American anthropologist James Scott, an expert in South-East Asian regions, in his famous book The Art of not being Governed has analysed the various conflicts happening in the highlands of Myanmar and euphemistically called them as efforts to bypass the sovereignty of the state. Now, coming from a standard Marxist perspective, where the State is categorised in a certain fashion, his analysis and sympathy for the underdog seem unproblematic and in line with the Marxian understanding.
However, one of the main arguments of this book seems inadequate or out of place, and that is about the justification of the conversion of these hilly communities involved in fighting into Christianity. As per Scott, Christianity, being monotheistic and a religion of the book, psychologically emancipates or alleviates the oppressed against an oppressor whose official religion is Buddhism, which is also monotheistic and gives the hilly people a semblance of equality in their fight against the state.
If culture is the rationale for the hilly indigenous communities to remain outside the domain of the state, then their conversion and the justification by the author serve no purpose other than an alibi for incessant fighting. The reasons must be lying somewhere, which the author has either bypassed or is not interested in probing.
Some things are neither openly accepted nor categorically rejected but only tacitly practised, like those involved in the domain of power politics affirm to the saying that in politics, only the paranoid survive. Now, this is as true at the individual level as at the collective level, like state and geopolitics. The above arguments might appear romanticisation of the people’s violence by the anthropologists but when we look at the larger picture or to say become paranoid enough, we can connect the dots which otherwise remain unnoticed.
After the recently concluded Bangladesh elections, where the ruling party under Sheikh Hasina has secured comfortable victory, she stumped the world by revealing that the US proposed to make her re-election easier if she was ready to cede some space for a separate country on the lines of East Timor, comprising of the parts of Bangladesh, and highlands of Myanmar. She said, “Like East Timor, they will carve out a Christian country, taking parts of Bangladesh (Chattogram) and Myanmar with a base in the Bay of Bengal.”
This revelation made all the sense since world powers have historically been interested in that part of the region for reasons best known and which unofficially is referred to as the Golden Triangle. With the recent flare-up in the Northeast region of India, especially Manipur, which is adjoining these conflicting zones, it would be unwise on our part to think of these recent flare-ups as isolated events given the geo-strategic significance of these regions and also the permeable nature of the borders and people’s movement in these regions.
If we, the common people, can see and sense the larger game at play; we are sure the policymakers of India must be acquainted with the dynamic and fragile character of these regions, given much information and resources at their disposal. Our main concern is to expose how Western scholars and academia have willingly or unwillingly become one of the tools to drive away a suitable narrative camouflaging as analysis. The uncritical acceptability of Scott’s thesis vis-à-vis armed conflicts in Myanmar sets up the tone, precedent and direction for further extending this way of looking at matters related to Northeast India and Southeast Asia. It is this uncritical acceptance of theories about culture and politics in Northeast frontier regions of India that has to be challenged and examined for their shortcomings. With this aim, we propose the creation of specific institutes dedicated fully to holistically study these strategic regions, which are also known for their cultural and ecological diversity.
There has been an increasing emphasis on both policy and research agenda to ‘Look East’. i.e. build bridges with neighbouring regions such as Southeast Asia. However, the knowledge of the borderlands within the country is lacking. Therefore, it is imperative to further study Northeast India, which is the primary gateway to Southeast Asia. Northeast India is home to different languages, ethno-cultural heritage and traditional knowledge systems and has also seen its share of inter-indigenous community conflicts and bloodshed, a legacy of colonial rule and their administrative practices. It is high time that we take cognisance of the ways through which public opinion is moulded by destabilising forces, including influencing academia and scholarship and putting forward a scientific and balanced counter-view.
Colonial administrators and anthropologists had taken a keen interest in the Northeast regions of India and, over a period of more than 100 years, produced a vast plethora of published and unpublished records pertaining to the culture, geography, ethnicity and socio-political organisation of the communities living in the Northeast hills. Along with the data, a lot of cultural artefacts were collected or appropriated from these places and were housed in distant museums in Europe and America.
In countries like Germany, England and the US, there are more number of museums and centres/institutes on Northeast than they are in India and have served as default centres for any knowledge (sensitive or otherwise) about the communities living in this region, with very little scope either for repatriation or for free sharing of knowledge with the new generation of scholars coming from India.
In the absence of any nodal institute of North-Eastern studies, we are still unable to keep track of the movements of scholars who are coming to study these regions from abroad nor have any mechanism to develop the inventory of artefacts that are in circulation outside India. It’s competitive to have established scholars, irrespective of their citizenship, to work here, but these foreign institutes training the required Indian manpower in the last 200 years would have been welcome. These challenges can only be addressed if we have an institute of national and strategic importance, such as the Indian Institute of Northeast Indian Studies in India.
Dr. Alok Kumar Kanungo has spent decades in the interiors of the Northeast and in institutes of (with department/centre) South Asian Studies, and museums with northeast Indian collections across Europe, UK and US, besides India for his research and analysis interests. Dr. Prashant Kumar Singh Martanda is a post-doctoral research fellow with an interest in anthropological theory. Both of them have rich, long-term experience working with indigenous communities and cultural representations of India and, at present, working in the interdisciplinary HSS department of IIT Gandhinagar. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.