jajabori-mon

2011-12-01T14:21:00.001+05:30

Dastabez, Unfinished

Our tribute to Mamoni Raisom Goswami

http://laffaireliterary.blogspot.com/p/dastabez-unfinished.html

http://www.sevensisterspost.com/epaper/melanee/

2011-11-25T13:35:00.000+05:30

Seven Sisters Post Online

The Seven Sisters Post is now available as an e-paper online (www.sevensisterspost.com).

Do check out the literary section (pp2-3 of the Sunday Supplement) and give me your comments and feedback.

http://sevensisterspost.com/epaper/sunday_20.11.11.pdf
http://sevensisterspost.com/epaper/sundayps13.11.11.pdf

2011-09-08T20:01:00.000+05:30

Call for Submissions

The Nor’eastern Post has been renamed the Seven Sisters Post. The daily will be launched from Guwahati and Dibrugarh in the first week of November, 2011. It will be a publication of the Saradha Group.

It will be a hyper-regional paper, giving extensive coverage to the entire Northeastern region. At the same time, our World Page will then focus on global developments but primarily look at the Afro-Asian scenario, drawing on non-western sources to give an alternate view of the world. We will have a features page and an op-ed page that will be rich in contributions from the locality, region, nation and often from our neighbourhood. We intend to do two pages of business in keeping with the emerging opportunities.

Our Sunday supplement will seek to showcase original creative writing from the region and neighbourhood, besides focusing on its varied traditional and contemporary life. We intend to print from other Northeastern states soon. Our team comprises media professionals from the region who have worked in top national dailies such as The Times of India, The Hindustan Times and Mail Today. Our chief editor is Subir Bhaumik, the BBC’s former East India bureau chief. Naba Sarma, ex-bureau chief of The Economic Times, our business editor, will be backed by Abhijit Deb, formerly with the Reuters.

In short, it will be a paper with a difference that the region has long waited for.

As the Literary Editor of the Seven Sisters Post, my aim will be to showcase the literatures produced in the Northeastern region to a wider audience as well as to make readers in the region aware of the richness of their own literatures. Literature from the Northeast is usually treated as a homogenous entity, but my effort will be to bring out the diversity within it. It is hoped that this will establish a dialogue of equality and harmony among the many constituents producing the various ‘literatures’ of the Northeast.

This is a call for contributors to share their creative and critical writings as well as translations with the newspaper.

- The critical writings/features could relate to any aspect of the literature of any of the regions within the Northeast. They may also deal with particular writers or texts or genres.

- In creative writing, poetry submission is particularly welcome, although space permitting, we might also occasionally carry pieces of fiction/memoir/literary non-fiction.

- We will also devote considerable attention to translations of classic and contemporary literary pieces. The translators must however, have acquired the necessary permissions from the original copyright holder. A short translator’s note and adequate information about the original author are also required.

Contributions from writers living in/hailing from outside the Northeast are especially welcome. I am also looking at ‘mainlanders’’ views of Northeast literature.

Please send in your entries to northeastliterature@gmail.com. To avoid having your email sent to the spam folder, please use the following in the subject line: “Submission: SSP”. Emails without this subject line may get deleted.

Uddipana Goswami

Literary Editor

Seven Sisters Post

2011-07-24T11:02:00.000+05:30

Call for Submissions

I am joining as the Literary Editor of the Nor’eastern Post – a daily soon to be launched from Guwahati, Assam. It promises to be a regional publication with a national and international reach. My aim as literary editor will be to showcase the literatures produced in the Northeastern region to a wider audience as well as to make readers in the region aware of the richness of their own literatures. Literature from the Northeast is usually treated as a homogenous entity, but my effort will be to bring out the diversity within it. It is hoped that this will establish a dialogue of equality and harmony among the many constituents producing the various ‘literatures’ of the Northeast.

This is a call to readers to share their creative and critical writings as well as translations with the newspaper.

- The critical writings/features could relate to any aspect of the literature of any of the regions within the Northeast. They may also deal with particular writers or texts or genres.

- In creative writing, poetry submission is particularly welcome, although space permitting, we might also occasionally carry pieces of fiction/memoir/literary non-fiction.

Contributions from writers living in/hailing from outside the Northeast are especially welcome. I am also looking at ‘mainlanders’’ views of Northeast literature.

Please send in your entries to northeastliterature@gmail.com. To avoid having your email sent to the spam folder, please use the following in the subject line: “Submission: Nor’eastern Post”. Emails without this subject line may get deleted.

Uddipana Goswami

Literary Editor

The Nor’eastern Post

2011-02-01T18:45:00.000+05:30

Occupying Imagination, Affiliating to the Nation

[My translation of an excerpt from Benudhar Sharma's Kangrecar Kanciali Rodat (1971), published in Asymptote Journal, January 2011.]

Translator's Note:

The northeast of India has, since the inception of the Indian State, been constructed as the nation’s periphery. Much has been written on how it became one of the most conflict-ridden zones of the country as well as on the political engineering involved in incorporating this periphery into the larger Indian nation. Little scholarship, however, has gone into exploring how the periphery began to imagine itself as a part of the nation. The manipulation of popular imagination that went into creating a subnational consciousness where there was none needs to be studied in the context of current insurgent movements in the northeast, many of which claim to be ‘anti-colonial’ and not ‘secessionist’ vis-à-vis the Indian state. Some of the best sources for such study are the memoirs of early members of the Indian National Congress (INC) active in interior regions of the northeast. On the Indian mainland, the INC was constructing the notion of an Indian nation while also fighting the British colonisers. Meanwhile, the elite of the northeast came into contact with the INC’s ideology during its pursuit of higher education and other activities in neighbouring Bengal. I have had access to a few accounts written by Axamiyā writers who represented the INC in Assam, which at the time comprised most of the rest of the northeast. Attracted by the ideals of the Indian nation and its fight against colonialism, these writers were instrumental in spreading these ideas in their native lands.

But just as the British occupied Assam and other parts of the northeast nearly a century after annexing the Indian mainland, Indian nationalism also took a long time making inroads into the psyches of the Axamiyā and the northeast. The extract I have translated (Sharma 1971: 50-53) is an account from the early days of proselytising by INC workers in Axamiyā villages. The author, Benudhar Sharma, recalls that even in the 1920s, when Gandhi and his non-cooperation movement were whipping the Indian nation into an anti-colonial frenzy, Axamiyā villagers nursed antagonistic sentiments towards INC volunteers. For them, Gandhi was ‘like the paddy-devouring gandhi insect . . . out to devour the nation.’ By the 1940s, however, folk songs began to laud Congress workers; Gandhi became an avatar of god; anti-British sentiments were visible. Indian was now hailed as the motherland and ‘Bande Mataram,’ the clarion call of the Indian nationalist movement, was heard in folk performances.

2011-01-02T21:47:00.009+05:30

Love has a way of happening

(My poem published in Focus on Indian Writing in English in Muse India 35. Jan-Feb 2011.)

[Read some other poems:Tejimolā Forever; Mother Goddess Kamakhya; Manufacturing Memories; For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead; End of Ennui; From Exile (1); After This Sky; Tryst; Would I Be A Poet Still; elegaic; A History of Violence, Fearless, The Rains Come from Behind the Curtains, Love has a way of happening]

Love has a way of happening at the most unlikely places.
For Rajen ata and Banalata it happened on a wooden bridge
Across the crazed Pagladia during turbulent times
Over handfuls of sanasur sold outside school
Shared in silence from a soggy piece of newspaper
That perhaps brought news of anti-immigrant riots.
From where they sat, they could not hear
Annunciations made in new centres of power
The din of displaced memories across far away borders
Birth pangs of twin states, breaking of a sub-continent.
Bonds of race, language, native land were nothing
Before the brush of shy fingers against soft hands.

Love has a way of ending in the most likely ways.
For Rajen ata and Banalata it ended
When indigenous livelihoods and cultural superiority clashed
Refugees are not to be trusted, his father said
Recounting how they had lost their all
To wily immigrants who exchanged a bag of salt for 10 acres
‘We will not concede another inch of our land’.
Her migrant father said these natives live
On culture borrowed from us
We have lost our homeland, our dignity remains.
An individual is slave to history
So they left their love at that.

***
Love has a way of happening in the most unlikely times.
For Dulu mama and Shipra it happened amidst
The most troubled circumstances, during volatile days
When the uneasy camaraderie of prolonged coexistence
Between communities was broken by a confused logic
Of entitlements, a climate of coercion.
He could not tear himself away from
Either the romance of jingoism or the love
That lingered from a childhood spent
Swimming together, cycling to school, climbing trees,
Stealing robab tenga from his father’s backyard
Peeling the fruit, popping into her mother’s kitchen for mustard oil
And green chillies, mixing it all and feeding each other
In the shade of the bakul tree.

Love has a way of enduring despite political turmoil.
For Dulu mama and Shipra it endured despite his leanings
Towards an ideology of hate, clothed in a glamorous pat xaj
Of nationalistic fervour, a greater love. It takes a while
To remove the veil from the face of evil
But love finds its way back home. They pulled him back,
The years of togetherness, even though the glamour wore off
From ultra-nationalism and youthful love.
His mother would not take her in – it was the climate –
They eloped, had children and reunited with the family.
A new politics was born.

***

Love has a way of happening quite naturally.
For Sumon and me it happened on the telephone
Over conversations that veered dangerously close
To intellectual discourse about intertwining histories,
Divisive politics and reshaped identities.
History no longer had a hold on us, we need not forfeit
Like Rajen ata and Banalata. Our politics wasn’t muddled,
We did not vacillate like Dulu mama and Shipra.
Lost love, redefined politics came to fruition
In a confident generation, globalised as far as suited us
Localised as much as was enough
To hold on to our ethnic identities over smoking cups
Of cappuccino and latte, feeding on pizzas
While in the background played
Rabindra Sangeet and Bihu songs.

***

[Notes: ata: grandfather; sanasur: mixed savouries; mama: maternal uncle; pat xaj: silk dress of Assamese women; Rabindra Sangeet: songs of Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali treasure; Bihu: the cultural marker of Assamese identity.]

2011-01-02T21:34:00.006+05:30

I Thought I Knew My Ma

(My short story published in Focus on Indian Writing in English in Muse India 35. Jan-Feb 2011.)

Read my other short stories: Virginia Mahi, Colors

I thought I could see my ma in a green and white polka dotted frock sitting on her bed beside the window, looking out at the night sky, trying to capture the full moon between two pink wild roses blooming on the old creeper that curled itself around the bars of the window. I thought I could almost hear her sigh as she smiled to herself dreaming of a tall dark-haired man, clutching a microphone and singing in a gravelly voice on the Bihu stage, under another full moon. She was thinking that she will marry him when she grows up, and koka should have no opposition to that because although he was a Muslim, he was an artiste, and koka was an artiste, and he always said that literature and art should be the only religions people were ever allowed to practice. They were her religions too, although she also toldkoka that loving flowers should be another religion. She was practicing her religion now, loving the flowers, letting them hold the moon in their bosom. The flowers shifted slightly in the breeze, and the moon was hidden for a moment. At that same moment, a shadow passed over her face. She was wishing he had not been a Muslim, because although art, literature and loving flowers should be the only religions, in Barbari where they lived, Hindu and Muslim were the only religions. The Muslims there were mostly immigrants, and Aita said they fought over land and cut each other up at the slightest provocation and gave birth to lots and lots of children “so that they can grab some more of our land.” Of course, aita had eleven children, of whom my Ma was the youngest. But she reasoned koka was very rich, and they could afford to have as many children as aita could bear. Aita was proud she could bear her husband so many children.Koka of course never knew how they were raised because aita kept them under her control and also, he was hardly ever home. If he was not supervising his vast land holding, he was settling some dispute in the village of which he was the undisputed patriarch because he had set it up by clearing the forests and settling people from his old village, and bringing Muslim agriculturists to work on their fields. In the evenings, koka would be rehearsing for the next play the Rangmahal club would stage – he was their chief patron and often, the lead actor. When there was no play, Choudhury koka, Sirajuddin koka, Dambaru mama and everybody else would get together and discuss poetry or music. Sometimes, if the artiste was not travelling with his troupe, he would come and sing in their batghar which koka had transformed into a natghar, aita often complained. When the sounds of the rehearsals started reaching the main house, and aita retreated into the kitchen, my Ma would sneak away from her study table and run to the batghar. It was through these rehearsals that Ma had become close to koka, who liked that one of his children was interested in the arts. And koka forever for her remained the artiste, the lover of literature, and the man who always quoted Chandraprasad: Xundarar Aradhanai Jibanar Khel: the sport of life is in the worship of the Beautiful. Sometimes, the image of the Beautiful conjured up in her mind would be that of her father, sometimes of the artiste. She only ever wanted to be the silent worshipper.

I thought I could sense my Ma’s bewilderment when she was forced to come and live in Guwahati. I thought I could measure her reluctance. She had not wanted to come, but koka had insisted she get a better education than he ever did: “Study English literature, because it will teach you to appreciate how beautiful life is.” She had heard from him that pain could be beautiful, and after the death of the artiste – some said from drinking too much, but she never believed them – she had often felt loss could be as precious as love. Without anybody knowing it, she had stolen the teacup kept aside for him – aita insisted that no Muslim could drink from the same cup as they did – and hidden it in her trunk under her bed. Although she hardly ever took it out of there, she liked to think: “this is the cup that ‘runneth over’ with my grief”. She left behind the cup when she went to Guwahati and once when she came home for the holidays, she didn’t notice that it was gone from her trunk. Just like the artiste’s cup, many things had slowly slipped away from her unnoticed, but not her shyness, her solitude, and her love of Beauty, reinforced now by the English Romantic poets.

