Materiality and Visuality in North East India: An Interdisciplinary Perspective 9789811619694, 9789811619700

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Tiplut Nongbri · Rashi Bhargava Editors

Materiality and Visuality in North East India An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Materiality and Visuality in North East India

Tiplut Nongbri · Rashi Bhargava Editors

Materiality and Visuality in North East India An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Editors Tiplut Nongbri Centre for North East Study and Policy Research Jamia Millia Islamia New Delhi, Delhi, India

Rashi Bhargava Department of Sociology Maitreyi College University of Delhi New Delhi, Delhi, India

ISBN 978-981-16-1969-4 ISBN 978-981-16-1970-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1970-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Foreword

It is both an honour and a real joy to have been invited to pen a Foreword to this very substantial volume on Materiality and Visuality in North-East India. It is also a sentimental journey for me personally, as I recall the landmarks in my own voyage of discovery and rediscovery in the developing field of South Asian visual cultures. Albeit a mere bit player in a much larger scheme of things, I continue to relish memories of those serendipitous moments when I came upon visual images from different universes and different histories engaged in clandestine conversation with each other. The story of the now grandiosely titled ‘Uberoi Collection of Indian Calendar Art’ began in Shimla in the late 1960s when ‘J.P.S.’ and I, newly arrived from abroad, discovered the gastronomic delights of Shimla’s Lower Bazaar (the world’s most succulent chole-bhature and most soothing jalebi soaked in warm milk). Just across our favourite watering hole was a so-called ‘glass house’—a framer of family photographs and ‘Photos of the Gods’ (to purloin the title of Chris Pinney’s eponymous study)—which, apart from educative school ‘charts’ and colourful printed ‘calendars’, the latter well-thumbed by passers-by, sold useful hardware items such as buckets and mugs, hammers and screw-drivers, and pegs to tether your goats. Our appetites well-sated, we regularly took to rooting through the heaps of prints to pick out pieces that tickled our fancy for one reason or another and, returning home, plastered a montage of prints across the walls of our flat. We congratulated ourselves that ‘this was the only art form we could afford to own’ and relished the notoriety that our execrable taste occasioned among the more refined of our colleagues at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study. And then, across styles and genres, the calendars began ‘talking’ to each other. Secular and sacred imagery converged; goddesses and pin-ups changed places; the new nation was manifested through myriad signifiers; urban modernity made peace with bucolic rusticity; divinities endorsed the consumer goods of the new economy; and subversive voices obtruded into respectable mainstream discourse. Meanwhile, guided by little more than gut reaction and individual fetish, our collecting continued. The only problem was how to turn this enjoyably eccentric ‘hobby’ into an academic pursuit, i.e. to make social science sense of this visual plenitude. v

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Indeed, at the time there seemed to be precious little to go on. To rather exaggerate the picture (for there are always notable exceptions), Indian art historians appeared to operate in a rarified aesthetic universe of their own, focused on the exquisite products of an ancient civilisation engaging modernity, even as students of folk arts and crafts wallowed in regret for traditions and artefacts on the verge of extinction, or attempted to retool them for middle-class home décor. Film-buffs shored up their reputations for discriminating taste by policing the divide between ‘art’ and ‘popular’ cinema, and keepers of the conscience of Indian social science decried the triviality of focus on printed or moving images while real-life ‘social problems’ clamoured for attention. Altogether there was little interest in trying to decipher the visual language and hidden politics of the printed image, or indeed of mass culture per se, except as the self-evident object of censorious judgement. If there was one theme that particularly struck me as permeating our emerging archive of contemporary calendar art, it was the semantic conflation of categories of ‘woman’, ‘goddess’ and ‘nation’. It is a theme that has since been richly explored in the popular arts, folk arts and fine arts of the colonial and post-colonial periods. Inspired, on the one hand, by Marina Warner’s feminist study of the cult of the Virgin Mary through European history and, on the other, by sundry anthropological studies of the multiple forms and traits of the Hindu goddess, I put together a set of colour slides and ultimately a curated calendar art exhibition, which visually connected the sacred and secular imagery of Hindu Goddesses/mythological characters and mortal women: the goddess as ‘consort’ in wifely subordination and devotion; the goddess as bride, the bringer of fortune and prosperity; the benign mother and the mother cow; the dangerous and protective mother, guardian of the nation; the blessed sister; the devotee-cum-lover; the vamp and temptress; the woman commoditised in the company of the fetishised consumer products of the day; the woman objectified for the prurient male gaze (the ‘pin-up’ par excellence); and finally, a divine image for which I had no language beyond ‘the unity of opposites’, Ardhanarishwara—Shiva and Parvati fused. Needless to say, the idea of the interplay of sacred and secular iconicity and powerful feminine roles that was so consistently attested in our modest archive of calendar art was not to everyone’s taste, and the 20th century wound up with feminist critic, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, posing the brutal question, ‘Is the Hindu Goddess a Feminist?’! Meanwhile, however, starting around the 1970s in the Anglophone scholarly world and stretching across humanities and social science disciplines, the visual studies’ scene opened up. There was ‘myth today’ and the mythology of yesterday; structuralism and semiology; cultural studies and subaltern studies; post-colonialism and post-modernism; and altogether new ways of seeing and reading, new categories and strategies of analysis, new archives of data, and a new pantheon of ancestors. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s engagement with Roman Jakobson, the Russian linguist and star of the Prague Linguistic Circle, foregrounded the tradition of Russian formalist criticism and the analytical schema of the folklorist, Vladimir Propp. Roland Barthes rescued Ferdinand de Saussure from relative obscurity and repositioned him at the heart of the new interdisciplinary project of Semiology. The British writer and artist, John Berger, leveraged Walter Benjamin’s famous 1935 essay on ‘The Work of Art in the

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Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ to explore the class and gender politics of ‘seeing’ a work of art under the regime of modernity and Benedict Anderson’s thesis of the determining role of ‘print capitalism’ in the making of nationhood became integral to social science theory and analytical practices. Around the same time, Pierre Bourdieu recreated sociology as a ‘combat sport’, exposing the social realities of privilege and deprivation that constituted the habitus of class-based distinction. And feminists of many shades joined in, newly empowered. In this distinguished lineage, it was Roland Barthes in particular who showed the way, from literary criticism to linguistics to semiology to visual cultures and to the materiality of everyday life through multiple media (photography, cinema, fashion, advertising, public spectacle, wrestling, toys, plastic, cuisines, striptease, steak and chips, soap-powders and detergents, etc.): the trite and trivial, profound and meaningful, benign and hegemonic, and signs and agents of modernity. Materiality and Visuality in North-East India is an important input into South Asian material culture and visuality studies in several respects. In the first place, as its title discloses, it seeks to suture the untidy discursive divide that has existed between the overlapping fields of material culture studies (focused on the relationships between people and the ‘things’ by which they choose to define their cultural identity or contest the identities thrust upon them) and visuality studies (focused on the modes of production, consumption and circulation of visual imagery, and ways of seeing and being seen). This gesture is certainly an important means of reclaiming the subject’s space for self-representation against the objectivising and predatory power of the colonial/neo-colonial gaze and the beguiling embrace of the modern ‘culture industries’. Secondly, following on from the example of Roland Barthes or, at a more philosophical plane, from that of Theodor Adorno, we see here a significant expansion of the range of visual media and material signifiers brought under critical examination—colonial and post-colonial (neo-colonial?) photography, clothing and fashion, product advertising, handloom textile production, digital media, ‘indie’ [non-mainstream] comics, and gendered ‘foodscapes’—as we have also seen recently in such collective endeavours as the Sarai Reader series, or the Tasveer Digital Archive of South Asian Popular Visual Culture (www.tasveergharindia.net), all of them excellent ‘do-it-yourself’ kits for classroom exercises in ‘seeing’. In a teasing gesture in a volume focused explicitly on material culture and visuality, the ethnic politics of ‘aurality’ (in this case, with reference to the unequal competition of the indigenous musical forms of the Hau-Tangkhul community of Manipur with exogenous Christian hymnal music), along with the class-based ‘spaciality’ that separates bosses and labourers in Assam’s tea gardens, are also subjected to critical interrogation. While the supreme Mother Goddess, Bharat Mata, is ever ready to manifest herself in defence of the nation, we can now, without incurring the guilt of apostasy, go beyond the compass of Anderson’s persuasive correlation of the rise of print capitalism with nation-formation to critically focus our attention on an expanded range of visual and material signifiers of ‘communitas’ at all levels of the social, from the most localised to the national to the global.

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The North-East is an administrative unit of the Republic of India, the adventitious product of the cartographical, historical and geopolitical imperatives of a contested frontier area. Notwithstanding the rich variety of sub-regional cultures, the ascribed and self-ascribed identity of the North-East is ever a function of its perceived ‘otherness’ or marginality vis-à-vis the so-called Indian ‘mainstream’ or ‘mainland’, to which it is perilously attached. Since colonial times, the many peoples of the region have been ‘primitivised’ by the anthropological gaze, exoticised by the tourist’s camera, patronised by the developmental state, and securitised against both infiltration and secession in a notoriously ‘troubled periphery’ rent by internal conflicts and insurgencies. While authors in this volume resist the temptation to postulate an alternative unitary identity for India’s North-East contra these well-rehearsed stereotypes, they succeed in demonstrating a shared determination to be the active subjects, and not merely the passive objects, of visuality and material culture studies in the region, in the process casting their nets widely and deploying the most robust analytical tools that the contemporary social sciences and humanities have to offer. Patricia Uberoi Honorary Fellow & Chairperson Institute of Chinese Studies Delhi, India

Preface

This volume is based on the papers presented in the International Conference titled Materiality and Visuality in Northeast India organised by the Centre for North-East Studies and Policy Research (CNESPR), Jamia Millia Islamia in February 2019. The conference brought together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds with similar academic interests in issues of the visual and the material and its implications in the context of North-East India. During the two-day conference, they engaged in productive, critical and reflexive dialogue on many significant issues to enrich the already existing scholarship on the region. Noteworthy is that many of the issues that were discussed during the conference have a wider appeal and are not restricted to the geopolitical region popularly referred to as North-East. This volume is about seeing, knowing and being by revisiting systems of knowledge bringing out the combined effect of production, circulation, reception and transformation. The chapters in the volume attempt to weave these issues together to provide the reader a comprehensive picture of different sites and processes in the context of North-East India. The volume takes material and visual culture as a base to understand the historical developments in the region and builds on these to delve into further arguments and discourses with regard to the politics of knowledge production and dissemination and its implications for understanding the contemporary discursive reality and everyday practices in and about the North-East. The contributions to the volume move beyond the engagement with the visual and the material as ‘objects’ of inquiry to be engaged with for their economic and aesthetic values and make a methodological intervention by viewing them as agents of constructing and disseminating perceptions, meanings and practices. The use of the analytical categories of materiality and visuality makes these essays universal in their appeal, especially regarding colonised societies and communities and their transformation thereafter. They underscore the argument that visuality and materiality are embedded within the wider frameworks of history, culture and politics and frames of reference created through interaction in different times and spaces. Only select papers from the conference are included in the volume. This is mainly because some papers are either being published elsewhere or the presenters had other commitments because of which they could not rework on their papers. We are thankful to all the paper presenters and the Chairs who presided over the sessions ix

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for enriching the discussions, debates and deliberations during those two days of the conference. We are especially grateful to all the contributors who, despite their heavy schedule, cooperated with us to make this book a reality. An endeavour of this kind would not have achieved its goal without active institutional support. In this regard, we are grateful to Prof. Simi Malhotra, Director, Centre for North-East Studies and Policy Research, for her constant encouragement and support to the conference and our decision to bring out this volume. The faculty, staff and student volunteers of CNESPR and Jamia administration deserve special mention for their ready cooperation and support to make this project a success, our sincere thanks to all of them. We also owe a debt of gratitude to the Indian Council for Social Science Research, New Delhi and the North-Eastern Council, Shillong, for the generous grant extended to the conference, which makes it possible for us to come up with this book. Thanks is also due to the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions that went a long way to improve the contents of the volume. We are also thankful to Dr. Alban von Stockhausen for giving inputs for the introductory chapter. We especially acknowledge the encouragement and support extended by Prof. Patricia Uberoi. Numerous discussions with her before and during the conference helped us gain critical insights into the theme and make it more robust. We would also like to thank her for graciously agreeing to write the foreword of this book. We are ever so grateful to Prof. Christopher Pinney, Prof. Susan Visvanathan, Prof. Willem van Schendel and Dr. Prasenjit Biswas for being generous with their time in carefully reading the manuscript and offering us advanced reviews of the book. Their words have indeed motivated us in this endeavour. Last but not the least, we express our sincere thanks to the publication team at Springer for the care and patience with which they handled the publication of this book. Needless to say, shortcomings, if any, are entirely ours. New Delhi, India

Tiplut Nongbri Rashi Bhargava

Introduction Tiplut Nongbri and Rashi Bhargava

The substantive and methodological shifts in the last three decades with regard to the study of material and visual aspects of culture have been referred to as the material turn and visual/pictorial turn, respectively. These turns are often seen as challenging the domination of text, textuality and language that was popularised by the linguistic turn in the social sciences. However, it can be argued that one need not necessarily separate these or look at them as chronologically placed. Instead, one can transcend the boundaries between the two turns and utilise their potential in exploring complex phenomena that might require a multi-pronged analysis. The advent of the material and the visual turn opened up the possibility of not only looking at the material and the visual anew but also exploring their prospective role in understanding how they connect with themes of power, domination and hegemony to create a discursive reality. Thus, transcending the structural and semiotic analyses, the contemporary focus is to look at them as powerful agents in not only ways of seeing but also ways of knowing and, consequently, of being. Set against the backdrop of these new ways of understanding the material and the visual, this volume on Materiality and Visuality in North-East India: An Interdisciplinary Perspective focuses on issues of symbols, meanings, representations, social, cultural and political implications of the material and the visual and the dynamics between power, social reproduction, ideological dominance and knowledge production. It seeks to understand why some things matter more than the others and what happens when certain objects and ideas are made more visible than the others.

North-East India: From an Object of Inquiry to a Subject in Inquiry North-East India has long been an object of study from different disciplinary perspectives. Most of these studies have either addressed problems related to politics, statemaking, nation-building, nationalist and sub-nationalist movements, construction and fragmentation of identities, borders and frontiers or oral history, folk traditions, xi

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ecology, gender, customary law, etc. With the methodological shifts and greater awareness of the importance of reflexivity in social science research, one can see a remarkable change in the trend of research in the region with respect to the themes, theoretical approaches, perspectives and methodologies. In the context of NorthEast India, such a task becomes more poignant given the large body of works that constructs the region under consideration as a cognitive and epistemological category. The construction of a meta-narrative has mostly been descriptive in nature and heavily influenced by historical, social, cartographic, geopolitical, administrative and institutional processes that unfolded in different temporal spaces. This calls for an exploration into these various processes to unravel the continuities and discontinuities, if any, not only in understanding the self but also in making sense of the social world within which it is embedded. The present volume attempts to capture this transition from two vantage points—materiality and visuality. The choice of the theme is partly a response to the methodological shift that is taking place in research in the social sciences and humanities in recent years which has taken a renewed interest in things (aka material culture) as elements for close and systematic scrutiny. The other reason is the imperative to bring the burgeoning research in North-East India, a region with an overwhelming repertoire of material and visual culture under one platform. Such a platform could help scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds with a common interest to come together for a constructive dialogue which is vital to take research in the region forward. Consequently, multiple attempts to not only identify new concepts, theory, methods, methodologies and objects of inquiry but also interrogate the various processes through which they become instrumental in drawing a cognitive and epistemological map in a specific time and space need to be mapped. To realise this end, various chapters in this volume engage with issues related to the larger theme of production, circulation, reception (this includes re-interpretation) and transformation of knowledge and knowledge systems. They intervene by looking at indigenous narratives, processes and people as subjects rather than objects. With scholars increasingly moving into topics like myths, metaphors, memories, images, texts, comics, bodily practices, performative traditions and media representations, to name a few, there is much to interrogate, discuss and debate about contemporary materiality and visuality in North-East India. The volume, thus, is an attempt to create a space for further explorations into colonial and post-colonial knowledge and knowledge systems as they exist in contemporary discourse. It is foregrounded on the contention: What matters more is a result of many factors—construction of the ‘self’, of the ‘other’ and how some things are made visible and the others ignored. This process is largely located within the dominant frames of power, hegemony and authority not only of people, objects, events and places but also of vision (seeing), perception, cognition and meanings. Some of the fairly recent studies1 involving the visual and the material may offer 1

For an exploration of these themes in the Indian context, one can look at Ramaswamy (2003), Uberoi (2003, 2009), Pinney (1997, 2003, 2004, 2012), Miller (1998, 2005), Brosius (1999, 2005), Freitag (2003), MacDougall (2006), Marcus & Ruby (2011) to name a few who have looked at the relationship between seeing, thinking and knowing.

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insights in understanding this transition. These studies do not engage with the visual and the material only for their aesthetic, affective and stylistic roles. Rather, they highlight their cognitive dimensions (and consciousness) and the implications that their construction, interpretation and representation may have on the people’s understanding of the ‘self’ and the ‘other/s’. The present volume, thus, seeks to intervene by using materiality and visuality as conceptual and analytical tools to understand the process of knowledge production in the region both by the concerned communities and the external observer. The study of material culture is not new in social anthropology. Some of the major ethnographic works from mid-19th century focused on the material world of the societies under study. Material culture of the communities in North-East India has been the subject matter of many studies in the fields of history, anthropology, geography, ethnology, ethnography, museology, culture studies, etc., starting from the colonial to the post-colonial period. However, most of these studies looked at artefacts, commodities, and objects as mere appendage to the studies of social organization and social structure. Additionally, both during the colonial rule and the period after, they have been primarily represented2 textually with visuals only complementing the text. This is hardly surprising given that even today, there is a strong emphasis on anthropology as a ‘discipline of words’3 with lengthy note taking clearly establishing the opposition between textual/verbal and visual4 or placing the textual and the visual hierarchically.5 Although the camera was a necessary accompaniment for most anthropologists, it was primarily seen as a mechanical device that serves as an aid to data collection. Many a time, the visuals presented did not add much to the narrative and were largely included either as evidence of ‘been there’, or for their exhibitionist/ornamental/aesthetic value, or as a ‘metaphor for anthropology’,6 which were further crystallised in the museum settings. Furthermore, it was basically the ethnographer who decided on how and what aspect of the native’s life are to be photographed with the subjects of the art having little say in the matter. Often, this not only results in gross misrepresentation of the observed, but also raises serious ethical questions in research. The issue of consent, let alone ‘prior and informed consent’, had no place in the research of the time. Although this may seem like a criticism that is valid only for studies conducted in earlier periods, not many contemporary studies can boast of a collaborative ethnography either. In the context of North-East India, the tendency to romanticise and exoticise the rich material and cultural heritage of the people by European ethnographers and the blind acceptance of these representations by the observers and the observed 2

See J. H. Hutton (1921) on Sema Nagas and Angami Nagas, J. P. Mills on Ao Nagas, Lhota Nagas, Rengma Nagas in the 1920s, C. Von Furer-Haimendorf’s work on Nagas till the 1950s. 3 One of the most significant exception being Sarah Pink who, for more than two decades now has worked for a visual ethnography. One can look at Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, Media and Representation in Research (2001) to begin with. Her other works include Doing Visual Ethnography (2006); Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the senses (2006). 4 Mead (1975). 5 Hastrup (1992). 6 MacDougall (2006).

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alike have resulted in the persistence of colonial-era stereotypes that not only are theoretically untenable but also have serious consequence on policies.7 The use of visuality as a conceptual tool can unravel the hidden meanings embedded in the representation/misrepresentation, of course, depending upon which way you perceive it and avoid the pitfall of presenting them as natural facts. As an analytical tool, visuality is not limited in its application to the study of the media and the aesthetic but extends to everyday practices of seeing and showing, especially those that we take to be immediate and unmediated.8 Till recent times, studies on North-East India from the colonial to the post-colonial period have given little attention to visuality as vital in understanding the process of knowledge production and the power dynamics salient to it. To address this lacuna, the methodological departure that the book ventures into is to trace the transition of the so-called other from being a passive object of inquiry in the colonial and post-colonial intellectual traditions to an active subject intervening in the existing knowledge systems and consequently producing knowledge. It reflects upon the remarkable ways in which certain kinds of knowledge structures, processes and institutions affect the social world the individual lives in. Noteworthy is that production, circulation, consumption and transformation of knowledge are affected by many macro and micro forces, foregrounding the postulation that knowledge systems are constantly evolving. Such a contention allows us to revisit existing forms to unravel the hidden meanings and explore why certain types of knowledge appear and disappear in different temporal and spatial settings. It, thus, requires a revisiting of historical developments, objects of inquiry and methodological frameworks9 to identify agents, structures and processes of knowledge production. The concept of visuality as the ‘regime of seeing and being seen’10 can come handy to look at the North-East as a site where certain aspects are viewed/represented as more important than others and how a focus on them provides new theoretical and conceptual understanding of the issues in the region. Furthermore, it allows us to look at how communities in the North-East are increasingly employing their agency to create their own narratives of their culture, history and society. The question that comes to the fore is to what degree is this version (about images, food, clothing, music, etc.) distinct from the ones created by the colonial and post-colonial ethnographers or the self-proclaimed ‘self’? Despite their different disciplinary locations and diverse sites of research, the chapters in this volume are bound by a common attempt to engage with similar questions. Some of the questions raised include: Can one talk about the material and the visual as active agents in the production of knowledge, social relations, 7

A recent discussion on the relationship between statist, dominant discourses, policies of the state and practices of the people is put forth in Sanjib Baruah’s In the name of the nation (2020). 8 See for instance, Miller (1998); Ramaswamy (2003). 9 Simone Lassig in her work titled The History of Knowledge and the Expansion of the Historical Research Agenda (2016) has argued that ‘“knowledge” as a phenomenon touches upon almost every sphere of human life, and it uses knowledge as a lens to take a new look at familiar historical developments and sources’. 10 Ramaswamy (2003).

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practices and ideologies? If so, how does this agency manifest itself in the context of North-East India? Do material objects and visual images perform a pedagogic task of training our eyes to see things and relations in particular ways; produce specific forms of knowledge; and create a complex of knowledge, perception and practice that subscribe to certain ideologies? Can materiality and visuality as methodological tools help us approach the question of politics of representation? Has globalisation and liberalisation, created a (new?) site where material objects, visual images and the market are in a dialogical relationship revealing an embodied and discursive framework in which these operate? The book does not intend to provide final answers to these questions. It, rather, aims to open a dialogue on the possibility of focusing on the visual and the material both as communicative agents (non-human actors) and objects of knowledge production which would also throw light on the various sites in which these objects are located.

Materiality and Visuality as an Intervention in Research on North-East Since the 1980s, it has been established that material things shape the social world as much as they are shaped by it. The studies on material culture conducted during and after this period questioned the earlier ones which were largely undertaken from the vantage point of formal (what it does) and structural and semiotic analysis (what it means)11 where material culture was either considered as analogous to texts formed around a problem or as models of social worlds representing underlying patterns, social locations and relations. The renewed debates and discussions on material culture between the 1960s and 1980s argued against considering objects as mere things bereft of meaning. The focus was to look at them as a complex of meanings, power relations and social dynamics.12 In other words, objects could be seen as active agents in creating material, visual and bodily practices, discourses and perceptions of our social world.13 The caveat, however, is that not all objects are equally powerful agents in these tasks. Some are deemed more important than the other and hence have received more attention. Daniel Miller states, ‘… in many cases material culture is better identified as a means rather than an end’ (1998, 5). The present volume does not look at material culture as they appear (or not appear) in a social world or observe and record their utility within a spatial and temporal

11

Refer to Daniel Miller’s edited volume Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter (1998) where in he traces the theoretical and methodological shifts in the analysis of material cultures. One can also see Marcus Banks and Jay Ruby’s Made to be Seen (2011). 12 One can refer to Ian Woodward’s book Understanding Material Culture (2007) to get a comprehensive analysis of various theoretical approaches to the study of material culture. 13 This is an idea which is most closely associated with the phenomenological approach beginning from Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1945 and is quite evident in Bourdieu’s theory of practice, 1977.

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setting but approaches objects through a theory of materiality.14 Broadly, it can be understood as a study of reasons, processes and perceptions not from the point of view of the observer but from that of the observed highlighting what matters to them and why. Materiality, thus, is seen as a relational effect,15 that is, it exists in relation to other objects/actors in a network16 /context/structure. It is closely tied to immateriality and thus, the absence of something is as important in establishing a meaning as the presence of something. As Miller writes, “through dwelling upon the more mundane sensual and material qualities of the object, we are able to unpick the more subtle connections with cultural lives and values that are objectified through these forms, in part, because of the particular qualities they possess” (1998, 9). A similar twist can be seen in the visual turn in the 1990s, whereby it was established that the visual is constitutive of the social world and not merely illustrative or reflective of it. Thus, visual images are extremely powerful in transforming the world they inhabit or come to circulate in. There is a certain power that is attached to the visual in contemporary studies in visual culture especially with regard to visual systems and visible culture.17 Thus, along with terms like visual culture, visual representations and processes of visualisation, visuality has emerged as an extremely significant concept. W. J. T Mitchell (2002) defines visuality as the dialectical relationship between the visual and the social. He argues that the social is as much a visual construction as seeing (visual) is a social construction. Exploring the power relations as informing the process of seeing, Ramaswamy describes visuality as the ‘regimes of seeing and being seen’ (2003, xiv).18 Her conceptualisation provides us with a possibility of using visuality as a tool to interrogate dominant forms of perceptions, meanings and identities and the processes that lead to them. Nicholas Mirzoeff, on the other hand, discusses the concept of visuality along with that of counter-visuality. The former is associated with the dominant hegemonic regimes and their discursive reality where the authority through classification, separation and aestheticisation makes its power self-evident. Counter-visuality, on the other hand, is that of the dominated and the suppressed and their right to claim ‘political subjectivity and collectivity’ (Mirzoeff, 2011). Extending this argument to the present volume, we look at visuality and counter-visuality as aides in interrogating the processes and realities in North-East India to understand the relationship between the dominant and the subversive.

14

Refer to Daniel Miller’s edited volume Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter (1998) and Ian Woodward’s book Understanding Material Culture (2007). 15 Camila Rudd, 2018 using the actor–network theory sees objects as analytical sites for the circulation of knowledge. 16 One can refer to Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT); 2005. 17 Skoda and Lettman, 2019. 18 Her idea is an extension to David Levin’s contention that power to control is closely related to the power to see and power to make visible (1993). Levin engaged with modern understanding of ocular centrism in the context of the Western world. He stated that the western world was drawn to the authority of sight but he added that we need to critically engage with not only this perception of ‘authority of vision’ but also with cultures of vision that inform our everyday lives.

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In the light of the above discussion, we intend to point out that a study incorporating materiality and visuality is a study not only in history, culture, politics of interpretation and representation but also needs to explore and critically engage with the role of varying apparatuses, institutions, discourses, bodies, and objects in creating what we see and know, and how we perceive it. Thus, each chapter in the volume is a result of an ethnographic encounter where, if it matters to them, it matters to us. In some cases, given that the authors belong to the region itself, there is an additional factor, which is, if it matters to me it matters to be explored, analysed and theorised 19 (or the inter-twining of the knower and the known, the viewer and the viewed). Although the chapters that constitute the basis of this book are set in the ethnographic context of North-East India, we do not engage with the category North-East sociologically. Rather we take it as a given geopolitical space as used in various academic and official discourses to bring out the issues that the region faces despite the variations, differences and fragmentations within its social, cultural, historical and political landscape. Thus, the contributors of the present volume have attempted to reveal the historical, cultural and political underpinnings of the body of knowledge that posits North-East as the ’other’ and how the region has been engaged with and transformed in the past few decades. What emerges from that engagement are the new ways of seeing by the community that these chapters have tried to capture and present for the readers. These engagements are at different sites, such as photography, clothing and textile, food, graphic novel, advertising, music, theatre, bureaucracy, tea estates and digital museums. They do so in the context of different geopolitical and administrative units viz. Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Mizoram and Nagaland in North-East India. Despite the variation, our contributors who are trained in different disciplinary backgrounds, namely literature, history, media studies, performance studies and sociology, are connected by their common quest for subjectivities and inter-subjectivities in understanding the contemporary social, cultural and political landscape of North-East. Most of these ethnographic inquiries explicitly or implicitly follow Bourdieu’s theory of practice (1977) and seek to explore the habitual ways of being in the world and experiencing it by highlighting the set of practices in the empirical setting they explore. Such an analysis begins from a phenomenological perspective that draws on a relationship between the objective world and the experienced world20 perceived through and embodied in different social and cultural frames. There is, as David MacDougall writes, ‘an interdependency between perception and meaning. Meaning shapes perception, but in the end perception can refigure meaning, so that at the next stage this may alter perception once again’ (2006, 2). It is for this reason

19

Miller chooses the term ‘matters’ over ‘important’ or ‘significant’ because he contends that its usage will lead to “more diffused, almost sentimental association that is more likely to lead us to the concerns of those being studied than those doing the studying. It puts the burden of mattering clearly on evidence of concern to those being discussed” (1998, 11). 20 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945.

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that MacDougall brings in another dimension to the world of knowledge, that of being in addition to that of meaning (2006, 2–6). The chapters in the volume take the analysis further by using the concept of visuality to interrogate the objective and the experienced world. The meaning of the concept ‘visuality’ used in the current volume is two-fold: one, an artefact that is more than just an object but can be seen as embodying the ephemeral, the imaginary, the ideological, the sensorial and the theoretical which is external to the object. What happens when the known becomes the knower? Most chapters in the volume work address this question. Two, it aims to highlight that seeing and being seen is a result of power regimes which helps us relook at Miller’s idea of why some things matter more than the others. As a corollary, it requires to give a form to the invisible and the immaterial by either looking at familiar objects differently or by turning our gaze on objects that are usually considered to be trivial or not worthy of attention.21 Sand (2012) argues that our current understanding of the visual is modern in nature, which looks at the Cartesian dualism of mind and body and between the object and the subject. This becomes most visible in colonial modernity and the ethnographic gaze that the North-East was subjected to and the implications the representations they created have on the observed.

Brief Note on the Chapters Engaging with the twin processes indicated above, Alban von Stockhausen presents his findings by looking at how people perceived themselves through a frame of reference created by the colonial forces and ethnographic gaze during and after colonialism. Furthermore, he brings forth the ways in which this perception was intervened and negotiated with. The embodiment of colonial modernity through photography and clothing is presented in his chapter where bodily acts become a tangible site for understanding the relationship between the visual and the material with the temporal and the spatial constructing the epistemological—a reality that one encounters, experiences and acts upon. Maria Karavoulia points out that the gaze can become knowledge and ideology and hence a frame of cognition (2008, 215). In von Stockhausen’s chapter, what we find is how the anthropologists’ gaze is located within the modern framework, which locates seeing as superior to the other senses hence the focus on the visual. He further presents the way in which the seeing anthropologist produces the seen as seeing through its visual practices by focusing on the reception and consumption of these visual practices. Through his engagement with the Nagas, he outlines the transition from being an object to a subject through his usage of Bourdieu’s (1977) concepts of habitus and hexis. Comparing the photographic sources of Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf and HansEberhard Kauffman, the author gives us a comprehensive account of how different structures were created, inhabited and then established through practice. His chapter 21

This idea is built on Alexa Sand’s definition of visuality (Visuality, 2012, 89–95).

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reveals in significant ways how interpretive studies could benefit from a theory of visuality that transcends the observer-observed divide to rework the dichotomy as a fluid relationship between the two. What calls to attention is that these images are not just a representation of what is/was but they also serve as a window to understand how certain ways of seeing22 became a predetermined and systematic frame of reference to establish a way of being. The two chapters by Avitoli Zhimo and by Alison Kahn and Catriona Child bring forth the significance of collaborative research approaches. The chapter by Avitoli Zhimo begins with an engagement with representation and interpretation of images of the Naga tribes in colonial writings and the period thereafter. The chapter highlights the use of photographs by early anthropologists as supporting documents, a proof of ‘being there’ to ethnographic data. This, as the author contends, was a reflection of the scientific approach that conceptualised photographs as documentary evidence especially when representing the ‘exotic, strange and distant cultures’ of the ‘others’. Zhimo critically analyses this ‘scientific’ approach of studying natives (both by the colonialists and the anthropologists) and rejection of their subjectivity to create ‘objective’ knowledge, narrative genre of static ethnographic present and exclusion of sensory experience in the first half of twentieth century. Recalling an autobiographical encounter and supplementing it with an in-depth analysis of J. H. Hutton’s monograph on Sema Nagas, the author unravels the complete lack of reflexivity on the part of those who textually and visually narrativised the ‘exotic’ tribes. She ends with affirming the importance of reflexivity possible through collaborative and ethical visual methodology drawing inspiration from the disciplines of anthropology, cultural studies and cultural geography. The question of the invisible is given a completely new turn by Alison Kahn and Catriona Child in their chapter on the museum of the invisibles by revisiting the embodied forms of unequal power relationships between the exhibitor (colonial agent) and the exhibited (colonised people). Through their chapter, they offer a holistic methodological approach that embraces the use of digital technologies in creating a collaborative methodology for a wider multisensory engagement with objects and the communities they represent. The chapter makes a significant intervention in the popular imagination of a museum space by re-imagining historical objects in that space as biographical entities, as conveyers of agency, as products of a market-based economy and as repositories of hidden cultural knowledge. Kahn and Child delineate the processes through which museums containing Naga artefacts were established in different European countries. They, through their project, seek a shift in the cultural relationship between ethnographic museums and their source communities, one which will reveal the invisible stories connected to the collections and transform the museum experience for the collector/curator and the source community as well. Thus, the proposed methodological approach begins with an attempt to re-trace the routes of select Naga artefacts from European ethnographic museums to Nagaland and back again, in the process exchanging knowledge and collecting new voices and gleaning fresh perspectives on European collections from source 22

Berger (1972). MacDougall (2006) calls it cultural and neural conditioning.

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communities. Their proposition for a museum of the invisible is founded upon the idea of collaborative and participatory field work, thus catering to the community’s aspirations to reconnect with their history and aid in creating a dialogic platform in the museum space. The chapter brings forth many pertinent issues with regard to the diversity of meaning, validity of perceptions, agency of the visible and the invisible, and ownership over the artefacts displayed. The chapter by Kahn and Child optimistically brings out the potential of modern technologies that could prove helpful to address questions of representation, decolonisation, collaboration, authority and issues of authenticity by including the invisibilised to rectify, modify and update, and share knowledge that have arisen in the twenty-first century. Of course, to what extent this potential can translate into reality time alone can tell. It is interesting to note that all the chapters in section one are drawn from the Naga context. This, as sheer volume of studies on the Nagas suggest, can be attributed to a comparatively longer history of research among the Nagas. This also enhances the scope for the contributors to experiment with new methods of study as well as critique existing ones. Shifting the focus on objects as agents of power and hegemony and varied responses to it by the communities, the two chapters by Prithiraj Borah and Rowena Robinson, and Rimi Tadu give us an insight into the establishment of systems of power, authority and hierarchy and their implications, through two vantage points. The chapters trace various mechanisms through which such a task is accomplished. Borah and Robinson’s chapter interrogates the establishment of authority in the tea estates—cha-bagan—of Assam during the colonial period and its continuity in the post-independence period. The chapter highlights the two major components of the tea-estates: the material structures in the garden space, the Bungalow in particular, and the social media practices that highlight visual inscriptions of race and gender on the body of the (adivasi) minis (female plantation labourers). Borah and Robinson identified the cha-bagan as a gendered space, which is reinforced through the patronage and power of the planter-manager-sahib and the memsahib (wife of the plantation manager) and made visible through material objects, like the bungalow and the siren, associated with his authority. The plantation labourers, thus, are socialised into a set of behaviour and practices that emphasise the ‘feminine’ and leads to their marginalisation. The unequal power relations that inhere in the process, however, is rendered invisible by the romantic and exotic representations of the labourers in advertisements and promotions undertaken by the state (tourism) and plantation authorities artistically presented through billboards, tea auction centres and product advertising. The chapter concludes by raising questions about the politics of representation that is so deeply embedded within structures of hierarchy and power that it invisibilises the very existence of pain, misery and violence that unfolds in everyday practices in the cha-bagan. Rimi Tadu looks at official photographs taken between 1950s and 1970s during different state events in the frontier state of Arunachal Pradesh. The author argues that these photographs can be seen as narratives of subjugation, domination and humiliation during state-making and nation-building exercises embodied in various discursive and performative practices. She focuses on the nuances of the narrative

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frames of the official photographs to understand the unequal and undocumented relationship that exists between the newly established Indian government in the region and the local communities. Her contention being that the way of seeing, which finds vivid reflection in the photographs, led to a certain way of being of the administered and the governed when ‘ruled by outsiders’. She regards these as lucid evidence of statist/power socialisation, discipline and allegiances that were produced by bureaucratic rituals, performances and traditions introduced in the postindependence period. While these sets of practices have led to an ‘emotional and psychological’ integration of the ‘stateless’ people into the newly established state system, it has also served to create a discursive framework of being in that system. Investigating the space for negotiations within structured social dynamics and power relations, Chapters 6, 7 and 8 offer discussions on the agency not in absolute terms of resistance and subversion to structures and norms, rather through an exploration of how individuals/communities become desiring subjects and inhabit norms accordingly.23 Thus, the other chapters in this section bring forth the negotiations and tactics as employed by the people themselves unravelling their agency. Pamyo Chamroy’s chapter explores the changes in musical practices among the HauTangkhul community of Manipur. He analyses in detail the factors that contributed to the transition from Hau-laa, a traditional musical practice that is primarily oral in nature to the Hymn, a western import embodied in a written text. Highlighting the continuities and discontinuities between the rich oral and musical traditions of the indigenous communities and the hymns as popularised within Christianity, Chamroy narrates the trajectory of how musicking has changed among the Hau-Tangkhuls. In addition to the much discussed processes like colonialism and conversion to Christianity, Chamroy explores the significance of the youth dormitory (Longshim) in sustaining the Hau-Laa practices before the advent of Christianity in the region. He follows this with an analysis of the establishment of the church and its various practices which helped to institutionalise the hymn in the predominantly tribal society. By positing musicking as an act with multiple connotations and using it as a site of his inquiry, the author seeks to show how Hau-Laa is not only multi-sensorial but also serves as a window to the life world, history and collective memory of the community. In comparison, hymn which has now become an important part of people’s life unfolded in the space of the church and gradually permeated into almost all spheres of their everyday lives. Both Hau-Laa and Hymn occupy important spaces in the cultural canvas of the Hau-Tangkhul community, fulfilling different but equally valued functions. While the hymn has become the most significant feature of present forms of Hau-Tangkhul Christianity and musicking, Hau-laa is a remnant of a cherished way of life in the distant past that is long gone, a reminder of an erstwhile musicking and a symbol of their ethnic identity. Hence, it is important that one employs new ways 23

The idea resonates with Saba Mahmood’s idea of agency. She stated, “Indeed, if we accept the notion that all forms of desire are discursively organized (as much of recent feminist scholarship has argued), then it is important to interrogate the practical and conceptual conditions under which different forms of desire emerge, including desire for submission to recognized authority”. (2005, 14–15).

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of investigation to explore these socio-cultural, historical and collective/community activities and narratives. Joy L. K. Pachuau utilises recorded images and texts (debates in a monthly Mizo leh vai) from the colonial to the post-colonial period, primarily engaging with the construction of identity gleaned from the historical trajectory of attire among the Mizos and the debates that surrounded it. This history, as Pachuau points out is deeply woven with the strands of colonial and missionary interventions, while the context itself enabled Mizos to express agency in sartorial self-expression highlighting the subjectivities involved in the much taken for granted costume of the Mizos. Though her main focus is on clothing (‘frames through which people were understood’) and the changes it undergoes over time, her analysis extends to the body and its ‘image making’24 wherein Mizos established themselves as subjects by actively participating in choosing material object (attire) and embodiment (appearance). She not only takes into account clothing and images but also traces its gendered connotations and various processes and factors that lead to it. Hence, the chapter on the history of clothing among the Mizos is not just an account of the changes in attire, but it brings out the relationship between perception, vision, appearance and meaning providing the readers valuable insights into the Mizos’ world of knowledge and perception of the self (‘sartorial self-expression’) as individuals and as a community. The chapter is especially relevant because of the lesser number of ethnographic inquiries among the Mizos as compared to the Nagas. In the next chapter, giving us an insight into consumer practices, Natasha Nongbri looks at visual representations of tea in print advertisements from the popular English daily, the Times of India, during the 1940s to demonstrate how topical contexts and exigencies like World War II were exploited to increase consumption and embrace new consumer groups. Using advertisements as visual and material aids, the chapter brings out the process by which the practice of tea drinking gained ground among Indians, particularly in the last decade before independence. Adopting a variety of themes from war to welfare to productivity, the colonial advertisers left no stones unturned to transform tea drinking among Indians into a plebeian and essential cultural practice. However, Nongbri argues the consumer is not a passive entity who blindly buys the things thrust upon him but an active agent who uses his thinking power and preferences to select the product that he or she needs and wants. The chapter also reveals that hidden behind the glossy advertisements on the merit of tea was the pertinent fact that tea was a product of colonial exploitation of the colonised subjects’ land and labour power and the denial of rights over their resources through the promulgation of draconian laws, such as the Assam Land and Revenue Regulation, Act, 1886, and the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation, Act, 1873 (Inner Line Regulation or ILP in popular parlance), which gave the British uncontrollable power over the people and areas they administer. The chapter not only gives the reader an opportunity to look into consumption as constituting an intrinsic part of the modern market economy but also in re-imagining the object-subject relationship from two 24

MacDougall uses this idea in the context of photography and contends that when we make images, we tend to invest them with desires and heightened responses (2006, 3).

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perspectives. One, by highlighting the role of visual representation as a marketing tool- selling a product is contingent upon creating a want for it; and two, by tracing the transition of the consumer from a passive object under colonialism to a conscious subject in the context of an expanding market economy. The four chapters in the section on Imagination, imagery and identity underscore the fragmentations within subversive representations and resistances. It reminds the reader of the fluid nature of identities and the complex nature of the processes involved in identity formation. In chapter nine, Pooja Kalita turns to food/foodscape (practices of preparation and consumption of food) to bring out the process by which women are marginalised in contemporary Assamese society and delves into the question of politics and aesthetics of representation and invisibilisation of certain ‘others’. She shows how the Assamese identity, what she terms ‘Assameseness’, is created and sustained as much through gendered and class understanding of culinary practices as through material and visual objects that animate the bodies of those preparing the meals and the spaces in which they are located. Interrogating the popular perceptions of authentic ‘Assameseness’, Kalita unravels the role of self-proclaimed cultural ambassadors, the market and popular media in producing these images and popularising them. She further highlights the disjunctions between these images and realities that unfold in different spheres. Focusing on the restaurant space, she argues women who are usually taken as emblems of ‘Assamese’ cultural production, reproduction and preservation are reduced to the ‘others’ when it comes to employing them in the restaurants that claims to serve authentic Assamese cuisine. Paradoxically, an ‘authentic Assamese’ illusion is manufactured in that very space of the restaurant through images of women presiding over their domestic kitchen space and material objects that are reminiscent of the traditional and cultural understanding of ‘Assameseness’. Like Borah and Robinson, Kalita’s chapter exposes the reader to an arena wherein the attempts to create new kinds of representations many voices get marginalized and muffled within the contemporary economic, political and global frames. Bringing forth the narrative of othering and possibilities of subversion to highlight the importance of aesthetics and reception, Samarth Singhal’s chapter analyses the visual metaphor of momo25 used in a graphic novel by a Mizo artist named C. Sailo. Through his engagement, Singhal highlights visual stereotyping which might lead to xenophobia (he calls it ‘appearance-based xenophobia’) and its manifestations. The metaphor of the momo is often used against people from the North-East to underline their otherness because of their Mongoloid features which makes them appear closer to China and South-East Asia than India. Singhal draws our attention to the tilted way of seeing through objectification of the human body, especially of one who is physiologically different resulting in discrimination, name-calling and exclusionary practices. The chapter engages with the artist’s perceptions by looking at the satire embedded in the novel which attempted to highlight social construction of vision with regard to certain objects, people and places and the discursive practices that it 25

Momo is a snack/dish that is quite popular in India subcontinent. It is a kind of steamed dumpling that originated in East and South Asia. Singhal describes it a “ubiquitous Delhi snack” in his chapter.

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gives rise to. Singhal considers this piece of art as critical as defined by Ranciere (2009) but questions whether it can really lead to ‘world transformation’. In response to this, he contends that the attempt at subversion made by the artist might fall short of bringing about any drastic change in appearance-based xenophobia because the conventional form of this expression, graphic satire might get entrenched in formal economy of circulation, reception and hence signification thereby limiting its subversive potential. Taking the narrative of subversion forward, Rakhee Kalita Moral explores the changing trajectory of meanings and metaphors that have come to be associated with Assam as an ethnoregion within the larger geopolitical space and national imagery. She argues that meanings and symbolisms are tied inextricably to visual representations and motifs forming a ‘visual regime’ which capture both aesthetic interest and epistemological thought on how we may reimagine the landscape and its peoples. The politics of that imaginary is what compels her discussion and the need to chart the transition from how Assam has normatively existed in the mindscape of North-East India and how that gathers meanings and signification for others over time and into the present moment. She further argues that the archetypal story of the pastoral finds re-imagination in a space that is suddenly terra nuova, and not the dark obscure land, in the changing history and material transformation of allegories of India’s northeast. Further, such refashioning of the space and those who inhabit the terrain enable a construct of the generic meanings of the everyday and symbolisms that imbricate past and present, highlighting the relationship between history, culture, politics and identity. The chapter by Thingminao Horam on textile practices of the Tangkhul Nagas provides an interesting insight into the dual use of objects as an agent of hegemony and resistance. Exploring the complex web of socio-cultural and political identities that go into the making of textiles, her chapter not only traces events and meanings through material culture but also lays out a framework to understand the construction of identities through contemporary weaving practices among the Tangkhul. Although Horam’s chapter focuses on the communicative potential of textiles with regard to the expression of identity, it socially contextualises them by focusing on institutions, people, space and technology. This, the author argues, requires attention not only to production, circulation and consumption practices but also to embodiment of these textiles to create a visual impact. A study of textile with focus on its motifs, patterns and colours has to be complemented with an engagement with the weaver and wearer of the dresses since it throws light on how and what they think of themselves. However, what happens when this system of signification is controlled? Answering this question, Horam provides insights into another aspect of politics of representation where surveillance emerges from within the community through an organised group of women to ‘re-tell history’ in order to form new and/or reinforce existing social and political relations in a society.

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Some Reflections on New (?) Ways to Seeing In the beginning of this introduction, we outlined a set of issues that the contributors to this volume have engaged with. These engagements are located at various sites, spaces and processes, wherein each chapter has raised as many questions as it has tried to answer. One theme that runs through this volume is that of the relationship between seeing, knowing and being, i.e. perception, meaning and experience. Through the use of the analytical tools of materiality and visuality, the chapters have delineated a methodological shift in addressing questions not only of ideology, power, dominance and hierarchy but also of production, circulation and transformation of knowledge, questioning the long-standing view that knowledge sets reflect reality. They call into question issues of interpretation and representation, thereby making it imperative that they should be contextualised within the changing set of processes and realities. As the chapters demonstrate, it is important that seeing, knowing and being are seen to be as much a product of existing frames of reference as they are of changing political and economic processes. Thus, what we see through these chapters are not only colonial and post-colonial knowledge sets but also liberalisation-globalisation paradigm and the percolation of digital technology leading to state discourses and interventions. The volume thus is a conversation between these varied structures, processes and events that have affected the way we think about the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ creating new and often conscious forms of seeing and hence, suggesting that seeing and being are not fixed but are constantly evolving. It is the interrogation of this process of evolving and transforming that the volume concerns itself with. What we get is a dialectical relationship between ways of seeing and ways of being in the context of North-East India which is a product of various historical, socio-cultural and political encounters. The chapters also lucidly bring out the fragmentary, contradictory nature of this dialectics as is demonstrated in different ethnographic encounters, giving the readers an insight into the fluid nature of being and knowing.

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Contents

Part I 1

Objects, Images and Meanings: Methodological Interventions

Negotiating the Visibility of ‘Habitus’ of ‘the Nagas’ and their Photographers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alban von Stockhausen

2

‘We Were the Others’: Visuality in Colonial Writings . . . . . . . . . . . . . Avitoli G. Zhimo

3

Conversation Pieces: How Digital Technologies might Reinvigorate and reveal the Social Lives of Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alison Kahn and Catriona Child

Part II 4

5

6

3 23

37

Material and Visual as Vehicles of Power and Hegemony: Adaptations and Negotiations

Mai-Baaps and Minis: Spatiality, Visuality and Materiality in Assam’s Tea Gardens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prithiraj Borah and Rowena Robinson

57

Mapping Power and Domination: Studying State Making in Arunachal Pradesh through Old Official Photographs . . . . . . . . . . Rimi Tadu

73

Hau Laa and Hymn: Musicking Dynamics of the Hau-Tangkhuls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pamyo Chamroy

87

7

Sartorial Matters: A Brief History of Attire in Mizoram . . . . . . . . . . 105 Joy L. K. Pachuau

8

Representing Tea, Creating Consumers: Tea Advertising in Late Colonial India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Natasha Nongbri xxix

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Part III Imagination, Imagery and Identity: Representations and Subversions 9

Food is Not Just ‘Food’: Analysing Gender in the Assamese Foodscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 Pooja Kalita

10 Tilted Views and C Sailo: A Study of Satire in Contemporary Indie Comics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Samarth Singhal 11 Reimagining the Pastoral: Metaphors and Meanings of the Everyday in Assam and India’s Northeast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Rakhee Kalita Moral 12 Weaving Resistance and Identity: Politics of Contemporary Textile Practice of the Tangkhuls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 Thingminao Horam Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors Tiplut Nongbri is currently Dr. Saifuddin Kitchlew Chair Professor at the Centre for North East Study and Policy Research, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She had taught Sociology at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, School of Social Sciences, JNU. She was the founding director of the North East India Studies Programme, JNU. She has published widely. Her research interests include family and kinship, studies of tribes and marginal groups, environmental sociology and development issues. Rashi Bhargava is currently Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, Maitreyi College, University of Delhi, New Delhi (India). She has a Doctorate in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research interests consist broadly of politics, ethnicity, identity construction and civil society in the region of North East India. She is also interested in issues of methodology and theory. In the past, she has taught at the Department of Sociology, Hindu College and Kamala Nehru College of University of Delhi.

Contributors Prithiraj Borah IIT, Bombay, India Pamyo Chamroy Centre for Media Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India Catriona Child The Kohima Institute, Kohima, Nagaland, India Thingminao Horam Special Centre for the Study of North East India, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

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Editors and Contributors

Alison Kahn Director Cultural Heritage, Education and AI Think Tank; Visiting Fellow in Digital Learning Systems and Tutorial Fellow in Museum Anthropology, SDS-Group (Research); Loughborough University; Stanford University (CA) Overseas Program, Oxford, UK Pooja Kalita Department of Sociology, South Asian University, New Delhi, India Rakhee Kalita Moral Cotton University, Guwahati, India Natasha Nongbri Department of History, Janki Devi Memorial College, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India Joy L. K. Pachuau Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India Rowena Robinson IIT, Bombay, India Samarth Singhal Department of English, University of California, Riverside, USA Rimi Tadu Ziro, Arunachal Pradesh, India Alban von Stockhausen Bernisches Historisches Museum, Bern, Switzerland Avitoli G. Zhimo Department of Anthropology, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India

Abbreviations

A.I A.R. AASAA AFSPA ICOMOS IPR ITA ITCC ITMEB MHIP NEFA RSS ST TBCA TSL UNESCO VIP VVIP

Artificial Intelligence Augmented Reality All Adivasi Students Association of Assam Armed Forces Special Powers Act The International Council on Monuments and Sites Information and Public Relation Indian Tea Association Indian Tea Cess Committee Indian Tea Market Expansion Board Mizo Hmeichhe Insuihkhawm Pawl North-East Frontier Agency Rastriya Swayamseva Sangh Scheduled Tribe Tangkhul Baptist Churches Association Tangkhul Shanao Long The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Very Important Person Very Very Important Person

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3

Fig. 1.4

Fig. 1.5

Fig. 1.6

Fig. 1.7

Fig. 1.8 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2

‘Group of Nagas, Marauding tribe. Cachar’. c. 1840–60. attr. E.T. Dalton (In: Watson and Kayne 1868: plate 38) . . . . . . . ‘Captain Butler and his Party among Nagas’. Print, handcoloured, 1874. (PRM Acc. No. 1910.45.18) . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘Mr. and Mrs. Clark on the porch of a house with Naga people’. Photograph attributed to James Buckingham, c. 1880. (PRM Acc. No. 1998.219.3.3) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘Portrait of Lokok and his daughter’. Ao Naga, Ungma village. 1926. Photograph by J.P. Mills (SOAS Acc. No. PP MS 58/02/K/07) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf photographing Konyak dancers. Wakching village, 24th April 1937. Photograph by Hans-Eberhard Kauffmann (Kauffmann Archive, LMU Munich, Photo No. 42–08) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Konyak dancers standing in a row on a large rock. Near Hungphoi village, 1937. (SOAS Archive Acc. No. PPMS19_6_NAGA_1968, 067_21) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Two Konyak men staging a mock fight for the ethnographer’s camera. One spear is being thrown with the pointed end facing the thrower. Wakching, 1st May 1937. (SOAS Archive Acc. No. PP MS 19_6_NAGA_2695, 088/34) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘Thangkholal, Thado-Kuki und ein Kachari’. Photographer unknown. Kohima, Spring 1937 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A close-up photograph of a Sumi woman (Hutton 1921a) . . . . . . The Daughter of Chief of Philimi village (Hutton 1921a) . . . . . . The tempered photograph of Kakughali advertising a cellular service as seen on a hoarding (2004) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The original photograph of Kakughali . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Official VIP visitors greeted by the locals standing in rows . . . . . An Apatani traditional house visited by VIPs. Posters of Nehru and other national leader hanging on top . . . . . . . . . . . .

7 9

10

12

14

15

16 17 27 28 32 33 79 79 xxxv

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Fig. 5.3

Fig. 5.4

Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6 Fig. 5.7

Fig. 5.8

Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5 Fig. 7.6 Fig. 7.7 Fig. 7.8 Fig. 7.9 Fig. 7.10 Fig. 7.11 Fig. 7.12 Fig. 7.13 Fig. 7.14 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 8.4 Fig. 8.5

List of Figures

A VIP and his family visiting Apatani village, while Apatani men, women, and children also gathered in their front verandah to watch them . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Opening day of a bathing Ghat somewhere near Hangu village. Boys and girls were being bathed naked in front of the VIPs and their children and the public, to demonstrate how cleanliness and hygiene are being taught to locals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The VIP sitting on temporary constructed darbar with Political Presents piled in display on one side . . . . . . . . . . . The VIPs distributing the Political Presents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Group of young Nyishi girls dancing for VIP guests in Ziro. The locals in far background separated by volunteers in uniform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An inauguration of water supply tank for a village and a visibly nervous Apatani elderly woman with her hands clasped . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mizo women in ‘traditional’ costumes and a Cheraw performance. Picture was taken from an online travel company advert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Photograph of a division of the Labour Corps in France. Sainghinga is second from right, sitting, 1917 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sainghinga and friends in uniform in France, 1917 . . . . . . . . . . . Sainghinga, most probably taken in the early 70s, in a puan and coat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Depictions of various tribes of the Lushai Hills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A dapper Challiana, early 20th century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Some of the early mission workers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Men in the styles of the 1960s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kaithuami, one of the first nurses in Mizoram, 1923 . . . . . . . . . . The Mizo Choir, 1929 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The puanchei worn at the wedding of Hrangzuala and Thangzuali, 1962 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A choir in the 50s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jawaharlal Nehru with a cultural troupe during Republic day celebrations, 1954 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Two family pictures for comparison. Top taken in 1931, below taken in the 1950s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ad—11 o’clock tea peak production, TOI, Oct. 16, 1941, p. 10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ad—Soaring production, TOI, Feb. 11, 1943, p. 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . Ad—Tea for optimum production and fatigue, TOI, Aug. 17, 1944, p. 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ad—Mid-morning investment, TOI, Dec. 4, 1945, p. 6 . . . . . . . . Ad—4 o’clock tea, TOI, Jun. 5, 1946, p. 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

80

81 82 82

83

84

106 110 111 112 114 115 116 118 119 119 121 124 125 126 134 135 136 137 139

List of Figures

Fig. 8.6 Fig. 8.7 Fig. 8.8 Fig. 8.9 Fig. 8.10 Fig. 8.11 Fig. 8.12 Fig. 8.13 Fig. 8.14 Fig. 8.15 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3 Fig. 11.1 Fig. 11.2 Fig. 11.3

Ad—Tea and industrial output, TOI, Jul. 18, 1946, p. 3 . . . . . . . . Ad—Fatigue factor, TOI, May 10, 1945, p. 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ad—Tea and man hours, TOI, Jun. 7, 1945, p. 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ad—Tea, man-power and output, TOI, Apr. 12, 1945, p. 6 . . . . . Ad—Tea and growth of industrial welfare, TOI, Jun. 27, 1946, p. 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ad—Factory canteen, TOI, Jul. 17, 1947, p. 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ad—Tea and war, TOI, Dec. 11, 1945, p. 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ad—Tea in peace, TOI, Nov. 6, 1945, p. 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ad—Tea in peace, TOI, Feb. 14, 1946, p. 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ad—Tea and nation-building, TOI, May 14, 1949, p. 5 . . . . . . . . Cover, C Sailo, momosapiens: an evolution story . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘momo-sapien?’, C Sailo, momosapiens: an evolution story . . . . ‘mom-ooo!!!’, C Sailo, momosapiens: an evolution story . . . . . . A time to sow …and time to think. Springtime promises Courtesy: Vikramjit Kakati . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Young couples headed to bihu rehearsals in a village in Assam Courtesy: Vikramjit Kakati . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Weaving dreams at her loom …a woman in the uplands of NE India Courtesy: Vikramjit Kakati . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 171 174 175 186 193 196

Part I

Objects, Images and Meanings: Methodological Interventions

Chapter 1

Negotiating the Visibility of ‘Habitus’ of ‘the Nagas’ and their Photographers Alban von Stockhausen

Abstract Based on historical photographs picturing the Nagas, this chapter discusses specific visualizations and actors in visual representational traditions in order to understand the historical development of a distinct visual grammar prevalent in most photography of ‘the Nagas’ until today. It argues that it reflects an assemblage created out of elements of ‘habitus’ and ‘hexis’ of those pictured—and those creating, disseminating, viewing and interpreting the imagery. According to Bourdieu, through selected case studies, depicted bodily practices of dress, posture and movement are highlighted, which resemble some of the core techniques that define or display ‘hexis’ (the embodied form of habitus). Pictured within a specific historical embedding, they reflect transformations of the social and political embedding of the photographed and their photographers and changes in imaging technologies and dissemination practices. Through their analysis, it becomes apparent how the stereotypical ‘visual’ and ‘material’ grammar European photographers followed in their work, formed, and consolidated today’s inclusive ‘visual’ label of ‘the Nagas’ to a significant extent. Keywords Visual Anthropology · Photography · Naga people · Nagaland · Northeast India

Introduction With a view to Northeast India, the introduction of this volume asks ‘what happens when certain things are made more visible than the others’ and points at Levin (1993) stating that ‘the power to see and the power to make visible is the power to control’. In linking visuality to the reproduction and structuring processes of power on the basis of notions such as ‘symbolic capital’, ‘habitus’ and ‘hexis’ we can take inspiration from no other than Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas (1977, 1991).

