Literature in Northeast India:An Overview
By MANJEET BARUAH

In this essay, the focus would be on some of the theoretical problems that are faced in discussing women as a concept in contemporary literature, with specific references to literature of Northeast India. One of the most common approaches in discussing “women” in literature has been in terms of “image” or representation, i.e. in terms of typology of image. In other words, how has women been represented in literature is the focus of such analysis. From such a line of enquiry, one can observe several “kinds” of representa-tion of women in contemporary literature in general and literatures from Northeast India in particular. For example, women could be represented through re-interpretation of mythical characters and presenting them as heroic challenge to patriarchy (Draupadi, Pratibha Ray, Oriya), they could be represented as victims of political violence (Jatra or The Journey, Indira Goswami, Assamese), as victims of social oppression (Neelkanthi Braj or The Blue Necked Braja, Indira Goswami, Assamese, or Mother from Morning to Dusk, Mahasweta Devi, Bangla), as a people who have overcome their status of being the subordinate sex (Bhal Nalage, Maini Mahanta), on aging motherhood (Ai Larki, Krishna Shobti, Hindi), on women and Naxal movement (Stree Sakti Sangathan literature), women as subaltern (A Life Less Ordinary, Baby Haldar), on the plight of being Dalit women (Sangati, Bama, Tamil), or as victims of conflict of political ideologies in Northeast India (No Man’s Land, Anuradha Barpujari, Assamese). There could be further additions to that list as well.

There are also representations in literature that does not situate women in a specific social identity; rather they situate women in more than one social identity. For example, in Indira Goswami’s Mamore Dhara Taruwal (The Rusted Sword), based in Uttar Pradesh, the women characters shared the twin identity of being a worker and an untouchable Dalit. The poverty of being an untouchable was an important reason for them becoming construction workers, i.e. working class. But the cultural markers of being a Dalit prevented women from becoming a worker in the truest sense of the term, viz. whose labour is completely “alienated.” This became a major cause of dispute of whether women workers had right to the commercial use of their body against the wishes of the Dalit men and against the morality that rejects prostitution. In the novel, the challenge that the women faced was not on whether prostitution is criminal or it isn’t criminal. They were challenged on the ground that culturally, prostitution was not acceptable to the community, i.e. to the men. Therefore, though labour for the construction work was an acceptable form of alienation, commercial use of body by women to fend off poverty and hunger was not an acceptable form of alienation of labour. The novel brought out how construction of an identity is not only economically, but also culturally, conditioned especially with regard to women and their right over their bodies. It also highlighted how though men have right over their own as well as women’s body, women had right neither over theirs nor over men’s bodies. Thus women’s body was the site of both economic and cultural conflict.

There are other examples as well of women’s situatedness in multiple identities or multiple subjugations. For example, in Temsula Ao’s These Hills Called Home, the life of the Naga women have been explored in great detail. There is less evidence of patriarchal subordination of women in the Naga society. It does not mean that their society is non- patriarchal. It is that the common markers of sexual subordination and sexual disempowerment are far less evident in their society due to their generally egalitarian (whether or not due to “tribal” context) gender relations. In fact, women occupy a significant place in their social system. However, in the conflict with the Indian military forces, the Naga women came to be situated not only as political foes for the soldiers but also as objects of patriarchal domination for soldiers who belonged to entirely different societies (mainland India) which were highly stratified with regard to patriarchy. Rape became the instrument that brought together both these facets of treatment of women together. The Naga women were raped by the soldiers because they were political enemies. But they were also raped because for the soldiers patriarchal subjugation of women through rape was a socio-culturally practiced phenomenon for them that could now also be used as a war time strategy upon their women foes. Thus, unlike the Naga men, who bore on their body the mark of being political enemies, the body of the Naga women also bore the mark of being an object of patriarchal subjugation along with that of being political enemies. The fact that the soldiers could only have been men and that only women and not men were raped by them made the point clear. Thus, women’s body became the site of both political and cultural conflict and political and cultural subjugation.

There could still be other representations of women in literatures from Northeast India. For example, in Anuradha Barpujari’s No Man’s Land, situated at the border between Meghalaya and Bangladesh, women constitute the central characters of the text. Both the author, as an outsider observant/researcher, and the Khasi women of the village constitute the central characters. The women of the village do not suffer from patriarchal subordination due to the nature of their social organization and the plot and characterizations highlights the significant role that the women play in the everyday politics and life in a frontier. Though with a tragic ending, the text shows that the hindrance to women and their life in the village is less of patriarchy and more of the political ideologies of nation state and the military system manned by personnel from mainland India who regulate the life of the village.

