Hello everyone, welcome to yet another session of the NPTEL course titled Indian Fiction in English. Today's lecture is titled Writings in English from the Northeast reading Tamsula Awe. We begin this lecture by Giving a background to the writings in English produced from the Northeast and we focus especially on the writer Temsula Ao.
There are two short story collections which are briefly discussed as part of this lecture. In 2015, Mamang Dai, one of the most known, one of the best known writers from the North East remarked that the North East is writing and is being written about. So it is a very recent phenomenon and it also needs to be kept in mind that the writings from the North East are not written about. northeast began to emerge and began to acquire visibility only in the recent decades.
So the initial flowering of the Indian English fiction which we noticed in the earlier decades from the 1930s onwards or the second coming or this watershed event, Midnight's Children which had a major impact on the writings produced from India from the 1980s onwards. These events did not have a major bearing on the kind of productions that came out from the Northeast. We need to look at this kind of writing though this is in English from a different perspective altogether. This lecture is all about trying to showcase the different context from which the writings from Northeast have been emerging.
And in these last few decades especially from the late 2000s onwards we find a major impact of emerging literatures of the Northeast region. The term emerging is used significantly in most discussions about the writings from the northeast region and these writings are available both in English and also in the vernacular tongue. There are also a number of translations which are coming out in the recent times and many critics and writers from the northeast region and also the outsiders they feel that these last few decade the last few years have been instrumental in making such works accessible for the first. time to the rest of the world.
In the context of the absence of authentic histories of most communities in the Northeast, we also find the creative writers taking the role of cultural historians to provide alternate histories. So very often than not, we find the fictional writings from the Northeast being read as alternate forms of history. history as well. And there is also a different context from which we can look at these discussions.
There is a prevalent oral culture which is part of most communities and tribal communities of the Northeast. And there is also a print culture which is associated with the modern kinds of writing. An amalgamation of these both, the oral culture and the print culture, it is also important to understand the spirit of what it means to write about the Northeast or how to define and access the Northeast.
Some of the important works of the recent times which have been instrumental in redefining and reshaping the perspectives towards this kind of writing include their work edited by Margaret Zama, Emerging Literatures from Northeast India, the another anthology edited by Tilottama Misra, the Oxford Anthology of Writings from Northeast India which consists of poetry and essays and a collection of essays edited by Preeti Gill, The Peripheral Centre, Poemices from India's Northeast. One of the recent works on literary criticism, literary cultures of India's northeast, Naga writings in English, these are some of the works which have tried to bring together the new writings, the commentaries on the new writings and the new perspectives which will also present these new writings in the context of the contemporary. Talking about the northeast, it is not a term that signifies homogeneity as we often tend to use it. It comprises of 8 different states but nevertheless.
There is a certain homogeneity and a number of sweeping statements which are associated with the Northeast as if it is one geographical and political entity. And the defining of the Northeast is also dominated by the misconception and misrepresentation by outsiders, the ones who are clueless about what the Northeast is about but still claim to have access to the truth, to the lived realities which are inside. And this area, the northeast is commonly associated with terror, insurgency and is seen as a violently explosive territory as Eastern Iralu one of the writers pointed out in 2004. Let media stop defining the Northeast by the conflicts going on there. Let media focus on ordinary people and their lives.
Let exoticization of the Northeast stop. So the only image available of the Northeast for public for white consumption outside of the Northeast in the mainland. It is that of either of.
Now, violent explosive territory or of an exotic remote location and this place is geographically and politically it is seen as being cut off from the nation. It is considered as a source of a place of bewilderment and external myth making and this could partly be due to the remote ways in which this area is located. It is away from the political. cultural and geographical center.
It could also be due to the less exposure in the publishing and consumer world which also dominate certain image making and certain kinds of stereotypical notions. The writings on the northeast are also informed by this troubled political climate, the beautiful landscape where which is hallmark of the almost the entire northeast and the confluence of various ethnic groups. And, this has led to not merely a factual kind of representation, but this has led to mostly a stereotypical and an exotic representation of the Northeast. And in a post-colonial sense, the difficult relationship that the Northeast shared with the Indian state, the historical nature of those relationships, it also had a major impact on the limited perspectives which are available on looking at the Northeast. The term Northeast India has been much contested.
