NELit review

POST script 3
FEBRUARY 19, 2012

SEVEN SISTERS

One-Page Mahabharata
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UNDAY morning. Cleansing his spectacles with a soft cloth, Narendra sat in front of the television in the drawing room. Has it started? His wife, Surabala, asked him from the kitchen. No. Surabala was busy preparing breakfast. With the serial about to start, she was in a tearing hurry. Hasnt it started yet? She repeated. No, not yet. I will call you. The background music will let you know, said Narendra. At the very moment, a scooter stopped in front of their gate. Narendra peeped through the window. Hey, do you hear me? Sunanda and Surendra have arrived! He rushed to open the door. What a pleasant surprise! Welcome, welcome. I hardly believed that you would come, said Narendra. Surabala, on the other hand, poured two more cups of water in the kettle. In haste, she made a couple of omelettes too. Has it started? Surendra too questioned as he set foot in the verandah. About to. We too are waiting, said Narendra. While Surendra sat in the drawing room, Sunanda went straight to the kitchen to meet Surabala. After a while, the two women came out with tea and snacks to the drawing room. Have you lost your way and landed up here? Surabala took a dig at Surendra. Surendra smiled and replied: Oh no, not like that. We have been planning, you know. Its to have a glimpse of your newly-built house and, while at it, to enjoy The Mahabharata serial together. Its nice that you have come, said Narendra. Maybe the birth of Krishna will be screened today. How can that be? In the last episode, just the fourth child was born, while Krishna was the eighth. Sunanda, on the other hand, had her eyes on the bonsai banyan tree near the TV. She studied it keenly and said: Where have you brought this bonsai from? From the horticulture firm at Zoo Road. Beautiful! With its prop roots hanging down, it looks like the old gigantic one near the Mahabhairab temple. They all burst into laughter. The otherwise sky-high, royal, gorgeous and longliving banyan tree was now a laughing stock. Its challenge was to reach the TV on the stand. Thanks to those who had cut its roots to size. The days episode of the Mahabharata started. The room wore a mantle of silence. At first, a recap of the last episode was telecast Daibaki gave birth to her fourth baby in captivity. She was making efforts not to let the guards on duty in the prison know of the newborn. However, a spying guard came to know of the infant and passed the message to King Kangs late at night. The days episode started A beam of light from the dawning sun illuminated a corner of the prison cell. Daibaki, who had to pass a sleepless night, was taken aback by the light. Bewitched by the newborn, Vasudeva, on the other hand, kept looking at the baby in bewilderment. A restless Daibaki was on a desperate lookout for a safe hideout, but to no avail. The guards were about to reach her cell. She was crestfallen when she thought of the fate of her baby when her brother Kangs would Lets do something. Its morning. Where to hide the baby? Daibaki said, and brought Vasudeva back to his senses. He kept looking at her and the newborn. Raising his chained hands up, a helpless Vasudeva kept praying at the beam of sunlight. The oracle went that the eighth son of Daibaki would be their saviour. Oracles always come true, but its all the same to parents, whether first or eighth. Oh God! What an ordeal is this! Vasudeva rued, and kept gazing at the sky, a piece of which could be seen through the small hole. King of Kings, His Highand smashed it against the wall. Fresh blood kept dripping down the wall A commercial break followed. The TVs volume was low. Pindrop silence enveloped the drawing room. Only the tictac, tic-tac monotone of the wall-clock continued. Detestable! Sunanda broke the silence indignantly. No character in the Mahabharata is as sadistic as that of Kangs, Surabala remarked. A commercial advertisement was playing on the screen. Silently the ad showed the preparation of tasty chocolates by the milk collected cooperatively by the women of Gujarat. A success story! The ad, however, failed to accommodate the tale of the calves, deprived of mothers milk. A sadist, you know, taking a piece of the omelette, Narendra continued, Its the height of cruelty. For the sake of his own life, so many innocents were slaughtered. Horrible! The director has done the job well, symbolically showing the patches of blood on the walla balanced shot. Wait, wait. The omelette is delicious. The taste isnt like that of firm eggs, said Sunanda. Yeah, we have reared a pair of local fowls. You know, its a must for our protein deficiency, said Surabala. The commercial break was over. The serial resumed. The fade-in on the screen was the prison of Kangs. Bereaved and wailing Daibaki was slowly losing her senses. A helpless Vasudeva was sprinkling water on her eyes, and kept on massaging her head as a solace. Thus the Mahabharata episode of the day ended there. But a lively discussion on the character, Kangs, continued, till Surendra and Sunanda got up to depart. Why have you got up? Lets have lunch together, Narendra proposed." No, not today. We will, some

