Book review: The perennial outsiders

The Peripheral Centre
Edited by Preeti Gill
Zubaan
400 pages
397 pages

This anthology of essays is an outsider’s attempt to “look in”, as its editor Preeti Gill puts it, at the fraught history and present of the Northeast, the region comprising seven states (here’s a simple test: try naming them without looking at a map), with Sikkim added to it since its annexation by the Indian state.

Gill begins by disparaging the term ‘Northeast’ as “meaningless and inappropriate,” pointing out that terms like Middle-east or Far-east were given by outsiders. It is telling that the official nomenclature for a region comprising of eight states ascribes to it an outsider status. Gill has, while putting together this anthology, brought to centre-stage a region which exists in the periphery, both geographically and politically — which explains the title of the book.

Apparently, the term came into circulation in the early 70s. That would be the period when disillusionment with the failed tryst with destiny of 1947 spread to many corners of the country. But for the northeastern corner, the disillusionment had set in even prior to 1947. Each state has a history of strife first against the British, then against the Indian regime. Gill quotes from Sanjib Barua’s essay in her introduction to the book “Northeast India’s troubled post colonial history does not sit very comfortably with the standard narrative of democracy in India.”

Gill points out the presence of the Indian army — “one for every 10 civilians in the region” — as a common feature (the highest ratio in the world, of course, is in Kashmir).

Along with problems of economic under-development, exploitation of natural resources and changing demographic profiles are adding to the insurgencies that are prevalent in the entire region. No explanation exists for the way Kashmir always holds centre-stage with New Delhi (and therefore in the media) and never the Northeast. Does it have something to do with the enemy we all love to hate being a neighbour of the former and not of the latter?

The collection features 26 essays by a formidable array of 25 writers. These include pieces by Sanjib Barua, Mamang Dai, Sanjoy Hazarika, Nandini Thockchom, Monica Bannerjee, Rahul Goswami, and Deepti Priya Mehrotra, among others.

The closing chapter has four interviews by CS Lakshmi (with Manipur’s Ima Thockchom Ramani Devi, one of the Meira Phebi protestors at Kangla Fort who dared to bare with their “Indian Army Rape Us” banner, Arunachal’s Jarjum Ete, Nagaland’s first woman graduate Ellen Phamnei, and Naga Women’s Union, Manipur president Dr Gina Sangkham respectively).

Though the essays were commissioned by Gill, she admits that the book “assumed a life of its own”. In that sense, there is no particular order or theme moulding the anthology. Rather, each writer has been chosen due to her or his association with one or more of the Northeast states and given a free choice of topics to write on.

The first essay, by Sanjib Barua, is a fine introduction to the region where he finds that “the deficits of democracy, development and peace are best explained by Northeast India’s history as a frontier and by the inability of Indian policy-makers to see the contradictions rooted in this context.”

Sanjoy Hazarika’s essay relives the horror of the 1983 Nellie massacre and the setting into motion of communal (in the name of religion, tribe and ethnicity) clashes. Mamang Dai’s is a moving essay on the insidious falling apart of a way of life in Arunachal due to the state becoming captive territory for warring Naga factions.

Mumbai-based writer Rupa Chinai has two essays — the first is on her personal engagement with the region for the past 25 years, and the second is a report on the state of women’s health.
Sanjeeb Kakoty’s piece is on the unmitigated plight of the borderland people or the “nowhere” people. Rahul Goswami recounts the views of an “outsider” on his stay in Khonoma, one of the villages to have held out against British conquest, to study the socio-economic and cultural dimensions of life in the region.
Essays by Deepti Priya Mahrotra (author of a book on Irom Sharmila), N Vijayalakshmi and Nandini Thockchchom explain their fascination with the Meira Paibis — otherwise ordinary, unlettered women — and what transforms them into the torchbearers for change in Manipuri society.

Monica Bannerjee explores the civil society’s role in conflict resolution in Assam, while Esther Syiem raises similar questions about Khasi matrilineal society, as does Lal Dena about Mizo women. Tillotama Sharma’s essay focuses on women’s writing in times of violence.

P Ngully, a practicing psychiatrist, writes about treating patients who had been tortured, and how the mere sight of a uniformed person evokes fear and terror in sections of rural Naga society. Mitra Phukan raises uncomfortable questions about the plight of children and youth in a conflict zone.

It’s impossible to cover the import of all the essays in the span of one review. But in short, the book is a brave attempt to cover just about everything there is to know about the region from a concerned citizen’s point of view.

Susan Abraham is a lawyer and democratic rights activist