This term has been dismissed by some of the writers, activists and the academics from the Northeast as a colonial and artificial construct. This term, the concept of Northeast, they argue that it is a purely geographical concept. It is like saying the Far East or the Middle East where the defining happens not from the inside but from the outside. And this label Preeti Gill also points out it is a meaningless and inappropriate label. It also reflects an external and not local point of view.
So it is bound to be limited in multiple ways. Sanjeev Bhadwa also held the opinion that unlike place names that evoke cultural or historical memory, the term Northeast India cannot easily become the emotional focus of a collective political project. So there are a number of writers and. Contemporary thinkers have begun to identify the limitations of using this term North East.
Barrow also by extension points out that the troubled post-colonial history that the North East shares with the Indian state, it really did not sit very comfortably with the standard narrative of democracy in India which also forces the writings about the North East and the representations of the North East to be outside the purview of what the mainstream literature. the main course of literature usually deals with. There are however of late few writers who really made it big who have got visibility in the national scene such as Mitra Phukan, Trubha Hazariga, Temsula Aai, Mamang Dai and Anjum Hassan. Some of them have also gone to win renowned awards like Mamang Dai.
In this lecture we focus on the writings by Temsula Aai. Temsula Aai is from Nagaland. She won the Sai Tegademi Award in 2013. Though today we are looking at her fictional writings, she is of the opinion that she would like to be considered as a poet first.
It is also said that her best work has come out in the form of poetry. We first take a look at a collection of short stories by Temsler Au which is called These Hills Called Home. It also bears the subtitle Stories from a War Zone and this is a collection of FAP. 10 stories titled The Jungle Major, Suwaba, The Last Song, The Curfew Man, The Night, The Pot Maker, Shadows, An Old Man Remembers, The Journey and A New Chapter.
As we noted earlier, we can see here that these are stories about ordinary men and women. The titles also imply that. This work has also been dedicated for those who know what we have done to ourselves. And this in that sense this could be seen as a typical post-colonial narrative of resistance. This was published by Zuban which was earlier Kali for Women.
one also encourages these. These publications of alternate narratives and alternate histories which would provide a counter narrative to the dominant forces of Indian writing in English that we had been talking about. As the subtitle of this collection implies, stories from a war zone, these stories were born out of the conflicting period in Nagaland mainly in the 1960s and 1970s. There is a prefatory section before the stories begin which Temsila has chosen to title as Letters to the Sages. lest we forget, I read to you an excerpt from this preface, which would also give us a sense of the way in which these stories and these histories have been located.
I read to you this excerpt. In these stories, I have endeavored to revisit the lives of those people whose pain has so far gone unmentioned and unacknowledged. These stories, however, are not about historical facts, nor are they about Contamination, justice or justification of the events which raged through the land like wildfire half a century ago.
On the contrary, what the stories are trying to say is that in such conflicts, there are no winners, only victims and the results can be measured only in human terms. In the same preface, she also gives a context for these stories. Many of the stories in this collection have their genesis in the turbulent years of bloodshed and tears that make up the history of the Nagas from the early 50s of the last century and the demand for independence. from the Indian state. These stories try to capture the ambience of the traditional Naga way of life.
So there are two things which inform the context of most of these stories. Some of them have a very predominant engagement. with the violent history of the region and some of them also try to capture the ambience of traditional Naga way of life. And as we noted earlier in the absence of authentic histories, in the absence of visible forms of histories, we can engage with these documents, these narratives as historical narratives and as historical documents as well.
There are some suggestions. significant short stories in this collection of 10 stories and 3 of them we find having an important or very different kind of focus on the female characters and the individuals here also become very very important. Though the stories are presented in the backdrop of the war zone, in the backdrop of the many violent happenings which dominate the region, we find that there is a humanness, there is a norm.
which comes through these tellings. In a story titled The Jungle Major, we find a woman saving her husband from the hands of soldiers through her presence of mind. Here what becomes important in the plot line is not the major event which is related to violence, which is related to the war zone but what becomes important is the presence of mind and the quality of the individual which emerges as being more powerful. powerful than the situation itself.
In Curfew Man, we find another powerful female character where the wife helps the husband to find a suitable job for himself. Though eventually it really cannot win any favour for him, we find the female characters getting caught in these situations in spite of themselves. We also find that Temsula Au has been able to show rather skilfully how the trauma is more than ever. tragic, how the trauma comes down more heavily on women than perhaps on men.
