towards elders and were instructed about the roles they would have to play in society. From the 1920s, Mizos started practising Christianity, attending schools started by the missionaries and getting modern education, and the relevance of Zawlbuk declined due to evangelisation and mass conversion to the Christian faith (Report 1938: 369; Sangkima 2004: 253–255). In neighbouring Nagaland, there was an institution similar to Zawlbuk called Morung. It was the boys’ dormitory for the Ao Nagas. It gradually declined due to evangelisation of the Naga Hills (Robinson 2004). In the case of the Morung, there was a forced stoppage of youth dormitories by the Christian missionaries with the objective of evangelising the Ao youth (Robinson 2004). However, based on my fieldwork data collected in Mizoram, the main factors for the (gradual) decline of the Zawlbuk are different. Christian missionaries did not abolish Zawlbuk. When I interviewed Pu C. Rokhuma, a former leader of the CYMA, he commented: ‘Alteration in socialisation process from Zawlbuk to modern educational learning was

Mizo identity: the role of YMA in Mizoram 235 the reason for the gradual decline of Zawlbuk’ (interview: 14 June 2011, Aizawl). Many who were born during 1920–1930 commented that the Zawlbuk gradually declined due to the heavy pressure on youth to receive modern education by their parents. They further commented that from 1925 onwards, parents preferred to send their children to school: they wanted them to learn sciences, English, discipline, hygiene and moral values.5 They realised that modern education with its valorisation of learning and writing were good investments, although it was at the expense of inherited oral knowledge. Those who received modern education during 1900–1901 soon rose to prominent positions in the society (Hluna 1992: 35). Newly trained literates acted as voluntary teachers. The end of Zawlbuk and the acceptance of modern school education occurred within a generation (Pachuau & van Schendel 2014: 92–95). This had consequences on the forms of socialisation and identity since it was in Zawlbuks that the youth would socialise and get acquainted with the customs, traditions and cultural practices of their community. By 1935, colonial administrators attempted to revive Zawlbuk, but there was no significant result. Even earlier, N. E. Parry (superintendent of Lushai Hills during 1924–1928), recognising its crucial role as a sociocultural institution, made an attempt to revive it through an order in 1926 that compelled all villages of the then Lushai Hills to rebuild their dormitories.6 Though the order was obeyed, it proved ineffective as times had changed and the Mizo had then outgrown the institution due to the advent of Christianity and the spread of modern education (Zama 2012). At that time, Christian missionaries and Church elders felt it necessary to establish an institution that could replace the Zawlbuk (Lalthangliana 2010). Young Lushai Association (YLA) was established on 15 June 1935 to fulfil that role; it was renamed Young Mizo Association in 1947. The three main objectives of YMA, as mentioned in its constitution and in its publications through CYMA Press are (a) to promote useful occupation of leisure time, (b) to work for the development of Mizoram and (c) to promote a good Christian life. The concept of this association was the combined outcome of Christian influence and the effort of the erstwhile colonial administration to replace the traditional institution of Zawlbuk with a modern institution. Hence the motives for its establishment emerged from the changing social scenario during the first half of the 20th century, and from a political project in the society. Rev. Dr Zaihmingthanga – who is the first Mizo to receive D. Th. Degree – shared with me his view of the YMA as an agent of unification of the Mizos since every Mizo above 16 years of age becomes a member of YMA provided that he or she is willing to abide by its objectives as well as pay the annual fees of Rs. 50 or a lifetime membership fee of Rs. 500. During our

236  N. William Singh interview, former Member of the Indian Parliament H. Lallungmuana told me: ‘YMA has members from all walks of life, rich and poor; there is no discrimination and most importantly YMA unites all the Mizos regardless of their Christian denomination’ (interview of 28 May 2011, Aizawl). The constitution of the Association directs members to follow strict rules primarily based on Mizo socio-cultural practices. It encourages members to preserve tradition, culture and core values. For instance, it exhorts members to abide by the following: ‘I shall be honest and diligent in my profession irrespective of its status and perform all my assignment with great dedication. Our most valued heritage from our ancestor’s chivalry beautifies our society. As such, I must cultivate chivalry in me and live with it’ (YMA Constitution 1994). The main motto of the YMA is to serve and help the poor and the needy (Nibedon 1980); this entails that members would be ready to serve the needy, rather than waiting for the state to help them. Members believe that the blessings of God dwell with the Association. The Association also responds according to the need of the hour, especially in times of natural disasters, by asking members to help the poor, needy and affected families. In this way, it motivates its members to perform tasks that go well beyond their stated objectives. Such requests to provide relief and humanitarian aid in the form of donating clothes or food to people affected by heavy rains and landslides that occur often in the hills of Mizoram are also conveyed through vernacular dailies and TV channels. In moments of need within the community, the YMA stands out among all the organisations in the state, mainly due to its wide presence and large membership. Albeit humanitarian aid is deemed a significant activity of the Association, it is hard to come by any reportage in the media about the level of outreach of the Association beyond the boundaries of the community. Reports of the YMA helping other communities are rare.

The YMA and politics A critical examination reveals the differences between rules written in the YMA constitution and the underlying political ideologies of the Association. The constitution notably states, ‘YMA is a non-political voluntary association, with the aims and objectives such as useful occupation of leisure time, all round development of Mizoram and promotion of a good Christian life . . . the government is mine and I belong to the government’ (YMA Constitution 1994). It also mentions that leaders should not take up political roles. When a youth becomes member, he or she pledges to stay away from political roles and abstain from political activities.

Mizo identity: the role of YMA in Mizoram 237 However, political dynamics influence the members and leaders of the Association. Elders and youth (all YMA members) I have interviewed informed me that both political sensitivity and cultural awareness are important for YMA members; this means that members develop their awareness of their traditions, culture, heritage, identity and questions of political nature while taking part in the activities of the YMA. Examining the vernacular dailies and YMA Newsletter (published by CYMA Press) shows that leaders encourage members to express their views on social issues and problems. These terms – social issues and problems – can then connect to other fields and activities, including some which are political in nature. Here is an illustration. In 1998, the YMA launched a campaign against drugs and on issues of free and fair elections (Vanglaini.org and YMA Report 2014: 28–35). Members mobilised each household, locality after locality, in support of their cause. The hypothesis is that, in doing so, the motive was to establish social order and reduce unwanted social activities. However, agencies of the state are responsible for the implementation of law and order. Why was the YMA then involved in this? In Mizoram, YMA leaders and members are of the view that there is nothing wrong in trying to end drug abuse, and irreligious and unwanted activities in society. According to them, these are ‘humble acts’. Furthermore, the YMA constitution mentions that members should not have any role in the religious domain. However, some activities of the association go against this stricture. For instance, the CYMA Press publishes Mizo Hla Bu (Mizo Hymn Book), which contains hymns and verses based on the Gospels of the Church. The Association organised a public meeting in the evening of 25 February 1946 at Mizo High School, Aizawl (Lalsangliani 1998). The meeting decided that the YMA members would volunteer to promote the message of Gospel and Mizo language on the other side of the borderlands in Myanmar. At that time, several dialects were spoken by the various Mizo sub-tribes inhabiting the Chin Hills and the surrounding regions of Mizoram. During the meeting, Pastor Chhawnvunga of Champhai suggested that the best way to promote the language would be to distribute the available books of songs, poetry and short stories in Mizo villages beyond the Triau River in Burma.7 This led to the event that is now commonly referred to as the ‘Gospel Mail’, which is a good example of religious activities that the Association undertook during the period 1945–1960 (CYMA 1986; Zaihmingthanga 2016). The story of the Gospel Mail is as follows: as per Pastor Chhawnvunga’s suggestion, many volunteers offered to collect gifts and books door to door in Aizawl and bring them to the ‘Mission Bookroom’, from where they

238  N. William Singh would be taken for distribution in the Chin Hills. Volunteers passed the message in each village through the village networks, going from one village to the next one and so on. The YLA leader of Champhai, named Robuanga, got the message that there were four boxes of books for him to collect. Robuanga’s deteriorating health did not allow him to walk the five days (200 kms) up to Aizawl. YMA leaders decided that the only way to send the boxes was through volunteers passing through the villages – from one to the next. This was the creation of the Gospel Mail (CYMA 1986). On 20 June 1946, the boxes were taken to the Mission Veng church in Aizawl for a dedication service. Later, the volunteers lifted and tied the boxes to bamboo poles, one by one, to be passed on from shoulder to shoulder. The boxes were taken from one village to the next. Members of the association took them to the village churches. Villagers poured in gifts, which were used books, the Bible, the Hymn book and so forth. When the consignment reached Champhai, there was a total of 16 boxes. Not only did people donate their clothes and books, but they also donated rice, vegetables and chickens for the celebration of the Gospel Mail and of the volunteers who made it all possible. The boxes were taken for distribution beyond the Triau on 28 September 1946 (Zaihmingthaga 2016: 24–35). History reveals the role of the YMA in the making of Mizo identity during 1945–1950. The association and its members did not organise only the first Gospel Mail. The second round of Gospel Mail was carried out in 1947 (Vanlallawma 1999). The call for contributions was circulated far and wide to every member and leader of the association. Almost every village in Mizoram contributed. People sent gift boxes for the community in the Chin Hills. By August 1947, Robuanga received more than hundred boxes. Until 1950, he received boxes every year. While villages beyond the Triau had four churches earlier, the number of churches rose to 137 after the second Gospel Mail (Zaihmingthanga 2016).8 Till today, there is no evidence of other Mizo bodies, such as the Mizo Zirlai Pawl (MZP),9 performing such religious roles in Mizoram. Regarding the YMA constitution’s directive to the leaders ‘not to take up political roles’, it has also been diluted since many of the association leaders have become very active politically. This is, for example, the case of the cabinet minister of the former Mizo National Front (MNF), Mr Tlanghmingthanga, who was a YMA leader in the past; the former Member of Parliament (currently a legislator), Mr Vanlalzawma, was also a YMA leader. The list is long, and many YMA leaders have even contested elections. For instance, present legislators Lalruatkima (MNF) and T. Sangkunga (Congress) were YMA leaders. They had to ultimately give up their YMA leadership because of their political activities.

Mizo identity: the role of YMA in Mizoram 239

The YMA and Mizoram communities The traditional institutions – Tlawmngaihna and Hantlang Volunteerism is an activity where time is given freely for the benefit of another person, group or cause (Kleidman 1994). Tlawmngaihna denotes a communitarian spirit for a collective purpose, which implies reverence towards others. It has no equivalent word in English. It means readiness to serve, love of the highest degree, spirit of altruism or unselfishness, courtesy and help to others, that people have been practising since immemorial time. Every YMA member is supposed to follow and practise Tlawmngaihna, by, for instance, helping an ailing person living in a remote area to reach the nearest hospital, or a poor family by donating clothes and food. Individuals who perform Tlawmngaihna are highly revered. During my fieldwork in 2011–2012, leaders and youth claimed that the ideological foundation of the Association is based on the concept of Tlawmngaihna. The members strive to uphold the cultural values by serving the poor and the destitute and hence contribute to create a more secure society. The voluntary activities of the YMA members are observable in every sphere of society. Local units inform members on occasions of marriage, death and birth to provide voluntary services for the preparation of food, serving the guests and decorating and readying the house and front yard of the host family. Once they have been informed, members come forward to help the family. A person who volunteered and served others receives in return services and help from fellow members on similar occasions in his or her family. My point is that voluntary work, which one undertakes in normal course as a part of society, can be considered to be a manifestation of one’s belonging and identity. The Association encourages its members to volunteer, and thereby safeguard tradition and cultural values. Members are also requested to spread awareness of any unwanted social behaviour like drug abuse. In other words, communitarian and traditional activities are repeated in everyday life to define a specific ethnic identity and enforce belonging, and the desirability of members leading a meaningful social life by avoiding addictions is also repeatedly pointed out. Since 1980, YMA has been trying to revive Tlawmngaihna through various programmes and social events. Leaders justify this project by pointing to the decline of the spirit of Tlawmngaihna due to the onset of modernity and growth of individualism. Pu Rokhuma, a Mizo elder, stated: There are less Tlawmngai people (one who does the act of Tlawmngaihna) in modern times; this is a matter of shame and it is a dangerous

240  N. William Singh trend popping up in Mizo society today. But, today, there is a difference in the presence of Tlawmngai people in the rural and urban areas. In rural areas, where traditional social forms can be observed, that are not much affected by modern ethos, there is a stronger presence of Tlawmngai people, and Tlawmngaihna is still in practice. In the urban areas of Mizoram, one witnesses the presence of less Tlawmngai people. (12 June 2012, Aizawl) Another person I interviewed, Lalthangfala Sailo from Aizawl, commented: ‘A Mizo is born with Tlawmngaihna; sad but true, Tlawmngaihna has been fading away and YMA is reviving it’ (Interview on 13 May 2011, Aizawl). These statements highlight the commonly shared idea that Mizo society in recent times has welcomed the modern way of life and has valorised external appearance over the earlier traditional way of life which was communitarian in character. Hnatlang is a voluntary social service in which every Mizo is supposed to participate during community activities. YMA is actively promoting it. It is carried out at least once in a week in every locality. Local leaders inform members about these activities. For instance, members volunteer to clean up their locality without any sponsorship from any state agency. Youth irrespective of gender participate in such social services. Hnatlang differs from Tlawmngaihna on two counts. First, it is a planned event, whereas Tlawmngaihna is an act of help or service rendered at any time and on any occasion. Second, members believe that Tlawmngaihna is a state of mind, a readiness to help and serve others, not just fellow Mizos, whereas Hnatlang is a service rendered to the community, friends and relatives. For instance, during events of death, members volunteer to dig the grave of the dead and help the bereaved family in many ways. They arrange Hnatlang and do not charge any money for their help. YMA leaders believe that Hnatlang helps members to realise the importance of their tradition and culture. During birth, death and marriage events, as part of Hnatlang services, members and close ones volunteer in various kinds of services like cooking, serving cooked food to the visiting guests, arranging sitting areas and cleaning up. The members help in making arrangements to perform the last rites of the deceased. Such voluntary services help needy families who are unable to pay for hired labour on such occasions. YMA also organises frequent interactions among the members to promote social solidarity and awareness. A unique feature is the system of exchange of information between people. Local units are the agencies who conduct and operationalise the exchange of information. Be it at night or

Mizo identity: the role of YMA in Mizoram 241 at very early hours, local units send out information in their locality. In the past, every village had a village messenger known as Zualko (village crier) who carried and passed on information to other villages and other households. Due to the advent of modern technology, the local units today use the electronic medium to announce information. They make announcements of death, birth, marriage and any other events in society. No one else, not even the church or the government, makes such announcements.

Promoting traditional dress and festivals At the annual event of the YMA general conference, leaders encourage members to wear traditional dress, not just at marriage, birth and death ceremonies and other social events but also during normal weekdays. The annual events are broadcast on vernacular cable TV networks and are also aired through All India Radio (AIR) Aizawl and Aizawl Doordarshan (DD Aizawl). The Association has a cultural committee called CYMA Cultural Committee, which aims at promoting traditional dresses and the organisation of festivals. During the annual event, the committee urges members, elderly persons, students and office goers to wear traditional dresses such as the Puan (a cloth wrapped around the waist), and not blazers and Western suits. It views modern dresses such as blazers, jeans and suits as a threat to the Mizo tradition and culture.10 During Chapchar Kut (a Mizo cultural festival marking the beginning of New Year), leaders encourage members to celebrate Kut wearing traditional dresses. They openly promote traditional dress in the vernacular cable TV networks such as Zonet, radio programmes, and through the CYMA Press. In earlier times, the bridal couple and the guests wore only traditional dresses; hence today the YMA members express their dissatisfaction with the Western outfits such as suits and gowns worn by brides and bridegrooms in contemporary Mizo marriages (Nunthara 1996). Promoting Mizo traditional dress has also been taken up by state dignitaries. For instance, Indian dignitaries at New Delhi appreciate a Mizo wearing traditional dress and performing traditional dance Cheraw (‘bamboo dance’). In the media too, leaders welcome dignitaries from New Delhi with a token of shawl (Kawrchei) and a hat made of bamboo. Leaders encourage YMA members to display traditional costumes and to perform cultural items. This was especially evident when people from Mizoram participated in events in New Delhi (Jain 2007). Leaders praised the efforts made by the Mizo District Council11 between 1952 and 1972 that led to the declaration of Chapchar Kut as a state holiday. They also celebrate national holidays such as Independence Day and Republic Day. On such occasions, markers of local identity are displayed:

242  N. William Singh participants wear traditional attire such as the Puanchei (black and white Sarong wrapped around the waist by women), and turban topped with long tail feathers of the Vakul bird; perform the traditional dance such as the Cheraw (‘bamboo dance’); and sing traditional songs. Additionally, on these occasions, an observer can witness a display of national symbols of India such as the national flag and the national anthem; emissaries from New Delhi attend the events. YMA members also organise the float displaying cultural dances, traditional dresses and headgears during the Republic Day parade in New Delhi. This shows that YMA has succeeded in creating awareness of ethnic identity and a sense of local and national belonging by focusing on affairs of everyday life, by promoting social and cultural events, dress, language, literature and traditional songs; the Association thus promotes markers of ethnic identification which are alternative to Christian values and practices; this questions Pachuau’s view of the Christian Church as the main resource for Mizo ethnic identification (2014: 140 and 157). Members of the association are not all Christian, since not all Mizos are Christian. The point is that Christianity or being a Christian cannot necessarily define a YMA member or a Mizo. In fact, more than 8,000 Mizo in Mizoram are not Christian and belong to indigenous sects like the Vanawia, the Lalzawna pawl and the Enohka sect, as well as to Judaism (for details on such indigenous sects, see Zaihmingthanga 2016: 261–269).

