[Reader-list] Naga curbs on history research

[Harsh Kapoor]

[Following up on a recent post by Shuddha on censorship, here is 
something else. xxx H.]

o o o

Frontline
Volume 20 - Issue 19, September 13 - 26, 2003
Objects of history

M.S. PRABHAKARA

On the politics of the Naga Students' Federation's warning against 
any academic research into the Naga people's history without its 
permission.

QUESTIONS about the ownership of a people's history have always 
exercised the passions and imagination of people, especially those 
who for various reasons have become objects of history instead of 
being in control of their history. The description fits the majority 
of the people. The same is the case with the felt passions too, 
though these are not always articulated cogently.

[Photo] N.SRINIVASAN
[Caption] In Kohima, the capital of Nagaland. Historically, the Naga 
people are divided into various tribal communities whose numbers as 
well as nomenclatures have undergone interesting changes over the 
years.

Recently, the Naga Students' Federation (NSF), a body whose support 
to Naga nationalistic aspirations and Naga sovereignty is well known, 
issued a directive and a warning requiring non-Naga scholars to 
secure its permission and clearance before undertaking any academic 
research pertaining to the Naga people, in particular their history. 
Maintaining that the history of the Naga people had been distorted by 
such research by non-Naga scholars, the president of the NSF said 
that `people from outside the Naga community' would not be allowed to 
undertake any research on Naga history without the organisation's 
permission.

The immediate provocation for this directive is, apparently, the 
`genome project' that has been undertaken at Nagaland University. The 
project, initiated by some scholars of the university, both Naga and 
non-Naga, has been going on for the last two years. Among other 
things, the project requires the collection of blood samples from 
every Naga tribe. The purpose of such research, with its obvious 
bearing on aspects of the physical anthropology of the objects of the 
research, it was felt, could well be to establish - if there is any 
need to do so - that the various Naga people of Nagaland (and of 
neighbouring States) who claim historic memories of being one people 
and who, as both the cause and consequence of the Naga insurgency, 
are in the process of constructing themselves into Naga, transcending 
all tribal divisions, are actually discreet and separate people, not 
one `nation' that Naga nationalist discourse insists they are.

Historically, the Naga people are divided into various tribal 
communities (the expression tribe and derivatives thereof have not 
yet become politically incorrect usage in these parts, though they 
will doubtless become so soon) whose numbers as well as nomenclatures 
have undergone some interesting changes over the years. Official 
records of the State government at present identify 14 separate 
tribal groups; however, there can be no finality about this number. 
At least one of these, the Zeliang-Kuki, is a self-evidently 
artificial construct, while another, the Chakesang, is a sort of 
portmanteau construct whose members were not so long ago categorised 
under three different denominations. Such a process of deconstruction 
of communities with seeming internal coherence to reconstruct other 
identities is not, after all, a unique phenomenon.

The concern about `genome research', such as it is (which is how 
sceptical scholars in the region view the programme), though perhaps 
ill-informed, is understandable. Those espousing Naga nationalistic 
aspirations and Naga sovereignty are at present on a high, having got 
the Government of India to get off its high horse and engage in talks 
with the leaders of the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (NSCN) 
on terms laid down by the latter. So, any research at this stage, 
whose implications might be to provide legitimacy to what Naga 
nationalists maintain were `colonialist constructs', the atomisation 
of the Naga people into mutually antagonistic tribes, is 
automatically suspect and could well be seen as a setback to the 
gains made by the Naga nationalists. While such suspicions might 
appear utterly ahistorical in any dispassionate consideration of the 
`Naga national question', the fact is that in these harsh times, 
history has more or less lost any claims - if indeed it had at any 
time - of being a detached study of a people's past and present.

Other recent NSF directives that are in fact renewals of initiatives 
undertaken periodically earlier are stricter enforcement of the 
existing Inner Line Regulations and warnings to non-Naga men residing 
in the State not to acquire immovable assets or marry Naga women. 
Interestingly, admonishments against Naga men marrying non-Naga women 
are seldom issued, consistent with the cultural norms in the rest of 
the country as well that sees a woman as the custodian of a people's 
history and heritage and whose `purity' has to be maintained. In the 
immediate context, however, the injunction against non-Naga men 
marrying Naga girls is related to the widely held conviction that 
many illegal migrants in the State, overwhelmingly male, have entered 
into such marriages of convenience with a view to legitimising their 
status as permanent residents.

On the face of it, such directives that are not enforceable except 
through coercion appear rather silly. For instance, the growth of 
Dimapur, the ancient capital of the Dimasa kings and now the largest 
city in Nagaland where the Inner Line Regulations do not apply, has 
been influenced by considerations that have little to do with Naga 
nationalism, non-Naga men marrying Naga girls or things like that. 
Indeed, the very ownership of the city is contested by Dimasa 
nationalist organisations fighting for a separate Dimasaland 
(Dimaraji), whose envisaged territory, as always, has claims across 
existing State/district boundaries.