A. von Stockhausen (B) Bernisches Historisches Museum, Helvetiaplatz 5, 3005 Bern, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. Nongbri and R. Bhargava (eds.), Materiality and Visuality in North East India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1970-0_1

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Based on my research on historical photographs picturing the Nagas (von Stockhausen 2014), this contribution discusses specific visualizations and actors in visual representational traditions in order to understand the historical development of a distinct visual grammar prevalent in most photography of ‘the Nagas’ until today. I argue that it reflects an assemblage created out of elements of ‘habitus’ and ‘hexis’ of those pictured—and those creating, disseminating, viewing and interpreting the imagery. Through selected case studies, I attempt to highlight how depicted bodily practices (Mauss 1935) of dress, posture and movement, which is to say, some of the core techniques that define or display ‘hexis’ (the embodied form of habitus) according to Bourdieu, are crucial in this process. Pictured within a specific historical embedding, they also reflect transformations of the social and the political embedding of the photographed and their photographers, as well as changes in imaging technologies and dissemination practices. Through their analysis, it becomes apparent how the stereotypical ‘visual’ and ‘material’ grammar European photographers followed in their work, formed, and consolidated today’s inclusive ‘visual’ label of ‘the Nagas’ to a significant extent.

Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Habitus’ and ‘Hexis’ Especially in his earlier works (1977), Bourdieu understands habitus to be a set of dispositions that reproduce social structures by means of embodied practices. The latter is ‘embodied’ to such an extent that they are perceived as ‘natural’, thus subconsciously internalizing social structures. Habitus cannot, therefore, easily be changed through discourse, rationalizing, or revolution. It is deeply rooted in all individuals of a social group and can only be transformed very slowly in the collective. While some critiques see here an exceedingly deterministic model (for instance, King 2000, also see Jo, 2013), others focus on the possibility of changing habitus, especially when the social environment of a group changes, or when individual social mobility happens (for instance, Horvat and Davis 2011, also see Jo 2013). It seems that habitus can be looked at in the light of reproducing social structures as well as in the light of changing them—or when analysing such changes. Going through the available literature on habitus, one gets the impression that practically anything can be ‘habitus’. But if it is so, does the concept of habitus actually explain something really? It also seems to get increasingly difficult to distinguish between what is habitus and what is not, and if it is not, what else is it then? Leaving such critique open for the time being, let us also think along another line that sounds promising: Habitus happens via bodily hexis, which in Bourdieu’s frame of thinking means an embodied, unconscious, ‘permanent disposition, a durable manner of standing, speaking, and thereby of feeling and thinking (1977, 93)’. Without transfer via discourse or consciousness, hexis is transmitted through practice exclusively (also see Scollon 2003). It is embodied behaviour, or if you want the subconscious material and bodily techniques in Marcel Mauss’ terms (1935), on whom Bourdieu strongly relies in this context.

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Of course, I could continue now by focusing on photography as bodily technique. Or, when pondering about the agency of things and the ‘hybridity’ of things, images, and humans, we can follow Alfred Gell (1998) and Bruno Latour or muse about the actors and actants network we focus on (Latour 1993, 2005). I could ask: Who makes the photograph, the photographer or the camera? And in all likelihood, Bruno Latour would reply: Neither nor. It is the assemblage of the photographer as an agent with the camera as actant that together makes the photograph (Latour 1993, 98f, 1999, Simpson 2018:74). And this photograph is not an object but what he would call a ‘hybrid’ (Latour 1993). However, for now, let me rather follow the hexis-thread, a thread by the way, that often ends to be exiled to a side-note in reflections about Bourdieu: What exactly in a specific photograph can be understood as an element of hexis, of the unconscious embodied behaviour that determines habitus? It could be the style of composing photographs, the preference for motives, and the way of looking at them and sharing them. All this has an impact on the evaluation of that what is shown and that what is seen. For Bourdieu himself, the development of his theoretical concept was closely linked to his own experiences with visual representations of people in a state of transformation (Sweetman 2009). During his fieldwork in Algeria between 1958 and 1960, he experienced a society ‘shaken by an exceptionally brutal colonial war and torn by anachronisms and burning social contradictions’. (Schultheis et al. 2012, 2) For Bourdieu, this situation raised some fundamental questions which can also be formulated in relation to the Nagas and their visual representation. The sociologist Franz Schultheis lists some of them: ‘What happens to a society when it is confronted with radically new economic and social conditions that run counter to all of its generations-old rules? How does its characteristic traditional economic habitus limit the field of possibilities of its economic actors, trapped in their traditional logic, and how does it prestructure what is thinkable and unthinkable?’ (Schultheis et al. 2012, 3). In the context of this volume we have to add: ‘And how does this reflect in terms of Visuality and Materiality?’—on the side of the Nagas, the photographed, and on the side of the mostly western photographers. In the case of this chapter, we will search for these reflections within the images themselves, the practice of photography and other means of visual reproduction over more than a century.

The Nagas and Their Photographers Since the early nineteenth century, ethnographers and photographers from various contexts visited the Naga Hills and made images of their inhabitants. If we look at the names of people who have produced images of the Nagas, we quickly realize that up until India’s independence, image production was entirely dominated by male westerners linked to the colonial administration. This—of course—raises various questions: How did the unequal power relations between the photographers and the photographed influence these images’ effect on the Nagas in the long term. How influential were the fundamental transformations Naga society underwent during the

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historical period in question, or, as Bourdieu called it in the context of Algeria, the situation of a society living in a ‘vast social laboratory’ (Schultheis et al. 2012, 4). In the case of the Nagas, the colonial power, as well as Christian missionaries, had changed some of the most constitutive elements of the social and political environments—decisions and enforcements that would play a vital role in the transformation of the ‘cultural’ and ‘symbolic capital’ of the entire northeastern region. But how did this reflect in the habitus of the Nagas? Did elements of the local habitus disappear or change because it was not possible to reproduce itself anymore? And is it possible to trace these changes in the visual reproductions created during this period?

Visual Sources of the Nineteenth Century Most of the early publications on the Nagas were authored by military personnel employing visual methods from early times. As Tarr and Blackburn put it (2008, 4), the camera followed the gun, and when the British Empire made its way up the Brahmaputra valley and the surrounding hills, photography and other technologies of visual reproduction followed its protagonists. Having an image at hand—of a Naga in his dress—was considered most helpful in the administrative process. Consequently, some of the military staff started to create imagery of Nagas in their ‘typical’ costumes (Pinney 1990, 256). At first, this was accomplished by pencil and brush, but as soon as photography was invented, the new technique was also adopted. Photography until the end of the century meant having to either carry huge loads of equipment and chemicals into the field or take photographs in a studio environment where the equipment was at hand and the lighting conditions could be controlled more easily. The photographed subjects had to stand still for several minutes due to the long exposure times necessary. The visual appearance of the early photographs was strongly shaped by the ‘technomateriality’ (Pinney 2008, 26) that photographers in the nineteenth century faced. In this phase of Naga colonial history, some of the most extensive collections of material culture were assembled, primarily for British museums (West 2011), that the first detailed ethnographic accounts were written in monographs, and that the first photographic collections of the Nagas were compiled. Some of the earliest sources of imagery of the Nagas can be attributed to MajorGeneral Edward Tuite Dalton (1815–1880), and the photographers working with him. Dalton visited the Naga Hills in the 1840s, when he collected materials for the publication The Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal (Dalton 1872), edited by order of the colonial government. The images of the Nagas published in the volumes are largely racial types, a common genre from the 1860ies until well into the twentieth century (Falconer 1984). In another volume (Watson and Kayne 1868), an image titled ‘Group of Nagas, Marauding tribe. Cachar’ (Fig. 1.1) can also be attributed to E.T. Dalton or one of his photographers. It could be argued that the visual and material habitus of the pictured is preconfigured by the photographer and his political and ideological embedding—but also by the available photographic technologies.

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Fig. 1.1 ‘Group of Nagas, Marauding tribe. Cachar’. c. 1840–60. attr. E.T. Dalton (In: Watson and Kayne 1868: plate 38)

The imagery was used equally to written accounts of the time, where specific elements of material culture were highlighted in order to classify and put into order the cultural diversity the British faced in the Naga Hills, or the perceived ‘ethnographic chaos’—as Julian Jacobs termed it (Jacobs 2012, 17). Where the military man R.G. Woodthorpe suggested a taxonomy of ‘kilted’ and—‘non-kilted’ Nagas (Woodthorpe 1882, 58), the photographs in the ‘Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal’ followed the same logic: The published information had to serve the needs for an efficient colonial administration, even though its actual applicability remains contested (Simpson 2018, 74f). If used in scientific contexts, it was the comparability of the materials that stood in the foreground: Imagery therewith followed the logic of the colonial endeavour and reflected the evolutionist approach of the comparison-based ‘arm-chair’ anthropology back home in Britain. The perceived ‘otherness’ of the habitus displayed by the people in the colonies— visually transported and continuously repeated for a European viewer in most images—must have strongly supported the fundamental misunderstanding that habitus is considered natural instead of being culturally developed. An understanding

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that was consequent in the evolutionist approach of the nineteenth century and that— in a colonial or missionary context—was often used to justify the suppression of local cultures under the pretension of ‘doing them good’, ‘saving’, or ‘uplifting’ them from their unfortunate fate or ‘primitive’ evolutionary position. The corresponding texts to the images of this period often support this misconception even further by adding a-historicity to the images. They describe the customs and traditions as rooted deep in the history of a local culture, unchanged since time immemorial. By introducing the pictured people with the adjective ‘marauding’ (Fig. 1.1), the caption locates them within the colonial project aiming to control and administer the otherwise imperiling local cultures of the Northeast. A specific ethnic name is not given; the geographic information ‘Cachar’ simply allows the reader to locate the group on an administrative map. The pictured individuals are shown as objects or commodities rather than as human beings. A narration even more evident in the caption of another image published in 1872: It relates to the image of a Naga chief, comparing the local variations of male and female dress to differing appearances found in the animal world. (Dalton 1872, plate XVI). Analysing the depicted bodily postures, the facial expression and the positioning of the pictured, we cannot help but identify a bodily hexis that corresponds to the historical and political embedding of the image: we do not see people performing or embodying much of their specific cultural or ethnic identity in a positive and individual sense. Instead, we see human beings that have been arranged carefully by the photographer, stripped off their local social embedding and individual identities. Their bodily hexis speaks of being defeated and humiliated. The reconfiguration of social structure, implemented by the colonialists and missionaries, had served its purpose, a situation that is inherent in the nameless creatures whose sole purpose— in this image—serves the colonial and scientific taxonomies of the suppressors. By being included into a volume that would have been geared at an entirely non-Naga readership, the photographs instead reproduce the overwhelming habitus of their colonialist creators’ gaze. The subjects embody the inequality of power relations installed by the British. The power to support or suppress the accumulation of cultural and symbolical capital had in the nineteenth century largely switched sides: From the local cultures of the Northeast to the British colonial administrators and American missionaries. Through a devastating invalidation of the local codes and practices, embodied capital—like status acquired in headhunting raids or as ‘feast-giver’—had become meritless or immoral in the administered areas. Traditional cultural capital became obsolete or was forcefully reduced to symbolisms not interfering with the new rules and regulations installed by the outsiders. In the context of Christian missionaries, we know that objects and mannerisms linked to the habitus of the pre-Christian society were—and still are today—deliberately destroyed or suppressed, forcing people to accept the objectified and symbolic capital of the new order. Institutionalised cultural capital followed in the same way—visible, for example, through the figure of the gaonbura, a translator, intermediary and local representative, was installed by the British colonial administration. The position of the gaonbura

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was objectified through specific red waistcoats, which could be granted positively or withdrawn as a punitive measure. One of the milestones for the early visual history of the Naga was created by Colonel and later Major-General Robert Gosset Woodthorpe (1844–1898). On the surveys that took him into Naga areas, he took ‘visual notes’ with his pencil and also used photographic equipment. One of his visual notes (Fig. 1.2) seems to frame a variety of differing habitus present—or deliberately represented—in the Naga Hills at the time. The pictured scene reminds the viewer of a re-staging of actors at the end of a theatre performance. All of them gather on the stage again, representing their allotted roles: The Nagas are shown in their war-dresses with shields, only a few of them are named, they are portrayed as headhunters and subjects of the British crown. On the other hand, the British administrators and military men are individually named—they represent the rulers, surveyors, scientists, collectors. The artist himself, a bit of everything, is visible in far-right background. In front of him stands, with his hand on the leg of a photographic tripod, Dr. Brown, the political agent at Manipur and one of the photographers contributing to A Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal (Simpson 2018, 79). Even though the reading of the image is contested and changes throughout its various versions, nobody on the image seems to cross the line of a predefined role in this play. The ‘feel for the game’ as Loïc Wacquant (2004), once a student of Bourdieu, might have put it, is not decided by the individual but by the social role he or she is assigned to through the more powerful player. Habitus visualizes one’s own limitation or virtue, predefined through a limited set of possible roles.

Fig. 1.2 ‘Captain Butler and his Party among Nagas’. Print, handcoloured, 1874. (PRM Acc. No. 1910.45.18)

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An image photographed around 1880 (Fig. 1.3) transfers the above narrative to a missionary context. It shows the Clarks, the first American missionaries among the Ao Nagas. Looking at the bodily postures and dress of the pictured, the viewer is clearly shown a difference in elements of habitus that locate the photographed people within the understanding the missionaries had regarding the religious practices and culture of the Ao Nagas. Converts were trained in behaving differently from their non-christian forefathers and were also encouraged to wear western clothing as a symbol for their social transformation. The individuals shown on the photograph can be easily assigned the different roles they had in this framework: their level of transformation to the new order is not only inscribed in their clothing but in their overall bodily hexis. The above examples point out how individuals shown in early drawings and photographs can be analysed to uncover elements of a specific habitus or hexis, linked to both the photographed and the photographers. Concerning the visual representation of the Nagas and their ‘cultural capital’ during that early period, the question must be raised, on which side of the ethnographic or photographic lens which distinguishable elements of this visual narrative were created and what role the pictured people had in this process (Simpson 2018, 74f). Most of the early sources were geared towards a European or American audience; their dissemination remained highly limited (Simpson 2018:84f).

Fig. 1.3 ‘Mr. and Mrs. Clark on the porch of a house with Naga people’. Photograph attributed to James Buckingham, c. 1880. (PRM Acc. No. 1998.219.3.3)

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Imagery After the Turn of the Century By the turn of the century, a second phase in the visual representation of the Nagas began. The British administration had well settled into the Naga areas and some of the main monographs on the Nagas were written. Photography had largely taken over from drawing, even though sketches were used alongside in most publications. Photographic technology was on the verge of becoming truly mobile, even though low-light and short exposure time photography possibilities were still limited. Naga society was still characterized by fundamental transformations which broke up traditional elements of habitus. However, and this becomes visible in the imagery of the time, the new networks and redefined status and social roles become an integral part of everyday life for the Nagas. Accepting the forcefully implemented roles, became a prerequisite for a peaceful co-existence with the new rulers. Internalizing the imposed other and its habitus was integrated into one’s own cultural capital, reproduced, and strengthened over time. This ‘hybrid’—to follow Latour (1993) — was strongly based on the social positioning implemented by the British rulers, which drew validity from its constant visual and objectified self-replication. The imagery created by outsiders had become an active agent in the re-assemblage of the habitus of the Nagas. The visual production of this early twentieth century period was characterized by the two anthropologist-administrators John Henry Hutton and James Philip Mills and their monographs. Included in the scientific monographs were photographs and pencil drawings by the authors. Dissemination was again highly limited, as the volumes were mainly geared at a western, academic readership. Accompanying the images, a different kind of habitus entered the visual narrative on both sides of the lens. The social meaning of the objects displayed, the importance of rituals, and the distinct aesthetics of Naga culture started to shine through—because they were noticed and respected by the photographers. The hexis of the photographed people reflected this. Heads were held high and the individuality of the pictured became part of the composition. The photographed and the photographers faced each other as human beings (Cp. Fig. 1.4).

Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf In the 1930ies, a new generation of ethnographers entered the Naga Hills. Many of them were trained anthropologists and only indirectly linked to the British administration, let alone the military. They brought along new scientific ideas and new photographic technologies. Researchers started to move away from all-encompassing monographs with an evolutionist approach towards atmospheric travel accounts or publications on specialized topics on the anthropological level. Photography had been technologically developed to such an extent that it had become cheaper and

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Fig. 1.4 ‘Portrait of Lokok and his daughter’. Ao Naga, Ungma village. 1926. Photograph by J.P. Mills (SOAS Acc. No. PP MS 58/02/K/07)

easier to handle; single photographic collections now soon encompassed thousands of images. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf surely is the anthropologist whose name is most closely associated with the Nagas at the time and whose photographic archive left— through its wide publishing—the most enduring impression of the visuality of the Nagas until today. The trained anthropologist visited Naga areas during a 13-month research visit in 1936/37. For most of the time, he lived among the Konyak Nagas in the village of Wakching, which is also at the centre of his book Die Nackten Nagas (eng. The Naked Nagas, von Fürer-Haimendorf 1939). This non-academic account of his field visit became a German-language bestseller after being published in 1939. It was translated into various languages and reprinted several times. The extensive photographic archive of Fürer-Haimendorf’s Naga materials contains more than 3,600 images on a multitude of topics. Looking at the references in the photographs and aligning them to his diaries, notebooks, object collections and vice versa, it becomes clear that his photography was more than just a loose collection of occasionally made images, but a methodology. Together with the written materials, photographs actually acted as a common thread, leading through all of his research and knowledge of the Nagas.

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His short stay in London strongly influenced Fürer-Haimendorf where he had attended seminars of Bronislaw Malinowski and learned about the new form of ‘participant-observation’. This implied living among the people to be studied and joining them in their work in the fields, their hunting and fishing trips, and taking part in their festivals and feasts. While being interested in the comparative and theoretical problems of anthropology, he also wished to understand what it must feel like to live in a Naga village in order to be able to convey that knowledge to a European audience by translating it into photographs and words. Fürer-Haimendorf’s use of images in addition to that came very close to the methodology Bourdieu was to develop later—which laid the base for his theoretical concept of habitus and hexis. But did Fürer-Haimendorf’s methods already contain elements of Reflexive Anthropology, as Bourdieu and Wacquant formulated it in 1992? In it, working with the habitus of a researched society became somewhat formulated as a methodology rather than as a theory. Field research was to become embodied, with a close reflection of one’s own embodiment within the habitus of the researched group. Looking at FürerHaimendorf’s photographs and their close linkage to his diaries, notebooks, and publications, it becomes clear that the power relations between photographer and the photographed had been further pushed into the background. Nonetheless, they continued to remain visible. Fürer-Haimendorf certainly proved capable of transforming his own habitus in ways to adapt it to the expectations of the British administrators. Having grown up in an aristocratic surrounding, well-trained at socializing, Fürer-Haimendorf soon became ‘one of the ethnographer-administrators’ rather than ‘one of the boys’ as Wacquant (2010) would have put it. His photography reflects these close relations— in its motives but also the covered topics and research areas. Through his good relations, he gained access to areas and topics that were not reflecting the social reality in the administered areas anymore but rather referred to elements of Naga culture that had been discontinued by order of the British. Fürer-Haimendorf’s main focus on headhunting and his participation in a punitive expedition to un-administered areas probably act as the best example to illustrate this. Fürer-Haimendorf not only had the ability to picture the spectacular culture of the Naga with his great sense of aesthetic composition but also succeeded in writing a bestselling book that spread his imagery among a wide European audience. In most of Fürer-Haimendorf’s photographs, his artistic photography talent and curiosity to experiment with the given technology become obvious. The longer he stayed in the field, the more he started to try out new angles and perspectives, deliberately staging scenes in order to adapt the output to the expectations of an envisaged ‘audience’. The ‘traditional’ habitus of the Nagas—as understood by Fürer-Haimendorf—was reinforced through the composition of the images (Fig. 1.5).1 Through their wide dissemination, Fürer-Haimendorf’s photography strongly shaped the image the western public had of the Nagas. Some of his images are today copied onto souvenirs from Nagaland or reappear in coffee table books. Some of the most influential photographs in this context are certainly the ones he published 1 For

a detailed analysis Fürer-Haimendorf’s photography, see von Stockhausen 2014.

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Fig. 1.5 Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf photographing Konyak dancers. Wakching village, 24th April 1937. Photograph by Hans-Eberhard Kauffmann (Kauffmann Archive, LMU Munich, Photo No. 42–08)

in The Naked Nagas (1939), a publication which he himself later described as being ‘naive and excessively romantic’ and ‘not in the nature of an academic study of one particular Naga tribe’, but reflecting the impression of a western observer exposed for the first time to close contact with an Indian tribal people ‘persisting in an archaic way of life’ (von Fürer-Haimendorf 1976, Preface). These ‘impressions’ had obviously fascinated him to an extent that he decided to photographically ‘translate’ his romantic view of the culture of the Nagas, to make it accessible and comprehensible to a European audience. Many of his photographic captures seem spontaneous and only reveal to have been staged after contextual research on his collection. The alleged spontaneity, the skillful light manipulations in dark rooms, and specific perspectives endow many images with an aura of authenticity and ethnographic intimacy, which was only assessed as dishonest, or even dangerous, after World War II. In the time between the wars, photography still had the air of objectivity, even though the construction of effect was employed consciously by the photographers of the time. The photographic equipment Fürer-Haimendorf carried with him during his Naga research in 1936/37 was developed much further than the cameras his predecessors J.H. Hutton or J.P. Mills had to work with. Light sensitivity of the photographic films had been developed to such an extent that a tripod was no longer necessary under normal daylight conditions, and the exposure time could even be short enough to freeze movements of people dancing or jumping into the air. In low-light conditions, photography was difficult but still possible, as many photographs in the collection

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show. Photography became less obtrusive and therefore blended more adequately into the new method of participant observation. Another issue becomes visible when we look at the sheer number of images shot. It becomes evident that through the uncomplicated and ever-ready technology, the personal fascination and excitement of the photographer was often directly translated into a higher frequency of photographs. The exposed films were sent to a studio in Calcutta where they were professionally developed and returned to the Naga Hills. Due to the well-organized postal services in the British administered areas, Fürer-Haimendorf had the possibility of checking the quality of his work shortly after he had taken the photographs and thus could learn from mistakes he may have made. For the first time the pictured individuals could see the images taken of them within a short period of time and could adapt their own bodily hexis accordingly when pictured again. This process of reflecting on one’s own visual representation is especially visible in photographs Fürer-Haimendorf made to showcase the ‘use’ of objects he collected for the Ethnographic Museum in Vienna (Fig. 1.6). One example is a set of images showing a so-called mock fight. Repeated over and over again, the situation was reproduced until both the photographer and the photographed were happy about it. The atmosphere of the situation, FürerHaimendorf described as cheerful. Some images (i.e. Fig. 1.7) even include a spear thrown in the wrong direction. Possibly planned as an experimental view— photographed a moment too early (the thrower has not pulled his arm back)—or just

Fig. 1.6 Konyak dancers standing in a row on a large rock. Near Hungphoi village, 1937. (SOAS Archive Acc. No. PPMS19_6_NAGA_1968, 067_21)

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Fig. 1.7 Two Konyak men staging a mock fight for the ethnographer’s camera. One spear is being thrown with the pointed end facing the thrower. Wakching, 1st May 1937. (SOAS Archive Acc. No. PP MS 19_6_NAGA_2695, 088/34)

an action that was performed to trigger laughter when the printed image was to return after a few days.

Hans-Eberhard Kauffmann At the same time as Fürer-Haimendorf, the German anthropologist Hans-Eberhard Kauffmann (1899–1986) conducted lengthier field research in the Naga Hills. During his field stay, he also spent several weeks together with Fürer-Haimendorf in the Konyak areas. Similar to Fürer-Haimendorf, Kauffmann documented his 12 months of travel in great detail, not only on 1400 pages of diary—unfortunately lost today– but also with sound recordings and films, a collection of objects from the Naga Hills, and more than 2,100 photographs. For Kauffmann, photography had great significance both as a story-telling medium that he used in the style of a diary and as a scientific method to document the cultures he was studying. Unlike Fürer-Haimendorf, Kauffmann also theoretically thought about visual methods at an early stage of his research (Kauffmann no year: 7). Methodically he seems to have been even more systematic in his use of photography than Fürer-Haimendorf, by tagging every photograph with ethnographic metadata in separate lists, and documenting the full names of the people portrayed.

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Fig. 1.8 ‘Thangkholal, Thado-Kuki und ein Kachari’. Photographer unknown. Kohima, Spring 1937 (Kauffmann Archive, LMU Munich, Photo No. 32–26)

His relation with Fürer-Haimendorf, whose photography was sometimes very staged, must have posed a dilemma to Kauffmann, who strongly pleaded for a ‘scientific’ use of the medium (Kauffmann 1937:166f). Maybe it was even FürerHaimendorf’s ‘aesthetic’ approach to photography that actually drove Kauffmann in the opposite direction of following a strictly ‘scientific’ approach in his photographic practice. Kauffmann wanted to educate people about the cultures and not repeat the stereotypes present in the viewers’ minds and in many of the books containing photographs of indigenous people (Kauffmann 1937, 166f). He tried to follow his principles in his own photographic work but at times seems to have succumbed to the attractiveness of the subject. Unfortunately, few of Kauffmann’s images were ever published.2 The Kauffmann collection contains a unique group of photographs done by his Naga assistants, to whom Kauffmann regularly borrowed his photographic equipment. While both Fürer-Haimendorf and Kauffmann gave the camera at times into the hands of their Naga friends and helpers, the resulting photographs were not published in any of the later publications. The setting of these photographs allows a rare insight into the ‘staging’ of ‘habitus’ from an indigenous perspective. The images show young men photographing each other on neatly cut grass in the garden of the administrative bungalow (Fig. 1.8). They sit on garden benches in western 2 For

a detailed analysis of Kauffmann’s photography, see von Stockhausen 2014.

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clothing, stand on a tennis court or gather their friends for group pictures. The individuals shown in these photographs imitate the privileged habitus of the British. In the captured moments, the power relations within the giant ‘social laboratory’, how Bourdieu would have termed it, seem to be reversed or equalized.

Photography After World War II and in the New Millenium After World War II and the independence of India in 1947, only a few anthropologists and photographers were allowed to enter the Naga Hills. Among the few that produced a larger number of images, we find Ursula Graham Bower (later Betts), W.G. and Mildred Archer, Verrier Elwin, Milada Ganguli, or the photo Journalist Sunil Janah. Even though some of their photographs were also shown in their publications, they were hardly of much impact in the sense of adding new elements to the existing visual grammar. Its constitutive elements had already been consolidated through continuous repetition at that point of time. The early second millennium saw a number of coffee table books on the Nagas. While some authors try to break the exoticisms of the genre effectively, most authors stick closely to it. The dominant visual representation of the Naga continues to edit out contemporary modernity; many photographs ‘present an image of the Nagas that depicts the notion of the “noble savage” in traditional regalia, with minimal “modern influences,” without the interference of the outsider’s photographic gaze’ (Longkumer 2015:53). They visually quote the aesthetics of earlier photographers, especially Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, and adhere to a globalized visual grammar in the photographic representation of people perceived as ‘tribal’. Since the turn of the millennium, Nagaland and other states of Northeast India were gradually opened up to visitors. Meanwhile, the technology of photography has undergone a major development again. Digital photography allowed thousands of images to be created and published within a very short time period. What can be found on image-based websites like Pinterest, Flickr, and Instagram largely reproduces the exotic style introduced by Fürer-Haimendorf and carried on by the coffee table books. Analysing the images created by contemporary Naga photographers, it becomes apparent that their work goes a lot further than the romantic images of the phototourists present during the festivals. Analogue to the local photographers in other areas of the Northeast (Pachuau and van Schendel 2015), these locally produced images strongly contest the outsider’s imaginations, opposing the derogatory assumption that the Naga are isolated and ‘backward’. However, looking at the visual material widely published, it is evident that the romantic exoticism and the stereotypes about Naga culture suggested by many of the European sources have found their way into the self-perception of the Nagas when it comes to displaying a specific ‘ethnic’ or ‘Naga’ identity. This also becomes visible in the re-appearance of ‘traditional’ dress in the public sphere: While during the 1980ies, few traditional clothes were visible in the streets of urban Nagaland, this has changed considerably today. Political and economic actors have identified

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the ‘visuality’ and ‘materiality’ of a perceived habitus as a ‘unique selling point’ of a ‘glocal’ identity, cementing the grammar of a globalized ‘visual’ economy.

Conclusion For more than 150 years, individuals from varying contexts visited the Nagas and created their personal textual and visual representations of them. Travel writers had a different interest than military administrators; social activists and museum curators saw other things than ethnographers interested in oral traditions; German researchers came from another scientific background than their British colleagues. The relations and expectations between the photographers and the photographed changed with every new setting. Habitus and hexis of the photographers and the photographed transformed over time, continuously adapting to changes in political and social reality. Remarkably, of all the visual sources produced, it was the images of the 1930s, of the time between the wars, which seemingly had the strongest impact on the (visual) image of the Nagas in the long run. For western audiences and the Nagas themselves alike. The mass production of images and their wide distribution seems to be the key to this development. Certain persisting visualizations of embodied behaviour and the ‘exotic’ were established in these years and strengthened through continuous repetition and dissemination. Michael Oppitz notes that the surplus value of the image generates the effect of the exotic, because the image does not merely show the ‘other’ as it is, but leaves room for interpretation and projection: ‘As a matter of fact the foreign matter— object or person—is not exotic in any sense; it is rather the attitude towards it, the degree of how ‘foreign’ it is regarded’ (Oppitz 1989, 24f). The romantic wilds that were becoming more and more visible in the Naga photographs of the 1930ies and onwards would in Oppitz’ view be a mirror of what western society needed at that point of time. Of among all photographers, one of the largest impacts on the visual representation and the self-perception of the Nagas—in the West and in Nagaland itself—surely came from Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf. His field research coincided with new photographic technologies and dissemination practices, which resulted in his work becoming paradigmatic for a ‘globalized’ image of the Nagas. Visually cited in coffee table books until today, the hexis captured in his images continues to be re-enacted in the context of local festivals. All of the actors in this ‘historic’ setting brought their individual bags full of expectations: how habitus was portrayed or displayed. As transformation of cultural capital was always strongly linked to politics of power and representation, and its visual translation to the perspective of the viewer, we can often find seemingly oppositional displays of habitus and hexis within close proximity—to be explained only if one analyses the individual motives of the person doing the photograph and the

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person that is photographed. On the Hornbill festival today, we can therefore find— side-by-side—the re-enacting of the exotic wild next to off-road car races and rock contests. The analysis of these developments also shows that cultural capital has become less attached to social groups than individuals and economic and political markets. But is this still habitus in the sense of subconsciously ‘embodied’ social structure? Yes and No. Pierre Bourdieu noticed something similar in his Algerian case. In 1964 he stated that the brutal economic changes in the society had led to an abandoning of one’s own responsibilities towards the larger group: ‘Now there is no hesitation before taking up any expedient, any ruse, in order to live […] There is no longer any obstacle to the individualism that is part and parcel of the modern economy: within large groupings, or large masses of isolated individuals, each is protected by his or her anonymity. Each feels responsible for himself or herself, but for himself or herself alone’ (Bourdieu and Sayad 1964, 86). In my analysis of motives and visual concepts that have been introduced throughout the ‘visual history’ of the Nagas, I employed the framework of Bourdieu’s habitus concept and hexis as ‘embodied behavior’. I analysed different photographs for specific (sometimes unconscious) behaviors and motivations that could be interpreted as elements of hexis: on both sides of the photographic lens. I suggested that composition strategies, the preference for certain motives, and the manner of sharing, had a great impact on ‘what happens when certain things are made more visible than the others’.

References Bourdieu, P. (1991). Towards a sociology of photography. Visual Anthropology Review, 7(1), 129– 133 Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P., & Abdelmalek, S. (1964). Le déracinement. La crise de l’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. (1992). Réponses: Pour une anthropologie réflexive. Seuil. Dalton, E. (1872). Descriptive ethnology of Bengal. Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing. Falconer, J. (1984). Ethnographical photography in India, 1850–1900. Photographic Collector, 5(1), 16–46 Gell, A. (1998). Art and agency: An anthropological theory. Clarendon. Horvat, E. M., & Davis, J. E. (2011). Schools as sites for transformation: exploring the contribution of habitus. Youth & Society, 43(1), 142–170 Jacobs, J. (2012) [1990]. The Nagas: Hill Peoples of Northeast India: Society, Culture and the Colonial Encounter. Revised edition. London: Edition Hansjörg Mayer. Jo, H. (2013). Habitus transformation: immigrant mother’s cultural translation of educational strategies in Korea. Asia-Pacific Education, Language Minorities and Migration (ELMM) Network Working Paper Series 7. Kauffmann, H.-E. (1937). Deutsche Naga-Hills Expedition 1936/7 (1. Bericht). Ethnologischer Anzeiger, IV (4), 162–167.

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Kauffmann, H.-E. No year. Soll der Völkerkundler filmen? [‘Should the anthropologist do filming?’]. Lecture Manuscript. Kauffmann Archive Acc. No. VoJ 4, Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU), Munich. King, A. (2000). Thinking with bourdieu against bourdieu: A “Practical” critique of the habitus. Sociological Theory, 18(3), 417–433 Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford University Press. Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s Hope. Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Harvard University Press. Levin, D. M. (1993). Modernity and the hegemony of vision. University of California Press. Longkumer, A. (2015). ‘As our ancestors once lived’: Representation, performance and constructing a national culture amongst the Nagas of India. Himalaya, 35(1), 10:51–64. Mauss, M. (1935). Les techniques du corps. Journal de psychologie normal et pathologique AnnCe XXXII: 271–93. Oppitz, M. (1989). Kunst der Genauigkeit Wort und Bild in der Ethnographie. Trickster. Pachuau, J. L. K., & van Schendel, W. (2015). The camera as witness: A social history of Mizoram, Northeast India. Cambridge University Press. Pinney, C. (2008). The coming of photography in India. The British Library. Pinney, C. (1990). Colonial anthropology in the ‘Laboratory of Mankind.’ In C. A. Bayly (Ed.), The Raj: India and the British 1600–1947. (pp. 252–263). National Portrait Gallery. Schultheis, F., et al. (2012). Pierre Bourdieu and Algeria: An elective affinity. In F. Schultheis (Ed.), Picturing Algeria, Pierre Bourdieu. (pp. 1–6). Columbia University Press. Scollon, S. (2003). Political and somatic alignment: Habitus, ideology, and social practice. In G. Weiss & R. Wodak (Eds.), Critical discourse analysis: Theory and interdisciplinarity. (pp. 167– 198). Palgrave MacMillan. Simpson, T. (2018). A fragmented gaze: Depictions of frontier tribes and the beginnings of colonial anthropology. In A. Motrescu-Mayes & M. Banks (Eds.), Visual histories of South Asia. (pp. 73– 92). Primus Books. Sweetman, P. (2009). Revealing habitus, illuminating practice: Bourdieu, photography and visual methods. The Sociological Review, 57(3), 491–511 Tarr, M.A., Stuart, H.B. (2008). Through the eye of time: Photographs of Arunachal Pradesh, 1859–2006. Leiden: Brill. von Fürer-Haimendorf, C. (1976). Return to the Naked Nagas: An Anthropologist’s View of Nagaland, 1936–1970. New Delhi: Vikas. von Fürer-Haimendorf, C. (1939). The Naked Nagas: Head-Hunters of Assam in Peace and War. Methuen & Co. von Stockhausen, A. (2014). Imag(in)ing the Nagas: The pictorial Ethnography of Hans-Eberhard Kauffmann and Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf . Arnoldsche. Wacquant, L. (2004). Body and soul: Notebooks of an apprentice boxer. Oxford University Press. Wacquant, L. (2010). Leben für den Ring: Boxen im amerikanischen Ghetto. UVK Verlagsgesellschaft. Watson, J. F., & Kayne, J. W. (1868). The people of India. India Museum. West, A. (2011). Museums, colonialism and identity: A history of Naga collections in Britain. The Horniman Museum and Gardens. Woodthorpe, R. G. (1882). Notes on the wild tribes inhabiting the so-called Naga Hills, on our North-east frontier of India. Part I. The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 11, 56–73

Alban von Stockhausen is an anthropologist and curator whose recent work focuses on the Greater Himalayan region, especially the shamanistic cultures of Eastern Nepal and the Naga tribes of Northeast India and Burma. He has curated and co-curated several exhibitions on South

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Asian and East Asian topics and was awarded a Ph.D. in Visual Anthropology by the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He worked in several international projects on ethnographic images and photographic archives. Among his research interests are the relations between ritual and landscape among the Rai of Eastern Nepal and various themes of material culture and visual anthropology. He is based in Bern, Switzerland where he works as curator for the ethnographic collection of Bernisches Historisches Museum. More information on Alban von Stockhausen’s work and current projects can be found online at https://www.stockhausen.ch.

Chapter 2

‘We Were the Others’: Visuality in Colonial Writings Avitoli G. Zhimo

Abstract The chapter seeks to engage with the representation and interpretation of images of the Naga tribes in colonial writings. The author seeks to explore the total lack of reflexivity while taking pictures of the ‘exotic’ tribes, based on her personal encounter with the same. Photographs from Hutton’s monograph were analysed, and photo-elicitation was attempted to bring out the nuance of colonial photography and representation of indigenous people. The chapter ends by affirming the importance of reflexivity and ethical visual methodology. Keywords Colonial photography · Photo-elicitation · Reflexivity · Ethics · Visual methodology · Naga

Anecdote from the ‘Others’ ‘People are coming; come to church adorn with traditional attires to be photographed’. It was 2001. I had just returned from Kohima to my hometown Zunheboto after successfully completing the undergraduate course in Anthropology. Before I could even clean up the dust from my clothes and recover from the long bumpy dusty road trip, I heard two women from my colony calling me with so much of urgency to hurry up. I was not very keen to climb up the highest hill where the church was located after a long journey. However, the women persuaded me to change my jeans and t-shirt and wear the traditional attire as the white people wanted to take photographs of the natives. They told me, ‘Since you are a graduate in Anthropology, you will be able to explain to them the significance and the symbolic aspects of our material culture’. Well, that got me. I borrowed those heavy necklaces of beads, bronze bangles and armlet, and scarlet headgear and earrings from my mother, draped myself in a traditional sarong, and walked uphill to the church with other girls who were also adorned in similar attires. All the girls adorned in traditional attire were lined up outside the church and waited for the patriarchs of the town to transport the white people to the church compound. Finally, a convoy of big A. G. Zhimo (B) Department of Anthropology, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. Nongbri and R. Bhargava (eds.), Materiality and Visuality in North East India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1970-0_2

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vehicles entered the church compound. The white people came out from the vehicles carrying big cameras. We were still standing in line waiting to be photographed and interviewed, and I was busy trying to recollect the symbolic aspects of our traditional attires. These white men observed us for quite some time and identified one girl with duskier colour from the long line and asked all of us to step back. They have found what they wanted to photograph. The rest can go home. I have never felt so humiliated. Suddenly it felt as though we were all lined up to be auctioned to the highest bidder only to be rejected; felt like a person with no value, no voice and no dignity. Since we were the ‘others’, eventually we were not worth interacting with; or was it just because we were girls and therefore, the older patriarchs will speak on our behalf. The twenty-first century has just begun, but late nineteenth century approach was still very much in use especially when it is about ‘white men’ coming to study the local people.

Construction of the ‘Other’ In 1898, Alfred Cort Haddon led an inter-disciplinary expedition to study the people of the Torres Straits Islands scientifically. The team was equipped with the latest scientific recording instruments. Haddon’s scientific project was concerned with the senses and wanted to prove a hypothesis of the relative significance of vision in civilised and primitive cultures. It was believed among civilised Europeans that the higher senses of sight and hearing are more important than the lower sense of taste, smell, and touch associated with animality. One task was to test the hypothesis that ‘primitive people would show a penchant for the lower or animal senses’ (Pink 2006). In one of the writings of classical anthropologist Tylor (1871), it was mentioned that animism characterises tribes, thus placing them very low in the scale of humanity. The ‘others’ were always the lowest order of humans. It is important to understand the process by which social anthropology established itself as a scientific discipline. At that time, the scientific approach to anthropology rejected the subjectivity of photograph and film to use visual metaphors—diagrams, grids, maps to objectify knowledge. It homogenised representational strategies that privileged visioncentred consumption of ethnographic experience, the narrative genre of the static ethnographic present, thereby excluding sensory experience. The first half of the twentieth century saw interwar years, economic depression, social unrest, and colonial expansion. Social anthropology was funded by virtue of its relationship with the colonial office (Pink 2006). Ardent fieldworkers like Bronislaw Malinowski took photographs to support ethnographic data and present them with written text. This kind of usage was more of evidence of ‘being there’. The photographs were merely documentary evidence and an aid to his scientific approach. In early anthropological writings, the photographs used tend to essentialise indigenous people as romantic savages, an unchanging people in an unchanging land. Photographs were used as a shortcut to give the readers a feel for the exotic, strange and distant cultures. This kind of tradition of using images continues till today. In the

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early part of the twentieth century, the Naga society was undergoing a transformation with the arrival of new administration and new-found faith. Yet, it was presented as a timeless and static society.

Colonial Writings and the Nagas I grew up listening to the elders who talked about Hutton sahib. In fact, for many Sumi, Hutton’s monograph The Sema Nagas1 is their ethnographic Bible. I was attending a case in a customary law court as part of my MPhil research way back in 2004; the case was about the right to become chief of a village that was being contested by the reigning chief. The latter held Hutton’s book as if it was the Bible itself and declared that even Hutton sahib has recorded his forefather’s lineage in the monograph. For many, the book was unquestionable, empirical, authentic and reliable. The natives are weary of the colonial representation, but the colonial monographs are taken as conclusive when it comes to matters of history, maps and lineage. I started looking at the monograph and its illustrations from a different perspective once I decided to become an anthropologist myself. The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century colonial administratorethnographers have taken pains of writing down the history of ‘tribes in transition’ ostensibly before the latter changed completely, or was it a daring adventure for them to record the exotic ‘others’ to affirm their superiority? Andrew West (2018) argued that the Nagas were not a political entity taken over at once by the British. In fact, the British were reluctant to annex the area as it had no obvious commercial value and they envisaged financial loss in its administration. Therefore, the extension of British control was a slow process. Over a period of time, administrators like J.H. Hutton, and J.P. Mills started writing about the Naga tribes. In ‘administrative literature’, material culture was emphasised a lot. Apart from that, the more obvious and unusual or exotic aspects of society such as headhunting and erection of megaliths dominated early writing. These exotic unusual aspects started gaining wider audience as articles began appearing in popular magazines by the 1920s. West (2018) opined that the Nagas seem to have fallen in the academic interest stakes with the emergence of social anthropology in 1930s. Early colonial writers were more concerned with the unusual aspects of Naga life such as headhunting and feasts of merit. Not much interest was seen in social structure and kinship, etc. Rather the unusual and exotic aspects seem central to comprehend the values and beliefs of Naga society. Description of appearance of various Naga groups in the monographs carried a tone of racial superiority and sexism of the writers. Here are few excerpts:

1 Hutton,

J.H. 1921. The Sema Nagas. London: Macmillan.

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A. G. Zhimo …In appearance, the average Sema is certainly inferior to the Angami. On the whole of shorter stature and darker complexion, he has a flatter nose, wider mouth, and his eyes even more often have the Mongoloid slope. His lips are thick and his ears, naturally rather prominent…. the men are comparatively tall and often of fine physique…. many have quite fair skins, and among the men good features are often to be met with sometimes even handsome ones. Among the women, however, ugliness is the rule…. the women generally are very short, squat, and horny-handed…(Hutton 1921a, 8) In appearance, the Angami2 Naga is by no means unprepossessing. His stature, tall for a hillsmen, is ordinarily about five feet nine….the young bucks are usually very fine, light, beautifully built, and powerful…The physical powers of the Angami are considerable….he has great powers of endurance….the Angami’s body is lithe and frequently very finely developed…the features of the Angami are mobile, pleasant and often decidedly handsome, while his voice is on the whole musical…the colour of the eye is always brown; lips are sometimes fine, sometimes very thick…the women, are seldom very pretty, and very quickly lose whatever looks they have, but their rather plain features and stumpy figures are more than redeemed by geniality of expression and attractive manner and tone of their voice. (Hutton 1921b, 20-1)

It is observed in the above-mentioned excerpts that Hutton gave such meticulous description of the handsomeness and fine-developed body of the male. However, when it comes to women, he abruptly stopped at ugliness. In fact, Hutton’s observation that ‘beards among men are about as rare as beauty is among women’ talks volume about his attitude towards Naga women.

Photo Analysis and Photo-Elicitation Few photographs from Hutton’s book ‘The Sema Nagas’ (1921a) have been chosen for analysis. Marcus Banks (2001) model is used to understand the relationship between the social context and image content. Banks rejected the idea that an image might be read as if it contained internal message that we may listen to. For him, to ‘read’ images, one must attend to both their external and internal narratives. The internal narrative is the image content or the story, and the external narrative is the social context that produced the image. In order to bring out the internal narrative, a photo-elicitation was attempted on a photograph of one topless young woman from the monograph. The same photograph was shown to few septuagenarians for their insights on the content. This is one creative use of the visual image in research, popularised by Collier and Collier (1986). Rather than merely attempting to interpret images, the researcher works with participants asking them to talk and think about how images were made and what they mean. This photo-elicitation method can effortlessly generate data without having to constantly maintain eye contact between 2 Angami

were the first group to encounter British dating back to 1832. Specifically, because of geographic location and Angami penchant for raiding the plains. So British had to control them. Angami Naga was written first but publishing was delayed due to WW1, so it got published with Sema Naga in 1921. They were the first tribe to be written extensively, so comparison with other tribes was expected. Sema description came about only in 1870s, while Angami description was there since the 1830s.

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the researcher and the participant, thus easing out awkwardness, if any. Visual images can also be used to create knowledge rather than ‘read’ visual media or use them as a tool to record or illustrate. As a Sumi (erstwhile Sema Naga in colonial writings) Naga woman myself, I do not wish for anybody to refer to us as ugly and stumpy. I contest the deliberate act of inserting a close-up picture of an old woman (Fig. 2.1) across the page where Hutton talked about ‘ugliness being the rule’ (Hutton 1921a, 8). Coming from a Victorian society, where girls were taught to reserve their delicate health for the expressed purpose of birthing healthy children, it is expected of him to judge Naga women based on his societal standard. Naga women were known to endure long hours of physical activity mainly contributing to the economy of the household. It is unfair to label a woman based on the standard of another altogether different culture. The photographs of ugly and horny-handed women (according to Hutton) were captured and published in his monograph. The representations of the photographs in his monograph were nothing short of romanticising the savages, the timeless unchanging society and the relics of pre-history. Apart from the close-up photograph to prove to his readers how ugliness is the rule, another topless photograph of a young woman (daughter of the Chief of Philimi) was also included in the monograph. Hutton admitted that

Fig. 2.1 A close-up photograph of a Sumi woman (Hutton 1921a)

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the daughter of the Chief of Philimi was afraid that something bad might happen to her soul when her photograph was captured (Hutton 1921a :200). She was satisfied only when she was given back the photograph. However, the topless photograph was reproduced in his monograph, allowing male gaze over the body of the young woman who was more apprehensive about her soul (Fig. 2.2). Reproduction of topless photographs of Naga women in monographs is not uncommon. One of the famous photographs of Christoph Von Fürer-Haimendorh was the photograph of a young Konyak Naga girl that was printed in The Naked Nagas. It was subtitled as ‘The Belle of Wakching’. The Konyak girl was pictured bare-breast, with her hands behind her head. Her pose was similar to popular erotic dancers of the 1930s. The young Konyak Naga girl was used as a symbol of nakedness and eroticism that was usually associated with ‘archaic’ tribes by the Europeans (Stockhausen 2014: 161). According to Stockhausen (2014), when the photographs of Hans-Eberhard Kauffmann were discovered in Munich new insights emerged as to the context of the making of this famous belle of Wakching. It was brought to light that Kauffmann had photographed the same scene from further away. It was evident that the Konyak girl’s ‘nakedness’ and her pose were staged by Fürer-Haimendorf.

Fig. 2.2 The Daughter of Chief of Philimi village (Hutton 1921a)

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From the images of Kaufmann, Stockhausen narrates a story of how the girl was actually wearing a shawl covering her upper body. Fürer-Haimendorf was seen talking to the girl and the latter was giggling. Finally, the girl removed her shawl and posed with her breast thrust out as suggested by Fürer-Haimendorf. Colonial photography with special reference to nude pictures of women can be interpreted in different ways.

The ‘Other’ Needs to Be Objectified in Order to Construct the ‘Self’ Engmann (2012) argued that the colonial photographs could be considered highly constructed documents that performed distinct discursive functions in the shaping of popular Victorian imagination, particularly the production, reproduction, and maintenance of European colonial forms of knowledge. She also asserted that the colonial photographs circulated extensively and trafficked indiscriminately are nothing but ‘tool of the empire’ and a technology of both representation and power. Engmann based her essay on the collection of photographs entitled ‘Fetish and Gold Coast’ held in the British National Archives in 1884. These images were of topless Asante women. The nude pictures of Asante women in British colonial photography are intimately entangled within a discourse that negotiates race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Engmann also pointed out that the whole process of capturing the nudity of Asante women is colonial, patriarchal, exoticised, eroticised, almost pornographic; it was also reflective of the personal sexual desires of British male colonial officials in nineteenth century. She states: Colonial photography was considered metaphor for an ‘objective truth’; in fact it was a celebration of the colonial project, serving to camouflage and maintain systems of power and domination inherent in colonial ideology and the colonial effort to categorize, define, and subordinate.

Engmaan argued that materiality coupled with nakedness is the marker of the ‘authentic primitive’. If nakedness is the marker of authentic primitive, then the colonial writers have rightly asserted and elevated their ‘self’ on the back of the ‘others’ primitiveness. While writing about the Konyak Naga, Fürer-Haimendorf used ‘The Naked Nagas’3 as the title, which in itself is problematic. However, there are arguments that it was not his intention to use the word naked Nagas, the publishers thought it will elicit more interest and, therefore, more sale. The monographs on Naga tribes with exotic photographs were an enterprise that included the European academia, publishers and colonial government keen to maintain its civilisational superiority. However, unlike Hutton and Mills, Fürer-Haimendorf was generous with his description of the Naga women trimmed of racial insensitivity, although he too participated in exoticising the Konyak Naga; in fact, Fürer-Haimendorf compared a certain Konyak woman to a beauty of Greek goddess. 3 Christoph

von Fürer-Haimendorf. 1939. The Naked Nagas. Methuen & Company, Limited.

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Interpretations and Contextualisation Hans Peter Hahn (2018), in his essay ‘on the circulation of colonial pictures’ argued that pictures from the colonial era could be ‘affront, shocking and they simply provoke rejection’. He further argued that it is imperative to focus on deconstruction, with the help of contextual information. Hahn contested the idea that photographs are objective documents. He argued that photographs are interpretations, to begin with. Susan Sontag (1980) also argued strongly against the claim of the objectivity of photographs. She added that ‘what we see in a picture is only a statement about a particular moment in time. It is not a window to the past, but an interpretation of the past’. The best way to understand these pictures is by expanding their contextualisation, which takes me back to the topless picture of a Sema Naga girl published by Hutton. Let me contextualise the said picture based on photo-elicitation. One of my key respondents, a septuagenarian, confirmed that women in most of the Naga tribes did not wear tops or blouse until the advent of the British. Their chest remained bare except for few strands of beads necklace. A woman’s chastity was well revered and expected of every woman who wish to marry a brave warrior or from the chieftain clan. The breast was an indicator as to whether one had breached her chastity or not. In the picture, a girl was seen wearing a knee-length skirt. Knees should be visible to everyone, for it also determines the kind of husband you will get. A man on the lookout for a wife will never marry a girl with knock knees as it was associated with clumsiness. From the above elicitation, it can be inferred that women in the photographs were the objects of colonial gaze and male gaze. Women were expected to be chaste, but the same courtesy was not extended to the men; their sexual prowess was celebrated. This was evident in the number of walking sticks pierced on his grave by his female paramours, and the number of tassels hanging down from his belt, signifying the number of women he had been with (Zhimo 2018, 158). Beth Newman (1997) discussed appropriation of power that is represented by visual metaphors of imperialism. Newman argued that the male gaze which was constructed by the western culture, is seen as a privilege of a male, and a means of relegating women to object(s). According to Newman, the imperial gaze is not different from the male gaze, as both assume a privileged status.

When the ‘Others’ Spoke Up A team comprising Post Graduate students in the Department of Anthropology, University of Delhi4 conducted annual fieldwork in a traditional Naga village in Manipur. It was my turn to take the students to the field. Sticking to official protocol and code of ethics in social research, we sent letters to the village authority three 4 M.Sc.

class of 2020, Department of Anthropology, University of Delhi conducted fieldwork in Ze-mnui (erstwhile Yangkhullen) village, Senapati district, Manipur from January 3–18, 2020.

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months in advance. The letters explained that we are interested in studying their culture from their perspective and how they want themselves to be represented. Though some anthropologists may disagree with me, I was convinced that I should go ahead with this plan. Finally, the village agreed to host us in the month of January 2020. I am a Naga, and this is a Naga village, but I belong to a Sumi (Sema) Naga group in Nagaland, which has little in common with the group under study except the headhunting culture of the past and erection of megaliths. My Naga identity also did not help much as I was always associated with the University where I am teaching. The first few days were more of negotiation. The village elders and youth club leaders were apprehensive that we may misquote them or misrepresent them. The village they live in is located on one of the steepest cliffs in Senapati district of Manipur. It is a treat to the eyes of a tourist and everyone who is looking for adventure. After discussing with them at length, they revealed that some white people had come to the village for research in the past. They used photography and videography to capture the people and the village. On seeing the result, the villagers were disheartened to notice that they have only captured the cracked heel of the elderly, the mucous-running nose of the infants and toddlers playing with pigs and dogs in their courtyard. The villagers felt that their village is much more than the visuals that were used to define them. I could not agree more. I assured the people that they could watch and validate our visual data before our departure. The images and films we captured were shown to the village elders and youth club. With their blessings, we wound up our fieldwork and returned to the university. After a month, the team organised a panel discussion on the fieldwork, where our research participants from the village were also invited. Every topic of research was discussed in detail and a short film based on our fieldwork was also screened. This perhaps is the beginning of collaborative fieldwork in Anthropology as far as Delhi University is concerned. It is time to change our approach to the study of indigenous communities, and stop taking them for granted as naïve, ignorant or innocent. There is a case of a telecommunication company which misused a picture of a ‘tribal’ girl for advertising their products. Kakughali (24F) and her folkdance troupe came to Delhi to participate in Republic Day celebration in 1997. A group photo of the folk dancers was taken by an unknown photographer. Little did she imagine that a giant telecommunication network would use that picture, and photoshop their brand’s cell phone into her palm, and make it look like she is using their cell phone to make a call (Fig. 2.3). One fine morning in 2004, the small town of Dimapur (in Nagaland) woke up to see her blown up image on big hoardings put up at many strategic locations in the town. Many friends and relatives started calling her up congratulating her on becoming a model. Some even asked how much she was paid for the project. She had no clue of the deception. After a few days, she received a ‘show cause notice’ from the Sumi Totimi Hoho (an apex body of Sumi women) for endorsing a commercial product for economic gains by wearing a Sumi Naga traditional attire. She was disturbed as nobody has ever approached her to endorse any commercial product. One of her sisters, a lawyer filed a case against the said telecommunication company and sued them for Rupees 75 lakh. The latter did not respond. After that the sisters approached the Guwahati High Court. The case went on for years. Finally, in 2012, the court found

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Fig. 2.3 The tempered photograph of Kakughali advertising a cellular service as seen on a hoarding (2004)

that the company had misused and tampered with the image for their own commercial gains. The court directed the company to pay a compensation of Rupees 25 lakh to Kakughali (Fig. 2.4).5 From the above case, we can see the callousness of the mainstream national company misusing the image of a tribal woman. Perhaps they must have assumed, what harm can it bring? After all, she is just a tribal girl; she will be thrilled to see herself on our hoardings. The twenty-first century Naga is not as naïve as represented. The progress in education and exposure to globalised world through digital platforms has equipped the once ‘others’. The ‘others’ have become conscious of their rights and found their voice. In social science research, especially in Anthropology, the classical approach has always been about the study of preliterate and primitive ‘others’ (Beattie’s Other Cultures, 1964), but the approaches are shifting. This also has to do with the emergence of auto ethnographers. Young budding scholars eager to conduct research 5 Photographs

used with permission. Courtesy: Zhekheli Zhimomi, Advocate, Gauhati High Court, Kohima Bench, Nagaland-797001.

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Fig. 2.4 The original photograph of Kakughali

within their own culture and present their findings based on how their own people want themselves to be represented. However, for an auto ethnographer, things are not easy. Acceptance is not easily found. If they present their findings as they see it, they are accused of glorifying their own culture; if they critique their culture, they are accused of towing the established line for acceptance by the dominant intellectual. Either way, I as an auto ethnographer, always keep in mind that things that seemed normal and proper are worth giving a second glance.

Final Word: Reflexivity Notwithstanding the inconsistencies and controversies surrounding the colonial monographs, their archiving effort has led to the preservation of the oral tradition of the Nagas of the nineteenth century. Even if their language carried a superior or racist or sexist tone, yet their works have significantly contributed to the history and

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culture of the Nagas. The usage of photographs had been done without much interpretation and contextualisation, for which the present chapter has been critical. The visual representation of the Nagas was problematic, as the colonial ethnographers were not reflexive about who was taking pictures and for what purpose. The twenty-first century social research requires more reflexivity and skilled methodology, especially while dealing with visual data. While using visual data, it is important to become more and more reflexive, thereby enhancing the quality of research (Emmison and Smith 2000). Ruby (2005) insists that to be ethical, visual research and representation ought to be collaborative, reflexive, and represent the informants’ voices. MacDougall (1970) has argued that visual data should take reflexivity to a deeper and integral level. A concept of ‘deep’ reflexivity requires us to reveal the position of the author in the very construction of the work. This means reflexivity alone is not enough. What is required is recognition of the constantly shifting position of the fieldworker as the research proceeds. Visuals have their own issues as far as ethics are concerned. There are rules in public places as to what extent one can record people visually. Ethnographers may obtain permission from the event organiser, or village chief, but the permission of all individuals in a setting may be difficult. Apart from that, one should think carefully about how images are disseminated or published. At the end, it all comes down to reducing harm to those represented. One should also be reminded that one can persuade people who may later regret their decision to be photographed or recorded. Some people might have agreed to be filmed or photographed because everyone else is doing it. It is important on the part of visual scholars to make the participants understand what consent means. They should also be told what will happen to their images after the event. It is suggested that image captured, and film recorded should also be sent back to the participants to give them some ownership of what was collected. Pink (2006) cautioned that sometimes the collaborators or publishers may want to utilise the image collected in ways that the researcher feels are unethical. Therefore, it is imperative to clarify ownership rights and how data should be used for a specific purpose only. Ethics ensures that you cause no pain or harm and be aware of your effects on the participants and your data. It is important to explain to the participants the purpose of one’s work and its outcome. Respecting the participants’ privacy is very crucial; offer them confidentiality and anonymity, in sensitive cases, use fictitious names to protect the participant’s identity if he/she desires. In visual footage, if the participant requests anonymity, his/her face can be blurred while editing or adjusting camera angles so that the face is not prominent. At the end of one’s research, it is accountable on his/her part to hand over a copy of any academic output in the form of photocopies of articles or digital files to the participants. This kind of exchange is possible now in this digital age. In India, many academic bodies and universities have come up with a code of ethics. Perhaps researchers may want to practice them in real-time fieldwork, especially while studying indigenous communities or marginalised communities.

