Abstract: Temsula Ao’s anthology of short stories,
These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone (2005), represents the
first instance in which the varied experiences of ordinary Nagas during the peak
of Naga insurgency (1950s to 1980s) are retold from the vantage point of
hindsight. Ao’s stories represent an attempt to contextualise the actions of
Naga individuals in a way that complicates the rigid notions of right and wrong,
patriot and traitor, etc., that are characteristic of Naga self-discourse about
their past. The overarching premise of Ao in this revisionism is the recognition
of the dynamic relation between the existential impulse of self-preservation (at
the individual level) and the demands of revolutionary ideals (decided at the
collective level). In Ao’s conceptualisation of this dynamic, the abstracted
idea of home functions as the default hermeneutical paradigm for individual
action. Accordingly, in this article, Ao’s stories in the anthology are read to
test and explore the viability of this alternative interpretive frame for Naga
literary criticism.
Keywords:
Naga, Temsula Ao, hermeneutics of home, Anglophone Naga literature, conflict.
Temsula Ao’s anthology of short stories,
These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone (2005), is the earliest
literary work in English by a Naga wherein the experiences of Naga people from
the 1950s to the 1980s are retold from the perspective of hindsight. Ao’s
stories represent a bold attempt at narrating the untold atrocities and
violence suffered by Nagas at the hands of the Indian state. At the time of
publication of Ao’s anthology, only one work of longer fiction in English by a
Naga was published – Kire’s A Naga Village Remembered
(2003). However, Kire’s novel is set in the late 19th century
Naga Hills – present Nagaland state – and does not concern with Naga political
movement for a sovereign state in its 20th century form. So, it was
unchartered terrain for Ao to write about the militarisation of the erstwhile
Naga Hills by the Indian state. Ao’s mediated redescription of real events in
the form of fiction also represents an important commentary on the “kinds” of
cultural and political violence Nagas experienced under successive powers: first
the British and then India.
In fact, the twin factors of growing
nationalism among Nagas and the extended armed conflict with a vastly superior
India produced events and anecdotes that could be characterised as ranging from
personal heroism to outright destruction of personhood, homes and villages.
There are many Nagas still alive with first-hand experience of the brutalities
and atrocities of the Indian state. For these Nagas, the political “solution”
India has offered in the form of the creation of the state of Nagaland in 1963
does not necessarily translate to finding a closure to a disrupted youth or a
trauma-ridden past. Their living testimonies carry an unrivalled moral weight
that is hard to outgrow and/or outlive. In fact, it is their oral accounts of
those years that, in significant ways, continue to keep the flame of Naga
nationalism burning. They furnish the frame through which the tumultuous period
in Naga history after 1947 is remembered in the culture.
Interestingly, the British period is not
accorded the same intensity of violence in Naga collective memory. Perhaps, this
is because there is hardly any who is alive that has experienced British
atrocities in the 19th and 20th centuries, or the
subsequent Indian experience superseded anything before of a similar kind. In
fact, “Japan War” – that is the native term for World War 2 in Naga collective
memory – had an unprecedented destructive impact on both the material and
psychological aspects of Naga experience. In Naga oral historiography, there is
a before and an after of Japan War experience. However, it is extremely uncommon
to hear of incidents related to Japanese presence in Naga homeland during World
War 2 that may be characterised as “traumatic”. This is perhaps due to the fact
that despite the unprecedented scale of destruction of some Naga areas in 1944,
the whole experience lasted only for a few months. It was nothing like the armed
conflict with the Indian state, which in terms of scale and intensity were
sustained for decades over the entire Naga homeland in Nagaland, Manipur, Assam,
and Arunachal Pradesh. Therefore, it is unsurprising that “generational trauma”
of Nagas – Temsula Ao characterises it as the re-structuring of Naga psyche in
the preamble to her anthology – exclusively concerns the Indian experience.
Considered from this perspective, Ao’s stories in this anthology represent an
attempt to break the cycle of “inherited trauma” of Nagas by offering a sort of
therapeutic catharsis in both their re-telling and reception.
