Traversing the “Margins,” Interrogating the Center: A Critical Rereading of Temsula Ao’s These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone

Abstract

Reading Temsula Ao’s collection of short stories, These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone (2006), this article aims to establish how violence against women in Nagaland and by extension northeastern India is not simply an offshoot of militancy and militarization, but is deeply embroiled in and betrays the gendered contexts of the nation-state. The article locates Ao’s text within the various socio-political processes which have affected Nagamese people’s everyday negotiations with the state. It does so by dwelling on official reports on the AFSPA and northeastern India, data from government reports, and sociological texts, illuminating in an interdisciplinary manner, microhistorical textures of individual lives that inhabit the frontier zones of the nation state. The article highlights the patriarchal biases inherent in the conception and construction of the official reports, political processes, and commentaries which aggravate the gendered contexts of women’s lives in myriad ways. It further illustrates how the contours of the cultural nation, imaginatively constructed by the author, problematize the sovereign and limited boundaries of the nation state.

Keywords:

• Nagaland
• Northeastern India
• Temsula Ao
• AFSPA
• gendered contexts

Notes

Acknowledgments

I am thankful to Dr. Uma Chakravarti (former faculty, University of Delhi) for reading the first draft of this article and giving her valuable suggestions. I would also like to thank Mr. Shrikanth B.R., doctoral scholar (Department of Humanities and Social Sciences), IIT Bombay for reading the subsequent drafts and giving his comments. I thank the peer reviewers for giving insightful suggestions for the improvement of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In the context of Nagaland, Dolly Kikon (2016) engages with the history of militarization and state violence in order to contextualise the extant culture of impunity. She mentions that the Indo-Naga armed conflict is the longest armed conflict in South Asia. This political tension between Naga insurgents and the Indian government “escalated in the early 1950s, especially after the Naga people voted in favour of independence from India in the plebiscite of 1951” (Kikon 2016, 94). Although the Indian government declared the plebiscite to be null and void, the subsequent decades have witnessed bloody and violent conflicts in postcolonial India (2016, 94). In 1997, Naga insurgents entered into a ceasefire agreement with the Indian government, leading to the establishment of ceasefire camps in various parts of the state (2016, 94). However, the ceasefire has not been instrumental in bringing peace into Nagaland because of, in the words of Kikon, “the indifference of the Indian state to seriously engage with the possibilities of a peaceful resolution and end the period of armed conflict and militarisation” (2016, 95).

2 Baruah (2002) and Hassan (2007) define security dilemma as: “In the absence of an over-arching authority, sovereign states are forced to provide for their own security through self-help, in turn causing the insecurity of other states” (Baruah 2002, 4179). It is this dilemma that has percolated to northeastern ground politics wherein people collectively share their distrust of the Indian nation state and its ability to provide security to the citizens.

3 A Newsletter (Saheli 1989) prepared by Saheli, Women’s Resource Centre, provides a detailed account of the Oinam incident which took place on 9 July 1987:

On the 9th of July 1987, at Oinam village in the Senapati district, the NSCN (National Socialist Council of Nagaland) raided the Assam Rifles camp and carried away arms. Instead of punishing the officers, who were responsible for the security of the camp, a counter operation codenamed, “Operation Blue Bird” was launched. 17 people were tortured and killed; 12 people including 6 babies died of starvation and lack of medical attention; more than 300 men and young boys were subjected to third degree methods. At least 10 women were raped or sexually molested by officers of the Assam Rifles [….].

4 In fact, violence was legitimised as a way of responding to people considered as deviant. For instance, G. B. Pant had declared that the Armed Forces Special Powers Bill was intended to quell “arson, murder, loot, dacoity, and so on, by certain misguided sections of the Nagas” (quoted in Banerjee 2010, 15). Thus, the State deftly hid its violent intentions under the garb of administrative expediency. The National Crimes Record Bureau (1963) also records an increased rate of crime in the Assam state and Naga Hills in the years 1959 to 1962. The AFSPA was clamped in 1958 to quell the liberatory agitation by the Naga people, deftly bypassing the mainstream biases, uneven administrative processes and structural violence that characterised the independent nation-state.

5 Women were subject to gross forms of violence in the event of the Partition of Undivided India. The two independent states of India and Pakistan systematically betrayed the concerns of women as citizens by launching the Central Recovery Operation in November 1949 whereby women were simply treated as Hindu women and Muslim women and retrieved from these nations so that they could be restored to their “original” families and nations. It was as if a homosocial pact was signed between the patriarchal communities, husbands, fathers and the paternal nation-state. The social pact was in turn contingent on the sexual honour of women, who were perceived as the reproductive beings of the new nation.

6 Paula Banerjee informs that the NMA came into existence on 14 February 1984 with preamble that stated – “Naga mothers of Nagaland shall express the need of conscientising citizens toward more responsible living and human development through the voluntary organisation of the NMA” (2014, 59).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bharti Arora

Bharti Arora works as an Assistant Professor at the Department of English in Tagore Government Arts and Science College, Pondicherry University. She has completed her Ph.D (English) from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. The title of her dissertation is “Writing Gender, Writing Nation: A Critical Study of Select Women's Fiction in Post-Independence India.”