Travel Log (14/4/08)

Dispatch 3 from Northeast India (14/4/08)

Identity and hegemony: Identity, with all of its philosophical and political complexities, is something that I have come face to face with numerous times in the short while I've been here. Whether it be the awe-inspiring struggles of oppressed identities in resisting both military and cultural hegemony or its degeneration into sectarianism and xenophobia, one is made to constantly think about where one is from, and its historical placing. Adivasi, Boro, Assamese, Naga, Khasi, Bangladeshi Muslim, Bengali, Bihari...often all other identities based on class, gender etc get subsumed under broad-based cultural-nationalist or sub-nationalist ones. In the Northeast, multiple identity-based struggles, positive or negative, and the acute nature of these struggles can more often than not be directly seen as a result of a very heavily armed occupationary presence.


Even sectarian battles, not obviously against the Indian state, have strong elements of Indian hegemony. In Gossaigaon, I found out that the Indian government supported, either covertly or openly, both the Bodo Liberation Tigers and the National Democratic Front of Bodoland at different times, which not only resulted in internecine battles between the two groups, but also the massacre of Adivasis and Muslims at different times by both Bodo groups. A friend who was doing field work in Manipur investigating clashes between different armed insurgencies such as Kuki and Naga groups found that the Indian government had funded and supported numerous of these groups at different times, playing them upon each other so as to dilute any resistance to the Indian state or even suppress any popular, democratic assertions. She also added that since the region she was examining bordered Burma, there was added cooperation between the Burmese and Indian militaries in planning operations together.


And this takes on other more sinister proportions. Another friend made an interesting point that while usually soldiers from the Indian heartland in the North and Central regions are used to suppress identity-based movements in the Northeast, soldiers from the Northeast are used to suppress the armed radical-left Naxalite movement in Central India, which has its base among the tribal communities of that region. Again further proving the designs of the Indian state that pits poor working class people with similar material conditions against each other.

Mongrel South Indian from Bangalore: I must say that, with all this talk on identity, I am of course finding previously dormant elements of my own. Now I have to strenuously say that it has been nothing but pleasant for me. The moment I say I'm from South India and live in Bangalore, I am greeted with the utmost affection. Multiple friends have told me about the great love that folks here in the Northeast have for South India and South Indians. Thus far, they have been proved absolutely right. Whether it's workers, intellectuals, peers, shopkeepers, or bus passengers, I have faced nothing but wide smiles and friendliness when I tell them about my roots in Kerala/Tamil Nadu and particularly when I tell them of the city I grew up in. Bangalore seems to have really built up it's brand value (for lack of a better phrase) across the region. Everyone tells me about a sister, cousin, uncle or grandchild working in Bangalore as a doctor, call-centre employee or a waiter in one of Bangalore's umpteen "Chinese" restaurants (come on, we all know Indian masalas are used there...which only makes the food that much more enjoyable). South India and South Indians seem to be viewed with a lot of affection, and I think this has to do also with the large number of people from the Northeast region who have gone their for work and many who have ended up settling down there.


One of the most interesting aspects of this treatment I have received is that, even among those opposing the Indian state, I have not been viewed as necessarily a denizen of the occupying state. I am not too sure why, because the upper-caste Hindu community I was born into is right at the top of the beneficiaries of any expansionist designs or resource-usurpation on the part of the Indian state. I think partly this might do with viewing the hegemony here as essentially one emanating out of the power-corridors in Delhi and thus North India rather than Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore or even Mumbai and Calcutta. It seems that the cultural character of the hegemony is obviously viewed as a Hindi one, which almost completely separates it from any South Indian connection, the numerous regions of which itself would have strong anti-Hindi streaks.

Shillong, a cursory look: Finally managed a very short trip to the very-famous city of Shillong in Meghalaya state. The trip itself was rather trying. 12 adults and 2 children were squeezed into a Sumo taxi, which is pretty much the only way to get to Shillong from Guwahati (the famous Indian rail-connectivity is missing in most of the Northeast barring Assam). There was probably a little irritation directed at slightly larger people like myself, and possibly quite understandably at that. After all we were all paying the same, yet I was occupying much more space then some of my smaller co-passengers. Offers to buy tea at the rest stop and small-talk of course cleared the air (and I always had Bangalore to fall back on as an ice-breaker!). But the cramped traveling was not the problem, I had traveled in much more tightly squeezed situations and through distinctly less beautiful scenery. The biggest problem was that the trucks along the road from Guwahati to Shillong and back are among the most polluting, black-smoke-spewing monstrosities this side of the continent. And we had to travel with the windows down lest we suffocate from lack of air. Also the windows had to be down because invariably somebody pukes during the drive through curving, hill roads (as did indeed happen with one of the tykes in our taxi). So the lowered windows and polluting trucks essentially resulted in the entire vehicle being filled with smoke each time we overtook a truck or one passed us, which happened approximately 50 times. It was 14 coughing souls who finally emerged out of the vehicle at our final port of call.

Shillong itself is beautiful. On first sight it reminded me of Bangalore many years back, before the city went mad with capitalism and started adding 200 vehicles a day onto its roads. Old Bangalore on sloping hills that is. Shillong is also, funnily enough, the first place I've gone to where I heard a lot of Hindi being spoken, probably because of the high influx of tourists. The leads I had to do a couple of articles on the exploitative mining industry didn't pan out, and I had to postpone it to another trip in May, so I decided to explore the place anyway.

Police Bazaar, which from what I hear is the heart of the city, is like any other mid-sized or big city commercial centre in India with large ad-hoardings, restaurants, bars, shops, crowds milling about and of course the street market. There is also an obviously wannabe-hip culture among the city's youth, with many sporting gelled-up hairdos, earrings, and t-shirts with old heavy metal bands on the front. The love for heavy-metal and hard-rock music is quite obvious here. Even garages and small shops on the way to as well as in Shillong had Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and PInk Floyd emanating from them. The interesting aspect is that for all its commercial activity, the place pretty much closes down by around 9/9.30pm, which is when things are just about starting to heat up in places like Mumbai!

It was quite sad that I had to cut my trip short, because Meghalaya itself has so much to be seen and examined, especially around mining. Uranium mining by the Public Sector Undertaking UCIL is being planned in the state on a fairly large scale, part of India's ambitious nuclear plans, and supposedly Meghalaya has the largest deposit of uranium in India. The effects on the local villagers can only be imagined. Limestone and coal are some other continuing mining initiatives, mostly by private companies protected by the Indian state as well as some public sector companies. The state and indeed the entire Northeast is being opened up to capital with quite a vengeance, and it remains to be seen how resistance is mounted against it.