It should be also noted that Ao’s
These Hills Called Home does not only recount the sufferings of Nagas at the
hands of the Indian armed forces. It also problematises the whole conflict by
exploring the subjectivities of some Nagas as passive sufferers and also as
complicit agents of “Indian terror”. Portraits of individual Nagas abandoning
the collective objective for personal interests are painted as intersecting with
the less-than-favourable material conditions of their existence. In this regard,
Ao’s focus on the domestic life of her characters and the type of home owned and
aspired by them are narratorial tools for embodying the motive force of their
actions. Whether the concerned individuals join the underground movement or
serve the Indian establishment in various capacities, the organising normative
principle for their actions is (their) home: the desire to secure a “better”
home. The narrativisation of individual action as driven by a subjective motive
that may not always align with the revolutionary ideals of the collective
complicates and reframes the nature and memory of Naga insurgency movement as a
whole. In this regard, the focus of this article is the liminal space that is
opened up by the asymmetry between individual action and collective ideals as
they are rendered in Ao’s stories.
When viewed from this perspective, Ao’s
anthology represents an attempt to contextualise the actions of Naga individuals
in a way that complicates the rigid notions of right and wrong, patriot and
traitor, etc., that are characteristic of Naga self-discourse about their past –
especially of the period in which Ao sets her stories. The overarching premise
of Ao in this revised historiography of Naga cultural memory is the recognition
of the dynamic relation between the existential impulse of self-preservation (at
the individual level) and the self-effacing, self-sacrificing demands of
revolutionary ideals (decided at the collective level). And in Ao’s
conceptualisation of this dynamic, the abstracted idea of home functions as the
default hermeneutical paradigm for individual action. Therefore, in this
article, Ao’s stories in the anthology are read to test and explore the
viability of this alternative interpretive frame for Naga literary criticism.
And given the relative recency of Anglophone Naga literature – especially
fiction, which began in 2003 – exploring new reading frames and hermeneutical
paradigms to access the layered meanings of subjective Naga experience is both
necessary and inevitable.
The stories in Ao’s anthology are
essentially organised around the central theme of dislocated home and its
intimate connection with the idea of a tribal or an ethnic identity. Domestic
imageries of home, marriage, family and village function as reference points in
this excursion into the source of the shadow that Nagas continue to contend with
in the present. The traditional image of constancy and stability that home
typically evokes in Naga cultural imagination is rendered unstable by their
fractured encounter with successive powers starting in the 19th
century: British (colonial), Japanese encounter (World War 2), and India and
Myanmar (post-British period). After 1947, the home-nonhome dialectic is
primarily disrupted by the counter-insurgency programmes of the Indian army,
causing widespread confusion, uncertainty and cognitive dissonance among Nagas.
In the preamble to the anthology, Ao provides the context and objective of her
stories: “the thrust of the narratives is to probe how the events of that era
have revolutionised or restructured the Naga psyche” (x). Home as a stable
category of Naga ontology, and firmly located within the boundaries of the
village space, is dismantled by the widespread violence from counter-insurgency
operations of the Indian establishment. Nonetheless, home is also the logic
through which any form of individual or collective resistance for
self-preservation is formulated and enacted into action by Nagas. In that sense,
home as both an abstraction and a real entity in the village becomes a contested
terrain for Nagas, and takes on physical and psychological forms in the stories.
The ironic use of the word “home” in the title of the anthology is both a
lamentation and a prefigurement of the “resistant actions” of the characters in
order to “secure” their home: Is this a place where home can be sustained? Or
could such a place marked by endless cycles of violence be called home?
The title of Ao’s anthology comes from
the story “An Old Man Remembers” (93). It is a poignant story of an old
grandfather who wrestles with the idea of recounting his life in the Naga
insurgency movement to his young, curious grandson. He eventually opens up
because “it is the secret of our lost youth and also because I realise that once
in a lifetime one ought to face the truth. Truth about the self, the land, and
above all, the truth about history” (Ao 112). The trajectory of Sashi’s youthful
life was not shaped by a belief in the grand ideas of nationalism and
sovereignty, even though Naga political struggle was at its peak then – in the
1950s. Rather, very “basic” concerns of having a home in the village and the
right to life were behind his decision to join the underground movement. In
fact, the dream was to return to the village and rebuild his home – a village
which has been burnt to the ground by the Indian army (Ao 102). And in search of
“a safer home”, Sashi found himself become a “ruthless killer” even before he
turned sixteen (Ao 108).
At this point in Naga political history,
it was uncommon to imagine home outside the village space. It would have been
“safer” to establish a new home elsewhere away from the conflict zone. But life
in the cities and towns outside the homeland was an option available only to a
fraction of Naga population. In fact, home within the same village territory,
but not on the same site as the existing/previous one, was not even
contemplated. This is one of the odd things, or a unique feature, of traditional
Naga conception of home and the village space. The attachment of Nagas (Aos in
this case) to their village sites in the “periphery” away from the new townships
is hard to explain in terms of the various formulations of attachment theory of
home (Tuan 1977; Casey 1997; Somerville 1992; Saunders 2021). Returning to the
same site of home that has been marked by a violent memory of destruction and
tragedy bespeaks of a cultural psyche that needs its own theorising. This
phenomenon requires historicising and a context-specific analysis, given the
widespread presence of the trope of migration in Naga folklore. A home to these
Nagas in the stories is no longer a home, or less of a home, if it fails to
provide security: imagined territorially and specifically in the village.
