Not the Ink of Northeast
By Kallol Bhattacherjee

The shape of a book bears essential resemblance to the icons of freedom, dream and love. A book can take flight like a bird and carry the reader to an unknown country on its powerful claws. In that sense, a book is a vehicle to an imagined space. An argument presented in a book-form often has a complex topography of ideas and ideologies.

Think for a moment, a book as a box containing, vision, knowledge, and sometimes wisdom and in rarest of rare cases enlightenment. It is a closed box when the book is unopened; when opened, a book can become a polli-nating flower fanning ideas like pollens at the reader and his environment. Shape of a book therefore signifies the functions it is supposed to carry out for its reader.

A book passes its test, if it shows the way to a rich vision that liberates the reader from the mundane. But books are structured spaces; they carry a discipline in the way they are arranged. You cannot open a book and start reading it from just any page. It is just not accepted. A text is written by keeping in mind the shape of the book that will be its ultimate carrier. Come to think of it, there will be the author’s name, the publisher’s name and address, the ‘acknowledgement’ pages etc.—all these indicate the spring of the book, where it comes from, who are its intellectual ancestors, its virility or sterility.

A book just by its mere appearance and origin can say a lot. A book published in the echelons of power in Delhi, e.g. India International Centre, carries the birthmarks left by that ideology of benevolent authority. A book published and read without elite socio-ideological consensus is hard to think of. The IIC Journal edited by Geeti Sen, is one such venture undertaken to expose the Northeast in a unique way. But a simple reading of this edited volume will miss the politics of book and book production that determined the course of this review.

Contrary to the editorial speeches, book production is a social process. The editors alone do not determine what will get published; even before the editor selects or publishes, the social process ensures who will get into the circle. Publishing is therefore always a discursive process, which leaves those with different social-political discourses outside the reception of the editorial offices.

The IIC journal under review is an interesting document as it collects leading writers of the Northeast and gets them speak about their life-world. But the book falls short on the test of ‘ideology of book production’ pointed out above. Taking off from the ‘shape of the book’ argument, this journal resembles a small room filled with museum artifacts. It has actually dealt with the Northeast through the pens of the distinguished writers and produced a museum-like point of view. As a result the reader is not brought close to the region through a series of illuminations. Despite the best efforts of the writers, the Northeast becomes even more distant for the reader. A book of this nature in fact performs the role of a divider, by keeping the two—the reader and the region—far from each other. As a result the IIC journal does not liberate us from the clutches of touristy and handicrafts museum approach to the region’s culture.

In brief, this journal which could have liberated the readers from the oppressive stereotypes of the Northeast, actually ends up reproducing them and also gives the past hegemonic efforts a new honorific space by bringing in new facets of the region which continue to feed from the closed books of earlier decades.

The Northeast is a casualty of the social process of book production that is in evidence in the capital and its power alleys and seminar halls. In fact, it is not just the Northeast, other neglected discourses also share the same fate in the publishing world of India. But in the context of the IIC journal of Monsoon–Winter 2003, we shall say that the discourse of the Northeast which was usurped earlier continue to be smothered by adopting a very ‘IIC-like’ approach to the region’s harder issues.

While the volume is a worthwhile effort, what surprises one is the way it ends up as a rather over-romantic projection of the region. As far as spirit rituals are concerned, the Hindi heartland is as rich as the Northeast. Yet these spaces get equal treatment for both their dreams and reality. But Northeast gets only its spirit tales, hill deities and ruthless rivers. It is clear that the social circuit of book production spearheaded for decades by the very IIC has not yet been short-circuited by the kali or ink for Northeast. The ink of Northeast is invisible in this book. Hopefully, one day, the kali for Northeast will emerge out of such exercises and their critiques.