***

The silken slender threads of a mournful flute found her one day at her hostel window when she was once again toying with the moon. They were floating in from the direction of the boys’ hostel, and she was immediately in love once again. Her artiste was back to life and she had found something to hold dear in this city where everything seemed daunting, everybody intimidating. Majnixa xar pai xunisane ketiyaba ketekir hiya bhaga mat? She felt the bird’s wailing that the poet heard in the middle of the night must have aroused the same pain, the same desire as the music of the flute now did in her. Sometimes she wondered who it was that could weave such sorrowful magic; often she told herself the magic was enough, the magician incidental. And she would not have known if he had not played the same melancholy notes on College Day, and as she sat there in the auditorium with her friends, she suddenly, for a moment, went back to her old bed at home and could smell the wild roses at her window. But she was grown up now, and knew she could not dream of getting married to somebody just because they pierced your heart with so much pain. Because she knew now what marriage entailed and she could foretell how aita and koka would both react if they only knew she was in love with a tribal boy. Koka would perhaps understand the love and devotion, but she knew well enough now that abstract religions of the heart had nothing to do with institutional religions people practised in everyday life, and even koka would not accept such a social ignominy as his daughter marrying a tribal boy. Oh, the tribals are Hindu alright, but they do still eat pork and drink alcohol. And although her elder brothers often went hunting in the reserved forest nearby and brought home deer meat almost every time, and maybe even ate wild pigs and buffaloes on the sly, pork – and of course beef – were taboo at home. And all the men of the house, including koka, only drank alcohol in secret, never socially like the tribals did. She had been shocked the day she found a bottle of rum in her father’s safe which he had accidentally left open. She had never told anybody about it, and had later accepted that although drinking alcohol was bad, it is a weakness even the strongest of men must sometimes give in to. And then, they say artistes need alcohol. Was he drunk now? Suddenly she came back to herself and found herself sitting in the auditorium surrounded by an applauding audience and blushed. The performance had ended, and she wished she could look at him sometime longer. Since she couldn’t do that now, she started sitting towards the end of the classroom and watching shyly, guiltily, his profile on the boys’ side of the room. And waiting for the evenings when she could listen to him playing the flute. She made believe that he played only for her, because she listened. One day instead of the music, she heard a huge commotion from the direction of the boys’ hostel. Some of the more adventurous girls in the hostel went over to the warden’s and brought back the news that the tribal boys had started a rebellion of sorts. They would no longer eat in the Second Dining Hall, they wanted to eat with the upper caste Hindu boys in the First Dining Hall. There was a little violence, and some of the boys on both sides had been injured. From the next day, she did not hear him playing the flute anymore. News was some of the boys in the hostel had been rusticated for indiscipline, he was one of them. Some of the other girls who had taken to openly declaring their adoration of him ever since the College Day, proudly proclaimed that at least his sacrifice had set in motion a change that would be good for the society. She wanted to cry because she hated it when they spoke about him as though he could ever belong to anybody but her.

***

I thought I felt my Ma’s trepidation the day she got married. I thought I knew how her tears were both of sorrow at leaving her parents’ home and of fear of the unknown life she was about to start by marrying deuta. Her only consolation was that koka had himself chosen deuta to be her husband, and she knew he would never make a wrong choice for her. She had barely met him a few times before the wedding but she had read his novel and imagined he would be like Pramathes, the protagonist, who was a social activist and stood for all that was true, right and good. She was also a bit worried that if he was as good as Pramathes, she might not live up to his expectations. But her sense of inadequacy began to disappear as she started learning a few lessons about life in the daily grind of married life. The first of these lessons was that a man who was too good to be true should not get married. Unaware of his duties to his family, deuta indeed turned out to be like Pramathes, consumed with a desire for cleansing the society of its evils and injustices. Perhaps it was something in the air in those days, but many other people like deuta also thought they could do this, and very naively they all joined the Asom Andolan – that massive civil unrest that turned our society upside down for nearly six decades – a well-intentioned movement which a few self serving people hijacked and turned into one that polarized our society, alienating all Muslims and as well as tribals. People like my deuta who had joined the movement because they wanted to fight for the rights of the “sons of the soil” did not realise this until it was too late. And then when they did, they ended up as bitter defeated crusaders who remained forever afterwards cynical about any change in society. Deuta could never get over it, and he changed, kept strictly to his textbooks and teachings and pretty much banished whatever was left of Pramathes from his person. Meanwhile, my Ma had already given up two of her favourite preoccupations, because early in the marriage, she had realized that it would not do for both partners to immerse themselves in art and literature, or there would be nobody to run the house, what withdeuta also possessing at the same time an unbending social conscience. Since the same realization had not come todeuta, it was my Ma who had to relinquish.

She did however keep her third religion alive, that of loving flowers. She had a huge garden with many different kinds of flowers to which she was more attached than to deuta. When I was born, she named me Pahi – flower petal – although she must have been disappointed that I did not turn out to be as delicate, as pliant, or as attached to her as her flowers. I was more attached to deuta who would sometimes, only for me, come out of his cynical shell and recount the fervour with which his generation had wanted to “save our nation and identity”. Another generation was at that moment in history trying to do the same with guns and explosives and failing miserably, defeated by ideological poverty. Growing up amidst all this and knowing what had gone before, I started believing that mass movements and armed insurgencies led nowhere. Revolution had to begin at the individual level, and I started my little rebellions. I began by renouncing the Brahminism I was born into. I took to eating beef and pork with friends, and later, travelling to places my mother would only have heard of, or my one-time social activist father would never have been acquainted with, where the people who he had once thought he was fighting for really lived. There, getting drunk on rice beer, we discussed ethnic reconciliation and religious tolerance, deliberated on blueprints of a future society without conflicts. And I thought I was in love, with an indigenous Muslim boy who spoke with the same passion about the same things I believed in.

I thought my Ma would be my worst enemy at this juncture. I thought deuta was the one who would understand. But it was deuta who very subtly blackmailed me into agreeing to marry Bordoloi khura’s son who lives in Bangalore. He stopped eating, and sat on his easy chair in the veranda for hours with a wounded look, the book on his lap open at the same page for a week. I gave in, but not before I realized my mother was on my side. She said nothing the day I broke the news, and I would have thought she was silent only because deuta had said what she would have wanted to say, had she not come and sat beside me on my bed and run her fingers through my hair the day the love of my life heaped accusations of hypocrisy and elitism on me and Bandini seeing that I was well rid of him, came up to me and told me how he had been sleeping with another woman all along. My world and my rebellion and my beliefs had all come crushing down, but in the midst of it all, I suddenly saw my Ma, I saw that my Ma felt my pain, that she was indeed made of pain. And it was then, for the first time in my life, that I thought I should get to know her the way she must have been.

***

2010-09-15T20:25:00.005+05:30

Colors

(My short story published in the South Asian Literary Association's journal South Asian Review 30:3)

Read my other short stories: Virginia Mahi, I Thought I Knew My Ma

Blue

Mur ee antar khani xagarar dare nila bedanare ...

—Debakanta Baruah

his my heart is blue like the sea, with pain. I always thought I could feel this pain, this intense agony, deep down in my heart. I always feared this pain will be with me till the end, refusing to go away, which is why I decided I should do something about it, maybe leave it all and go away, far far away, from my parents, from all acquaintances, and from the familiar places that had shaped my life and given me this pain.

I was born in Guwahati, a city I called home but never really felt at home in. Many like my parents had come to this city from mofussil towns and villages to build a new life, and in the process, had started imparting to the city, just as the city had imparted to them, hypocritical middle class values. These were also the values that have always repulsed me so much, and instilled in me the desire to run away, be in some other place, assume some other persona. I always blamed these values for my parents’ lack of courage, the kind of courage one needs to be able to match up to one’s ambitions. True, they capped their ambition at a stable job with a secure income, but it was a lot for them to achieve in a new city with a new way of life, and they were willing to do anything to achieve that ambition—provided it could be done without any kind of confrontation with anybody.

My mother was the more ambitious of the two; my father just sort of went along. He came from a very poor family that did not have enough agricultural land to be shared among the five sons of which my father was the fourth. So he had to come to the city to look for a job. My mother’s father was a fourth-grade officer in the district magistrate’s office, and he earned enough—very little of it by way of government salary of course—to keep his sizeable family of six daughters and two sons in relative comfort. She moved to the city when she married my father.

At first my mother was appalled by how little my father made at his job as an officer at the State Bank. What was more, he seemed content with his job and salary. But my mother had enough ambition for the two of them, and she forced him to sit for all the exams that would ensure him promotions, sitting up nights to ensure that he did the same, till he became a branch manager with a decent salary and the scope to earn some more on the side. After that, she used the influence of one of her father’s acquaintances to join a government school as a subject teacher, and turned her attention to making something out of me. I was admitted to one of the three elite English medium schools in Guwahati at the time, a school that had a Catholic management and hence was sure to instill the kind of discipline she thought would take me far in life.

I was not an extremely bright student but good enough to keep her ambitions for me alive. Although I came to know early in life that she planned for me to be a doctor—because doctors are never without a job and make lots of money besides—I always wanted to be a writer. Even when I grew up and got to know that writers, especially in Assam, make almost nothing from their writings, I thought my parents had made enough for me to live on for the rest of my life—and then some—so that I could easily indulge myself and my passion for poetry and literature, which I had developed while still in school. But my mother would have none of that and she made me sit for the medical entrance test, which I cleared in the second attempt, thus falling behind my classmates and losing what little I had in the way of friends and companions. But my mother persisted and when I did get through I was so bad at studying medicine that I kept falling more and more behind in class. However, I did finally emerge an MBBS doctor and in the absence of any desire to pursue a specialization, started looking around for a job, any job that would take me away from Guwahati and my parents and the ignominy of being the only one among my contemporaries who was not yet a specialist, gainfully employed, and married.

Finally one day, I got a call from the Kalguri Tea Estate authorities for an interview, and when I reached the tea garden and saw the bungalow set aside for the doctor and took a walk among the tea bushes for the first time in my life, I knew I had to get this job and come and live here. I did not care that in a tea estate, the frequently changing doctors are mostly retained for ornamental purposes, with the local compounder being the one the laborers all came to for his reassuringly familiar, high-handed, bumbling system of medication that he had acquired through years of trial and error. After all, I never did perceive of myself as a qualified enough doctor, having been always behind in class, and was only too eager to come to Kalguri to unlearn all that I had learned. For the first time in my life, on the night before the interview at the tea estate guest house where I was given accommodation, I felt a kind of peace trying to make its way into my heart, nudging at the precious pain I had nurtured all these years. As I stood in the huge lawn and bathed in naked moonlight, I knew if I came here, I would have all the time in the world to indulge my passion for literature, and read and write to my heart’s content. As I looked out at the rows and rows of tea shrubs in front of me, I could feel every novel, every poem, every word I had read about lives hitherto unknown to me come alive and call out to me, entice me, irresistibly pull at every molecule in my being.

I did not waste any time setting out on my way to Kalguri after the appointment letter reached me next month. My mother said she would not let me go so far away to Delhi or Bangalore to study like many of my friends and cousins because she could never be sure whether I was applying myself enough, but I knew it was really because she could not bear to have me slipping out of her control. However I was almost twenty-eight now, and could not bear to be near her anymore. I needed to break away and even if it meant being only 400 kilometers away from her and lying to her that I wanted the effortless tea estate job so that I could prepare for my postgraduate exams and would be back in time for the exams in six months, I managed to get her to agree in the end. The fact that the tea company was paying me a very handsome salary must also have had something to do with her acquiescence.

The six-hour journey to Kalguri may not have seemed momentous in any way to anybody else; after all there were so many people who travelled back home to Guwahati every weekend from what they thought of as punishment postings in the Kalguri village, which had grown up around the tea garden, or in the Barbari town nearby. For me, however, it was a remarkable journey, because for the first time I felt free, on my own and on my way to shedding the agonizing blue that had housed itself in me all these years, so tenaciously, and it suddenly seemed to me, in hindsight, so melodramatically. And strangely, as the bus began crawling its way out of Guwahati, I saw the evening sun reflected in the waters of the vast Brahmaputra, and the fantastic blue of the sea neither I nor my poet had ever seen seemed already to be shedding its sadness. Instead, seeping into my heart now was the satiny blue of the Brahmaputra tinged with the red of the setting sun.

Black

Tourou thakiba pare janu bhem

Naharani baganar koli mem...

—Pranab Barman

an you too be so arrogant/Black memsahib of Naharani garden? I had come to Kalguri wondering whether it would turn out to be my Naharani, where I would find my black memsahib and a tragic love affair. I had been in love once, earlier, at medical college, but she had left me because of my lack of ambition as she perceived it. How would she know that I did have a lot of ambition—only they weren’t the kind she or my mother would understand? My ambitions were not limited to jobs or money; they had more to do with finding people, discovering places, and getting rid of all that blue. During my initial days at Kalguri, every time I saw a pair of muscular black calves below the undulating folds of a grimy sari walking away from me, I would wonder if she could have been my Chameli memsahib, and I—though not a white man—could be George Baker, shedding sweet tears of sorrow while in the background Bhupen Hazarika sang his heart wrenching, “O Bidexi Bandhu….”

But I did not fall in love in Kalguri, and all the black memsahibs gradually lost the romantic sheen I had draped them in. They became everyday people like their brothers or fathers or lovers or uncles, all of whom warmed up to me enough to soon start offering me their haria to drink and allowing me to participate in their evenings of jhumur dance once in a while. Alcohol had been taboo in our house, but now, having left behind the Hindu traditional universe I had been confined to, I got more and more attached to the drink. The more I drank, the more I rose in their estimation as somebody who was “not like the rest of them.” Often I would get too drunk to walk back to my quarters on my own and a few of them would carry me and put me in bed. They felt good that the doctor sahib was fraternizing with them, and no doctor at the tea garden had ever done that before. And I felt good that they were accepting me more and more into their lives, and often congratulated myself that I could shed my ingrained elitist education and upbringing to mingle with the workers and laborers.

I stopped going back to Guwahati every weekend like I initially used to under pressure from my mother. I also stopped calling as often as she would have me call her. My mother kept threatening to come down and stay with me, but I kept putting her off. My father made the appropriate amount of fuss, then gave up. My mother persisted, but I learned that it was easier to handle her long distance and mastered the art within a short time. All in all, my life at Kalguri was going quite well. I was leading the kind of idyllic idle life I had always dreamed was necessary for any kind of literary pursuit, whether reading or writing. Unlike many other tea gardens, this one had an excellent library, which had been built up over the years by the erstwhile white masters of the plantation, and I was catching up with all the reading I had missed out on in the years wasted in medical school.

When I wanted my dose of Axamiya literature, all I had to do was send one of my orderlies, Dambaru, on his cycle to the village headmaster Praphulla Narzary’s house and I could have the learned man’s handpicked selection of the literary masters. Whenever I was at the village, I would always visit him and discuss all that I had read with him, over cups of steaming tea or glassfuls of jou that his daughter, Deepti, had brewed. I would often cycle back to my quarters late in the night, despite Narzary saar’s repeated warnings about gunmen on the prowl at that time. Every time I was late, he would apologize for not having kept track of the time, and plead with me to stay back at his house for the night rather than get shot by the militants or the army, whoever happened to be around. But the jou would have made me fearless, and happy like I had never been before, and I would ignore his pleas. Besides, as I always reasoned with him, it would not look nice if I stayed the night given that he had a young daughter at home, and nobody else.