If the “representation” of women in contemporary Indian literature in general and that from Northeast India in particular is studied, one of the points that emerge sharply is that experience of patriarchal subordination need not necessarily be an internal social phenomenon. Patriarchal subordination can come about also through cross politico-cultural interactions, as seen in the writings of Temsula Ao or Anuradha Barpujari. However, depiction of women has not necessarily been in terms of victims. The defiance, or the attempts at defiance, against domination have also been important images that literature has worked with. The domination that is being fought against or being questioned is not only patriarchy, but a wide range of other societal factors in which patriarchy has historically come to be weaved in. It is this diffused character of patriarchy that has resulted in different kinds of representation of women in contemporary Indian literature as well as literatures from Northeast India, which could be overtly anti patriarchal such as in Pratibha Ray’s Draupadi or could be the protest against the concoction of nation state system and patriarchy such as in Anuradha Barpujari’s No Man’s Land or still could be otherwise such as in Temsula Ao’s These Hills Called Home. But one of the most common themes in most such contemporary writing by and/or on women has been the powerful use of women’s body as the site of operation of society. It is the women’s body and the experiences of the women’s body that provides a common space for the diffused nature of patriarchy and society in large to integrate into a unified whole. In other words, it is in the platform of the women’s body where the diverse means of operation of patriarchy can be found to come together.

However, if the focus on “women” in contemporary Indian writing changes from “representation” of women to aesthetics of writing and women in the context of a given aesthetics, the conclusion could be starkly different from that shown in the preceding discussion. For example, in Indira Goswami’s Bhikhar Patra Bhangi (To Break the Begging Bowl), though the novel revolves around the lives of the women of the family (the mother and her two daughters) whose son/brother had become a militant, the meaning of the text in terms of narrative structure can more plausibly be located in construction of Assamesehood (or Assamese national identity) in the text rather than merely the travails of the women of the family for being women. The use of direct speech (for dialogues among the characters) and indirect speech (for narration by the author, i.e. author’s voice) in the text assumes critical importance in this regard. Within Assam or more appro-priately in the Brahmaputra valley, more than one variant of the Assamese language is spoken. In the novel, women from different regions of the valley converse in the different variants of the language. The use of language is not only to highlight the nature of social interaction of regions belonging to a culture, but also to highlight the differential class formation in the regions and the inability of women based on this class/region difference to comprehend each other as social beings. Language, in other words, is used as the signifier of these embedded differences and it deconstructs the category of “women” within Assam into its various forms of gender constituents. Therefore, despite being women, they are unable to help and understand each other. Therefore, antagonisms that lie embedded in social identities also play its part in the continued misfortunes of the family that constitutes the theme of the novel.

But to be noted is that the differences are also held together as part of one culture in the novel. That critical role of bonding is performed by the language of the (author’s) narration (in the third person). The language of narration was the dominant variant of the Assamese language. Therefore, the variations are constitutive of the unity that the language of narration conveys. In other words, the variations were operative features of the fundamental unity of the culture. Bhikhar Patra Bhangi is not the only novel by Indira Goswami in which such textual structure has been used thus. In many of her other novels and short stories such as Datal Hantir Une Khowa Howdah (The Moth Eaten Howdah), and especially those that are based on the locales of Assam rather than those based on other parts of the South Asia, the language of narration has played that critical role in the narrative. Characters and characterizations have had a close relation with language, or more correctly with variants of a language, and thereby the meaning of the characters and characterizations cannot be understood in isolation from the role of language. Further, as it follows from above, the meaning of plot too is, therefore, crucially related to the use of language. The argument that one can forward in this regard is that though women can apparently constitute the subject/s of the novel (or in her novels generally), an analysis of the textual structure of her fictions highlight that it is rather Assamese culture, its nature and its constitution including the conflicts that lie at the centre of her fictions.

