Ethnicity and Contemporary Assamese Writings *

Assamese as such is not a mono cultural embodiment; it is rather a composite manifestation of multiple voices. Hence, Assamese writing is characteristically polyphonic with multiple nuances arising out of varied ethnic vantages. Contemporary Assamese literature betrays a peculiar awareness of the world and its various complexities, while being rooted to its locale. This has, perhaps, resulted in the involved idiom of some recent Assamese poetry. The ubiquitous element of protest of the post colonial scene has also formatively informed this poetry. This is evident in Samir Tanti’s (b.1956) ‘How do I Blame It’:

                                                How can I hold hunger guilty

                                                hunger is my childhood’s bounty

                                                leaning on its shadow I played the flute

                                                played being Shyam –Kanu

                                                back to back I dreamt

                                                and one day drank a toast

                                                I have no quarrels with it

                                                How can I hold hunger guity

                                                hunger is my mother’s first miscarriage

                                                the third world of my agony.

                       

                (Anthology of Contemporary Poetry from the Northeast p. 65.  Tr. Pradip Acharya)

This poem addresses the native reality of the workers in the tea estates of Assam. The sentiments are human and universal and can be likened to the protest in Black poetry. This has been given a more intimate, personal touch by Jiban Narah (b.1970) in his  ‘Mother’ included in his collection of poems, The Buddha and Other Poems:

                                    Mama, you are drinking more than your need

                                    the grey crop on your head worries you no end

                                    and you drown yourself in the cup

                                    as we are away, you call and holler, pause and wail,

                                    and duck your tears deeper in the pillow.

                                    You’re getting on in age, Mama, but don’t you cry

                                    don’t you drink more getting mad at what father says

                                    you’re addicted you’re hitting it hard

                                    as the night grows you bend over, then sit up again,

                                    you call out to the stars and howl at the moon

                                    you wail, and wailing burst into song

                                    don’t you wail so hard, Mama

                                    let the doves settle on the boughs

                                    or their sorrows too might flow wailing,

                                    if they wail your breasts would go dry

                                    A lean river swells again routinely

                                    your dry breasts wouldn’t ever-

                                    it ails all old women

                                    why would you wail?

                                                                                                            (Tr. Pradip Acharya)

Jiban Narah belongs to the Mising community. An academician by profession, he teaches Assamese, writes in Assamese and in terms of his temperament and attitude belongs to the contemporary time, but his linkages with his native ethnic roots remain vibrant to inform his creative explorations.         

Protest gets militant in the poems of Megan Kachari (b.1967) alias Mithinga Daimari who was the cultural and publicity secretary of the outlawed ULFA and is in jail now. His poems translated into English and published with the title, Melodies and Guns (2006). The book was edited by Indira Goswami and was released in the Frankfurt Book Fair around 2007. Protest is poignant and finds a passionate manifestation in Daimari’s poems as in his poem, ‘Megan and Stray Ramblings’:

                                    Tears make me drink till I am sozzled,

                                    The night sky shivers at my mad rants

                                    My ruined vitals go alert like a cat,

                                    And the startled whore spits at me

                                    Out of hatred, sheer hatred....

                                    Like erosions I steadily break and splinter,

                                    Breaking against the bend in my heart.

                                    The river of sorrow rushed relentlessly on

                                    Don’t you cry anymore,

                                    Leave me your eyes,

                                    I’ll do the crying.

                                                                        (Melodies and Guns, p.13. Tr. Pradip Acharya)

The reflection of folk realities is not peculiar to contemporary Assamese poetry alone. Sibananda Kakoty, a significant short story writer of the period, bases almost all his stories on the quotidian actualities of Vaishnavite hamlets in central Assam. His series of stories on the ‘Bridle Path’, especially ‘The silver roll of the bridle path’, exploits the sacred and the profane, ghosts and goblins as they figure in folk beliefs. The stories of Arupa Patongia Kalita, however, concentrate on women’s concerns. One of the most significant contemporary novelists, Mamoni Raisom Goswami (Indira Goswami), presents the rural women’s lot with telling candidness. In her stories and novels she often moves beyond the confines of her village to varied locales. Her protagonists inhabit different areas of experiences and the narratives are well researched. Her Pages Stained with Blood is one of the few significant Indian novels on the 1984 Delhi riots. While Neelakanthi Braja  feelingly recreates the life of widows in the temple town of Brindavan.

