[Reader-list] Renee on Shilong

[Sadan]

Dear Renee,
Hi!
I just wrote a mail to you and then read your earlier postings. There 
are couple of threads that I found personally quite interesting in your 
work hence this response. If I am not wrong, one of the central issues 
that you are dealing with is the question of outsider and those who 
belong to the place. In your word, it is about the cosmopolitan and the 
indigenous in Urban cosmopolitan Shillong. You enter into a very 
complicated domain of memory ( urban memory) with these figures and then 
try to explore  physical spaces.  Now, this sounds very complicated and 
exciting.  There are couple of responses.  In your postings it appears 
to me that you have not questioned enough your categories of 
cosmopolitan and indigenous. Is it a sociological category( 
cosmopolitan= first generation migrants/ second generation migrants)? Is 
it about an outlook ( cosmopolitan with particular kind of appearance, 
dress, food habits, language, education etc)? Now, similar questioning 
can be applied to the figure of indigenous. Now, the need for asking 
such questions is two fold. If it is about sociological categories then 
these categories do not make much sense as your project by its very 
nature is not sociological. In the heart of the project lies an 
exploration about  belongingness with place/physical spaces and its 
relation with memory.
If categories and figures you choose are not social categories then why 
this distinction between cosmopolitan and indigenous at all.
The point I am trying to communicate is that the very question, who 
belongs to and who does not belong to a place, a city or to any space 
for that matter actually frames your project and limits its significance.
The wider question that needs to be posed here is how to approach ( for 
some of us how to write) about belonginess.
Can we do it in sociological framework? My response would be skeptical. 
But more difficult question would be can we ignore sociological 
questioning while approaching the problem? Phenomenologists would look 
at the question quite differently and art practitioners will take a 
different route. It is easier to say that I am so and so hence my 
practice does not demand questioning from any other perspective. It is 
difficult to engage with what one is not. And, it is here both memory 
and place-ness become crucial as both have tendencies to evoke what it 
is not, both elides 'here' and 'now'.
We can talk about memory and place ( with spaces) some other time.
wishes,
sadan.