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References Banks, M. (2001). Visual methods in social research. Sage. Beattie, J. (1964). Other cultures. The Free Press. Collier, J., & Collier, M. (1986). Visual anthropology: Photography as a research method. University of New Mexico Press. Emmison, M., & Smith, P. (2000). Researching the visual. Sage. Engmann, R. A. A. (2012). Under imperial eyes, black bodies, buttocks, and breasts: British colonial photography and Asante ‘Fetish Girls.’ African Arts, 45(2), 46–57 Hahn, H. P. (2018). On the circulation of colonial pictures: Polyphony and fragmentation Stefanie Michels. Transcript Verlag. Hutton, J. H. (1921a). The Sema Nagas. Macmillian. Hutton, J. H. (1921b). The Angami Nagas. Macmillian. MacDougall, D. (1970). Prospects of the ethnographic film. Film Quarterly., 23(2), 16–30 Newman, B. (1997). ‘The situation of the looker-on’: Gender, Narration, and Gaze in Wuthering Heights. PMLA 105 (1990): 1029–41. In R. R. Warhol & D. P. Herndl (Eds.),Rpt. in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, Rev. ed. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP. Pink, S. (2006). The future of visual anthropology. Routledge. Ruby, J. (2005). The last 20 years of visual anthropology- a critical review. Visual Studies, 20(2), 159–170 Sontag, S. (1980). On photography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Tylor, E. B. (1871). Primitive culture. John Murray. Von Stockhausen, A. (2014). Imag(in)ing the Nagas: The pictorial ethnography of Hans Eberhard Kauffman and Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf . Arnoldsche Art Publishers. Von Fürer-Haimendorf, C. (1939). The Naked Nagas. Methuen & Company, Limited Zhimo, A. G. (2018). Customary laws, patriarchy and gender relations in contemporary Sumi Naga Society. In M. C. Behera (Ed.), Revisiting Tribal Studies: A Glimpse after Hundred Years. Jaipur: Rawat Publications.

Avitoli G. Zhimo is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Delhi. She received her Master’s degree, M.Phil degree and Ph.D. from the University of Delhi. Her areas of interest are Visual Anthropology, Anthropology of Law, and Tribal Studies. She had worked extensively among the Naga tribes exploring the politics of conversion and the dynamics of customary law with special reference to gender relations. Her research papers had been published in reputed peer-reviewed journals like Indian Anthropologist, Economic and Political Weekly, and Sage’s Social Change. She is currently holding the position of Secretary-cum-Treasurer in Indian Anthropological Association.

Chapter 3

Conversation Pieces: How Digital Technologies might Reinvigorate and reveal the Social Lives of Objects Alison Kahn and Catriona Child

Abstract Revisiting Foucault’s analysis of power-knowledge relationships, we argue that the European ethnographic museum remains the locus of a distorted set of relationships that embody the continuing inequalities between the exhibitor and the exhibited. In this chapter, the authenticity of the postcolonial agenda, as performed in the public gallery, is questioned as we ask whether the European ethnographic museum has only the semblance of an enlightened approach to museum display. In light of the neo-politicisation of the colonial body, we advocate a revised approach that reminds us of the role of artefactual histories and their function in understanding complex cultural pasts. Here, we offer a methodology that embraces the use of digital technologies; we trace the routes of selected Naga artefacts from European ethnographic museums to Nagaland and back again, exchanging knowledge and collecting new voices and gleaning fresh perspectives on European collections from source communities. Through recording and questioning the aesthetic responses and notions of authenticity gathered through collaborative and participatory field work, we propose a methodology for the future of ethnographic museums—The Museum of the Invisible. This project applies emerging techniques of augmented technology, currently being used to train astronauts for missions in space, to the museum physical and virtual exhibition space. Our research focuses on objects as biographical entities, as conveyers of agency, as products of a market-based economy and purveyors of hidden cultural knowledge. Keywords Digital technologies · Ethnographic museums · Source communities · Audio-visual holograms · Cross-cultural dialogue · Authenticity · Discourses · Multidimensional · Loci · Power relations · Postcolonialism · Decolonisation · Representation · Histories · Emerging voices A. Kahn (B) Director Cultural Heritage, Education and AI Think Tank; Visiting Fellow in Digital Learning Systems and Tutorial Fellow in Museum Anthropology, SDS-Group (Research); Loughborough University; Stanford University (CA) Overseas Program, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] C. Child The Kohima Institute, Kohima, Nagaland, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. Nongbri and R. Bhargava (eds.), Materiality and Visuality in North East India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1970-0_3

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Introduction ‘the questioning of the document […] the document was always treated as the language of a voice since reduced to silence, it’s fragile, but possibly decipherable trace. Now through a mutation […] history has altered its position in relation to the document […] the document, then, is no longer for history an inert material through which it tries to reconstitute what men have done or said, the events of which only the trace remains; history is now trying to define within the documentary material itself unities, totalities, series, relations’ (Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge 1969).

It has been recorded that Foucault’s provocative reckoning with the materiality of power within the Western psyche was influenced in part by Nietzsche’s seminal essay, ‘On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life’ (1874); the latter recognising that history should not be engaged with as a set of facts from a disinterested past, but must be appreciated as having an instructive pertinence for all times. Foucault applied this line of questioning to many of the major institutions in Western society such as schools, prisons and hospitals and revealed a set of power relations that obscured a false sense of wisdom and enlightenment; that is, we should not assume the present is better than the past or revel in an optimistic smugness about our times; we should rather pick up lessons from the storehouse of ideas that are scattered along the path of human history. Here, we apply Foucault’s approach to state institutions, to that of the modern European ethnographic museum, and adapt his use of the ‘medical gaze’ (Foucault 1975) to that of the European ‘curatorial gaze’. His objection to the over-medicalisation of illness as treated by the modern physician who, he claimed, ignored the person as an individual in an attempt to cure the organ, is analogous to the twenty-first century European curator, whose ‘curatorial gaze’ attempts to cure a display case of a colonial evil by taking away controversial objects, while ignoring the diverse set of relations to which objects and communities are connected both inside the physical museum and beyond; in both cases, opportunities for a deeper dialogue are missed. In this chapter, we propose a holistic methodological approach to the future of ethnographic collections. The Museum of the Invisible is a project we currently undertake that asks how emerging digital technologies might enhance our understanding and appreciation of cultural objects in public spaces. We propose a collaborative methodology to embrace research techniques that use digital film and photographic elicitation, augmented reality (A.R.) technology and Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). We explore a wider, multisensory engagement with objects and the communities they represent. Creating 3D holograms of living individuals from source communities brings a contemporary voice into the museum exhibit, one that embodies a rich mental landscape yet to be realised in current European ethnographic displays. This approach reveals the human experience of the individual living in the twenty-first century and offers an original insight into collections where object-histories are problematised. Furthermore, it provides the chance for researchers and community members to engage directly in a sustained dialogue. Our research includes discussions with Naga tribal communities, whose homeland spans the four states of Arunachal

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Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, and Nagaland in Northeast India, and who are also part of a wider global diaspora. To provide a historical context for an analysis of Naga material culture, its social reproduction, ideological dominance and continued relevance in European museums we look to the macrocosm of their history and attempt to construct pathways to objects to help frame future research around issues relating to objects as biographical entities, as conveyers of agency, as products of a marketbased economy and as purveyors of hidden cultural knowledge. We also address notions of the collected body as an agent of human experience that lives with but is apart from the products it creates in its personal, social, physical, and virtual worlds.

Source Communities Our individual personal relationships with friends and family members of several Naga ‘tribes’ that inhabit four states in Northeast India have highlighted the need to assist in creating sustainable links to European Naga collections. As a result of British colonial history, the Nagas have been subjected to ethnographic scrutiny since the early nineteenth century. Colonial officers, soldiers, explorers, surveyors, anthropologists, botanists, and various eccentrics have been fascinated by the tribal communities, whose traditional way of life attracted a mixture of curiosity, awe, fear, bewilderment, and often love in the hearts of the European traveller. Important collections made by Europeans during these early encounters with Naga tribes found their way into European museums. Still, unfortunately, only a fraction of the vast hoard can be displayed to the public. Very few of the artefacts have been commented on or contextualised by the Naga communities from where they originated. However, Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum and the Humboldt Museum in Berlin are taking steps to correct this. We are aware that the Nagas have a desire to see the objects produced by their ancestors. Indeed, there is empirical evidence for a deep hunger in the Naga communities for a reconnection with their history. Historical images presented in lectures or put up on social media evoke strong emotional reactions from young Nagas, who are greatly moved by images from their forefathers’ time. In the case of the Nagas, there are explanations for this beyond the human need to know one’s roots. A body of scholarship has shown how the Nagas have become separated from their past through major events in their recent history. One major factor in the cultural dislocation is the large-scale conversion of Nagas to Christianity in a movement that began in the nineteenth century and accelerated during the twentieth. Although the attitude of the Church is different now, the early missionaries regarded Naga cultural objects such as jewellery, war trophies and traditional dress, as ‘works of the devil’ and instructed that they should be destroyed. A second factor was the trauma caused by the protracted conflict with the Indian state, which has extended over more than sixty years and is one of the world’s longest-running conflicts. Lastly, there is the confusion caused by the Nagas’ troubled relationship with India. While young educated Nagas can readily list the twenty-nine states of India, they go to study or work in Indian cities only to be asked

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by equally well-educated ‘mainland Indians’, ‘Where or what is Nagaland?’ or they are subjected to various forms of racial discrimination. So, when members of various Naga groups state, ‘We do not necessarily want objects back—we want a voice in the museums that house our cultural past!’ we know that the true value of any museum collection is its connection with the authentic voices of the source community. Now a few generation gaps have already taken place after the collections were made and there is no way that either the present generation would know the exact context of the collected objects. (Kanungo 2014: 500). Objects are meaningless without a story, and the ethnographic archive is nothing without the human spirit. European collections need to be connected to the authentic voices behind the objects. In so doing, we may restart dialogues and rebuild relationships with the present-day communities to benefit all parties.

Who Owns Naga Heritage? One of the most pressing issues for contemporary guardians of ethnographic collections is whether to decolonise the museums that have held material culture for generations after geographical and political control has been released back to independent nations. Northeast India was caught up in the territorial ambition wanting to exercise political control over ‘their’ land in the nineteenth century, partially coming under the administrative control of the British. As Kanungo (2014) observes: It was perhaps a coincidence (if deliberate, we wouldn’t know till detailed research) that the Naga Hills were exposed to the western world, when the focus was on study of anthropology, ancient knowledge systems and collections of ethnological museum objects, and within no time it became the focal area for ethnological collections for museums across the western world. (488)

Studies proliferated through Europe as the Nagas became a source of interest for British administrators and the military personnel, especially between the world wars, and during the Second World War, when the administrative centre, Kohima, became a strategic point of defence against the Japanese invasion of India. The Battle of Kohima (1944) retains a significant place in Naga cultural memory, and many still commemorate the lives of the combined British, Indian, and Naga forces that held Kohima in a heroic war effort.1 The region had been documented by European travellers, administrators, missionaries and scholars since the mid-nineteenth century, when the first administrative headquarters was established in Dimapur in 1848 (Elwin 1969, 3). Kanungo’s thorough study of the whereabouts of some of the most prominent museum collections reveals a vast stockpile in European national museums, from whence expeditions abounded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from

1 For

an extensive account of this battle, see Keane 2011.

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countries such as Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the United States of America, and the United Kingdom (Kanungo 2014, 488).2 Notable among these are J.H. Hutton and J.P. Mills’ collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, which include artefacts collected from the Zeme, Angami, Ao, Sema and Konyak communities in the early to mid-twentieth century. Hutton and Mills were British colonial administrators posted in the Naga Hills in the first half of the twentieth century. Often the administrative officers, military personnel and missionary personnel became collectors for museums in both official and unofficial capacities.

Combined/Collaborative Methodologies The Museum of the Invisible seeks several outcomes: firstly, to trace the routes of selected Naga artefacts digitally from European ethnographic museums to Nagaland and back again in order to contribute to Naga online archives that are currently being established in India; secondly, to collect new voices from source communities and make them accessible on the Internet; and thirdly, to offer innovation in the museum exhibit by way of A.R (Augmented Reality) and A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) technologies to update the lens through which we see the Nagas in the twenty-first century, and to improve the way Naga communities are represented in Europe. The ultimate aim is to encourage a more nuanced understanding of the complexities involved in tribal-global identities and relationships. We will collaborate with European curators to create exhibitions about Naga life today as members of local, national and international communities; in this way, we encourage the curator to rethink the museum space as a living document and testament to the mutual influences that European and Naga cultures have had upon each other. To this end, we have been recording responses to European Naga collections of film, photography, and objects during extensive periods of collaborative and participatory fieldwork in India. We apply emerging techniques of digital communication that include film, social media, and augmented technology with the intention of 2 Kanungo’s

research shows the following expeditions from Germany: Bastian 1883 (in Naga Hills 1878–79), Ehlers 1894a, 1894b, 1896 (in Naga Hills three time between 1890, 1893, 1895), Scherman 1911 (in Naga Hills 1911); Austria: [(Haimendorf 1939, 1969, 1976 (in Naga Hills 1936–37, 1962, 1970) Trichy 1937 (in Naga Hills 1935); Switzerland: [(Kauffmann 1939, 1966 (in Naga Hills 1936–37); Paul Witz in Naga Hills 1938; America: (Vernay-Hopwood 1936). Britain: J.H. Hutton and J.P. Mills (both Deputy Commissioners of Naga Hills) together collected more than 5,000 objects for the Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford). K.J. Kiernan, who worked in the Indian Army between 1943 and 1948, collected objects that are now housed in the Horniman Museum, Forest Hill (London). More than 50,000 Naga objects are in the possession of forty-three public museums and private collections in the UK. In the Pitt-Rivers Museum alone, there are about 8,000 items, in the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology there are about 1,500 items, and in the British Museum there are about 1,000 items from the Naga Hills. Also, see Kunz and Joshi’s edited book published along with their exhibition in 2008 at the Museum der Kulturen Basel.Naga: a Forgotten Mountain Region Discovered : Christoph Merian Verlag, 2008

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redressing an imbalance in Western collections of tribal artefacts in which indigenous voices and context are largely absent. Our study is based on ongoing research with several Naga tribes based in Manipur, Assam, and Nagaland. We are eliciting responses from different generations of Nagas through the screening of digitised film footage and photographs taken throughout the twentieth century at workshops, meetings, and interviews led by Child and Kahn in Nagaland and the rest of India, and on social networking Internet sites since 2016. An example of the collaborative methodological approach is in the following case study. In the summer of 2019, Child screened a film taken by Ursula Graham Bower (1918–1986), a British colonial tourist who travelled to Northeast India during the 1930s and 1940s. Bower was an enthusiastic and gifted photographer and during her stay in the Naga area, she took more than two thousand black and white photographs. She procured a 16 mm movie camera and film stock and made a series of black and white and colour films, which are rare examples of moving images of ethnographic subjects from that period. Her footage, which Kahn has digitised, was used to elicit discussion and debate on objects and customs. Included in this rare footage is a fishing sequence in North Cachar in the 1940s, where at one point, a man climbs up to get a length of bamboo, taking quite a lot of trouble over the task. It is not immediately obvious how this relates to the fishing expedition. When Child showed the film, Lungreihingbe B. Riame, a 25-year old Zeme from Laisong was able to explain that the bamboo was used in a fishing technique called hekakinibe. This involves the following stages, which would have been quite difficult to film: (a) stones are thrown close to a pool in the river in such a way that the fish hide in holes in the tank. The Nagas already know where these hideouts are; (b) the most promising hole or holes are blocked with stones or other material while the Nagas go to cut the bamboo, which should be several inches in diameter. The bamboo is cut so it forms a pipe; (c) the blockage to the fish hideout is opened slightly and the bamboo pipe is inserted so it protrudes slightly above the water. A herbal substance to stun the fish is then poured into the pipe that goes down into the fish hideout. This information was captured in a lively debate and would be a fascinating addition to any exhibition relating to hunting and fishing in Nagaland. An example of a digital photo and film eliciting method was undertaken on a recent field trip to Nagaland in December 2019, when Kahn shared some digitised film footage with Zeme Nagas at the First Zeme Olympic games in Jalukie Village.3 It was particularly interesting to record an intergenerational commentary from the elders of the tribe and from young Naga filmmakers who were fascinated to see their ancestors captured on film. One primary teacher from Laisong Village was emotional at seeing the footage from his village and told us that his father and grandfather had met Ursula Graham Bower in the 1940s when she lived with their community. This 3 Alison

Kahn, co-author of this paper, produced a documentary film of the First Zeme Olympics, held in Jalukie Town, Nagaland, from the 10 to 17 December 2019. The filmmakers were a select group of young, amateur filmmakers, including Zeme from Nagaland, Manipur and Assam, Indians from Tamil Nadu and Kerala, and an Oxford DPhil student from California, USA. More information of the filmmakers and the film in progress can be found on the Oxford Documentary Film Institute website: https://www.odfi.co.uk.

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social connection to a recently digitised archive brought the film to life and added new contexts as details and personal stories were stimulated by viewing it with people who held personal connections to that otherwise remote space and time. The men’s house (morung) was commented upon by Daniel Hemang, a Zeme Naga elder. He told us that the wedding procession in the footage we showed occurred just after the matrimonial rites had been performed. We are using our combined fieldwork and archive experience, together with social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp, to make objects from European museums and informed digital archives accessible to all members of Naga communities as part of an education program to be disseminated through universities, museums and schools. The aim is to create a series of digital pathways between Naga European cultural heritage and source communities in India, and by doing so, to create a new digital contact zone.4 This digital contact zone will be positioned in the physical space of European and Indian museums and on the Internet, where emerging technologies will facilitate voices and 3D representations of present-day Nagas through audio-visual holograms of our informants from India and the Naga diaspora. All archives in European museums pertaining to tribal communities must be accessible via mobile technologies as this is often the only form available for remote communities. Our project proposes a method that links European cultural collections to source communities using emerging digital taxonomies that ensure open access to schools and universities, enabling a new generation to recapture their cultural heritage. As participant-observers of the digitisation process of the film, photograph and object archives of the Naga communities, we propose an investigation that attempts to reach the heart of the ethnographic museum’s dilemma of our time. How can cutting-edge technology such as A.R. and A.I. machine-learning help curators and educators create new forms of dialogue in museums? Is it possible to activate an incisive line of questioning about cultural objects that transcends geographical and cultural boundaries and moves towards a democratisation of access to the stories behind the objects? Metaphors of space and topography in digital technologies are acquiring increasing popularity in the arenas of knowledge transfer in schools, universities and museums. However, the proliferation of applications and tablet technology software packages barely touch the potential of the ontological exploration possible for research and teaching. Museum studies, methods and curatorship offer innovative possibilities for the production and consumption of digital information. Museum curatorial good practice stems from a history of tried and tested narratives that have continued to evolve in museum displays and exhibitions. Conservation of the archive offers a pertinent set of established ethics and practices that bring solutions to the 4 Pratt

introduced the concept of “the contact zone” in a 1991 keynote address to the Modern Language Association entitled “Arts of the Contact Zone”. She articulated, “I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they lived out in many parts of the world today” (Pratt 1991, 34). Clifford (1997) adopted this concept in his chapter “Museums as Contact Zones”.

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organisation of digital knowledge. We can learn from the many attempts at organising narratives in museum displays that form a well-documented set of histories of material cultural collecting and curating practice to consider the methodological consequences of realising an object’s agency and ‘the social relations in the vicinity of objects mediating social agency’ (Gell 1998, 43). The Museum of the Invisible project will use emerging technologies such as A.R. technology and A.I. machine-learning, which is currently being used to train astronauts for tasks in space, in museums. In the first phase of this project, we take digital images of a selection of objects, photographs and films to the Naga communities to promote discussion and create new knowledge for European museums. Since the inception of the Internet, we have multiple layers of audiences to consider. So, what are the practicalities of adapting museum narratives and applying good practice to the process? We can curate an ontological framework that sets up mechanisms for modelling a flexible relationship between image, objects and text for mobile, A.R. and A.I. learning machines. This has already been achieved in modelling activities for astronauts to use in simulation exercises for space expeditions. We are researching possible object-human interactions in A.I., which will set out a series of question-led possibilities for non-linear mappings between several sources of information about individual objects. This creates the potential for an active narrative by the user, who in turn can choose different pathways through the archive, such as image to object; object to text; moving image to moving image, etc. The combinations are multiple. There is also the opportunity to redefine the ways we ‘read’, ‘see’, ‘feel’, ‘smell’, and ‘taste’ objects, photographs, films, and text, and perhaps even more importantly, how we present material to different types of learners and to those with restricted hearing and sight. The relationship between the archive and the curator is a constantly mutating chain that is always influenced by changing technology, discourses of ownership, academic discipline, control of copyrights, politicisation of the subject/object, identity, and overwhelmingly the structures of power at large. We propose audio-visual holograms that would be seen by groups of visitors using A.R. glasses that would enable them to visit the galleries’ collections following a Museum Trail to seek out the holograms. At various points in the collections, the visitor will witness a ‘pop-up’ hologram of a Naga who would tell them stories and information about the object, updating the visitor with facts about any uses and changes since the time it was collected. For Nagas, there is more than the human need to ‘know and understand their history’. ‘A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots’. We are working backwards from field to museum finding objects the Nagas deem relevant, symbolic and useful. We elicit responses through collaborative data collection using audio, visual, corporeal, and textual mediums.

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Exhibition Curating exhibitions in physical spaces explores opportunities to connect the exhibit with the museum and gallery visitors in innovative ways while abiding by strict ethical and intellectual codes of propriety and property. The curator is always aware of the unequal power relationships between the exhibitor and the exhibited. Therein is a canon of literature and stories of how exhibitions have failed and succeeded over the last 400 years. Now in the digital space, we can curate ideas and material in ways that connect the user to one archive and many archives that do not rely only on internal links with the institution and its collections. Rather, they can display several archives from a host of sources to expand the perimeters of thought and interpretation. In the digital space, we can apply the many considerations relating to power for a cross-platform analysis and introduce a grid of perspectives that open up new and exciting ways to discover the stories and histories behind the exhibits. With the aid of material cultural analysis, we may reconsider the links between form and function of artefacts. We can learn a great deal from the history of museums and see how they have reinvented the relationships between the observer and the observed. Curatorship provides the vehicle of interpretation and translation. Technology does change society, and the way we use it impacts our way of interpreting the world. Indeed, technology does not expand the way we experience the world, and merely digitising material culture archives does not help us understand the content. The informed curating of digitised material provides us with an insight into the significance of its representation. In the museum’s physical space, we must make visible that which is still tantalizingly invisible in the contemporary ethnographic exhibition. We must expose the entangled relationships between the collectors and the collected to reveal and reinvigorate the museum experience. For us, an innovative museum experience requires that the visitor be informed of the dialogic context beyond the artefact on display. The experience only becomes meaningful if the cultural other is explained by the cultural other, whom we believe to be a more authentic voice than the one we are currently offered. A cross-cultural dialogue about the past, present and future of collections from any community must begin and end with direct contact with the communities we aim to represent. We seek a shift in the cultural relationship between ethnographic museums and their source communities, revealing the invisible stories connected to the collections and transforming the museum experience.

How Did We Get Here? In the past three decades, former colonial institutions have existed as the arbiter of Western and non-Western worlds, and it could be argued that they have remained the mouthpiece of the elite classes of the Western world. Although the early ethnographic museums were central to framing objects, largely amassed from colonial networks

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and world fairs, they ceased to sway in academic communities. Many museums remained in a state of stasis between the world wars and a generation after, only becoming re-centred within the revived or new branches of academic disciplines that emerged during the 1960s, such as semantics, symbology, transcultural studies, women’s studies, Black history, and visual and material anthropology. Ethnographic museums have always raised feelings of distrust and suspicion and for many good reasons; the limited scope of exhibition and published material that emanates from these museums serves only the few, and large amounts of funds are provided to maintain institutions that do relatively little to include non-academic voices, or the voices they claim to represent from their source communities. Permanent exhibitions still last a generation and are quickly outdated in the physical space of the museum, a space that could be better used to conduct multiple exhibitions that interact with each other, raising questions as they emerge from the wider world in a more temporally relevant way that engages popular debate with historical knowledge. Many argue that databases of ethnographic collections are difficult to negotiate and unintelligible to members of source communities. National and international cultural institutions often act as gatekeepers of hidden knowledge, while some have been criticised for becoming inward-looking and distant from their founding missions: currently completely globalized national(ist) elites gather in networks of supra-national institutions, such as UNESCO, ICOMOS etc., to care for what are de facto still very regional heritage formations. At the same time, all participants in this game continue to follow a neocolonial salvage paradigm that masquerades as universal, in which cultural heritage now supposedly belongs to all humanity according to imposed and therefore leveling civilizational standards. However, the question remains: who dictates these and does the subaltern have a voice? (Falser 2015, 7-8; original emphasis)

European museum curators are well aware of their institutions’ cultural past, and projects such as Ethnography Museums and World Cultures were a collaboration between ten ethnographic museums funded by the European Commission in 2008. The project’s mission statement prompted ethnographic museums to ‘redefine their priorities’ in response to ‘an ever more globalising and multicultural world’ (Harris and O’Hanlon 2013, 8). It ran from 2008 to 2013 in anticipation of the conference at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford in 2013; its fundamental focus was to question the future of ethnographic museums. In a recent discussion with a curator from the Welt Museum in Vienna, we addressed several of the issues that still concern directors of European ethnographic museums. These were articulated at the 2019 Annual Conference of the Directors of Ethnographic Museums of German-speaking countries in Heidelberg.5 They put to themselves the following questions: Which knowledge do we preserve? For whom is the knowledge relevant nowadays, and in what ways? Which interpretations need 5 Statement

approved on the occasion of the 2019 Annual Conference of the Directors of Ethnographic Museums in German Speaking Countries, in Heidelberg: Decolonising requires dialogue, expertise and support—The Heidelberg Statement. Accessed in January 2020 https://www.mus ethno.uzh.ch/dam/jcr:101bb5ec-cc0c-4014-afd7-77974f9e8e03/20190506%20Heidelberg%20S tatement.pdf.

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to be urgently reconsidered, what has been overlooked as yet, and what has been mis-judged? Who were the objects’ creators and what rights have developed today from their authorship? Who are the owners? Which forms of relations, of sharing heritage and collections, which kinds of restitution are necessary, possible, desired? How can cooperation, dialogue and negotiation processes be shaped, into which the knowledge of all participants can be obtained and used, at an equal level? Which new knowledge related to the collections can thereby evolve? A recent concept exhibition at Berlin’s Ethnologisches Museum entitled Forging Identity: The Naga Exhibition at the Humboldt Forum (2019)6 engages with some of these concerns. Zubeni Lotha, a Naga photographer, addressed these points when she was interviewed by Friederike Schmidt: Schmidt: When did you first come in touch with the collection from the Ethnologisches Museum, and what is your personal connection to the collection? Zubeni Lotha: In 2014 Roland Platz, the curator for South and Southeast Asia at the Ethnologisches Museum, came to Nagaland for the Hornbill festival, during which an anthropological lecture series, the ‘Hutton Lectures’, took place. I presented my photo works during the Hutton Lectures. He liked my photographs and we talked about the museum in general. In 2015 he invited me over to Berlin to have a look at another exhibition that he was curating at the Dahlem Museum. Schmidt: Did you know about the collection before you came in touch with Roland Platz? Zubeni Lotha: No. We have very limited knowledge of all the Naga collections around the world. In fact: The collection in Berlin was quite a surprise to me. I knew about the collections in Oxford, Cambridge and Zurich, but not about Berlin. Schmidt: Do you think that the presentation of the collection in the Humboldt Forum can give something back to the Naga people? Zubeni Lotha Absolutely! The biggest benefit would be if the Nagas became aware of this collection and they wanted to have access to the collection. The Nagas have lost a lot of knowledge of their past or most of their past is sitting in museums like Berlin or in the UK or in different parts of the world. It will be very beneficial for the Naga people to actually be able to access this. I do not know how this will come about, but I hope that one day it will be possible’.7 In preparation for an exhibition of Naga artefacts, the project Forging Identity sets a standard for the future of the ethnographic museum, prompting a review of other exhibitions and how they will be presented in the future. The Welt Museum in Vienna is a good example of exhibition methodology in view for the public to consider in the 6 View the following website for more details about the exhibition: https://www.preussischer-kultur besitz.de/newsroom/dossiers-and-news/all-dossiers/magazin-international-cooperations/forgingidentity-the-naga-exhibition-at-the-humboldt-forum/?L=1. 7 Consult the following link for the full interview with Zubeni Lotha https://www.preussischerkulturbesitz.de/newsroom/dossiers-and-news/all-dossiers/magazin-international-cooperations/for ging-identity-the-naga-exhibition-at-the-humboldt-forum/?L=1.

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context of the gallery. The existence of an entire room dedicated to problematising the history of the collections and clarifying the position of the curatorship behind the objects helps to create conversations about the pieces they hold. The exhibition panel on display on the wall of the gallery of the Welt Museum states: Most of the world’s population was dominated by foreign powers in the years between 1500 and 1920. This foreign rule was defined by conflicts and exploitation. Against this backdrop, ethnographic museums flourished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and shaped stereotypical beliefs of lost or colonised cultures. As our Museum was one of those benefitting from Europe’s colonial expansion, the stories behind many objects and how they were acquired deal with appropriation and colonial violence.

There are walls dedicated to questions that might stir a response in the visitor, but even these questions are difficult to grapple with unless the museum visitor has some idea of the global history behind the collecting methods and principles of the museum. The sentiment written on the panel is commendable, stating, ‘After all, how we deal with our collections and the people related to them in the present will shape the image of ethnographic collections in the future’ (ibid); however, there is little evidence of indigenous representatives shaping the displays in the exhibition space and much more attention is given to the voices of past and present European scholars than the current descendants of the communities represented. Curators dedicating time to explain the stories behind their objects and their wealth of knowledge adds an important layer of understanding in the galleries. Transparent historical and political explanations of the collections in person are essential for appreciating the work that goes on behind the displays. On a visit to this museum in February 2020, Kahn observed first-hand how the curator’s explanation about the decision-making process behind the exhibits helped a group of students understand the nuances of representation in the museum for the first time. They benefitted from the honesty and clarity of exposition by the Welt Museum’s curator who talked them through some of the difficult decisions made by the museum director with regard to sending back objects to their source communities. Many of the mechanisms that have kept subaltern voices out of the ethnographic museum are still very much in operation; there is little transparency as to how exhibitions are chosen, whose agenda they are fulfilling and why certain collections are favoured above others for public consumption. Vast amounts of other objects are stored in inaccessible places at great cost to the institution and at an even greater cost to the source communities who will never see objects from their own heritage. The recently modernised university and national European ethnographic institution presents a complex hybrid of ‘pre-colonial, colonial, postcolonial, national, international, and universalist elements from various civilizing visions’ (Falser 2015, 8). However, instead of creating historico-spatial ellipses or contradictory multivoiced participation between several stakeholders connected to the collections, the complexity of the artefact is still often reduced to a linear narrative of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in temporal and spatial terms, and opportunities for critical thinking are missed behind political correctness that ultimately sterilises the exhibit and hides the truths behind the collections.

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Visiting ethnographic museums can be unsettling. There are rarely any stories about non-European individuals on display or updates on the communities represented since the collections were gathered. ‘Individuals’ are referred to as ‘a culture’ or ‘a community’. Their lives are reduced to what they produced, not what they did or what they aspired to be. Contrast this with how we exhibit the Westerner. We celebrate personal endeavour and accomplishment. We have narratives, trophies, medals, and, most importantly, we have names. Hoskins succinctly describes how objects have not just lives, but biographies, and the complex nature of fieldwork involves discussing the significance of object collections with source communities. She writes, ‘In 1989, […] I tried to define a new category of ‘biographical objects’, which occupy one pole of the continuum between gifts and commodities and are endowed with the personal characteristics of their owners’ (Hoskins 1998, 7). Here Hoskins identifies how individual narratives are not easy to explore and that different cultures tell stories in different ways. The idea that personal narratives are cultural constructs embedded with social meanings explains not only a function, but also holds political and hierarchical meanings that do not translate directly to our own systems of value or power: If Euro-American possessiveness is colonial and acquisitive, and we need to deconstruct it by contrasting it to other models of the person/object relation, what would then be the content of these new models? Do gifts in traditional societies escape the exclusiveness of other possessions? Or is it instead the case that they have value precisely because they are imbued with the “subjective” attributes of the biographies of their former owners? (Hoskins 1998, 12)

This inequality evident in the museum exhibition is a result of oversimplification of the social relationship between the museum institution and its source communities, where exhibits are not explained or contextualised ‘as things in a certain situation’ that might characterise ‘many different kinds of a thing, at different points of their lives’ (13). In 2020, we are still grappling with the semantics and symbols that object collections provoke in the way Hoskins describes and must continue to ask: ‘What is the twenty-first century language of the museum? How might we decipher the signs and symbols of museum display? How has technology influenced the way we see objects from different cultures? Which exhibitions have helped change the way we experience collections?’ The physical walls of the museum guard a space for debate that involves conflict and trauma, and it has the potential to evoke the whole spectrum of human experience. It is still very much an elitist enterprise, and it is often more convenient to commit to consolidating alliances between European museums rather than seeking authentic knowledge from source communities. Appadurai’s work draws into question the social lives of objects identifying value systems and social relations that are drawn from and draw upon human interaction as a form of agency (Appadurai 1986, 12). Appadurai challenged the oversimplification of the way we see products of our culture, as an inadequacy of interpretation is still played out in the museum exhibition space: Part of the difficulty with a cross-cultural analysis of commodities is that, with other matters in social life, anthropology is excessively dualistic: “us and them”; “materialistic and religious’;

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Plenty of sensitive and conscientious work has been done by museum curators, and delegations of representatives from communities whose objects reside in Western museums have been hosted to discuss and share knowledge. However, the shared discussion is rarely evident in the museum gallery.

The Body and Agent of Human Experience Here, we address notions of the collected body as an agent of human experience that lives with and apart from the products it creates in its personal and social worlds. This concept has been problematised by Lock and Farquar (2007) who state that ‘the human body as it is lived, is a multiplicity of bodies, inviting a great number of disciplinary points of views and modes of interpretation […] historically contingent, deeply informed by culture, discourse, and the political, [that] cannot be summed up in any one kind of narrative’ (2). Museums are fundamentally not about objects but about representation, and anything that operates as a space of representation can be called a museum. Our Naga collections are most vulnerable here, as the updating of a database is not sufficient. It is clearly time to reconsider some of the accounts of these collections that were made by and on behalf of a patriarchy that saw the occupation of and collecting of cultural artefacts an entitlement rather than an honour. Many of these collectors, who began as exploiters, had great success in their de facto roles as collectors for national museums and universities, but are only remembered as specialists in tribes that they had the fortune to meet, and whose culture was shared generously with free explanations by the communities compelled to collaborate with an invading entity. Should we still defend the right to possess collections that are not being questioned sufficiently by their guardians? Is it ethical for curators to store troubling imperial collections and wait for generations to pass in order to avoid criticism rather than rethink and readdress the political balance on cultural possessions? What good do the objects serve in storage? Should funds be secured to expose and explain the possession of collections obtained from the exploited? Or should we open up the crates and invite and pay for living representatives of tribal collections to sessions at the highest level of the decision-making process, thus reaching out beyond the museum’s physical structure to wherever we can to rediscover cultural connections between past and present? What is the twenty-first century language of the body of the museum? How might we decipher the signs and symbols from the body politique of its curators? These questions provoke debate as tribal communities demand more transparency and accessibility to their objects housed in Western museums, a space that has become ever more politicised in the twenty-first century.

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Conclusion To budget for a new type of relationship between the tribal and global worlds and provide a space in time is a theoretical option and a practical duty. We would like to assume this duty, and in doing so start dialogues and build relationships with the present-day communities to the benefit of all bodies who have a stake in Naga collections. Objects in the museum are metonymies, standing for that which is absent; they also stand in paradigmatic relationship with each other, identifiable through contrast, significant through juxtaposition. The key to making museums visible is not by lamenting the past, but by forging new forms of remembering, ones that touch upon common sensibilities through the experience of knowing and meeting the people behind the exhibits. How can you ever forget the witnessing of an event that touches the spirit? It is only by altering the order of the narrative that we breathe new life into the experience of the audience and put flesh on the bones of the hidden faces behind the legacies. We must push the audience to renegotiate that relationship between observer and observed in order to combine provenance with revisionist approaches that take the object out of the old storage house of thought and into a new dimension that connects bodies to objects; with infinite possibilities. It is important that we attempt to reach beyond the current ‘curatorial gaze’ of museum collections, where adhering to postcolonial politics means erasing elements of a museum’s collection to fall in with local and global politics. Instead of elimination we might gain from our shared historical past by acknowledging the deceits of the ancestors, and imbalances of power embodied as metonymies of the ‘yet to be known’, and move to a more holistic approach that provides room for an uncomfortable experience for the museum’s visitor; one that will provoke response and thought. The Museum of the Invisible provides a departure in thinking about the museum space, objects and their meanings and the relations between the visible and the invisible truths. We imagine that creating new forms of digital contact zones that can be accessed via the Internet and mobile technology will add to the sphere of knowledge production, dissemination and reception vis-a-vis power relations by locating the user at the site of the material and the cultural. The Museum of the Invisible will churn up the unspoken and unspeakable past through direct contact with individuals who are our modern informants. This will also address issues of language and labelling of objects by Nagas who can inform us on changing dialects and modified customs adjusted to the changing times: in Europe there is little fresh evidence on display for the museum visitor, and it is high time that we make room for modern Naga voices. Modern technology has provided a means of communication to address issues of representation, decolonisation, collaboration, authority, and authenticity issues, and we now have the means to rectify, modify and update, and above all, share knowledge that has arisen in the twenty-first century.

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References Appadurai, A. (1986). Commodities and the politics of value. In A. Appadurai (Ed.), The social lives of things: Commodities in cultural perspective. (pp. 13–16). Cambridge University Press. Clifford, J. (1997). Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century. Harvard University Press. Elwin, V. (1969). The Nagas of the Nineteenth Century. Oxford University Press. Falser, M. (2015). Cultural heritage as civilizing mission: Methodological considerations. In M. Falser (Ed.), Cultural Heritage as Civilizing Mission: from Delay to Recovery, Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Cultural Heritage and the Temples of Angkor (Chair of Global Art History, Heidelberg University, 8–10 May 2011. New York: Springer. Foucault, M. (1969). The archaeology of knowledge. Routledge. Foucault, M. (1975). The birth of the clinic. Routledge. Gell, A. (1998). Art and agency: an anthropological theory. Clarendon Press. Harris, C., & O’Hanlon, M. M. (2013). The future of the ethnographic Museum. Anthropology Today,29(1), 8–12. Hoskins, J. (1998). Biographical objects: How things tell the stories of peoples’ lives. Routledge. Kanungo, A. K. (2014). Who owns the ethno-cultural past: Cultural objects of the Nagas in far off Museums. In M. Hazarika & T. Jamir (Eds.), 50 years after Daojali Hading: Emerging perspectives in the archaeology of Northeast India: Essays in Honour of Tarun Chandra Sharma. (pp. 488–502). Research India Press. Keane, F. (2011). Road of Bones: The epic siege of Kohima. HarperCollins. Lock M., Farquhar, J. (2007). Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1874). “On the uses and disadvantages of history for life” Unzeitgemäss Betrachtungen. In: D. Breazeale (Ed.), Reprinted in Timely Meditations (1997) Translated by. Holingdale, R.J. Nottinghill Editions. Pratt, M. L. (1991). Arts in the contact zone. Profession, 33–40.

Alison Kahn works in the creative industries and in academia, lecturing on documentary filmmaking and museum anthropology. She integrates the use of audio-visual artefacts and digital media as tools and products of her research. Her area of study traces the roots of the national European ethnographic museum in Europe, introducing the Vatican’s ethnographic collections into scholarly debates on the political, religious and emerging scientific climate of the nineteenth century. Her work in India has included ethnographic filmmaking in Nagaland among the Zeme, and rethinking representations of Naga and Anglo-Indians in European Museums. Her recent projects experimenting with digital media formats have included non-linear storytelling with ebooks, interactive documentaries, Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies. Catriona Child is the acting Associate Director at The Kohima Institute, Nagaland, an independent research organisation. She is an independent researcher with socio-historical expertise on the Zeme Naga communities in Assam, Manipur and Nagaland states in Northeast India. Holding a Master’s degree in environmental studies from University College of North Wales, she is particularly interested in ethno-botany. In addition, she has been looking at linkages between colonial and postcolonial social histories in the North East as well as current efforts among indigenous communities and scholars to recover and preserve vernacular archives. At The Kohima Institute,

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she has been involved in research on the provision of surgical care for rural patients in North East India for the Global Health Research Group. Catriona is also an experienced writer and editor. She is part of the team at the academic publisher Highlander Books and works on a freelance basis for Cactus Communications in the Life Sciences section. Websites: https://www.kohimainstitute.org.

Part II

Material and Visual as Vehicles of Power and Hegemony: Adaptations and Negotiations

Chapter 4

Mai-Baaps and Minis: Spatiality, Visuality and Materiality in Assam’s Tea Gardens Prithiraj Borah and Rowena Robinson

Abstract The imperial perspective on Assam’s ‘cha bagan’ has been studied through the alteration in colonial documents from the usage of the term ‘forests’ to ‘gardens’. This chapter scrutinises the material structures within the garden ‘space’ and the visual representation of female labourers. It looks into the material culture in the cha bagan, most visible in the bungalow, signified as a powerful structure. It further examines the relationship between the racialised inscriptions of minis (a racial term used for the female plantation labourers) associated with the processes of garden work. The colonial planter’s self-representation gives shape to an identity that is remembered and reinvented by the post-colonial planters. The first mai-baap of the nineteenth century conceptualised the nature of work and leisure, especially the leisure to give orders, go for hunting, billiards and polo matches. These practices are recreated among the contemporary Indian planters in the big bungalows. The social and material practices inside the garden are explicitly patriarchal. At the same time, state and private capitalism visually represent the body of the woman labourer (mini). The chapter traces the violent contrast of this exoticisation with everyday experiences inside the tea gardens and the incipient efforts of the workers as political subjects. Keywords Garden · Bungalow · Mai-baap · Mini · Labour lines · Cha-bagan

Introduction On 24th November 2007, the All Adivasi Students’ Association of Assam (AASAA) organised a protest programme in Guwahati demanding an increase of wages for the plantation labourers and the Scheduled Tribe (ST) status. AASAA, which has the most visible mobilisation in Upper Assam, has been demanding the wage hike and tribal status since the 1990s, but without much success. To capture the attention P. Borah (B) · R. Robinson IIT, Bombay, India R. Robinson e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. Nongbri and R. Bhargava (eds.), Materiality and Visuality in North East India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1970-0_4

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of the authorities, on 24 November 2007, a protest was organised near the Assam Secretariat which was attended by thousands of adivasis. For most protesters, it was their first visit to Guwahati. Laxmi Orang, a girl of 16 years too participated in the protest and things did not turn out the way she would have imagined. The AASAA representatives were told by the police and security personal that they do not have the necessary permissions to organise the protest programme. The protesters became angry and frustrated and asked their fellows to raise slogans. The area of Assam Secretariat ‘belonged’, as it were, to upper-caste Hindus. They came out of their houses and tried to dismantle the protest. This was the first time they had come across such a huge protest from the adivasi communities. Quickly the upper caste-class mob of the city encircled the protesters and started attacking them. The attack was triggered by the fact that the upper caste Hindus never ‘imagined’ the adivasis could ever come and protest for their rights in Guwahati City. The mob of young ‘Assamese’1 men attacked Laxmi Orang brutally, kicked and stripped her of her clothing. To escape from the attackers, she ran naked on the streets of the city, where no one came to help her and instead laughed and derided her. The fate of Laxmi Orang is significant to this chapter. The way Laxmi was brutally attacked and stripped on the streets of Guwahati might seem far removed from the way the state represents the minis (a racial term to address the female plantation workers) in the social and print media meant for tourism. However, there are brutal connections. It is an excruciating reminder of the disjuncture between the represented and the experienced in the lives of adivasis across Assam. The adivasis in Assam form the bulk of the labour force in the tea plantations whose images (constructed by the state and plantation authorities) are available on advertising billboards all across Assam consumed both by the Urban Assamese and by the innumerable tourists and visitors who come to the state. The exoticisation of the body of the women workers by the private tourist agencies and tea gardens for tourist purposes puts the actual labourers at the fag end of modern, urban life far removed from the life of upper caste-class citizens. One can see the big hoardings of women plucking leaves exotically depicted alongside the tea gardens. Inside the plantations, the mini’s everyday work is scrutinised and observed by male managers. What, then, emerges is the possibility of viewing the garden as a panopticon2 enabling the mai-baaps (the male managers and supervisors) to control, observe and thereby discipline the minis. The tea gardens are the site of toil and 1 The

category of ‘Assamese’ as a dominant identity is often criticised by scholars. Saikia (2005) and Sengupta (2016) explore how the hegemonic ‘Assamese’ identity emerged as a colonial and imperial construct. This colonial project has its genesis in the nineteenth-century cultural movement, not only confined to the literary phenomenon but associated with the food, customs and religious beliefs. Sharma (2011) explains that the Assamese identity is a gendered and classed identity which is also based on ‘location’, primarily the Brahmaputra Valley. 2 Foucault (1975), discusses the role of modern tactics and strategies for constant observation. Foucault cited in Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison, the architectural layout given by Jeremy Bentham for the prison, asylum, hospital and factory. Foucault used the concept of panopticon which is central to modern institutions, instead of using violent methods constant observation can control and discipline subjects.

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labour for the women plantation labourers, often invisible to the upper caste-classes. Thus, the sudden emergence of the body of the exotic woman worker protesting within the city as a political subject poses a threat to the proponents of the dominant social order. Hence the protest must be scuttled by whatever means possible. What better ways than disrobing and shaming the ‘defiant’ mini. The ‘garden’ has a special material relationship with colonial objects, most clearly visible in the towering bungalow in the cha-bagan. The garden bungalows constitute a form of material culture and enable us to understand how labourers are exploited not only in terms of consciousness but also through the external built environment that habituates subservience and encourages exploitation. Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) enquiry of ‘being’ in the social world is primarily embodied through materiality; where the mind and body experiences the everyday. He writes, ‘in short, my body is not only an object among all the objects, a nexus of sensible qualities among others, but an object which is sensitive to all the rest, which reverberates to all sounds, vibrates to all colours, and provides worlds with their primordial significance through the way in which it receives them’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 236). This is the unexpected capacity of the object which remains peripheral to the individual’s visualisation but is determinant of the workers’ performance and identity within and outside the ‘garden space’. Through the planter’s bungalow, the mai-baap inherits colonial authority and its spatial performance. The bungalow maps out a power structure within and beyond garden space. In this chapter, the ‘garden’ is viewed as a material entity which can be studied through colonial objects such as bungalows and sirens. Work and domination inside the garden have colonial roots and carry oppressive material practices. The relationship between planters and workers in the form of mai-baap, meaning father and mother, still exists inside Assam’s tea gardens. Distinctions based on gender, caste, class and ethnicity are also firmly embedded within the plantation practices of difference, power and hierarchy. This chapter discusses how patriarchal concepts such as sahib, mai-baap, babu and hukum still operate inside the garden. The chapter also attempts to discuss the visualisation of the female workforce popularly known as minis in Assam. Tea gardens in Assam are grounded in the colonial and post-colonial histories of atrocities towards the plantation labour force which is produced through the culture of patronage, where the planter-manager-sahib stands tall. In the contemporary scenario, the burra sahib (senior manager) figure is a continuation of pre-independence colonial lordship. Social practices inside the garden are explicitly colonial and patriarchal. Manager’s hukum (order) works through a hierarchy of overseers and supervisors who all are men. Even the role of sardarni3 is masculine. The social and cultural relations between the mai-baap and minis in the contemporary scenario are mediated via materiality and seem more prominent than the colonial period. The analysis in the chapter is based on ethnographic observations of the first author, made during his stay in Doom Dooma and Chabua tea gardens in Tinsukia and Dibrugarh districts in Assam. During the study, interactions and

3 Sardarni

is a position held by a woman under whom there are 20–25 women plantation workers, a sardarni’s job is to give daily updates to the garden authority.

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observations significantly helped us understand and reflect on the material practices inside the tea plantations of Assam.

Constructing the ‘Garden’ The garden has a long standing historical significance often associated with the notion of paradise and civilisation. Jayeeta Sharma records that the new imperial perspective on Assam viewed it as a wild abundance of ‘arable potential’. This was most evident in the change in terminology from the use of the term ‘forests’ to that of ‘gardens’ in documents of the tea estates (2006, 448). She mentions, ‘in 1940, Charles Bruce pioneered the use of the term ‘garden’ alongside its vernacular equivalent ‘bari’ in his reports’ (448). The transformation of the wild ‘forest’ to possible ‘garden’ was, however, a phenomenal task. The cultivation itself as a project depended upon human action. Labour and toil were at the heart of this cultivation enterprise. The colonial mechanism for constructing ‘gardens’ was dependent upon the native labourers. For construction, the planters were dependent on the local communities, and if peasants were unwilling to work then they brought communities from the hills for ‘forest’ clearing. In an early description of hill communities in Assam one planter notes, ‘arrangements had been made for a batch of 250 Naga hill tribesmen and swarms of Singhpo. I soon had 750 of them, both men and women hard at work. The men were given axes with which to fell the trees. They fairly ate into the jungle and with amazing agility and ran skimming over the tangle to felled jungle and bamboos with bare feet’ (Ramsden 1945, 65). His description of tribal labour clearing the forest perceives them as going about it with almost animal-like ease. These racialised constructions with regard to the labourers hold the key to the colonial construction of ‘garden’. Planters failed to recruit the ‘local’ peasants from the villages of Assam and to convert the cultivators into wage earners. Consequently, the peasants were given the nomenclature ‘lazy native’ (Alatas 1977), and planters looked for an option beyond the western territory of Assam. The planters managed to identify the Chotanagpur region as an ideal source of labour for the plantations. This huge region (of contemporary Bihar, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal) is the home of the Oraon, Munda, Santhal and Gond communities. Throughout the nineteenth century, they were affected by movements of merchants and landowners, which were supported by colonial land revenue policies. Xaxa suggests that a conscious colonial policy linkage exists between land dispossession and recruitment for plantations in Chotanagpur (1999, 74). British emigration policies identified the catchment areas by studying regional demographic factors such as high population density, land sales and evictions. Inland Emigration Acts of 1882 noted that attention of the ‘government of India was directed to large overpopulated districts and saw much reason to flush out poor people from famine-stricken parts into plantation areas’ (Chatterjee 2001, 73). Land alienation and famines created a reservoir of dispossessed villagers who readily migrated to the plantation belt in search of work.

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A system combining both private contracts and the government sardari system constituted the labour catching schemes. Private unlicensed contractors working for a particular agency or planters were known as arkatti. Fraud and coercion characterised the first phase of recruitment.4 In contrast to the private recruitment system, in the sardari system an individual plantation sent back a worker who was appointed as a ‘headman’, who would wield considerable power over the recruits. With his presence, the planters created an indirect rule within the plantation, because the working class of the plantation had to deal with the headman who understood their likes and dislikes. ‘A Sardar’, Piya Chatterjee writes, ‘has nothing to do with the actual work in the plantation. A headman under his name works with his relatives and friends. He is responsible for their advances to his sahib, he often gives his coolies small weekly advances upon their pay and he generally looks after their interests, a sardar may be what we call a duffardar or in charge of a section of the people at work upon the garden’ (Chatterjee, 2001, 75). In the formative years of the plantation, women were not sent as sardars. Although when women became an integral part of the workforce, generally the wives of garden sardars were considered desirable for the job. As the British mapped prime labour catching areas, the criteria for a worker depended on the notions of appropriate physical strength, the ability to work hard and to stay inside the plantations. The most suitable labourers were from Chotanagpur and the Santhal Pargannas, classified as junglis by the planters. The discourse of recruitment classified labourers into ‘inferior’ and ‘superior’ types. In Bengal plantations, there was also a caste prohibition for the recruitment of ‘Gorkhas’ for military and tea company work. The king of Nepal, Maharaja Chandra Jung Bahadur Rana, told the planters to abstain from recruiting people other than members of the Damai, Sarki, Kami and Gaini castes. These were subordinate caste groups who continued to be recruited under the contractors, sahibs and sardars. Planters and colonial administrators systematised labour recruitment schemes and various settlement policies to encourage the continuous flow of new recruiters. After a few years, the planters encouraged a policy of family recruitment, and women entered the garden space. The gendered practices inside the tea plantations had significant historical underpinnings. The planters became conscious that the presence of women and children in the garden would stabilise the recruited male labour. In 1863, the Chief Commissioner of Assam expressed some concerns about the increasing population of men, that there were only 5–15% women out of the total number of immigrants (Ramsden 1945, 76). 4 In the context of Assam, the recruitment practice of the bondage labour was exclusively dependent

on the arkatti and sardari system. The arkatti system had earned a historical reputation of fear and hatred because of the use of physical threat, kidnapping and other abuses. This recruitment was based on deception and exaggeration. Labour historian Chandavarkar (1998) argued that in sardari system the role of the sardar was not only limited to the recruitment process, but also in labour control and supervision. According to him, the sardars occupied the position of disciplining and supervising the workers. Sen (2010) examined that during the colonial time in urban industries and mills, employment was casual and informal. Still, interestingly there was an organised recruitment process for the Assam’s tea plantations. Sen wrote, ‘sardars were able, as insiders, sometimes to better exploit vulnerabilities within their communities to practice fraudulent recruitment’ (Sen 2010: 6).

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There was an emigration of solitary or single women to free themselves from their families. The important role of women within the ideology of the family settlement was not limited to take care or control their ‘unstable’ husbands. Slowly the plucking activity became particularly one for women. Ingold (2000) demonstrated how making particular commodities shapes the maker to acquire specific skills. At the same time, the material technique that is based on people and things, becomes gendered. The ‘two leaves and a bud’ became a gendered task, because women developed certain kinds of material techniques in the process of plucking. Hermkens (2013) examined how producing barkcloth became a gendered project, where women transferred this knowledge from generation to generation. She discusses how making the barkcloth in Papua New Guinea has a material past, and the cloth and design are embodied in gender relations. The barkcloth is a material object that has been made and designed by the women, and it also carries women’s bodies and minds in the production of such an object. Similarly, the women plucking tea leaves offer us a significant understanding of how the material culture of tea production defined identities such as gender and tribe in both colonial and post-colonial Assam. The material world of the colonial tea gardens confronts the labourers as well as the planters and continues to evolve through them. The bungalows inside the gardens are more than mere houses; they carry the status and class privileges of the planters. The images of the colonial bungalows are the bearers of owners’ identity, personality, and visual likeness. Taking material culture into account not only provides an alternative source of evidence, but it also demonstrates why the representation of the colonial bungalow can be problematic in the contemporary scenario of the tea gardens. David Miller in his book Materiality (2005) writes about the power of the ‘object’. According to Bourdieu, individuals and collectives create a relationship with the habitus (1977, 83) and objective events. The plucking of tea leaves consciously and unconsciously shapes the female plantation workers. The social environment or habitus we are looking at is the tea gardens determined by the colonial and material setup. Bourdieu discusses the capability of objects and materials which covertly condition the human actors as socialised beings. One such object is the garden bungalow. The material object of this chapter is the tea garden, a material space to exert power over the labourers. For example, we sometimes perceive the mai-baaps bungalow just as a structure. In upper Assam, individuals also idealise and romanticise such colonial establishments. Miller writes, ‘the less we are aware of them, the more powerfully they can determine our expectations by setting the scene and ensuring normative behavior, without being open to challenge. They determine what takes place to the extent that we are unconscious of their capacity to do so’ (2005, 6–7).

Understanding the Gendered Plantation The word plantation is associated with painful and uncomfortable memories of the American south. The plantation was born out of colonial and feudal control, and its

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commodities were consumed in the former colonial countries. Plantation labourers of Assam5 not only work on plantations but live on them as well, in villages owned by the tea companies. They are not bonded labour in the same way as colonial plantation workers, whom planters categorised as coolies.6 Notwithstanding the difference in categorisation, tea workers are still submerged in the process of generational indebtedness and patriarchal reproduction. Plantation jobs are passed from person to person, often through the kinship network. The plantation labour practice is organised by hierarchies of administrative control and sexual division of labour embedded within the plantation. The gendered differentiation inside the garden is directed through symbols of leisure, racial and ethnic boundaries into a daily theatre. Gendered hierarchies also function through feudalism and are rooted in caste-based hierarchies. The majority of plantation workers are lower caste or adivasi women. Sabala and Meena (2010) explain women’s multiple experiences with their bodies through history. They observed how bodies are constructed at different times of a woman’s life through the forces of capitalism and patriarchy. They do not homogenise the bodies of women, rather differentiate how the lower caste and classes’ gendered bodies are constructed. They write, ‘the gendered bodies of lower castes and classes get constructed by poverty, malnutrition, heavy burden of work, gender discrimination, and so on…they become survivors with nothing much to lose’ (Sabala and Meena 2010, 44). Inside Assam’s tea plantations, the women’s work is observed and monitored by the babus and mai-baaps. The mai-baap signifies the authoritative personality of plantation patronage and power. The symbolic display of leisure and non-work is the sign of his superiority and the mai-baap legitimates the power of the planter in familial terms. The planter exemplifies a symbolic father staying in a big bungalow, playing polo at the club and standing at the centre of the plantation family where the workers were his children. The family has its paternal and patriarchal centre; the maibaap is an attempt to create a legitimate spirit sanctioning both consent and coercion. Though mai-baap means mother and father, the category is used exclusively for the men inside the garden. The construction of mai-baap can be understood through Marx’s (1978) notion of materiality. In Capital Volume I, Marx emphasises how human consciousness is produced/reproduced through the material world. He demonstrates a dialectical relationship between individuals’ consciousness and their material conditions of existence. The post-colonial mai-baap exert their dominance over the plantation workers through material relationships. The mai-baap with his binoculars, expensive watch, a short khaki pant comes in a jeep to the garden; he observes and examines the female workers while they pluck the leaves. For instance, during Durga Puja, the Assistant Manager (appointed supervisor to supervise the workers in recent times) displays his power by throwing coins to the adivasi dancers. In return, the trade 5 Guha

(2006) and Behal (2014) discussed the colonial atrocities inside the plantation, these commentaries on exploitation should not be limited to the social history of colonialism. 6 The term coolie is often used to refer to unskilled labour in India, China and other countries in Asia. The term was popular particularly during the colonial period.

