A Phenomenological Exploration into Lived Experiences of Violence in Northeast India

Abstract

The Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Districts (BTAD) in the state of Assam in Northeast India can be described as a landscape of terror since the area has been a stage for recurrent, mostly violent contestations along ethno-religious lines for more than four decades. Over the years, the violence has claimed more than a thousand lives and displaced millions. Using a multi-sited ethnography carried out over more than eleven months of fieldwork in the region, this paper looks at the everyday lives of those affected by the conflict and critiques the notion of spectacular resistance and exceptionalism in the context of Northeast India. This is done by using a phenomenology of lived experience framework to pay closer attention to the distinctly ordinary ways in which populations survive and endure states of dispossession, displacement and abandonment.

Keywords:

• Displacement
• ethnic conflict
• everyday
• lived experience
• Northeast India
• ordinary
• phenomenology
• resistance
• violence

Introduction

The Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Districts (BTAD) in the state of Assam in Northeast India can be described as a landscape of terror since it has been the stage for recurrent, mostly violent contestations along ethno-religious lines for more than four decades. The conflict situation in BTAD has to be situated both geographically and politically within the larger framework of insurgent and self-determination movements in Assam in particular, and the north-eastern region of India in general. The Northeast refers to the wedge of land situated on the far eastern periphery of India,¹ which is joined to the rest of India by a narrow tract of land in West Bengal called the Siliguri Corridor, commonly referred to as the Chicken’s Neck. The region consists of eight federal states around the Brahmaputra and Barak river valleys and shares international borders with Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, China (Tibet) and Nepal, and the majority of its population has ethnic and linguistic links to Southeast Asia and the greater Himalayas. Although talks about conflict resolution have been taking place, emergency laws that deal with this disturbed area are still in place. The Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), for example, was extended in the state of Assam for six months in August 2019.² The AFSPA is a reworking of the Armed Forces Special Powers Ordinance promulgated by the British in 1942 to suppress the nationalist Quit India Movement—a colonial law that has had an afterlife in post-colonial times.³

The Bodo are the largest plains tribe in Northeast India and consider themselves to be the autochthons of the region. The more recent events that led to the Bodo agitation can be traced back to 1967, when the Plains Tribal Council of Assam (PTCA) and an All Bodo Students’ Union (ABSU) were set up to fight for better status for the plains tribals. Later the PTCA moderated its demands, but the ABSU became increasingly committed to a more radical stand. Simultaneously, an anti-foreigner movement began, led by the All Assam Students Union (AASU). It aimed at more autonomy for the Assamese in order to protect the state’s natural resources and demographics by keeping out foreign nationals, mainly from Bangladesh, who were exerting severe pressure on local land and resources. The Bodo leadership anticipated that an eventual agreement between the Indian government and the AASU would result in the Bodo community escaping its predicament.⁴ However, the Assam Accord of 1985 between the Indian state and the AASU was far from satisfactory. Moreover, the AASU, which had by then launched a political party called the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), appeared reluctant to help the Bodo push for the creation of a separate state of Bodoland. For the ABSU leaders, this was a clear sign that the time had come to take up arms. In 1987, under the umbrella of the Bodo People’s Action Committee, the ABSU staged huge rallies and demonstrations against Assamese supremacy.⁵ The movement became violent with the launch of the Bodo Security Force, which later changed its name to the National Democratic Front of Boroland (NDFB). A failed Bodo accord in 1993 led to a further intensification of violence with the entry of another rebel group called the Bodo Liberation Tigers Force (BLTF) alongside the NDFB. Eventually, a tripartite agreement was arrived at between the Government of India, the Government of Assam and the BLTF, which led to an amendment of the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution⁶ and the creation of the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Districts within Assam in 2003. The agreement provided for electoral reservations for the Bodo community on the Bodo Territorial Council (BTC), along with sharing of power between the state government of Assam and the BTC. The BLTF (trans)formed itself into a political party called the Bodoland People’s Front (BPF) and has been in power ever since.

The NDFB refused to participate because the agreement did not grant a separate state of Bodoland; nevertheless, it did implement a unilateral ceasefire. Since then, however, several offshoots of the NDFB have continued to engage in periodic episodes of violence in support of a separate state of Bodoland. One faction, called the NDFB(S) or (Songbijit) remains active. Since the inception of the BTAD, there have been more than twelve reported episodes of violence between the Bodo and Adivasis⁷ as well as between the Bodo and Bengali Muslims, the most prominent ones being in 2007, 2008, 2012 and twice in 2014.⁸ Prior to 2003, ethnic violence occurred in 1993, 1996 and 1998. The violence has claimed more than a thousand lives and displaced millions.

Interrogating the state of exception in Northeast India

Against this backdrop, when I entered the region for the first time in 2009, what stared me in the face was a landscape strewn with narratives of fear, terror, violence and uncertainty. My first visit was followed by over fifteen months of ethnographic research spanning four years, from 2014 to 2017. This mostly consisted of participant observation, in-depth interviews, life histories and informal conversations with various ethnic groups and those affected directly by violence.

The need for a multi-sited ethnography into the everyday lives of those affected by conflict was especially important since a majority of the scholarship on Northeast India continues to unearth the cause and effect of violent conflict by resorting to an Agambenian framing of the region as a zone or ‘state of exception’ or ‘bare life’.⁹ McDuie-Ra makes a digression from his theory of exceptionalism in the case of the Northeast in his book, Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, Refuge and Retail, by critiquing the predominance of ‘greed and grievance’ scholarship on this region, and argues that academic and policy studies on the Northeast ‘tend to focus on the causes of violence rather than its effects on everyday life’.¹⁰ Using this critique of the state of exception as a starting point, in this contribution, I use a phenomenology of lived experience framework to pay closer attention to the distinctly ordinary ways in which populations survive and endure states of dispossession, displacement and abandonment. The exceptionalism theory, while being reductionist, also stands in contrast to Veena Das’ views in Life and Words, where she notes how our theoretical impulse ‘is often to think of agency in terms of escaping the ordinary rather than as a descent into it’.¹¹ I use the notions of everyday and the ordinary to highlight how they crosshatch with articulations of the strategic and the tactical will to survive. This is achieved by drawing on over fifteen months of fieldwork across two sites in Kokrajhar district. The first is a village that was torched during an episode of ethnically motivated violence in 2012 in which I conducted fieldwork in 2014 and subsequently in 2015 and 2016. The second site is a temporary relief camp that was set up after an episode of conflict in December 2014, and fieldwork was carried out from January to May 2015. I elaborate on the ethnic make-up of the sites and delve into more detail in a subsequent section.