Not to say that the trauma had affected women more than the men but it affected them in varying degrees and these experiences have a dominant gender difference in their lives. In the story that night, we have the protagonist as a young girl. She has made a strong decision for a good upbringing of her children though she herself is neglected by the society.
And I find the story particularly impressive because it does talk about a future. It does talk about this ray of hope which is there, the ambition which is there in spite of the situations within which these characters are fraught. So there is a certain humanness, there is a certain ordinariness and a normalcy which Thames Law is able to bring into her short stories.
She is able to bring into the many narratives. and which I believe also has the power to transcend the many exotic violent narrations about this region. I also now invite Shweta one of her students to share a few things from another short story collection by Temsila Aav titled Labanum of my head. I hope that this will also give you an entry to talk about some kind of an introduction. production to engage with other works produced from the northeast to engage with other writers who belong to the northeast.
I also encourage you to be more familiar with different perspectives and different regional inputs like this which also feed into and which also get more energy in return from this vast body of writing now known as Indian Fiction in English. Thank you. I will be talking about Temsula Aue who is a North Eastern author and one collection of stories that she has written called Labunim for my head.
Aue was born in Assam in 1945 in October and she grew up mainly in Nagaland. Her parents died when she was very young and she grew up. in Nagaland.
She studied mainly in Nagaland through with the help of two missionaries who funded her education and later received her masters from Assam, came down to Hyderabad at the Centre for English and Foreign Language. languages and earned a teaching degree there and went back to Shillong where she taught at the Northeastern Hill University and where she still taught until very recently and she retired a few years ago. She was the, she was a professor of English and she was also the dean for the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences.
In between her teaching stint, she was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Minnesota for Yes, for two years. This is a very bare bones overview of her. But, oh yes, I am sorry.
She was also the director for the North Eastern Zone of Cultural Centre. And that is a fairly high post in the government where they go around, the officials rather, go around collating cultural evidences, curating folk songs, folk dances, legends, folklore, things like that. And And I think she was an officer for nearly 5 years according to my notes. Right these are her main works. She has not written much not in the conventional sense of much at least.
The Aonaga oral tradition was her first compilation of folklore from her own area. These Hills Called Homes stories from a war zone deals with Naga, deals with the situation in Naga land as it was when she knew it. and Labanum for my head is her most recent one, well it was in 2009 and it won the Sahitya Academy Award in 2013 but interestingly these Hills called home have received more attention, critical attention as such than this one even though this is an award winning collection.
She is focused, she is said that she personally prefers poetry and she would like to be considered a poet rather than authoress and she has written one, two, three, four, yes five collections of poems. James and she also says that she considers songs in poetry to be very similar so it is alright she interchanges the two quite frequently. Ao studied English literature all her life and she was also a professor of English and she has written exactly one critical essay as such and that is on Henry James and it is called Henry James's Quest for an Ideal Heroine but it has received absolutely no attention and there are no copies available on the internet. So I So I suppose she started out there and realized that she wasn't receiving much attention and came back to documenting Naga folklore because if you see the dates there for the poetry in 92 to 2007, she was the cultural officer, the one I mentioned from 92 to 97. So she possibly, these two sections interlapped quite, overlapped quite a bit.
Right. This is the book I've read and this is what I'll be trying to confine my presentation to. Labanum for My Head is a collection of short stories. It's eight stories in the book.
The titles are up there. The very short stories, they're very easy to read. They're not interconnected in any way.
And they're very simple as well. So the first story, Labanum for My Head, is about a woman called... called Lentina who lives in Nagaland, who lives in a fairly upper middle class setting you might say, although Aho never specifies it, you just glean all this when you are reading the book because she has a car and she is the only one in the village who is well off in comparison to the others, she knows how to read and write while everybody else needs to use their thumb prints, it's things like that. She grows up with this woman Lentina.
She grows up with a desire to have a laburnum tree in her garden because she's always been captivated by the yellow flowers. And all her efforts at trying to grow one of these trees fails. And her family thinks she's obsessed with the laburnum tree and quite openly make fun of her for it. And then... Ao very quickly kills off Lentina's husband in a matter of two lines or so.
