MY proposal is fairly straightforward – conflict resolution in Tripura can begin only by acknowledging it as a settler colony. This is a difficult proposal for two reasons. One, it requires the indigenous political organizations to eschew political vocabulary of ‘illegal Bangladeshi’ immigrants. Two, it requires the settler society to confront their settler anxiety and to recognize the uncomfortable truth that Tripura has been transformed into a settler colony. But it is as a settler colony of a particular type where the settler society did not create a new state, they took over a state controlled by indigenous people and transformed it into a settler colony. The sinuous history of this transformation, and continuing strategies to hide this fact feeds into what I have called settler anxiety.

I do not frame these two difficulties in isolation, they are relational. One cannot dismantle one without dismantling the other, they are co-determined. It is beyond my scope here to gauge the consequences of this acknowledgment on the shape of politics in the state. What I sketch here is how we might understand history as a site for working through these two problems.

The dominant historiography of Tripura – sanctioned and circulated by academia, media and the state – perpetuates the indigenous/tribals as subjects of customary; whereas the settler as subjects of law proper. This is a hegemonizing strategy – the tribal as ‘subject without history’ and the settlers as ‘subject with history’, who had the assurance of history. The tribals as occupying behind time, backward, needing help of the subject with the assurance of history. One way of contesting this dichotomy or binary – subjects without history and subjects with history – has been the notion of fateful time immemorial. A politics that flow from this idea of time immemorial is fraught with numerous dangers. What flow from this binary are two dominant ways of writing and speaking about Tripura as a place: (a) Tripura as a geography distinct from Bengal and outside of British India colonialism; and (b) Tripura as part of the historical-geography of Bengal. I am not saying these are wrong and should be rejected, but that they should be brought into dialectic.

History cannot be contained within borders. History is not ours alone, but a product of our encounter. The challenge for us, then, is to invest in producing knowledge about how we are co-constituted by history. This would mean critiquing the two dominant ways of writing about Tripura. We need a critique of the relationship between history and community, especially of history which demands our absolute relationship to a past. One cannot do a politics of expelling immigrants; neither can one make this a Bengali state. This is the real challenge in contemporary Tripura. Our task then has to be directed against the prevailing knowledge about Tripura – the dominant and the rival – to take them together and rub them against each other, a sort of dialectical rub, to bring forth a new narrative.

 

This happened in the December of 2015. I was a guest at the New Year ‘Tring’ celebration at Takarjala, organized by the Twipra Students Federation (TSF). As a guest, I was expected to speak in praise of the glorious past of Tripuris, to which the event owed its origin. As the celebration progressed into the cold winter night, each dignitary (almost all of them men, in their long overcoats) screamed out past glories of the Tripuri people – a glorious past originating in time immemorial. All of them instructing those who were present about the glorious past, and inviting us to be proud members of the community; but at the same time invoking our sacred duty to payback the community – to help it rise from the suppressed present. The occasion was simultaneously one of mourning the present political condition – dispossession of indigenous people from political power.

From the warmth of my sofa on a well decorated platform, I watched the crowd seated on the fallow paddy field, wrapped in their shawls and eagerly awaiting the ‘culture’ to come alive with songs and dances – to blast away the chill of the night. I was the one who froze.

I froze because of my own past as a member of the nationalist Twipra Students’ Federation – I had been a subject of that glorious history, a subject of this way of looking at the past. I do not remember how and where I had learned this history (like everyone present there I probably learned it through cultural events). But this way of thinking about the past, and my own subjectivity in it, had come to confront me like a spectre. I was there because of my own past, but I could no longer speak of history in the absolute, linear, homogeneous, and immemorial narrative. In fact, I think we were all there embroiled with our individual pasts and our subjectivity to that glorious collective past. After all we are creatures of our own creation. We are our own Frankenstein’s monster. That history, to which I was complicit in believing and reinforcing, now stares back like a dark monster, lurking around us in the dark winter night. Was my cultural consciousness shot through historical consciousness?

 

History leaves wreckages along its path. Sometimes the wreckages are the assured subjects of that history. I could no longer speak in praise of the glorious past, which I once did. Not only because such a past now looks strange to me, but also how this past is serviced into mobilizing rage against the other-enemy and its own dissenting members. And when anger of fellow members turns against their own, the violence administered is most visceral. My membership to that community or at least to that small group of that history’s subjects, is one of ambivalent attachment – a collective is neither all good or all bad. I believe there is a political lesson in that.

