Reading the North-East

By Utpal Borpujari

Is there a distinct literary stream that flows from North-East India as compared to literary trends in the rest of India? As literature from North-East India, a region still far removed from the national consciousness unless it has to do with negativities such as insurgencies, corruption and natural calamities, is slowly but surely getting more and more visible, this is the question that is raising its head.

A region with rich literary traditions – whether in written form or in the oral traditions of numerous tribes – the written word from the North-East is suddenly attracting the attention of big publishing houses and even legendary agents like David Godwin like never before. Authors like Mamang Dai from Arunachal Pradesh, who resigned from the Indian Administrative Service to become an author, or Temsula Ao from Nagaland, have been published more than once by publishers like Penguin and Zubaan and got noticed for their strongly rooted writings.

And while writings like them who write in English, a language that traditionally has been a strong point with North-East Indians, are getting their place under the sun, the rich literature in the local languages and dialects, and even those carried from generation to generation as part of the oral storytelling traditions among the numerous tribes, has started attracting the attention of the outside world through increasing translations. While authors like Dai has recreated stories from oral traditions in English, the powerful writings of prominent authors such as Bhabendranath Saikia, a physicist-turned-author-playwright-filmmaker who is considered among the greatest of Assamese creative brains ever, and Jnanpith Awardee Mamoni Raisom (Indira) Goswami are getting appreciated by readers across India in their translated versions.

These and particularly a recent publication by Oxford University Press (OUP), the two-volume “The Oxford Anthology of Writings from North-East India” comprising fiction, essays and poetry by both prominent past and present writers as well as young authors and poets, has been in a way a pointer to a distinct literary strain in the region – distinct from the rest of India. The OUP publication, for the first time, has brought within one single cover writings of some of the most brilliant authors from the region, such as Navakanta Barua, Hiren Bhattacharya, the first Jnanpith Awardee from the region Birendra Kumar Bhattacharyya, Saurabh Kumar Chaliha, Dai, Ao, Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih et al. While much of the content in the publication have been reproduced here from various publications, what this has done is to enable the reader to have a first-hand journey into the literary minds of the North-East in one single place.

While original English writing has come out into the mainstream only recently, literature in Assamese and Manipuri has histories going back to centuries. But thanks to increasing translations, even North-Easterners, leave alone book lovers from rest of India and the world, are discovering literature from within the region. And with that the distinctiveness of the literary trends of the region. As Tilottoma Misra, the editor of the OUP volumes, puts it, “An intense sense of awareness of the cultural loss and recovery that came with the negotiation with ‘other’ cultures is a recurrent feature of the literatures of the seven north-eastern states. Each small community or linguistic group has responded through its oral or written communication to the encounters with the majoritarian cultures from either mainland India or from outside the borders of the country, in its own distinctive manner.” This is exactly what perhaps makes literature from the region different, as the writings not only tell a story but also reflect the unique histories, cultures and heritages of each of the multiple communities there.

Aruni Kashyap, who is the first author from the North-East to be represented by Godwin, and whose debut novel “The House With a Thousand Novels” will soon be published by Penguin, agrees with Misra’s view. “Due to the troubled relationship with the narrative of the Indian state which north-east shares with India, the writers have something very different to say than the other Indian-English authors. Apart from having a different sensibility, it’s the political nature of these writings which make them different. The fraught relationship most of the North-Eastern states have with the Centre often gets reflected in the literature, be it in  English, Assamese or Bodo. The fact that literary circles have been discussing ‘literature from NE’ as a different body of work, attests that it is developing in opposition to Indian-English writing, which probably mirrors the fraught relationship NE has with Delhi,” says Kashyap, two of whose poems feature in the OUP publication.

Indeed, much of the original English or regional language literature, that has emerged from the region at least in the last two decades or so, either have strong political backdrops or recreates stories from the history of the North-East that ‘mainstream’ historians – be it those writing school or college history books or those who have been known as prominent historians – have always bypassed while telling the ancient, Medieval or modern history of India. If Birendra Kumar Bhattacharyya’s 1979 Jnanpith Award winning novel “Mrityunjaya” fictionalised the large-scale participation of North-Easterners in the Freedom Struggle of India, something that has never been given its due space by ‘mainstream’ historians, Easterine Kire’s recent “Mari” (Harper Collins) or Siddhartha Sarma’s award-winning “The Grasshoppers Run” (Scholastic) have brought to the mainstream stories of times when the region had become a major theatre of the Second World War. The OUP publication itself has “Samiran Barua is on his way”, a translation of a story by young author Manoj Goswami that has already achieved a cult status in Assamese literature for its strong political content. But apart from this strong tilt, stories from the region are also getting the attention for being able to reflect the societies of North-East that are unknown to the rest of the world, for example those by Arunachal Pradesh’s Lummer Dai and Yeshe Dorjee Thongchi, Assam’s Rong Bong Terang, Manipur’s Yengkhom Indira or Mizoram’s Margaret Ch Zama.

