Men at the Margins: Ceasefire, Liberalization, and Masculinity at the Indian Frontier
by
Matthew Wilkinson
A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Social Sciences
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
2020 THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet Surname or Family name: Wilkinson First name: Matthew Abbreviation for degree as given in the PhD University calendar: School: School of Social Sciences Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences Men at the Margins: Ceasefire, Liberalization, and Title: Masculinity at the Indian Frontier
Abstract (350 words only) This thesis examines men’s experiences of change during a prolonged ceasefire in the state of Nagaland, India, following decades of armed conflict. Nagaland’s conflict has had an immense impact on life in the state. Conflict is a source of economic stagnation, state dysfunction, and has encouraged the preservation and maintenance of a rigidly gendered social order that frames Naga men as guardians and protectors of Naga territory, culture and society from outside intruders. However, following ceasefires signed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, immense changes are taking place in Nagaland. The frontier state is becoming more economically incorporated and politically integrated with India, and a younger generation of Nagas have greatly different experiences with the Indian state than their elders. In light of these changes, the rigidly gendered model of Naga society is subject to new questions and new challenges. In this thesis, I ask ‘how do men in Nagaland experience ceasefire and its associated changes?’ Through ethnographic fieldwork involving interviews and observations made throughout the state this thesis reaches three conclusions. First, that ceasefire in Nagaland is conducive to a number of wider social changes that extend well beyond the immediate goals of the ceasefire. Second, that liberalization at the post-conflict frontier is marginalizing for certain groups of men in ways that are obscured by the presence of patriarchal customary institutions in the frontier. Third, that changes associated with ceasefire and liberalization at the post-conflict frontier are conducive to a patriarchal backlash against migrants and Naga women agitating for change.
Declaration relating to disposition of project thesis/dissertation I hereby grant to the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all property rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstracts International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only).
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SUPERVISOR STATEMENT
I hereby certify that all co-authors of the published or submitted papers agree to Matthew Wilkinson submitting those papers as part of his Doctoral Thesis.
Signed ……………………………………………......
Dr Nicholas Apoifis
Date ……………………………………………...... 14/09/2020
5 Abstract
This thesis examines men’s experiences of change during a prolonged ceasefire in the state of Nagaland, India, following decades of armed conflict.
Nagaland’s conflict has had an immense impact on life in the state. Conflict is a source of economic stagnation, state dysfunction, and has encouraged the preservation and maintenance of a rigidly gendered social order that frames Naga men as guardians and protectors of Naga territory, culture and society from outside intruders.
However, following ceasefires signed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, immense changes are taking place in Nagaland. The frontier state is becoming more economically incorporated and politically integrated with India, and a younger generation of Nagas have greatly different experiences with the Indian state than their elders. In light of these changes, the rigidly gendered model of Naga society is subject to new questions and new challenges. In this thesis, I ask ‘how do men in
Nagaland experience ceasefire and its associated changes?’ Through ethnographic fieldwork involving interviews and observations made throughout the state this thesis reaches three conclusions. First, that ceasefire in Nagaland is conducive to a number of wider social changes that extend well beyond the immediate goals of the ceasefire. Second, that liberalization at the post-conflict frontier is marginalizing for certain groups of men in ways that are obscured by the presence of patriarchal customary institutions in the frontier. Third, that changes associated with ceasefire and liberalization at the post-conflict frontier are conducive to a patriarchal backlash against migrants and Naga women agitating for change.
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Acknowledgements
Producing this thesis has been a monumental task, and a number of people have lent me their time and energy while writing this. First and foremost, an immense thanks is owed to my supervisor, mentor, and friend, Professor Duncan McDuie-Ra.
Your work and your words have encouraged my initial journeys to Nagaland and have been a constant boost to my own confidence. This thesis would not exist without your input, guidance, and friendship. Second, thank you Dr. Tanya Jakimow for the hours you have spent thoroughly reading this thesis, and your detailed feedback and support throughout my candidature. Your input has moulded this thesis into a more coherent whole, and has greatly improved my own writing. Thank you also to Dr.
Dolly Kikon. Dolly, your work with women in Nagaland is an inspiration, and as I spoke with men in Nagaland I hoped that I was doing justice to your efforts unpacking gender, society, and culture in Nagaland. Dr. Xonxoi Barbora, you threatened to lock me in a room if I did not write enough, and that was a huge motivator for completing this thesis. Thank you to my two late-stage supervisors Dr. Nicholas Apoifis and Dr.