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union leader who is a prominent man inside the garden honours him with a gamosa (an article of significance in Assam) and a basket of fruit. This public ritual of the appearance of mai-baap still exists in the plantations. He also gives judgement over any marriage or family-related dispute with magisterial power. At night, usually, the mai-baap throws a party to the neighbouring mai-baaps, often they meet every weekend to discuss the revenue and turnover of their respective gardens. They try to imitate the colonial planter in their everyday lives. Veblen (1964) explains about the influence of ‘pecuniary culture’, which led to social differences and the desire to imitate one’s peers through conspicuous consumption. Veblen also identifies tastes and discrimination as a material force that shapes modern societies. His account of ‘conspicuous consumption’ (Veblen 1925, 15) allows the material form of social life to become visible as a portion of the lifestyle of a social group. He also points out the materiality of consumption, whether clothes, furniture, gardens, or household equipment. For Veblen, material life is about the display of material consumption through which an individual or a social group positions itself in relation to others. The luxurious life of mai-baap symbolises power and leisure; also, his wife, the memsahib, is served by the minis and a cook. She retains considerable control over her bungalow. Unlike the sahib whose power and influence is played out outside the bungalow, the memsahib rarely goes outside the bungalow, nor is she seen by the plantation community. The plantation’s clerical staff is known as babus, whose primary duties are in the office and factory. They take orders from the sahibs and supervise the field production. Unlike the planters who periodically move to different plantations once they attain seniority, the babus inherit the jobs from their fathers and remain inside the plantation. Most of the babus hired during the colonial period are Assamese or Bengali, usually from upper caste and middle-class background. The British administrators were dependent on this emerging middle class with clerical knowledge and innate intelligence. Most of the babu families follow the upper caste tradition and adhere to strict codes of separation from the plantation labourers. Staff families who settled in the plantation were given large plots of land for cultivation. Mostly because of their clerical work (garden administration and accounting), most staff members are in daily contact with the workers, then the planters. As witnessed in the field by the fieldworker, everyday life experiences of the people help to understand and explain thereafter the social distancing among the babus and workers. The babus enact their administrative rule and maintain their class and status distinction. These are mainly maintained through customary upper caste understandings. The otherness is reconstructed through the material and cultural politics of the staff and sahibs. These differences inside the plantation mainly rely on the consent of a small stratum of men among the indentured labourers. These men were the sardars, created to serve as the first link between the British planters and the ‘new’ workforce. They were sent by the planters to their ‘native’ villages to recruit and organise new plantation workers. Slowly, the sardars established themselves to occupy supervisory positions both in the factory and the field. Planters also relied on another class of workers to act as a network of surveillance. Chowkidar (Watchman) was hired to

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observe and report the movements of all bad characters within the locality. Any incident of robbery, theft, riot, dacoity, rape and murder were to be noted (Barker 2004, 136). Today, the sardari system of recruitment no longer exists, but the effects are still visible in the gardens. The status and authority have transformed into other positions of power within the working hierarchy. They are situated as the post-colonial labour elite in the form of union leaders and netas. Even a few babus’ sons have remained involved in the union politics both within the plantations and in nearby plantations. These leaders create a neutral zone of patronage between the planters and workers. In contemporary times, an ordinary worker remains considerably dependent on the union leaders for wage and bonus negotiation, conflict resolution, and permanent and casual employment. The babus and sardars observe the minis while working in the garden; apart from the working space, the minis can be seen during the community and trade union meetings. In Chabua tea estates, Sunday is considered to be a community organisation day. This day is specially kept for community gatherings of the tea plantation workers. The labour unions set up special programmes such as movie screenings, local bazars and gambling and music programmes in the labour lines. But such spaces are also controlled by the male workers and the trade union leaders. The community gatherings to celebrate social and leisure activity for a day are limited to male workers. Kathy (1986) speaks of the ‘sexual division of leisure’ in her study Cheap Amusements wherein she studies the gendered relationship of working-class women of New York city to leisure between 1880 and 1920, something that resonates with the events that unfold in the tea estates of Assam as well. Chandavarkar (1994) also observes that working-class women were mostly excluded from social gatherings or participation in community activities in Mumbai’s textile mills. In Chabua tea estates, during the community gathering, the male workers even dominated the tea and liquor shops. Fernandes (1997) in her ethnographic study on the women workers of Kolkata’s jute mills, analysed working class politics in terms of the ‘masculinization’ (1997, 525) of space. She argues, ‘we begin to see that the boundaries of the public sphere constitute an exclusionary terrain, contingent on the production of gender hierarchies and the marginalization of working class women’ (530). Chabua tea estates reproduce gendered hierarchies in public spaces of work and leisure. Furthermore, in the tea plantations, working class identity and material culture play an important role in constructing gender identities. The community meetings and trade union meetings are exclusively reserved for men, which legitimises masculinity over material and ideological lives. Both material and ideological dimension of masculine assertion validate men’s control in the home, community, and workplace. Hoven and Horschelman (2005) interrogated how space is important to construct gender identities in different material settings. They observed that the male bonding established while drinking and working creates exclusive male spaces that shape masculinity. Chowdhry’s (2014) study in rural Haryana shows how male culture is exclusively visible everywhere. She contends, ‘most common are the gendered spaces like the baithak (an outer apartment reserved for men corresponding to a sitting from the visitors), the chaupal (community building), the traditional panchayat (council)

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or the leisure time activities of male…or all male army” (Chowdhry 2014, 41). The plantation patriarchies are manifested not only through the labour organisation and practice, but they are also inextricably linked to colonial and feudal politics. Plantation feudalism transformed into wage contract labour continues to be shaped by material practices of the bungalow and garden. Labour practices are enacted through the feudal call of hukum. Strategies of order and rule are conceptualised and administrated by upper caste men. The regime of indentured labour and its particular disciplines are secured by the sahib’s office, the garden’s relative autonomy, and the measures of exclusion within the village. As has been described above, the mai-baaps with their caste, class and gendered privileges control the plantation space. The minis have to follow the everyday work routine of the plantations strictly. The gaze of the planters is the male gaze which is not only limited to the sexual gaze, it is also related to the labour exploitation gaze. This routine surveillance on the minis was and still continues to be also sexually exploited by the mai-baaps. The next section of the chapter discusses the strict routine of the plantation work culture. This exploitative working culture has been normalised; the disciplined minis have to follow and accept severe surveillance throughout the day. The feudal call of mai-baap’s hukum functions as their gaze on the minis, which controls the work culture inside the plantations.

Plantation: Time, Work and Representation Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) examines how sound affects the creation and use of material artefacts and landscape. He examines what sound means, what sound does, how sound functions, and its powerful role in a particular context. Though invisible to the eye, sound is material and effects particular actions, emotions and gestures. It is a powerful instrument of organisation, management and discipline. According to garden time schedules, the siren’s call is the signal to start working. Shera (2008) records that from its 18th century roots as a scientific instrument, the siren evolved everywhere into a public warning and address mechanism. The sound of the sirens control the body of labourers in a tea garden. Sirens powerfully alter labour behavior and make them conscious of the daily schedule. Schafer (1993) categorised the siren as an imperialistic sound; unlike the sound of bells, honks, yells and whistles, the sound of the siren inside the garden cannot simply be ignored. According to him, the voice of the sirens is thus much larger than the sound itself. The siren is a code that all modern participants understand, the symbolic materiality of the siren lies in its ability to alter our behavior on a cultural scale (Schafer 1993, 47). The siren of the garden would sound around 6:30 in the morning, so the minis have to get ready by that sound. The sound of the siren has a cultural context, which is gendered and class based. Olofsson argues that both the production of sound and the process of listening are gender and class based and speak of ‘the ephemeral qualities of sound and subsequent listening practice…and how these two factors contribute, both to enforce and challenge the ways in which gender and class are enacted’ (2017,

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2). The right to switch on the siren is not only based on class privileges but is also gendered. The switch belongs to the authorities of the garden, the babus and maibaaps who are men. The minis have to be alert to the sound of the siren. The minis are forbidden to go near the switch and are merely supposed to follow its sounds as a set of orders. Carson (1995) studies the history of patriarchal orders which restrict women’s voices. She investigates the way men dominate the process of sound production as well as women’s voices. She shows how disciplinary measures subjugate the sound produced by women. The sound of the siren also disciplines the time and body of a mini. This daily mundane work culture signifies not only a particular spatial power and order but also a sensorial one. In fact, sometimes the babu pushes the siren for extra sound if he thinks that during the morning shift minis did not perform their job adequately. The production process takes place within the radius of the planter’s power that is the factory. A large building near to the managerial and staff office, the factory is the endpoint of the plantation’s production. Thompson (1967) suggests that, ‘in the nineteenth century industrialisation transformed the customary rhythms of agrarian work. Task time upon which the seasonal harvests of farming depended, shifted into quite temporal and spatial modalities. Both symbolically and materially, the clock and factory siren now marked the beat of the daily life’ (1967, 62). Hence, discipline time, attached to the factory assembly line, began to define production, profits and manufacture in Assam plantations. The factory workers are only men, so factory work also narrates their bodily stories. Piya Chatterjee’s examination of the lives of women tea workers on a Dooars plantation explores the forms of structural oppression that envelop female tea labourers. She explains the factory within the plantation as essentially a masculine space. She further explains that the separation of women and men workers translates body politics into fields of labour. In the field, babus keep a surveillance on women’s work, which is a basic form of labour control. Women’s names are grouped under the overseer’s name, which signifies that contemporary women’s work inherits the pattern and organisation of labouring kinship from their foremothers on the colonial plantation (2001, 183). This section elucidates clearly how the controlling gaze of the babus impinges on the lives of the minis throughout the day. The gaze has been perceived to be visual, through various forms of surveillance, as well as sonic. Sounds such as those of the sirens control the everyday lives of the minis. The siren may be seen as a dynamic force, with its own power to set in place a relation between minis and mai-baaps, materials, time and space. When the mai-baaps’ direct gaze is absent, such sonic control dominates the working culture of the plantations. The power of these sounds and their related disciplines make the minis more vulnerable and they cannot escape what is perceived here as a gendered exploitative gaze. When the mai-baaps are not present during the plucking, the babus keep an eye on the minis’ movements. For the minis, it is difficult to escape from such surveillance practices, even in the absence of the mai-baaps. Such power structures are normalised and are certainly hidden from the tea museums or any tea advertisements.

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Beyond the Plantations: Representation of Minis in Advertisements The chapter began with a recounting of the experience of Laxmi Orang and how the state exoticises minis’ bodies. Whereas minis’ everyday life inside the garden is a product of the structural frameworks and conceptualisation of time and work, advertising agencies locate their bodies as the beauty of Assam. Laxmi should have stayed back in the garden where her labour remains invisible to the urban Assamese and she is only known through her depiction as exotic and beautiful. The assertion of the real Laxmi as a political subject on the streets of Guwahati cannot be tolerated. It challenges the assumptions of the Assamese urban middle and upper castes and classes, steeped in hierarchies of gender and status. Due to the gendered practices inside the gardens, the minis’ labour has been used for generations. Minis are compelled to perform the daily work of plucking because of constant surveillance, which is enforced, controlled and regulated through masculine historical practices (Butler 1988). The picture of a mini carried on tourism or government advertisements and the real mini inside a garden carry different social-cultural meanings. The tourism agencies project the gardens as a ‘museum’ of attractiveness, where the tea plantation workers in Assam, Munnar, Darjeeling and Siliguri are projected as exotic. Inside Assam’s Tea Auction Center, the images of minis plucking tea leaves are associated with regional identity. Since Assam’s cultural heritage is often linked to the tea gardens, the gardens are regarded as part of the project of colonial modernity. However, the visual representation of minis inside the museums and billboards invisibilises the work and toil of minis in contemporary times. These sites of visual representation are based on the relationship between the audience and the bodily images of minis alongside the garden, where the audience cannot recognise the toil or oppression of the female plantation workers. The green landscape and a mini with a basket on her back, plucking tea leaves, both reveals and conceals the racial and gendered inscriptions of labour inside Assam’s tea plantations which have been maintained since decades through various material and visual practices. The visual representation of minis is also explicitly based on gendered terms. These taken for granted constructions are reinforced on billboards and in the tea auction centre. These graphic representations are also a metaphor of a dominant sexuality. The representation of women’s bodies can be traced back to colonial knowledges of race and alterity. Dirks (1996) argues that the superiority complex of the colonisers over the colonised ‘other’ was represented in paintings and photographs. The mini on the big billboards on the highways of Assam is available for the voyeuristic male gaze. Such exoticism reproduces orientalist ideologies.7 Ponzanesi (2005) examines how visuality continues racist inscriptions in post-colonial times. Colonial legacies associated with ethnic and gender relations carry over into contemporary societies. Images of minis carry both colonial and post-colonial predicaments 7 For

example, see Eugène Delacroix’s painting Women of Algiers in their Apartment.

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in the making of gendered identities through visual culture. The romantic picture of Assam’s tea gardens chafes increasingly against the political churnings among the labourers and highlights the discomfort of the privileged on seeing what lies beneath the lush, green tea gardens of Assam. In his book, Right to Look Mirzoeff (2011) illustrates the idea of ‘look’ which is not about ‘looking’. He challenges the very idea of visualisation. According to him, the history of visuality is constructed on the history of plantations. The first instances of visuality can be found in the relationship between the slaves and the planters, the slaves were observed constantly by the overseer. Visuality asserts authority over the plantation slaves. On the other hand, the virtue of the right to ‘look’ is based on mutual friendship/solidarity between the audience and the subject. He further elucidates his idea of counter visuality that is founded on the transformation of a passive object to a political subject. The visual images of the mini inside the garden, billboards, and the museum prevent her from becoming a political subject. Her act of resistance displayed on the streets of Dispur was returned with savage violence rather than solidarity. As an object of visuality, she was restricted to the site of visual production in the garden and should not have expected solidarity in the city. Only a critical reflection on the concept of ‘look’ can enable the challenge of this authority and its principles of segregation.

Conclusion The materiality of the garden, its architectural and built structures, its spatiality and the sensorial disciplines it enforces constitute integral aspects of the shaping of everyday experiences and practices. This chapter delved into the materiality and representation of the tea gardens as sites of power constituted through the plantation and its various material manifestations: the bungalow, the factory, and the lines, the siren and thereby the mai-baaps, sardars and babus in relation to the labourers, particularly women. The bungalow presents mai-baaps as lords and patriarchs over a ‘family’ of labourers. The bungalow in Assam is treated as an architecture of significance and its hegemonic materiality is taken for granted. The bungalows and labour lines materially organise the power relations inside the garden where the divisions and limits of each group lie. The gardens are a material space where the mai-baaps, babus and chota sahibs stand tall. Moreover, the chapter examined the materiality of sound through the siren, which forces the senses and the gendered body both in the plantation and the factory into particular disciplines of time and work. The exotic symbol of the mini put up on the billboards misrepresents the materiality of life inside the plantations. The images of minis smilingly plucking tea leaves inside the ‘beautiful’ tea gardens obscure the harsh inequalities and poverty of the labourers in the lines. These altered images reinforce the imperial culture of framing, misrepresentation and seeing the ‘other’ invidiously. WEB Du Bois (1903) argued that racially marginalised communities face a dilemma on seeing themselves

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in visual representations. He illustrates that such communities experience alienation and lack of power during those situations. Similarly, Spivak (1988) addressed the lack of voice and power of the subalterns seeing their own culture through the lens of the ‘other’. As this chapter has shown when the marginalised steps out of the billboard and onto the street, the incongruence of image and reality deforms sociality, marked by derisive laughter and, tragically, bestial aggression. For the Assamese, to ‘look’ at the mini in solidarity rather than ‘visually’ represent her (Mirzoeff 2011) or violently thwart her political citizenship would involve acknowledging her subjugation within the spatial and architectural beauty of the garden and their own implication in the post-colonial politics of caste and class that render this oppression possible.

References Alatas, S. H. (1977). The Myth of the Lazy Native. New York: Routledge. Barker, G. M. (2004). Tea Planter’s life in Assam. Bombay: Thacker & Co. LTD. Behal, R. P. (2014). One Hundred Years of Servitude: Political Economy of Tea Plantation in Colonial Assam. New Delhi: Tulika Books. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, J. (1988). Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal, 40(4), 519–531. Carson, A. (1995). Glass, Irony and God. New York: New Directions Books. Chandavarkar, R. (1994). The Origins of Industrial capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay 1900–1940. London: Cambridge University Press. Chandavarkar, R. (1998). Imperial power and popular politics: Class, resistance and the state in India, pp. 1850–1950. United Kingdom: Cambridge university press. Chowdhray, P. (2014). Masculine spaces: Rural male culture in North India. Economic and Political Weekly, 49(47), 41–49. Chatterjee, P. (2001). Time for Tea: Women Labour & Post/Colonial politics on an Indian Plantation. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Dirks, N. (1996). Colonialism and its forms of knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Du Bois, W. (1903). The souls of black folk. New York: Burghardt. Fernandes, L. (1997). Beyond Spaces and Private Spheres: Gender, Family and Working Class Politics in India. Feminist Studies, 23(3), 525–547. Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish. London: Penguin.Government of India, to the Chief Commissioner. 1892. Inland Emigration Act 1882. No 1071/7. Simla. Guha, A. (2006). Planter Raj to Swaraj. New Delhi: Tulika Books. Hermkens, A. (2013). Engendering Objects: Dynamics of Barkcloth and Gender among the Maisin of Papua New Guinea. Leiden: Sidestone Press. Hoven, B., & Catherine, H. (2005). Spaces of Masculinities. New York: Routledge. Ingold, T. (2000). The perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. New York: Routledge. Kathy, P. (1986). Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in turn of the Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Marx, K. 1976 (1867). Capital Volume I. London: Penguin Books. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962 (1945). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Miller, D. (2005). Materiality. London: Duke University. Mirzoeff, N. (2011). The right to look: The Counterhistory of visulaity. London: Duke University Press.

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Olofsson, J. (2017). Gender, class and altered soundscapes: Following the implementation of a robotic welding system. Ethnography, 1–17. Ponzanesi, S. (2005). “Beyond the Black Venus: Colonial Sexual Politics and Contemporary Visual Practices” page no. 165–90. In Italian Colonialism: Legacies and Memories, edited by J. Andall and D. Duncan. Oxford: Peter Lang. Ramsden, A. R. (1945). Assam Planter: Tea planning & Hunting in Assam’s Jungle. London: John Gifford. Sabala & Gopal, M. (2010). Body, Gender and Sexuality: Politics of being and belonging. Economic and Political Weekly, 45(17), 43–51. Saikia, Y. (2005). Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India. London: Duke University Press. Schafer, M. (1993). The Soundscape. London: Destiny Books. Sengupta, M. (2016). Becoming Assamese: Colonialism and new subjectivities in Northeast India. New York: Routledge. Sen, S. (2010). Commercial recruiting and informal intermediation: Debate over the sardari system in Assam tea plantations, 1860-1900. Modern Asian Studies, 44(1), 3–28. Sharma, J. (2006). British Science, Chinese Skill & Assam Tea: Making Empire’s Garden. The Indian Economics & Social History Review, 43(4), 429–455. Sharma, J. (2011). Empire’s Garden. New Delhi: Duke University Press. Shera, K. (2008). The Anthropology of Sound. Viewed on 10th May 2020 at https://ocw.mit.edu/ courses/anthropology/21a-360j-the-anthropology-of-sound-spring-2008/assignments/shera_ siren.pdf. Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Thompson, E. P. (1967). Time, Work-Discipline & Industrial Capitalism. Past & Present, No. 38, 56–97. Veblen, T. 1925 (1899). The theory of the leisure class: An economic study of institutions. London: George Allen & Unwin. Veblen, T. 1964 (1914). The instinct of workmanship: And the state of the industrial arts. New York: Augustus M. Kelly and the Sentry Press. Xaxa, V. (1999). Tribes as Indigenous People in India. Economic & Political Weekly, 34(51), 3589– 3595.

Prithiraj Borah is a Ph.D. scholar in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India. He broadly works in the area of trade union and student union politics, colonial history of the plantations in South Asia and class and caste politics in Assam. Rowena Robinson is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India. She broadly works in the area of Anthropology of corruption, constitutional law, sociology of higher education, sociology of religion and kinship, conversion, Christianity in India.

Chapter 5

Mapping Power and Domination: Studying State Making in Arunachal Pradesh through Old Official Photographs Rimi Tadu Abstract Despite several inherent biases, official documents and government archives are used as one of the major sources for reconstructing the past and history. The scope of reading and interpreting these state-produced documents is quite limited, if not inaccessible. During my study of the state-people relations in the early period of state establishment in Arunachal Pradesh (1950–1970s), particularly among the Apatani tribe, I came across several old official photographs in the Information and Public Relation Office, Naharlagun. These photographs, taken during different official functions and events captured and revealed more than what they intended to. These photos captured complex power relations- the subjugated and the state, the locals and the outsiders- in a single frame. Historically and politically looking at, these photos captured the processes of state socialisation, and colonisation. In this chapter, I am looking at the state’s efforts in socialising the erstwhile non-state people by mapping the available official photographs and reading them against the intended frame. Through my analysis of the official photos, I argue that unlike written documents, photographs often presented multidimensional stories of each subject within a frame. These off-the-focus stories can be collected and connected to write histories about people who were non-written. Keywords State making · Tribes and state · State socialisation · Bureaucratic rituals · Colonial photography · Official photographs

Introduction For several reasons, the region, now named Arunachal Pradesh in the eastern most part of the Himalaya, presents a unique opportunity to understand India’s state making and nation-building process. The region belongs to numerous and diverse indigenous My deep gratitude goes to Prof. Martin Fuch and Prof. Antje Linkenbach, and other fellow colleagues both at the Max Webber Kolleg for Advanced Studies at University of Erfurt and ICAS:MP for their critical engagement with the early drafts of this paper. R. Tadu (B) Ziro, Arunachal Pradesh, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. Nongbri and R. Bhargava (eds.), Materiality and Visuality in North East India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1970-0_5

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communities very distinct from mainland Indian societies. For centuries, they had maintained their autonomy from the state systems existing around them (Scott 2009). While their contact with the modern state system started since mid-nineteenth century onwards when colonial British rulers started establishing their base in the northern foothills bordering the Brahmaputra plains, it was only after India attained its independence that the state and state administration became a real phenomenon for most of the communities. The region was brought under Indian sovereignty and policies for geographical, political, and psychological integration of its people with the nationstate of India was being planned by early policy makers. Thus a unique governmentality of state-socialization of erstwhile non-state people into a state system begun to achieve the territorial assimilation. Various government archives and official documents related to Arunachal Pradesh, earlier known as the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA), are testament to these processes albeit one reads it against it’s grain or take note of the absolute silence of the people it talks about. Most of the documentations exist today in the form of official documents like records, directives, memos, reports, notifications, communications, animated exchanges of letters and notes, publications, photos and videos, etc., to record and keep an account of their own activities. This chapter aims to read against the obvious narrative or narrative frames of the official photography to understand the undocumented relationship shared by the newly established or establishing Indian government in the region and the local communities. I attempt to look at this complex process of state socialisation by primarily focusing on the bureaucratic rituals captured in old official photographs. For this purpose, I closely examined the old official photographs taken during different state occasions between 1950s and 1970s. Most of the local communities, who were hitherto unexposed to outsiders or the outside world, were suddenly overwhelmed by the rapid entry of official establishments and personnel, and many other working groups who travelled along with these systems from outside. This development placed the communities under a new political regime governed by outsiders and forced them to learn a new language and code of behaviour that was alien to their way of life. As discussed in sections below, bureaucratic rituals, performances, and traditions manufactures statist socialisation, disciplining, built allegiance- and particular power relation. The daily performances and commemoration of these rituals by bureaucratic actors, produced new normative beliefs among the locals as they started internalizing them.1 For instance, the communities started internalising the new norms and structures of power and class hierarchies produced by bureaucratic practices. They might not see these processes as problematic and would rather participate in such a process with all sense of loyalty towards the state. However, evidence reveals the policies are clearly problematic. They are not only highly intrusive, but they also critically altered people’s choices and perception of themselves and others. In the 1 My

Ph.D. work on writing the local history of Apatani tribe about their earliest experience of engagement with the Indian rule, then my postdoctoral study and fellowship engagement with ICAS:MP and Max Webber Kolleg, University of Erfurt, respectively- I particularly looked at the state establishment process and state socialization process primarily among the Apatani community of Arunachal Pradesh.

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following sections, I will try to show how this operates with examples from the Apatani community of Arunachal Pradesh.

The Coming of the State There is no unanimity or clarity among scholars about how these diverse group of people came and settled in this particular region. Stuart Blackburn notes that despite various claims of migration routes by scholars, a very strong and compelling counter claim comes from the people themselves whose oral traditions substantiate the straight north to south migration across the Himalayas (Blackburn 2012; Blackburn 2004). At present, more than 26 major tribes and more than 110 minor ethnic tribal communities with their distinct language/dialect, traditions, culture and belief system coexist in the region. The migration and shifting process continued till the middle of last century. After the coming of the Indian government, who began territorialising the region and started entrenching the borders, that movement of communities ceased. From the 1950s onwards and particularly after the 1962 war with China, the Indian state’s engagement with the region and its people had conspicuously increased (Guyot-Rechard 2017a). From renaming the region as North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) to granting it a Union Territory status and then a statehood under a new name—Arunachal Pradesh—introduction of new land laws, administrative and bureaucratic establishments, agriculture and educational programmes, and the processes of nationalisation along with state socialisation of the people was carefully carried out. The first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru and his Advisor on Tribal Affairs, Verrier Elwin, worked very closely on policy plan for dealing with the tribal communities of Arunachal Pradesh- to assimilate and integrate the tribal communities with the Indian nation-state in most human way with great sensitivity towards the tribal way of life. After the 1962 war, this philosophy changed drastically when the Union Government was criticised for holding back the absolute grip over the region for the cause of few tribes. More aggressive modernising and transformative policies were introduced. The new policymakers argued that for the greater interest of the country, the tribes had to make this ‘sacrifice’, in return, the government would try to preserve the ‘basic elements’ of tribal way of life (Elwin 1961). Educational and agricultural policies were the main programmes, along with further diversification of various existing government departments. New administrative districts were created, the districts were further divided into administrative divisions, blocks, and segments for efficient administration. The assimilation and national integration and state socialisation were carried out at both territorial and psychological levels. While for the policymakers based in Delhi and Shillong Secretariat who were drafting the integration policies and plans, the papers subsumed the realities of people and their social communities were represented only by the names, numbers and few ethnographic briefings. The state representatives in the field had to carry out and put into effect the state’s desired outcome. It

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is at this level, the names on papers become real men and women in flesh and blood, the actual dynamics of biopolitics played out. The daily and eventful interactions between the state agents/officials and the local communities had strong undertone of unequal power relations. Compared to other Northeastern states, Arunachal Pradesh is considered the most peaceful state where the national integration policy is considered most successful. Today, unlike many other states in the Northeast, where autonomy and right to self-determination against Indian nation-state is still being fought out and negotiated, people in Arunachal take pride in their sense of patriotism towards India and their fluency in Hindi. The ‘emotional and psychological’ integration to the Indian nation-state seems to be complete in Arunachal Pradesh. Further, unlike many states in the region which has been placed under the Constitutional provision of the Sixth Schedule and Article 371A-C, F&G that provides for the creation of the Autonomous District Council and areas as a mechanism to protect tribal dominated areas and their customary laws and practices; Arunachal Pradesh was kept out of its purview but comes under Article 371-H of the Constitution with the Governor as the head and no special provision to rights of tribal communities.

Performing the State Far away from the capital city of Delhi, the hub of all political processes and decision making, in the interiors of peripheries, the only face of India were the administrative bureaucrats and the military. The bureaucrats, in their person, and their performance of bureaucratic rituals embodied and represented the state before the local indigenous of the land. They were not only mandated to enforce the state and its norms but to also embody its authority and influence, upholding the sanctity of state rituals and its commemoration. This is necessary for the bureaucratic actors because it is these traditions that ‘ensure their own survival and access to resources’ (Alderson 2001). Most of the methods and traditions established by the British administration in these hills were borrowed and continued in a similar fashion by the new government, but more aggresively and with more consistency. These intrusive expansion and military activities were balanced out with beneficent activities to not antagonize the communities (Guyot 2017b). The local communities with no prior contact to the modern state system were to be trained in order to understand and internalise the sensibilities of these rituals. The new status labels, distances, boundaries and privileges were to be demarcated in order to mark the hierarchies of power and class. The ‘banal’ and even sometimes ‘vulgar’ display of power and hierarchies (Mbembe 1992) comes to the fore in state sponsored administrative ceremonies and functions in which people are segregated into VIPs, VVIPs, servants, peons, other contractual staffs, uniformed officials and those who are recognised local non-official agents and those who are outside the system (the least powerful) audiences of the state rituals. Along with this physical segregation, an entire system of communication with power markers was introduced to local

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vocabulary. Language embodies and brings an entire meaning to experience or a way of experiencing the reality. Terms to address someone or way of salutation, such as Saab, Memsaab, Babu, Surdar, became part of the local communication system. The terms like Surkara (corrupted from Hindi word Sarkar for the government), Appenmen for appointment, Jo Hin for Jai Hind, Puisa for money, Ma-le for loads, Hujur, etc., became part of the local vocabulary. These words have no simile in their language but the people picked them even if pronounced in a corrupted form. People who could pick the language of the Halyang (plain people in Apatani language) found easier access to officials and became local influencers of the Surkara. For the villagers, learning the language of the Sarkar could make one resourceful by opening up opportunities for jobs as interpreter, which gave them some influence and rank among their peers. Locals who could get appointed as village head (Gaon Bura or Kotokis), political interpreters and labour corp. heads (Sardar) had their own subordinates or assistants, and they emulated the power and privileges through various manipulations of their access to state resources. These power structures and state presence were emulated and reproduced repeatedly until it became a normative reality to have power-laden hierarchical ranks and privileges, and simultaneously, their lack on the receiving end. There were attempts to inspire awe and respect through a regular showcase of film shows, radio shows, demonstrations of various technologies, taking locals for tour to cities like Delhi, etc. Or on the other hand, through extravagant ceremonies. These ceremonies demonstrated power and affluence of the state, and reiteration of domination and powerlessness as its effect (Mbembe 1992). An example of such a phenomenon can be found in the events organised during the visits of VIPs from Delhi or Shillong to the region. These were seen and used as great opportunities for socialising the subjugated to state system. State was also performed through various acts of benevolence and patronage. The villagers were to welcome such VIPs by attending the event where they would be made to stand in rows with joined hands doing namaste, of course ‘properly dressed’ or well covered so as not to offend the sensibility of the accompanying female guests with their scanty loin cloth (see Fig. 5.1: VIP visitors greeted by the locals ). They also had to welcome the VIP entourage at their villages and homes (Figs. 5.2 & 5.3), entertain them with food and gifts, while they inspect and examine (maybe even abhor) them. All these were to be arranged with the positioning of army men and Gaon Buras and Kotokis in the villages. The roads being cut out, broadened and smoothened, villages being cleaned to not offend the VIPs with its smell and sights, and houses decorated and prepared to receive the visitor. These houses were often adorned with pictures of national leaders as a mark of their loyalty and patriotism (see Fig. 5.2). It also became a tradition to present the so called ‘traditional dance’ performance by young girls for the visitors’ gaze (see Fig. 5.7), a tradition which has continued till today so much so that even the community members have adopted these dances as ‘traditional’ dance. Traditionally Apatanis never had a dance per se but a sing-song game, it did not have the performative element neither it was performed for any audience as it was a game. Teachers were appointed to teach dancing and singing to school children according to cultural sensibilities of the dominant.

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People and State: Re-Reading the Official Photographs Late nineteenth century onwards, photography and photographs became part of state documentation apparatus, especially to document the state’s social welfare activities. However, as John Tagg (1988) argues, what happened in the process was the emergence of new methods of regulation through record creation and keeping, surveillance, disciplining and training of the social body. The instrumental deployment of photography by the government was privileging the administrators and training the eyes of the audience to the category ‘other’ as subordinate and subjugated. Writing about the use of a particular mechanism of photopgraphy by administrators that produce a particular scrutinizing gaze reducing the ‘other’ into subhuman, Tagg argues that, the working classes, the colonized people, the criminal, poor, ill-housed, sick or insane were constituted as the passive - or, in this structure ‘feminised’ – object of knowledge. Subjected to a scrutinizing gaze, forced to emit signs, and yet cut off from command of meaning, such groups were represented as, and wishfully rendered incapable of speaking, acting or organizing for themselves.’ (1988, 12)

The ‘other’ here is not just passive but also ‘pathetic objects capable only of offering themselves up to a benevolent, transcendent gaze—the gaze of the camera and the gaze of the paternal state’ (ibid). Within this understanding and method of state mediated subjugation through official photo documentation, I am re-visiting the official photographs taken during the early phase of state establishment in Arunachal Pradesh. Re-reading those photos beyond the intended narrative of state benevolence towards the communities requires another kind of gaze- a defiant, decolonizing, and maybe an anarchic gaze. Following are few old photographs collected from the Information and Public Relation Office in Naharlagun (AP). During my research I actually came across several other official photos of different communities in Arunachal, taken across 1960s and 1970s, for research purposes by the Department of Research and Publication. The official photographers and whosoever directing those researches had full access to those communities- as their private and personal spaces were overridden by authorities. As it is common for many ethnographic visual documentation, many of them are staged. Many photos had half naked women and young girls. I particularly remember a set of photos taken of a young Apatani couple staged as intimately hugging each other. There were other photographs of touring medical teams into interiors documenting the challenging journeys and the good works they were doing. Many of these photos often re-emerge in official reports, pamplets and exhibitions organized by government departments, and sometimes even in social media accounts. I was informed that recently, after few complaints, many of these photos are no more accessible to public from IPR office because of their ‘obscene’ contents. These photographs should be problematised for the patronizing, dehumanizing and colonial gaze. They require a re-visit and newer lenses and framing to illuminate what is not visible to naked and unsuspecting eye. Much like how UV imaging works, one needs to shed that penetrating light and bring forth the layers of structural dynamics

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Fig. 5.1 Official VIP visitors greeted by the locals standing in rows. Source IPR, Naharlagun

Fig. 5.2 An Apatani traditional house visited by VIPs. Posters of Nehru and other national leader hanging on top. Source IPR, Naharlagun

and relations by juxtaposing them with the historical context. These photos capture the authority and their subjects in the same frame revealing many unintended stories that official narratives do not tell. Unlike the written documents or records that are

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limited in its dimensions of expression or what it reveals, hence limiting their interpretation; photographs are more revealing than intended. These photographs were taken by official photographers during various official events such as celebration of Independence Day, inaugural functions of departmental centres, visits by VIPs from Delhi or Shillong, touring officials, and cultural programmes, welfare activities, etc. These photos also invariably captured the incoherencies, multi-subjectivities, coordinated and uncoordinated expressions, multiple realities and roles people played, and people in the background who are not the main subject. Most importantly they captured both local and outsiders in one frame, capturing their stark difference. Several photos are of some VIPs from Delhi visiting the Apatani village. In Fig. 5.3, one could see that many Apatani men, women and children had gathered in their verandah curious to see the visiting Halyang Saab. One needs to know that despite the shared curiosity they do not share similar access and control over the situation. In other photos, Apatani men are huddled in rows with joined hand symbolizing Namaste, a gesture alien to them, while the visitor is smiling, looking amused and inspecting the locals as they walk pass the rows. There is always a distance, benevolence, disdain, and a gaze (Figs. 5.3 and 5.4). For the locals or the indigenous it reproduced fear, distrust, sense of inferiority, powerlessness, subjugation and obedience and loyalty in a twisted way. These VIP visits would also be followed by the elaborate ceremony of distribution of gifts or ‘political presents’. Wool yarn, umbrellas, red clothes, axe, tea, sugar, etc., were distributed among people selected by the local agents and local officials to reward their loyalty. ‘Political Presents’ was another bureaucratic tradition introduced by the colonial officials to be presented to village heads or chiefs to build friendship alliances, or to reward the loyals. It was a crucial means to maintain their influence and there was a separate budget allocation for ‘Political Presents’. While it was well Fig. 5.3 A VIP and his family visiting Apatani village, while Apatani men, women, and children also gathered in their front verandah to watch them. Source IPR, Naharlagun

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Fig. 5.4 Opening day of a bathing Ghat somewhere near Hangu village. Boys and girls were being bathed naked in front of the VIPs and their children and the public, to demonstrate how cleanliness and hygiene are being taught to locals. Source IPR, Naharlagun

known that each touring official carried a good deal of these gifts, the British officials were still quite discrete and calculative about it fearing a theft or an ambush. The photos of these ‘gift’ distribution ceremonies, as it became a tradition of Indian administrative system in these highlands, are quite interesting. Highly decorated platforms resembling the Darbars were erected where one side of the platform the piles of ‘gift’ materials are kept either on a table or on the floor in open display (See Figs. 5.5 & 5.6). The VIPs sit on the chairs on the platform above the ground where the locals are in audience waiting for their gifts. One by one the names of selected individuals are called out to collect gifts from the hands of the VIP while others watch the proceedings. The photos are taken from particular camera angles and direction. They capture the grandeur of the event and the stage (Fig. 5.5), the tilted angle often emphasising the authority figure or benevolence (Fig. 5.6) and the direction of camera focused in a way to show who and what these photos are about. Figure 5.7, portray a group of girls dancing for the official guests. It is important to note that some tribal communities in Arunachal did not have a tradition of dancing or playing musical instruments, in fact, dancing was alien to them. This particular photo is taken in Ziro, the Apatani land, but the girls dancing here belong to Nyishi community. This could be because Apatanis do not have any so called traditional dance. However, Verrier Elwin believed otherwise. He believed that dancing and singing were integral to the way of life of tribals (Elwin 1956). Fuelled by the belief, he recommended the appointment of teachers to teach the school boys and girls to dance to ‘revive’ the culture, that they should dance on all important occasions and that senior touring officers should encourage dances while on tour (Elwin, op.cit). As a result, many communities which did not have dancing as part of their tradition

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Fig. 5.5 The VIP sitting on temporary constructed darbar with Political Presents piled in display on one side. Source IPR, Naharlagun

Fig. 5.6 The VIPs distributing the Political Presents. Source IPR, Naharlagun

have now incorporated practices of modern dance, borrowed from other communities, Bollywood and other media, as their cultural dance in their teachings in schools. Elwin’s proposition of introducing dance in official functions became a customary practice among administrative staff to make young boys and girls in school dance

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whenever any official visitor comes so much so that even today the practice is continuing and normalized. For communities with no say and power to refuse, having to be forced to dance and entertain the official guests itself is a dehumanising experience. In their traditional and fairly egalitarian society, people did not have such visible expression or demonstrations of power and authority or of subjugation and powerlessness. Another interesting aspect of these interactions between the people and the state is how the authorities and locals would position themselves in a shared common space. While the officials would be either standing or sitting on the chairs on one side from where they could look upon the people or the masses, surrounded by their subordinates and local members who work as the state representatives such as the Kotokis and the Gaon Buras to assist them or do the running around for them, the other people would be seated on the ground. One could see all the men dressed in their traditional attire, most of them wearing their Gaon Bura red coat, carrying their traditional machetes with them, all huddled and squatting on the ground in an apparent display of obedience. In another photo an elderly woman was used as a prop to inaugurate and demonstrate the tape water tank supply (Fig. 5.8). The old woman with her head held low and eyes cast downward with folded hands looks nothing but petrified surrounded by Halyangs. These captured moments show the processes of socialisation of a once stateless community in the process of adapting to state system. Every moment of their interaction with officials or state representatives was their exposure to new social norms and power relations. The roles and body language that locals are depicting here are instructed or learned behaviour. The community does not have any cultural meaning Fig. 5.7 Group of young Nyishi girls dancing for VIP guests in Ziro. The locals in far background separated by volunteers in uniform. Source IPR, Naharlagun

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Fig. 5.8 An inauguration of water supply tank for a village and a visibly nervous Apatani elderly woman with her hands clasped. Source IPR, Naharlagun

for ‘folded or clasped hands’, neither they were used to being ‘inspected’ with a gaze. These socialisations are further carried out through various other mechanisms, such as school education, decentralised (but mainstreamed) governance system, the introduction of modern agriculture systems, land policies, new judiciary system, development programmes and communication infrastructures, etc. Under these circumstances, state, over the decades, became a hegemonic reality. Today even when most of these administrative and legislative structures are run by the local representatives, their loyalties and their relation with the state system is still that of unequal power relation and the unquestioning observance of the system. These realities had severe impact on people during the transition period and how they narrate their past.

Conclusion State making process is continuing in and through each and every bureaucratic office, every written document it produces, and every individual who participates in it (Bierchenk and Sardan 2014) ensure its reproduction. State socialises people for its own preservation and to actualize its interest. In the process, it generates a particular hierarchical order of power and power relation. Communities in Arunachal Pradesh, like Apatani communities who were outside this state system, were brought under

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the state system and socialized into new forms of governance, administrative functions, and ways of power relations. Over the period they have learned to re-organize themselves under new situation in order to access power and resource distribution. In a very rapid succession throughout the 1950s, the entire area was annexed and occupied, often with the aid of military force against the defenseless people. The entire area was insulated from any outside effect. Most of the policies and programmes were designed with an objective of nationalist integration underlined by a strong overtone of Hindu nationalism. The use of media, education, language, religious ideology, works of Hindu missionaries, etc., provided good ground for accepting Hinduism as the ‘national religion’. The attempts and huge investment to settle more loyal and ‘civilised’ non-tribal outsiders among the communities in different, especially the border regions to increase the presence of mainland population in the state are also part of the strategy employed by the state. Mapping these processes is necessary for undestanding how state system works. What is known as a ‘civilizing’ mission is actually a socializing design. The documented trails of the state activities were created to run its own system; to understand what it actually did one needs to read it against its frame. One can look at the bureaucracy as a mechanism of its own with various rituals, performances and traditions that produce a very different kind of socialisation, discipline and allegiance. The language of addressing and honouring superiors or officials; the elaborate award ceremonies and ‘political presents’ distribution ceremonies; the so called cultural programmes where the local people were made to perform for the official visitors; the exposure trips of villagers to Delhi which conversely involve their display before the affluent and ‘civilised’ people of cities, etc., are numerous processes. What is important to note is that all these processes and programmes were regularly documented but in an official language and hence from nation-state-making administrative perspective, through which the non-state people were exposed to state people with unique set of norms and rules. Such exposures not only introduce and induce a sense of inferiority and self-negation but also the cognizance of hierarchy, authority, and power. People’s food habit, language skills, dressing, housing, and economy were transforming, but people were also being socialised to hierarchical division based on administrative and economic class. At present, the region is progressively being militarised both on the Indian and Chinese sides, as if this is going to be the future battleground. An increase in military infrastructure and military personnel, more and more circumvention of boundaries, the introduction of the draconian military activities such as introduction of AFSPA, increased attention to border issues, are another form and cause of controlling the people.

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References Alderson, K. (2001). Making sense of state socialization. Review of International Relation, 27(3), 415–433. Blackburn, S. (2004). Memories of Migration: Notes on Legends and Beads in Arunachal Pradesh. European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, 26(26), 15–60. Blackburn, S., & Huber, T. (2012). Origin and migration in the extended Eastern Himalayas. Leigden: Brill. Bierschenk, T., & Olivier de Sardan, J.-P. (2014). State at Work: Dynamics of African Bureaucracies. Boston: Brill. Elwin, V. (1956). The policy of the government of india for the administration of NEFA (pp. 23–26). Government of India: NEFA. Elwin, V. (1961). Elwin’s letter written by Elwin to K.L. Mehta on 31st may 1961. Verrier Elwin’s Papers. Vol. Fl. no. 96. New Delhi: NMML. Guyote-Rechard, B. (2017a). Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910–1962. Cambridge: Delhi. Guyote-Rechard, B. (2017b). Tour Diaries and Itinerant Government in the Eastern Himalayas, 1909–1962. The Historical Journal (Cambridge University Press), 1–24. Mbembe, A. (1992). The banality of power and the aesthetics of vulgarity in the Postcolony. Public Culture, 4(2), Spring, 1–30, Translated by Janet Roitman. Scott, J. C. (2009). The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale University Press: New Haven. Tagg, J. (1988). The Burden of Representation: Essay on Photography and History. Series published by Communication and Culture. New York, Palgrave Macmillan.

Rimi Tadu received her PhD from TISS, Mumbai- CSD, Hyderabad. She was a postdoctorate fellow with ICAS:MP and a Fellow at Max Webber Kolleg, University of Erfurt where her works focussed on archival studies of early stage of state establishment and their engagement with the locals in Arunachal Pradesh. She has taught in the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Most of her works concern with decolonizing history and documenting local and oral histories of indigenous communities in the Eastern Himalayas. At present she is working on the study of lived reality and struggles of gendered life in communitarian societies with Adivasi and tribal women scholars.

Chapter 6

Hau Laa and Hymn: Musicking Dynamics of the Hau-Tangkhuls Pamyo Chamroy

Abstract In the past, the Hau-Tangkhuls musical practices were always in the lived moment. Words, in the form of songs, had no tangible visual presence—they were primarily sounds, albeit pregnant with deep meanings. As such, songs were never separated from the living present; they never existed alone without a performing or an oralising human being. Wherefore, the retention of their songs was also dependent on their constant use of the songs and the community’s collective memory. But in the late 19th century, with the arrival of the Western Christian missionaries in the Hau-Tangkhul hills, a new dimension was added to their musicking—the presence of a written text—in the form of hymn—embodying the musical tradition of the West. This chapter explores the nuances of the then musical practices of the Hau-Tangkhuls when it was a primarily oral culture and the changes that ensued in their musicking with their conversion to Christianity and the subsequent adoption of Christian hymns—taking into account the consequent impact on their identity over time. Furthermore, this chapter locates these modes of musical practices in their present context. Keywords Musicking · Christian hymn · Orality · Naga music · Identity

1 The

Hau-Tangkhuls are one of the many Naga ‘tribes’ whose ancestral domain is situated in the contiguous frontier areas of North-East India and North-West Myanmar. In India, they are largely concentrated in Ukhrul district and Kamjong district of Manipur State. Over twenty HauTangkhul villages are also located in Kangpokpi district and Senapati district, few villages in Thoubal district, and Tengnoupal district in Manipur. Hau-Tangkhuls also known as the Somra Tangkhuls in Myanmar, are situated in Leishi Township and Homalin Township in the Sagaing region of Myanmar too. According to 2011 census their population is 1, 83,115 in India. But if we take into account the Somra Tangkhuls in Myanmar, some scholars suggest their strength to be over three lakh (Vashum 2014). P. Chamroy (B) Centre for Media Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. Nongbri and R. Bhargava (eds.), Materiality and Visuality in North East India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1970-0_6

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Introduction The Hau-Tangkhuls or the Tangkhuls1 as they are more popularly known, are one of the many communities in North East India who now profess Christianity as their faith. A stark visual presence of this faith is the dominance of the structure of the church in all their villages and in Ukhrul town, their main headquarter in the state of Manipur. Even in some of the Hau-Tangkhul villages in Myanmar, such presence is now visible. But, such was not the case a century and a few decades ago. Like most of their Naga kindreds, for the Hau-Tangkhuls, religion did not exist or was practiced in the manner it is done today, in an institutionalised form with distinct separation of a secular or religious space. Rather, it was a way of life attuned to the actualities of their life then. As Thong (2011) articulated: ‘for the Nagas religion permeated all of life…there was no designated worship place, literature, creed or a religious expert to help delineate such beliefs. It was represented by the communal life, wisdom and experience of a group of people over a long period of time’ (17–18).2 Music was richly ingrained and was practiced as entailed by such a way of life. However, such actuality underwent a drastic change on their encounter with Colonialism and the advent of Christianity in their midst—beginning in the late nineteenth century.3 Christianity took roots amongst the Hau-Tangkhuls with the arrival of ScottishBritish Christian missionary, Rev. William Pettigrew and his wife Alice Goreham Pettigrew in their hills, in 1896.4 Pettigrew’s original intention was to work amongst the Meiteis in Manipur and had set up a school in Imphal where he worked as a teacher. But due to restrictions imposed by the British authority on carrying out mission work amongst the orthodox Hindu Meiteis, to avoid antagonism between the British colonialists and the Meiteis, he had to call off his mission in the Imphal valley (Zeliang 2005). However, he was permitted to stay in the state of Manipur as long as he confined his missionary enterprise amongst the tribes in the hills, ‘at his own risk’ (Solo and Mahangthei 2006). Thus, began the history of Christianity amongst the Hau-Tangkhuls. With it came a new form of music—the Hymn. With the introduction of hymns by the Christian missionaries and its subsequent adoption by the Hau-Tangkhuls on their conversion to Christianity, not only a new musical style was imbibed by the converts, even the mode of musical practice was transformed. Hymns aided by a written text entailed a way of musicking which unsettled their rich musical tradition—how songs were learned, retained, composed, and so on. The endeavour in this chapter is to detail the nuances of these changes, taking into account the factors and actualities under which such changes came about, 2 The contention here is not to suggest that Christianity cannot be a way of life and that it is not in the

present age. In fact, Biblically that is what is espoused. But at that point in time, unlike their earlier religious practices and spiritual beliefs which were borne out of their lived experiences, Christianity was then a foreign religion and had only just begun to leave its mark amongst few individuals. 3 Within the limits of this chapter, interrogation on the dynamics of relationship between Colonialism and Christian missionaries are not delved upon. 4 Rev. William Pettigrew was an Anglican who came to India in the 1890s under the Arthington Aborigines Mission. But by the time he came to the Hau-Tangkhuls, he had changed his affiliation to The American Baptist Missionary Union (Dena 1988).

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by drawing comparisons between the Hau-Tangkhul musical practices as it was practiced in the context of their oral tradition and the new mode of musical practice accompanied by the technologies of a foreign culture. This chapter also attempts to locate the repurposing of these modes of musicking in their contemporary musical practices.

Contextualising the Introduction of Hymn In the Hau-Tangkhul hills, Christianity and music were intertwined right from the very inception. The importance of music itself was ingrained in Christian religious doctrine. Biblical statements exalting the significance of music in the Christian faith abounds: Speak to one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your hearts to the Lord (Ephesians 5:19, NIV); give thanks to the LORD with the lyre; sing praises to Him with a harp of ten strings. Sing to Him a new song; play skillfully with a shout of joy (Psalms 33:2–3, NASB); O come, let us sing unto the LORD: let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving, and make a joyful noise unto him with psalms (Psalms 95:1–2, KJV), etc.

The importance accorded to music in Christianity came to play a vital role in the evangelisation of the Hau-Tangkhuls. In the early days of Christianity among the Hau-Tangkhuls, apart from the Western Christian missionaries, there were just few persons from within the community who were literate and had undergone Christian theological training. Hence, the lyrical content of the hymns was one of the key means to introduce the gospel of Christ to the people. As Arrington (2015) posits in the context of the Lisu people in China, hymns were a vital theological mediator between the text-intensive religion of Christianity and the largely oral culture of the Hau-Tangkhuls. Furthermore, as a community with a rich musical tradition, the Hau-Tangkhuls were often more receptive to the Christian gospel, as this new faith was enhanced with songs in the missionaries’ enterprise. In the early days of HauTangkhuls’ Christianity, every Sunday, after the worship service in their respective churches, the Christian converts collectively marched in the lanes and by-lanes of their villages as a means to take the gospel to the people, all the while beating their Pung5 and singing hymns after hymns. This drew the attention of their non-Christian kinsmen and women, and through the words of these songs, many accepted Christ as their saviour.6 Besides, singing acapella in three-part or four-part harmony was very much a part of Hau-Tangkhul musicking. So, hymns which were generally sung in four-part harmony in a congregation, were picked up quite easily by the people.

5 Pung/Phung

is a type of drum made out of cylindrical dry wood, with an animal hide stretched over one or both the sides of the hollow wood. 6 These marchings happened either in the evening or in the morning depending on the specific village. However, what was common in such marchings was that it was mainly led by youths.

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Significantly, as scholarship on the Nagas points out, in the Western missionary worldview, Christianity and Civilisation were viewed as two aspects of the gift of god. No doubt, many of the missionaries sincerely endeavoured for the welfare of the Nagas that they were working with. Nonetheless, to a certain extent, their views on the Nagas were quite similar to those of British colonizers. Placed on a timeline of civilisation with the modernity of Europe at the apex, the Christian missionaries and the British colonisers saw the Nagas as ‘savages’ lying outside of ‘civilisation’ (Lotha 2010). Both viewed the cultural and social practices of the Nagas through the lens of binary oppositions—‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised,’ Christians and ‘Pagans’/‘heathens,’ ‘light’ and ‘darkness.’ As a result, many of the Naga cultural and social practices which they deemed as ‘not in congruence’ with Western Christianity were termed as ‘evil,’ making it necessary to terminate such practices (Thomas 2016). Biased by the Western cultural perceptions, the traditional songs and dances, which were traditionally considered indispensable to the well-being and social life of the Nagas, were looked at as vehicles of ‘demon’ worship and trafficking with evil spirits. Through such erroneous views, the new Naga converts were discouraged from engaging and expressing in their traditional music (Thong 2011). Similarly, Hau-Tangkhul music was not deemed ‘appropriate’ for Christian worship—it was considered as antagonistic to their ‘true faith.’ This was also compounded by the missionaries’ apprehension of the new converts returning to their native faith if they continue singing their traditional songs. Ngakang maintains that such attitude was partly due to the unintelligibility of Hau-Tangkhul music to the Western missionaries (Ngakang 2014). Consequently, only Western Christian hymns were deemed the ‘appropriate’ musical mode to worship their new god (Thong 2011). Thus, began the introduction of Western music in the form of hymn—in their itinerant preaching tours, churches, and the mission schools. As noted by Rev. William Pettigrew in his diary: It is a pleasure to find many an opportunity has been given for preaching the gospel, through the singing of these hymns in their villages by the converts. Many from other villages call the boys together and listen with attention to the singing. It seemed to be a grand way of preaching the gospel (quoted in Solo and Mahangthei 2006, 31).

Meanwhile, the need was also felt to translate the Bible into the language of the Hau-Tangkhuls. But at this point in time, there was no common lingua franca applicable to all the Hau-Tangkhuls. Each village spoke its own village-specific language,7 which was only intelligible amongst the neighbouring villages and region.8 Hunphun village9 was the centre of Rev. William Pettigrew’s missionary enterprise amongst the Hau-Tangkhuls, where he and his wife established the first mission school and 7 Several

villages could be considered as speaking varying dialects of what is presently known as Hau-Tangkhul language. But to classify every village as speaking dialects of this language is problematic, as there are also villages whose languages are unintelligible for many other HauTangkhuls. So, for the purpose of this chapter, the term language is used instead of dialect. 8 Amongst the Hau-Tangkhuls, they identify each other as Raphei, Kamo, Kharao, Veikhang, etc. 9 Ukhrul town, the main headquarter of the Hau-Tangkhuls, is located in the ancestral land of this village and its neighbouring village, Hungpung.

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the first church, and other reasons that one can only speculate, this village became prominent. He transliterated the language of this village in Roman character. To better capture the highly tonal nature of this language, he added two more letters, ‘a,’ ¯ denoting an extended ‘a’—‘aa,’ and ‘a,’ which is pronounced closer to the sound of ‘u.’ With this writing system, by 1897 and 1898, Pettigrew had prepared the First and Second Primer as textbooks for the Mission School in Ukhrul. The translations of the gospels in The New Testament too emerged from 1902 onwards. By 1903, he had also translated forty hymns drawn from Western Christian hymnals and were put to use in his mission work. By 1907, he compiled fifty-one translated hymns and published them as the first Hau-Tangkhul hymn book, titled Jesuwui La: ¯ Hymns in Tangkhul ¯ Naga. ¯ And in the third edition of the hymn book, Jesuwui Laa Lairik published in 1929, musical notation tonic sol-fa was also included along with the hymns (Shimreiwung 2013). In the course of time, as the number of Christian converts swelled, the increasing adoption of hymns and the circulation of a common hymn book began to induce a transformation in not only their musicking but also had an impact on their very identity.

Conceptualising Hau Laa Extensive debates and contentions on what ‘music’ is and how it is to be conceptualised or studied, have been and continues to be a part of the discourse on music. Different schools of thought and the complexity accentuated by attempts to engage with musical practices concerning communities whose conception of music does not necessarily fit into modern notions of music have resulted in the emergence of varying disciplinary names/phrases or approaches to study the phenomenon of music. The contentions have also aroused, in no small extent, a critique of the Western-centric conceptions of music and the limitations brought about by restrictive disciplinary concerns. Bigenho (2009) critically posits that external perspectives and institutional demands have made ethnomusicology construe music as its central object in a reader on ethnomusicology. In this construction, because of powerful Western ideologies about music, ethnomusicology remains at odds with one of its major projects ‘to move music out of the autonomous space afforded it by Western-centered musicology’ (31). That, ‘when music is taken as the object or when music practices are privileged over other kinds of fieldwork participation, “music” begins to get in the way of questions that could be of interest to both anthropologists and ethnomusicologists” (32). Such reflexive awareness becomes pertinent in attempting to engage in a discourse on the music of communities like the Hau-Tangkhuls and especially of a time frame when it was primarily an oral culture—where a restrictive notion of art or music denoting entities produced solely for aesthetic pleasure, free from any overt social function, or divorced from the lifeworld of the community, will yield a shallow understanding of what one aspires to understand. As Manuel (2011) points out, in some cultures, there is no word for ‘music’ as a general category even when they

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have terms for specific entities such as ‘drumming’ or ‘song’. Likewise, in some cultures, what is considered as ‘musical’ in the West is not considered under the rubric of ‘music’. Hence, the necessity to cautiously locate theoretical framework and terminologies pertinent to the context of the community being studied. In the context of the Hau-Tangkhuls, Christopher Small’s conception of musicking is a helpful framework. Small’s formulation of musicking stems from a critique of a reification of music, which he considers a besetting fault of Western thinking ever since Plato—where the word music becomes equated with music works in the Western tradition. This presumed autonomous ‘thingness’ of works of music is only a part of the prevailing modern philosophy of art in general. The created art object is valued, not the action of art, not the act of creating, and even less that of art perceiving and responding. Defying such dispositions, Small (1988) posits music as an activity—something that people do. Conceptualising music as musicking or ‘to music’, he states, ‘to music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practising, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing’ (9). He contends that music’s fundamental nature and meaning lie not in objects, not in musical works, but in action—in what people do. So, it is only by understanding what people do as they take part in a musical act that one can hope to understand its nature and the function it fulfils in human life. As such, the meaning of music is to be found not only in the organised sounds that are often considered as music in the Western sense but also ‘in the relationships between person and person, between individual and society, between humanity and the natural world and even perhaps the supernatural world’ (13). On a similarly holistic approach, Alan Lomax, in the study of folk song style, also propounds that musical ethnography should be based on the study of musical style or musical habits of mankind which embrace the total human situation which produces the music: the number of people habitually involved in a musical act, and the way in which they cooperate; the social function of the music and the occasion of its production; its psychological and emotional content as expressed in the song texts and the culture’s interpretation of this traditional poetry; how songs are learned and transmitted; the formal elements in the situation (in Cohen 2003). Gillespie’s approach in discussing Duna’s music is also particularly useful in delineating Hau-Tangkhul music practice that had emerged and was prevalent before their encounter with Christianity. In Steep Slopes: Music and change in the highlands of Papua New Guinea (2010), Gillespie uses the terms ‘ancestral’ and ‘introduced’ in place of the widely-used concepts ‘tradition’ and ‘modern,’ as a reference to the period in Papua New Guinea when the Duna people had not met the whites yet, and post their encounter with them, respectively. She derives these terms based on the translations of Duna peoples’ reference to their ancestors as Awenene—‘of the grandmother kind’—and Khao, meaning ‘the White people’ (9). Similarly, a historical reference to the Hau-Tangkhuls’ pre-contact and post-contact with Christianity (primarily) and British Colonialism in general, is helpful in delineating and conceptualising Hau Laa. Among the Hau-Tangkhuls, everything associated with their ancestors is often referred to as Hau/Hao, preceding every other word: Hau ngashan

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(Hau custom/tradition), Hau shim (Hau house), etc. The term Hau is also popularly used to refer to the past life of Hau-Tangkhuls as non-Christians. This connotation can perhaps be traced to the days when the early Christian converts among them described themselves as Vareshi (God’s people), distinguishing between them and their kindreds who continued living their old way of life. Over time, the usage of the term Hau became synonymous with the way of life when Christianity had yet to make its presence among the Hau-Tangkhuls. With the aid of the frameworks mentioned above, Hau Laa can thus be conceptualised as a reference to the overall mode of musical practice of the community before they encountered Christianity—which includes the songs, the musical style, and the nature of their musicking interwoven with the lifeworld of their community— a musicking impressed upon by their primary oral culture. However, this conception should not be construed as suggesting that this mode of musical practice of the HauTangkhuls was static in the past, or that it ceased post their contact with Christian missionaries and colonial rule. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that in the present context, the meanings, functions and the place of Hau Laa in their community has altered significantly from what it was when their community was primarily based on orality or without a written script.