Urvashi Butalia of publishing house Zubaan, which has published several women authors from the region, explains the scenario thus: “When publishing writers from the North-East it is difficult not to look at the political nature of that writing – virtually everyone writing from there is somehow or the other rooted and involved in the politics of the region. It is difficult to find writers from the North-East who, importantly, are not scared – as often writers of fiction are – of saying they are political. I’d say that is a key difference, and personally I find that much writing from the region has a strong sense of place. I expect that over the years, North-Eastern writers will begin to transcend borders and write about things that may not necessarily be rooted in the North-East, but for the time being it is this that makes the writing so distinct and unique.”

Siddhartha Sarma, whose travelogue on the region, “East of the Sun” (Tranquebar Press) has just hit the stands, believes that while every part of the world has a fascinating collection of story mines – and so does North-East India – but says there are some distinct markers about literature from the region. “The ethnic/tribal/linguistic interplays, tensions and interactions are possibly a little more pronounced, even edgy, in the region, than elsewhere. The more complicated the scene on the ground, the more fertile the ground is for harvesting stories. Viewed in that light, the North-East contains within it the kernels of some of the richest stories that can be told. I also like to believe that in many ways, the region contains some distinct attitudes to life and living. There is a degree of innocence and simplicity which runs through our lives. Part of it has to do with the fact that the region has stayed away from the mercantile approach to living that appears to have permeated the rest of the country so definitively. One still meets artists and craftsmen in far greater number from the region who practise their craft out of love for it, not so much for profit or publicity.”

Norway-based Kire, who taught at Nagaland University for some 18 years and did her PhD in English literature from Pune University, has an interesting viewpoint to offer. “The North-East has always been under-represented because all literary output from it has been hitherto overshadowed by the political conflicts that plague the region. We have had to make our own mark in the Indian literary world by forming The North East Writers Forum and showing the rest of India that there was much more to the North-East than political literature.” She also strongly believes that literature from the region has its own uniqueness, “The entire cultural base of the North-East is different from the rest of India. We may have some shared folk stories with some of the other states of India but otherwise, what the region has to offer is a wholly new literary experience. Its myths and legends are tied to the land, the hills and the rivers. Both the natural world as well as the spiritual world are always alive and real to the North-Easterner. What the North-East has to offer is this spiritual apprehension which is unlike anything that the other states have in their cultures.”

But Atreyee Gohain, who is currently pursuing her PhD in English literature at the Ohio University in the US, and whose translations of various authors have been published in the OUP anthology as well as by Penguin and Sahitya Akademi, has a slightly different viewpoint to offer. “I am not sure. I don’t know if there is a NE literature, same as I am not sure if all the diversity of literature in India can be categorized under Indian literature,” she says. But like all others, she too is happy that literature from the region is starting to get its due at last. “The ignorance of the rest of the country regarding writers and writing in North-East is not just limited to literature. It is heartening now to see our writers getting their dues.We have good translators, and publishers are just about beginning to explore the richness of writing in the North-East,” she says. The rays of the North-Eastern literary sun is for sure lighting up new horizons.

(An edited version of this article was published in The Times of India Crest Edition, 05-02-2011, http://www.timescrest.com, 05-02-2011)

http://www.timescrest.com/culture/recognition-for-north-east-writers-4689

Karan Bajaj: Hungry for adventure

By Utpal Borpujari

For a writer who says he is more restless than competitive in both his professional and writer’s avatars, Karan Bajaj has been quite a success. His first novel, Keep off the Grass, published in 2008, not only sold 40,000-plus copies but also was picked up by a major Hollywood production house for film adaptation, and his second novel, Johnny Gone Down has recently been released with a first print run of 50,000 copies, claimed to be a record for Indian fiction. But Bajaj, an IIM-Bangalore alumni and a brand management specialist based in New York, sounds modest enough when he sidesteps a question on whether his publishers, Harper Collins, has pitched him as a competitor to Chetan Bhagat, arguably the biggest-selling commercial fiction writer in India today. Bajaj, in fact, is quick to point out that his and Bhagat’s subjects and writing styles are worlds apart, and hence there is no scope for competition.

