By Reeju Ray

THE term north-east of India as a geographical location consists of eight states (Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura, Sikkim ) each linguistically and cultur-ally diverse. The term north-east is also used to mark a certain identity. I often introduce myself as a historian working on the north-east, or as someone from the north-east. For me, the geographical location is synonymous with home. However, it is also a classificatory term that is limiting and exclusionary. The characterisation of people or places as north-eastern feeds into the imaginary of this region as a homogenous corner of India, and often validates tropes used by the colonial and postcolonial rulers to contain, domesticate, and control the space.

Common tropes, such as violence and isolation, used in discussions and writings on the region and its people are rooted in the history of colonial rule. Associating this geographical region to ideas of isolation, violence, danger, nature, periphery and so on has a long history of oppression and marginalisation. In this article I will not elaborate upon these colonial processes that have affected present-day sociopolitical realities but will instead highlight the contribution of women writers from north-east India who engage with, break down, and demystify some of these common tropes.

Mitra Phukan, whose fictional works are based in Assam, points out that “writers in English from the north-east” is a useful category because of certain shared contexts of class and social location. As she points out, many of the women writers are first-generation writers in English and often have lived outside of the region for work or education — the latter gives some of these works a trans-regional perspective and further complicates the category north-eastern. However, the category seems less and less useful any more than a geographical indicator because of what the authors reveal in these narratives.

North-east on the map: violence as trope

For the colonial rulers in the 19th century coercion and violence were necessary tools for transforming the region into a north-eastern frontier on the imperial map. Coercion went alongside processes of negotiation, diplomacy, information and knowledge building. The region was never entirely under the control of the British, with autonomous zones and sovereign polities existing within the larger imperial space. This history of autonomy and resistance is made accessible and problematised in recent fiction writing by women writers such as Mamang Dai, Temsula Ao and Easterine Kire.

The journalistic, even scholarly writings have often relied on basic assumptions about violence being a central and pervasive characteristic of the region. The social and political aspects that char-acterise contemporary realities such as nationalist struggles, inter-ethnic conflict, identity assertion movements etc. have been represented as within a larger trope of violence inherent in the region. However authors such as Dai and Kire depict the past and present lives of people in this region and their experience of violence as distinct from the mainstream and pervasive understandings.

Dai’s historical fiction, The Black Hill, set in the 19th century, is a vivid reimagining of the colonial encounter with the Abor and Mishmee groups. She uses the colonial archive to unearth and recon-struct an actual event — the murder of a Jesuit missionary Father Nicolas Krick who was on his way to Tibet to set up a mission there. The disruption of colonial intrusion (into what is present-day Arunachal Pradesh) brings two lovers from different tribes together. At the heart of the narrative is the voice of a young girl called Gimur and her lover Kajinsha. Gimur’s life, her thoughts, feelings, and actions give access to the gendered experiences of colonial encounter. Dai demonstrates the layered nature of colonialism and the simultaneous yet distinctly gendered experiences of the people’s lives it uncovers. Kire’s Mari uncovers the story of her aunt Khrielieviü Mari O’Leary and the impact of the Japanese invasion into the Naga hills during World War II. The war front of the north-east during the final years of colonial rule are forgotten not only in the grand narratives of the war fought in Europe, but also in historical works on the British empire. The recounting of the story of doomed lovers — Vic, a soldier in the British army, and Mari — is a window into entwined, non-combative relationships, breaking rigid binaries of the coloniser-colonised.

Once again the lives of women affected by colonialism and war are beautifully rendered. Violence is explained not as an abstract quality of the place but as materially shaping the everyday by forces both within and external to the society. Kire uses a diary left by her aunt as her primary source to reconstruct the narrative. These two works therefore offer readers as well as historians and social scientists a unique and nuanced understanding of historical events and life experiences of the inhabitants. Gendered violence is explored as not only a condition of interpersonal relationships but a factor central to state and military violence.

Ao, a leading literary figure and educator, similarly offers a microscopic insight into the struggle for an independent Nagaland, and the ways in which state violence and war affect the lives of ordinary people, in The Hills called Home: Stories from a War Zone. Like her memoir Once Upon a Life: Burnt Curry and Bloody Rags, the stories she narrates at once provide a larger context of militarisation, state violence and internecine conflict and also reveal the contradictions, aspirations, love and struggle of individuals and communities.

Although the theme of violence is central in these works, the manifestations and experience of violence is revealed as quite different from the general understanding in relation to the region. Violence and aggression were common tropes used by the British to describe autonomous and even directly administered tribal groups. Such characterisations enabled the ‘lawful’ use of military offensives, and reconnaissance warfare to quell autonomy and resistance. Colonial construction of the region in government records and unofficial publications has had a profound influence on the postcolonial Indian understanding of the north-east and its people.