Orality and Hau Laa A conducive point of entry to engage in a discourse on Hau Laa is the old saying of the Hau-Tangkhuls, laa hi channa, ¯ cha¯ n hi laana, a poetical rendering that can roughly be enunciated as ‘songs they are words, words they are songs’. This saying can be understood better if we closely examine the use of the words laa/la¯ and chan. ¯ The Hau-Tangkhuls use laa for the term ‘song’ on its own, as well in the common understanding of the word ‘music.’ Inference to its usage either as a song or music is based on the context of the usage. When it comes to chan, ¯ the term is often used when someone has something to say—or communicate an information (to put it crudely) to another person. And ‘story’ in Hau-Tangkhul is khararchan, ¯ a word formed out of chan ¯ and kharar, a reference to the days of yore. In light of the aforementioned context, laa hi channa, ¯ chan ¯ hi laana, can be formulated as an allusion to music as a story—the story of an individual, a clan, and a village coalescing into the narrative of their people. Thus, alluding to the primacy of songs in expressing and recording the actualities of their community.10 Through songs, the aspirations, beliefs, and sentiments of their lives were expressed and retained. Accordingly, for every occasion or event, they composed a number of songs and bequeathed them as an inheritance to the younger generation. Indeed, their songs serve as one of the richest repositories of the historical narratives of their community. Moreover, songs being an expression of deep sentiments of the community, the lyrical contents of their songs were also embellished with the choicest of words—words which they might 10 Besides

songs, oral tales and legends were also vital in expressing their beliefs and world views.

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not necessarily use in everyday conversation. With songs, the Hau-Tangkhuls could imaginatively play with words and nurture their creative potentials. Such exercises in creative compositions brought out the best in their languages and sustained the longevity of poetic and aged words—words that would have ceased to exist, left on their own in daily speech. Used thus, songs serve as an important tool to express and retain the richness of their numerous languages. In this formulation of songs as a medium of expression and as a repository of their narratives, words did not have tangible and visual form, they were only in the form of sound (Ong 2002). Consequently, words and songs were never separated from the living present; they never existed alone without a performing or an oralising human being. Wherefore, the retention of their songs depended on the constant use of the songs and on the community’s collective memory. Therefore, such actuality entails that the songs that continued to circulate and retained were the ones that expressed not just the sentiments of an individual but also the societal expectations of the community too. A song might begin with the composition of a few creative individuals, but for the songs to continue in their musical and social repertoire, they were to be processed and accepted by the community. If they agree with what the author expresses, then it becomes their voice as well. Words and themes were added or dropped, and tunes were tweaked as per the need of the community. Everyone was invited to contribute his or her share in the communal re-creation of the song. So, no songs bear the authorial name of an individual. It was the wealth of a clan or a village (Ngakang 2014). As a community where songs were learned, retained and recalled entirely based on the collective memory, a conspicuous characteristic of Hau Laa is the repetitive qualities that abound in their songs. Many of their songs have the quality of strophic structure—where a specific tune is repeated several times in a song. The repetition is not confined to just the tunes, but even words or a sentence are often repeated. In many of their songs, the ending part of the previous line of a song is sung again in succeeding lines. It is likely that such repetitive characteristic was framed to a certain extent by thinking mnemonic patterns ‘to solve effectively the problem of retaining and retrieving’ (Ong 2002, 34) as repetition in Hau Laa has a functional purpose, besides stylistic characteristic. Repetitions not only aided in establishing a sense of familiarity with a song and enabled everyone in the community to follow and empathise with the song—making the song all-embracing. Repetition also helped in easier retention of songs. To quote Mills (1974), ‘(Repetition) it aids in memory and identification of its listeners to the point of involvement with the art’ (32). However, repetition does not imply that their songs were always recalled word for word. Musicking of a song was not necessarily rendered the same way every time. They were subject to change depending on the occasion of the performance. With the core intact, embellishment to a song was sometimes added, or aberrations of memory sometimes alter a narrative structure (Horam 1977).11 But, since their songs are also historical narratives, the 11 Even in recent scholarship on the Hau-Tangkhuls, several authors have presented varying rendition of the same song as per their source of the song. One prime example is that of “Miwurlung Laa”

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specificity of the names of a person or a place are strictly recalled, and to a certain extent, group singing ‘necessitates that there is uniformity in the lyrics and rhythms of singing’ (Shimreiwung 2009, 84). Nonetheless, since most of the songs are specific to each village, the participants are usually attuned to the structure of their songs. Even if one has not learned it, as entailed by their worldview, which strongly emphasises community participation, they eventually follow others in singing and learning the songs. No one was an idle spectator. There were no distinct divisions of an audience and performers, no conception of a musician and a non-musician. Even if there were special performances by groups or individuals on auspicious occasions (such as weddings, festivals, feast of merit, etc.), there were no such prolonged or rather categorical groupings that put the performers in a distinct class from the crowd. Besides, non-participation was dealt with punitive measures. It was considered a social aberration not to participate in the community musicking. In the context of learning music, since musicking was an integral part of their lives in their everyday activities and social interactions, which arises out of various life situations, Hau Laa was often imbibed spontaneously rather than by making a conscious effort to learn (Ngakang 2014). Yet, like in many primary oral cultures, as musicking was entirely embodied music, the transmission of songs was also incumbent on the elders in the community. In this effort, the youth dormitory (Longshim) was a vital space. This was the institution that undergirded transmission of the Hau-Tangkhul way of life from generation to generation. A place where the ‘present generation was shown the direction of their future by pointing to and imparting the values of the past’ (Thong 2014, 96). As such, in the dormitories, young men and women in their association with their senior inmates and elders imbibed not just music as it is, but also the values to earnestly engage and maintain their musical culture. The intent and the significance of Hau Laa could be absorbed and lived out meaningfully only in the context of the totality of their beliefs and way of life. Musicking was a functional response that their way of living called for—an integral part of the habitus that shaped their life views and actions, and moulded their musical style. It was a way of living where the community was always placed above the individual—the individual was for the community, and not the other way round. As Shimray (1985) rightly observed, ‘Naga individuals knew no other life except that of community life. All things were done in groups and in the full presence of the entire community. The individual had no existence apart from the community” (121). In this way of life, Hau Laa was not only a significant aspect of their oral tradition, but their oral culture also entailed the very nature of their musicking. Amid such musicking, came the Christian missionaries. Along with them, the musical tradition of the West, in the form of hymn.

(Song of Origin and Migration) as cited in the works of Shongzan (2013), Ringkahao (2013) and Vashum (2014).

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Hymn: A New Way of Imagining and Musicking The introduction of hymn in the musical practices of the Hau-Tangkhuls was a considerable intervention in the ontological conception of their musicking. In hymn, words now had a material visual presence. Hymns were introduced as songs with not just aural characteristics, but the lyrical contents of hymns were presented as a written text, as well. Without the necessary presence of a musicking human, now songs could be retained on its own, as a material thing. Such materialisation was not just confined to words but included a broad spectrum of the formal elements of music where even the sounds were now presented in a visible material form—in tonic sol-fa method,12 a pedagogic technique that originated in the Victorian era religious institutions and its supporters with an evangelical zeal in promoting it (Olwage 2010). As Southcott and Lee (2008) elucidate, the tonic sol-fa system or Curwen method was an educationally sound approach to the teaching of sight-singing through aural training and a carefully sequenced programme of music learning and activity—a system ‘which was always intended to aid in worship and in missionary endeavours’ (225). As such, the inculcation of hymns was not only an introduction of writing in the musicking of a primary oral culture, it also brought along the musical tradition of Western society—resulting in intended and unintended transformations of Hau-Tangkhul musicking. In the musicking of hymns, as the formal elements of music are set permanently, and a material text could be relied on to retain and recall—and not exclusively from human memory—the songs sung in their Christian worship had a very strong element of rigidity in opposition to the fluidity in the songs of Hau Laa. Hymns could be faithfully sung the same way every time.13 Moreover, in the formalised nature of worship in the church, standard pattern hymns are sung as pre-planned by the church elders, a choirmaster or persons allotted with that responsibility. All these hymns are also drawn only from a standardised hymnbook, Khokharum Laa.14 The reasoning being the sanctification of their hymnbook as an essential medium of doctrinal instruction, apart from the Bible (King 2008). Such rigidity starkly differed from Hau Laa musicking where no songs were necessarily sung in the same way everytime. Even though there were songs for specific occasions, there was no such standardised repository of songs or fixed way of singing it. Each rendering may not

12 Tonic

Sol-fa is a system of music notation adapted by an English congregational minister, Rev. John Curwen, from the music pedagogy of Sarah Glover (Rainbow 1989). 13 Here, the contention is not that there are no variations in the rendering of the hymns but that there are no alterations in the framework of the hymns as the written lyrics and the musical notation remains constant. 14 This hymnbook is a collection of translated hymns drawn from standard Western Christian hymnbooks, as well as few songs composed by Hau-Tangkhul composers, in the tradition of the Western Choral music.

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necessarily be the same. Besides, with Hau Laa, there were many more provisions for any songster to initiate a song that suits the occasion.15 In addition, within Christian worship, especially in the confines of a church, the architectural structure models a proscenium stage where there is a distinct separation of an elevated stage for the musical performance and a separate place for the congregation, which was very unlike their Hau Laa musicking spaces. At most, on festive occasions, the demarcated areas for musical performances for their songs were either in the yard of the village chief or in open spaces in the village where the villagers could congregate. There were special performances, but it was not in the sense of contemporary conception of a separate stage and a distinct identity of audience and performer. Even if there were special performances by individuals or groups on favourable occasions, there were no such prolonged or rather categorical groupings of the performers from the crowd. Musical performances or expressions were conducive of accompaniment from their fellow villagers. In contrast, within the church, appointed choir members led by a choirmaster leads the congregation from a distinct stage. Perhaps, such a formalised tradition also led to a more restrained musicking in their Christian religious congregation.16 Another significant change that came about in the musicking of hymns was the conception of authorship. Western Christian hymns originate in a society with a long history of written tradition where most hymns are identified distinctly with individuals, even if the songs are for the use of the larger Christian family. Following such a tradition, unlike in Hau Laa, where songs were collectively identified and are retained as per the needs of the community, the composition of hymns by the HauTangkhuls took on the form of an individualised authorial name. Y.K. Shimray, Rv. Ringkahao, M.K. Shimray and Rs. Ruichumhao, are some of the early Hau-Tangkhul composers whose hymns still find a place in the hymnbook that is presently in use within the community. The rendition of hymns in the tonic sol-fa system also introduced a new way of learning music and a conception of professionalisation in Hau-Tangkhul musicking. Learning to read the musical notation involves much more serious learning. It is a task that not everyone can quickly master. It involves a conscious dedication which requires time and resource. So, while in the early years of Hau-Tangkhul Christianity, students in the Christian mission schools were religiously taught to learn the hymns, with the strengthening of an institutionalised church in the later years, assigning specific members to lead the congregation in singing hymns became a necessity. So, in every church, the role of a choirmaster and choir members gained prominence. Dedicated music training even if for short durations thus began in their churches and the position of a choirmaster also partly became a fulltime work with payment, even though nominal, in many cases. 15 For instance, during a wedding, the people gathered will not only sing an eclectic variety of songs but they also often compose songs spontaneously in praise of the bride and groom. During courtship, a man and woman converses with each other through songs, and so on. 16 The author is only referring to the general visible and audible reactions in a church congregation rather than engaging with the semantics of how the musical performances are enjoyed by the congregation and in their individual capacity.

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Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, with the intent to teach the Hau-Tangkhuls to learn to read the Bible and sing hymns in their own language, Rev. William Pettigrew transliterated the language of Hunphun. In this village, he set up his first mission school and church. In the course of his missionary enterprise and other Christian missionaries, including the new converts, musicking of hymns was strongly encouraged in their Christian way of life. These actualities engendered an intriguing phenomenon in Hau-Tangkhul musical practice. Even as the HauTangkhuls continued to sing their aged songs in the native language of each village, without a marked distinction of a ‘religious’ or ‘secular’ space, the Christian converts in every village were singing the Christian hymns in Hunphun language. So, one can imply that there was a demarcation in language as well as musical compartmentalisation of different musical styles and mode of musicking—Western hymns along with a written text in a Christian worship, and the continuation of the oral tradition of Hau Laa in the other domains of their life. However, this compartmentalisation was not precisely the same as what Merriam (1964) and Kartomi (1981) wrote about—where an individual or a community are skilled in both musical styles of their own and other cultures do not mix the two. In the context of Hau-Tangkhuls, it was a case where the Christian converts were steadily letting go of Hau Laa in their everyday lives even as they regularly adopt Western Christian hymns in their worship—consequentially, not only adopting a new musical style but also learning a new mode of musicking which was aided by the ‘technology of writing’ (Ong 2002). Except for the Pung, neither were their traditional musical instruments, such as, Sipa,17 Tingteila,18 and Talla,19 etc., successfully incorporated in the musicking of the hymns.20 Meanwhile, the non-Christians continued to practice Hau Laa in the oral tradition. But, along with the increasing circulation and adoption of hymns, a significant movement was also felt on the very identity of the Hau-Tangkhuls. In the study of the print culture of the Hau-Tangkhuls, Shimreiwung (2014) rightly attributes music and literature as having played a pivotal role in the consolidation of the identity of the Hau-Tangkhuls. As he posits, ‘the social and political significance of every Christian village singing from one standard Hymnal, studying the same textbook in Tangkhul language, and reciting from the same Gospel, has more reaching impact on the consolidation of Tangkhuls as one single tribe than what the Missionaries were intending to do’ (158). However, in the early phase of the 17 Sipa

is a flute made out of bamboo with a solid end and an opening on the other end. is a fiddle-like instrument with a single string stretched over a body, and a long neck with a head. The body is made of half gourd and plastered with pig’s bladder or skin of a goat. The string is fastened by a peg on both ends of the gourd, and a key is attached at the end of slender wood or bamboo. The bow is also made of slender bamboo or wood, and the strings on both the body and the bow are made from the hair of animal’s tail—often, a horse or a cow. 19 Talla is a trumpet made out of bamboo. On the opposite end of the mouthpiece, a Mithun or Buffalo horn is fitted to amplify the sound of the trumpet. Talla can also be simply in the form of a Buffalo or Mithun horn. 20 In the contemporary context, even the Pung is rarely used in the confines of a church. The Guitar, Keyboard/Piano, modern drums are now the primary musical instruments in a Hau-Tangkhul Christian worship. 18 Tingteila

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Hau-Tangkhuls’ embrace of Christianity, it should also be noted that it was primarily the youth and few elders who knew reading and writing. Neither were there many Hau-Tangkhuls who had undergone Christian theological training. So, hymns had a significant place in the proselytisation of new converts and the transmission of the doctrines of Christianity. As such, for many Hau-Tangkhuls, the early initiation of this language and its adoption in their everyday lives was mostly through the singing of hymns in missionary enterprise and in their practice of the new faith. As hymns were transliterated in the language of Hunphun village, with the increasing number of Christian converts, the adoption of this particular language increased manifold in their Christian worship, irrespective of village—in the long run playing a significant part in the yielding of a lingua franca amongst the Hau-Tangkhuls.21 In addition, unlike in Hau Laa musicking where their songs were mainly confined to a clan, a village and its neighbouring areas, the adoption of hymns united the repertoire of their songs as well (amongst the Christians). The hymns drawn from their standard hymnbook22 could be commonly sung in any Hau-Tangkhul village and any member from the community introduced to the new faith, irrespective of the village that one hails from. As a result, such actualities aided in breaking the language barriers and effectuating and consolidating the singular historical root which were conceptualised in localised narratives in their oral tradition (Shimreiwung 2014).

(Re) Purposing of Music In the course of Hau-Tangkhuls’ embrace of Christianity, the entrenched position of hymns has become such that, in their religious practice, especially in their congregational singings, the place for any other styles of music is minimal. This conception is not confined to the elderly Hau-Tangkhuls. There is a sense of comfort with the established tradition of singing hymns in their religious practice even among the youth. There is a sense of reluctance when it comes to the notion of incorporating the musical style of Hau Laa in the domain of their Christian worship. One can perhaps account the sense of attachment or the disposition to find comfort in hymns to the ‘anticipations of the habitus’—which has been shaped by their past experiences—‘in accordance with the schemes generated by history’ (Bourdieu 1990, 54). As mentioned earlier, with the decay of the youth dormitories, which was a vital space for facilitating and enriching the music culture of the Hau-Tangkhuls, young people were deprived of a critical institution where they could imbibe the musicking culture of their community. A key bridge between the younger generation and the 21 In the domain of the mission schools, this language was primarily taught, and translation of the books from the Bible was written in this particular language. So, these factors also aided in the popularisation of this language. 22 In the present context, the standard hymnbook, Khokharum Laa (KKL), is now primarily used by the Baptist denomination. Along with the KKL, the Catholics uses another hymnbook, Haori Haorangva Proholi Sosa (1996). Amongst the Seven Day Adventists, the first edition of Thotrin L a¯ was published in 1998.

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ways of their forefathers-mothers was severed. Meanwhile, the mission schools and the church which the missionaries promoted filled the void created by the decay of Longshim. Expectedly, as the core intent of the mission schools and churches was to evangelise and constitute a Naga Christian, in these new spaces or institutions, encouraging the reading of Bible, and the practice of singing Christian hymns was systematically enforced. As Rev. William Pettigrew noted in his diary, ‘the books they study aim to inculcate Christian truth. The school is opened daily with singing and prayer. On the Lord’s Day, they come together for singing and to listen to the Gospel story. As soon as the Catechism is printed, they will be more efficiently able to retain in their minds the truths they have learned orally’ (quoted in Solo and Mahangthei 2006, 16). Thus, in the deliberate attempt to nurture and inculcate the practice of Christianity that the missionaries deemed ‘appropriate’, learning to sing the hymns or to own a hymn book also became a necessary cultural capital in living a life of a Christian (Bourdieu 1986). However, these processes of learning to read the Bible and singing of the Christian hymns should not to be read as a simple one-way process of toil and acceptance. As Thomas remarked, ‘accruing the benefits of ‘modernity’ required that one also familiarise and fashion oneself according to the civilisational standards set by the missionary and his religion’ (Thomas 2016, 49). Rev. William Pettigrew in his itinerant preaching tours made use of technologies such as the Magic lantern, Bible roll, and the Gramophone. He would translate the meaning of the records—‘Glory Song,’ ‘Tell mother I’ll be there’—for the ‘benefit’ of the Hau-Tangkhuls (Solo and Mahangthei 2006). These technologies signified the new religion and culture of the missionaries. Through the Bible rolls and Magic lantern, the narratives of Christ turned into a visible entity. Similarly, through the Gramophone and musical instruments that the missionaries brought, the sound of the new religion came to be popularised. The songs that were played through it became the ‘legitimate sounds of Christianity’ (Thomas 2016). Seen in such light, the act of singing hymns from their hymnbook can be construed as not simply an act of worship but also an identification with the musical tradition of the missionaries as well the adoption of the material extensions of such musicking—in their aspiration for an alternate way of life and the world that the Christian missionaries represent. Rooted in such historical context, with the increasing strength of Christian converts and the ensuing popularisation of hymns, by the end of the twentieth century, from the mere twelve Christian converts in 1901, the Hau-Tangkhuls had become a Christian community where the musicking of hymns was ingrained as an essential part of their everyday lives (Luikham 2002). Incorporated, inculcated and nurtured in the congregational singing in their churches, the music camps organised by their churches and religious organisations, as well as in the confines of their homes, the musicking of hymns now permeates in their marriages, funerals, public gatherings, in the church, and even in festivals and occasions which are not necessarily a Christian affair. Musicking of hymn is now ‘an organic, a living aspect of public life’ (Frith 1996, 151). Yet, the prejudiced conception of the Western Christian hymns as

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‘appropriate’ music still plagues their Christian religious spaces. So, despite practising Christianity for over a century, the Hau-Tangkhuls have failed to develop an indigenous hymnody. Meanwhile, with little or no experience of acquiring, experiencing and appreciating the aesthetics and significance of their indigenous musicking, for the HauTangkhuls, their aged songs are now a remnant of or index to ‘a way of life that is no longer available…a way of living (that) is now gone forever’ (Appadurai 1997, 76). And as Straw (2012) posits, music is arguably one of the most embedded in the material infrastructures of our daily lives and that the uses of music in everyday life are increasingly about the ongoing ‘repurposing’ of music and its integration within ever more varied activities and situations. In the changed actualities of their community in the twenty-first century and no longer a necessary music to be engaged in everyday life’s purposes, there has been a transference in the function of their Hau Laa (List 1964). The few remaining aged songs of their ancestors are now performed and preserved as a representative symbol in official functions, festivals and occasions, where the purpose of musicking is to assert their distinctive identity—in (re)constituting their community identity—for themselves and in relation to other ethnic identities. They are thus not necessarily incorporated in everyday life’s purposes but valued as ‘emblems of (their) communal identity’ (Abels 2008, 228).

Conclusion As explored in this chapter, the adoption of hymns by the Hau-Tangkhuls was not simply a case of learning a new music genre or style. Hymns aided with writing had a profound impact on the very ontological conception of Hau-Tangkhul musicking at that point in time. The adoption of hymns entailed learning a new musical style and engendered a new mode of musicking. However, the ramifications on the musicking culture of the Hau-Tangkhuls were also more drastic as the introduction of hymns came about in an encounter between societies of varying knowledge systems and unequal power relations. Musicking was a part of the processes of negotiations of the Hau-Tangkhuls with the changes that came about in their lives, on their encounter with Colonialism and Christianity. As such, in the long run, the gradual neglect of Hau Laa and the overwhelming musicking of hymns affected not just the musicking culture of the Hau-Tangkhuls but also on their identity. Beyond ethnicity, Christianity is now an intrinsic part of Hau-Tangkhul identity and hymns have been and still remain an essential element of this identity. While Hau Laa is valued in tracing and affirming their indigenous identity, musicking of hymns thrives in the practice and expression of their Christian faith in their everyday lives. As King (2008) writing on the prominence of hymns in Victorian England remarked, perhaps it would not be too much of an overstatement to state that hymns provide the most characteristic expression of Hau-Tangkhul Christianity and their musicking.

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References Abels, B. (2008). Sounds of articulating identity: Tradition and transition in the music of Palau, Micronesia. Berlin: Logos Verlag. Arrington, A. (2015). Christian hymns as theological mediator: The Lisu of South-west China and their music. Studies in World Christianity, 21(2), 140–160. https://doi.org/10.3366/swc.2015. 0115. Appadurai, A. (1997). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bigenho, M. (2009). Why I’m not an Ethnomusicologist: A view from anthropology. In S. Henry (Ed.), The New (Ethno)musicologies (pp. 28–39). Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). Westport, CT: Greenwood. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cohen, R. D. (2003). Alan Lomax: Selected writings, 1934–1997. London: Routledge. Dena, L. (1988). Christian missions and colonialism: A study of missionary movement in Northeast India, with particular reference to Manipur and Lushai Hills, 1894–1947. Shillong: Vendrame Institute. Frith, S. (1996). Music and identity. In S. Hall & P. D. Gray (Eds.), Questions of cultural identity (pp. 108–127). New Delhi: Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd. Gillespie, K. (2010). Steep slopes: Music and change in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Australia: ANU E Press. Horam, M. (1997). Social and cultural life of Nagas: The Tangkhul Nagas. New Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation. Horam, R. (2013). The Tangkhul folk poetry: Haolaa in song. Imphal: NCDS (Naga Cultural Development Society). Kartomi, M. J. (1981). The processes and results of musical culture contact: A discussion of terminology and concepts. Ethnomusicology, 25(2), 227–249. http://www.jstor.org/stable/ 851273. King, R. R. (2008). Music culture: Euro-American Christianity. In R. R. King, J. N. Kidula, J. R. Krabill, & T. A. Oduro (Eds.), Music in the life of the African church (pp. 17–35). Texas: Baylor University Press. List, G. (1964). Acculturation and musical tradition. Journal of the International Folk Music Council, 16,18–21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/835061. Lotha, A. (2010). Nagas’ conversion to Christianity and modernity in Colonial India. In Z. Yanthan, A. S. Shimreiwung, G. Poujenlung, P. Veio, & V. Seve (Eds.), Nagas today: Indigenous discourse (pp. 73–87). Delhi: Naga Students’ Union Delhi. Luikham, R. (2002). Phungyo Baptist Church history 1901–2001. Ukhrul: Phungyo Baptist Church. Manuel, P. (2011). Ethnomusicology. In T. Gracyk & A. Kania (Eds.), The Routledge companion to philosophy and music (pp. 535–545). New York: Routledge. Merriam, A. P. (1964). The anthropology of music. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Mills, I. (1974). The heart of the folk song. Canadian Folk Music Journal, 2, 29–34. https://jou rnals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/MC/article/download/21894/25383. Ngakang, T. (2014). Loss and revitalisation of traditional art: The state of Tangkhul Naga Music. In R. Vashum, A. S. Yaruingam, A. S. Shimreiwung, & Y. Kapai (Eds.), Encountering modernity: Situating the Tangkhul Nagas in perspective (pp. 170–188). New Delhi: Chicken Neck. Olwage, G. (2010). Singing in the Victorian world: Tonic sol-fa and discourses of religion, science and empire in the Cape Colony. Muziki: Journal of Music Research in Africa, 7(2), 193–215. https://doi.org/10.1080/18125980.2010.526801. Ong, W. J. (2002). Orality and literacy: The technologising of the word. London: Methuen. Rainbow, B. (1989). Music in educational thought and practice. A survey from 800 BC. Aberystwyth, Wales: Boethius Press. Shimray, R. R. (1985). Origin and culture of Nagas. New Delhi: Pamleiphy Shimray.

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Shimreiwung. A. S. (2009). Music, literature, and representations of culture: A study of Tangkhul Naga tribe in Ukhrul District (Unpublished doctoral disserttion). New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru University. Shimreiwung, A. S. (2013). Pettigrew’s children: Tracing the history of print culture in Tangkhul language. Journal of North East India Studies, 3(2), 70–81. https://works.bepress.com/jneis/37/. Shimreiwung, A. S. (2014). Print culture and the rise of identity consciousness in oral society:Trajectories in conception of community identity in Tangkhul literature. In R. Vashum, A. S. Yaruingam, A. S. Shimreiwung, & Y. Kapai (Eds.), Encountering modernity: Situating the Tangkhul Nagas in perspective (pp. 154–169). New Delhi: Chicken Neck. Shongzan, M. (2013). A portrait of the Tangkhul Nagas. Ukhrul: Wungramthing Shongzan. Small, C. (1988). Musicking: The meanings of performing and listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Solo, J. M., & Mahangthei, K. (2006). Forty years mission in Manipur: Mission reports of Rev. William Pettigrew, (Compiled by Solo & Mahangthei). Imphal: Christian Literature Centre. Southcott, J. E., & Lee, A. H.-C. (2008). Missionaries and Tonic Sol-fa music pedagogy in 19thcentury China. International Journal of Music Education, 26(3), 213–228. https://journals.sag epub.com/doi/10.1177/0255761408092528. Straw, W. (2012). Music and material culture. In M. Clayton, T. Herbert, & R. Middleton (Eds.), The cultural study of music: A critical introduction (pp. 227–236). Oxfordshire: Routledge. Thomas, J. (2016). Evangelising the nation: Religion and the formulation of Naga identity. New Delhi: Routledge. Thong, T. (2014). Progress and its impact on the Nagas: A clash of worldviews. New York: Routledge. Thong, T. (2011). A clash of worldviews: The impact of the notion of progress on Naga culture, 1832–1947. Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Religion, 2(5), 1–37. http://raceandreligion.com/ JRER/Volume_2_(2011)_files/Thong%20JRER.pdf. Vashum, R. (2014). Terrains of Tangkhul society: An overview. In R. Vashum, A. S. Yaruingam, A. S. Shimreiwung, & Y. Kapai (Eds.), Encountering modernity: Situating the Tangkhul Nagas in perspective (pp. 9–27). New Delhi: Chicken Neck. Zeliang, E. (2005). A history of the Manipur Baptist Convention. Imphal: Published by The Manipur Baptist Convention, Imphal, on occasion of MBC National Leadership Golden Jubilee Celebration (1955–2005).

Pamyo Chamroy is a Ph.D. candidate in the Centre for Media Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. His research interests are in the realms of music, political economy of media, oral culture and alternative media.

Chapter 7

Sartorial Matters: A Brief History of Attire in Mizoram Joy L. K. Pachuau

Abstract This chapter is an attempt to trace the history of attire in Mizoram. Over the 19th century, with the arrival of colonial modernity, changes came about not only in sartorial styles but also in the way people related to clothing. The chapter addresses issues of gender, status, authenticity and photographic representation through the frames of changing attitude to clothing. The transformations are traced through the life of an important official in Mizo history who lived through most of the 20th century when these changes were taking place. Keywords Mizo · Attire · Clothing · Puanchei · Labour Corps · Lushai · Photographs · Representation A typical representation of the Mizos of Mizoram, whether by non-Mizos or even the Mizos themselves, whether for government brochures or tourism purposes, inevitably sees them dancing the cheraw or ‘bamboo dance’. The women are in uniform puans1 or ankle-length sarong-like skirts with the predominant colours being red, black and white with specific designs woven onto them (hence called puanchei, lit. ‘adorned puan’). A blouse of similar colours (kawrchei, lit. ‘adorned blouse’) complements the puanchei. The women may also have a headdress (vakiria), which in contemporary times can be of plastic beads, feathers and other trinkets, but in the past included ‘parrot’s feathers and porcupine quills inserted into a bamboo slotted ring’, and 1 While puan literally means a piece of cloth, it is also a generic name for the attire of the Mizos, made mainly of handwoven cotton, although silk puans are gaining popularity now. An important feature of puans is that designs are woven into the puan rather than being printed on to them. They are mostly worn by women but also in informal settings by men. It is rectangular in shape, the width being 45 inches to 47 inches, while it can be anything between 56 and 70 inches in length (Pachuau, Lisa Lalmuankimi, Ritu Mathur, and Kiran Kapoor, 2018, Weaving in Thenzawl: A case study, in International Journal of Applied Home Science, Vol 5 (4), pp. 916–921, p. 916.

This chapter is a revised version of an earlier paper by the same author, Sainghinga and His Times: Codifying Mizo attire, in MZU Journal of Literature and Cultural Studies, 2:2, 2015, pp. 272–293. J. L. K. Pachuau (B) Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. Nongbri and R. Bhargava (eds.), Materiality and Visuality in North East India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1970-0_7

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Fig. 7.1 Mizo women in ‘traditional’ costumes and a Cheraw performance. Picture was taken from an online travel company advert4

seeds of pingpih2 intermingled with black shiny beads.3 The men, on the other hand, wear their puans, usually the puan dum (a predominantly black puan with narrow horizontal stripes of red, white, yellow and green) knee length along with a headgear comprising a rectangular strip of woven cloth tied around the head similar to a turban. It goes without saying that the performance itself involves the rhythmic tapping of the bamboos by the men, to different beats, at the ankle height of the women, to which beat the women jump to avoid their feet being struck by the bamboo staves. The dance is accompanied by the beating of a drum and a gong. The attire worn during this dance has come to represent the ‘traditional Mizo’. Men, on more formal and customary occasions, wear shirts (in black) of a similar design as the thangchhuah puan, a puan/wrap/shawl given to men who had earned the status of the same name by killing a certain number of animals or hosting a certain number of feasts for the village (Fig. 7.1). The emergence of ‘customary attire’ based on the need to represent a people ‘traditionally’ is not new. The chapter seeks to understand the history behind the emergence of what we now know as ‘traditional’ Mizo attire. Within Mizoram there are many ethnic communities that express varying levels of ethnic proximity and distance from the Mizos, such as the Lai and the Mara or the Chakma and Bru. I will not be talking about them, not because of some underlying need to maintain a distinction. Rather, the trajectories of their development are different and, therefore, homogenising that evolution would be inappropriate. While the puanchei and the kawrchei are attires worn on ceremonial and cultural occasions such as when the cheraw is performed, the puanchei itself is also commonly worn at weddings or important Christian festivals such as Christmas or Easter. Thus, especially for women, the traditional attire is not simply a garment with cultural capital; it is part of everyday wear and a very common one at that. Despite the common enough view of the ‘westernisation’ of people from the Northeast, attire is 2A

species of wild Job’s tears, a legume. A.G., 1977 (1949). Lushai Chrysalis. Aizawl: Firma KLM. p. 27. Also see Pachuau and van Schendel (2015), p. 283. 4 https://www.holidify.com/pages/mizoram-culture-84.html.

3 McCall,

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definitely not the arena where it takes place, especially for the Mizos. Therefore, the puan is an extremely important and common piece of clothing, worn by all sections of society, worn as everyday wear, be it at home or at workspaces, or even at ritual events. Considering its popular usage, the handloom industry of Mizoram, which uses the fly shuttle loom, has become a very important contributor to the local economy since the early 1980s.5 In more recent years, puans made using the traditional loin loom are also making a come back. On the other hand, men have moved wholesale to western wear, something that we observe from the early 20th century itself, which will be explored further in the chapter. The men’s puans today are usually worn by cultural performers or at home, in informal settings. Attire is not merely fabric that one clothes one’s self with; it reveals a historical layering and the various influences that a community has been exposed to. At times, the word traditional often misleads us into thinking that a particular custom, in this case, attire, is ‘ancient’ or as government sites and tourist brochures are wont to depict, existing from ‘time-immemorial’. An anteriority is often assumed for them and, in Mizoram, too, as elsewhere, ownership of the costumes is reiterated by obtaining labels such as Geographical Identification tags.6 Historicising attire enables us to recognise that modern notions of the self and the idea of self-representation have played an important role in the construction of the ‘self’. With regard to the Northeast, recent scholarship has focused a great deal on contemporary Naga attire and its politics especially in the construction of the self and identity.7 Wettstein, for instance, while referring to the many ‘shows’ that stage Naga attire and the discussions surrounding them also maps the transition of ethnic clothing from being items of everyday wear, or status markers, to that of symbols of identity.8 It may be briefly pointed out that the intersection between colonialism and anthropology in the late 19th and 20th centuries did bring out for the colonialists, and in the case of the Northeast too, the significance of clothes, or its lack, as ‘frames through which people were understood’, as ‘badges of identity’ and, in their presentations in museums as representations of ‘ossified’ identities.9 To put it simply, people were typified or categorised through the clothes they wore or did not wear. The historical literature on clothing has also focused not only on the changes in clothing over time but also in its symbolic associations. Cohn’s work explores through dress, the

5 Pachuau,

L.L., et al., Weaving in Thenzawl, p. 917.

6 https://www.eastmojo.com/mizoram/2019/08/17/breaking-5-mizo-traditional-shawls-get-gi-tag. 7 Wettstein, M., 2008. Defeated Warriors, Successful Weavers: Or how Men’s Dress Reveals Shifts of

Male Identity among the Ao Nagas; Kikon, D., 2009. From loincloth, suits, to battle greens: Politics of clothing the ‘naked’ Nagas in Sanjib Baruah, Beyond counter-insurgency: Breaking the impasse in Northeast India, pp. 81–100. Wettstein, M., 2013. The Ethnic Fashion Scene in Nagaland. Archiv für Völkerkunde, 61(62), pp. 31–49. Arkotong Longkumer, Representing the Nagas, Negotiating National culture and consumption, in Bhattacharya, N. and Pachuau, J.L. eds., 2019. Landscape, Culture and Belonging: Writing the History of Northeast India. Cambridge University Press. 8 Wettstein, The ethnic fashion scene, p. 31. 9 Tarlo (1996), p. 6.

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‘wider relationship between the British ruler and the Indian ruled during the colonial period’.10 Tarlo, on the other hand, addresses what she calls the ‘problem of what to wear’, that is, the issue of why people make certain clothing choices.11 Turner had coined the notion of ‘social skin’ establishing clothing as a subjective and social experience.12 Because of its duality as touching the body and facing the world outside, according to Turner, clothing invites us to explore both, ‘personal and social identities’.13 There is therefore a subjective and social experience of dress, which informs one’s choice of clothing. Tarlo explored this further to show that what one wore depended on one’s sartorial affiliations, that is, where one believes one is coming from and whether one wants to affiliate with that or not; moreover, the subjectivity arises due to perceptions of clothing as extension of oneself (for instance, this is shown when we say a particular kind of attire is not ‘me’); finally, its receptivity can also be subjective. The chapter draws from these insights in not only presenting a historical trajectory of that change for the Mizos but also in trying to understand how the choices of today in terms of how a community decides on what to wear came to be. It seeks to show the subjectivities involved in the much taken for granted costume of the Mizos. The chapter thus seeks to look into the history of Mizo attire and the debates surrounding it. This history is deeply woven with the strands of colonial and missionary interventions, while the context itself enabled Mizos to express agency in sartorial self-expression. I explore two ways in which these changes have been recorded, firstly, photographs, and secondly by bringing out the debates that are found in the Mizo leh vai, a monthly that began publishing from the end of 1902. Photographs are a very useful tool in highlighting these changes even though it was only in the late 19th century that Mizoram saw the beginnings of this kind of documentation. Interesting exchanges in the Mizo leh vai also show that people recognised the significance of clothing, its symbolic aspects beyond its intrinsic material value. Writings about the Northeast rarely show the agency of the people when colonial transformations were taking place. Attire, we will find, is an area that clearly shows an active choice and participation. The chapter thus explores through photographs these changes but also expresses through documentary evidence the active involvement of Mizos in the changing perceptions of the self, as individuals and as a community. This engagement with clothing and its significance can however only be properly understood if we understand the context. I intend to do this by mapping the life of one Sainghinga, who rose to be an important government official and who, fortuitously for us, lived almost a hundred years leaving behind important visual and textual documents. Let us now briefly explore Sainghinga’s story.

10 Cohn

(1996). Emma, Clothing Matters, pp. 1–21. 12 Turner, T.S., 2012 [1980]. The social skin. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2(2), pp. 486– 504. 13 Turner, The social skin, p. 487. 11 Tarlo,

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Sainghinga and Attire Sainghinga was born in 1899,14 soon after the establishment of colonial rule. If we take a political timeline of Mizoram, his life-span included the early years of the establishment of colonial rule in the Lushai Hills, the creation of the Lushai Hills district under Assam in the post-independence period, moving on to union territory status and finally statehood in 1987. He died in 1990. His life also encompassed the period of resistance against the Indian government, which began in 1966 and ended in 1986. During the period of this timeline, Mizos witnessed radical changes in the manner in which life-ways were constituted. Sainghinga was born in what was then known as South Lushai Hills, just a few years after the missionaries had reduced the language into the Roman Script for the first time. Literacy, as we know, is not a mere reduction of a language to script but also a mode of life15 and hence its implications were to re-organise life completely not only for those who had access to it, but also those who did not. His parents and grandparents had already become Christian by the time he was born, he himself being baptised in 1909.16 However, as a family, they had to bear the brunt of their conversion, and they were forced by the chief and elders of the village to leave their settlement and move to a village close to Lunglei, near which missionaries of the Baptist mission also resided. It was perhaps this proximity that enabled him to acquire the education that he came to have. In the secular as well as the religious spheres, Sainghinga can be seen as one who negotiated capably the changes that he and his generation encountered. In Sainghinga, we see a man who was eager to participate in the modernity brought forth by the British, and his own sartorial self-expressions are an interesting aspect to this life. One of the earliest pictures that we have of Sainghinga is of him in France during World War I, as part of the Lushai Labour Corps, wearing a uniform. In a memoir he wrote, which was published as Indopui (translation: ‘The Great War’), he spoke about how happy he and his cohort were, in receiving these clothes.17 Another picture of him in France sees him in winter uniform, clearly signifying the importance of being seen in clothing that was not common for the then Lushai Hills (Figs. 7.2 and 7.3).

14 Born

on 15 Sept 1899 at Pukpui, he died on 20th March 1990.

15 See for example; Goody, J. and Watt, I., 1963. The consequences of literacy. Comparative studies

in society and history, 5(3), pp. 304–345; Goody, J. and Goody, J.R.G., 1986. The logic of writing and the organization of society. Cambridge University Press. 16 He was baptized on 14.04.1909 by J. H. Lorrain. His grandfather, Thangngaia had become a Christian in 1901, while his own father had become a Christian in 1905. His mother, Dosati, born in 1875 had become a Christian in 1905. 17 Sainghinga (n.d.).

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Fig. 7.2 Photograph of a division of the Labour Corps in France. Sainghinga is second from right, sitting, 191718

From the 1940s to the 1980s, we see Sainghinga in various kinds of attire, from formal western clothing to those that seemed to be a mix of the western and the local. The latter was an ensemble of a particular kind of puan (the ngotekherh, a woven puan with black vertical and horizontal stripes on a white base) but worn to the length of the knees rather than the ankles as is the norm for women. This was worn with a shirt and a coat, depending on the occasion. The latter seemed to be similar to the Scottish kilt, according to AG McCall, the Superintendent at Aizawl in the 1940s (Fig. 7.4).

18 Figure

7.2. Collection Sainghinga/Chawngpuii.

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Fig. 7.3 Sainghinga and friends in uniform in France, 191719

Sainghinga’s adoption of this attire was surely the result of his constant contact with colonial modernity interacting with a deep sense of pride or acknowledgement of his own background. At the cusp of Indian independence, he had risen to the rank of Political Assistant and thus was the first Mizo to have reached such a position in the colonial bureaucracy. This was no mean achievement for the Mizos and him in particular—he had only passed the Upper Exam (i.e., 7 years of schooling) and had risen from the ranks, serving first as an apprentice clerk at Lunglei in 1915, going on to be the Head Clerk in Lunglei in 1926, and then at Aizawl, at the Superintendent’s Office in 1932.20

19 Figure

7.3. Collection Lalhmingliana and Ramthangi.

20 In 1942, he became the Political Assistant to the Superintendent, the highest official in the district.

He retired in 1964. After retirement he continued to be assigned important positions such as the President of the District Aizawl Court, as well as the Liaison Officer for the Border Task Force at Zemabawk.

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Fig. 7.4 Sainghinga, most probably taken in the early 70s, in a puan and coat 21

Sainghinga was also a participant-observer to other transformations that came, inadvertently perhaps, due to colonial presence. These included larger macro developments whereby it became possible for the people to identify themselves as Mizo, or in other words, as a ‘nation’ in the modern sense. This meant that unlike earlier times where kinship networks as well as specific settlements defined who a person was, identification was now with a wider territory, and the inhabitants of that territory.22 Although chiefs in the Lushai areas tended to be from a set of particularly related clans (Sailos), real or imagined, they nonetheless constantly waged wars against each other as access to resources for a jhum-based cultivation depended on it. ‘Pax Britannica’ put an end to such fighting, providing for an over-arching rule, which facilitated and helped notions of a Mizo ‘nationhood’.23

21 Figure

7.4. Collection Sainghinga/Chawngpuii. for instance, van Schendel (1992). 23 See Pachuau (2014). 22 See

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Thus, Sainghinga’s experiments with attire or, rather, his adaptations, clearly reveal his own engagement with his context, as modern, yet traditional, as being a part of the government, but also outside of it—as one who could lend his own voice to the context in which he had been immersed. It was a means of showing the ‘nationhood’ or identity of the Mizos. More importantly, however, the development that needs to be noted was the possibility of juxtaposing the idea of a ‘local’ with that of the Western and inscribing it on to attire. We are not sure when Sainghinga adopted the attire of a kilt for formal occasions, and a timeline for the emergence of what Mizos would call their ‘traditional clothing’ is still not clear. What is clear, however, is the recognition that attire was, as Tarlo has pointed out, not just an item of concealment but an expression of where one came from and who one thought one was. Sainghinga’s story in attire can therefore be seen as a response to the colonial encounter, which, in the Lushai Hills as elsewhere, meant new ways of doing things. However, the repercussions could not but be more in a ‘traditional’ society that was far simpler in organisation and technology, impacting lives in several profound ways, the most profound of course being in that of self-perception. Essays in the Mizo leh vai point to very engaged discussions on these transformations. Most of the debates can be subsumed within the category of what the Mizos called changkanna or ‘self-improvement’. There were calls to be part of the new order through education, through modern medical practices, through the new religion and through abiding with the rules and regulations of the colonial government—all these aspects were incorporated as better forms of living and existence. At the same time, there were others who recognised that such transformations brought about different equations in society and that old ways of doing things were being superseded by new ways. Thus tunlai fing (‘wisdom of today’) and hmanlai fing (‘wisdom of old’) and changkanna (‘self-improvement’) were the means through which these issues were addressed.24 In these developments that the Mizos came to be a part of, we can see that attire became the means through which the changes were adopted as well as discussed. What was appropriate attire for the Mizos or what was proper clothing for them came to be an important point of discussion. The debates were initiated by the many participants in the context—colonial officials, missionaries and locals—and it took on different contours. But, before we look into these issues, I first turn to a brief history of what has come to be known as standard Mizo attire.

24 See

for example, Hmasawnna (1938), Bawla (1935).

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Fig. 7.5 Depictions of various tribes of the Lushai Hills25

A Brief History of Attire and Photographic Representation of the Mizos Mizos, for reasons yet unexplored, did not come as much under the scanner of professional ethnographers. Some of the early images, detailed sketches, mainly by colonial officials, tried to depict and distinguish the various tribes of the Hills through their clothing and as an extension, their headdress. These include the sketches by RG Woodthorpe as well as the photographs by Emil Riebeck. T. H. Lewin, too, took several images of related tribes in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (Fig. 7.5).26

25 Woodthorpe, R.G., 1873. The Lushai Expedition, 1871–1872. London: Hurst and Blackett, inside cover. 26 For a sample of these photos see Pachuau and van Schendel, The Camera as Witness, Cambridge, The Camera as Witness.

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Fig. 7.6 A dapper Challiana, early 20th century27

A large number of photographs are also available from the missionary archives. Photographs from these archives are different in that the aim was not to show ‘primitiveness’ through a lack of clothing. In fact, no such photos of anthropologised bare bodies exist as tribes are wont to be shown. Instead, what we have more prominently are images of the ‘transformed Mizo,’ of civilisation having reached these distant lands. Thus, a large majority of the photographs in the missionary archives are that of converts, of mission workers, of people who had taken to western clothing, wherein such changes were self-evident. The photographs reveal the various experiments with clothing the converts who were close to the mission partook in. Often times, these were hand-me-downs from the missionaries and their families.28 Challiana’s (one of the first pastors of the Baptist Church) photograph above is a clear indication that he had fully adopted western wear, while there seem to be a mix of the western and the local in Fig. 7.7 of some of the early mission workers of the Baptist Church (Figs. 7.6 and 7.7).

27 Collection

Baptist Church of Mizoram Archives. Rosaline, 2018. Evolution of Mizo dress a historical study, Ph.D. thesis submitted to Mizoram University, http://hdl.handle.net/10603/237266, p. 214. 28 Varsangzuali,

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Fig. 7.7 Some of the early mission workers29

Early accounts of the colonial encounter too substantiate the pictographic evidence and most such works describe the Mizos as fully clothed, as opposed to the nudity that is often imposed on so-called ‘tribes’. RG Woodthorpe and J Shakespear who were part of the early expeditions in the 1870s, the former from the North and the latter from the South, give us useful descriptions. Both are agreed that the people wore a ‘large homespun sheet of cotton cloth, passed round the body under the right arm, which is thus left free, the two ends being thrown in opposite directions over the left shoulder where they are secured by a strap of tiger or otter skin, supporting a bag in which is carried a knife, a dao, tobacco, flint, steel, and other little necessaries…,’ Woodthorpe described the colour and pattern on the cloth as ‘…generally grayish white, with a dark blue stripe running through it; but sometimes it is dark blue, with a few stripes of white, yellow, or red, or all three interwoven into it’.30 Shakespear, who stayed longer in the Lushai Hills, was able to differentiate and distinguish different categories of vestments, such as those worn in colder weather, which included what he called ‘a white coat, reaching well down the thigh but only fastened at the throat. These coats are ornamented on the sleeves with bands of red and white of various patterns.’ He also noted that there was a difference in attire on ceremonial occasions 29 Collection

Baptist Church of Mizoram Archives. (1873), pp. 70–72. He further adds: ‘ … The women…wear a small strip of cloth, eighteen inches deep, passed round the waist, and over this, a cloth of dark blue wrapped carefully about them, in which they carry their young children on their backs’.

30 Woodthorpe

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between commoners and the chiefs and people who had earned titles by giving certain feasts, who wore, ‘dark blue cloths with red lines of a particular pattern, and plumes made of the tail feathers of the king crow, in their hair knots… those who have killed men in war have special headdresses known as chhawndawl and arkeziak…’ All women, according to Shakespear wore ‘the same costume: a dark blue cotton cloth, just long enough to go around the wearer’s waist with a slight over-lap, and held up by a girdle of brass wire or string… the only other garments being a short white jacket and a cloth which is worn in the same manner as the men. On gala days the only addition to the costume is a picturesque headdress worn by girls while dancing…’31 All these descriptions are confirmed by the images we have of the Mizos at the beginning of the establishment of colonial rule, suggesting that the people clothed themselves, but that their vestments were rather basic. Among the missionaries, it was J. H. Lorrain, a Baptist (in Lushai Hills 1894–1897; 1903–32), who played an important role, much more than colonial administrators, in photographing missionary work and Mizo life, having stayed in the hills for more than three decades. Mizos also took to photography, although a proper history of its incorporation and use cannot yet be told fully.32 A combination of these two factors, that of missionary and local intervention, ensured that ‘clothed men’ were the focus of photo-taking, rather than say, the nude women that colonial administratorethnographers (elsewhere) were wont to take. Men, obviously, were those who were educated first, and the photographs represented the transformation that was being brought about especially among them, inscribed onto attire. Photographs also reveal that there was a broad difference in the way men of the mission clothed themselves in the early years as opposed to those who took up secular jobs. While both commonly wore shirts and coats, the former was also happy to be seen in the puan, while the latter incorporated trousers, and, on occasions, the felt cap as well. Soon, however, the incorporation of western attire was complete for men and it began to follow international trends. Bell-bottoms and block heels, symbols of youthful coolness of the seventies, came to mark the attire for men as well as women of the seventies, who, by then, had also begun to wear trousers, especially when outside the state. An interesting aspect of this development was the self-conscious incorporation of cowboy styles into men’s attires in the 1950s and 1960s (Fig. 7.8).

31 Shakespear

(1988). of early Mizo photographers include Lalhema, Vankhama and Zataia. Lalhema in fact had a store where he sold photographic equipment in the pre-independence period. Also see, Tochhawng (2012). The Advent of Photography in Mizoram, MA Thesis, National Institute of Design, Bengaluru. 32 Names

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Fig. 7.8 Men in the styles of the 1960s33

Major changes were also seen in the way women transformed themselves through attire. Women seemed to have experimented more with their clothing, especially in the way their puans were draped. Some of the early images of women we have, where the focus is on them, rather than as part of the scenery, are images of the first educated women, where the puan is wrapped around the person in a distinctive and purposeful manner and then draped over the shoulders in a style that is reminiscent of a sari. The puans designed with stripes and called the puanlaisen were the template from which the later puanchei emerged (Figs. 7.9 and 7.10). Another important photograph is that of the Mizo choir before their tour of North India in 1929. The men and women, in their respective choir formals, displayed their sartorial confidence and this is where we see the beginnings of a self-conscious ethnic representation through dress. The men wore western formals, but the women were dressed in the puanlaisen that was draped across the shoulders. By the fifties, the draping across the shoulders had been abandoned, and Mizos wore their puans shorter, more akin to the sarong. The main reason, it was felt, was that the previous styles encumbered movement. Meanwhile, the puanchei, a more elaborate puan with much more intricate designs began to make its appearance in photographs from the 50’s, showing that there were innovations taking place in terms of design. It is also draped differently and one end is made to fold over an arm, as in the picture below (Fig. 7.11).

33 Collection

C. Manliana.

7 Sartorial Matters: A Brief History of Attire in Mizoram Fig. 7.9 Kaithuami, one of the first nurses in Mizoram, 192334

Fig. 7.10 The Mizo Choir, 1929

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Specific names are given for the designs on puans35 and contemporary puans are often seen as playing with these so-called ‘traditional’ designs. However, as we have seen, these so-called ‘traditional designs’ were clearly developed through the course of the first half of the twentieth century. Missionaries also mention the development of new designs by the girls who were educated by them.

Debates on Attire The adoption of various forms of attire was not an uninformed acceptance; rather, the espousal of new forms of clothing created its own share of criticisms and controversy. These debates reflect the symbolism that accompany clothing and attire beyond just what are deemed to be individual choices. To clothes were ascribed morality; and there always were doubts about innovations that were seen as moving away from ‘traditional’ ways of being. Attire thus reflected the social fabric of the transformations that Mizos were a part of. It also suggested that clothing was among the areas in which Mizos inscribed change, or rejected it as the case may be. While the colonial government itself was the harbinger of change, it was officials of the government who initially rejected the Mizo embracing of clothing change. The official line was that of retaining native clothing, and the mixing of attire—that of the Mizo and the non-Mizo proved to be a sore point for officials. In an article written by a Mizo employee of the government in March 1903, and entitled, ‘What the Commanding Officer wants’, the official line was stated very clearly, saying: Mizos, giving up their customs are taking up vai [non-Mizo] customs, and this, according to him [the Commanding Officer] is highly inappropriate. It [i.e. vai customs] is followed in this manner: They wear vai clothes, such as the dhoti, or wear trousers or shoes. He [the Commanding Officer] says, ‘let them always be in their normal customs, this is the best and the most appropriate; however, they should be clean at all times…The bad customs of the vais are being copied by the Mizo, it brings no great glory to him and neither is it pleasing and it is also not what they are accustomed to; moreover clothing is so expensive and they can spend a lot of money on it.’36

34 Collection

Thankhumi.

35 Names for the designs include sakeizangzia, disul, lenbuangthuam,

kikiau, senior maimu—these names are based on shapes, seeds, flowers and animal prints found in nature. 36 S. Ch. V (1903a).

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Fig. 7.11 The puanchei worn at the wedding of Hrangzuala and Thangzuali, 196237

The question of hybrid dressing was addressed too in the same article. It went on to say that ‘Some men with long hair tie a knot and use the two-pronged hairpins, and then they wear shoes and socks, with a puan. This is highly inappropriate.’ The article encouraged people who worked in the offices to wear the uniforms that were sanctioned by the government while at work and when at home, to stick to local attire. Another wrote, ‘Some people take great pains to dress-up; it may be beautiful. But if they [the men] wear necklaces and earrings at work places, it is highly inappropriate. What is important most of all is cleanliness.’38 Maintaining indigeneity, addressing appropriateness of location, and questions of hygiene were thus addressed through clothing. Moreover, it was the colonial state that was attempting to make its inputs into codifying or systematising local sartorial tastes. From the point of view of the colonial state, the economic implications of this change of style were also important and it was addressed. A certain JN Sarma, probably a medical officer, believed that it was best for Mizos to stick to their traditional forms of clothing, saying that the acquisition of what was then called vai clothing 37 Collection 38 Dova

Rev. Zairema. (1905).

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(or the clothing and cloth of the plainspeople) made no economic sense. In May 1903, he wrote in the Mizo leh Vai, in the context of how Mizos could save money, saying, ‘Mizos ought not covet clothing from the plains and then you will be able to save money… Continue to live in the ways of your forefathers and then you will be able to save money’39 To this end, by 1904, women were also asked not to forget their weaving so that cloth from the plains would not have to be imported.40 And yet, contradicting this early assertion, clothing was one sure means for the colonial state to establish a dependent relationship with the plains. For instance, in 1905 a ‘Big Market’ was introduced by a Superintendent at Silchar, and Mizo chiefs were invited to bring in their goods which included baskets, and other Mizo craft and cane products, which they could exchange for cloth from the plains.41 Even in the decades that followed, advertisements for Flex shoes from the plains as well as yarn and dyes from the plains made a recurrent appearance in the Mizo leh Vai.42 The shops often belonged to the people of the plains, even though a few Mizos also took up shopkeeping. For the Mizos, the question that needed to be addressed in the area of the taking up of non-Mizo attire was the corresponding attitude that it was felt it conveyed— that of being frivolous or facetious, lepchiah. ‘If they wore their own clothes, and if they kept it clean all the time, then there was a possibility of being considered less frivolous,’ was the opinion of one.43 Others who were in favour of changing Mizo attire such as S. CH. V wrote, ‘when Mizos say, being properly dressed is a sign of being lepchiah, don’t you believe it’.44 Another important discourse that wearing such clothing brought about was that of ‘originality’ and ‘personal integrity’. It was said that many who were not even educated were taking to western clothing such that it was difficult to distinguish those who were (educated), from those who were not. Many, it was said, were taking to wearing these clothes without being able to ‘speak a word of English or even the language of the plains’. Such people were said to be making fools of themselves. Thus, while being educated was seen as behooving a certain attire, its lack (of education) meant the opposite, and the pursuit of such attire without the necessary qualifications meant a lack of integrity, a presentation that was not deemed fitting or appropriate. Another way in which such clothing was seen to be inappropriate was when people were taking to these clothes in such a way that they were not concerned about the conditions of their own homes. Clothing was to reflect one’s background, one’s station in life, although not in a deterministic sense, and going against such a practice was inappropriate. It was seen as being deceptive. ‘Many people do this at the expense of what should be going down our throats. Our families are worried

39 Sharma

(1903). (1908). 41 Anon(1905). 42 Anon(1907). 43 S. Ch. V (1903b). 44 S.Ch. V. (1903c). 40 Chandra

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about the next meal and here we are dressing up like people who earn 500 rupees… while our own homes are as empty as escargot shells that have been sucked out …’45 In a manner, similar to that of those who felt that clothing should reflect the background of an individual, chiefs in the Lushai Hills also debated on an attire that could distinguish them from the common people, or the ‘Commoners’ as they were called, and among themselves. There were a series of letters and discussions through 1925 in the Mizo leh Vai sent in by chiefs. Some chiefs wanted a shirt to be designed for the purpose and for others, it was a shawl. Others suggested that the clothes should symbolise a distinction that they themselves recognised, that of chiefs descended from ‘legal’ wives or concubines, chiefs who recognised particular ancestors, or chiefs that were installed by the British government. However, such a dress code for chiefs does not appear to have come about, but the idea of depiction of traditional hierarchies onto attire continued, albeit through the new materials that colonialism had brought in.46 Even as the appropriation of non-Mizo clothing had its own hill to climb and had to be overcome, we find that it was from the 1930s that clothing as not being merely vestments but as being a form of self-representation of a community came to be recognised. Unlike in contemporary situations, wherein so-called traditional costumes are seen as primordial and existing in the so-called ancient past of the Mizos, the constructionist aspect and the need to modify along with the times was often addressed. This can be seen when it was written that all nations, even those considered advanced, had adapted their clothing at some point in time. Similarly, in the process of finding clothing to self-represent it was argued that Mizos had to adapt what was the best from other communities. A contributor to the Mizo leh Vai thus wrote in 1938, ‘Taking from others and yet at the same time showcasing your own, that which we can distinctively call our own is something that I would like very much.’47 By the 1950’s when Nehru’s call for all the peoples of India to showcase themselves in the Republic day parades to represent the diversity of India came, the Mizos had confidently bridged the gap between ‘tradition’ and modernity, by, at one level, showcasing themselves as ‘primitive’ and yet modern (Figs. 7.12 and 7.13).

45 Zakhama

(1926). articles in May, June, July, August 1925 issues of Mizo leh Vai. 47 Anon ( 1938). 46 See

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Fig. 7.12 A choir in the 1950s48

One of the interesting things about these discussions on attire, especially in the preindependence period was that it was men’s clothing that had largely been discussed and not so much that of women. The earliest reference to the discussion on women’s clothing appeared in the 1940s when it was said that Mizo women, despite the improvements that had been made to their traditional attire the kawrchei and the puanchei were embarrassed about wearing them outside the state, when they had no reason to be. The author was also happy that the young Mizo women at the Welsh Mission School in Shillong were going to school wearing a puan from that year on.49 When one takes into consideration the over-emphasis on women’s clothing in today’s context, its inverse in the early period of non-Mizo incorporation is interesting and perhaps requires further research (Fig. 7.14).

