In 1925, Survey of India as part of its Indian city map series published a guide map of Shillong. Beautifully rendered in colour, this Map along with 1935 black and white map are the only maps of Shillong ever published for general public. Independent India’s idiotic polcy of not allowing public access to border area maps has meant that Shillong has no contemporary maps in print. I thought I would publicly share this map because the map allows us to locate various changes to our town. Maybe the map may also help us find out how the rivers like Wahumkhrah and Umshyrpi have been strangled. You are free to download the map.

Meghalaya has been at the forefront of the struggle for the Right to Information Act. Story in Meghalaya began much before RTI Act became a law. It was in 2001 when Bah Michael Syiem started talking about a Meghalaya Right to Information Act and in 2002 that Meghalaya Right to Information Movement came into being. MRTIM was a network of various civil society groups like KSU, FKJGP, the freedom project, Bethany Society, Mait Shaphrang and others. MRTIM would also submit its own draft Right to Information Act for Meghlaya.  This draft was even introduced in the Meghalaya legislative assembly.
While struggling for a state act, MRTIM also became an active constituent of National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI). When UPA-1 introduced a weak RTI bill in the parliament to replace weaker Freedom of Information Act as passed by BJP led NDA, MRTIM protested the bill and demanded the bill should be sent back to standing committee of the parliament. Angela Rangad of MRTIM was invited by the standing committee to present MRTIM’s critique of the bill. She spoke against the automatic exemption provided to armed forces in the original bill and also its applicability to just Central govt. bodies. MRTIM made a strong pitch for the act to cover states too.

In December 2004 UPA govt. introduced an amended version of the RTI Act. MRTIM celebrated it in Khyndai Lad. Click an image to enter the gallery

Ka lamphrang da ka Raiot: Lai phew san snem mynshuwa (35) U Bah Shlur Nongbri, uwei na ki khlur kynjat bol (Football star) uba don nam jong ka Wahingdoh Sports Club bad  ka Shillong, u la khlad noh na ka pyrthei  ha ka 3 tarik November 1980. U la iehnoh shadien ia ki dienjat ba kynsai bad ba nylla jong u ha ki madan kynjat bol jong ka Ri khasi bad shabar ruh kumjuh. Kumba la kren ha ka sngi  leit on tep, “Haba ngi kynmaw ia U Bah Shlur, ngi kynmaw ia ki ‘ball’ kiba u kynjat”. Kumta ha kane ka lyngkhuh sngi iap kaba laiphew san ka Raiot ka pynmih ia ka jingkren jong u General secretary, ka Wahingdoh Sports Club ha ka jinglehniam leit on tep kaba la long ha ka 5 November 1980. Ryngkat bad kane, ka Raiot ka pynmih ruh ia ki dur bad jingthoh shaphang  U Bah Shlur. Ka jingthoh bad ka dur jong u Bah Shlur lem bad kiwei de ki khlur kynjat bol ka Ri India kaba la mih pyrthei ha ka kot khubor Sports and Pastime, 23 June 1956. Nangta ka khubor bad ka dur kaba iadei bad ka jingiakhun jong ka Wahingdoh Sports Club ha ka Bordoloi Trophy ha ka snem 1961 bad sa kawei pat ka dur jong ka Shillong Team kaba la jop ia ka Assam Inter-District Football Tournament ha Karimganj ha ka snem 1963, ha kaba U Bah Shlur u la long u Captain.

U Bah SHLUR

(Kane ka long ka jingkren jong u Bah L.Filbert Shullai, General Secretary, Wahingdoh Sports Club ha shuwa ban pyndep ia ka jinglehniam ha ka sngi leit on tep ha ka 5 November 1980. Ia kane ka jingkren la sot na ka kot Snem Thymmai ba la thoh da L.Gilbert Shullai)

U Bah Shlur um don shuh- Sah tang jingkynmaw. Bun ki la leit noh ha shuwa jong ngi, bad u Bah Shlur u la leit noh ha shuwa jong ngi kiba iadon lang hangne-

“Ki la shu lip noh kum khlur step ka mihngi,

Ha  jingshai ka sngi kum ka ding ba meh;

Kumta ka long jingleit jong ngi na pyrthei,

Sah tang jingkynmaw ki kam ba ngi leh”.

U Bah Shlur u la long u mawlynnai ba korkor ha ka pyrthei ‘football’ jong u paid Khasi Ba Iar; hoiod jong ka North East India bad jong ka Ri India hi baroh kawei, lada ym shym la don ka jingpynwit ba un ia ioh bynta ha ka jingiapynbeit ba khadduh ban ia jied ia ka ‘football team’ jong ka Ri India kaba yn leit ia shim bynta ha ka jingialehkai Olympic ha Rome ha ka snem 1960.

Kum u nongialehkai ‘football’ u Bah Shlur u la sdang paw pyrthei naduh ka por ba u dang don kumba khadphra snem ka rta. Ka lah ban dei ka sap kyrpang ba u Blei Trai Kynrad U la ai la sam kyrpang ha u. Haba ngi kynmaw ia U Bah Shlur, ngi kynmaw ia ki ‘ball’ kiba u kynjat, bad ia U Bah Shlur kum u nongialehkai ‘football”. U riewstad u ong- “Ban khein dor ia uno uno u briew dei ban peit ia u ha ka jinglong ba bha tam jong u”.

Ka kot khubor SPORTS & PASTIME kaba 23 tarik u bnai June jong ka snem 1956 ha ka jingthoh kaba iadei bad ka Inter-State Football Tournament (Santosh Trophy) kaba la long ha Ernakulum, la thoh kumne ha ka jingiadei bad u Bah Shlur:-

“There were a few good goals, but the one scored by Assam inside-right, Shlur Nongbri against Delhi was a real gem. Eighteen year old Nongbri-the youngest member of his team- is a product of the Mawkhar Christian High School in Shillong. He showed rich promise. He appeared facile in both inside berths. He also displayed an equable temperament”

Mynta ngi wan hangne ban leit on tep donburom ia u Bah Shlur. U Bah Shlur um don shuh hapdeng jong ngi; u la khlad noh na kane ka pyrthei shong basa ha ka 3 November 1980. Ha kane ka por, la sngewdei ban iathuh kham bun shaphang ka jingim u Bah Shlur, hynrei la kham sngewdei ban kyntu ia ki paralok ban ia pule biang ia kaba u Bah Shlur u la thoh hi shaphang ia lade ha ka SILVER JUBILEE SOUVENIR jong ka Wahingdoh Sports Club ba la pynmih ha ka snem 1971. U Bah Shlur u la pynkut ia ka jingthoh jong u da kine ki lain-

“Aiom iwbih ki dang pyrta

Ho ia ki lok ban ialehkai sngewbha,

Kawei ka buit kawei ka bor

Ko samla na wahingdoh”.

Hynrei shuwa ban pynkut, u la buh kum u “Maw jabieng” ha ka kynroh jong katei ka jingthoh jong u ia kine ki kyntien shongsbai:-

“Ka jingialehkai Football kam dei ka jingialehkai jong ki kynthei, hynrei ka dei ka jingialehkai jong ki Rangbah ha kaba hap pynlut bad bor bad sor, bad buit bad sap, bad dei ruh ban pynshitom ia lade ha ki bun rukom lada ki kwah ban long ki nongialehkai kiba tbit bad kiba don nam ha ka Ri”.

Kumba ban biang ia kajuh, haba ngi kynmaw ia u Bah Shlur, ngi kynmaw ia ki ‘ball’ kiba u kynjat, bad ia u Bah Shlur kum u nongialehkai ‘football’. Ha ka kot khubor- Shillong Times kaba 28 tarik June 1960 la thoh shaphang u Bah Shlur kumne:

“It is a moment of profound delectation and pride for the soccer fans of Assam in general and Shillong in particular to learn that one of its prominent and scintillating footballers Shri Shlur Nongbri has been selected to undergo training in Hyderabad for the final selection of Indian Football Team for Rome”

To many who have had the opportunities to observe closely the performance of this star player, there is absolutely no room for doubt of his immense potentialities in the field of soccer. By displaying his wonderful consistency of dexterity and technique he has earned his fame and popularity in Assam-nay even outside. In fact, his name has become a household word in every nook and corner of Assam whenever soccer is played

Ha ki kyntien u Edson Arentes Do Nascimento,u nongialehkai ‘football’ ba donnam ka pyrthei jong kane ka juk, ia uba la ju tip kum u PELE nga pynkut-

“This is not our life

Everything here is a game

A passing thing,

What matters is what I’ve done

And what I’LL leave behind,

Let it be an example

For those that come.

There are many people

With the will to fight

Life is not just this

Truth is farther beyond”

U Bah Shlur um don shuh ha pyrthei. Ngi duwai ba ka mynsiem jong u kan shong junom ha ka jingsuk.

KHUBLEI BAH SHLUR-LEIT SUK – RAIOT Collective

Ia ka History ngi pule ym tang kum ka jingiathuh khana, hynrei ngi dei ruh ban pynshai shynna (interpret) ia ki jingjia history na kawei ka pateng sha kawei pat. Ki jingjia ha ka history ym dei ba ki iathuh ne kdew tang shaphang ka mynnor, khamtam eh ka History ka don ruh ban hikai bad pyrsad mynsiem thymmai ia ka mynta. Lada don ei ei ban kynmaw ia U Kiang Nangbah ka long kum u nongialam ha ka thma jong ki paidbah (Peoples rebellion).

Sa shisien pat, ha ka 30 Nohprah 2015 ngin kynmaw burom ia lyngkhuh sngi iap kaba 153 (Shi spah sanphew lai) snem jong U Kiang Nangbah. U Kiang Nangbah, u la im bad iakhun ha ka juk bad ka por kaba u im. U la im bad iakhun pyrshah ia ki bor ka Sorkar Phareng kiba synshar ia ka Hima Sutnga ha ka spah snem kaba khatkyndai, hoiod ka khana shaphang ka jingiakhun bad jingialeh jong U ka la pur kylleng ka Bri Hynniewtrep bad U Kiang Nangbah u la kylla long u riewiakhun ba ki Trai Ri ka Bri Hynniewtrep ki niewkor bad burom. Ha kata ka jingiakhun bad ka jingialeh pyrshah jong U ia ka Sorkar Phareng, u Kiang Nangbah u la iatyngkhuh bad hap ban ialeh pyrshah ruh ia la ki jong ki para doh para snam kiba don ha ka liang jong ka Sorkar Phareng. U Kiang Nangbah u la long ka bynta kaba kongsan ym tang ha ka History ka Hima Sutnga, hynrei ha ka History ka Bri Hynniewtrep baroh kawei.

Kumno ngi pule bad kynmaw shaphang U Kiang Nangbah? Ki kam ba radbah jong U Kiang Nangbah kum u riewiakhun ki don aiu ban iathuh bad hikai ia ngi ki long mynta? Lyngba ki por, ka jingtip kaba bun shaphang U Kiang Nangbah ngi ioh na ki Kaiphot ( Report) jong ki babu sorkar jong ka Sorkar Phareng ne na ki jingthoh jong ki dohlieh. Ngi la ju iai pule bad ringdur shaphang u Kiang Nangbah na kaei kaba ki nongthoh dohlieh ki thoh bad iathuhkhana shaphang jong U. Niuma, ka por ka la dei ban jurip, ban wad ban thud bniah ia ka history bad ban pule ia ka na kawei pat ka phang, kata na ka phang jong ki paidbah ne ki Trai Ri/Trai Hima (post-colonial reading). Ha kane ka lyngkhuh sngi iap kaba 153 (Shi spah sanphew lai) snem jong U Kiang Nangbah to ngin kynmaw ba ka Thma Synteng ne “Jaintia Rebellion” ka dei ka thma ba radbah jong ki paidbah ne ki khun ki hajar ka Hima Sutnga . U Kiang Nangbah u la mih pyrthei kum u riewiakhun bad u nongialam jong ki paidbah, ki riewmadan, ki rangli ki juki jong ka Hima Sutnga kiba shah khnoit bein ha ka Sorkar Phareng bad kumjuh ruh ha ki Nongsynshar Trai Ri ha kato ka por. Kane ka thma jong ki paidbah ka long pyrshah ia ka bor, ia ki shipai ki swar , ki kuli ki bakhor bad ki tup ki man jong ka Sorkar Phareng.Lada don ei ei ba ngin pule shaphang kane ka bynta jong ka History to ngin pule ia ka lyngba ki khmat jong ki riewpaidbah bad ki riewmadan.

Ha ka snem 1835 ka Sorkar Phareng ka la pyniasoh ia ka Hima Sutnga ne Hima Jaintia, bad arsien ka la bthei ka Thma Synteng ne “ Jaintia Rebellion” kata ha ka snem 1860 bad 1862. Ha ka snem 1862 ka Sorkar Phareng ka la jop ha ka Thma Synteng bad ka la lah ban pyndem shi syndon ia ki khun ki hajar ka Hima Sutnga da kaba sdien phasi ia U Kiang Nangbah ha ka snem 1862. Ka Thma Synteng kaba la bthei ha ki snem 1860 bad 1862 kam dei satia ka thma ba la ialamkhmat ne kaba la iakhun da ki Syiem, ki Doloi ne ki bakhraw batri, hynrei ka dei ka jingiakhun bad ka jingialeh jong ki paidbah, ki khun ki hajar ne ki nongshong shnong jong  ka Hima Sutnga. Ka daw kaba khraw eh kaba la pynlong ia ki khun ki hajar ne ki nongshong shnong ka Hima Sutnga ban iakhun pyrshah ia ka Sorkar Phareng ka dei ka jinglum khajna na ki Iing ki sem (House tax) bad ka Sorkar Phareng ka la lum jubor ia kane ka khajna da ka jingiarap jong ki Trai Ri hi, kaba kynthup ruh ia u Doloi ne bakhraw batri.

Ki khun ki hajar ne ki nongshong shnong ka Hima Sutnga kim lah shah ia ka jingthombor jong ka Sorkar Phareng bad ki bakhraw batri ka Hima Sutnga. Kim lah shah ba ka Sorkar Phareng kan niew bein bad kan khnoit bein ia ki kum ki mraw, kumta ki la ieng ban iakhun pyrshah ia ka Sorkar Phareng . U Kiang Nangbah u mareh, u rynsied u ryngkang kylleng ki shnong bad ki elaka. Na kawei ka shnong sha kawei pat u iaid ban kyrsiew, ban khot, ban wer ia ki paidbah, ki nongshong shnong bad ia ki khun ki hajar ba ki dei ban ieng bad iakhun pyrshah ia ka Sorkar Phareng kaba thombor, kaba leh jubor bad u la wer bad lum lang ia ki paidbah nongshnong shnong ha ka Dorbar ne ka Lympung paidbah kaba la long ha Syntu Ksiar. Ka madan Syntu Ksiar ka la dap bad shlei da ki paidbah bad ki khun ki hajar na kylleng ka Hima Sutnga ki la iawan lang ha ka Dorbar. Ha kane ka Dorbar ki la iakren-iatai nia bad ki la rai kut ban ieng bad ialeh pyrshah ia ka Sorkar Phareng. Ki don shibun bah ki khana kiba iasoh bad ka Dorbar ne ka Lympung paidbah kaba la long ha Syntu Ksiar, hynrei kaba kongsan ka long ka sur bad ka rai kut jong u paidbah ban iakhun pyrshah ia ka Sorkar Phareng. Nalor nangta ka jinglong la kloi bad ka jinglen lade jong u Kiang Nangbah ban ialam ia ki paidbah, ia ki khun ki hajar ka Hima Sutnga bad ban pha la ka jong ka jingim.

U Kiang Nangbah um dei u Syiem ne U Doloi, hynrei u dei tang u riewpaidbah, uwei na pdeng ki nongshong shnong jong ka Hima Sutnga. La pynheh pynsan ia u da ka kmie kaba la tip kyrteng kum ka Nia Rimai Nangbah . Ka kmie ka ju hikai ia u bad ka ju iakthuh khana ruh shaphang u Ksan Sajer, uba long ruh u kni jong U Kiang Nangbah, uba la iap ha ka por ba u ialeh pyrshah ia ki dohlieh. Kumba la kdew sha khmat, ha ka jingiakhun pyrshah ia ka Sorkar Phareng, U Kiang Nangbah bad ki paidbah ne ki khun ki hajar ki la iatyngkhuh bad hap ban iakhun pyrshah ruh ia la ki jong ki para doh para snam, khamtam eh ki bakhraw batri ne Doloi kiba don ha ka liang jong ka Sorkar Phareng. Ka la don ka jingjia ba U Doloi Manik Pakyntein, uba ki ju sin u Doloi Tyngker ryngkat bad ki briew ka Sorkar Phareng ki la leit ban lum khajna na ka iing jong ka Lakhi Pyrdiang ha Shilliang Raij, kane ka briew ka la iathuh ha ki briew Sorkar ba kam don ei ei, hynrei ka don tang u khiew shet ja. U Doloi Tyngker u la kynjat ia ka. U Kiang Nangbah bad ki paidbah ki la bitar halor kane ka jingjia bad kane ka la nang pynrhem bad pynskhem jingmut shuh shuh ia U bad ia ki paidbah ban ieng ialeh pyrshah ia ki bor ka Sorkar Phareng bad wat ia ki para doh para snam ne ki Nongsyrshar Trai Ri, kiba thom bor ia ki kup shilliang ki sem shilliang.

I Kong Phidalia Toi, ha ka jingthoh kaba la ai kyrteng, Ka Nongmuna U Kiang Nangbah Ia ki Longdien I kynthoh kumne, “ Ka nongrim ne ka daw kaba khraw kaba la pynlong ia U Kiang Nangbah ban len lade bad pha ia la ka jingim ha u tyllai phasi, ka long namar ba um lah shah ban iohi ia ka jingshah khnoit bein ki rangli-ki juki, ki kup shilliang bad ki sem shilliang” Nangta I kynthoh shuh shuh kumne, “ la iehnoh ha ngi ki longdien ia ka jingkyllki kaba khraw ban pyrkhat. Hato ngin bud ia ka nongmuna U Kiang Nangbah uba la len ialade na ka bynta ban ym ailad ia ki bor synshar ban khnoit bein ia ki paidbah bad ka Jaidbynriew? Ne ngin bud ia ka Nongmuna u Doloi Tyngker uba pyrkhat tang na ka bynta ka jingbit jingbiang ka ma lade ne shimet?

References:

1. Donbok T.Laloo, “U Kiang Nangbah bad ka Syntu Ksiar”, Maitshaphrang, 1991.
2. Phidalia Toi, “ Ka Nongmuna U Kiang Nangbah”, Maitshaphrang,

Amidst the curfew and rumours of 86-87, Robin Ngangom, Ananya Guha, Desmond Kharmawphlang, three young college teachers from Shillong, who had each brought out a book of poems and even had their poems published in Calcutta Telegraph Sunday magazine and Debonair (oh what fun), decided to make public their obsession. It was to be a poetry reading at St. Edmund’s College. The reading, contrary to all expectations, turned out to be an overflowing affair. Shillong Poetry Circle (SPC) came out of that reading. This informal gathering of, mostly, poets met every Saturday(?) in Jalpaan, a Laitumkhrah dairy (or cafe you cosmopolitan fools) or college class rooms until it found M. C. Gabriel, a novelist(?) who headed  North Eastern Hill University (NEHU) Publication Cell. NEHU had not yet constructed its huge decrepit campus, but operated from various rented houses in town and Publication Cell was in a Assam-type pile opposite St. Edmunds. That MC Gabriel ‘moment’ meant that SPC had access to some publishing knowhow and this desktop calendar was a result of that encounter.

The art for the calendar came out of a workshop which (L) Mainul Haq Barbhuiya had organised with Jogen Chowdhury of Shanti Niketan. Mainul worked at that time with the Statistics department of NEHU, drawing graphs and plotting a contemporary art movement in Shillong. Obviously as any disaffected ‘artsy’ soul, Mainul was a regular at the Saturday sessions of SPC. Many years on, almost all the poets are names worth something. As for the artists, you see the early work of Benedict Hynniewta (he was fourteen then) and Raphael Warjri. Kishalay Bhattachrjee, who incidentally sent us this ephemera and whose sketch you see in July, wrote poetry in those days but these days survives on journalism. Don’t ask us about M. C. Gabriel.

I recently dug up a paper I had written when I was a perpetually homesick student in Delhi. As I was reading an article on tourism in Meghalaya recently published on Raiot I felt compelled to revisit a few questions that I sought answers to a decade ago.

The article I was reading discussed the various dimensions of tourism industry in remote places like Meghalaya. In spite of having grown up in Shillong with deep affective and political relationship to the place I have often felt like a tourist during my visits to several places such as the Air Force-controlled Shillong Peak. Surrounded by vendors, taxis, tourists, looking at the magnificent view and the city below there was always something new and refreshing. Trying to point to where our homes were located, chewing on foods we bypassed on regular days, my friends and I assumed the role of tourists rather uncritically. I did not travel much growing up; perhaps that’s why playing tourists in familiar places came naturally.

With the growing understanding of the political landscape that encompasses these hills many questions emerged. One of those questions that I wondered about was this: Is the quest to see new places, get acquainted with new people, and other aspects of travel simply to broaden one’s breadth of knowledge about the world? My training in History allowed me to answer this question with a resounding no. Thus followed other deceptively simple questions: What is the purpose of travel? What are the ethics of travel? The debate that has been documented in this forum is perhaps just the beginning of a longer and larger one. It brings up important questions about travel and tourism that I feel are crucial.

Tourism is not only a commercial enterprise but key to nation building through representation of a diverse margin of India (see for example Incredible India ads), representation of indigeneity (of those whose culture, whose homes, and food are up for display), and construction of relational identity (between traveller and inhabitants). This article does not address these aspects directly. I succumb to historicizing, something of a habit lately.

The Masters paper I dug up was my attempt to write about a place I recognized as home, to be drawn closer to it as I attempted to learn and write about its history. I got my cue from Mary Louis Pratt’s book Imperial Eyes: Travel and Transculturation and chose to focus on the aspect of travel in colonial writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.[1] I chose to focus on travel literature because it transcends disciplinary bounds and often mediates across such boundaries and knowledge systems. To challenge common tropes about the North East- the all engulfing violence being one such trope- I had chosen a topic which would uncover different forms of interactions, dialogic processes, and improvisational encounters during the period of British colonial rule. I soon learnt that travel for the purposes of geographical explorations, revenue surveys, annexation and conquest produced written accounts that contributed to an emerging genre of travel literature. Therefore the seemingly benign travellers’ encounters and experiences described in journals, diaries, letters, published accounts were embedded in processes of violent transformation.

Those writing travel accounts were either directly or indirectly part of a colonial machinery working its way to subjugate the landscape and inhabitants of the swiftly transforming imperial frontier in the North East. The colonized, or soon to be colonized, people were simultaneously exoticized and domesticated in these accounts.

Representation in these accounts served the purpose of domestication rather efficiently. The image of the author emerged as relational to the places and people encountered, thus reinforcing the distinctions between the European ‘self ‘and primitive ‘other’. There were also several accounts by those within colonized societies travelling to the hills to retreat away from the urban metropolis. These writers did not stray far from colonial forms of representation albeit with the complexity of a colonized subjectivity. These accounts provide a window into different motives of travel and the co-constitution of identities of those brought together in frontier ‘contact zones’. The representations of tribal life, cultural practices, and landscapes belied the subjectivity of the observer/traveller as much as it was informed by what the observed chose to transmit. Travel accounts that reveal varied forms of interactions, observations, and exchanges are sites where power relations between the different actors participating in the contact zone are reinforced.

As I started ploughing through travel accounts my search for a framework outside of violence became increasingly bleak. The radical inequality of colonial contexts undercut all dialogic processes. A rather well referenced travel account of a British officer’s wife was the first one I perused. This book titled My Three Years in Manipur and Escape from the Recent Mutiny published in 1891 contains passages where the author Ethel St. Claire Grimwood describes part of her journey to Manipur between Shillong and Sylhet.[2] A Khasi porter whose name is not mentioned in the text carried her down the mountain on his back in a thaba. She describes her perilous journey through a rugged landscape matched by unpleasant company of her bearer/porter and dangerous mode of travel in a thaba. The “great physical strength” of the thaba bearer is a point of admiration, soon to be dismissed by his habit of chewing betel nut and his rude disposition.

Imperial rhetoric formulates the uncivilized, domesticated, subject whose indispensability to her travels remains unrecognized. Her account is conditioned by colonial constructions of the specificities of the “domestic subject”. In her recognition of the anonymous thaba bearer’s role as a subject is also recognition of her self as a distinguished ‘white’ woman. Race and gender weave into her narrative where her femininity and cultural superiority are repeatedly juxtaposed with his laboring body and uncouth ways. This account intervenes in the genre of colonial travel writing on the North East frontier dominated by masculinist rhetoric and perspectives of male explorers and officials. I choose to start with this account because of the clarity with which class, race, and gender frame her writing, a condition often obscure in accounts of the intrepid male traveller.

An early nineteenth century account of travel through the Khasi hills by a British sessions court judge stationed in Sylhet brings together the perspective of an intrepid male traveller, an imperial agent, and an officer stationed thousands of miles away from his home. Henry Walters’s “Journey across the Pandua Hills near Sylhet”, which appeared in Asiatic Researches in 1832 employed the style of a personal travel narrative reflecting the increasing popularity of the genre. [3] At the same time, it is hard to miss that Walter’s personal account was interspersed with geographical methods of inquiry. Travel narratives often overlapped with geographical accounts, as historian Mathew Edney points out, the distinguishing feature being the number of self-references by the author. Walters journeyed through the hills between 1828-29, soon after the famous rebellion led by Tirot Sing, Syiem of Nongkhlaw in 1827. The motive of travel was not simply a personal holiday, an escape from seething temperatures of Sylhet. This personal account like many official explorations served to document varied forms of information about a place and a people who were yet to be colonised.

H Walters, “A Journey Across Pandua Hills, Near Silhet, in Bengal”, Asiatic Researches XVII (Calcutta Benga… by Raiot Webzine

Pandua, at the foothills of the Khasi hills, is identified as a frontier village and a physical marker of an imposed political separation between British Sylhet and sovereign polities of the Khasi hills. The assumed geographical separation between hills and plains is reinforced and polities of Nongstoin, and Rambrai among others that extended into the plains are erased in such accounts. This erasure of the seamlessness of the hills and plains is politically motivated and not borne out of sheer ignorance since Walters was well acquainted with the Syiem of Nongstoin, Syiem Ram Sing and even made a stop at his house during the journey. He also made stops at Mawsmai, Cherra and Nongkhlaw polities describing a few villages as unfriendly while maintaining that the “Cassias” generally possessed ‘high moral character’.

Romantic descriptions of the scenic beauty abound his narrative, with several comparisons with English landscapes. For instance, he compares the monoliths strewn across the hills with Stonehenge, and other pre-historical megalithic structures in Cornwall and Wales. Such comparisons are expressed with both awe and pleasure. Domestication of the hills and subjugation of its inhabitants required their co-option into a metanarrative of civilizational history. The primitive subject was merely at an early stage of civilizational progress, one that Britain long surpassed. He wrote, “…doubtless these ancient monuments were appropriated to the same purpose….If this was the case, how singular it is that customs of nations, in the same stage of society indeed, but situated at such immeasurable distance from each other, should be found so exactly to coincide! If any doubt exists as to the purpose for which the monuments in Britain were erected, is it not dissipated by observation, as to the actual use of similar monuments in this country at the present day?” These descriptions readily transformed ‘dangerous’ landscapes into consumable, relatable and domestic spaces.

Such comparisons with England scattered throughout his account also encouraged colonial initiatives of carving out colonial pockets in the hills. Supporting the proposed sanatorium to be built at Cherrapoonjee by comparing its hills with the English hills in Bathford, Walter wrote, ‘‘…the elevation is about five thousand feet above the level of the sea. The air is cool, light, and refreshing; and although the sun is hot, it is not innoxious. The hill is free from jungle, covered with fine pasture and flowers, but rocky- and the ravines filled with trees and shrubs- I can almost fancy myself on the top of Bannerdown!’’ He was further elated when on the way to Nongkhlaw he found, ‘‘… with one steep descent and little streams here and there, the valleys stiff and white with hour frost! The first I have seen since leaving England fifteen years ago.’’ Colonial pockets in the hills were crucial imperial nodes of power in the frontier, valued for the recuperation of soldiers and officers, important missionary and educational centres, and thriving commercial hubs. By early 20^th century as Baptist missionary Mrs. P. H. Moore’s book Twenty Years in Assam documents, Shillong had been made into a ‘hill station’, a sanatorium, and a capital in the North East frontier. Apart from urbanization and incorporation into a colonial capitalist economy some travel writing suggests that the political trajectory of the Khasi hills was not the same as the rest of the colony.

H G Alexander in his book The Indian Ferment published in 1929 reveals that his primary motive to travel across the Indian colony in order to document anti-colonial agitations was broken during his visit to the Khasi hills. [4] Shillong is represented as a retreat in contrast to other places like Bombay, Mount Abu, and Guwahati. The “little people” he encounters in his journey to this hills are first identified as commercial subjects conducting trade in markets, carrying huge loads and moving nimbly up and down the hills. The analytical and enlightened self is placed starkly in contrast to the labouring, rural, and supposedly apolitical colonized subjects of the hills. Certainly his description of morning walks in the woods, the refraction that led to an unexpected view of the Himalayan peaks, the familiar birds which are found in large numbers in England, and the ‘glorious’ place that Shillong reflects that he is taking time off from the ‘ferment’ that seemed to overwhelm him in his visits to other places.

Shillong emerged not only as a hub of colonial power in the North East but also increased in popularity for writers, poets from neighbouring Bengal who found the verdant hills, and salubrious climate conducive for their creative faculties. Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore found in these hills a refuge and made frequent visits in 1919, 1923, 1927. These were the years when nationalism was being expressed in diverse forms like the non-cooperation movement, followed by its withdrawal, arrest of the leadership, the significant development of revolutionary terrorism, Swadeshi and Boycott. These were forces that had a deep effect on the minds of many including Tagore. The writings on Shillong reflect the influence of the political context and also form a basis of his expression of the same.

The reason Shillong is most attractive, he says, is because of its cool weather. The sultry heat of the plains drives him to the cold quietness of Shillong. The metaphor in his words is clear. The heat of politics of the time forced him to escape into a place that offered natural solace and isolation. He describes his walks through stony paths enveloped by the smell of pine trees. This enchantment is temporary as his lists things that he dislikes and cannot seem to escape even in Shillong such as the sound of bullets from the firing ground of the Gurkha regiment, the sound of cars and horns, the menacing insects, the incessant cold and cough. He points out that what he finds in Shillong is quietness unlike other hill stations such as Darjeeling flocked by tourists. While for the English travellers, Shillong and its surrounding landscape offered a glimpse of home or a place to recover from illness; for Tagore it was a refuge for the intellectual non-pretentious traveller. Just like Amit, the protagonist of his famous novel based in Shillong, Shesher Kobita, who struggles to distance himself from the pretentions of the English educated Bengali elite society. [5]

That both Tagore and his protagonist are merely passing through and the refuge is temporary, comes through in Amit’s inability to connect with overwhelming natural beauty which to him remains a monotonous background. Tagore, weary of politics, wants to move away from familiar faces and the hills and its people are thus represented as the colonially constructed, the other, apolitical, background. His poem Shillonger Chithi further reinforces the role and failure of the place to revitalize his aging spirit and thus remains a backdrop to his quest. [6] He is the quintessential intrepid traveller bound by the complexity of his privileged position in colonized society and aspirations of freedom from being colonized and from his own privilege.

What has shifted in travel writing in the post colonial period? What do tourists visiting these hills look at, how do they represent the people and the places, and what traces do they leave behind? Contemporary travel writing to a large extent continues to use the same tropes found in colonial writing- such as violence, isolation, the primitive and the “noble savage”, quest and refuge to name a few. Travel literature contributed to the colonizing project in the nineteenth century. This genre traversing across disciplinary boundaries informs the travellers’ gaze in the present. The expansion of the tourism industry relies on tropes that are now globally relevant- indigeneity and indigenous way of life, and the remoteness of the region serving as a perfect backdrop to experience life of indigenous people. The ways in which tourism and constructions of indigeneity relate with one another needs to be further interrogated. The motives of travel are still political. The ethics of travel still questionable.

NOTES

[1] Mary Louis Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, (London: Routledge, 1992)

[2] Ethel St. Claire Grimwood, My Three Years in Manipur and Escape from the Recent Mutiny (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1891)

[3] H Walters, “A Journey Across Pandua Hills, Near Silhet, in Bengal”, Asiatic Researches XVII (Calcutta Bengal Military Press 1832)

[4] Alexander H G, The Indian Ferment: A Traveler’s Tale (London: Williams and Norgate Ltd, 1929)

[5] Rabindranath Tagore, Shesher Kobita, Traslated by Anindita Mukhopadhyay, (New Delhi: Rupa, 2006 first published Vishwa Bharati 1925)

[6] Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Shillonger Chithi’ in Rabindra Rachanaboli, (Shanti Niketan: Vishwa Bharati 1924)

Independence Day in India – a day of celebrating our national sovereignty and saluting the anti-colonial freedom struggle. The triumph of Indian independence, however, is inseparable from the trauma of the Partition experience. Hence, in mainstream culture in India, August 15 becomes a day of bashing Jinnah left, right and centre. It makes one suspect that the ideals of populist nationalism and inclusive democracy have been long forgotten under a sea of symbolism, antipathy and myth making– of what a successful nation we could have had, had there not been an evil separatist at work whose legacy sabotages us even today. This begs the question – have we or our government ever tried hard enough to achieve our so-called original goals nevertheless? The fight was against the status quo and yet it remains entrenched today, hardly due to the deeds of a hostile neighbor.