I believe this contribution assumes further significance when it is considered that for scholars within the Agambenian trajectory, the question of survival beyond emergency and the move beyond incapacitation is often equated with the notion of (spectacular) bodily resistance. This analysis more often than not also tends to dwell on some major and iconic points of reference—the killing of Thangjam Manorama resulting in the subsequent ‘naked protest’ by the Manipuri Imas (mothers) and the (now suspended) hunger strike by Sharmila Irom.¹² I situate the notion of the everyday in the face of such forms of spectacular bodily resistance to show that this is not the only way in which survival can be imagined. My idea has been to document the uneventful as the locus of survival, which becomes the everyday. In the overt emphasis on deciphering the causes of violence and the conceptualisation of such spaces as exceptional or spectacular, what gets lost is the minutiae of the everyday and a contention with ordinariness, as has been found in the works of Das, Green, Daniel, Vigh and Finnström, among others.¹³

The contribution progresses as follows: drawing on the above, I first present a more contextual account of the causes of the conflict along with the various ethnic groups involved in the process. This is followed by an exploration of the broader phenomenological literature looking at lived experiences of conflict as well as the larger body of work centring round the anthropology of conflict. This leads to the identification of two main tropes, endurance and survival. The ethnography that links to the phenomenological approach follows, consisting of narratives gathered across the two sites, a relief camp set up after an episode of conflict between the Bodo and the Adivasis in 2014 and a village inhabited by Muslims which was completely torched during an outbreak of violence between the Bodo and the Muslims in 2012.

Contextualising the conflict: Ethnic groups and recurring violence

To give a brief overview of the context of this conflict, the Bodo, the largest plains tribe in Northeast India, at present constitute 29 percent of the population in the BTAD, followed by the Rajbonshis (15 percent), Bengali Muslims (about 12–13 percent) and the Santhal, who are an Adivasi group (6 percent). Regional scholars like Udayon Misra deem control over land to be at the heart of the inter-ethnic contestation in the BTAD.¹⁴ Recurring clashes along ethno-religious lines are the outcome of flawed and inconsistent policies pursued since colonial times, which have resulted in the marginalisation of the plains tribal communities and the dispossession of their land.

Amalendu Guha attributes the Bodo’s land dispossession to the British tea planters.¹⁵ The colonial administration declared vast stretches of agricultural and forest land belonging to the Bodo as wasteland to enable a land grab by planters through the wasteland settlement policy. The Adivasis working in the tea plantations were encouraged to settle in the forests that had been originally inhabited and used by the Bodo. The continuing resentment of the Bodo towards the Adivasis has led to several episodes of violent conflict between the two groups, most recently in 2014.

The other group seen as a threat to the Bodo are the Bengali Muslims. In the early 1900s, the British administration encouraged labourers to emigrate from the Bengal area to the region with the twofold purpose of administering populations and growing food through settled agriculture (since the local tribal populations practised shifting agriculture). The local population felt threatened by these new settlers who ushered in an agrarian economy. Anti-immigration (read anti-Bengali Muslim, and now anti-Bangladeshi) sentiments started growing as early as the 1930s and intensified post Indian Independence in 1947. In recent times, the perception of massive illegal migration from Bangladesh has led to the production of a psychosis of fear among the Bodo. This perception seems to centre around the fact that their ancestral lands would be illegally taken away by the immigrant Muslims. Moreover, the lack of any reliable data on the number of people coming into Assam from Bangladesh has aggravated this situation. The eventual inclusion by the Indian state of the names of the purported illegal immigrants onto the voters’ roll is seen as a deliberate strategy to strip the Bodo of their distinct indigenous identity. The existence of armed rebel groups like the NDFB(S), the Birsa and the Cobra Commando Forces representing the Santhal¹⁶ has further contributed to repeated cycles of violence.¹⁷ In a scenario characterised by frequent violent attacks, the Muslims and Adivasis continue to experience a perpetual sense of vulnerability. Every attack on an Adivasi or Muslim group usually results in retaliatory attacks by them on the dominant ethnic group, the Bodo. The continuing conflict along ethnic-religious lines thus necessitates the unpacking of political and social violence layer by layer, and interrogating the production and maintenance of agency in contexts of extreme suffering and uncertainty.

A phenomenological approach and the anthropology of conflict

Drawing from and expanding on Henrik Vigh’s idea of crisis, in which he argues that instead of placing crisis in context, the need is to view crisis itself as context—as a terrain of action and meaning, thereby opening it up for ethnographic exploration.¹⁸ Here I propose a phenomenological inquiry into the experiences of those living through these chronic crisis contexts in the BTAD. Phenomenological approaches have continued to gain significance in anthropology in the past 25 years, and they have helped anthropologists ‘to reconfigure what it means to be human, to have a body, to suffer and to heal, and to live among others’.¹⁹ Therefore, as Desjarlais and Throop note, ‘to study experience from a phenomenological perspective is to recognize the necessary emplacement of modalities of human existence within ever-shifting horizons of temporality’.²⁰ Human existence is temporally structured in ways such that past experience is always retained in a present moment that is feeding forward to anticipate future horizons of experience. Duranti points out that Husserl’s rendering of the natural attitude ‘closely resonates with what anthropologists understand to be the cultural configuration of reality’.²¹ To this extent, as Duranti suggests, the ‘natural attitude’ might just as well be termed the ‘cultural attitude’.²² By developing Husserl’s phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty views the individual as the body itself, within a time and place, performing in the world in which it lives. For Merleau-Ponty, the body is ‘our anchor in the world’, or ‘our general means of holding on to a world’.²³ Such an approach focuses on the reading of social behaviour as ‘the study of human lived experience and that human experience is rooted in people’s meanings, interpretations, activities and interactions’.²⁴ Thus one of the more instrumental influences of phenomenology on contemporary phenomenological anthropology becomes apparent in the tradition’s focus on embodiment, where the body is not just an object that is available for scrutiny, but is also a locus from which our experience of the world is arrayed. The objective of a phenomenological method is, therefore, to describe the full structure of an experience lived, or what that experience meant to those who lived it. Every armed conflict, therefore, consists of an accumulated mass of small details which linger as facts, figures and memories in people’s attempts to make a social life and a living beyond the conflict, and especially when it comes to war and peace, every case needs its own context.²⁵

