The Sisters
Click here to read this on Rasa Journal where it was first published on March 26, 2022.
When you live away from home, how do you find comfort? Amongst other things, perhaps most warmly in food. It is after all the food that you grew up eating, sustaining not just your body but also bringing forth some of your fondest memories. But what if even preparing that delicacy becomes a struggle because your neighbors cannot bear the stench arising from it? In fact, they forbid you to cook it. That is the plot of Nicholas Kharkongor’s Axone (pronounced Akhuni), which is now available on Netflix. The movie is a light-hearted but sincere take on the life of people from the North-East living in major Indian cities such as New Delhi.
A group of friends, living in Delhi’s Humanyupur area, almost end up having to run an undercover operation to make a delicacy which is supposed to be a surprise for their friend getting married that evening in a small online ceremony. Kharkongor deftly packs the issues of discrimination, lack of jobs, negative stereotypes within the various North-Eastern communities, and a glimpse into their respective heritage in one narrative that unfolds in a single day. “It’s actually not difficult for someone from the Northeast to think of a story like this,” he said in an interview, “for a North-easterner living in Delhi or Bangalore, it’s a rite of passage to cook your food.”
Merenla Imsong, who played one of the supporting characters in the movie, in a speech for an event spoke about her experiences while studying at Delhi University. She shared that she was called “chinky” (a derogatory term used to refer to the people from North-East) but why she has come to embrace it now. “Our victim status has become so strong of an identity for us, it becomes the crutch that writers depend on when they’re writing stories about us,” she says in the speech that would ruffle feathers left, right, and center.
Originally ruled by the Ahom and Manipuri kindgoms, the region fell to Burma in early 18th century and came under British colonial rule around the same time. At the time of India’s independence in 1947, the region became a part of India and has subsequently been divided into its various states in later years. The sobriquet, Seven Sisters, was coined by a journalist at the formation of Tripura in 1971 to collectively refer to the new state as well as Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Nagaland. Years later in 1975, Sikkim was included into the Indian Union as well, totaling the number of sisters to eight which are now referred to as the North-East India. While the term is often used for the purpose of convenience, it misses out on immense cultural and political context which may become counter-productive.
Both Kharkongor and Imsong, then, seem to make the same important point — see us for who we are with our challenges, instead of victimizing us or worse, saving us. Along with Amazon Prime’s The Last Hour in 2021, a thriller based in Sikkim and centered around the practice of shamanism in region, authentic cinematic representations of the North-East have been few and far between. Considering how relevant popular culture can be in breaking stereotypes and shaping narratives, it provokes the question of what does an average Indian knows or understands about the region? More to the point, as long as the region is treated as a monolith in media, academia, and the wider public discourse, can there be any substantial and positive changes?
“The tendency to see North-East India as a monolith or as a very homogenous place stems from the lack of understanding about the internal complexities and diversity but also lack of engagement,” says Kham Khan Suan Hausing, professor and head of department of political science at University of Hyderabad. “Even people from North-East India do not have much knowledge or understanding about internal diversities within as well as across states,” he adds.
Originally from Manipur, he explains that the state can be seen as a mini-India in itself, given that there are 34 communities recognized as Scheduled Tribes. “We have the Meiteis which is the Hindu community, the Muslim community who are locally known as the Pangals, a sizeable presence of Nagas, and more,” Hausing explains. In fact, even amongst the Meiteis who turned to Vaishnavite Hinduism in 18th century and intermingled with the Bengali community, there are the Sanamahis who seek to revive and follow a more indigenous religious practice.
Hausing, 44, is based in Hyderabad and grew up in the state. He completed his college education in Haryana and Delhi’s JNU, taught for eight years at Banaras Hindu University, and was a Fulbright post-doc fellow at University of Pennsylvania. He is, he says, arguably the youngest professor at his position in India. “What is spectacular about North-East India is that we have a long-standing “autonomous societal culture” structured around common religious, educational, and territorial institutions which in effect predate the formation of states here.” This autonomy could show up in different forms of self-rule and communities in different states such as Manipur, Mizoram or Meghalaya would aspire for those forms of autonomy as their historical right.
“It’s very convenient to say the North-East without realizing that it is actually made up of eight states,” says Hoihnu Hauzel, the founder and editor-in-chief at The NE Stories. “If you look at Nagaland, there are about 16 tribes, in Arunachal there are 26 tribes and over 90 subtribes, Tripura has about 19 tribes — and so, [North-East] is culturally, linguistically, and ethnically very diverse,” she adds. “If you look at the weaves, for instance, to an outsider it would just look like one shawl but one state, one tribe, one subtribe will do it differently,” she explains.