The relationships of YMA to non-Mizos The YMA constitution states, ‘In today’s world of inter-communal existence, communion with other community, without prejudice is necessary. But, I must not make myself despicable to them’ (YMA Constitution 1994 Revised). ‘I’ refers to every member of the Association. ‘Them’ here refers to the non-Mizo communities, which are the Chakma, Lai, Mara and Gorkha. Leaders use the terms ‘YMA members and non-YMA members’ during public events and in the publications of CYMA Press. Pachuau explains that the idea of cultural differences was maintained in rules and policies in Mizo society since the colonial period till today in order to keep control over the creation of identity (Pachuau 2014: 3). Different practices created by British missionaries and British administrators are now being politicised by the Mizo to subvert, distance, alienate and to mark ‘others’ (i.e. Non-Mizo) in Mizoram (Pachuau 2014: 3–6). Here is a case of the space introduced between ‘us and them’ in contemporary Mizoram, which also demonstrates the promotion of ethnic nationalism by politicians who were former CYMA leaders. During 1997– 1998, YMA leaders vehemently opposed the demand for a separate ethnic

Mizo identity: the role of YMA in Mizoram 243 homeland of the Bru community (a minority community inhabiting the western parts of Mizoram), non-indigenous to Mizoram (Syed Sajjad Ali 1998). During 1997–1998, the Bru National Union (BNU) claimed an autonomous district in Mizoram; this movement was unsuccessful due to the pressure exerted by the Association on the state.12 The peculiarity of this case was that the opposition to the BNU demand did not come from the other non-Mizo units such as the Chakma Autonomous District Council (CADC), the Lai Autonomous District Council (LADC) and the Mara Autonomous District Council (MADC). A speech by Lalruatkima in 2002 (former CYMA leader, at present a MNF legislator) received huge applause and chest-beating during the general conference (see www.centralyma.org/general conference/) because he declared that the Bru community is not originally from Mizoram, and hence, it has no legitimacy to form an organisation under the Societies Registration Act of 1860. The same argument was repeated during the 2014 CYMA general conference. Leaders declared that civil society bodies – YMA, Mizoram Upa Pawl (Mizo Elder Federation) and Mizo Hmeichhe Insuihkhawm Pawl (All Mizoram Women’s Federation) – would pass a resolution on 5 August 2014 against the formation of organisations along ethnic lines.13 In other words, the Association, along with a handful of other Mizo organisations, reserved the right to decide who belongs and who does not belong to the land, who is indigenous and who is not. However, according to India’s constitutional arrangement, these questions are a matter for the law, and not for the YMA. Regarding the upholding of social order through, for instance, campaigns against drug, intoxicants, for moral reformation and for supporting households to get their ration cards to be able to procure subsidised essential commodities, there are no news reports of such activities by organisations other than the YMA. Here one sees the extent of influence of the association. In almost all matters, the Association’s concern and participation are considered pivotal. The main difference of the Association with other bodies like the MZP (Mizo Zirlai Pawl or Mizo Students Association) is that the motives, agendas, consensus and reach of the Association are wider, deeper and more influential. For instance, the MZP makes headlines in local dailies solely by organising protest marches against illegal migrants. Furthermore, the students’ body did not participate in many of the activities undertaken by the CYMA. Till today, the MZP has not made any press statements against the formation of organisations along ethnic lines. Since 1998, the activities of the MZP were reduced to organising long marches protesting against illegal migrants in Mizoram and holding street protests against government policies on education and scholarships.

244  N. William Singh Since 1941, the CYMA has been holding its general conference once a year. Members and leaders decide an ‘annual theme’ (kumpuan), which reflects the agenda of the Association and the tasks to be performed and achieved for the particular year. During the event, members also elect the leaders. Since 1941, the annual conference has been held in different towns of Mizoram and not only in Aizawl. The main reason is to make the presence of the Association felt everywhere the Mizos live. The Association even tried to hold the annual event in other Mizo towns in Assam (Haflong), Manipur (Churachandpur) and Tripura (Vanhmun), but this did not work out; the reason for this failure has not been explained by the Association. During 1955–1973, the conference was held only once, in 1963, due to a shortage of fund, the Mautam (famine) and Rambuai (troubled times during the 1966 to 1986 Mizo insurgency).14 Scrolling through the section on general conference of the CYMA website revealed two themes which were repeated more than eight times, especially during the period between 1982 and 2015 (see, Central YMA website/general conference). The repeated themes are – (a) Ram Leh Hnam Humhim (Safeguarding Nation and Land) and (b) Preservation of Mizo Culture.15 Such themes encourage members to draw distinctions between ‘they and we’. It encourages members to draw ethnic boundaries, define belonging, give more importance to their culture and traditions and see more clearly their differences from other communities. Such themes have ethnic overtones and can be seen as leading to the definition of markers of ethnic nationalism. The headline of The Shillong Times (a daily from Meghalaya) on 4 August 2014 provides another example of the YMA leaders’ opinion on other communities. Here is the news excerpt in full, which was entitled ‘Mizo body to conduct Chakma16 headcounts’: Concerned over an ‘abnormal increase’ of Chakma population in southern Mizoram, the state’s largest organisation YMA has decided to conduct a census on Chakma population in the state to check Chakma infiltration. ‘The census on Chakma will be conducted soon in the Chakma autonomous district council areas in southern Mizoram and other parts of the state’, Lalbiakzuala, president of YMA central committee said, ‘It [the census] is necessary to study the rapid growth rate of Chakma population and further check influx from the neighbouring Bangladesh’, he added. Chakma issue topped the agenda of the YMA central executive committee meeting in Aizawl on Saturday. The meeting decided to collect Rs 5 each from all the YMA members in Mizoram to conduct the gigantic task. The YMA meeting also decided to put more pressure on its demand for removal of Mizoram minister of state Dr B D Chakma from the Cabinet. The YMA had earlier written

Mizo identity: the role of YMA in Mizoram 245 to Chief Minister Lal Thanhawla to remove Chakma from his Cabinet for his (Chakma) participation in a poll boycott against allocation of land in Chakma autonomous district council for construction of a Mizo guesthouse by Mizo students’ body MZP. (The Shillong Times, 4 August 2014) Readers should note that such headcounts are not a recent trend in Northeast India (see Singh 2012b, 2014). Organisations in Meghalaya, Nagaland and Manipur have also conducted headcounts. They started headcounts in the villages of Mizoram in order to check the influx of ‘foreigners’ (a term used by Mizo signifying people from Myanmar and Bangladesh) since 1998. Sammadar mentions that minority communities have often been the victims of these individual headcounts, and for this reason, criticises the YMA (Sammadar 2006: 8–9). The members of the Association are also accused by other communities of Mizoram for not making their services available to other communities. They volunteer only within their families and friends. During my fieldwork in a lower middle school in the outskirt of Aizawl, where 90 per cent of the students were Mizo, the members volunteered to teach in the school without any emoluments. A Bru villager in the western part of Mizoram commented: ‘Volunteerism of YMA is mainly within the context of Mizo society. The members did not volunteer to teach at primary level schools in the Bru villages of Mizoram’ (Name withheld, Mamit district, Mizoram, 2012). Regarding the policy of compulsory Mizo language education in schools in Mizoram laid out by the Mizoram Board of School Education (MBSE), minority communities are sceptical of this policy. They firmly believe that the motive behind compulsory Mizo education is to ensure that the language is learnt by all the communities in Mizoram. They disagree with YMA’s support of this policy and accuse the Association of openly promoting learning of only Mizo language in schools. The prime reason for their dissent is that other communities often face difficulties in learning the Mizo language. They contend that the state authorities should also provide options to learn other minority languages like Mara, Lai and Chakma in school. A dissenter from the Chakma community of Mizoram stated: Mizos want to get most of the jobs in Mizoram, since they are well versed in Mizo language, and it is obvious that the Mizos will capture most of the jobs. This is the main reason for mandatory Mizo language in the high schools. Minority communities do not have much hope to get Mizoram state government jobs; instead we look for central government jobs. (A Chakma elder, 2012, Chhwangte town, Mizoram)

246  N. William Singh The YMA also supports the usage of Mizo language in the media, debating competitions, educational event and social events. One of the office bearers in CYMA commented: ‘If you want to live in Rome, you should live like the Romans’ (CYMA leader 2011, Aizawl). Coming back to Hnatlang, it is also one of the markers of differentiation between Mizos and non-Mizos. For instance, during Hnatlang, an observer will find the YMA members playing an active role while other communities rarely participate. Social activities should be opened up to all communities, but in Mizoram, it remains exclusive. The exclusivity of social activities undertaken by the YMA echoes the sentiments of Alain Touraine in his essay Sociology without Society (Touraine 1998: 12–18) where he claimed that identity politics involve movements and exclusive tendencies rather than movements organising around a variety of identities that may alternate between exclusivity and inclusivity. Members of the Association constantly create meanings of belonging while performing a variety of activities under the banner of Hnatlang. Everyday activity of Hnatlang is performed within a territory or a space. Relevance of the activity and the very notion of participation in such activity by the YMA members exclusively are significantly displayed on everyday occasions of life, birth, marriage and death. Following the norms that already exist in Mizo culture, members and leaders of the Association have never questioned the logic behind the existing norm differentiating who can participate and who cannot. Reification based on conscious categories and cultural symbols operates strongly in creating awareness of Mizo identity through events and activities promoted by YMA.

The political and religious YMA A former leader who is unhappy with the present-day office bearers contesting elections in Mizoram commented: YMA office bearers use their position as a stepping-stone for recognition and future political aspirations. It took a step to abolish CADC [Chakma Autonomous District Council] during the CYMA general conference at Champhai in 1999. We all know that the CADC is a constitutionally recognised body with certain autonomy. YMA is not the Mizoram government. It is a non-government organisation, which can pressure the government for the welfare of Mizoram. (Ex-president CYMA, 11 June 2011, Aizawl) During the leadership of T. Sangkunga (1998–2000), the Association initiated the problematic idea of re-checking the electoral roll of Mizoram,

Mizo identity: the role of YMA in Mizoram 247 which is unconstitutional, since the electoral roll is a white paper, and can be accessed and checked only by authorised officials of the Government of India. During 1997–1998, YMA members demanded a new electoral roll. The intention was to delete many non-Mizos from the electoral roll.17 This shows the degree of intolerance, xenophobic attitude and the intention to keep alive the Mizo/non-Mizo identity debate in Mizoram. During the electoral roll reform of 1997–1998, the YMA filtered and deleted many non-Mizo names from the electoral roll. It stirred up discontentment, especially among the Mara, the Lai and the Chakma communities. Curiously, no official records could be found to confirm the Association’s involvement in the deletion of non-Mizo names from the electoral roll, neither in its archive nor in the Mizoram government records; few reports were made in vernacular dailies (see www.vanglaini.org, 17 July 2013). The leaders I met considered that safeguarding and deleting the names of illegal settlers in Mizoram is ‘a humble act’. The electoral roll recognises an individual as a bonafide resident if he or she is born prior to 1951 in the state. The members of the YMA considered it as part of a policy initiated to bring down unwanted migrants across the porous borders of the state. It was also a message to the effect that even though the state had failed to bring down the unwanted migrants, the Association would help to successfully send them back. It was a pure exercise of protecting their interests, displaying a xenophobic tendency that a popular ex-CYMA leader highlighted in the following way: We felt that foreigners should not take part in the decision making of Mizoram. We want Mizo to make decisions for us, not foreigners. Those who were born outside and brought up outside of Mizoram are foreigners and they cannot be Chief Minister or any kind of ministers; that is against our socio-cultural traditional values, and also against the Constitution of India. YMA is a part of Mizo social life; without the association, Mizo society, Mizo culture and Mizo history would have been different. (Lianzuala, ex-president CYMA, 12 May 2011, Aizawl) Electoral roll reform also created many divisions in Mizoram. Many Mizo migrants from Myanmar and neighbouring states of Manipur became illegal inhabitants in Mizoram. After the Mizo Peace Accord of 30 June 1986, many of them migrated to Mizoram from the Chin Hills of Myanmar and Manipur for a better livelihood and because of the on-going conflict in Manipur and Myanmar. During my fieldwork, many YMA members commented that the association ‘flexed its muscles resembling a state within

248  N. William Singh a state’. Two elderly Mara individuals from the Saiha district of Mizoram commented: Mizoram electoral roll reform was wrong in every sense. Mara Thyuthia Py (MTP)18 had negative views on the 1997–1998 Electoral roll reform. MTP raised voice against YMA’s role. Lai, Mara and Chakma residing in Mizoram felt that YMA leaders were laying their hands on the electoral roll. The worst was that Mizoram government agreed to delete many voters from the electoral roll, simply due to their pressure. Our concern at present is that they should not intervene more on sensitive issues such as gender, class inequality, corruption, and better provision for health care. (Dr Pahnie & Rev Leicchuama, 27 May 2011, Saiha District, Mizoram) The huge influence of the YMA in the state administration allows the members of the Association to give their opinion in formulation of state policies, for instance, in state education reform, state environment reform, labour reform and trade committee reform. The Association showed its might by expressing the ethnocentric views of its members (see details in Singh 2014: 3–4). Furthermore, their clout in the activities of the state is increasing. Sangkima, a Mizo historian, argues that the success the YMA has in lobbying is due to the weakness of the state; since the state does not address the issues actively, YMA leaders take up those roles. Since 1998, these leaders have started taking up active roles in education, environment, the fight against drug abuse and health care, which are actually matters of the Mizoram state. Sangkima commented: YMA has been influencing and putting their hand in state government affairs. This is not the fault of the YMA. The state, now seeks the opinion of the YMA in important policies to be initiated by the state. They are compelled to take charge of some of the government’s tasks. Why was the YMA involved in Chakma infiltration issue? This is something political. Government has its own agencies such as police, excise and narcotics. These agencies are supposed to perform roles. But they fail. That is why the YMA steps in. (Sangkima, 24 May 2011, Aizawl) The Association seeks to promote Mizo culture through bringing in Christianity, sowing seeds of ethnic nationalism through texts published by the CYMA Press, organising headcounts, reforming the electoral roll, organising Hnatlang and Tlawmngaihna.19 It has maintained close relationships with the state, in line with its constitution, which states, ‘government is our

Mizo identity: the role of YMA in Mizoram 249 government’. Its influence is so immense that the YMA has a partnership with the state in providing essential services and for the implementation of development projects. For example, Aizawl-based newspaper Vanglaini reported on 23 May 2012 that the YMA is a key actor in state government’s Intodelhna (self-sufficiency), a project launched during 1990s (Newslink, Aizawl, 23 May 2012). In contrast, the MZP has not played any role in development projects in Mizoram.

Concluding remarks Since its conception, the YMA has been emphasising the preservation of tradition and culture. As one of the foremost non-governmental agencies promoting cultural values, it plays a visible role in promoting identity through its activities. It promotes Mizo culture, language and identity by organising high-school debating competitions, supporting compulsory Mizo language education in schools and by promoting traditional dress and attire. The Association utilises festivals, games and sports, socio-cultural events and birth, marriage, death ceremonies and traditional dresses as instruments for promoting Mizo identity among the members. Most importantly, the members endeavour to promote Mizo identity through volunteerism. Preservation of traditional institutions such as Zawlbuk and Hnatlang are used effectively to promote Mizo identity. It remains the only organisation in Mizoram promoting these traditional institutions. YMA leaders claim that the association is purely non-political, with no political affiliations and not promoting any political party. Field data show that their activities have political overtones, as made evident in their position with regard to the electoral rolls reform, non-Mizo exclusion campaigns, the activities of the CYMA Press, the increasing trend of its leaders becoming legislators and their stance in enforcing compulsory Mizo language. The CYMA Press plays a role in spreading awareness of Mizo identity. It reminds members to actively participate in its activities through its monthly and weekly letters. While promoting tradition, culture and traditional institutions, the Association creates cultural markers dividing Mizos and others. The creation of these markers and boundaries, the ethos of exclusivity and the defining of intrinsic values central to a particular community is what we generally understand as politics of identity.

Notes 1 According to the 2015 YMA Report, the Association has a total membership of 405,709 members. Every Mizo youth (irrespective of gender) automatically becomes a lifetime member of the YMA.

250  N. William Singh 2 CYMA is the official central office of all the YMA branches of Mizoram; it is located at Aizawl, the capital of Mizoram. It looks after the activities of the YMA branches. In this chapter, the names YMA and CYMA will be used interchangeably. 3 The general conference of the YMA is held once a year. It was first held in 1941 at Aizawl. 4 The CYMA Press is located in the heart of Aizawl, staffed and managed by the CYMA Publication Committee. It publishes weekly and monthly newsletters as well as journals in Mizo language. 5 Chatterji 1975. 6 From 1898 to 1954, Mizoram was known as the Lushai Hills District. 7 The Triau River runs along the border between Mizoram and Myanmar. 8 According to Rev J. M. Lloyd (2004), two churches were initially founded in the Dai and Matupi areas. Many new churches from all denominations came up later. 9 The Mizo Zirlai Pawl (Mizo Students Association) was established on 27 October 1935 at Shillong, Meghalaya. Its present headquarter is at Aizawl. 10 Lal Chungnuna. 2003. ‘Self Reliance’, Speech at Central YMA General Conference, Thenzawl, 2003. www.centralyma.org, [Accessed on September 9, 2016]. 11 The Mizoram District remained a schedule district of Assam till 1972. 12 Press Release by Bru National Liberation Front (BNLF), 20 October 2007. www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/states/mizoram/. . ./BNLF.htm [Accessed on October 17, 2016]. 13 ‘Preserving National Identity’, speech delivered at YMA general conference, Khawzawl, 2014. See www.centralyma.org.in/general assembly [Accessed on September 8, 2016]. National Identity here denotes Mizo identity. 14 Vanglaini, ‘A Mizo Daily Newspaper’, www.vanglaini.org [Accessed on September 8, 2016]. 15 Lal Chungnuna, 2003, ‘Self Reliance’, Speech at Central YMA General Conference, Thenzawl, 2003. www.centralyma.org [Accessed on September 9, 2016]. 16 The Chakmas are a Buddhists minority ethnic group of Mizoram found in Lawngtalai and Lunglei districts. 17 For further details, see D. Singh (2010:115); Dhar (1998: 346); Bhatia (2012: 164). Most of the aforementioned books discuss the issue of foreigners and deletion of non-Mizos (including minority ethnic groups like the Chakmas) from the electoral roll list and argue that it was spearheaded by the YMA, the MZP and the political parties of Mizoram for electoral gains. 18 Mara Thyuthia Py (MTP) is the youth organisation for the Mara tribes of southern Mizoram. It was established in 1950. 19 Lal Chungnuna, ‘Self Reliance’, Speech at the Central YMA General Conference, Thenzawl, 2003. See www.centralyma.org [Accessed on September 4, 2016].