To retreat into the history of the Partition and Indian politics would provide us useful insights. The question of powerful actors in the deal-making that happened at the dusk of Imperial rule, on the desk of colonial masters immediately questions the common narrative.

The Pakistan demand was initially a bargaining tool against a Congress party that was itself bulldozing through in a very Jinnah-like manner as the sole spokesman for India (never mind that Congress was a semi-communal, casteist party of the first order, right?) – to sideline the various popular movements that arose in the 1930s onwards. The main victims of this exercise of monopoly and backdoor favoritism were the Left (which controlled large sections of the peasant and trade union movement), Ambedkar and other Dalit movements, including the non-Brahman movements in Madras and Maharashtra, autonomous peasant struggles against politically well-connected zamindars, and any regional struggle that challenged upper caste North Indian hegemony.

The Muslim League was a pretty shady party too – landlord backed to the core, and a leadership that was socially conservative. It did not have any better a record than the Congress did in terms of backing social mobility. Only three leaders seemed to have a heart beyond their own self-interest: Jinnah (who was hardly a Muslim by anything but birth), Liaqat Ali Khan (who wrote the most progressive budget in Indian history as the first Finance Minister – many provisions of which were shot down by the Congress) and Jogendranath Mandal (a Dalit leader and the first Law Minister of Pakistan).

Jinnah was hardly familiar with the provinces he would later govern, and his dispensation appears far more secular than that of his party. Ayesha Jalal argues that Jinnah finally resigned himself to Partition when he became convinced that Muslims would not be treated equally in the halls of legislation in India. His first choice always had been a unified India with decentralization, as well as representation for minorities and protection.

The Cabinet Mission plan in 1946 provided for precisely that. It was accepted by Jinnah and vetoed by the Congress. The Muslim League was the first party to accept the Plan and the last party to join the Interim Government. The Congress was the last party to accept the Plan (why it in any case did not do fully) and the first to join the Interim Government. The relative weights of the actors comes out clearly here.

I would argue that the Pakistan Jinnah would have preferred to have would have been just a chunk of Uttar Pradesh and nothing else. That is where the Muslim League was strong – and those are the Muslims the League actually spoke for. Pakistan was then shortly led by an immigrant set of leaders (the old Muslim League guard) till the local landlord-Punjabi-Army elite took over soon after the assassination of Liaqat Ali Khan at the behest of the CIA. Jinnah’s vision died then and there – have no doubt about it.

The freedom of Bangladesh enabled West Punjab to dominate Pakistan electorally and demographically – any party that gets an overwhelming majority in Punjab becomes close to a majority in the National Assembly in Pakistan.

To say that Congress leaders from Bengal and Punjab didn’t benefit from the partitioning of their provinces would indeed be revisionist beyond redemption. After all which Congressi would have wanted the chance of a Muslim League ministry in the two undivided provinces (where Muslims were a slightly higher percentage), when they could guarantee themselves a state-level victory with Partition?

Most of the Muslim League’s actions between 1940-46 show us a higher concern about Muslim safety and representation in areas where Muslims were not a majority, than a concern with Muslim majority provinces (where the Muslim League did badly till 1945). In the end, I believe the Congress found Partition a better deal than a less centralized state with several non-Congress provincial governments and a rival party perhaps buttressed by separate electorates.

The Congress had a final say in each of the decisions taken in 1947, by when the British were eager to leave showing a successful handing over of power at least on paper. Only the Congress government sanctioned history textbooks say otherwise.

In Pakistan, to some, Independence means azaadi even today. To others, it brings up the contrast between what is and what should have been. The leaders of their nation and their ideas had died out of power by the 1950s itself – that dream was over.

In India, however, the articulators of freedom and the political inheritors of freedom remained the same. That the populist elements of the national vision still remain a distant vision even now, while fiscal, administrative and communal matters overrode welfare and social justice – shows us how much remains of the pre-Independence status quo. That the socio-economic status-quo is a colonial heritage is bulldozed by bucketfuls of cultural nationalism, and what some would say – hegemony itself.

The idea that freedom was to most people the promise of a higher standard of living and an end to exploitation first and foremost, has been long subsumed by semi-communal outcries that should have no place in our society that serve to cover up what has not been achieved even today.

A conversation with Late Zygmunt Bauman, social theorist of Modernity & its discontents 

Zygmunt Bauman  was emeritus professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds and had developed key concepts for the understanding of fundamental issues of today’s world, such as liquid modernity, time, space and disorder, individualism versus community, globalization and consumer’s culture, love and identity, etc. His analyses of the links between modernity, Holocaust, democracy and social politics were the principal subject of the following interview, which was conducted by Vicente Ordóñez and Vicent Sanz for the Italian Journal RECERCA in 2013

Recerca: Mr Bauman, we would like to begin with some reflections about the relationship between Sociology and History. The structures and social dynamics analysis’ is a link shared by Sociology and History. Many pages have been written about this particular issue, but the interdisciplinary dialog is far to be fluid. In what measure the interdisciplinary dialog is necessary for the comprehension of the present or past societies?

Zygmunt Bauman: I have a slightness sceptical approach with the question of so-called interdisciplinary relations. I believe that the division of knowledge, particularly Human Society and Humanities, is an artificial product of universal administration. You need departments, because you need to have the address where you send an application for a grant or money, for research and so on. So obviously, integrally, unified, human world split into parts, which don’t have direct relation to the aspects of human existence. It might be Sociology is about human condition changing over time and space. So, because this sort of integrating inclinations of the speech, the historians work on different kind of sources. I think academic structure, in general, is one of the few relics of feudal system. Nevertheless, the human beings who are the objects of your study, of my study, of everyone in Humanities’ study, they don’t live in History or in Sociology or in Political Science or in Economics. It is not like that: the question is that we are competing for the same territory, in fact. You want to understand, I want to understand: we use different tools, different approaches, but that’s actually irrelevant. Therefore, the cooperation is absolutely inevitable, and is capable. Just to give you one example: when I started to work on the book Modernity and the Holocaust, I was not interested in learning something new about the Holocaust, because that has been already done by historians. I was trying to find out what sociologists have to say about the connection between modern life conditions and the possibilities of evaluating Holocaust and genocide in modern terms. What I found out is that what I could read in sociological works about the Holocaust told me more about the state of Sociology than about the history of the Holocaust. Holo- caust was treated in Sociology as an unfortunate accident on the road to progress, and I thought that historical perspective was not strictly necessary to understand the sociological problem, because “modernity” and the “Holocaust” is a sociological problem. But in order to understand it you have to use the material collected mostly by historians. Just one example: interdisciplinarity is not a particular, artificial, special, unusual, abnormal, achievement of representing one or another stabilised discipline at the University. I think it is the return from the artificiality to normality.

Recerca: But is not easy to fight with this administrative division…

Zygmunt Bauman: I can afford that because I’m a very old man. I’m twenty years after retirement. I can say things without looking what the reactions inside the academia would be. Until you are retired, you are confined, you are constraint by the rules of the academia; you have to observe the boundaries, you cannot trespass over somebody else’s territory. I’m free to move according to my consideration, my wishes. But I really do believe that we are in the same business, grazing at the same meadow, and the meadow is called “human condition”, which is changing, constantly changing in time and space as well. Differentiated, if you look at the globe, at the planet today. Changing on a different pace, with local differences in the way in which it is developing today in Brazil, for example, and in the United Kingdom. So it is spatial differentiation together, of course, with the historical development.

Historical perspective is terribly important for sociologists, I believe. If you want one example again: Ignacio Ramonet wants to understand what is happening to the world today, and I’ve tried to solve the same problem. But he is not a historian, and I’m not a historian. Anyway, without history you cannot understand what is going on at the moment. In order to understand this, you must go back to a crucial date in the history of the world, particularly Europe, but through Europe, the rest of the world as well. The year I have in mind is 1648. In fact, you have to go back even to 1555 when in Augsburg the dynasties, fighting each other in the religious wars, wanted to achieve some modus vivendi: an ability to live together in peace. And they coined the concept cuius regio eius religio. But I’ve mentioned 1648 because it took almost one hundred years more for this principle to be actualized into a document. Indeed, two documents: one in Osnabrück and the other in Münster, the so-called Westphalian Agreement. The formula cuius regio eius religio means that the ruler has the right to tell which god you should believe in: if I rule you, I have the right to decide what god to select. Once you have this formula, you have the foundation of the modern concept of sovereignty: that each ruler is free from external interference within a territory. We have an inheritance of Westphalian Agreement and still live under its pressure. That simply means that it is an Unholy Trinity of the Political State, Territory and Nation what called is nation-state. I think it was developed within the already existing historical in created formula: if you take the formula cuius regio eius religio and put “nation” instead of “religio”, you have the key to the contemporary organization of the planet.

Recerca: The interconnection of the events and the dynamics in the era of globalization has arisen as issues in more than one occasion. How do we incorporate this transnational perspective into the social analysis?

Zygmunt Bauman: Let’s see. We have globalization. Therefore, the essential issue it was inherited by us remember the Westphalian Agreement. Maybe the idea of territorial sovereignty has lost most of its meaning, but it has a tremendous impact on what is happening inside the country. I think every government acts under a double bind. On the one hand, there is political fiction of sovereignty: a government is elected by the electorate living in all the territory of the state; on the other hand, however, there are multinational banks: financers are travelling, as Manuel Castells points out in its Space of flows, beyond the reach of the local sovereignty. They are specializing, very much like international terrorism, international drug traffic, international weapon trade and all these other things. They are specializing in ignoring the local customs, ignoring the local boundaries, moving free here and there. So, we have power: it is already free from political control. And we have politics, which is suffering daily from the deficit of power. That’s our condition now. You cannot find a good way out, really. On the one hand, whoever happens to be a prime minister temporarily in Spain, or in Greece, or in Italy, must look to order the electorate, because in three years there will be another election. I’ve heard that Spaniards want to occupy the Parliament and they want a quicker election even, faster than three years. So you must look to order. But in the other hand he is not free to follow his own ways, follow his initiatives. If he does, then obviously even more financials run away from Spain. And it would be high day or festival for currency speculators if that happens if he abandons the impulse from outside, policy of austerity, and goes for growth rather than austerity.

We live out of the border of the inherited arrangement. Everything that has happened between 1648 and 2012 was in the shadow of this concept: politics is a local affaire, and until the middle of the twentieth century it was close to truth, because power and politics were united in the framework of the nation-state. But this is no longer the fact. Nevertheless, our politics have not caught up with the development of power: power is globalized, politics still local. And if you look at this historical period, step by step mind you the United Nations, which is the closest of the idea of global government, at some sort, it was created with one instruction: to defend, tooth and nail, the national sovereignty of every state. The people who created the Charter of the United Nations were under the impression of the Second World War. And started from aggression: aggression means violating the territorial sovereignty of another state. So, they thought that the future of humanity, peaceful future, would be secure if the impossibility, the sanctity of the state boundaries are preserved. But they cannot be preserved because they have been already subbed by globalization. I don’t know what the solution is today, really. I think that we are in a situation which is not a slight reform here and there (which is necessary), but rethinking from scratch, obviously, the historical created condition of our living today. That’s my answer.

Recerca: This is an arduous task that implies, also, a revision of democracy. Is it time to rethink democracy, Mr Bauman?

Zygmunt Bauman: Well, the question is: in a globalized world you cannot have democracy in one super country. Can we have democracy in its present shape? Democracy is already a fiction because the idea of democracy was based on the idea of national sovereignty. Democracy was inscribed into the national frame, right? But there is no such thing as national sovereignty. They are already pitted in a double bind in two contradictory pressures, under which every double element is smarting. So the hands of governments are tied. In the idea of a democratic country they move the election the electorate instructs the government what to do and the government follows the instruction. This logic has been broken. Apparently we are still thinking in the old terms: we speak about the recent election in Spain as the turn from the left to the right; we think of the last election in France as the turn from the right to the left. Nothing of this has happened! There are no trends of this at all. I think the changes in political governments are directed today not by the changing sentimental ideologies of the population, but by the dynamics of frustration. If there had been a right wing government in Spain before the credit collapse, I’m quite sure that there would be a movement from right to left. If Hollande had been the president before the latest election in France, I’m sure that Sarkozy would have become the president. People are reacting to frustration. Each government is coming to power today because of this double bind. They say that they will defend the interests of the country. But they are not able to do it, because there are pressures which are completely unconcerned, completely uninterested, and completely indifferent to the wishes and preferences of Spaniards or Frenchmen or Germans or whoever, right? They have to manoeuvre between two pressures, which cannot be reconciled. I don’t think that there is a little line, a line of compromise between these two pressures. And let me be sorry for this very pessimistic picture. But I believe that this is not a question of occupying Parliament here and there: it is a question of raising our politics to the level achieved by power. What was the secret of the relatively successful period of nation-state building? Power and politics were at the same level; they were operat- ing at the same level. For example, nineteenth century in France was a period that started from what Max Weber described as a separation of business and household, which meant separation of business from the local control, because a household was involved in local community, in craftsmen, deals and things like that, and they were the only real powers: local powers. What happened at the beginning of the twentieth century? Business emancipated from these constraints, created a new territory, a sort of a Wild West we all know Hollywood films where the stronger wins and the weaker is defeated. The whole nineteenth century is the history of the emerging modern state trying to colonize this Wild West by imposing to some level on it. It was successful. There were a series of factory bills: legalizing the means of working-class’ self- defence, allowing trade unions, strikes, and so on. In the end, there was some sort of a temporary settlement at the beginning of the twentieth century, which is simplified by the Ford Factory. The Ford Factory was this sort of a tooth between two sides. Why? Because of the accompaniment of power and politics within the framework of the same territory it was the territory of the nation-state. Both sides of the company, bosses and their employees, were painfully aware that they were going to meet again, tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the year after, and ten years after. That is the situation: there are two bounds fixed to each other, bounds that remain together. They have to sit around the table, like we are sitting, and elaborate some modus vivendi. For example: to delineate the limit to which the inequality overage and profits can go read: some modus coexistendi. That has actually happened—as long as this mutual dependency was a mutual dependency. But the mutuality has been unilaterally broken because of the power globalizing and politics remaining lonesome. So the dependency is no longer mutual. The rival is tied to the ground. It cannot travel freely like you and me, because the emigrants will be stopped at the next border, sent home back and so on. But the bosses if you go on strike, for example they have a very simple solution: they just pack up their belongings and send their finances to another country, another country in which people are prepared to work for a dollar a day. They are more docile, they don’t have trade unions, and they don’t have all this high flown ambitions. And you are doomed. What is left? Let’s think of Western Europe: Western Europe is now a graveyard of the past, big industries sentenced. They went elsewhere, they vanished from the ground, but all sides are painfully aware that they are doomed to each other—they missed each other forever. They are painfully aware now that their relationship is very frail, very brittle, and could be revoked at any mo- ment without any notice. And that’s what I called liquid modernity.

Recerca: So, right now the relationship between power and politics is unbalanced?

Zygmunt Bauman: The problem that politics is facing is, first, to raise politics to the level achieved already by powers in order to subordinate powers again to political control. And second, to develop instruments of political action, which are equivalent to the instruments developed again I go to History by our grandfathers or great-grandfathers, for the service of the nation-state. They developed representative democracy, the ideal of the universal electoral alike, the political rights and so on, public opinion promotion… they developed media, which is able to condensate the different ideas, the different preferences and so on. It all works; it works at the level of the nation-state. We need something like that, equivalent of that, but at a global level. Actually, we haven’t started doing anything seriously; we have no idea how could it look like. One thing I’m sure of is that it will not be the national Parliament on main, big earn, that will follow this pattern. It will look different, it will be a different form of democracy in the same way as twentieth century democracy, modern democracy, is still democracy, but absolutely dissimilar to what Aristotle thought of democracy when he wrote about it. He thought about people coming to the agora, and to the market place, quarrelling directly, selecting their committees, or removing people from their committees if they were dissatisfied. The mere idea of indirect representative democracy was virtually non-existent still in the eighteenth century it was created after the French Revolution. It is a novel idea, but it was developed with this idea of the nation-state in mind, within the resources available at the level of nationality. These resources are not available at a global level. But so far there is a person who suggested how that could be done at a planetary level: Jürgen Habermas, as you know, and his idea of the constitution of public. The idea is that the feeling of ethnicity or common history or belonging to the same past and having the same destiny, the same future, is not a universally necessary condition of social integration. Social entities were integrated by this principle, in the historical period, from the beginning of modern times until now. But it is not necessary to continue with it. One can replace this emotional attachment to the ethnos, which is an emotional attachment to the common law, in the sense of the interest of constitutional project. Whether it can be done or not I have no idea. What I am concerned, however, is this: whatever is called integration could be achieved or not; but it needs to be based on institutions. And we don’t have a single, truly global institution, so far. I don’t see it. You can name them, but… I don’t think the United Nations is a global institution. It is an intergovernmental institution. It is very much like… let’s imagine that in Benicàs- sim or in Valencia or in Madrid or in Paris, there are new rules of traffic. It is said that at the red light you should stop if you side or range, but inside the municipality you have to go. Now, our global laws are like that at the moment. It is not a global law: it depends on the negotiation around the table. Alliances are made at hot. They are temporary. So the institutional crisis of global politics does not exist. And I also believe I won’t see it because I am a very old man, but you all around the table will see it, I hope the twenty-first century will be spent on the attempt to raise politics to a global level. It is a matter of life or death.

Recerca: In this landscape of rupture between politics and power, you have awarded a relevant prominence to the efficiency of the state. This efficiency nowadays is questioned because of the disability to give answers to the economic and social problems. The state as we conceive it, has it remained obsolete?

Zygmunt Bauman: Well, this is the problem. We are speaking about power and politics. What is power? And what is politics? In my, very simplified, very down to earth, definition: power is the ability to have things done. And politics is the ability to decide which things ought to be done. In order to have democracy, you have to have power and politics together. But now they are not connected any more. So, that is why I’ve said that, on the one hand, you have power free from political control; on the other hand we have politics, which is powerless: politics cannot force the way which things ought to be done. If your Prime Minister makes decisions that currency speculators and stock-exchange don’t like, probably it would be the end of Spain. So, I repeat what I have in mind: finances are globalised, investment capital is globalised it moves freely in the space of flows commodity trade is globalised, information is globalised, also the criminality is globalised, terrorism is globalised, drug traffic is globalised, weapon-trade, which is behind the 49% crypto-wars which are going on now at the moment, when we are sitting around the table we don’t read very much about them in the newspapers, but they are very real. Now, these forces, these powers are globalised. One could ask: what is the connection between finances and interna- tional terrorism? They all agree at one point: they all undermine, ignore and neglect the idea of national territorial sovereignty. Politics tries, against all logic and against all realities, to defend this territorial sovereignty. Can it do it with the economic powers globalised? I believe that it is impossible.

Recerca: Are we experiencing here, in the Western World, something like a colonial state? And, could we learn something from the anti-colonial movements? Because, at some point, the anti-colonial movements have something in common with European social movements—anti-global movements, 15-M and so on.

Zygmunt Bauman: I’m very grateful to you that you have brought the issue of Europe. Let’s think about the legacy of Westphalian settlement, a key and also a problem of the European Union. Lisbon treaty: the first reaction the practical implementation, which established some sort of a President of the European Union and some sort of a Minister of Foreign Affairs, was to elect to a point two dispositions, people who were selected on the basis of their facelessness. They were invisible. I’m travelling around Europe giving lectures and asking on every occasion: “what are their names?” Nobody could answer. They were elected on the basis that they wouldn’t interfere in the traditional Westphalian set side of sovereignty. It’s interesting: we have Europe, we have a united currency, which is run by seventeen sovereign Ministers of Finances. It is absurd. It is creating simply a field day for the currency speculators. They went first for Ireland, then they went for Greece, Portugal; then for Italy and Spain, and I’m quite sure that when Spain extricates itself from the crisis they will go to France. Yes, why not to France? That is part and parcel of the nature of capitalism. Capitalism is a parasitic institution. Parasitic in the sense that defines a host organism, it feeds on it, it bleeds it to exhaustion and then it is abandoned to go to another one. Remember history: from 1990 until today there have been a series of crisis, economic collapses. It started in Argentina Argentina had such a crisis; Malaysia had such a crisis; there was collapse of the ruble in Russia; there was an Icelandic collapse; there was Mexico; etc. It is a law of capitalism existence: there must always be a host organism. Each crisis, a suc- cessful crisis of capitalism, is all about redistribution of wares. The United States of America are very the same. They have all the other side of the crisis: they are recovering. Joseph Stiglitz published a month ago a calculation: he pointed out that, in the recovery of 2009-2010, the top 1% of US income earners captured 93% of the income growth. 93%. All the rest of the American nation is going deeper into death: people are losing their homes, losing their jobs, losing their prosperity. It is the tantamount of the economic crisis.

All right: that is the first thing I’m grateful for. The other question, which I would like to mention, is the new totalitarian use of the market. It is true. Because, what is totalitarism? Totalitarism is an aspiration to control every aspect of human life. That is exactly what the market is doing at the moment. Every aspect of the human life, every aspect of the human relationships is to be estimated, evaluated, and run according to the market. That is the new totalitarism, which is, according to this one has to do with oneself: we are all contributing to this totalitarism voluntarily. We are reproducing it daily.

Recerca: Is it possible to recover the essence of the socialist thought, something useful and usable for the construction of a future society? Which is the sense of the left-wing politics?

Zygmunt Bauman: Well, you see, Schröder, the former chancellor of Germany, is famous and remembered to have said that there is no capitalist or socialist economies: there is only good economies or bad economies. I think that, until 1989, until the collapse of the Berlin Wall, reality or fiction, the imagination of the communist alternative set the agenda for capitalism, as well. Social-state État-providence had to be preserved because you had this communist power breezing to your neck and you had to provide some sort of insurance, pretention of equality and so on. Inequality was actually falling down, disappearing. It does change after 1989. The political agenda is no longer set by an alternative. That’s one change. The other change is the slow dissipation of the working class. The working class today is going through the same process which the agriculture workers went through in the nineteenth century. They started essentially from being 90% of the population; they ended up being 9%. Exactly the same is happening now with the working class. So the traditional basis, the natural constituency of social democrats doesn’t exist or is disappearing fast. It does exist, but not in our part of the world. Not in Western Europe, not in the United States of America. What is the place for the left under these circumstances? What is the identity of the left? It is not simply: “what the right wants to do, we will do it better”. It is something very different. I believe, I suggest, it is just an idea, that there are two things, two principles, which define the difference, the separate identity of the left, whatever the circumstances, whatever the change of the social conditions in which the left hake part. One is the principal of the communal insurance against individually super-misfortune. Community whatever is the community, whether it is a planetary community, whether it is an industrial community, whether it is a local community is responsible for providing assistance to each member of it. That is one principle; a principle shan’t be denied by neoliberal development. According to Ulrich Beck, he is a very clever man and a very successful master, who has very well-aimed formulations, said that we are now all expected to find individual solutions to socially produced problems. So we have to deal with the dominant ideology, with our own individual resources, and limited talent, and limited cleverness, we individually have to find the solutions of the socially produced problems. Which in practice means that we are no longer concerned with a good society, we are concerned, everyone of us, with cutting for ourselves a little place in the dreadful world. The second principle is the principle that the quality of society, like the quality of the rich, is not to be measured by the average extremes of the pillars, but by the extremes of the weakest pillars. You cannot measure the caring capacity of the rich by finding the average extreme of the pillars. The weakest pillar in size —the same applies to society— the weakest part, will measure the quality of society, and in the same way, the quality of life will be measured by the weakest part.

Zygmunt Bauman’s Selected Bibliography

1972: Between Class and Elite. The Evolution of the British Labour Movement. A Sociological

Study. Manchester: Manchester University Press (Polish original 1960).

1973: Culture as Praxis. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1976: Socialism: The Active Utopia. New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers. 1976: Towards a Critical Sociology: An Essay on Common-Sense and Emancipation. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

1978: Hermeneutics and Social Science: Approaches to Understanding. London: Hutchinson.

1982: Memories of Class: The Pre-history and After-life of Class. London/Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

1985 Stalin and the peasant revolution: a case study in the dialectics of master and slave. Leeds: University of Leeds Department of Sociology.

1987: Legislators and interpreters – On Modernity, Post-Modernity, Intellectuals. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

1988: Freedom. Philadelphia: Open University Press.

1989: Modernity and The Holocaust. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press 1989.

1990: Thinking Sociologically. An introduction for Everyone. Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell.

1991: Modernity and Ambivalence. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 1998: Work, consumerism and the new poor. Philadelphia: Open University Press. 1998: Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia University Press.

1999: In Search of Politics. Cambridge: Polity. 2000: Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity 2001: The Individualized Society. Cambridge: Polity. 2002: Society Under Siege. Cambridge: Polity.

2004: Europe: An Unfinished Adventure. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 0-7456-3403-6

2008: Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.

2011: Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age. Cambridge: Polity.

2012: This is Not a Diary. Cambridge: Polity.

An essay by Hiren Gohain published 34 years ago in SUNDAY magazine

This article was first published in Sunday Vol. 10 Issue 33, 6 -12 March 1983. Sunday, was a political weekly published from Kolkata by Ananda Bazaar Patrika group and M J Akbar was its founding editor. Dr. Hiren Gohain’s essay is reproduced here for educational purpose from the private collection of Guwahati based senior journalist and commentator Haidar Hussain.
Bonojit Hussain

HIREN GOHAIN, a leftist intellectual, does not support the Assam movement as he considers it impracticable and dangerous. However, he feels that if peace is to return to this north-eastern state, the genuine and long-standing fears of the Assamese people must be set at rest.

People who take pride in their scientific outlook seem as prone to irrational opinions and prejudiced views as the allegedly unenlightened masses. In fact, they appear to be quite incapable of examining with dispassionate application and searching honesty positions to which they find themselves committed as consequence of some ‘line’ adopted collectively. Such advocates of scientific realism are so carried away by the prospect of total support among their colleagues that they debunk any critic of that privileged view as a coward or a traitor. One does not begrudge such people their right to indulge in vicarious heroics. But surely one may be allowed to express some reservations about their strange notion that courage is a product of organisation. Indeed, one does not know how such scientific people distinguish complacent acquiescence in the opinion of others from courage to conviction, which is capable of resisting pressures of organised (and at times armed!) opinion.

I have become aware of such unpleasant truths while trying to understand the Assam Movement. My views on Assam movement are known. I have never supported its objectives or taken any part in its programmes. Since interested circles are already busy spreading slanderous rumours, I should like to affirm in all humility that I had taken the initiative in organising the first serious resistance against the movement through a paper that survived against all odds for two years, funded out of public donations and my small resources. In consequence I faced and am still facing a lot of persecution, social ostracism, and physical risks. Only a distaste for dramatising suffering and the kind of synthetic charity it seems to attract, has kept me silent on the extremely vicious nature of these persistent and atrocious persecutions. Ironically, I now find myself facing a kind of crude propaganda from leftist circles because I do not swallow their hook, line and sinker.

Briefly, my position is that while democratic people must condemn chauvinism in Assam, they ought to recognise the fact that Assamese chauvinism is an unhealthy reaction of the Assamese against the oppression of more powerful forces. True, the middle-class leadership in the class-interest has distorted the national protest into chauvinist and communal forms. Further, this Assamese chauvinism has in its turn oppressed other minorities. But the Assam movement has not been confined to the middle-class alone. It has a fairly broad-based rural support. Land-pauperism, indebtedness, un-employment among rural youth, have all contributed to rousing the peasantry to solid support to the movement. Yet the peasantry is not organised on class lines. At the present stage of development national forces in Assam are more powerful and influential than class forces. The Assamese peasants would make common cause with the Assamese middle-class rather than with the immigrant peasants. While the left may be able to overcome these differences eventually, the present contradictions may also completely frustrate their aims unless national forces are recognised and properly guided. There is an entire historical backdrop to this problem which conditions the Assamese awareness of it. Of course, the nationalist forces in Assam either ignore or soft-pedal the structural roots of this problem of underdevelopment and backwardness. The left is under no obligation to follow them here. But underdevelopment in the peculiar conditions in our country has also led to all kinds of pressure building up against the Assamese. Whether in trade or industry, or in agriculture, or in the higher rungs of the bureaucracy, the Assamese find themselves outclassed and outmaneuvered by ‘outsiders’ as has already been pointed out by many objective non-Assamese observers.

Hiren Gohain / SUNDAY by Raiot Webzine on Scribd

It will not do to dismiss the movement as a CIA-inspired conspiracy. The CIA appears to be in any major Indian movement or upsurge in recent times. But if the leftists realise that the present Akali movement cannot be understood in such terms alone, one fails to appreciate why the Assamese alone are to be awarded that dubious honour. In March 1980, I had read a paper entitled ‘On the Present Movement in Assam’ in a seminar on national integration at Calcutta University. When it was reported in a section of the press that I had called it a CIA-engineered movement, I at once sent a correction pointing out that my view was rather that the CIA had set a match to a situation that had been deteriorating for decades and had now become explosive (Jugantar, 5 May 1980). I had also pointed out that all along the central government had patronised the chauvinism of the Assamese middle-class instead of ensuring real economic development of this region. Apart from the CIA, the influence of certain indubitably Indian forces needs to be taken into account. At any rate since the alleged successes of the CIA imply both objective and subjective weaknesses of the left in area like Assam, should not the left and democratic forces also engage in some self-criticism?

On similar grounds I refuse to christen the movement as an exercise in secessionism. However one may disagree with them none of the demands of the movement seems to smack of outright secessionism. To give the devil its due, the movement leaders had at least raised no objection to giving citizenship rights to immigrants of the period 1951-1961. To affirm the fact of the central government’s callousness towards Assam’s problems with some vehemence or to reject certain suggestions of the central government on parochial ground is not necessarily secessionist. Of course, the spectrum of opinion in the movement includes a secessionist band as well. If it gains the upper hand, that will be due to wrong political handling of the movement. Since the demands of the movement derive their strength from historical urges and basic grievances, even though the demand themselves are irrational, a solution will require tact, patience and a proper perspective on the part of the union government. Unfortunately, the latter may fall back upon repression if the issues are trivial or irrelevant in its eyes.

But the limitations of such an approach may be seen at their most glaring in Manipur and Nagaland. Secessionism will in that event be the illegitimate child of an unimaginative policy of repression. The tripartite talks when leaders of opposition parties were associated, were a sound step taken rather late. And why is it that Assamese leaders of such parties and groups have not been invited to such talks?

One would have thought they would be able to communicate with the movement leaders better. Has not the central government been a party to decision that gives the student leaders from Assam the status of leaders of some alien nation? I still feel that not enough has been done to persuade the movement leaders, and that both the leaders of the movement and the central government representatives have been guilty of endless legalistic quibbling. Secessionism is a consequence of alienation, and not merely of some monstrous CIA plot.

This alienation, however, however has deep historical roots. The Assamese have never felt an identity separate from India, unlike the Nagas and the Mizos, who have, after all, little in common with the Indian heritage. But Assam has also been marked by certain features that distinguish her. Though she is so close to Bengal, the character of the Vaishanava movement in Assam had been quite different from that of the Vaishnava movement in Bengal. Assamese Vaishnava institutions, for centuries had a more central role to play in society. The satras or monastries were not retreats, but centres of learning and culture, and discharged important social functions. As the eminent historian, Sir Edward Gait, noticed in the late nineteenth century, the vast majority of the Assamese Hindus were tribal converts assimilated in phases through the ministry of the satras, (Introduction to Census Report on Assam, 1891). Besides, Assam managed to retain her independence from the successive medieval empires ruled from Delhi down to the 19th century. These two facts are most vital for any appreciation of the character of the Assamese nationality.

Yet the stunted growth of native capitalism in the colonial setup failed to generate the forces for complete assimilation of all the various ethnic elements in the area. The caste-Hindu elements in the vanguard of Assamese nationalism were never as secure in their hegemony as their counterparts in other regions in India. The Assamese nationality has had a troubled time since its inception. To cite only a few instances, the tribals had already threatened to break away before Independence. In the Sixties the Ahoms started a movement for separate state in upper Assam and the plains’ tribals also started a similar campaign. Both these movements had powerful grassroots support. The fear that the Assamese nationality may disintegrate is a persistent anxiety for the Assamese middle-class. In my paper On the Present Movement in Assam I had pointed out how the chauvinist movement had, ironically, brought about those very changes that the Assamese feared so much. Yet it is known outside Assam that the tribals are sensitive to immigration as the Assamese Hindus, and powerful tribal organisations lie the Bodo Sahitya Sabha had never withdrawn their support to the movement.