The phenomenological approach feeds into and augments the body of work around the anthropology of conflict. The anthropology of conflict and violence is a fast-growing field of study. Critical ethnographers like Finnström have used phenomenological and reflexive approaches to minutely detail the everyday lived realities and experiences of those living amidst violence in northern Uganda. His work has reflected on how people engage with their local surroundings in search of balance, control and meaning.²⁶ This resonates with Jackson’s idea of balance and control, or the lack of them, which should be woven into any analysis of suffering, loss and vulnerability.²⁷ Daniel’s anthropography of violence in the context of the civil war in Sri Lanka revolves around an extended peripatetic inquiry into the effects of violence on victims both in the short term, which he describes as ‘the experience of the passion and the pain of violence in its brutal immediacy’, and in the longer run, outlined as ‘complex agendas and already begun mediations such as demands for justice, revenge, forgiveness, freedom, and relief’.²⁸ Thus it becomes apparent that at the core of phenomenology, ‘the intent is to understand the phenomena in their own terms—to provide a description of human experience as it is experienced by the person herself’,²⁹ thereby also allowing for the essence to surface.³⁰ According to Wolputte, in social and cultural anthropology, ‘the body was never completely absent, even if only for the fact that, implicitly, the bodiliness of the Other served as a principal marker of his or her Otherness’.³¹ The body can be further distinguished at an individual and social level. The individual body, as already mentioned, emerges as the domain of phenomenological analysis through its focus on the lived or embodied experiences people have of their bodies. The social body, by contrast, refers to the ways in which the body (including its products like blood, milk, sperm, etc.) functions as a natural symbol and a tool to think and represent social relationships like kinship, gender and mode of production.³²

Therefore, the anthropology of the body has transcended its focus on the ‘abstract or ideal(ised) body’ to instead shift to those moments during which the body and bodiliness are questioned and lose their self-evidence based on the experience or ‘threat of finiteness, limitation, transience, and vulnerability’. These embodied ambiguities confront the autonomy of the individual in the sense that they no longer appear ‘as a lack or deficiency, but instead as an existential characteristic of the human condition and as an ethical challenge’.³³ Phenomenologists argue that, at root, even one’s very basic experiences of physical objects both envisage and entail a foundational intersubjectivity. Indeed, phenomenological anthropologists have frequently relied on the concept of experience as a way to orient their research generatively to the ‘complexly temporal, at times ambiguous, and deeply ambivalent realities of human existence’.³⁴

It is in line with the existing approaches within anthropological phenomenology that I use this approach in a situation of intense conflict and suffering, and reflect on how the focus on the immediate is usually guided by the past and in anticipation of the future. As Vigh further notes, the focus should be geared towards the way people cope, not through crisis, but in crisis, and in so doing provide valuable insights into an important but as yet largely implicit anthropological enquiry.³⁵ Moreover, my attempt at reconstituting the normal or the ordinary does not mean that life in the relief camp or in the village is somehow what it was before the conflict.³⁶ As I go on to show, however compromised, makeshift and uncertain, everyday life continues to have some form of stability and predictability. Over time, the occurrences people encounter during the day assume familiarity and begin to make sense (the transition from relief camp back to village). People are almost forced to chalk out ways in which to organise their present lives and attempt to plan for the future.

Emergence of two tropes: Endurance and survival

The ethnography that follows has led me to identify two crucial but analytically distinguishable tropes through which the communities under study practise agency, namely endurance and survival. The distinction between the two concepts is one of temporality. Povinelli describes endurance as a mode of being that ‘encloses itself around the durative—the temporality of continuance, a denotation of continuous action without any reference to its beginning or end…’. Internal to this concept, she adds, is its sense of ‘strength, hardiness, callousness; its continuity through space; its ability to suffer and yet persist’.³⁷ This form of endurance can be explained using what Hage calls the state of ‘stuckedness’. He argues that the ‘social and historical conditions of permanent crisis we live in have led to a proliferation and intensification of this sense of stuckedness’.³⁸ He further adds that this mode of confronting a crisis by a celebration of one’s capacity to stick it out, rather than calling for change, contains a specific experience of waiting that is referred to commonly as waiting it out,³⁹ even though the crisis appears to be never-ending. The temporal horizon here is that of the constant present, relentlessly affected by the past. The temporal horizon of survival, however, is that of the deferred-yet-possible future.⁴⁰ While being stuck in the present, modes of excessive life and escape flit intermittently and can expose lines of flight from emergency-like situations in a relief camp. Survival through crisis gestures to an excess, to that which escapes sequestration and lives on.

The two sites: Narratives of survival and endurance amid episodes of recurring conflict

The ethnographic material presented in this section builds on work on the anthropology of conflict discussed above and highlights the ways in which survival and endurance are practised by the communities living at two particular sites. The first site is the village of Misalmari,⁴¹ which was torched during an episode of violence in 2012 (fieldwork was carried out in 2014, 2015 and 2016). The second site is a temporary relief camp set up in the reserved forests on the India–Bhutan border⁴² after an episode of ethnic conflict between the Bodo and the Adivasis in December 2014 (fieldwork conducted in 2015). The narrative within the context of the temporary relief camp, the abject loss and magnitude of suffering, is immediately visible through imageries of physical destruction of property, bullet injuries on bodies and extreme emotions either through hysterical outbursts or haunting silences. However, within the context of the village, two years after the episode of conflict, it is the memories that gradually begin to take shape, and everyday chores are exercised cautiously and social interactions are restricted and relatively circumscribed. There, although the material culture of violence lingers, physical violence ceases to be the centrifugal part of life, at least temporarily.

The empirical narratives seem to shift and alternate within the realms of the past, the present and the future of my interlocutors across the two sites. They provide a window into the impact of this conflict on the daily lives of individuals, families and communities, and the reflective ways in which they make meaning of these experiences, and the activities they occupy themselves with to maintain a sense of agency. The multi-sited ethnographies show how the body understands, feels and interacts with the textures and objects of everyday life. Since this notion of lived experience relates to how members of subjugated groups find themselves in the world, make sense of the external world and, through their actions, actively (re)shape their world, the data presented below interrogates, compares and captures the temporalities of lived experience across the two sites. This, I believe, also aids in unravelling how temporality or time alters people’s experiences in terms of the effect conflict has on people’s bodies and senses.