Andy Kaladelfos. Nick, you taught me to be bolder and braver in my writing, and Andy, you helped see this thesis through to the end. Thank you as well to some key academics, friends, and colleagues have helped me along the way. These people have lent me their thoughts, opinions, and in many cases have put food in my stomach and a roof over my head - my co-supervisor Professor Kama Maclean, Dr. Susanne
Schmeidl, Dr. Colin Clark, Rita Kutchevskis-Hayes, Dr. Dominic Fitzsimmons, Dr. Jamie
Roberts. Thank you also to the North East Social Research Centre in Guwahati, and the Don Bosco Centre at Karghuli, for giving me a space to work and sleep as I wrote 7 the final parts of this thesis. An immense tike ase, moi bishi kuchi paishei to my close friends in Nagaland and in Assam. You’ve let me into your homes and into your lives as I have written this, and this thesis is a product of the start, not the end, of our adventures together. Akang Longchar, Aren Longchar, aunty Carole, Aheli Moitra, Dr.
Lula Longchar, Bona, Wabang, Mar Longkumer, Dr. Lanu Jamir, Joel Naga and your family, Dr. Anwesha Dutta, Aotemjen Jamir, Imli Walling, Imu, Sashi and your brothers, Temjen Aier, Pongmai Konyak, Akum Longchari, Kaka Iralu. Yangti Walling,
Ngapkao, Acho, Horace, and Zoe. Naro, and Yanger. Dr. Michael Heneise and your family. Monalisa Changkija. Atet and Apen. The mysterious Samson Thur. Finally, little
Niksunger this one’s for you!
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Contents Abstract ...... 6 Acknowledgements ...... 7 Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 11 ‘The Nagaland State Co-operative Bank Ltd. Welcome You to Nagaland’ ...... 11 Statement of Problem ...... 19 Research Aims ...... 22 Thesis ...... 24 Contributions ...... 25 Outline ...... 29 Chapter 2: Men & Masculinities, Frontier, Conflict ...... 34 Outline ...... 34 Men and Masculinities ...... 35 Frontier ...... 41 Highland Frontier at the India/Myanmar Border ...... 49 Men, Frontiers and Conflict ...... 51 Conclusion ...... 61 Chapter 3. Methodology ...... 63 Ethnography ...... 64 Site Selection ...... 71 Meeting Discussants ...... 73 Talking: Interviews ...... 76 Walking ...... 81 Method Assemblages ...... 86 Limitations, Positionality, Reflexivity ...... 88 Confidentiality ...... 93 Language ...... 94 Writing Ethnography ...... 96 Conclusion ...... 97
Chapter 4: Nagaland ...... 99 Nagaland ...... 100 Colonial Encounters ...... 106 Independence, Conflict, Statehood ...... 119 Ceasefire ...... 127 Nagaland’s Current Predicament ...... 128 Conclusion ...... 131 Chapter 5: Nagaland Opening Up ...... 133 Chimukedima. Dimapur ...... 133 ‘Opening Up’ ...... 137 Nagaland’s Tourism Industry ...... 140 Urbanization ...... 145
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Naga Out-Migration ...... 150 Youth Cultures and Nagaland’s ‘Hallyu Wave’ ...... 153 Cosmopolitan Aspirations in the Post-conflict Frontier ...... 156 Emerging Urbanities in the Post-conflict Frontier ...... 165 Conclusion ...... 171 Chapter 6. Legacies of Conflict ...... 173 Chedema Peace Camp, Kohima. March. 2016 ...... 173 Militarization, Conflict, and Masculinity in Nagaland ...... 180 Serving Smoked Pork to ‘Thugs’ ...... 187 Legacies of Conflict in the Frontier ...... 192 Conclusion ...... 198
Chapter 7: Men at the Margins ...... 200 State Stadium, Dimapur. January. 2018 ...... 200 Emerging Margins in the Frontier ...... 206 Thomas ...... 211 John ...... 214 Simon ...... 219 Men at the Margins ...... 222 Conclusion ...... 231 Chapter 8: Outsider Politics in Nagaland ...... 233 ‘Our Fight is Against IBIs and Not Against Religion’ ...... 233 The Outsiders Discourse and Nagaland’s ‘IBI Menace’ ...... 239 ‘Like Tripura’ ...... 244 Sexual Politics and the IBI Menace ...... 247 Masculinity and Nagaland’s IBI Menace ...... 252 Conclusion ...... 256 Chapter 9: ‘Spinsters and Divorced Women’ ...... 260 ‘Bad things happened’. April. 2016...... 260 (In)equality as Tradition ...... 266 Nagaland’s Patriarchal Backlash ...... 275 Patriarchal Backlash in the Post-Conflict Frontier ...... 280 Conclusion ...... 287 Chapter 10: Conclusion ...... 290 Thesis and Findings ...... 293 Contributions ...... 295 Men and the Legacies of Conflict ...... 295 Frontier ...... 298 Masculinities ...... 300 Limitations and Future Research ...... 302 Closing ...... 305 Bibliography ...... 309
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Chapter 1: Introduction
‘The Nagaland State Co-operative Bank Ltd. Welcome You to Nagaland’
The thoughts that shaped this thesis began in their haziest sense in 2012, when I was travelling through India to Nepal, having started in Bangladesh on a personal mission to reach and explore the Chittagong Hill Tracts in the country’s east