During its growth and development the Assamese nationality has had to overcome several nearly insuperable obstacles, which have left a legacy of bitterness and anger. First it was an alien language that was imposed by the colonial rulers as the official language. Then they tagged on to Assam large Bengali-speaking territories without any regard for the sentiments of either nationality, and actively encouraged jealous bickerings and tensions between the two linguistic group for decades. Amalendu Guha’s From Planter Raj to Swaraj provides plenty of instances of imperialist hatching of such national jealousies. The infamous partition of Bengal not only threatened to obliterate the separate identity of Assam by merging her with East Bengal, but sowed the seeds of aggressive communal politics by introducing to the Muslim leaders of East Bengal, the idea of turning Assam into an extension of a Muslim Bengal. The colonial rulers at first encouraged immigration of East Bengal peasants to Assam for economic reasons, e.g. putting under the plough vast stretches of ‘waste’ land, raising food for plantation labour, and promoting commercial crops like jute for the mills. But in the Thirties, they gave the problem the familiar communal twist. The census commissioner of Assam, in 1931, used inflammatory language against immigration in an official document to frighten the Assamese, but other Englishmen in the Legislative Assembly of the province posed as friends of the immigrants.

The League ministry in the Forties certainly encouraged immigration from the point of view of communal politics. To cap it all, the cabinet mission recommended as a part of the plan for independence the ‘grouping’ of Assam with Muslim-majority provinces. Noted freedom-fighters of the Thirties, like Mahadev Sarma and Krishna Sarma, led a movement against immigration. Feelings ran so high that later even the Assam branch of the CPI adopted a resolution against immigration from East Bengal. (Guha, Amalendu, Op cit.) The movement against the ‘grouping’ in the late Forties was led by no less a person than Gopi Nath Bardoloi, the undisputed leader of the freedom struggle in Assam. Even in the constituent Assembly, Assamese leaders were speaking in aggrieved tones about the indifference of the all-India leaders to Assam’s plight and the fears of the Assamese.

Speaking on 16 June 1949, Kuladhar Chaliha not only urged the constituent Assembly to favour assimilation of the minorities in Assam, but sounded a note of warning against suppression of the rights of the provinces; “If you suspect the provinces and take greater powers for the centre, it will only lead to undesirable results … If you take too much power for the centre the provinces will try to break away from you,” (Proceedings, Constituent Assembly of India, Vol. VIII, p. 919). This appears to be a secessionist threat, but it actually reflects the rising Assamese middle-class’ fear of constraints. A weak, underdeveloped bourgeoisie in dread of the power of a rival (the all India bourgeoisie represented by Delhi) considers it natural to impose its conditions on weaker national groups. But one had better not forget how this regional elite also led militant peasant movements against colonial rulers in the late Thirties and Forties, and the ’42 movement witnessed a tremendous upsurge in the countryside of Assam. The pattern here is conspicuously different from that of Bengal. There is a continuity between the movement against grouping, the movement for a university in Assam in the period before Independence, and the movement for the oil refinery and the official language in the post-Independence period. And that is a national union of all classes against central authority, Assamese nationalism has not yet become a spent force, nor lost all its creative elan if only because the nationality itself is still in the process of growth.

Stalin’s contribution on the national question is generally acknowledged as of primary theoretical significance. Yet Stalin had repeatedly warned his doctrinaire comrades against the simplistic theory that all national ideals are reactionary. Speaking to the students of the University of the Toilers of the East on 18 May 1925, Stalin underlined “the absolutely correct proposition that universal proletarian culture does not preclude, but rather presupposes and fosters national culture”. He also made a significant remark on the varying historical stages of development represented by different nations of the U.S.S.R. “The comrades who commit this deviation fail to understand two things. They do not understand that conditions in the centre and in the ‘border regions’ are not the same, and far from being identical. They do not understand, furthermore, that Soviet republics of the East themselves are not all alike, that some of them, for instance, Georgia and Armenia, are at a higher stage of national formation, while others, such as Chechnya and Kabarda, are at a lower stage of national formation”.

Stalin’s cautionary remarks on the need to keep in mind the concrete situation and especially the stage of development of a particular nationality, ought to apply to different Indian nationalities as well. It will therefore be foolish to put the Assamese middle-class in the same category as the Bengali or the Maharashtrian middle-class and imagine them to have the same traits. The Assamese middle-class still cherishes hopes – some will say illusions – of establishing itself as a dominant national class, while the Bengali middle-class has already resigned itself to playing a subsidiary role, either behind the Indian big bourgeoisie or the working-class. The oppression of the big capital as well, as the unrest among the peasantry have threatened these hopes. At this critical moment it has been surprised by the challenge of the richer and better-educated sections of the immigrants and the tribals. The desperate tactics it has adopted to save the day can never appeal to the democrats. But it is hardly fair to assume that repression is the only proper response to it.

From about 1970 onwards I have been trying, with the help of my friends among the leftists, to fight Assamese chauvinism from a humanitarian and democratic point of view. The struggle has forced me to give some thought to the origin and character of the problem. In 1970 I wrote in an article in Frontier; Roots of Xenophobia in Assam, trying to grasp the misgivings and anxieties behind the chauvinist upsurges. In fact, I even soft-pedalled the chauvinist tendencies there in my sympathy for the underdogs. But the reading did not go deep enough. In 1973 I returned to the question in the wake of the widespread and impassioned movement to make Assamese the sole medium of instruction for higher education. Since the Assamese middle-class was at the helm of affairs in such movements I studied the Origins of the Assamese middle-class in the Social Scientist in August, 1973. Until then it had been the tendency among the leftist intellectuals to consider the different regional middle-classes as identical sections of the all-India petit-bourgeoisie rather than as embryonic regional bourgeoisie, since economic criteria seemed to support the former view. I took the line there that the Assamese middle-class can be better understood as an embryonic bourgeois class stunted in colonial environments and with its progress further blocked by the growth of big capital in India after Independence. Its aspirations for equal development have been frustrated by the monopolistic tendency of Indian big capital, and its semi-feudal moorings have been threatened by rising peasant militancy. The consequent chauvinist reaction of the Assamese middle-class, I concluded, could not be overcome except through prolonged working-class struggles leading the peasantry. But the importance given to the middle-class in that article itself cried aloud for a conclusion that I failed to draw at the time: the regional middle-classes should be sympathetically handled as long as this did not endanger the long-term aims and plans of the working-class. But such a conclusion had more or less been implicit in that reading, as the very first paragraph of the article will show.

While reviewing Amalendu Guha’s Planter Raj to Swaraj in the Economic and Political Weekly in April, 1978, I expressed strong reservations against Guha’s incidental remarks (in an otherwise important and well written book) that one-sidedly blamed Assamese chauvinism. These bear repetition today:

“Thus his treatment necessarily fails to throw any light on the exact relationship between the regional bourgeoisie and the ‘national’ big bourgeoisie. Guha also fails to be sufficiently critical of the class character of the Congress leadership on the national scale. Hence, while he makes much of the chauvinist tendencies in the Assamese middle-class, he is unable to see that this can be connected with the failure of the all-India leadership to solve the national question with wisdom and foresight. The tendency to dominate and browbeat the aspirations of the small national groups was there among a considerable section of the national leadership from the very beginning. Guha does not draw the relevant conclusions from the data supplied by himself… For instance, on many occasions the Assam leadership failed to agree with the views of the national leadership … This may of course be considered in terms of the vested interests of the provincial leaders. But a more pertinent point is the inability of the national leadership to appreciate the difficulties of a neglected, backward and weak national group … Against such a backdrop, the fears and the worries of the Assamese are understandable.”

There is thus no contradiction between my defence of the rights of the minorities in Assam and my plea for a sympathetic approach to the national aspirations of the Assamese. Instead of encouraging minority chauvinism in the interest of short-term political gains, the central government had better urge the minorities to make certain sacrifices and adjustments. On the other hand the Assamese masses should be weaned away from a chauvinist outlook through a sincere implementation of their reasonable and practical demands and firm discouragement of chauvinist perspectives. Leftists can take upon themselves the task of monitoring this programme and prevent it from sliding into apathy in the usual manner. Since the mudslinging cleverly directed against me paints my present position as that of a renegade, I had better quote here what I had written in Economic and Political Weekly on 24 May, 1980:

“All this is true enough, yet it will be lunacy to dismiss the explosion of popular passion as something trivial and useless. Unless the leftist and democratic forces do something about it the tide of feeling will turn against them and sweep them far from their present moorings. For the ardour, the spirit of sacrifice, and the zeal of the participants – thousands upon thousands of them – can scarcely be ignored or overlooked. The backbone of the movement is the militant rural youth …”

That article, thereafter, went on to point out how that militancy had been squandered in fraticidal violence because of the false choices of the leadership. Neither at that time nor at any time later have I found it necessary to support the Assam movement. But a blind hostility to it will not lead to a solution. It may be courage in the eyes of some people to stick to some dogmatic assertions, especially if these are echoed automatically by other people. The sooner one dispenses with this kind of courage, the closer one may move towards the truth of a complicated situation.

Before rounding off this creed I should like to point to certain striking facts to explain why immigration has become such an explosive issue. To forestall the slanders from high-minded leftists I better put on record here that while immigrants in Assam have long been seen as a nuisance, I tried for the first time to correct the picture by quoting official sources and pointing out their services to Assam’s economic growth as early as 1972 (Bastava Swapna, a collection of essays in Assamese). I have also protested recently against the unfortunate slant in the officially sponsored and otherwise well researched Political History of Assam Vol. III, where immigrant Muslims are shown as communal by nature, and where their role has been painted in black. Mrs. Anwara Taimur’s government ignored this protest, probably because it was preferable to let such misunderstandings thrive! but this stand against communalism need not deter us from examining why immigration has assumed the form of a nightmare to the Assamese.

It transpires that 50 per cent of the total population of Goalpara, 33 per cent of the total population of Kamrup district, 49 per cent of total population of Darrang district, 54 per cent of the Nowgong district and 57 per cent of the Dibrugarh district is constituted by people of immigrant origin, i.e. by people who entered Assam in the wake of the British annexation in 1826 (P. 65, unpublished Ph.D thesis by Dr. Manomohan Das in 1980). The great majority of them are yet to accept the Assamese way of life and, indeed, may be persuaded by certain political elements to reject it explicitly eventually. Another facet of the problem is that the proportion of Muslims in Assam rose from nine per cent in 1921 to 23 per cent in 1941. Concurrently there was an increase in communal tensions under indirect government patronage. The proportion of Assamese-speaking people declined from 49.2 per cent in 1911 to 42 per cent in 1931. The present high figures for Assamese speakers in the last census, held in 1971, are largely due to the decision of the immigrant Muslims to declare themselves as Assamese speakers. While the saner sections of the educated immigrants consider the decision irreversible, certain political groups are already canvassing a retreat from that position. All this is bound to increase Assamese fears.

In the late nineteenth century the Assamese gentry supported British plans for colonising the province by immigrants. But by 1920s the tide had turned. Moving a resolution against the continuing immigration in the provincial legislature, Mahadev Sarma, respected Assamese leader and Congressman, said on 23 July 1927: “A piece of land is the only source of wealth for the ordinary people. They have no idea or ideal of industrialism. If, however, no provision is made for preserving lands for future development, our future will be jeopardised for lack of new avenues.” The traditional system of agriculture in Assam and the wellbeing of Assamese peasantry depended on availability of fallow land, for grazing purposes, winter crops, as well as for cultivating plots by rotation. This system was threatened by the arrival on the scene of lakhs of immigrant peasants who squatted upon such land. Nor did the local peasants receive assurance of an alternative. There were increasing clashes between peasants from two communities recorded in confidential official documents. These are events of recent history and may not be ignored in wishy-washy fashion. It would now seem that the compromise arrived at during the long congress rule in the state postponed rather than resolved the crisis.

Once again, let me repeat that I do not support the actual demands of the Assam movement, as I consider them impracticable, inhuman and dangerous. There is no question of pandering to intolerance and aggressiveness. But if peace is to return to this unhappy state, the genuine and longstanding fears of the Assamese people must be set at rest. All the political parties that have realised the danger of progressive alienation of the Assamese, must come together to persuade the various groups settled in Assam against taking inflexible and self-centered positions, and for the moment must give up all thoughts of petty political gain. This will have to include assuring the Assamese of a secure national future, both economic and political, within the Indian federation. The repressive instruments of the state must be used with moderation. Or the hotheads among the youths and the psycopaths among the journalists will hold the saner elements in the grip of fear and lead our people on a suicidal march towards chaos.

K Mark Swer translates & introduces Late Webster Davis Jyrwa’s priceless history of western music in #Khasi Hills & #Shillong

Bah Webster Davis Jyrwa’s prologue to the book ‘Ka Marynthing Rupa’ (The Silver Harp) by L Gilbert Shullai is a much longer piece where he talks about other aspects of Khasi culture, literature etc. The excerpts translated here by Mark Swer only deal with the sections about music. To read the original prologue in Khasi, click here.

INTRODUCTION BY K MARK SWER

Webster Davis Jyrwa’s prologue to L. Gilbert Shullai’s book ‘Ka Marynthing Rupa’ (The Silver Harp) is a rare document.  It could be one of the few surviving testimonies about western music in Shillong from the 1920s through to the 1960s. This is the era that one has grown up hearing about but which one can’t quite seem to put a finger on.  It is all a hazy blur of stories about the foxtrot, the waltz, tea gardens, dance parties, ‘Tommy’ soldiers, their ‘mems’ and their mistresses. Once in a while it is brought alive by our grandparents’ tales about their legendary jams where spoons and forks were turned into percussion instruments and where there was nothing like a tea cask to pump up that bass. And if one was lucky enough one may have witnessed recreations of such jams as a kid when an elderly neighbor would do the foxtrot with your grandaunt as your grandfather’s friends play ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’. The grandfather would make it a point to school you about ‘good music’ at such times and remind you why he bought you that guitar in the first place.  It was a world far removed the alternative pretensions of 90s rock and perhaps even more distant from the ‘flower power’ affectation of our parents. It was fascinating to watch those old folks put such passion into the foxtrot, the waltz, the march, the rumba and to hear about the strange (at least in the limited collective imagination of one’s youth) instruments they used – the viola, the mandolin, the Hawaiian guitar, the clarinet, the maracas and so on. What’s more is that these instruments were always talked about with the names of local masters attached to them as if nothing existed or mattered beyond the alchemy of player and instrument and where no one else but the narrator was allowed to inhabit that space. These maestros were elevated from normalcy but regular enough to dine, wine, hung out with and invariably take pride of place in the jams that people organized at home.

One can now recollect those ‘Down Memory Lane’ type shows that were ubiquitous in the mid to late 1990s where some promoters realized there was money to me made in invoking the past and getting old folks to attend encomiums to the music of their youth.  But the memory lanes by the 1990s had been clogged where the past was an indistinct collective of all acts who evoked even a bit of nostalgia.  So, the songs of Gene Autry were clubbed with those of the Who, Louis Armstrong with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and so on.  In the same way, older musicians like Iris Thomas and Bernard Khongmen were made to share the same stage with less older artists like Headingson Ryntathiang, the Highway band et al without an iota of curation or perspective added to these shows. The 60s were the 40s which were in turn were the swinging 20s, no one cared anymore. As far as the media was concerned everything started with the Great Society with a perfunctory nod given to the Fentones and the Vaudevilles every now and then. By this time Shillong’s collective memory of its musical past had become tangled in a web of misinformation and complacency. It had accepted its storied past without bothering to remember it properly.  And it speaks volumes of our amnesia and myopia that such a thing should come to pass when a rough diamond like Webster Davis Jyrwa’s prologue to L. Gilbert Shullai’s book ‘Ka Marynthing Rupa’ had been published as far back as 1985.

In his foreword to the book, Webster Davis Jyrwa or Bah Webb as he is fondly known gives us an intriguing account of western music in Shillong in the years after the First World War and well into the 1960s.  Bah Webb is the perfect chronicler of that era as he is both an observer and participant in the making of that era’s music. Born in 1923, he is well placed to narrate tales of his forbears like the famed viola player, Bah Ramsong from whom he is probably just a generation removed, and he can also offer his observations on contemporaries like Kelly Lyngdoh and the Tham Sisters with whom he has performed. But more than anything else, as the leader of the Jaiaw Orchestra, he had a ring side view of the emergence and progression of a host of musicians and musical styles of that period. And so it is that he untangles for us the foxtrot from the jive, the rumba from the rock and the orchestra from the beat group and hence releases the names of musicians and their musical instruments long caught in the cobweb of our forgetfulness.

In this account, we start our journey after the First World War when the Khasi Labour Corps retuned from France and Iraq. Bah Webb suggests that this period is seminal though he doesn’t specify how. But we do learn of the viola player named Bah Ramsong whom Bah Webb has no memory of anymore and whose heyday would probably be in the 1920s or earlier. He was probably someone who was part of the Labour Corps or benefitted enough from them to bamboozle “even the ‘Mems’ who were accomplished at the piano” that they “couldn’t keep up with him even though they were following the same music sheet”. Bah Webb then goes on to tell us about a generation of musicians in Shillong who before the Second World War were already playing the Viola, Accordion, Clarinet, Banjo, Ukulele, Flute, Mandolin and Hawaiian guitar and were covering the popular waltzes, marches and dance band tunes of the 20s and 30s. We also learn the name of the local maestros – Kelly Diengdoh, Bah Rishot, Bah Orgheus Pakma, Kong Trilian Pariat, Kong Lenbuit and so on. This is an incredible flowering of musicians who played a wide variety of instruments

Unfortunately, what this account does not refer to is the infrastructure that supported this incredible flowering of musicians, especially before the Second World War.  There are fleeting references to the Shillong Club, Gauhati Cotton College and a few other places but surely these would account only for a few concerts a year at most. So what sustained these musicians and what encouraged them to take up such a wide variety of instruments? Where did they play? Who was the audience? Where did they learn to play these instruments?

At this juncture, one can point to the church, especially the Presbyterian Church, where the missionaries had introduced Welsh hymns (albeit in the local language) to the Khasis as far back as 1842. But as any church historian will tell you, this tradition is largely a vocal one. Important though this vocal tradition is, as it was our introduction to western musical arrangement, it should be noted that there is no definite account of when musical instruments were introduced to church and evangelizing services and most would agree that the Presbyterian Church has been very conservative in the choice of musical instruments that it allows into its services.  According to W.R Laitphlang, a deacon of the Khasi Jaintia Presbyterian Church and one of our earliest music chroniclers, the first instrument allowed in the church was the folding organ which arrived here in the early 1900s. It took another 30 years for the piano to be accepted in church service and as late as the 1960s even the harmless acoustic guitar was still frowned upon when brought into the liturgy of the Presbyterian Church. But the Catholic Church ran by the Salvatorians were more encouraging of musical instruments. Some accounts attribute the introduction of instruments like the viola and mandolin to the Italian and German Salvatorian priests when they set up shop first in the village of Laitkynsew and then later Shillong around 1891.  So it is possible that by the early 1900s Khasi Catholics would have picked up these instruments.

All these dots remain to be connected in a meaningful manner just as how this largely church based exposure and training interacted with the more secular mores of the British army remains to be explored. The army set up a proper base in these hills in 1830 when a sanatorium for British soldiers was set up in Sohra (Cherrapunjee) and by the 1840s there are already stories of a ‘drink and dance set’ emerging around the military station. So the twin western agencies of the cross and the army have had a long time to blend and act on the imagination of their hosts. W.R. Laitphlang in his essay ‘Katto Katne Shaphang Ka Jingrwai’ (A Short Discourse on Music), also mentions that that even before the great earthquake of 1897, such western folk and traditional classics like Auld Lang Syne, Old Folks at Home, Loch Lomond and The Last Rose of Summer were sung among the Khasis. By the Second World War, there were already Khasi bands and musicians who were playing for the entertainment of the soldiers and Bah Webb gives us an account of the time when Shillong was an R & R centre for the British Army. This must have been a particularly formative period for local musicians as they came into contact with British cultural troupes and spent their evenings at the Garrison Theater singing ‘Lay that pistol down’, ‘With someone like you’, ‘White Cliff of Dover’ etc . Bah Webb takes us there and reels off the names of the musicians who emerged along with their instruments, their songs and their achievements. We learn about a Khasi woman (Kong Icydian Swer) who played Hawaiian guitar and also about the Shillong Music School (the town’s first). The timeline becomes a little unclear after this but Bah Webb opens a window for us when he mentions the musicians De Mello, De Suza and the band ‘The Dynamites’ who were led by Mark Fernandes. This interaction between local and Goan musicians is another fascinating insight about which not much is known or at least not much has been documented.

Bah Webb’s prologue to ‘Marynthing Rupa’ also mentions the names of probably the first Khasi musicians to play in Calcutta – Hem Swett and Toto Wahlang. Although much of the stories about the Shillong-Calcutta connection have passed into hyperbole, a lot is still not known about how the connection came to be established in the first place. What were the circumstances that led to the first musicians from Shillong to travel to Calcutta? Were they taken there by the white sahibs or was it a case of them striking it out on their own? How did Trinca’s in Calcutta become much more known in Shillong than say The Jorhat Gymkhana Club which is much closer? What was in Calcutta that the musicians didn’t find in the tea gardens of Assam? Also was the Calcutta of Hem Swett and Toto Wahlang different from the one that Lou Majaw and Eddie Rynjah later inhabited? In this regard, Bah Webb’s account provides us with the earliest link to what become known as the Golden Triangle (the musical exchange between Shillong, Calcutta and Darjeeling) and what would later produce the storied exploits of our musicians.

The section on the Jaiaw orchestra is the most illuminating which is not surprising since Bah Webb was its leader and driving force. But for a small town the sheer scope of the Jaiaw Orchestra’s aspirations boggles the mind. Formed in 1948, the number of musicians, musical instruments and musical styles that it embraced could just make it one of the first ‘big bands’ playing western popular music in the country. At any rate, and without meaning to sound parochial, a string orchestra backed by (and backing) all girl vocal harmony groups playing the Waltz, Rumba, Samba, Tango and Beguine would have been extremely rare in India in the 1940s and 50s.  Since recordings of the early Jaiaw Orchestra are yet to be tracked down, one can only imagine The Tham or The Warbah Sisters transforming a bland version of ‘Mexicali Rose’ (at least the Gene Autry version) by adding layer upon layer of harmony while the violas, mandolins and guitars sizzle and illuminate their voices.

The Jaiaw Orchestra had the musical rigor to rehearse for months on end and the musical literacy to learn songs from pamphlets printed with Staff Notation and Tonic Sol-fa for their big shows (Annual Meet of the Bakisha Sahibs or Tea Garden Balls) and one would imagine that they had acquired a certain degree of musical accomplishment to be covering the popular foxtrot, waltz, tango and beguine tunes of their day. So when their leader speaks of Persing Lyngdoh as the ‘most accomplished piano player among the Khasis’ or when he admires Markos Sawian, Noel Arbor Khongwir, Eugene Rynjah, Siken Swer etc for their exceptional gifts, we’d have to hold his estimation in high regard. But these names are mostly lost to modern Shillong’s (and its hagiographers’) imagination. Isn’t it the bitterest irony of all that a town that likes to call itself ‘Rock Capital’ has largely forgotten or remains ignorant about a period of their history that might actually measure up to some claim of exceptionalism? The Jaiaw Orchestra, the era that shaped it, the musicians that was it influenced by, the ones it nourished, their achievements, their stories, their musical talents – now that is a story. Barring Goa’s rich jazz history, this might well be the only other western popular musical tradition in the country that dates as far back as the 1920s.

The book ‘Marynthing Rupa’ by L. Gilbert Shullai, is in itself an intriguing one because it is a collection of Khasi lyrics (in Appendix A) that he has written to be put to the music of popular western tunes that he has listed in Appendix B. For example, he suggests that his lyric ‘Ki Khun U Hynniewtrep, IaidShaphrang’, listed as number 1 in Appendix A, could be put to the music of ‘Way up down the Swanee River’ listed as number 1 in Appendix B. In this manner he has written 80 Khasi lyric poems and suggested that they be put to the music of the waltzes, folk, country, polka, spirituals and ballads that were popular in their day. Some of the suggestions are rather dubious, like when he suggests that one of lyrics be put to the tune of Rule Britannia. It is unclear, however, whether this juxtaposition of Khasi lyrics and western tunes was ever put into practice and what the author’s intentions were for suggesting such an exercise. But as Bah Webb points out that he is ‘…of the opinion that Khasi tunes would be better suited to accompany some of the lyrics instead of the English tunes’ and in any case L. Gilbert Shullai has allowed composers to lay whatever tunes they see fit over the lyrics.

Also Bah Webb’s prologue to the book is a much longer piece where he talks about other aspects of Khasi culture, literature etc. The excerpts translated here only deal with the sections where he writes about music.

As an ending note, one can’t help but marvel at the names that Bah Webb mentions in his account and how closely they were associated with the early development of western music in Shillong. Some of them had gone on to shape the state’s politics, policies, poetry, folklore etc (not always in a good way) while some had fathered (and mothered) the next generation of musicians, here are some of them:

Ripple Kyndiah, who in Bah Webb’s account was ‘one of the more talented and popular mandolin players’ was also a 3 time Member of Parliament from Shillong, a member of the Meghalaya Legislative Assembly for 23 years and a former Governor of Mizoram.

Bevan L. Swer, part of the group that won the All Assam Inter-college Music Competition in 1959 was also a highly accomplished Khasi poet, author and much respected professor of the North Eastern Hill University.

Sumar Singh Sawian, part of the group that won the All Assam Inter-college Music Competition in 1959, is also a celebrated writer, folklorist and a leading authority on Khasi indigenous culture. He has translated Rabindranath Tagore’s “Gitanjali” into Khasi.

B. Wallang (Bah Toto), who Bah Webb describes as having ‘a natural flair for western music’, was also known as Golden Voice in the Park Street Scene and one of Shillong’s earliest stars. He played saxophone for the seminal beat groups the Fentones and the Vanguards besides being Rudy Wallang’s father.

Kong Stella Rynjah, part time pianist with the Jaiaw Orchestra, was also the first female singer and pianist (western music obviously) to be recorded in All India Radio, Shillong. She is the mother of Eddie Rynjah – one of Shillong’s most well known musicians who achieved fame in the Park Street Scene in Calcutta with the Flintstones and Great Bear. Stella Rynjah retired as a Senior Manager of the Compton Greaves Company.

Bernard Khongmen, referred to as one of the ‘good singers’ in the piece, he retired as a high ranking bureaucrat.

Teddy Pakynteiñ, part of the group that won the All Assam Inter-college Music Competition in 1959, was also one of the first tribal I.A.S officers from Meghalaya.

Ganold S. Massar, part of the group that won the All Assam Inter-college Music Competition in 1959, was also a member of the Meghalaya Legislative Assembly and one of the state’s leading legal practitioners even serving as its Advocate General for a while.

Late Bah Webster Davis Jyrwa’s prologue

One of the ways in which music bewitches you is through the way its rhythm or beat is kept in what is called Timing or Measure – be it a 1 x 1 beat, a 2 x 4 or a 3 x 4 beat like in the Foxtrot, the Waltz, the Rumba, the Samba, the Beguine Tempo, the March. Songs can be set to a high or slow tempo. In days gone by, when Iewduh ¹ was filled to the brim with tailors, one would hear such beats emanating from the rhythmic spinning of the wheels of sewing machines as they’re being controlled by the feet of the conductor or tailor or one could hear it in the ‘Walts’ as mothers are putting their babies to sleep or maybe even as children are performing drills.

These days, it seems that songs are being made just so that young and old alike can pound their feet and dance wildly. As soon as they hear the tunes, they’d start banging crudely on any available table or chair or they’d get up and dance whenever they feel like, as they do in the Jive, Rock or Disco. It seems that our youth especially are making songs where there is no effort to harmonise the music and lyrics. Most of the songs feel forced and haphazard. Sometimes the lyrics don’t make sense and the melodies are a blight to the ear. You can hear in most Khasi Cassettes these days that the lyrics mean one thing and the music something else. As a friend of mine says, it seems like Khasi cassettes these days come as a Three in One package –  the lyrics, the music and the sound of the words come as separate entities and have nothing to do with each other. That is why they are inadequate.

Each and every opening line of the songs featured in this book ‘Ka Marynthing Rupa’ by L. Gilbert Shullai takes me back to the time when western music took root in the flesh and blood of Khasi musicians and when it seemed like the music itself was going to be an integral part of Khasi culture. Perhaps, this was possible because there hadn’t emerged at the time Khasi musicians who were skilled enough to understand the intricacies of songwriting.  In those days, Khasi songs had a very strong mainland Indian influence and they were performed mainly in theatrical shows in places like Jowai, Mawphlang, Mawngap, Marbisu, Sohra, Mawsynram and among the Seng Khasis ² in Mawkhar.

The craze for western music among the Khasis perhaps caught on after the First World War i.e. after 1918 when Khasi soldiers returned from France and Mesopotamia. When the Second World War happened, it enhanced our enthusiasm for western music even further.

When I reminisce about the era before the Second World War, I am flooded by memories of the great musicians of that time. I remember Bah ³ Rishot the Viola player, Bah Destar who played Mandolin, Bah Kelly Diengdoh who was a master of the Viola, Accordion, Clarinet and other instruments, Bah Syndor who played the Clarinet, Bah Jokes the Accordion player, Bah Bishar played Banjo, Bah Baden played Ukulele, Bah Reban played the flute. Then there was Bah Theo Lyngdoh, Bah Soverine, Bah Orgheus Pakma, Bah Owen Rowie, and Kong ⁴ Trilian Pariat who all played the Viola. Bah Vie Swer, Bah Garlile Diengdoh and Kong Lenbuit played Hawaiian guitar while Bah Din Swer played the mandolin.

I remember Bah Kelly Lyngdoh playing the song ‘Ramona’ in the dead of the night in the streets of Jaiaw and one would see the lights coming on through the windows just so people can listen to the melody coming out of his Viola while Bah Syndor blew the clarinet. I’ve heard what the dexterous fingers of Bah Rishot Khongwir could do with the Viola and similarly what Bah Destar Khongwir could do with the mandolin and I’ve had the chance to accompany them on songs like “South of the Border”, “Little Girl of my dream”, “After the Ball”, “Merry Widow”, “Three O’clock in the Morning”, “Colonel Boogie” and many others. At that time I was honing my skills as a Mandolin and Viola player.

It is pleasing to remember how those greats took pains to gain proficiency first, to the extent of learning how to read sheet music, before they made themselves known to the public. They were free, broad minded thinkers and never stood in anyone’s way. Music, at that time, was cheerfulness for oneself and merriment to be shared with others. Even when these musicians played in the streets no one would say or do anything unpleasant. There were those among them who when not sufficiently ‘warmed’ or not having gotten into the spirit of things yet would not play at all or would just fiddle with the strings. One gentleman recalls an incident that took place when these musicians were invited to play at the Shillong Club at a time when its members were mostly white. At the end of the show, when the chowkidar was cleaning up the bottles he found quite a few of them without labels and which had been corked with banana leaves. ⁵

In the years that followed, there emerged a highly skillful Viola player by the name of Besterwel Soanes. People tell the story about the concert that Bah Besterwel played in Gauhati Cotton College and how all the acts that followed him had to be cancelled because the crowd wanted him to play all night long.

The Viola player who surpassed all other Khasi musicians was Bah Ramsong but he passed away when I was very young so I have no memory of him and I never heard him play. But people say that when Bah Ramsong played, even the ‘Mems’  who were accomplished at the piano couldn’t keep up with him though they were following the same music sheet.  He could play even the most difficult Classical pieces because of his mastery of staff notation.  Shouldn’t we be building a memorial in the name of this genius who has surpassed all others and the likes of whom we will never see again especially now that imitation is rife and music is played without any understanding of it basics?  (I mean staff notation and Tonic Sol Fa)

In the years 1939-45 when the Second World War took place, white soldiers – the Johnies and the Tommies, arrived in Shillong and the enthusiasm for western music in the city got a revival. At this time a British musical and theatrical troupe called ENSA came to Shillong to entertain the troops stationed here. Almost every night there would be music and entertainment at the Garrison Theater Cantonment which also included a screening of English films. A large Khasi contingent would throng to the Garrison Theater Cantonment not to watch the films but to soak in the music and entertainment there and also to participate in a sing along which took place in the cinema hall. Before the show started there would always be a sing along of the popular tunes of the day like You are my sunshine, Lily Marlane, Sierra Sue, Goodnight Irene, Lay that pistol down, With someone like you, White Cliff of Dover, Slow boat to China, Home on the range, My wild Irish Rose, Rose of Tralee.

This period also saw the emergence of many talented and popular Khasi musicians like Bah John Shome, Bah Hebress Marbaniang, Kong Semina, Bah Rosbell Chyne, Bah Gretan Sun, Bah Richard Nalle, Bah Beriwell Kyndiah, Bah Lebi, and Bah Filkin Laloo who all played the Viola. There were mandolin players like Bah Noel Arbor Khongwir and Lursingh Jyrwa and also Bah Thomlin, Bah Kynsai Nalle and Kong Icydian Swer who played Hawaiian Guitar. Bah Cyril Lyngdoh and Bah Harvey played Spanish Guitar. It was also around this time that Bah Andreas Shome opened the Shillong Music School in the locality of Umsohsun. This was the first school to impart musical training and a lot of people benefitted from it. But when Bah Andreas Shome passed on the school also closed down and there hasn’t been another one ever since.