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THE otherwise sky-high, royal, gorgeous and long-living banyan tree was now a laughing stock. Its challenge was to reach the TV on the stand. Thanks to those who had cut its roots to size

ness, King of Mathura, Maharaj Kangs is c-o-m-i-n-g an alert sounded by a royal guard. A frenetic Daibaki kept running from one corner to the other to hide the baby. Her chained legs were bleeding profusely. At last she lay on her side and started lactating the baby. She pretended to be oblivious to Kangs, who entered the room and said:

iNKPOT
Smriti Kumar Sinha Translator: Ramlal Sinha

Daibaki, hand over the baby. Baby? What baby? There isnt any. Dont hide it. I came with a confirmed tip-off. Im bowing down to you, spare the life of an innocent infant, she said. Kangs was bewildered, looking at his most affectionate sister. But he soon came to his senses, and thought: That cant be. For my life, the death of Daibakis babies is a must. Defending oneself is no sin. He laughed in her face and took away the infant from her lap, raised it up

other day. We have an appointment with the doctor today. Why dont you hold a feast? We expect such a treat as you have completed your house, said Surendra. Its great. We will hold one on a holiday, Narendra said. Wait, wait. In the doctors chamber too, we will be kept on waiting. Lets have a look at the newly-built house. We too have a plan to erect one, said Sunanda. Its our pleasure to show you around. Narendra and Surabala led the guests to the dining room, the kitchen, bedrooms, the in-house mandir one by one. The bamboo basket in front of the images of conjugal Radha-Krishna was full of freshly plucked flowers. Half-bloomed or about-to-bloom flowers hanging from their necks reeked off the mundamala with choppedoff baby heads! What was dazzling on the cheeks? Tears? All of them bowed down together. Chatting about the vastu of the house, they all stepped into the kitchen garden in the backyard. Narendra and Surabala briefed the guests with all the details of the house. Surendra and Sunanda were glued. The blueprint of a dream house seemed to flash in their eyes. Adjacent to the left corner of the boundary walls stood a small poultry shed. Its roof was of abandoned tin cans of mustard oil, embossed with the trade-mark, Tripti complete satisfaction! The walls were of wire mesh. A pair of snowwhite fowls was inside. Not one or two, but a brigade of four was approaching them. The scared hen in captivity became frenetic. She moved from corner to corner fluffing out her feathers, shedding many of them. She poked the cock and warned it of the impending danger. Finding no way out, the mother hen went round the just laid egg once, twice, many times, in quick succession. At last, she covered the egg with her bosom and started incubating it. Like every other day, the cock kept gazing up, with its beak pushed out through a grid of the mesh. He kept gazing at the fragment of the sky, looked like a rag of a denim, seen through the juncture of the two moss-covered walls. It gazed and kept waiting, maybe still with the faint hope of an oracle. T

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TURNERS
DILS LK SINHA
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u How close is your relation with literature in general, and with literature of the Northeast in particular? t I wont classify literature because I feel it is general. The word mother, in whichever language you utter, addresses the same person everywhere. I feel folk literature in Assamese, Bodo, Rabha, Mising, Manipuri, Mizo and others are very developed. I have a collection of Bishnupriya Manipuri folktales to my credit. Folk literature is a very interesting genre. It attracts readers of all ages. Bishnupriya Manipuri is a marginalised community, but we feel we are very much a part of literature in general.

u What does literature mean to you? Do you think it has any relevance in our day-to-day lives? According to you, does it have anything to do with all that is happening around us? t Literature is the reflection of life in terms of humanity. It is a means to the ultimate truth in the inner soul of man. Through poetry, I try to spread knowledge about the Bishnupriya Manipuris, which is on the verge of extinction, and at the same time I try to express feelings which are hard to share in other mediums. Literature mirrors society. We learn about things that happened in the past through books. In the same way, our posterity will find out what we feel now through our writings. Everything happening around us, from terrorism to price rise, finds an outlet through literature.