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Mizo identity: the role of YMA in Mizoram 251 Bhatia, Lakshmi. 2012. Education and Society in Changing Mizoram. New Delhi: Mittal Publication. Chatterji, N. 1975. The Earlier Mizo Society. Aizawl: Tribal Research Institute Publication. CYMA. 1986. Golden Jubillee 1935–1985. Aizawl: CYMA Press. Dhar, Pannalal. 1998. Ethnic Unrest in India and Her Neighbours. New Delhi: Deep and Deep Publications. Hluna, J. V. 1992. Education and Missionaries in Mizoram. Guwahati: Spectrum Publications. Jain, Jyotindra. 2007. India’s Popular Culture: Iconic Spaces and Fluid Images. Mumbai: Marg Publications. Kleidman, Robert. 1994. ‘Volunteer Activism and Professionalism in Social Movement Organisation’, Social Problems, 41 (2): 257–276. Lal Chungnuna. 2003. ‘Self Reliance’, Speech at Central YMA General Conference, Thenzawl, 2003. www.centralyma.org, [Accessed on September 9, 2016]. Lalruatkima. 2002. ‘Preserving National Identity’, YMA General Conference, Khawzawl, 2002. www.centralyma.org.in, [Accessed on September 9, 2016]. Lalsangliani, R. 1998. Life and Works of Rev. Chhuahkhama. Aizawl: Self Published. Lalthangliana, B. 2010. ‘Zawlbuk Tawp Dan (The End of Zawlbuk), Zotui Thiang Thu-Hla’, 21 July. www.lawrkhawm.com [Accessed on September 9, 2016]. Lloyd, Rev J. M. 2004. History of Church in Mizoram: Harvest in the Hills. Gospel Centenary Series No. 1, Aizawl: Synod Publication Board. Lorrain, J. H. and F. W. Savdige. 1917. Chanchin tha Johana Ziak: The Gospel According to St. John (4th edition). London: British & Foreign Bible Society. Newslink. 2012, Mizoram Intodelhna, 23 May, Aizawl. Nibedon, Nirmal. 1980. The Daggers Brigade. New Delhi: Lancers Publishers. Nunthara, C. 1996. Mizoram: Society & Polity. New Delhi: Indus Publishers. Pachuau, Joy L. K. 2014. Being Mizo: Identity and Belonging in Northeast India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Pachuau, Joy L. K. and Willem Van Schendel. 2014. The Camera as Witness: A Social History of Mizoram, Northeast India. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Pachuau, Lalsangkima. 2009. ‘Ethnic Identity and the Gospel of Reconciliation’, Mission Studies, 26: 49–63. Report. 1938. ‘Reports by Missionaries of Baptist Missionary Society 1901– 1938 (1993): South Lushai Hills: Report for 1938, Mizoram Gospel Centenary Committee’, Baptist Church of Mizoram Serkawn, Mizoram, 1993. Robinson, Rowena. 2004. Christians of India. New Delhi: Sage. Sammadar, Ranabir. 2006. Refugee & the State: Practice of Asylum & Care in India. New Delhi: Sage. Sangkima. 2004. ‘Young Mizo Association (YMA): A Study in Historical Perspectives’, in Essays of the History of the Mizos. Guwahati, New Delhi: Spectrum Publications, 22–40.

252  N. William Singh Shillong Times. 2014. Mizo Body to Conduct Headcount, 4 August, Shillong. Singh, Deepak K. 2010. Stateless in South Asia: The Chakmas between Bangladesh and India. New Delhi: Sage. Singh, N. William. 2012a. ‘The Gorkhalis of Mizoram: A Small Community of Gorkhalis Fight for Rights and Recognition in Ethnocentric Mizoram’, The Himal South Asian. www.himalmag.com/component/content/ article/5088-html [Accessed on December 10, 2015]. ———. 2012b. ‘Politics of Divine Edicts and Reverse Secularism’, Economic and Political Weekly, 67 (52): 23–24. ———. 2014. ‘Quit Mizoram Notices: Fear of the Other’, Economic & Political Weekly, 21 June XLIX (25). www.epw.in/journal/2014/25/reports-statesweb . . . /quit-mizoram-notices.html [Accessed on October 17, 2016]. Touraine, Alian. 1998. ‘Sociology without Society’, Current Sociology, 46 (2): 119–143. Vanglaini. ‘A Mizo Daily Newspaper’, www.vanglaini.org, [Accessed on September 8, 2016]. Vanlallawma. 1999. Chanchinthar Dak. Aizawl: Hrithansanga. YMA Constitution. 1994. Revised Edition. Aizaw: CYMA Press. YMA Report. 2014. Young Mizo Association Report. Aizaw: CYMA Press. Zaimingthanga, Rev. 2016. The History of Christianity in Mizoram (1944– 1994). Lengchhawn Offset. Zama, Margaret Ch. 2012. ‘The Intangible as Cultural Heritage’, Marg: A Magazine of the Arts, The Free Library, 1 June 2012 [Accessed on September 4, 2016].

14 Situating language, recognising multilingualism Linguistic identities and mother tongue attachment in Northeast India and the region Mark Turin* The language policy of post-colonial India was born in conflict, controversy and compromise. While some commentators have portrayed this intricate balancing to be an effective, albeit unstable, equilibrium, others have been less forgiving. This chapter addresses language politics, policy and identity through the Indian Northeast, with a particular focus on Sikkim, but also touching on Nepal and Bhutan. Many of the region’s 45 million inhabitants are rapidly shifting from speaking traditionally unwritten and increasingly endangered Tibeto-Burman vernaculars to regional (Assamese, Nepali), national (Hindi) and international (English) Indo-European languages of prestige that carry with them the promise of economic benefits and digital access. Communities that were once plurilingual are at risk of becoming functionally bilingual, with the move from boli (oral speech forms) to bhasa (written languages) appearing to be one of replacement rather than one of addition. This transformation is the focus of this chapter and warrants careful analysis. In particular, I address the following questions: How are linguistic identities changing as an ever more mobile workforce is incentivised to learn English? What is the functional role of traditional ethnic languages in inter-ethnic relationships and relations between people and the state? Do ‘heritage’ or ancestral mother tongues risk becoming markers of fetishised attachment and nostalgic belonging as they cease to be communicative vernaculars of daily conversation? And what are the consequences of including more languages in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India that mandates official language use for communities who call India’s Northeast their home?

Language and the framing of modern India Given the increasingly regular waves of ethnic and linguistic claims asserted by Northeast Indian communities, Granville Austin’s 1966 monograph on the framing of the Indian Constitution is worth revisiting. In the course

254  Mark Turin of a 40-page chapter on language, Austin works his way around to a more positive reading of the deliberations that went into framing India’s modern language policy: the ‘nation’s most delicate problem’ (1966: 270). While Austin first dismisses the prolonged discussions held from 1 August to 14 September 1949 in India’s Constituent Assembly over the role and status of Hindi and English as a ‘half-hearted compromise’ (ibid.: 268), by the end of his contribution he sees a ‘more positive side’ (ibid.: 307), praising the Indian Constitution for how it makes ‘clear what the national ideal is, and then, realistically, compromises, laying down how the nation is to function, linguistically speaking, until the ideal is achieved’ (ibid.: 307). Half a century ago, the leaders of an independent India held strongly divergent positions on how the nation should work as a linguistic whole, and these differences were vocally aired through the constitution drafting process. The issue, as encapsulated by Suniti Kumar Chatterji, chairman of the West Bengal Legislative Council and member of the Official Language Commission, in his ‘Minority Report’ contained within the larger Report of the Official Language Commission, was that ‘people in non-Hindi areas agreed to accept Hindi . . . because they had an uneasy feeling that India lacked that linguistic unity which was thought to be so vital for a free people’ (1956: 282), and that English, while certainly useful, was simply not compatible with Indian nationalism. Rather like fundamental rights, linguistic policy ‘touched everyone . . . problems of language were an everyday affair’ (Austin 1966: 268). In his 1955 Thoughts on Linguistic States, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar makes clear just how central these deliberations on official language policy were: ‘There was no article which proved more controversial than Article 115 which deals with the [language] question. No article produced more opposition. No article, more heat.’ Nehru was characteristically insightful about the potential of language to evince strong feelings, noting that when linguistic norms were challenged, conservative reflexes were inevitable: ‘Scratch a separatist in language and you will invariably find that he is a communalist and very often a political reactionary’ (from Nehru: Unity of India, 1948: 248; cited in Austin 1966: 273). Quite characteristically, Gandhi’s vision was altogether more hopeful and expansive. The often-cited paragraph that follows warrants reproducing in full, as it offers a helpful frame for the following discussion: This Hindustani should be neither Sanskritized Hindi nor Persianised Urdu, but a happy combination of both. It should also freely admit words wherever necessary from the different regional languages and also assimilate words from foreign languages, provided that they can mix well and easily with our national language. Thus our national

Situating language, recognising multilingualism 255 language must develop into a rich and powerful instrument capable of expressing the whole gamut of human thoughts and feelings. To confine oneself exclusively to Hindi or Urdu would be a crime against intelligence and the spirit of patriotism.1 We may pause to consider whether the contemporary speech of so many educated and urban Indians – in which English, Hindi and regional Indian languages intermix with freedom and comfort within one sentence – may have achieved the blending to which Gandhi aspired. Is ‘Hinglish’, that ‘wonderful language that combines English and Hindi noun and verb forms in a single sentence’ (Brass 2004: 361), an embodiment of Gandhi’s dream – a South Asian ‘Esperanto’ – therefore to be lauded as a success, or rather a sign of confusion, semi-lingualism and a damning illustration of the consequences of linguistic fragmentation? As noted by Austin, India has until recently ‘produced very little feeling of linguistic nationalism. It was not, and is not, generally speaking, un-Indian to speak English’ (1966: 306). The problem ‘has been and is, rather, one of sub-national sentiment and sub-national competition, which often takes the form of linguistic rivalries’ (ibid.: 306). And it is to these rivalries, through enumeration, recognition and scheduling, that we now turn.

The politics of linguistic surveys The fits and starts that have bedevilled the new Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) are a powerful illustration of the enduring political valence of language in India. Originally designed as a much-needed update to the first LSI – conducted between 1894 and 1928 and released in published form over a period of almost 30 years by George Abraham Grierson – the new LSI was designed to be an ‘ongoing research project’ of the Government of India, Office of the Registrar General, India, Language Division, authorised in the Sixth Five Year Plan (Pattanayak 2009: i) and subsequently ‘initiated in 1984’ (Chandramouli 2009: vi). While there was little movement on the linguistic survey through the 1980s and 1990s, increased official activity in the 2000s resulted in a slew of newspaper reports. Srivasta (2006) described the new LSI as a ‘gigantic exercise involving at least 10,000 language and linguistic experts’, slated to take ‘10 years at the cost of Rs. 280 crore’ and set to involve ‘nearly 100 universities’. With the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) in Mysore at the helm, the new LSI was to be an ambitious, governmental exercise, leveraging decadal census data, technology and a large army of linguists to examine every speech form in the nation. Professor Udaya Narayana

256  Mark Turin Singh, director of the institute, informed the popular news website Rediff.com that ‘the CIIL will kick off the National Linguistic Survey in April 2007 and target completion by 2017’ (Sahay 2006). Official support for the initiative is located in Volume II of the Eleventh Five Year Plan (2007–2012), which speaks of a ‘New Linguistic Survey (NLSI) of India [that] will be undertaken during the Eleventh Plan as a CS [Central Sector Scheme]’ (Paragraph 1.3.77, page 35), without mentioning that the survey had been sanctioned five plans (25 years) ago. The prominent billing in the Eleventh Plan confirms that central resources would be allocated to see it through. Presciently, the Eleventh Plan also suggests that the NLSI not only ‘focus on 22 languages in the Eighth Schedule . . . but . . . also pay special attention to the top 15 Non-Scheduled languages’, proposing that a ‘new scheme for the preservation and development of languages not covered by the Eighth Schedule, namely, the Bharat Bhasha Vikas Yojana2 would be taken up’ (Paragraphs 1.3.78 and 1.3.79, page 35). These official statements contain important insights that warrant further reflection. First, while the first post-independence Indian Language Commission believed that ‘there is no particular distinction bestowed on a language because it is named in Schedule VIII’ (Report of the Official Language Commission, p. 186, cited in Austin 1966: 297), the contemporary reality is quite different. The scheduling of languages has ‘set off power struggles among linguistic communities, to the detriment of the weak’ (Dasgupta 2011). While the Eighth Schedule, currently an expandable list of 22 scheduled languages, ‘obliges the state to help the languages prosper and make official documents available in them . . . the development of non-scheduled languages, on the other hand, requires no such obligation’ (Dasgupta 2011). It is now apparent that the scheduling – and thereby privileging – of certain languages is to the detriment of other non-scheduled languages: the vitality of the latter is eclipsed by the very process that promotes the recognition of the former. In the cover story of the Indian edition of GEO in January 2011, Debarshi Dasgupta makes this case most compellingly: The divide between major and minor languages and the official sidelining of the latter which is enshrined in the VIII schedule of the Indian Constitution – has also set off power struggles among linguistic communities, to the detriment of the weak. [The] Schedule, currently an expandable list of 22 scheduled languages, obliges the state to help the languages prosper and make official documents available in them. The development of non-scheduled languages on the other hand, requires no such obligation.

Situating language, recognising multilingualism 257 Writing on the Northeast, Pauthang Haokip notes that minority tribal speech forms in Manipur are under pressure from regionally dominant (and Scheduled) languages, rather than by Hindi or English: The languages which are more vulnerable to language shift are the old Kuki groups. It is interesting to note that in most instances the direction in which these languages shift is towards the other neighbouring language(s) who speak(s) more or less similar language(s), though in some instances the shift is towards Manipuri. (2011: 57–58) Second, the realisation articulated in the Eleventh Plan that language use and linguistic diversity is not only something objectively ‘out there’ to be enumerated and documented, but rather a socio-cultural resource to be nurtured reflects a deepening insight on the part of the Indian Planning Commission. I view the decision to de-couple description and documentation (the survey) from programmatic support and development (the Bharat Bhasha Vikas Yojana) as an attempt to depoliticise the whole enumerative initiative. As time went on, the price tag of the new linguistic survey continued to soar, with SASNET reporting in November 2007 that the operational costs of conducting the new LSI were estimated to be around Rs 600 crore (over US $110 million).3 While some survey findings were released and published – principally on Rajasthan, Orissa, Dadra & Nagar Haveli and Sikkim (to which we will return in due course) – the Times of India reported in 2010 that the LSI had been ‘abandoned’ (Chaturvedi 2010). The new director of the CIIL, Rajesh Sachdeva, even spoke of the government developing ‘cold feet’ about conducting the linguistic survey, out of concern that the findings could be explosive and divisive, and wary of being accused of fomenting disagreement through language (Malekar 2010). The much-anticipated Bharat Bhasha Vikas Yojana, to be established within the wider ambit of CIIL and administratively distinct from (although developed in parallel with) the Linguistic Survey, was also languishing. The concept note was stuck on a desk in Delhi, pending final approval from the Ministry of Human Resource Development. The new LSI had been quietly and discretely buried, despite public recognition and announcements in the national press.

By the people, of the people, for the people? Almost immediately, out of ashes of the aborted governmental survey rose the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI). Spearheaded by Ganesh Devy, a charismatic activist and linguist, and Founding Trustee of the

258  Mark Turin Bhasha Research and Publication Centre (BRPC), and funded by the Sir Jamsedji Tata Trust in Mumbai and initiated in 2010, the PLSI describes itself as ‘rooted in people’s perception of language’ and ‘carried out by scholars, writers and activists in partnership with members of different speech communities’.4 Devy is an impassioned advocate for the protection and revitalisation of India’s endangered languages. Decrying the government’s neglect of indigenous speech forms as wanton phonocide in recent UNESCO briefings, Devy has grand ambitions for a Language Forest (or Bhasa-Van) at the 10-acre Adivasi Academy in Tejgadh, Gujurat. There, according to a newspaper report, he imagines that the ‘trees, when they grow, will be fitted with bio-sensors and every time a visitor passes a tree in the Bhasha-Van, it will speak or sing in an Indian language’ (Malekar 2010). In the same article, Devy explains to the journalist that ‘we have decided to conduct a linguistic survey of India on behalf of the people. It will not be an official exercise. . . . Ours will not be a survey really’ (ibid.). His aim, somewhat paradoxically perhaps for a self-proclaimed ‘people’s survey’, was to rectify the census record by counting languages rather than speakers (or people). From Devy’s perspective, the decadal census of India leaves much to be desired as the important data have remained unexamined and under-collected: the census enumerates only speakers of languages rather than the names of the speech forms themselves, it restricts its interest to languages listed in and recognised by the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India and it has not ‘disclosed languages that are spoken by less than 10,000 people’ (Pathak 2013). As has become clear, Devy is not alone in arguing that the distinction between scheduled and unscheduled language is deleterious for the latter, both in terms of visibility but more importantly, through the constraints on resources to support under-recognised speech forms. The findings of the PLSI, which are explicitly not meant to be comprehensive but rather, according to their website, ‘a quick, non-hierarchical, public consultation and appraisal, intended as an aid to cultural impact assessment of development, and as an acknowledgement of the self-respect and sense of identity of all, especially, endangered speech communities of India’ are being released in waves.5 Unlike Government of India publications that are commonly disseminated for free online, the PLSI is working with commercial publishers in relevant states and the published volumes are not currently widely available. While methodologically distinct from one another, the aborted new LSI and the ongoing PLSI share a fascination with the linguistic landscape of the Indian Northeast. At least in part, this may be accounted for by the sheer linguistic diversity of the eight states that make up the region: Devy invokes Arunachal Pradesh as the Indian state with the highest number of

Situating language, recognising multilingualism 259 languages – 66 distinct speech forms – and Haokip notes that ‘out of 100 non-scheduled languages mentioned in the Census of India, 2001, around 55 languages are spoken in the Northeast’ (2011: 25). But the emphasis on the Northeast may also reflect an enduring central Indian preoccupation with the tribal frontier that appears to be undiminished. To whatever end, both the LSI and the PLSI have focussed much of their early attention on conducting fieldwork in the Indian Northeast. Before turning to the sociolinguistic make-up of Sikkim, about which there are now considerable data in the public domain, I will reflect for a moment on how issues surrounding linguistic surveys relate to India’s northern neighbour, Nepal.