- three hilly districts that have witnessed decades of communal violence between migrant Bengali settlers from the plains and tribal communities indigenous to the hills. After several months in Bangladesh, I came to the Indian state of Meghalaya overland through the Dawki Border gate. I spent several weeks in Meghalaya, and several more in the neighbouring state of Assam, a lowland valley state that is bounded by six highland ‘tribal states’ - Meghalaya, Tripura, Mizoram, Manipur,
Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland, as well as the Kingdom of Bhutan. From Assam I moved to the state of Nagaland with the aim of travelling from Nagaland’s capital
Kohima northwards to the village of Longwa in Mon District, Nagaland’s most isolated and poorest district, using Nagaland’s notoriously unreliable public bus service,
Nagaland State Transport. The journey was an opportunity to engage more with people living along the India/Myanmar border and to continue to observe the after- effects of decades of armed conflict that has become the background of everyday life for communities at the highland frontier between India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar.
Arriving at Nagaland’s largest city, Dimapur, via the Kamrup Express railway after midnight, I was confronted with a rusty, muddy, foothills town not dissimilar to
11 the towns I had visited in Assam. Much like other foothills towns, the stations leading to Dimapur were crowded with corrugated iron sheds and bamboo shacks along the railway tracks. Dimapur station itself was built in the same utilitarian style as the stations in neighbouring Assam, with a corrugated iron roof over the platform and grey floor tiles spattered with occasional stains from paan1 spit. However, some differences quickly became apparent. As a foreigner, I was required to immediately register at the police headquarters located at the train station. Inside the smoky, sunken concrete station, while swatting mosquitos and speaking over the noise of trains outside I was questioned at length about my reasons for coming to Nagaland, how long I planned to stay, where I would be staying, and who I would be staying with. Leaving the station, I encountered a crowd of brown-uniformed Nagaland
Armed Police (NAP) officers standing in the attached parking lot with automatic rifles in hand. A few hundred metres ahead, a fog-light-lit pillbox equipped with a heavy mounted machine gun and draped in camouflage netting overlooked the station and parking lot. The camouflage netting served to make the pillbox more conspicuous and imposing rather than conceal it. Immediately next to the pillbox a large sign read ‘The
Nagaland State Co-operative Bank Ltd. Welcome You to Nagaland’ (see Photograph
1).
1 A popular mix of betel leaf, areca nut, spices, and tobacco that is chewed and stains teeth and saliva a distinct dark red, which is then spat out.
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Photograph 1: View from Dimapur train station. Dimapur. 2016. Taken by author.
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Nagaland is an isolated and poor frontier state of India that is emerging from decades of separatist and tribal conflict. The conflict involved extreme violence between Indian paramilitaries – most often the Assam Rifles2, and various Naga nationalist groups (referred to by Indian armed forces as Naga insurgent groups) who have been agitating for an independent Naga homeland since 1947. Extraordinary laws apply to the state, including the controversial Armed Forces Special Powers Act
(AFSPA) (1958), granting Indian paramilitaries rights to search, detain and arrest without warrant, and to use deadly force with impunity. Throughout the conflict, partly due to the difficulties distinguishing Naga insurgents from civilians and widespread civilian support for the Naga nationalist cause, Indian paramilitaries indiscriminately targeted Naga communities in efforts to flush out Naga insurgents or to identify and punish people harbouring and assisting insurgents. Indian counterinsurgency operations often involved burning villages and crops to clear settlements and ‘starve out’ suspect communities. Rape and other acts of sexual violence were employed as weapons of war by Indian paramilitaries to intimidate
Naga communities, humiliate Naga women, and emasculate Naga men (Human
Rights Watch, 2008). As the conflict continued into the 1980s and 1990s, Naga nationalist groups divided along ideological and tribal lines, and fighting between nationalist groups overlapped with inter-tribal conflicts and clan and family feuds.
2 The Assam Rifles are India’s oldest paramilitary wing and have been active in Nagaland since 1954. Before 1954, the Assam Police conducted village raids and military exercises in Nagaland. The Rashtriya Rifles, another Indian paramilitary wing, has also been active in Nagaland, however much less than the Assam Rifles.