Dils LK Sinha is the president of the Bishnupriya Manipuri Writers Forum and has authored numerous poems, books and plays. Talking to Gitanjali Das, he says that he fears the extinction of his language

ES, its a tale of cities, not of one or two. Take Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Guwahatias a case study its the same basic storyline. From Google earth, lets zoom in on any of the cities, say Guwahati Its a sweltering noon. Its the hustle and bustle of city life, with honking cars lined up. The road on the left leads one to Fancy Bazar. A billboard stands erect on the right. Rich in carbohydrate, vitamins and minerals reads the advertisement of a baby food. No substitute for breastfeeding, maxim of the WHO, written in a small font size, almost invisible. Oh no! What a stark contrast! A corpse, on the footpath! Could be of a mother. A baby is sucking its breasts, breathlessly. A bagging bowl is lying near, up-

A Tale of Cities
side down. The crying baby is standing up. Limping a baby boy. A mass of tangled and matted hair on its head. Mercy coins keep falling from the pedestrians chatting over mobile phones and commuters busy surfing Internet broad band Wi-Fi. A digital divide! What else can they do? The kid starts walking over the coins, making thuds. The metallic sound stops. It looks at the other side a glimmer of hope. Crossing the main road! The speeding cars break to a halt, with an awful screeching. Oh God! Youre really omnipresent. The kid has crossed the road. The swamping traffic has resumed free flow. The kid is craning his neck to have a better view of a green hoarding. A rhino is grazing in foliage of wild grasses in the Kaziranga National Park a tourism departments ad with a tag on the top Incredible India! Incredible indeed! Limping a few steps further, the kid has stood in front of another hoarding. A few kids of his age are playing with colourful toys. Kids Dreamland, an English medium nursery school. A red missed ball is falling down. The kid on the footpath has forgot his stomachache, and extended his hand to catch it beyond his reach. The crying baby is limping

ahead, thumping against the roadside wall. Stopped! An eyecatching cartoon on the wall. A boy and a girl are playing seesaw sitting on a long and striped wood pencil! Written atop is Lets all go to school Sarba Shiksha Abhiyan a government mission. The kid has rushed to catch the pencil a fake one! It keeps limping till another poster gloomy orphan faces, matted hair. Tears dripping down their cheeks. Known faces? It has turned back and stood. On the backdrop, fellow faces and a tag UNICEF HELP. The kid is slowly extending his untutored hands.Stop it. Im here, a street teen has rushed to the spot in a whirlwind. He has held the hand of the kid. A mobile phone in hand, his is a

known face. A beggar-turned service provider through his mobile public call office for phoneless pedestrians. An innovation, thanks to Mahammad Yunus! The kid bursts in hunger. The teen has taken him to a pilfered water pipe, offered him a palmfull. No, not a substitute. A solace? Relinquenched, the kid is clinging, a passionate hug in return an age-old bond of eMotion amidst eBusiness, eLearning and eGovernannce hoardings. Lets zoom in on, say T
Note: The story is especially dedicated to famous economist Prof. Mahammad Yunus, Nobel Laureate from Bangladesh, who changed the lives of street children and the poor of South-East Asia.

u What future do you see for literature from the Northeast? t The future of Northeast literature is very bright. With book fairs like the 13th North East Book Fair being held and books focusing on the region being published, the future ahead is bright. However, I fear that Bishnupriya Manipuri literature will become extinct. More and more elite litterateurs and scholars are joining our cause. But our literature is not as developed as Assamese, Bodo or Mizo, because it does not get financial support from any quarters. Moreover, there is no political patronage from the state. People associated with Bishnupriya Manipuri literature have translated many books into this language. The Gita has been translated a number of times by different writers since 1920. We are working with zeal without pondering much about how the future unfolds. u Name one book that had a lasting impact on you. In what way? t Rabindranath Tagores Gitanjali, TS Eliots poem The Wasteland and the Upanishads have made an impact on me. They have given my life some sort of a direction. Eliots poem is an amalgamation of the East and the West. His philosophy of life has really inspired me. He has taken so much from different cultures.

Smriti Kumar Sinha teaches at Tezpur University and has authored three anthologies of short-stories in Bishnupriya Manipuri.

