The Himalayan Arc

by Namita Gokhale

  ‘Sure,’ said the old man, as if he’d been waiting for such a request. ‘Your mechanic will take some time to some. All those who come here for tea listen to my songs.’

  ‘Customers? No one’s come here for the last many days, though so many cars went past,’ grumbled his wife. She turned to the old man and said, ‘While I give tea to the customers, go to the railway tracks with the lamp for a look. God knows you won’t get up if you sit down to gossip and sing.’

  ‘I’ve heard this story before. Some months back, didn’t we hear the same rumour?’ the old man mumbled as he took the two glasses from his wife and handed them over to us respectfully. Then he said in a relaxed tone, ‘Have your tea, please. I’ll sing now.’

  Suddenly a young girl entered the room, limping; she could walk only with the help of a stick. She had long silky hair. It was left loose. Seeing her the old couple shouted, ‘Why have you come here, you bitch!’ We could guess at once that this was the girl who had had an affair with the soldier from the Indian army who had come to flush out the militants from this area.

  The tea was excellent. The old man brought the dotara. As he started turning it, he said, ‘Did you have a chance to see tigers in Kaziranga? People say there were only twenty tigers there in 1966. Now there are about sixty. Rhinos have grown in number from 300 to 1,500. There are some 500 elephants too.’

  ‘We saw some elephants,’ I said. ‘Do they come here, ever?’

  ‘Not these days, because of the traffic. Earlier, before the floods, they would descend on our paddy fields and all of us farmers would work together to drive them away. But tigers do come. Do you know what happened just the other day? Dimuiguria Mahanta’s elephant was tied to a tree beside a roadside pond. The elephant is very gentle. Whenever he’s taken for a bath in the Diphlu, he plays with the boys and girls there. He was lying by the pond that day when a tiger jumped on him and tore away a whole chunk of flesh from his back!’

  ‘Oh God!’ we cried out in horror. ‘And then?’

  ‘Elephants are omniscient creatures. Did you know that the Moamaria revolution, where the Vaishnavites fought against the Ahorn kings, started because of an elephant?’

  ‘An elephant?’

  ‘Yes. A thin and tottering elephant. It happened during the time of King Lakshminath Singha who came to the throne only in his old age. He was very friendly with his minister, Kirtinath Borbarua. Two friends. Now, among the Ahom kings, Lakshminath and Gaurinath Singha were the ugliest. Opium eaters, they could barely keep their eyes open. Gaurinath fancied a fisherwoman who lived on the banks of the Dipholu. His palanquin would wait and wait outside her place while…’

  ‘What about the elephant?’ I asked.

  ‘Kirtinath Borbarua had a tussle with the Moamaria mahantas. There was this law that said that the mahantas must make a present of elephants to the royal court as tribute every year. Once these mahantas gave an old, sick elephant to Borbarua. A mahanta went with this tottering elephant to the Borbarua. When he saw the rickety old animal, the minister was wild with rage. He cut off the mahanta leader’s ear.’

  The old woman interrupted him impatiently. ‘Lopping off ears indeed! Old man, for God’s sake, take the lamp and have a look around. The boy might be lying somewhere, hit by military bullets.’

  The old man continued as if she had not spoken. ‘In this month of Aghon, 9,000 Moamaria soldiers made Kirtinath a prisoner while he was on his way to Rongpur. And all because of a deformed elephant, as I said!’

  We sat there sipping tea and listening to the old man. Ramakanta dropped in for a while, had his tea and left. He said, ‘It’ll take at least one-and-a-half hours to finish the work. The mechanic has taken the radiator to the workshop.’

  The old woman approached me. ‘Only a couple of customers have come today. Daughter, take one more glass of tea each. There’s sugar and tea leaves.’

  We asked for two more cups of tea. Meanwhile the old man was tightening the two strings of the dotara. ‘I barely managed to save this dotara from the flood. There’s no one in this area who can make a dotara like this any more.’

  The old woman prodded him once more. ‘I’ll look after the customers. Take the lamp. Go to the railway tracks. Who knows … who knows.’

