[ This is Essay # 27 in our Spotlight Series. Click here for the archives.]

Calling Into Question

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Swar Thounaojam

“In the old days, they didn’t even know they were Kurds. And it was that way through the Ottoman period: None of the people who chose to stay went around beating their chests and crying, ‘We are the Ottomans!’. The Turkmens, the Posof Laz, the Germans who had been exiled here by the czar - we had them all, but none took any pride in proclaiming themselves different. It was the Communists and their Tiflis Radio who spread tribal pride, and they did it because they wanted to divide and destroy Turkey. Now everyone is prouder - and poorer”.

My mind has been recycling this quote for the past few years. I like to think it is a very important summary of what’s happening around me. It is also crucial because if I substitute the self-inflicted sectionalisation with an imposed one, it becomes the gist of what has happened to me.

Let me start with an unusual source that has made it easier to identify the category I belong to. Sepia Mutiny. Whenever a mutineer posts a length touching on the immigrant position of Indians in America, hundreds of pronounced comments flood that blog. It is an outspoken rostrum, built and surrounded by an articulate immigrant group. The opinions, digressions and emotions that fill its comment space come very close to the ones North East Indians negotiate daily, living in mainland India. The only major difference is that North East Indians have never been sufficiently articulate. The resentment that each of us harbour at our quasi-immigrant status in India has never been adequately transmuted into a critical dialogue with the rest of the country. This is a shameful failure for both sides.

I am done with the introductory officialese. It’s time to get personal.

When Sridala asked me for an essay that can purposefully cast a perspective on the North-East, she added another question on assimilation. It is in connection with a comment that I have left on a blog post on identity. I am assuming it is the one by Meena Kandasamy to which I have left this comment:

“I think you have to be very conscious of your background, of where your roots lie.”

- After a period of being conscious of my background and roots, I have almost become rootless and anonymous. Its been a conscious decision. Why? It just happened - I got tired of people prefixing my name. Rootlessness has become my new form of freedom. People still peg me for their own understanding but me, myself - its a different story.

Yes, there was a time when I was extremely conscious of my background. It was the time when I was vulnerable to imposed sectionalisation. I was too young to dismiss the collective, disgruntled cry “You are from the North East”. I was told I was different and poorer than the rest in taste, morals and overall judgements. Men in cars considered it right to throw bottles at me because I was too tired to respond to their racial insults on my way to college. Women in friends’ houses saw nothing wrong in refusing to sit next to me because I supposedly came from the hills where dogs were eaten. My face, the slits I have for eyes, the clothes I wore, the food I ate and even the parents I have were up for general vilification. Of course, a small circle of loyal friends and college teachers were available to cushion me against the abuse orgy but it was not enough to stem the resentment from growing deeper.

Mine is not a unique story. Each of us from the North-East has a similar or perhaps a bitterer story buried inside. It sucks. It sucks to belong to a country where the police of the national capital think it right to publish a manual on how people from the North East should live, dress and eat in the metro. It sucks to belong to a country whose army can barge into my parent’s house at the crack of dawn, line up my half-naked male relatives in the courtyard, rummage through our personal properties and shoot any one of us with no qualms because they, not us, are protected by the nation. I do not see assimilation here nor do I feel one. Before, there used to be a form of anger inside me. I had walked in rallies, been tear gassed and lathi-charged by the authorities. I had protested.

Then, what happened? Did I give up?

I gave up the anger. The anger limited my responses and furthermore, I inevitably saw that I was not at the bottom of the food chain. My own people were imposing divisions onto more vulnerable groups, sadly confirming the classic vicious cycle of human oppression. This must have been the period when I started questioning roots and identity. It is not an easy process because many can righteously accuse me of being in denial. I also ask myself these questions regularly. What is home? What do I leave and lose if I suspend myself? Does my being become inferior if I am indifferent to my birth and roots? These are not rhetorical questions. At this phase of my life, they are the most valid ones. For many like me who have gotten past the anger arc, we are trying to make sense of our vagabond selves. This is the perspective I can give right now.

I am not sure what purpose this ‘essay’ will serve. I only like to think that a dialogue has to begin somewhere and perhaps, this is my contribution.

I live in München now. I am anonymous in the UBahn. I do not attract stares or comments here. This anonymity is liberating.