I write this as the airport attack on Istanbul has just come under control, only to erupt in a hostage attack in a Dhaka café resulting in a shootout. The latest details of the shootout continue to flash on my screen as I type these words. I watch these events from the warmth of my 4G internet and morning cigarette. I have recently come back from a research foray in northeastern India – mainly Manipur and Nagaland – one of India’s major ‘disturbed areas’. Aside from trying to entangle why and how it is ‘disturbed’, I have begun to learn how life is lived with conflict as a backdrop, an infrastructure so to speak. Lovers giggle, mothers worry, rains wash away the tiredness of the day. Chinese clothes and shoes are smuggled through Burma. Leather jackets and shiny converse shoes speak of new alignments – new sovereigns sharpening their knives in the depths of these forested hills. Burma across the border emerges as a place of hope. ‘We can go to Burma and come back anytime’, I am told in an air of pluckiness.

I sit against a window of an unwieldy bus anxious about the twelve-hour ride from Churachandpur (Manipur) to Dimapur (Nagaland). It is a bumpy ride against lush green hills and cloudy horizons. A girl in a black dress sits next to me. She is constantly chomping and generously offers me candy, berries and dried beef as the ride progresses. She makes sure to check that I am Hindu. I clarify that I am Hindu and I eat beef. She is relieved and pleased at her offering. She sings with abandon through the journey. I ask her about the songs. These are Kuki gospel songs, she says. She is Kuki. She is a chirpy, modern girl with two cellphones, who wears a short black dress with the elan of an Oscar winner. She articulates a Kuki modernity. Her songs are Kuki, her cultural and spiritual associations are Kuki, her modernity is Kuki.

I ask about gospel songs that I had learnt in school. She says, you must have gone to a Baptist school. In our church, we sing only Kuki songs. A bit disheartened at not sharing my gospel universe, she says she knows a Bengali song. Her Bengali friend taught it to her. She sings Tagore’s ‘more bhabonare ki hawaye…’ with panache and abandon. She bears stereotypes about Bengali Hindus and I bear stereotypes about the tribal subject. Yet we become friends.

My purpose here is to tell the story of stories told in and through conflict. Where laughter, love and gossip over chai continues. Gunshots are heard. Brothers and lovers die. Yet one continues to chomp on a bus ride and sing for one’s misunderstood neighbour. I begin to think of the northeast as India’s internal colony with the soulful song a (presumably Lepcha) boy in Darjeeling which ends Ray’s famous film Kanchenjunga (1962). This boy looks ethereal in his innocence. His claim over this landscape is relegated to his lilting song. The words for which are not translated in subtitles. He is a mute subject. A protosubject even. We do not need to know his words as a route to his thoughts.

Ray would rather we stare at his innocent smile dazzling in the morning sun and feel better about the fraught romantic relationships among the Bengali upper classes. The Bengali upper classes need a liberating geography and the presence of innocent mute subjects to stage their bourgeois angst. In other films like Aranyer Dinratri and Agantuk too, Ray uses the trope of tribal life to resolve Bengali bourgeois emotional and spiritual tussles.

Looking for narratives from within the region, an ‘insider’ perspective so to speak, takes me to Temsula Ao’s work. I remain cautious of the risk of portraying her as a ‘Naga’ writer; my offering here are some thoughts on views of conflict from lives lived within its landscape (physical, affective and ideological) that Ao is able to offer.

 

Temsula Ao’s collection of short stories These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone (2006) begins with a story about a married couple, Khatila and Punaba. This childless couple live in marital bliss, unfazed by the rumours of either’s reproductive inability leading to their lack of an offspring. It turns from a story about a village couple anywhere in the world into that of a couple embedded in a landscape of insurgents. From time to time, men are called to join the underground army. They go away to jungles. Their wives remain in the village. It also becomes the story of the Indian Army which is on the hunt for insurgents and will raze villages to the ground if it comes to suspect that villagers are harbouring the insurgents.

The story emerges as a powerful comment on the mundaneness of conflict. Wives and husbands fall into its logics and routines. A husband emerges from the depth of the forest to cohabit with his wife from time to time, risking being found out by the army. The wife risks the lives and property of the whole village in trying to hide her husband and appear nonchalant to the group of armymen. It is her performance of nonchalance which forms the pivot of the story. A woman does her bit for the insurgent/freedom movement. But really, she does it in a desperate attempt to protect her husband. This story can be read as a love story even as it can be read as a story of heroic defence of a political cause.