The event described above throws up important questions regarding the nature of community and politics. If mourning, and the inability to mourn, makes us a kind of political subject, what kinds of political subjects does this simultaneity bring into play? Is this simultaneity a strategy for retaining one’s capacity for political action when confronted with a state that refuses to recognize this mourning of loss, grief and rupture? What does this political grief tell us about the community’s relationship to history? Engaging with this set of questions and by framing Tripura as a settler colony is analytically rewarding, not only because of the explanatory power it bestows on the context, but the frame also helps to trouble the longing for an idealized past on the part of the indigenous communities, and reveals the hegemonic power associated with settler anxiety.

 

No one believes their myths as historical truths more than the subjects of nationalist history. Sometimes, their myths are created from earlier myths, whose history the nationalist claim as their own. Tring encapsulates this myth within a myth. The event reclaims the story of Hamtor Fa’s victory against a ruler of Bengal. The name and the un-dateable event is mentioned in passing in the chronicle of the Manikya dynasty, Rajmala. The event is reclaimed as the foundation of the Tripuri nation, because to commemorate that particular victory, Hamtor Fa is believed to have established the Twipra Era or Tipperah Era (TE). This era was used by the Tripura state till the 1960s, when it was replaced with the Bangabda/Bengali calendar. The significance of this sketchy, obscure, and non-datable event mentioned in the chronicle, lies in the political trajectory of Tripura in the post-British India period: The metamorphosis of Tripura as a settler colony space.

It is within this frame – the initiation of the place as a settler colony – that one has to locate the significance of this new event which came to be named and celebrated as Tring or Tripuri New Year. The present event, Tring, and the event it commemorates, troubles the history and narrative of belonging and space in Tripura. This appropriation of an event from Tripura’s past unsettles the assurance history gives to the settler society and its ideological structures.

 

However, this mining of the chronology, which itself is tainted by myths the former ruling class narrated about their power to themselves, is a shift from the older and popular myth of origin Tripuris tell about themselves – the myth of Dongoi Ma-Dongoi Fa. One possible reason for this shift might be the desire to articulate historical merit of the new collective. While the myth of Dongoi Ma-Dongoi Fa resides in shared oral folklore, the myth of Hamtor Fa is a written historical fact. As such, their historical consciousness, if one may name this as a desire for historical merit, demands the projection of the self into time immemorial to contest what the ideological basis of a settler colony denies to them, or repudiates.

But the subversive potential in the invention of this new New Year, in so far as it disturbs the happy settler’s story – story of its civilizing presence on the indigenous communities and the land – is foreclosed by its own relationship to history and its dogmatic vision of the future. In the end, their use of history is no different from the way settler societies use the history of the place. Such use of history, to quote Nietsche, merely instructs us instead of orienting us towards life. If history instantiates the conscious collective, the very process consigns a slice of truth about itself in the realm of the unconscious. After all, history cannot be contained within borders, it percolates and permeates through our borders, no matter how much we desire to contain it by erecting fences and posts, making each of us subjects of histories, formed by connection and mutuality.

This essay, then, is a critique of the relationship between history and community, especially of history that demands our absolute relationship to a past, to that historically conscious collective. Such a task is urgent and difficult. Urgent, because the defenders of such history no longer hide in faraway camps and issue dictates from their hideouts or maraud the streets as lynch mobs calling out for unity and protection of culture. They also now hide in nooks and crannies of social media as troll armies, self-styled warriors of culture and defenders of history, waging battles against those who dissent against such a vision of the community. Difficult because imagining history in terms of a unique and distinct culture and time immemorial past has been a defence against hegemonic power that wields extractive and bureaucratic power, complicit in material dispossession of the indigenous communities. How does one carry out a critique of this history without curtailing the power of the subjugated, and by refusing to serve the power which dispossess?

 

Within the ongoing mutations of Tripura, as a settler colony for the indigenous, to be a conscious collective is to be historically wounded subjects. To be aware of the other, the opposed other, albeit the template on which one must fashion oneself, requires a possession of time immemorial, a memory whose content cannot be altered without injuring the consciousness which it constitutes and is constituted by. (This is not to say that time immemorial contains a history created out of nothing, or that history is what we make it to be). The very self it imagines of itself, or brings into consciousness, is designed after a template already existing, already rendering it behind time. That community is merely a templated community, forever seeking to heal the wound through repayment, service and sacrifice.

This historical consciousness as a wound is counterpoised against a history founded on repudiation of a similar consciousness on the indigenous body, and thereby renders them always behind time. This repudiation takes place in academia, media, political speeches, quotidian life. Thus, this historical consciousness as a wound begins with the identification of loss, which must be mourned, and the disavowal by a hegemonic settler state inaugurates the making of melancholic subjects who desire to be like the settler society. Such a memory and the politics it embodies must be challenged because this is a politic which desires melancholic love for the community in its subjects.

