(…) the practices and politics of life in these areas shaped the political, regulatory, and disciplinary practices that constitute, somehow, that thing we can call the ‘the State’.

– Veena Das and Deborah Poole

 

Crossing into Burma was an imaginary act. There was no perceptible boundary; the only way you could tell India from Burma was through the creepers. That is strange like most things here but it’s the truth.

– Jim Wungramyao Kasom, ‘Crossings’.

 

NARRATIVES of belonging and identity are rather complex terrains and, therefore, it may not be possible to shelve or demarcate individuals or communities into neat categories. While the state defines and categorises people and communities, there are also ways and practices in which people and communities register their narratives of belonging and identity. Extending Veena Das and Deborah Poole’s discussion of how creativity works in the ‘margins’, I would like to discuss practices and strategies in the everyday life of individuals and groups which articulate complex narratives of identity and belonging and refuse to fit into the neat frames of identity prescribed by the state.¹

In this paper, I would like to specifically discuss this aspect in the case of Nagas through a reading of contemporary Naga literature. Importantly, the attempt would be to look into practices of belonging and identity articulated through what may be seen as creative interventions by the Nagas with regard to their identity.² In this regard, I will discuss Temsula Ao’s short story ‘The Boy Who Sold an Airfield’ and Jim Wungramyao Kasoms’s story, ‘Crossings’.

The registers of belongingness and non-belongingness are commonly used by a state in marking individuals’ belongingness on its terrain. The concern as such is to engage with the registers of belongingness or trace its trajectories, specifically since the period when curtains were drawn on British colonization of India. The specific aspect which this paper explores is how people inhabiting India’s borderlands or those communities living near the boundaries between two postcolonial nations, negotiate with their everyday life and what their everyday life practices tell us about their negotiations with identity.

While resistance and subversion constitute an important aspect, what also needs to be looked into are the registers of creativity in everyday life practices in articulating narratives of belonging and identity by the people. In this paper, I look at the narratives emerging through literature (contemporary) on articulations of identity and belongingness in social spaces, which subvert state ascribed or state defined categories. Even in the seeming illogical nature of such practices, a community’s negotiation with a social space highlights the complex nature of belongingness which eludes the state’s framework of citizen or non-citizen bodies on its terrain.

It would perhaps be a little too unwieldy an argument if I were to engage with the question of belongingness and practices of belonging and identity, in the broad context of Northeast India. Given the complex nature of this heterogenous social space, although a broad term to signify certain commonalities and also as a category of convenience, it would be simplistic to engage with this aspect on such a broad terrain.³ Therefore, specifically, this paper attempts to look into the Naga context and their practices of belonging and articulation of identity.

 

Articulations of identity in the case of Nagas, works on a rather complex terrain. Even as the Nagas or Naga society is part of the larger postcolonial frame, it is simultaneously also negotiating with a national identity. Rendering it further complex is the contemporary moment that is also regarded as the ‘postnational’ moment.⁴ Given the pertinence of the nationalist question or question of sovereignty, the Naga context needs to be seen as negotiating with postcolonial, nationalist and ‘postnational’ moments.⁵ The contours of belonging and non-belonging is further rendered complex, in the case of those Naga communities inhabiting social spaces near the international border. How does one engage with the articulations of identity, emerging in conversation with this layered context?

 

In his discussion on the Angami Nagas and their practices of belonging and identity, Michael Heneise explains how communities in Nagaland practice (specificaly those in Khonoma and Kohima) narratives of belongingness, community identity and (largely) citizenship. Heneise argues: ‘belonging may be a nexus or linkage between these ostensibly distinct domains of remembrance or re-experience, and kinship.’⁶ Elsewhere, Veena Das and Deborah Poole discuss how margins articulate interesting narratives in their everyday life that ‘constitute’ (…) that thing we call the State.’⁷ Extending it a little further, I argue how contemporary literary writing from Nagaland articulates a layered and complex terrain of identity and belonging.

The genre of literary writing constitutes an important intervention with regard to Naga identity in the contemporary period. That is, contemporary Naga literature needs to be seen as a form that engages with crucial moments in the contemporary history of Nagas. Importantly, given the nature of militarization and surveillance, literature becomes an important intervention in articulating complex negotiations with identity by Nagas in contemporary times.

I will elaborate the central idea of this essay through a discussion of two literary texts belonging to the contemporary period. One is a short story entitled ‘The Boy who sold an Airfield’ by Temsula Ao.⁸ The other story, ‘Crossings’ is by Jim Wungramyao Kasom; both are contemporary Naga authors.⁹

 

Negotiations with sovereignty constitutes an important aspect of the Naga negotiation with identity.¹⁰ Engaging with certain moments or events in contemporary history and stitching it into the fabric of a literary work, it tells the story of Nagas negotiation with identity, specifically political identity, through the commonplace and the everyday. As indicated in the earlier section, Nagas negotiate with a complex terrain in the contemporary period. That is, they are postcolonial given their history of British colonization. However, they are also engaging with questions pertaining to self/identity even in the contemporary moment which, interestingly, is regarded as the ‘postnational’ moment.¹¹ This then makes it a complex terrain that the Nagas inhabit in the contemporary period.

