After Boats on Land was published in 2012, I’ve often been labelled a writer from the Northeast. Sometimes, even a ‘woman’ writer from the Northeast.
Labels, as we know, can be endlessly concocted. I’ve also often been asked, in interviews and at literary festivals, about how I feel about being labelled so. And at first, I’d launch into an impassioned rant. Labels are restrictive, I’d say. They exclude. They essentialise. They fix identity into something monolithic, frozen, dead. Over the years, I’ve calmed down. Mostly because I’ve seen how little flying into a rage can accomplish. Surely labels reveal more about the person doing the labelling rather than the one being labelled.
And what harm can labels do, after all, if they’re being employed merely to provide context? A bit of background. To make marketing easier. To allow an author to be slotted into a bookshelf divided by region, for example. Isn’t it okay to sometimes just let labels be? The short, and long, answer is no.
Illus: for MP_sreejith r.kumar
It’s true I may have written a book filled with stories set in the places where I grew up, Shillong, Cherrapunjee, pockets of Assam, but not all the books I will ever write will always be set in this region. It doesn’t mean that I am in some way entrusted to be “the voice of my people”. To begin with, the term ‘Northeast’ implies a geographical lumping that the region doesn’t deserve (neither, for that matter does any other: South India, Africa, South America). Given its immense cultural and ethnic diversity, the ‘Northeast’, like all labels tend to do, flattens, and dangerously homogenises. There is little space for complexity or nuance. For multiple narratives to co-exist, resulting in, to borrow a phrase from the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the emergence of the ‘single story’. (In this case mostly one of social unrest and bomb blasts, or music festivals.) As Adichie says in her TED talk, “The consequence of the single story is this — it robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasises how we are different rather than how we are similar.” The many multitude of stories within these regions deserve to be recognised for their own individual worth and significance. Calling me a ‘Northeast’ writer does no favours to the place or to me.
I suppose I feel more strongly about it precisely because my ethnic make-up is one that can only be described as mongrel. Although there can be no such thing as ‘pure blood’, I am more obviously not with Portuguese, Khasi, Jaintia and English ancestors all thrown into the mix. So where am I from precisely? I balk at an attempt to answer. And my question back is why does it matter? This is precisely why labels fail. They claim to reveal all yet tell you nothing. After Boats on Land (almost in rebellion?), I’ve written books that also do not easily fit into convenient literary boxes. My new novel The Nine-Chambered Heart out in November 2018 discards geographical markers completely, and is set in familiar yet nameless cities, moving between the east and west. And I’m not the only one telling stories that fall outside the purview of what a writer of the Northeast is expected to be writing about. Yuva Puruskar Award winner Kaushik Barua, from Guwahati in Assam, also inculcates a similar disregard for labels. His first novel Windhorse is a historical fiction account of a band of Tibetans fighting for their homeland. His second book is a post-modern, drug-and-alcohol-addled existential adventure through Rome, a city which has been his home for several years. I guess what I’m trying to say is that as writers we wish for the freedom to forget where we’re from. To be able to follow the stories that intrigue and excite us, no matter where they emerge from and no matter where they lead.
And yet, if a writer should choose to locate and identify himself or herself with a particular community, they too have the right to do so. For Aruni Kashyap, author of The House with a Thousand Stories , being an Assamese writer, who also writes in Assamese forms an integral part of his identity. Rather than limiting him, it gives him strength. It bolsters his stories. He tells the stories of the place he comes from because they are the ones that speak to him most. At least for now. The point is not to restrict someone by slapping on a pre-crafted and pre-determined label because it helps you contextualise a part of the country, or the world, that you know little about. As Adichi says, “I’ve always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person.” Rather than resort to labels, resort to ferreting for stories, ones that expand and enlarge and remind you how crazy complex the world is as are all the people living in it.
