BUT I AM ONE OF YOU: NORTHEAST INDIA AND THE STRUGGLE TO BELONG
Edited by Samrat Choudhury and Preeti Gill
HarperCollins, Rs 499
The book is a collage of biographical notes of 19 authors. The overall message is that the constitutional identity modern India pledges to its citizens can be secondary to the primal, contesting identities of linguistic groups in the Northeast. This is made evident from a collage of voices.
Indira Laishram, a Meitei from Cachar in Assam, who grew up in Shillong and worked in Delhi before settling in Australia, finds herself never completely accepted at any of these places. This is even among Manipur’s Meiteis, indicating the fault lines within the community along regional accents and vocabularies. Makepeace Silthou, a Kuki and the daughter of an army officer, grew up in cantonments. She came to believe she was a global citizen but discovers that the India outside the army’s closed world is very different. Veio Pou, a Naga lecturer in Delhi University, finds himself to be similarly alienated in his adopted residential locality.
Teresa Rehman writes of two Pangal sisters (Meitei Muslims) who are married and settled in Assam. But their hearts remain wedded to Manipur, its culture and cuisines, even though bridges remain unbuilt between them and the predominantly Hindu Meiteis.
Margaret Ch Zama profiles the shattering of her girlhood innocence in her boarding school in Assam by the Mizo rebellion of 1966. Pratap Chhetri writes of the Gorkhas in Mizoram — they even fought alongside Mizo rebels — remaining aliens in that state.
Haamari Jamatia and Subir Bhaumik present two aspects of the identity friction between Bengalis and Tripura tribals. Bhaumik takes the cerebral approach to presume tribal land alienation and inadequate representation in power corridors as the causes for this and suggests ways of offsetting this imbalance. Jamatia charts deeper, intangible injuries of the tribals who had come to see even their customs and attires as primitive and shameful. In later years, wearing these attires in public became their statement of resistance.
Ramona Sangma ridicules the exotification of tribals and shows that the matrilineal tradition amongst the Garos is not the opposite of patrilineal ways. Patricia Mukhim deliberates on the inherent suspicion of outsiders among the Khasis, making her wonder if she is really an insider given her father is an Assamese Muslim.
Vatsala Tiberwalla, a Marwari girl with ancestral roots in Shillong, provides another insight. She is saddened by the ‘us versus them’ division, but implies that the blame must be shared. Her community has also refrained from integration, discouraging children from fraternising with local peers in schools, securing the community’s closed world.
Abhishek Saha sketches the ambiguity of the NRC exercise in Assam and its resultant traumas. Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty ridicules the absurdity of identity-profiling. Rashmi Narzary highlights how non-Assamese communities like Bodos remain invisible in Assam till they resort to violence.
Nona Arhe writes of how migrant labourers in Nagaland are destined to be aliens. Ranju Dodum gives a similar picture of Arunachal Pradesh and explains how tribals see their identity as intrinsic.
Karma Paljor and Naresh Agarwal co-author the last chapter, discussing the nuanced history of the insider-outsider divide in Sikkim.