Temsula Ao’s ‘The Boy Who Sold an Airfield’ narrates the story of Nagas negotiation with identity.¹² A young boy named Pokenmong, also referred to as Porky towards the end of the story, is the central character or protagonist. Pokenmong lives a somewhat nomadic existence, and moves away from his village working as a household help in many people’s homes. While working in Jiten’s house, he becomes very attached to the family and is regarded as one of their children by Jiten and his wife.

 

One day, while watching American soldiers near the railway crossing where Jiten works, Pokenmong hops onto their convoy, unnoticed, and goes to their camp. He hovers around and eventually his presence is accepted by the American soldiers. But very soon the soldiers finish their evacuation procedures and leave the camp. The commander gifts Pokenmong whatever they have decided to leave behind, including the land on which the camp is located.

The twist in the plot emerges when Pokenmong decides to sell this piece of land to farmers from a village neighbouring the camp. Having bought the land the villagers begin to fence the area. Soon, government officials intervene and point to them that the land belongs to the government. When the villagers show the piece of paper given to them by Pokenmong, who in turn had received it from the camp commander, the officials dismiss their claims saying the land does not belong to the person who sold it.

Outwardly, it might seem as a case of villagers being duped by a stupid boy and also, in turn, Pokenmong being duped by the camp commander. However, the narrative subverts our understanding of belongingness throughout this story. The concluding lines reinforce the tenuous nature of the terrain of belongingness and ownership. In the concluding lines of the story, Ao writes; ‘When the official read the document, he began to laugh and told (…) the airfield had never belonged to this person who sold.’¹³

A closer reading, based on an understanding of the Naga nationalist movement, points to a quest for belongingness and identity which works as a trope in this short story. While it speaks of the uncertainty of Pokenmong’s inhabitation and his shift from one space to another, it simultaneously renders complex the idea of space and belonging, specifically the belongingness or identity of people in relation to that space demonstrates, as the excerpt from this story, which narrates the consistent movement and shift: ‘The boy, whose name was Pokenmong, was around twelve when he left home (…) he was moving from house to house looking for any kind of work that would buy him two square meals a day. (…) The only thing he remembered was the happy face of his domestic servant now moving on to another sphere.¹⁴

In other words, the narrative in ‘The Boy Who Sold an Airfield’, subverts the idea of legality or legal markers of belongingness and ownership, or more appropriately, identification with a space. Ao’s story narrates the complex workings of belongingness and identity, specifically in the case of Nagas.

 

Another story, entitled ‘Crossings’ by Jim Wungramyao Kasom, narrates the everyday life of truck drivers who inhabit a village along the Indo-Burma border and traverse across borders gathering timber and ferrying it back.¹⁵ The narrative is structured as a recounting of a truck driver’s disappearance during the routine traversing across borders on work by a friend of the disappeared man who is also a truck driver.

The narrator describes in intricate details their routine as truck drivers and the day his friend and co-worker, Ngathingam Woleng whom he also refers to as Lamboo, got lost while they were working on the other side of the border. As the story tells us, the narrator and his co-workers are resting after lunch when the Burmese army suddenly begins firing. In the confusion and mayhem that follows, they all run in different directions until the guns fall silent. In this mayhem, Lamboo goes missing. These truck drivers who traverse the border to gather timber are regarded as illegal entrants. The Burmese army’s firing was probably in response to the presence of these illegal people on their border.

 

There are many studies that discuss the legality, illegality, licit and illicit border transactions/trading and connections.¹⁶ My concern is not about how the story posits any of these aspects, while they do constitute vital features in understanding the nuances and specific contours pertaining to the regions marked as the border between two countries. It is crucial to understand the tenuous nature of the physical markings that separate two countries and their socio-cultural processes.¹⁷ The following excerpt from Kasom’s story illustrates this aspect: ‘Crossing into Burma was an imaginary act. There was no perceptible boundary; the only way you could tell India from Burma was through the creepers. (…) Everyone knew the clues and nuances of survival.’¹⁸

A shift in the narrative occurs in the latter half of the story when the narrator realises that Lamboo is still alive and not a prisoner of the Burmese army. However, he identifies a shift in Lamboo’s identity. He realises that his friend has merged into the local culture and social space. He has married a local woman and begun a small business venture across the Khanti-Moreh (in the Indo-Burma region of Manipur state). He describes how Lamboo had forgotten the languages that he spoke earlier when he was his friend and co-worker, living on the other side of the border.