Site 1: Misalmari

Demographically, Misalmari is inhabited solely by Bengali-speaking Muslims. Most people in the village work as agricultural labourers cultivating paddy, either on their own plot of land or in fields owned by the Bodo through the shared cropping system. Interviews with local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and communities revealed that due to recurring conflict, the practice of shared cropping was on the decline. A small part of the population also engaged in the illicit timber trade.⁴³ I visited Misalmari first in April 2014 when the residents were beginning to return and rebuild their homes and lives after having spent between ten and twelve months in makeshift relief camps; Misalmari had also been the site of violence in 1996. In the words of one of my interlocutors, ‘it was 19 July 2012 when uncontrolled violence commenced and spread like a virus’.⁴⁴

The calcined remains of the sole primary school around which the village was built were still visible from the muddy main road that led into the village. The local market was on the main road, and housed a homeopathic pharmacy, a cassette store, a butcher shop and a tea-stall where, every evening, the villagers gathered to discuss their lives, local politics and business, among other things. I often sat there and engaged in detailed conversations and discussions for hours. Invariably, the villagers’ thoughts returned to the sultry summer evening in July 2012 when their village was set on fire; ten people were shot dead, over ten went missing and several were injured as they ran for cover. At first, they took shelter inside the primary school to escape from the bullets being fired by the attackers. The Indian paramilitary forces arrived and started shooting at the attackers from the other side. After being confined inside the school for several hours, the villagers were escorted by the military to a nearby relief camp. Two days later, when a few men returned to the village, all that remained were ashes. As I began to visit the households, each time I was told: ‘My entire house was burnt down, I lost all my cows and crops. I still have not fixed my tin roof since I am scared, they might come and burn it all down [again]’.

Although the memory of the conflict had become somewhat stale, yet it remained part of the everyday vocabulary of the village residents. Almost two years since the violence, people had rebuilt their houses. And the village headman told me:

Men and women from our village have started going to work in [the] households and fields of the Bodo. We are scared of them and we hate them, but we need money and that is why we go. Not everyone in this village has their own land or cattle. Since we are surrounded by Bodo villages, we have to go there to find work.

Fatima was a thirty-year-old woman who had lost her husband in the conflict of 2012. She had three children aged three, six and nine. Fatima recounted her story:

My husband had gone to visit a neighbour and we thought he would join us but even after we moved to the relief camp there was no trace of him. I have been going to police stations and morgues and looked for him in every corpse they showed me, while also hoping for him to return. But now I have come to accept that he is dead. I cannot continue to mourn with three little children to feed and no roof over my head. I have started collecting firewood and selling it in the market—after all, how long can one mourn?

She continued: ‘Although I go to the local market and sometimes even sit next to Bodo women, I make sure to come back to my village before it gets dark. We do not speak to our Bodo neighbours unless they speak to us. But if they speak to us, we have to respond, right?’ One day when I went to Fatima’s house with some medicines for her daughter who had a bout of the flu, I happened to meet her brother, Abdul, who had moved to the nearby town of Kokrajhar after the conflict and now worked as an apprentice to a mechanic in a garage. Abdul told me: ‘These Bodo killed us and now they will also all die. Allah will see to it and give us justice’. The village headman, who had also been affected by the conflict in 1998, once said to me: ‘They all came with black handkerchiefs wrapped around their faces…’; his son, who was sitting nearby, immediately interrupted: ‘Father, you are again mixing this up with 1998. This time their faces were not covered’. This was not just a one-off incident. On another day, the headman said to me: ‘Did you notice those embankments by the river on your way to the village? After the conflict we often saw hands and fingers of those killed or shot sticking out of the ground’. This time Fatima, who was nearby, said: ‘Oh that was way back in the late nineties, during the Bodoland movement. He is getting old and always muddles up details of the numerous conflicts’.

Usually, for a story to count as memory, it must have a sense of pastness about it, but repeated violence distorts the sense of time, rendering it difficult to know when the past flows into the present. Ewa Dománska has termed this the ‘non-absent past’, which she describes as a ‘past, which is somehow still present, which will not go away or, rather, which we cannot rid ourselves of’.⁴⁵ This becomes particularly true when the body is exposed to repetitive cycles of violence in one lifetime. A widow named Jahan ran the tea-stall where I usually sat. I typically indulged in more than one cup of tea, but one day I refused my cup of tea as I was running late for an appointment, and this upset Jahan. When I promised her that I would be back soon to have that cup of tea, she said: ‘What if me and my tea-stall is not here anymore? What if they kill me and burn my stall?’ Another time, she told me: ‘Baido raati judi kiba hobdo xuna pao, aru ekjon douri polai, aami sobe polau (Sister, if at night we hear a sound, any sound, and we see someone from our village running, we all follow suit and run with him)’. This is how experiences from the past insert their tentacles into the everyday, and the body reacts as if it were in a state of emergency within the ordinary. The anticipation of the future emerges in discrete, bound, temporal segments. The possibility of death is momentarily stalled before the cycle repeats itself, as it has in the past. The villagers also spoke about revenge, saying ‘we should have also burned their houses’. Misalmari is surrounded by Bodo villages, and even after returning from the camps, for a while the inhabitants just remained in the village and did not use the main road which led to the Bodo villages. Since Misalmari only had a primary school, many children had to travel to Kokrajhar to attend high school. But since travelling to Kokrajhar would mean going through the Bodo villages, the children were not sent to school. What upset Jahan most was that:

before 2012 we were friendly neighbours, we never harmed them, then why would they hurt us? Each time we walk past their village, we see our cows, our chickens, our television sets and mobile phones. Yet when they greet me, I smile back. This makes me so angry…makes me want to smash their heads.

The villagers have to put on masks of affability to manage everyday social situations. Jahan had to struggle to retain control over her body in order to maintain cordial relations with her Bodo neighbours. Although the past contains the germ of antipathy, defensiveness and violence, it also contains the possibilities for trust, openness and reconciliation.⁴⁶ It is for those in the present to decide which option they prefer and how the past will be interpreted. Fatima’s narrative revealed hope even in distress. Through her reflections, Fatima realised she needed to focus on her present for her children, who needed her, and actively discover meanings and purpose in her present life.