The range and magnitude of earlier novelists like Syed Abdul Malik, Navakanta Barua, Debendranath Acharya or Rangbong Terang are hardly encountered in present day fiction. Abdul Malik’s Longing for the Sunshine, and Devendranath Acharya’s Anya Yug Anya Purush creatively document significant social realities often neglected by history. Nabakanta Barua’s Kapiliparia Xadhu has an intimate classicism and he presents the Roman myth of Hero and Leander as if it were a native sprout. Rongbong Terang’s Rongmilir Hanhi provides an intimate narrative on the ethnic life-world of the Karbis.

Among the recent fictional works, perhaps, the most significant is Rita Choudhury’s Makam which followed her earlier historical fiction, Deolangkhui. These two novels have opened up new narrative possibilities to resurrect ethnic histories of the communities from the brink of oblivion. Deolangkhui is the tale, with the vivacious details, of the ethnic history which the mainstream chroniclers reduced into mere footnotes. Makam, on the other hand, is the epic narration of an ethnic entity that has not only been erased by the social narratives but also has been unceremoniously abandoned by the national memory of the land as history’s wretched orphans. The novel rediscovers the vibrating Chinese community of Assam who settled way back in the early 19^th century and were forcefully displaced from the spaces that they so endearingly made their native hearth. Deolangkhui and Makam provide the alternative routes to reach out to history. Rita Choudhury has achieved a rare literary distinction by being able to resurrect the ethnic entities that had to smart from the prolonged silencing of their subdued voices. Her narrative in Deolangkhui creates a historical trajectory to penetrate deep inside the territories that have been perpetually relegated outside the ambit of institutional historiography. She recaptures the histories of the indigenous ethnic royalty that was thriving only in the varied textures of folklore and community memory. She reinvents the indigenous ethnic legacies of the Kacharis, the Chutias, the Koches and others enabling readers to look beyond the received texts of history.   

Makam, perhaps, is the only full scale novel written in the subcontinent that makes a compassionate account of the unspeakable suffering of the Chinese community in India. This is a novel that depicts poignant human tragedy of a community who seemed to have been accursed with eternal suffering. She rediscovers the forgotten people who were a vibrating community in Assam during the early tea plantation period in colonial Assam in the 19^th century. The Chinese were the first tea garden workers in the British gardens in Assam. They eventually settled in upper Assam, became a part of the state, made this their own land and allowed their roots to grow deeper through local marriages and mixing with the native populace. They made important contributions to the life and culture of the land including giving Assam its distinctive architecture for they were the ones to have given characteristic pattern of housing with the use of woods and local materials like bamboo. They were also the ones to have built the palaces of Coochbehar king and the zamindar of Gauripur which later became the models for regal architectural structures. Makam narrates the story of their devastating sufferings that followed after the Chinese aggression. Their forceful eviction from their ancestral hearths, their deportation to unknown destinations across places all over India and the atrocities they were subjected to during their those terrible journeys, their being forcefully pushed into the Chinese border and their similar sufferings in China under the draconian communist regime have formed the central theme of Makam which narrates the overwhelming suffering experienced by this small Chinese community which was quite akin to the atrocities unleashed during the Holocaust. The feeling and compassion with which the novel narrates the sufferings of a tiny ethnic entity force the readers to reorient their conventional understanding of the values like patriotism, political ideologies and nationalistic pride. The novel has expanded range of the ethnic discourse in the context of the Northeast. 

The composite culture of the Assamese people is made of diverse ethnic communities. Perhaps, because of this that it has not degenerated into near uniformity of life style, consequent upon globalization, and literature even now, in our mobile spaces, has remained distinctive. Anupama Basumatary who belongs to the Bodo community gives a feel of fresh realities in her poems like ‘Snail’:

                                    Those days I picked the upside down snails

                                    From among the stalks of growing grain

                                    And filled my creel till the neck.