But then, this is not the first initiative of its kind by the NSF, or 
indeed by other self-appointed guardians of a people's history, 
heritage and culture, terms that can be interpreted elastically. One 
recalls that during the height of the Assam agitation against foreign 
nationals, there were calls that Assamese women, in particular 
students in colleges and universities, should wear only the 
traditional Assamese dress, strikingly beautiful (and quite 
expensive) but hardly the most practical kind of dress that a young 
woman could wear every day to work and study. Again, interestingly, 
corresponding directives were never issued in respect of the male 
Assamese youth simply because, as leaders of the anti-foreigner 
agitation, clad in trousers and safari suits and jeans and such 
accoutrements, it was they who issued such prescriptions and 
proscriptions.

These norms, and the underlying romanticisation and fear of and 
anxieties about female sexuality, continue even to this day, evident 
in any public function where the mandatory opening song is sung by a 
chorus of boys and girls, the girls all dressed in traditional finery 
while the boys are more casually dressed.

Given its origins, which are deeply rooted in the very beginnings of 
the Naga nationalist struggle, the NSF clearly considers itself as 
having rather more legitimacy in claiming the ownership of history 
and issuing more directives than many other corresponding `student' 
organisations in the region. Indeed, disapproval of, if not outright 
ban upon, research by `outsiders' on tribal societies of the 
northeastern region is becoming the norm.

While structures calling for such an exclusion or outright ban are 
yet in no position to enforce the proscription, they can certainly be 
an inhibiting factor. "We will study our societies ourselves, we will 
not allow outsiders to study them", is now a fairly commonplace 
sentiment among many tribal groups.

However, while such a self-appointed gatekeeping role in respect of 
academic research (or modes of social conduct) by student 
organisations is rather laughable and certainly deserves to be 
condemned - who gave the authority to the NSF to lay down the law, 
one may question with all the indignation one can muster - one also 
has to admit that these new censors have modelled themselves after 
very respectable and powerful precedents - states and governments 
with greater legitimacy. One laughs at (or quails over) such diktats 
depending on the muscle that those who issue such orders muster. But 
academic gatekeeping as a method to control free intellectual 
activity has perfectly legitimate precedents.

The point hardly needs to be pressed in respect of academic research, 
or even the much less exalted profession of journalism, the routine 
reporting and analysis of news and events, in northeast India. 
Several `sensitive' areas of study and, in some cases, whole physical 
spaces, have been demarcated as out of bounds, not solely to foreign 
scholars but to locals as well. Foreign scholars interested in the 
region are required to submit details of their proposed research 
before they get a visa to travel to India - not to speak of the 
further hurdles, like the Restricted Area Permit and the Inner Line 
Permit, they have to cross if they have to visit the area of their 
study in the region. Their host institutions in the region too 
sometimes come under scrutiny.

The rationale for such restrictions and monitoring is that India is 
now viewed by those in authority as a besieged state; that much of 
the academic research by foreign scholars and their Indian 
collaborators relating to the problems in the northeastern region, 
very broadly issues of ethnicity, insurgency and unresolved national 
questions though much criminality too masquerades under such 
high-sounding problematique, is driven not by academic interest or 
democratic instincts but by more malignant considerations.

Perhaps the kind of restrictions imposed by the Indian state is not 
unique. Even more likely, they are not being strictly implemented, 
given the huge internal contradictions that affect every aspect of 
governance in India, including issues of national security. And what 
has one to make of the reports of stricter monitoring in the United 
States and other prosperous Western countries of research into 
`sensitive areas' with a bearing on national security by scholars of 
the Third World, certainly by Arab and Muslim scholars, following the 
attack on symbols of American authority and power on September 11, 
2001? Indeed, even journalists from the Third World whose passports 
clearly identify their profession, are finding it hard to get a visa 
across the counter; applications for visas that would allow one to 
work, as different from tourist visas, will in many cases have to be 
cleared by the authorities in the capital of the country that one 
plans to visit as part of one's work.

In other words, suspicion and disapproval of `foreign' influences on 
the subjects of history while those tasked with shaping that history 
revel in absorbing every aspect of that very same pernicious 
`foreign' culture is a near universal phenomenon. For instance, the 
`traditional kings and princes' and `traditional leaders' in South 
Africa, some of whom are among the richest and most Westernised South 
Africans, nevertheless mobilise their supporters on the most 
parochial issues, demand the most feudal of loyalties, routinely 
admonishing them against succumbing to corrupt Western influence, in 
the process demarcating vast areas as their exclusive fiefdoms where 
no political challenge is allowed. Coming closer home, those leaders 
of the freedom movement in India who had the advantages of a Western 
education and were highly Westernised in their lifestyles routinely 
pandered to and promoted `traditional' values for their adoring 
followers, though not for their own progeny. There is no need to 
press the point about the advantages that such prohibitions and 
admonitions have brought to the owners of history.