  The old man explained, ‘I’ve gone almost blind and this woman wants me to go in the dark looking for the boy. The other day I fell down near the railway tracks when I went searching for him and, my knees are still aching and bruised. My chest hurts too… Listen daughter, we weren’t always like this. It’s the floods. It’s a pity that we have had to take shelter by the highway and wait for customers day after day! We were respectable people. We had two granaries, full of paddy. Even strangers were sure of a meal with scented rice and kaoi fish. We come from a Borbarua family who had the power to punish criminals by crushing their kneecaps. But my father was kind-hearted. If this had been daytime, I could have taken you to my house and shown you the ceremonial hat which I have managed to hold on to, his umbrella, and silver vessel; a decorated couch, the silver betelnut holder. But our paddy fields, which were as dear to me as my own flesh and blood, producing gold and pearls, and no more.’

  The old woman was furious. ‘Why are you digging up those old graves? I’ll myself go to the railway tracks to see…’

  ‘Shut up, old woman. How many times have we heard this talk of his coming back? But nothing! He didn’t come back or show his face to us. These two good people have come to my shop today. I must serve them well, make them feel comfortable.’ The old man started to sing a song composed by Padmapriya the Vaishnavee:

  This world is futile

  Like drops of water

  on a lotus leaf

  Fate will make us

  a heap of ashes…

  This life, this youth

  is all a fleeting dream…

  I could see the crisscrossing lines under his eyes. His teeth were missing, his cheeks sunken, making his nose look longer than it actually was. He sang as if the songs would never come to an end. After Padmapriya’s composition, he sang several other songs composed by the Vaishnava saints. I felt as if I was sitting on the bank of the Dipholu, watching the moon playing in the waters.

  We listened to his song for about an hour, punctuated by his wife’s restlessness. She sat muttering, ‘People came to say that he was seen near the railway tracks… Even if the lad falls prey to army bullets, he won’t care.’

  Suddenly the old man stopped singing. Mirajkar hastily pulled out some money from the pocket of this coat and placed it in the betelnut tray in front of the old man. ‘Oh mother of Nirmali,’ the old man called out. ‘Keep what you charge for the tea and return the rest.’

  Turning to Mirajkar he said, ‘Why did you give so much money, my dear sir? My songs are an echo of the songs of the saints. It hurts me if anyone pays me money for it. No one understands my feelings! No one!’

  The old woman was staring at the money. She didn’t touch it. She didn’t speak.

  At that moment, we heard a big bang from outside, as if a bomb had exploded. We felt as if we were being thrown violently to the ground. From the shadow of a tree nearby, someone emerged and walked slowly towards the shop to stand before us. Everything had happened in a fraction of a second and seeing his face now my throat went suddenly dry.

  He was a young boy. Across his cheek ran a deep gash, from eye to lip – made by a bullet or a sharp knife. There was blood and pus in it. The flesh under his lip looked as if it been ripped open and we could see his teeth in the quavering light.

  I went to the old woman and took her hand in mine, gripping it tightly. We were both shivering. The boy was wearing black jeans and a khaki jacket. And what was that in his hand? A revolver? Even in the smoky light of the kerosene lamp the barrel shone. The old woman burst into a hysterical cry.

  ‘Oh my Kanbap, my son! I told your father a thousand times to bring you from the railway track. Oh my son, what has happened to you? Why are you bleeding like this?’r />
  Suddenly the boy’s eye fell on the girl, sitting in the corner and trembling with fear. He sped like a bullet towards the girl and grabbing her hair, rained blows and kicks on her stomach, shouting: ‘I will smash your womb! I will kill the bastard child of that soldier you are carrying… Making love with an Indian soldier, dirty bitch! Phooh! Phooh!’

  He kicked her viciously in the stomach. ‘Oh my, oh my! He will kill the girl…’ The old parents tried to pull away the enraged youth. The boy didn’t even look at his mother. He stared at the money lying before the old man. He pounced on it like a vulture.

  The old man shouted. ‘This is not my money, son. Give it back to our revered customers…’ The boy ignored his father’s words. He spoke as if to himself. ‘Those poachers are selling a US carbine. It’s an old gun, but sturdy. With this money.’