Is Nepal still India in the making? Scholars and citizens alike often characterise India as a nation of ‘big government’. Whether through employment, education, development or tribal affairs, the central government of India dominates: it is the ever-present primary conduit through which resources flow. In such imaginings, India is regularly contrasted to Nepal, a nation where the state’s capacity to deliver basic services remains woefully inadequate (and receded further during the decade-long conflict that lasted from 1996 to 2006) and a place where NGOs and INGOs occupy an unusually large seat at the national table. In Nepal, NGOs and INGOs are supported by foreign development dollars and employ some of the best and brightest minds in the country. These non-state actors are involved in implementing even the most basic national infrastructure: roads, schools and hospitals. How, then, can we make sense of this unusual inversion? The LSI has been abandoned by the Union Government and effectively handed over to an activist NGO in Vadodara, Gujarat, while the Linguistic Survey of Nepal (LinSuN) has been entrusted to the Central Department of Linguistics at Tribhuvan University – Nepal’s flagship state institution of learning – with government backing. Recognising that the identity of indigenous and minority communities is intimately connected with vitality of their languages and the endurance of their cultural traditions, the National Planning Commission (NPC) of the Government of Nepal commissioned the Central Department of Linguistics at Tribhuvan University to conduct a linguistic survey of Nepal. The Commission earmarked a provisional budget for the survey for a period of seven years (2009–2016) and mandated (LinSuN) to ‘build a foundation for the linguistic rights of the citizens of multiethnic and multilingual Nepal so that they will be included without linguistic discrimination’.6 LinSuN’s programme is at once ambitious and traditional, and guided by a number of interconnected objectives: to prepare a sociolinguistic profile of the languages of Nepal including a mapping of languages and dialects; to

260  Mark Turin produce a basic description of at least ten languages, including a working orthography, a grammar, a trilingual glossary and publications of folk tales; to develop and maintain a complete database of the languages of Nepal including sociolinguistic information, grammatical information, oral and written texts and vocabulary; to describe the use of mother tongues in education (formal and non-formal) to better understand the development needed for mother tongue curricula in the national educational system; and to produce high-quality written and electronic publications for each of its major research activities. Like the new LSI, however, the LinSuN has been dogged by administrative, political and financial challenges since its inception and results have been uneven. Linguistic surveys are political tools. It may be that the Government of India is loath to re-open a can of worms that has remained conveniently closed for generations, while the Government of Nepal is in the middle of a moment of historical restructuring through which the administrative lines of the nation may be radically redrawn. Harkening back to Sylvain Lévi, who so provocatively suggested that Nepal was India in the making (‘Le Népal, c’est L’Inde qui se fait’, Lévi 1905: 128), we may see in Nepal’s current (and first ever) linguistic survey some of the classificatory dynamics that compelled Grierson to conduct his original survey a century ago, the findings of which have haunted the Indian state ever since. Has India effectively washed its hands of the challenge of conducting an official linguistic survey because it knows – through painful experience – that linguistic surveys are not enumerative tools in which governments can safely engage? When Debi Prasanna Pattanayak reflects that ‘states have boundaries whereas languages don’t’, he may be musing on the challenges faced by the LSI as much as he is noting that speech forms do not follow administrative divisions.7 There is also, after years of government involvement, a growing sense across Indian civil society that languages may be better off when not interfered with by the state (whether through literacy programmes, mechanisms of official recognition or formal ‘upliftment’ initiatives). Now that Nepal is engaged in its first ever comprehensive national linguistic survey, the survey team may want to take head of India’s ambivalence and learn from the experiences of their southern neighbour.

Over-studied and under-understood: the language landscape of Sikkim As India’s second smallest and least populous state, Sikkim has attracted a considerable amount of linguistic attention, far out of proportion to its size. With a population of only 607,688 inhabitants according to the

Situating language, recognising multilingualism 261 provisional results of the 2011 census, Sikkim accounts for only 0.05 per cent of India’s total population. According to the 2001 census, STs make up one-fifth (20.61%) of the Sikkimese population, with scheduled castes comprising a further 5 per cent. Starting in 1995 and ending in 2000, the LSI had been cumulatively gathering data on the languages spoken in Sikkim. The data collection was followed by an updating and verification exercise in 2008. Two volumes on the Linguistic Survey of Sikkim were released by the Language Division of the Office of the Registrar General in November 2009 and March 2011, respectively. Revealingly, the first volume does not include a description of Nepali, even though this is acknowledged to be ‘the first populous language of Sikkim’ (Chandramouli 2009: vi), and focuses instead on Sikkim’s TibetoBurman languages used by ever-dwindling numbers of speakers. Debi Prasanna Pattanayak correctly notes that the ‘peculiarity of the linguistic composition of the state lies in the existence of Nepali’ (2009: ii). Nepali is not only the ‘only language of Indo-Aryan family’ spoken in the state, and widely used by all ethno-linguistic communities, but ‘being the most populous language as well as the language used for education, administration etc., Nepali has emerged as the superposed language of the state’ (2009: ii). The relative absence of Nepali from the written record in his publication is all the more revealing given that the Sikkim Official Language Act – passed by the governor of the state on 17 October 1977 – even adopted Nepali, Bhutia and Lepcha as ‘the languages to be used for the official purposes of the State of Sikkim’. The enumerators and drafters of LSI’s Sikkim volumes were clearly mindful of the political nature and implications of their work. Reflecting on linguistic states and the worry that drawing ‘state maps on the basis of language’ gives the ‘false impression that each state is monolingual’ (2011: 3), Pattanayak goes so far as to suggest that there is ‘no language policy and planning in any of the States’ (ibid.: 2), a strange abdication of responsibility (and indictment on decades of involvement) for one of India’s most prominent linguists and the first ever director of the CIIL in Mysore until his retirement. The issue, according to Ganesh Devy, is not one of planning or policy, but rather of interference: ‘where literacy has gone up, . . . local languages have dwindled because of the imposition of the state’s official language’ (cited in Dasgupta 2011). Indigeneity, specifically autochthonous inhabitation and the settlement pattern of Sikkim, is an ongoing trope in the two-volume government publication on the languages of Sikkim. The scholarly collective that authored the many chapters appear united in one position: the source of Sikkim’s ethnolinguistic diversity is primarily of external origin, the result of waves

262  Mark Turin of in-migration to the state. Consider this statement by Kakali Mukherjee, author of the Introduction to Volume II: While the Lepchas are the original inhabitants of the state, the Bhutias are the migrants from Tibet into Sikkim in seventeenth century and the Nepalese started migration into Sikkim from the beginning of the nineteenth century. This diversity primarily, has arisen from the cultures brought in Sikkim by the immigrant communities, namely Nepalese and Bhutias. (2011: 11–12) Mukherjee’s presentation of population movements and ‘origination’ differs considerably from the political position articulated by the Bhutia-Lepcha block in Sikkim who put chronology to one side in the interest of a generally more united indigenous position. Not only is the Limbu community – widely held to be one of Sikkim’s core ethno-linguistic groupings alongside the Bhutia and Lepcha – absent from Mukherjee’s description, but the presentation of diversity as being external in origin and a result of incoming population migrations is at odds with many contemporary ethnopolitical imaginings. I note this not as a critique of Mukherjee, whose position is perfectly defendable, but rather as a reflection on the complexity of overlaying linguistic, cultural and political frames of reference, and deriving claims of antiquity, residence and indigeneity from them. To their credit, though, the LSI-Sikkim survey team was careful to address some of the criticisms raised by Ganesh Devy and others of the decadal census that does so little to tabulate non-scheduled languages. To that end, the enumerators collected data on ‘Rai’ (really a group of languages rather than a single speech form), Tamang, Gurung, Newari, Mangari and Sunwar, all of which now have Sikkim-wide recognition but no visibility at the central government level. Overlapping with the government surveying initiative, from September 2005 to November 2006, I directed the first phase of a modern linguistic survey of Sikkim on language use in education through the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology and in close partnership with the Department of Human Resource Development (formerly Education) of the Government of Sikkim. Together with the research team, I visited most of the government and private secondary schools across the state to administer an extensive questionnaire to the senior students.8 While many of my findings dovetail with the results of the governmental LSI-Sikkim survey, there are some noteworthy differences. While I certainly agree with the LSI authors that many of Sikkim’s inhabitants ‘have shifted from their indigenous languages to regional language [sic], i.e. Nepali, in

Situating language, recognising multilingualism 263 spite of maintaining a separate ethnic identity’ (Office of the Registrar General 2009: 17), and that ethnic and linguistic identities are related but quite distinct, I take issue with the singularity of their conclusion, namely, that ‘especially the young section . . . are indifferent to their respective mother tongues’ (2009: 18). The situation is more complex than this simple statement would lead us to believe.9

One tribe, one language, one identity? As Paul Friedrich noted half a century ago in his writing on India, ‘Linguistic problems tend to emerge as a symbolic reflex of almost any other conflict’ (1962: 546). In other words, languages are not usually in and of themselves the issue, but rather a convenient, and seemingly bounded outlet for complaints about the unequal distribution of resources, often exacerbated by differential access to government benefits. More recent scholarship on the language politics of the Indian Northeast confirms that little has changed since Friedrich’s time: ‘ethnic tensions are often directed on a linguistic basis’, writes Haokip (2011: vii). Just as they are conduits for the transmission of culture, then, the indigenous languages of India are also vehicles for the transmission of grievances and discontent. In the course of his long career, Paul Brass has regularly drawn attention to the political and non-linguistic (or para-linguistic) nature of Indian language movements and effectively shown that ‘language is not necessarily the primary form of ethnic affiliation or, to be more precise, it is not necessarily the central affiliation’ (Brass 2004: 354). Yet, having noted that ‘in their initial and developing stages, language movements are everywhere vehicles for the pursuit of economic advancement’ (2004: 360), Brass acknowledges that the choices to use a certain dialect or language over another, ‘as well as its form and style, constitute political as well as “linguistic acts”’ (2004: 361). On a related note, I view the collapsing of ethnicity and language into one category to be a ‘political act’, whether unknowingly blended or wilfully undertaken for strategic and instrumental ends. I have for some time (see Turin 2006) articulated concerns about the recklessness with which scholars and officials alike label ethnic groups who historically spoke languages of the Tibeto-Burman language family as ‘Tibeto-Burman’, irrespective of their contemporary language practice. After all, we do not refer to African Americans as Niger-Congo-ese just because some of their ancestors spoke Yoruba. In other words, one’s forefather’s mother tongue should not – necessarily – impact contemporary ethnic labelling. Yet the terms ‘Tibeto-Burman ethnic group’ and ‘Tibeto-Burmese people’ are still regularly used as erroneous and lazy short cuts for an array of standardised

264  Mark Turin characteristics believed to be shared by various contemporary communities: being more egalitarian, consuming alcohol and meat, practising shamanism and animism and generally not adhering to one of the ‘great’ religious traditions of Hinduism or Buddhism which surround them. While the classification of languages as Tibeto-Burman (versus AustroAsiatic or Indo-Aryan) is precise, the use of linguistic terminologies and models of classification to label ethnic groups is not, and perpetuates the very same kind of fuzzy – and even dangerous – thinking that fuses ethnicity together with language, tying the fate of one to the success and endurance of the other. The source for this terminological collapsing lies in part with the decennial Indian census that has perpetuated lasting confusion by not enumerating ethnicity (with the exception of ST, SC and OBC) and opted rather for language – specifically ‘mother tongue’ – as a metonym and shortcut for ethnicity. The result of this unhappy ethnic and linguistic merger is an enduring belief in the one-to-one correspondence between a distinct, bounded (albeit historically constructed and mutable) ethnic community and their ancestral speech form, whether or not they speak it. Haokip spends a good number of pages in his socio-linguistic survey of the Indian Northeast trying to make sense of this puzzle: Many North-Easterners do not differentiate between language and tribe. To them, each tribe is presumed to have its own language, and each language is presumed to be spoken by just one tribe. This presumption comes about because of the fact that by tradition tribes and languages are called by the same names. (2011: 6) Just as some economists are troubled by the ‘discovery’ that not all humans act in economically rational ways all of the time, Haokip is concerned about the transparently incorrect, yet strangely enduring, view that language and ethnicity are functionally coterminous, and sets out to ‘dispel the often misunderstood concept among the Northeasterners that language boundary corresponds to tribe boundary’ (2011: vii). Along with other observers, Haokip notes the mutability of ethnic and linguistic affiliation, but fails to probe deeper, seeing the shifts themselves as the problem rather than indicative of the politicised nature of ethno-linguistic belonging in the Northeast: So long as people remain under the membership of one tribe they regard themselves as speaking the language of that tribe. But, the moment they are recognised as separate tribe they will regard themselves to be speaking a separate language. (2011: 56)

Situating language, recognising multilingualism 265 We should not be surprised, then, that when ‘people talked about ethnic affiliation of the group, they talked as if they have shifted their language as well’ (Haokip 2011: 56). There is no reason that communities should be expected to define or categorise themselves based upon externally imposed linguistic criteria that have a lot to say about grammar but nothing to say about belonging. We need to be more mindful of the shifting nature of language identity practices and linguistic belonging. While language affiliations are attributed on the basis of grammar and vocabulary, linguistic identities must be understood to be as changeable as ethnic affiliations. In some cases, people change the language that they speak – just as they do their habits and habitus – other times they continue to speak the same language as before, but change what they call it. The distinctions between autonyms, exonyms, glossonyms and loconyms are particularly helpful for scholars involved in classificatory questions (cf. Matisoff et al. 1996). The scheduling of languages in India and the uneven development of the nation’s speech forms has resulted in a linguistic caste system in which, to cite an unnamed leader quoted in Friedrich, ‘the strength of a language is as large or as poor as its literature’ (1962: 552). Haokip is spot on when he notes that ‘whatever is spoken by a “tribe” is likely to be called a “language”, and whatever is spoken by a “sub-tribe” is a “dialect’ ” (2011: 6), as in India, officially recognised tribes must – almost by definition – speak officially recognised languages, simply as a result of their scheduled classification. The oft-cited saying that a language is a ‘dialect with an army, a navy and a flag’ needs to be reconfigured somewhat for the Indian Northeast. In this linguistically diverse sub-Himalayan region, I would rather propose that a language is increasingly a dialect with a library and preferably its own specific font and orthographical tradition. Un-Scheduled, un-enumerated communities are widely perceived to speak bolis (dialects, oral speech forms) rather than bhasas (languages with written traditions and texts). These orally transmitted speech forms are increasingly at risk not because of encroachments made by Hindi and English, but rather under pressure from the regional dominance of statesupported languages such as Manipuri, Nepali and Assamese that have become compulsory subjects and sometimes even the medium of instruction in government schools. Interestingly, in the current political context of contemporary India, the term ‘mother tongue’ has a specific set of meanings, increasingly unrelated to the idea of a first or primary language, or an arterial language that one has learned from birth. Answering Question 10 of the standard Household Schedule of the decennial Indian census on ‘mother tongue’ is for many communities a chance to stake a claim to heritage, representation and cultural belonging, and less about their speech practice and use of an everyday vernacular.

266  Mark Turin Taking a psycho-dynamic approach, Brass goes further, arguing that the ‘passionate attachment’ to a mother tongue is ‘not to the language but to the self’, a ‘metaphorical displacement’ in which the ‘language of the body and of the mother and of the mother’s body. . . [come] to stand in for the self and the group’ (2004: 365). Drawing on Pollock, Brass argues that the ‘talk of mother-tongue and mother’s milk . . . is the talk of language and blood, of separation and difference, of self-glorification and other-disparagement’ (2004: 366). Whether one wishes to go this far or not, it is apparent that the category of ‘mother tongue’ is open-ended, political and somewhat counter-intuitive. As I discovered through my work in Sikkim, one does not have to speak a language in order to claim it as a ‘mother tongue’, exploding conventional linguistic understandings of competence, practice and transmission. The category of ‘mother tongue’ – in all of its linguistic and political incarnations – has come under greater scrutiny of late with the emergence of the ‘father tongue hypothesis’. Historical linguist and Himalayan language expert George van Driem introduced his ‘father tongue hypothesis’ in 2002 in response to an emerging picture of sexual dimorphism in linguistic prehistory.10 Drawing on genetic studies in the Greater Himalayan region as illustrations, van Driem proposes that ‘some languages appear to be mother tongues, whereas others show up as father tongues’ in the understanding that ‘at many times and in many places in prehistory, the father tongue may have been the guiding mechanism in language shift’ (2012: 198). To be clear, this is not a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Mothers are still acknowledged to have a primary role in the transmission of language; the issue now becomes whose language they are transmitting: ‘The dynamics of a process whereby mothers passed on the language of their spouses to their offspring also has major implications for our understanding of language change’ (van Driem 2012: 198).

Multilingualism and linguistic pluralism India’s intriguing approach to the ‘mother tongue’ question may have much to do with its legendary linguistic pluralism. While certainly contested, and always political, Brass and others argue that language is not at ‘the centre of the group conflict and violence that are endemic’ (2004: 370), a statement with which I would tend to agree. While the inequality on which this ‘interlinguistic balance’ is predicated – ‘a base of mass illiteracy in most languages and a consequent demarcation of opportunities for power’ (Brass 2004: 371) – remains troubling, shifts in ‘political hegemony can lead very rapidly to linguistic change’ and have done throughout India’s history (Friedrich 1962: 552). Nationally mandated multilingualism, in which citizens

Situating language, recognising multilingualism 267 use different languages in different contexts with different people each day, is no new beast: the 16th-century Spanish King Charles (and Holy Roman Emperor) was rumoured to have said: ‘I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to horses’. India and its citizens remain resolutely plurilingual. Many observers have argued that this multilingualism ‘should be regarded as a goal and a form of knowledge’ (Friedrich 1962: 558) and recognised and promoted as a unique feature of India’s linguistic landscape. In the ‘Suggestions and Recommendations’ that grew out of a ‘Seminar-cum-Workshop’11 on Language Education Policy in Arunachal Pradesh, the participants pursued linguistic as well as social arguments: not only should the famed threelanguage formula (Hindi, English and a local or regional language) be developed further with ‘cognitively rich local-based textbooks’ (Report 2012: 3) in the mother tongue, but the importance of local languages should be reflected in equal pay: The participants unanimously felt that when the government is able to appoint Hindi teachers all over the country why there should be any difficulty in appointing mother tongue teachers in the same footing with Hindi teachers. . . . Therefore, it is recommended that mother tongue teachers may be paid with full salary on par with Hindi teachers. (ibid.: 6) Movements for language rights and linguistic representation, then, are as much about economics, social capital and resourcing as they are about speech forms.