Sometimes when I returned late at night from my trips to the village, which gradually became more and more frequent, I would find a potful of haria left at my door. No doubt by Dambaru who followed me around like a little lost black puppy most of the day, and at night missed me if I did not come to their basti to drink. Then I would drink some more of the haria or risk offending Dambaru and go off to sleep. No matter what time I rose, Dambaru would be ready with my breakfast. After breakfast, I would go off to the hospital. I would sit there as long as it took for the compounder, Biswas da, to have his paranoia come back and feel threatened by my presence and say kindly to me: “You must be tired, saar, why don’t you leave? I can handle it here.” Sometimes, the manager’s wife who was nothing less than a queen in the tea garden would summon me to administer her insulin and I would spend a couple of hours talking to her about nothing of any consequence. And as soon as I could, I would return to my books or cycle down to the village or walk around to the labor basti. Once in a while, the manager or the assistant manager would invite me to come along with them to the Planters Club where the management of about ten tea gardens in a radius of about two hundred kilometers would meet whenever they felt they needed the company of their peers instead of the illiterate uncivilized laborers they were forced to deal with day in and day out. I would accept the invitations at reasonable intervals but come back sick to my stomach with all their wives’ flirtatious advances.

All in all, I was packing in more experiences during my stay here than I had ever absorbed in my whole life before. And I should have been able to write like I had always planned to, but I was too busy soaking it all in to find time to reflect and recollect. I was not complaining however and was perfectly happy with the way things were—till one day, I killed Dambaru.

Yellow

Tumi mouk bhal pale/Sarimuthi halodhiya xuta kini dim ...

—Jiban Narah

f you love me, I shall buy you four lengths of yellow thread. These lines always now remind me of Deepti in her yellow dakhana, sitting at the loom, looking up and smiling at me every time I pushed aside the horizontal bamboo poles on their gate and walked in. How was I to know that Dambaru was in love with Deepti? How was I to know that Deepti—the college-going daughter of the village headmaster—could be in love with a boy from the tea tribes, an uneducated, quiet mild mannered boy, whom I sent to her house so often at all odd hours to collect books for me? Surely it was because of me that this could happen but other than Narzary saar, nobody in Kalguri village was willing to allow that fate also could have had something to do with the development of this socially unacceptable relationship. It was now a matter for consideration by the village elders, and though the Bodo community to which Narzary saar and Deepti belonged was largely detribalized, it did still retain a characteristically tribal distrust of outsiders. No Bodo could marry a harsha or outsider. And what is more, Dambaru’s tribe was not even indigenous, his grandparents had come from somewhere in the Indian mainland as bonded laborers to work in the tea garden and had settled here. It was to free their indigenous land from the occupation of outsiders that many Bodo youths had taken up arms today and if it should be known that a girl from their village had been involved with a tea tribal, the entire village would be in trouble.

I was present at the meeting and I could sense the fear as well as the anger. But because Narzary saar was well respected, they let me off with a small fine. Dambaru, however, was not so fortunate. He was found killed just outside the tea garden one morning. Nobody could or would say who did it. But everybody began to keep their valuables packed and ready in small pouches, ready to abandon the village at the first signs of trouble. Able-bodied men from the village started staying up nights on sentry duty. I was forbidden by the tea garden authorities to go to the village, and I could not also go to the labor basti anymore, because even though they did not openly accuse me of anything, I could sense that they felt betrayed somehow. Meanwhile the news of Dambaru’s death had made it to the newspaper as it had followed closely on the heels of ethnic clashes between Bodos and tea tribes in the adjoining district. The media predicted that ethnic clashes were imminent in the Kalguri area also. My mother read the news and decided I was to come back immediately. Two years was long enough to have wasted in a remote tea plantation and according to her, it was time I got out of this mess and came home to take stock of my life.

I told her I could not come. For the first time in my life, I was straight with my mother. I told her that now more than ever, I could not and would not abandon the people who meant more to me than anybody else had ever done in my entire life. The city meant nothing to me, and though I did not directly tell her this, I am sure she also understood what I left unsaid—that she herself meant very little to me. She, who stood for all that I hated—a limited life, constricting values, and a self-centered universe. As I stood my ground for the first time in my life, I suddenly realized that I myself had epitomized the things that I had hated all my life. What had I done for the garden laborers who had welcomed me into their lives so uninhibitedly? I had taken their affection for granted and not even rendered them the service for which the garden management had hired me in the first place. On the contrary, I had jeopardized their very existence. It was not as though I was not aware of the tensions prevalent between the two communities—even though remote, news does travel to Kalguri. And there had been ethnic clashes in the neighboring districts only a month ago. Yet, I had sent Dambaru to the Bodo village over and over again, in order to satiate my own lust for literature. I had been blind to the growing affection between him and Deepti, because I had not paid attention to either of them. I was so engrossed in my discovery of Narzary saar’s treasure trove of knowledge that I had become insensitive to the boy who ungrudgingly acted as my go-between and the girl who quietly looked after my comfort while I was engaged with her father. Had I only acknowledged their existence and made an effort to know them as persons, I could perhaps have gauged the growing involvement between them, and helped them before things got out of hand. Who knows? And now I will never know because Dambaru is dead and Deepti cannot even mourn his death because if she showed any signs of mourning, the villagers will ostracize her father. As it is, they blame her and Narzary saar for the imminent attack on their village, although nobody says it openly.

The attack came one night. There were people with bows and arrows and some with guns. Two Bodo villages in the area were razed and twenty people killed. The same night, five tea tribe villages were also set on fire, and fifty people made to stand in line and riddled with bullets. Dambaru’s basti was inside the tea garden and the management had received prior information about the date of attack. So they had shut all entry points into the garden and tightened security. Some said they even paid the militants not to deplete their labor force. Cheap labor was hard to find and any untoward incident inside the plantation meant losses amounting to hundreds of thousands of rupees every day. So Dambaru’s basti was safe, but Deepti’s village was devastated. And Deepti had disappeared. The survivors had to go live in a relief camp twenty kilometers away in Kalibheta.

Two days later, when the tea garden management allowed me to take the official jeep, I went to the relief camp. Narzary saar sat under a tree and would not talk to me. The other villagers met me coldly and told me nobody knew anything about Deepti. As I was coming back to the garden, my driver stopped on the roadside to take a piss. There was a mustard field there, and it was all yellow with mustard blossoms. I thought I could see clotted black blood splattered over the yellow.

Red, Green, Grey

Issa hoi tar hatar ranga patakakhan

Jui huwar agate

Tat jen xeujiya xutare buta basi aki dim

Puwatit jak pata uranta maral ...

—Geeta Goswami

want to snatch the red flag he carries/Before it flares up/And weave into it with green thread/A motif of a flock of maral/Spreading their wings in the morning light. Between file shots of the red and green flag of their organization, the local news channel was showing pictures of Deepti in handcuffs. That was when I discovered that she had joined the militants after that night. She told me later that she was carried away by the attackers, who dumped her in a mustard field not far away from the village. From there she was picked up by a group of men who did not seem to belong to either community, but were armed with guns. They had raped her, repeatedly, and dropped her off near the army camp at Barbari and she had crawled her way to a nearby village, which luckily for her turned out to be a Bodo village. There she was nursed back to health and indoctrinated in the militant ideology. Because she was well educated, she rose quickly in the ranks and they used her for writing press releases and demand notes and communicating with the media. She told me all this when I went to meet her at the jail in Guwahati five years later.

After watching the news, I had spent a sleepless night, wondering if I should go and see her. In the end I decided I should. It took me some amount of maneuvering of the jail officials to be allowed to meet her, but I managed in the end and I am glad that I did. She also seemed genuinely glad to see me. She told me how she had been away taking military training in the hills of Karbi Anglong when her father had died. She had gone to see him when she came back two years after the carnage, but he was no more. When I asked her why she had joined the militants, she said she did because she had been very angry. When I asked her why she had joined the militants whom everybody knew had killed Dambaru, she did not reply. Instead she asked me what I had been up to. I told her how I had taken the easy way out and escaped to the city. My mother had said nothing, but I knew she felt triumphant when I sat for the

Assam

public service exams and qualified and asked my father for money to pay for a post in the Guwahati Medical College. I had been leading a quiet life since then and next month, I was getting married to a girl my parents had found for me.

She said she was very happy for me. I asked her if she intended to surrender now that the government paid generous rehabilitation packages to surrendered militants.

“You mean get co-opted like you? Yeah, I might,” she said.

2010-08-11T12:15:00.002+05:30

Why I Fear Ignorance about the Northeast

It is a well-established fact that most people from 'mainland' India have little or no knowledge about the realities of the Northeast of India. But what bothers me more than the ignorance itself is the fact that many in the public sphere - be they journalists, writers, politicians, or policy makers - do not think twice before putting their half-baked 'knowledge' out there, thus perpetuating and reinforcing the myths and stereotypes surrounding the region and its people.

A recent example of the same was brought to my notice by a friend. It involved a report in one of the biggest 'national' dailies, The Hindustan Times, which claimed that one of the most representative Axamiya dance forms of Assam was "a tribal dance form from Assam that has now been elevated to the status of a classical dance". I made my reservations against this statement clear in a mail I sent to the writer. I am reproducing the text of my email below:

dear ruchira,

this is with reference to your piece entitled 'dance like a sattriya woman' published online on 7/8/2010. as somebody from assam, it deeply pains me to observe often the blatant ignorance of most 'mainstream' journalists affiliated to the 'national' media regarding my state and the northeast as a whole. your current piece also displays an ignorance about the vibrant culture of a region that is claimed to be an integral part of the country but about which the rest of the country has little knowledge, or for which they show much empathy.

for many like you, the northeast as a whole is a land inhabited by naked tribals, who have climbed the ladder of civilization only after their political affiliation with the indian mainland. the richness of our tribal cultures and the simultaneous prevalence of 'classical' art forms for centuries now is something that is beyond the imagination of most people from outside the region.

i have nothing against personal ignorance. but as a journalist writing for a major 'national' daily however, i would urge you to check your facts before publishing inaccurate information like calling sattriya a 'tribal dance form from assam', when it is and has been one of the purest 'classical' dance forms of india since its introduction by the assamese icon, xankardeb. such fallacies in print only perpetuate the myths and stereotypes surrounding the entire northeastern region, and sow the seeds of further alienation.

best regards,
uddipana

(Read the entire report at http://www.hindustantimes.com/Dance-like-a-Sattriya-woman/Article1-583325.aspx)

Alienation of course, is not the only factor to be feared here. In an earlier piece I had written regarding my experience of the misrepresentation and lack of proper knowledge about the people of the Northeast nearly a decade ago, I had explained why I most fear such an attitude:

I used to shudder to think that it was people with attitudes like this whose parents, or relatives, or friends were sitting in crucial decision-making forums and determining the destinies of my region. By now some of them would themselves have picked up the mantle of 'Northeast experts' perhaps. The popular imagination is after all, not so far removed from the political and all of it affects policy-making, which in turn determines the destiny of an entire region.

(Read the entire piece at http://jajabori-mon.blogspot.com/2008/12/identity-in-exile-published-indian.html)

Such fears are alive still, as is the lack of an empathetic understanding of the Northeast and its people.

2010-06-08T18:53:00.007+05:30

My article on AFSPA in The Peace and Conflict Review
Volume 4, Issue 2 - ISSN: 1659-3995
[Details of other academic publications here.]

Abstract:

The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act 1958 (AFSPA) forms the core of the Indian Government’s relationship with the Northeast region. Fifty years after its inception violence in the region is increasing rather than decreasing. While the AFSPA is central to the ways the state relates to citizens in the region and has been a major catalyst for increasing violence, this paper will not treat the AFSPA as the sole instance of the Indian state’s skewed security regime in the Northeast region, but will instead argue that the act is only a symptom of a larger malaise characterised by alienation, militarisation, and a dangerous counter-insurgency strategy. The fallout has been not merely a brutalisation of the security forces, but a legitimisation of violence. A vicious cycle has been set in motion punctuated by three main dynamics: violence giving birth to more violence, brutalisation eroding ideologies, and state-sanctioned terror engendering a disregard for peaceful alternatives. It is argued that unless the Indian state bases its approach to the region on a proper understanding of the nationalistic aspirations and indigenous and ethnic identities of the people there, this cycle cannot be stopped.

Read full article

2010-04-21T21:42:00.002+05:30

The Rains Come From Behind the Curtain

[Read some other poems:Tejimolā Forever; Mother Goddess Kamakhya; Manufacturing Memories; For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead; End of Ennui; From Exile (1); After This Sky; Tryst; Would I Be A Poet Still; elegaic; A History of Violence, Fearless, The Rains Come from Behind the Curtains, Love has a way of happening]

A few centuries ago, we first awoke from a deep sleep. We saw the world as a beautiful place, so giving, so loving.

It was some time before a few of us took a peek behind the curtain where dreams floated. What lay beyond was a nightmare.

Others among us had entered into a pact with the world and created this nightmare.

When the nightmare threatened to engulf us, we also entered into a contract with the world – we agreed not to look at the world, and those in cahoots with it complied to leave us alone.

Thus we had continued for centuries and thus I thought I would pass by.

But he jolted me out of my complacence – the naked man in the park.

They said he was mad. All he did the whole day was sit on the pavement and draw shapes and figures on the concrete.

And he laughed the whole day, all by himself.

I knew he was laughing at me and at all who had signed the contract. He had not.

I looked at him and marveled; I looked at his drawings and shuddered.

The world was there, naked. And all its people – distorted, disproportionate, unsightly.

I had known it was like this all along but it had taken a madman to define it for me.

I was sane. So I had always looked the other way to avoid embarrassing the world.

The madman dared to look straight at it and all its naked, ugly people, to point at them and laugh. He did not turn his back.

So they called him mad and connived to isolate him so others would not be influenced by him.

But the madman did not care. He only sat and drew.

He knew he need not go in search of kindred souls – they have a way of coming together, these souls.

And when they come together? Do they all sit down and draw?

Would you find me tomorrow on the pavement with the madman? I don't think so.

I don't have the courage yet. I am sane yet.

Where then am I different from the rest of the world? Or am I at all? I like to believe I am not in the cabal.