John Shome played in many concerts where his musicianship was clearly displayed. Bah Gretan Sun had incredibly soft hands. Bah Noel Arbor Khongwir was perhaps the best mandolin player of his time and I used to listen to him playing in ‘Peak Hour’ where he played the Tango in pieces like ‘Jealousy’ and ‘La Cumparsita’ along with De Mello bad De Suza. Bah P.Ripple Kyndiah was also one of the more talented and popular mandolin players.  We performed together in a concert once at Dinam Hall, along with Kong Trilian, Bah Orpheus, Kong Semina, and Richard Nalle, which left the audience mesmerized. A lot of great singers also emerged after the Second world war like Bah Jes Nongkynrih who could sing all night accompanied by his guitar and he really had the English songs of the time down pat. I still remember the tunes that he favoured like “Sheik of Araby”, “Slow boat to China”, “I’ll get by”, “Lay that pistol down”, “Come on and hear” and a few more.  Bah Jes could entertain even with just two stings left on his guitar.

There were also singers like Hem Swett who excelled as a Tenor Voice. Bah Hem had a mellifluous voice and he could sing high pitched songs by Slim Whitman like “Indian Love Call” and “China Doll” and “May Time” by Nelson Eddie and Janet Macdonald. They say that when he sang and played piano in one of the big hotels in Calcutta, the white audience would just shake their heads in amazement. And who can forget the beautiful voice of Siken Swer who could hit the highest note on the octave unerringly. I remember, when he was younger, Bah Siken used to sing ‘Ave Maria’ in Italian and he would deliver it with such ‘expression’ and emotion that even the Catholic priests would be amazed. There was no problem with his pronunciation of the words and it felt like listening to a Viola piece. Then there was A.B. Wahlang better known as Bah Toto playing in the big clubs in Calcutta; he had a natural flair for western music and his name would grace the English papers very often.  In the later years there emerged a band called ‘The Dynamites’ who were quite good and played together for a while.

In the year 1948, a group of young musicians from Jaiaw got together and formed the musical collective called ‘Jaiaw Orchestra’. I was chosen as its leader and I worked tirelessly for many years to shape it and lead it.  The first members of the orchestra were:

1. Bah Bonarwell Lyngdoh – Viola and Guitar.
2. Bah Harold Nongkynrih – Mandolin, Ukulele and Viola.
3. Bah Everland Syiemlieh – Mandolin, Piano, Accordion.
4. Bah Kyndwer Khongwar – Viola.
5. Bah Rosswel Chyne – Viola.
6. Bah Soken Kharshandi – Spanish Guitar and Banjo.
7. Bah Betterland Syiemlieh – Spanish Guitar.
8. Bah H.Methington – Hawaiian Guitar
9. Bah Arthur Warren – Harmonica and Drums.
10. Bah Hubert Dkhar – Spanish Guitar.
11. Bah Mawrong Kharsati – Spanish Guitar and Banjo.
12. Bah Borwin Nongrum – Maracas and Guitar.
13. Bah Osland Nongrum – Viola.
14. Bah John Ryntathiang – Viola.
15. Bah Sainmanik Syiemlieh – Spanish Guitar.
16. Bah Clader Rynjah – Spanish Guitar.

Beside their playing duities, Sainmalik Syiemlieh and Calder Rynjah were also singers. Later the following musicians also joined us:-

17. Bah Marshal Blah – Viola.
18. Bah Fredie Cholas (from Riatsamthiah) – Spanish Guitar.
19. Bah Dodo (from Laban) – Spanish Guitar.
20. Bah Orlando (from Mawlai) – Spanish Guitar.
21. Bah Phil Lyngdoh – Spanish Guitar.
22. Bah Horil – Viola.
23. Bah Diren Swett – Viola.
24. Bah Aibor Lyngdoh – Spanish Guitar.
25. Bah Defend War – Viola.

Apart from these regular members, there were also those who joined us during concerts, like –

1. Bah Pires – Drums.
2. Kong Stella Rynjah – Piano.
3. Kong Eugene Rynjah – Piano
4. Bah Phersingh Lyngdoh – Piano

The Tham Sisters – Deidora, Ivora and Balmora – were one of the best singers of the time and they would sing with the Jaiaw Orchestra even though they weren’t regular members. The Jaiaw Orchestra existed for many years. It would organize concerts to raise funds for hospitals, schools and victims of natural disasters. It would celebrate its anniversary every year. The opening numbers at these concerts would be “Danawelin” or “Waves of the Danube” and the closing number would be “Look for the Silver lining” where all the singers and musicians would join in.

The Orchestra specialized in western styles like the Waltz, Rhumba, Samba, Tango, Beguine, Quick Step, Slow Step and many more. Along with the music and under the guidance of B.R Dohling, it also brought out short plays like “Discovery” and “Bishop’s Candlesticks”. The Tham Sisters accompanied us often in our concerts and the beauty and harmony of their voices meant that the audience would never tire of hearing them sing “Harbour Lights”, “My Happiness”, “Souvenir”, “Juanita”, “Sweet Marie”, “Mexicali Rose” and a few others.

Similarly, Sainmanik Syiemlieh and Clader Rynjah were singers with great voices and energy who could really express themselves, i.e. their heads and hearts always worked in tandem. Sainmanik Syiemlieh would regularly sing – “I love those dear hearts”, “Have I told you lately”, “Broken Hearts” while Clader Rynjah favoured  “Damino”, “Begin the Beguine”, “Delilah” and a few others.

Around this time, there also emerged a young singer from Jaiaw – Markos Sawian- who had a silky, honeyed voice and who could carry difficult songs by the Platters like “Only You”, “Twilight Time”, “Great Pretender” etc.

The Warbah Sisters, Merinda, Itymon and Liomon Warbah, were another highly regarded group with a wonderful blend of voices.  They would join the Jaiaw Orchestra on numbers like “Lightning Express”, “My Lonely Footsteps”, “Carolina Moon” “Tennessee Waltz” and a few other songs.

In those years, I would also take the more accomplished musicians and singers from the Orchestra to play in the ‘Annual Meet’ of the Bakisha Sahibs in the big clubs of Assam. These were Bonerwell Lyngdoh (Guitar), Everland Syiemlieh (Piano, Accordion), John Ryntathiang (Viola) and Arthur Warren (Drums). I had also taken with us on these trips two very gifted musicians – Noel Arbor Khongwir (Mandolin) and Miss Eugene Rynjah (Piano).

Before playing at these clubs we would rehearse many songs for months on end focusing specially on newer songs. At that time we would get songs in pamphlets sent from Calcutta and Bombay which were printed with Staff Notation and Tonic Sol-fa. We would prepare hundreds of songs in styles like the Waltz, Rumba, Samba, Tango, Foxtrot, Beguine and Reel and we had to be ready to play any song requests by the members of these clubs. Along with the musicians mentioned above, we would also take Sainmanik Syiemlieh and Clader Rynjah as our singers. The English songs featured in the book ‘Marynthing Rupa’ are just a small sample of the many songs that we played at that time.

We had to be well prepared and really adept because we were playing western music for a western audience. To play western music for a Khasi audience is one thing; it’s like being a lion in the company of wolves but to stand proud as a lion amongst a pride? Well, you understand.

In those times, there were a lot of good singers like A.B.Wahlang (Bah Toto) who played even in Calcutta’s big clubs and then there was Peter Shylla, Herman Lyngdoh, Bernard Khongmen, Lok Jyrwa and a few others.

A piano player who often accompanied the Jaiaw Orchestra was Phersing Lyngdoh. He was the most accomplished piano player among the Khasis and could play any piece from the sheet because of his command over staff notation but he could also play even the most difficult pieces by ear.

Another singer we shouldn’t forget is Phrangsngi Kharlukhi. His forte was not English songs but he had an ability to mimic even wind instruments with his voice. I remember him singing like Bing Crosby in one of the All Assam Inter-College Music Competitions in Gauhati where he had the audience in his thrall and in the end they were chanting “Phrangki”, “Phrangki”. Then there was also Bransley Marbaniang and Khain Maink Roy who were fine crooners in their own right.

When we turn to the Khasi songs in ‘Marynthing Rupa’, we can’t help but admire the songwriting skill of Bah Gilbert Shullai because it’s never easy to create and especially so at the rate that he’s done it. To simply turn English songs into Khasi ones is one thing but to make your own material requires a special gift. When I say gift, I mean the imagination and the ability to excel at whatever one does. Here I might point something out – there are people who write books but when one interacts with them one finds no wisdom but just a mere possession of facts. But there are those whose wisdom transcends the printed page and when one picks their brains one will find ideas and thoughts that contributes to the benefit of others, be it in making music or producing texts.

Bah Gilbert, though we’ve never seen or heard him play, is a great lover of music and song. I remember Bah Gilbert as one of the volunteers who helped organize the All Assam Inter-College Music Competition in Tezpur in the year 1959. I recall going as a Judge (along with Bah H. Teslet Pariat and Bah Nando E Wankhar) to that All Assam Inter-college Music Competition, which would make it about 35 years ago. There were some Khasi students representing various different colleges under Gauhati University who were in competition like Sumar Singh Sawian, Newland Sohliya, Teddy Pakynteiñ, Ganold S. Massar, Bevan L. Swer, Neston Dkhar and Densil Lyngdoh. Besides competing individually they also competed as a group and won the Trophy for best group. This trophy still stands in my house as a testament to the musical gifts of that special group of young men. I am yet to remember young Khasis ever winning such a title and taking home a trophy like that. While we were still in Tezpur for the Inter College Music Competition we also played at the Mental Hospital and the Baptist Mission Hospital there.

I’ve examined the lines and lyrics of the songs in KA MARYNTHING RUPA and I’m of the opinion that Khasi tunes would be better suited to accompany some of the lyrics instead of the English tunes that have been suggested. But mind you, Bah Gilbert himself has afforded songwriters the freedom to put down whatever musical arrangements they see fit.   There are songs, though, that go quite well with the arrangements laid down in the book. To cite an example, let us take the song “Colonel Bogey” or “Bridge over the River Kwai”, tunes that most are familiar with, and place over them these lines that I had written some time back:

Shaphrang

Ki Khun U Hynniewtrep

Shaphrang
Ka um ka ding ia ia phi kim khang,
Lada phi iaid lang
Phi ia tylli bad ryntih lang.

Shirup
Shirup u lai ko Khon ka Ri
Naduh Rilang haduh Kupli
Ban skhem la riti
Ban sah nam burom
Ban im ka Ri.

This song will serve well as an anthem to rouse up collective enthusiasm in public gatherings that are held to celebrate our regional identity. Or take the tune of “Ramona” and place these words over it:

Lanosha,
Ki por b’la leit kin wan pat

Lanosha,
Phin wan ummat jong nga kin rngat
Sa tang ha jingphohsniew
Ia dur bhabriew jong phi nang i,
Ban da don ki thapniang
Sha kut pyrthei nga ruh ngan jngi

Lanosha,
Ki lum ba jrong kin hiar madan

Lanosha,
Phin wan ia nga nangne ban tan
Sha Ri ba suk ban im bad phi baroh shirta
Lanosha – iathuh seh – ia nga.

When one sings the song this way there is just a right balance between the tune and the words to enable the singer to find the required emotion and ‘expression’ that I had written about earlier. There were a lot of English tunes that we had turned into Khasi songs in the time after the World War but their names escape me mow.  What I can remember is the song – “When Whip-poor-wills Call” being translated like this:

Ha la i ïingtrep ba kynjah marwei,

Duitara kynud sngewsynei.
Ki khla ki dngiem ki kitbru bad ki ñiangkynjah
Sawdong i ïingtrep ki wan kynoi thiah.

The songs in KA MARYNTHING RUPA will not only delight readers and musicians but they’ll help enrich the understanding of one’s own land, the land I love – The Land Where Our Forefathers Bled. I respect Bah Gilbert for reminding us old folks once again about the times gone by – The Days of the Golden Past – and for imparting more knowledge about our land through the words and verses contained in these songs. I hope that Bah L.Gilbert Shullai will continue to do research and write books to advance our culture – Khasi Culture.

Webster Davies Jyrwa,
Retired Senior Station Director,
All India Radio
and
Member, Plan Projects Committee,
National Academy of Arts,
New Delhi.

Dated Jaiaw Langsning,

Shillong

The 15^th October 1984.

Notes:

1. Meghalaya’s biggest traditional market
2. Followers of the traditional Khasi faith
3. The Khasi honorific for men
4. The Khasi honorific for women
5. Local toddy is usually sold in bottles without labels and corked with banana leaves

 It should also be noted that names of the songs mentioned in this account may not necessarily correspond to their original names. For example, ‘When Whip-poor-wills call’ could well be the song ‘My Blue Heaven’ by Walter Donaldson and the same goes for ‘Danawelin’, ‘Damino’ etc

Like all histories, this is not a definitive story. If you have similar stories, documents, photographs to share, please send them to raiotwebzine@gmail.com

A video was recently circulated around the usual social media outlets featuring a man singing Dylan’s ‘Lay Lady Lay’.

It was a recording of a live performance, probably in the mid 90s, in a Dylan tribute show and like the recording itself the performance was imperfect – the accompanying guitar seemed a little off and the voice singing it sounded unsure. It was as if the singer was searching for something, trying to remember an ability that he once had. But every once in a while he’d hit his stride and smile to himself, as if happy that the old gift hadn’t completely left him. Looking back now, it is a performance at once soulful and touching yet immensely sad, as we witness an artist working with just the bare bones of a skill that he once possessed in abundance.

Flash back to a fete in the late 80s. The venue was Assam Club in Laban and its lawns were decked with stalls offering people ways to make or lose money. Men and women were trying to fish for a beer or throwing hoops around soaps and perfumes while children burst balloons with an air rifle.

Bah Eddie, Ma Eddie or simply Eddie Rynjah is considered by most – layman and musician alike – to be one of the most distinctive talents that this town has ever produced. That baritone could accommodate a range from Lemmy to Dylan, pour soul into worn out classics and all with the stage swagger of a man born to be on it – which is not surprising because he comes from a rich lineage indeed. Edward Raymond Rynjah was born on October 16, 1948 to Stella Rynjah, the first western music artist to be recorded in All India Radio, Shillong who was also a piano player with the Jaiaw Orchestra – one of the country’s finest and first string and horn ensembles. Eddie Rynjah’s uncles, Peter, David and Jimmy Rynjah, were the founders of one of Shillong’s earliest rock/beat groups, the Vaudevilles.

Eddie’s musical education would’ve started at a very early age when his mother Stella, as her daughter Yvonne would tell me, would never waste an opportunity to light up family gatherings with renditions of jazz classics of the day on the family piano. It’s no surprise, therefore, that Eddie picked up the guitar early and his first stage performance, at age 13, was also a family affair with his uncles in the Vaudevilles. Yvonne fondly remembers her younger brother crooning ‘Shooting Star’ by Cliff Richards on his coming out.

Eddie, YC, YS and YO

It was a blustery day in the summer of 2016 when I had tea with Yvonne Rynjah and before us were laid out the assorted newspaper cuttings, photocopied magazine articles, photographs, obituaries and even a memento prepared by the Guwahati band Month’s Mind that Yvonne had collected over the years as a memorial to her younger brother. She recalled their childhood in the home of her musician mother and her Irish father, Carlyle Edward Young – a soldier in the British Army who stayed back after Independence with his new family in Shillong. Yvonne struggles to recall what her father did for a living but remembers her mother leading the family by taking up odd jobs until she landed one with the Crompton Greaves Company. It was a great opportunity but also a conundrum as it meant that she would have to move to one of the company’s bases in Khulna (now in Bangladesh). It isn’t clear if Stella was given the option of taking her family along but in any case, her mother, Hesina Rynjah, stepped in and asked her daughter to pursue her career thereby taking up the mantle of raising her grand kids herself.

Eddie and his siblings attended junior school at Dr. Graham’s Homes in Kalimpong, Darjeeling. So their early schooling along with their mixed parentage meant that Yvonne, Yvette, Yolanda and Eddie Rynjah spent their early years in a very Anglo atmosphere. But this fact doesn’t allow one to make the facile connection that an Anglo upbringing and schooling was the direct result of Eddie’s tilt towards western music. If anything, Yvonne remembers, the strict, Protestant atmosphere afforded Eddie no liberties with music whatsoever. He never exhibited any musical skill there nor was he encouraged to do so. His only contact with music at this formative time was when he came back home for the winter holidays. The Kalimpong chapter didn’t last long as their grandmother decided that she wanted them closer to home and Eddie resumed his 6^th standard in the Government Boys’ School in Mawkhar. Yvonne remembers being baffled by her grandmother’s decision at the time but now she smiles and tells me that even after all these years, she still can’t make sense of the contradictions that this remarkable woman embodied.

Kong Hesina Rynjah was strong willed and old-fashioned to the point that she would follow her grand-daughters to college to make sure that they were on the up and up. Yvonne and her sisters had to resort to hide and seek games to avoid their spying granny with shop keepers around the college serving as look outs for them. But she never left them in need of anything and encouraged Eddie, just like she did her daughter Stella, to pursue music by buying him his first guitar – it was a gift for passing his Matriculation exams. As dynamic and pioneering as his mother Stella was, she was less of an influence on Eddie Rynjah than his hard headed and somewhat conservative grandmother. I ask Yvonne if Eddie received special attention for being the only male in the family and she sips her tea thinking. She agrees that it was probably inevitable for Eddie to be sort of special for the family but their grandmother never let the sisters feel that way on an everyday level. Eddie for his part, Yvonne says, was a loving kid who loved to tease his sisters by referring to them by their initials – YC (Yvonne Clarissa), YS (Yvette Susan) and YO (Yolanda Olivia) – something that he continued to do till his last days.

The Artist as a Young Man

Eddie, as mentioned, was already doing the circuit with the Vaudevilles by age 13, handling bass guitar and backup singing duties. This was the early to mid 60s but the Vaudevilles were still a dressy band with their slick hair, sharp dinner jackets and pencil ties – more Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons than the Stones or the Beatles. The Jaiaw Orchestra had been playing the Waltz, Rumba, Samba, Tango and Beguine since 1948, so the Vaudevilles were already Shillong’s second or third generation pop musicians. They would play at weddings, jam sessions, college shows and developed enough of a reputation for people to develop personalized post cards for them. But as a collective they were like a revolving door of musicians flitting in and out with Peter and David Rynjah as the only constants. This meant that his uncles would call on Eddie whenever there was a slot to be filled. He didn’t play too many shows with them but whenever he did, he looked and sounded the part. Yvonne says that their grandmother wasn’t happy with Eddie spending too much time with music but he had a clever way of using tantrums to get his way.

His mother Stella, in the meantime, was moving up the Crompton Greaves ladder and was soon promoted to a managerial position in Calcutta. According to Yvonne, her father Carlyle found employment as a jockey in the Calcutta Maidan but his marriage to Stella ended after that. Stella would visit her kids once a year and soon she would be accompanied by a Goan man, whom Eddie and his sisters ended up calling ‘Papa Joe’. It’s not clear what Stella’s attitude to her son’s musical inclinations were but she was determined that he would pick up a skill other than the guitar. So after his matriculation, she set him up to join an engineering apprenticeship course in Calcutta. Yes, the Calcutta of the 60s! Man, did she send him to the wrong place.

By the 60s, what become known as the Golden Triangle (the musical exchange between Shillong, Calcutta and Darjeeling) had already developed. Hem Swett, Toto Wallang and Lou Majaw had already blazed a trail and as Rudy Wallang would recall ‘entering Park Street then is like entering Times Square now’. Rudy tells me about the lights, the pubs, bars and musical joints of Park Street in the 60s – Trinca’s, Blue Fox and Moulin Rouge to name a few.

He remembers the sharply dressed people, the sailors, Anglo-Indians, Jews, Europeans and Armenians. On any given day, there would be cabaret, magic shows, ventriloquism, stand-up comic acts, even fire-eating and, of course, music. Calcutta’s prolific night life was centred on Park Street and some have described it as the ‘Broadway of India’. Toto Wallang, was then the toast of the Park Street Scene earning the moniker ‘Golden Voice’. So when the Park Street Scene hit peak season, Bah Toto would be invited to play and was provided with the best facilities that the scene could offer. Rudy recalls being put up with his parents in an apartment complex called ‘Kanani Mansions’ in Park Street and there was a car to drive his father to and from his gigs. Rudy would receive gifts from ‘uncle Joshua’ (Ellis Joshua, the man who ran Trinca’s) by day and in the evenings, he would watch his father enthrall an audience at the joint – filled with Calcutta’s English speaking elite, expats and ‘shippies’. So this was the possibility when Eddie Rynjah, age 18, arrived in Calcutta.

He wasted no time in dropping out of his engineering apprenticeship course and hit the Park Street Scene running – an action that would result in a major falling out with his mother. Yvonne tells me about Stella informing their grandmother on the phone and swearing that she will wash her hands off her errant son. At this point, the details of ER’s life in Calcutta become a little hazy as he immersed himself in the Park Street Scene and had irregular contact with his family in Shillong.

Nondon remembers that Eddie could be enigmatic – shy and withdrawn one minute but easy going with a sharp sense of humour and an eye for the ladies the next. What was constant was an electric stage presence, especially when he sang. Park Street attracted glamour and glamorous women like Moon Moon Sen and Manjula Sinha frequented it. Eddie is said to have had ‘close friendships’ with both these women. Yvonne tells us that he also lived with an Anglo Indian lady named Kitty and had a daughter named Natalie with her. Nondon says that Eddie sang infrequently for Great Bear, so his prominence in the scene must have come from his work as a solo artist. But the dots on this one are yet to be connected at this point.

Anyway, it seemed that Eddie was living a musician’s dream and Great Bear was really going places. Apart from scorching the Park Street Scene, in 1970, they were also finalists of the country’s premier rock platform at the time – the Simla Beat Contest. They were on the road often and they travelled first class. Nondon remembers a particularly hilarious incident on one of their travels. They were on a train and had closed the door of their compartment for a drink when someone knocked. It turned out to be a cop but Eddie took the uniform to be that of a train sweeper’s. So drink in hand, he tells the cop ‘Andar ao aur aacha se saaf karo’ (Come on in and clean up properly).

Eddie Rynjah would go on to achieve whatever fame that Park Street could offer and Nondon Bagchi says that he was as close to being a household name as any musician of that scene. But this was also a limited scene driven by Calcutta’s position as India’s premier eastern port and I suppose a few decades was as long as it could’ve run. People have attributed a lot factors to the decline of the Park Street Scene – the Naxalite movement, the flight of corporate munificence and the Anglo-Indian community, a higher entertainment tax regime and a more militant cultural morality. What we know is that as the fortunes of Park Street dwindled, so did Eddie’s patience with the city. Nondon recalls Eddie getting drunk at a party and repeatedly saying that he wanted to go home. Nondon thought he meant his place in Calcutta but realized later that Eddie meant going back to Shillong.

So it was that he bid adieu to his mates at Great Bear and headed back home. Great Bear later became High and went on to achieve great critical acclaim – they are now regarded as one of the most influential Indian bands ever. Eddie would meet up with High again only in 1984 when the band played Mokokchung in Nagaland and Nondon remembers that they had a pretty lively jam session.

The Abode of Doubts

The Shillong that Eddie Rynjah left behind was vastly different from the one that he stepped into. First of all, it was no longer the capital of Assam but the seat of a small hill state called Meghalaya. Its tribal identity was strongly being asserted and in a few years the riots of 1979 would hit the town.

As always, though, his family was there to help out and the man who blooded him into the Vaudevilles, Peter Rynjah, this time too helped him set up The Super Sound Factory along with Pete Khongmen and a few others. (Lou Majaw was also associated at some point with the band). The appeal of Park Street helped as Eddie Rynjah was seen by many as someone who had made it in Calcutta and legends grew around his escapades there (musical and otherwise). Anyway, they started small playing church and school fetes at first but slowly graduated to the more robust jam sessions at the Pinewood Hotel. Along the way they even won a few beat contests and gradually built a loyal following with their blend of Dire Straits, Pink Floyd and Cat Stevens. Eddie’s deep, distinctive voice cut himself out from the rest of the pack and people would often compliment an upcoming singer by saying ‘you sound like Eddie Rynjah’.

But Eddie Rynjah was changing – he got a job with the State Electricity Board and married Judith Rymbai, with whom he’d have four children. Stylistically too, he was becoming more of a solo artist who wanted to explore the moodiness of people like Cat Stevens and Gordon Lightfoot than to play out the usual rock band repertoire. More tragically, though, he started hitting the bottle more than he needed to.

Despite his lively stage demeanour, Eddie was a private person who chose a close circle of friends over a gathering and it was to this circle that he retreated more and more. Was it that he lost interest? Cushioned by a regular job, did he lose his fire? Or more interestingly, did he lack an outlet to express himself? The music scene at this point was almost entirely ‘covers’ only. Yes, Great Society made ‘Dance Your Ass Off’ but to no great effect. Shillong didn’t want its own artists, it wanted a slice of the ‘western’ pie and the purpose of musicians at that time was to make people realize that fantasy. Nothing could’ve been more dreary than listening to locally made music.

Eddie Rynjah wrote his own material and some reports suggest that he even tried putting together something called ‘It’s you I came here for’. It’s not clear whether this is a collection of songs and there are suggestions that he did record something but despite his sister Yvonne’s best efforts, this material can’t be located anymore. So, did he become disillusioned by the limitations of a small town and never quite got over the lights of Park Street? I asked Yvonne all these questions but she has no answers, only memories.

She tells me that Eddie didn’t give up completely. He went on to form bands called New Era and Blue Sky but decided that it was best to stick to himself backed by a band. On the side, he also formed an all employee band for the State Electricity Board called ‘Powerhouse’. Apparently, the Director, V.S Jaffa played a hand in this and also in organizing the band to go around town singing Christmas Carols on the back of a truck.

Was Eddie Rynjah an accidental pioneer of what is such a common sight (or eyesore) now? But this was no more the man who cut his teeth at Park Street. It would seem at this point that Eddie had drifted into a kind of stupor – on the one hand, the misleading comfort of the patronage and praise of his bosses, colleagues and hanger-ons and, on the other, the seduction of the bottle. The audience too had changed and concert goers were no more of Eddie’s generation. It was the era of ‘hair metal’ and Shillong didn’t escape it – for a Scorpions and Def Leppard in the west there was a Rock Galaxy and Living High here. People would respectfully listen to ‘Ma Eddie’ but they were also just waiting for the time when bands playing ‘their’ music would come on. Eddie would try to adapt but how many ‘Killed by Deaths’ could he accommodate? The music concert experience hadn’t been as compartmentalized as it is now, so a man who should’ve been playing for 50 year old parents was baring his soul instead to their long haired kids in their skin tight jeans and double breasted leather jackets.

Three Pines

Through it all though, he never lost his sense of humour – playing the truant brother to YC, YS and YO and even tried his hand at a game that he loved, cricket. He was too old to play, so he managed the 3 Pines Cricket Club and went on to win quite a few trophies with them. As a manager, he clearly belonged to the tough love school and wasn’t afraid to browbeat his players with that baritone. Members of the club still can’t help laughing at Ajit Malakar, a young player who was terrified of Eddie Rynjah. Young Ajit, as the story goes, finally got a chance to make the first XI and played as a wicket keeper. So when he took his first catch, he immediately turned to Eddie and said ‘Bah Eddie, catch pakar liya’ (Bah Eddie, I’ve taken a catch). Incensed, Eddie shouted back ‘Arre, hum ko kyun bol raha hai? Buddhu, appeal kar’. (Why are you telling me? Idiot, start appealing). His interest in the game was apparently quite serious, so it would have been something for him to collect the Runner’s up trophy for the Cricket for Peace tournament organized by the YMCA in 1988. The trophy was presented by none other than Sunil Gavaskar himself.

Eddie Rynjah never really withdrew from his family or his immediate community in Laban. Old wounds had healed and Eddie was always there when his mother Stella visited. She had retired as a Senior Manager with Crompton Greaves and spent her old age with ‘Papa Joe’ in the United States. Old photographs also show Eddie as a contented man when he was with his extended family and he continued to play whenever a community occasion came calling.

The name Eddie Rynjah was still known and respected around the country, so when the Rock Street Journal attempted to codify ‘Indian Rock’ with their compilation albums and shows, they naturally zeroed in on Lou Majaw and Eddie Rynjah as the north eastern representatives. We all know that Lou Majaw’s ‘Sea of Sorrow’ was featured on the Great Indian Rock 1 compilation but their deal with Eddie Rynjah is not quite clear. Some reports suggest that he was invited to play on RSJ’s first ever Great Indian Rock (GIR) show that was to be held on April 19, 1997 in Calcutta, others say that his songs too were to be featured on the GIR 2 compilation. Sadly, the first would not be possible and the second just never happened. Eddie’s family says that the RSJ people never got back to them. I ask Yvonne how Eddie felt about RSJ’s interest and she says that he was excited to get something on tape but fate had other plans. Eddie Rynjah died on 12^th March, 1997 due to complications related to alcohol. He was 49.

Many afflicted musicians before and after him have died younger but the tragedy with Eddie Rynjah was that he lived long enough to realize his immense potential but either chose not to or was not allowed to – or both.

Some of his children took after him but they sing strictly for the Lord and of the generation of his grand nephews and nieces only one has taken up music seriously – Debra (Demi) Martina Rynjah, his sister Yvonne’s granddaughter. Yvonne remembers Demi’s first performance at a community youth week where she sang Eric Clapton’s ‘Tears in Heaven’. Who else would teach her that song but old Eddie Rynjah himself.

PS: Shortly after his 1^st death anniversary, Eddie’s family organized a tribute concert for him. It was well attended by the music fraternity and fans from Shillong and outside, including his old friend Nondon Bagchi.

For years, a needless ideological battle has been fought in India. The root of the debate is a seemingly irrelevant question – Did the ancient Indian “Vedic” civilisation originate in India or did it come to India from outside?

To most rational people, this would seem to be a non-issue. Does it even matter? Indian culture today is what it is. A study of its origins and roots is interesting, but it shouldn’t change the way Indians look at themselves or their cultural practices.

However, to one particular group of people, the origins of Indian culture, equated by them to “Vedic” culture, is of crucial ideological importance.The people and organisations loosely affiliated under the generic “Hindutva” umbrella are very keen to establish that Vedic culture originated in India and was not imported into the South Asian region by an external group of people. It seems to be a point of pseudo-nationalistic pride with them and nothing more. Even to devout Hindus who believe in Vedic scriptures, myths and rituals, it should not matter a whit whether Vedic culture was indigenous to India or not. As I said before, Indian culture is what it is. There is no need to make its exact origin a point of pride. And yet that’s the way the Hindu right-wing has chosen to play it.

When I was growing up, I learnt in my history books about the Indus Valley Civilisation that existed from about 3300 BCE to 1300 BCE, with its mature period between 2600 BCE and 1600 BCE. The culture of this civilisation was suggested to be Dravidian. I also learnt about the ‘Aryan Invasion Theory’, which held that a different race of people from Central Asia or the Middle East invaded India, destroyed the Indus Valley Civilisation, drove the Dravidians to the South of the country, and settled in the North. They brought with them a different culture, including a different set of gods and religious rituals (the Vedic culture). Over time, there was some cultural and genetic cross-pollination between the two groups, but the predominant genetic/racial and cultural divide of Aryan versus Dravidian remains in India today as North Indian versus South Indian.

That’s what I learnt at school, and so did the rest of my generation. In addition to what was taught in textbooks, I learnt from observing politics that some South Indian politicians (notably belonging to the “Dravidian” parties of Tamil Nadu) accused “upper-caste” people even in South India of being Aryans. So the popular discourse seemed to uneasily entertain (if not fully accept) the idea that India consisted of two races of people – the Aryans and the Dravidians. The Aryans were typically North Indians and “upper-caste” people; the Dravidians were typically South Indians and “lower-caste” people.

Somewhere along the way, this set of hypotheses began to acquire ideological overtones. People belonging to the Hindu revivalist movement intensely disliked it. To them, this seemed at once to have two implications:

1. It divided Hindus into two (or four) groups – North vs South, and upper-caste vs lower-caste. Viewed from their ideological angle which saw Muslims and Christians as enemies of the Hindus, such internal schisms within Hinduism were an unacceptable weakness.

2. Their own perception, perhaps born of cultural insecurity, was that it called into question the very legitimacy of the Hindu Vedic tradition, by suggesting that it may have come to the country from outside and was therefore not worthy of respect as a genuinely original civilisation.

For these two reasons, Hindu revivalist groups such as the Hindu Mahasabha (now defunct) and later the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its sister organisations, have worked very hard to disparage the Aryan Invasion Theory. One could understand a Hindu revivalist movement working to eliminate regional, linguistic and caste differences among Hindus through a positive appeal to unifying ideas, but the approach they took was entirely different. It was through the more expedient means of attempting to disparage the Aryan Invasion Theory by imputing anti-national motives to historians.

That has been the background to the debate so far, and the ideological lines have been drawn. Western Indologists like Max Mueller, colonial-era British historians such as Mortimer Wheeler and Indian ones like Romila Thapar are on one side of this debate. Intellectuals (to use a term that errs on the side of respect) such as Michel Danino, Koenraad Elst, David Frawley and Rajiv Malhotra are on the opposite side. The hypothesis favoured by the latter group is the ‘Out of India Theory’ which postulates that far from India being the recipient of an Aryan migration from Central Asia, it was India that was the original home of the Aryans, who then migrated outwards.

Under the onslaught of the right-wing reaction, the proponents of the Aryan Invasion Theory have back-pedalled a bit, and conceded that “invasion” was probably too strong a term. They have settled for a milder term – “migration”. It’s the Aryan Migration Theory that is a little more respectable nowadays. However, even that is disputed by the Hindu right.