Meanwhile, in neighbouring Bhutan . . . Having invoked Nepal in the context of national language surveys, and given Bhutan’s geopolitical position on the fringes of the India Northeast, it would seem remiss to conclude a discussion on linguistic identities in the region without touching on a series of recent reports from the kingdom. While Bhutan’s linguistic terrain is diverse and the country is home to around 19 distinct speech forms, its language policy remains surprisingly clear-cut. According to Item 8 of Article 1 of the Constitution of the Kingdom of Bhutan, enacted on 18 July 2008, by the Royal Government, ‘Dzongkha is the National Language of Bhutan’. While the ‘State shall endeavour to preserve, protect and promote the cultural heritage of the country’, including ‘language’ (Item 1, Article 4, ‘Culture’), and there is a provision against all forms of discrimination, including on the basis of language (Item 15, Article 7, ‘Fundamental Rights’), no official status is

268  Mark Turin accorded to any of Bhutan’s other languages, and English and Nepali are not even mentioned in the constitution. In this, the Bhutanese authorities have apparently committed themselves to pursuing a policy of linguistic assimilation, prioritising the use and development of (and competence in) Dzongkha over other languages spoken within Bhutan’s boundaries, all in the name of national unity, integration and state building. But even well-intentioned programmes of this nature often fail to connect with speech communities and cause tension and division. Reporting on Bhutan’s 2013 elections, articles indicate that the national language policy caused difficulties on the ground. Not only were candidates ‘already opting out of common forums that are conducted in national language, citing the electorate’s inability to understand them’, some aspiring members of the house were even struggling ‘to read their campaign speeches’.12 While Bhutan’s chief election commissioner Dasho Kuenzang Wangdi is quoted as stating that ‘Dzongkha is the language of the Parliament and if someone aspires to be a member, he or she has to be conversant in Dzongkha’, the article notes that the promotion of Dzongkha over other local speech forms has alienated both voters and candidates: ‘Interrupting us, voters tell us to speak in Sharchopkha or Lhotshamkha, because they hardly understand Dzongkha, and don’t get our message’, says candidate Pelzang Wangchuk. Revealingly, a few politicians took the bull by the horns, and – risking official sanction – started to speak local languages on the campaign trail. When two candidates spoke Sharshopkha at a public event, it was significantly newsworthy for the Kuensel to report it under the banner of ‘Breaking the language barrier’.13 One of the comments posted online in response to the article serves as a powerful conclusion to this brief discussion on the identity politics of language in the Indian Northeast and the wider region: I think its a good approach from the candidates’ side to speak in local dialect, but if we look at long run, this is not a good sign. Candidates in future may ask the pamphlets to be printed in Nepali, Hindi and so on. . .

Conclusion The role of language in shaping discussions of ethnicity and belonging across India’s Northeast remains under-studied and under-theorised. All too often, the default position taken by scholars and communities alike is of a one-to-one correlation between an apparently bounded (but essentially fluid) community and their speech form. Such a collapsing of ethnic and linguistic categories is often intentional, as the result can serve political, strategic and instrumental goals that relate to state-sponsored projects of

Situating language, recognising multilingualism 269 recognition and assumed benefit. At other times, the conflation of cultural belonging and linguistic affinity is entirely unintended, but predicated on a specious and originary or nativist belief that one people necessarily, ipso facto, speak one language. These unspoken assumptions need to be spoken and aired, and in the process, subjected to rigorous analysis. Despite high levels of linguistic diversity and a burgeoning number of language documentation projects that are active across the region – whether governmental or activist – the politics of language and the language of politics in the Indian Northeast and neighbouring nations are overdue for rigorous analysis as expressions of cultural heritage, public displays of identity politics and statements of state-making. In a modest way, this chapter – based on two decades of ongoing fieldwork in northern South Asia and the Himalayan belt – aims to rebalance the discussion, noting that the Indian Northeast remains as linguistically heterogeneous as it is historically multilingual.

Notes * A full version of this chapter was presented at the conference entitled ‘Negotiating Ethnicity: Politics and Display of Cultural Identities in Northeast India’ held between 4 and 6 July 2013 in Vienna, Austria. I am grateful to the participants of the conference and editors of this volume for their comments and editorial guidance. Needless to say, errors, omissions and opinions are all my own. Earlier iterations of some of the ideas advanced in this chapter were first presented at the First Himalayan Studies Conference organised by the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies (ANHS) at Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA, held between 28 and 30 October 2011. This chapter was entitled ‘Mother Tongues and Multilingualism: Reflections on Linguistic Belonging in Sikkim’ and was presented in a session chaired and organised by Sarah Besky. 1 From Harijansevak of 12 October 1947: see Gandhi Thoughts, p. 174 as quoted in Austin (1966: 272). 2 There appears to be no official English translation of the ‘Bharat Bhasha Vikas Yojana’. A working approximation might be ‘Development Scheme for Indian Languages’ or ‘Development Program for the Languages of India’. 3 See the Swedish South Asian Studies Network, www.sasnet.lu.se/sasnet/ visit-central-institute-indian-languages-ciil-mysore-thursday-29-november-2007 [Accessed on November 29, 2015]. 4 The People’s Linguistic Survey of India, Bhasha Research and Publication Centre, What Is PLSI. See http://peopleslinguisticsurvey.org/aboutus. aspx?page=PLSI [Accessed on December 4, 2015]. 5 ibid. 6 Central Department of Linguistics, Tribhuvan University, Linguistic Survey of Nepal. See http://cdltu.edu.np/site/index.php?option=com_conte nt&view=article&id=61&Itemid=60 [Accessed on November 29, 2015]. 7 November 2009 Foreword to Volume 1 of the Linguistic Survey of IndiaSikkim, page ix.

270  Mark Turin 8 The preliminary results of these 16,500 completed survey forms were presented for the first time at the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology Jubilee Conference in October 2008 and subsequently published in Turin (2012). 9 Making sense of these two distinct datasets – and the different questions that they raise – has much to do with understanding the agency (in terms of both organisation and affective intervention) of the individuals and institutions involved. 10 In a paper presented at the 17th conference of the Indo-Pacific Prehisory Association, held at the Academia Sinica, 9–15 September 2002. 11 The ‘Seminar-cum-Workshop’ on Language Education Policy in Arunachal Pradesh was organised by the Arunachal State Council of Educational Research & Training (SCERT) in collaboration with CIIL in December 2012. 12 From the Kuensel Online: www.kuenselonline.com/language-and-politics/ [Accessed on November 23, 2015]. 13 Ugyen Dorji and Mingbo Drukpa were reported as speaking in Sharshopkha for 20 minutes on a visit to the Jigme Namgyel Polytechnic common forum in Dewathang on 20 June 2013, see www.kuenselonline.com/ breaking-the-language-barrier/.

References Austin, Granville. 1966. The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Brass, Paul. 2004. ‘Elite Interests, Popular Passions, and Social Power in the Language Politics of India’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 27 (3): 353–375. Chandramouli, C. 2009. ‘Preface’, Linguistic Survey of India – Sikkim, Volume 1. New Delhi: Language Division, Office of the Registrar General, India. Chatterji, Suniti K. 1956. ‘Note on the Report of the Official Language Commission as a Minority Report’, in Report of the Official Language Commission. New Delhi: Government of India, 271–314. Chaturvedi, Darshana. 2010. ‘Phase 1 of Survey to Map Himalayan Languages to Begin Soon’, The Times of India, 4 April. Dasgupta, Debarshi. 2011. ‘A Silent Story’, GEO (Indian Edition). Friedrich, Paul. 1962. ‘Language and Politics in India’, Daedalus, 91 (3): 543–559. Haokip, Pauthang. 2011. Socio-Linguistic Situation in North-East India. New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company. Lévi, Sylvain. 1905. Le Népal: Etude historique d’un royaume hindou. Paris: Ernest Leroux. Malekar, Anosh. 2010. ‘The Case for a Linguistic Survey’, Infochange Media, April 2010. http://infochangeindia.org/media/languages-of-india/the-casefor-a-linguistic-survey.html. Matisoff, James A. with Stephen P. Baron and John. B Lowe. 1996. The Languages and Dialects of Tibeto-Burman. STEDT Monograph Series, No. 2. Berkeley: University of California.

Situating language, recognising multilingualism 271 Mukherjee, Kakali. 2011. ‘Introduction’, in Kakali Mukherjee, ed. Linguistic Survey of India – Sikkim, Volume 2. New Delhi: Language Division, Office of the Registrar General, India, 11–22. Office of the Registrar General. 2009. ‘Introduction’, in Kakali Mukherjee, (ed), Linguistic Survey of India – Sikkim, Volume 1. New Delhi: Language Division, Office of the Registrar General, India, 1–23. Pathak, Maulik. 2013. ‘India Becoming Graveyard of Languages: Ganesh Devy’, LiveMint and the Wall Street Journal. 22 February 2013. www.livemint.com/Opinion/vIbx7ZUHxvTQMbwboNYHPI/India-is-becoming-agraveyard-of-languages.html. Pattanayak, Debi Prasanna. 2009. ‘Foreword’, in Linguistic Survey of India – Sikkim, Volume 1. New Delhi: Language Division, Office of the Registrar General, India, iii–v. ———. 2011. ‘Foreword’, Linguistic Survey of India – Sikkim, Volume 2. New Delhi: Language Division, Office of the Registrar General, India. Report. 2012. Seminar-cum-Workshop on Language Education Policy. State Council of Educational Research & Training. Government of Arunachal Pradesh. 6 pages. Sahay, Anand Mohan. 2006. ‘CIIL to Conduct First Ever National Linguistic Survey’, Reddif.com, 26 December 2006. www.rediff.com/news/2006/ dec/26lingu.htm. Srivasta, Sharath S. 2006. ‘New Linguistic Survey of India to Begin in April Next Year’, The Hindu, 16 November. Turin, Mark. 2006. ‘Rethinking Tibeto-Burman: Linguistic Identities and Classifications in the Himalayan Periphery’, in P. Christiaan Klieger (ed), Tibetan Borderlands: Tibetan Studies Library, Volume 10, Number 2. Leiden: Brill, 35–48. ———. 2012. ‘Results from the linguistic Survey of Sikkim: Mother Tongues in Education’, in Alex McKay and Anna Balikci-Denjongpa (eds), Buddhist Himalaya: Studies in Religion, History and Culture, Volume II. Gangtok: Namgyal Institute of Tibetology, 127–142. van Driem, George. 2012. ‘Glimpses of the Ethnolinguistic Prehistory of Northeastern India’, in Toni Huber and Stuart Blackburn (eds), Origins and Migrations in the Extended Eastern Himalayas. Leiden: Brill, 187–211.

Afterword Contested, vertical, fragmenting: de-partitioning ‘Northeast India’ studies Willem van Schendel * In the winter of 1951–1952 groups of people from Northeast India crossed the border into East Pakistan. They began clearing plots of forest there, as shifting cultivators had done for many generations. Some months later the Pakistan authorities detected about two thousand of them in a reserve forest and police was sent to evict them. But the immigrants tried to protect their crops and put up resistance. They did not consider themselves trespassers on foreign soil: they had ignored the border because they considered it irrelevant to their older claims to the land. The police opened fire and shot one person dead. The others were expelled to India and their huts destroyed. These people might have been from Northeast India but they certainly did not feel that their world should be confined to that space. It was only after violent confrontations over many years that they gradually, and partially, resigned themselves to the reality of a Northeast India encircled by international borders. (East Bengal 1953; Van Schendel 2005: 120)

Northeast India provides a golden opportunity for scholars of social space and its imaginations. As a distinct region with well-defined borders, Northeast India did not exist before 1947. It sprang into life at the moment of the partition of British India in 1947, the spatial upheaval that has dominated Southern Asian historiographies since the middle of last century. Historiographies in the plural because the territorial partitioning of the colony into four modern states – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma/Myanmar – has created partitioned communities of historians who have developed their own perspectives and largely separate debates about history. This afterword engages with the earlier contributions in this volume by highlighting how our current spatial imaginations of Northeast India are comprehensible only in view of the moment of Partition. To this end I will look at Northeast India as a new space, a contested space, a vertical space and a fragmenting space.

Afterword 273

Northeast India as a new space It is essential to recognise that the history of Northeast India begins with Partition in 1947. Before that date there was nothing that foreshadowed the entity that we now know as Northeast India. In precolonial times the notion of Northeast India as a geographical or cultural unit simply did not exist. And in colonial times the term, if used at all, referred to a much larger area: Orissa, Bihar, Bengal and Assam. The space that we currently know as Northeast India is a freak child of Partition – but 70 years on we still know remarkably little about its birth, certainly in comparison with the much better studied cases of Punjab and Bengal. And yet, Northeast India experienced painful territorial division first-hand as well as archetypal Partition-related communal killings and mass flight. We still lack studies of these events – for example, the Kamalpur massacre in Tripura, in which a town was burned to the ground, Muslim citizens were murdered and many others expelled to Pakistan (East Bengal 1952). We also need a better understanding of distinctly regional forms of communal violence, such as clashes between organised locals (e.g. the Seng-krak movement in Tripura) and incoming Bengali refugees right after Partition; these were forerunners of the Assam Movement and the Tripura civil war of the 1980s (Van Schendel 2005: 195). Northeast India too rarely figures in historians’ accounts of Partition violence – and Partition violence too rarely figures in historians’ accounts of Northeast India. The Northeast India that emerged from Partition was every bit as ‘motheaten’ as other fragments of the erstwhile colony. It was burdened with a bizarre and unmanageable geobody (Figure 15.1). It lost crucial access to the Bengal delta (now in East Pakistan) and all it stood for in terms of communication – rivers, railways, roads, access to the Indian Ocean trade; professional and educational opportunities; cultural connections and labour. Think of the fate of the Lushai Hills (now Mizoram). The colonial period had brought very little infrastructural improvement here, and river routes remained the principal connections with the outside world. The two main rivers were the Kaladan – linking the region with the seaport of Akyab (Sittwe) some 100 km to the south – and the Karnaphuli – linking the region to the sea and the railway at Chittagong in the west. After 1947 these outlets became inaccessible: the Lushai Hills had become part of India, but Akyab was now in Burma, and Chittagong in Pakistan. Suddenly the Lushai Hills found themselves at the farthest extremity of Northeast India, a culde-sac surrounded on three sides by foreign territory. Local society had to reposition itself drastically: henceforth its links had to be via the north. Now the nearest seaport, Calcutta, was more than 1,700 km away over

274  Willem van Schendel

Figure 15.1  Northeast India and its neighbours, 1947 Source: Prepared by the author.

very poor roads – the hills had no railway connections and today they still lack such connections. Such tremendous spatial reorientation, which took place all over Northeast India, may well have been greater than in Bengal or Punjab, and yet we have few studies to help us understand its effects. Partition created a novel relationship between a new-fangled ‘Northeast India’ and what came to be known there as ‘Mainland India’. In the words of Sanjib Baruah (this volume), ‘Northeast India’s postcolonial history is to a significant extent about the disenchantment of postcolonial sovereignty’. Feelings of dissociation, disenfranchisement and exploitation gave rise to a discourse of internal colonialism, which fuelled a spiral of protest movements (Soibam Haripriya, this volume, describes the roles that gender could play in these), colonial-style punitive expeditions and extensive systemic militarisation. This was not unique in the subcontinent. For example, there are clear but rarely explored parallels with East Pakistan. Northeast

Afterword 275 India came to be positioned vis-à-vis mainland India much as East Pakistan was vis-à-vis West Pakistan: a raw-materials-producing area that was territorially and politically isolated from the new national power holders. The movement for Bangladesh and many of the autonomy movements in Northeast India could be studied jointly as belonging to a category of postimperial movements against internal colonialism, especially because these movements influenced each other: the success of the movement for Bangladesh changed the political equation in Northeast India (Van Schendel 2016). Similarly, Northeast India shared its experiences of army rule under a veneer of democratic institutions with its neighbours: Burma/Myanmar, East Pakistan/Bangladesh and Tibet. These experiences are rarely studied in their wider regional context. A claim to take Partition seriously in the study of space does not in any way imply that we should neglect the long and complex pre-Partition history of the region that roughly coincides with what we now call Northeast India. There is a lot of rethinking to do about pre-colonial state formation, patterns of mobility and cultural permutations, especially by strengthening comparative perspectives. Where, for example, would we place Northeast India in a scheme developed by Victor Lieberman (2008), in which he divides pre-modern Eurasia into ‘protected rimlands’ (such as mainland Southeast Asia) and ‘exposed zones’ (such as South Asia and China)? The region’s colonial history, particularly well documented, is now rightly attracting historians who are keen to explore contrasts and similarities with spatial imaginations in other parts of British India. These are exciting developments, and they bolster my conviction that the thrust of rethinking Northeast India should come from a closer research engagement with its Partition, post-Partition history and post-Partition history writing. This is not only because Partition was a mind-blowing event but also because it was a mind-altering event. It changed the way we perceive the region’s history, the way we seek to construct narratives of its past and even the people we discuss these with. For the current generation of historians and other social scientists, and possibly for one or more generations to follow, Partition inescapably acts as a bamboo screen through which we peer at a past that seems fragmented, disjointed and territorialised. It is as if the new spatial frame of Northeast India sets limits on our enquiries into history, both pre- and postPartition. For most of us it is now hard to re-imagine the web of connections that once linked the peoples of the region with friends, trade partners and political associates in areas that fell to Burma and Pakistan – and to perceive that many similar webs of connections persist today. 1947-and-all-that narrowed our scope, fitted us with blinkers, and introduced new research taboos. We are only just beginning to push beyond these.

276  Willem van Schendel

Contested incorporation Contested incorporation was another spatial outcome of Partition. In the subcontinent the most notorious and explosive case is Kashmir whose status remains disputed between the two successor states of Pakistan and India. But Northeast India actually offers a far more diverse set of circumstances. Here we can speak of not just one but multiple contested incorporations: Northeast India attained its present territorial form in the face of many challenges. To start with, there were British dreams of continuing to rule here after the rest of British India gained independence. The Reid-Coupland plan foresaw a Crown colony covering mountainous areas in present-day Bangladesh, India and Burma. The deputy commissioner of the Naga Hills, J. H. Hutton, first floated this idea in his presentation to the Simon Commission, which toured India in 1928–1929. The plan later became linked to the names of Sir Robert Reid (governor of Assam) and Prof. Reginald Coupland. The Crown colony would include the Chittagong Hill Tracts (now in Bangladesh), the Chin and Kachin areas (now in Burma/Myanmar) and the following areas in India: Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, Meghalaya and mountainous areas in Assam. Although the plan lost out at the time of Partition, it did not disappear overnight. The Reid-Coupland plan continues to be part of political discussions in Northeast India, as a model for an independent mountain state (Mansergh 1970: I, 649; Chakrabarty 1974: 45; Aishikho-Daili-Mao 1992: 31; Nag 2002: 73–81). In addition, there were refusals to join Indian national space, notably among Nagas who began the struggle for an independent state – Nagalim – that straddles the India-Burma border. There were others: Sanjib Baruah (this volume) discusses the much less well-known case of resistance by the Apatanis in Arunachal Pradesh. Yet others did accept to join India for a trial period but later strove to opt out of Indian national space: the Mizos declared independence in 1966 and battled with India’s armed forces until a settlement was reached in 1986 (Pachuau & Van Schendel 2015). Reversely, in the first few years after Partition, groups in the northern Chittagong Hill Tracts (allocated to Pakistan) wished to join their territory with Indian national space. There were more challenges, among them persistent doubts as to the lawfulness of the incorporation of areas that had been ruled indirectly in colonial times, especially the contentious annexation of the kingdom of Manipur in 1949 and that of the federation of Khasi states in 1947. Arguably less directly related to Partition, but certainly contested, was India’s 1975 annexation of the kingdom of Sikkim, now routinely (but controversially) considered to be part of Northeast India. And, last but not least, India has enduring territorial quarrels with neighbouring states over its Northeastern borders. Since Partition, East Pakistan/Bangladesh and India

Afterword 277 have clashed – frequently and often violently – over the location of their joint border (Van Schendel 2005). And China went to war with India over the northern border (the McMahon Line) in 1962 and continues to claim the state of Arunachal Pradesh (‘South Tibet’) as Chinese territory. None of the spatial imaginations underlying such contested incorporations have entirely disappeared. In 70 years, the political and administrative reality of Northeast India has not been able to dislodge these competing images. Despite frequently having been declared dead, they remain alive in private and public discussions in the region – varying in saliency over time – and they continue to serve as springboards for alternative constructions of history. For example, the current movement to create a separate state of Kamtapur (or Kamatapur) as a homeland of the Koch and Rajbongshi people in western Assam, northern West Bengal and northern Bangladesh builds on the history of the Koch-Rajbongshi movement for an autonomous ‘Rajasthan’ in this region in 1947 as well as on the fame of the pre-colonial kingdom of Kamatapura and its large ruined fortress that straddles the India-Bangladesh border (Figure 15.2) (Das Gupta 1992: 238, 253–255).