The rains are though. Last night, they came and washed it all away – the madman's etchings on the pavement.

For days now, I had tried to sidestep them as I walked past them on my way to the institute, only to see them being trampled under desperate feet trying to keep up the façade: nobody likes to be caught in the nude.

The madman only sat down to draw again. The world continued to conspire.

And last night, the rains also conspired with the world. The rain joined hands with the people. The rains washed it all away.

The rains came from behind the curtain.

2010-01-31T11:21:00.004+05:30

We Called the River Red at the World Book Fair 2010, Delhi

The book will be available at the ongoing 19th World Book Fair 2010 (30TH JANUARY TO 7TH FEBRUARY) at the AUTHORS PRESS STALL NO. 613 - HALL 2, PRAGATI MAIDAN, NEW DELHI.

2010-01-28T09:29:00.019+05:30

Fearless

A poem excerpted from We Called the River Red in the January 2010 issue of Pratilipi

[Read some other poems:Tejimolā Forever; Mother Goddess Kamakhya; Manufacturing Memories; For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead; End of Ennui; From Exile (1); After This Sky; Tryst; Would I Be A Poet Still; elegaic; A History of Violence, Fearless, The Rains Come from Behind the Curtains, Love has a way of happening]

I will walk down the streets of my city without fear

I will not be slapped like my cousin
Because he walked on the pavement
Where ‘Black Cat’ commandos
Brandished machine guns behind sand bags
Securing us against insurgents.
He was only sixteen.

I will not be interviewed on television
Lying half naked, faint, prodded by microphones
And asked to narrate how and why I got caught
In a crossfire in somebody else’s war.
My war is not being fought
Those who did have died,
Those who kill now live.

I will not smell the smell
Of burnt explosives clotted blood
Charred flesh outside my house
I will not watch the people
Sifting among mangled vehicles broken glass
Cast away footwear looking for the dead

I will walk to school everyday
I will greet everyone on the way
I will go out alone to play
Yes, I will dream everyday

I will walk down the streets of my city
Without fear today.

2009-12-25T11:33:00.001+05:30

Here's the YouTube link to my poetry reading video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8klAz31cjI

2009-12-19T09:57:00.001+05:30

We Called the River Red

The book is available for online purchase at:

http://www.a1books.co.in/itemdetail/8172735286/WE-CALLED-RIVER-RED/

2009-12-16T14:57:00.001+05:30

Lawkeepers Lawbreakers, Us Weepers

Last Sunday Sumon and I decided to take a ride on the Delhi Metro to my sister’s place in West Delhi. Commuting from the NCR has now become easier with the DMRC rolling into Noida. The metro station reminded me of those in Europe – the infrastructure is world class, and the maintenance almost so despite the lack of civic sense among the commuters.

It was a long journey that we had to take. So, having comfortably settled ourselves into one of the coaches – kept surprisingly clean despite the very high volume of commuters every day – we looked ahead to a pleasant journey for the next hour or so. But pleasant it was not to be. Two stops later, a large group of young men – more than 50 perhaps, boarded the train, about 20 of them in our coach. Suddenly, the decibel levels went up – once, a long time ago, loud conversations in public places would put me off. But having been in Delhi for so many years, and hearing loud music blaring from every nook and corner of every street, having had umpteen conversations with people who shouted at you as though you might be deaf, in short, having accepted the fact that either your ears have to get used to all the noise pollution or stop functioning, it didn’t come as much of a surprise to me. But offensive it definitely was. Every sentence the young men uttered was generously flavored with random expletives and delivered in a manner that said ‘we are rather proud of our vocabulary’.

One can often ignore such verbal indecency but what followed was an assault on the senses. Loud music started blaring from one of their mobile phones. The others started cheering him, and egging him on whenever he tried to switch it off. ‘Chala chala, dekhte hai kaun kya kehta hai (Play it, play it, we’ll see who says what),’ said one of them; another was mimicking the voice of the announcer over the train’s intercom, ‘Train ke andar music bajana mana hai (It is forbidden to play music on the train)’; and all of them were laughing and having a jolly good time.

Sumon turned to one of the quieter fellows wistfully watching his companions from the sidelines and asked where they had come from and where they were headed. He said they had all come from UP to apply for enlistment in the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF). ‘So these are our future lawkeepers?’ I thought. ‘These were the people who will be entrusted with ensuring the common citizen does not break the law?’

Suddenly, one of the louder fellows broke into poetry, spewing shayari. One after the other, his friends followed suit. And the gist of all their poetic outbursts was that being a soldier was a masculine job, where only the men who are worthy can enlist and even if they die in the course of defending their country, they would have died a manly death. It also became quite obvious that these hopefuls had come with a lot of jingoistic nonsense filled in their brains, without understanding the first thing about the real nature of their future job.

And while all this poetry of machismo was doing the rounds, I was watching one would-be soldier leering at a young woman seated opposite me, mentally undressing her and adjusting his crotch, and nearly salivating. I knew of course that he could not go beyond mentally raping her here, on the Delhi Metro, in the Delhi metro. But I could not help wondering what he would do if he was posted somewhere in the Northeast or in Jammu and Kashmir, armed with the impunity provided by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), and let loose upon the populations there. It was clear to me what he would do – like some of his colleagues did during the ethnic riots of October last year, like so many of them do regularly, he would go around raping the women, and breaking every law in the book. But he would be untouchable because of the AFSPA.

I was safe, and women in Delhi generally were safe from them – oh, rapes do happen every other day here, but at least the perpetrators are not the lawkeepers who are given carte blanche to be the lawbreakers by the very system that employs them.

2009-12-12T10:55:00.006+05:30

My publisher tells me the book will be available at the Northeast Book Fair in Guwahati. Here is also a list of stores where they say the book is available in Guwahati. More details soon!!

1.Bani Mandir, Congress Bhawan Hedayetpur, Guwahai - 781 003 (Mr. Utpal Hazarika PH.94351 47832)

2. DVS PublishersH B Road, Pan Bazar, Guwahati - 781 001 (Mr. Vinay Sharma PH. 94350 10198)

3. Nivedita Book Distributors, Ashok Path, Kahilipara Road, Jatia, Guwahati - 781 006 (Mr. K.B.Singh PH. 94351 46571)

4. Eastern Book House, Opp. Pan Bazar Girls High School, M L Nehru Road, Pan Bazar, Guwahati - 781 001 (Mr. J P Sharma PH. 94351 95550)

5. Kamakhya Book Agency, 24, R G Complex, M L Nehru Road, Pan Bazar, Guwahati - 781 001 (Mr. Singh PH. 94356 45706)

6. National Book Distributors, Kumudini Mansion, 2nd Floor, Opp. Prag Continental Hotel, M L Nehru Road, Pan Bazar, Guwahati - 781 001 (Mr. Sukanta Biswas PH. 94351 43739)

2009-11-19T13:50:00.001+05:30

We Called the River Red

The advance copies are here! The publishers however say that the book will only hit the market in the first week of December.

2009-11-05T16:31:00.001+05:30

My Book Cover

2009-09-23T10:08:00.007+05:30

We Called the River Red:

Poetry from a Violent Homeland

That’s the title of my poetry collection to be published soon by Author’s Press, Delhi. I have been talking at various forums – most recently at the ICRC-WFS seminar on ‘Women in Conflict Zones: Survivors and Peace Makers’ on 22 September 2009 at IIC, Delhi – on poetry being both personal and political and on the need for more politically conscious literature. This is my contribution in this regard.

2009-06-11T11:28:00.020+05:30

Virginia Mahi

[Published in Dreadlocks Vol 5, 2008. School of Language, Arts and Media: University of the South Pacific.]

Read my other short stories: Colors, I Thought I Knew My Ma

Bortee mama (i) and Xorutee mama were the twins and younger than Virginia mahi (ii). Baganor koka-aita (iii) did not name their daughter Virginia. The Christian midwife did. The midwife was a tea-tribal woman who lived in the labour lines and picked tea leaves like all other labour women. Her name was Rojina. Midwifery was Rojina’s “side business” and they said there was no one who knew more about bringing babies into the world than she did. Even Bijon Roy Compounder who was the only medic in the tea estate, had had to take her help in many complicacies.

Anyway, Rojina brought Virginia mahi into the world and predicted that she would grow up to be a very beautiful woman. “Like the virgin Mary”, she said and Virginia she named the baby.

Baganor aita always had a tough time with babies. Had Rojina not been there, everybody says, neither aita nor Virginia mahi would have made it. As it happened, Virginia mahi came into the world safe and healthy and as Rojina had predicted, she grew up to be quite a beauty.

Baganor aita however, was not very healthy after Virginia mahi’s birth. She had always been a frail woman and when a few years later, Xorutee and Bortee mama were to be born, everybody thought she would die. But again Rojina took charge of things and the twins were born and Baganor aita did not die. But then she never really recovered either. She continued to be weak and fell ill so often that nobody was really sad when she died. “It’s a mercy on her,” they said. But I suppose it was a mercy on the entire family, especially on Virginia mahi who had always had to look after her mother instead of her mother looking after her. Our own aita said that in their family the roles of mother and daughter were quite reversed.

When Baganor aita died, koka who loved her very much took a transfer and went off to work in a tea company in Upper Assam. Virginia mahi and the twins stayed back and koka said, “My Virgie is such a capable and responsible girl, she can look after her brothers while I’m away.”

So Virginia mahi looked after her brothers, and when Baganor koka came home on his monthly visits, she looked after him as well.

Only, in the process, she forgot to look after herself. So one month when Baganor koka came home, he realized Virginia mahi was pregnant. And she was only sixteen. Baganor koka felt he could not carry the burden of the shame on his own and he dragged Virginia mahi to our koka-aita’s house and handed her over to our aita. Aita sent for Rojina who also knew more than others about not bringing babies into the world.

After a month, Virginia mahi went back to her own home and Baganor koka had also come back home for good. And when we went visiting next, it was like old times again. Baganor koka gave us rides on his bicycle through the tea garden. He didn’t mind when we put our hands into the pockets of his shorts looking for lozenges. He said he was younger than our koka and so he wore shorts instead of dhutis (iv) like our koka wore. We did not believe him of course, because our koka looked so much younger and was so much more active even though he wore dhutis.

Then Virginia mahi gave us orange cream biscuits, and when we pestered her she also made malpuas (v) for us. Then she sat down with us and told us stories.

Bortee mama was always studying but he wouldn’t mind taking some time off to ask us about our studies. Xorutee mama was hardly ever there. We always went hoping he would be though, because when he was there, he would teach us how to climb trees, pluck fruits for us, and tell us about the leopard he and his friends saw among the tea plants at night when they went there for a picnic. At this, Baganor koka would tell him to shut up and not frighten us kids and Xorutee mama would shut up and walk into his room and not come out for the rest of the time that we were there. That is why we never wanted Baganor koka and Xorutee mama to be home at the same time. They seemed to be fighting all the time.

One day we heard Xorutee mama had left home after a fight with Baganor koka. They tried to trace him but he was nowhere to be found. Our visits to Virginia mahi stopped. Our aita said we were not to trouble her and Baganor koka as they were very sad. We thought we could cheer them up if we went but aita still wouldn’t let us go. Instead, we were sent back home to Guwahati.

Guwahati was a different place altogether with different people and different sets of growing-up problems. And after a while, we quite forgot about Virginia mahi and Xorutee and Bortee mama and Baganor koka.

Then suddenly one day, Virginia mahi turned up at our place in Guwahati. There was a girl with her whom we had never seen before. Mahi said she was Xorutee mama’s wife and could she stay with us for a couple of days till she could catch her train back to Calcutta?

‘Calcutta?’ my ma asked. Yes, Xorutee mama’s wife was from Calcutta. A year after he had left home, Xorutee mama had sent word that he was in Calcutta and doing well. He would not be coming back home again. But he had to come back four days ago to attend Bortee mama’s shraddha (vi).

After we had left Kopati, Bortee mama had joined the xangathan (vii). He had given up his studies to become a revolutionary. And last week, he had been picked up by the army. They had beaten him to death. Virginia mahi cried when she told us she had gone to collect the body but could not make out at first which one was Bortee mama’s. When they had picked up his body to place it on the pyre, his head had rolled back at his neck – there was not a single bone intact in his body.

Baganor koka had taken to bed as soon as he heard of Bortee mama’s death. And when Xorutee mama had come home, he had been taken to the army camp too for questioning. He had not come back since and Virginia mahi had decided it would be best for his wife to go back to Calcutta and wait for news there.

‘And what about you, Virgie?’ my ma asked.

‘I am going back home to look after deuta (viii),’ she said, and left.

***

(i) Mama – maternal uncle.
(ii) Mahi – maternal aunt.
(iii) Koka – grandfather; aita – grandmother; bagan – garden (here, refers to tea garden/estate), baganor – of, or from, the bagan.
(iv) Dhuti - men’s lower garment; a white piece of cloth tied around the waist.
(v) Malpua - kind of fried, sweet flour cakes.
(vi) Shraddha - Hindu ceremony for the dead.
(vii) Xangathan - literally, organization. It is a common Assamese euphemism for the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), the most prominent separatist insurgent outfit of Assam.
(viii) Deuta - father.

2009-04-24T12:10:00.006+05:30

Dhodar Ali, Or The End Of Ennui

[Publsihed in Pratilipi, March 2009.]

[Read some other poems:Tejimolā Forever; Mother Goddess Kamakhya; Manufacturing Memories; For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead; End of Ennui; From Exile (1); After This Sky; Tryst; Would I Be A Poet Still; elegaic; A History of Violence, Fearless, The Rains Come from Behind the Curtains, Love has a way of happening]

Roll over, roll back.
Did you hear the story of these two Assamese bums?
Their house was on fire.
They were too lazy to get out of bed and run.
The flames scorched one’s back.
Pi pu, he said; not in full pithi purise.
The other wanted to sleep on. Xi xu, he said.
Xipithidi xu.
Roll over on the other side.
Yes, roll over and go back to sleep.
Good idea. That’s what I shall also do.

Outside, the Sardar is watering his plants.
The other morning he scared me
Half to death with his howls.
When I went out to see
Who was strangling him, he said
He was chasing the monkeys away.
(The monkeys come from the ridge nearby
They uproot his plants and break his flower pots.
They are his mortal enemies.)
Today he is quiet. Thank god. I can laze in peace.