 

The question I wish to ask of Ao is – how does the genre of war stories come to demarcate lives of people lived in love, hate, sorrow, desperation, hunger, thirst, fear, trepidation? A woman’s act of tackling the army in the warmth of her evening home may not have been the pivot of the story. It could well have been the story of a strong marriage. The lens of tribal life and the lens of insurgency qualify Khatila and Punaba as two very distinct kind of subjects – tribal and war-ridden. The interesting thing is the gender reversal in the story. We see Punaba mostly as ‘husband’, although we are told he rises in ranks within the insurgent fold. We see Khatila take the lead in tackling the army when they enter her home. We see Punaba as an enthusiastic husband who makes sure to take time out and visit his wife. He is not a self-absorbed insurgent hero for whom women pine while the men are away waging war.

The most acute observation by Ao on the nature of bureaucratized insurgency is that when there is ceasefire, Punaba comes overground and joins the transport corporation. It is mentioned in a tone as mundane as the tone in which his going underground was narrated. A vast bureaucracy of recruiting and releasing operates in which there are many Punabas and many Khatilas trying to hide them and later convince them to come over-ground to work in transport management. This oscillation of attachment and detachment from the insurgent apparatus is a key rhythm through the conflict unfolds and wraps around mundane happenings of people’s lives.

 

Like in Ao’s stories, I encountered the word ‘underground’ or UG often in my conversations and travels in the region. ‘Underground’ refers to the hidden armed outfits that fight the Indian Army in a bid for a separate sovereign entity called Nagalim. It has many factions, many cartographies invested in telling people and mainland India what Nagalim is. It is worth discussing here, especially in the context of the rich portrayal of common lives in Ao’s writing, what it might mean to live everyday lives under competing shadows of the Indian state and the ‘underground’. The ‘underground’ is composed of homegrown boys, as we shall see later in the description of how young boys go ‘underground’. There is also a normalcy and a neighbourliness expressed in reference to the underground. Like a grumpy old neighbour of the village – the underground roars and rumbles from the hills and collects taxes from the village. Its sovereignty is shaky yet accepted. Its voice is an indigenous one – that of a locally grown Kuki or Naga sovereign.

The geographicity of the reference to ‘ground’ is a telling one. ‘Ground’ perhaps gestures to the territorial divide between the places where the Indian state can fully assert sovereignty, and the liminal zones where its sovereignty blurs. It also ecologically maps onto to the forest-village divide. The village is a place of submission. The forest is a place of autonomy, rebellion, a nursery for the growth of sovereign expression. When a person comes ‘overground’, they submit to the authority of the Indian state who in turn offers them petty jobs in the government. The straddling of underground and overground is a routine occurrence, its implications weave in cajoles of wives and children as much as grand political gestures and strategies. Punaba and Khatila’s story shows that straddling across the ground-divide in the course of the progress of a strong marriage.

 

Apenyo and her Song are stories of grand resilience often, but unaware, innocent ones. A young girl Apenyo sings as the army raids their church gathering. Through her innocent resistance of singing in the face of an army attack, Apenyo is framed as the locus of morality amidst the community. The metaphor of a little girl singing can be likened to how the nation sees the tribal – who displays for the urban, individualistic citizen, an imagined version of their own past selves. This is the national imagination of the tribal subject – clothed in innocence, timelessness and wrapped in cultural and aesthetic folds, strong yet childlike. I would argue that Ao affirms this view and mediates it to the reader as the image of the ‘desirable tribal’ – a moral exemplar who could only be a child. Satemba, who is a middleman, and the likes of him, are not. Though Ao describes the conditions of their moral ambiguity with great empathy, it is called that his standing in the local moral spectrum is not a central one. So, gradually there emerges in Temsula Ao’s writing actors who carry on themselves a moral score, which denotes their location in a moral spectrum.

