Since wars began in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.

AFTER the Second World War, imagination and poetry had been perceived to be irreparably damaged. Or so it seemed. ‘No more poetry’, screamed the ghosts of the Holocaust from the dark and silent walls of the concentration camps. Too much had been staked, too much lost and the writer’s muse had fled. Poetry was damned. But while this famous moratorium on the literary sensibilities of the postwar generation was recanted by its author later, it arguably threw open a dialectic that ever since has remained with posterity.¹ And even as one understands the simple truth of that ethical concern, one also begins to consciously look at the way this finds expression in writers and poets who continue to write from distant spaces in distant times afflicted by strife of a different nature. How does conflict affect the mind of the writer? What does it do to art and literature and poetry? And does it finally unsettle a tradition and shake it to reorder a whole generation of people, and renew the paradigms of what is considered literary or artistic? Or simply, what is truth in times of crisis?

 

In a society that bears the injury and scars of militancy and militarization, the literary output from northeast India in the last three decades or so has been remarkably prolific and is informed, quite understandably, by the dominant themes of trauma and violence. This holds true for most of the writing that has poured out of Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Tripura, all of which have been in the grip of insurgencies, state violence and long drawn years of waiting for peace.

The year 1985, a reference to the end of the Assam Movement which witnessed six extraordinary years of street mobilization protesting the entry and enfranchisement of ‘foreigners’ threatening the state’s indigenous population, is clearly a faultline in the region’s history that was paralleled by the emergence, earlier in 1979, of a thirty-year old rebellion against the state and what the ULFA called Assam’s ‘last struggle for survival’ towards what one of its leaders, now a surrendered civilian, labelled the ‘the freedom of minds.’² Freedom, it must be noted, is a much contested and often very inclusive term, used variously in the discourse that came out of the insurgency in Assam. Yet, the overarching tenor of the conflict narratives has typically been one of lost innocence, disenchantment, betrayal and oppression, and the need to break free, as it were, from these shackles.

Curiously the period saw the rise of several chronicles that document the textured history of the region’s encounter with several cross-currents – political, social and intellectual. If living on the edge, whether by being subject to a climate of fear and uncertainty, or by being witness to death and devastation, or by taking arms oneself against the state, has rendered some of the people cynical, or turned them into sceptics, it may be useful to bear in mind that most people now, and in retrospect, often want to understand too much too quickly. And, as in every other event of history, knowledge comes with a price. The reading of Assam’s present history has factored in elements of myth, fantasy and imagination, where sometimes imagination and belief prevail over the plain facts of history. Thus, the new brands of writing are powered by an unprecedented rise of folk memory and the ‘local’ that seek to assert the identity and claims of land and history, suggesting a regional and subnational category that has come into its own.

 

If there is, however, one binding factor that spells out Assam or the idea of the Assamese in the history of this northeastern state, or a symbol that unites the diverse peoples that live here, it must be the songs of Bhupen Hazarika (1926-2011), rightfully called the bard, singing the land, the cultures and its multidimensional ethos springing out of a larger and composite Indianness and yet at once uniquely distinct and separate from it. Bhupen Hazarika’s music which has come to stay with the Assamese people, reinforced remarkably during the turmoil in Assam, the spirit of the Assamese and was appropriated and embraced equally by rebels and the ordinary man on the street. His songs are resurgent with the idea of a golden Assam and have been aptly read as constituting the ‘Assamese national imagination.’³

 

In his seminal work on Assam’s politics of nationality Sanjib Baruah points to Hazarika’s lyrics which he suggests are significant leads to the ‘imaginative geography and history’ animating Assamese subnationalism in the postcolonial era. While opinion is inevitably divided about how much and how well the maestro’s music represented a pre-deterministic history of Assam that ULFA wanted to write, it is a truism that to the layman ‘Bhupenda’ was synonymous with the voice of Assam. In his death last year, the congregation of hundreds of thousands of Assamese from every corner of the state to the centre of Guwahati underscored the belief that in the conflict stricken land, the singer assumed unequivocally the conscience of its every citizen.

A song pulled out of his own books and refashioned by academic-writer and social commentator Amarjyoti Choudhury, Eta Gaan Xex Hol (A song has ended) and aired by local television channels at his state funeral, in more ways than one clearly marks the end of an era with the passing away of Bhupen Hazarika. As an intertext of the Assamese community and its recent history, the song turns upon the struggle of the people and reverberates with the strains of an apocalyptic end that is temporal, and yet also envisions a beginning.

