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A foreigner in one’s own land

A survey report titled, The Topography of Assam, by certain John Mcoshe has an interesting reference on women of Assam.

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Parbina Rashid

A survey report titled, The Topography of Assam, by certain John Mcoshe has an interesting reference on women of Assam. “The women of this country are very fair, fairer than any other race I have seen in India. Radiantly fair. And many of them would be considered beautiful by the standard of any part of the world. In this part of the country, the women go about in public quite divested of the artificial modesty practiced by native ladies in other parts of India. Unfortunately their morality is at a very low ebb.…The Assamese, by the inhabitants of most provinces, are looked upon as enchantress…”

The report, which is now preserved in the archives of Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, was written in 1837. Even after two centuries, Mcoshe’s perception finds takers among the people living on this side of the Chicken Neck. Only his ‘enchantress’ has been replaced with ‘easy lay’.

Men, too, don’t escape such prejudices, if the number of boys from North-East who get abused, even killed, in other parts of the country is anything to go by. The killing of a boy from Arunachal Pradesh in Delhi shook the conscience of Preeti Gill, who shares deep ties with the region. And eventually this case and several others became the trigger point for this book, which she has co-edited with Samrat, an author and journalist.

The book, an anthology of essays, first-person accounts, and poetry by well-known authors, policy makers, activists and poets, not just captures the not-so-pleasant experiences of the people from the North-East who venture out to the ‘mainland’ India but also the sad stories of outsiders residing in the region, those who wear the tag of videkhi in Assam, vai in Mizoram and dkhar in Meghalaya.

So, as anyone from the NE would agree with Jahnavi Barua while she describes how she felt like an exotic specimen when she first moved to Delhi, the same pain would be felt reading Mahua Sen’s article, capturing the agony of a Bengali Hindu living in Shillong. “We inherited the collective fate of the Punjabi Hindus of West Pakistan and the Kashmiri Pandits. In the majoritarian spectrum, if Kashmiri Pandits are the acne of secular India, the Bengali Hindu of Shillong is the genital wart. Nobody knows you have one.”

For every North-Eastern girl who has to explain her slanting eyes, there is a Paramjit Bakshi, a dkhar in Shillong, who pays for ‘looking different, the sin of somehow being responsible for everything that has and still goes wrong in these hill states’.

If the conflict at the macro level is full of complexities, it is no less at the micro level, too. Shalim Hussain in his article, Growing Up Miyah, describes how accepting the Assamese language does not necessarily allow Bengali-origin Muslims to belong to the mainstream Assamese community. ‘Our use of Assamese in public and our own dialects in private is viewed as double-facedness.’

Though displacement of dkhar from Shillong after Meghalaya became an independent state remains the toast of the book, yet, to a certain extent it has managed to dissect a region as diverse as NE, with 220 languages and multiple faiths in practice.

Hard facts with the right dose of emotion make these essays readable and relatable. They evoke questions like how are descendants of original inhabitants to be determined — by purity of blood or linguistic identity? The right answers to these questions can bring the humane angle to the raging debates over the National Register of Citizens in Assam from which 4 million residents have been excluded because of their alleged Bangladeshi origin.

Similarly, it would also help ‘others’ in mainland India to move over Mcoshe’s prejudiced perception and look into those slanting eyes, not just at them.

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