48 Collection 49 Anon

Rev. Dr. Zairema. (1940).

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Fig. 7.13 Jawaharlal Nehru with a cultural troupe during Republic day celebrations, 195450

Conclusion The attempt in this chapter has not been to problematise the photographic representation of a people through clothing or its lack. Rather, photographs have enabled us to underscore people’s incorporation of change in attire. In the Mizo case these were tightly woven together with notions of being modern and educated, especially for men. Women, on the other hand, were made more ‘traditional’ despite going through the very same processes of modernity. At the same time, the taking on of western clothing was not without its assumptions. For many, it was a mask, a costume, a theatrical performance, if it did not come with the right qualifications. Thus, questions of authenticity and integrity were closely tied to attire. Clothes were, in a sense, to reflect the essence of a person. While modernising was a theme that was recurrent in the pre-independence period, especially for the educated, notions of Mizo nationhood, emergent from the 1940s, came to underscore attire-making, and the onus of representing this new-found identity increasingly came to be imposed on women. The chapter has not been able to trace the changes in clothing for children and this lacuna is acknowledged. Hopefully, further research in the future will be able to give a sense of the direction in which this category progressed.

50 Collection

J. Malsawma.

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Fig. 7.14 Two family pictures for comparison. Top taken in 1931, below taken in the 1950s51

References Anon. (1907). Man pek a zawrh. Mizo leh vai, Sept., p. 172. Anon. (1905). Hringchar dawrpui kai thu. Mizo leh, Feb., Vai, p. 1. Anon. (1940). Mahni Hnam Incheina. Mizo leh Vai, Apr., p. 52. Anon. (1938). Mahni hnam incheina. Mizo leh Vai, Mar., pp. 46–47. Bawla, K. (1935). Tlawmngaihna thu. Mizo leh Vai, April, pp. 9–17. Chandra, H. (1908). Thu beng lut chanchin thar. Mizo leh Vai, June, pp. 77–78. 51 Top: Collection Dr. L.N. Tluanga (family of Upa Chalkunga), below Collection Biakliani (family of Pachhunga).

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Cohn, B. (1996). Colonialism and its forms of knowledge: The British in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dova, D. (1905). Mawi Hriatna thu. Mizo leh Vai, Aug., p. 10. Hmasawnna, L.K.S. (1938). Mizo leh Vai, Apr., pp. 54–56. Pachuau, J. L. K., & van Schendel, W. (2015). The camera as witness a social history of Mizoram, Northeast India. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Pachuau, J. L. K. (2014). Being Mizo, identity and belonging in Northeast India. Oxford: New Delhi. S. Ch. V. (1903a) Kammanding sap duh zawng, Mizo leh Vai, p. 8 S. Ch. V. (1903b) Kammanding sap duh zawng, Mizo leh Vai, Apr, p. 8. S. Ch. V. (1903c) Bawr Shawmna Hnar, May, p. 11 Sainghinga. (n.d.) Indopui 1914–1918: Mizote France Ram kal chanchin. Aizawl, (c. 1939). van Schendel, W. (1992). The invention of the ‘Jummas’: State formation and ethnicity in Southeastern Bangladesh. Modern Asian Studies, 26(1), 95–128. Shakespear, J. (1988 [1912]). The Lushei-Kuki Clans. Aizawl. Originally published by London: Macmillan and Co., limited. Sharma, J.N. (1903). Tangka nei theina thu. Mizo leh Vai, May, p. 1. Tarlo, E. (1996). Clothing matters: Dress and identity in India. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Tochhawng, L. (2012). The advent of photography in Mizoram. MA Thesis, National Institute of Design, Bengaluru. Turner, T. S. (1980). Social Skin. In J. Cherfas & R. Lewin (Eds.), Not work alone: A cross-cultural view of activities superfluous to survival (pp. 112–140). London: Temple Smith. Woodthorpe, R. G. (1873). The Lushai expedition: 1871–1872. London: Hurst and Blackett Publishers. Zakhama. (1926). Mizo zirsanglo te leh mi naran tan a thupuan. Mizo leh vai, July, p. 146.

Joy L. K. Pachuau is Professor of History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She was visiting fellow at Agrarian Studies, Macmillan Centre, Yale University for the project titled: “Beyond the borders: Exploring connected histories between Northeast India and Northern Myanmar/Burma”; Honorary Research Fellow, University of Liverpool (2015); Charles Wallace Visiting Fellow, Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, Cambridge (2013). Her area of specialisation includes European expansion in Asia in the 16th–17th centuries, history of Christianity in India and Asia, Sociocultural History of Northeast India, Visual Anthropology. She is also a recipient of an honorary title “Mizo Warrior” awarded by the Mizoram Government. Her recent publications include, Landscape, Culture, and Belonging: Writing the History of Northeast India co-edited with Neeladri Bhattacharya (2019), The Camera as Witness. A Social History of Mizoram, Northeast India co-authored with Willem van Schendel (CUP 2015), Being Mizo. Identity and Belonging in Northeast India (OUP 2014).

Chapter 8

Representing Tea, Creating Consumers: Tea Advertising in Late Colonial India Natasha Nongbri

Abstract Selling tea to Indians became one of the most elaborate and widespread colonial marketing campaigns evolved by colonial governmental agencies like the Indian Tea Cess Committee (ITCC) and its, successor, the Indian Tea Market Expansion Board (ITMEB) during the first half of the twentieth century. Among the various marketing strategies launched by the ITCC, and later, by the ITMEB in the late 1930s and 1940s, the print medium became one of the most effective ways to popularise tea among Indian consumers. Tea was visually represented in several ways to appeal to various groups ranging from women, middle-class families and children to peasants, factory workers and soldiers. This chapter looks at how visual representations of tea during the late colonial period were instrumental in disseminating the practice of tea drinking among Indians. Print advertising in both English and vernacular mediums popularised tea as a ‘national’ drink in an attempt to create a tradition and culture of tea drinking in the subcontinent. In particular, visual representations of tea in print advertisements from an English daily like the Times of India in the 1940s are used to demonstrate how topical contexts and exigencies like World War II were exploited to increase consumption and embrace new consumer groups. Print advertisements as visual texts can serve as tools to understand how the domestic consumption of tea expanded in the Indian subcontinent. Keywords Tea · Indian consumers · Propaganda · Consumption · Print advertisements · Second World War · Workers · Productivity · Chai Tea cultivation by the British in India first began in colonial Assam in the late 1830s and later spread to various parts of the subcontinent. This development was a fallout of the end of the East India Company’s monopoly of the tea trade with China in 1833, along with the accidental discovery of tea growing wild in the northeastern frontier of the subcontinent in the 1830s. The colonisation of tea as a commodity and the region on which it was initially chanced upon were concurrent and intertwined events in the nineteenth century. Tea from Assam bore the irrevocable imprint of the region. By the close of the nineteenth century, India was the foremost exporter of N. Nongbri (B) Department of History, Janki Devi Memorial College, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. Nongbri and R. Bhargava (eds.), Materiality and Visuality in North East India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1970-0_8

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tea to Europe. However, this was also the time when the Indian tea industry faced a crisis of over-production which led to a price crash, and the growing competition posed by other tea-producing nations like Sri Lanka, etc., somewhat contributed to the working of a new strategy. Consequently, over the first half of the twentieth century, the tea industry focused on creating a domestic market for tea in India. Through novel colonial marketing strategies tea was transformed from an imperial beverage to a plebian drink of the masses. As with other colonial commodities, advertising became an important fulcrum of tea propaganda. Selling the beverage was contingent upon creating a ‘want’ for it. With products like tea whose popularity was dependent upon taste, advertising not only sought to address the availability, price and quality of the commodity, but, more importantly, to educate potential consumers about the virtues of tea drinking and the proper method of preparation, so that they got the best out of the product. In the recent past, tea advertising in the early decades of twentieth century India has drawn some attention (Bhadra 2005; Lutgendorf [‘Chai Why’?] 2011; Nijhawan 2017; Kaushik 2014). The transition of tea from an ‘imperial’ to a ‘national’ or ‘swadeshi’ drink in the contemporary print media has been a theme of vivid discussion. Scholars like Gautam Bhadra and Philip Lutgendorf in their visually appealing work have persuasively underscored this aspect. More recently, Shobha Nijhawan, focusing on advertisements from the Hindi periodical Sudha of the late 1930s, has shown the construction of national, class, caste and, mainly, gendered identity of tea. As Nijhawan contends, the ITMEB’s agenda to nationalise tea was meant to create a ‘custom of tea consumption’ and ‘a tradition-in-the-making’ by targeting Indian women in different roles and across class as the creator and perpetuator of that tradition (Nijhawan 2017). Indian women were not the only targets. From mid-1938 onwards, in a bid to increase mass consumption and counter the Indian nationalists’ anti-tea propaganda, who viewed tea drinking as an imperial design to impose their culinary habits on a people used to other forms of beverage, tea advertising targeted different consumer niches using a wide variety of tropes ranging from the peasant, factory worker, the middle-class family, to soldier and children. The outbreak of the Second World War took the tea print advertising campaign in the 1940s beyond nationalistic advertising to embrace the various contexts provided by the war to increase consumption. This chapter examines, in particular, the print advertising campaign during the Second World War leading up to the eve of independence to demonstrate how the Indian Tea Market Expansion Board (ITMEB) spread out in almost every possible direction to promote its drink. In modern times, print advertisements can serve as an important form of material culture as they provide evidence of human beings’ attitude towards the consumption of material objects. They also reflect the social and cultural values of a particular society and changing values towards commodities and consumption. Through advertisements as visual and material aids, this chapter looks at the process by which the practice of tea drinking gained further ground among Indians, particularly in the last decade before independence. These advertisements are suggestive of how colonial advertisers adopted a variety of themes, especially in

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the context of the Second World War, to transform tea drinking among Indians into a plebian and essential cultural practice and the challenges to such efforts.

Tea Advertising in the Early Decades of the Twentieth Century As with other colonial commodities, advertising became an important fulcrum of tea propaganda. Tea advertising in the early part of the twentieth century primarily made use of posters, handbills, and show cards printed in several vernacular languages, besides English and Hindi (TOI 1916). These were doled out at various sites where tea demonstrations were held and tea distributed in the form of brewed cups and pice packets to acquaint customers about the beverage and its preparation. Selling tea through pice packets was, in fact, one of the most popular methods of introducing tea in small quantities to a non-tea-drinking population in the early decades of tea propaganda in the subcontinent. Two significant devices of modern advertising, the bioscope, and the gramophone, were also extensively used to advertise tea in the early decades. Print advertising, as in late nineteenth century Britain, too proved a highly effective publicity medium. Until the creation of the ITMEB in the late 1930s, print advertising in leading dailies of the day (mostly English ones) was dominated by private tea companies like Lipton and Brooke Bond, who publicised their products by attesting to the virtues of tea, initially among well-to-do Indians and later the middle classes. The visual content of such advertisements was generally replete with imperial symbolism, with India, the arena of production invisible, but this gradually changed as advertisers widened their net for prospective consumers in the subcontinent. With the growth of Presidency towns, railways, mills and ports, the service sector and labouring class became the new targets of the colonial tea promotion campaign. By representing tea as an innocuous, refreshing, and socialising drink, tea penetrated and innocuously seeped into the lives of the masses in a gradual but steady manner. Through catchy phrases and cleverly crafted images printed in newspapers, the virtues of the drink were sold to the Indian public. Though hot beverages or brewed drinks had never really been popular in the sweltering heat of the tropics, the commerce of tea inverted this tropicality, making it the basis for advertising and marketing the beverage among the captive population. The merits of the drink to refresh, energise and counter the ‘lethargy’ and ‘sloth’ caused by the overbearing tropical weather were relentlessly extolled. Interestingly, hidden behind these glossy advertisements on the merit of tea was the pertinent fact that tea was a product of colonial exploitation of the colonised subjects’ land and labour power, and the denial of rights over their resources through the promulgation of draconian laws, such as, the Assam Land and Revenue Regulation, Act, 1886, and the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation, Act, 1873 or Inner Line Regulation which gave the British uncontrollable power over the people and areas they administer.

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In the opening decades of the twentieth century, global business firms transplanted European advertisements indiscriminately, in their original form and content, into the colony. However, by the late 1920s, market forces made it imperative for advertising professionals to adapt advertisements to the Indian context by addressing Indian sensibilities and cultural conditions (Hayes 2017). Consequently, tea was gradually detached from its imperial context and Indian imagery and symbols began to be used in tea advertisements to attract the ordinary Indian consumer, urban and rural.1 Modern advertising practices such as market research to gauge demand, the appropriate media for publishing, techniques for printing text and illustrations, size and placement of advertisements in newspapers and magazines, and use of advertising art were used for tea advertising as well. The initial endeavour of the Indian Tea Cess Committee, a government agency created in 1903 to promote tea, had been to make the beverage available at public places across the country where consumers could taste and enjoy the brew (Tea Quarterly 1938). It was only by the 1930s, when tea was amply accessible in open public spaces, that due attention to ‘inducing’ tea drinking as a habit among the general populace was given. In 1935, the ITCC launched a forceful advertising campaign through the Indian press, both English and vernacular, as a direct form of publicity. Such ‘educative propaganda’ was intended to gain the support of Indians to the work of the Tea Cess and for ‘educating them to the utility of tea in Indian social and economic life’ (TOI 1935a). Publicity through the vernacular press was especially focused on the ‘Indian intelligentsia’, to draw its attention to ‘what may be regarded as India’s national beverage’ (TOI 1935a). For the task, the ITCC appointed Prabhu Guha Thakurta as publicity officer to publicise the virtues of tea through vernacular newspapers. He is generally credited with reorienting tea’s image to suit the transforming socio-political scenario in the country (Bhadra 2005). W.H. Miles, the then Tea Commissioner, described the newly launched advertising campaign as ‘amongst the biggest and most comprehensive ever launched in the Indian Press on behalf of a single product’ (Miles 1946). With the high tide of nationalism in the subcontinent in the 1930s, organisers of tea propaganda appropriated the nationalist discourse to bolster the image of tea as a ‘national’ drink. The attempts to project tea as a national beverage were meant not only to cast off tea’s imperial and elitist overtones and reinvent it as a quotidian drink for the masses, but by appealing to the nationalist sentiments of the public, tea as a commodity was given a new identity. The forging of a new identity for this otherwise colonial and global commodity went in tandem with creating new local consumer niches who were ascribed a role in the nation-in-the-making through the appropriation of tea drinking. The move itself was not without resistance. Even as tea was acquiring a new nationalist idiom, the Bengal press used the Bengali nationalist chemist, Acharya P.C. Ray’s anti-tea arguments to attack the ITCC’s propaganda 1 For instance, see Advertisement by Brooke Bond, from ‘Chai Why?: The Triumph of Tea in India

as Documented in the Priya Paul Collection’, https://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/essay/89/index_ 1.html. This advertisement depicts Brooke Bond promoting cheap tea dust among village folk. The scene is one of celebration indicating a folk festival with musicians and dancers holding cups of tea in hand while one person appears to be holding an oversized packet of Brooke Bond tea.

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efforts (TOI 1935b). The Acharya had objected to tea on three grounds: first, it was an expensive habit; second, it was addictive and enslaved the consumer like alcohol; and third, it was harmful to the human body. The Times of India editor countered the attacks by pointing to tea’s advantages when taken in moderation. Not to be outdone by the anti-tea campaign, the ITMEB’s print advertising campaign continued to harp on the nationalist theme cutting across gender, class, caste and religion to perpetuate a tradition of tea drinking among Indians (Bhadra 2005; Nijhawan 2017). From Indian women to the modern Indian family, the office goer, the worker and even children—all were pressed into projecting and cultivating tea as a distinctly ‘Indian’ commodity and a ‘national’ beverage. To what extent advertising per se fuelled popular taste for tea is perhaps a theme for future research, but it definitely succeeded in creating a space of its own not only in popular perception and imagination but also in the nation’s variegated menu.

Peddling Tea in Wartime The outbreak of World War II took tea propaganda, including advertising in India, to an altogether different plane. Unlike in Britain, where tea control and rationing became a prime concern of the government, tea in India was not strictly restricted. Subjected as it was to wide inflation, tea consumption in the subcontinent did not decline even when prices doubled. While print advertisements and mass media reinforced it as a drink for a wide range of people through multiple contexts and images of tea, the onset of war provided the tea industry with a new idiom that showcased tea as the magic potion that not only reinvigorates the body but also enhances productivity. Scores of advertisements put up by the Board during the war years blatantly extolled the virtue of tea as a wartime necessity and a driving force of industrial productivity. A perusal of advertisements brought out by the Board in an English daily like the Times of India, with a more urban Indian middle-class readership, reveals how nationalistic advertising somewhat took a backseat with all attempts focused on the war effort. A large many of the advertisements were elaborately worded along with catchy taglines and punch lines prominently displayed at the top and bottom of the advertisement. The detailed printed text alongside illustrations clearly reveals the need to explain the purpose and importance of the advertised commodity to consumers who were still not too well versed with its potential and virtues. In fact, the war accentuated earlier declared virtues of tea as never before. As the war intensified and industrial production gained urgency, the industrial worker’s physical ability to keep up with work acquired increasing importance. While advertisements linking tea to better efficiency and alertness among workers were not new, wartime exigencies provided a fresh fillip to the age-old concern of fighting ‘human fatigue’ and ensuring productivity. In fact, the Board’s wartime print publicity was directed at making tea ‘indispensable to modern industrial life and progress’, as it declared in one advertisement (TOI 1941).

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World War II validated the Board’s thrust on tea as the ideal beverage for workers because it ensured that workers overcome fatigue at a personal level and ‘maintain their speed and output’ to guarantee ‘peak production’ and meet the demands imposed by the war. The advertisement of a worker holding a mug of tea against the backdrop of a factory with the tagline ‘11 o’clock Tea gives that extra ounce of energy’ and ‘fight fatigue with Indian tea’ was aimed at institutionalising the tea drinking habit at a certain time within the working hours of the day (Fig. 8.1). The Board’s constant refrain on maintaining ‘war-level output’ and ensuring ‘soaring production’ was also a call to industrial employers to serve tea to their workers to relieve them of the ‘strain of industrial work’ and fight ‘mid-work fatigue spells’ (Fig. 8.2). In another advertisement, the Board claimed Indian tea as a ‘harmless yet valuable stimulant’ to have ‘played its part’ in industrial concerns throughout India ‘achieving output far in excess of their normal capacity’ (Fig. 8.3). The theme of wartime productivity was not limited to the industrial worker alone but extended to the office-goer as well. As another wartime advertisement stated, tea was as much a necessity for modern offices where to ensure ‘maximum efficiency’ and overcome ‘nerve-fatigue, boredom and listlessness’ serving tea at 4 Fig. 8.1 Ad—11 o’clock tea peak production, TOI, Oct. 16, 1941, p. 10

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Fig. 8.2 Ad—Soaring production, TOI, Feb. 11, 1943, p. 8

o’clock everyday was a must (TOI 1942). The Board especially stressed tea’s ability at building a work culture and work efficiency that was required to sustain the war efforts. Tea’s refreshing and energising potential, which were emphasised upon in print advertisements of the earlier decades, were now presented through a new rhetoric of productivity and efficiency. Further, by linking the commodity’s consumption to increasing efficiency, advertisers harped not only on creating a modern work culture, but culling out a new kind of worker (factory worker and office goer) whose hard work could contribute both to the war efforts and the nation’s progress. Tea became a crucial element in reinforcing this new image of the worker with a new work ethic centred on efficiency and productivity. This is also evident in advertisements on the factory canteen as an indispensable space for the worker discussed a little further. By the end of the war, the 11 o’clock tea was transformed into a ‘mid-morning investment’ meant not only for the industrial worker and office-goer but the ‘housewife, manual labourer or artist’ to renew their flagging energy and concentration (Fig. 8.4). With the return of peace and normalcy, tea reappeared in the lives of the ordinary Indian. Such advertisements also contained detailed instructions on ‘how

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Fig. 8.3 Ad—Tea for optimum production and fatigue, TOI, Aug. 17, 1944, p. 6

to make good tea’ with step-wise directions on how to brew tea in a ‘teapot’ and not a ‘kettle’ for ‘not less than five minutes’, with milk and sugar added separately in the cup as per individual taste and preference. Since earlier times, the ITCC and the ITMEB were emphatic about ‘good tea’ prepared only through the brewed method and officially endorsed it in their advertising campaigns through various media. Notably, however, in later decades, large sections of the Indian population came to embrace tea as chai—the sweet milky brew laced with spices. Chai was not only the Hindi nomenclature for tea but, in due course, came to stand for the process of preparation as well.

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Fig. 8.4 Ad—Mid-morning investment, TOI, Dec. 4, 1945, p. 6

The British method of preparing tea required elaborate tea equipage that the mostly poor native population could ill afford. This was perhaps one of the chief reasons why for the local tea shop and for the vastly poor populace making tea at home, the practice of boiling together water, milk and sugar with a spoonful or two of tea leaves in a single vessel became more appealing. The method reduced the requirement for tea equipage and required lesser amount of tea leaves than the brewing process (Collingham 2006; Lutgendorf 2012; Wiley 2014). The gradual adoption of alternative methods of tea preparation by Indians in contrast to the British method

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was not merely a matter of economy and expediency. In the long run, it articulated the agency of consumers and their ability to transform the product marketed to them. It also revealed the limitation of advertisers and advertising strategies to mould consumers to their liking, and the choices the Indian consumers exercised in matters pertaining to their diet. The Board was careful to advertise its tea as distinctly ‘Indian tea’ in an apparent attempt to delink it from its imperial and colonial context and to cater to the specificities of its Indian consumers. However, at times, tea’s imperial legacy was still invoked, as is evident in the Board’s advertisements of 1946 on the four o’clock teatime. In one advertisement, it described tea at 4 o’clock as a ‘British institution’, tea a ‘universal beverage’ and ‘man’s first comfort, refresher and friend’ (TOI 1946). In another, tea is again placed within the Indian context with an Indian couple depicted as enjoying their four o’clock tea. While keeping the Indian consumer in mind, tea’s universal appeal is drawn out: ‘Rich palaces and poor hovels; large boisterous families with scores of friends running in and out—and lonely spinsters; artist and coal miner; peer and peasant; frozen North and sweltering tropic; at four, by some magical process, all become of one mind and equal; four o’clock is the world’s tea time’ (Fig. 8.5). The tagline ‘Any time tea is tea time’ was further meant to convince consumers that the beverage need not adhere to any routine or ritual but could be had anytime and anywhere.

Tea, the Guarantor of Welfare and Productivity Towards the end of World War II and its aftermath, the Board continuing with the industrial theme brought out a new series of advertisements based on ‘maximum industrial efficiency and output’, as part of the focus on postwar reconstruction (ITMEB 1945). Tea’s strong association with ‘efficiency of industrial production’ promoted during World War II was a constant refrain in the postwar period as well. The rising output in a large number of factories was attributed to tea’s ability to increase concentration, thereby inverting old theories of productivity proclaiming that output generally declined as the working shift came to an end (Fig. 8.6). The mid-shift fall in output or the ‘fatigue factor’ was increasingly attributed to ‘falling concentration’ than to ‘loss of physical energy’ (Fig. 8.7). Tea, ‘India’s own product’, the Board professed, ensured that ‘output remain[ed] at its peak level right to the end of the shift.’ Another advertisement with the tagline ‘Man-hours’ used a common algebraic problem to show that the ‘day to day factory experience’ did not translate into output with mathematical precision. However, tea served ‘in the middle of a long shift’ helped in ‘maintaining output at a high level’ (Fig. 8.8). With manpower not being directly proportional to output, the beverage became ‘a very real boon to the factory manager’ maintaining ‘a high standard of physical effort and concentration for long periods.’ Ultimately, industrial production, aided by tea, was to ‘speed victory by keeping production at a very high level, yet, at the same time, conserving manpower and materials’ (Fig. 8.9).

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Fig. 8.5 Ad—4 o’clock tea, TOI, Jun. 5, 1946, p. 5

A common thread in these advertisements was the stress on a canteen culture in factories and industrial establishments. The introduction of tea breaks punctuating the rhythm of work as essential to remove monotony, restore frayed nerves and fight fatigue had been in keeping with the Board’s larger aim of encouraging the establishment of factory canteens. The Board invoked serving tea to workers on the job as a significant part of industrial welfare service (Fig. 8.10). One particular advertisement had a larger than life-size illustration of an industrial worker placed right at its centre, between the surrounding text, to indicate the centrality of his position in the war economy.

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Fig. 8.6 Ad—Tea and industrial output, TOI, Jul. 18, 1946, p. 3

While the idea of labour welfare in India was not new, the concern with employees’ health and efficiency was. Tea could be a guarantor of both, but organising a canteen for employees’ welfare where tea was a crucial component became as important. ‘A factory is as good as its Canteen’, was the tagline of an advertisement brought out on the eve of independence. As a place for ‘happiness and health, rest and relaxation’, it maintained workers’ morale paying ‘handsome dividends in low absenteeism and industrial peace’ (Fig. 8.11). Hence, its organisation, the Board pronounced, was not a ‘spare time job’ but deserved all ‘seriousness’. With the rising importance of industrial welfare, the Board amplified the canteen as a much-desired space in a modern factory setting and for the new nation. By linking workers’ productivity and efficiency to the nation’s advancement, the factory canteen became a participant in the new nation’s progress and development. During the war years, while it was involved with opening and running factory canteens across the subcontinent, the Board’s advertising campaign had emphasised more on the sale of tea in industrial establishments. Postwar, it was quick to cash in on its canteen experience to press for the establishment of more canteens everywhere. Through these advertisements, the Board also keenly attempted to popularise its pamphlets on canteen planning (eg. Canteen for the Workers) offering its expertise free of cost

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Fig. 8.7 Ad—Fatigue factor, TOI, May 10, 1945, p. 6

to industrial concerns desiring to institute canteens in their workplace.2 Ironically, while the Board persistently pressed for canteen facilities in modern industrial establishments, it did not do the same for the plantation sector whose employees were engaged in overtime work throughout the war period to meet the wartime demands for tea.3 From October 1944, the Board also initiated a new theme in its press publicity campaign known as the ‘Problems Appeal’ focusing on problems of common people arising from the war such as severe hardships and scarcities of food, fuel and clothing (ITMEB 1945). For such times and moments of stress, tea was presented as the ‘unfailing comforter’ assisting everyone both during wartime and in peace. These full length display advertisements brought out after the war’s end bore the captivating punch line ‘In Peace as in War rely on Tea’, and boasted of the 2 The

canteen as part of industrial welfare measures was provided for in the Factories Act, 1948 introduced by the government of independent India in 1948. Any factory with more than 250 workers employed was bound to provide canteen facilities to its workers. 3 Canteens in plantations were provided for under the Plantations Labour Act, 1951 introduced for the welfare of plantation labour and regulate its working conditions. Plantations with over 150 workers were entitled to one or more canteens.

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Fig. 8.8 Ad—Tea and man hours, TOI, Jun. 7, 1945, p. 6

beverage’s exploits both during war and in peace time. In one advertisement, the narrative personified tea as donned in uniform describing its participation at the warfront on ‘frontline duty, nursing the sick, comforting the wounded, counselling the homesick and encouraging the down-hearted.’ It was depicted as assisting factory workers and civil defence personnel in fighting ‘fatigue and boredom.’ It cheered ‘tired fighting men in the burning desert and steaming jungle, in the frozen Arctic waters, as well as blazing tropical plains.’ Tea was also present at the height of gaiety and victorious celebrations in Europe, and finally, in preparing ‘for the quiet and unhurried days of peace when the rhythm of life will once again return to normal’ (Fig. 8.12). Through the war imagery and narrative, this advertisement especially endorsed the global presence of Indian tea and its ability to straddle continents to bring relief and cheer. The war also provided tea the occasion to move between national and international contexts. Tea, another advertisement pointed, ‘the only sure comforter when nerves reached breaking point’ during the war, was in peacetime ‘still the comforter of the weary’ and ‘the purveyor of social cheer and inspiration’ (Fig. 8.13). As the ‘dependable comforter’, tea now carved a new role for itself in peace and reconstruction and in ‘the fight for human progress’ (Fig. 8.14). In brief, few commodities, if any, could replicate or boast of the feats and successes that tea derived from the war and its aftermath. While the link between tea drinking

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Fig. 8.9 Ad—Tea, man-power and output, TOI, Apr. 12, 1945, p. 6

and productivity is an issue that remains to be scientifically established, wartime advertising went a long way in reaffirming tea’s construction as the ideal beverage in times of crisis, as an aid to industrial productivity, and as a restorer of peace and normalcy. Through tea’s selfless and altruistic portrayal the Board made several gains. For the tea industry and the ITMEB the war had meant business, and the latter in particular lost no attempt to sell tea in every conceivable manner, finding new consumer markets where none existed before. However, the business aspect was cleverly camouflaged by the rhetoric of service, welfare and philanthropy (Rappaport 2017). As the horrors of war gradually ebbed, so did the wartime rhetoric in print advertising with the Board’s advertisments returning to earlier themes and a few new ones thrown in. Tea was presented as the drink that refreshed the individual and family, provided ‘stamina’ to sportsmen, ‘vitamins’ to workers and finally as a beverage for nation building—‘a fountain head of prosperity for the nation’ (Fig. 8.15). The nationalist rhetoric adopted by the Board in the late 1930s resurfaced with the war’s end and the growing inevitability of independence. As an aid to normalcy through postwar reconstruction, tea was expected to assume the new role of building the

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Fig. 8.10 Ad—Tea and growth of industrial welfare, TOI, Jun. 27, 1946, p. 9

nation. Tea for national development and progress remained the shrill cry of the Central Tea Board, the ITMEB’s successor, in its print advertisements from the early years of freedom. For all the efforts of the ITMEB to project tea as a drink of and for the nation, on the eve of independence tea still remained far from being a ‘national’ drink. Eleven years after independence, I.T. Carmichael, the ITA’s Chairman, still lamented on the average Indian citizen drinking only ‘one cup of tea every three days’ while his British counterpart ‘put away eight cups a day’. ‘If we could only double India’s consumption or if we could induce each citizen to drink one cup of tea a day, our present difficulties would be over.’ (ITA 125 Years 2008) This was the task of the Tea Board of independent India, which, however, did not differ much from its predecessor especially in terms of rhetoric and propaganda strategies deployed. Over the decades,

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Fig. 8.11 Ad—Factory canteen, TOI, Jul. 17, 1947, p. 5

tea eventually and truly has become the national drink of Indians, as the ITMEB envisioned, but that is a different story of propaganda left to be told.

Conclusion Today, tea has become an integral part of life in India. Though the product that constitutes the basis of this chapter had its genesis in Assam, Northeast’s oldest and largest state, the discussion moves beyond the confines of the region to reveal how a commodity that catered to imperial needs became a quotidian drink for the Indian masses as well. Through print advertisements of the 1940s, this chapter has tried to demonstrate how tea consumption among Indians was transformed into an essential

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Fig. 8.12 Ad—Tea and war, TOI, Dec. 11, 1945, p. 7

cultural practice, if not a ‘national’ practice, as desired by the producers of such images. Placing this chapter within the larger context of materiality and visuality in the northeast that this volume engages with, print advertisements can be seen as powerful visual tools that can help in understanding consumption practices and attitudes. While the colonial and economic imperatives behind such advertising are evident, the most predominant image produced through such advertising was the commodity itself. Tea, the commodity, in its myriad roles and in several contexts, was shaping the rise of the domestic tea consumer as well. Even so, the domestic tea consumer was not merely an inert or passive recipient of market forces or advertising gimmicks with no agency or volition. The history of tea in colonial northeast frontier militates against such a conceptualisation. The trajectory of tea consumption in the Indian subcontinent brings out the limitation of the colonial strategy to popularise tea consumption in the colony. While the aggressive use of advertisements and the nationalist discourse succeeded to take tea from the ruling elite to the masses, it failed to make tea a universal drink as intended by the colonial masters. Attempts to universalise the beverage in the subcontinent fell short of the

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Fig. 8.13 Ad—Tea in peace, TOI, Nov. 6, 1945, p. 7

desired goal. Tea neither became a ‘national’ or ‘universal’ drink among Indians during the colonial period. What the British succeeded to do was to lay the basis of a commodity culture and a culture of tea drinking that was gradually incorporated as an everyday practice in the life of the colonised people, albeit long after the end of colonial rule. A close scrutiny of the history of tea consumption in the Indian subcontinent also reveals the inherent tension that existed between the East and the West centred on taste. While the British spared no efforts to make tea a universal drink accessible to all segments of the Indian population, across caste, class, gender, ethnicity and region, they were unwilling to compromise on its taste. The British mode of tea preparation was contingent on the method of brewing the tea leaves in boiling water in a teapot, away from the fire, without milk or sugar for about five minutes or till the boiled water in the teapot acquired the right potency. This mode of preparation not

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Fig. 8.14 Ad—Tea in peace, TOI, Feb. 14, 1946, p. 3

only gave tea a distinct and pure flavour untainted by other ingredients, but also an identity considered uniquely English. To maintain its identity as a colonial legacy, native consumers were persistently impressed upon to follow the ‘proper’ method of preparation. Scores of advertisements were printed and tea-making campaigns organised to educate the native consumers the proper mode of preparation and serving tea, but with little effect. That the Indian consumers were not an easy lot to be swayed by taste that was alien to their palate is evident, in that it was chai, the spiced milky tea and ‘corrupted’ form of the beverage’s imperial form that won wide acceptance among the Indian masses. Easy to prepare and economical in time and money, the concoction boiled in water, milk and sugar at one go (with or without spices) not only went on to become a near universal beverage in the Indian subcontinent, but also gave English tea a good run for its money. The complexity of choice asserted by the domestic consumer is also apparent in the way tea without milk or laal chai found as much acceptance in eastern and northeastern parts of the country where milk was a luxury. Tea appealed as much to non-milk consumers, as sweeten black (or red) tea went well with the rice- and meat-based diet. Sugar was the chief ingredient that

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Fig. 8.15 Ad—Tea and nation-building, TOI, May 14, 1949, p. 5

pleased the palates of the non-milk drinking population. In fact, tea without milk was acceptable but without sugar it had little appeal. Tea drinking in India definitely offered a new choice of beverage that went beyond the mere imitation of a British practice with domestic consumers also exercising choices that did not necessarily replicate the advertisers’ objectives and purpose. Nevertheless, print advertising through its visual imagery did succeed in widening the network of domestic consumers. Tea drinking in India gradually stood its ground, gaining its own identity that was far removed from its British heritage. In modern times, the adaptability and appeal of tea to a variety of tastes and consumers accounts for its vast success in India.

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References Bhadra, G. (2005) From an imperial product to a national drink: The culture of tea consumption in modern India. CSSS in association with Tea Board. Collingham, L. (2006) Curry: A tale of cooks and conquerors. Vintage Books. Hayes, D. (2017). Brand-name advertising and the making of modern conjugal family. In J. Jain (Ed.), The story of early Indian advertising (Vol. 68, No. 3, pp. 74–87). (Special Issue of Marg). India’s National Beverage. (1935a).The Times of India Feb 6 (p. 4). Indian Tea Association 125 Years. (2008). Kolkata: Indian Tea Association. Kaushik, S. (2014). Viewing advertisements doing history: Advertisements in Aj, 1935–1938. In Proceedings of Indian History Congress, 74th session (IHC, 2014), (pp. 587–93). Lutgendorf, P., [Chai Why?]. (2011). The Triumph of Tea in India as Documented in the Priya Paul Collection. https://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/essay/89/index. Lutgendorf, P. (2012). Making Tea in India: Chai, Capitalism, Culture. Thesis Eleven, 113(1), 11–31 Miles, W. H. (1946). Tea Propaganda in India: A Brief Survey. Calcutta: ITMEB. Nijhawan, S. (2017). Nationalizing the consumption of tea for the hindi reader: The Indian Tea Market Expansion Board’s advertisement campaign. Modern Asian Studies, 51(5), 1229–1252 Rappaport, E. (2017). A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. The Indian Tea Cess: Its Work in India. (1916). The Times of India, Feb. 22, 1916, (p. 5). Tea Drinking. (1935b) The Times of India, Sept. 10, (p. 8). Tea Consumption in India. (1938). The Tea Quarterly (Vol. 11, p. 208). Tea Advertisement. (1941). TOI, Oct. 16, 1941 (p. 10). Tea Advertisement. (1942). ‘4 o’clock Tea for Maximum Efficiency’, TOI, Aug. 13 (p. 6). Tea Advertisement. (1946). ‘4 o’clock Tea’, TOI, Nov. 29, (p. 3). The Indian Tea Market Expansion Board (ITMEB) Report 1945 (1945). Wiley, A. S. (2014). Cultures of milk: The biology and meaning of dairy products in the United States and India. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Natasha Nongbri is Associate Professor at the Department of History, Janki Devi Memorial College, University of Delhi, India. She completed her doctorate from Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her areas of interest include environmental history, commodities and socio-economic history of India.

Part III

Imagination, Imagery and Identity: Representations and Subversions

Chapter 9

Food is Not Just ‘Food’: Analysing Gender in the Assamese Foodscape Pooja Kalita

Abstract This chapter attempts to broadly answer the question—‘How does the materiality and visuality of food serve as a medium to establish gender norms in the Assamese foodscape?’ Food and the paraphernalia surrounding it are as cultural, social and political as much as it is physiological. Food has always been used to demarcate various boundaries based on ethnic identity, class, caste, gender, etc. Anxieties regarding who and what is ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ to Assamese identity have been a perpetual burning issue in Assam. Thus, this chapter looks into how, when ‘Assameseness’ is established through food, certain gendered norms and roles are (re-)defined. For instance, often relation between women and the preparation of Assamese cuisine is evoked, as women are marked as cultural bearers. This, in turn, produces a homogenous idea regarding both womanhood and being Assamese, which is both parochial and patriarchal. Keywords Gender · Assamese · Foodscape · Visuality · Materiality

Introduction During my culinary excursions, I often come across restaurants that claim to sell ‘Assamese’ cuisine. One particular thing I invariably notice is the way everything in these restaurants has a visual appeal; from the photographs of ‘Assamese’ culture that adorn the walls to the decor and the utensils used in such restaurants. All the animate and inanimate objects can be seen as materials designed to enhance the ‘Assameseness’ of the food prepared and consumed within such spaces. Most of them also claim that they serve ‘authentic’ Assamese food to their customers. Authenticity then becomes a crucial part of such spaces along with the food served. This is demonstrated by pictures of women in Mekhela-Chador 1 serving and offering food. Bishnu Rabha, one of the most renowned cultural figures in Assam, famously remarked in regard 1 An

Assamese traditional attire for women.

P. Kalita (B) Department of Sociology, South Asian University, New Delhi, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. Nongbri and R. Bhargava (eds.), Materiality and Visuality in North East India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1970-0_9

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to Assamese women that ‘her contribution towards the art of cooking Assamese cuisine is extraordinary. She herself takes care of even the smallest of the details and activities related to preparing a cuisine which is our very own as Assamese cuisine is very different from any other Indian cuisine’. I came across this remark in one of the menus of an Assamese restaurant. This view of Bishnu Rabha, propagated by the restaurant, certainly underlines the idea of authenticity of Assamese cuisine that has been preserved by Assamese women through her culinary practices. Following the thread on gender norms, the idea of ‘authenticity’ itself in relation to food is often evoked. Needless to say, authenticity, like all other dimensions of material culture, is constructed rather than being a given fact. Against this broader framework, this chapter is an attempt to locate the narratives on visuality and materiality of gender, Assameseness and food in the urban context of Guwahati. I refer to this as the foodscape of Guwahati, which includes the practice of both food preparation and consumption. But why Guwahati? This is primarily for two broad reasons: Firstly, the scholarship on food and gender in South Asia has mostly focused either on metro cities such as Mumbai, Bangalore, or rural hinterlands for studies on food security. Relatively smaller urban locations such as Guwahati have hardly been studied. Also, studies on Northeast India (with few exceptions) generally take the entire region as a monolithic entity without touching upon the discomforting terrains of gender, caste, class and religion. Secondly, in recent times, the urban location of Guwahati has become the hot bed for ‘Assamese’ identity assertions especially during the National Register for Citizens (NRC) and Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests. An urban space such as Guwahati, on one hand, has gained significance for its role in propagating macro-narratives on Assamese identity in public media and spaces. On the other hand, material cultural manifestations such as food is appropriated by the market through restaurants and eateries here to lay a claim to an answer to the question ‘Who and what is authentic Assamese or Assameseness’? The unprecedented growth of such restaurants is a stark reality in Guwahati today; much more than any other region in Assam. It is fascinating how a city that is constantly attempting to be ‘smart’ and ‘modern’ gets engulfed in boundary maintenance of Assameseness creating rigid boundaries of ‘us’ and ‘others’ in the narrowest sense. However, before delving further into this issue I would like to cite two instances which have been crucial to my understanding of how gendered and constricted some popular notions of Assameseness is and how food has an intricate link to such perceptions. A few years ago, in a conference on ‘Northeast’ India, one of the organisers who happens to be an upper caste Assamese female anthropologist was highly infuriated by the fact that I asserted on both Assameseness and womanhood not having homogenous and essentialist characteristics and imagery. Later, during an informal conversation after the conference, she retorted back to me by emphasising that the image of the ‘authentic’ Assamese woman is epitomised by a woman garbed exclusively in a Mekhela-Chador. According to her it is only the Miyah women, who do menial jobs, wear withered cotton sarees. After this, I did not see much scope in

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carrying the discussion further with her even though it gave me a good reference point for this particular essay and for many of my writings. The second one is an incident I recalled when I was a school going kid. I remember this particular incident from my childhood which one of my aunts whom I address as Mami often teased me about. I demanded that I too should have an equal share of the ilish fish which everybody else in the family had for their meal. She would time and again refer to this incident with much sarcasm that continues even today. It has served as a constant patriarchal reminder that women should not demand or desire the same amount or share of food, particularly the ‘good’ ones as the men of the family do. My aunt’s retort clearly points that women act as agents of patriarchy too. These two instances have been quite constructive for me in conceptualising how certain hegemonic ideas of materiality and visuality of a culture and its manifestations is formed, nurtured and imposed; be it about clothing, food or gender. While on the one hand, I displeased someone’s upper caste and class sensibilities in regard to how an Assamese woman should be, on the other, this aunt of mine is still uncomfortable with the thought of women exercising their agency to demand something as mundane as food. These reactions nonetheless, emerge from images of the women in South Asia as homogenous, docile and passive. A homogenous notion of the inferiority of women as a group is assumed, which, in turn, produces the image of an ‘average third world woman’ who lives a life without any agency in a perpetual state of docility (Mohanty 1984, 337). This image for most of the time is also taken as the ideal for women here. These formulations about women in the third world can be similarly extended to the context of Assam as Deka (2013) points out to this actuality by citing the example of the myth of King Naraka.2 This popular myth suggests a patriarchal society with delineated ‘separate spheres’ wherein woman is assigned to the domestic realm and man to the public. Women, as depicted in the myth, are emblematic of motherhood and divine powers of love and sacrifice (Deka 2013, 2). Since the question of authenticity is also a corollary to such a discussion, we need to ask questions as Abarca puts forward; what is the ..politics of claiming authenticity, of speaking from a position of knowledge and of authority, to define the legitimacy of a particular cultural production? How does this legitimacy affect the politics of inclusion and exclusion in terms of “membership” in a national, cultural, or even familial group? Finally, what does it mean to speak of the authenticity of culinary practices when traditions within all cultures are constantly changing? (Abarca 2004, 2).

Therefore, by employing feminist ethnography, I seek to bring together the discursive strands of all these concerns. Interviews, participant observation, conversations, studying structures and images have been crucial to my ethnographic endeavour. In 2 King

Naraka or Narakasura is considered as the first king of the Naraka Dynasty who established the kingdom of Pragjyotisha in Assam. The Kalika Purana mentions that in a mythical legend on the life of King Naraka, the power relations of the two sexes is depicted as the concept of negotiation/domination, as well as that of separate spheres. The myth which became entrenched in the later legends and incorporated in the epics suggests a patriarchal society with delineated ‘separate spheres’ wherein a woman is assigned to the domestic realm and a man to the public space (Deka 2013, 2).

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addition to that I have also tried to reflect through my own memories and experiences. As feminist ethnographers, can we ever separate ourselves from our ‘field’? The field definitely is in us as we are in it.

Thinking ‘Assameseness’ Let me briefly point out the idea of Assameseness that exists in the contemporary landscape. The objective is not to give a historical account but rather to highlight the manner in which these hegemonic ideas come to exist in acts and deeds today. Nonetheless, the gendered narrative laden with aspects of caste, class and race of this very identity has deep historical roots. To start with, contrary to the present popular assertions, there is no uniform answer to the question ‘who is an Assamese?’ Dutta (2012) eloquently illustrates this point when she states that it was the advent of British colonialism that gave rise to something known as ‘Assamese’. The inhabitants, instead of being seen as belonging to various tribes and castes were clubbed together under a single nomenclature ‘Assamese’. Rather than respecting their ethno-identity as Tiwa, Motoks, Lalungs, Bamuns, Sudirs, Kayastas, they were homogenised under this term, mostly inspired by the pre-colonial Ahom rule (Dutta 2012, 193). This consciousness thus, can be credited to the colonial era tapered with borrowed nationalist consciousness from Bengal by the elite men from Assam. Sharma (2011) mentions that, Well into the twentieth century Assam’s elites depended on an external infrastructure of higher education...Often this produced a complex situation in which economic links and newly created emotional attachment to Calcutta and Bengali culture jostled with regional pride and cultural nationalism. Thus, journeys and passages into urban realms of British India helped local elites to articulate their specific claims to the colonial modernity that they encountered, while at the same time they negotiated differing understanding of what was Assam and what was Bharat (India), and the spatial and emotive nodes of evolving identities (Sharma 2011, 8).

Simultaneously, there was an urgent desire among this class of people to give a ‘voice’ and recognition to their ‘motherland’ Assam. They were concerned not to lose the distinctiveness of this very land within a pan-Indian nationalist imagination. In this pursuit, the local male elites wanted to assert their distance from the aboriginal labouring coolies as well as the indigenous low-castes and those defined as tribes. As a consequence, they claimed kinship with upper caste Indic groups elsewhere on the subcontinent. “A variety of historically framed linguistic and racial claims allowed local elites, Hindu and Muslim, to assert claims to modernity while simultaneously pushing the burden of primitiveness onto “non-Aryan” neighbours, whether indigenous tribals or migrant coolie plantation workers” (Sharma 2011, 9). Again, although these imaginations and claims were something that gained prominence with the new educated class of Assam in Calcutta and the rest of Bengal, the desire for rescuing ‘Assamese’ culture from getting engulfed by Bengali was also present.

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Hence, the consciousness or rather the anxiety of preserving Assamese culture, which was a by-product of the partial consciousness of a privileged few (which excluded the marginalised castes, religious minority, women and tribal groups) is nothing new but has been an omnipresent historical reality. This, however, has had a trickle-down effect, an imposition of sorts on the masses; for instance, today, we see people beyond the upper caste men aligning to chase out the ‘other’ based on religious, caste, class, ethnic and racial parameters. The creation of the Bengali ‘other’ on these parameters and blaming them for ‘our’ lack of ‘development’ can be also due to the failure of the model of progress desired by the nationalists which did not succeed in breaking free from the colonialist mould. The counter-trope of the Bengali ‘other’ has been used to justify the non-realisation of its development projects (Sengupta 2016, 10). As the new Assamese educated gentry tried to preserve its culture as exclusive from both West and pan-Indian imagination of national culture, which in present times we refer to as the Indian ‘mainland’, the women came to be seen as the bearers and protectors of culture. Chatterjee (1989), in the context of Bengal has written about the emergence of new Indian/Bengali women during the British era. This new woman was educated and yet her position was delegated to the spiritual private sphere of the household rather than the public sphere, which was considered as the material male dominated space corrupted by western ideals. Since the newly educated class of men in Assam was highly influenced by the Bengali ideals of nationalism, it is no surprise that similar gendered norms were publicised in Assam too. The new women of Assam had to be an emblem of preserving Assameseness in her thoughts, deeds and attires. Various essays and articles in Assam during that period focused on this topic. As Sengupta points out, These articles celebrated a whole range of Assamese cultural forms such as ‘traditional’ festivals like the Bihu, common forms of music such as the kirtan and common styles of dressing with special emphasis on the Mekhela Chador for women…discouraging women from wearing sarees as this could dilute their distinctiveness from women of other parts of India, where saree was the common attire of the female sex. Women were, instead, exhorted to dress in the traditional Assamese style, as this was the attire that became them (Sengupta 2016, 214).

Dresses and attires, then, which are visible, tangible and reproducible have served as a material proof that gained importance as a cultural artefact (Wickramasinghe 2003, 69–70). Material imagery becomes as important as imagination itself. Hence, it is not surprising that the same ideals of cultural propagation, preservation and imposition play a significant role in contemporary times too. Gendered norms and morality are part of it, as can also be understood from the two anecdotes I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. In this chapter, I argue that the gendered Assamese foodscape too has never been immuned to it. In the next section, I bring out how these ideas of ‘Assamese’ representation have shaped the foodscape in the contemporary urban space of Guwahati.

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The Gendered Foodscape If anyone is asked to reflect upon the materiality of any culture, food would perhaps be one of the first items that would come up. The importance of food is such that, eating is not simply an activity aimed at obtaining nutrients. There is clearly much more to it than that and beyond that. When we look into various cultures, we can see that all cultures are highly selective in what they define as food, that is, delineating items acceptable for human consumption. Different cultures will typically reject as unacceptable a whole range of potentially nutritious items or substances while often including other items of dubious nutritional value, and even items with toxic or irritant properties (Breadsworth and Keil 1997, 51). Food is about boundary setting of various kinds and its maintenance. Historically, in India for instance, with the emergence of cookbooks to help women cook various cuisines, the marking of boundaries of legitimate taste and other relations and hierarchies also came into existence. Appadurai remarks, “insofar as cookbook reflects the kind of technical and cultural elaboration we grace with the term cuisine, they are likely, as Jack Goody has recently argued, to be representations not only of structures of production and distribution and of social and cosmological schemes, but of class and hierarchy (1982)” (Appadurai 1988, 3). However, no taste, including that in food evolves in isolation. In this case, whether something is eaten for the simple sake of food or because of the space in which it is consumed, it is a product of an already established mechanism, which gives legitimisation to certain tastes but not others. “That is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences” (Bourdieu 1984,7). What Bourdieu argues for art can also be argued for food and its relations within the broader realms of cultural production, consumption as well as social capital. In different time periods this pursuit of hierarchisation might assume different forms though. There would be however some changes, continuations and modifications. As a child growing up in the 1990s and 2000s in Guwahati, I was fascinated as well as intrigued by the mushrooming of a new consumer culture in the city. The restaurant business was booming too. This was the phase when the LPG (Liberalisation, Privatisation, and Globalisation) project made its way here. Globalisation became the buzzword in what one wore, watched, and ate. Simultaneously, the project of ‘Assameseness’ has also been gaining much boost and evolving since then. Globalisation has had its local variations. While addressing the issue of these waves of globalisation and their engagement with local cultures often captured under the term Glocalization, Ritzer (2013) defines it as the unique outcome of the global and the local in different geographic areas (Ritzer 2013, 168). According to him, the global does not overwhelm the local nor does globalisation homogenise all cultures throughout various locations. Moreover, while indicating the importance of analysing the specificities of local experiences, Ritzer adds, “thus to fully understand globalisation, we must deal with the specific and contingent relationships that exist in any given locale” (Ritzer 2013, 169). Restaurants selling ‘Assamese’ cuisine and that too

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‘authentic’ Assamese cuisine have been a local offshoot of this global–local food culture. Before this phase, although a couple of restaurants in the city did belong to this category, it was not a common appearance in the city space. If people were aspiring to go ‘global’, parallel to this has also been the pull and push for preserving Assamese culture and its ‘authenticity’ in materiality and visuality. The market, as in many other avenues played a massive role during the LPG phase in Guwahati; the city regarded as the gateway to Northeast India and thus significant for trade and business. However, these desires for preserving the Assamese culture have been gendered, sprinkled with high-caste and elite consciousness as pointed out in the previous section. The ‘Assamese’ restaurants that came up after that phase have been harping on selling ‘authentic’ food as a means of affirming to class and status hierarchy. Gilmore and Pine (2007) argue that most people as consumers are always in search of something ‘authentic’. Their reference to the idea of the ‘authentic’ evokes a nostalgic, static, and a given category which was or is still there to be achieved by people who desire to achieve it. In contemporary times, this quest for authenticity has gained even more impetus through material objects. Knowledge of authenticity today has become a cultural capital and function as a mark of distinction as Bourdieu (1984) would suggest. Nevertheless, any claim to authenticity is assumed to be at best “misrecognition of what is, in reality, an unwarranted assertion of hegemony. Culture is no longer the seat of a transcendent sacred order, but is contested, construed and contradictory; a never-ending battleground for superiority among competitors who use the notion of the holy as a ploy” (Lindholm 2002, 337). The images of women that adorn the walls of the restaurants selling ‘Assamese’ cuisine in traditional Mekhela-Chador of the choicest variety, jewellery and lighter skin sets the parameter of who can and who cannot claim to be an Assamese through such food practices in such spaces. Her body becomes a signifier of class, caste and race. Interestingly, the Assameseness that is desired to be preserved through such restaurants seems to be a legacy of the elite gentry of Assam who were much influenced by Bengal’s preservation of its culture during the anti-colonial struggle. Women in the images put up in these restaurants are seen preparing and serving food. There were also pictures of women in the paddy fields of Assam and also of women from communities regarded as Assamese tribes. These images would seem to romanticise the real toil and labour of food production and preparation by women. In reality, these token representations are primarily meant to beautify the space that would be appealing to its clientele as they buy ‘Assameseness’ in prices not affordable to the masses. This consumption pattern then becomes a matter of establishing hierarchy and not an equaliser. Food becomes a matter of taste and distinctions that are established through it. As Bourdieu (1984) writes, “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classification, distinguish themselves by distinctions they make between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed” (Bourdieu 1984, 6).

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The private space of the household is also an extension of such food practices and gendered norms. In the public spaces, it is mostly the images of women in MekhelaChador that are perceived as representing Assameseness. It performs the function of boundary maintenance of community and culture. This is not to say that all women in contemporary Guwahati have made this attire a daily wear or keep preparing food in the kitchen as docile beings but this is an image which is admired and to an extent aspired for. As one of my female upper caste research participant said, it is about preservation of our culture. We should never forget our culture, never. It differentiates us from others. For the preservation of Assamese culture and community, it is very important. Why should we get influenced by other cultures? A person from outside never adapts to Assamese culture or wears a Mekhela-chador…A saree no matter how expensive it is cannot get the respect and the dignified look that the Mekhela-Chador gives to a woman .”3

The idea of cultural maintenance is equated with traditions. But Tarlo argues that, the process by which we categorize things as ‘traditional’ and ‘old-fashioned’ is the process by which the ‘stuff of the past’ is divided into categories of relevant and irrelevant. The ‘traditional’ is that stuff of the past (real or imagined) that we consider relevant to our present and our future, while the ‘old-fashioned’ is that stuff of the past which we dismiss as irrelevant to our contemporary life (Tarlo 1996, 317).

In addition to this, not only the imagery of Assamese women in a traditional attire preparing and serving food is taken as an ideal but is also related to how a ‘good’ woman is envisaged. When it comes to food, women are perceived and expected to be the ones who would be food providers rather than consumers. Women who demand or desire food are put under the category of ‘bad’ women. Bordo (2003), while writing about social and cultural constraints placed on women as consumers of food, claims that women who express the desire for food have been tabooed and that women’s lust for food is acceptable only if she is pregnant or starving (Avakian and Haber 2005, 225). As I went about studying images where women are seen as eating or relishing food, it was found that people who were asked to comment on these images did not have a positive outlook towards them. Some accepted such images as simply a staged market strategy. While others dismissed the fact that women too can desire food as consumers. Such women were perceived to be deviants from the established gendered norms of the society. Some were also of the opinion that women can desire food or eat alone but that can happen only in exceptional situations such as pregnancy cravings, extreme hunger pangs or as someone told me, ‘if she has gone mad’. Thus, women as eating beings, craving for food and relishing it are still not an ideal or usual in mundane situations. Even when not all women might cook or enjoy this activity in their real lives, the figure of the woman as nurturing beings, feeding her family is appreciated both in the commercial space of the ‘Assamese’ restaurants as well as in the household. The visuality of her material being in the traditional attire endowed with emotions of love, care and sacrifice is what makes her a ‘good’ 3 From

an interview; woman of 71 years, Guwahati: 31/12/2015.

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woman. Yet, men are not entirely absent from this discourse. But it is also quite a commonplace practice to understand men’s participation in the kitchen as either professional chefs or cooks employed in commercial spaces of food consumption or as higher beings who take up to an otherwise feminised work (cooking) or pursue it only in exceptional situation such as staying alone or not having any other female member in the household. Hence, despite the decided emphasis upon mothers in foodies’ upbringing, these memories were not devoid of men. Unlike the care work performed by mothers, fathers and grandfathers entered these narratives as public food professionals...Only one participant spoke of his father as the primary cook within his childhood home. In all other cases, men entered into foodie memories with traditionally masculine performances as cooking professionals, intrepid explorers, and culinary artists (Johnston and Baumann 2009, 188).

Since these imaginations and enactment of gendered norms of Assameseness, food and gender function to segregate boundaries of who is an Assamese and who is not, the demarcation of ‘us’ and the ‘other/s’, it is imperative that this chapter devotes some space to how this ‘other’ is conceptualised, confronted and often negotiated with.

The ‘Others’ in the Foodscape Fanon (1967) explores the idea of ‘other’ with relation to colour and colouring. He investigates othering not only as values and norms assigned to different colours, but explores the concept of subjectivity, and observes ‘othering’ as an activity of the powerful subject. Guru (2009) defines the practice of untouchability as humiliation towards the ‘other’, where the upper caste elite tries to make the ‘other’ invisible inside the house. The Indian nationalist project against colonialism and even now against the perceived ‘others’ have made gender, especially issues related to representation of a culture through the woman’s body a relevant issue. Sarkar (2001) referred to the female body as the site where ideals of freedom, chastity, and purity took refuge in. The image of the Indian woman evokes the picture of a deity, at least the upper caste perpetuated this image of an ‘ideal’ woman based on the Victorian model representing the purity of the upper-class women (Uberoi 1990, 42).For instance, in terms of authentic food, as in the case of British era, the middle-class Bengali Hindus constituted a new rhetoric of cuisine that enabled them to distance themselves from their ‘others’, especially the lower classes. Often this distancing was done through aestheticizing women’s cooking that assimilated gender with class. Undoubtedly, women were the signpost of ‘tradition’ in the middle-class discourse. However, the same discourse also assigned them the responsibility for producing a ‘modern’ Bengali cuisine (Ray 2009, 60).

The ‘Assamese’ foodscape of urban Guwahati is dotted with the ones considered as ‘others’. The ‘us’ and ‘other’ narratives are not simple black and white narratives.