She says he died of some mysterious disease and that really isn't so important as is the fact that it's only at her husband's funeral that Lentina realizes what she's going to do to get her laburnum tree. She decides to buy a section of the cemetery and she decides to plant a laburnum tree there when she's alive and once it blossoms and once it grows into a full-fledged tree, she wants to be buried underneath it. And this is what she does or proceeds to do with the help of her trusted driver.
And her family thinks she is crazy. She has three sons and three daughters-in-law and all of them think she is obsessed with laburnum trees. But she goes ahead and does it anyway.
And as the tree grows, Lentina grows older and older and closer to death. But she is resolved not to die until she has seen the tree blossom at least once. And this she does. So the... The moment the tree blossoms, the driver takes her to see the tree and two days later or so she passes away in her sleep.
And she, oh interestingly yes, she, the section of land that she has bought, she gives it over to the cemetery on the condition that there will be no tombstones erected there. Only plants will be grown in lieu of tombstones of course, so that you have a very colorful spectacle and the laburnum tree is. the main focus in the cemetery. That's the main story I intended to focus upon, but there are a few more that I have read that I might keep referring to.
One is Death of a Hunter, and then the letter, and then a simple question. Death of a Hunter is, I might not do the story justice if I explain it, but I will give a very bare overview of it. It's about a man who lives in a village who is a primary school teacher.
except he is also the most renowned hunter in the village. The story opens with him intending to kill a boar that's been devastating all their rice fields for nearly three years now. And he starts remembering his past hunting exploits and he dwells upon one in particular where the government ordered him to kill a rogue elephant.
And he did because the government left him no choice but he did not accept the government's request. Well, he accepted the government's payment but he did not accept the gun they gave him because he felt that it would be akin to selling his soul to people he did not really hold any water with. Then he goes ahead and he kills the boar and except the boar's ghost or memory haunts him until he makes an offering of his own hair to the spirit to appease it and the hauntings stop.
It doesn't sound very well put together. other but it reads much nicer I can assure you. The letter is a nicer, it is a shorter story but it is also very poignant. It is about again another village in Nagaland that is being pulled apart by both government, by both the Indian army and by underground quote unquote rebel forces in Nagaland and the people are caught, they need to pay taxes to these underground forces, they need to cooperate with the army.
periodically get questioned, interrogated and beaten up by both sections and they are not very happy about this. And there is one man who is trying to make ends meet very much. He is trying to give his son a good education, he is trying to keep his wife in good health, he is also trying to feed himself, it is a lot going on.
And what he does is he acts as an informer for the rebels upon the government. And I think that is what is happening. At the end, nobody gets to know of this until the very end when they kill him because he's an underground force, so to speak. And he's been demanding higher and higher taxes from the village.
And the people who kill him are three young brash men in the village and they kill him. And then they go through his pockets and they look at the letter and they find a letter in his pocket that says he was trying to fund his son's university fees and, you know, that he'll be able to get some money in a week or so. And it's that one week.
in which he terrorizes the village asking for more money. And they realize that he was actually a villager from some other village but who was struggling just as they are. A simple question I will elaborate if necessary.
I have not made too many references to it. But this, all her stories are very much like this. They deal with ordinary people, with common people, not with, there is no grandiose reference to the army as this savior or as this.
A heroic force that comes in liberating people from dark forces or anything of the sort. Themes, I do not know if you can call them themes as such. These are just things you see when you read. I do not think I would categorize them as themes, but for want of a better word, I will with the addition of a question mark.
A different view of the Indian state. This I have said this. The army is not.
salvation of any sort. The villagers hate the army equally, seem to sympathize a bit more with the rebels because they are from villages that are very much like their own. And when one of the rebels is beating up a villager for not paying the tax, the man says, well, I needed to send the fees so that my son can sit in an exam.
And it's a civil services exam. And the rebel leader hears that and he says, why are you... Paying for your son to be part of the Indian government, it's the government that's oppressing us.
And it says, even as he uttered the word Indian, his face seemed to distort with naked rage, like a fierce animal at the sight of an adversary. And he would have killed the man simply because he was helping his son get into the Indian government if it hadn't been for the quick-wittedness of another villager. This comes up in a simple question. Whichever village allowed the setting up of an army camp became prime suspects in the eyes of the underground.