Elite politics and ethnic conflict

RAKESH GUPTA

HIS book can be read in multiple ways. It is a text on ethnic struggles, on conflict resolution and on mass campaigns in a comparative perspective. This PhD work at McGill University, Montreal, is an in-depth study of the Bodos, Dimasas aned Misings in Assam with references to the revolts in far-off places like Abkhazia, Nigeria and Peru. The theorisation is with regard to the internal processes of mobilisation and conflict resolution and the failures of these. This is the new ground and does not depend on developmental models or modes of production. Here the theorisation on levels of violence in ethno-political mobilisation is linked to the process and not to structures. The three cases chosen in this work are three communities of Assam in Northeast India, namely, the Dimasas (of the North Cachar Hills, now renamed Dima Hasao district), the Bodos (of Kokrajhar district) and

ETHNIC MOBILISATION AND VIOLENCE IN NORTHEAST INDIA

Pahi Saikia Routledge, 2011 `695 , 236 pages Hardcover/Non-fiction
the Misings (in North Lakhimpur district). The merit of the book lies here. It examines the levels of violence in a democracy like that of India and so is different from many other books on ethno-nationalist politics in states like Germany, Malaysia, Nicaragua and Turkey, or, for that matter the works on the ethnic cleansing exercises in Milesovics Serbia. Authors have theorised about democracy being the solution to the problems. Here the problems are related to the manner of operation of democracies. A general truism is used here to explain to the reader about the different levels of violence. The book claims that accommodation leaves little room for

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ELITE politics, even among a tribal society in conflict, needs to be focused upon, especially in the context of the security concerns of a democracy

OTHER WORDS
violence, as in the case of the Misings. Targetted repression, on the other hand, leads to midlevel violent mobilisation, the Dimasas being a case in point. Most significantly however, widespread repression leads to high levels of violence. This had been seen in the case of the Bodos. These outcomes are then combined with the orientation and structure of the ethno-nationalists capacities of mobilisation through networks and sustained emotional appeals through years and decades of sustained violence. In order to weave her argument, Pahi has brought together a vast body of published and

unpublished material and provided an empirical base to prove her point. This base becomes brighter in the form of graphs and maps as part of sentences and arguments. One also notices that she provides for graphs to show frameworks of accommodation (p133), graphs on state violence (p107) and a graphic showing interaction of state and ethno-nationalist structures related to the theories of mobilization (p. 30). As for the process, while reading the evidence provided, especially on the Bodos, a question kept disturbing the reviewers mind. This was relating to the role of the middle-class local elites in spreading the lethality of conflict over plums of power. Such a question came up because the Bodos were part of the government that accepted the demand of Assamese language being made the official language. That initial lack of consciousness later changed to making demands on territoriality. Secondly, in case of the Bodos again, the issue was that territoriality linked the movement to the security concerns of the state, since Assam shares an international border with China. A third question that posed itself was: is it true that initially

the support for the Bodo demands of territoriality came from the State organs, especially in its earlier phase? Lastly, were the Bodos supported in this way in order to counter the outcome of the Assam Agitation of the 1980s? If so, will the situation become more complex in the future? These questions have not been adequately addressed. Elite politics, even among a tribal society in conflict, needs to be focused upon, especially in the context of the security concerns of a democracy. Like the Assamese elites, the Bodo elite also shows signs of cunning as is evident from their chosen non-Bodo targets of violence and avoidance of persistent engagement with the State forces (for this reading of the text, see p117). The battle among Assamese and Bodo elites could be seen as a conflict between ego (in group) and alter-ego (outgroup). The Indian centre may still have the last laugh. The appendices included in the book are made more attractive by the photographs but also give a turn to the emotive revolt. Saikia needs to be congratulated for this major work on violent conflict which is a must read for the lay reader and the scholar. T

u What book would you recommend for our readers and why? t I would suggest they read the Upanishads and the Vedas. I dont feel they are religious books. They reflect love for humanity. I would also ask them to read Eliot. Terrorism and the emptiness of our society are evident in his poetry.

BOOK ABLE
Book release
Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network & India International Centre released Cheitharol Kumbaba: The Royal Chronicle Of Manipur, written by Nepram Bihari at IIC, New Delhi on 30 January. The book is a monumental work covering the history of Manipur upto the modern period with a detailed record of the rule of 76 kings.

International seminar held

Arunachal Institute of Tribal Studies (AITS), Rajiv Gandhi University, organised an International Seminar on Resources, Tribes and State on 13-15 February. Participants focused on the emerging relations between tribes and resources in relation to state mediation. Attended by academics, NGO activists, planners, journalists, research scholars from across the disciplines and administrators.