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Most of the times, the ‘others’ are despised, while at times they are negotiated with and often they are exploited in the garb of benevolence. The people from the Miyah community—the East-Bengal origin Muslim community in Assam and Guwahati, particularly straddle between these categories of the ‘other’. There would be protests for protecting ‘Assamese’ culture and people from the onslaught of this community. The recent NRC (National Register for Citizens) especially points towards this fact. However, there is a parallel reality about this group of ‘others’ that often go unacknowledged. The city of Guwahati has been thriving on their labour. Besides being manual labourers, a lot of women from this community work as part time domestic help. The upper caste neighbourhood which I studied also employed such women. These ‘Assamese’ employers are ardent supporters of movements that chase these people out from Assam to protect the purity of Assamese culture but at the same time continue to employ them in their homes by paying them less and exploiting their labour. These patronising employers perceive it as being benevolent to a community which is otherwise despised in this city space and Assam broadly. They negotiate with the ‘otherness’ of their helps not because they believe in any concept of equality but because these others being a socially, politically and economically vulnerable community work for low wages. The Miyah domestic helps are employed to clean, mop, sweep and wash. Their work in these households is intrinsic to the way the kitchens functions. The kitchen forms an important part of the domestic space. But who sustains the ‘Assamese’ domestic space and more specifically the kitchens? It is the domestic workers. The Miyahs are employed to practically build and clean the city. The Miyah women who are employed as part time domestic helps receive inhuman and exploitative treatment along with low wages, as they are the ‘others’. Employing the ‘other’ on the part of their employers do not result into any just treatment or fair wages but only allows them inside the household and, most notably, the kitchen area to carry out the tedious household chores, which suits the needs of the employers. The ‘cleaner’ ones get to touch the utensils or clean the fish and meat but when it comes to meals they will be made to have food in separate utensils than their employers. One of these women once told me that for the next three days, she would be able to come early to the employer’s house to work because she has got her periods that very day and a couple of houses where she only cleans utensils do not allow her to enter the kitchen or touch utensils when she is on her periods. Also, since she is a Muslim, in some of the houses she works in, her employers only allow her entry into the outer part of the house but not into the kitchen. I asked one of these helpers, Noor (name changed) about the kind of food she gets in the households she works and the kind of utensils she is given to have her food. She replied that it is usually from the breakfast they prepare that food would be given to her. Sometimes rotis, breads, or they save something for her from the dinner the previous night and so on. On the question of utensils, it was a separate set for her. Her set of utensils are never mixed up with the other utensils used by the employers. They also get angry when she does not turn up for work sometimes, but this, she feels is ‘natural’ and part of their lives.

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Hence, this term—Miyah evokes ‘othernesses’, and the accompanying disgust, mockery and hatred. The primary reason for their employment, as I have mentioned is the cheap labour they provide but at the same time, Hindu part time female helps are seen as ‘cleaner’. The Miyah women in that sense are perceived to be ‘dirty’ and ‘unhygienic’. But that necessarily does not lead to expulsion of them from their work in these households. In fact, they are seen as someone who is fit to do the ‘dirty’ work; something which the Hindu Assamese women would not willingly do. For instance, the Miyah women are not only made to mop and sweep the houses but also to clean the kitchen drains at times. They are also made to clean and wash fishes, chicken and meat and soiled clothes as well. In that sense, their ‘otherness’ is negotiated to make them work in dire circumstance and exploit their vulnerable position in the ‘Assamese’ society. Sinha and Varma (2019) also trace the history of domestic work and servant’s life in South Asia. They argue that during the colonial time ‘servants’ were categorised as a distinct social group to perform menial tasks. In the broader Indian context, Chopra (2012), questions about the feminisation of domestic work. According to Chopra, the feminisation of female domestics started around 1930s and became a moral order during the 1960s. Chakraborty (2018) too observes that in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century female domestic workers were a marginal figure. However, employing female domestic cooks mostly Hindus are a common phenomenon now. In the domestic space of contemporary Guwahati, most women would not be adorned in traditional attire while cooking or serving food. The cooking is done by the ladies of the house especially the married ones who are regarded as the ones characterised by emotions such as love, affection, more ‘clean’ and thus having better taste. One of the early women writers in Assam— Pragyasundari Devi,4 in her cookbook—Amish o Niramish Ahar (1902) too touches upon this issue. This book is sometimes regarded as the first cook-book written in Bengali. One of her concerns was housewives leaving the responsibility of cooking to the servants. She writes, They have, in a way, bidden farewell to cooking. However, they cook once in a while only if the fancy strikes them. This is why we do not get good food to eat…Expecting the same sort of clean and hygienic but delectable food that can be provided by the women of the family, from the hands of salaried cooks is expecting too much. These draw their salaries and thus do their work. Their fundamental effort is to complete their work as quickly as possible and in whatever manner affordable. It is not for them to think about good or bad…But if the women of the family do the cooking then just as the food produced is quite appetising, so is it also quite clean and hygienic5 (Dutta 2016, 266).

These notions have continued till date in urban Assam too. The female helpers who are employed as cooks are perceived as ones who cook for money and thus, generally seen as having no love or affection for the work they do or the people they 4 Pragyasundari

Debi was the Bengali wife of a pre-eminent Assamese writer, Lakshminath Bezbaroa. She was the daughter of the elder brother of Rabindranath Tagore. 5 The English translation of the preface and the first chapter of Pragyasundari Debi’s cook-book is done by Arjun Choudhury in—Communities Of Women In Assam : Being, doing and thinking together (2016) edited by Nandana Dutta.

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serve. The cleanliness factor is another issue with respect to servants. They need to be instructed and trained. Indeed, I did not come across anybody who told me that that their employed cook prepares meal with more love, affection or takes care of the cleanliness more than the women in the family. Although there were some who said that they can be regarded as equally hygiene-conscious as the other women in the family. There were some who stated that certain dishes are prepared better by their cooks than their mothers or wives. Nonetheless, there was a general sense that food prepared by mothers, wives and grandmothers are better than the ones made by the employed female cook. The public space of the ‘Assamese’ restaurants, nevertheless, is a different space from the domestic kitchen. Mostly, they have men in the kitchen and also as waiters and helpers. During a conversation with the manager of an ‘Assamese’ restaurant, I asked him about the kind of food he likes. Not to my surprise, he narrated about the dishes prepared at home in his village by the women. I then asked him his opinion on a restaurant specialising in Assamese cuisine not employing women; even though images of women adorn the walls of the restaurant. He told me that employing women has a lot of ‘problems’. Firstly, there is the ‘safety’ issue. Initially I thought he was talking about the difficulty women face travelling at night from their place of work, which the restaurant business demands. However, as he proceeded with his narrative it emerged, safety aside he was more concerned with the effect women’s presence in the restaurant kitchen would have on men; men working in the restaurant kitchen as helpers and waiters would feel uncomfortable as they would have to be very careful on how they talk to the women and what kind of jokes they crack. According to him, women might become uncomfortable too. As Chowdhry (2014) argues, “by focusing on the “danger” of these spaces for women they not only reserve this privileged space for themselves but also emphasise women’s space at home” (Chowdhry 2014, 43). Initially, when he was narrating this to me, I was thinking of how men are never taught that it should be normal not to speak or to joke about things that make anyone uncomfortable; be it men or women. However, later when I was reflecting on this issue I could somehow empathise with the manager because patriarchy has not only made enemies out of men against women but also vice versa. Also, he added, that women might need more leave since they have wifely and motherly responsibilities to fulfil in their homes. In addition to that, I asked him about the kind of people they employ in their restaurant. He revealed that he was employed as the manager by the female owner of the restaurant because he was her relative. She needed someone who she could trust for her business. The cooks, waiters and helpers do not have any special criteria for getting employed. They simply get employed based on their initial skill. Some become cooks, some are employed as helpers and some become waiters. They learn the rest ‘on the go’, especially the cooking. In other words, there is no criterion for ‘Assameseness’ to be employed there. In fact, the cooks who were employed had previous specialty in Chinese food, not Assamese as one would expect. Besides, helpers and waiters who show interest are always given a chance to be cooks. They can be from any part of Assam or India. Their ethnic background or place of origin does not matter to the restaurant. The cooking matters; which they believe is not difficult to learn. In

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such a scenario, women, who are usually taken as emblems of ‘Assamese’ cultural production, re-production and preservation are strategically made the ‘other’ when it comes to employing them in these restaurants. The female domestic workers based on their diverse affiliations such as caste, religion or class are regarded as the ‘other’ inside the household. Likewise, in the arena of restaurants claiming to sell ‘Assameseness’ through its food, women are considered as the ‘other’ when it comes to employing them as cooks or chefs there. Othering is played out through a discursive foodscape embedded within multiple boundaries.

Fractured Concluding Remarks The field of ethnography is an ongoing process; the field starting from the ethnographer herself and beyond. Hence, any definite conclusion on it would not be viable. But what is certain is the fact that fixing definitions of/for any category, be it ‘Assamese’, women, food, or authenticity is committing methodological and theoretical sacrilege of the discipline of Sociology/Social Anthropology. I cannot help but keep going back to Ramanujan’s ‘informal’ essay on the question ‘If there is an Indian way of thinking?’ (Ramanujan 1989, 41–58). He points out that there can be no uniform answer to this question but multiple ones. Similarly, if we go back to the question of ‘Who is an Assamese?’ or ‘Who is an Assamese woman? it evokes diverse answers, depending on who is asking this question, who is in a position to come up with the definition and for whom it is defined. The imagery of women peppered with upper caste, elite, racial and patriarchal sensibilities cannot be taken as having an innocent presence, in this case, the ones related to ‘Assamese’ food. It has both historical and contemporary political underpinnings in Assam, as pointed out earlier. Temporal and spatial contexts are crucial elements while deciphering such visuality and materiality. Images then, should stir up questions, such as,—what is the image of? Who took it, when and why? Who and how people access it? How do they read it and what do they do with it? (Pink 2003, 179–192). As an extension to these questions, one may add, if nothing else, we might perhaps come to an understanding that, “things taste better when you think you have found a story” although the quest for the authentic can be like searching for some “impossible truth” (Shaffer 2012, 122–123). Acknowledgements I am grateful to Dr. Rakhee Kalita Moral of Cotton University (Guwahati) for her valuable suggestions and comments as my chair during the conference. I am indebted to Prof. Tiplut Nongbri and Dr. Rashi Bhargava for being such kind editors and the anonymous reviewers for patiently going through the drafts of this chapter.

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References Abarca, M. E. (2004). Authentic or not, it’s Original. Food & Foodways, 12(1), 1–25 Appadurai, A. (1988). How to make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in contemporary India. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30(01), 3–24. Avakian, A. V., & Haber, B. (2005). From Betty Crocker to feminist food studies: Critical perspectives on women and food. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Beardsworth, A., & Keil, T. (1997). Sociology on the menu. London: Routledge. Bordieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bordo, S. (2003). Unbearable Weight: Feminism, western culture, and the body. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chakraborty, S. (2018). Mammies, Ayahs, Baboes: Postcards of Racialized Nursemaids from the early twentieth century. Visual Culture & Gender, 13, 17–31 Chatterjee, P. (1989). Colonialism, nationalism, and colonized women: The contest in India. American Ethnologist, 16(4), 622–633 Chopra, R. (2012). Servitude and sacrifice: Masculinity and domestic labour. Masculinities and Social Change, 1(1), 19–39. Chowdhry, P. (2014). Masculine spaces: Rural male culture in North India. Economic and Political Weekly, 49(47), 41–49 Deka, M. (2013). Women’s agency and social change: Assam and beyond. London: Sage. Dutta, N. (2012). Questions of identity in Assam: Location, migration, hybridity. New Delhi: Sage Publications India. Dutta, N. (2016). Communities of women in Assam: Being, doing and thinking together. New York: Routledge. Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white masks. New York: Pluto Press. Gilmore, J. H., & Pine, B. J. (2007). Authenticity: What consumers really want. Boston : Harvard Business Press. Guru, G. (2009). Humiliation: Claims and context. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Johnston, J., & Baumann, S. (2009). Foodies: Democracy and distinction in the gourmet foodscape. New York: Routledge. Lindholm, C. (2002). Authenticity, anthropology and the sacred. Anthropological Quarterly, 75, 331–338 Mohanty, C. T. (1984). Under western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. Boundary, 12(3), 333–358. (2). Pink, S. (2003). Interdisciplinary agendas in visual research: Resituating visual anthropology. Visual Studies, 18(2), 179–192. Ramanujan, A. K. (1989). Is there an Indian way of thinking? An informal essay. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 23(1), 41–58. Ray, U. (2009). Aestheticizing labour: An affective discourse of cooking in Colonial Bengal. South Asian History and Culture, 1(1), 60–70 Ritzer, G. (2013). The mcdonalization of society. California: Sage. Sarkar, T. (2001). Hindu wife, hindu nation. community, religion and cultural nationalism. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Sengupta, M. (2016). Becoming assamese: Colonialism and new subjectivities in Northeast India. New York: Routledge. Shaffer, H. (2012). Dum Pukht: A pseudo-historical cuisine. In K. Ray & T. Srinivas, (Eds.), Curried cultures: Globalization, food, and South Asia, pp. 110–125. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sharma, J. (2011). Empire’s garden: Assam and the making of India. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Sinha, N., & Varma, N. (2019). Servants’ pasts: Late eighteenth to twentieth-century South Asia (Vol. II). Hyderabad: Orient Black Swan.

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Tarlo, E. (1996). Clothing matters: Dress and identity in India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Uberoi, P. (1990). Feminine identity and national ethos in Indian calendar art. Economic and Political Weekly, 25(17), WS41–WS48. Wickramasinghe, N. (2003). Dressing the colonised body: Politics, clothing and identity in Colonial Sri Lanka. New Delhi: Orient Longman.

Pooja Kalita is a Ph.D. scholar with the Department of Sociology, South Asian University, New Delhi, India. Her research interests include Feminism in South Asia, Sociology of Food, Urban Anthropology and Politics of Art and Visuals in Sociology/Social Anthropology. She has published her articles at both academic and non academic platforms. She juggles between the mediums of poetry, art or photography besides being a ‘forever student of Sociology’.

Chapter 10

Tilted Views and C Sailo: A Study of Satire in Contemporary Indie Comics Samarth Singhal

Abstract For John Berger, the act of seeing is locative. It provides a site for the viewer to base herself upon. In this chapter titled ‘Tilted Views: A Study of Satire in Contemporary Indie Comics’, I will discuss the graphic satire of C Sailo, a young artist originally from the state of Mizoram, India. The comic seems to take Berger’s dictum to heart as it elaborates on the biases ingrained in Delhi residents and their instinctive responses to viewing ‘typical’ North Eastern facial features. The characters view the protagonist and verbally abuse him thus leading to a decision. There is a note of sharp empathy as the graphic novel medium is used to manage time and space to let the readers-viewers understand the experience of being viewed differently. The treatment is ironic and the piece becomes a satire on xenophobia in New Delhi. It is a powerful comment on marginalization. In fact, it may be defined as ‘critical art’, as elaborated by Jacques Ranciere in Aesthetics and its Discontents. However, I want to ask if critical art in general, and this piece of satire in particular, is a complex intervention. The medium of the graphic novel and the usage of caricature in the line drawings coerces the artwork to a reception of leisure and pleasure. This may undermine the effect of the comic. This means it is difficult to label the art as ‘critical art’. The art is undoubtedly subversive but it may also reconfigure itself owing to its ambiguous signification. Keywords Visual Culture · Indie · Satire · Mizoram · Power

Introduction C Sailo is the creator of momo-sapiens: an evolution story. Sailo is an ‘Indie’ graphic artist from the state of Mizoram in India. ‘Indie’ stands for Independent. Sailo and many others like him publish their work independently at their own cost and attempt to create sustainable profit through self-managed systems of distribution and sale. The recent phenomenon of the Indie Comix Fest (ICF) is one such platform. ICF is where I came across Sailo’s work for the first time. The chapter is titled ‘Tilted Views’ S. Singhal (B) Department of English, University of California, Riverside, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. Nongbri and R. Bhargava (eds.), Materiality and Visuality in North East India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1970-0_10

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to bring attention to the skewed practice of viewing the ‘other’, as demonstrated in the graphic satire under consideration. Concomitant with a vision of the ‘other’, is the practice of assuming an innocent visual exchange; a consideration of the satirical piece clearly announces that a visual exchange cannot be innocent. ‘Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak’ (1). Berger attributes a significant power to visual apprehension of the world. A visual relationship to the world is paramount to one’s sense of self. The argument in the chapter is that the economy of visual exchange activated is tilted in favour of an inherent ‘way of seeing’ the other. This flattens the subject of the art and mobilises a limited narrative. The chapter is divided into two sections. The first is called ‘Critical Art’ and begins with a brief survey of contexts that Sailo’s art is appealing to, and proves that the visuals’ interventionist potential demands that we understand the visuals to be Jacques Ranciere’s ‘critical art’. The second section called ‘Style Reconsidered’ responds to this understanding through critical work on the practice of political graphic satire or cartooning. The chapter ends with conclusions about the possibilities of graphic satire in the contemporary atmosphere of the reception.

Critical Art The title—momo-sapiens: an evolution story—itself initiates the viewer into the comic mechanism of the plot. It combines multiple ideas but linguistically brings together homo-sapiens and ‘momo’: the ubiquitous Delhi snack which has its own history in travel. The cover image (Fig 10.1) illustrates this joke. One notices a typical evolution illustration, in the foetal movement to adulthood from left to right. This passage of space marks a passage of time and is assumed to symbolically indicate the millenia of evolution. The joke, however, lies in the replacement of the foetus with the momo, indicating that perhaps mongoloid features evolve from a foetal momo and not a foetal homo-sapien, a momo-sapien. Using eight panels, C. Sailo succinctly delivers a nifty resolution to the problem in the first panel. As he walks by, random passers-by are heard hailing him as ‘momo’. A time of introspection ensues and an unexpectedly comic resolution transpires. The image is an irreverent allusion to the popular and recognizable illustration ‘The March of Progress’ by Rudolph Zallinger, published in 1965, which is understood to illustrate a view that human evolution is progressive. The double spread depicts a series of android beings that become homo sapien by the end, as the last body, with the straightest backbone, almost flies off the page, in muscular determination. The illustration confirms the principle of evolution. As each body grows in size, musculature, and stature, concluding with the zenith of bodily achievement, the illustration reminds us that evolution is the method through which humanity itself has reached the apex position in the food chain, and also the chain of being. It is emphatically unfair to compare Zallinger and Sailo. Armed with retrospection, one may uncover biases in Zallinger’s vision. But such biases are to be expected. The rationale for beginning our discussion with Zallinger is to put Sailo in perspective.

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Fig. 10.1 Cover, C Sailo, momosapiens: an evolution story

Zallinger’s piece imagines humanity occupying a desirable spot in an imaginary chain of being, and as we shall see, Sailo’s piece intends to shift our vision to allow us a view of the chains that shackle beings despite the understanding that all humans are the same species. Zallinger’s imagination is not the only context that Sailo’s work is embedded in. As Neha Sinha informs us in her 2014 Economic and Political Weekly piece ‘Race and Space’, there is a clear sense of discrimination based on facial features in the urban cityscape of New Delhi. She opines, ‘Ironically, I have escaped racism (but faced ignorance and some stereotyping) because my face is not “ethnic enough.” For many others, the personal is painfully political, each day of their lives’. Sinha quotes a friend thus, ‘The problem is my face, a young Mizo friend told me once. They see nothing but the face—they see ‘chinky’ eyes, they see my straight hair. I am slotted as a ‘type’ in a second. A type that will not mind male attention, she says’ (2014, 46). It is imperative to mention visual stereotyping here because it is the obvious manifestation of the verbal and physical violence against individuals from the ‘North East’ in the last two decades across the country. It is this economy of affective and material exchange that Sailo’s satire intervenes in. Sailo’s intervention is both affective and material. As reports of the nature of escalating violence show us, facial stereotyping is accompanied by a range of beliefs

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along gender, occupation, food practices, and costume. Sailo’s choice of centrepiece—the ubiquitous momo—allows the reader and the viewer to underline the relations around culinary practices that find themselves incarnated in verbal and physical violence against anybody that bears certain facial traits. Indeed, if evolution is the mutation of bodily traits, the evolution of the momo-sapien is the reverse of this presumption; as if the momo-sapien is proscribed mutation and transformation. Perhaps in the imaginative lifeworld of the aggressor, the momo-sapien is merely an eternal stereotype. This emphasises the rationale for including Zallinger’s illustration as a framing comment for Sailo’s art. A glimpse into the affective and material consequences of facial stereotyping reminds us that evolution may not be granted to all individuals. Given that evolution is an essential aspect of rational humanity, this allows the aggressor to deny the humanity of the stereotyped. Stereotyping, and its attendant connotations, invoke the histories of print and visual craft that go into publication. In fact, as print finds itself practised in more communities after colonisation, one must interrogate the implications of print. What is worthy of print, and who may productively consume the printed word or image? The spread of textual literacy and the transformation of visual literacy that the coloniser affects may be another framing comment for Sailo’s art. This may be a context that makes it possible for Sailo’s art to be interventionist. An imperative element of Sailo’s juxtaposition of identity and art, thus, must be brought attention to—the magic of the visual object in colonial Mizoram. Practices of visual control attached to these subjects, and consequent visual analysis performed by academics enrich our reading of Sailo. Kyle Jackson’s 2015 chapter ‘Hearing Images, Tasting Pictures: Making Sense of Christian Mission Photography in the Lushai Hills District, Northeast India (1870– 1920)’ takes us through myriad aspects of the visual object in colonial Mizoram. His chapter is devoted to one photograph, which the analysis reveals to be an index of a complex ‘sensorium’, as the senses of the colonized body are concluded to have been disciplined and managed in the building of the church and its record-keeping. In the section on seeing, Jackson reminds us that his central photograph is a record of windows, church welcome signs, and books. Windows were thought to be a route for malignant spirits to enter the house (by the Lushai natives), but the authorities insisted on windows as mediums for literal and spiritual light, in the architecture they commissioned. Mission photography also makes a prominent display of print: ‘Whatever the interpretations, by the time our central photograph was taken, the New Testament had become a mandatory photographic prop in all Mizo Christian Circles’ (2015, 469). As if the photograph desires to saturate the record with the instrument of control as much as possible. Visual culture studies ask questions of who sees what and how. (Mitchell 2002; Bal 1996) Indeed, the insistence on windows, welcome signs, and books in photographs, is a material practice that enables curators of churches and photographs to impose a way of seeing on subjects, and at the same time restrict a way of seeing the subjects. Jackson adds, ‘Only by approaching this photograph in context—and by leaving aside our modern, western assumptions about communication—can we see the extraordinary in what would otherwise just be a church welcome sign’ (475). Jackson

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makes this conclusion after a brief survey of social and ceremonial greeting in Mizoram. The term ‘chibai’, Jackson tells us, ‘featured in chants and forest negotiations’ (473) and it functioned as a propitiatory greeting to forest spirits and entities. But it transformed into a greeting similar to ‘hello’ in colonial Mizoram. It is this word, that assumes a print manifestation as a welcome sign, that becomes a sign of power crystallized in mission photography. Jackson’s intention is not to argue that the natives of Lushai hills were unable to participate in instances of re-vision, but that the multimodal medium of print accommodated this revision, and predominantly preserved the crystallization of colonial power. In other words, the magic of the printed image reigned supreme despite attempts by natives to revise. Jackson’s chapter is broadly similar to the argument in this essay—that the visual economy of exchange is tilted, despite contestations. C Sailo’s intervention remonstrates with the viewer and thus gestures to a sharp understanding of this economy of exchange and exposes the power presumed by visuality. The summary above of multiple axes that shape Sailo’s art is intended to provide a context for the emergence of this style of graphic satire. I should add that this is not to suggest that visual control in colonial Mizoram is similar to material violence—which is intimately dependent on visual control in contemporary India—but the two cannot be conflated. This is a fruitful question that is beyond the scope of this chapter. For our purposes, it is important to be cognizant of violence existing and affecting the individual across space and time. I will now discuss Panels 4 (Fig 10.2) and 5 (Fig 10.3) to make a point of entry into a system of visuality that Sailo’s work is inscribed in. Panel 4 is a repetition of the cover image, but with a crucial shift. Its syntagmatic position reminds us that it appears after three panels of xenophobia. This explains the question mark in the text at the top of the image. Sailo has provided no titles for individual images and so I have tentatively used the text in the image as title. The text reads ‘momo-sapien?’. The question mark and its placement transform the panel into an interrogation of the xenophobia. Does the xenophobe think mongoloid features evolve from a momo? This rhetorical question is clearly articulated for the viewer. The answer is provided in hyperbole, in the extension of the idea illustrated in the image. In fact, the comic principle here functions through the use of exaggeration. A rhetorical response to the momo, the hail (the protagonist is ‘hailed’ as momo in the opening sequence) is enlarged and illustrated. The joke is emphasised through selective detailing. Notice how the mohawk hair of the individual is clearly momolike until the last individual where it vanishes, as if to say, you expect people to have gluten hair instead of actual hair? Obviously, then this panel presents a challenge to the xenophobe. The text and the image, owing to the question mark above, are in tandem with each other. The symbol of interrogation is complemented by the absence of momo hair in the last figure. The text accompanies the image in driving the point home. The question mark turns the statement, the statement now pirouettes into an interrogation. Both the image and the text question the viewer. Rudolph Zallinger and C Sailo work with a similar premise but diverge radically in their intent. Zallinger’s work has been popularised as the illustration of the zenith of human achievement, and a reminder of humanity’s journey and evolutionary poise.

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Fig. 10.2 ‘momo-sapien?’, C Sailo, momosapiens: an evolution story

Sailo’s piece, on the other hand, is a piercing reminder of the inadequacy of evolution. Humanity’s achievement is offset by the pain of daily exclusion. The momo-hail is a visual cue. It purveys a movement towards these images. It is a device to ensure that attention is brought to discrimination and exclusionary practices that a group of people is routinely affected by. Hence the pointed use of visual paraphernalia like the panel, the text, and the question mark works towards achieving this clarification. The satiric point is sharpened beyond ambiguity in Fig 10.3, which uses the method of fantastic exaggeration. Refraining from a closer close-up, the illustration manages to gesture to larger discursive practices of the consumption of momo and the exhibition of xenophobia. The viewer is invited into the grotesque tableau, into the mouth of the consumer. As the consumer swallows the momo-sapien, it is left to the viewer to imagine if it is she/he who is being swallowed whole. It must be said that the head of the consumer is almost bigger than its upper body, the open mouth is half the size of the head, and the nostrils gape wide. Play with shape and size is the prerogative of the caricaturist. Satire is indeed premised upon this basic tenet: the assumption of a socially useful exaggeration to determine the incongruity of the object satirised. This panel answers those conditions. The protagonist has transformed into a marionette doll and is ready to be gobbled by the xenophobe. As if the protagonist was a momo this whole time and has finally attained his true form. As if the human being is not

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Fig. 10.3 ‘mom-ooo!!!’, C Sailo, momosapiens: an evolution story

an evolved human but a mouth-watering savoury snack that must be gulped down. The momo that is to be devoured by the cavernous mouth has been granted a facial expression that curiously refuses to emote. It stares back at the viewer, dramatising the challenge to the xenophobe in the preceding panel. The protagonist has turned into a rag doll, literalising the idea that when the xenophobe consumes the momo, it may also consume the homo sapien it thinks is akin to the momo. The human body stands objectified. The joke now takes on serious overtones as it seems the object is alive and is forcing to the viewer to contemplate its half-life. What forms then is a delicious contrast between the grotesque fantasy of the consumer and the deadpan calm of the consumed body. This challenges consensus reality. There is a marvel in the protagonist reducing in size and assuming the identity of the momo itself. There is a reduction of the protagonist to an absurd extreme. This is the visual punchline of the graphic novel. As has been pointed out, it performs a biting challenge to the reader/viewer. It is a direct confrontation. It questions the viewer, eliciting an understanding of complicity and responsibility. The shape and lines of the contrast embed the face in two histories: that of the stuffed toy and the political cartoon. I will elaborate on this in the second section of the chapter. To this extent then, C Sailo’s art is an intervention in appearance-based xenophobia. It manoeuvres stylised humour and asks uncomfortable questions.

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Sailo’s work may be understood as ‘critical art’ as delineated by Jacques Ranciere. Ranciere discusses critical art and establishes a history of twentieth century art that attempted to critically enable ‘world transformation’ (2009, 45). For Ranciere critical art must facilitate a radical revisioning of the status quo. Ranciere clarifies there exists an aesthetics of the political as much as there exists a politics of the aesthetics. As we have just seen, C Sailo’s art seems to find itself under such a categorisation. However, Ranciere is also careful to caution his readers with a conclusive rider: that critical art also works through mechanisms of exhibition and exhibition and the gallery system may not be conducive to ‘world transformation’. He admits, ‘contemporary installations and exhibitions confer on the couple ‘exhibit/install’ several roles at once, they play on the fluctuating boundary between the form of the exhibited work and that of the instituted space of interaction’ (59). I find this admission to be crucial in understanding any kind of visual art: reception is refracted through multiple layers of circulation and apprehension. It necessitates a timely warning that ‘critical’ art may not always fulfil conditions of being critical enough. Reception of this art may defeat its purpose. Bourdieu also reminds us of a similar predicament but approaches it differently. He exhaustively demonstrates the circulation of cultural capital that galleries enable. He states, ‘Social subjects classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed’ (1984, 6). Bourdieu reverses Ranciere’s idea: consumers of art (or ‘social subjects’) use aesthetic categories to include or exclude other consumers of art. Both commentators are interested in the effectivity of the aesthetic. Both write about the presumptuous attraction, perhaps magic, of the visual object, and show that the magic is both potent and critical. Ranciere imagines art as interventionist but also sedulously informs us that there are limitations to such an intervention. I would extend this to the distinction of the comic and the satiric, and certainly there is much to be said about who finds what funny and why, much like who may find magic in vision and why. But that is beyond the scope of this chapter. For the purposes of my argument, it is important that Ranciere is able to allow for a shift away from ‘critical art’ and Bourdieu is able to articulate routes of artistic reception that may be understood as subverting the critical nature, if any, of art. In such a scenario, the question relates to an accurate understanding of Sailo’s art. Is it wholly critical, or does it stop short of talking back to power? The next section may shed light on this question.

Style Reconsidered Both toys and cartoons as we know through the works of Dorfman and Mattelart (1975) are especially vulnerable to systems of meaning that hierarchize its users and receivers. ‘Walt’s view of the world…it is a world already colonized with phantom inhabitants who have to conform to Disney’s notions of it…when something is said

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about the child/noble savage, it is really The Third World one is thinking about…the imaginative world of the child has become a political Utopia of a social class…’ (Dorfman and Mattelart 1975, 48). Dorfman and Mattelart carefully unpack the ideological state apparatuses that work through popular cartooning like Donald Duck. They are trenchant in their writing about the discursive underpinnings of fantastic visual art produced putatively for the child. Indeed this problem of apparatuses that hail and interpellate is evidently found in political cartooning or graphic satire as well. As we see in the first section of this paper, the protagonist’s problems are visibilized as the momo, and the momo-sapien is hailed as ‘momo’ in our comic. It is interesting that the ideological state apparatus is mediated by a visual apparatus of representation. This means that each gesture in the form and content of representation contributes, perhaps contrapuntally, in the fulfilment of ideology. It may be possible that gestures are polysemic, or that not all gestures move in similar directions. While Dorfman and Mattelart are interested in specific plot sequences and the contextual relations of production amongst the Disney exporter and its consumer, it seems as if artistic choices in terms of line, colour, material, and style may have resounding consequences for the politics disseminated through the comic. Visual Culture studies are based on the disciplinary axiom that elements of visual apprehension contribute to understanding politics. This relationship between the elements of a magical visual object and its viewer allows us to ask questions about visual art’s effectivity. Is it possible that the method of fantastic caricature is not as effective as we assume? Or that not all gestures move in the same direction? I suggest that the source of the fulminating power of the comic principle is also the site of its unmaking. The facilitation of fantastic play in size, and a reduction that is as traumatic as it is playful, are two related sources of the polemic power of Sailo’s work. I am interested in a complicated effect that arises from the usage of these techniques. Christel Devadawson reframes this question in Out of Line (2014), a comprehensive study of political cartooning in post 1947 India. She writes, ‘Traditionally graphic protest has depended for its effect on black-and-white representations as regards palette, and often as regards moral code as well. As readers we focus our attention on its comic and didactic potential, and tend not to look for nuances of character, thought, or action’ (17). Her argument here is that there is an oversight. The experience of the political cartoon makes an oversight available, as ‘nuances’ are rendered invisible. This means that political cartooning may not always conform to one’s notions of rectitude. It may provide an instance of witty play but it may stereotype in turn. As a corollary, this is an irony inherent in visual art: it hides as it displays. Devadawson’s caution in the study is twofold: she asks if the political leanings of the cartoonist are not suspect, and secondly, if the visual style, that is, ‘the faces we see’, are not themselves suspect. The first caution is moot here. Sailo’s political leanings and desire for satiric portrayal stem from a laudable understanding of the material and affective violence that a group of people are routinely made the victim of. This satirical piece is incontrovertibly necessary and sharp. I will focus on the second caution that she lists: that of visual style. The principle of caricature is distortion and exaggeration to serve a socially useful purpose. This purpose itself, like the purpose of the satire, is to castigate public policy and practice. In other words, it must excoriate

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and exorcise a social evil. However, as the evil or foible is excoriated, it must be identified. It is identified in recourse to basic visual elements. ‘’The faces we see’ answer a more basic ontological purpose. Line work and shape help the artist in an easy consumption of the comic. That is possible with the use of ready lines, quick symbols, and recognisable shapes. The style thus makes it easier to recognise and easier to appreciate the comic. An easy appreciation is at heart of the suspicion that Devadawson encourages. Grotesque and ready exaggeration makes identification easier and indeed allows the artist to make an instant appeal to the viewer. While the artist’s political leanings may be progressive and necessary, there is a danger of easy appreciation leading to an essentialisation of political nuance. Such an essentialisation is what one must be cautious of when negotiating the volatile site of cartooning. As visual art hides and makes visible at the same time, in the case of political cartooning, it exaggerates certain traits of the subject at the expense of others. An example of such an erasure of nuance is Panel 5 (Fig 10.3). It has been read as the visual punchline of the graphic novel. It is fashioned as an absorbingly explosive interrogation. It theatrically imagines the ideological underpinning of the momohail. It suggests that discrimination is similar to such a schizophrenic consumption, that perhaps routinized discrimination may lead to the obliteration of the discriminated. But must the stereotyped be eternal? At this point, the tableau is frozen. It is a condensation of multiple experiences of a group of individuals. It stands to reason however that not all individuals have experienced the same sets of behaviours. Perhaps some have confronted the aggressor, perhaps some have responded to their aggressor creatively, at the risk of escalating violence. It is this deliberation of nuance and multiplicity that is conspicuous in its absence in this graphic satire. The tableau is frozen and thus unchanging. There is an element of mythic eternity in this performance of xenophobia that is pernicious in its assumption of incessant repetition. It seems to imagine the aggressor and the discriminated in a stationary position, unable to mutate. I suggest that owing to its purpose it jettisons complexity. The intention is not only to berate but also to communicate the satire. With that in mind, the artist does not illustrate the interrogation of the cause of xenophobia. He is interested in the effect and response to the problem. But the ‘economy’ (Devadawson 2014, 25) requisite in graphic satire precludes the space for complexity. This means that the time taken to illustrate, the effect intended, and the resources available to the artist all contribute to the line work that involves creating an easy recognition of symbol. It behooves us to clarify that it is not possible to communicate nuance in a cartoon, or in this case political satire, that is formally shaped by economy. The panel seems to imagine the consumed momo-sapien as a passive, unresponsive, and an almost silent victim of circumstances. The deadpan face makes such a reading amenable. The panel does not create the space for the imagination of an agential person ensuring an appropriate response to her social climate. Indeed, such a complexity, while desirable, also undermines easy identification into binaries of oppressor and oppressed. This binary is the black-and-white moral code that Devadawson speaks of. The grey ambiguity that may lie in this situation is ignored.

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With a few deft strokes, Sailo has created a powerful indictment against xenophobia. But the image in its desire to rivet and communicate relies on a marginalisation of nuance. This illustration suggests that there is something mythically permanent about the momo-human consumed by an uncouth xenophobe. As if the victim is always a victim and the xenophobe always a xenophobe. Devadawson’s caveat refers to just such a tendency in the context of caricature: the abnegation of nuance. In fact, this capitulation of complexity may be observed in many pieces of graphic satire. It seems this is embedded in any performance of satire. It is important that one remembers the multiple contexts the chapter began with. The visual allusion to Rudolph Zallinger’s work sets the tone for the work in the satire. The critique is immanent in the style and shape. Sailo’s visual remonstration takes on the tilted way of seeing discussed by Neha Sinha and Kyle Jackson. Given that facial features are an obvious index of material violence, Sailo’s satire reinvents the face as a fantastic joke. Kyle Jackson’s critique of the ‘sensorium’ constructed between 1870 and 1920 as sensual discipline that was aimed at creating docile bodies finds itself responded to by Sailo. Sensual discipline is disrupted in this example of satire: in fact there is an overwhelming sense of sensual explosion, as if the conventional way of seeing cannot articulate the pain of routine violence. The intervention this ‘indie’ comic participates in cannot be overstated. At the same time, a sacrifice of nuance is to be expected. As we see in the second section, the medium itself privileges easy recognition over complex systematic critique. It reduces the potential for just ‘world transformation’. Ranciere and Bourdieu’s suspicion of art and cultural capital partly stems from this inability of mediums to confer complexity in circulation and signification. While Sailo’s piece reminds us that othering is a painful and agonizing experience, it also does not allow for any potential for the ‘other’ to liberate themselves. There is no doubt that such art is critical, it is not only critical for it to be produced and shared, but it is critical because it succintly and rightfully punishes its viewers for participating in othering. Yet, it is hesitant in pushing its agenda forward. In conclusion, then, the chapter has attempted to introduce and briefly illustrate the valencies of graphic satire that putatively encompass a visual ontology of reactions to a jocular hail. The chapter began by arguing for the ascription of ‘critical art’ to C Sailo’s work and proceeded to complicate that category. The second section took this forward through the prism of political cartooning to arrive at an understanding of formal economy. Owing to the conventions of form, the medium of graphic satire in Indie comics seems to exercise a prerogative of negating nuance in the favour of recognition and recognizability. This means that while we recognize its critical artistic potential we may not be oblivious to its limiting underpinnings.

References Althusser, L. (1970). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses: notes towards an investigation (trans: Brewster, B.). Marxists.org. Accessed 10 Sept 2016.

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Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. 1983 (Rev ed.). London: Verso. Backemeyer, S. (Ed.). (2005). Picture this: The artist as illustrator. London: The Herbert Press. Bai, D. illus. (2010). The Churki-Burki Book of Rhyme. Text Gita Wolf. Chennai: Tara Books Pvt Ltd. Bai, D. illus. (2014) Sultana’s dream. By Rokheya Sakhawat Hossain. 2nd ed. Chennai: Tara Bal, M. (1996). Double exposures: The subject of cultural analysis. New York: Routledge. Barthes, R. (1977). The Photographic Message. In Image music text (trans: Stephen Heath. St Ives). Cornwall: Fontana Press. Benjamin, W. (1969). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (trans: Zohn, H.). www.mit.edu. Accessed 20 Apr 2016. Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. London: BBC and Penguin. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste (trans: Nice, R.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bryson, N. (1986). Vision and painting: The logic of the gaze. New Haven: Yale University Press. Chandra, N. (2008). The classic popular Amar Chitra Katha, 1967-2007. New Delhi: Yoda Press. Chatterji, R. (2012). Speaking With Pictures. New Delhi: Routledge. Devadawson, C. R. (2000). Black-and-white or shades of grey: Lockwood Kipling’s Illustrations of India. In Word, text, image: Studies in literary and visual culture, edited by Shormishtha Panja, Shirshendu Chakrabarti, and Christel R Devadawson, 114-21. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Devadawson, C.R. (2014). Out of line. Delhi: Orient Blackswan Dorfman, A., Mattelart, A. (1975). How to read Donald Duck (trans: Kunzle, D.). New York: International General. Gombrich, E. (1960). Art and illusion: A study in the psychology of pictorial representation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Guha-Thakurta, T. (2004). Monuments, objects, histories. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hossain, R.S. (2005). “Sultana’s Dream”. 1905 (trans: Bagchi, B.). Gurgaon: Penguin. Hutcheon, L. (2006). A theory of adaptation. New York: Routledge. Jackson, K. Hearing images, tasting pictures: Making sense of christian mission photography, in the Lushai Hills District Northeast India (1870–1920). In From dust to digital: Ten years of the endangered archives programme, edited by Maja Kominko. JSTOR.org, www.jstor.org/stable/j. ctt15m7nhp.25. Accessed 10 Jan. 2020. Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. Marxists.org. Accessed 20 Sept 2016. Mirzoeff, N. (Ed.). (2012). The visual culture reader. New York: Routledge. Mitchell, W. J. T. (2002). Showing seeing: A critique of visual culture. Journal of Visual Culture, 1(2), 165–81. Mitter, P. (2007). The triumph of modernism: Indian artists and the avant garde 1922-47. London: Reaktion Books. Pinney, C. (2003). How Indian Nationalism Made Itself Irrefutable. In S. Ramaswamy (Ed.), Beyond appearances (pp. 113–50). New Delhi: Sage. Ranciere, J. (2009). Aesthetics and its discontents. Boston: Polity. Sailo, C. momo-sapiens: an evolution story. N.p, n.d. Shyam, B. (2009). illus. The flight of the mermaid. Text Gita Wolf and Sirish Rao. Chennai: Tara Books Pvt Ltd. Sinha, N. (2015). Race and space: Ignorance, bolstered by stereotypes of external appearance, is a determinant in racism and is increasingly manifesting itself as hateful external aggression. Economic and Political Weekly, 49(46), Nov. 15: 79–80. JSTOR.org, www.jstor.org/stable/244 80966. Accessed 20 Mar 2020. Zallinger, R. (1965). The March of progress. Early Man, Wustl.edu, sites.wustl.edu/prosper/on-theorigins-of-the-march-of-progress/. Accessed 5 Aug 2019.

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Samarth Singhal is pursuing his PhD at the University of California, Riverside. He has been Assistant Professor of English at Maitreyi College and Kamala Nehru College, University of Delhi. His M Phil dissertation discussed contemporary Indian Fantasy across the mediums of the novel, the picturebook, and the graphic novel. He has published on Detective Fiction, Political Cartooning, and Painting. Forthcoming publications include essays on Indie Comics, Indian Fantasy after Harry Potter, and an edited anthology on South Asian Visual Cultures with Primus, New Delhi.

Chapter 11

Reimagining the Pastoral: Metaphors and Meanings of the Everyday in Assam and India’s Northeast Rakhee Kalita Moral

Abstract The chapter explores the changing trajectory of meanings and metaphors that have come to be associated with Assam as an ethnoregion within the larger geo-political space and national imagery. I argue that meanings and symbolisms are tied inextricably to visual representations and motifs forming a ‘visual regime’ that captures both aesthetic interest and epistemological thought on how we may reimagine the landscape and its peoples. The politics of that imaginary is what compels the present discussion and the need to chart the transition from how Assam has normatively existed in the mindscape of northeast India and how that gathers meanings and signification for others over time and into the present moment. I argue that the archetypal story of the pastoral finds reimagination in a space that is suddenly terra nuova, and not the dark obscure land, in the changing history and material transformation of allegories of India’s northeast. Further, such refashioning of the space and those who inhabit the terrain enable a construct of the generic meanings of the everyday and symbolisms that imbricate past and present, highlighting the relationship between history, culture, politics and identity. Keywords Pastoral · Everyday · Assam · Representation · Bihu

R. K. Moral (B) Cotton University, Guwahati, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. Nongbri and R. Bhargava (eds.), Materiality and Visuality in North East India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1970-0_11

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Introduction Watching the official publicity video of a few years ago on the state, tagged as ‘Awesome Assam’ which features a top Indian actor as its brand ambassador, that has since gone viral, the viewer is left with arresting images of lush paddy fields, rolling meadows and emerald tea gardens nestling in the Brahmaputra valley, with boats on the river, vying for space in the two-minute film with the wildlife and folk cultures of the region displayed through the traditional Bihu dance and local music as the ancient rituals of an Ahom wedding are performed, among other visual acts and motifs.1 The state tourism’s novel attempt at what the administration envisaged as integrating the country’s energy and dynamism under a new political dispensation with Assam’s hoary past and the life of its community has clearly stretched the cultural optic to accommodate certain timeless motifs of the northeastern region while introducing new metaphors of the terrain and its new vision in the national and global imaginary. Political scientist and critic Sanjib Baruah has earlier alluded to this imagination of the northeast mediated by a ‘visual regime’ which he observes is increasingly constructed via films, advertisements, television and the popular media (Baruah 2005). Amidst several debates over the Assam tourism commercial and a general concern about who represents the state and what value addition was made by this fairytale narrative of an urban, cosmopolitan woman from the metropole besotted by the virgin hills and grasslands of India’s northeast to the already available rich tapestry of sights and sounds of Assam, the abiding idea of a pastoral with its attendant stories finds itself as the focus of recent discussions. In a sense, it rearticulates how we learn to see the state (Pisharoty 2017). Aside of the clamour and controversy over such visual representations, I argue that meanings and symbolisms are tied inextricably to them which capture both ideological interest as well as epistemological thought on how we may reimagine the landscape and its peoples. The politics of that imaginary is what compels the present discussion and the need to chart the transition from how Assam has normatively existed in the mindscape of the northeast and how that gathers meanings and signification for others over time and into the present moment. To that effect the circulation of signs and registers in the network of the semiotic process in which meanings are made is vital to that politics and its poetics of cultural representation. The idea of a remote and ‘backward state’, insular and even inaccessible, is semiotically turned into an attractive and dynamic global space inviting outsiders to savour the best of its attributes. A video that goes viral carrying the signs of this incredible northeastern state then fixes its identity through what linguist Susan Gal has called ‘perceived repetitions’, circulating the visual and mental images in linkages across encounters and events, employing affective language and, in this 1 The

Ahoms have been understood as belonging to ethnic groups of the Shan and Tai tribes of the Chinese-Myanmar-Thai borderlands that migrated to the Brahmaputra valley in the thirteenth century and set up a powerful kingdom for about 600 years, deeply influencing the culture and life of the people of the state. See for instance, W.W.Cochrane and Taw Sein Ko. 1914. “The Origin of the Ahoms” The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Jan 1914. 150–58.

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case, its figurative aspects, for instance, of metaphor (Gal 2019). Thus, the Bihu dance and the elephant ride, or the tea gardens as much as the Assamese silk donned by the bride and her bridesmaids in the publicity film, all become part of a language whose circulation endows it with authority and legitimises notions and constructs about the place.

Collective Representations and Popular Imaginations: Bihu as Cultural Motif In his much read thesis on the social life of material things, Arjun Appadurai notes that human actors encode things with significance to illuminate their social and human contexts: ‘We have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories’ (Appadurai 1986). In the historical and psychological radar of the northeast, Assam’s new social contract with the country depends on how images collate and cohere from what is typically regarded as marginal and ‘remote’ to emerge into new ways of seeing and thus, of being. Understandably, in the popular imagination the visually verdant state stands in sharp relief to the relatively dry, arid Gangetic plains in the north of the country or westwards with its flatlands and is a topos that corresponds to what writers and poets have lyrically, and emotionally, imaged variously as ‘red river and blue hills’, ‘hills called home’ or land of the ‘thundercloud’ (Barua 1956; Ao 2005; Kire 2016). At the heart of this imagery dotted with hills and dales, rivers and cataracts, gardens and grasslands, is the ecological dimension of Assam and an imagination fuelled by its rich natural endowments animating a reigning pastoral that affords new ways of thinking about identity and culture. The songs of the season, ushering in the primary festival of Assam, the Bihu, even as they celebrate romance and courtship are couched in a space and context that is unmistakably tied to the environment and the community, both intertwined and seamlessly bound together. Here comes spring calling out again … O dancer, The cuckoo too beckons you my lissome lass And the easterlies blow, as drumbeats and pipe-song welcome you back to the swaying earth Lyrics from a Bihu song (anonymous)2 In this snatch of song that is accompanied by the tapping of dancers’ feet and lithe movements by young women during the agrarian festival of Bihu, celebrated both as new year by the Assamese in northeast India and as a fertility myth of spring-time, the ‘swaying earth’ and the pipe-song are familiar motifs, referents of a timeless 2 Bihu

songs have been central in Assam’s literary and cultural imagination and their aphoristic, colloquial and often graphic lyrics mirror the patterns of everyday life and thought. Classic and authorised accounts of Assamese literature are often incomplete without a socio analysis of the ballads and other narratives that Bihu occasions, giving rise to a vast body of folk and cultural marginalia to the literary traditions of the region.

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Fig. 11.1 A time to sow …and time to think. Springtime promises Courtesy: Vikramjit Kakati

Assamese ethos and serve as central metaphors of a robust season of mating and nuptials. By extension, the song also calls attention to the earth’s fertility and the ritual of planting new crop in the rain-soaked fields. Ethnologists point out that the festival itself has earned pride of place in the minds of the people and is embraced as ‘our own very dear bihu’ (otikoi senehor bohagor bihu) which then grows into an instrument of regionalism (Goswami 1957). The Bihu dance culture, merriments and music, all come together in a wonderful mnemonic re-enactment of everyday life around a living pastoral (Fig. 11.1). What connects all of this together is the tenuous thread on which hangs a world both insular and unique, bringing about a global modernity imbued with local meanings as a digital world across spaces allows a simultaneous celebration of seasons and their symbolisms. Assam’s Bihu or, seasonally, the advent of spring inheres the idea of regeneration and in the rhetoric of the Assamese people is a necessary platform of collective representation. In 1980, in the heydays of the Assam movement, the All Assam Students’ Union, whose call to unite against the problem of foreigners in the state assumed social sanction and consensus, convened on the occasion of Bihu to address the citizens and mobilise the people in the heart of its capital city, Guwahati.3 An ideology of the people was sought to be filtered through the popular imagination into the common folk customs and everyday practices, making 3 The All Assam students’ Union ( AASU) chose to borrow a central motif of the bihu, its gamosa, the woven handtowel that is both functional and metaphorically an identity trope, to unite the civil society and widely diverse masses of the state to awaken to their call for intervention against the threat to demography, and citizenship. Its leaders flagged the gamosa, wore it around their neck

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the occasion a moment in which vital rethinking for the state and its people was seen as necessary. A new season in the calendrical time assumed importance as the moment to consecrate and offer new promises and symbols to the community. Thus the symbolic and the material do not remain dichotomous in separate realms but are closely interlinked with the region’s cultural and social life, together creating new metaphors of place and people. In that sense, human products or artefacts and the body merge to reproduce meanings that shape and give new signification, and as Keane explains, ‘signs give rise to new signs, in an unending process of signification. This is important because, viewed sociologically, it can be taken to entail sociability, struggle, historicity, and contingency’ (Keane 2003). In the historical view, the land seemed ready to take on new forms and as the appointed time in which certain points of inflection are made evident. Signs and material objects, Keane has argued exist in a dynamic relationship and that the way people handle and value material goods may be implicated in how they use and interpret words, and vice versa, reflecting certain underlying assumptions about the world and the beings that inhabit it (Ibid, 410). A timeless and visible trope used as a figuration of the land of Axom (Assam, as it is known natively) features in the preeminent composer and poet, Bhupen Hazarika’s eulogy to his land: Axom amar rupohi Gunoru nai xex Bharatore purba dixor xurya uthaa dex… Gutei jiwon bisaarileu alekh diwax rati Axom dexor dore napau imaan roxaal maati O siro binondiya tumar xeuji poribex Bharotore purbo dixor xurya uthar dex Bohagote amar aai mohura hoi ghure… The lyrics of this song encapsulate the idea of a ‘beautiful’ and ‘endlessly accomplished’ maiden (rupohi) who is synonymous and coterminous with the land that the poet envisions as the eastern point of the nation, witness to the rising sun. Assam personified as this feminine vision wrapped in green, likened to her fecund environment, remains to the mind of its inhabitants, the gentle and benign terrain, which is transformed to the flying shuttle (mohura) as women participate in weaving to the clatter of the looms, symbolically heralding the onset of spring. The land is sacred evoking in a familiar way, the myth and metaphors of a virgin land, no less sacrosanct as is the archetype of America to its people (Smith 1950). The gendered imaginary of this vision notwithstanding, a male river the Brahmaputra (Saikia 2019), its vast unquiet waters coursing through the land completes the allegory of the pastoral. In Assam’s Brahmaputra valley springtime is, thus, inseparable from the sound of the shuttle, drums and the echo of pipe notes accompanied by bawdy Bihu songs that announce the arrival of the festive, and the season of courtship and nuptials. The discursive practice and semiotics of the celebration of fertility, beginning in the agrarian, from the fields and lush meadows to rustic homes and the objects of everyday but seamlessly available also in the urban spaces explains not just the like their badge of courage and presented it to the elders, to attract and appeal to emotional and collective instincts of the people of Assam.

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all-encompassing nature of the Bihu as cultural motif and symbol in the life of the Assamese, but also charts an interesting trajectory of transition in the visual imaginary and material politics of the festival. This discussion attempts to locate the various networks of meaning and place that give significance to some of these motifs and metaphors at a time when increasing mobilities and exchanges tend to render the local, cosmopolitan and global. I argue that the practice and poetics of celebrating the season constitutes a central narrative that stitches the materiality of the everyday and the corporeal to the timeless presence of nature in the contemporary reimagination of India’s northeast. In evoking the idea of India’s northeastern region, several dominant modes of representation have resulted in a particular form of knowledge production of its space from the colonial times to the present. Central to this history and its discourse has been the way certain myths and memories about place and people have been reiterated and inscribe the sense of its unique material culture. Further, what complicates such an envisioning of local histories and spatialities, is the place of a region in the social reality of larger surroundings and locations, for example, a South Asian one. As anthropologist David Ludden in his essay ‘Where is Assam?’ notes, ‘most of the time, everything in social life is on the move, in a way that national geography cannot accommodate. By considering how trends of mobility have changed throughout history, we can locate Assam in a more flexible geography’ (Ludden 2005). How this territorial imagination (the eastward direction of the country, for example) attaches meaning and gives materiality to what is otherwise a vague terrain in the peripheries of the nation-state lends an ecology to seasons and space that also fixes visual metaphors to the place and its peoples. In a telling narrative from Bihu songs, hunting and fishing find mention as work of the everyday, and the boar and the rhino, respectively are cited as game: ‘porbotot marilu nodoka gahori, bhoyyamot marilu gorh’ (In the hills I hunted the stocky wild boar, and in the plains I hunted the rhino)4 (Barua 2009). The invoking of the pastoral whether in cultural representations of Assam or as residual motifs in the mindscape of the people as they celebrate, perform or in their everyday and lived practices returns the idea of nature’s past and creates networks of new meanings and metaphors. That this is mediated through significant material exchanges between the body and the environment in turn create and affect the discursive production of identities. In this context, I shall also draw upon some contemporary poets and fiction writers to show how their narratives feed on stock visual and material tropes that frame the region in terms of its everyday life, practices and politics of space and mobilities. Also pertinent to this argument is how the availability of this material matrix in turn endorses the representation of the region in the national imaginary and creates a myth of the northeast in the intellectual and political history of the nation. Finally, I also shall bring into the purview of this discussion a recent film from Assam that reinscribes the region with nostalgia and invites a fresh look at some of the popular perceptions on India’s northeast particularly Assam, that dislodge the myths and metaphors it has come to be constructed by. 4 See

also, Barua (2003), History of Assamese Literature which can be read as a cultural history of Assam for its inclusive character.

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Historical Construction of North East’s Discursive Reality: Marginality to Subalterneity The term northeast, itself a neologism which had been appropriated by both the official discourses from the colonial idea of the northeastern frontier, later gave birth to the more popular and literary rhetoric emerging about the region. The origin of an interesting coinage that followed was that of the Seven Sisters, borrowed from a Wordsworthian poem, ‘The Seven Sisters of Binnourie’, wherein the phrase elegiacally referred to the seven sisters who wilfully took their lives in the lakes that surrounded the British Isles. While the original reference had an unambivalently sad overtone its modern day postcolonial Indian counterpart found itself refurbished in a romantic version of idyllic eastern Himalayan hills and the majestic Brahmaputra valley nestling amidst the most picturesque and pristine of panoramas, itself the reigning metaphor of the region during the reorganisation of states of the Indian Union in 1971, following the creation of Bangladesh.5 Now nearly five decades from those times, the idea of NE India continues to be reconfigured in ways that have recast its image in many more hues, with several other narratives than the ones it was sought to be framed ideally in. If postcolonial India permitted the coming of age of regions and states which were erstwhile kingdoms and provinces before it achieved independence, there were attendant histories that also sought to be often reinterpreted and revisited. What lends rich complexity to these ways of seeing, is the sense of marginality that has for long been the refrain about the region and become almost inextricable from the manner in which northeast India appears, whether on the map of the Republic of India or as a social scientist once said, ‘on the map but off the mind’ of the rest of the nation. Arguably, we have come a long way now from looking at ourselves as only remote and peripheral, challenging the nation-state, in a manner of speaking, and that somewhat weary, self-flagellatory narrative has emboldened itself to adopting a more inclusive, even plural idea of India in which the northeast can accommodate itself. If India’s northeast had been cast into slots and stereotypes of backwardness, and nonbelonging, owing to several decades of postcolonial rebuilding and change, this was further reinforced by long periods of sub-nationalistic upsurges and insurgent unrest that has accumulated violent and recalcitrant images of the northeast in what had been otherwise quiet frontier landscapes of the country, barring a traumatic seige by China in 1962 in a moment of national unpreparedness for war. The post 60s response by an indifferent nation-state to the vulnerability of a frontier region, came to be etched in the imagery of the northeast’s grouse against the rest of the country as a dominant motif of resentment and uncaring for the mother nation who had let its 5 The

idea of the Northeast as rebel country has been more recently developed in academic discussions as a generic category giving rise to literary, political and cultural offshoots that are now the mainstay of a discourse around rebellions and resistance in the region. See, for instance, Amit R Baishya, Contemporary Assamese Literature. Deathworlds, Terror and Survival (2020) and Rakhee K Moral, “Writing Terror: Men of Rebellion and Contemporary Assamese Literature” in Beyond Counterinsurgency.ed. Barua (2009).

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young ones stray away from the heartland and out of its orbit, as it were. And needs neither reiteration nor a defence anymore that the infamous remark attributed to the country’s then premiere had been disastrous to the state-centre relationship and the northeast had never recovered from it, or conversely, often read out of real context in which it had been uttered. The call to the people of Assam, Tezpur more particularly, bordering Tawang along the international boundary from where emerged threats of a violent incursion called the ‘Chinese aggression’ has over the decades shifted in the collective mind to other materialities, and to images of a transregion that is home to several culturally rich assets and symbols for the people of Assam. The present discussion is an attempt to examine how the image of the region may be reinvented in the present through the visual media, whether in television, film, or urban grafitti or the manner in which the northeast finds itself represented even in social political and academic forums. The media and more formal spaces such as academic and research institutions and quasi government organisations have understandably, in the last three decades busied themselves trying to define the northeast often mostly by difference. In the aftermath of militant activity through the eighties and nineties in Assam, Nagaland and Manipur primarily, and in Tripura to some extent, the northeast came to be easily identified as ‘rebel country’. It was viewed as the trouble spot of the otherwise rapidly developing nation and often the northeast and its peoples were also cause for worry and an inability to connect, at either emotional or social level. The northeast was the outlier. Prickly, precarious and with perilous implications for those who lived there and those who chose to visit it. In 1990s the grand Indian nation’s most famous subaltern was the northeast. Any poster or shot that easily framed the region was that of blood, guns and armed forces or barbed wires suggesting the collision of both what were seen as hegemonic state forces and the non-state warriors in camps and the thick of the jungles. Perhaps, the most iconic and now very cliched image that framed this subaltern to her mainstream Indian counterpart is that of the stunning shot of Manipuri elders, mothers, in the nude, barely covered in front of the Kangla fort demanding justice as their bare bodies wrapped with banners, protested asking the Indian army to rape them. This was the region’s collective memory of 2004, a scene that gripped the nation’s imagination and unleashed mob-fury seeking justice for the death of Thangjam Manorama, a young woman, claimed to be a rebel of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), who was brutally assaulted, allegedly gang-raped and shot to death in Imphal by counterinsurgency forces (Rehman 2017). Graffitti around Manipur and in many cities of the northeast, notably Nagaland in the grip of the (Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland/Nagalim) NSCN’s unflagging struggle for the Naga nation, appeared everywhere, and was dominated by the call to repeal the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), and young school children, across the northeast who did not know what the letters stood for were able to utter the word and chant the slogans like a curse. In the plains, impunity and state terrorism had come to hound the neighbourhoods of Assam’s towns and villages in the height of the militant activities waged by the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) in the early nineties when two potent counterinsurgency operations, Operation Rhino and Bajrang were conducted against the rebels (Baruah 1999).