 

An old woman sits around the fire with young ones and initiates the young generation into the legacy of their village – the story of Apenyo and that horrific night. A sociality and a communitarian bond are sustained by passing stories of horror and bravery on to successive generations. One grows from a tribal village community into a tribal survivor community. This is a new bond. ‘We have survived together’ they tell each other. But not all of them are in a position to affirm loyalty. Petty criminals are picked on by the government officials and paid sums of money to act as informers. Satemba tries to get out of a situation like this by damaging his knee. If he doesn’t inform, his wife will lose a well paying job at the SDO’s household. If he informs, the underground groups will find out and there will be consequences.

Many like Satemba are in a moral dilemma, caught in the battle-field of competing sovereigns. Their lives are small change. Just like the life of Soaba who, in a singular heroic act in his otherwise country bumpkin existence, lunges to save the woman he loves from being beaten by her drunken husband, Boss. And dies in the encounter. This is a story that grows out of the conflict but does not relate to the conflict. It is a story of a small life that dared to love.

In Ao’s writing, we see that for small lives or subalterns like Satemba or Soaba, the experience of either sovereign is tyranny and oppression. They live their lives strategizing how to minimize the effect of such competing registers of tyranny. They play a kind of trapeze game, swinging between hooks of either sovereign. Ao’s comment here is perhaps about the horror of conflict zones that lie fundamentally in the name-changing of violence as sides and factions emerge with the same zeal, the same hunger for power. She hints at a masculinization of violence, which I am less keen to accept. Her women are mostly ambivalent to the separatist cause, trying to protect their husbands and brothers from becoming canon fodder. The normalcy of ceasefires and attacks occurring in regular intervals, shapes the rhythm of daily life. Marriages, love affairs, births and deaths are marked along with the occurrences of ceasfires and fresh attacks of the ongoing conflict. What Ao portrays effectively is that the conflict is not an event when it has carried on for decades, across generations – it is a landscape, a milieu in which life unfolds.

 

Village life is portrayed in its intricate desires and anxieties. A girl’s desire to be a perfect potmaker is satisfied suddenly even as her mother dies on the occasion of her making her first series of perfect pots. Another story of a girl’s endurance of two childbirths out of wedlock and attendant humiliation keeps the conflict packed into a corner. Village patriarchy and a girl’s internal and external battles take the forefront. In effect, Ao treats conflict like a musical chord – sometimes pronounced, sometimes muted, sometimes faint enough to evade the ear. In so doing, she tracks the loci of daily frustrations, dreams and nightmares, camaraderie and discords through which life is lived in survival of conflict. Ao’s stories could be quaint village stories not unlike those of R.K. Narayan or in the Bengali canon, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay.

An agrarian scene and mood are sketched in an anthropological method. But these grow to be stories of desire – imagined worlds, and fights with reality with the weapon of imagination. Soaba joined the underground army because he fancied their vehicle. These idiosyncracies of her characters come to occupy focal light as the conflict often lurks in the background. But in stories like those of Khatila and Punaba, the conflict comes into our view, front and centre. It is almost as if the conflict is subject to a shadow-and-light game. Thus, Ao casts a very sharp light on the way lives unfold in all their intricacies even as conflict with the Indian Army unfolds in their village and hills and fields, with its gunfire and curfews and threat and loss. The war is domesticated. Life rests in the landscape of war. These are stories of loss but loss is not all these stories are about.

 

The mood changes abruptly through the stories ‘The Shadows’ and ‘An Old Man Remembers’. The war comes out of its lurking presence in the preceding stories, and attacks the reader. The writing changes rhythm and mood. Anxiety, stealth and speed are spoken in these stories. It is as if the author is choking while telling these stories. We enter the war – a dark chasm.

It is in the story ‘The Shadows’ that the conflict itself opens its wounds to us. Imli is brutally killed by his very own fellow underground soldiers in the depth of the forest, on Hoito’s orders. No one was ever supposed to know how Imli died or whether Imli died. Imli simply disappeared into the forest, was Hoito’s explanation to the rest of them. Roko and Lovishe find Imli’s remains on their march through the forest – their friend Imli. They recognize the body from his watch. A lifetime of secret-keeping and inward, suppressed horror awaits them. Hoito is punished as Imli’s father turns out to be second-in-command – punished brutally. But Roko and Lovishe live on in lingering horror that leads them into a lifetime of stupor even after they leave the underground life. It is as if the conflict starts telling its own story of hunger for power, masculine domination, friendship, subalternity, suffering and bravery. Roko and Lovishe, in their own cowardly and frightened ways, sought justice for their dead friend. Roko and Lovishe were destroyed in the process nevertheless.