  He had come like a cyclone. He disappeared as swiftly, like a flash of lightning in a dark, still night. While wiping the blood running out of the wounds of the girl, something like a smile hovered on the lips of the old man. I had never seen such a painful smile in my life…

  Mirajkar and I resumed our journey towards Guwahati. Neither of us spoke. It was as if we were travelling through a dark tunnel, endlessly.

  LOOKING TO THE FUTURE, SPANNING 1,000 YEARS IN A LIFETIME

  Sanjoy Hazarika

  The stretch of the far eastern Himalaya from Sikkim eastward is significantly different from the rest of the mountain range. The reach of the Gangetic plains – of Hindu ethos and historical Moslem influence – is much more muted here. Many hill tribes have embraced Christianity. Unlike the cultures of the faraway flatlands, these eastern communities have closer ancestral links to the Tibetans of the north, or the communities of South-east Asia, especially Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia.

  The region is also unique in its geography. Although part of the same Himalayan range, these southern latitudes nurture a lush tropical landscape drenched by one of the highest precipitation rates in the world – strikingly different from the high desert of Ladakh or the dry terraces of western Nepal. The High Himalaya itself is lower at these extremities; with the peaks descending eastward from Mount Everest (8,848 m), to Kanchenjunga (8,586 m) at the Nepal–Sikkim border, to Namcha Barwa (7,782 m) standing guard at the great bend of the Tsangpo. About here, the Himalaya lurches southward into Burma and dwindles away eastward into hills of the Hengduan mountains of Sichuan-Yunnan.

  From Sikkim, with Tibet a constant companion to the north, the political boundary snakes across Bhutan and Arunachal Pradesh before plunging southward along the edges of the Yunnan province into Burma’s Chin and Kachin hills. Its spurs bring in the states of Meghalaya, Nagaland, Mizoram, and Manipur before meandering through Tripura into the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, close to the Bay of Bengal.

  The western and central parts of the Himalayan range are neatly packaged into a steady progression of states from Pakistan to Nepal. But in the east the range becomes a geopolitical jigsaw, crossing national frontiers with impunity. The rectangle of the far eastern Himalaya is broken up among five nation states: little Bhutan, the Indian north-east, the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, the Arakan region of northern Burma, the south-eastern tip of Tibet, and the hills of Yunnan.

  While the geography and fractured frontiers of this region are fascinating in themselves, it is the population that holds even more interest – the cultural diversity and shared history, the deep animosities within and the xenophobia as far as ‘outsiders’ are concerned.

  The jungles seethe with unrest and rebellion each step of the way as diminutive men and women, some in battle fatigues and others in tattered clothing, some with modern weapons and others with crude arms, fight for ideals, funds, profitable drug routes, and lost causes. They confront the military might of their respective governments. The belt has seethed with unceasing conflict, violence, anger and grief. Modern times seem only to have exacerbated the situation.

  The babel of languages heard along this Himalayan flow includes the guttural Tibetan and its offspring, Dzongkha, the sweeter Assamese in the Brahmaputra Valley, and the lilt of Tibeto-Burman tongues in the hills of Nagaland, Manipur, and Mizoram.

  It is Asia in miniature, a place where the brown and yellow races meet. The range is astounding.

  Taking a south–north transect, for example, you encounter the Assamese and Bengali migrants in Assam, Tibeto-Burmans in the Himalayan mid-hills, and the Khampa of the high plateau. Going west to east, the spectrum is even more diverse; from the people of Tibetan stock – the Bhutia and Lepcha of Sikkim and the Ngalong Dzongkha-speaking people next door in Bhutan – the population takes on Tibeto-Burman hues with the Sharchop of eastern Bhutan, who have affinity with the tribes of neighbouring Arunachal. Eastward, the communities become progressively less ‘Tibetan’ and more ‘Burman’.

  The tiny state of Manipur, bordering on Burma, has a population of barely three million, yet it shelters more than thirty separate linguistic and ethnic groups, including the Tarao whose number is down to less than 400. The forested frontier between Yunnan and Burma is host to fifteen distinct groups, including the Yi, Naxi, Bai and Lisu. Several communities of Arunachal Pradesh, such as the Monpa and Abhor, are also to be found in Tibet.