Dhishiau, Dhishiau.
He he he boss. Police ne tyre mein goli mar di.
Ei chinta mat kar la mobile de.
Hello, JK tyres dial-a-tyre service…

The FM had kept me drifting
In and out of sleep the whole night.
Snatches of Beethoven, Roxette and Udit Narayan
In between muddled dreams of sex
With the unlikeliest persons
And of being back in school.
And now these gun shots.
Somebody switch off the radio.
The radio is the opium of the people.
Was it Papa Hemingway who wrote that?
(You know of course
He did not do half the things he boasted of.
So what the eff? Nobody ever wrote like him.
The existentialist outsider. Read Colin Wilson.)

Today is Friday.
No not quoting Hemingway again.
It IS Friday today.
What difference does it make?
I could sleep through the weekend.
I could sleep through all weekdays.
Nothing happens. Nobody comes. Nobody goes.
This time it is Beckett…

True nobody goes. I can’t go. Anywhere.
Like the lizard on the wall.
Stuck to these four walls.
No, these walls do not close in on me
Like they do in other people’s writings.
It would be a change if they did.
Something different. But they don’t.
They just stand where they are,
Boobs, dicks and all.
There’s Gaugin’s Breasts and Red Flowers.
(Do all Tahitian women have such well-formed breasts?
Why couldn’t I have such nice breasts?
They are called boobs, Ed!
Julia Roberts as Erin Brockovich…
She’s got a nice pair I suppose.)
And then there’s David’s dick.
Michelangelo was stingy with his strokes.
David’s dick is too short.

But the Sardar’s hair is too long.
He washes his hair on Sundays.
Then you can see his flowing mane.
On other days, it is hidden under his turban.
He’s got turbans of all color – red, blue, black, brown…
The brown bald patch at the back of his head
Can be seen on Sundays
When he leaves his hair loose.
It looks like somebody cleared
A portion of the forest to pitch a tent.
Ever seen a hill in outline?
Looks like a bald pate sprouting new hair.

There are no decent hills in Delhi.
There were so many hills back home, in Assam.
Did you know that hills are not just about height?
I’m staying one flight down from the moon, Zax says.
Maybe all barsatis are that close to the moon.
But living in a leaking barsati is not the same
As living on a hill. We used to live on Chintachal hill.
That was a long time ago. In my dreams,
I still think we are living on the hill.
But we moved to the bottom
Of another hill some time ago.
This bottom doesn’t show in my dreams.
Others do. Dream bottoms. Bottom of the dream.
How do you get to the bottom of a dream?
Freud didn’t know all.

Last night between Saira’s voice on FM
And maili chadar orh ke kaise,
I dreamt I was ow kuwori. The princess inside a fruit.
Somebody was removing the layers from the ow tenga.
I wanted to see who it was.
But the Sardar rang the bell and woke me up.
I woke up feeling hungry.
I’ve skipped two meals in a row.
This morning’s breakfast will be the third.
My ulcers will start complaining,
My reflux esophagitis will flare up again
And I will throw up some more blood.
But I can avert that with an omeprazol.
I shall have one soon.

Ghadi detergent cake ki dhulai sajana…

Do they have to sing about cakes now?
So long as you don’t remember
You have to eat, you’re ok.
I have to switch off the radio.
Even the lazy Assamese bums built a road.
That is the Dhodar Ali.
I have to build my own.
I also have to xi xu.
I will in a moment….
***

Notes:
Dhodar Ali: legend has it that the Ahom king of Assam mobilized the dhod or sluggards of the kingdom to build a road which has been known as the Dhodar Ali ever since
barsati: Hindi for ‘rooftop apartment’
maili chadar orh ke kaise: a line from a bhajan or Hindu devotional song
ow kuwori: from a popular Assamese folktale

2009-04-24T12:05:00.006+05:30

elegaic

[Published in Tonight: An Anthology of World Love Poetry. South Africa: The Poets Printery, 2008.]

[Read some other poems:Tejimolā Forever; Mother Goddess Kamakhya; Manufacturing Memories; For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead; End of Ennui; From Exile (1); After This Sky; Tryst; Would I Be A Poet Still; elegaic; A History of Violence, Fearless, The Rains Come from Behind the Curtains, Love has a way of happening]

in our skies
an emasculated sun
borrows silver light
from leaden birds
while a forgotten wound
is reopened by
a concrete phallus
and it rains green mucous
on the earth
where a grey peacock
spreads its fan
to keep the sun
from our eyes

we cry but our cries cannot
wash away the sky's venom

we laugh and our laughter drowns
the cries of the peacock

2009-04-24T12:02:00.005+05:30

After This Sky

[Published in Tonight: An Anthology of World Love Poetry. South Africa: The Poets Printery, 2008.]

[Read some other poems:Tejimolā Forever; Mother Goddess Kamakhya; Manufacturing Memories; For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead; End of Ennui; From Exile (1); After This Sky; Tryst; Would I Be A Poet Still; elegaic; A History of Violence, Fearless, The Rains Come from Behind the Curtains, Love has a way of happening]

You cannot sow seeds
in a parched sky
and hope they will germinate.

Just as you cannot
drive along cloudy streets
and hope they will tell you
which way to go.

You have seen naked trees
but you want to believe
you need not cry.

Instead you dream
and your dreams
hold up mirrors of sand
for you.

So what do you do
but make love
under a street lamp
while a lunatic moon
on the loose
peeks in through
the frosted panes
of your car window?

And cry
for bleary streets
for denuded trees
for unwilling dreams

for a jack-in-the-box love
that jumps to life
or fades away
while you join
a voyeuristic street lamp
in watching yourself make love?

For no doubt you know
there’s nowhere to go
after this sky.
***

2009-04-24T11:55:00.006+05:30

Tryst

[Published in The Other Voices International Project, Volume 34, 2008]

[Read some other poems:Tejimolā Forever; Mother Goddess Kamakhya; Manufacturing Memories; For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead; End of Ennui; From Exile (1); After This Sky; Tryst; Would I Be A Poet Still; elegaic; A History of Violence, Fearless, The Rains Come from Behind the Curtains, Love has a way of happening]

When we met
On the afternoon sands
The Dibong was on fire
And I, my Kaneng,
Was on fire too.

When you let fall
Your ribi-gacheng
At my feet,
I was scalded.

I reached out
For coolness in the shadow
Of your breasts
And I was scorched.

You did nothing to help.
***

[Notes: Dibong: A river in Assam; Kaneng: Beloved, in the Mising language of Assam; Ribi-gacheng: A Mising woman’s clothing.]

2009-04-24T11:27:00.012+05:30

From Exile (1)

[Published in Pratilipi, March 2009]

[Read some other poems:Tejimolā Forever; Mother Goddess Kamakhya; Manufacturing Memories; For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead; End of Ennui; From Exile (1); After This Sky; Tryst; Would I Be A Poet Still; elegaic; A History of Violence, Fearless, The Rains Come from Behind the Curtains, Love has a way of happening]

Each day is another lifetime
In purgatory.
Immediately as I step out,
I am drowned in a sea of eyes,
Hands seize me,
Breaths scorch me.

Somehow I swim across,
Somehow, I’ve learnt to.

On the other shore,
I am shorn of my identity.
I stand half naked.
They ask me:
‘You eat human flesh, don’t you?’
Nowadays I do not protest
Quietly, I pay the price of being
What they are not.

As I swim back across
Fighting monsters, gasping for breath
I miss life.
I search for an anodyne,
Find oblivion.

But even as I do, I remember,
Tomorrow is yet another lifetime
In purgatory.

The exile begins to seem pointless.

***

2009-04-24T11:13:00.016+05:30

A History of Violence

[Published in Pratilipi, March 2009]

[Read some other poems:Tejimolā Forever; Mother Goddess Kamakhya; Manufacturing Memories; For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead; End of Ennui; From Exile (1); After This Sky; Tryst; Would I Be A Poet Still; elegaic; A History of Violence, Fearless, The Rains Come from Behind the Curtains, Love has a way of happening]

A river flowed here
When we reached the valley
Carrying our gods
On the strains of our songs.
Some gods were more enterprising:
Khunlung and Khunlai climbed down on their own
From heaven on a golden ladder)

Our gods were good gods, free gods
They mixed well, changed names, traded identities
Like the river, they ebbed and flowed
Sometimes we too ebbed and flowed, together
On the banks of our river, singing
Luitare pani jabi o boi…
But we were only human
Soon we wanted to be our own gods.

We called the river Red
Because that was our favored color
And we thought the favorite of our gods
Who drank the red blood we offered
And read patterns in sacrificial blood.
We drowned our gods in the red river
Where we drained the blood from our souls
And thought: Now this is how we pray.

The deafening noise of our prayers
Could not be drowned
By the river Red which flowed on
Blood clotting in its heart
Skeletal remains of our sacrifices
Clogging its veins
Till one day, there was a river no more
And our gods died a violent death.
***
Notes:
Luitare pani jabi o boi…: Literally, “Waters of the Luit, keep flowing…” A line from a song by Jyotiprasad Agarwala.

2009-02-10T20:31:00.002+05:30

The Question of 'Assamese' Identity...

Been pondering on this question for a while. An article published in Dainik Asom on 26 December 2004:

[Also read Identity in Exile, Burnt Flesh and Xewali Flowers, Baptism by Beer...]

2009-02-10T19:15:00.000+05:30

Terror and Urban Apathy

(For those who could not read the earlier, more emotive Axamiya version: Burnt Flesh and Xewali Flowers)

[Published Assam Tribune, 21 January 2009]

After the devastating serial blasts in Assam, on October 30, – six of which were in the capital Guwahati – everybody in the media and elsewhere was talking about how insurgency there has degenerated into urban terrorism. What very few people were talking about is that Guwahati has experienced such terror before, many times and with similar shocking impact. It is of course true these most recent blasts were of a higher magnitude and much better coordinated than any other that the entire North East with its long history of conflict and violence has ever seen. What is also true, however, is that it is definitely not the first instance of big or serial blasts in the city, nor of multiple casualties and severe damage as was being projected by most media with clichés like terror getting a new face there.

The United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) which is one of the groups under suspicion for the October 30 blasts, has on earlier instances also been accused of involvement in triggering powerful explosions in Guwahati and killing many. In 2004 alone, for instance, the group targeted Guwahati five times, one of which included a series of blasts in one upper and four lower Assam districts, besides two in Guwahati. Six people were killed and about 80 injured. But Guwahati has not been targeted by the ULFA alone. No one who has followed the conflict scenario in Assam can forget the 1992 blast in the busy Paltan Bazar area of the city where at least 43 persons were killed and nearly 150 injured. An ex-‘insurgent’ who is currently the chief of the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC), Hagrama Mahilary, was widely suspected to be behind this blast. Today, Mahilary’s party, the Bodoland Peoples Front (BPF), is part of the ruling coalition in Assam, sharing power with the Congress-led government.

So if any new face was given to terror at all, it was not done on October 30, 2008, nor by the perpetrators of terror alone who have only done what they have been doing for a long time now ever since they traded away their ideologies in exchange for shelter and security. On the contrary, the painting of a new face for terror has been in process for a while now and at the helm of this process has been the state itself which condones such acts, often even legitimises them. Whether this legitimisation be in the form of political power sharing, or bestowing of financial largesse and an above-and-beyond-the-law status – as that provided to many Surrendered ULFA (or SULFA as they are popularly known) cadres – the fact is that nobody has been held accountable for perpetrating such heinous crimes against humanity. On the contrary, they have been rewarded and the powers that be have patted themselves on their backs for bringing ‘the youths gone astray’ back to the ‘mainstream’.

Meanwhile, what has been happening to the ‘mainstream' – whatever its definition? With such criminal elements being pushed back into its midst and woven into its fabric, the very nature of Guwahati society has changed forever. From a predominantly quiet middle class city holding dearly on to certain traditional values that defined it, it has transformed – in the course of much less than a decade – into a brash, garish, confrontative, ugly city that has internalised the discourses of death, destruction and violence to the extent that it has become inured, even apathetic.

Many ‘morning-after’ reports in the media relating to the bomb blasts talked – again in clichés – about people bravely coming out on the streets of Guwahati defying terror and fear, refusing to be cowed down, their spirits uncrushed. I saw these reports on national media, which usually relegate news of such events in the North East to the tickers at the bottom of the screens, or better still, ignores them: like the October 22 blast in Manipur where 15 people were killed and 24 injured. The October 30 Assam blasts however made it big, given their resemblance to the recent spate of bombings elsewhere in India and speculations about the suspected collaboration of Islamist militants. The day before, I had also seen raw unedited footage of the blast sites on TV, thanks to satellite technology. And everybody in Guwahati had seen them too. Earlier – before the North East had its first satellite television channel and insensitive unethical journalists thrust their microphones at burnt, bleeding and grievously injured blast victims and camerapersons blithely filmed charred bodies and mangled limbs and the channel aired them with a cursory ‘unedited footage’ note – the reality of suffering in and witnessing a bomb blast might not have been so palpable. And yet, on the evening of the blast when I spoke to my parents in Guwahati for the ninth time that day – my father had had a close call – my mother told me with horror that she could hear people bursting leftover Diwali crackers!

No news channel, national or otherwise, of course reported this because it has nothing to do with changing the faces of terror. And talking of urban apathy does not go well with the proclaimed political agenda of tackling terror and its perpetrators. So they call the proverbial rose by another name, one that smells sweeter. After all both are ways to come to terms with the blood and gore that defines city life in times of terror. Only, the way my city has learnt to live with the phenomenon seems as inhuman as the acts of terror themselves.

2009-01-26T22:49:00.004+05:30

Politics and Art

[Published in Geometer Magazine, January 2009)

[Read some other poems:Tejimolā Forever; Mother Goddess Kamakhya; Manufacturing Memories; For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead; End of Ennui; From Exile (1); After This Sky; Tryst; Would I Be A Poet Still; elegaic; A History of Violence, Fearless, The Rains Come from Behind the Curtains, Love has a way of happening]

Would I be a poet still?

Your vocabulary is no longer mine.
My language you may not know.
But would you call me a poet still
If I did not write the words you spoke?

Would I be a poet still
If I wrote instead the cacophony
Of insurgent cross-fires
And false encounters, secret killings?
Will you consider it poetry
If it were splashed with mud from military boots
Mixed with the blood of revolutionaries and mercenaries
And political touts and merchants of ideology?

They were dreamers who thought poetry
Was about nation, revolution, freedom.
They were dreaming in their sleep
Their dreams died as they slept.

