Travel Log (23/3/08 to 3/4/08)

Northeast India Diary 2 (23/3/08 - 3/4/08)

Jhum and the markets of Tuenzang in Nagaland:

I'm going to continue to write a little bit about hardened working class women and so it would be a travesty to not mention the hard labour of women in Nagaland.

I had the opportunity to join a couple of friends on a project they were conducting on Art and Conflict, which gave me the chance to learn a little more about work and livelihood in Nagaland. Driving along the undulating hill roads of the region, my eyes were greeted with what can only be described as a riot of green starting with the tea gardens in Upper Assam that border Nagaland to a verdant explosion once we entered the tribal state. Now, my roots are in Kerala, which I chauvinistically believed to be the greenest region on the planet but I'm now forced to beat a timid retreat from that position, particularly as I was told that it was one of the driest times of the year! However the lush and dense foliage covering the steep hills pose a particular problem with respect to cultivation for the local population…a problem overcome only by dint of hard labour. And that is where once again, I came to witness the awesome strength of the local population, particularly women.

The cultivation practised in Nagaland and in many other parts of Northeast India is called jhum and is essentially cultivation along hill slopes. Anyone who has ever done some real hiking would confirm that trekking up a steep hill slope, even for fairly fit individuals, is hard work. Now imagine chopping firewood along a tract of hill-land, clearing that tract through controlled fires for cultivation, cultivating on the land as per a tight seasonal schedule, and then carrying large bundles of firewood (uphill) back to your village in the evening for cooking fire. Add to this, household chores, preparation of meals in the morning and evening, tending to livestock as well as rearing children and you've pretty much got a vague picture of the sheer volume of hard labour that rural women here (and all over the world for that matter) are immersed in. I'm not going to fall for the liberal middle-class trap of romanticising the idyllic village life while hardly being able to function without a computer, cell phone and a grocery store round the corner. What I saw with the women in Nagaland was hard work, the hardest there is, and it required not just strength of character but actual physical strength as well (both abominably lacking among upper-class city folk).

I was also told by locals and friends familiar with the area that jhum is usually a cooperative system of production with a village or many villages cultivating one tract of land and then sharing the produce at the end of the harvest. The practice of jhum is however sadly affected in certain parts of the region due to the presence of the Indian army and the resulting conflict, which causes disruption in the cultivation cycle resulting in harsh insecurities for people depending on the produce to feed themselves.

Cut to the main market in Tuenzang town, and one can see that out here almost every element of public commerce has women pretty much running the show. About 90% of the vendors were women, many clad in jeans and t-shirts, and wearing makeup. They were selling anything from vegetables and tubers to snails and frogs. To those of you whose quasi-brahminical sensibilities are a little pricked, I would like to add that in many European and Asian countries snails and frogs are delicacies in some high flung restaurants (they just have some hoity-toity name for it that make it sound all exotic when some upper-class twit eats them with a small silver fork).

Mothers, daughters, relatives, and friends ran small stands together, many with babies on their laps. Older children would sometimes take the young infants on their backs and care for them while the women worked at the stands. Unloading boxes, setting up the stands, arguing with shoppers on prices…all women, all the time, at the Tuenzang market.

I hope and pray that the strength and public presence of women in this region continues to grow and show others how, even poor societies functioning under tremendous pressures from outside forces can function with remarkably lesser patriarchy and macho male oppression.


Anti-immigrant sentiments against those who toil:

Thus far I have been quite struck by many aspects of the region...it's raw beauty outside the cities, extremely hardworking people in the face of numerous obstacles, strength of women and amazing diversity. However I feel compelled to write a little bit about some very stark anti-immigrant, xenophobic sentiments (especially in Assam) that I am continually coming to face to face with, which is starting to feel a little disturbing in a place I'm fast falling head over heels in love with.

Right at the beginning of my travels here, on the train to Guwahati from Bangalore, I chatted with an obviously middle-class woman (we spoke in English), who was returning to Assam after working for a couple of years in Bangalore. As the conversation started veering towards the issues that the people face, she seemed to feel that all the problems were singularly because of Bangladehsi Muslims, whom she felt were taking over the state with their continued migration as well as the Biharis, whom she felt were corrupting the purity of Assamese culture.

I dismissed it as a one-off incident incident, but again and again, speaking with workers at the Guwahati Oil Refinery, a very intelligent, proud Assamese intellectual as well as shop keepers and traders in Uzaan Bazaar, the anti-immigrant (read Bihari and Bangladeshi) sentiment, at times virulent, hit me hard. Of course none of the people mentioned had any problems at all with me, being an outsider myself, rather they were extremely friendly and helpful to me. My head rang out "CLASS"

Let me elaborate...two extremely brutal incidents (among many) came to my mind regarding this. One happened very recently, when about 60-70 Bihari migrant labourers were gunned down. The other occured in 1983, and is now known and as the infamous Nelli massacre when hundreds of Bangladeshis were killed in a riot. Now I'm not going to speculate who perpetrated these crimes, as I've been getting different accounts from different people. But what is clear is that this is a particularly bloody manifestation of the xenophobic sentiments in Assam, that I can now only assume to be a fairly mainstream one.

I earlier mentioned the class factor...because in both incidents, it was poor, working-class people who were killed. The softest targets. They weren't the occupationary forces, they weren't the armed police state...they were toiling workers. Many

An Assamese friend told me that if the Bangladeshis were to leave, then the entire vegetable supply and a good amount of the grain supply to Guwahati would come to a halt as they are the ones who cultivate on the chars (little island-like tracts of land along the Brahmputra river). In all the building and road construction sites that I have had a chance to speak to workers, a huge chunk of the contract/daily-wage labourers come from Bihar often working for private companies based in Guwahati.

These are the vegetables and grains eaten by the very people who feel that Bangladeshis are taking over the country, the roads and buildings used by the same people who say that these uncivilised Biharis should be thrown out.

The paradigm, lacking in any rationalism or political sensibilities, is astonishingly similar to the one in the USA with strong streams of xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiments, particularly against migrant Mexicans and other Latin Americans who work in all the crappiest jobs for even crappier wages building the roads, manning the stores, repairing the cars and pruning the gardens used by well-off white folk.

It is sad that in a region like Assam, which boasts of such a proud and diverse histroy of peoples struggle, one finds a mainstream sentiment akin to what is found in an imperialist rogue state.

Of course this sentiment is not even minutely unique to Assam. As recently as a couple of months back, a few North Indians were attacked by goons of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena. Even a few days back, in my own neck of the woods, the longstanding conflict between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu over Cauvery Water threatened to flare up again. All over India, there is xenophobia and often the degeneration of positive identity-based movements into hatred for the other.

Northeast India which has been facing the brute end of the armed Indian state, has a host of rather wonderful identity-based sentiments, and it's sad to see a few of them go down the route of sectarianism and xenophobia, but one is hopeful that this is not a trend that will engulf the region.