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Repeated invocations of “India” in the literary scape seemingly exclude India’s North East.
The term “Indian” is used in the titles of many courses in various Indian universities. The recently revised BA Honours English programme by the University of Delhi includes writers from India’s North East in its “Indian” courses, but most of the “Indian” courses in other Indian universities categorically exclude them. Many universities may have centres named after the North East; concurrently, the “Indian” courses in their English departments periodically exclude the same region.
In this context and sharing my experience of a recent Faculty Development Programme (FDP) titled “Remapping the Indian Novel in English,” I ask: What is “Indian” in the Indian novel? Are Indians in India’s North East same as Indians in the rest of the country? How are these two “Indians” different? Why are they not the same? This leads me to examine the rise of the novel in India. This form has traversed many historical moments such as colonialism, liberalism, globalisation, nationalism, and modernity. However, the trajectories of these narratives need to be mapped differently in India’s North East. There must not be a quick dismissal of postcolonial methodology as commonsensical and deterministic vis-à-vis this region because many critics still argue that the region is yet to exit the moment of the colonial while postcoloniality remains a desirable aspiration.
Does “Indian” in the title of the FDP include India’s North East? Its repeated invocations in various sessions seem to exclude this region. There is no one Indian novel. The form emerges from the indigenous traditions of katha, upakatha, dastan, qissa, kadambari, afsana, fasana, and naval. However, wari (Meiteis), thawnthu (Mizos), chan-chin (Lushais), demoko (Mao Nagas), kothma (Kokboroks), and mon tum (Lepchas) remain unexplored. Here, the region is represented through the more visible and accessible Hinduised Assamese tradition, which has cultural domination over the region. Even the alternative history explored in Indian English fiction between the 1950s and the 1970s with gender as a significant concern has no place for history from this region. The Indian novel from—or of—India written in English during the 1980s and the 1990s finds a place in the canon of universities in the United States, and Indian writers are included in the emergent Asian American Studies. Here, Indian English writing becomes the default representative. However, this “Indian” too remains elitist excluding both the regional/vernacular writing and writing from India’s North East.
There is a connection between class (here, the middle class) and the rise of the Indian English novel, with the North East novel being a subset of the latter. Yet, the question remains whether the Indian middle class invoked here could contain within it the middle class of India’s North East. If so, are these two middle classes the same? How do they relate to one another? The literary terrain occupied by the postmillennial Indian fiction in English also remains elitist, exclusive, and inaccessible to fiction from the North East.
The diasporic subjectivities in the Indian novel in English result from the transnational or international interactions/encounters, while internal migrations within a nation (characteristic of diasporic subjects from the North East) remain unattended to. The contemporary Indian English novel with its experimental historiography blurs the line separating literature, criticism, and technology and posits two available models: the politically progressive Dalit model and its opposite—the apolitical market model. Both, however, provide no scope for exploring the North East experiences. If the former is too general with no acknowledgement of cultural difference, then the latter with its apolitical characteristic is not applicable to writings from this region. This is also the case with the Indian novel in the 21st century with the new political subjectivity of the aam aadmi or common man where the defining feature of this new subjectivity is that of class (also gendered male) while there is a complete rejection of the postcolonial as commonsensical and deterministic. This also leads to a reshuffle narrative to counter the narrative of decline (of the postcolonial?). The new narrative reimagines the idea of Dalits writing for themselves, but the Dalits here belong to the rest of India, excluding those from its North East. This becomes clearer when the representation of Dalit identity in these novels examines the category of caste only in writings in Hindi or Marathi. When the issue of translation is raised, the gendered “translated” self that emerges from a discussion on vernacular novels is usually either a Malayalee or a Bengali.
The market-driven post-liberal Indian English novels and the publishing scenario focusing on awards and receptions have no discussion on novels from India’s North East. A problematic question raised in such circles is if an Indian novel was to represent India, in which language should it be written? The question ignores the debate on oral versus writing still relevant for literatures from this region. If the oral represents inherited past culture, then the writing is intrusive imposed colonial modernity. Here, the graphic novel becomes a site to negotiate the two. However, within the genre of graphic novels too, Assamese cultural hegemony is evident, with Parismita Singh and her Pao Collective being more visible than the rest of the North East.
Going back to the FDP, as if to reflect the two Indias that exist in the literary scene, there was a separate session dedicated to India’s North East. Yet, similar to the exclusive centres in various Indian universities, this session is probably a reminder of the fact that the region is missing in all other “Indian” sessions and the inclusion of this session is possibly only tokenism. It is not only history books and the histories written in these books that have excluded this region, but also the historiographies of scholars and critics who write these histories and collaborate in the writing of this history of exclusion, absence, and silence. The identity politics of this region have often been dismissed; similarly, the FDP too stripped the region of the only politics available for its self-assertion and self-representation. This is evident from the title of the session that urges the need to read “beyond tribe, kin, [and] nation”: three identity markers inseparable from the politics of the region and whose erasure signals the silencing of the politics of protest originating from this region. Indeed, the “nomadic” Janice Pariat’s global model becomes the acceptable representative for this region—a model that privileges the global over the local and is for an English-speaking readership, which also has a danger of furthering
Assamese hegemony by citing her Assamese origin even when she identifies as a Khasi writer. However, a question remains: Where does the local feature in this global politics? Clearly, the global here emerges with the rejection or erasure or absence of the local, and this is not without problem.
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