Site 2: Temporary relief camp

The temporary relief camp in the foothills of Bhutan comprised residents primarily from seven Adivasi villages and was situated deep inside the reserved forest. Prior to the conflict, the Adivasi villagers had mostly engaged in subsistence agriculture, cultivating mustard, chillies and, rarely, paddy, or they worked as daily wage labourers or hajira in nearby Bodo villages. Some also collected firewood from the forest to sell in the local weekly markets.

On Christmas Eve in December 2014, attacks were carried out by the NDFB(S) faction on seven villages within the reserved forest. The villagers were then temporarily rehabilitated in a makeshift camp. The relief camps (as they are called locally) are temporary arrangements; for shelter, there are blue tarpaulin tents donated by an NGO, and a single tube-well is the only source of drinking water, serving about three hundred people. This camp was strategically set up in a field opposite the walled compound of the Border Security Force (BSF).⁴⁷ The people in this camp had already suffered a violent attack in 1998 and they had moved into houses inside the reserved forest just a few years before, after having received compensation from the government for their losses in 1998. They acknowledged that their proximity to the forest meant that they often had to feed and shelter NDFB(S) militants and they tried to maintain a good relationship with them out of duress. On Christmas Eve 2014, the women had returned home after a day’s work in the fields and were sitting by their hearths cooking the evening meal. Malati, a 25-year-old woman whose husband had been shot at by the militants, summed up the incident for me:

We were very familiar with the presence of the NDFB(S). That evening they entered our huts and asked, ‘Baido aji ki bonai ase? (Sister, what is for dinner tonight?)’. Just as I started responding to them, I heard gunshots outside and the militants inside my hut also ran out and started firing indiscriminately. We ran into the forest for safety, but almost twelve people, including women and children, were killed from my village.

Standing close to Malati was Babulal, a forty-year-old man who worked as a daily wage labourer in a neighbouring Bodo village. He had come home early that Christmas Eve to prepare for the celebrations. He lifted his shirt to show me his bullet wounds and the stitches that were still healing on his abdomen. He had sutures along his right thumb too. He told me: ‘Baido ami jongol, dhaan kheter maaje di polai golu, ekdum andher aaru gute gaat jok dhorise (Sister, we ran through forests and paddy fields for hours in the dark with leeches sticking to our bodies)’. Malati continued: ‘As I was running into the forest, I saw my neighbour also running with her three-month-old child, until a bullet pierced her breast [and] she collapsed, still holding the baby close to her heart’. I was later informed that the child had been saved by another neighbour and is now being raised by his father. Among others who lost young children was 23-year-old Jagori. When I first met her, she was dressed in a long loose gown and her two-year-old toddler trailed behind. She slowly began to recount the events of that evening:

I had gone to fetch water from the village well to cook the evening meal. A few NDFB(S) militants had come to my house with a chicken and wanted me to cook it for them. My husband and two sons aged two and four were at home chatting with the NDFB(S). As I was getting water and discussing the day with the other women, we heard gunshots and they grew louder. I ran towards my hut and found that both my sons had been shot. My husband and I picked them up and ran to take shelter deep inside the forest, on the heels of our neighbours. My older son bled profusely throughout the night. We tore up the clothes we were wearing to cover his wounds along with wild medicinal leaves. We all crouched together, shivering in fear. The army finally came after what seemed like several hours and we took our son to the hospital, but he could not be saved.

Jagori narrated all of this without shedding a tear and with an unmoving expression. She then lifted up her toddler’s shirt and showed me the multiple bullet injuries he had sustained, while he constantly tugged at the suture that was biting into the bullet wound on his arm. Satya, a forty-year-old man, also described his narrow escape on that evening:

I was returning home after working in the field with two of my friends, on our bicycles. We did not hear about the attack that was taking place in the village. Suddenly we heard gunshots and a few men with locally made guns came chasing [us]. We left our bicycles and fled for our lives. I hid by the side of a stream. Then I heard a loud scream. One of my friends had been shot. I ran away like a madman and I thought this was the end for me. I ran for quite a while and thought that my other friend was behind me, but after running for some time, I hid behind a tree. I saw my friend was being hacked with a sickle. I started running again, and finally came to a side road along which I escaped.

Both Jagori and Malati’s narratives point to the fact that the coming of the NDFB(S) men to their villages, the women cooking meals for them and perhaps even sharing a meal were nothing out of the ordinary. The villagers’ bodies had become oriented to this activity and thus they could not foresee the coming attack. This notion of how bodies relate to familiar events leads me to Amit Baishya’s expansion upon Jean Amery’s notion of codified abstraction. Baishya states that everyday reality is a dense network of ‘codified abstraction that orients my body towards objects in a certain way’. He explains: ‘the image of me buying a newspaper orients my daily action of going to buy a newspaper. This act seems habitual and familiar because this orientation towards the object closes the gap between the imagination and the event. A familiar world comes into being through a repetition of this act’.⁴⁸ This connects with what Sarah Ahmed writes: ‘Familiarity is what is, as it were given, and which in being given gives the body the capacity to be oriented in this way or that. The question of orientation becomes, then, a question not only about how we find our way but how we come to feel at home’.⁴⁹

An encounter with a world-shattering event, like a sudden attack by established acquaintances, strips away the protective casing that comes with our body being at ease with the familiar world around us. The body then begins to relate to everyday objects through the tragic incident. Thus, paddy fields and leeches remain etched onto Babulal’s body as objects intrinsically connected to the violence, since Babulal and his friends ran for hours though the paddy fields. In my subsequent visits, Babulal would often speak about that night and how he had developed both an aversion to and fear of leeches, which are usually an everyday object in the reserved forests. He and others in the camp no longer slept properly, and they claimed to be in a constant state of alertness. Conversations always spiralled down into the events of that evening and their present state of helplessness. On one of my visits to the camp, I went for a walk with Bimala to her village, which had been set alight in the conflict. She took me to see the remains of her house where she had lived with her mother, father and two brothers. On the way to her house, she pointed to a well and told me: ‘Look there…this is where they dumped the dead bodies of two elderly people in the village. They first shot them, then tied them with ropes and threw them into the well. The police found their bodies three days later’. She then pointed at a few cows and goats that were grazing in a nearby field and said: ‘We had three cows and two goats. But we lost them to the conflict’. Her body (re)orients to sites and to everyday objects both living and non-living through her lived experience of terror.