But like any young writer of this day and age, Bajaj too is image and media savvy, not content with just his small biographical note at the back flap. Along with it, he gives not a mug shot of himself, but a whole front profile shot with what looks like the Mayan ruins of South America forming the backdrop. Add to that his email id for readers to contact him, and a self-formulated author Q&A in which he gives replies to what can be the FAQs about him. His protagonist Nikhil Arya, one might argue, is a bit like him. He too is young, an Ivy League scholar and loves travelling. But that is where the similarities end, as Bajaj stresses that there is no autobiographical streak in Arya, whose fast-changing fortunes forces him to play a dangerous game of survival across geographies and nations.

Writing this novel, for Bajaj, has been as exciting as the adventures of his protagonist, but bigger excitement was in store from him after giving the book to his publishers. Says the intrepid backpacker (something which reflects in the backdrops of his stories), “I was surprised and excited more than nervous when I was told that they would print 50,000 copies. I think it’s a big, bold move from Harper, more so as ‘Johnny Gone Down’ is a completely different story from my first as well as the adolescent urban fiction genre doing very well in India right now.”

Bajaj also finds it exciting that though only a portion of the book is set in India, most of the action taking place in Cambodia, Thailand, Brazil and the Silicon Valley with Arya donning the avatars of a NASA scientist, a genocide survivor, a Buddhist monk, a drug lord, a homeless accountant, a software millionaire, among others, still there has been a huge print run. This, and a pricing as low as Rs 99, led to the conjecture that the publishers were pitching him as a rival to Bhagat, but Bajaj does not concur. He says, “If you look at Chetan and my second novels, they are in completely different genres with completely different stories/themes. I write about things that excite me—travel and the bizarre, surreal underbellies of places I have visited; my own struggles with philosophy and quest for meaning, etc. From what I’ve read of his work, I think he is motivated by different ideas. I’ve never met Chetan, but I respect what he has done for Indian publishing and I sincerely wish him all success in his future endeavors.”

Bajaj describes himself as neither too competitive in the corporate world nor in the literary world. “This is not because I am a great person but because I have an innate restlessness, probably due to the displacement that comes with an Army background, and all my free time and mind space is occupied with planning work sabbaticals so I can travel; exploring various religious and spiritual philosophies to understand myself better; consuming meaningful art, theatre, literature, films, etc. The quest to be in control of my own life leaves very little time to focus on someone else’s journey,” says the 1974-born author who was schooled in places as apart as New Delhi, Shimla, Lucknow, Jabalpur, Bangalore, Assam and Ranchi, thanks to his father’s Army postings.

Ask him if there is an autobiographical streak in Arya’s character, Bajaj gives a philosophical tinge in his reply, “I think emotionally all novels are autobiographical so in that sense, I deeply relate to the displacement, loss and failure that the protagonist experiences as I can to the unconditional love and friendship that he receives. The situations in the novel are less autobiographical, but somewhere or the other, I have experienced somewhat similar things. When I was backpacking through the Philippines, for instance, a sudden violent protestation broke out just in front of me as I was ambling aimlessly down the streets. People were shot and killed and I had to run for cover.  Those kinds of events do make you wonder on how fragile life can be and how one, unexpected event can set off a chain of events in motion that can alter your life completely. That’s what happens to Nikhil – a sudden event in a vacation leads to his bizarre, almost surreal twenty-year journey.”

Bajaj, however, does not agree that his novel is a critique of the corporate world of which he is a citizen. “The comparison of the protagonist’s life with that of a corporate cog is a less significant component of the story and I used it only as a readily comprehensible device to emphasize the bigness of the protagonist’s life and his eventual realisation that perhaps, Johnny hasn’t gone down after all,” he explains, adding that he “quite loves” his corporate job, “probably because I work in Brand Management, a very fulfilling, creative line of work which actually infuses my life with energy versus sap it out of me”.

The author says that his next book could be a combination of subjects he is getting interested in – mysticism, the philosophy behind occult sciences and the importance of charity. In that sense, he is always looking forward, a trait that also comes through when he says that he is not keeping track of at what stage the film adaptation of “Keep off the Grass” is in. “I feel my job is done when I finish writing the book and the film adaptation is completely the film-maker’s discretion. Personally, I’m indifferent to adaptation, choice of actors, etc., as I have no desire to be involved in the film-making process. Nor do I find Bollywood particularly fascinating or glamorous. Actors and film-makers do a job as you and I do, and I don’t think that equips them with any special insight into life or elevate them into any higher a pedestal than anyone else,” says Bajaj, whose only interest is in seeing if the filmmaker is able to finally transfer the broader emotional and philosophical thoughts in the novel into film or ends up making it a fast-paced, racy intercontinental adventure that the novel automatically lent itself to.

(Published in Deccan Herald, www.deccanherald.com, www.deccanheraldepaper.com, 06-06-2010)

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/73532/hungry-adventure.html