Returning ‘home’ for a prolonged period posed challenges that extended far beyond the trials of the circuitous journey back. The first month was especially trying as I grappled with feelings of estrangement, anguish and alienation. As I re-acclimated to the local context, I came face to face with a version of my hometown that was distinctly different from my nostalgic idealizations. I was struck by the general apathy and the absence of spaces to register social critique. As I contended with these realities, I realized that the physical distance helped me engage with this work while holding on to the memory of the ‘home’ unmarred by ruptures, contradictions, and ambivalence. I recognized the feat of forgetting that is involved in the very act of remembering. While I did not expect the memory to be congruent with the actual hometown, I had hoped to find possibilities for their coexistence. Returning home for fieldwork invoked a sense of belonging but the dilemmas and challenges I faced were antithetical to the homely feeling. Paradoxically, the loss of home was most profound while I was actually at home.
Understanding and making sense of one’s history is generally considered critical for being meaningfully grounded in the present. But the ‘History’ itself is partial and partisan and failure to recognize it as such tends to limit the parameters of dialogue. Enmeshed and intertwined in the complexities of history there is often conflicting evidence that permits different people in Northeast India to claim a right on the same land. When the master narrative is so contentious, simply attending to the historical roots of the conflict and associated violence is not sufficient to lead us away from the increasingly fissured political landscape of Northeast India. Efforts to trace historical roots of the conflict often tend to emphasize the historical victim in a way that establishes a dichotomy between victim and perpetrator. These categories however are neither mutually exclusive, nor are they static. Yet entire cultures can sometimes take on the identity of tragic victims and unwittingly use the energy of fear to become the perpetrator. When two groups are in conflict, each bearing a deeply embedded ethos of victim, there is the greatest danger of blind, brutal treatment towards a dehumanized and demonized other. Absolute wrongness allows for absolute rightness and unjust treatment allows for unjust treatment in the guise of retribution towards wrongdoers.
I do not contest the crucial role of historiography in comprehending the complex problems of Northeast India. I would however argue for the need for a certain break from the tangled web of the past, albeit not an amnesic one. To this end, my ethnographic project
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foregrounds the embodied everyday lived experiences and concerns of young people living in the Garo Hills, that illuminate this particular political moment and offer new vantage points for reframing our understanding of the conflict and associated violence. This reframing represents ontological and epistemological shifts, new ways of knowing and being in the world, informed by the stories of young people’s negotiations of the contradictions of everyday life. Critically, these shifts are galvanized by an emotional geopolitics that situate subjects’ own constructed meanings at the heart of something previously characterized within national security frames. There is an emphasis on working from the ‘inside out,’ which can potentially point to sites of resistance and open up possibilities for reworking rigid ethnic boundaries that have come to be taken for granted.
I.7.1. From Everyday Violence to Everyday Peace
Like many others working on protracted ethnic conflict in Northeast India, I too cannot distance myself from a crucial question - so what do we do? In his analysis of the hegemony of divisive politics in Northeast India, Baruah (2003) urges us to explore alternative approaches to citizenship. Others have argued for alternative policy frames anchored on a discourse of human rights (e.g., Barbora, 2008). McDuie-Ra (2006) advocates for a “third sphere” of civil society organizations that resist co-optation by armed ethno- national movements as well as the Indian government. He shifts the focus from nationalist and ethno-nationalist agendas to local human security issues of ordinary citizens who live between these two poles. My activist ethnographic (Angel-Ajani, 2006) work begins to explore what these shifts might look like in practice and how they might be achieved. Over the course of my extended ethnographic engagement with the Garo Hills, I have discovered that any attempt to address the endemic conflict and violence must privilege the composite and inter-lived nature of the space. To that end, this dissertation interrogates and excavates the ubiquitous divisive discourses that frame people’s everyday lives. In doing so, it articulates the need for a shift in the terms of the discourse. The alternative discourse has to necessarily shift attention away from the blinding and divisive glare of the normalized conflict. I explore these possibilities by repositioning disenfranchised local youth as critical inquirers into the problems faced by the local community. The decision to use youth engagement as a vehicle to understand and possibly intervene in protracted ethnic conflict was informed by a performative praxis that inspires and empowers persons to act on their utopian impulses (Denzin, 2009). Despite manifold challenges from within and from external entities, the youth engagement project opened up dialogic spaces for interrogating contexts,
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negotiating notions of community, and framing action. It indexed possibilities of negotiating parameters of belonging, which can be very powerful in the face of apparently intractable conflict that mediate everyday life.
Efforts to create an inclusive space are also deeply rooted in my own history and my utopian impulse for my hometown to “be home for everyone who lives there, for everyone to have a place in it that cannot be lost or stolen” (Deb, 2004). As I continue to reckon with the ethnic divide and othering, both in my fieldwork and my writing, I confront dilemmas surrounding my own positionality, the advantages as well as the blind spots generated by intimacy and by my own cultural links to the community and larger history. Some of these dilemmas will emerge through my writing while I will take up others more explicitly because of their potential for illuminating important issues.