Dolly Kikon

English-Language Documents and Old Trucks: Creating Infrastructure in Nagaland's Coal Mining Villages

ABSTRACT In Nagaland, state attempts to control coal mining are framed as efforts to stop practices labelled ‘unscientific’ by the government. In this article we explore the ways in which communities create their own mining infrastructure built on networks of relations—materialised in English-language documents—and everyday technology—demonstrated in the prevalence of old trucks and improvised machinery. These objects enable livelihoods and supplementary incomes in this region. At the same time, they are also ways of challenging state attempts to control natural resources and for tribal communities to make claims on territory. We focus on coal mining infrastructure, technology and territorial claims in a frontier described variously as remote, inaccessible and underdeveloped, and explore the ways in which practices considered ‘unscientific’ endure and undergird an alternative system of community natural resource management and exploitation.

Destroying differences, schooling consent: a critical analysis of education policy in Indian-administered Nagaland 1

Indian policy makers have always held “national integration and unity” as the foundational stones of their administration. While educational policy makers have time and over emphasised over making the curriculum towards making India into one nation one people. On the other hand, self-contradictory speeches with themes like ‘unity in diversity’ have been on the forefront of every speech of Indian politicians who have visited the indigenous regions of North East India. The issue of culture is a determining factor in the dynamics of the Naga nationality movement. The Naga peoples struggle for the right to self-determination has been an issue of political and legal discourse in postcolonial India. However, while modern India came to be a multinational state, some of the indigenous peoples of North East India who have developed a distinct political identity like the Nagas ... (at the same time) also laid claim to being a nation. The concept of a Naga nation can be seen can be defined to consist: (1) a reference group, to which the nationality claim is attached; (2) the claim to self-determination, which may or may not mean the right to establish their own state; (3) a territorial definition, and (4) the claim that the reference group constitutes or aspires to be a global society, containing within itself the full range of social institutions and the mechanisms for social regulation, as opposed to a mere fragment of larger society, making specific claims for cultural recognition, or for special policy measures. A political issue, which has received some attention in recent times, concerns the need to protect cultural diversity in contemporary societies. Almost all large states today face a plurality of ethnic demands for self-determination. While there may be sympathy for ethnic demands within a state, they may also be viewed with some fear as posing a possible threat to the integrity of the nation-state. They may also be perceived as posing a threat to the orderly conduct of international relations. The political responses of nation-states to ethnic demands have been therefore somewhat ambiguous (Joseph 1998: 18). While India has agreed with the fact that the issue of culture and the Naga peoples struggle has a very strong political dimension, it has consciously worked towards policies especially in the field of education that will finally identify the Naga people as one with India culturally. The area of education has recently become a contentious one for Indian citizens. With the State slowly moving out of social spendingincluding in the primary and secondary education sectorsthe fear that a Right wing Hindu agenda to homogenise cultural histories, has created a furore. While this process has caught the imagination of liberal democratic opinion in India, the education policy of obliterating the historical process of consolidation of the Naga people and their struggles, has gone on for more than four decades without any dissenting voices being raised outside the region.2 However, the case of the Naga peoples struggle has not got any resonance thus far in the realm of international law and jurisprudence related to cultural genocide. Part of this reason has to do with the rather ambiguous definition of the term “cultural genocide” itself. The thrust of the first international discussions on genocide in the United Nations General Assembly in 1946 had more to do with the physical elimination of peoples. However, an ad-hoc committee soon produced a draft that sought to incorporate any deliberate act to destroy the language,

Wayfinding: Indigenous Migrants in the Service Sector of Metropolitan India

ABSTRACT In the last decade, large numbers of indigenous youth from the uplands of Northeast India have migrated to metropolitan cities across the country. Many end up in the new service sector, getting jobs in high-end restaurants, shopping malls and spas. The demand for their labour is due to their un-Indian ‘exotic Asian’ appearance and a reputation for being hardworking and loyal. Such labour market value is a remarkable reversal of their position considering the earlier colonial stereotypes of their savagery and disobedience, reproduced through the de-politicisation of their armed insurrections during the post-colonial period. This paper addresses their daily experiences of vulnerability and marginality as well as the freedom and aspirations that a migratory life seem to engender.

Jackfruit seeds from Jharkhand: Being adivasi in Assam

This article examines how adivasis in Assam assert their sense of belonging to the land. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted along the foothills bordering Assam and Nagaland, I present the everyday lives of adivasi villagers in a militarised landscape and examine how adivasi belonging and identity are constructed in a political milieu where ideas of indigeneity and territoriality are deeply internalised. I look into how adivasi accounts highlight the weaving together of the histories of the tea plantations and social alliances with neighbours in the villages. I argue that these narratives are used to assert rights and claim an identity of belonging. Specifically focusing on adivasi accounts situated outside the tea plantations in Assam, this article seeks to contribute towards scholarship about everyday practices of belonging, memory and social relations in Northeast India and beyond.

Fermenting Modernity : Putting Akhuni on the Nation's Table in India

Abstract In this article, I explore notions of modernity, citizenship, belonging and transgressions in South Asia through the fermented food, akhuni. Fermented soya beans, popularly known as akhuni in Nagaland, a state in Northeast India with a majority tribal population, has a distinct pungent aroma and taste. This food is relished across the eastern Himalayan societies, including Nagaland, but routinely causes conflict between akhuni consumers and those who find the smell revolting. In 2007, due to increasing akhuni conflict in New Delhi, the Delhi police produced a handbook t hat cautions students and workers from Northeast India and eastern Himalayan societies that they should refrain from cooking akhuni and other fermented foods. Such official directives reiterate how the state plays a significant role in legitimising or prohibiting certain foods that particular social groups in contemporary India consume, relegating these communities to a remote position in the national social and culinary order. Against the backdrop of such friction, this article examines why akhuni consumers of the eastern Himalayan societies assert that eating fermented food is an integral part of their culture and history. Conversations about eating cultures, I argue, have to be understood as expressions of resistance, negotiation and the anxieties of striving to be a modern tribal in contemporary India.

Educating the Naga Headhunters: Colonial History and Cultural Hegemony in Post-Colonial India

The mission to civilize the “savage” Naga headhunters inhabiting the Northeastern frontier of India was accidental. The primary concern for the British administration was centered on protecting their lucrative tea trade and oil explorations in the Brahmaputra valley. Colonial regulations and expeditions systematically encroached upon community lands for tea plantations and pushed back the Nagas into the hills. The Naga Hills were declared Excluded Areas, which restricted movements of both outsiders entering the hills and the Nagas from coming out of these enclosures. Such regulations cut off trade and communication with the neighboring communities. Instead, military barracks, educational institutions, and mission churches came up in Naga villages. What was the process of conquering and educating the “Naked” Nagas? Was there any clash of interests between the British administration and the American missionaries? Most importantly, how did the Nagas see the transition of power in 1947? Have postcolonial nation-building processes been accommodative of the histories of peripheral regions? These are some of the questions that animate this chapter.