Therefore, when situations improve a bit, the displaced villagers return and
rebuild their homes on the ruined site (Ao 111).
Continuing in this vein, the “politics”
of a man like Sashi in the story is essentially driven by the need to secure a
safe home in the village. Ontologically speaking, whatever Old Man Sashi did was
not “unplaced.” The coordinates of his actions were rooted in the primality of
the village space. Without the village, there was a loss of ontology. Or “a loss
in a kind of being and not merely in the number of beings that exists”
(Casey 71). Could Sashi have obtained a secure home for himself if he had sided
with the Indian state? Perhaps. But at what cost? This is a question Ao
obliquely explores in “The Curfew Man” and “Saoba”.
“The Curfew Man” is a story about
Satemba, a Constable in the Assam Police, who retired prematurely after he
damaged a kneecap in a football match. His measly pension of 75 Rupees per month
is barely sufficient to support himself and his wife. So, his wife accepts the
job of helper and companion to the wife of the Sub-Divisional Officer (SDO).
From this association Satemba is “lured” into becoming an informer of the
Government by the SDO. Initially non-committal, he accepts it as “he was
discreetly reminded that his wife’s job was somehow connected with the offer”
(Ao 37). The monetary rewards from this “side business” after dark prove a huge
help in meeting the expenses of the family. But Satemba has misgivings about his
job. His wife catches on to his “secret” job, but Ao rationalises her silent
“acceptance”:
circumstances were forcing innocent,
peace-loving people to turn to means that they would not ordinarily employ, just
to stay safe and alive. She had to admit that they were indeed caught in a
vice-like situation and every time Satemba went out at night, she kept a lone
vigil in the darkness of their small hut and worried until he appeared at the
door (38-39).
However, when Satemba’s second kneecap
gives up and renders him unable to walk, his wife, Jemtila, feels a huge burden
lifted. She goes to work “unusually light-hearted and free because now that both
of Satemba’s knees were damaged, he would no longer be able to work for the
S.D.O” (Ao 42). For Jemtila her husband’s status as a cripple is preferable than
being employed as a Government informer. “If the first bad knee had secured him
his pension from the Assam Police, the second injury truly secured his freedom
from the sinister bondage” (Ao 42). Her attitude arouses contempt in the SDO,
who realises that Satemba would be of no practical use in his present condition.
So, he fires Jemtila from her job and also adds that her husband’s “services
will no longer be needed.”
Jemtila’s characterisation of the manner
in which her husband “truly secured his freedom” is a poignant commentary about
life during this period. At this point in time, Nagas were segregated into three
political categories: rebels and their sympathisers, moderates and fence-sitters
(neutrals), and Naga Indians. The “freedom” Jemtila “cherishes” is the kind that
comes from a “neutral” position in a conflict situation, and relates more to a
mental state. The fact of the matter is that both she and her husband could be
casualties of the armed conflict any moment. Being released from the “bondage”
of the SDO and the Government did not guarantee that they would not be harmed in
some unpredictable way. Nonetheless, simplicity characterises Jemtila’s
expectation from her marriage, and life in general. Her husband’s neutrality,
both physically (due to broken kneecaps), and symbolically (no longer an
informer of the Government), provides her with a sense of relative security from
both the Naga rebels and the Indian armed forces. She represents the majority of
Nagas caught in-between the armed Naga rebels and the Indian state, and to whom
the word “neutral” registers “security”.
Even though Ao seems to attribute
Satemba’s job as an informer to his unique circumstances, and his desire to have
enough money to build his own house, the ending of the story undercuts that and
reinstates the necessity of ethical choices in any given situation. It is not a
straightforward case of “exoneration” because of the compulsions of economic
struggles and physical disability. Rather, the place of choice in ethical
conduct under complex and difficult situations undergirds it. Ao explores this
theme further in “Shadows”. The story narrates the tragic murder of a young
recruit of the Naga National Council, who is also the son of a high-ranking
officer, by his comrades while they were on their way to China via Burma
(Myanmar). The order for his murder is issued by the Captain of the team, who,
it is recounted, had been humiliated in the past by the victim’s father. What Ao
underscores in this story – which is likely based on true events – is the
presence of variables that complicate a political movement like the Naga armed
struggle for sovereignty. Beyond the gruesome, bone-chilling account of the
murder, what comes through distinctly is that ideals alone are not enough for
revolutions, as the variable of the individual – made up of heart and mind – can
alter the course and outcome of such long-drawn struggles. Choice, an ethical
one at that, is always available as an option no matter the circumstances. So,
for Jemtila, a rented hut is preferred over a hypothetical building constructed
with “blood money”, and a measly income is preferred over an ill-gotten wealth.