Figure 15.2 Some territorial visions spilling over the borders of Northeast India: Kamatapur, Nagalim and Greater Mizoram1 Source: Prepared by the author.

278  Willem van Schendel We are only beginning to explore why these visions have not withered away, why and how they have flared up at different moments since 1947 and in different parts of Northeast India, and who are the people who seek their perpetuation or resuscitation. These visions challenge the post-Partition state notion of Northeast India as an integral part of the nation-state, and they defy the hegemony of Indian national identity by slogans such as ‘Khasi by blood, Indian by accident’ (Guenauer, this volume). These alternative visions also challenge the idea of Northeast India as a fixed, unified and settled space, a misconception that still informs much social science research on the region despite the fact that, even as an administrative unit, it has never been ‘fixed’ or ‘unified’. Its territorial contours have been unstable as Tripura, Manipur and Sikkim joined (see Figure 15.1), neighbouring countries disputed Northeast India’s international borders, and the Nagas refused a merger. It was not a ‘unified’ administrative entity either: a dizzying cocktail of graduated arrangements throve in its subregions – some being administered as union territories, others as tribal homelands, some under inner line regulations, others under direct control of the armed forces, and so on. Not surprisingly, the region never spawned a unified political movement or party. It is essential to realise that, ever since 1947, irreconcilable spatial visions have dominated life in much of the region. Mark Turin (this volume) argues that speech forms do not follow administrative divisions, and this is true for many other social ties. Each has its spatial connotations and can be exploited politically (Mélanie Vandenhelsken, this volume). Many of Northeast India’s insurgencies and complex turf wars can be understood as attempts to create protective administrative borders around ethno-linguistic identities that resist being pinned down geographically – and that often overlap with competing identities (Kaustubh Deka and William Singh, this volume). For many inhabitants of the region, this has resulted in a life of constant fear, uncertainty and despair, in which giving support to one vision or another can mean the difference between life and death.

Verticality A third spatial perspective that has always been integral to life in Northeast India, and is currently gaining ground in academic writing, is verticality, the social importance of differences in land altitude (Dolly Kikon, this volume). It is hardly a new idea that altitude has an impact on human organisation, and that economic, ritual and political connections between people living at different altitudes should be taken seriously. A number of theoretical approaches to the social construction of vertical space in the region are available – from Edmund Leach’s statement (1960) that the region

Afterword 279 between India and China should be looked at as ‘a continuing process of interaction between two kinds of political structure, two kinds of ecology, two distinct patterns of kinship organisation, two sets of economic interests’, to recent research on the ‘Southeast Asian Massif’ and Yunnan, and James Scott’s ‘anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia’ (Michaud and Ovesen 2000; Jonsson 2005; Sturgeon 2005; Michaud 2006; Scott 2009). Up to now this has been mainly a discussion among Southeast Asianists, but scholars of Northeast India have a lot to offer here, especially because Partition had unintended but distinct effects on verticality. The Partition of British India was an exercise in religious demography: Muslim-majority areas were to go to Pakistan, all others to India. In this part of the colony Islam had been very successful as a lowland religion, but few hill people had adopted the faith (Eaton 1993; Van Schendel 2005: 39–52). As a result, Partition separated the lowlands from the hills: most of the former went to Pakistan – first becoming East Pakistan, then Bangladesh (Van Schendel 2009: 96–130, 161–171) – and most of the latter joined India. The creation of Northeast India turned out to be an exercise in religious demography as well as a form of vertical surgery.2 This becomes clear when we consider rivers, vertical entities by their very nature. All of Northeast India’s main rivers were partitioned, with India controlling their upper reaches and Bangladesh and Burma their lower ones. Think of the Kaladan (linking Mizoram with Burma), the Karnaphuli (Mizoram-Bangladesh), the Meghna (Tripura-Bangladesh), the Barak (Cachar-Bangladesh), the Brahmaputra (Assam-Bangladesh) and the Tista (Sikkim-North Bengal-Bangladesh). All of these are old and important trade and travel routes. These routes were truncated in 1947, and most trade had to find new avenues. The economic, social and cultural effects on towns, villages and markets along their banks and on the hinterlands dependent on river trade – both in Northeast India and downstream – were enormous. The subsequent fate of the rivers has caught the attention of documentary photographers such as the Baldizzones (whose books [1998, 2004] on the ‘bamboo caravans’ of the Barak and Brahmaputra Rivers evoke post-Partition river life), and of administrators, engineers and environmentalists grappling with river-linking and hydropower development (Mibi Ete, this volume). But scholars have hardly begun to look more broadly at how the vertical partitioning of rivers necessitated spatial rearrangements in the new Northeast India. What happened to rivers happened to railways and roads as well (Sur 2012, 2015). Partition transformed hill-valley relations in Northeast India. One major outcome was the emergence of a new regional centre of power. Whereas before 1947 hill regions such as Meghalaya and Tripura had had open access to the Bengal plains, and Manipur and Mizoram had access to the Irrawaddy valley (Bianca Son, this volume), after 1947 they focused

280  Willem van Schendel increasingly on the largest valley in Northeast India, the Brahmaputra valley, turning this lowland region into Northeast India’s new power hub. This did not come about without struggles, however. Demands for administrative separation from Assam, which controlled the valley, soon materialised and (outlawed) river trade and mobility across the Partition borders persisted. Verticality was central to this process: the state of Assam gradually lost most of its hill regions and was reduced to the Brahmaputra valley. Assam and the Brahmaputra valley thus became almost synonymous terms for the new power centre of post-independence Northeast India, and surrounding hill societies were converted into satellites. Even Assam’s second river valley, the Barak valley to the south, had to reorient itself towards the Brahmaputra valley, across hill country, rather than to the Bengal plains, of which it is a natural extension. This process of Assamisation was especially galling for those hill societies that had previously also, or primarily, been linked to other valley regions (Bengal, Arakan and the Irrawaddy valley). Assamisation in post-Independence Northeast India is far from unique and could usefully be compared with post-1947 Bengalisation in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh and post-1948 Burmanisation in the Chin and Arakan Hills of Burma. Bengalisation is also pronounced in a region that has never been administratively allocated to ‘Northeast India’, although it forms the geographical and social link between its two noncontiguous parts (Sikkim to the west and Assam and other states to the east). This region is the northern outlier of the state of West Bengal. It shares many features with ‘Northeast India’, notably ethnic complexity, verticality, serious after-effects of Partition and resistance against Bengalisation (e.g. the movements for Gorkhaland and Kamatapur).

The homeland model This brings us to the fourth point on spatial imaginations and Partition. Northeast India offers a regional paradox. Many have argued that the remedy of 1947 has been worse than the disease it sought to cure. Partition clearly brought suffering to the region, and it did not offer the solutions politicians had hoped for. The economic, social, political and psychological costs were enormous and – what few anticipated at the time – they continue to this day. The homeland logic that powered Partition produced a bizarre region faced with intractable challenges. And yet, as a model, Partition became ever more popular within post1947 Northeast India, both as a political and cultural project of aspiring local elites and as an administrative solution to law-and-order problems. The model is derived from the globally influential model of the nation-state, but arguably it has been especially salient in South Asia in the wake of the

Afterword 281 Partitions of 1947–1948 (India/Pakistan/Burma) and 1971 (Pakistan/ Bangladesh). It can be described as a spatial imagination that is preoccupied with fixed boundaries, control of land and its resources, displacement and exclusion (Sanjay Barbora and Kaustubh Deka, this volume). It is the model of the exclusive homeland, and it has proved to be highly destructive of earlier arrangements. Assam, the sole state of Northeast India in 1947, was joined by two more (when the kings of Tripura and Manipur signed accession documents) in 1949, and by 1987 there were seven states in Northeast India – or eight, if you count Sikkim (Figures 15.3 and 15.4). But the homeland logic did not stop here. Further fragmentation led to the creation of 22 autonomous districts within these states. Assam now has no fewer than nine autonomous councils (the most recent created in 2005), Manipur has six, Meghalaya three, Tripura one, and Mizoram three. Arunachal Pradesh is planning two; only Nagaland is without autonomous districts. And all over Northeast India there are movements afoot to create more homelands (Figure 15.5).

Figure 15.3 Administrative divisions in Northeast India, 1949: 1. Assam; 2. Manipur; 3. Tripura; 4. West Bengal Source: Prepared by the author.

282  Willem van Schendel

Figure 15.4  Administrative divisions in Northeast India, 2016: 1. Assam; 2. Arunachal Pradesh; 3. Nagaland; 4. Manipur; 5. Mizoram; 6. Tripura; 7. Meghalaya; 8. West Bengal; 9. Sikkim Source: Prepared by the author.

Clearly, over the years the homeland model has captivated many people in Northeast India. This march towards the exclusive homeland is supported by specific legislation for the region. The Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution provides a legal tool for achieving territorial autonomy that is more robust in Northeast India than in other parts of India. In this legal sense Northeast India is indeed a well-defined unit. All this is familiar terrain for scholars of Northeast India and so is the assessment that the region’s post-Partition spatial trajectory has been largely a tragic one. Time and again, Northeast India’s homeland discourses have turned into an exclusionary politics of belonging, based on roots and origins. Too often, ‘the geographical imaginations that local actors and institutions have deployed to command their home “turf ” have . . . been chauvinistic, essentialist, and exclusive, as opposed to ecumenical, open and inclusive’ (Castree 2004: 141). There seem to be two very important tasks

Afterword 283

Tripura 4

Bru

Mizoram

BANGLADESH 1

2

3

BURMA/ MYANMAR Figure 15.5 Examples of homelands within states: Mizoram and Tripura: 1. Chakma; 2. Lai; 3. Mara; 4. ‘Tribal’ 3 Source: Prepared by the author.

for scholars of Northeast India here: (1) to disentangle and elucidate the trajectories of inclusive (rather than exclusionary) geographical imaginations in Northeast India (Chatterjee 2013), and (2) to compare Indian solutions to the homeland model with those of neighbouring states emerging out of Partition: Bangladesh and Burma.

De-partitioning ‘Northeast India’ studies Imagining Northeast India as a new space, a contested space, a vertical space and a fragmenting space helps us to reconsider the Partition of 1947 in two ways: as a political upheaval that had specific regional effects and as a mindset that has determined the way we study the region. Northeast India highlights the regional specificity of Partition. Here the spatial implications of territorial separation went well beyond drawing international

284  Willem van Schendel borders and creating two new nation states. Vigorous nation-building in India sought to promote the notion of ‘Northeast India’, but it encountered resistance from many quarters and, as a result, nationalist agendas failed to achieve hegemony. And yet, scholars of Northeast India, even if they rejected those agendas, resigned themselves to a methodology that treats the region as a self-enclosed geographical unit. The same is true for scholars dealing with the areas surrounding Northeast India: Bangladesh, Burma, Bhutan and Tibet. Pushing beyond national frames of reference (or unclenching the ‘iron grip of the nation state’) is necessary to make sense of the contexts, vocabularies and meanings that have dominated the region’s post-1947 history. It goes without saying that the national scale has been a very important one but so have others, especially the local, cross-border and transnational visions that have inspired so many actors on the regional stage (Teiborlang Kharsyntiew, this volume). As Bengt Karlsson writes in the introduction to this volume: affirming Northeast India as an enduring formation ‘still allows for a processual and open-ended geography’. Within the national framework of India, Northeast India usually stands out – or is ignored – as an exception. Looking beyond this framework, however, the region’s exceptionalism shows itself in a different light. If we take Northeast India, East Pakistan/Bangladesh and Western Burma as a single imagined space for historical research in the period after 1947, we may be in a better position to explain ruptures and continuities across the moment of Partition. These three fragments of what used to be British India show contrasts as well as similarities. The different post-Partition trajectories that they followed show both what different policies and popular agency may achieve – intentionally or unintentionally – and how received explanations for the Northeast Indian trajectory may be qualified. Take administrative fragmentation. Neither the Chittagong Hill Tracts (East Pakistan/Bangladesh) nor Chin State (Burma/Myanmar) underwent the multiple subdivisions that characterised Northeast India, suggesting that the nexus of identity politics and homelands worked differently there. Explanations for different outcomes of identity politics in Bangladesh and Burma are likely to consider the absence of a ‘Sixth Schedule’ and the idea of ‘scheduled tribes’, the far more gradual and still incomplete dismantling of indirect rule in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, the particularities of federalism in the early Union of Burma, Rangoon’s de facto loss of control over large parts of the Chin state and so on. Despite these distinct state policies, identity politics and spatial imaginations, there were many connections and parallels as well. In all three countries, Partition created new, contested, vertical and fragmented spaces and there were multifarious connections across their poorly monitored borders, many of which persist today (Iris Odyuo, this volume). Ideas about

Afterword 285 autonomy, self-determination, historical iniquity, belonging, political strategy and armed resistance against state militarisation circulate in the entire region – by means of cross-border networks of kinfolk, trade partners, refugees, co-religionists and political elites. Borderland markets, insurgents’ training camps across Partition borders, religious festivals, vernacular writings and global links (from indigenous peoples’ organisations to arms suppliers’ networks) form important nodes in this flow of similar ideas across the wider region. Social scientists have paid little attention to these cross-border connections. For example, a recent overview of Burma studies in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (June 2008) demonstrates how little Burma scholars are concerned with Northeast India, even though the spatial issues they deal with are quite similar. It is almost as if you can picture two scholars standing back-to-back at the border post of Moreh, the Burma scholar looking east and the Northeast India scholar looking west (for an exception, see Sadan 2013). By and large, scholars of Bangladesh remain equally blind to their northern and eastern neighbours, and vice versa. This is not a general academic blindness, however. What may give us pause is the remarkable disconnect here between two styles. On the one hand, we have the nationalised research practices of social scientists working on post-1947 Northeast India, Burma and Bangladesh. On the other, we have the far more transnational perspectives of medical and environmental researchers and practitioners working on these regions (on themes such as avian flu, HIV-AIDS, the Asian Brown Cloud and the Eastern Himalayan biodiversity hotspot), or the concerns of politicians and administrators dealing with transnational flows of arms, migrants, drugs and other commodities in these regions. Students of Northeast India have not been unaware of this disconnect. And they have proposed post-national, trans-border perspectives for years, but too few of us have come around to actually formulating research projects based on such perspectives. If our research consistently turns out to require spatial frames that follow state boundaries, we are clearly selling ourselves short by limiting our scope to a particular set of questions. We need a more concerted effort, perhaps some sort of academic ‘Look East’ policy – but one which, unlike its political namesake, focuses on the immediate neighbours (Burma and Bangladesh), and, indeed, on Northeast India itself. This will require us devising research projects that treat Northeast India as a Northwest (of Southeast Asia), a South (of the Himalayas), a North (of Bangladesh, Arakan and Chinland) or a Centre with links to all these regions. A plan of action must start from the highly nationalised research practices that we are all still involved in and should lead to a ‘community of interpretation’ that includes scholars working on Northeast India as well as

286  Willem van Schendel on ‘the greater Northeast’ (the Bangladesh-Burma-Bhutan-Tibet-Yunnan region) (Aung-Thwin 2008). For this to be successful we have to overcome our hesitation to working in teams because teamwork can be a real help in creating such a new community. We may take some guidance, perhaps, from the collaborative models already applied by environmentalists and conservationists working in transnational teams. Such teamwork will not come about without institutional involvement. It is necessary to get academic institutions committed to this endeavour. A relatively easy first step would be to organise conference panels on the ‘greater Northeast’ with scholars studying Burma, Bangladesh, Northeast India, Tibet and Yunnan. A second step could involve setting up exchanges between university departments in the region and beyond, which focus on Bangladesh, Burma, Northeast India and Southwest China; and working towards joint ‘transnational’ applications for research funding. In these ways we could try to keep the momentum going. There will be obstacles on the way, but I trust we will fare better than those Tripura cultivators with whom I began this chapter. They had ignored the Partition border because they saw themselves as entitled to roving wherever they wanted, not as trespassers on foreign soil. Some may consider us infiltrators in post-Partition academic and geographical territories where we do not belong, but these days we are also likely to find allies across the borders in Burmese, Tibetan, Bhutanese and Bangladesh studies.

Notes * This chapter developed out of a presentation at the international seminar ‘Writing the Northeast: New Perspectives’, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India (14–16 January 2009). I would like to thank Malini Sur for suggested improvements. 1 Like many territorial projects in the region, the vision of Kamatapur has different versions and uncertain boundaries, and its political relevance fluctuates over time. Here both a smaller project (only West Bengal districts – dark shading) and a larger one (also covering districts in Assam and Bangladesh – lighter shading) are depicted. Nagalim (or Greater Nagaland) is a project that overlaps partly with several others. The one shown here is Greater Mizoram/ Zoram, whose northern claims coincide with Nagalim’s southern claims (white dotted lines). 2 ‘Vertical surgery’ had long preceded Partition, notably in the drawing of administrative boundaries. See Ludden (2003) for a precolonial example and Sen (this volume) for a colonial one. 3 The shaded areas are autonomous districts within the states of Tripura and Mizoram, homelands for different minority groups. Activists among the Bru, a minority community of northern Mizoram, have been fighting for their own autonomous district. This has led to violent confrontations with

Afterword 287 Mizoram armed forces, tens of thousands of Bru refugees in camps in Tripura since 1997 and stalled peace negotiations.

References Unpublished East Bengal. 1952. ‘Government of, Home (Political) Department’, C.R. (Confidential Records) Branch, B. Proceedings, 1B3–2/50 (7–52), National Archives of Bangladesh. East Bengal 1953. ‘Letter from the Deputy Commissioner, Chittagong Hill Tracts (9 January 1953)’, in Government of East Bengal, Home (Political) Department, C.R. (Confidential Records) Branch, B. Proceedings, 7C1– 1/52 (1–54), National Archives of Bangladesh.