  Straddling the ages and the mountains, the people of this winding trail form an anthropological bridge to South-east Asia, where the roots of many still lie. The Khasi of Meghalaya are believed to have come from Kampuchea (present-day Cambodia) and still speak a form of Mon-Khmer, although due to British missionary influence they use the Roman alphabet. The Tai-Ahom migrated from Thailand to Assam 600 years ago and settled in a land that they reported was as rich as gold. The number of Tai speakers in Assam is small, but there is a Thai Association and the community is politically active.

  There are Garos in Meghalaya and in Bangladesh; there are Nagas and Mizos in Nagaland and Mizoram and in the neighbouring hills of Burma. Festivals, liquor, dance, and music shape approaches to life and the habitat of the tribes. History and contemporary experiences also forge affinity and identity, the latter being regarded as the most crucial in maintaining both distance and dignity in the face of intrusion of the larger cultures of South Asia.

  Convictions about the sanctity of borders are weaker here than elsewhere. Many Nagas still refer to their own region as ‘western Nagaland’ and speak of areas with Naga populations in Myanmar as ‘eastern Nagaland’.

  Guwahati, the capital of Assam, is closer to Hanoi than it is to Delhi. On my first trip to Imphal, capital of Manipur, decades ago, I was struck with the easy grace of young women in sarongs, skirts and blouses cycling to work. One could easily imagine oneself being in Vientiane or Rangoon (Yangon). There is a fierce pride and independence that marks the tribes. And a disdain – despite using the good things that money can buy and central funds can achieve – for the national durbar and the local elites whom they patronize.

  This bewildering medley and mosaic is dear to the social scientist, but makes administration and political control extremely complex for the faraway capitals, be it New Delhi, Rangoon, or Dhaka, even in these days of instant connection and communication.

  The choice for the people of the eastern Himalaya is clear. It is either to throw up one’s hands in despair at the problems associated with divided geographies, migration and confrontations, or it is to try to chart a path that involves joint planning for economic growth. If massive inflows of migrants and refugees are to be reduced, and the people of the region are to be saved from endless rebellions, the economies of the far eastern Himalaya, relegated to the periphery for too long, must expand, and expand on all sides.

  Economic development, rooted in the sharing of river waters and inland water transport, multilateral trade, and assisting communities at the micro level – instead of imposing centrally sponsored schemes – seem to be the way out. Inclusion and participation of local communities in economic programmes and planning is critical in making programmes work. Paternal
ism only provokes bitterness.

  Local groups need to be given effective control over resources, and development schemes must have their participation and not be devised and dictated by central authorities. An example of effective local institution-building is the system of Block Development Villages in Nagaland, where locally managed schemes are working where larger top-down schemes are not.

  A formula has to be found where it is possible to work across the borders while maintaining the sanctity of frontiers. The possibilities are endless, if the vision exists. It will require the national governments in the neighbourhood – India, Bhutan, Myanmar, and Bangladesh, which have only begun to address some of these issues to put their heads together. In the end, only a regionalism spurred by the vision of a new economic architecture for Asia can bring peace and progress to the far eastern Himalaya.

  We should look ahead to the day when workers from different parts of the region participate in economic activity under migration and employment laws, instead of being driven out by hasty anti-migrant xenophobia. Our economies cannot expand without enabling legal movements of people for work, better roads, railways, and communication facilities. These arteries should be intra-regional. Opening up of port and transit facilities in Bangladesh, as is happening, would in one stroke provide an economic boost to a land-locked hinterland.

  With the loosening of border restrictions, numerous cross-border contacts could be resumed. To use just one example, the Garo and the Khasi of Meghalaya could restart their trade routes with Bangladesh, facilities that they enjoyed for centuries before Sir Cyril Radcliffe drew the line that divided British India. Rather than transport their goods to Assam using unreliable public transport, they could, like in the past, simply march ‘down the hill’ into Bangladesh.

  Development of tourism and promotion of handicraft and handloom industries will also have an impact. In India, the marketing of products should involve much more than displaying local items at the state emporiums in New Delhi and a few exhibitions. These need sustained policies implemented at the ground, national, and international levels.