Kirmayer shows that metaphors are extra-rational and are tools not only for thinking, but also for working with experience.⁵⁰ Metamorphosing how the body makes such negative associations, my interpretation of Babulal’s account of the leeches indicates that this haptic can be a mode of interspecies connection to describe the general feeling of disgust that is now elicited by the feeling of the leeches sticking onto his skin. Part of that comes from the viscosity and shapelessness associated with worm forms; worms after all are ‘other’ because of their general association with stickiness, decay and death.⁵¹ As well, the leech is horrifying because it obliterates the boundaries between the inside and the outside—sticking to the skin, it bores into the body. The body (re)orients to everyday objects like the well, the bushes, the trees and the stream, where memories of conflict are etched onto bodies and surface in everyday narratives: ‘See that well, they tied two men from our village and plunged them into the well’; or ‘See those bushes, we hid inside them when the militants razed our village’; or ‘See that river, we swam across it, often underwater, to get to the other side to safety. Unfortunately, the children couldn’t make it’. The conflict passes, but these everyday objects in the outside world remain to bring up memories of past incidents.

The untimely rains that year added to the villagers’ misery because the tarpaulin tents offered hardly any protection when it rained heavily, and it often did rain heavily due to the location of the camp within the reserved forest. It was as if everyday life had come to a standstill since the villagers were too scared to venture too far into the forest or even to go and check on their destroyed homes. The men sometimes took day trips to the nearby town of Kokrajhar to enquire about the compensation money which they had still not received. Temporally this was where the present loomed large, leading to either the starving or bloating of memories and hope. Bodies move within nested identities: the household, the fields, the village all define the individual. Conflict upturns and throws people out of such nests, and survival becomes essential.

I soon became a familiar presence in the life-worlds of the camp residents. This was also around the time when the monsoon was well on its way with regular thunderstorms, and most families had received at least a part of the compensation from the government along with mosquito nets and some utensils for everyday use. But this bounty was because of the elections to the Bodo Territorial Council that took place in April 2015: local leaders were capitalising on the conflict situation as a strategy to garner votes. Spending more time with the residents soon revealed to me how everyday conversations alternated between what was to be cooked for dinner, if the rations would arrive on time, the future of the children, illness, and gossip about Jonaki, a young mother of two who, according to Bimala and her friends, ‘is usually drunk and flirts with the BSF guards’; they also covered counter-insurgency operations taking place inside the forest, abductions, army raids, sightings of NDFB(S) cadres in the local market and violence. The urge to go back to their own villages, rebuild their homes and buy new cattle was often overshadowed by feelings of fear and uncertainty. The general sentiment seemed to be: ‘At least we are all together here, and what if they attack us again when we go back, and this is too soon’. After a period, the camp residents had started going to their villages during the day. The farthest village was about a mile from the relief camp. Once there they rifled through and then cleared the charred remains of their houses, pulled out the weeds that were taking over their lands, and fed any remaining cattle or ones that had come back, but they made sure to return to the safety of the camp well before nightfall. On one occasion, rations did not arrive for ten days and the residents had to seek work in the nearby Bodo villages. They told me that their bodies often trembled with fear when they made their way outside the security of the camp and their own villages, but as they explained: ‘Upai naai (there is no other way)’. The body adapts and (re)orients itself, but only when it is a necessity, because the wound was still fresh and not healed.

Then six months later, the monsoon forced the camp residents to retrace their steps back towards their villages. Recurring exposure to terror has the effect of incapacitation: it can render people immobile in anticipation of danger. As a result, the villagers’ mobility became extremely constrained and they rarely ventured into the forest out of fear. When I asked why they were so hesitant about leaving the camp, I was told: ‘Baido ei NDFB keta etia o aahi thake. Aami hodai heo tok bozaar ot dekhi pau (The NDFB rebels continue to come to this village and roam around. We often see them in the market)’. This surprised me because the camp was heavily guarded by the army as well as the paramilitary forces. I had the most obvious counter-question, ‘Are you sure?’, to which the response was: ‘Ami xiotor mukh cini pau. Etia xihot civil dress ot ahe. BSF nejei ph(f)oreigher hoi. Xiot keneke gom pabo. Ami kio kobo zaam, amak bhoi laage. Aku amak attack koribo (We know these insurgents by face. These days they come dressed as ordinary people. What does the army know? They are foreigners’. I am not in a position to confirm the presence of NDFB(S) cadres around the relief camp, but what this exchange reflects is how terror creates a general aura of distrust and insecurity. The body is guided by notions of familiarity, intimacy and habit. The case of the relief camp shows how people navigate through the everyday in the immediate aftermath of a world-shattering event in their life-worlds.

Weaving together narratives: Temporality, endurance and survival

The above narratives assume significance because of what they can reveal about how people, as experiencing subjects, make sense of violence and turbulent transformations. More specifically, they relate to understanding other people’s experiences and how best they and the people involved can be represented in order to do them justice. The nature and the setting of the two sites discussed above and the narratives I heard, which emerged through repeated interactions, were of a shocking nature, but nonetheless pertinent in terms of analysis, especially in terms of the residents’ everyday lived experiences. The accounts show how conflict shapes the everyday lives of the different ethnic groups in the area and how their recollections seep into the everyday even as they attempt to go back to what used to be their normal lives—cultivating paddy, going to work in Bodo households, sending children to school, women gathering at the village well at the end of the day, and so on.

In the temporary relief camp, in the wake of the immediate violence, the everyday is even more extraordinary due to the villagers’ most recent uprooting. Those in Misalmari who recounted their narratives two years after the last episode of violence clearly continue to struggle to come to grips with the past. By understanding the lived experiences of those directly affected by violence in two different sites that are just sixty miles apart, I strove to unpack how exposure to repeated cycles of violence influences temporalities, i.e. experiences of the past versus the present, the cycle of temporal regularities and irregularities, as well as the ordinary and the extraordinary. The residents of Misalmari had already been affected by the violence of 1996, as had the internally displaced persons at the relief camp been affected in 1998. This demonstrates their engulfment in cyclic episodes of violence. The past remains more pronounced in the relief camp because, for its residents, the present is still sinking in and the future does not hold much significance. In Misalmari, by contrast, the immediate past is often mixed up with the more distant past, and the future appears to be more prominent than the present. Although the violence constitutes a break in their life-worlds, the external world continues on, and the residents of both Misalmari and the relief camp voted in the national, assembly and state elections in 2014, 2016 and 2017.

