I have never travelled outside of Nagaland. My family and I have always lived in Nagaland. I don't know much about India outside of Nagaland. And I don't want to send my children outside Nagaland because I fear they might be mistreated. There's no difference between my Indian and Naga identity. I'm quite happy with life and now I am just waiting for the day I will die. I went to medical school in the southern state of Karnataka and I lived there for six to seven years.
I have also travelled to other parts of India. Being Indian - that's my nationality; it's my identity when I am out in the world. Being a Naga is my bloodline, my race, my clan - that is also my identity.
I have never felt isolated from the rest of the country. But I do feel sad when I read or hear of stories about discrimination against people from the north-east. That's when I feel a little isolated. But that said, I have a lot of good friends in cities such as Bangalore and Mumbai. We keep in touch and we visit each other often. The discrimination we face in other parts of India is often because of a lack of understanding. We also look different. Many people know nothing about Nagaland or its culture.
School textbooks have never taught them anything about this part of the country. I sell chillies, oranges, beans and bananas. I'm very happy with life. I have only twenty years left to turn ! Whenever you come to Nagaland, you'll find me here, in the same spot. I have never been outside Nagaland. In fact, I have never been outside my village, Phomching. Everyone in my village is illiterate. Erases not only a unique region but a unique literary tradition. Seems its hard for ppl to see without their racist lenses.
A 15th August list that is honest enough unlike all the shallow fluffy songs causing migraine from Northeast India. Thanks for clearly saying buzz off Northeast India: and take all your writers and thinkers and poets with you. Reading along in Goa, I was struck by how little things have changed over the past two decades, even though publishing in India has exploded in size, scale and ambition, and online booksellers have made it possible to get almost any book delivered to our homes.
Books had brought me to Shillong. They had drawn me into an unknown world: tribal and globalised at the same time, not-quite-India and perfectly content to remain that way.
What is more, all of this great writing was in English. I knew that I needed to go, and eventually spent a month in the Khasi Hills with my family. Sounds outlandish? Let the evidence speak for itself. Just compare Shillong to Bengaluru. Several other writers in English from the North-East states have produced brilliant books that deserve inclusion in any Indo-Anglian canon that purports to serve for India.
We just have to connect more- in pockets, or cross country, and have to work at it from here, the region, too. For how long? How are the sales going? Will the publishers supply more books? Are they balancing supply and demand, vis-a-vis books by North Eastern writers?
Conventional wisdom had previously seen the ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural terrain of the northeast as almost impossible for the BJP to penetrate. However, the ability of the party under Modi to transcend these exclusive conceptions, focus on issues of development at least rhetorically and broaden its cooperative appeal into a highly flexible electoral force has been remarkable.
This has enabled the party to consolidate its dominance over the Congress Party, the only other national political force. The area is the traditional home to the Kokborok-speaking Tripuri people, but is now dominated by Bengali migrants pushed into the area by Partition. Despite winning enough seats to govern outright, the BJP displayed what has become an interesting facet of its approach to regional politics by forming an alliance with the Indigenous Peoples Front of Tripura to govern in coalition.
Although the BJP is an ideological party—with a radical and revisionist agenda—politics in India remain predominantly transactional in nature. The party is increasingly seen to be the only entity that can offer smaller interest groups access to the Indian state and it has been able to develop an electoral flexibility to harness this reality.
The dominance of Christianity in the state, with three-quarters of the population, proved no obstacle to this alliance. The BJP has rapidly been able to forge a symbiotic relationship with local interests, understanding both what it provides and gains, as well as a nimble ability to reposition itself within the local political terrain.
Sensing a power shift and an opportunity for greater influence, the BJP abandoned its coalition with NPF and formed an electoral alliance with the newly-formed party.
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