The ethical ending of “The Curfew Man” is
also the moral framework for the story of “Saoba”. An orphan boy with some
cognitive issues, Saoba is taken in by Imtila, the wife of Boss, the leader of
the “squad”. The squad is made up of personnel of the Home Guards that was
raised by the Indian Government to aid its military efforts against the Naga
rebels. As Boss grows in prominence in the eyes of the Indian establishment, his
home becomes more of a “public” space, stripped of its personal and private
characteristics. His “boys” take up residence and women visitors are entertained
regularly. This causes Imtila to lose domestic autonomy over her home, and the
moral of the story is articulated from her perspective. “She could no longer
call her home her personal domain. There was no peace and quiet for her or the
children because her husband’s lackeys seemed to be everywhere” (Ao 15). When
Saoba, a mentally challenged orphan which she had taken in, is mistakenly shot
dead by Boss in a drunken state, Imtila’s lamentation represents an indictment
of the perversion of the “ideal” home: “Oh my poor boy, were you born for this?
Why did I let you come into this evil place?” (Ao 19).
To call one’s own home “evil” is to
invoke an idea or notion of home beyond the materiality of the house. Even if
the “what” of a home is not explicitly spelled out, what it is not is
implied through the description of the goings-on in the house. Ao foregrounds
the distinction that exists between home and house in this story, but the nature
of their relationship is only vaguely suggested. The materiality of a house is a
necessary condition for a home in Naga culture, but can there be a “home”
without a “fixed” house along the lines of the figure of the nomad? In any case,
Imtila’s lamentation and disparagement of her house as “evil” introduces a moral
dimension to the idea of “home”. However, Ao stops short of “prescribing” the
features of an ideal home; she merely describes what it is not.
Ao’s focus on the quotidian in her
stories in this anthology also suggests a degree of detachment from the
collective rhetoric of Naga political aspiration. For Nagas whose experience and
struggles Ao chose to portray in her stories, their concerns seem to be more
about the immediate struggles of establishing and sustaining a stable home.
Faced with an existential situation because of the armed conflict with India,
these Nagas grope for vocabularies to articulate their situation and
aspirations. Any new word that negates or transgresses the familiar vocabularies
of domesticity (village life) has a disorienting effect. “Grouping”, “convoy”,
“curfew”, “army”, etc., are some of these new words that in due course of time
register dread in Nagas. The “dread-ness” of these words primarily originate
from their associative meanings, which is the reterritorialisation of the
familiar homespace – village.
“Grouping” refers to the forced
collection of villagers into manageable groups while military operations against
the armed Naga insurgents are carried out. Often, these operations involved the
destruction of whole villages to render them unsuitable for Naga insurgents to
take shelter in, and/or to punish the villagers for not distancing themselves
from Naga rebels enough. In due course, the word “grouping” had acquired a usage
that became associated with destruction of villages, barns, and the forced
migration of Naga civilians into grouping areas – which basically are
concentration camps. Ao writes about “grouping” in the story “Saoba” thus:
The word ‘grouping’ had a much more
sinister implication; it meant that whole
villages would be dislodged from their ancestral sites and herded into
new
ones, making it more
convenient for the security forces to guard the day and night…It was the most
humiliating insult that was inflicted on the Naga
psyche by forcibly uprooting them from the soil of their origin and
being, and confining hem in an alien environment (11).
“Grouping zone” is also evocative of what
Marc Auge, in a different context, described as “non-place” (122). A place of
transience away from the village is converted into a temporary “home” to pen in
Naga villagers. Nagas generally have a “totalistic” attachment to their village.