Poetry became a casualty of armed skirmishes.
***

2008-12-22T17:31:00.001+05:30

Identity in Exile

[Published Indian Journal of Postcolonial Literatures No 11, Jul-Dec 2008.]

[Also see A Question of 'Assamese' Identity, Flesh and Xewali Flowers, Baptism by Beer...]

I grew up amidst an atmosphere of ultra-nationalism generated by the Assam Movement of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. And then, there was the romance of insurgency, the fire of idealism that inspired an entire generation of Assamese youth. That fire, though dimmed to a great extent, was still burning when I left home in 1996: ‘home’ has always been equated with Assam - and Northeast India as a whole - in my vocabulary. And that was my first time away from home, away from everything held fanatically dear.

I was eighteen then and romanticism at age eighteen is permissible. With juvenile simplicity I wrote in a poem how ‘after cradling me for nine months in her womb, my mother planted me – a tiny seed – in the soil of my birth’; very idealistically, I wrote of myself as the tree that grew towards ‘the sun and the blue’, till one day, ‘I touched the sky and gathered the blue’. I bent then to plant the sun in my soil and my siblings thereafter grew higher and higher, taller and taller, ‘till all said, “Look, they are the sun, the blue.”’

It has been a long time since I shed such messianic ambitions and unquestioning idealism. But at the time, I was very much steeped in these sentiments and did not see the irony of the fact that I had unintentionally symbolized Delhi as the sun and the sky of my poem. Delhi, after all, was the place I was grudgingly going to; for me, as the heart of mainland India it was a place where every person (or so I thought) would be hostile to me because I was Assamese.

I was wrong. They were not at all hostile. They were mostly curious. I was something exotic to them, coming as I did from the land of half naked tribals, perhaps even cannibals, and which was now the land of insurgency, of terrorism, of secessionism and all things decadent.

Do you have plains in Assam?
Haven’t you done your geography in school?
You have buses in Assam!
No, we travel by bullock carts, or by boats across the Brahmaputra.
But the Brahmaputra is in Bengal.
How did you ever reach college?

I did not look ‘Oriental’ – the politically correct term that had been devised in lieu of the derogatory sounding ‘chinky’. So I did not have to face some of the more incendiary questions. My friend from Mizoram was asked if she needed a passport to come to India. ‘I am Indian, f*** you’, she said in sheer exasperation. But who cares? Naga or Mizo, Assamese or Manipuri, it was all the same. If one came from beyond Bengal, one came from beyond India. Like this first year student who was ragged when we were doing our second year BA who thought that Nagaland was in Nepal.

The ‘Oriental’ looking among us were not ragged – Indians are always nice to foreigners. One year, the students from the Northeast volunteered to be ragged in the hostel ragging sessions – ‘we also want to feel a part of the community here’. And then they ask why we need separate students’ unions for the Northeast students when none of the other regions have such bodies. I wonder now if it would have served any purpose to tell them that we have very strong community ties in the Northeast, especially those among us who come from ‘tribal’ communities. Some communities even own land as a body, not as individuals.

And these communities may be patriarchal in many ways, but at least in the public space, women are not treated as sex toys. Imagine the rude shock then to find men masturbating over you in public buses! It is no romanticism certainly when I say that in my part of the world women are not burnt with their husbands, or by them. A Naga friend could not understand what the big deal was in being from the opposite sex – ‘we are brought up as different units of a community; we have our well defined functions in the community but we are not polarized by gender.’

My angst as a woman and Northeasterner come across in everything I wrote at the time. I wrote,

From exile

Each day is another lifetime in purgatory
As soon as I step out, I drown in a sea of eyes
Hands seize me, breaths scorch me.
I struggle to swim across.
On the other shore, I am shorn of my identity
I stand half-naked
They call me a barbarian
‘You eat human flesh, don’t you?’
Now-a-days, I do not resist
Quietly I pay the price of being superior.
The exile begins to seem pointless. (1996)
***

Distance, they say, makes the heart grow fonder. Though in some cases, blinder too. I’m thankful that in my case distance from home only cleared my perspective and cured me of my blindness. Familiarity with the outside world, instead of breeding contempt, bred tolerance in me. Fanaticism and love were sifted and separated. Yeats felt like a kindred spirit.

Out of Ireland have we come,
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us from the start,
I carry from my mother’s womb,
A fanatic heart.

Literature is good. It emancipates, makes you bigger, better, broader. At last you have found the right set of people. Of course, once in a while there is a new lecturer in class who makes it difficult for you to remain very tolerant.

Uddipana. Nice name. Bengali?
No ma’am. Assamese.
But you don’t look Assamese.
What is looking Assamese?
Why, chinky of course.
***

College over and the world of journalism. You write about your culture, your people. You are read and appreciated; you feel you have done your bit. Of course, the mainstream national media cannot give you the kind of space you would ideally want for representing your region nor afford to place your concerns over Delhi’s, but within these constraints, you can work your way around.

Then suddenly one day, you open a magazine where your write-up was supposed to be. Only, it is not your write-up anymore. It used to be until the printer’s devil (I suppose) took away whole alphabets from the transliterated text of your language. The language that in your literature has been described as honey-dripping, the very language to incite the dumb to speech, is not even a coherent language anymore; just some garbled conglomeration of letters. Perhaps a language spoken by the fidgeting females and the peacock-feathered accompanist in the illustration? Where do these people come from? They are surely not Assamese. And certainly not the graceful, erotic, enticing, ecstatic Bihu dancers about whom the write up was supposed to be!
Time then to return from a pointless self-imposed exile.
***

All this was a long time ago. I am told Northeast students in mainland India still face similar questions and prejudices. Now when I go back to Delhi, I see many eateries increasingly employ girls from the Northeast – the ‘Oriental’ ones – to serve customers, a trend not entirely absent even 10 years ago when I first went to Delhi. To my mind it is commercialization of an attitude. It seems to me as cashing in on the mixed reaction I had seen even among my mainland Indian classmates seven to ten years ago – on the one hand they were in awe of the more ‘Westernised’ (as they felt) Northeasterners and the way they dressed or carried themselves; and on the other, they looked at them with some curiosity, some derision, some fear: the usual ambivalence attached to exotica.

I used to shudder to think that it was people with attitudes like this whose parents, or relatives, or friends were sitting in crucial decision-making forums and determining the destinies of my region. By now some of them would themselves have picked up the mantle of 'Northeast experts' perhaps. The popular imagination is after all, not so far removed from the political and all of it affects policy-making, which in turn determines the destiny of an entire region.
***

2008-12-22T16:43:00.002+05:30

Burnt Flesh and Xewali Flowers...

After a long gap, I am writing in Assamese again. This one was a reaction to the 31 October serial blasts in Assam, the media circus that marked it, and the urban apathy that followed. It was published in Deobariya Khabar, the Sunday supplement of the daily Asomiya Khabar on 16/11/2008.

[Also see Identity in Exile, A Question of 'Assamese' Identity, and Baptism by Beer]

2008-10-23T22:17:00.004+05:30

Sometimes Poetry is Written in Blood

[Read some other poems:Tejimolā Forever; Mother Goddess Kamakhya; Manufacturing Memories; For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead; End of Ennui; From Exile (1); After This Sky; Tryst; Would I Be A Poet Still; elegaic; A History of Violence, Fearless, The Rains Come from Behind the Curtains, Love has a way of happening]

I have been fascinated with the 1 Giant Leap concept since the time I was with National Geographic Channel, India, and I got to have a preview of the film before it was aired. So when I came across The Other Voices International Project on the web, and it said it is dedicated to 1 Giant Leap, I was intrigued. And then, Roger Hulmes published my poetry on the site, and I was thrilled. Here’s one of the featured poems, one I should not have had to write:

For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead

(He enriched me for life in the two days I met him)

A man lived and a man died

And I can still hear his song:

Melākpānite dubiba sapnāte dikhiba…(1)

His voice must be floating now

On the Melakpani river

Stopping at every bend

To tell a tall tale.

II.

The man’s voice on the telephone:

Uddipana, toi kelei uddipanā?(2)

Yet, he inspired zeal like none else.

To him and those around, all else was

Because he deemed just so.

III.

Sahariā suāli, toi ki bujibi?(3)

True, big politics lives in small border towns

Where administrative expediency sunders lives

Barters souls vends death

Transplants land to paper from earth while

City dwellers complain of value erosion.

IV.

Nilikesh da(4),

Self-crowned swargadeo(5) of an independent dreamland

Foul-mouthed rum-drinking stealer of hearts

Doer of deeds weaver of tales leader of men

Killed because he happened to be.

***

[Nilikesh Gogoi was shot dead by Indian Central Industrial Security Force personnel on 23 January 2007 in Geleky, a town on the Assam-Nagaland border. In a highly militarized and insurgency prone frontier zone like the northeast of India – of which Assam and Nagaland are a part – such incidents keep recurring to remind one how cheaply are the lives of precious people like Nilikesh da dispensed of.]

***

Notes:

(1) “I’ll drown in Melakpani, you’ll see me in your dreams”. Folk song in Nagamese, a creolized version of Assamese, used as link language between the Assam valley and the Naga hills of Nagaland. Both Assam and Nagaland are states in India’s northeast frontier.

(2)“Uddipana, why are you uddipana?” Uddipana means inspiration/enthusiasm.

(3)“City girl, what will you understand?”

(4)A term for addressing elders in Assamese.

(5)King of the Ahom dynasty which ruled over Assam for nearly six centuries.

***

You can read the rest at http://www.othervoicespoetry.org/vol34/ugoswami/index.html.

2008-03-08T18:01:00.004+05:30

Manufacturing Memories

[Published in Muse India 18]

[Read some other poems:Tejimolā Forever; Mother Goddess Kamakhya; Manufacturing Memories; For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead; End of Ennui; From Exile (1); After This Sky; Tryst; Would I Be A Poet Still; elegaic; A History of Violence, Fearless, The Rains Come from Behind the Curtains, Love has a way of happening]

My memories do not go so far back as that.
I do not even remember the 80’s agitation –
The Axam āndolan.
I would like to believe I do
But I would only be impinging
On āitā’s wide-eyed memories
Of how there was ‘the smell of blood in the air. And fear’.

Āitā had ten children
And a fair sprinkling of grandchildren
By the time of the āndolan. I was one of them.
I would like to believe I remember her ample figure
Standing guard at the front gate, three-not-three in hand,
Her limbs trembling, her mouth dry,
As she waited for the militant migrants to come
With daggers and dās to fall on her brood.
But I don’t.
I only have a piece of conversation with me.

Āitā: I couldn’t let that happen; I had to save what was mine.
Me: But āitā, you don’t know how to work a gun!
Āitā: It would have gone off somehow.

Being a poet, I need no more.
I build on it and shape for me
The memory of the life and times of
Sushila Kumari Misra, dārogā’s daughter,
Fiercely proud, and still believing
She’s queen of a scattered tribe.

What I narrate could be
The true story of Sushila Kumari,
Arrogant but not unkind daughter
Of a colonial serviceman whom everybody feared,
Married off to a man, who led other men
To reclaim land and open a frontier –
He became the arbiter among communities,
The patron whom everybody revered.

This might really be how life took shape
For Sushila Misra nee Debi
Whose hands were never idle
Even while she received her regular feed
Of community gossip
From ādhiār’s wives and the headmistress
Of Kopati High School.
She knitted and kneaded and sifted and sorted
While doling out advice and some money
To distressed women whose husbands
Dared not approach the patriarch
Whose progeny she had borne.

What I actually know though,
Is that she is today a queen without a clan,
The queen who weaves even now
That her husband is no more
(He only wore clothes she wove).
She weaves even now
When all she can see is her dead son’s ghost.
Because she has been weaving forever,
Even when she was mistress
Of five elephants, ten granaries, and thirty-nine servants.

She weaves furiously
As though not to weave would be
Not to be able to hold it all together.
As though all of it is still together
Only because her māku flits in and out
Of the threads of diverse lives –
Lives she had saved
At gunpoint one day…

And I of her progeny,
Realise as I weave her story
That it is very easy
To manufacture memory.
***
[Axam āndolan – Assam Movement of 1979-85 against illegal migrants in Assam; āitā – grandmother; dā – big cutting blade; dārogā – policeman; adhiār – sharecropper; māku – shuttle used in the handloom for weaving.]

2007-11-17T09:40:00.003+05:30

REMEMBER TEJIMOLĀ?

[Published in Chandrabhāgā 15/2007]

[Read some other poems:Tejimolā Forever; Mother Goddess Kamakhya; Manufacturing Memories; For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead; End of Ennui; From Exile (1); After This Sky; Tryst; Would I Be A Poet Still; elegaic; A History of Violence, Fearless, The Rains Come from Behind the Curtains, Love has a way of happening]

Tejimolā Forever

I am a survivor, I am.
Didn’t that stepmother of mine
Try a thousand and one ways to kill me?
And didn’t I survive still?

Māhi āi, māhi āi, muk nāmāribā…

What a pathetic creature I was!
Crying and cringing, letting her grind me in the mortar
And throw me away in the backyard.
Only I grew back as a creeper.
She cut me and threw me in a ditch
I started blooming.
She tried to drown me
I became a lotus.

I knew pitāi would come back soon.
I’d then tell him about his wicked wife.
I sang out as his boat went by:
Don’t reach out, don’t pluck me
O you strange boatman
Māhi āi ground me in my silk clothes
I am Tejimolā really.

Pitāi of course chased away his wife
And brought me back to shape
And got me married
To Dhonpur who loves me.

But having been a creeper,
A flowering plant and a lotus,
I did not want to be a wife.
But nobody asked me.
So I left when it got to me.
They searched of course
But I’d learnt to disguise well
And they gave up.

Now I live and die
A plant, a creeper,
A vine, a flower.
I live and die,
Tejimolā forever.
***

[In the Assamese folktale, Tejimolā, the story ends where the eponymous heroine gets married. To retell the tale to let the docile Tejimolā choose her own fate is to take a gendered stance vis-à-vis the process of translation.]
***

2007-09-20T07:34:00.003+05:30

SOMETIMES I ALSO WRITE POETRY MYSELF

[Published in Etchings 3. http://www.ilurapress.com/E3-Sample.htm]

[Read some other poems:Tejimolā Forever; Mother Goddess Kamakhya; Manufacturing Memories; For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead; End of Ennui; From Exile (1); After This Sky; Tryst; Would I Be A Poet Still; elegaic; A History of Violence, Fearless, The Rains Come from Behind the Curtains, Love has a way of happening]

Mother Goddess Kamakhya

I
The world will end
In a deodhani’s(1) dance
Blood trickling from the corner of her mouth
Black pigeon feather stuck to her chin.
What is her prophecy today?
No prophecy today, she only laughs.
And somewhere in the background,
A black goat bleats.
The mother goddess loves blood.
She drinks thirstily
Goat-blood, pigeon-blood, bull-blood.
And once a year, she menstruates.
A great event: the only time her devotees
Consider menstrual blood sacred.
(You cannot worship a vagina
And expect it will not menstruate.)

