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partition of the subcontinent. Here there are a thousand imagined
homelands that have struggled to become reality.
The phrase ‘northeast’ arrived with the coloniser and his map, in
which over 255 tribes, and their history, their memory and their land,
were violently clubbed together into a fictional region for political
convenience, administrative ease and the purpose of surveilling the
border regions. Unrest and violence have been ubiquitous here. The
result has been six decades of armed conflict, ranging from demands for
self-determination and greater autonomy, to the assertion of more rights,
to complete secession from India. These demands are rooted in a violent
past that has never been acquitted.
As I started my travels in Nagaland, a friend—a musician raised in
both Shillong and Calcutta, who now gives piano lessons in Kalimpong
—had given me a collection of poems he had collected from writers in
the region over the years. Every time he encountered a writer or a poet,
he saved their poem in a document and sourced them.
When no translation existed, he crudely translated the words he
could, and asked his friends for help with other languages. When he
started collecting these writers and poets almost twenty years ago, there
were no anthologies or collections of poetry from this region.
When I asked him what I should read, he sent these poems as a pdf
along with this email:
We have lived through so much, my dear S. Here, we struggle
to find our chronologies. What book should I give you? Where
would this history begin? 20 years ago? 50? 130? Or 400?
What book could explain to you my Tamil friend whose
history is alien to me, and mine to her?
Sometimes I feel poetry is a much better signifier of our
loss, hope and butchered freedoms. Read as you travel. Call
when you return, else stop by in Kalimpong on your way back.
My friend was right; I knew nothing about curfews, martial law, or
growing up around guns. I knew less about the people who lived here.
We carried the same navy-blue Indian passport; we spoke about the
peculiar smell of the passports, which my friend dubbed as the smell of
the ‘mainland imprinted through the bureaucracy’. But beyond this
passport, we had nothing in common. We were strangers bound by the
territorial limits of a nation that struggled to contain us. I knew nothing
about his people’s history. My school textbooks and the newspapers I
read growing up taught me nothing of the many histories of Indian state
violence.
These were places unimagined by my nation’s cartography.
The poet and writer Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, one of the most
important contemporary writers from Meghalaya, appeared in my
friend’s pdf of poems. His prescient phrase captures this: ‘Somewhere in
a forgotten little corner of the world a hill tribe of one million, fearful of
its extinction, waged an arms insurrection against a nation.’
My friend’s other advice to me was, ‘Don’t orientalise the beauty of
this region.’ Beauty and violence coexist, but never as a binary. This
stuck with me. I was here not to tell their stories, but to critique a state
that was complicit in silence, violence and erasure.
Nagaland is home to one of the longest-running conflicts in the world.
Nagas were the first to insist on independence, a separate homeland from
India. Active as early as the 1950s, the Naga insurgency is the oldest and
most potent resistance in India today. This region has seen insurgency,
separatist movements, tribal and non-tribal conflicts. Here violence,
bloodshed, conflict and corruption have spilt over into everyday life. It
was not just boots on the ground that they feared; they also feared an
absolute annihilation of their history, language and identity.
Before British colonisation, the Nagas had very little contact with
the outside world. Like the phrase ‘northeast’, the word ‘Naga’, too, was
an arbitrary grouping of otherwise distinct tribes, communities and
people. The first British incursion into Naga territory took place in 1832.
Captains Francis Jenkins and R.B. Pemberton attempted to map the land
route from the Manipuri kingdom in Imphal to the British headquarters
in Assam. What followed was a series of violent engagements that
stretched over thirty years.
Most accounts from this time—missionary reports, ethnographic
writings and personal diaries of British officers—all casually erase the
brutality of colonial violence. The banning of headhunting, the
annexation of territory, the imposition of Western-style education
through newly arriving missionaries and the papering-over of
complicated local rivalries were all seen as necessary aspects of a
‘backward’ and ‘uncivilised’ people’s transition towards becoming one
nation under the British Crown. In a letter, the secretary to the
Government of Bengal writes, ‘[They] need to restrain the savage tribes
which infest the frontier . . . existing only as pests and nuisance to their
neighbours, and to wean them gradually from their present habits of
plunder and outrage against inhabitants of British territory.’
3
Colonisation was described as ‘the most precious gift for all those caught
in the state of barbarous disorder.’
4
A certain kind of violence was not
only allowed, but justified.
Eighty years later, Naga forces were enlisted and sent to France as
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