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The northeast gradually got iconised as guerrilla territory, and the face of Nagaland and Manipur were symbolised by youth in war fatigues and commando hats to the rest of the country. While the northeast cried itself hoarse to repeal the draconian laws that had strangled life and liberty in the hill states and in Assam for several decades, New Delhi’s gaze on the region continued to remain weary, guarding watchfully the periphery it did not entirely trust. Truckloads of armed forces slowly climbing mountain roads in those states and elsewhere piling up on stretches of asphalt alongside deep forests in Upper Assam filled up signature photographs in newspapers. The counter hegemonic responses came unleashed from civil society and a literature and narrative of protest abounded in the 90s. Rumours proliferated and the rhetoric of revolution swept the countryside as much as it did the small towns and commercial hubs of northeastern states. A typical image that stayed with many growing up in those times was the silence of towns and street corners that routinely went into bandhs as mark of protest against killings or atrocities by the armed forces on local populations, or the wailful siren and deeply disturbing sound of a menacing flag march that one could see in what were officially defined as ‘disturbed areas’ excluded from participating and partaking in other liberties that the rest of India celebrated as rightfully theirs. Then came the age of the peace talks, negotiations and peace settlements that brought respite from the threat of unabated violence and war. It was in those critical moments between conflict and the time of peacemaking, when governments put their heads together to broker peace and harmony in a region disrupted by fear and violence, that the development discourse came into being (Baruah 1999, 2005, 2012, 2019). What for very long had been seen as the crucible of unrest and chaos came to be reenvisioned as islands of music, culture and ethnic diversity. The northeast of India was a hardsell for tourism and the government’s new and aggressive tourism policy brought its focus on what it now labelled as the ‘incredible India’ spaces, recovering the land of the seven sisters and the lone brother from the morass the region had long sunk into. As James Clifford has pointed out, a recognition of allegories of description are extended to metaphors, patterns of association, additional meanings that draw ‘special attention to the narrative character of cultural representations’ (Clifford and Marcus 1986, 100) This is able to break down sometimes, the seamless quality of cultural descriptions by adding what Clifford terms ‘a temporal aspect to the aspect of reading’ (ibid). In reading meanings to the way Assam, and much of the northeast, is viewed as a pastoral that was sundered in the late twentieth century by the politics of insurgency, it is helpful to look for a pattern in the millennial literature that came out of the region. Temsula Ao graphically portrayed the rebel decades of the 80s and 90s in her signature work, These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone (2005), while Mamang Dai mediated the story of a pristine Arunachal Pradesh ensconced in the Himalayan uplands of NE India with her Legends of Pensam (2006), revealing the visible nature of developmental agency that disrupted the quiet and peace of a mountain people. Dhruba Hazarika’s Sons of Brahma (2014) adopted a mythopoetics of the region to narrate the story of a rebel university student who flees the city to escape persecution and flings himself into the safety and timeless refuge that the lush Brahmaputra valley seems

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to afford connecting land and symbol to the cultural meanings and individual lives of people. Critics have also pointed out the stereotypes that bind the northeast together in a string of stock images advanced both by the media and official representations, often as an ‘enchanted frontier’ imperilled by insurgency and cast in the rhetoric of violence (Das 2007, Moral 2009). While contemporary discourses of the northeast in literature and cultural studies hinge often upon the twin tropes of death and survival driven by its militarised recent pasts, there are other lenses that view the region as a transforming space with new narratives in the making (Baishya 2020; Hazarika 2018). In the early 2000s, as Sanjib Baruah, political scientist and academic points out, the development deficit paradigm overtook the northeast and peace packages came attended by huge grants and subsidies that promised to wrest the region from its years and decades of decadence into what promised to be hubs of productive growth. While rebels were rehabbed and often co-opted into government sectors as para militaries and police personnel, or given seed moneys to begin entrepreneurial ventures, the earlier claims of the local populace on territory, sovereignty and liberty were subsumed under the reigning metaphors of national unity and India shining which of course had no place for discordant notes of demand for homelands, or autonomy and ethnic self-determination. Yet, the idea of the northeast seemed to evolve from the river banks of Majuli, touted as the largest riverine island, just as the Naga hills brought cuisine and ethnic culture to the heart of the cities beyond the northeastern borders and Manipur and Meghalaya introduced the martial and traditional arts and performances of its folk life into the culture of diversity that India as a nation had learnt to wear on her sleeve. And in that spirit the recent times have witnessed a Mary Kom biopic, a symbol of national pride, for example which is a far cry from the angst of a Ratan Thiyam, theatre maestro who most notably reimagined Macbeth through the rebel lives of his Manipuri countrymen slain for their faith in a separate homeland. Gayatri Spivak’s famously posited remark, Can the subaltern speak? (Spivak 2010) then turns the idea of a subalternist northeast right upon its head, as the nations’ ‘periphery’ walks into the halls of debate and dialogue framing peace accords, demanding justice for innocents who were denied their redressals and paving the way for a resurgent Act East Policy from the borderlands of northeast India into its South east Asian neighbourhood. The nation now reimagines its northeast as an ‘arrowhead’ lauded both politically and with economic hindsight as the vantage from where to forge ties with a larger transregion on its borderlands.6 Left to its own esoteric and tribal cultures for long, the demystification of India’s northeast in the present marks the final crossing of the bridge from mainland India to its periphery. Not unnoticed are the efforts made by several leaders and civilians, writers and artists alike who have sought to integrate the beauty of India’s northeast into the national imaginary, whether through 6 The

Northeast of India has been hailed for its “arrowhead” role and growth in the official policy document of the region called NER Vision 2020 and is envisioned as a vital connect to the rest of SE Asia. The document cogently mentions, its purpose to “return” the region to its former position of eminence economically and culturally.

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Fig. 11.2 Young couples headed to bihu rehearsals in a village in Assam Courtesy: Vikramjit Kakati

official ethnographies, literary creations or music or films. The iconography of an all pervasive nationalism sweeping India’s eastern corner is evident in the newly raised architectural mural on the banks of the Brahmaputra facing the river at Guwahati. This signature spot of the city recaptures a slice of Assamese history and celebrates the naval supremacy of Lachit Borphukan who led his sailors into combating Mughal forces invading the country and who preserved the sovereignty of its northeastern parts. In a recent documentary made by Mukul Haloi, Loralir Xadhukotha (Tales from Our Childhood 2017) the recasting of insurgent Assam into a new metaphor of reconciliation allows the filmmaker to turn memory into motif.7 The material realities of the militancy, dead rebels and hidden letters, a uniform and some photographs turn the real into fiction as the history of the turbulence of insurgency is sought to be revisited through the remembered past and a certain closure is achieved. In an interesting mise-en-scene in the film, Haloi introduces the bihu husori (a group rendering of the bihu with several male and female dancers joining the performance) which disrupts the dark narrative of insurgency to usher in new hopes and allows this moment of energy and zest among the young to build a new motif of meaning to their lives. As the bunch of youngsters get together and prepare for rehearsals of the husori to be performed in the ensuing bihu festivities the prevailing mood of elegy and despair is overtaken by this new figuration of belief and repair (Fig. 11.2). 7 See

this interview with Mukul Haloi for an in depth discussion of his reflective documentary on the remaking of meaning of the insurgency in Assam of the 90s that helps create a new metaphor for the state. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH_JD58rGqM.

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Amidst the surrounding desolation of death and loss, the beating of the drums and the cheer in the voices as the youth begin to break into a dance stridently signals towards a new time, and a moment of renewal.

Crossing Bridges: New Imageries and Meanings Notwithstanding the peace initiatives, the deep-seated alienation that had crept into the communities of northeastern India manifested in several cycles of violence and ethnic conflicts, chiefly iconised by the Bodo riots and pogroms of the 2000s that continued well until a couple years ago. These inter-community clashes that divided Adivasis from immigrant Muslims, the Bodos from the hill ethnicities or for example, the tea-tribes from the rest of the Assamese came to embody the violent destinies of northeast India that most other countrymen recognised the region by. Identity politics was pronounced in the bid to assert dominance and superiority and this was aggravated by the doubts and fears about the other, aliens and foreigners from across the border. Several campuses in the metropolitan centres of India also notably propose case studies of problems of inclusion and exclusion with a view to conducting field work in northeast India, the hub of ethnic violence and homeland politics in the past several decades since the nation’s independence. Media channels always reserve, and this is true even now, a slot and regular spot for NE India which does not take long to burn or brew trouble. It is important to ask here, and question the rationale for such representation: as Joan Scott argues in her essay, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, which categories of representation are historicised and privileged is also a political act, and contingent on what the historian or viewer’s stake is in the production of that knowledge, as it remains in reimagining the nation’s northeast (Scott 1991). When policies and politics of northeast are interpreted in centres of knowledge, often far away from the spaces in question, the more frequently used signposts and keywords are racial discrimination, ethnic difference, rebel politics and alienation. Cinema, produced in more recent times in this region, I argue, has been able to cross over beyond the interstitial spaces of ‘misrecognition’ and has introduced northeast India most intimately to the rest of the country. Likewise, music and musicians from the region, and here mention must be made of Neil Nongkynrih’s Shillong Chamber Choir, have reversed the narrative by leading the country in creating fusion symphony of a unique kind, marrying the folk from the northeast with the classical traditions of pan Indian songs and lyrics from its national anthem.8 As the crystal clear notes of the Khasi folksong spill into the silence of the country’s impressive halls and theatres, members of the SCC’s band in traditional clothing and jewellery, in their native kynjri ksiar and the regal dhara stand before a mesmerised metropolitan audience donning 8 Neil

Nongkynrih, the soul of the Shillong Chamber Choir, who also composes the music, write songs and plays the piano for the band, has seen it evolve into a multi-genre choir. The band became popular when it participated and won the reality TV show, India’s Got Talent and since bridged some of the cultural gaps that have long existed between Northeast India and the rest of the country.

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the material objects of the land they belong to while their music evokes the deep gorges and pristine valleys of the distant Khasi Hills in the country’s borderlands. The hills come alive in their music and their identity is inseparable from the way they erect the idylls of a pastoral available, through this visual imagination, to those beyond the region. It is also important to note how ‘northeast’, a directional term at its core, has been internationalised by people belonging to the several states of the region creating a brand equity, a label, an image and metaphor of one of India’s most richly endowed natural and scenic regions. Twenty-five years ago, I identified myself as someone from Assam, a state blessed by the Brahmaputra and whose precious grasslands and waterways gave me distinction of belonging to such a place and of origin. In the last couple of decades, I have blurred those identities and recast myself as a northeasterner, whatever fecundities and frailties it might embody. In doing so I had perhaps unconsciously also appropriated the subalterneity that now more public efforts are attempting to relinquish. We are in a moment of transition and the shapes and the patterns of our region keep evolving. Our rich multiculturalism and plural identities, northeastern, for example, Assamese and genealogically, even part Mongoloid perhaps, with the ability to speak at least five languages, make us unlike people from most other constituencies, less monolithic, more open to possibilities. I am equally at home with fermented soyabean and greens from the hills as I am with bamboo shoots and pork, or a traditional Assamese breakfast of curd, flattened rice and jaggery from the Brahmaputra valley and a meal of fresh catch from the river. Yet the ‘mainstreaming’ of the ‘northeasterner, (a term I am not happy to use, but now a part of the much circulated and accepted discourse on the region) remains a problem that is not easily resolvable given the frames in which the people of the region had long been cast. I briefly want to recall here the experience of a simple working woman in her Khasi jainsem, accompanying her Assamese employer to a private club in Delhi a few years ago who created a furore for the denizens of that hallowed circle, for being a stranger, both in her phenotypic image and the dress that defined her.9 Aside of this, the making of aliens out of people in our midst and around us in a country that boasts of diversity and multiple ethnicities and as many languages, everyday lives and cultures, can be morally callous, just as it is ethically irresponsible to create and sustain perceptions about mainstreams and marginals. A nation that teems with more than a billion people needs to recognise difference and learn to coexist with it, and cast the idea of India out of the mould of a monolithic sameness. Why should anyone else who may not share your phenotypic features be always deemed as the stranger at your door? In this case, the lady who was asked to leave, happened to belong to the Khasi Hills in Meghalaya, a fish out of water in the capital’s carefully cultivated members’ clubs which the privileged and cultural cognoscenti tread. The stock perception 9 For a nuanced idea of how the traditional dress of the Khasi hills of Meghalaya in Northeast India,

a piece of women’s clothing is intertwined with the psychological connect and sense of belonging to the topography and terrain, and its misrecognition thereof by exclusionist mainland Indian responses to the cultural tropes and metaphors of the Northeast, see, Samudra Gupta Kashyap, “Simply put: her jainsem woven from lightning” Indian Express (2017).

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that all ‘northeasterners’ (a term that again dilutes the compositeness of the people who belong to or originate in any of the eight states of the region) must have flatter noses, narrower eyes, paler skin, spiky hair and what is more, different morals from the pan Indian ethos is not only deeply flawed, stemming out of ignorance and a patronising stance with a propensity to stereotyping but also built on a premise that has by default now reinscribed for the nation the separateness or, euphemistically speaking, the ‘uniqueness’ of its northeast. Hence not admitting the ‘jainsem’ in this case, or for that matter a Mizo puan or a Bodo dohkna, or further up north a Tibetan baku into the sartorial norm of our national diversity and casting it aside as foreign or ‘unknown’, or holding some of its culinary tastes in contempt (that has now ironically gained a reversal with northeastern cuisine being celebrated widely in major Indian metropolises) amounts to misrecognition of the neighbourly Indian citizen and perpetuates feelings of alienation, and of being a subaltern in one’s own country (Kashyap 2017) (Fig. 11.3). In terms of policy, anti-discriminatory committees have also sounded with caution the need to ameliorate feelings of difference between the region and the ‘mainland’, a term whose currency itself points to the embeddedness of that state of mind. For a long time until the last decade, the populist rhetoric of ‘them versus us’ from either side and contestatory feelings had fuelled subnationalist politics and fissiparous sentiments. The need to reorient and increasingly make aware our own nation and its many cultures to ourselves is imperative in the new discourse that teems with the images and metaphors discussed above.

Fig. 11.3 Weaving dreams at her loom …a woman in the uplands of NE India Courtesy: Vikramjit Kakati

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The metropolitan media, with regard to the incident of sartorial misrecognition mentioned here, found grist for fiery debates, both in print and television, where panels of irate ‘northeasterners’ voiced their impassioned reactions to this ‘ghettoising’ of tribal northeast India. The Delhi High Court now sits in judgement over the case of discrimination slapped on the elite club by a few eminent ‘northeasterners’ who petitioned the government challenging the right of the club to dismiss the woman on ground of not being properly attired or worse, for looking different, and demanded the removal of such exclusionist policies that continue to make strangers out of our country men and women.10 It is not the intention of this essay to dwell on more unhappy memories of discrimination or of the ‘chinki’ syndrome that drove a firm wedge between the northeasterners and rest of India leaving many to mourn the young, the unfortunate and the victims of racial hate and violence that has marked the events of recent urban Indian history. And despite it all the propensity of the northeasterner to migrate to the centres of the country seeking jobs, livelihoods, better lives and better mobilities stays unabated (Mc Duie-Ra 2012). Pride and prejudice have been left behind in the quest for greater freedoms and the subaltern face from the northeast is more ubiquitous, more recognisible, more in sight everywhere. The fear of representing small numbers has been overtaken by swelling populations from the region finding opportunities in the metropolitan centres of the country. As we may have evidenced the visceral northeast of the past few decades is slowly being displaced by a more visibly mobile and visually familiar northeast, recapturing tropes that emerge from the happy bucolic world alluded to at the beginning of this discussion that seeks to find synergy with the rest of the nation. While societies within the northeast may still be caught in the task of finding a balance between themselves and their various identities, the idea of being a northeasterner outside allows people to dissolve differences and bond together to become, what writer Sanjoy Hazarika’s recent narrative from northeast India claims, are new Indians who are ‘strangers no more’.11 The image of the stranger though inextricable from the ‘gaze’ of the nation, sometimes patronising, at times compassionate is tied to a relational pattern of networks and negotiations that continues to give the region its place in the body politic of the country. The story of the pastoral then, to be sure, finds reimagination in a space that is suddenly terra nuova, and not the dark obscure land, in the changing history and material transformation of allegories of India’s northeast. Assam, being geographically the corridor that connects the nation to its northeast more critically is viewed 10 In what was a long drawn battle for recognition, the state’s representative at the Centre and minister of Home Affairs, Kiren Rijiju, himself from Arunachal Pradesh, alleged that this was a case of racial discrimination against India’s northeast which he claimed would “destroy the social fabric” of the country. See, https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/rijiju-terms-meghalaya-woman-shu nted-out-of-delhi-club-as-racial-discrimination/article19154295.ece. 11 The trajectory of a changing narrative that Hazarika charts can be traced back to his earlier work, Strangers of the Mist, written 25 years ago which presented an image of the veiled, hidden and unknown northeast, whose citizens were unfamiliar to the rest of the nation. The idea of transition that the author develops of the state and its accommodation in the national imaginary brings the wheel full circle in the making of India’s northeast and its peoples to a millennial audience.

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as gateway to the South east Asian hub, endorsed both culturally and politically, and literally a chosen terrain that is laden with new value systems and signs, in which images and symbols connect to each other and to the larger universe. In many ways this is a refashioning of an older idea that has existed in the songs of the Brahmaputra’s bard, Bhupen Hazarika, who had earlier imaged the region as being central to the corporeal and natural graces of India’s vast and diverse geo-cultural terrain (Baruah 2019; Dutta 2014). Stacy Alaimo in her work on material histories urges that the ‘twin ghosts of biology and nature’ must be ousted if only by materialising them with flesh and a new positivism that shall make possible critical thinking about transnational or transregional cultures, and the connectedness of peoples and environments. This reimagined cosmology of the northeast ushers a new cycle in the history of the region and new modes of engagement with meanings that can be read into the larger cultural histories that frame it.

References Ao, T. (2005). These hills called home: Stories from a war zone. New Delhi: Zubaan Books. Alaimo, S. (2010). Bodily natures: Science environment and the material self . Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Appadurai, A. (1986). The social life of things. Commodities in cultural perspective. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Barua, H. (1956). The Red River and the Blue Hill. Guwahati: Lawyers’ Book Stall Baruah, S. (1999). India against itself. Assam and the politics of nationality. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Baishya, A. R. (2020). Contemporary assamese literature. Deathworlds, terror and survival. London and New Delhi: Routledge. Barua, B. (2003). History of assamese literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Barua, M. (2009) The ecological basis of the bihu festival of assam. Folklore, 120(2), 213–223. Baruah, S. (2005). A new politics of race: India and its Northeast. India International Centre Quarterly, 32(2/3), 163–176. Baruah, S. (Ed.). (2009). Beyond counterinsurgency: Breaking the impasse in Northeast India. New Delhi and London: Oxford University Press. Baruah, S. (2012). Durable disorder. New Delhi and London: Oxford University Press. Baruah, S. (2019). In the name of the nation: India and its Northeast. Standford, California: Stanford University Press. Clifford, J., & Marcus, G. E. (Eds.). (1986). Writing culture: The Poetics and politics of ethnography. Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Dai, M. (2006). The legends of Pensam. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Das, P. (2007). Contemporary Indian English writing from the Northeast. DUJES, 16, 23–47. Dutta, D. (2014). Bhupen Hazarikar Geet aru Jiban Rath, Guwahati: Banalata, 6th edn. Gal, S. (2019). Making registers in politics. Circulation and ideologies of linguistic authority. Journal of Sociolinguistics. Vole, 23, 450–466. Goswami, P. D. (1957). The bihu songs of Assam. Guwahati: The Lawyers’ Book Stall. Hazarika, D. (2014). Sons of brahma. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Hazarika, S. (2018). Strangers no more: New narratives from India’s Northeast. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Kashyap, S. G. (2017). Simply put: Her jainsem woven from lightning. The Indian Express. 3 July 2017.

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Keane, W. (2003). Semiotics and the social analysis of material things. Language & Communication, 23, 409–423. Kire, E. (2016). Son of the thundercloud. New Delhi: Speaking Tiger. Ludden, D. (2005). Where is Assam? Using geographical history to locate social realities. Himal South Asia. 5 Nov 2005. McDuie-Ra, D. (2012). Northeast migrants in Delhi: Race, refuge and retail. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Moral, R. K. (2009). Writing terror: Men of rebellion and contemporary assamese literature. In Beyond counterinsurgency. Breaking the impasse in NE India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Pisharoty, S. B. (2017). Ugly and full of technical faults. The Wire 25 March 2017. Rehman, T. (2017). The mothers of Manipur: Twelve women who made history. New Delhi: Zubaan Books. Saikia, A. (2019). The Unquiet River: A Biography of the Brahmaputra. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Scott, J. W. (1991). The evidence of experience. Critical Inquiry, 17(4), 773–797. Smith, H. N. (1950). Virgin Land. The American West as symbol and myth. Boston: Harvard University Press. Spivak, G. (2010). Can the subaltern speak? Reflections on the history of an Idea. In R. Morris (Ed.), Columbia: Columbia University Press.

Rakhee Kalita Moral is currently Head, Centre for Women’s Studies and Associate Professor of English at Cotton University. Earlier in 2013 she was awarded the Nehru Fellowship of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi for post-doctoral work in women and insurgency, and has held several research collaborations with institutes nationally and internationally, including the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and more recently as Consultant in the Oral History Project at the School for Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University. She has under the aegis of Humanities Across Borders, a research program of the International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden supported by the Mellon Foundation, USA, worked on Naga women’s mobilisations and collectives resulting in a publication Once Upon the Hills: Everyday Practices of Women in Nagaland (2020). Widely published, Dr Moral’s other works include Voices and Concerns :Gender and Society in NE India (2010), At the Frontier and Beyond (2005) and a forthcoming monograph on women combatants in Assam, Under the Shadow of the Red Sun: Women, Insurgency and Power in Northeast India (2021) apart from a host of chapters, research papers and reviews in literature, gender and NE India in both national and international publications. Most recently she won the WISCOMP Saahas Prerna Award 2020 (Women in Security, Conflict and Management of Peace) for her work as a gender-justice animator in universities and colleges across India who has expanded the canvas of gender sensitivity and gender equity in higher education spaces in NE India.

Chapter 12

Weaving Resistance and Identity: Politics of Contemporary Textile Practice of the Tangkhuls Thingminao Horam

Abstract The chapter looks at the textile practice of the Tangkhuls focusing on how textiles, as part of their material culture, not only function as objects of adornment but are ‘political’ in nature made so through a range of processes and relations. Contemporary Tangkhul textiles and their narratives are produced as part of engaging with, or part of a complex context; institutions, people, space and socio-political realities. This chapter will particularly explore how institutions such as the Tangkhul Shanao Long and the Church play crucial roles in the meaning-making and production of Tangkhul textiles. Owing to the involvement of these social agencies and institutions, contemporary textile has found itself entangled in the politics of representation and resistance. Through an examination of the making of contemporary kashan, this chapter explores the complex relations between materiality, agency and context. It also broadly illustrates how textiles are witness to and address significant issues pertaining to cultural politics, ethnicity, gender, symbolic systems, religion and ideology of the Tangkhul community. Keywords Northeast India · Tangkhul textiles · Material culture · Weaving · Resistance · Identity politics

Introduction Specific contexts shape objects or material culture and their meanings are derived from object-people interactions. They are important in the study of culture, for they can shape and determine culture and human relations in society (Woodward 2007; Miller 1998). They are signs in the larger communicative system that reflect social structures and systems of society and have ‘social life’ and can travel across time, space, and contexts, in the process accruing multiple meanings, function, and value (Appadurai 1986). Analysis of the ‘paths and uses’ of objects reveals politics behind their circulation and focuses on objects’ agency and unveils the socio-cultural and political systems objects emerge from. Objects and things, in their materiality, also T. Horam (B) Special Centre for the Study of North East India, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. Nongbri and R. Bhargava (eds.), Materiality and Visuality in North East India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1970-0_12

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have the ability to shape human behaviour and relations. Approaches such as the Actor-network-theory (ANT) give focus to the networks that take place in such object-people relationship (Latour 2005). Humans and objects are also ‘entangled’ and co-dependent on each other (Hodder 2012). These approaches or ways of seeing material culture or objects posit that the relationship between objects and people is complex and that objects are not simply signs and tools for signification, but are dynamic agents that can mediate and determine how humans live in the world. It is, therefore, important to examine the structures and multiple connotations of objectpeople relations and how it constitutes a window to the understanding of society and culture. Beyond its utilitarian value, textile or cloth presents an innumerable potential for signification and social and cultural expressions. Weiner and Schneider (1991) write that “broad possibilities of construction, colour and patterning give cloth an almost limitless potential for communication”. It can communicate the wearer’s values, ideology, complex moral and ethical issues of dominance and autonomy, opulence and poverty, continence and sexuality; all these find ready expression through/in a cloth. In a diverse setting like North East India, textiles reflect complex cultural, geographic and socio-political settings and therefore immediately capture our attention. Textiles in this region are powerful bearers and markers of identity and sociocultural realities. For the Nagas in particular, textiles are not simply cloths but are repositories of world views, meanings, and narratives. Textiles bear much of the community’s ideologies, values and beliefs in tangible form. Textiles are also imbued with political importance. They are significant, in the specific case of the Tangkhul Nagas1 as important cultural objects of exchange, tangible heritage and heirloom, as modes of communication, and in contemporary times, a powerful medium of resistance. Owing to their geopolitical location in the contiguous borderland of North East India and North West Burma, the Tangkhuls are caught between multiple nationalistic politics and geographies of state-making. The Tangkhuls are also immensely shaped by marked processes of cultural flows, migrations and movements, indigenous and ethnic determinations in the region. In view of the above, this chapter attempts to locate the dynamic dialectical relationship between structures and agency to understand practices and subjectivities of the Tangkhul Nagas through a closer look at their textiles. It will mainly explore how institutions such as the Tangkhul Shanao Long (TSL) and the Church influence textile production and thereby, entangle textiles in the larger politics of identity assertion, nationhood and gendered distinction.

1 The Tangkhuls are one of the major Naga communities located in the Indo-Burma borderland. They

are mainly situated in Ukhrul, Kamjong, Kangpokpi, Senapati and Thoubal districts in Manipur on the Indian side, while on the Burma side, they are mainly situated in Somra tract.

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Tangkhul Textile Practice and the Church In pre-colonial times, weaving and its processes were greatly defined by cultural and ritual practices such as Maran Kasa,2 festivals and traditional practices of war. For the Nagas, textiles were powerful insignias of merit and honour that fuelled such practices (West 1985, 22). The prohibition of such rituals by the British administration and the Christian missionaries did not deter the making and wearing of traditional textiles. It, however, transformed the signification system. In this regard, it can be said that the coming of Christianity and missionaries played a huge role. The relationship between the Church and textile practice can, therefore, be traced back to colonial times. This can be done by investigating the early civilising mission by missionaries, which involved a transformation of religious beliefs and values and the practices and perceptions of social habits, ‘modesty’ and clothing of the community. In the context of the Tswana of South Africa, clothing was one significant aspect of the ‘civilising’ mission of the Christian missionaries (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997, 225). Similarly, in the context of colonialism in India, the desire to ‘civilise’ and clothe the native was particularly apparent in missionary activities (Tarlo 1996; Cohn 1996). Among the Nagas too, the history of the changing uses of indigenous textiles or cloths is inextricably linked to the coming of Christianity in the region. Missionaries encouraged the Nagas to wear clothes that conformed to their standards of modesty and propriety. In this regard, the intervention of William Pettigrew and Alice Pettigrew, the American missionary couple who began their proselytising work among the Tangkhuls in 1896, changed the course of textile practices of the Tangkhuls. Alice Pettigrew not only taught young Tangkhul women to read and write, but also knitting and sewing, gardening, home sanitation and general cleanliness (Keishing Byrne 1996, 64–69, Sinalei 1996, 26–34). John Thomas notes that as the missionaries encouraged ‘more clothing’ on the body of the Nagas, and particularly as a requirement to become a Christian, the sewing machine, in the hands of the wives of missionaries, became another important ‘civilising’ agent among the Nagas (Thomas, 2016). The introduction of ‘domestic work’ such as cleaning, sewing, knitting, and weaving in the school curriculum reinforced women’s close relationship with the manufacture of textiles. It also re-defined and categorised this activity as a distinctly ‘feminine’ work. As Comaroff and Comaroff (1997, 229) point out, the introduction of sewing and the importance given to the manufacture of clothes in colonised societies brought about: …a restructuring of relations of production in general, and of the division of labor in particular; and the creation of a distinct, and distinctly feminine, domain of domesticity and discerning consumption, naturalized as taste.

2 Maran Kasa or Feasts of merit was the practice of giving a series of feasts to mark the growth of a man’s wealth. A man who have given the feast of merit could wear more elaborate and patterned cloths.

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In the Tangkhul context, traditionally, weaving was exclusively the domain of women. The missionaries’ introduction of these crafts and skills made textile production even more connected with women (than men) and the reinforcement of weaving and knitting as ‘feminine’ domestic tasks have shaped contemporary textile practices. This can be understood in how weaving and production of textiles continue to work within religious and social and cultural arenas. It can also be understood from the monopoly of women and women organisations over the meaning-making and production of textiles. This aspect will be discussed in detail in the next section. Furthermore, the signifying system (symbolic meaning) in Naga textiles was transforming. Although the missionaries denounced the practising of rituals and ceremonies related to feasts of merit and ‘headhunting’, textiles related to these practices were worn by newly Christian converts, as evident in photographs captured during this period. Vibha Joshi notes that this was an interesting development taking place during the time. She writes: Although the Christian converts preferred to wear Western clothing, an interesting development was taking place simultaneously. The converts in certain Naga groups began to wear the cloth, which could traditionally be worn only by those who had earned the right by taking a human head in the raids or given a series of feasts of merit (Joshi 2000, 381).

The coming of British colonisation and Christianity were significant factors that led to a transformation in the symbolic language of textiles. Rituals, practices and ceremonies related to Maran Kasa (feasts of merit), Rai Kasa (war) and Thisham (Soul send-off festival) have been discontinued. However, textiles that were integral aspects of these practices—as reflecting status, merit and social structure, continue to be produced and worn, but recast in new social and cultural meanings. For instance, zoomorphic motifs and patterns such as the buffalo horn, the cock and the elephant in Raivat Kameo Kachon, which was related to ‘headhunting’ are now being woven into modern clothing such as waistcoats, bags and neckties. In the past, Raivat Kachon could only be worn by warriors and their wives who had successfully taken heads in war. Similarly, the Luirum Kachon could only be worn by the village chiefs, clan heads and individuals who have given the feasts of merit and Thangkang Kachon was only worn by the old and aged people in the village. These shawls were more decorative and symbolised status, merit and social standing in the society. However, today, with the changing socio-cultural dynamics, it is worn mostly during occasions—Church services, community gatherings, protests, death ceremonies, and festivals. Post-British colonial period, the Church undertook the task of performing and administering various functions such as marriage ceremonies, divorce, funerary rites, and enforcement of moral laws (Ruivah 1993). In all these aspects of culture now falling within the purview of the Church, textiles continued to play an instrumental role. Textiles or traditional cloths remained an integral object of exchange, especially within the institution of marriage. This also highlight the economic value of textiles beyond their symbolic value. Textiles continue to be used as gifts or presentation in marriage ceremonies as a way of symbolising kinship relationships and the establishment of new bonds. Textiles, especially those used during ceremonial occasions

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constitute an integral aspect in the bride-wealth that a newly wedded girl takes to her husband’s home. This aspect of textiles as significant objects of monetary value is brilliantly highlighted by Lovitoli Jimo in examining the Ameh, or bride-wealth in Sumi marriages, in which textiles and clothes play an intrinsic role in reinforcing existing bonds as well as establishing new ones (Jimo 2018, 144–171). Beyond marital customs, textiles are circulated as gifts or presents in religious ceremonies, gatherings and celebrations. Textiles are significant elements in the Church and its related activities, wherein religious discourses and cultural activities occur. This is evident from the way wearing traditional clothing has become the norm for Sunday Church services at the local level and can be seen even in larger Tangkhul religious gatherings. For instance, the Tangkhul Baptist Churches Association (TBCA) holds their Triennial gathering in different villages where delegates from every Church under the aegis of TBCA gather. These gatherings are not limited to religious exhortations and preaching of the Gospel but involve various other activities and showcases—singing competition, presentation of folk dances, folk songs and other cultural performances. In all these performances and competitions, wearing of traditional attire is the norm. Quite the norm is also the use of textiles as gifts to resource persons in such gatherings. Traditional textiles and clothes have also become an important element of religious and cultural and social events in metropolitan cities such as Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, and Chennai where many Tangkhul migrant students and working professionals reside. Community gatherings such as Freshers’ meet and other annual meets held in these cities encourage the wearing of traditional clothing and ornaments. The North East Choral Competition, initiated in the year 2012 in Delhi, is another event where one can witness the vibrant presence of traditional clothing. It brings together various community fellowships hailing mainly from Manipur and Nagaland to exhibit ‘togetherness’ and solidarity through singing. In this ‘Christian’ event, textiles become a significant element, as participating choirs from different communities and Church fellowships wear their respective traditional attire as ‘uniform’ (Pheichon 2017). It is important to note how textile practices have thus been used over time and reflect different historical trajectories and processes of changing sociocultural and political realities of the Tangkhuls. This is evident from the community’s emphasis on wearing traditional clothing during religious, cultural and social events as we have seen in the above discussion. As highlighted above, after the coming of Christianity, the Church has played an important role in re-defining the socio-cultural practices of the Tangkhuls and textiles have been a significant element in these processes. The relationship between the Church and textile practice sheds light on how objects such as textiles have been instrumental in defining and articulating changing perspectives and subjectivities of the Tangkhuls. Textiles have become instrumental in conveying a distinct Naga identity largely shaped by religious ideologies. Body politics and new social habits that came with Christianity and western education, coupled with teaching women ‘feminine’ crafts further cemented the predominant role of women in textile making.

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The Role of Women Organisations in Naga Textile Practices Since a material production is a socio-political act, and objects acquire meaning through such acts, it is imperative to understand the role of Tangkhul Shanao Long (TSL) in the realm of material production. TSL, the apex Tangkhul women’s organisation is a crucial agent that facilitates and has furthered the politics and agency of textiles, especially by transforming an individual act of weaving into a collective responsibility. TSL was formed in 1974, in Ukhrul with the aim to address women’s plight and issues in the light of the then counter-insurgency violence in the hills of Ukhrul district, Manipur. Among other broad objectives, the TSL assumes the role of monitoring creative expression in textiles. This is similar to the functioning of other Naga women organisations with regard to traditional knowledge and textiles. The Chakesang Women Welfare Society (CWWS) and Watsu Mungdang (Ao women’s organisation) are cases in point. The CWWS founded on 10 January 1976, function as a body which regulates the production and creation of what constitutes the ‘community attire’ of the Chakesang community (Chakesang Women Welfare Society 2016). The Watsu Mungdang is a similar organisation that acts as a ‘guardian of the traditional crafts’ of the Ao Nagas which mainly works to ‘preserve’ the traditional knowledge of the Ao community by sometimes assuming the role of censoring creative expression in textiles. Marion Wettstein observes that ‘for women’s questions of tradition, the Watsu Mungdang is the body of authority’—for if a village wants a certain textile to be recognised as a traditional cloth of the village, the recognition usually comes from the Watsu Mungdang.’ (Wettstein 2014, 285). Naga women organisations in general, among other objectives, seek to ‘preserve’ traditional original motifs and patterns of their respective communities with the larger aim to sustain traditional knowledge and cultural heritage. In the context of the Tangkhuls too, TSL plays the role of sustaining or ‘preserving’ traditional knowledge by assuming an active role in overseeing meaning-making and creative expression in textiles. Article XXI of the constitution of TSL explicitly claims to promote the community’s traditional culture and knowledge of the past. Given this particular objective, one can say that TSL have monopoly over the textile practice of the Tangkhuls. It is directed that samples of new textile designs or articulations should be sent to TSL for its approval before it can be ‘officially’ used and worn by the community. The seeking of approval for new textile articulations entails a written petition addressed to the TSL stating the details of the textile; the purpose of its creation and the meanings of the motifs/patterns attributed to it (Tangkhul Shanao Long 2013). Two forms of contemporary kashan namely, Luingamla Kashan and Rose Kashan have been ‘approved’ by TSL. Luingamla Kashan was first designed in 1990 but the design, meaning and name of the kashan was officially accepted and recognised by TSL only in the year 1997 after a series of reviews by the TSL. Only after that, it was widely endorsed by TSL garnering huge popularity for it. Though designed in 1990 and approved by TSL in 1997, Luingamla Kashan has been assigned a

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‘traditional’ status because of the involvement and subsequent approval by TSL. The political importance and significance accrued by Rose and Luingamla Kashan in the community have inspired and influenced the creation and designing of numerous other kashan. As mentioned above, TSL is directly involved in the preservation and promotion of Tangkhul heritage by assuming the role of overseeing the production of new textiles and ‘authenticating’ traditional Tangkhul symbols. By assuming such roles of reviewing, approving, authenticating and endorsing textiles with the broader aim to sustain traditional knowledge and heritage, TSL directly participates in the wider discourse on demand, value, production and circulation of commodities, and the symbolic representation of Tangkhul identity. This reflects the ‘politics’ behind the ‘social life’ of commodities that Arjun Appadurai talks about. ‘Politics,’ pertaining to the power to approve or disapprove a product in this sense, is what links value and exchange in the social life of commodities: …the politics of diversion and of display; the politics of authenticity and of authentication; the politics of knowledge and of ignorance; the politics of expertise and of sumptuary control; the politics connoisseurship and of deliberately mobilized demand. The ups and downs of the relations within and between these various dimensions of politics account for the vagaries of demand. It is in this sense that politics is the link between regimes of value and specific flows of commodities. (Appadurai 1986, 57).

The Tangkhul Shanao Long and the Politics of Contemporary Kashan The roles played by TSL cannot be understood separately from the framework and ideology it is inextricably linked to. Like most Naga civil societies in the region, TSL also emerged in reaction and response to the Nagas’ inclusion into the Indian fold and the Indo-Naga conflict that ensued (Tunyi 2018, 199–210). TSL was formed with the aim to address women’s plight and issues in the light of the then counter-insurgency violence in the hills of Ukhrul district, Manipur. The role of TSL in the making of contemporary textiles, especially kashan is important because it was against the backdrop of continued violation of human rights by armed security forces in the region that it was formed in 1974. This organisation was formed during the period when state-sanctioned counter-insurgency operations were taking place in the Naga Hills and numerous civilians had been killed as a result. The year 1974 was especially crucial. In March 1974, during the counter-insurgency operation conducted by the 95 Border Security Forces (BSF) in Grihang and Ngaprum (now Kumram) village, a number of women were raped and molested while men-folk were brutally tortured (IWGIA 1986; Misra 1984). In this ordeal, Rose Ningshen, a young girl was raped by three BSF officers on March 4th. Unable to bear the shame and humiliation of the act, two days later she committed suicide. This was one of the many violent incidents that unfolded under the ambit of counter-insurgency operations in the hill districts of Manipur. The violent incident leading to Rose Ningshen’s death sparked off a

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wide protest on April 9, 1974, after which, a public meeting was called in Ukhrul, in which 703 representatives from 90 Tangkhul villages gathered for the mass protest at Tangkhul Long Ground. It was against this backdrop that the TSL was formed as the apex Tangkhul women’s organisation on May 8th, 1974, with ‘Unity for Justice’ as its motto. It was formed foremost ‘as a platform to safeguard the rights, modesty and dignity of women’ and has been instrumental in lobbying against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA)3 and human rights violation in the hill districts of Manipur (Haksar and Hongray 2011). Luingamla Muinao was another victim who was assaulted and murdered by an army officer during a counter-insurgency raid conducted in Ngainga Village, Ukhrul District.4 Zamthingla Ruivah immortalised the story of Luingamla Muinao by using thread, motifs, patterns and colours. The kashan designed stood as a signifier of atrocities meted out by the Indian armed forces on the community. The process of this signification is achieved by the conscious interplay and use of thread and symbols such as motifs, patterns, and colours as signs. According to the designer, the red colour signifies the ‘innocent blood’ of Luingamla Muinao and ‘the valour and unflinching courage of women’. The right and left ends of the kashan, are bordered by phorrei motif which signify ‘chastity, beauty and dignity of a woman’. Four black parallel horizontal weft bands run through the kashan with weft designs such as: the shongfa phor which signify ‘seeking justice for Luingamla from one place to another’, the konghar angachang and khaifa akashan motifs signify ‘places of judgement (courts)’, and the malum mik motif signifying ‘solidarity, encouragement and the united support given by the TSL and other organisations in the fight for justice for Luingamla Muinao.’5 Years later, Rose Kashan was designed by Ateophy in memory of Rose Ningshen. The colours, patterns and motifs in the kashan are meaningfully ordered and arranged to bring out the tragic story of Rose Ningshen in the language of textiles. According to the designer, red colour in Rose Kashan signify the richness and significance of the colour in the Tangkhul community. The six black weft horizontal bands that run parallel to each other signify the death anniversary of Rose Ningshen which is celebrated every year as Tangkhul Shanao Long Day. The pleated threads in the corners signify Rose Ningshen’s ‘integrity and quality’. Chamva phor is also reinterpreted and recast to signify Rose’s ‘gentleness’ and her ‘unfortunate life’.6 3 Armed

Forces Special Powers Act (1958), a legislation of the Government of India was enforced in the ‘disturbed areas’ of North East India, particularly Assam and Manipur in 1958. This Act gave ‘special powers’ upon the ‘members of the forces in disturbed areas’. This Act further gives impunity to members of the forces because of which numerous human rights violence that have been meted out under this act have been unjustified and unaccounted for. The violation of this Act mainly in the Naga areas is documented in the book The Judgment that Never Came: Army Rule in North East India by Nandita Haksar and Sebastian Hongray. 4 Luingamla Muinao was murdered by Captain Mandhir Singh of the 25 Madras Regiment on 24th January 1986 in Ngainga Village. 5 This information is obtained from the personal notes and documents maintained by Zamthingla Ruivah Shimray on the Luingamla Kashan. 6 As obtained from the document or letter that was submitted to the Tangkhul Shanao Long in describing the purpose, objective and meanings ascribed in the kashan. This petition was written in

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In these two kashan, the designers draw from the ‘langue’ of Tangkhul textiles; an existing set of conventions for the use of motifs, patterns and colours. This is achieved by using motifs such as the phorrei, konghar angachang, khaifa akashan and malum mik which are present in other traditional/original kashan. Phorrei motif traditionally signify nobility and wealth. However, in Luingamla Kashan, it is used to particularly signify the ‘chastity’ of Luingamla Muinao. Earlier, Konghar angachang or chamva phor and khaifa akashan signified wealth, prestige and nobility, but are used here to signify a contemporary scenario—legally seeking justice in courts for Luingamla Muinao. Chamva phor motif which was used to signify wealth and nobility signify the ‘unfortunate life’ and ‘tragic love story’ of Rose Ningshen. Motifs, patterns, colour scheme are consciously arranged and coordinated by the designers from the langue of textiles to create Luingamla Kashan and Rose Kashan which are individual speech or ‘parole’.7 These two kashan are imbued with political importance and can be considered ‘hidden transcripts’ for it is coded in nature but critiques power.8 The symbols, motifs and overall meaning of the two kashan can only be decoded and understood against the backdrop of the culture in which it was created. Luingamla and Rose Kashan are ‘hidden transcripts’, as counter-narratives to ‘official’ records, with its meanings obscured to the oppressor/s. In this context, weaving and textiles which traditionally form part of women’s domestic chores became ‘weapons of the weak’ and ‘everyday forms of resistance’ (Scott 1990). Luingamla and Rose Kashan are possessed by most Tangkhul women. Given the political message imbued in the kashan, it has gained recognition and immense popularity among the Tangkhuls. Weaving and producing such subversive textiles are less known forms of resistance than other confrontational protests such as the infamous ‘nude protest’ or otherwise known as the ‘Mothers of Manipur’ protest.9 Anindita Ghosh writes that women critique the world they live and experience in ‘subversive expressive traditions or actions, some overtly dissident than others’ (Ghosh 2008, 2). Ghosh therefore argues that we should look beyond violent confrontational struggles or collective acts of protests and give attention to the various forms of ‘everyday negotiations of power’. She further posits that this approach is helpful in analysing women’s life in India because:

Tangkhul dialect by Ateophy of Kumram Village as ‘Rose Kashan wui Kakhalat’, meaning—‘The Meaning and significance of Rose Kashan.’. 7 Borrowing Ferdinand de Saussure’s concept of langue and parole, whereby langue is a system of conveying meaning, or in other words, it is a set of systematic rules and conventions of a signifying system. Speech or parole, then is the individual act of expression or articulation drawn from this abstract structure or system i.e. langue. 8 According to James C. Scott, ‘hidden transcripts’ are ‘offstage’ discourses, e.g. ‘Speeches, gestures, and practices that confirm, contradict, or inflect what appears in the ‘public transcript”. Hidden transcripts are created by subordinate groups and are critiques of power spoken behind the back of the dominant. These transcripts might be ‘veiled’ and ‘coded’. 9 Twelve women stripped and protested naked in front of Kangla Fort, Imphal Manipur on 15 July, 2004, to oppose the gang rape and death of Thangjam Manorama Devi in the hands of Assam Rifles.

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What has been systematically excluded from accounts of women’s struggles is the everyday realm of social relations in which power is constantly and relentlessly negotiated (Ghosh 2008, 6).

Due to its coded and ‘hidden’ nature, the two kashan discussed above avoid any direct confrontation with authority. These kashan can also be viewed as texts and weaving as a form of writing. Moreover, since weaving has been a history of women’s work and artistic articulation, weaving cloth/textiles can be considered ‘ecriture feminine.’10 The two kashan can be seen as symbols of resistance against oppressive state forces and against gendered violence and patriarchal structures whereby the act of weaving itself can be understood as women negotiating with gendered discrimination in their everyday lives. The use of dress or clothing as non-verbal resistance is not a unique phenomenon. Clothing have been a site of resistance and confrontation throughout history, most illuminated in the context of colonised societies. A significant example for this has been the khadi movement of satyagraha popularised by M.K. Gandhi in the wake of the anti-colonial movement in India. This movement is significant because it became a powerful ‘non-violent’ resistance movement that garnered considerable moral support by the mass and shaped the idea of khadi and local weaving industry in the larger Indian context (Bayly 1986, 285–320, Tarlo 1996, 62–128). In the context of the Nagas, Dolly Kikon highlights how the Naga ‘body’ and traditional attire is used as a site of resistance in contemporary times against the Centre and the State. She argues that the Nagas have reclaimed the ‘naked’ and ‘savage’ imagery propagated by the colonial state to resist against oppressive state politics. She argues that the Nagas are increasingly using their bodies and wearing traditional attire during protests and demonstrations as a strategic method of asserting their own identity, indicating how textiles have become significant objects and mediums that annunciate political views and opinions (Kikon 2009, 81–100). These two kashan highlight the location of women in the socio-political structure especially in the context of militarised or conflict ridden societies. These kashan therefore, embody the story of the two slained individuals but are mediums of protest; a subversive site of resistance that counter oppressive state, patriarchal, community, and religious mechanisms. Being produced through the bodily practice and gendered role of women, these kashan are symbolic of their gendered experience and voice. Further, the use of traditional motifs, patterns and colour scheme recast in new contexts producing new meanings altogether, represents in a way, a subversive attempt to remember and re-articulate a past which is rooted in tradition. It can be argued that women reclaim the ‘feminine’; the role assigned to them by tradition or social institutions, more so with the advent of Christianity and uses it as a subversive tool for self-expression. The ‘feminine’ here is appropriated, reclaimed and used for their own ends; telling the story of their oppression and lived experience. This is evocative of what Rozsika Parker argues in 10 ‘Ecriture

feminine’ is a term first coined and propounded by Hélène Sixous. This concept/term is drawn to highlight that textiles, woven by women through their body, worn by women for their body, which are replete with symbolic meanings from their worldview represents what she calls ‘feminine writing’ or the more generic term for ‘women’s writing’.

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her seminal book on needlework/embroidery and its constructed connotations with femininity and women’s work, and its subversive or revolutionary potential in the hands of women (Parker 1996).

Conclusion As the discussion in the chapter indicates, textiles reflect the changing subjectivities of the Tangkhuls; they are witness to and address significant issues pertaining to cultural politics, identity, historical change, gender identities, socio-cultural and religious structures, symbolic systems, and ideology of the Tangkhul community. We have seen that the TSL and the Church deeply influence the symbolic production through textiles. The signifying system of the Tangkhuls transformed markedly with the coming of Christianity and the increasing presence of the Church. The Church has also been instrumental in continuing and making relevant the wearing of textiles. With its varied events, it directly influences and increase the demand for indigenous textiles. In the past, manifestation of identity in textiles was more in terms of communicating individual identity (which indicated individual achievements and social standing) but this has changed. In contemporary times, textiles have become important in strengthening and negotiating what it means to be Tangkhul Naga vis-à-vis the Indian state, other communities in the ‘mainland’ and various other ethnic movements in North East India. Textiles bear witness to and reflect socio-cultural and political transformations of the Tangkhuls. The two specific examples discussed (Luingamla Kashan and Rose Kashan) illustrate how kashan, or textiles in general not only signify or carry narratives and meanings that reflect ideologies of the community, but are also subversive sites of resistance politics. This is made possible by the relationship between women and the practice of weaving and their symbolic production in textiles. In this context, it is important to understand the role of TSL as a crucial actor facilitating and furthering the agency of textiles. Therefore, the emergence of TSL in 1974 is a game changer in the textile discourse of the community. It was initially formed out of the need to resist against the Indian state and its excesses but consequently also became a body that would monitor and oversee the production of new textiles. The legitimacy of such a role is drawn from the traditionally exclusive role of women—weaving, as well as by the re-definition of women’s work brought about by colonialism and Christianity. Further, examining these two kashan bring the position of women to the fore. If political message are conveyed through textiles, one can further ask if weaving is a conscious way of documenting injustice, discrimination and violation against the female body? The subversive nature and agency of textile production by Tangkhul women thus lie here; it carries articulations and experiences of women which are formulated, expressed and produced in their own voice and terms. Contemporary kashan with narratives centering on violence on/against women have drawn political importance and attention to the relationship between textile making and TSL and in

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turn have strengthened the role of TSL with regard to meaning-making in textiles in contemporary times. The TSL continue to hold immense power in the sphere of knowledge production and representational politics of the community. The discussion in the chapter have tried to make sense of the ways in which textile production with their narratives reflect subjectivities of the Tangkhul community and the dialectic web of relations between structure and agency that shapes this. The making and production of textiles mediated by institutions such as the Church and TSL allows us to also understand how textiles not only reflect but also create the realities of the Tangkhuls; how textiles are significant objects in their practice of Christianity that is deeply rooted in ethnicity, and how it is a subversive medium of resistance against oppressive structures and practices. It has been an attempt to illustrate and highlight this aspect of textiles—as having not just a utilitarian function but owing to their materiality and symbolic power, they have the ability to influence social and political relations in a society.

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Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network- theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, D. (Ed.). (1998). Material cultures: Why some things matter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Misra, U. (1984). Human rights violation in North East (A review of Nagaland file: A question of human rights by Luingam Luithui, Nandita Haksar). Economic and Political Weekly 19(51/52), 2159–2160, Dec. 22–29: 2157. Parker, R. (1996). The subversive stitch: Embroidery and the making of the feminine. London: Women’s Press. Pheichon. (2017). A publication of Tangkhul Church Delhi. October-January, Vol. 4/3. Ruivah, K. (1993). Social changes among the Nagas (Tangkhul). New Delhi: Cosmo Publications. Scott J. C. (1990). Domination and the art of resistance: Hidden transcripts. New Haven. London: Yale University Press. Sinalei, K. (1996). Contribution of Ms. Alice Pettigrew in the field of women’s education in Manipur. In Rev. William Pettigrew (A pioneer missionary of Manipur) (pp. 26–34). Imphal: Pettigrew Centenary Celebrations Committee. Tangkhul Shanao Long. (2013). Tangkhul Shanao Long: Riyan (Revised edition). Ukhrul: Tangkhul Shanao Long. Tarlo, E. (1996). Clothing matters: Dress and identity in India. New Delhi: Viking Penguin Books. Thomas, J. (2016). Evangelising the Nation: Religion and the formation of Naga political identity. New Delhi: Routledge. Tunyi, Z. (2018). Exploring civil society in Nagaland. In J. J. Wouters & Z. Tunyi (Eds.), Democracy in Nagaland: Tribes, traditions, tensions. Highlander: Kohima. Weiner, A. B., & Schneider J. (Eds.) (1991). Cloth and human experience. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. West, A. C. (1985). Nineteenth century naga material culture. Newsletter (Museum Ethnographers Group). No. 18 (June): 21–34. Wettstein, M. (2014). Naga textiles: Design, technique, meaning and effect of a local craft tradition in Northeast India. Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Art Publishers. Woodward, I. (2007). Understanding material culture. Los Angeles: Sage.

Thingminao Horam is a PhD candidate in the Special Centre for the Study of North East India, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Her area of research interest includes textile studies, cultural studies, material culture, Northeast India studies, and resistance studies.

Glossary

a¯ ‘a’ with an upper dash denotes an extended ‘a’—‘aa’ a ‘a’ underlined is pronounced closer to the sound of ‘u’ A capella/acapella Singing in solo or groups without the accompaniment of musical instruments Appenmen Appointment Arkatti Coercive recruitment system during colonialism Babus Plantation’s clerical staff Baithak An outer apartment reserved for men corresponding to a sitting from the visitors Baku A cloak-like upper garment worn by women and men, tied at the waist typically by a silk sash and is a traditional dress of Sikkim in India’s Northeast Bari Orchard Burra Sahib Senior Manager Chai Indian tea Chambyo Conflict Chamva phor A lozenge patterned motif used in Tangkhul textiles, usually in green and white. It is also known as Konghar Angachang Changkanna Self-improvement amongst the Mizos Chei Literally means ‘decorated’ Cheraw The bamboo-dance wherein the costume is worn by the female dancers is often an extension of that representation Chowkidar Watchman Coolies Racial term to denote the plantation labourers Dacoity Robbery Dhara The traditional dress for women of the Khasi hills in Meghalaya, and is made of plain mulberry silk with patterned borders worn for formal occasions or in public places Dokhona A long woven clothing for Bodo women in Assam, which is traditionally worn to cover the whole body from chest to the lower limbs by wrapping it tightly around the body over the waist like a sheath © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. Nongbri and R. Bhargava (eds.), Materiality and Visuality in North East India, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1970-0

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Gaon Bura A village leader appointed to assist an administrator. It is an institution established by the British which was later adopted by the Indian administrators Gamosa An article of significance in Assam. It is a light cotton towel woven in Assam, typically in white with red motifs, and is held as a sacrosanct article of the indigenous people, used both for rituals and in everyday practice Hazeera Wage Hmanlai fing Wisdom of old amongst the Mizos Hukum Command Hymn Hymn is a style or genre of Christian religious songs sung in praise, and as prayers to god Ilish Also known as Hilsa fish in Bengal and quite sought after for its taste. It is usually highly priced than the other varieties of fish found in Assam. Scientific name for this species of fish is Tenualosa ilisha Jainsem Like the dhara, a dress worn by Khasi women in Meghalaya, is a twopiece attire and part of the identity of the enterprising women of the matrilineal Khasi society. The jainsem is more informal than the dhara and worn as regular everyday wear Jo Hin Jai Hind Junglis The British mapped the Adivasis of Chotanagpur and Sathal Paragannas as ‘junglis’ Kashan It is the Tangkhul term for the wrap-around worn by women around the waist. These were earlier worn with a bodice on the upper body. Today, it is worn with tops or blouses Khaifa akashan A lozenge patterned motif used in Tangkhul textiles. It used to signify prestige, wealth and status Kawr It can refer to either a shirt or a blouse Kawrchei and puanchei Women’s dress in Mizoram often accompanied with a headgear known as the vakiria Khokharum Laa The standard hymnbook of the Hau-Tangkhuls King Naraka King Naraka or Narakasura is considered as the first king of the Naraka Dynasty who established the kingdom of Pragjyotisha in Assam Konghar angachang A lozenge patterned motif used in Tangkhul textiles, usually in green and white. It is also known as Chamva phor. It used to signify prestige, wealth and status Kynjri ksiar Heavy gold chains with large pendants of 24-carat gold often adorn the female dancer in traditional festivals and rituals of the Jaintia tribes of Meghalaya Laal chai Red or black tea Longshim Youth dormitory Luingamla Kashan A Tangkhul wrap-around for women designed by Zamthingla Ruivah in memory of Luingamla Muinao Luirim Kachon A Tangkhul broad shawl worn by men. In the past, it was worn by village chiefs, clan heads/elders of the village Mai-baap Mother and father Ma-le Loads Mami Aunt; mother’s brother’s wife

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Malum mik A diamond shaped motif used in Tangkhul textiles Maran Kasa Feasts of Merit. The practice of giving a series of feasts to mark the growth of a man’s wealth. A man who has given the feasts of merit could wear more elaborate and patterned cloths Mekhela-Chador Traditional attire for Assamese women Memsahib Garden manager’s wife Minis Racial and gendered category to classify the women plantation workers Miyah A term used for the East Bengal origin Muslim Community of Assam Mizo leh vai A monthly in Mizoram that began publishing from the end of 1902 Mohura The spindle, in Assamese language, used as a weaving tool and usually made of bamboo or elephant grass. It is a small frame around which the yarn for weaving is tightly wrapped to facilitate the movement of the shuttle Musicking Musicking or to music is Christopher Small’s conception of music as something that people do: to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practising, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing— covering all participation in a musical performance, whether it takes place actively or passively. The verb to music is not concerned with valuation Neta Politician Puan It is a generic term for all sarong-like wrap-arounds. It is a piece of cloth woven on backstrap looms in Mizoram in two pieces that are later sewn together and worn like a skirt by women. It is regarded as the national dress of the state Pung/Phung A type of drum made out of cylindrical dry wood, with an animal hide stretched over one or both the sides of the hollow wood Phorrei A spiked patterned motif used in Tangkhul textiles, usually in green and indigo. It used to signify prestige, wealth and status Political Presents A practice of ‘gifts’ presented to local villagers, usually village heads, by the colonial officers. It was used to forge friendship and goodwill with people in power in the locality, hence called as ‘political’ presents Puisa Money Rose Kashan A Tangkhul wrap-around for women designed by Ateophy of Kumram village in memory of Rose Ningshen Sardar Labour Corp. Leader, with the responsibility to recruit and manage labourers Sardari Colonial labour recruitment schemes Sardarni Under whom there are 20-25 women plantation workers, a sardarni’s job is to give daily updates to the garden authority Shongfa phor A zig-zag patterned motif used in Tangkhul textiles Surkara Sarkar, meaning the government The chaupal Community building Tonic Sol-fa A system of music notation adapted and popularised by Rev. John Curwen from earlier music systems. This was a pedagogic system dating back to the Victorian era designed for teaching of sight-singing Tunlai fing Wisdom of today amongst the Mizos Watsu Mungdang Ao Women’s organisation