While this debate has been rancorous, a lot of it has been based on conjecture and circumstantial evidence. But in recent times, genetic research has begun to provide clearer answers.

In 2013, a paper by Priya Moorjani et al made a number of important points based on genetic evidence, and I have blogged about that here. To recapitulate,

A more recent paper by 16 researchers led by Martin Richards is consistent with the Moorjani paper, and provides much more emphatic evidence.

Its conclusions are explosive. To cut a long story short, the genetic evidence suggests that the Aryan Invasion Theory is probably on the money. The Out of India Theory stands discredited. What’s more, it really was an invasion and not a peaceful migration. Read this commentary in The Hindu which explains the conclusions of the paper in layman’s terms.

The research for the first time analyses patrilineal DNA or Y-DNA, whereas previous studies had focused on matrilineal DNA or mtDNA. Previous studies had not detected any genetic infusion into India around the time of the Indus Valley Civilisation, but the newest one does. What’s more, the dating of this infusion (around 2000 BCE) matches the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilisation to an astonishing degree.

Let’s think about this for a moment. No infusion of matrilineal DNA occurred during the 2000 BCE period, but there was an infusion of patrilineal DNA at that time. In other words, a large group consisting almost exclusively of men entered India at that time. What’s the probability that this was an army as opposed to a nomadic community of men, women and children? I’d have to say the evidence very strongly suggests an armed invasion.

Let’s think further about the remarkable coincidence that the Indus Valley Civilisation should have collapsed at about the same time that a large group of men (that we have to admit was probably an army) entered the region. What’s the probability that these were unrelated events? I’d have to say the evidence strongly suggests a cause-and-effect relationship. An invading army caused the downfall of the Indus Valley Civilisation.

The commentary article in The Hindu is however not bold enough to join these dots as I have above. It echoes the researchers’ own circumspection by continuing to talk about a “migration” rather than an “invasion”.

To my mind, it’s all over but the shouting. The genetic evidence very clearly and strongly suggests an invasion of India by men from Central Asia. The Aryan Invasion Theory was therefore on the money. The ideology of the Hindu right-wing, that Aryan (or “Vedic”) culture originated in India, and that all Indians share a single and indigenous genetic heritage, lies in tatters.

None of this should matter to regular Indians, who will probably shrug and carry on with their lives, absolutely untouched by what the evidence says about their past. But to the Hindu right wing, which has made this debate such a point of pride, the latest evidence is devastatingly bad news.

It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people.

To trace back the history of Darjeeling, we need to go back to a period three and a half centuries ago. East India Company’s trade with Nepal started in 1767. There were four small Newari or Malla kingdoms in the Kathmandu valley. When these Malla kingdoms broke into pieces and became quite weak, the Gorkha ruler Prithwinarayan Shah announced his dream to rebuild United Nepal Dynasty and started expanding the empire, and swallowed these four small territories. These four kings prayed to the British for help in 1767, and the British aggred to help them, and initially they succeded in stopping Prithwinarayan Shah. Although two years later, when British help was withdrawn, Prithwinarayan Shah established his capital in Kathmandu. His conquest started then. His rule extended from Punjab in the west to Sikkim in the east. He took help from the British in the form of arms and advice, as well as maintained a peaceful but distant relationship with them and thus succeded to safeguard the territory.

In 1773, he conquered the Bijaypur kingdom, which extended his territory upto the Teesta river in the east. The places we call Darjeeling and Kurseong today, located in the western bank of Teesta, were parts of this Bijaypur Kingdom. In the year 1788, these hilly places alongwith the other regions came under the ambit of the Prithwinarayan Shah dynasty.

Kalimpong, located in the eastern side of the Teesta, was initially in the hands of the King of Sikkim and later, the King of Bhutan. In 1706, King of Bhutan defeated the King of Sikkim and got hold of Kalimpong. The western bank of Teesta was inhabited mainly by the Lepcha, Murmi and Limbu tribes; there were Nepali people too, their sub-tribes—initially in a lesser number but it increased with this expansion of the Gorkha empire. On the other hand, to the east of Teesta, there were the original settlers – the Lepchas, and the Bhutias and the Limbus, who came from outside, settled there. After 1780, the Gorkhas too started settling there. So in this region, the history of settlement of several tribes is a pretty old and convoluted one.

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the British East India Company became very interested in the hills and captured this region through a sequence of events from 1835 to 1865. In the year 1814, there was a war between the British and Nepal, in which the British took the help of the Sikkimese people and thus defeated the Gorkha dynasty of Nepal. The three subdivisions that came into the possession of Nepal in the period 1788-89 were snatched away by the East India Company through the treaty of Sugauli (1815), and along with that, with an intent that they might need the help of Sikkim to expand their trade with Tibet, Britishers gifted the land between the Mechi and Teesta rivers to the Chogiyal (king) of Sikkim by virtue of the Titalya treaty (1817). But the condition imposed was that, in case of any dispute over the border between Nepal and Sikkim, the king of Sikkim will have to seek the intervention of the British, and mandatorily accept their decision.

During such a dispute over a place called Antudnara, two officers of the East India Company, namely George Alymer Lloyd and J. W. Grant, put up for some days in a hilly region called ‘Dorjeeling’ in February 1829, and proposed to build it as a site for a sanatorium and hill station. Accordingly, the British in 1835 proceeded and succeded to manage the the king of Sikkim to sign the agreement prepared by them. The region thus acquired was known as Darjeeling tract, for which they agreed to pay an amount of Rs 3000, which increased later to Rs 6000. The agreement initially shown only mentioned a portion of the Darjeeling town, but later on, the agreement which the British pursued with the king of Sikkim to sign, mentions a region extending 30 miles in the north-south and 6-10 miles in the east-west. The agreement paper was placed by Lloyd in Lepcha language, which the king of Sikkim was unable to understand. The King of Sikkim had an understanding that according to the agreement he will receive compensation, but he didn’t. Later on when the British started constructing roads and houses in that region, the king of Sikkim started to protest vigorously, and the British understood that there have been some misunderstandings, so they sent a compensation consisting of a double-barreled gun, a rifle, twenty yard of red cloth and two shawls to the king of Sikkim!

For several reasons, the agreement although being a foolish one, and although it was impossible to meet the terms, it was not possible for the British to return the region, as they had already spent a lot of money and already much of the land was sold to several aristocrats of Calcutta. Moreover, they needed such a health resort in the eastern india, which they said has ‘home weather’. So, it was a necessity to them. The agreement was in such a way that the road to Darjeeling, was still beyond the hands of the British. In 1849, the king of Sikkim arrested two Britishers as they entered the remote forest areas of Sikkim. Making this an excuse, the British army entered Sikkim and after putting up for some days there, they told the local residents that, then onwards, this area will be in British occupation. Thus, in 1850, Siliguri became a part of Darjeeling. The Kalimpong subdivision, as is called today, and the entire region, including the Dooars, was captured by the British in November 1865, through the Anglo – Bhutan war.

This region was initially included in the Western Dooars, but later was added to Darjeeling, and then only Darjeeling got the shape of a full-fledged district. At first, the newly formed district was marked as a non-regulation district, which means none of the laws of the Bengal Presidency (if not mentioned) is applied here. During the Partition of Bengal in 1905, Darjeeling was pushed with the Bhagalpur subdivision in Bihar. In 1919, there was again a change that any legislation made by the government of Bengal, if dismissed by the governor, will not be applicable to this district. This system continued for 15 years, and after that, in the hundredth year of the British intervention in Darjeeling, it was included in Bengal, and elected representatives from here were made to attend the assembly of Bengal. Dambar Singh Gurung was the the first elected representative.

Apart from their interest of ‘Home weather’, the East India Company had other important reasons for their interest on Darjeeling. The need to protect the northern border of India from the threat of China and Tibet, arising from the need of land trade with Tibet and Central Asia, was their essence of the foreign policy relating to Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal. Sikkim was of special importance, as it touched the border of China, Nepal, Bhutan and India. Through this small state passed the shortest Kalimpong-Lhasa trade route between India and China. After the conquest of Nepal by Prithwinarayan Shah, this route was already facilitated.

In general, after the Sugauli treaty, the Gorkha kings of Nepal kept good relations with the British. After Darjeeling came into the hands of the British, through Darjeeling, there started the import of horse, blankets, tea, tar sands, coal, wool, musical instruments, shoes, etc., and export of rice, salt, indigo, copper and zinc, tobacco with Sikkim, Nepal and Tibet.

By weakening the Gorkha kings, Jungbahadur Rana of the Rana dynasty announced himself to be the Prime Minister of Nepal, and his loyalty towards the British was revealed more concretely. Jungbahadur Rana not only offered military help to the British in the Anglo-Sikh War, but also led the Nepali soldiers in favour of the British to suppress the Sepoy Mutiny, and to recover Lucknow from the rebels. Due to this role, the British started to mark Darjeeling as a permanent recruitment centre for the British Army, as the kings of Nepal in Kathmandu was not favouring recruitment in the British army within the territory of Nepal. All nepali speaking people were named ‘Gorkha’ in the British army and became famous for their loyalty. The British were interested much about their recruitment as they were not in touch with the nationalist ideas, and thus their numbers started increasing.

Nepalese kings are mainly of Hindu religion. So the British thought that they ought to be historically assimilated with the Tibetan and Bhutias, as they are Buddhists. The British understood that they would oppose the Dalai Lamas, and thus tried to create a Nepalese landlord class in Bhutan and Sikkim.

#The_ethnic_demography

From the 1860s, in a fairly peaceful atmosphere, the town started to take its shape, its infrastructure was built. In the meantime, tea gardens had already sprung up around Darjeeling, mainly to the west of the Teesta. In the year 1835, population of Darjeeling was hardly around 100. But for the work in tea gardens, to build roads and the town, to enhance agriculture, and to recruit in the army, the British needed lots of laboring poor people. In 1872, there were 74 tea gardens in Darjeeling. By 1990, this number increased to 170. Lots of people started to come here; in the year 1871-72 the total population became 94712, in 1881 it was 155179, in 1901 it became 249117. According to the ‘Terai settlement report’ placed by the settlement officer, Sashibhusan Dutta, let us see the distribution of various ethnicities of population in the Terai (Plains in Darjeeling district): Koche-11133, Nepali-10354, Shek-6301, Oraon-4632, Lepcha-1122, Bhuimali and Mehetar-1079, Bura-644, Rajput-509, Bhutia-420, Munda-255.

Now, there are differences and confusions regarding this data. Many people say, most of this Nepalese people came from Nepal and started dwelling here. According to others, these people originally inhabited this place. The people doing job in the tea gardens were of two categories. One, the permanent dwellers who had their job year long and the others who came from western Nepal in the winter, did their contractual jobs and went back. The historians bearing this very opinion say that the British didn’t bring captive labourers from Nepal; they were the old dwellers here. Tribals from the Chhotanagpur region were the only ones brought as captive labours who couldn’t cope with the climate here and descended to the forests of Terai, and later when tea gardens grew up in the terai-Dooars region, these people went for work over there.

Anyway, it is for sure that this huge Nepalese population was residing here for a long time. If we take it that they came from some other place, still their settlement here is since a long time. Another fact clearly revealed from the data given by that settlement officer is that the Bengalis were not at all settlers there. With the increasing Nepalese settlements, in a very slow pace, the Bengali middle class people too started to come from the plains to the hills, started joining the administrative jobs, or jobs as tea garden managers and clerks, and mainly settled in the hill towns. Then came the Bihari and Marwari traders and the local retail and wholesale trade started to go into their hands. In 1941, the distribution of population was like Bengali, Bihari, Marwari together were 5.1%, and Nepali-speaking people were 86.8% in the three subdivisions of the hills. On the other hand, in Siliguri subdivision, which consists of mainly plains and had adjacent forests and tea gardens in the Terai, there was a majority of Bengali people, which increased even more after the partition in 1947.

The Nepali language that was usually spoken here, was the one known as ‘Khaskura’ or ‘Gorkha’ dialect in the seventeenth century Nepal. Although in Nepal, use of this ‘Khaskura’ dialect was mainly limited among the upper caste Bahun-Chhetris (Brahman-Kshatriyas). Even after the Gorkha triumph led by Prithwinarayan Shah, this language didn’t succeed to build a bridge between the low caste Tibeto-Burmese speaking tribal-ethnic people. But in Darjeeling, it was a bit different scenario. The tibeto-burmese speaking people like Rais, Limbus, Pradhans, Gurungs, Tamangs, Kirats, who came to Darjeeling, in need of communicating each other, accepted this upper caste dialect ‘Khaskura’, as their second preffered language. This very dialect came to be the Lingua Franca or medium of communication in the hills. Other languages and several ethnic dialects headed for extinction. Even the Lepchas and Bhutias too went on accepting this language.

Another feature was the process of imparting Brahminical culture on the lower cast Nepalese immigrants. Hindu shrines started increasing and soon it outnumbered the Buddhist monasteries. On the other hand, the number of retired army personnel and police started increasing, who were known to be ‘loyal’ to the British. This is the way in which a mixed Nepalese-culture-bearing-society came up, and it was divided vertically in terms of economic status. On the one hand, the landlord class, retired police-military and on the other hand, middleclass servicemen, small traders and even tea garden workers, construction workers, small peasants and agricultural labourers.

According to population, the numerical dominance of Nepalese people in this hill region on one side and the whims of the British regarding what status should be given to the Darjeeling district, on the other, gave rise to a reaction, following which, a section of aristocrat people of the hills, comprising Nepalese police and armymen, rich traders, and well off Tibetan and Bhutia people too, in the name of ‘Hillmens’ Association’, submitted a memorandum to the government in 1907. They demanded ‘a separate administrative system’ apart from Bengal. Starting from 1907, this Hillmens’ Association kept on submitting this demand for a separate administrative setup in gaps of few years repeatedly. There is no need to go into the details. But it should be mentioned that, this hillmens’ association expressed their loyalty towards the British and their dislike about the ‘nationalist movement’. Their charters carry the marks supporting this.

The other version of these demands came up through an educated middle class section of Darjeeling. There was a big role of language in this assembling of people. Different sections of these people who came to study in Kolkata from Darjeeling played a role in this context. In 1906, they began publishing the ‘Gorkha Sathi’ magazine in order to propagate the ideas of patriotism among Nepali people. Later on, the British government put a ban on it. Many of these people were in contact with the Swadeshi movement; some even had links with the extremists of Bengal too. Parasmani Pradhan, Suryabikram Ghewali, Dharanidhar Sharma and many others established Nepali Sahitya Sammelan, aimed at the development of Nepali language and literature. They opposed the demand of separation from Bengal, which was placed by the Hillmens’ Association, and said that it will only increase the backwardness of the poor Nepalis, And in 1920, through a separate demand sheet, they placed the demand for self rule within Bengal. During this time, Gandhian non cooperation movements started flourishing in the tea plantations, under the leadership of Dal Bahadur Giri and other educated Nepalis. After Dal Bahadur passed away in 1923, Mahatma Gandhi expressed his grief over his death at the Nagpur session of National Congress in 1924. In this way, in 1943, All Indian Gorkha League was established here, under the leadership of Dambar Singh Gurung. In a sense, the Gorkha League grew out of the legacy of Hillmens’ Association. They started to talk to the Congress leaders about the discontent prevailing among the hill’s people. The same year also saw the formation of the Darjeeling wing of the then undivided communist party, whose members initially also used to work in the Gorkha League.

There was an outbreak of famine in Bengal in 1943. At the same time, there were massive destruction due to the second world war. On one hand, the communist party, besides taking part in the freedom movement, was also involved in its struggle against the hoarders and black marketers. Relief committees were being set up in parts of Bengal. The newly formed Gorkha League or the old National Congress did nothing in this regard. At that time, activities of the communist party in Siliguri was administrated from Jalpaiguri, it had no connection with the hills. Sushil Chatterjee was entrusted with the responsibility of overseeing Darjeeling on behalf of the state committee of the Communist Party. Sushil Chatterjee having heard of one Ratanlal Brahman, a driver, popularly known as Mayla Baje, who had reportedly robbed godowns with his friends and distributed among the masses, contacted him. Ratanlal became influenced by the ideology of the communist party, and soon under his initiative, drivers’ union, security guards union, rickshaw pullers’ union, daily wage earners’ union, students’ federation, women’s committee and peasants’ committee sprang up. It was Ratanlal whose leadership helped form the Gorkha “dispelling sorrow” conference. A district committee of the party was created in Darjeeling, whose members were Sushil Chatterjee, Ratanlal Brahman, Ganeshlal Subba, Bhadra Bahadur Hamal and Charu Mazumdar. The secretary of that committee at that time was Ganeshlal Subba. In the last election under British India, there were two election centers in Darjeeling. The general center, like the previous occasion, was once again won by Dambar Singh Gurung, with the support of the Congress. The other one was a coalition of 12 tea plantations’ workers. Ratanlal Brahman won by defeating the Congress candidate, who had direct support of the tea garden owners. This was one of the altogether three seats won by the communist party in the state. The first district conference was held at the residence of Snehangshu Kanta Acharya, in Jwalapahar in Darjeeling. On behalf of the provincial committee, were present Saroj Mukherjee and Bhabani Sengupta. A political resolution was accepted at the conference:

Since this decision was taken in the presence of the higher leadership, it can be safely assumed that the party did not have any objections with it. Accordingly, a charter of demand was placed with the Parliament of India by Ratanlal Brahman and Ganeshlal Subba on 6th April, 1947, on behalf of all Nepali speaking people. The copies of text of the demand were sent to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the finance minister and Muslim League leader Liyaquat Ali Khan as well. Stating different geographic, political, historical, cultural, linguistic reasons, the demand charter signed by Ratanlal Brahman and Ganeshlal Subba stated :

But Ganeshlal Subba, who at that time was the secretary of the Darjeeling wing of the communist party, was removed. And in addition to this, it was also mentioned that the draft of demands was not given clearance by the national or district committee. Understandably, there is a lot of dispute surrounding this matter.

Till then, whenever the demand for separate administrative structure for Darjeeling used to be raised, it used to be in the name of Hillmen’s Assoication. That the Hillmen’s Association is an agent of the British was the allegation raised by the Communist party. They also wrote a deputation on this issue saying:
“The communist party strongly opposes the horrendous imperialist conspiracy by the British to separate the Darjeeling district from the rest of India and its constitution and annexe it under the chief commissioner, as evident from December 1946’s document presented to Lord Pethik Lawrence by the Hillmen’s Association. This association is nothing but the regional wing of the British imperialists. Any such demands and proposals placed by the imperialist agents will always be opposed by the communist party. There is enough reason to believe that there is an ongoing effort to annexe Darjeeling with Assam and Dooars and the people of those regions to create a new region named North Eastern Himalayan Hill Province.“

Soon after 15th August 1947, in the following month, the fourth provincial conference of the communist party took place. Then in 1951, at the Calcutta Congress, the point of districtwise autonomy came up, as opposed to separate country or state. At that time, Satyendranarayan Majumdar was among those in the Communist party who used to work among the Gorkha populace, and who had even written a few books on the nationality questions in Darjeeling. To demarcate their stand from that of the Gorkha League, the stand of the communist party regarding autonomy became clear even from his writings:

#Darjeeling_After_47

Right after the transfer of power, in the August of 1947 a public assembly was called in Darjeeling, arranged chiefly by the leaders of various languages living in Darjeeling. In 1952 as prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru came to visit Kalimpong, Gorkha League presented to him a charter of demands in which, detailing the demands since 1907 they gave three alternative proposals: a) different administrative unit like union territory for the district, that will be under the central government b) a new state comprising of Darjeeling and surrounding regions c) joining Darjeeling and a part of Jalpaiguri, namely Dooars, to Assam.
Deputy Prime Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, in a letter to chief minister Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote in 1950,

In 1955 the independent elected candidate from Darjeeling, N.B. Gurung, complained that the West Bengal state government and the Congress party are discriminating against the population of Darjeeling. Mentioning a charter of demand presented to the State Reorganization Committee by the Congress, he said, “in Darjeeling there are 20% Nepali speakers, 14.3% Bengali speakers, 6.8% Hindi speakers, 4% Lepcha and Bhutia, 45.1% in total. It is not understood who the 54.9% are. Obviously they are not Chinese?” Quoting a report from the state reorganization commission, he said, if a region of a state has 70% or more people belonging to the same nationality or language, then those people must be regarded as a minority in the state and that language of theirs must be the official language of the province. The state reorganization commission took material from the census report in drawing their conclusions. The census report that the commission based their conclusions on was tampered with, so it showed 88,958, or 19.96% people as Nepali speakers. The very next census report showed 94% Nepali speakers, and in the charter of demands for a separate administrative structure in the hills that was presented in 1920 it was said ‘the population here is quite the same as that of New Zealand’s.’ What accounted for the differences? In the first census only the Brahmins, Chhetris and tribals were considered Nepali, the rest of the Nepali-speakers of various castes (Rai, Limbu, Khambu etc.) were each considered belonging to a separate language-speaking group.

In the year 1955, Jyoti Basu pleaded in the assembly for constitutional recognition of Nepali language, autonomy for Darjeeling hills and rights and demands for the tea garden workers. In that very year, police opened fire on the agitating workers in Margarette’s Hope tea garden in Darjeeling. Shramik Sangha, the trade union affiliated to Gorkha League and Chiakaman Mazdoor Union, the one affiliated with the Communist Party, placed a charter of demand to the tea garden owners and the Government. Their were several demands like same wage as that of the tea garden workers in Dooars, distribution of bonus according to profit, amendments to standing orders, repeal of the ‘Hattabahar’ system by which management could sack any worker whenever they wished. Management and the government didn’t bother to respond as usual. It was Bidhan Chandra Roy led Congress government in the state. On 9 June, the two unions concluded in a meeting, held at Gorkha Dukkha Nibarak Sammelan, to go for an indefinite strike from 22 June. There were several talks, but with no positive fallout. On 20 June, arrest warrants were issued in the names of the leaders. Many were arrested, some absconded. On 25 June at around 3pm, police fired bullets at a peaceful rally in Margarette’s Hope tea garden. Amrita Kamini (18 yrs), Moulisobha Raini (23 yrs and she was pregnant then), Kancha Sunwar (22), Padambahadur Kaami (25), Kaale Limbu (14), Jitman Tamang (57) died. On 27 June around 30000 people gathered in their funeral rally.

In March 1958, while the bill was placed to recognize Bengali as the official and administrative language in this state, B B Hamal of the Communist Party raised the demand to recognize Nepali as the official language in the hills. N B Gurung also strongly supported him, and finally, Nepali language was recognized as the official language of the hills. The language was however recognized, but what about autonomy? It was clear that, although the local leadership of Congress and the Communist Party, the other regional parties went on raising the demands for separate state, autonomy etc, the higher leadership either denied it or dallied about the demands and all the governments smashed it. In 1967, the United Front government came to power in the state but nothing changed. Gorkha League leader D P Rai, the elected MLA from the hills, became minister of this rulling alliance twice, in 1967 and in 1969. In 1973, CPIM and Gorkha League placed the demand of an autonomous Jilla Parishad, through preparing a document titled ‘Programme and demand of Autonomy’. In the period of rule of Siddhartha Shankar Roy, a hill development council was created for Darjeeling. Despite it being the first ever officially recognized separate administrative structure for the hills, it miserably failed to meet the democratic aspirations of the people.

#In_the_eighties

Even after the Left Front came to power in 1977, the old system of governance kept continuing. But people became restless. Some thoughtful intellectuals from the hills joined hands to build up a new organization ‘Pranta Parishad’. They put a deputation demanding separate state to the then prime minister Indira Gandhi. On 7 September 1981, police fired bullets on their agitation in Darjeeling Chowkbazaar. Pranta Parishad disintegrated gradually facing a lot of repression. Akhil Bharatiya Nepali Bhasa Samity started their movement at that time demanding the inclusion of Nepali as an official language in the Indian Constitution. At that very period came up Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) in the leadership of Subhas Ghising. The demand of separate state initiated by Pranta Parishad, successfully reverbed in the hands of GNLF, in 1986. This followed a phase of fratricidal sequence of events in the hills, among CPIM and GNLF. After two years of unprecedented violence, death of a lot of people, Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGHC) was formed. It was later turned into DGAHC, which means the word ‘autonomous’ was added, which however was again dropped in the year 2005.

The 1986 movement remains as an open wound on the face of the Darjeeling hills. That was the first time that the hills saw such mass mobilization of common people in support of Gorkhaland. Police-firings at Kalimpong-Kurseong, other atrocities committed by the government against its own people further inspired people to join mass protests. On the other hand, the government tried hard to portray this movement as anti-national. Some tried to see Subhas Ghising as just a pawn in the hands of the Congress government at the centre plotting against the CPIM led state government. They would put forward as evidence the closeness of Subhas Ghising with various government intelligence agents. About 1200 GNLF supporters and 200 CPIM supporters were killed during this time. Through this, a deep desire for Gorkhaland got instilled in the minds of the people of the hills. But in 1988, Ghising gave a written undertaking to drop the demand for separate Gorkhaland and accept creation of Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council by becoming its chairman. The following history is that of unconceivable nepotism and corruption. And all this happened with tacit support from the state government. In some elections Ghising supported CPIM, in some the Congress, while in some boycotted vote. By creating a ‘contractor-raj’, Ghising and his party established an asbsolute authority over the hills.

In 1992, culmination of a long drawn struggle saw Indian constitution adopting Nepali as an official language. Even after 26 years of this campaign, Indrajit Khullar, the congress MP from Darjeeling, who won with GNLF support, commented in the parliament that Nepali is a foreign language and should not be included in the Indian constitution. However, this could not derail the movement and finally on 20th August, 1992, Nepali, along with Konkani and Manipuri, got recognized.

GNLF’s lukewarm support for Nepali language was not the only problem. Instead of supporting a 3-tier panchayats, it continued with its own 1-tier system and also paralyzed school service and college service commission. It continued to take undemocratic stance on various issues. All this fomented opposition against its anti-people policies. On the other hand, CPIM in the hills was also facing internal trouble and in December 1996, it broke off completely from the main party. Out of the 42 members of the Darjeeling district committee, 29 were from the hills. 25 of them left CPIM, and a new separate party, Communist Party of Revolutionary Marxists (CPRM) was born. They questioned CPIM’s stance on ethnic identity and raised the demand from Gorkhaland, once again. However, apart from this identity question, CPRM did not bring remarkably new perspective beyond the revisionist thesis of CPIM. Just as CPIM shows the weaknesses of bourgeoisie nationalism of the majority, CPRM similarly demonstrated feebly the similar nationalistic tendencies of the oppressed nationality. There were situational hazards, as it is now too, but their programs in reality emphasized more on the demands related to self determination of nationality rather than with focus on struggles based on class. Thus, in Darjeeling, the place bearing strong leftist traditions, we came to witness those very deviations of bourgeoise nationalistic tendencies of dominant and dominated nationalities, among these leftist parties. As people lost their faith to leftism owing to treacherous acts of CPIM, it made the task of advancement of class politics tougher, in such a region full of working people.

Ghising’s regime continued till 2004. Even after expiration of its term, he continued to avoid elections using one excuse of the other. The state government made him the caretaker administrator. In the meantime, Ghising started saying that elections can only be held after the inclusion of DGHC into the sixth schedule which was constituted to respect the socio-economic and cultural aspirations of various ethnicities of the north-east of India. In 2005, the state government acceded to Ghising’s demand. According to the new agreement, 31% of the seats would be reserved for scheduled tribes, which does not include most of the Gorkhas. However, Tamangs, of which Ghising is one, got included in that list in 2005. In order to see the hills as a place resided by various tribes, he started issuing various whimsical dictats. He started patronizing worshipping stones over idols or encouraged various shamanistic rituals. The people, already under the siege of capital and slowly identifying its impact on the social order, slowly became disgusted with these actions. Finally they revolted.

#Movement_of_2007

The Gorkha Janmukti Morcha now picked up the batton of Gorkha Nationalism and came to the fore. It was November 2007. In this newly invigorated movement, some intellectuals were visible, as also were some part who might be called the civil society. The entire group of Ghising supporters, including contractors, political leaders, and village and slum elders now joined Bimal Gurung’s group. Right after the movemnt started, the proposal for inclusion in the 6th Schedule was rejected. After the following three and a half years of unrest, state repression, arguments, violence, death, bandhs and boycotts, the agreement was finally signed. In this entire interval, only once was the Morcha’s popularity affected when Gorkha League leader Madan Tamang was murdered publicly in Darjeeling. Apart from this, the Morcha enjoyed full support from the people of the hills. Recently, however, there are stray instances arising out of the people’s sense of betrayal after the Morcha came to power. Right now, the Morcha voices its demands loud and clear again, possibly from pressure owing to public opinion, electoral politics and the state government’s emerging show of force. The agreement that was created has allowed merely for extended self-rule; Gorkhaland was never achieved.

The rulers have been quite successful in this politics of division and bribery. In North Begal, there are several movements for a separate state or repressed nationalities. The Kamtapur or Greater Coochbihar movement was born from a long history of feudal exploitation, fuelled further by deception. But the demands of Gorkhas in the hills have gradually intensified along with the organization of oppressed nationalities. If we note the progress of the movement, we will notice that in different times, different councils were created in response to the demands of the movement. The first time was during Siddharthasankar Roy, and then again in 1988, and once again now. Each time, the council enjoyed a greater self-rule than it had earlier. Therefore, the more the nationality becomes stronger, the more the desire for freedom, and rights earned earlier seem all the more insignificant.

This desire for freedom will constantly strengthen the demands for a state. A state might be formed in this way, but would the problems be solved? When the Pandora’s box of organized demands is finally opened in front of the state, how will the problem be solved? Would a state, A Gorkha Hill Council or a Lepcha Development Council provide ultimate solutions? Those who seek (or show others) the ultimate solutions in this way, might look at the previous instances of Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh or Jharkhand. Are the people liberated there? The liberation of workers and the poor is a distant dream, but were even the aims of nationalist liberation achieved here?

Overall, it is clear that the quantitatively increasing lures of self-rule will not convert to the qualitative taste of freedom for a race. The question of ultimate freedom is therefore tied to the end of class-based exploitation. The mode of capitalist production utilizes, among many other methods of exploitation, the practice of unfair exchange based on a repressed group’s lack of consciousness, helplessness and rampant unemployment. But in the recent phase of capitalist growth, when foreign and national capital alike are invasive presences in every area, the emphasis should be more on the issue of class struggle than on nationalist movements. Although it had been predicted at the beginning of capitalism that the many discriminations would cease to exist, and only free labour would be there, we later witnessed that such was not the case. The dawn of capitalism in Europe witnessed the expansion of capitalism sweep away the narrower boundaries of nationalism, and the gradual evolution of large nationalist groups through unification.

But the historical inevitability of the movement cannot be denied. We have to approach this as an ongoing process of building nationality, and aid the progress of the movement in that way. Finally, the path to ultimate emancipation for that race is inseparable from the struggle for a classless society.

I am an individual of mixed ancestry and I have often wondered where my ancestors came from. Who were they? Where did they come from? What of their culture?

These questions had kept me awake my entire childhood and I never got an answer to them, not even when I earned a Bachelor’s degree in history. My entire life I was taught about the cultural practices and folktales of my mother’s Khasi ancestors but the history of this tribe remained unknown to me. There was a gaping hole in my knowledge that neither school nor college ever attempted to fill.

I was given lessons on Khasi language and folklore in school, but they could hardly be considered rigorous or deep. Instead what was offered to me at my ICSE school was a superficial knowledge, I was taught the Khasi language, poetry and prose and a bit of Folklore but I was never told their significance or historical context. My school history books contained the names of dynasties and rulers of far away and alien lands. No mention was made of the history of the local land.

Even when I joined college, my syllabus of local history began with the arrival of the British with David Scott and ended in the 1970’s. What came before that? Not the professors’ problem. There was an option to teach medieval and ancient North East history but I do believe the professors did not want to touch that with a ten-foot pole so we ignored that portion.

My knowledge of Khasi came from an alternative source outside of the educational institution, in a library, the State Central Library on a warm summer afternoon. I was perusing through the history section when I happened across a book, “Archaeology in North East India” by Jai Prakash Singh and Gautam Sengupta. The book contained the published works of various scholars on the history and archaeological studies done in North East India, the chapter, “Who are the pre-historic dwellers of Meghalaya Plateau?” by Zahid Hussain caught my eye. The theories put out in the chapter quite literally realigned my entire perspective on the Khasi tribe and gave answers to many questions I had about my Khasi ancestors.

In short, the chapter argued that the Khasis were a hybridized ethnicity. According to the author with evidence he had at the time, Khasi were the descendants of Australoids and Mongoloids who had settled on the Meghalaya plateau since Mesolithic and Neolithic times. The theory explained the strange physical features of Khasis which differentiated them from surrounding tribes. Apparently, these two distinct groups of people intermingled and intermarried and gave rise to the unique and distinct ethnic group, the Khasis. The Khasis as a result of their mixed ancestry have features of both Australoids and Mongoloids. The author also presents the shared ancestry of the Khasis and Mundas of the Chota Nagpur Plateau as evidenced by shared cultural practices like cremation of the dead and similarities in language and other things.