And as a form of punishment were taxed double the amount. Resisting the coming of the army on the other hand was not an option because then the government itself would initiate measures to punish the uncooperative village. It goes on to say that the government, the Indian government who was supposed to protect the state would make the people of the village work without food or without wages at menial labour, you know, levelling hills and clearing roads and things like that.
And if the villagers still continue to resist, then they would quite simply burn down the granaries and drive the villagers away into the forests. And this is something the Indian army does, so the villagers have very little sympathy for them. But they are living in a very precarious position because they try and keep peace with both the army and the rebels in all of these stories. And it's also to be noted that this isn't the main focus of these stories. All of this is taken for granted.
And it's... It's like this is all the mention there is of the army and of the hardships the people undergo. It's been a way of life so long that Ayo seems to have normalized it quite a bit.
Identity is another thing that you can sort of cull out from the readings. It's not there in an obvious sense of the word. Previously, he the hunter had been in control all the time and chosen when, what and when to kill, but it was not so with the huge elephant lying dead before them.
The prey had been allotted to him. This is the death of a hunter when he realizes that he is killing at the gunman's insistence. And it also goes on to describe that a true Naga hunter takes pleasure in his kill because he is killing for the necessity of it and not simply for the pleasure of it. And he describes how a hunt goes on. He says you wait, you lay in wait, you lay traps, you wait for the animal to show up, sometimes it is days, sometimes it is hours and then you take careful aim.
And you might perhaps say a little prayer hoping to be forgiven for killing the animal and then you kill the animal. But it was not so with this one. He says he felt none of this when he was killing a prey that was allotted to him. And then when the government gives him his cash reward and a new gun, Iman Chowk who is the hunter does not accept the gun as I've already said because he doesn't want to be obligated to the government and also he doesn't want this to become a regular thing.
He doesn't want his... He is his, I will say identity, but I do not quite mean it. His identity as a hunter to be co-opted so entirely by the government.
So it is, he does not think of himself as a hunter and as a manchurian in two different ways, they are one and the same. Nature is again, it is something that is so prevalent that I do not think it should be classified as a theme, but for want of themes in general, I will put it down as one. This is from the first story, Labanum for my head. Aho talks about, or rather this is Lentina describing the graveyard at first. I am sorry, this is not Lentina.
This is Aho describing the graveyard with the labanum tree in it. The phenomenon stood out as a magnificent incongruity in the space where man tries to cling to a make-believe permanence wrenched from him by death. So she talks about how in a space of death, which is a cemetery, There are grander and grander monuments and stone tablets as the days go by.
And the people who die just seem to crumble away even more beneath the earth. But she said that... Rather, she says that these tombstones have, today rather, even have photographs adorning. them of the dead. They're not just simple tombstones with the name, right, date of birth, date of death, he was loving father, husband, whatever.
No, it's even got photographs and the glossy photographs that are embossed onto the stone. And she dislikes all of this opulence enormously, which is why Lentina goes on to decide that she will have a cemetery where no tombstones will be erected and just be plants and flowering bushes and such like. And the laburnum tree is supposed to be a symbol of immortality in this space of death. It is a very nice story, that one.
Right, so this is an overview of all the stories in the book, rather detailed overview. But it is very hard to fit Ao in anywhere. She and...
All of the other quote unquote north eastern writers dislike the label intensely. They say that it is defacing all of the north east and it is just a shorthand way of referring to people. people from that geographical region who might who actually do not have that much of a similarity in their writings, but whom people believe should have a similarity in their writings because there is violence and where is it going on?
It is going on in the northeast, not in specific states, but in the northeast. The, at least in the essay, there is an essay written by Meenakshi Mukherjee, I am sorry, by Thilothi Mamistra who has compiled an anthology of Northeastern literature and she says that every Northeastern state has at least 25 or 26 languages or tribes that have their own languages that are perfectly unintelligible to each other. And when these people can't comprehend or can't understand entirely what people from other groups are saying, it's certainly not right to classify all of them and lump them into one category that says Northeastern writings.
She also says that perhaps in the 60s or 70s, schools in the Northeast stopped teaching as such schools of certain standard had only English. So first generation learners who went to these schools, the only language they came out with possessing high levels of competency and confidence in. English and Mishra says that if they choose to write in English then it should be perfectly alright because it's the only language they feel confident writing in and she also points to a number of examples in which these writers have made English their own language.