 

The following excerpt from the story highlights this aspect: ‘But the Burmese army patrols didn’t kill Lamboo, or for that matter, even caught him, as we had suspected. He learned to slowly slip into the Burmese way of life for his survival. (…) Lamboo had forgotten every dialect he had known except broken Tangkhul (…) He had taken a girl from Tamu as his wife and was engaged in a small business between Khanti and Moreh.¹⁹

Lamboo’s merging or transposal of identity and his amnesia, may be seen as a strategy for survival. At a symbolic level, it also hints at a creative strategy in articulating a narrative of belongingness that is shared or fluid in nature. That is, it puts forth the complex socio-cultural terrain with which this community of Nagas in a border village of Manipur negotiate, in articulating their narratives of identity. Lamboo’s transposal of identity also questions the validity of national boundaries. It narrates how people’s lives and identity, specifically in the borderlands, need to be seen as moving beyond the markers of citizen and non-citizen identity labels, imposed by nations. In a way, it highlights the absurdity of lines marking the end and beginning of a different terrain in a region that had socio-cultural and economic interactions, prior to the post-colonial marking of borders, as studies indicate.²⁰

In other words, Kasom’s story pushes us to engage with the complex and layered workings of identity, specifically in the case of borderlands and the inevitability of such strategies and practices in their everyday life. An exaggeration that it might seem in the description of Lamboo’s transposal of identity, this story narrates complex negotiations and practices of the inhabitants of a border village. This story does not indicate a resistance, but points to strategies adopted by people as part of their routine everyday life in order to survive.²¹

 

The two stories discussed in the earlier sections of this paper, draw attention to practices of belonging as articulated by the people rather than by the state. In the specific case of India’s Northeast, and also in the case of the Nagas, narratives of identity need to be seen as layered and complex in nature. While Ao’s story is a subversion of the narrative of belongingness, Kasom’s story highlights the everyday life practices of strategy, crucial to a mundane life in a border village like the one described in Kasom’s story. Both ‘The Boy Who Sold an Airfield’ and ‘Crossings’, narrate creative practices of articulating belongingness and identity and also reveal the complex terrain of identity.²² Pushing it a little further, the possibility of neat categories of belongingness and identity are rendered difficult and fuzzy.

 

* I would like to thank Professor Shiv Vishvanathan for the opportunity to present my ideas.

Footnotes:

1. Veena Das and Deborah Poole, ‘State and its Margins : Comparative Ethnographies’, in Veena Das and Deborah Poole (eds.), Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2004, pp. 3-33.

2. Sahana Ghosh, ‘Crossborder Activities in Everyday Life: The Bengal Borderland’, Contemporary South Asia 19(1), 2011, pp. 49-60.

3. Parag M. Sarma, ‘Towards an Appreciative Paradigm for Literatures of the Northeast’, in Margaret Ch Zama (ed.), Emerging Literatures from Northeast India: The Dynamics of Culture, Society and Identity. Sage Studies on India’s Northeast, New Delhi, 2013, pp.37-46.

4. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996.

5. Bhumika R., ‘Engaging with the Specific Realities of Postcolonial Literatures: A Discussion of the Complex Socio-Cultural and Political Contours of Contemporary Naga Literature in English’, Asian Ethnicity, 2019, pp 1-17.

6. Michael Heneise, ‘Citizenship from Below: Establishing Continuities of Belonging in Nagaland’, in Jelle J.P. Wouters and Photo Tunyi (eds.), Tribes, Traditions, Tensions: Democracy in Nagaland. Highlander Books Kohima, 2018, pp. 223-244.

7. Veena Das and Deborah Poole, op. cit.

8. Temsula Ao, ‘The Boy Who Sold an Airfield’, in Laburnum for My Head: Stories. Penguin Books, New Delhi, 2009, pp. 41-53.

9. Jim Wungramyao Kasom, ‘Crossings’, in Homecoming and Other Stories. Bibliophile South Asia, New Delhi, 2018, pp. 48-59.

10. Bhumika R., op. cit., 2019, pp 1-17.

11. Arjun Appadurai, op. cit., 1996.

12. Temsula Ao, op. cit.

13. Ibid., pp. 41-53.

14. Ibid., p. 42, 44.

15. Jim Wungramyao Kasom, op. cit.

16. Michiel Baud and Willem van Schendel, op. cit., pp. 211-242. Itty Abraham and Willem van Schendel, ‘Introduction’ (The Making of Illicitnes), in Willem van Schendel and Itty Abraham (eds.), Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2005, pp. 1-37.

17. Ibid. Also Manjeet Baruah, ‘Introduction’, in Frontier Cultures: A Social History of Assamese Literature. Routledge, New Delhi, 2012, pp. 3-14.

8. Jim Wungramyao Kasom, op. cit., p. 54.

19. Ibid., p. 57.

20. Michiel Baud and Willem van Schendel, Towards a Comparative History of Borderlands’, Journal of World History 8(2), 1997, pp. 211-242.. Also, Itty Abraham and Willem van Schendel, ‘Introduction’, op. cit., p. 1-37. Sahana Ghosh, op. cit., p. 49-60.

21. Sahana Ghosh, ibid.

22. See Temsula Ao, ‘The Boy Who Sold an Airfield’, Also, Jim Wungramyao Kasom, ‘Crossings’