Hauzel, also in her 40s and from Manipur, she grew up in Shillong and Delhi and is now based in Gurgaon. She has worked as a journalist for about 15 years at publications like The Telegraph, Indian Express, Asian Age, Hindustan Times, and Times of India, writing human interest stories. She set up her publication when she realized that there was a lack of stories about the region. “The food is different across all states but the ingredients that we use is what binds us like rice, bamboo shoots, and meat,” she says, making a case for how the region has commonalities but also uniqueness within itself which is what people in rest of the country often miss.
The publication is an eclectic journal of food, emerging personalities, and latest trends. A story, for instance, details the career of a upcoming artist and Mizo entertainment industry mentioning how shows from Japan, Thailand, and Korea dubbed in Mizo are amongst the most popular forms of entertainment for the locals. Another story, has a writer talk about how her book reviews lament the lack of mention about the politics of Nagaland and gently nudges us instead towards something else, writing — “Look at our beautiful folk tales. They are incomparably lovely. I love the Khasi tales of creation. And our landscapes of mountains, clear streams, dark forests with magic stones and mystic river folk that create and recreate stories”. In fact, Hauzel shares that one of the most interesting outcomes is how often investors get in touch wanting to invest in the work of indigenous and start-up entrepreneurs featured by The NE Stories.
Why, then, is the story of North-East often that of a politically troubled monolith? “Politics is what interests people,” says Karma Paljor, the founder and editor-in-chief at Eastmojo which is a first of its kind North-East focused media platform. Currently one of the most prominent journalists in India, he has spent close to two decades in journalism working at CNN News18, CNBC TV18, and Times of India and won the prestigious Ramnath Goenka award in 2011 and 2014. He mentions that even when it comes to political reportage, newsrooms often appoint only one journalist who is usually stationed in Guwahati. That makes it difficult to accurately report on the region, such as in case of a border conflict with China where it would take atleast 30–40 hours from Guwahati to reach Arunachal Pradesh.
“North-East is very unique but it has been conveniently forgotten by the mainstream media,” Paljor adds, “we don’t have enough representation”. Originally from Sikkim and based in New Delhi, he shares that the biggest challenge for Eastmojo is finding good and passionate journalists in the region. This, he says, highlights the problem of unemployment as well as the fact that people often prefer to go for a government job.
And when national newsrooms do report about the North-East India, it is almost an after-thought and it never gets enough space. “They are never central to the national imagination,” Hausing says. He recollects that when a national seminar was organized at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Shimla in 1971, leading sociologist of the time M.N. Srinivas lamented that the North-East was the least emotionally integrated region of India. This, he says, was reinforced by the vision outlined by the Ministry of Development in North-Eastern Region in 2020 which showed that there was a deficit of understanding between mainland India and North-East India and vice versa.
“North-East India has always been seen as frontier or a buffer zone where the developmentalist project of the state finds it so difficult to climb up the hill,” Hausing says. “The cultural connotation is that the tribal groups which inhabited large parts of these hills are considered to be unamenable to civilization and order and that they are oriented to chaos and anarchy,” he adds. In this context, he mentions the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act which was first introduced in Nagaland in 1958 to “discipline” the “unruly” Nagas and later extended to parts of Assam, Manipur, and Arunachal Pradesh. Calling it “lawless law enforcement” which when compounded with the typical imagery around the region as “troubled periphery” or “durable disorder” by Subir Bhaumik and Sanjib Baruah in their books respectively, he points out that the region was marginalized because this helped entrench the mainstream narrative of North-East as being problematic.
However, Hausing says that there have been positive changes in academia in the last few years. There are many more scholars from the region who are now publishing their research in political science and cultural anthropology in top-notch journals in the country and across the world as well as academic publishing houses. “[They] look beyond the traditional or monochromatic narratives and look at issues of say state-building, environment, statelessness, extractive economic zones, and so on,” he explains.
“North-East is now looked at with renewed interest and there is far more deeper engagement with rest of India politically, economically, and even with corporate houses,” says Hauzel. “Corporates are looking at it in terms of investments and what they can get out of it, therefore that is creating buzz,” she says. There are now 15 operational airports in the region with two international ones in Guwahati and Imphal and a third one planned in Agartala. There is a much better connectivity and infrastructural intervention now, Hauzel says, but there is a need to not just look at the region as a playground. “What is anchoring all of this are the people and so the importance of people should never be overridden by the sudden and renewed interest that India has towards the region,” she concludes.