 

While it may be difficult to map the entire range of literary and aesthetic output that has been witnessed in these times of trouble for the simple want of space here, a few representations and writings that suggest the quality and nature of the thought and imagination spawned by the peculiar conditions of Assam’s recent history can be read as evidence of civil society’s responses to it. A quick survey of such works that particularly draw attention to the culture of resistance reveals a persistent and general state of anxiety, as for example in Harekrishna Deka’s poetry or short fiction, Arupa Patangia’s fiction, Dhrubajyoti Bora’s Kalantoror Gadya (The Prose of Transition) or Manoj Goswami’s startling account of the wide and diverse speculations on the return home of a dreaded insurgent in his ‘Samiran Barua Aahi Aase’ (Samiran Barua is on his Way). The sheer oppression that many innocents have faced, the complete dismissal of the dignity of the human and the claim to ordinary human rights, and the hounding fear that attends the spaces of conflict and strife – these are common and intersecting tropes in the writings that have poured out of the region.

What is perhaps most interesting with Assamese vernacular literature of the last two decades is the volume of writing contributed by actual participants of the rebellion and insurgency. Whether one looks at Mithinga Daimary’s poetry written from his prison cell or earlier, the slain rebel Kabiranjan Saikia’s many poems that have endured his brutal death, an ex-combatant Jibon Goswami’s perilous account of seeking safe homes across the Burmese border, or journalist and ULFA ideologue Parag Das’ Sanglot Fenla, a novel based on the real time experience of cadres in the jungles of Kachin, there is a concerted attempt to speak from the margins of civil life and record the voices of dissent.⁴ The latter, never a cadre himself of the banned outfit, however, per haps articulated most vehemently some of the discontent and revolutionary impulse among a section of the Assamese that led to the birth of ULFA. His Swadhinotar Prostab (A Proposal for Independence), proscribed by the Government of Assam in 1994, is in many ways read as a challenge to the state, a job he took up seriously while persistently urging in his newspaper column for the abolishment of AFPSA in the region. Fifteen years on after his killing by unknown assailants in a Guwahati street, the draconian law persists.

 

For the other set of writers, conflict is what makes the author a witness. The writer from Northeast India, as Robin Nnangom, Manipur’s celebrated poet and academic reminds us, consequently differs from his counterpart in the mainland in a significant way. While it may not make him a better writer, living ‘with the menace of the gun does not permit him to indulge in verbal wizardry or wooly aesthetics’, but his condition and context in the time of conflict is a constant reminder that he must perforce ‘master the art of witness.’⁵ The anthropology of violence is best intuited by those who witness it. Indeed the writer here is also an observer of not just modernist angst and ennui but more vividly and sordidly, witness to the blood in the streets or to the sudden emptying of homes or worse still, to the disappearance of neighbours and acquaintances.

 

In fact, in the intellectual ambit, there is now a rising debate on the need to categorize what is endemically and intrinsically, a literature of the Northeast. Anthologies and volumes that represent the literatures from these parts may uncannily find within their covers a sample of similar voices of concern and chaos, anger and frustration. A panel discussion put together by the Guwahati-based North East Writers’ Forum recently deliberated on the canonization of Northeastern writing and what constitutes such a category. Scripting ‘stories from war zones’ demands a first-hand understanding of the political and social milieus out of which they issue and involves a clear and objective analysis of the intertwined meshes of violence, ethnonational emotion and wars that often spin out of control.

However, as I attempt to argue here, the times of conflict are, necessarily, also an era of making peace. Between war and peace, conflict and post-conflict, and even as several outfits across the region are in prolonged dialogue with the government and have formally declared ceasefire, a new discourse of normalcy and restoration is on the anvil. Writer and commentator, Sanjoy Hazarika’s metaphor for the return of peace and stability, ‘After the long night there is a dawn’, despite his anguished reportage of the corruption rampant in the state and of the mindless continuance of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), seems to easily symbolize the contemporary aspiration of the Assamese.⁶

 

The surfeit of blood, gunfire and tears cannot sustain the imagination too long. Clearly, there is a weariness about these themes and images that strike at the very conscience of the writer who knows that his world is also the world of survival. The troubled postcolonial history does not, of course, easily accommodate the conventional narratives of nation and national pride, and these are in the Northeast littered with images and symbols of a decadent, destroyed and often despairing society. Yet, there is the anticipation of peace and serenity, honour and dignity. In a recent work, Rebirth, Man Booker nominee Jahnavi Barua, while questing out for her protagonist’s peace with enviable stoicism in her novel about deception and love, loss and self-renewal in a bid to overcome the past and its perils, may have just as well symbolically narrated the subtext of Assam’s coming to terms with the ghosts of its turbulent years. There is no outcry, no shrill outrage but a quiet unsentimental if firm resolve to repair, renew and move ahead.