                                    It was fun removing the shells

                                    and watching their recoiling tongues

                                    before I boiled them.

                                    As I sucked the sap and threw the shells

                                    They lay creaking on the floor

                                    in a certain strange rhythm

                                    that hid the agony of their dying.

                                    Now I crawl around the sea-shores

                                    clamber about the land and water

                                    to look for the roots of that strange note

                                    as the marauding waves draw me back and fling

                                    Srangely,an unseen hand picks me up

                                    Sucks my sap and leaves me empty

                                    The shell of my body creaks

                                    in the agony of the heart breaking

                                    and makes the strange measure of a sad strain.

                                                                                                                (Tr. Pradip Ahcarya)

Saurav Saikia and Anubhav Tulasi are mainstream Assamese writers. But they reflect an abidingly dense, sensuous rural reality with modern awareness primarily because of their warm intimacy with their roots. Saurav Saikia’s ‘A Shadow in the Rain’ invests a casual urbane scene with a passionate awareness of the country:

                                    Suddenly it poured

                                    and at the corner of the floating balcony

                                    the sky glowed

                                    May be the market at Rani had

                                    daubed itself in chiffon dazzle by then

                                    I too had ventured out to buy an autumn

                                    blue,a doe’s eyes

                                    And at that instant I saw

                                    not ease,but an ease-thirsty bird,as it were!

                                    Loose T-shirt,tight blue jeans

                                    May be she had come shopping with her mother

                                    to place this alien form in front of the Bijulee theatre

                                    Ah! As if the rain,and the rain went away

                                    The eyes pouring on me stayed stuck to the trees.

(Tr. Pradip Ahcarya)

In like manner, Anbhav Tulasi’s  ‘Evening in the Village’ is a metaphoric reconstruction of a petite country scene:

                                    Evening descends on the village

                                    Painting blue the warp and woof of clouds

                                    Damsels coop in pigeons

                                    with blue feed

                                    In the temple- hall too

                                    beats of the blue drum

                                    Blue water sprouts out

                                    of the willed pond alone

                                    Village belles lay bare their blue to the river

                                    filling the jars with the evening 

                                    The blues plod back home.

                                                                                                                  (Tr. Pradip Ahcarya)

On the other hand, Kabin Phukan(b.1964-2011) has taken a deliberate anti romantic stance in his earlier poetry but the following shows that his anti-romanticism is not a negation of human intimacies and sentiments. His poems, as Pradip Acharya would put it, “retrieves words lost in dictionary and gives them currency” as in ‘A Little Colour’.

I want a little colour,just a dash.

Green,if there is,if not a little red.

Or something veering on the brown.

Even vermillion will do.

If not,just pure white.

I’ll put a dot on the setting,mellow sky

Of evening strains.

.........................................................

Giving the bride the ceremonial bath,

and, after a dip in the Luit,

with corn on the winnowing fan

on the magnifying glass

will go round and round in dance

suppressing the heart’s wail.

                                                                        (Tr. Pradip Acharya)

                                                                                                                               

Assam also has a rich heritage of theatre that began way back in the early sixteen century with the Ankia Naats of the Vaishnavite saint and reformer, Srimanta Sankardeva. Theatre emerged as a major popular art form in recent times with the advent of Bhramyamaan Theatre or Mobile Theatre groups. The major dramatists that had given a definitive character to the theatre movement in Assam were, Birinchi Kumar Barua,Satya Prasad Barua, Durgeswar Borthakur, Bhabendranath Saikia,Taffazzul Ali, Jayanta Barua, Dr.Bhupen Hazarika and the like. Amongst the Assamese playwrights, Arun Sarma is the most academically acclaimed. His plays, Mr.Nibaran Bhattacharya, Ahaar and Aditir Atmakatha, mark a modernist beginning of Assamese theatre. His plays are also considered to be the first Assamese plays to have experimented with the absurdist theatrical elements.