I shan't say an Indian language because the North East does not see itself as Indian as such but these writers have, there is none of the conflict. that we've been seeing amongst the, between the Basha writers and the English writers so far in the trajectory of Indian fiction in English. These writers or specifically Ayo does not seem to be conflicted by it.
She is perfectly happy to write in English. She makes no apologies and she is very confident in it. So Timothy Brennan in 1989, he is a scholar and an author. He says that there should be or rather he identifies a section of writers called Third World Cosmopolitan Writers which are when the flounce and the fancy stripped away, Mukherjee says is simply post-colonial writers, emerged from a non-Western culture, but their mastery over the current idiom of the metropolitan meta-language of narrative ensures their favorable reception in the global centers of publication and criticism.
Global centers of publication and criticism, these are centers that have always been hotspots for publications and criticisms, mainly the Western world, London, Europe, I suppose New York, and a lot of centers in the States as well. Meta language of narrative that Mukherjee explains is nothing more than parameters and categories that is been set forth by these centres of publication and criticism and these are the only means of recognition that any writer who writes in English will receive. So it is to be expected that post-colonial writers will stress upon themes of colonialism or of post-colonialism or of of discovering their identity once they have been, once they have, I do not know, ushered the colonial forces out of their land. This is what is expected of them and it is only when they deal with themes like these that they will gain acceptance as is seen with Rushdie.
Aarhus work especially does not deal with the nation, does not deal with the nation in any sense of the word, it does not even acknowledge the Indian nation to be a major part apart from destroying the lives of common people in Nagaland. It's, it's. always mentioned in passing, there is never any explicit reference to it and she focuses more on the daily lives of people in the villages in, I have not read that much of her work apart from this book, but mainly in the villages about how their daily lives are torn apart and interestingly her poetry goes back to. Legends and myths in the Awu tribe in Nagaland and she draws upon that and says that you know well we have given all of this up to a sort of ape, a western culture. There is no animosity there, it is just more along matter of fact observation.
kind of statement that she makes. Right. There is also a difference between post-colonial and post-colonial without the hyphen. This is debated over, but I think it is a bit interesting.
So, post-colonial with the hyphen emphasizes the fact that. Any writing that is post-colonial with the hyphen is something that is written chronologically in the time period after you gain independence. And any writing that is post-colonial without the hyphen just deals with the state. of being post-colonial.
Am I making enough sense? I hope I do. Right. That's basically it. And this is Ao.
She's not written... There's no critical material... material on her work. There is all of her works are analyzed through the lens of eco-criticism, but I think that quite frankly that is quite lazy because simply because there is a lot of nature in her work, there is an eco-critical lens that slammed on to it and said right well she is clearly advocating that nature should be saved and things like that.
But there is I do not hold with that. And she says that the reason I write in English is because I feel at home in that medium that also my might be as all my life I taught English for a living. She also says that the Northeastern identity is a misnomer because the region is home to a multitude of people with diverse languages, cultures, costumes and therefore no one should use this term because it defaces the real identity of the people living here. There is also been work that is posited in a very roundabout way that the Northeast is still trying to find its identity, not Northeast as such but specific groups of people.
people in the North East and that Nagaland specifically advocated independence in 1945 or 47 and ever since then it has been dealing with the disillusionment of this dream. Right, Ao also says that however in my writing I would like to retain the white spots because they give me a certain identity of being a Naga writing the language not her mother tongue. So you think when you read Ao that she is a fairly apolitical writer that she is not not dealing too much with the political undertones, overtones of the entire situation because it is so very normal that it is not necessary to point it out.
But in an interview when asked if you know right okay so you have been receiving a lot of attention so far and people are ranking you as one of the best writers in India and who sort of belong to the global cosmopolitan elite, what do you think of it? And she said, well I am certainly not one of the best and I do not aspire to do away with my identity completely as most of these writers have. I have nothing against them and I do not condemn them for it. But I quite simply personally speaking I think I would like to see myself as a Naga writing in English not as a person who is so very confident in English that I do not know any other language.
She interestingly went back and learnt Assamese. how to read and write it fluently enough so that she could read and write in it. I do not think she does, but she just, according to her, she wanted to know it well enough. That is about it.
Right. That is about it.