During the ULFA‘s heydays, a popular video film that did the rounds was Surjya Tejor Anya Naam (The Blood Red Sun). It was touted as the outfit’s own production and it overtly symbolized in its title the reigning motif of the rising sun, the official logo of the rebel group, and which was inseparable from the idea of a bloody revolution, violence and sacrifice. The film was, of course, an undisguised tribute to the cause of the revolution, an insurgency that the youth saw as justified and, therefore, an act of real sacrifice.

In due course though, came other visual versions of the insurgency. Mon Jai (I Wish), a wistful looking back to the good old times, Antaheen Jatra (Endless Journey) and Xex Upohaar (The Final Gift), all of which in their own way presented the other side of the story. They sought to scratch the glorious surface that was commonly available and uncovered some of the ugly truths about the rebellion. For many young cadres who had been inducted on a zealous promise of freedom and sacrifice for the nation and jati, the dream had faded and the mindless violence and bloodshed witnessed in the mid-nineties seemed to give lie to the founding ideology behind the outfit’s existence. Some of these films captured the lost dream and the nostalgia for the peaceful past that had slowly crept into Assamese society.

 

The regional media in the past several years has taken up cudgels on behalf of a civil society that has increasingly come to believe that the insurgency has lost its relevance. Sanjeev Sabhapandit’s film, Jatinga Ityadi, premiered at the Indian Film Festival in 2007, revealed the frustration of the youth implicated in the banned struggle and urged the community to reiterate its faith in peace and implored the young cadres to return to civilian life. Sabhapandit felt that filmmakers were responsible to society and it was incumbent on the media to restore the Assamese ‘social fabric’.⁷ A need to reassert self-worth and a viable means of employment in the end, as his representation of insurgent life makes apparent, often prevailed over the more esoteric ideal of ‘Assamese nationalism’ that sought to restore Assam’s ‘lost independence’.⁸

Jatinga Ityadi, incidentally, takes its title from the peculiar avian mass suicide at Jatinga in the North Cachar Hills district of Assam (now Dima Hasao) annually, when early autumn winds and standing fog in the hill district cause huge assemblies of birds to fly into the hillside where they are eventually lured by torches in the dark misty night and stoned to death by village folk. The deliberate analogy of suicide/murder played up by the movie is an interpretation not to be missed about changing perceptions of civil society towards what they deemed were misguided insurgents and the rise and decline of the outfit’s ideological base.

 

The vernacular journalism too, both print and electronic media, echoed the line of the rebels for a fairly long period only to give in to pressures for a more balanced, if clinical, approach to the problem and to the government’s concerted attempts at a reconciliation of differences and to end the political strife and violence that had endured three decades. Gone was the hype and hoopla that had attended the myth and mystery in the media about heroes in the jungles or elegy for those that had fallen to the dust. The national and metropolitan press’ brief romance with ULFA was over. With the changing scenario, popular bytes and column spaces on many of the militants’ Robin Hood-style lives or their families and of stories about how a cadre came to be inducted or often got deified in his village or community gave way to critical information and harsh commentaries on the unethical means that the banned outfit had employed to sustain militancy in its later years.⁹ The student led Assam agitation under AASU was also openly critical of ULFA’s stern diktats on major social issues such as internal migrants to the state and their subsequent killings in 2006-7 which earned the outfit severe denunciation from several quarters.¹⁰

 

If the problems of the state have been viewed from the prism of a common and typical discourse centred around insurgency, it is important to note that much of the effort and attention by the media on the outfit in more recent times is unequivocal with regard to equations of peace and peace-brokering by the rebels and the government in conjunction with civil society stakeholders. In the process many lives have got elided, many crucial and socially determining issues swept under the carpet, and the outfit itself has been severely gendered in the time of post-conflict rehabilitation. One of the vital questions, thus, often missed in regular academic debates is, where have the women of ULFA gone? Can an understanding of their role in ULFA’s armed struggle recover important missing links in the actual workings of power and hierarchy in the outfit’s claim for a separate destiny? In a bid for negotiated settlement of a low-intensity conflict simmering for several years now, the business of peace has unleashed new configurations of life and living and a new dynamic in the knowledge capital of the state.¹¹ A culture of hasty and mechanical peacemaking, however, even with the best of intentions, has in its wake led to many angularities and skewed approaches, by the state and rebels alike, towards the dispensation of peace and transitional justice to victims on either side.