Assamese writings are not confined to the geo-political territory of Assam alone. Assamese literature gains its multi ethnic diversity and varied cultural perspective through the writings that have come from beyond its boundaries. Some of the most significant names of Assamese literature do not belong to the geo-political territory of Assam but Arunachal Pradesh. Lumer Dai was one of the first major literary voices in Assamese from Aruncahal Pradesh. His works like Paharar Sile Sile, Prithivir Hanhin, Mon aru Mon, Koinar Dam et al stand out as some of the most significant creations in Assamese from across its borders.  In contemporary Assamese literary scenario Yeshe Dorjee Thongchi is the most prominent from among the writers in Assamese from Arunachal. Yeshe Dorjee Thongchi, a career bureaucrat and the winner of Sahitya Akademi Award for Assamese writings, has truly expanded the landscape and the horizon of the Assamese literary imagination. The life and the rich nuances of the Apatanis, the Adis, the Abors, and the other ethnic communities of the state have become parts of authentic literary narrative of Assam through the writings of Yeshe Dorjee Thongchi. The greatness of his writings lies in his ability to transcend the limiting compulsions to merely let his narrative degenerate into cultural documentations. His writings have recreated the life of the people with its varied dimensions. Some of the most significant works of Yeshe Dorjee Thongshi are Linjhik, Sonam, Baanh Phoolar Gondh, Sha Kata Manooh, Bih Kanyar Deshat and the like.  Historically, Assamese fictional writings began from the ethnic landscape as the writers like Rajani Kanta Bordoloi and Birendranath Bhattacharya through Miri Jiwari and Yaringom had launched the tradition of modern fiction writing in Assamese. Both these works narrate the life of two major ethnic communities, the Misimgs and the Nagas.  But with the writers like Lumer Dai, Yeshe Dorjee Thongshi and Rongbong Terang the ethnic imaginations have found expressions through its own voices.  Thongchi through his narrative achieves the idioms to narrate the subtle nuances of his society characterized by its multi-ethnic reality. His narrative, to a large extent, negotiates with the abiding sense of distrust that emanated in the intra-ethnic transactions in his society in the wake of the social transitions affected by the onset of modernity. In the land of pastoral innocence, the arrival of modernism has brought along with it the different values like the primacy of material pragmatism which has greatly changed the traditional foundations of the ethnic societies. This has also led to growing misunderstanding and distrust among communities, erosion of their moral universe and destabilization of the vantages from where they used to look at themselves. Dorjee Thongchi has also taken up the issue of seemingly innocuous intrusion of the missionaries that has gradually dislodged the abiding embodiments of their traditional religious and spiritual faiths resulting in the consolidation of culturally incompatible values in their societies.

One major site of Assamese writings that lie beyond its boundaries is Meghalaya, Garo Hills to be precise. Garo Hills in Meghalaya is a home to multi ethnic cultural identities. Apart from the Garos, who are the major community in this part of Meghalaya, there are some other prominent ethnic communities like the Koches, the Rabhas and the Hajongs who have steadily making their literary expressions through their richly endowed Assamese writings.  Umendra Koch in his “My Beloved Country” evolves a different mythic constituency by brining in the myths and folk believes associated with the geo-cultural spaces of his land:

This is the land of clouds

With the enchanting  mysteries of the hills

My beloved country.

The delicate clouds float like

Restless children in search of

The warm love of mother mountain

Along the uneven mountain groves

Rocky terrains, the huts and the trees

The wind blows with a long sigh

The clouds shed tears throughout the year

You would hear the heart rending wail of

The lovers- Bisop and Bidon.

Their cry freezes in the wide heart of lover Umiam

Countless faces of the flowers in the other bank

Adorn the Memang land of Balphakram.

Homeless souls wander

In the bank of Simsang

In the green grassy meadows of Golf Link and Ward’s Lake.

