Literary Cultures of India's Northeast: Naga Writings in English

Book Review: People and Articulations in Naga Literatures

February 2, 2016, Morung Express

Manjeet Baruah

Literary Cultures of India’s Northeast: Naga Writings in English by K.B. Veio Pou
Publisher: Heritage Publishing House
Pages: 213, Price: Rs. 300/-

K.B. Veio Pou’s book Literary Cultures of India’s Northeast: Naga Writings in English is an important contribution to the study of literature and culture of Northeast India. It is important because it is an extensive study of Naga literatures, especially since the twentieth century. It is also important because it provides a nuanced view of literatures in English that have emerged from the region during the period. Divided into five chapters, the book covers themes which are as historical and political as they are literary and cultural. Therefore, it makes the study not only one on literature, but also a socio-cultural history of the Nagas, possibly one of the few in this field.

Issues such as modernisation, religion and orality; political experiences and shaping of ideological apparatuses; genres of texts; memory and social experience; and notions or practices of political geography, these issues have figured in different ways in some of the other works on the Nagas too. Then what makes the present book distinct? A reading of Literary Cultures of India’s Northeast highlights a difference which entering such issues through the vantage point of literature can make. For example, the book shows how literary works construct characters. The characters are drawn from the social world, and their experiences and perspectives, as provided with, are important in the making of the narratives. The characters may be of the urban world, or they may be rural. They may be male or female, and could be of different ages. They could speak or imagine in different forms, whether in oral genres or in the written ones. They could be part of events which occur in different locations such as market places, domestic confines, roads, camps, churches, graveyards and many more.

In other words, what is shown in the book is how literature allow us to see the people, the common people, and acquire a sense of how they view their own locations in history and politics. Therefore, what we see is how people being historical and political beings is also closely connected to they being human beings. And it is this relation which the characters and the narratives illustrate. Perhaps, it is this visibility of the common people and their lived worlds which often remain in the shadows of discourses. Therefore, Veio Pou’s book is importantly positioned, wherein the common people become humanly tangible, and it is the tangibility of human life which gives concreteness to discourses or their understanding in research work.

However, one may argue that literatures being fictional narratives, are the characters too only imagined realities? Perhaps not. One can support Veio Pou’s contention through other illustrations as well. For example, when one goes through the tour diaries, reports and brief life narratives of the 1950s from the erstwhile Tuensang Frontier Division, one gets to see how agrarian and guerrilla existences, landscape, objects, building roads, rituals and customs, and firearms were inextricably connected in the lives of the people. There were instances when land was exchanged for rifles and problems that could arise thereof. There were instances when disputes over ownership of agrarian resources were connected to the vicissitudes between agrarian and guerrilla existences. From growing rice to finding wireless sets in the rice fields were part of people’s experiences. There were instances when the focus was not Zapu Phizo per se, but his Tommy gun, and how it changed hands through several people until one day it was found in a field in the village outskirts.

To borrow an insight from Veio Pou’s book, perhaps one can say that what these archival narratives highlighted was the world of those Nagas who were common but tangible people. They were concrete in the materiality and thoughts of their lives. And as his book shows, people in this sense of reality abound as different characters in Naga literatures too. The people who figured in the archival texts were engaged in living their socio-economic lives and also had their political convictions for the Naga movement. After all, they entered the archival narratives because the state encountered them, at times accidentally, while looking for camps and leaders, and did not appreciate their political convictions. Similarly, many important Naga literary works bring out the inextricable totality of the human and political existence, or the historicity of life that comprises both the everyday and the political of the landscape.

Thus, characters from the archives and literatures appear to express a common point. Veio Pou’s book has numerous discussions on how culture, politics and history are contained in the very materiality of people’s existence and thoughts. We get to hear them, see them, and find how the vividness of their past and present can come alive if only we make that little effort. Naga literature abounds representing and manifesting such reality. Genres, languages, or styles in literature are also part of such conditions of reality. The nature or choice of genres and styles cannot be isolated from how they articulate such reality, and also seek to shape the making of reality. As the book shows, folk and written, human and political, state and organisations, body and gender, peoples and nation, these dimensions converge in Naga literary narratives, transforming literature into rich and complex narratives of a national life.

Veio Pou’s book, through exploration of these dimensions, is not only a work of literary studies but also one of socio-cultural history. And it stands as an important contribution towards a nuanced understanding of people, landscape and articulations from this part of the world.

Manjeet Baruah teaches in North East India Studies Programme,

Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

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