 

The problem with history in Northeast India has not been confined to the absence of written records, but that the written records are in themselves the problem of history. They cannot be treated merely as evidence or proof for its unique culture or history. This problem with historical writing in the region has been pointed out by historians such as Yengkhom Jilangamba, who insist that scholars using the archives should take care not to reproduce colonial descriptions, and has emphasized the need for democratization of history as a discipline. He also hinted at the need to do away with the binary of historical people and people without history. That task is best left to professional historians. My concern here is the politics of that binary. This binary is a product of power, and serves that power, which makes possible for certain forms of power, especially colonizing power to be established. In the context of this essay, that power of the settler society was initially wielded by colonial anthropology, and later by the settler society.

The settler was the subject of history, whereas the indigenous was the subject of culture within which they were designated as autonomous and distinct, and the preservation of which activated the settler colonial relationship. Settlers were subjects of the law, whereas the indigenous were subjects of the customary within which they were produced as a distinct unit of analysis. The frames of the binary which legitimates colonial, or other forms of hegemonic relationship, is treacherous terrain owing to the inherent instability between time and meaning, and memory and history. Together, these two unstable relationships (time-meaning and memory-history) can serve as a basis for certain forms of collective consciousness, which the communities who are denied history can wield against the hegemonic communities. The mobilization of time immemorial as a resource of collective memory needs to be placed in this phenomenon.

 

This is because what time does to meaning, and how meaning changes the conception of time, is never given. More importantly, while history demands a linear, progressive narrative, memory does not wish to remain a slave to chronology. Memory seeks the easiest way out, and memory is afraid of the messy entanglement of our politics. Yet, it is the easiest way out which invites and metes out violence, while the messy entanglement instantiates our vulnerabilities, complicity, and the precariousness of our existence.

How does one critique a memory which the subjugated wield against a power that arrogates for itself ‘true time’, and forever renders others ‘behind time’? To pose such a question is to articulate a refusal on two fronts: one, a refusal to be burdened by the historical weight of the division into true time and behind time; and a refusal to be trapped by the dark monster lurking around us with its threatening glare to devour. The task, then, as Walter Benjamin envisaged, is to rescue history from conformism, to which is entangled our own liberation.

 

History enables imaginings, and also resists imaginations, in so far as the content of the imagination is dissent. History is easier if its task is to fashion national consciousness, a consciousness whose very purpose is sacrificed at the moment of its birth because its debut is marked by violence of the status quo. To bind history to a place, to a people, not only makes it possible to think of people without history and people with history; but also helps unlock the access to a past termed ‘time immemorial’. Time immemorial is that fateful memory where events are locked away, the content of which can no longer be altered without having violent implications on those it enables as a voice of resistance.

The difficult task of a historian is to chisel away on the constraints of imaginations, to breathe life into the wreckages piling up at the feet of the ‘Angel of History’. This is an uphill task because it must face up to the larger agents of history who are equal participants in the production of history. For history is not necessarily the domain of professional historians, to quote Michel Trouillet, there are those who take history in their hands and live it.

History then is produced, lived, and acted upon at multiple sites, beyond the control of professional historians who subject themselves to disciplinary epistemological and ontological constraints. These are the sites, such as the event under consideration here, where history and ‘culture’ merge into knotted seams, whose production is irrevocably bound up to each other. The fateful history of assigning ‘culture’ to the indigenous, and arrogating history for the settler, comes back to haunt the settler self. The indeterminacy of the relationship between timemeaning and history-memory, enables the subjugated self to re-enact that relationship, one in which the assurances of history is denied to the settler self.

If the settler state instrumentalized culture as an unproblematic category and hijacked it to institute and perpetuate state power of a certain kind, it is now serviced by the indigenous for politically conservative causes. For the subjugated communities, to be a historical subject is to be a cultural being. Tring as an event encapsulates this problematic. Every year, on the night of 21 December, people are called upon to not only live a history but also to live a culture, as a mechanism for producing one’s historical merit. A critique of time immemorial might be directed towards this cultural being.

 

The history which the historically conscious collective remembers as their past is a product of their present realities, of which the conscious collective self is a product. Therefore, a critique of our relationship to history, since that relationship is almost always infused with power, and a relationship of power, might open ways for theorizing community in terms of co-determination. Such a critique also helps reorient the relationship between community and its members as one of ambivalence.

In Tripura, today, what is celebrated and mourned through this event forecloses acknowledgement by the state and settler society. The loss, which the event mourns, is unrecognized and disavowed, because such an act implicates the settler self, forever ridden with lingering anxieties about the ongoing repercussions of the foundational violence.