Zee JLF 2018 | Life and works of women in the Northeast

For most people who do not belong to Northeast India, their views about the region are shaped by photographs in government advertisements, depicting picturesque locales and smiling women carrying baskets up steep hills.

However, the struggles and aspirations of the indigenous women in the seven states have rarely found a place in popular discourse. The Zee JLF session with the self-explanatory title, Fish at War and a Cup of Brew: The Politics and Poetics of Women's Work in India's Northeast, looked at the region from the working women's perspective. Padma Shri awardee Mamang Dai and visual artist Minam Apang, both from Arunachal Pradesh, and poet Mona Zote from Mizoram delved into myths, histories and contemporary realities to present a series of vignettes that are unique and rewarding for an outsider.

"The rural women have enormous reserves of strength and resilience. Their lives have enriched my writing and understanding of life," said Dai, a novelist and a journalist. Women, she informed, do most of the weaving for the entirely family, and many of them who get government jobs as weaving instructors fund their siblings and husbands' education. With the Northeast opening up, there are now many women entrepreneurs, she said.

Apang is trying to preserve the oral histories and mythology of the Adobe tribe through our artworks.

Zote, who described herself as a poet, disguised as a government employee (she works with tax department), spoke about how her day job has been instrumental in opening up her mental horizon. It has given her an opportunity to know the people, and explore Aizawal, where she is currently based, which in turn, has stimulated her creativity.

All three of them contributed for the book Centrepiece: Women's Writing and Art from Northeast India, published by Zubaan, a feminist publishing house based in New Delhi.