Overall the chapter was quite eye-opening and answered a large number of questions I had. Of course, the ideas and theories of one individual may be mistaken but at least someone tried to provide answers. In academia and in history, theories and ideas often get replaced as the evidence changes, but there is at least an attempt to seek answers. Why were such things never taught to us in our school years? I am sure many would find that much more interesting than memorizing the entire list of Mughal rulers. Surely one measly chapter in a tenth-grade history book would not hurt? Perhaps the theory is widely disputed? Perhaps the people who set syllabus did not think it was important?
Whatever the case may be, people have a right to hear both sides of a controversy, considering the importance of the subject matter. Whatever the case, people need to hear about their history. In the absence of open discussion, it leaves the door open to malevolent people to create pseudo history to fulfill some absolutist political aim. History may be scorned and ridiculed of all the humanities but humans have always looked to it to form an identity, a sense of self. We have to change how it is taught and discussed.

The enslaved Africans who first arrived in the British colony of Virginia in 1619 after being forcefully removed from their natural environments left much behind, but their rhythms associated with music-making journeyed with them across the Atlantic.

Many of those Africans came from cultures where the mother tongue was a tonal language. That is, ideas were conveyed as much by the inflection of a word as by the word itself. Melody, as we typically think of it, took a secondary role and rhythm assumed major importance.

For the enslaved Africans, music – rhythm in particular – helped forge a common musical consciousness. In the understanding that organized sound could be an effective tool for communication, they created a world of sound and rhythm to chant, sing and shout about their conditions. Music was not a singular act, but permeated every aspect of daily life.

In time, versions of these rhythms were attached to work songs, field hollers and street cries, many of which were accompanied by dance. The creators of these forms drew from an African cultural inventory that favored communal participation and call and response singing wherein a leader presented a musical call that was answered by a group response.

As my research confirms, eventually, the melding of African rhythmic ideas with Western musical ideas laid the foundation for a genre of African-American music, in particular spirituals and, later, gospel songs.

Spirituals: A journey

John Gibb St. Clair Drake, the noted black anthropologist, points out that during the years of slavery, Christianity in the U.S. introduced many contradictions that were contrary to the religious beliefs of Africans. For most Africans the concepts of sin, guilt and the afterlife, were new.

In Africa, when one sinned, it was a mere annoyance. Often, an animal sacrifice would allow for the sin to be forgiven. In the New Testament, however, Jesus dismissed sacrifice for the absolution of sin. The Christian tenet of sin guided personal behavior. This was primarily the case in northern white churches in the U.S. where the belief was that all people should be treated equally. In the South many believed that slavery was justified in the Bible.

This doctrine of sin, which called for equality, became central to the preaching of the Baptist and Methodist churches.

In 1787, reacting to racial slights at St. George Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, two clergymen, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, followed by a number of blacks left and formed the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

The new church provided an important home for the spiritual, a body of songs created over two centuries by enslaved Africans. Richard Allen published a hymnal in 1801 entitled “A Collection of Spirituals, Songs and Hymns,” some of which he wrote himself.

His spirituals were infused with an African approach to music-making, including communal participation and a rhythmic approach to music-making with Christian hymns and doctrines. Stories found in the Old Testament were a source for their lyrics. They focused on heaven as the ultimate escape.

Spread of spirituals

After emancipation in 1863, as African-Americans moved throughout the United States, they carried – and modified – their cultural habits and ideas of religion and songs with them to northern regions.

Later chroniclers of spirituals, like George White, a professor of music at Fisk University, began to codify and share them with audiences who, until then, knew very little about them. On Oct. 6, 1871, White and the Fisk Jubilee Singers launched a fundraising tour for the university that marked the formal emergence of the African-American spiritual into the broader American culture and not restricted to African-American churches.

Their songs became a form of cultural preservation that reflected the changes in the religious and performance practices that would appear in gospel songs in the 1930s. For example, White modified the way the music was performed, using harmonies he constructed, for example, to make sure it would be accepted by those from whom he expected to raise money, primarily from whites who attended their performances.

As with spirituals, the gospel singers’ intimate relationship with God’s living presence remained at the core as reflected in titles like “I Had a Talk with Jesus,” “He’s Holding My Hand” and “He Has Never Left Me Alone.”

The rise of gospel

Gospel songs – while maintaining certain aspects of the spirituals such as hope and affirmation – also reflected and affirmed a personal relationship with Jesus, as the titles “The Lord Jesus Is My All and All,” “I’m Going to Bury Myself in Jesus’ Arms” and “It Will Be Alright” suggest.

The rise of gospel song was also tied to the second major African-American migration that occurred at turn of the 20th century, when many moved to northern urban areas. By the 1930s, the African-American community was experiencing changes in religious consciousness. New geographies, new realities and new expectations became the standard of both those with long-standing residence in the North and the recently arrived.

For the former, there was little desire to retain what some called “corn-shucking” songs, songs associated with plantation life. New arrivals, however still welcomed the jubilant fervor and emotionalism of camp meetings and revivals that included, among other things, the ring shout, a form of singing that in its original form included singing while moving in a counterclockwise circle often to a stick-beating rhythm.

The 1930’s were also the era of Thomas A. Dorsey, the father of gospel music. Dorsey began his campaign to make gospel acceptable in church after the tragic death of his wife and child. A former bluesman who performed under the name of Georgia Tom, Dorsey, after his tragic loss, rededicated his life to the church. His first gospel song published was “If You See My Savior.” He went on to publish 400 gospel songs, with the best known being “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.”

Dorsey was also one of the founders of the first gospel chorus in Chicago, and, with associates, chartered the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses, the precursor to gospel groups in today’s black churches.

Gospel song and the Hammond organ

In the ‘30s black gospel churches in the North originally, began using the Hammond organ, which had been newly invented, in services. This trend quickly spread to St. Louis, Detroit, Philadelphia and beyond. The Hammond was introduced in 1935 as a cheaper version of the pipe organ. A musician could now play melodies and harmonies but had the added feature of using his feet to play the bass as well. This enhanced the players’ ability to control melody, harmony and rhythm through one source.

The Hammond became an indispensable companion to the sermon and the musical foundation of the shout and praise breaks. Solo pieces within the service imitated the rhythms of traditional hymns in blues-infused styles that created a musical sermon, a practice still common in gospel performances.

Gospel’s journey continues today producing musicians of extraordinary dedication who continue to carry the word.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

It is absolutely not farfetched to argue that Manipur was imagined in the 18^th century, some 250 years ago. I must, however, caution myself here lest my arguments are misconstrued as denying the existence of state/states or communities with distinct social, political or cultural identities in the region which is called Manipur today, one of the many provinces of Indian ‘state….nation’. The states in this region were referred to by many names.

In 1799 CE, Francis Buchanan wrote an article about the languages and people surrounding the Burmese empire, and he wrote in the article of a rebellious people who inhabited the region between Sylhet in Bengal and Ava. He wrote that the people inhabiting in the valley called themselves as ‘Moitay’, and those in the hills by many names. However, he argued the region was known by many names. The Burmese called it Kathee/Cussay, the Britishers in Bengal called it Meckley and the Brahmins of the region called it Munnypura. The existence of many names often confused the Europeans so much that Rennel who prepared the first map of Hindoostan and beyond laid down two Kingdoms, Cussay and Meckley in the first draft of his map. He was also considering including Munnypura as the third kingdom between Hindoostan and Burma. The two treaties signed with the East India Company in 1762 and 1763 CE also referred to the region as Meckley, and the king as Meckley Raja. Moreover, revisionist historiography has also come up with many names such as Kangleipak and Meitei-leibak etc.

These various names represent competing political and cultural visions for the region. We should also not forget here that parts of the Manipur state are claimed by other political movements today. By mid 18^th century CE, a particular political and cultural vision was promoted aggressively in the region aided by the royal court at the expense of the others. Munnypura or Manipur, a brahmanical imagination of the region began to be identified with the region by the beginning of the 19^th century. This was achieved through a careful and meticulous myth-making by the Brahmans who are locally referred to as ‘Bamons’ or Manipuri Bamons. It is also important to point out that we should not treat Manipuri Brahmins as a single monolithic category. Brahmins migrated to the court of Manipur in different waves and many of them were imposters and fortune seekers who travelled in disguise of Brahmins. Moreover, they belonged to different sects and denominations and were often exiled to Kubo, Ava and Arakan for political and religious dissents in the court. Many of them actively took part in the making of a Brahmanical Manipur through myth-making. Vaishnavism received royal patronage only in 1704 CE, when Raja Charairongba embraced and consecrated idols of Hindu gods and subsequently built a temple dedicated to Vishnu in the year 1707 CE. Such traditions were followed by Raja Garibniwaj who transferred the responsibility of taking care of the shrines and lais/deities from the amaibas/amaibis (priest/priestess) to the Bamons in 1723 CE and subsequently demolishing of many pre-Vaishnavite shrines. The succeeding kings also followed the policy of popularizing Vaishnavism in the region. Myth-making was done in many ways, but this article will engage with one dominant form of myth-making by writing texts called Bijoy Panchalis.

The region is often associated with orality and oral traditions, and it is shocking to many in the academia when it is pointed out to them that the region developed a written literary culture between 14^th and 15^th century CE. It is definitely not to say that oral traditions are less important, and in fact oral traditions continued to remain the foremost form of knowledge transmission in the region. Texts which are locally known as Puyas were written mostly within the confines of the royal court. Likewise, Bijoy Panchalis were also commissioned and written in the royal court. However many do not consider it as a Puya depending on how one defines a Puya. If we are referring to all the written texts as puya, it is definitely a puya since it was commissioned and composed in the court by the Pundits/Maichous. However many scholars refrained from using the word Puya for Bijoy Panchali, because in their understanding Puyas are associated with pre-Hindu or non-Hindu traditions and they find Bijoy Panchali lacking such attributes. Manihar Singh and Jayanti Thokchom consider Bijoy Panchali as state chronicle which emerged with the adoption of Vaishnavism by the court in the 18^th century and J.B. Bhattacharjee calls it a Bengali chronicle of Manipur. However, it did became the state chronicle and did not replace Cheitharon Kumpapa as the court chronicle. Bijoy Panchali comprises of five parts/volumes written over 150 years between 1782 CE and 1954 CE. There are many manuscripts of these texts; in Bengali in Bangla Lipi and in Manipuri in Bangla Lipi. Then there are translations in Manipuri in Bangla lipi by L. Mangi Singh and L. Mani Singh and by Anganghal Singh in Manipuri language in Bangla lipi which cannot be traced.

Unlike Cheitharon Kumpapa, each of the five volumes of Bijoy Panchali deals with the genealogy and heroic deeds of various kings of Manipur who embraced Vaishnavism. The five volumes are: volume 1- Garibaniwaj Charit; Volume 2- Bhagyachandra Charit; Volume 3- Gambhir singh and Nar Singh Charit; Volume 4- Chandrakirti Charit and Volume 5- Surchandra, Kulachandra and Tikendrajit Charit. The commissions of Bijoy Panchalis are recorded in Cheitharon Kumpapa. It is recorded, ‘On 15^th of the month of Langban (Aug/Sept), Ibungshi Mantri, Lairikyenba Kirtichandra and Tulsi Narayan, the hanjaba (an official) completed the composition of Bijoy Panchali of King Garibniwaz’. The first volume, Garibniwaj Charit, was initially written in 1782 CE in Manipuri language in Bangla lipi, later rewritten in Bengali in 1872 CE. This text follows the birth and career of Maharaja Garibniwaz (1709-1748), his matrimonial alliances, his religious pursuits such as pilgrimages and endowments to temples and his military exploits in Burma, Cachar and Tripura. The second volume, Bhagyachandra Charit was written much later, composed by one Gunendra in the year 1932 CE. This volume deals with Raja Bhagyachandra(1763-1798), and it deals with his birth, his wars with the Burmese, his exile to Cachar and Ahom capital, and his religious pursuits such as the construction of the Govindaji temple in Kangla, introduction and composition of Raj Lila and Rajeshori Pala, consecration of Sri Govindaji idol and finally his pilgrimage/retirement in Navadip in Bengal. Similarly the third volume, Gambhir Singh and Nara Singh Charit was compiled in 1935 by the same person Gunendra, which recounts the reign of Raja Gambhir Singh (1825-34) and Raja Nara Singh (1844-50), their birth, wars against the Burmese and introduction of Rath Yatra festival (Kang Chingba) and Jalakeli Pala. The fourth and the fifth volume was composed by L. Mangi Singh at the order of Maharaja Bodhachandra in the year 1954, which deals with the reign of Raja Chandrakirti, Surchandra, Kulachandra and Tikendrajit.

It is important to remember that Bijoy Panchali texts are commissioned and composed within the court, and written by Bamon pundits. New narratives were introduced through these texts, such as a Brahamanical narrative of the creation/origin of the kingdom whose name Manipur appears in these texts prominently and a new genealogy of the kings of Manipur also emerged in these texts. In Bhagyachandra Charit, it is mentioned that the kingdom was created by lord Shiva in the last Satya yuga. Lord Mahadeva, according to these texts was in search of a place for the divine dance with his consort and they found a place which was flooded. They could only see the tip of Nongmaiching hill, the abode of many traditional deities. Mahadeva stood on this hill and dug a hole with his trisul, a trident and drained the water. Thus the valley came into existence and a dance was performed in which all the gods participated. According to the narratives in the texts, the dance performed was the first Lai Haraoba. The gods gifted the region with many jewels to the region. Ananta, the snake god also apparently took out his precious gem from his head and granted it to the land, and hence it became covered with jewels. The text claims that from that day onwards the region came to be known as Manipur, or land of jewels.

These texts also traced the genealogy of the kings of Manipur to Babrubahana, the son of one of the Pandava brothers Arjun and a Manipuri princess Chitrangada. The text narrates how Babrubahana and his queen Urmila failed to conceive an heir to the throne. They prayed to the sun god for a child, which was granted to them in the form an egg which was rejected by queen Urmila. The sun god asked Yamraja to keep the egg till the beginning of the Kali Yug. When Kali Yug began, Goddess Laxmi descended to Manipur with the egg so that the child hatched from the egg will become the king. The egg was received by the chief of Angom clan, Pureiromba. When the egg hatched, the boy Jabishtha or Pakhangba was born along with 5 snakes named Sarang-Leishangthem, Luwang, Moirang, Khuman and Khaba. The text further says that another snake emerged from the navel of Pakhangba, and it was named Ningthoucha, and then all the snakes turned into men, and along with Pureirongba became the ancestors of the seven salais/clans which today constitute the Meetei society. Eventually, Pakhnagba of the Ningthoucha clan became the first king of Manipur. Similarly, many myths were created by these texts. These texts aggressively sanskritised the names of the kings, the rivers, the mountains and villages and older traditions and deities were identified with Vaishnavism.

However such works and arguments have been widely discredited by generations of historians and political commentators. It began in a movement during the 1930s and 40s which sought not only to reform the corrupt and exploitative Brahmananical Hinduism under the Brahma Sabha, but to reject the Brahmanical religion altogether. They rejected the efforts of Atombabu and others to bring the Meiteis within the Aryan Hindu tradition, and strongly rejected the Aryan origin of the Meiteis. Naoria Phulo, Takhellambam Bokul and others played significant roles during these movements. Naorio Phulo wrote and published as many as 22 books on different subjects on Meitei philosophy and religion, and was directly responding to the works of Atombabu Sharma and Mutum Jhulon Singh. In 1934, he published a work, Meeitei Houbham Wari, which describes the origin of the Meiteis or Manipuris with a plea to acknowledge their real identity. Similarly, in 1940, he wrote and published another work, ‘Eigi Wareng’, which criticized the misinterpretations and corruptions followed specially by Manipuris and suggested ways to realize their correct history, religion and identity.

Bijoy Panchalis played a crucial role in creating these myths, which were used by the elites to legitimize their stations and privileges in society. Today even devoted Hindus in the state do not subscribe to such outlandish claims. No sensible historian, amateur or professional, worth their salt will dare to claim these myths as historical facts. However, the recent speech in Hindi by the Chief Minister of Manipur on 28^th March at Madhavpur fair held at Porbandar, Gujarat claiming Manipur and the entire Northeast region as a part of the Brahmanical cosmological universe dragged out from obscurity and obsoleteness, an old debate which have been dumped in the darkest abyss by generations of historians so that it does not find light again. The Indian state has not been very successful in nationalizing this recalcitrant region and its population, and successive governments have used different strategies to bring the region under their firm control. With successive electoral gains in the region, the ruling party has been emboldened to go ahead their master plan of submerging the entire country under one national identity. The Madhavpur Mela, organized by Ministry of culture in Gujarat to celebrate another mythical claim that Lord Krishna married an Arunachali princess, is a grand and a very expensive affair to bring the region and its population under the hegemonic Hindu nation. What is even more disappointing is the fact that local elected leaders who are supposed to defend the local interests in a federal system are dancing to the enchanting tunes of their masters in New Delhi.

Select references 

Bhattacharjee, J. B., ‘Bijoy Panchali’: A Bengali Chronicle of Manipur, 1990, Proceedings of the Northeast India History Associations,pp.43-46

Buchanan, Francis, “A Comparative Vocabulary of Some of the Languages Spoken in the Burma Empire.” Asiatic Researches 5 (1799): 219-240.

Charney, Michael W., ‘Literary Culture on Burma-Manipur Frontier in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, The Medieval Journal, 14 (2). Pp 159-181, 2011

Chatterji, Suniti Kumar, Kirata Jana Kriti, Asiatic Society, 1951

Hodson, T. C., The Meitheis, published in 1908

Karam Manimohan, Hijam Irabot Singh and Political Movements in Manipur, B.R. Publishing Corporation, 1989

Pratt, John, Wounded Lands: Politics and Identity in Modern Manipur, Mittal Publications, 2005

Pratt, Saroj Nalini, 2005, The Cheitharon Kumpapa: The Court Chronicle of the Kings of Manipur, Vol 1, London: Routledge

Singh, L. Mangi and L. Mani Singh trans, 1967, Bijoy Panchali, Imphal: Mahabharat Press

Thokchom Jayanti, March 2015, ‘Religious Interaction in Manipur in the 18^th and 19^th centuries: A Study of the Bijoy Panchali’, Presidency Historical Review, 1(1), pp 82-93

1. One precondition and a feature of any genocide is an unshakable belief that such is not possible. Not just in the minds of the victims but also of the perpetrators. It might surprise many that Nazis did not think of, or plan to, kill all the European Jews and Roma. (Nor did they actually managed to kill all of them. A quarter of the European Jews survived). This is very reassuring, isn’t it?

Calling this inconceivability it a precondition for Genocide might SOUND like a circuitous argument, but it isn’t. Denial, in every sense of the word, is a constitutive element of ethnic cleansings and Genocides.

2. A Dalit Marxist comrade of mine likened the so-called North-Eastern states would be for Hindu Nazis what Eastern Europe was for original Nazis. As these tangled geographies and histories demonstrated, time and again, all parties in an internecine fight, as an understandable response to an unchosen condition, have reasons to indulge in their aggression for self-protection, acts of vengeance, preventive attacks. In this communitarian Hobbseanism, balance sheet usually highlights the most successful criminal, who does more what everyone is doing. This is a situation where the most self-less tend to be most fanatical, intransigent and murderous.

3. If the explosion of the stupidity, refusal to reason, concern for others, consequences of one’s preferences for others and elsewhere on facebook commentators is any indication and reflective of the sensibilities on the ground, the next government at the center is either BJP again or the next government does not fundamentally change the situation (asserting the residents are by definition citizens), the North-East is going to be our Balkans.

I am not referring only to the open murderous slogans and demands from the people Hindu Nazi party and its affiliates. As in the case of Balkans and Balkanization, the poets and cultural creators who sung the praises of every day and the innocence of life, the humanist Marxists who struggled to break out of the rigidities of totalitarianism, the good samaritans, with their rather limited but genuine ethics of care who paved the way and participated in the mass murder and mayhem. Right in the middle of the European map, in the late twentieth century.

4. Citizenship lists are not like census data collection, population transfers are not like displacements of development projects, dislocations, and relocations and statelessness such demographic engineering projects, basically the fantasies-turned-policies “cumulatively radicalize”, until the point of no return when the only rational solution to the mess created is to dispose of the people off the horizon.

Utmost criminality unseen by the unconscious complacency in the minds of the shrill advocates in defense of the Registry is the idea that none wants to kill anyone. If Genocide is about “with an intent to destroy…”, there is not yet a genocide in Assam, surely not any progressive or nationalist in his wildest dreams thinks of such a possibility. But the groundwork for ethnic cleansings and Genocide is laid and the unstoppable process begins more likely when no one wants such outcome.

Deleting the huge number of humans off the face of the earth is not as easy as delisting them from the registry. As Hilberg and later many others demonstrated, the physical destruction of humans begins with a mere definition of them.

Threatening millions of humans with the stripping of their citizenship and extending it to the whole country is exactly like the issue of Nuclear weapons, it is all others who have more, in fact, all, stakes.

5. What is most deadly is not even the monstrous registry and its eventual extension everywhere in India, but the response of the loudest and the poetic of the Assamese progressives and nationalists. While laying out the infrastructure of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Assam as well as everywhere else, they rightly deny that they don’t want mass murder.

To repeat, for a mass murder to happen, you don’t need an intention or a plan to want it, the suitable conditions created for it to occur for something else is enough. In fact, a non-murderous idea actually helps and hastens the process far better.

This week, India celebrates 70 years of independence. The tricolour flag, perhaps the most tangible and potent symbol of freedom from colonial servitude, is on particularly full display.

Few weeks ago, a rally was organised in Delhi under a 2,200-foot-long tricolour. At Attari, on the border of India and Pakistan, the tallest Indian flag in the country was recently mounted atop a 360-foot-high pole. Last year, Purnia, a town in northern State of Bihar, had a 7.1-kilometre-long tricolour. Size, it turns out, does matter.

Flag-waving also occupies a wide range of terrains, from banal street corners and sports matches to movie screens, in a display of both fervour and pride. The song “Maula Mere Le Le Meri Jaan” from the Hindi movie Chak De India (2007) is one such moment:

“Teeja tera rang thaa main to teeja tere dhang se main to”, it intones, reflecting on the flag’s green shade: “I was your third colour, the one as fashioned by you”. Chak De India, 2007, starring the well-known Shah Rukh Khan.

Such spectacles generally come wrapped in the visual vocabulary of majoritarian politics, wherein the voices and concerns of the largest community dominate. Loyalty to the flag is never sui generis; its citizens must be inculcated to display and demonstrate patriotism in this specific way.

The vivid shades of the Indian tricolour actually have a secret subaltern history, a genealogy that has been largely forgotten. As India celebrates its independence from Britain, it’s a story worth remembering.

A symbol with a forgotten history

We begin this brief history with an official document called Specification for the National Flag of India (Cotton Khadi), in which the Bureau of Indian Standards prescribes that the Indian national flag shall be a tricolour consisting of three rectangular (sub)panels of equal widths.

The specified colours are “India saffron”, “white” and “India green”. At the centre is a design of the Ashoka Chakra, the “wheel of peaceful change” associated with a legendary ancient emperor Ashoka from the third century BCE. The wheel is in navy blue, the document says, before going into great technical detail on other aspects of the national flag.

Two obvious questions arise here. Firstly, why do we call it a three-colour flag? Why has blue been erased from our cognitive frame when we think about the colour scheme of India’s national flag?

And, second, this document does not tell us anything about meanings, social significance and popular perceptions pertaining to these four shades. We must go back in time to understand their origins.

Blue, the colour of revolt and dalit politics

In the popular memory of colonial period, blue is the colour of resistance. Commonly associated with indigo, the shade owes its political imagery from the “Indigo revolt” (Nil vidroha), a peasant uprising against the white Indigo planters in 1859-60 in Bengal.

Later, in 1917, the country witnessed another massive peasant mobilisation of indigo growers, this time in the northern state of Bihar. This event was transformative even for Mahatma Gandhi, who shifted his political attention from urban centres to rural landscapes of suffering and exploitation under the colonial regime. Gandhi’s first interview, 1931.

It would be a fitting tribute to Gandhi and those rebellious peasants that the charka, or wheel, in the centre of the flag is in navy blue. But the wheel is bereft of Mahatma’s spindle.

“India as a nation can live and die only for the spinning wheel”, he often claimed, and this symbol occupied a central position in the model of Swaraj, or self governance, laid out in his book Indian Home Rule.

In 1931, the Indian National Congress adopted it to don India’s pre-Independence flag as an emblem of the anti-colonial movement.

But in July 1947, just before independence, the charkha was replaced with the Ashokan wheel (chakra) in the design of India’s national flag. This irked Gandhi, who said he would “refuse to salute the flag” if it did not contain the charka.

There’s also the eerie silence about navy blue, which compels us to confront the deep political prejudices of Indian politics. That’s because its roots trace back to the dalit, to lower-caste politics. India’s most famous dalit icon, a contemporary of Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, is always portrayed wearing a blue coat. Blue is still the colour of dalit politics in modern India, too.

Is it a mere coincidence that the colour of the Ashokan wheel in the Indian national flag, navy blue, remains uncounted when we talk about the “tricolour flag”? Or does this gesture perhaps reveal a deep grudge against dalit politics and subaltern voices?

White for minorities

Another colour that deserves more attention in any story of the flag is white. In the aforementioned official document, while saffron and green are affixed with the word “Indian”, bestowing them a sense of rootedness and specific history, white has been denied similar cultural milieu.

Instead, it is perceived only in the universal vocabulary as representing peace and humanism. Why this erasure of particularities?

White is perhaps the most difficult shade when it comes to telling a tale. From the bridal trousseau of Christian tradition to the Himalayan snow capped Mount Kailasha, where, in poet Kalidasa’s Sanskrit classic Meghadutam, it represents the laugh of Hindu god Shiva, to the ubiquitous caging in the monochromatic uniform of Hindu widowhood, the colour white is a canvas spread wide.

For Gandhi in 1921, while the flag’s red and green symbolised Hindu and Muslim communities, respectively, white was to represent all the minority communities put together. In his scheme, they were to be protected by the other two.

Red and saffron

Soon, however, his own party, the Indian National Congress, officially distanced itself from this direct connection between colour and community. This was particularly important in the aftermath of violence between Muslims and Hindus communities that had gripped the country in the 1920s.

Secular leaders (including the future prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru) championed saffron as a colour of valour, an ancient colour, and underplayed its popular association with right wing Hindu organisation, the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh and to the 17th-century Maratha warrior king Shivajji.

Yet to this day, the colour remains well associated with Hinduism and with Hindutva, an ideology that promotes an essentialist vision of Hinduism. We have forgotten that saffron also came to India through minority religious traditions, including Buddhism, and via other ascetic religious movements, like ancient Shramanic traditions.

It is rather ironic that in today’s aggressive nationalism, India has completely forgotten the minority histories of these colours.

Bypassing the green

The amnesia acquires a sinister property considering that the outgoing vice president, Hamid Ansari, recently voiced his anxiety pertaining to the vulnerability of minority communities in contemporary India.

In the song from the film Chak De India, this anxiety is palpable. Premised upon the popular equation of green with Islam, the lyrics refer to green as the third colour, using the past tense – “I was your third colour” – lamenting the Muslim’s community’s growing marginalisation in contemporary India.

This erasure from the present, green’s exile into the past, calls for deep introspection.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

One of the world’s most famous Christmas carols, “Silent Night,” celebrates its 200th anniversary this year.

Over the centuries, hundreds of Christmas carols have been composed. Many fall quickly into obscurity.

Not “Silent Night.”

Translated into at least 300 languages, designated by UNESCO as a treasured item of Intangible Cultural Heritage, and arranged in dozens of different musical styles, from heavy metal to gospel, “Silent Night” has become a perennial part of the Christmas soundscape.

Its origins – in a small Alpine town in the Austrian countryside – were far humbler.

As a musicologist who studies historical traditions of song, the story of “Silent Night” and its meteoric rise to worldwide fame has always fascinated me.

Fallout from war and famine

The song’s lyrics were originally written in German just after the end of the Napoleonic Wars by a young Austrian priest named Joseph Mohr.

In the fall of 1816, Mohr’s congregation in the town of Mariapfarr was reeling. Twelve years of war had decimated the country’s political and social infrastructure. Meanwhile, the previous year – one historians would later dub “The Year Without a Summer” – had been catastrophically cold.

The eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora in 1815 had caused widespread climate change throughout Europe. Volcanic ash in the atmosphere caused almost continuous storms – even snow – in the midst of summer. Crops failed and there was widespread famine.

Mohr’s congregation was poverty-stricken, hungry and traumatized. So he crafted a set of six poetic verses to convey hope that there was still a God who cared.

“Silent night,” the German version states, “today all the power of fatherly love is poured out, and Jesus as brother embraces the peoples of the world.”

A fruitful collaboration

Mohr, a gifted violinist and guitarist, could have probably composed the music for his poem. But instead, he sought help from a friend.

In 1817, Mohr transferred to the parish of St. Nicholas in the town of Oberndorf, just south of Salzburg. There, he asked his friend Franz Xaver Gruber, a local schoolteacher and organist, to write the music for the six verses.

On Christmas Eve, 1818, the two friends sang “Silent Night” together for the first time in front of Mohr’s congregation, with Mohr playing his guitar.

The song was apparently well-received by Mohr’s parishioners, most of whom worked as boat-builders and shippers in the salt trade that was central to the economy of the region.

The melody and harmonization of “Silent Night” is actually based on an Italian musical style called the “siciliana” that mimics the sound of water and rolling waves: two large rhythmic beats, split into three parts each.

In this way, Gruber’s music reflected the daily soundscape of Mohr’s congregation, who lived and worked along the Salzach River.

‘Silent Night’ goes global

But in order to become a worldwide phenomenon, “Silent Night” would need to resonate far beyond Oberndorf.

According to a document written by Gruber in 1854, the song first became popular in the nearby Zillertal valley. From there, two traveling families of folk singers, the Strassers and the Rainers, included the tune in their shows. The song then became popular across Europe, and eventually in America, where the Rainers sang it on Wall Street in 1839.

At the same time, German-speaking missionaries spread the song from Tibet to Alaska and translated it into local languages. By the mid-19th century, “Silent Night” had even made its way to subarctic Inuit communities along the Labrador coast, where it was translated into Inuktitut as “Unuak Opinak.”

The lyrics of “Silent Night” have always carried an important message for Christmas Eve observances in churches around the world. But the song’s lilting melody and peaceful lyrics also reminds us of a universal sense of grace that transcends Christianity and unites people across cultures and faiths.

Perhaps at no time in the song’s history was this message more important than during the Christmas Truce of 1914, when, at the height of World War I, German and British soldiers on the front lines in Flanders laid down their weapons on Christmas Eve and together sang “Silent Night.”

The song’s fundamental message of peace, even in the midst of suffering, has bridged cultures and generations. Great songs do this. They speak of hope in hard times and of beauty that arises from pain; they offer comfort and solace; and they are inherently human and infinitely adaptable.

So, happy anniversary, “Silent Night.” May your message continue to resonate across future generations.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post The humble origins of ‘Silent Night’ appeared first on RAIOT.

Political conflicts have lifecycles: like persons they go through different stages with each associating with particular behaviours, experiences, emotions and viewpoints. While each stage informs the articulations and acts that become seen as characteristic of the next, these stages do not necessarily follow in a unilinear fashion, nor is it always possible to demarcate different stages in a clear-cut manner. Their points of beginning and ending are often fuzzy, overlapping, and open to interpretation. However, especially as time passes, distinct stages tend to become analytically distinguishable and recognizing these offer heuristic frames to better understand the evolution of political conflicts. Reading stages into a political conflict may not be feasible in the heat of the war, or even during its immediate aftermath, but become the domain of ‘second-generation historiography’, or the more professional, more detached forms of history writing that emerge after ‘those who experienced the war fade away and, with them, the scars, emotions, myths, and self-justifications that were part of their mental make-up’ (Van Schendel 2016: 76).

The protracted Indo-Naga war is one such political conflict whose historical trajectory can be deconstructed and analysed in the form of analytically distinguishable stages. At the time of writing, the conflict continues to evade a final political settlement, although since the 1997 Indo-Naga ceasefire the war has increasingly turned into a low-intensity conflict. In this context, it remains ‘first-generation historiography’, written by stakeholders or veterans of either the Naga Movement or the Indian state and its army, that dominates public discourse and moulds popular understandings of the conflict, its causes and consequences. 1Examples include: Iralu, Kaka. 2000. The Naga Saga: A Historical Account of the Sixty-Two years Indo-Naga War and the Story of Those Who were Never Allowed to Tell it. Kohima: published by author; Anand, V.K. 1980. Conflict in Nagaland: A Study of Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency. Delhi: Chanakya Publications; Aram, M. 1974. Peace in Nagaland: Eighty Year Story: 1964-72. Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann; Sema, Hokishe 1986. The Emergence of Nagaland. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House. Gradually, however, space is beginning to open for more detached reflections on the conflict, particularly concerning its origins and early beginnings in the 1940s and 50s.2Examples of more detached exercises of Naga history writing include Franke, Marcus. 2009. War and Nationalism in South Asia: the Indian State and the Nagas. London and New York: Routledge and Thomas, John. 2016. Evangelizing the Nation: Religions and the Formation of Naga Political Identity. New Delhi: RoutledgeWhile historians differently portray and theorise the Naga Movement, the moment the actual war breaks out is shrouded in less ambiguity: ‘Troops moved into Tuensang by Oct. 1955’, B.N. Mullick, then Director of India’s Central Intelligence Bureau, recounted, ‘and the war with the Nagas started from then’ (cited in Vashum 2005: 112).