            (Tr. J. Prodhani)

           

Poems of Kushal Koch reveal deep pathos that subtly characterizes the introspective consciousness of his community against a backdrop where social living, at times, becomes a veritable challenge. He expresses the awareness of a deep seated melancholy in his “After the Sunbath”:

                        Since there is nothing to be called as my own

                        I have saved just my mind

                        For the days of future turmoils

                       

                        I measure the warmth of the day at night

                        Measure the beats of my heart

                        In fact, no one understands that

In the scorched heart

A river used to flow

The moon used to brim

The river banks with its dazzle

A plateful of famished meal

And a split heart

You would get

A well preserved heart

I swear

I am so lonely these days

As if am I a puppet in the hands of void.

(Tr. J. Prodhani)

Satindra Hajong, who belongs to the Hajong community living in the Garo hills, endeavours to gain an approximation with the divinity while searching for a spiritually endowed path:

O my Lord

Thou giveth me the path

That is enlightened by your grace

Giveth me the path that leads me to the Buddha

Or giveth the path that would make

This earth my neighbour

(Tr. J. Prodhani)

Minakshi Buragohain teaches Assamese at Tura Government College. Her short stories are cosmopolitan and she is at ease with both urban and rural milieu. Her narrative is enriched by her underlying humour as in her short stories included in her collection, Hatikhutarar Shopon.. Her novel, Nokme, is an authentic portrait of the Garo society. She affectionately fictionalizes the subdued pains of a common Garo woman through her protagonist, Nokme. Minakshi Buragohain’s narrative opens up the possibilities of the deeper understanding of the Garo society for the mainstream Assamese readers for whom the ethnic society of the Garos, to a large extent, has mostly remained elusive following cultural distance that occurred for various reasons.

 Assamese contemporary writings reflect a deep resonance of the intimate folk realities of diverse ethnic communities. These writings make successful attempts to transcend the confines of, what Pradip Acharya calls, ‘accessible history’. In his essay, ‘Meandering in Assam’, Prof. Acharya writes, ‘In fact, we are so used to the written word that we forget that there were centuries of literature before the first word came to be written. Folk tales, songs, riddles etc.(oral literature) lengthen our past, and they are handed down from generation to generation, and in a place like Assam, they persist till this day. They change and are often added to. They are living memory, not ethnography.’ (2009, pp. 25-26)

References:

Acharya, Devendranath. Kalpurush. Guwahati: Banalata, 2007 (3^rd Edn).

Acharya, Pradip. ‘Meandering in Assam’ in Glimpses from the North-East. New Delhi:                    National Knowledge Commission, 2009.

Buragohain, Minakshi. Hatikhutarar Shopon. Guwahati:L Akhar Prakash, 2009.

__________________Nokme Guwahati: Purbanchal Prakash, 2010.

Chakraborty, Paritosh. Ed. Paharor Okho Ting (A Collection of Essays). Tura: Tura          Sahitya Charcha Kendra, 2007.

Choudhury, Rita. Deolangkhui. Guwahat: Jyoti Prakashan, 2010 (7^th Edition)

______________. Makam. Guwahat: Jyoti Prakashan, 2011

Kachari, Megan. Melodies and Guns. Ed. Indira Goswami.NewDelhi.UBSPD,2007                (first reprint)

Koch, Nirmal. Bodhidroom. Borkona: Borkona Kali Dhaam, 2011-08-14

Koch, Umendra. Spriha (Anthology of Assamese Poems) Tura: Eeu Dee Printers, 1997.

_____________. Jagriti (Anthology of Assamese Poems) Tura: Eeu Dee Printers, 1998

Narah, Jiban. The Buddha and Other Poems. Calicut: Monsoon Editions, 2008

Tanti,Samir,. ‘How do I Blame It’ in Anthology of Contemporary Poetry from the              Northeast. Eds. Kympham Sing Nongkynrih and Robin S.Ngangom. Shillong;   NEHU 2003

Deka, Basanta. Ed. Assam: Land and People. Guwahati: K.C.Das Commerce College       Publications, 2009.

                       

*This is a modified version of the paper presented in the National Seminar on Literary Trends: Northeastern Trends and Streams.  Organized by WB State University in collaboration with Sahitya Akademi at Bharatiya Bhasha Bhavan, Kolkata, 18 & 19 August, 2009.