By Anjum Hasan
What do you think of ILP, I asked a taxi driver the other day, once we were done with the usual conversational suspects – the impossible traffic in Shillong and yet how government employees get easy loans to buy cars, how tourists dropped off after the lockdown and are now slowly returning, while droves of young people are forced to leave the city because there are hundreds of hopefuls for a handful of openings here, and so on – basically what the world in general is coming to. He laughed bashfully. “What to say?” he said, then gave me the spiel. We are a small people, we need protection. We must band together and look out for each other.
I didn’t learn anything from our chat but was struck by the civility of it. In Shillong, despite the consensus about the city’s decline, we are still able to be, at once, shy and warm, say decorous hellos, thank you’s and welcomes, make time to sit and chat, sometimes even, traffic permitting, stand and stare. Of course, taxi drivers anywhere in the world make for great interlocutors – I’m always drawn to their streetwise takes. But this young man also had a laidback Shillong cheerfulness, which one misses.
One misses it because this distinctiveness of daily life, these everyday interactions, are rarely part of our self-image. ILP consumes us but what about the tones of voice in which we discuss it? The politician’s is one style, the agitator’s another, the so-called common man’s a third. And then there is the writer’s. I’ve just read Stuart Blackburn’s 2016 novel Into the Hidden Valley, set in 19th century Assam during the early decades of British experiments with the Inner Line. Blackburn captures so well a combination of two things – colonialism’s self-justification through high-sounding administrative protocols and the violence that this officious guise of empire-building helped conceal. The Inner Line is meant to prevent timber and tea companies from pushing further into the hills – encroaching, in this instance, on the mountain valley that belongs to the Apatanis. And yet the colonials themselves don’t honour the notional line; they are after exploitation of another kind: the establishing of a military base in this frontier region near Tibet so as to have the upper hand in the area’s geo-politics. The two interests eventually coincide; the attack on the Apatanis, when it comes, is in order to “defend British commercial and political interests in the region”.
Missionary-turned-anthropologist Verrier Elwin, who was an advisor to the Assam government for the very area Blackburn writes about, and who lived in Shillong at the end of his life, said, in his 1960 book A Philosophy for NEFA, that “the Inner Line Regulation was enacted not with the aim (as is so often thought) of isolating the hill people from the plains, but to bring ‘under more stringent control the commercial relations of British subjects with the frontier tribes’.” This suggests something of a benevolent outlook but there is nothing kind-hearted about the administrators described in Into the Hidden Valley. Yet the novel is not merely an account of aggressive white men and unwitting tribal victims. That would be too simple. Instead we have George Taylor, a sensitive, well-meaning, ambitious although often irresolute young British officer, with a past that makes him vulnerable, and Gyati, an Apatani shaman who too is acutely alert to his world and sometimes finds himself at an angle to it. The two come close to friendship and then what one might call the hand of history intervenes.
In Shillong, perhaps in all of the north-east, we increasingly look to politics as the arena in which problems that affect us a society will be solved, even as politics becomes ever more vitiated. The hope that laws and regulations will save us does not seem, in our minds, to conflict with a political society in which, as Patricia Mukhim, wrote recently in these pages, “corruption is not just taken for granted but also perpetuated […] people valorize corruption by giving those indulging in scams a place of honour in society instead of socially blacklisting them.”
To rest all one’s faith in politics is to discount everyday life and individual experience, that is: the stuff of literature. Blackburn’s novel won’t help us decide whether putting in place an inner line regulation in 2021 would be a good thing or bad. (Though it does illustrate how the law was undermined by those who established it, obviously no effective novel is written to present a solution or make a point.) What it shows us is how the seemingly small stuff – a wrong decision taken in the heat of the conflict or a few words spoken in rapprochement can have an incalculable effect on the world. “Words can change things, the right words” Gyati believes, and yet when his wife is dying, all the “incantatory power” of his chants amounts to nothing. This double bind is the writer’s as well – literature, unlike politics, seems to make nothing happen, and yet grasping the relation between language and reality makes one wield a certain power over the world.
“Literature is like an ear that can hear things beyond the understanding of the language of politics; it is like an eye that can see beyond the colour spectrum perceived by politics. Simply because of the solitary individualism of his work, the writer may happen to explore areas that no one has explored before […] to make discoveries that sooner or later turn out to be vital areas of collective awareness,” wrote the always prescient novelist Italo Calvino in his collections of essays The Literature Machine. To me the key words here are “solitary individualism”. For Blackburn to write a compelling novel about the politics between colonials and tribes, he has had to single out characters who can’t quite be reduced to those categories, who are recognisable but not typical. Taylor, while surrounded by empire-builders, is private, conflicted and flawed, and we empathise with him. So also Gyati, a loner in a close-knit society who likes to wander by himself in the pine forests. “Other people, especially young men, didn’t roam like that, without apparent purpose and all alone.”
Fiction can only address politics by working against its generalising tendencies, thereby revealing those homogenization we take comfort in – tribal and non-tribal, coloniser and colonised, them and us – as, to some extent at least, sophisticated fictions. But there is a deeper sense in which a writer can challenge and enrich politics. In today’s world she is obliged to be alive to her possible hidden motives, her biases and blind spots, as well as the fact that she does not control all the possible meanings of her work. What if, asks Calvino, the same happened to politics? “Politics, like literature, must above all know itself and distrust itself.” In Meghalaya, we valorise politicians and we trust politics. Perhaps we need to read more novels?
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