The outbreak of war occured within the stage of the Indo-Naga conflict I propose to demarcate and discuss here, which is the period roughly between the Battle of Kohima in 1944, which ended Japanese expansionism in the east, and the enactment of Nagaland state in 1963 as an envisaged (but failed) political compromise to the demand by the Naga National Council (NNC) for complete Naga sovereignty. This stage often finds itself subsumed into a larger master narrative of the Naga struggle that reconstructs a relatively straight and uncomplicated historical trajectory that sees the genuine awakening and NNC-led political mobilization of a highland community situated off the beaten track of both Indian civilization and colonial domination, and of Nagas’ collective resolve to take up arms to fight for a place on the table of nation-states. Alternatively, if the story is told from the vantage of the Indian state, the dominant narrative apportions blame to a ‘misguided’ Naga elite that seeks to undermine the territorial and national integrity of the Indian state.

Simplistic historical reconstructions of any war are worrisome enough in themselves. In the case of the Indo-Naga war such readings become particularly constrictive, though, when they make the present and future generations see the armed conflict – and the death, misery and societal destruction havocked in its name – through a reductive lens of historically inevitable and clear-cut fault-lines between India and Nagas that erupted in full force during the difficult process of decolonization. These prevailing views, attractive for their absence of complexity, however, ignore the anguished debates, interpersonal and intertribal differences, contingent histories and events, dissenting voices, political assassinations, and sharp differences within the rank-and-file of the NNC prior to the outbreak of the armed conflict, and whose inner dynamics and sentiments could as well have produced outcomes other than war.

While the Naga Movement is home to a growing body of scholarship, I am not aware of any study that concentrates in detail on the period between 1944 and 1963. This is a lack because the political debates and events that transpired in this period not only led to the outbreak of armed conflict, but also set the stage for later developments and complications that continue to haunt and divide Naga society, including intertribal antagonisms and a broad division into ‘underground’ and ‘overground’ Nagas. This essay uses archival histories to challenge and complicate the historiographical certainty apportioned to the early political evolution and outbreak of the Indo-Naga war. I tell the narrative that follows through hitherto scantily used sources, including official statements and memorandums, colonial tour diaries and personal journals, memoirs and biographies, and those memories recorded by history. First, however, the next section offers, in much abridged form, a few reflections on the rise of Naga political consciousness and self-assertion during the era of late-colonialism.

Antecedents of Naga Nationalism

Modern Naga political history can be read as the product of two mutually constitutive processes – the internal dynamics of clan, khel (village ward or sector), village, and tribe and the effects and transformations impelled by systematic contact with external agencies and events such as colonial rule, Christian missions, and the First and Second World Wars. Their conjunction is what first gave rise to an encompassing, though ever fraught and fragile, sense of a pan-Naga political identity that became articulated during the era of late-colonialism. While most Naga nationalists prefer to frame the Naga nation as God-given, rather than man-made, and speak of a perennial, historically immutable Naga essence that was not created but awakened in the 20th century, most historians agree that the Naga nation, in its present form and substance, did not flourish in primordial isolation but emerged and took on significance in relation to particular historical processes and cataclysmic events.

Historians variously theorise the experience of colonial rule – here including ‘pacification’, administrative unification, the imposition of an Inner-Line regime, and ethnological classification – and Christianity – its universal ‘truths’, the standardization and Romanization of languages, the advent of mission schools and education – as centripetal forces that established the initial terms for an emergent Naga national identity (see Thong 2016; Thomas 2016). Other reconstructions are less processual and highlight specific events, such as the recruitment of an estimated 2000 Naga villagers from different clans, villages, and tribes into the Labour Corps that was dispatched to war trenches in France during the First World War. Toiling within the sound of guns, these Naga ‘coolies’, the argument goes, gained political consciousness as they were introduced, with harsh clarity, to the modern compulsions of nation, nationalism, and patriotism (Chasie 2005)3On the role of the Indian Labour Corps, including Nagas and other hill tribes, see Singha, Radhika 2015. ‘The Short Career of the Indian Labour Corps in France, 1917-1919’, International Labor and Working- Class History, 87: 27-62.. The journey across seas and the war trenches subsequently ‘awakened the spunk of the Naga nationalism’ (Yonuo 1974: xii) as it led to a rethinking and broadening of Naga identity that began to transcend divisions along tribal, village and clan lines.

The returning home of these Naga labours is popularly associated with the establishment of the Naga Club in 1918, the first pan-Naga apex body, even as most of its founding members had not been part of the Labour Corps but were newly educated and entrepreneurial Nagas, the majority of whom were serving the colonial government.

It is under the aegis of the Naga Club that, in 1929, Naga representatives petitioned the Simon Commission, which had come to British India to study constitutional reform. Were the British to depart, as rumour already had it, they pleaded:

‘We [the Nagas] should not be thrust to the mercy of other people… but to leave us alone as in ancient times.’

While, bar a few, the 21 signatories belonged to the Angami Naga and hailed from Kohima and its immediate surroundings, they nevertheless claimed to represent not only ‘those regions to which we [the signatories] belong… but also other regions of Nagaland’ (Vashum 2005: 175). This determining influence of the Angami tribe in Naga political expressions was to remain characteristic, as subsequent sections will show, of the beginnings of the Naga uprising. This thesis of Angami ‘leadership’ or ‘domination’ (depending on whom you ask) is personified by the charisma and activities of Angami Zaphu Phizo, who was the fourth president of the NNC and the main ideologue and prophet of Naga nationalism, and whose ascend to power and influence I will discuss further below.

While historians debate and disagree about the relative importance of these processes, events, and the political magnetism that emanated from Phizo, they broadly agree that, taken together, they transformed a social fabric that revolved strongly around fragmented and ‘primordial givens’ into a society progressively preoccupied with constructing a more generic Naga cultural and political identity.

The Second World War and the Nagas

If Naga labourers travelled frightening journeys on rundown ships to participate in the First World War, the Second World War announced itself at Naga doorsteps. In December 1941, the first Japanese bombs fell on Rangoon, the capital of British Burma. A few months later large swathes of Burma were in Japanese hands. India was to be conquered next and rumours of an imminent invasion spread across the hills and valleys of Assam (Bower 1950: 171). Contrary to expectations, the Japanese advance paused at the foot of the Patkai range, the jungle-clad and upland frontier that separated India and Burma. To prepare for the assault, Allied Forces turned the Naga highlands, and neighbouring hills, into a huge ‘military bulwark against Tokyo’ (Guyot-Réchard 2017: 7). In 1944, Japanese forces began their by now long anticipated march into India and which resulted in a destructive battle that bogged down to the towns of Imphal and especially Kohima, whose hilltop garrison the Japanese placed under siege.

The Battle of Kohima raged between April 4 and June 22 1944 and witnessed some of the fiercest hand-to-hand combat in the Second World War (see Guyot-Réchard 2017). While thousands of Allied Soldiers lost their lives, victory was nevertheless claimed by them, making Kohima to the Japanese what ‘Stalingrad was to Russia and Alemein to the Dessert’ (Philipps cited in Horam 1988: 57). What greatly frustrated the Japanese Army, as well as the collaborating Indian National Army (INA) led by Subhas Chandra Bose, is that, at the decisive moment, Nagas sided with Allied Forces, instead of capitalizing on the opportunity to revolt against their colonial rulers. A large literature of military analyses and memoirs document how Nagas actively contributed to the Allied Victory by serving as scouts, interpreters, spies, labourers, orderlies, and levies.4See, among several others, Rooney, D. 1992. Burma Victory: Imphal, Kohima, and the Chindits – March 1944 to May 1945. Oxford: Osprey Publishing; Campbell, A. 1956. The Siege – A Story From Kohima. London: George Allen and Swinson, A. 1956. Kohima. London: Arrow Books. Wrote John Colvin (1994: 35): ‘Irrespective of the tribe or sub-tribe, the record of the Nagas during the Japanese occupation was one of extraordinary loyalty to the British’. General Slim (1956: 341) similarly acknowledged: ‘These were the gallant Nagas whose loyalty, even in the most depressing times of the invasion had never faltered’.

But while this official narrative firmly places the Nagas on the ‘good side’ of history, not all Nagas sided with the Allied Forces. Amongst those who did not was the later NNC president A.Z. Phizo. On the eve of the Japanese invasion of Burma, Phizo was in Rangoon, where he had arrived some years earlier out of a mixture of business interests and ‘self-imposed exile’ following a series of ‘anti-British statements’ in Kohima that earned him the reputation of a ‘potential troublemaker in the eyes of officialdom’ (Steyn 2002: 48). Despite past ill-feelings, Phizo enlisted himself as a volunteer in the British Army. ‘I did not hate the British, only their colonialism and what they stood for’, he justified his decision many years later (cited in Steyn 2002: 52). However, Phizo’s political convictions prevented his actual enrolment:

At his interview trouble arose when he was told that Asiatics could not be enrolled and he would have to change his nationality to either Anglo-Indian or Anglo-Burmese if he wanted to enlist. Such a suggestion, of course, immediately put his back up in no uncertain way – his uncompromising retort being:

‘I am a Naga first, a Naga second, and a Naga last’

An inevitable stalemate ensued. The commanding officer, Major Sample, lost his patience and summarily ordered him to depart. Once again, stubbornly dignified Phizo had his way:

‘If you tell me to go, I will go, but for my part I have offered my services’ (Steyn 2002: 54).

Following this encounter, Phizo, accompanied in Rangoon by his wife and brother Keviyallay, did not join the large stream of refugees that fled towards India, but stayed put. He now offered his services to the Japanese:

When war came to Burma in 1942, my brother and I were asked by the Japanese Army to assist them. As they promised to recognize Nagaland as an independent sovereign state, we rendered whatever service we could towards what seemed to us the liberation of our own country (Phizo 1960).5This assertion by Phizo is not corroborated by any other source I am aware of.

In the end, it was not Phizo but Keviyallay who guided several Japanese patrols into both the Naga ‘Control Area’ 6The Naga ‘Control Area’ here refers to the Naga uplands east of the Naga Hills District, and which were not formally administrated by the British, but where colonial offices and officers nevertheless exerted considerable influence, mostly through military and punitive expeditions.and the Naga Hills District (Steyn 2002: 58). Meanwhile, Subhas Bose arrived in Burma. Phizo met him on several occasions, and became, somewhat informally, associated with the INA, again on the premise that Bose would recognize Naga independence after the British would be routed. While Phizo was inspired by Bose’s ‘charisma and boundless energy’, he is said to have ‘refrained from joining the cries of Jai Hind whenever and wherever Bose appeared’. Phizo offered to join the INA in their invasion of India, but was ‘rebuffed’, reportedly because ‘he would be needed once Nagaland had been liberated’ (Steyn 2002: 60). Phizo subsequently waited out the war in Rangoon (Nibedon 1978: 23).

After Burma fell back in British hands, Phizo and Keviyallay were arrested on charges of collaborating with the enemy. Phizo was jailed and remained so for eight months. Following his release in 1946, he returned to the Naga Hills, and now did so ‘with his mind full of unwavering determination and revolutionary ideas to achieve political independence for his homeland’ (Yonuo 1974: 199).

From Reconstruction to Political Assertion: the Making of the Naga National Council

By July 1944, Kohima was reduced to ruins and rubble. ‘After the battle I was one of the first to return. The entire place was strewn with corpses, rubble’, reflected Langalang (cited in Aram 1974: 18), the Headmaster of the Kohima High School and soon to become an influential NNC member.

Villages through which Japanese and Allied Forces had passed too suffered painful destruction and depletion. Fields lay uncultivated, granaries were empty, and most livestock was confiscated and slaughtered. This destruction, however, was also politically productive with the war serving as ‘an agent of ethnicization’ (Guyot-Réchard 2017: 3; emphasis in original). As Fürer-Haimendorf reflected:

When the Japanese invaded Burma and India during the Second World War the Naga Hills became a battleground. Soldiers of various races passed through, lived, fought and died among the Nagas. Thus new people, new weapons, new attire, new food and above all new ideas were introduced to the Nagas and when the War came to an end they could not go back to the old secluded life (cited in Joshi 2012: 26).

In the aftermath of the war, the Assam Governor constituted an Assam Relief Measures organization that provided relief and reconstruction for war-affected areas. In the Naga Hills District, Charles Pawsey, the District Commissioner, invited Naga government officers and tribal leaders to his bungalow and proposed the formation of the Naga Hills District Tribal Council (NHDTC) ‘with the aim of uniting the Nagas and repairing some of the damage done during World War II’ (Elwin 1961: 51). While Pawsey saw the NHDTC as a technical, apolitical body, ‘once it was formed the council increasingly became a platform for Nagas to express and debate some of their pressing political concerns, ultimately leading to the formation of the NNC in February 1946’ (Thomas 2016: 102). As opposed to the NHDTC, which soon dissolved, the NNC was wholly an indigenous creation.

The NNC began with 29 members and was organized around two central councils: Mokokchung and Kohima. Its members represented all Naga tribes located within the Naga Hills District and several of the ‘Control Area’. Membership, however, was dominated by the Angami and Ao tribes with 7 and 5 members in the council respectively (Misra 2000: 29). At first, the NNC received ‘official patronage’ from colonial officials who perceived of the Council as a ‘unifying and moderating influence’ (Elwin 1961: 51), and who were themselves engaged in discussions on the future administration of the hills. 7Administrators like Mills, Reid, and Adams variously envisaged this in the form of a Crown Colony or North-East protectorate, the creation of a separate province for the hill tracts within India, or through the inclusion of the Assam hills not in India but in Burma. These proposals were however resisted by Andrew Clow, the last British Governor of Assam, his successor Akbar Hydari, and the Congress Party, and in the course of 1946 were shelved. The Crown Colony was discussed in early NNC meetings with its members perceiving positively of a plan that ‘would sever them from the administration of the plainsmen’; ‘thus when the British abandoned the idea of a crown colony and withdrew from India, they left the Council with its expectations heightened by the discussions of a crown colony’ Franda, M.F. 1961 ‘The Naga National Council: Origins of a Separatist Movement’, Economic and Political Weekly, February 4.However, as NNC members became more politically assertive, they increasingly began to view the Council with apprehension. ‘There is a somewhat nebulous body in existence (more or less self-created) called “the Naga National Council”’, J.P. Mills, a veteran administrator among the Naga and then Advisor to the Governor in Shillong, wrote to William Archer upon the latter’s posting to Mokokchung. Mills explained:

‘It is not “National” at all, of course, though it may be nationalistic. It has to be treated with politeness – rudeness never pays – but I personally don’t regard it the mouthpiece of the public’8Letters from Mills to Archer. Digital Himalaya, Naga Video-Disc. Url: http://himalaya.socanth.cam.ac.uk/collections/naga/record/r66612.html This is the first of a large number of references I make to the Naga videodisc (http://www.digitalhimalaya.com/collections/naga/), hosted by Digital Himalaya of the University of Cambridge, and which now offers a significant collection of letters, tour-diaries and memoires written mostly by colonial administrators.

In his judgment, Mills was to be mistaken as the NNC soon became the catalyst of political developments in the Naga highlands.

The Debate Within: Autonomy versus Independence

Dominant Naga national reconstructions tell that immediately after its formation in 1946, the NNC began to prepare itself for complete independence, ultimately resulting in a unilateral declaration of independence based on the general will of the Naga people. This single master narrative highlights the political unity of the Naga people and presents the enactment of the NNC and the declaration of Naga independence as complementary events that followed in linear and relatively uncomplicated fashion. This section unsettles such historical certainties and complicates the proclaimed inevitability of Nagas’ claim to independence by focusing on debates, disagreements and divisions within the NNC rank-and-file between its formation in February 1946 and the Naga declaration of independence on August 14 1947, one day before India achieved hers. I am not aware of any surviving minutes of early NNC meetings (if they were kept in the first place), and I therefore rely on official memorandums and statements issued by the NNC as well as on secondary sources, mostly in the form of diaries, notes, and correspondence written unfortunately not by Nagas but by colonial officers (and the spouse of one such officer) then posted in the Naga Hills District. These officers kept themselves abreast of (and also interfered into) political developments through personal discussions with NNC members.

‘The Naga future would not be bound by any arbitrary decision of the British Government, and no recommendation would be accepted without consultation’ (Lisam 2011: 447), the first NNC memorandum read and was submitted to a British Cabinet Mission that visited Delhi in April 1946. The generality of this statement is not because NNC members lacked concrete political vision, but because, right from the beginning, the NNC was broadly divided into two camps: those in favour of meaningful Naga autonomy within Assam and India and advocates of complete Naga independence. These conflicting political viewpoints revealed themselves along tribal lines with Ao Naga representatives, supported by their Lotha neighbours, arguing for autonomy and Angami delegates making the case for Naga independence.9The tribal dimension emphasised here does of course not mean that all Ao Nagas were in favour of autonomy and all Angamis wishing independence, but that these views were popularly associated with NNC members of these tribes and became talked about as tribal political positions. Basing her notes on conversations with Aliba Imti, NNC’s first president, 10NNC, Golden Jubilee: Naga Independence 1947-1997, p. 28. and Mayangnokcha, the vice-president (both Ao Nagas), Mildred Archer (the wife of William Archer, then Sub-Divisional Officer of Mokokchung District) detailed the rift between the Mokokchung and Kohima centres of the NNC:

On the Kohima side of the district, the Angamis and Kacha Nagas began to dream of a fully independent Naga Hills.‘Until the British conquered us, we ruled ourselves. We were never under the Assamese. Why should an Assam Raj be foisted on us now? During the war we saw the plainsman. We know his tricks. We will never be safe without a Naga Raj’. But on the Mokokchung side, the Aos and Lhotas were much less hostile. The Japanese were halted on their boundaries. They have experienced no Indian exploitation, while a few who were educated in Jorhat and Shillong [Assam] had even imbibed some Congress ideas.

In important parts, these conflicting political positions seemed a response to divergent historical experiences, not least in relation to the Second World War. While the war destroyed and depleted Kohima and most Angami villages, Mokokchung district was saved this disaster, witnessed fewer Japanese and Allied soldiers on its soil, and was so spared the exploitation most Angamis experienced. After the war, Angami villagers favourably compared the behaviour of Japanese soldiers to that of ‘the “Punjabis”’ (Guyot-Réchard 2017: 21) with whom they had sided. Subhas Bose’s INA conjured similarly disparaging evaluations. ‘They treated us like dirt’, an Angami headmaster recalled, then added: ‘It will be like that if the plainsmen rule us’. ‘I worked as a road contractor’, another Angami narrated. ‘The Indian officers made me promises but they never kept them. They only wanted bribes. The Pathans and the Sikhs were the worst. How can we stand against the plainsman?’ (cited in Guyot-Réchard 2017: 21). But not just differential experiences of war. Divergent trajectories of Christian conversion and pre-existent intertribal animosities, too, shaped Ao and Angami political positions differently:

Moreover at the back of their [Ao and Lhota] minds was the vague fear that Independence would mean in practice not a Naga Raj but an Angami one. They saw themselves weakened by Christianity [Ao Nagas were the first to convert in large numbers], no longer militant in outlook, and opposed by a vigorous thrusting tribe [Angami] which was still proud of its warriors’ traditions and was only recently weaned from head-taking.

This apprehension of a Naga independence becoming an ‘Angami Raj’ was to remain an important subtext of NNC debates. While touring the Rengma Naga, neighbouring the Angami, William Archer noticed the strengthening of village defence walls. Villagers told him that they did so for reasons of ‘cattle’, but when Archer asked poignantly: ‘for Angami cattle?’, ‘they laughed and did not deny it’. Archer wrote: ‘Rengmas fear an Angami Raj on the one hand and an Assam Raj on the other, the latter the lesser of the 2 evils’.

Differences between Angami and Ao delegates came to a head during an NNC meeting in Wokha, the Lotha Naga headquarters, in June 1946. Kevichusa, the first Naga graduate and a senior government servant in Kohima, strongly made the case for Naga independence: ‘Self-government should mean a government of the Nagas, for the Nagas, by the Nagas. Nothing else means anything to the Nagas. We have to be masters of our own country and be free’. Ao delegates were ‘unconvinced’ and ‘realising that only through a united front would any advance be possible, the Angamis yielded to Mokokchung opinion [and] abandoned the demand for independence’. What resulted was a four-point memorandum, which T. Sakhrie, the Angami NNC Secretary, dispatched to Jawaharlal Nehru. It read:

1. 1. This Naga National Council stands for the solidarity of Naga tribes including those in the un-administrated areas.
   2. This Council strongly protests against the grouping of Assam with Bengal.
   3. The Naga Hills should be Constitutionally included in autonomous Assam, in a free India, with local autonomy and due safeguards for the interest of the Nagas
   4. The Naga tribes should have a separate electorate (Vashum 2005: 69).

In his response, Nehru endorsed the first three points, but rejected the idea of a separate Naga electorate: ‘We are against separate electorates as this will limit and injure the small group by keeping it separated from the rest of the nation’. Nehru also informed that an Advisory Committee would soon be enacted to offer recommendations on the constitutional inclusion of the Assam hill tribes, and added that this Committee ‘should have representatives of the tribal areas’ (Vashum 2005: 69-70).

Once enacted, however, the Committee was primarily made up of Congress politicians from Assam, including Gopinath Bordoloi (Assam’s first chief minister) and had only two tribal representatives: Nichols Roy, a Khasi Reverend married to an American and known to favour an integrated Assam, and Mayangnokcha. This immediately irked the NNC:

‘Everyone realised that the object of the sub-committee was not to give the Nagas the constitution they wanted but to ensure that Congress ideas of what the Nagas ought to want should prevail’

It reinvigorated the Angami voice for independence, and in the next NNC meeting, in February 1947, Angami delegates proposed that a clause be included in any agreement that allowed for a Naga interim government for a period of ten years, under the protection of either the British or Indian Government, and after which Nagas would freely decide their political future. A furious debate ensued with Ao representatives standing by the Wokha resolution. It was only after the interference of Pawsey, who called the disagreeing NNC members to his bungalow, that the deadlock was resolved. This time Ao delegates yielded to the Angami position and the proposed clause was added to a new memorandum. Pawsey’s intervention (and not just in this instance) frustrated Phizo. He reflected later: ‘I had seen nationalists at work in Burma. I had witnessed what patriotism could achieve. What I found on my return to Nagaland was nothing – no unity, no ideas. Everybody waited to hear what the District Commissioner wanted’ (cited in Steyn 2002: 72).

Mayangnokcha presented the new memorandum to the Advisory Committee in Delhi, but was rebuked by its members: ‘Your memorandum is merely history… Who ever heard of a Naga interim government?’, they reacted. ‘I tried to reason with them’, Mayangnokcha recounted,

‘but they were all sour. They do not argue straight. They twist your words. There is no love in them. No one of them desired the Nagas’ good. They think only of Assam’.

A frustrated Mayangnokcha tendered his resignation. A few months on, in May 1947, the Advisory Committee visited Kohima to meet the NNC. Bordoloi proposed several suggestions for Nagas’ constitutional inclusion in an independent India. ‘Give us a reply to our demands, then we will answer your question’, is what NNC members responded. The meeting ended with Bordoloi retorting: ‘You are really very obstinate’. In a report of the meeting, the Secretary of the Committee stated: ‘It was clearly perceived that the Council was now dominated by certain Angami leaders like Kevichusa and Lungalong and the more reasonable elements were prevented from asserting themselves’ (cited in Chaube 1999: 141-2).

Now it was Sir Akbar Hydari’s, the Assam Governor, turn to try and resolve the deadlock. Three days of consultations in Kohima resulted in an agreement known variously as the ‘nine-point agreement’, the ‘Hydari agreement’, and the ‘Governor’s agreement’. It proposed measures of executive, judiciary, and legislative autonomy. Its ninth, and soon controversial, clause read:

The Governor of Assam as the Agent of the Government of the Indian Union will have a special responsibility for a period of 10 years to ensure the observance of the agreement, at the end of this period the Naga Council will be asked whether they require the above agreement to be extended for a further period or a new agreement regarding the future of Naga people arrived at (Nuh 2002: 67-8).

The Hydari agreement divided the NNC. While it was realised that most clauses were ‘very loosely worded’ and that ‘it said nothing of an interim government’, it did fulfil the Ao demand for autonomy and Ao representatives, guided by Mayangnokcha and Aliba Imti, were ready to accept it. The Angami response was more complicated and disagreements led to a split between the historically influential Kohima and Khonoma villages, and their respective traditional allies and tributaries. While the Kohima group reluctantly accepted the agreement, the Khonoma group, of which Kevichusa, Sakhrie, and Phizo were part, called upon Hydari to clarify whether clause nine allowed Nagas to declare their independence after ten years if they would so desire. When Hydari explained that it did not, and threatened violent repercussions if Nagas would proclaim independence, the ‘Khonoma Nagas’ rebuked NNC leaders for having agreed to it, seceded from the NNC, and began a movement of their own under the banner of the People’s Independence League (PIL) with headquarters in Khonoma village.

Confusion within the NNC mounted further when, a week after the Hydari agreement, the Advisory Committee met in Shillong. Aliba Imti, who replaced Mayangnokcha as a member, attended, but discovered that the Hydari agreement had been brushed aside by the Committee, whose members insisted: ‘We find the recommendations made by us cover in essence the measure of autonomy contemplated by the Nagas and go much further in some respects’. It were these recommendations that ultimately became the basis of the Sixth Schedule to the Indian Constitution that came to apply to selected upland areas [and later also certain territories in the plains] in India’s Northeast. Aliba Imti objected against the Committee ‘treating the Naga Hills District as part of Assam and not as an independent area’, but he was overruled. In the aftermath of the Shillong meeting, Mildred Archer recorded how ‘those who never liked the agreement now feel themselves no longer pledged to it, while those who were satisfied are at loss to understand the position’. Another NNC meeting was scheduled. This time in Mokokchung.

On the 21^st of July, Mildred Archer wrote in her diary:

Today there is great excitement as the Naga National Council is beginning to assemble. Kohima is sending Angami, Rengma, and Kacha Naga delegates, while Sema, Lhotas and Aos are coming in from villages all over Mokokchung. Imlong and Hopongki, the Chang and Sangtam members, are putting their shops in order and already the air is full of trade and politics.

The splitting away of the ‘Khonoma group’ was the first point on the agenda. Mildred Archer wrote down what Aliba Imti told her: ‘the Angami split is more serious than was thought. The Khonoma group have denounced the NNC and formed a separate independence party. A delegation has gone to Delhi and he hears that they have met Gandhi and Jinnah. Their action is a challenge to the NNC and the delegates must now decide what counter steps to take’. Mayangnokcha, however, was of the view that ‘a little “extremism” will do no harm’, reasoning: ‘the Congress leaders will be more ready to listen if they had a preliminary shock’. He then proposed that the NNC send a counter-delegation to Delhi. To be noted, here, is that at this stage, less than a month prior to India’s independence, the demand for Naga independence was still talked about as ‘extremist’ within the NNC.

The Hydari agreement was next on the agenda. Once again, Ao and Angami positions clashed with the Angami insisting on the modification of clause nine to allow for the possibility of Nagas seceding from the Indian Union after ten years. Ao delegates, on the other hand, argued in favour of the original agreement and wished to press for its immediate implementation. After three days of discussion, it was the Angami viewpoint that prevailed. This resolution now split the Ao:

‘All the morning, excited angry groups of villagers have been standing round and complaining of Mayang[nokcha]’s “treachery.” Late last night they angrily abused him. “We stood by the Governor’s agreement”, they said, “What right had you to change it?”’

Meanwhile, confirmation arrived that the Khonoma delegation had met both Jinnah and Gandhi in Delhi, and it was said that both leaders did not object to political projections of Naga independence. In Assam, Bordoloi reacted with fury:

‘The question of the Nagas remaining independent of the Indian Union is absurd. A section of the Angami tribe under the leadership of persons from the village of Khonoma is misguided and their number is small’.

The NNC reacted and, apropos Mayangnokcha’s suggestion, send a counter-delegation to Delhi.

‘The suspense in Mokokchung is electric’, Mildred Archer wrote as India’s independence was drawing closer. ‘Some of the Aos are exasperated, others are bewildered and every day the silence thickens’. On August 12 a cable arrived informing that the NNC delegation had met Nehru and summoned all NNC members to Kohima for an emergency meeting.

Mildred Archer pondered: ‘Have the Mokokchung demands been granted? Will the meeting be asked to ratify the new terms? Are we on the verge of a Naga revolt? No one can say and no one dares to guess’.

The meeting with Nehru had not gone well. While Nehru listened carefully to the NNC delegation at first, after Longri Ao, an NNC delegate, remarked, somewhat crudely, ‘if the clause is not accepted the Nagas will go their own way’, Nehru banged the table with his fist: ‘India cannot be split into a hundred bits. If you fight we shall resist’. The next day, two press communiqués appeared. The first, on behalf of the Indian Government, said: ‘We can give you complete autonomy but never complete independence. You can never hope to be independent. No state, big or small, in India, will be allowed to remain independent. We will use all our influence and power to suppress such tendencies’. In turn, the communiqué the NNC released stated:

The Naga National Council recently sent a full representative body to Delhi to reach a settlement regarding their future relationship with India. In interviews with some of the Government of India leaders in Delhi, they were given to understand that their demands could not be satisfied in full. Since the people they represent will accept nothing short of their full demands, the members of the various delegations have decided that the Naga National Council is henceforth free to decide the future of the Naga people in the way that suits them best.

The NNC met in Kohima on 13 and 14 August and decided that India’s independence celebrations will be boycotted in protest against the government’s refusal to revise clause nine of the Hydari agreement. In Khonoma, the People’s Independence League took matters in its own hands and on August 14 declared Naga independence. Its leaders drafted a cable to the United Nations. It read:

Benign excellence,

Kindly put on record that Nagas will be independent. Discussion with India are being carried on to that effect. Nagas do not accept Indian Constitution. The right of the people must prevail regardless of size (Nuh 2002:115).

The cable, copies of which were addressed to Delhi and Indian newspapers, never left the Naga Hills, however. The postmaster, sensing the sensitivity of the cable’s contents, referred them for clearance to Pawsey, who ordered the cables to be withheld. As a result, ‘Nothing therefore reaches the press, not a word appeared announcing their tremendous step’.

Naga Raj or Khonoma Raj?

‘Since 15 August, nothing has happened’, Mildred Archer told her diary on August 23.

‘The Khonoma group have had a number of meetings but have so far done nothing to set up a rival government. Pawsey thinks that having declared their independence they are now at loss to know what to do next’

In their private correspondence, Pawsey, Archer, and other colonial officials disparagingly referred to the PIL as the Khonoma ‘independence racket’ and doubted their true motivations:

‘In Khonoma it is the Christian clan [khel] which demands complete independence. One is indifferent and the other does not want it – the clan which want it does so because it desires to re-impose Khonoma domination – to terrorize the region – as Khonoma did before’

To situate their reasoning we need to back up a little. Prior to British annexation, ‘pacification’, and overrule, ‘No Angamis enjoyed such prestige or levied such widespread tribute as ‘Khonoma’, wrote the colonial officer J.H. Hutton (1921: 11). Several Kacha Naga villages, he observed, ‘seem to have been entirely dominated by settlements of Khonoma Angamis who superimposed on them their own customs’ (ibid.: 156). And not just Kacha villages. The colonial archive reveals that Khonoma raids and tributary relations extended far and wide. Inside Khonoma, the ‘Christian khel’, which colonial officers singled out as the forerunner of the independence claim, referred to the Merhü khel. This khel was heir to powerful chiefs and warriors, had earned itself a hardy reputation for subjugating villages (as well as for struggling with the other two Khonoma khels over property and domination within the village), and put up a particularly fiery resistance against British invasions in the 19^th century.

‘Today I have been reading a number of tour diaries… The most interesting is by Capt. John Butler who was here from 1870 to 1875’, wrote Mildred Archer. She continued:

‘It is amusing to see how Butler found the Khonoma group a wearisome problem with their unending feuds and “stubborn importunity”. It is the same provocative qualities which mark their incursion into politics today’

‘It is not perhaps surprising that Kevichusa himself should come from the Merhü or partially Christian khel of Khonoma’, William Archer agreed, referring here to Kevichusa’s political argument for Naga independence. Not surprising, too, then, in this line of reasoning, is that A.Z. Phizo hailed from the same village and khel. In this reading, the Khonoma declaration for Naga independence was framed within intra-Naga constellations of power and hierarchy: not only did the independence claim provided a new political arena to struggle over pre-existent rivalries and divisions, it also became the basis for an envisaged regeneration of Khonoma village, and the Merhü khel within it, as the leading political and intellectual Naga bastion.

The Khonoma declaration, for one thing, imbued new tensions between Khonoma and Kohima villages, which shared a long history of feuds and raids. Being attached to the offices of Pawsey, Kevichusa was a long-time Kohima resident, but when his wife hoisted an Angami cloth to a bamboo pole in their yard in support of the Khonoma declaration, her doing so ‘immediately revived the old Kohima-Khonoma rivalry of headhunting days’. An angry crowd of Kohima villagers surrounded Kevichusa’s house and shouted: ‘take it down’. Anticipating a breakdown of law and order, Pawsey personally intervened to have the flag removed. ‘Kohima [villagers] are very angry with Khonoma’, he subsequently reported to William Archer.

The PIL, meanwhile, sought to defuse apprehensions about a looming ‘Khonoma Raj’. In a cyclostyled paper they produced and called ‘Our Home News’, they wrote:

‘Some people said that independence is the voice of Khonoma. What silly talk! How foolish it is! Why is Indonesia fighting today? Is it not for Independence? Why Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru and all the Indian leaders went to jail? Is it because of their foolishness? Is it not for the independence of India? So, why not say I am not Khonoma, but a Naga’.