And so the “grouping zone” modality of the counter-insurgency operation of the
Indian army proved very disconcerting for them. Cognitive dissonance produced an
existential crisis similar to what Levi experienced in Easterine Kire’s novel,
A Naga Village Remembered (2003). Ao perhaps had a similar image in mind
when she characterised her stories in The Hills Called Home as concerned
with the representation of the ways in which Naga psyche was restructured by the
events of this period (1950s-1980s). In any case, it is safe to say that Naga
psyche begins with home in the village. And to be forcibly removed from it
without is bound to produce psychological and existential situations which would
require adapting in order to survive. In that sense, individual as well as
collective choices and actions in the stories can be taken as examples of the
manifestation of Naga psyche in the process of being restructured. And in this,
home, or an idea of it, functions as the “baseline” for cognition and action.
That said, Ao does not close her
anthology with a grim picture. Fractured as it may be by the decades-old
experience of violence, Ao pays tribute to the indefatigable Naga spirit for
survival, albeit with a caveat, in a context in which old solidarities and
values are locked in a new contest with non-traditional values. The creation of
Nagaland state in 1963 produced a palpable degree of optimism as conditions for
stable homes were (partly) guaranteed. Ao captures this in the story, “A New
Chapter”, which is designedly featured last in the anthology: “With fresh hope
in their hearts, they were also talking of re-building burnt down houses and
granaries” (121). Ao also adds:
Slowly and painfully Nagas were beginning
to look at themselves through new prisms, some self-centred and some thrust upon
them…Those who survived,
learnt to adopt to the new trends and new lifestyles (122).
A close-up view of the lives of the
protagonists, Nungsang and Merenla, reveals new notions of social status and
worth occasioned by the rise of the moneyed class of politicians, contractors
and bureaucrats. Uncannily reminiscent of 19th century English
novels, social mobility becomes the norm; and marital alliances are determined
by material considerations – the marriage of Merenla to Nungsang for instance.
The idea of a good home too is now subject to a new set of criteria as the
community uneasily straddles tradition and modernity. Armed conflict,
globalisation and individual aspirations had combined to produce a new cultural
reality in which owning multiple houses (as in distinction from homes) is
considered a distinctive hallmark of social mobility in Naga society. So, from a
very monolithic and totalised ideation of home in the village space, Naga
imagination of home becomes less fixed to a “prescribed” place – the village. A
vague outline of a more fluid conception of home begins to emerge on the
horizon, and with it a new set of criteria of home is also encoded in the
narrative as underpinning individual action.
The tentative use of “home” in These
Hills Called Home is a deliberate ploy by Ao to characterise the
destabilised and contested reality of Naga homeland. The ironic sense in which
the Hills are called “home”, bereft of all that one would normally associate
with home – security, freedom, comfort, etc. – can be said to make the moral as
well as existential case for armed rebellion. The decision of Sashi and his
friend to formally join the Naga rebels after their accidental “enlistment”
exemplifies this position. They visualised their role in the insurgency as
motivated by the desire to defend their right to own a safe home in the village.
Of course, one might argue that the loss of a “safe home” after 1947 was due to
Naga refusal to be part of the Indian Union. But Ao certainly does not position
her stories in that way. The justness of Naga armed movement for political
self-determination remains unquestioned. Instead, the “compulsions” of ordinary
Nagas and their actions (for self-preservation) are Ao’s principal focus in the
stories.
At another level of signification, Ao’s
graphic account of the cycles of atrocities and sufferings received by Nagas at
the hands of the Indian armed forces “explains” the motive underpinning the
“surrender” of the so-called moderate Nagas. Their action is portrayed as driven
by the desire to choose life over death, which Ao does not explicitly indict nor
approve it. Nonetheless, what comes through from Ao’s decision to re-inhabit the
position of ordinary Nagas caught in the quagmire of the violence and articulate
their experience is the familiar desire for self-preservation. And if the
individual desire for life negates the revolutionary demand for self-sacrifice,
it is merely human and relative. In that sense, Ao’s anthology can be
characterised as an apology for those who may be deemed as “traitors” for
choosing to live a little, even if that means exchanging the ideated notion of
Naga sovereignty for a set of limited but guaranteed rights under the
constitution of India.
1.
Ao, Temsula. These Hills
Called Home: Stories from a War Zone. New Delhi: Penguin India, 2005.
2.
Auge, Marc. Non-Places:
Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe.
London: Verso, 1995.
3.
Casey, Edward. The Fate of
Place: A Philosophical History. Okland: University of California Press, 1997.
4.
Kire, Easterine. A Naga
Village Remembered. Kohima: Ura Academy, 2003.
5.
Saunders, Peter. A Nation of
Homeowners. London: Routledge, 2021 (1990).
6.
Somerville, Peter.
“Homelessness and the Meaning of Home”. International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research, Volume 16, Issue 4, 1992, pp. 529-539.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.1992.tb00194.x
7.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1977.