Equally significant also is the constant effort to tailormake and refurbish a region or a problem-state to suit the official narratives and templates that abound on insurgency, conflict and the complex notion of restoration of peace, often in abeyance of locally contingent and people specific solutions. The absence of war, as the popular notion goes, is not always necessarily peace. Under the huge pile of debris that the militancy and its discontents have shored up in Assam, a native narrative that is muffled and probably not heard enough is, not surprisingly, gradually being buried by politically correct analyses, oversimplification and even impatience.

 

Nowhere has such an interregnum between war and peace been better or more graphically described than in Polish poet, W. Szymborska’s vision of ends and, at once, of new beginnings:

After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won’t

Straighten themselves up, after all

 

Someone has to get mired...

In scum and ashes,

Splintered glass and bloody rags

 

Photogenic it’s not

and takes years

All the cameras have left

for another war...

 

Those who knew

what was going on here

must give way

to those who know little

and less than little...

 

Footnotes:

1.After the devastation of the Holocaust, German philosopher Theodore Adorno had famously declared, ‘After Auschwitz there can be no more poetry’: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (Cultural Criticism and Society), 1951. The nightmare of history for Adorno, even when he is typically read out of context, is reason to shun the attempt to be aesthetic in denial of the horrors of the past. As if in answer to that pessimism arising out of war-scarred Europe, several poets refuted the claim and wrote brilliantly of war, peace, resurrection and hope.

2. Sunil Nath, ‘The Seccesionist Insurgency and the Freedom of Minds’, Faultlines: Writings on Conflict and Resolution. Vol 13, 2002, p. 29. It is interesting to note that the ULFA’s mouthpiece regularly circulated both online and in print was also called ‘Freedom’.

3. Sanjib Baruah, India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 87.

4. Mithinga Daimary, alias Dipak Das (who writes poetry under his nom de guerre Megan Kachary) a cadre of the central executive of ULFA and its publicity chief until his 2003 arrest in Operation All Clear in Bhutan, admitted in an interview to this author that he was not a poet-rebel but a ‘rebel poet’. With three collections of verse to his credit, including Guns and Melodies (in translation) released at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2006, Kachary came to represent, in a manner, the artist caught in the state’s turmoil. Likewise, Anuraag Mahanta, alias Jibon Goswami, former ULFA commandant is now an emerging novelist (Owlingor Jui or Harvest Fire, 2007) and has joined a local writer’s foundation in the hope of turning to his pen rather than the gun.

5. Michael Ignatieff, ‘The Art of Witness’ inThe New York Review of Books XLII(5), March 1995 quoted by Robin Ngangom in ‘Poetry in a Time of Terror’, Sarai Reader: Turbulence, New Delhi, 2006, pp. 422-30.

6. Writing on the Wall: Reflections on the Northeast. Penguin India, New Delhi, 2008, p. 7.

7. Accessed on www.nagalim.nl/news, 12 July 2012.

8. Sanjib Baruah has argued that ULFA’s brand of Assamese subnationalism informed by a militant and radical turn is best described as Assamese nationalism, 2001, p. 6.

9. Uddipan Dutta’s account of the early years of ULFA vis-à-vis the vernacular press emphasizes this central aspect of the outfits’ popular image in Creating Robin Hoods: The Insurgency of ULFA in its Early Period, its Parallel Administration and the Role of Assamese Vernacular Press (1985-1990). Wiscomp, New Delhi, 2009.

10. ‘ULFA Faces Public Wrath in Assam’, Hindustan Times (North East), 19 January 2007.

11. Rakhee Kalita, ‘Living and Partly Living: Notions of Freedom, the Politics of Violence and the Women of ULFA.’ Talk delivered at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Teen Murti House, New Delhi, 02.12.2011.