II
There is a tortoise which has seen
A hundred, five hundred xankarabdas(2) now.
Sunning the algae on its back,
It dreams of a terrible goddess
Fallen from the sky,
A yoni on a phallic mountain.
The birth of a noble generation
And its gradual degeneration
Later, the tortoise still suns itself
And cringes, at the nightmarish vision
Of a blood-bathed people.
Its ancient limbs thrill at the sound
Of taal, khol, dhol, mridanga(3).
It has seen an eighty year old oja(4)
Dance two feet above the ground
And a deodhani swing her torso
Up, down, round and round.
The bull calf ’s lowing is drowned
The kharga(5) falls to the ground,
And the mother goddess is sated.

III
I, terrible goddess of Kamakhya,
Have seen it all –
Have seen the beginning
Now bear the end.
My little world will end
With the last bleat of the lamb.
Death – moss covered –
Will live on
Feed on
Blood.
I created this nightmare.
***

(1) Shaman.
(2) Assamese years.
(3) Percussion instruments.
(4) Practitioner of the Ojapali art form, performed mostly on religious occasions.
(5) A huge blade; cutting instrument.
***

The legend is that the temple of the goddess Kamakhya was erected on the
Nilachal hill in Assam at the place where her vagina fell when her decomposing
body was being carried across the three worlds of Hindu mythology after her
death by her inconsolable husband, Lord Shiva. She has been the patron
goddess of the Assamese people for centuries now and who knows but that the
political bloodletting taking place today in the valley below flows from the
goddess’s own blood lust?
***

2007-06-07T03:21:00.000+05:30

SOME POEMS I HAVE LOVED TRANSLATING

[The poetry translation workshops organised by poet Sarah Maguire at the School of Oriental and African Studies began on 7th October 2004 with a discussion of these translated poems. The workshops have now grown to become the Poetry Translation Centre at SOAS. These poems have also been published in Etchings 3.]

See more translated poems on Muse India 18.

Translation of

Jonaki Mon (Hemontor Keitaman Kobita)
by Hiren Bhattacharya

Moon Soaked (Autumn Strophes)

I
Icy autumn winds sway
In the cradle of dusk
Like honey bees drunk on orange blossoms.

II
Between the desire and the deferral
Windswept autumn.

III
Hemonta – the season of heartbreak
When pregnant paddy fields swell in fragrant prayer.

***

Translation of

Ahinor Landscape
by Hiren Bhattacharya

October Landscape

I
It’s over –
The orgiastic frenzy of a brutal sky.
In the restive fields now ripple
Wave after green wave.

II
The white of the kohua
Breaks the lull of an inky sky.
An autumn sky whispers –
There’s a season for every poem.

III
In every crease of descending light
A revelation.
With every emotion
Awakens a word…

[Kohua is a kind of river reed with fluffy white flowers]

***

Translation of

Jonaki Mon
by Hiren Bhattacharya

Moon Soaked

I
Clouds – swollen in the wind
Rivers – rising with the waves
And a kneeling heart
That buries its face in the stream
And wonders – what if I jump?

II
Whose moon-soaked hands are these
In the enchanted night?
In the breathless darkness,
Suddenly, the rain dampened scent
Of distant bokul.

III
In a sanguine sea, the island of love
No words there – only silence.

(Bokul is a big tree with tiny white fragrant flowers)

***

ANOTHER POEM BY HIREN BHATTACHRAJYA I JUST LOVE

[Published in Etchings 3. ]

Translation of

Bhogali
by Hiren Bhattacharya

Plenty

You know
This poet has nothing more
Just this one shirt
Coming apart at the seams

Love also is perhaps like this
Unclothing itself to sate the heart…
***

2007-05-05T15:29:00.000+05:30

AN ARTICLE ON INTERNALLY DISPLACED PEOPLE IN ASSAM

[Details of other academic publications here.]

Published in
Refugee Survey Quarterly, Vol. 25, Issue 2
© UNHCR 2006, all rights reserved

ENABLING IDP LIVELIHOODS IN WESTERN ASSAM: NOBODY’S RESPONSIBILITY

Assam is one of the seven states in India’s Northeast frontier. Famous for its scenic
beauty, natural resources and cultural richness, its infamy however lies in the
ethnic turmoil that has characterized most of its postcolonial history. Turbulent
migration and constant demographic shifts has made it a playing fi eld of ethnic
and identity politics which has resulted in such turmoil. Autochthons and nonautochthons,
indigenous and non-indigenous native populations, and indigenous
and settler communities are just some of the multi-layered polarizations that
surface in any study of the peoples of Assam. Such polarizations when coupled
with a scramble over limited resources and continued migration, naturally lead
to conflicts.

As a consequence of such conflicts, a large number of internally displaced
people has been created in Assam. Indeed, in Western Assam where this study is
based, it has been estimated that every fourth person in the district of Kokrajhar
is a confl ict induced displaced person. Though a sustained mistrust between the
indigenous and non-indigenous native populations has been the cause of much
turmoil in Western Assam, it is mainly settler-indigenous confl ict that has caused
such displacement. Till a Memorandum of Settlement granting them autonomy
was signed in 2003, the most vocal and volatile indigenous native community
of Assam, the Bodo, had been in confl ict for more than a decade against settler
communities like Muslims of East Bengali origin and Adivasi. This study looks at
the hopeless situation that the IDPs from these settler communities continue to
live in after almost a decade or more of displacement...

Read the entire article at:
http://rsq.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/25/2/60?ijkey=5xF4veIvkc3OwnD&keytype=ref

2006-01-25T00:09:00.001+05:30

SOME STUFF I HAVE EARLIER WRITTEN:

[Also see A Question of 'Assamese' Identity, Identity in Exile, Burnt Flesh and Xewali Flowers, and Muse India issues I edited on:
Literatures of Assam, Influence of Insurgency on Assamese Literature]

BAPTISM BY BEER

The Axamiya cuisine is an integral part of its culture and flora and fauna says Uddipana Goswami as she takes us through a culinary tour of her childhood days in Axam

(Published 2000, http://www.tehelka.com/)

We are the bhatuas. We Axamiya (Assamese) cannot do without rice – bhat. Or saul as it is called in its uncooked form. Rice in its various forms is part of our main meals, our snacks and even our drinks.

Rice kept standing in water for a few days turns into beer. It is called lao-pani, or rice beer. In the days of the Ahom (the people who trekked from Southeast Asia and ruled Axam, or Assam, for 600 years), lao-pani was the staple drink and the Ahom had turned producing beer into a fine art. They added a variety of substances like pepper and different kinds of herbs like kapoudhekiya, patixondar, tongloti and jetulipoka to produce lao-panis with varying nuances of taste and colour. Lao-pani made of ripe jackfruits and varieties of banana called athiya kal and bheem kal was made at times. Lao-pani thus made was part of the daily diet. The Mishing, Bodo and other ethnicities have their own drinks indigenously manufactured, with nutritious values to boot. Thus, there are drinks like apong, and ju.

An Ahom custom I'd heard but never managed to establish the veracity of, was that an Ahom baby is dipped in beer immediately after its birth. Well, we are not Ahom. So I wasn't dipped in beer. And drinks were not allowed in my family. So as a child, I never got to taste apong or ju or lao-pani. The nearest I got to lao-pani was paita bhat. Paita bhat is soaked rice.

There was a song we used to sing as kids. Actually it was a kind of game we played. One person tickled you all the way up from your palm to your underarm, singing

Igharar mekuri xighare jau
Pura mase paita bhate khai gusi jau.

(A cat I am, going from one household to another I ransack their houses for roasted fish and soaked rice.)

Soaked rice tastes great, especially if Ma mixes onions and butar guri (powdered gram) or mahor guri (powdered lentils) with it. Some mustard oil and a pinch of salt – the combination of lon-tel – and it is a treat. 'You cannot have it on school days', Ma used to say. I understood why only later when I learnt the principle behind making lao-pani.

But paita bhat is not a regular feature. Mas-bhat is. Fresh river fish with rice. Though fresh river fish is really hard to come by these days, and quite expensive when you do get it, fish still remains central to the Axamiya diet. Rice, a big piece of fish and a little bit of tengar jol, the tangy gravy that gets its taste from the thekera tenga or, in its absence, from the tomatoes added to it, is all it takes to make a feast of the daily meal. A feast my deuta (father), like most Axamiya people, cannot do without.

And then, there is khar. An Axamiya meal is supposed to start with khar and end with tenga. 'Khar khowa Axamiya ' is a common, supposedly derogatory way of addressing us Axamiya, though I don't see why a particular people should be looked down upon because they have a particular dish, and why a people should feel affronted at the epithet if they enjoy the dish. The khar we most frequently used was kalakhar. It is made by drying the trunk of athiya kal and setting it on fire. The ashes are kept soaked in a coconut shell and the juice that flows out is kalakhar. Not only does it make a cooking ingredient but is also used as an Axamiya substitute for shampoo, with the difference that it is far more beneficial than the artificially manufactured shampoo. The kalakhar so extracted is then added to the vegetable, usually papaya and cucumber, when it is being cooked and the end result is a dish as tasty as it is healthful.

So rice with khar or rice with fish or with both is almost a must. Some padina (mint) or dhaniya (coriander) chutney, a mixed vegetable or mashed potatoes, and dail (lentils) is what makes up our normal diet. I love to have roasted potatoes but it is to be had only when we go to our native village. While other dishes are being cooked, the potatoes, and sometimes even tomatoes and brinjals and fish are left to roast in the souka (earthen stove where wood is used as the fuel). When they are cooked, everything is mashed together and the pitika is ready. The dail we usually have can be moog, mah, mosur, or but. When the tangy ou-tenga is added to the mahar dail, it becomes a delight to have. The ou-tenga is a small vegetable and I always used to wonder how the ou-kuwari – as the fairy tale goes – could hide inside it for so long till the rajkuwar saw her, fell in love with her, and brought her out of her shell. But then fairy tales are fairy tales. They even build houses of chocolate in fairy tales.

Of course, if anyone knows anything about Ahom architecture, they wouldn't consider fairy tales too far fetched. The Ahom added mahar dail, bora saul, eggs and other food materials to make a cement that held their huge monuments together for ages. They stand even today; obviously Axamiya people were never too draught ridden or flood driven to devour their ancient buildings.

Meat, for us, is an occasional event. And then too, it is mostly goat meat or chicken. Pork and beef are restricted to certain peoples only. And then, there's pigeon meat – the tastiest of them all. Domesticated pigeon makes ready meat for guests who come by without intimation, especially in the villages.

Venison, it seems, is even tastier than pigeon meat, but we never got to have it. Venison is considered quite a delicacy and I've heard stories of how, in the days when hunting wasn't forbidden, my uncles would go deer hunting in the nearby Orang sanctuary. Even if they regret those killing sprees now, it doesn't help much. Orang is in a sad state today.

Till Sankardeb introduced the Ek Saran Nam Dharma, his brand of Vaishnavism in Axam, it seems there were no restrictions regarding food. One ate almost everything, as long as it wasn't poisonous – even crabs, bats and snakes, all kinds of lichens and ferns and mushrooms and cows and buffaloes and pigs and pigeons and what not. Most of the foodstuff, was first offered to the gods to appease them and then eaten by the people. This was especially true of the indigenous peoples Axam. When Vaishnavism came to Axam, and restrictions were imposed on peoples’ food habits, thanksfully some cults like the Ratikhowa retained these practices.

But by and large, there are many restrictions, and one is not refined enough if one eats anything but the usual stuff. However, I have seen some daredevil guys, cousins and friends, having bats and snakes and wished I could too, if only to find out how they taste. After all, if my ancestors could have it all, why not me? I've had to be satisfied with cooking up stories for ignorant acquaintances in Delhi about how tasty snake meat and toad milk is – they lapped it all up. According to them, if we can have bamboo shoots, we can have anything. I only said, 'O lord, forgive them, they know not what they are missing'. For bamboo shoot, or khorisa as we call it, is just heaven. If you have not had raw, grated bamboo shoot mixed with salt and mustard oil, you do not know what taste is. If you have not had pork cooked in bamboo shoot, you might as well take to eating grass.

Which reminds me, we Axamiya are also said to feed on anything and everything we can lay our hands on, including grass. But of course, it is far from true. We do not eat grass. We have almost everything else that is green and nutritious. Spinach, or paleng as we call it, may be Popeye's favourite green food. Mine is dhekia which is a kind of fern. It grows in abundance by the roadside in villages, so that you only have to go, pick it up and fry it; it tastes great. Then there is also bhedelata which smells icky and doesn't taste too great but is supposed to have a lot of medicinal value. No wonder I never liked to have it. Xak is what we call these green leaves that had so much nutritional value and were to be found everywhere. We can pick manimuni, padina, lai, lafa, nefafu and masandari from our garden. We make pakoras, or phularis as we called them, out of some. Xewali, or the night jasmine is not just a beautiful flower. Its leaves, bitter though they are, make tasty phularis. Dip the leaves in gram flour and fry them and you have mouth-watering phularis as we call them.

Most of these herbs have very pungent tastes; they're either too sour or too bitter; we Axamiya have a penchant for strong tastes, while we are also the people who can be just as happy with bland, boiled mar-bhat and alu, that is, boiled rice and potatoes. We have the bitterest of leaves like nefafu and xewali and we have the tangiest of fruits like the rabab tenga (shaddock) and the Naga tenga – a very politically incorrect name, if I should say so. (For the Axamiya, anything intemperate used to be 'Naga' by virtue of the fact that the Naga were considered a hot-headed race.) But if you have a palate for them, the taste sticks to your tongue for a lifetime. Like they have to mine.

Talking of sticky things reminds me of bora saul. I hated it till I got to know most varieties of lao-pani cannot be made without bora saul. And then, it has a sticky quality by virtue of which it formed an ingredient of the cement used by the Ahom builders. Because of this reason, bora saul was also the rice we used for making those delectable pithas – that typical Axamiya snack more common at Bihu-time. In this avatar, of course, bora saul becomes not just tolerable, but sheer heaven.