The texts of Indira Goswami are important in the larger study of text and textual structure in Assamese fiction generally as well. In most texts of the post colonial period, language has played a major role in harmonizing differences within society along lines of ethnicity, class, region or gender towards the construct of Assamese nationhood wherein such differences disappear. The Sibsagar variant of the language was extensively used both for authorial narration or commentary as well as for the conversations/dialogues among the characters, irrespective of the socio-cultural, economic or gender location. This is evident in texts like Seuji Patar Kahini (The Story of Green Leaves) by Birinchi Barua or Iaruingam (People’s Rule) by Birendra Kumar Bhattacharya. In the former, based on the tea plantations in the colonial period, that British planters, indentured workers, local neighbouring “Assamese” villagers, the language of labour (between management and workers), or the language of protest, the differences among all forms of communications are subsumed in the Sibsagar variant of the Assamese language is a significant indicator of the point. In the latter, based on Naga movement and possibly the first major novel on the Naga movement (and categorized as “classic” by Sahitya Akademi), the case is same as in the former. Such a use of language is notable because the various variants of language (including Nagamese) that the social constituents otherwise use in everyday life are comprehensible to the intended readership in Assam. However, it is generally in Indira Goswami’s texts, especially those based on locales within Assam, wherein the grammatical facility of direct and indirect speech came to be extensively used to highlight that Assamese identity is constitutive of diversity, but within the larger universe of Assamese nationhood. It is pertinent to note that the historical period of her texts based on locales within Assam and the challenges to the universality of Assamese identity in the politics in Brahmaputra valley (for example, Bodo movement) are co-terminus, i.e. since 1980s. Therefore, the structure of her texts can be taken as significant attempts to overcome the critique of the universality of Assamese identity in the valley that emerged during the period. The fact that her forthcoming novel (Thengfakhri) is on a legendary Bodo woman could be argued as further evidence of this attempt at socio-political engagement of her texts with politics of the valley.

Indira Goswami’s texts, therefore, are also different from other contem-porary women writers in Assamese language such as Nirupama Bargohain, Phula Goswami, or even younger writers like Anuradha Barpujari. The fundamental difference between texts of Indira Goswami and those of contemporaries that can be pointed out is that unlike in the former, in the latter texts no distinction is created between subject matter/topic and its arrange-ment into a textual structure in terms of language and grammar, and plot and characterization. As a result, whereas the latter texts, as textual structures, operate primarily as props of ideological (or worldview in general) representations of women or any other subject, texts of Indira Goswami have been attempts through textual structures at re-working/interpreting the very ideology(ies) that they seek to highlight. Therefore, a mere ideological reading of her texts whether in terms of author’s ideology or in terms of typology of images of women would prove theoretically insufficient as explanations. The role of the textual structure, in other words, is fundamental.

The preceding discussion shows that an analysis based on “represen-tation” of women in literature and that based on the textual structure could yield different results. What lies at the centre of the difference is what constitutes (a) the subject of the text, (b) arrangement of the subject/topic into a textual structure, and (c) thereby, the meaning of the text. The problematic noted above, however, is not to be confused with the post modernist problematic of multiple subjectivity or fragmented reality. Whether in terms of “representation” or in terms of textual structure, there is no fragmentation of “reality” or of “subjectivity” in the texts already discussed in the preceding analysis. Rather, what becomes a problematic is what to consider as the “reality” or the subject when different approaches and assumptions of analysis yields different results. In other words, it is the lack of multiple subjectivities or of fragmented reality that creates the problematic of what is the subject or meaning of a given text. And the problematic exists because the characters of the text do not operate at any pure psychological frame divorced from the social context. It is the social context of the individual character (and in the larger sense, of the individuality of the author) that creates the problematic noted above.

But if one tries to analyze what causes the above problematic, it can be argued that it is due to the false posing of gender or patriarchy as distinct and different from the larger social context in which it operates. For example, if structural analysis of the texts is located in the historical context in which they are produced, the attempt at understanding gender in and by itself will appear less relevant than understanding it in the larger context of society and identity in/through which gender operates. As indicated, Indira Goswami’s texts, though have women as central characters and “women” as mover of the plot, it is the very situatedness of the women in the larger context of society, region, class and their politics that gives meaning to treatment of gender in her texts. Patriarchy as the conceptual framework for analysis of “women” would, therefore, prove insufficient to explain the meaning of her texts.

One of the primary difficulties in premising textual analyses in the concept of patriarchy is the twin feature that the concept carries, viz. (a) gender being a phenomenon of sexual differentiation that is universal and (b) gender being a phenomenon of sexual differentiation that is specifically local at the same time. Further, patriarchy as a concept helps understanding sexual differentia-tion and its implication in/within a given social unit. But it does not explain the constitution of the very unit per se. It once again follows from the earlier point of simultaneous universality and specificity. Thus, diverse approaches of analysis based on patriarchy do not necessarily arrive at same or similar conclusions. Similarly, diverse approaches to understand gender through “gender” also suffer from the same problematic of simultaneity and consequent result as indicated above. As a methodological approach in research, therefore, locating gender in the specifics rather than the universal may yield more plausible results than otherwise. In the field of literature, it is only such an approach that can explain diversity of types of “representation” or images of women in texts as well as texts which despite being apparently based on women as subject/topic, structurally are arranged towards meaning that are otherwise of gender.