In Misalmari, the body has moved beyond the immediate present and reached a stage of endurance rather than mere survival. This resonates with Judith Pettigrew’s work on the civil war in Nepal.⁵² She established that in landscapes marred by strife, performing everyday chores helped ease anxiety. Misalmari’s villagers had started going to the market and even to Bodo households seeking work. Labour, which is a very bodily activity, assumed prominence because it became imperative to use one’s body by engaging in manual work to earn money, sufficient to overcome fear. People are usually hyper-vigilant and try to pay enhanced attention to daily activities as they attempt to evaluate the degree of risk, and this was also witnessed in Misalmari, where people returned home before dark or took certain routes to the market, avoiding others. Moreover, the river near the village acted as a continuing reminder of having had to swim across it to save their lives, and the school, which they refuse to repair, stands as a site of carnage. Despite all their physical and mental suffering, the people of Misalmari continue to persist, and this can be referred to as endurance. The catastrophic, crisis-laden and sublime form of violence, whose memory is still fresh in the relief camp, is usually followed by uneventful, less visible forms of structural violence—ordinary ongoing experiences of violence, as visible in Misalmari.

Conclusion

Using a phenomenological approach and multi-sited ethnography, I have tried to illustrate lived experiences of conflict and how they vary in their temporal aspects. This contribution attempts to augment the existing body of work, more specifically on the formulation and representation of violence in Northeast Indian studies. The multi-sited ethnographies, in a Muslim village and an Adivasi relief camp, show how bodies move from Point A—the relief camp—to Point B—the village—while constantly remaining vigilant, engaging in everyday chores, rebuilding homes and (re)orienting everyday spaces and sites of familiarity, intimacy and habits. Yet another analytical distinction I emphasise across the two cases is that of survival and endurance. With these narratives, I have unpacked the notion of how conflict affects the body and ruptures the life-worlds of its victims even while the external world continues to operate. By adding the extra analytical layer of the elections, I have striven to show how the external world not only continues to operate, but also expects the individual to function in a certain way. In the context of the Sri Lankan civil war, Daniel writes that there is an analytic ambiguity in ethnographies of conflict because ‘experiences of conflict in the camps, other rural areas, and towns—which differed substantively—tend to be conflated’.⁵³ I have tried to overcome this ambiguity by using two sites that are spatially and temporally different from each other. Therefore, what has emerged as a process is a comparative shared repertoire for expressing emotions and views on the lived environment of violence because the narratives are woven into patterns related to temporality, space and sites. Given that anthropology is increasingly focusing on conflict, violence, suffering, oppression and marginalisation, there exists an impending scope to thoroughly realise and reflect upon the deeper effect that continuing volatility and uncertainty have on both our interlocutors and the conceptual apparatus we employ to comprehend their lives.

Acknowledgements

I am enormously grateful to my interlocutors who laid bare their hearts to me in recounting some of the most traumatising experiences of living in a violent geography. I am thankful to friends and colleagues who commented on the draft versions of this article. Special appreciation to the three anonymous South Asia reviewers for their extremely detailed comments, suggestions and insights which significantly improved the quality of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Duncan McDuie-Ra, ‘Vision 2020 or Re-Vision 1958: The Contradictory Politics of Counter-Insurgency in India’s Regional Engagement’, in Contemporary South Asia, Vol. 17, no. 3 (2009), pp. 313–30.

2. The AFSPA confers on the armed forces of India the power to maintain public order in ‘disturbed areas’. The army has the authority to prohibit gatherings of five or more persons in a particular area and is allowed to use force or even to open fire (after giving due warning) if it is felt that a person is contravening the law. On grounds of reasonable suspicion, the army can also arrest a person and/or enter or search premises without a warrant, and ban the possession of firearms [https://www.deccanherald.com/national/east-and-northeast/afspa-extended-for-six-months-from-aug-28-in-assam-759787.html, accessed 27 Feb. 2020].

3. Amit R. Baishya, ‘Translation of Jehirul Hussain’s “Soru Dhemali, Bar Dhemali” (Minor Preludes, Major Preludes)’, MuseIndia.com (1 Aug. 2015) [https://www.academia.edu/15365768/Translation_of_Jehirul_Hussains_Xoru_Dhemali_Bor_Dhemali_Minor_Preludes_Major_Preludes_MuseIndia, accessed 15 Nov. 2020].

4. N. Vandekerckhove and B. Suykens, ‘“The Liberation of Bodoland”: Tea, Forestry and Tribal Entrapment in Western Assam’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 31, no. 3 (2008), pp. 450–71; and Sanjib Baruah, ‘Citizens and Denizens: Ethnicity, Homelands, and the Crisis of Displacement in Northeast India’, in Journal of Refugee Studies, Vol. 16, no. 1 (2003), pp. 44–66.

5. S.J. George, ‘The Bodo Movement in Assam: Unrest to Accord’, in Asian Survey, Vol. 34, no. 10 (1994), pp. 878–92.

6. The Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution provides for the creation and management of autonomous districts and provinces within the Indian federation [http://www.prsindia.org/uploads/media/Sixth%20Schedule%201/bill164_20080318164_SIXTH_SCHEDULE_with_amendments.pdf, accessed 15 Feb. 2020].

7. The term Adivasi translates literally to original inhabitants. In the 1850s, the British administration brought large populations of indigenous groups or Adivasis from the Central and Eastern regions to work as wage labourers in the tea plantations of Assam. These groups were mostly constituted of tribes such as the Santhal, Munda and Orao and are collectively known as the Adivasis or the tea tribes.

8. See South Asia Terrorism Portal, ‘Violence in Four BTAD Districts’ (23 July 2017) [http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/states/assam/data_sheets/BTAD.htm, accessed 10 Jan. 2020].

9. Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer urges a reconsideration of theories of sovereignty as put forward ‘from Hobbes to Rousseau’. The theory of sovereign power offered by Agamben is based on the state of exception, drawn from Carl Schmitt, who, in Political Theology, established the contiguity between the state of exception and sovereignty by defining the sovereign as ‘he who decides on the state of exception’, and the production of a bare, human life caught in the sovereign ban, which constitutes the threshold of the political community. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 109; and Carl Schmitt, Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology (John Wiley & Sons, 2014). See also McDuie-Ra, ‘Vision 2020 or Re-Vision 1958’, pp. 313–30; Ananya Vajpeyi, ‘Resenting the Indian State: For a New Political Practice in the Northeast’, in Sanjib Baruah (ed.), Beyond Counter-Insurgency: Breaking the Impasse in Northeast India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 25–48; and Sanjib Baruah, Postfrontier Blues: Toward a New Policy Framework for Northeast India, Policy Studies, no. 33 (Washington, DC: East West Center, June 2007), pp. 1–94 [https://www.eastwestcenter.org/publications/postfrontier-blues-toward-new-policy-framework-northeast-india, accessed 7 Feb. 2020].

10. Duncan McDuie-Ra, Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, Refuge and Retail (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), p. 17.

11. Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), p. 7.

12. The naked protest was conducted by a group of elderly women collectively named Imas (mothers) in front of the Indian army cantonment to protest the rape and murder of Thangjam Manorama. Sharmila Irom ended her sixteen-year-long hunger strike against the AFSPA in August 2016. For discussions of Irom’s hunger strike, see D.P. Mehrotra, Burning Bright Irom Sharmila (London: Penguin UK, 2009). For readings about the naked protest, see Papori Bora, ‘Speech of the Nation and Conversations at the Margins of the Nation-State’, in Interventions, Vol. 17, no. 5 (2015), pp. 669–85.

13. Veena Das, ‘Violence, Gender, and Subjectivity’, in Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 37 (2008), pp. 283–99; Linda Green, Fear as a Way of Life: Mayan Widows in Rural Guatemala (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Valentine Daniel, Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); H. Vigh, ‘Crisis and Chronicity: Anthropological Perspectives on Continuous Conflict and Decline’, in Ethnos, Vol. 1, no. 73 (2008), pp. 5–24; and S. Finnström, Living with Bad Surroundings: War, History, and Everyday Moments in Northern Uganda (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2008).

14. Udayon Misra, ‘Bodoland: The Burden of History’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 47, no. 37 (15 Sept. 2012), pp. 36–42.

15. A. Guha, Planter Raj to Swaraj (New Delhi: ICHR, 1977).

16. McDuie-Ra, Northeast Migrants in Delhi.

17. N. Goswami, ‘Counter-Insurgency Best Practices: Applicability to Northeast India’, in Small Wars Journal (6 Dec. 2012) [https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/counter-insurgency-best-practices-applicability-to-northeast-india, accessed 8 Feb. 2020].

18. Vigh, ‘Crisis and Chronicity’.

19. R. Desjarlais and C.J. Throop, ‘Phenomenological Approaches in Anthropology’, in Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 40, no. 87 (Oct. 2011), pp. 87–102.

20. Ibid.

21. A. Duranti, ‘Husserl, Intersubjectivity and Anthropology’, in Anthropological Theory, Vol. 10, nos. 1–2 (2010), pp. 16–35.

22. Ibid., p. 18.

23. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1945), p. 239.

24. R.C. Prus, Symbolic Interaction and Ethnographic Research: Intersubjectivity and the Study of Human Lived Experience (New York: SUNY Press, 1996), p. 9.

25. P. Richards (ed.), No Peace, No War: The Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts (Oxford: James Currey, 2005), p. 14.

26. Finnström, Living with Bad Surroundings, pp. 16–33.

27. M. Jackson, ‘Storytelling Events, Violence, and the Appearance of the Past’, in Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 78, no. 2 (2005), pp. 355–75.

28. Daniel, Charred Lullabies, pp. 4–6.

29. V.M. Bentz and J.J. Shapiro, Mindful Inquiry in Social Research (London: Sage Publications, 1998), p. 96.

30. M.E. Cameron, M. Schaffer and H.A. Park, ‘Nursing Students’ Experience of Ethical Problems and Use of Ethical Decision-Making Models’, in Nursing Ethics, Vol. 8, no. 5 (2001), pp. 432–47.

31. S.V. Wolputte, ‘Hang On to Yourself: Of Bodies, Embodiment, and Selves’, in Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 21, no. 33 (2004), pp. 251–69.

32. M. Featherstone et al. (eds), The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory (London: Sage, 1991).

33. Wolputte, ‘Hang On to Yourself’.

34. Desjarlais and Throop, ‘Phenomenological Approaches in Anthropology’.

35. Vigh, ‘Crisis and Chronicity’.

36. L.S. Greenberg, Emotion-Focused Therapy (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2011), p. 89.

37. Elizabeth Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 32.

38. Ghassen Hage (ed.), Waiting (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009), p. 10.

39. Ibid.

40. Baishya, Contemporary Literature from Northeast India.

41. Amit R. Baishya, Contemporary Literature from Northeast India: Deathworlds, Terror and Survival (London/New York: Routledge, 2018).

42. Reserved Forests were introduced through the Indian Forest Act of 1927. These forests are under government jurisdiction and cannot be used for any activities unless special permission is obtained from the state forest departments.

43. A. Dutta and B. Suykens, ‘Constellations of Power and Authority in the Political Economy of Illegal Timber Extraction in BTAD, Assam’, in Alternatives, Vol. 42, no. 3 (2017), pp. 146–65.

44. All interviews were conducted in the local languages, Bengali and Assamese, and the excerpts are my translations.

45. Ewa Dománska, ‘Toward the Archaeontology of the Dead Body’, in Rethinking History, Vol. 9, no. 4 (2005), pp. 389–413 [405].

46. Jackson, ‘Storytelling Events, Violence, and the Appearance of the Past’.

47. The BSF is one of the seven central police forces of India.

48. Baishya, Contemporary Literature from Northeast India, p. 29.

49. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 7.

50. L.J. Kirmayer, ‘Healing and the Invention of Metaphor: The Effectiveness of Symbols Revisited’, in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Vol. 17 (1993), pp. 161–95.

51. Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia (New York: Vintage, 2010).

52. Judith Pettigrew, ‘Living between the Maoists and the Army in Rural Nepal’, in Michael J. Hutt (ed.), Himalayan People’s War: Nepal’s Maoist Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), pp. 261–84.

53. Daniel, Charred Lullabies, pp. 4–6.