The northeastern experience to relish

Come visit the region and enjoy its varied charms. But meanwhile, respect its culture and its distinctive features, and return with a little more understanding than what is seen today

June 21, 2016 01:46 am | Updated October 18, 2016 01:43 pm IST

Afew months ago, I reached out to a school friend after a decade. When I called him, though, one of the first questions he asked was, “Assam? Your husband works in a tea garden?”

Oh Hello Face, Meet Palm.

He is not the exception. When I tell anyone that I live in the northeast, a bunch of stereotypes fall out of their mouths. About whether people look ‘chinky’, about ‘weird food’, ‘Chinese language’, and whether I worry about insurgency.

The truth is, however, my worries are familiar to most Indians: traffic jams, power outages and blocked sewerage, on most days. The local newspapers primarily carry stories about corruption and elections. Entertainment news is about Anushka Sharma’s lip job and Aishwarya Rai’s purple lipstick. Bomb blast stories are rare.

If you need any more convincing that life here is perfectly normal, listen to local radio. The RJs speak a stylised and anglicised version of Assamese that vaguely reminds me of the radio channels in Chennai.

A grain of truth

However, stereotypes often have a grain of truth. Many parts of the northeast do have predominantly tribal populations. But tribal doesn’t mean primitive. For example, former Meghalaya politician P.A. Sangma’s children are named Agatha, Conrad and James after his favourite authors. He isn’t an exception, either. Meghalaya has a high rate of literacy (over 75 per cent by the 2011 Census); that figure is also one of the lowest for the region. Women appear to be treated better here than they are in the rest of the country. As a small indicator of this, look behind the cash counters in small shops. It is nearly always a lady handling the money. Asia’s cleanest village, Mawlynnlong, is also in Meghalaya.

As for language, not all languages are ‘Chinese’ in origin. Like every part of India, the northeast has many many languages (two hundred and twenty at last count). Assamese is a part of a language continuum whose closest relatives are Bengali and Mythili (Bihari). In fact, some dialects of Bengali can be hard to differentiate from Assamese. Two other States (Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh) use an Assamese creole. There are four major language families in the region. But don’t be alarmed. You can make do with Hindi and English.

As for people looking ‘chinky’, the region has seen many rounds of migration both from the Indo-Gangetic plains and the Himalayas and Myanmar. In that sense, they are just as ‘chinky’ as they are ‘Indian’, so the perception is all in the eyes of the beholder.

They are also very well-informed about the rest of the country. Whenever I tell someone here that I am from the ‘south’, they often ask for details. “Chennai or Bangalore? … Where in Chennai? … Oh Adyar? My sister lives in Shastri Nagar. Nice place, no? I like going to the beach.”

And here we are reducing their State to a bunch of tea bushes.

One delightful thing about Assamese culture is the sense of leisure. It has a musical sounding word in Assamese: laahi laahi. You cannot understand the true meaning of this till you live here, though. Here is an example of a conversation with a pizza delivery man.

“When will the pizza be delivered?”

“It will arrive when it does.”

He says this in perfect good humour and with a lot of understanding kindliness. He knows you are hungry, but what can he do? It will arrive when it does.

It isn’t all bad, though. It means that the farmers here don’t over-tax the land with three crops, though the soil is extremely fertile. They rarely overfish in the rivers.

Perhaps because of this innate sense of leisure, I find that people here have a refined sense of visual aesthetic. Our campus gardeners make the roads bloom with life. Traditional Assamese villages are exceptionally clean and beautiful looking (though Guwahati city is a mess). People also take the effort to look presentable. Think about Govinda in the 1980s and walk away from that aesthetic as far as you can. That’s the Assamese style.

The placidity

The place encourages a sense of placidity that goes well with the job of nurturing things. It isn’t suited for hectic activity. But the patience that it takes to raise a baby or grow a garden or make beautiful art? That you can find here in abundance.

Of course, the northeast is different and exciting and there is a lot to see and learn. But the problem with calling the region ‘exotic’ or ‘mysterious’ is that it automatically makes it seem like another country.

So come visit the northeast.

Be respectful, enjoy its varied charms, take dozens (or thousands) of photographs, upload all of them, see the plains of Bangladesh, walk with the clouds, sample local cuisine, show some eagerness to know about their history, and return with a little more understanding. And it would be really nice if you didn’t litter.

yasaswini@gmail.com

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