These works of fiction not only provide a corrective to general assumptions and stereotypes, but highlight the specific effect of colonial and state violence, insurgency and militancy on the lives of the largely rural women and families of those fighting in the war. By examining violence as a gendered experience, these authors offer an analysis of the overlapping relationship between insurgency and law, military and militancy, statist violence and societal formations.

Looking beyond the frontier: isolation as a trope

The Himalayan borderlands discombobulated to form the north-east frontier of the British empire was further fragmented with the formation of India and Pakistan in 1947 and Burma in 1948. Boundaries drawn over the 19th and 20th centuries in arbitrary fashion by colonial officials became international borders separating communities with linguistic, cultural, and social affinities. Thus, to imagine the north-east as a physically contained space is to invisibilise the larger social formation and politico-economic space that it was once a part of. The dynamic trading networks and social interchange that spread across this space disproves the idea of isolation of tribes and tribal culture.

In her short story collection, Boats on Land, Janice Pariat narrates stories that traverse the postcolonial present and colonial past of the Khasi hills with equal ease. The stories blur the boundaries between myth and reality, past and present. Magical realism is usefully employed to explore the knowledge systems that have been marginalised by Western scientific and rational approaches to the past and present.

The stories reveal the presence of “outsiders” in the land of the Khasi tribes including missionaries, colonial officials, white soldiers, Bengali employees of the government from neighboring Sylhet, and the relationships, both violent and intimate, that formed between the colonisers and the colonised. The hierarchical power relationships between these groups are undercut by intimate relationships, for example when a young rural Khasi boy and a 15-year-old orphaned British girl fall in love. The stories do not allow for a resolution of those relationships in any easy manner. Instead one is left with the impression that love in the colonial context was afflicted with the violence of race, class, and gender differences.

Other such books set in the Khasi hills are Iadalang Pyngrope’s One Sohra Summer and Bijoya Sawian’s A Family Secret And Other Stories. Pyngrope’s work buys into the isolation trope but also reveals the connections between the Sylhet plains in present-day Bangladesh, and Sohra, more popularly known as Cherrapunjee (a town in Meghalaya at present and a British sanatorium in the hills in the past). Sawian’s stories celebrate the uniqueness of Khasi’s matrilineal society, and although she doesn’t offer a feminist retelling, women appear as central characters affected by modernity, education, and change. The stories break the isolation stereotype by showing experiences, exchanges, connections, and relationships that are lived not only within the physical confines of the hills but in various cities across India.

Other authors show the connections between rural contexts of the north-eastern states and urban-modernised lives in big cities like Delhi, Bangalore, Calcutta and across India. These works explore the trajectory of lives of people from the north-east such as students, entrepreneurs, and those employed in government and private sectors living outside of the north-east. Their relationship to home is fraught just like their identities.

Dai’s Stupid Cupid, set in the Indian capital New Delhi, helps the reader travel between Arunachal Pradesh and the capital. Challenging the myth of isolated tribal lives, the rural and urban, and modern and traditional are shown to be inextricably connected. Anjum Hasan’s Lunatic in my Head explores the lives of people caught in an identity matrix, the longing from home and a desire for flight. Set in the lovely town of Shillong, the book is plotted through a series of emotions such as sadness, fear, love, disgust, and wonder. It highlights the sharpening differences between the indigenous Khasis and non-Khasis who reside there, the slow and meandering pace of the lives of people living in this town, and the almost irresoluble questions of identity and belonging.

The unfortunate result of conflict and insurgency movements within the larger set-up of a militarised state system, visible in all states of the north-east, is the essentialising of identities of its inhabi-tants. The insider and outsider are shifting but always present categories in the present day. The deeply rooted idea of the Other, sharpened by changing contexts of insurgency, militarisation, and gender violence, emerges as a key issue in these works. The essentialised and multiple Others leave little room to explore the ambiguity of identities caused by a long history of associations, intima-cies, exchange and contact. The reconceptualisation of the north-east as part of a region beyond the confines of national boundaries can bring to light many illuminating histories and narratives of groups and communities of the region.

As much as there is cause to celebrate the growing corpus of literary works by women including poetry, monographs, novels, short stories and non-fiction, they also represent a fraction of the stories from north-east India. Amplifying the voices of a gendered minority within the patriarchal nation state contributes to the richness of literature being produced by regional writers in India. Marking the absence of voices from marginalised spaces in India, these authors engage with and challenge the tropes of violence and isolation of the north-east.

REEJU RAY is a historian from Shillong and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Women’s Studies and Feminist Research Department at the University of Western Ontario, Canada.