There is no Bihu without pitha. Dry, ground rice powder is given a cylindrical shape with sesame or coconut fillings. And accordingly, tilar pitha or narikolar pitha is made. There are also other kinds of pithas – ghila pitha, kakalsinga pitha, sunga pitha, jonai pitha, bakul pitha and so on, named after their shapes and fillings.

Sunga pitha was always my favourite. It is cooked by stuffing the bora saul, whether ground or whole, into bamboo cylinders, and placing the cylinder on fire. It can be had with gur (jaggery) alone, or with doi (curd) and gur. Doi can't taste any better than this, neither with sira (rice flakes) nor with komal saul, that typically Axamiya ready-to-eat rice; soak it in water and it's ready to eat. It is impossible to translate the taste of it into words. It can only be felt.

And then, at the end of every meal, there is the endemic Axamiya addiction – tamol-pan. Tamol is areca and pan is betel leaf. Have them with a dash of sun (lime) and some dhapat (tobacco), and tamol-pan leaves a taste in your mouth that lingers for a long time. Like the lingering taste of a lover's kiss.

***

NOSY PARKER

Uddipana Goswami poses as a noxiously vain nubile nymphet in search of a nose-job and comes out holding her nose

(Published 2000, http://www.tehelka.com/)

It wasn't as though I really needed a nose fix. But all my friends kept teasing me about my 'beaked' nose and then this cousin of mine in New York had gotten her teeth re-set and you won't believe the difference it made to her appearance. So I decided to give it a go. My aunt who is rich enough and doting enough to fulfill all my whims agreed to sponsor me, although she said I looked good enough as I was. Even the doctor said so, to start with. "If I do a shoddy job on an unattractive woman, she will be grateful for the slightest improvement in her appearance. But when dealing with beautiful women, one has to be very careful because it is a delicate job. And that's the way I feel about you," he said when I told him about my nose. Quite good for my ego, I thought. But my ego wasn't at stake here, my nose was. He hadn't really asked me what it was about my nose that bothered me. He was the one who pointed out the scar on it, he was the one who said it is humped; I'd only told him I was worried about the beaked tip.He said that he could set everything right, except perhaps the scar, which could be reduced but not removed altogether, that it wouldn't take more than a day for the surgery and that it wouldn't hurt at all. "Why doesn't everybody get it done if it's that smooth?" I wondered. Because of the cost perhaps? "How much will it cost me, doctor?" I asked him. "Around ten thousand", was his answer. I'd heard of doctors charging more. "Money is no problem, doctor. My aunt is very rich. I only want a good job done." He thought for a second. "Will you buy your own medicines or should I supply them?" "Of course, it will be better if you do." "Then it will cost you more." Aha! Now we're talking. "It will come up to around Rs. 12,000." Fair enough. My aunt will be happy. But she'll be happier if somebody could convince her cosmetic surgery doesn't kill you. "Can you give me the contact numbers of a few of your clients so my aunt can check with them about side-effects and such things?" I asked him. "Why do you need phone numbers? I can easily call them before you do and ask them to say good things about me. Or there is this woman who will not admit that she came to me; she says she got it done in the U.S! How can you be sure?" True. But then, those are myaunt's orders, I persisted. In the end, he gave me one number, which incidentally, turned out to be a wrong number! And what about the whole procedure before the surgery? "You just have to come in at around 9, I'll start work around 11, and you can go home in the evening." "No, that is not what I meant. Don't I have to go to a shrink or something?" My cousin had told me that that is the normal procedure. The shrink is supposed to find out if you are sure of yourself. "What for?" the good doctor sounded as though he had never heard of shrinks, whereas he is supposed to put every patient through one. "If you wanted a nose fix because somebody else is asking you to, you might be abnormal. But I think you are perfectly normal, above normal, in fact." Above normal? My aunt says I'm obsessed with my nose. "Of course not! Or if you kept thinking about your nose all the time, you might be obsessed. If I wanted long legs like Amitabh Bachchan, I might be obsessed. But you are completely normal." Thanks, doctor, for all the ego-boosts. But now that I'm out of your clinic, I'm not sure I want to go through it after all because you are a quack and I bet my nose that you'll ruin it.

***

2006-01-15T09:21:00.000+05:30

TO CONTACT ME, EMAIL:

Uddipana Goswami at uddipana@gmail.com

2006-01-15T09:14:00.011+05:30

PUBLICATIONS
BOOKS
2009
We Called the River Red: Poetry from a Violent Homeland. New Delhi: Authors Press.
ACADEMIC PAPERS
2011
'Miyā or Axamiyā? Migration and Politics of Assimilation in Assam' in Journal of Social and Policy Sciences 1:1. Islamabad: Institute of Social and Policy Sciences
2010
'Armed in Northeast India: Special Powers, Act or no Act' in The Peace and Conflict Review Volume 4, Issue 2.
2008
‘Nobody`s People: Muslim IDPs of Western Assam’ in Blisters on their Feet: Tales of Internally Displaced Persons in India’s North East. New Delhi: Sage Publications.
2007
‘The Kamakhya Lore and Inter-ethnic Relations in Assam’ in Tribes of India: Identity, Culture and Lore [Special Focus on the Karbis of Assam] (ed. Prakash C Patnaik & Debojit Borah) Guwahati: Angik Prakashan.
'Report on Muslim IDPs in Western Assam' in Refugee Watch 29. Kolkata: Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group.
Internal Displacement, Migration, and Policy in Northeastern India. East-West Center Washington Working Paper No. 8. Washington: East-West Center.
'Performing the Nation: Ojapali and Axamiya Nationalism' in Historical Journal '06. (ed.) Samina Sulatana. Dhaka: Jagannath University.
2006
‘Enabling IDP Livelihoods in Western Assam: Nobody’s Responsibility’ in Refugee Survey Quarterly 25: 60-68, a journal issued by the UNHCR Library and published by Oxford University Press.
‘Folklore of Bangladesh’ in the Greenwood Encyclopedia of World Folklore and Folklife. (ed) William Clements. Connecticut: Greenwood Press.
2005
Various articles and thought pieces in Assamese dailies and magazines like Dainik Axam, Axamiya Khabar, Axam Bani, on issues relating to identity, nationalism, ethnicity and geo-politics of Northeast India.

CREATIVE/NON-ACADEMIC WRITINGS
2011
Poem 'Love has a way of happening' in Focus on Indian Writing in English in Muse India 35. Jan-Feb.
Short story 'I Thought I Knew My Ma' in Focus on Indian Writing in English in Muse India 35. Jan-Feb.
Translation of an excerpt 'Meeting in Deodhai Village' from Benudhar Sharma's Kangrecar Kanciali Rodat (1971), published in Asymptote Journal, January 2011.
2010
Poems 'Moon and Night Scents' and 'Terminus' in Writing Love: Anthology of Indian English Poetry (ed. Ashmi Ahluwalia) New Delhi: Rupa.
Feature 'Facebook Face Off in Assam' on the cyber-war around a recent anti-corruption drive on media watchdog The Hoot.
2009
Short Story 'Colors' in South Asian Review 30:3, published by the South Asian Literary Association.
Short Story 'Virginia Mahi' in Dreadlocks Vol 5, 2008. School of Language, Arts and Media: University of the South Pacific.
Poems 'Dhodar Ali, or the End of Ennui', 'From Exile (1)', and 'A History of Violence' in Pratilipi, March 2009.
Poem 'Would I Be A Poet Still' in Geometer (Art & Politics Issue)
2008
Article 'Identity in Exile' in Indian Journal of Postcolonial Literatures No 11, July-Dec 2008.
Poems 'elegaic' and 'After This Sky' in Tonight: An Anthology of World Love Poetry. South Africa: Poets Printery.
6 Poems in The Other Voices International Project Vol 34.
Poem 'Manufacturing Memories' in Muse India 18.
2007
Poem 'Tejimola Forever' in Chandrabhaga: a season of Indian writing 15/2007 (ed. Jayanta Mahapatra)
Poem 'Mother Goddess Kamakhya' in Etchings 3. Melbourne: Australia.
2006
Article ‘Taking the Other Route’ on XCP Streetnotes, a biannual online exhibition of the socially descriptive arts. Xcp: Streetnotes is part of the Xcp: Cross Cultural Poetics Website of the University of California.
TRANSLATIONS
2008
Translated poems of Ganesh Gogoi and Lakhminath Bezbarua from Assamese to English in Muse India 18.
2007
Selection of translated poems of Hiren Bhattacharjya in Etchings 3. Melbourne: Australia.
2005
Poetry translated from Assamese to English, as part of Poetry Translation Workshop at the Poetry Translation Centre, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
REVIEWS AND ABSTRACTS
2007
Translation Studies Abstracts/Bibliography of Translation Studies. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
EDITORIAL
2008
Literatures of Assam in Muse India (Jan-Feb '08)
Influence of Insurgency on Assamese Literature in Muse India (July-Aug '08)
***

2006-01-15T08:29:00.005+05:30

ABOUT ME:

For the love of Assam and Assamese Literature, I have been:

# CONSULTING EDITOR, ASSAMESE LITERATURE with Muse India, a literary e-journal showcasing Indian writings in English and in English translation.

This is what I have been doing professionally:

# CONSULTANT (NORTHEAST INDIAN MEDIA) with Open Source Center, American Center, New Delhi

# CONSULTANT (NEW MEDIA) with National Geographic Channel, India

# ASSISTANT EDITOR with Sterling Publishers, New Delhi, India

# CONTENT EDITOR with India Today Group Online, New Delhi, India

# INTERN, TRAINEE, SUB-EDITOR with www.tehelka.com, New Delhi, India

This is what I have been doing academically:

# PhD SCHOLAR at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. Research project entitled Ethnic Conflicts and Conflict Resolution in Assam: The Case of Axamiya, Koch and Bodo Relations.
# PROJECT DIRECTOR of research project on Reconstruction of Settler-Indigenous Conflicts in Western Assam Through Oral History granted by the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), New Delhi.
# PARTICIPANT AND PAPER-WRITER, NORTHEASTERN STUDY of the East-West Centre (EWC), Washington. Studying Internal Displacement, Migration and Policy in Northeastern India, as part of EWC’s project on Internal Conflicts in Asia.
# INDEPENDENT RESEARCH FELLOW at Sarai, the New Media Initiative at the Centre for Studies in Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi. Project title: City As Setting: Reflections Of The Changing Faces Of Guwahati In Axamiya Literature. http://www.my-guwahati.blogspot.com/
# JUNIOR RESEARCH FELLOW at Centre for Northeast India, South and Southeast Asia Studies (CENISEAS), Guwahati. Project title: Miyā or Axamiyā: The Politics of Assimilation in Assam.
# CASE STUDY RESEARCHER at Department of Anthropology, University of Zurich. Study entitled, "Co-opting the Wild West: The Indian State and Conflicts between Settlers and Indigenous Peoples in Western Assam" as part of the NCCR North-South’s project on 'Indigenous Communities and Settlers: Resource Conflicts in Frontier Regions of South and Southeast Asia'.

Some workshops conducted, and papers presented in seminars and conferences:

# Paper: Axamiyā Identity and the Influences from Southeast Asia in Assam: International Symposium on Inter-Cultural Dialogue between North East India and South East Asia (19 March '10, Jawaharlal Nehru University/Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts)
# Paper: Ethnic Conflicts in Assam and Categories of Conflict: Challenges for Social Research: National Seminar on 'Social Research in North East India: Issues and Challenges' (25 February '10, Jawaharlal Nehru University).
# Paper: Politics and Identity in the Writings of Indira Goswami: National Seminar on ‘The Fictional World of Indira Goswami’ (14 November '09, Delhi University).

# Presented paper titled IN ASSAM SOME BODO WOMEN ARE WRITING WRONGS at the Women’s Feature Service (WFS) and The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) seminar on ‘Women in Conflict Zones: Survivors and Peace Makers’ on 22 September 2009 at India International Centre, Delhi.

# Presented paper on ASSAM'S CONFLICT AND FINDING WAYS TO SOLUTION THROUGH WOMEN'S WORK, WRITING AND ACTIVISM at Northeast India Women Initiative for Peace, First Consultative Conclave of Women from Northeast India, organised by Manipur Women Gun Survivor’s Network in collaboration with India International Centre, Delhi.
# Conducted workshop on DISPLACEMENT, DEVELOPMENT AND MILITARIZATION organized by THE OTHER MEDIA in Imphal, Manipur on 8-10 December 2008.
# Presented paper titled THE KAMAKHYA LORE AND INTER-ETHNIC RELATIONS IN ASSAM at the NATIONAL SEMINAR ON ‘TRIBES OF INDIA: IDENTITY, CULTURE AND LORE’ held in the University of Delhi, Delhi, on September 5-7, 2007.
# Presented paper titled TRANSLATING AN AXAMIYA SAGA: RESISTANCE AND CULTURAL TRANSLATION exploring possibilites of reflecting an empathetic politics of identity and recognition through resistant translation, at University of Delhi, Delhi on 2 March, 2007.
# Presented paper titled NATIONALISMS IN ASSAM THROUGH AXAMIYA NEWSPAPERS questioning the contribution of Axamiya language newspapers since the birth of the industry in Assam towards popularising a multi-cultural approach to nationalism, at the Assam Institute of Management, Guwahati, on March 27th, 2006.
# Presented paper titled PERFORMING THE NATION: THE OJAPALI AND AXAMIYA NATIONALISM analysing the role of the Ojapali art form during two decisive moments in the history of the formation of the Axamiya nation, at the Fourth International History Conference at Jagannath University, Dhaka, on January 20th, 2006.
# Presented paper titled REDEFINING INTER-ETHNICITY: MITIGATION OF SETTLER-INDIGENOUS CONFLICTS IN ASSAM exploring possibilities of inter-ethnic conflict mitigation in Assam, particularly in reference to settler-indigenous conflicts, at the workshop on RETHINKING NORTHEAST INDIA'S CONFLICTS AND THE ROADS TO PEACE conducted by the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, from November 30th to December 2nd, 2005.
# Presented paper titled MANIPULATING NATIONALISM: OJAPALI IN THE PERFORMANCE OF AXAMIYA, (Ojapali is an ancient performing art form of Assam) exploring the interface between nationalism and culture in times of political upheaval, at the INDIAN FOLKLORE CONGRESS held at the Gauhati University, Guwahati, on February 1st, 2005.