Published Aishikho-Daili-Mao 1992. Nagas: Problems and Politics. New Delhi: Ashish Publishing House. Aung-Thwin, Maitrii. 2008. ‘Introduction: Communities of Interpretation and the Construction of Modern Myanmar’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 39 (2): 187–192. Baldizzone, Tiziana and Gianni Baldizzone 1998. Brahmapoutre: Légendes d’un fleuve. Geneva: Éditions Olizane. ———. 2004. Caravanes de Bambous. Paris: Seuil. Castree, Noel. 2004. ‘Differential Geographies: Place, Indigenous Rights, and Local Resources’, Political Geography, 22 (9): 133–167. Chakrabarty, Saroj. 1974. With Dr. B.C. Roy and Other Chief Ministers (a Record Upto 1962). Calcutta: Benson’s. Chatterjee, Indrani. 2013. Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages and Memories in Northeast India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Das Gupta, Ranajit. 1992. Economy, Society and Politics in Bengal: Jalpaiguri 1869–1947. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Eaton, Richard M. 1993. The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jonsson, Hjorleifur. 2005. Mien Relations: Mountain People and State Control in Thailand. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Leach, E. R. 1960. ‘The Frontiers of “Burma” ’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 3 (1): 49–68. Lieberman, Victor 2008. ‘Protected Rimlands and Exposed Zones: Reconfiguring Premodern Eurasia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 50 (3): 692–723. Ludden, David 2003. ‘The First Boundary of Bangladesh on Sylhet’s Northern Frontiers’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 48 (1): 1–54.

288  Willem van Schendel Mansergh, Nicholas (general editor). 1970. The Transfer of Power, 1942–1947: Constitutional Relations between Britain and India. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Michaud, Jean. 2006. Historical Dictionary of the Peoples of the Southeast Asian Massif. Lanham: Scarecrow Press. Michaud, Jean and Jan Ovesen. (eds). 2000. Turbulent Times and Enduring Peoples: Mountain Minorities in the South-East Asian Massif. London: Curzon Press. Nag, Sajal 2002. Contesting Marginality: Ethnicity, Insurgency and Subnationalism in North-East India. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers. Pachuau, Joy L. K. and Willem van Schendel. 2015. The Camera as Witness: A Social History of Mizoram, Northeast India. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Sadan, Mandy. 2013. Being and Becoming Kachin: Histories beyond the State in the Borderlands of Burma. Oxford: Oxford University Press/British Academy. Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sturgeon, Janet C. 2005. Border Landscapes: The Politics of Akha Land Use in China and Thailand. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Sur, Malini 2012. ‘Bamboo Baskets and Barricades: Gendered Landscapes at the India-Bangladesh Border’, in Barak Kalir and Malini Sur (eds), Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities: Ethnographies of Human Mobilities in Asia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 127–150. ———. 2015. ‘Indelible Lines: Revisiting Borders and Partitions in Modern South Asia’, Mobility in History, 6: 70–78. Van Schendel, Willem. 2005. The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia. London: Anthem Press. ——— 2009. A History of Bangladesh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2016. ‘A War within a War: Mizo Rebels and the Bangladesh Liberation Struggle’, Modern Asian Studies, 50 (1): 75–117.

Index

activists 27, 109, 120, 122, 128, 132, 136, 181, 182, 184, 202, 221, 257, 258, 259, 269, 286; ethnic xix, xxviii, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100; women 216, 228 Adivasi 72, 74, 79, 98, 135, 177, 191, 193 aesthetics xxi, 196, 205, 206, 209, 210 Agartala 54, 68 agrarian 54 – 6, 58, 59, 61, 62, 65, 69, 135; relations xx, 129 agriculture, xvii, 4, 9, 11, 76, 114, 115, 131, 135, 136, 154; agricultural activities 142, 143, 145, 147, 149, 151, 154; agro-ecology 114 – 15; cultivation 8, 60 – 3, 80, 115, 135, 136; cultivators 68, 69, 76, 77, 83, 85, 86, 286; jhum 81, 142; shifting cultivation xvii, 4, 131, 272; swidden 114, 142 Ahom 4, 72, 75, 79, 131, 146 All Assam Minority Students Union (AAMSU) 178, 179, 183 – 5 All Assam Students Union (AASU) 128, 180, 192 All Bodo Students Union (ABSU) 128, 133, 138, 178, 179, 180 – 2, 185, 187, 188, 190, 193 ancestors 44, 95, 123, 236, 263 Angami 18, 24, 140, 142, 146, 147, 150, 155 anthropology 5, 17, 18, 20, 76, 94, 208, 210; anthropologist xvi, xvii, xxiii, xxvi, 2, 5, 6, 9, 11, 18, 19,

20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 48, 76, 77, 89, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 100, 101; anthropology and 19; observation, fieldwork 24, 94; political 130 Ao Naga 7, 20, 141; villages 143, 145, 146, 147 Apa Tani (Apatani) 2, 17, 19, 21, 22, 23, 28 Arakan 280, 285; Arakanese 38, 42, 45; Arakan Yomas 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 46, 48; mountains 41, 43 archives xvi, 34, 35, 47, 48, 53, 55, 57, 60 – 5, 97, 140, 247 area studies xvii, 3, 10 armed 22, 23, 132, 134, 137, 138, 143, 163, 164, 181, 220, 227, 276, 278; Border Force 115; conflicts 18, 81, 164; Nagaland Armed Police 73; resistance 7, 285; struggle 159, 162, 166 Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) 164, 226 Arunachal Pradesh xvii, xix, 1, 2, 4, 10, 11, 19, 22, 72, 109, 110, 112, 113, 118, 123, 131, 156, 167, 258, 267, 270, 276, 277, 281, 282 Assam xvii, xviii, xx, xxii, 4, 5, 10, 17, 19, 20, 23, 31, 33, 35, 39, 43, 72, 74, 77, 78, 79, 81 – 4, 87, 110, 128, 129 – 33, 136, 138, 146, 147, 152, 156, 177 – 81, 183, 187, 188, 190, 191, 192, 198, 199, 210, 211, 223, 244, 273, 276, 277, 279, 280, 281, 282, 286; Assamization 280

290 Index Assamese xxii, 72, 73, 77, 78, 79, 128, 129, 134, 135, 142, 180, 184, 192, 199, 253, 265 Assam Movement/Agitation 180, 183, 184, 192 Assam-Nagaland border conflict 72 Assam-Nagaland foothills xix, 72, 73, 75, 76, 78, 79 authenticity 96; authentic 19, 94; authentication 96; authenticity of cultures 25, 95 autochthony 189; autochthones 189; autochthonous inhabitation 261 Ava 38 – 41, 45, 46 Bangladesh xix, xxii, xxv, 3, 4, 48, 49, 54, 79, 162, 199, 244, 245, 272, 275, 276, 277, 279, 280, 281, 283 – 86; Bangladeshi 78 barbarian 74; barbarism 26, 87; culture 21 barter 114, 143, 156 belonging (to a human group or place) xvi, xx, xxii, 4, 75, 87, 88, 129, 130 – 32, 136, 138, 159, 165, 167, 171, 182, 183, 189, 239, 242, 244, 246, 253, 264 – 5, 268, 269, 275, 282, 285 Bengal 4, 31, 33, 43, 55, 58, 59, 62, 69, 131, 182, 183, 191, 193, 200, 254, 273, 274, 277, 279, 280, 281, 282, 286; Bengali xix, 47, 49, 54, 80, 93, 128, 135, 136, 137, 163, 164, 184, 199 Bharat Bhasha Vikas Yojana 256, 257, 269 Bhutan xxii, 4, 25, 29, 102, 135, 136, 253, 267, 284, 286; Bhutanese 131, 268 Bhutia 90, 91, 97, 98, 101, 102, 162, 261, 262 Bihar 82, 199, 273 Bodoland, Bodo areas xxi, 13, 128, 130, 178 – 93 Bodos 4, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 177, 178, 178 – 93 Bodo Territorial Area District (BTAD) xx, 128 – 30, 132, 134 – 8, 177, 182, 183 – 5, 187 – 91,  193

Bodoland Liberation Tiger Force (BLTF) 134, 137 Bodoland Liberation Tigers (BLT) 181, 182 Bokars 114, 117, 118, 123 Bollywood 116, 205 Bombay/Mumbai 8, 104, 155, 161, 164, 167, 258 border(s) xviii, xxii, xxvii, 4, 11, 21, 22, 31, 32, 33, 35, 40, 46, 47, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59, 61, 64, 72 – 9, 115, 135, 140, 151, 198, 207, 250, 272, 276, 277, 278, 280, 285, 286; areas, borderlands xvii, xxii, xxiii, 1, 2, 21, 79, 87, 237, 285; trans-border xxii, 284 boundary xix, 53, 54 – 68, 72, 78, 179, 181, 264 Brahmaputra 74, 78, 79, 84, 87, 130, 131, 136, 180, 279, 280 Brahmin 76 – 7 Bricolage 168 – 9 British 24; colonisation 131, 143; district xviii, 53 – 6, 58, 61, 64, 67, 68; officer 23, 57, 66; rule xxvii, 2, 165 Bru 243, 245, 250, 286, 287 Buddhism/Buddhist 3, 37, 38, 92, 93, 95 – 104, 124, 250, 264 Burma/Myanmar xvii, xxii, xviii, xxi, xxii, xxv, xxvii, xxviii, 2, 4, 11, 20, 31, 33, 34, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 45, 48, 49, 146, 147, 156, 237, 272, 273, 275, 276, 279, 280, 281, 283 – 8; Burmese 32, 36, 37, 38, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49 Calcutta/Kolkata 31, 147, 273 Catholic: Catholicism 37; church xxix; missionaries, priest xxix, 37 category xvi, 6, 33, 62, 66, 67, 68, 131, 132, 197, 198, 199, 200, 210, 211, 216, 220, 228, 230, 234, 246, 263, 266, 268, 275; categorisation 40, 47, 77, 96, 98, 179, 265; colonial xx, xxii, 202; ethnic xxviii, 54, 90, 189; political 55; primitive 27 Census 115, 137, 199, 144, 255, 258, 259, 261, 262, 264, 265

Index  291 Chakma 242 – 8, 250, 283 Cheraw 241 – 2 Chin xviii, xxvii, xxviii, 31, 32, 33, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 45 – 9, 276, 280, 284; Chin-Lushai 31, 33, 46, 48, 49; Hills 31, 33, 237 – 8, 247 China xxii, 2, 3, 4, 11, 22, 35, 47, 115, 162, 275, 277, 279, 286 Chittagong 37, 56, 57, 59, 62, 273; district 42, 66; Hill Tracts 48, 49, 66, 276, 284 Christianity xvi, 6, 11, 141, 142, 234, 235, 242; Christian 77, 79, 131, 162, 211, 234, 235, 236, 242 Chuklabustah tenures, 61 – 3 citizenship, citizenry, citizen 5, 27, 28, 90, 97, 98, 121, 164, 168, 173, 189, 193, 223, 259, 266, 267, 273 civil society xvi, xxi, 199, 215, 216, 217, 220, 243, 260 class (social) 8, 9, 11, 116, 137, 161, 170, 192, 197, 204, 218, 224, 230, 248 clientelism 112, 121 climate change 10, 122 coalmines 74, 76, 79 – 82 colonial xvi, xx, xxii, xxv, xxvii, xxix, 2, 4, 6, 19, 20, 21, 22, 32, 33, 41, 42, 43, 46, 47, 48, 49, 54, 55, 61, 67, 68, 91, 129, 130, 131 – 3, 140, 162, 171, 178, 188, 197, 198, 200, 202, 206, 209, 211, 218, 235, 242, 273; administration xvii, xxix, 19, 21, 31, 32, 33, 41, 43, 45, 60, 62, 64, 68, 69, 74, 79, 82, 130, 140, 147, 162, 178, 191, 197, 198, 199, 200, 216, 218, 242, 272, 275, 276, 279, 284; colonialism 26, 66, 165, 274, 275, 276, 286; pacification 23, 25 communal: communalism 189, 242, 254; violence/killings 273 conflict xx, 2, 7, 18, 24, 25, 26, 42, 63, 72 – 4, 81, 92, 101, 113, 119, 123, 128, 129, 130, 131, 134, 135, 136, 138, 146, 159, 164, 165, 177, 178, 179, 180, 185, 186, 188 – 92, 197, 201, 207, 210,

227, 228, 229, 231, 247, 253, 259, 263, 266 contractors 113, 117 conversion xxii, 211, 234 cosmopolitanism 163, 167 counter-insurgency operations 25, 192 cultural xxvii, 2, 6, 8, 18, 26, 89, 91, 92, 99, 109, 120, 134, 152, 153, 156, 159, 160, 164, 165, 170, 178, 180, 181, 189, 192, 201, 205, 208, 217, 218, 224, 237, 239, 241, 246, 247, 257 – 9, 262, 265, 267, 269, 273, 275, 279, 280; diversity xv; domination xx, 159; identity xxii, 1, 159, 168; performances, display xix, 7, 76, 94, 167, 233; politics 25; practices 72, 90, 92, 93, 94, 101, 235, 236, 242; production 93, 95, 96, 98, 99, 101 dam(s) xix, 28, 109 – 112, 188, 121, 122 Darjeeling 93 – 5, 101, 102, 104, 162, 163, 164, 169, 171, 186 democracy 48, 97, 187, 191, 207, 209 development (economic) xx, xxvii, 27, 28, 74, 109, 110 – 5, 117, 121, 122 – 4, 153, 156, 203, 235, 236, 279; projects 92, 120, 249 diaspora xxviii, 169; diasporic spaces 8 Dimapur 78, 141, 142, 151, 152, 154, 155, 156, 158, 166, 168 displacement xx, 76, 110 – 3, 118, 120, 131, 281 Disputed Area Belt (DAB) or Disturbed Area Belt 73, 74 domination xx, 54, 159, 181, 200 drug 220; abuse 161, 239, 243, 248; campaign against 237; flows of 285 East India Company xviii, 33, 34, 38, 45 – 7, 53 – 6, 59,  67 ecology 114, 155n 279; Ecologically, ecological 109, 121, 129 education xxviii, 43, 44, 50, 117, 155, 163, 180, 181, 205, 243,

292 Index 246, 248, 259, 261, 273; children 116, 117, 202; language xvi, 245, 249, 260, 262, 267, 270; modern 234, 235 Eighth Schedule 253, 256, 258 election xx, 117, 128, 167, 178, 181 – 5, 187, 192, 196, 197, 202 – 9, 237, 246, 268; campaign 205, 206, 208; electioneering xvi, 202, 206, 208; electoral issues 138, 190; electoral politics 7, 179, 191; electoral roll 247 – 50; electoral system 115, 204; electorate 201, 207, 208, 210, 268 elite(s) 37, 38, 90, 97, 116, 163, 207, 219, 285; economic 8; Indian national 27; local 280; tribal 86, 120, 182, 187 Empire xvii, 20, 21, 35, 36, 38, 40, 45, 48, 67, 147 empowerment 27, 184, 201, 218, 225, 228, 230 endangered xiii, 119, 188, 198, 253, 258 environment 9, 10, 40, 75, 178; activists, movements 109, 122, 279, 285, 286; environmental realities, concerns 2, 112, 120, 121; reform 248 ethnic 43, 130, 135, 160, 179, 183, 185, 190, 193, 199, 204, 243, 244, 248, 253, 259, 264, 265, 280; belonging xxii; boundary 78; category/categorisation xviii, xxviii, 36, 37, 42, 54, 77, 189, 268; community, group xix, xxii, xxviii, 8, 21, 48, 72, 76, 89, 90, 91, 92, 97, 100, 131, 137, 142, 217, 219, 223, 224, 234, 250; entrepreneurs, leaders, activists xix, 89, 93, 94, 95, 98, 99, 100; identity xxii, xxvii, xxix, 166, 167, 181, 187, 233, 239, 242, 251, 263; politics xviii, xx, 1, 186; solidarity 142, 165; state 72; violence, conflicts, clashes 129, 140, 178, 180, 187, 188, 191, 263 ethnicity xxii, 7, 129, 140, 162, 185, 191, 210, 229, 264, 268;

ethno-nationalism 179, 242, 244, 248 ethnography xix, 9, 76, 77, 82, 94, 95, 99, 148; authority 100; encounter xix, 100; ethnographer xix, 20, 98; knowledge 89, 90, 100; observation, fieldwork 92, 96; studies 19, 91, 93, 97; monograph, accounts xviii, 7, 21, 114 exclusion 27, 231, 249, 281, 282, 283 fashion xx, 8, 159, 160, 161, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171 feminism: feminist xxi, 77, 216, 217, 221, 226, 228, 230 flood(s) 10, 84, 119, 130, 135 forest 9, 80, 81, 87, 113, 144, 129, 131, 134, 135, 136, 137, 180, 188, 258, 272 Freud, Sigmund 17 – 18 frontier xxii Garo xv, 5, 131, 198, 200, 202, 210 gender 228, 240, 248, 249, 274 genealogy(–ies) 54, 77, 99 globalization 3, 28, 142, 169; global connections, flows 3, 10; global culture 159, 167; global links 285; global market economy 152, 155, 169, 170, 171; global media 159, 161, 164, 168; global south 5; global subject 27 Golaghat district (Assam) 76, 84 government xx, 2, 9, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 32, 35, 41, 42, 45, 56, 62, 65, 70, 74, 76, 86, 89, 91, 92, 93, 97 – 9, 101, 109, 110, 113 – 24, 128, 132 – 8, 141, 153 – 6, 153, 165, 166, 177 – 83, 186, 190, 192, 197, 200, 205, 222, 230, 236, 241, 243, 246 – 9, 255, 257 – 63, 265, 267, 269; emporiums xx; jobs 205, 206, 245 Greater Northeast xxii, 286 Gurung xix, 89 – 93, 95 – 9, 101 – 5, 262 Haats (weekly market) 76, 86 headhunting 7, 37, 43, 143