 

Sovereign ambitions on any political side claims the lives and youths of young, strong, innocent men. Men who leave wives and lovers back in the village to embrace what seems adventure at first and horror in the end. Men who return to these villages as broken entities. They live on like in the story ‘An Old Man Remembers’, in stupor, trying to hide from the spectre of the memory of living in war. The old man, Sashi, hobbles about with his bad leg (from the war) assisted by his grandson. He prefers not to tell the story of the war, but he begins one evening.

His is a story of two boys who ran into the forest, away from an army ambush and into a ‘camp’.

‘How could he explain why his childhood ended so abruptly? And why youngsters like Imli and him would be running for their lives deep into the jungle in winter, which was the time of plenty in the village after harvest? It was the time of festivities, but they had to go hungry for days in the makeshift camps, always hungry, always cold, but most of all terribly afraid of the marauding Indian Army that burnt their granaries and villages and that was pursuing them even in their jungle hideouts.’ (p. 96)

The jungle is the site of war. It is the site of the possibility of eruption of new sovereignties. The Indian state doesn’t have full control over it, the way it does over the valleys. It is also the site where young boys are broken and moulded into soldiers. They are warned against the temptations of desertion and those of becoming informants. We have seen earlier in the story of Soaba, under what kinds of circumstances one becomes an informant. But, Sashi and Imli’s story is not only of innocents being turned into sepoys of the revolution. Sashi and Imli fled a camp and made their way into the forest only to come into the preserve of another camp, where they served as soldiers. They killed. It ‘happened’, said Sashi. One gets moulded into the fold of an activity, however kicking and screaming, but ultimately acquiescent.

 

Sashi’s is perhaps the story of a particularly intense time of struggle – the fifties. He wishes that his fate should not befall the younger generations. He is hesitant to evoke the shadows of war even in his words. He wonders though if – ‘Survivors like Imli and himself, did not owe it to their fallen friends to tell the world what it was like to fifteen and sixteen in the turbulent fifties in these remote hills they called home?’ (p. 93). This is Ao’s most important contribution in this collection, the exposition that intergenerational survival of war binds a constantly threatened community. Lives lived in and through war bind themselves to lives of others, especially to lives of successive generations. The war emerges as landscape, as milieu, as atmosphere in which life begins, proceeds and ends.

Suffering, loss and commonality of being caught between two competing sovereigns generates a sense of a place – Nagaland. So, Ao tells an unapologetically particular tale of a particularly conflicted land – Nagaland – and not Iraq and not Kashmir and not Kosovo. I was overly cautious in reading her so as not to particularize her as a Naga writer, but I finished the book concluding that perhaps Ao wanted exactly that, to be read as a writer who tells Nagaland, who tells the conflict that makes Nagaland and the Naga – and ultimately, a writer who makes a Nagaland for the reader in so doing.

We know of diverse literary traditions of narrating place – particular registers of event and time emerge as tools of narration of place. In this case, Ao deftly shows an accumulated, embedded historical milieu – the insurgent conflict with the Indian state. War turns into a spatial container that receives life’s occurrences and from time to time shows its own inner tectonic energies and disturbances. The landscape is sometimes calm, sometimes turbulent like a volcano. In all of the story, the building blocks of plot and character are taken essentially from the war. Ao leads us to an important question in literary criticism – event as detail or event as milieu, as landscape? Pacification, ceasefires, attacks, searches are but different notes on a scale.

War unfolds through these various rhythms. It encases the rhythms of the everyday – which then begin to keep time with the war. Ao’s literary effort has been to produce a milieu of love and loss in conflict – the events of the conflict playing the role of a spatial container of the lives and actors that animate the place. In this production, time is an important element holding together the many histories and memories of the conflict as the conflict and the place emerges into an inheritance of loss. Thus, I see Ao as yielding a literary tool kit with which to narrate suffering and make place using the method of storytelling.