In the following issue of Our Home News, the PIL both admonished and encouraged the NNC:

The present situation is very serious. Those members who are and have been in the NNC seem to be feeling down-hearted. There can be no good reason for this lack of enthusiasm. It is true that their old friends [the Khonoma group] have left the NNC because they want something higher than what the NNC is still now fighting for. A nation must move on according to time and circumstances. Those who are still in the NNC must buck up their spirit and face the situation with manly determination.

The statement then continued:

We are convinced that INDEPENDENCE IS THE BEST SAFEGUARD [sic] and the only salvation for the Nagas to be free from political turmoil… But a few NNC members talk as if they have the fate of the Nagas in their pocket. So we challenge the NNC to take a referendum whether the Nagas want independence or join India. We know definitely that people in the villages are very angry and they will never agree to join India.

It was this challenge to ‘take a referendum’ that, a few years later, resulted in the Naga plebiscite, which became foundational to the Naga political struggle. I return to this shortly.

The Abeyance of the ‘Hydari Agreement’

While the ‘Khonoma group’ was pushing for independence, the NNC continued to pursue the revision of clause nine of the Hydari agreement. Governor Hydari himself, however, became increasingly wary about the agreement – both in its original and proposed revised form. He now told William Archer:

The Nagas must learn to fit in. They must shed their insularity. The hills must be integrated with the plains. I look forward to a time when the hillmen will be indistinguishable from the plainsmen. We must modernize the tribes. We must make them citizens of the new India. From this point of view, the objective must be greater and greater subordination, lesser and lesser independence.

As William Archer communicated Hydari’s stance to Aliba Imti, the latter admonished the colonial officer: ‘You have also failed us’.

In response, Aliba Imti wrote a letter to all NNC members in which he called for tougher action:

‘That the Naga people attach so much importance upon the point no 9 modified and as such as we had anticipated from the very beginning that hardly will there be any government who will recognise it easily without strong opposition and firm stand from the Nagas themselves’.

His letter went on:

I personally have lost confidence that words alone will bring no effect upon the politicians of India. I presume the Nagas mean what they are uttering for it should be our motto now – “Deeds but not words.” 1. Decision should be made in favour of non-cooperation with the existing government. 2. One month’s ultimatum be given to the Government of India. 3. From the beginning of Nov. ’47, the government servants of Naga people should be ready to lay down their pens. Naga Hills must show worthy of the CALL [sic].

Imti’s letter exacerbated intra-Naga political divisions. ‘Perhaps the Angami will favour civil disobedience, but if the Aos stay true to type, I am sure no one in Mokokchung will’, Mildred Archer predicted. Imti’s political shift, from autonomy into the direction of the Khonoma position, indeed upset the other Ao NNC members, who now decided to boycott the NNC meeting scheduled for September. Mildred Archer wrote: ‘They [the Aos] are all angry with Aliba and his pompous announcements. They are opposed to civil disobedience and they are tired of being dragged along by the Angamis. The Aos are prepared to accept the Governor’s agreement, although they are still not happy about Clause 9, and are anxious that a committee should start to work out the details’. But while civil disobedience was discussed during the September meeting, no consensus was reached and instead a committee was enacted to work out the original Hydari agreement.

Clause 2 of this agreement read:

‘Executive – The general principle is accepted that what the Naga Council is prepared to pay for, the Naga Council should control’.

As the Committee tried to work out what departments the NNC could reasonably manage on its own, the problem of finances immediately arose. Increasing the house-tax by ‘four or five times’ appeared the only option. This, however, was a contentious matter. Mayangnokcha opined: ‘The villagers will pay anything for complete independence, but what will they pay for this? If we double the house-tax they will grudge it… If we treble it they will refuse to pay any tax at all’. Representing the Kohima circle, Krusihu added: ‘The Independence party will laugh at us. They will tell the villagers, “You have not got independence. You have only got taxes”’.

Despite difficulties of finance, the committee fleshed out a draft constitution and another NNC meeting was called to deliberate on it. In this meeting several ambitious alterations and additions were proposed and incorporated, to the extent that, William Archer adjudged, they ‘completely nullify the Governor’s [Hydari] “agreement” and amounted to a new constitution for an independent state’. ‘The same people [of the NNC] speak without stopping’, Mayangnokcha lamented after the meeting concluded. ‘At the end a vote is taken and everyone agrees without knowing what is really being decided’. Amongst those overruled were Hopongki and Imlong, the Sangtam and Chang delegates of the ‘Control Area’. They wished for the ‘Control Area’ to remain under Assam as the NNC did not have the finances to develop it. Mayangnokcha blamed Governor Hydari for his failure to expedite the initial agreement: ‘This delay has given the Nagas time to talk and talk. If he had acted quickly, none of these present difficulties would have arisen’.

Aliba Imti led an NNC delegation to Shillong to meet Governor Hydari with the proposed constitution. Hydari, however, refused to meet them unless they withdrew the ultimatum, which the NNC was not prepared to do. On the 2^nd of December, Mildred Archer wrote:

‘At the bungalow, we found a typed notice from Aliba announcing that at 12PM on 5 December, the Naga Hills would leave the Indian Union’.

Pawsey successfully pressed the NNC to have the ultimatum postponed to 31 December, but this too did not prompt a response from either Hydari or Nehru. The ultimatum passed. However, divisions within the NNC prevented a declaration of Naga independence or large-scale civil disobedience and records available suggest that the first months of 1948 passed in an uneasy calm.

Then A.Z. Phizo stepped up.

The Ascendancy of A.Z. Phizo

In the spring of 1948, the draft Indian Constitution was published and proposed the Sixth Schedule as the legal basis and machinery to safeguard measures of autonomy for all Assam hill tribes, including Nagas. By now, however, the NNC had moved beyond their initial political demand for autonomy and its members refused to see the Sixth Schedule as the constitutional translation of the Hydari agreement. Sentiments were now changing fast in the Naga uplands. If, early in 1948, Hydari could tell Pawsey that ‘Kevichusa has arrived in Shillong, but I am told he and his party [the PIL] have little following in the hills’ (cited in Steyn 2002: 77), the continued abeyance of the Hydari agreement progressively strengthened the position of the ‘Khonoma group’, of which Phizo was rapidly turning into its most prolific and influential leader.

Phizo began the touring of villages and in fiery speeches decried the timidity and servility of the NNC, lambasted Akbar Hydari, and warned villagers about the taxes and restrictions the Indian state would soon and surely impose upon them if they would not actively resist the enclosure of their hills. Phizo was persuasive and the theory and voice of Naga independence was gaining ground. While stirring up popular support, Phizo also followed a constitutional line and repeatedly called upon authorities in Kohima, Shillong, and elsewhere to seek clarification on the government’s position. ‘What struck me about Phizo at my first meeting was his extraordinary thoroughness and pertinacity’, Nari Rustomji, Advisor to the Governor, recalled, then continued:

He was armed with neatly typed, systematically serialized copies of all documents relevant to the Naga problem and he gave the impression of carrying, in his little briefcase, the destinies of the entire Naga people. Everything had to be documented, nothing left to chance, and as soon as the discussions were concluded, he insisted on having the minutes drawn up while the proceedings were still fresh in mind, and taking copies certified personally by the Governor and Chief Minister… The next I heard of him was when I received monumental letters addressed by him from a jail in Calcutta to the Governor General, Rajagopalachari.

In June 1948, Phizo was arrested for stirring trouble in the Naga highlands. From his prison cell, he appealed to the India’s Governor-General: ‘I, A.Z. Phizo, Naga, your state prisoner, address this letter to you as one of the spokesmen of the Naga people’, he began a series of letters. He then wrote:

Since we endured a life together as the British conquered subjects along with the Indians, we sincerely believed India not to interfere in our liberty and freedom now the British had [sic] left and India is politically free. But the possibility of India’s annexation of Nagaland and domination over the unwilling Nagas, have become more a fearful problem than the British Imperialism whose home country was at least several thousand miles away… (see Nuh 2002: 51-62 for the complete letter).

An answer Phizo did not receive.

While incarcerated, the vehicle in which Phizo’s wife and infant son travelled met with an accident, instantly killing his son and grievously injuring his wife. Phizo appealed for release on compassionate grounds. His plea was successful and he was conditionally released in December 1948. Jwanna, his wife, made a slow but successful recovery in the Welsh mission hospital in Shillong, with Phizo at her side. In August 1948, Phizo was permanently released, reportedly ‘in recognition of a bond of good behaviour’ (Steyn 2002: 79).

Meanwhile, Hydari passed away (as did Bordoloi soon after). His successor, Jairamdas Daulatram declared the Naga Hills as an unambiguous and integral part of Assam and India, a political position he impressed upon NNC delegations that called on him. When he subsequently visited Mokokchung he was greeted with ‘Go Back’ placards. Humiliated, Daulatram dispatched armed police into the Ao region. It was an action that further strained relations and in a follow-up NNC meeting Ao and Sema Naga leaders publicly, and for the first time, ‘cry for complete sovereign independence’ (Steyn 2002: 80).

It is amidst these political developments that Phizo returned midway 1949. His spell in prison for advocating Naga freedom now added to his name an charisma, and he resumed, ever more vigorously, his touring ‘from one village to another in the Naga inhabited areas to mobilise support for Naga freedom’ (Yonuo 1974: 200). His popularity soared and ultimately resulted, in 1950, into his election as NNC president. In analysing the beginnings of the Naga Movement it is nearly impossible to overstate the influence of Phizo. Literature that exists on him indeed typifies him as a ‘Moses of his people’ (Horam 1988: 45) and ‘father of Naga nation’ (Ao 2002: 21). Even an Indian General conceded how, from the late 1940s onward, Phizo ‘operated his strings to skilfully that one by one all tribes were caught in his net, which he cast far and wide and with speed’ (Anand 1980: 70).

Violence or Non-Violence: The NNC Divided (Again)

Phizo’s ascendency to NNC president signalled the definite replacement of the initial Ao stance for autonomy with the Angami, but especially Khonoma, demand for independence. However, it did not take long for new divisions to emerge within the NNC over the preferred strategy to achieve this political end. This divide, which turned deadly, was between those who sought to metamorphose the NNC into a militant organisation and advocates of a Gandhian strategy of nonviolence. The main protagonists, here, were Phizo and Sakhrie, the NNC president and secretary, who turned from ‘friends’ into ‘foes’. Both leaders hailed from Khonoma. But whereas Phizo’s election to NNC president reinvigorated Khonoma’s longstanding political supremacy in the hills, the Sakhrie-Phizo fallout simultaneously created a wedge within the village, and was to stir inter-clan tensions that blemished its social fabric for long decades following.

As president, Phizo immediately ‘put the house of the NNC in order and filled its executive with his own chosen men from the People’s Independence League [which is subsequently disbanded], purged all his opponents who were determined to remain in India [from the ranks of the NNC]… and strove to make it a militant political organization pledged to fight for the sovereignty of Nagaland’ (Yonuo 1974: 201). In response, Governor Daulatram severed all communication with the NNC, insisting that ‘no useful purpose would be served by having personal discussion with NNC representatives unless they made it clear that they would enter into talks with an open mind to discuss the place of the Nagas within the framework of the constitution of India’ (cited in Steyn 2002: 80-81). At this increasingly tense juncture, the NNC formally followed the path of nonviolence. While a new NNC memorandum, adopted in 1950, declared that ‘anything that is autonomous in character will not be accepted by Nagas’, it simultaneously asserted:

‘The aspiration and inspiration of the Nagas is to fight for freedom through peace and goodwill, not through bloodshed. The Nagas are strongly determined to fight constitutionally for the liberation of their motherland – Nagaland’ (Steyn 2002: 81).

It was in this spirit of struggling ‘constitutionally’ that Phizo announced the plebiscite the PIL had wanted to carry out as early as 1947. But if, back then, the plebiscite was envisaged as a tactic to silence the Ao voice for autonomy, in 1951, with the official NNC policy already shifted to independence, the plebiscite was conducted to dispel, once and for all, claims from the Indian government that the independence demand was the handiwork of a few ‘misguided’ Nagas. Bishnuram Medhi, who succeeded Gopinath Bordoloi as Assam’s chief minister, personalized this view: ‘I cannot think’, he said, ‘of any demand for independent sovereign Naga state raised by a few handful of leaders, mostly Christians’ (cited in Maitra 2011: 22). Phizo wrote yet another letter to India’s president in which he explained that a Naga plebiscite was to be held ‘with the view of furnishing the people and the Government of India with evidential and conclusive proof of their national aspiration and for independence’. In the same letter he regretted ‘the scant attention paid to the case of the Naga people by the Government of India despite very fervent and earnest pleadings’, and concluded by inviting the Government of India to ‘send their observers to witness the whole processing of the plebiscite from beginning to the end’ (Nuh 2002: 92-3).

At this stage, Phizo and Sakhrie still worked in tandem. Not only had Sakhrie actively campaigned for Phizo’s election as NNC president, he now led the organizing of the plebiscite. He printed the papers in Imphal and transported them by truck to Khonoma, from where he saw to it that they were rolled in bamboo cylinders and dispatched to Naga villages (Sakhrie 2006: 11). One the eve of the plebiscite, Phizo addressed a large crowd in Kohima:

We are here to commence our voluntary plebiscite to put on record and to express our mind, our national policy, in the form of thumb impression. It is five months now that our nation has been given time to discuss about this plebiscite voluntarily offered by us to prove our unity and our spontaneous willingness to continue to live on as a distinct nation. In the past five months I have visited every region of our area and met everyone of you. What we do now will go down in our history (see Nuh 2002: 116-133 for the complete speech).

The plebiscite’s result, as declared by the NNC, was an overwhelming 99% of thumb prints in favour of independence. An NNC delegation subsequently carried the plebiscite papers to Delhi, but where, to their dismay, the plebiscite was derided as illegitimate and non-consequential. And when several subsequent meetings between Phizo, or NNC delegations sent by him, and Nehru (variously held in Delhi, Assam, and Manipur) also proved futile, as well as turned increasingly frosty, Phizo departed from his earlier commitment to struggling through constitutional means. He called for civil disobedience. This time civil disobedience was actively participated in: ‘School teachers resigned, children left their studies and village headmen returned their blankets [that signalled their authority and alliance to the government]’ (Nibedon 1978: 39). In addition, and crucially, the NNC boycotted independent India’s first general elections in 1952 and ‘not a single vote is cast’ (Sema 1986: 92).

Things came to a head in 1953, when Nehru, accompanied by the Burmese Prime Minister U Nu, visited Kohima with the aim of persuading the Nagas into accepting the Sixth Schedule. The NNC prepared to meet Nehru, but Deputy Commissioner Barkataki denied them the opportunity. Instead he instructed NNC leaders ‘to listen what the two Prime Ministers would say’ (Yonuo 1974: 204). The Nagas gathered in Kohima responded in style and ‘as Nehru and his cavalcade started moving towards the podium, the Naga assemblage started moving out… The Nagas left in full purview smacking their bottoms’ (Nibedon 1978: 45). What followed this Naga walk-out were repressive police measures that included raids on the houses of top NNC leaders, including Sakhrie’s, the establishment of nine additional police posts, and the enactment of the Assam Maintenance of Public Order (Autonomous Districts) Act, which bestowed extra-constitutional powers on the armed police to decisively and swiftly quell any Naga ‘disturbance’.

Anticipating arrest, Phizo slipped into Tuensang, the formerly ‘Control Area’, and from where he began organising a guerrilla force. According to one reading: ‘The adamant posture of the Assam authorities, perhaps natural in those given circumstances, forced Phizo and his men to pledge for a war that would not admit of truces, retreats or compromises’ (Nibedon 1978: 57). In a highly symbolic move, Phizo declared the formation of the Hongking Government in 1954 as the government of all Nagas, so formally undercutting the authority and jurisdiction of the Indian government. The next year, in 1955, the Indian Army moved into Tuensang, which was soon followed by reports of encounters, scuffles, attacks, and burning villages. The war began.

Experiencing new levels of insecurity and violence, voices within the NNC raised objections to Phizo’s turn to armed resistance. Amongst these were Sakhrie and Jasokie. While subscribing to the thesis of Naga independence, Sakhrie preached passive resistance. In a letter to Purwar, a Gandhian activist, he wrote:

[there] are developments such as the NNC has so far worked to keep in check. The idea is gaining popular favour and momentum. The situation is getting out of control… After the first strike it will not stop until it exhausts itself. We must therefore prevent the first strike from being ever struck. This must be attempted by peaceful methods (cited in Sakhrie 2006: 13-14).

Phizo disapproved strongly of, what he saw as, Sakhrie’s softening stance. In several meetings in Kohima and Khonoma, the two debated furiously. ‘You are placing your opponent in a position where he feels morally wrong to oppose you’, Sakhrie countered Phizo. ‘Fight rather than be oppressed… Die rather than lose your honour’ (cited in Sakhrie 2006: 13), Phizo returned. Sakhrie not only took on Phizo verbally, but also began ‘blazing his own trail with the message of peace and non-violence… touring the countryside in a bid to dismantle Phizo’s guerrilla machine’ (Nibedon 1978: 64). It fragmented the NNC and followers of Phizo and Sakhrie now convened separately. Sakhrie’s influence was growing and he called for a NNC meeting on the 31^st of January in which, it was rumoured, he planned to table a no-confidence motion against Phizo’s presidency. It infuriated Phizo as ‘Sakhrie’s vehement opposition to Phizo’s theme of violence made the threat to his preeminent position in the NNC too real’ (Anand 1980: 96). Followers of Phizo arrested Sakhrie, took him into the jungle, tortured him for two days, then killed him. The gruesomeness with which this was done made it not just a murder, but a ‘crucifixion’ (Nibedon 1978: 71). Sakhrie’s assassination was the first in a series of attacks by, what press reports soon called, Naga ‘extremists’ on ‘liberals.’

The scheduled NNC meeting and the no-confidence motion never took place.

Violence and the Return of the ‘Liberals’

‘They have killed Sakhrie! The balloon has gone up’, Carvalho, the District Commissioner, exclaimed upon receiving the news (cited in Stracey 1960: 79). While Phizo was seen mourning Sakhrie’s death, and termed the murder a great tragedy, all leads pointed to his personal involvement. A police warrant (and a bounty of 5000 rupees) was issued against his name on charges of ‘rioting, abduction, trespass, murder, and conspiracy to commit murder of T. Sakhrie’. Sakhrie’s rising influence in the rank-and-file of the NNC had been the Indian Government’s last hope of seeing Phizo’s guerrilla army contained organically. It now reacted strongly: ‘Full Army operations in the Naga Hills’, The Statesman reported on 31 March 1956.11The Statesmen, ‘Full Army Operations in Naga Hills’ (31-03-1956). Click to view slideshow.

In the aftermath of Sakhrie’s murder it was not just arrest Phizo needed to dodge. Sakhrie’s clan cried for revenge and Khonoma split into rivaling camps. What colonial officers dubbed as the ‘Christian khel’ and ‘forerunner’ of the Naga independence claim turned into a site of internal division and violent tension. Once again Phizo disappeared. His loyalists, now referred to as ‘Phizoites’, followed suit, and in February 1956 it was reported that ‘All top leaders of the Naga National Council led by its president A.Z. Phizo have gone underground and are directing lawless activities in isolated areas’.

The armed conflict was multisided, and while the Indian Army hunted after NNC members, Phizo and his men pursued the ‘liberals’ within the NNC and word had it that they were working their way down a hit-list (of which Sakhrie had been on top). ‘Official confirmation is lacking’, The Statesman reported, ‘about the latest rumour that another Naga young man belonging to the liberal group has been shot dead’.12The Statesman, ‘Naga Leaders go Underground’ (01-02-1956). The Phizo-led armed uprising also pitched, what the Indian Army called, ‘hostile’ against ‘loyal’ Naga villages (or what the NNC called ‘national’ and ‘anti-national’ villages). In June 1956, for instance, seven Ao Naga villages publicly pledged to ‘break completely with Phizo and his associates and to abstain from violence’.13Assam Tribune, ‘Nagas pledge to break with Phizo’, (26-06-1956). Another report read: ‘Naga rebels kidnapped seven loyal Naga leaders in the Mokokchung [Ao Naga] sub-division of the Naga Hills District and beheaded at least four of them’.14The Statesmen, ‘Rebels behead four loyal Nagas’ (05-04-1956).

Amidst this engulfing crisis and chaos, Phizo enacted the Federal Government of Nagaland (FGN) as the Naga government, replacing the earlier Hongking government that operated from the formerly ‘Control Area.’ By now, two guerrilla wings were fully operative and called the Home Guards and the Safe Guards, both of which specialized in classic ‘hit and run’ attacks on Indian police posts and army convoys, as well as assaulted ‘anti-national’ Naga villages. The Indian Army stepped up its ‘operations’ even further, often exerting force at Naga guerrillas and villagers alike. A European tea-planter in the Assam foothills wrote to Pawsey in August 1956:

The Indian Army is in full occupation of every section of the Naga Hills. 60% of the Ao villages have been burnt… 70% of the Sema villages have been burnt, and 30% of the Angami. The army uses incendiaries. Worse still: the Nagas are not allowed to rebuild them so they are living in the jungles as best they can. Their crops are being deliberately destroyed and any Naga seen is apt to be shot on sight so that they cannot enter their fields anyway.15Pawsey Papers, Letter from Stephen Laing, (13-08-1956). I thank Edward Moon-Little for very generously scanning and sending me the Pawsey Papers from the archives of Cambridge University, where they are kept.

On February 5 1957, Pawsey received another letter from the same tea-planter: ‘Conditions in the Naga Hills seem to go from bad to worse. No one ventures to predict what the outcome will be. There is so much wrong now on both sides and so much pig-headedness to go with it’.16Pawsey Papers, Letter from Stephen Laing, (05-02-1957). Violence continued to escalate, and began to draw voices of protest from elsewhere. On the floor of the Assam Assembly, an elected member accused the Indian Army of ‘excesses’ and declared: ‘I cannot support the steamroller of police rule in the Naga Hills’.[/footnote]The Statesmen, ‘Police Accused of “Excesses” in Naga Hills’ (27-03-1956) [/footnote] In the Indian Parliament, Rishang Keishing, a Tangkhul Naga MP from Manipur, blamed the Indian Army of orchestrating ‘an orgy of murder’.17Pawsey Papers, Newspaper clipping (name of newspaper not mentioned), ‘Nehru told: try peace in your own land’ (27-08-1956).

Nehru, on his part, defended his armed forces and stated that no talks would take place until Phizo and his men surrendered their demand for independence. As for Phizo himself, he slipped out of the Naga Hills and into East Pakistan towards the end of 1956. In the year 1960 he arrived in London – officially to internationalise the Naga issue – but where he soon adopted British citizenship and died in ‘self-exile’ roughly three decades later, still in the armor of NNC president. But I am getting ahead of myself.

While the Naga Army was outnumbered by Indian armed forces many times over, it put up a daring fight: ‘Naga tribes hold down 30.000 men [Indian soldiers], The Telegraph reported on March 20, 1957.18The Telegraph, ‘Naga Tribes Hold Down 30.000 Men’ (20-03-1957) Here and there, Naga guerrillas won battles. ‘Naga rebels… have scored their first spectacular triumph by sending a platoon of Indian soldiers home naked’, The Statesman reported on August 5, 1957. The article went on:

The platoon was stripped of rifles, ammunition, and every stich of clothing in the steaming Naga hills near the Burma frontier. They surrendered after another platoon of the same regiment – the Garhwal Rifles from the Indian plains – had been massacred. The tribesmen, who have a headhunting tradition, let them go after stripping them. As the naked soldiers ran away, the Nagas jeered after them.19Pawsey Papers, Newspaper clipping (name newspaper not mentioned), ‘Head-Hunters Strip Nehru’s Soldiers’ (05-08-1957).

Even more Indian armed forces were dispatched into the hills, and violence flared from one village to the next. From London, Phizo (1960) called it ‘genocide’, while Indian commentators began to speak of ‘India’s little Vietnam’ (Nibedon 1978: 75).

The grim violence exacerbated the crisis within the NNC, to the extent that the Assam Tribune reported its ‘dissolution’ following ‘a rift between the leader of the council, Phizo, and its members’.20Assam Tribune, ‘Dissolution of NNC’, 23-05-1956. ‘Dissolution’, however, was too strong a wording for the resurrection of Sakhrie-inspired ‘liberal’ NNC voices, despite continued threats to their lives. In September 1956, Jasokie, Sakhrie’s former right-hand and fellow Khonoma villager, led a delegation of ‘liberal’ NNC members to Delhi where they told Nehru that they were ‘convinced of the futility of the so-called demand for independence’ and condemned ‘the use of violence by some misguided sentiments of their people [read: Phizo and his followers]’.21India News, ‘Prime Minister meets Naga delegation’, 22-09-1956. On returning to the Naga Hills, they pursued internal NNC reforms through the enactment of a ‘Reforming Committee’. However, with Phizo resisting these reforms, and him ruling the day, the group of NNC liberals resolved to break away from the NNC and proposed an all tribes Naga People’s Convention (NPC) to deliberate the political situation.

Came August 1957. A reported 1765 tribal representatives of both the Tuensang Area and the Naga Hills District convened in Kohima.22Yonuo (1974: 222) speaks of ‘1765 traditional representatives of the different Naga tribes particularly from the Naga Hills and Tuensang Area of NEFA and about 2.000 observers from the other Naga areas.’ 23 The Convention explained its coming together as a response to the ‘killings and widespread suffering’ and their desire to ‘end the infinite sufferings and bloodshed’. Five days of discussions resulted in three demands that were communicated to Delhi:

1) to come to a ‘satisfactory political settlement’
2) to amalgamate the Naga Hills District and the Tuensang Area of NEFA into a single administrative unit
3) a ‘genuine, general amnesty’ for Naga rebels.

The Convention also called on Phizo and his guerrilla army to renounce ‘the cult of violence’ (Yonuo 1974: 232). Imkongliba Ao was selected as the Convention’s president and entrusted to head a delegation to meet Nehru in Delhi for political negotiations. Nehru applauded the NPC’s efforts, consented to the demands, and acted promptly: a general amnesty was declared immediately, Naga political prisoners were released, and the Naga Hills and Tuensang Area merged into a single district within Assam in December 1957.

To further deliberate the nature of a definite political settlement a second NPC was scheduled for May 1958. The NNC, however, took exception to this ‘overground’ political process and warned that NPC activities should ‘not pose any obstruction on the way of independence of Nagaland’ (Yonuo 1974: 228). Warnings and threats were issued to the villagers of Ungma, who offered to host the NPC meet. Within the NNC views on the NPC were not unanimous, however. S.C. Jamir, a later Nagaland chief minister and organizing member of the Ungma Convention, recalled: ‘To clarify the real stand of the underground, Dr. Imkongliba and I met Mr. Jakrenkokba, Advisor to the Home Guard in the village at Sungratsue. He gave us verbal assurance and clearance to go ahead with the preparations for the Convention’ (Jamir 2016: 125).

Attended by an estimated 2700 delegates, the Ungma Convention condemned violence of any source and sort, appealed to the Indian government to extend the period of amnesty, and envisaged the political and administrative elevation of the Naga Hills and Tuensang Area from a district into a state within the Indian Union, but with special provisions for autonomy. Significantly, the Convention also enacted a Liaison Committee with the task of contacting the NNC/FGN and to persuade ‘underground’ Nagas into joining the ‘overground’ political process. The Committee was chaired by Kevichusa, an early advocate of Naga independence and former confidant of Phizo (as well as his immediate relative), but who disassociated himself from the NNC after its turn to armed struggle. Naga underground leaders rejected the Liaison Committee’s overtures and instead asked Kevichusa ‘to inform the Government of India to confirm recognition of the Naga Federal Government first as the basis of negotiation for a political settlement’ (Yonuo 1974: 229). For the NNC/ FGN, the Indian Government communicating with the NPC was an affront to the Naga plebiscite, from which they derived the legitimacy to represent the Nagas politically. The NPC, they insisted, carried no such legitimacy. A disillusioned Kevichusa reported:

I have to report after meeting different leaders that up to this time the Naga Political Party [NNC] does not desire to have any negotiation except on the issue of Independence… So the stalemate continues, and will, I am afraid continue for some time longer. I do believe in the good sense of our people, and I earnestly believe that change in the mind of the people will also come and there will be a settlement on practical lines. But I and my colleagues [of the Liaison Committee] feel that a forced settlement will not bring about any permanent solution (cited in Nibedon 1978: 117-118).

Kevichusa’s message that Nagaland statehood will not bring a political solution, but only produce further divisions was not heeded to by the NPC, which instead enacted another Committee to work out a draft constitution. In a public meeting, Kevichusa made his dissent known: ‘I was the originator of the resolutions of the NPC in 1957. But, friends, I had not the slightest suspicion that a political settlement was going to be made behind the back of those who had their difference with the Government. It was, therefore, a surprise to me that a second NPC was held in Ungma in May, 1958 and the question of a political settlement was raised’ (cited in Nibedon 1978: 117). ‘I hold no brief for the rebels’, Kevichusa clarified (ibid.: 120), but then insisted that the NPC was to act as ‘a bridge between the Government of India and the underground people’, not to push for a settlement of its own (ibid.: 117).

A third (and final) NPC met in Mokokchung in October 1959 to discuss the draft constitution that was prepared. This meeting culminated into 16 concrete demands to the Indian Government, core among which was the creation of Nagaland state (Nibedon 1978: 88). This demand was accepted by Nehru, who subsequently ushered the Nagaland statehood bill through parliament. From London, Phizo reacted with dismay: he reiterated that the Naga struggle was for complete independence, called the NPC a ‘puppet assembly’ (Yonuo 1974: 236), and stated that ‘No agreement can be recognized regarding the future of Nagaland except with the people who are truly representative of the Naga people’, which Phizo insisted was not the NPC but the NNC/FGN (Stracey 1960: 93).

To waylay these political developments, the NNC stepped up its guerrilla attacks, bombed a train in Assam, and shot down a Dakota plane of the Indian Army, capturing its four crewmen (Yonuo 1974: 237). Phizo’s stance did not dissuade the NPC from enacting an ‘Interim Body’ to prepare the grounds for statehood. In this, Jasokie became a prominent leader and was seen as the carrier of Sakhrie’s legacy. Jasokie’s leadership had repercussions in Khonoma that was ‘now split by a deep hatred between the two khels of Phizo and Jasokie’ (Stracey 1960: 103). While the Interim Body and the NNC were now at loggerheads, ‘only a handful [of the Interim Body] had never come under Phizo’s revolutionary doctrines’ (Nibedon 1978: 85). With Nagaland statehood drawing closer, Imkongliba appealed, once again, to the NNC/FGN:

I, as the President of the Naga People’s Convention, appeal to all the Nagas, including the underground people to join hands with the members of the Interim Body in building up a strong and progressive state of our Nagaland. For the last six years, beginning from 1956, there had been killings, bloodshed and burning of villages causing great suffering to the people on account of widespread armed hostile activities followed by military operations throughout Nagaland. It is high time, therefore that all the sensible citizens of Nagaland should devote wholeheartedly to bring peace to the land doing away with the mutual suspicions and hatred amongst us (reproduced in Jamir 2016: 132).

The NNC/FGN refused to heed. Instead, in a final attempt to obstruct ‘overground’ political developments, it targeted the Interim Body; [Its members are] the inevitable targets in the shape of verbal abuse [by the NNC], which included such words as ‘traitors’ and worse… words, which for a Naga were harder to bear than the bullets which were also flung at them’ (Stracey 1960: 94). In August 1961 Imkongliba was assassinated by the NNC. Another member of the Interim Body, Phanting Phom, was killed the next year, while several other members made narrow escapes. Many decades later, S.C. Jamir reflected on this period:

‘I would also like to keep it on record that the underground’s aim was to eliminate all leaders and functionaries of the Interim Body; but they were not successful in their efforts’ (Jamir 2016: 134).

The reason the Naga Army was not successful in carrying out these assassinations was because Interim Body members were guarded day and night by Indian security forces, an observation which further indicates that it does not serve to look at the Naga uprising in terms of a clear-cut Naga-India binary.

On the 1^st of December 1963, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, India’s president, flew to Kohima to inaugurate the state of Nagaland. He spoke:

Friends, I have great pleasure in inaugurating the new state of Nagaland. It takes an honoured place today as the Sixteenth State of the Indian Union… [Our] attempts to secure you the fullest freedom to manage your own affairs have culminated in the creation of Nagaland State… May I also express the hope that, now that the wishes of the Nagas have been fully met, normal conditions will rapidly return to the State, and those who are still unreconciled will come forward to participate in the development of Nagaland (reproduced in Sharma and Sharma 2006: 253).

Coming ‘forward’ the NNC/FGN did not. To the contrary: ‘All those wishfully expecting the collapse of the Underground after the granting of statehood found themselves to be wrong’ (Horam 1988: 12). As predicted by Kevichusa, Nagaland statehood worked to divide Naga society more definitely into two – the people of the new state and the people supporting the NNC/FGN – although the boundaries between them soon had very many crossings, so further complicating the Naga struggle, and the Indian state’s response to it, in ways that, five decades on, continue to impede a permanent political solution of the Indo-Naga conflict.

References

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