Index  293 health 75, 116, 117, 120, 155, 238, 248 hegemony 168, 192, 266, 278, 284 heritage 142, 154, 236, 237, 253, 265, 267, 269 hierarchy 91, 99, 216 – 18, 228, 258 highlands xxix, 33, 37, 39, 41 – 9, 130; highlanders xviii, xxv, xxvii, 31, 36, 37, 39, 41 – 9 Himalayas 3, 10, 22, 28, 29, 99, 100, 109, 112, 124, 131, 265, 266, 269, 285 Hindi xxii, 78, 163, 164, 168, 169, 233, 253, 254, 255, 257, 265, 267, 268 Hinduism 99, 131, 231, 264; Hindu 77, 79, 91, 95, 128, 131, 135, 165, 167, 183, 184, 193, 211, 230, 231 Hornbill; feather 144, 146, 151; festival 7, 167 household 72, 77, 79, 95, 101, 116, 142, 154, 223, 237, 243, 265 human-animal/plant relations xviii, 9, 10 human rights 25, 191, 230 hydroelectric dam projects, development xix, 28, 110, 112, 113, 120, 121, 109, 119 – 27, 279 identity (collective) xvi, 74, 97, 123, 130, 131, 134, 184, 186, 190, 191, 193, 199, 220, 278, 284; activists 27; ethnic, tribal, cultural xxi, xxviii, 7, 25, 54, 69, 77, 89, 90, 133, 142, 159, 160, 161, 163, 165 – 73, 177, 178, 181, 187, 196, 197, 200, 206 – 11, 233 – 5, 237 – 9, 241 – 3, 245 – 7, 249 – 51, 253, 258, 259, 263; identification xix, xxix, 89, 102, 190; linguistic 253, 263, 265, 267, 268; politics of 72, 201, 269 illegal settlers, migrants 4, 11, 78, 79, 163, 180, 188, 192, 199, 243, 247; voters 183 immigrants see migrants Imperial 18, 21, 22, 55, 275; frontier 53, 58, 59, 65

Imphal 8, 168, 218, 220, 223, 224, 226, 229 independence, Indian xxix, 18, 22, 82, 162, 165, 177, 197, 200, 206, 210, 216, 218, 241, 256, 276, 280 Indian Union xxii, 54, 162, 233 indigeneity 96 – 9, 121, 122, 261, 262; indigenous communities people, xv, xix, 6, 7, 27, 54, 73, 91, 101, 102, 109, 113, 128, 130, 132, 156, 162, 163, 171, 187, 189, 192, 198, 199, 211, 259, 285; indigenous epistemologies xviii; indigenous knowledge 10; indigenous language 92, 258, 263; indigenous sect 242; non-indigenous 243 Indo-Aryan language, family 261, 264 inequalities 5, 8, 248, 266 influx 4, 165, 196, 199, 200, 207, 244, 245 informant(s) 32, 33, 35 – 49, 51, 76, 78 Inner line regulations, permits 197 – 9, 213,  278 insider see outsider vs insider insurgency 25, 70, 127, 164, 186, 192, 197, 229, 244, 288 Irrawaddy valley 44, 279, 280 Jaintia, xv, 200, 210 Jorhat district (Assam) 72, 76, 84 jungle 17, 62, 63, 156, 187 Kachin 48, 276, 288 Kamtapur/Kamatapur ix, 277, 280, 286 Karbi 72, 180 Karte (Arunachal) 113, 115 Keithel (women’s market) 217, 220, 222 – 4,  230 Khasi xv, 5, 8, 12, 162, 166, 198, 199, 200, 202, 205, 206, 210, 211, 213, 276, 278 Khasi Student Union (KSU) 163 kingdom xi, xv, xxvii, 4, 34, 36, 37, 41, 42, 43, 51, 90, 101, 103, 162, 211, 230, 267, 276, 277

294 Index knowledge xviii, 3, 6, 10, 24, 26, 36, 39, 40, 77, 82, 89, 90, 93, 94, 96, 100, 130, 153, 235, 267 Kohima 140 – 2, 152, 154, 155, 166, 168 Konyak Nagas 20, 24, 80, 143, 145, 146, 147, 152 Korea xxvii; Korean xx, 8, 159, 161, 164 – 71,  205 Kotokis 144, 115 Kuki xviii, 32, 33, 39, 41 – 4, 46 – 9,  257 land 10, 63, 69, 86, 87, 96, 97, 109, 111, 112, 113, 117 – 21, 123, 129, 131 – 8, 188, 190, 192, 211, 245, 272; alienation 8, 110, 180, 183, 219; land-disputes 64, 65, 180; ownership xvi, 3, 4, 28, 55, 56, 58, 50, 60, 61, 62, 74, 75 landscape xviii, 9, 10, 34, 53, 55, 58, 59, 62, 82, 129, 130, 135, 183, 192, 202, 258, 260, 267 language xv, xvi, xxii, xxviii, 27, 36, 38, 40, 41, 48, 55, 57, 68, 69, 78, 90, 91, 92, 97, 99, 101, 105, 133, 135, 137, 142, 164, 170, 184, 200, 201, 206, 208, 209, 210, 221, 223, 224, 231, 233, 234, 237, 242, 245, 246, 249, 250, 254 – 70 law 17, 55, 64, 67, 69, 87, 97, 164, 171, 180, 187, 192, 198, 203, 211, 227, 237, 243 legislative assembly xxi, 90, 97, 183, 184, 196, 200, 202, 209, 213, 214 Lepcha 90, 91, 96, 97, 101, 162, 261, 262 Libo 114, 116, 118, 119, 124 Limbu 91, 97, 101, 262 linguistic 25, 178, 181, 199, 254, 255, 257, 263 – 5, 267, 268; classifications xxi; groups, communities 25, 38, 185, 192, 258, 262; identity 153; rights 259; survey 258, 260, 261 locals xix, 37, 40, 53, 57, 199, 273 Longleng district (Nagaland) 76, 141 Lotha Nagas 20, 73, 74, 77, 78, 145, 146

lowland xxvii, 46, 61, 66, 279, 280 Lushai xviii, xxvii, 31, 39, 41, 46 – 51, 65; Hills 32, 33, 42, 235, 250, 273 Mahabharata 167, 225, 226, 230 manifesto, party 196, 203, 204, 206, 209, 213, 214 Manipur, xvii, xxi, 4, 5, 8, 32, 41, 42, 47 – 9, 68, 72, 110, 143, 147, 156, 157, 162 – 171, 215 – 27, 229 – 32, 244, 245, 247, 257, 265, 276, 278, 279, 281, 282 map 32, 39, 40, 57, 58, 59, 62, 63, 180, 261 marginalisation x, 111, 179, 182 margins xviii, 2, 3, 6, 113, 120 material culture xx 167 matrilineal xv, 215 Meghalaya xv, xvii, xxi, 4, 11, 72, 131, 161 – 3, 165, 167, 196 – 200, 202 – 11, 244, 245, 250, 276, 279, 281, 282 Meitei xxi, 143, 147, 170, 215 – 23, 225 – 7, 229,  231 Menchukha 113 – 18, 123, 124 middlemen 148, 151 – 3, 155 migration xii, xvii, xxii, xxvii, 3, 7, 8, 11, 91, 116, 131, 135, 164, 171, 199, 262; immigrants, emigrants 4, 44, 135, 163, 183, 272; migrants 8, 33, 79, 90, 98, 164, 192, 199, 200, 243, 247, 262, 285 militant(s) 27, 134, 163, 164, 169, 177, 181, 185, 187 militarisation xii, 87, 274, 285 minority xxi, xxix, 48, 52, 119, 182 – 4, 199, 207, 234, 243, 245, 250, 257, 259, 270, 286 missionaries xxix, 33, 38, 47, 48, 49, 116, 234, 235, 242, 251 Mizoram xvii, xxi, xxvii, 4, 9 – 12, 72, 138, 162, 233 – 50, 273, 276, 277, 279, 281 – 3, 286, 287 mobility xvi, xvii, 7, 8, 69, 102, 275, 280 modernity 9, 26, 27, 47, 67, 234, 239 moral 5, 75, 78, 87, 122, 167, 182, 219, 220, 230, 235, 243; morality 216, 217, 228

Index  295 Muslim 128, 131, 135, 137, 138, 177 – 9, 181 – 4, 193, 217, 231, 273, 279 Naga xvi, 7, 12, 21, 24 – 7, 54, 72 – 9, 81 – 4, 86, 138, 198, 276, 278; handicraft/art xx, 2, 140 – 58; movement 18; rebel organization 19 Nagaland xvii, xix, xx, 4, 5, 6, 11, 20, 72 – 9, 81 – 4, 97, 135, 140, 162, 166, 167, 234, 245, 281, 282, 286 National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) 138, 187 nation-state 2, 3, 27, 178, 195, 278, 280 nationalism xvii, 7, 179, 180, 184, 185, 187, 192, 194, 242, 244, 248, 254, 255 native 6, 19, 22, 39, 40, 42, 47, 77, 115, 188; state 53, 55, 58, 60, 62, 69 nature xxi, 9, 39, 111, 217 Nellie 183, 184, 194 Nepal 4, 20, 90, 96, 97, 99, 101, 112, 152, 169, 171, 199, 253, 259, 260, 267, 269; Nepalese 89, 91, 98, 127, 262; Nepali xxii, 72, 78, 79, 80, 92, 95, 102, 129, 121, 136, 163, 193, 261, 262, 265, 268 NGO, 136, 137, 195, 233, 259 North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) 19, 114 Nupi Lan, 216, 218, 219, 221, 223, 224, 239 oil, 75, 83, 87, 130 oral history, 22, 156 other backward classes (OBC) 90, 91, 101, 264 outsider vs insider, xix, xxi, xxviii, 73, 77, 78, 90, 95, 134, 136, 163, 165, 166, 171, 189, 196, 199, 207 paddy cultivation, 4, 73, 129 Pakistan, xvii, 3, 135, 272 – 6, 279, 281, 284 Pargana, 56 – 9, 61 – 4

Partition, of British India, xviii, xxii, 54, 66 – 8, 272 – 6, 279 – 86 People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI) 255 – 62, 264, 267, 269 performance, xix, xxii, 69, 94, 95, 100, 204, 206, 225, 226 periphery, xv, 178 Plains Tribal Council of Assam (PTCA) 134 police 54, 73, 115, 124, 229, 248, 272 political xv, xvii, xix, xx, xxi, xxvii, xxviii, 2, 4 – 6, 8, 10, 17, 18, 20, 24, 25, 26 – 8, 42, 54, 55, 59, 66, 67, 76, 90 – 2, 94, 97, 97, 99, 100, 110, 112, 114 – 17, 120, 123, 128 – 34, 136 – 8, 156, 159, 160, 161, 164 – 6, 168 – 70, 177, 178, 180 – 92, 196, 197, 200 – 2, 204, 205, 207 – 19, 229, 233 – 8, 246, 248 – 50, 252, 254, 255, 260 – 8, 275, 277 – 80, 283, 285, 286; officer 21, 31, 41, 48 postcolonial xvii, xviii, xx, 18, 26, 67; sovereignty 27, 274 pre-colonial xxix, 3, 47, 129, 131, 171, 273, 277, 286; state formation 275 primitive 26, 27, 37, 93, 210; primitiveness 7; societies xviii, 19; tribesmen 17, 38, 198 pollution 88, 203, 231 princely states xviii, 53 – 6, 58, 62 – 4, 66 – 9 property 28, 55, 59 – 62, 69, 73, 76, 87, 136, 192, 227 Pune 8, 164, 167 punitive expedition 23, 46, 274 purity 77, 78, 88, 221, 231 Rabha xv, 4, 128, 131, 183, 226 race 38, 39, 41, 44, 45, 47, 48, 230 radicalisation 179, 182, 187 Raj, 22, 38, 42, 49, 55, 115 Ramo community/tribe/village xx, 113, 114 – 21, 123, 124 Rangoon 31, 38, 284 Rapum village 114, 115, 119 reconciliation 129, 136, 189 religion 36, 38, 72, 77, 92, 97, 142, 155, 171, 199, 227, 233, 234,

296 Index 238, 264, 279, 285; religious change 95, 99, 100, 102; religious conversion xxii; religious minority 183, 192; religious movements 7; religious solidarity 160, 165 reservation policy 91, 101, 188, 200, 201 resistance xx, 7, 23, 26, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 122, 123, 160, 161, 164, 165, 168 – 70, 199, 223, 229, 272, 276, 280, 284, 285 resource xix, 72, 73, 76, 86, 87, 95, 97, 99, 111, 112, 113, 117, 119, 120 – 2, 129, 130, 140, 177, 186, 191, 201, 202, 210, 242, 256 – 9, 262, 263, 281; extraction xvii, 8, 9, 10, 74, 75, 188; natural xix, 2 rice cultivation/use 80, 115, 143, 147, 218, 238 riot, ryots 56, 181, 199 ritual xix, xxii, 48, 91, 94, 95, 98, 101, 142, 143, 144, 150, 278; practices 93, 99; specialists 100 rock music xvi, 8, 159, 205 Roshnabad (pergunnah) 55 – 62,  68 Sardar Sarovar Project, Narmada valley 109, 122 Sarong 26, 162, 242 savage 7, 26, 43, 198, 210 scheduled 265; caste 261; tribe xix, 4, 89, 200, 210, 284; area 182; language 256 – 8,  262 secession 197, 201 security 4, 9, 39, 73, 74, 110, 115, 137, 164, 179, 186, 187, 197, 219 settler(s) xx, 90, 98, 102, 247; old settler 90, 98, 102 sexuality 221, 222; de-sexualised 223; sexualisation 226, 228, 266 shamanism 99, 170 Shan 32, 45, 48, 146 sharecroppers 82, 135, 136 shifting cultivation see agriculture Shillong 17, 159, 163, 165, 166, 168, 171, 199, 200, 203, 206, 244, 245, 250, 252 Siang district 110, 113, 119 Sibsagar (Assam) 72, 76, 81

Sii Valley xx, 110, 113, 114, 117, 118, 120, 123 Sikkim xvii, xix, xxiii, 4, 11, 89 – 103, 110, 112, 121, 162, 171, 253, 257, 259 – 62, 266, 269, 276, 278 – 82 Simla 21, 22, 33 Sixth Schedule 133, 177, 178, 180, 185, 189, 187, 190, 191, 193, 210, 282, 284 slave 32, 37, 42, 43, 46, 114, 115, 123, 124, 224 son of the soil 90, 189 Southern Silk Route 33, 34, 35, 47 spear(s) 22, 26, 145, 146; spear-head 142, 147, 151, 178, 250, 257 spirits 72, 156 state xvii, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, xxix, 1, 4, 11, 19, 24, 32, 35, 41, 42, 46, 61, 65, 72 – 4, 87, 90 – 3, 95, 96, 97, 98, 101, 109, 110, 111, 113 – 17, 119, 120 – 3, 128 – 135, 138, 140, 153 – 6, 159, 162, 164, 166, 170, 177 – 83, 185 – 192, 196 – 211, 217 – 24, 228 – 31, 233, 234, 236, 237, 240 – 5, 247 – 9, 253, 256, 258 – 62, 265, 267 – 70, 272, 275 – 8, 280 – 6; anthropologists 89, 94; princely 53 – 6, 58, 60, 62 – 4, 66 – 9 subaltern 5, 169, 191 Subansiri 19, 21, 28, 114, 123 subsistence xx, 85, 86, 114, 116, 143, 154 Sudder Dewany 55, 65 survey 43, 46, 48, 56 – 8, 60, 65, 68, 118, 119, 120, 137, 255 – 62, 264, 267, 270; surveyors 33, 34, 39, 45, 62 swidden cultivation see agriculture Sylhet District 55, 59, 62, 65, 68 Talookdars, local farmers 56 – 8, 60 Tamang 91, 97, 101, 262 Tato 115 – 18 tea 9, 10, 34, 72 – 6, 82, 130, 132, 191, 195, 198; Tea-Horse Road 33 tenure(s) 61 – 3,  137

Index  297 territory xx, 3, 22, 23, 25, 27, 45, 58 – 69, 72, 78, 87, 113, 119, 128 – 30, 132, 138, 147, 177, 180, 189, 191, 192, 198, 234, 246, 272, 273, 275 – 8, 282, 283, 286; territorialisation xvii; territoriality 77; territorial nationalism 7 Tibet xxxiv, 4, 22, 34, 102, 262, 275, 277, 284, 286; Indo-Tibetan borderland 21; Tibetan 90, 98, 99, 101, 114, 115, 124, 162, 170; Tibeto-Burman vernacular/ language xxi – xxii, 38, 253, 261, 263, 264 timber 81, 188 Tippera xviii, 53 – 65, 67, 68 Tiwa 4, 183 tourist 5, 151 – 3, 167; tourism xxii trade/traders 84, 86, 114, 115, 140, 142 – 8, 151 – 3, 155, 156, 188, 218, 248, 273, 275, 279, 280, 285 tradition 19, 75, 135, 199, 215, 218, 219, 234, 236, 239 – 41, 249, 264, 265; traditional institution(s) 235, 239, 249 transgression 78, 222, 226 transnational xxviii, 122, 166, 169 – 71, 184 – 6; connection 10; flows 3; media 159 – 61, 164, 167, 168 tribal 5, 6, 19, 27, 73, 76, 77, 89, 92, 94, 96, 134, 162, 202, 203, 207, 210, 219, 257, 259, 278, 283; area 21, 54; communities/ people xix, 9, 79, 99, 100, 109, 111, 112, 132, 133, 138, 163, 165, 177, 180, 182, 183, 188, 191, 197 – 200; conflict/warfare 123, 140, 143; elite 120; identity xxi, 69, 196, 206, 208, 209, 211; recognition/status 90, 91, 93, 95, 97, 98, 101, 102, 190 Tripura xvii, xix, 4, 53, 54, 59, 66, 72, 161, 244, 273, 276, 278, 279, 281 – 3, 286,  287

United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) 137 untouchability/‘untouchable’, 226, 227, 231 urban 152, 163, 165, 224, 255; life xviii; migration 8; space(s)/ area(s)/centres xx, 115 – 17, 135, 151, 154, 240 Velcan Energy 117 – 20, 124 violence xvi, xx, xxi, 7, 22, 54, 73, 74, 76, 87, 128 – 31, 134, 135, 138, 143, 163, 164, 177 – 9, 181, 182, 186, 187, 190, 191, 201, 210, 219, 221, 222, 226 – 9, 266, 273 Wakching village 80, 81, 145 war 2, 3, 7, 11, 18, 20, 21, 22, 34, 39, 42, 46, 47, 143, 163, 182, 216, 218, 219, 224, 273, 277; warfare xvii, 22, 32, 140, 143; warrior 21, 143, 146, 149, 157 water xx, 35, 75, 118, 120, 124, 156, 192, 266 weapons 143, 151 – 3, 155; weaponry xx, 114, 142 welfare 118, 120, 121, 124, 155, 230, 246 Wokha district (Nagaland) 73, 76, 141, 155 World War: First 20; Second 2, 3, 18, 21, 163 Yunnan 34, 279, 286 zamindar(i) ‘landlords’, 55, 56, 58, 59, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 91, 96 Zawlbuk 234, 235, 249 zemindaree 60 Zo xvii, xviii, xxvii, xxviii, xxix, 31 – 49, 51,  52