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Higher estimates of casualties mention 200,000 combatant and civilian deaths since the conflict began in 1947 (Phillips, 2004, p. n.p.). In 1997 and 2001, two ceasefires were signed between the Government of India and Nagaland’s two largest nationalist groups, the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah) (referred to as NSCN-
IM) and the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Khaplang) (referred to as NSCN-K) respectively. Since these ceasefires, Nagaland has been in a tense and prolonged peace-conflict continuum. Open hostility between Naga nationalist groups and the
Indian state has officially ended, although the state continues to be governed through military priorities. Ceasefires are occasionally broken on both sides, and various Naga nationalist groups and factions within nationalist groups fight each other in a decades-long turf war for the right to control key territories and transport routes and to extort a conflict-tired Naga public.
Because of the state’s security situation and because of poor transport infrastructure related to state-dysfunction and corruption, both closely linked to the conflict, travel in Nagaland is slow and arduous. Roadside stop-and-checks are common, and most towns have army bases or camps within their boundaries or at their entry points. At nearly every town and village I visited in Nagaland, including the state’s isolated ‘interior’ villages, local police were rigorous in recording my details, inquiring about where I had been and where I was going, and asking about who I had met, who I knew, and who I was planning to meet. On entering a town it was often a matter of minutes before a Nagaland Armed Police officer would stop and escort me to a damp station or office to fill a worn-out logbook with my name, visa details, and any other information from my passport that officer’s felt could be relevant. Owing
15 to these difficulties and to the state’s reputation as unstable and dangerous, foreign tourists have only recently made inroads into Nagaland. Foreigners tend to restrict their visits to Nagaland’s largest city, Dimapur, and Nagaland’s capital city, Kohima.
Some tourists travel to Mon district in the north, although the numbers are very small. Foreign visitors rarely come to Nagaland’s smaller interior towns and villages.
For this reason many people in Nagaland’s interior were eager and excited to host a foreign visitor. On entering towns or villages I was often invited to eat and sometimes stay in people’s homes. These were people that I had met on long distance bus rides and had gotten to know sitting and talking with, or sometimes people who had seen me in their town, noticed that I was foreign, and invited me to share a meal. In some cases, people in one town had phoned ahead to the next town to announce the foreigner en-route, and I was met on arrival by the relatives and friends of previous encounters. While travelling between towns, I occasionally met with and was hosted by young men who claimed to be members of or closely associated with nationalist groups, or otherwise involved in the ‘underground’.
During these conversations and homestays, I noticed significant disparities between younger and older Nagas in the ways they discussed their experiences, their ideologies, and their aspirations. The older people that I talked to, people in their fifties, sixties, seventies, and occasionally eighties, regaled me with stories of
Nagaland’s long fight for independence. They discussed, often in gruesome detail, atrocities committed by Indian paramilitaries. They gave accounts of widespread village burning, summary executions, beheadings, and having to hide and live in
Nagaland’s dense forests, forage for food after dark, and drink dirty water. Some gave
16 first-hand accounts of being tortured at the hands of Indian paramilitaries. Some older Nagas also mentioned being members of or knowing members of Naga nationalist groups such as the Naga National Council (NNC) and Naga Federal
Government (NFG), often using the term ‘freedom fighters’ when discussing these groups. Older people were more likely to speak positively about the Naga nationalist movement, despite its recent fragmentation into warring factions, and often espoused their support for an independent sovereign Nagaland, referred to as
‘Nagalim’. Younger people, on the other hand, made little reference to the state’s violent history and where they did, were often reiterating or recounting stories told by elders. People I met and spoke with in their teens, twenties, thirties, and forties, while often aware of Nagaland’s conflict and sharing some knowledge of injustices committed during the conflict were much more focused on problems finding work in
Nagaland and of corruption and poor governance throughout the state. While many younger people expressed support for Naga autonomy, they also often mentioned the opportunities that greater connection to India brought, their own intentions to travel, study, or find work outside of Nagaland, and of wanting India to invest into the state’s development. Many of the contacts I made have followed through with those intentions and have moved to other Indian cities such as Delhi and Bangalore to study and work.
Gender was a recurring issue in many of these discussions. Gender appeared in discussions of the state’s future and in discussions about the difference between
Naga culture and a loosely drawn pan-Indian culture from the plains. Many discussants, younger and older, made a special point that women’s freedoms
17 surrounding work and the absence of arranged marriages and dowry in Naga culture
(although arranged marriages do take place in many Naga families) were indicative of Naga culture being more modern and more egalitarian than cultures found in the
Indian plains. However, often in these same conversations, discussants made a special point that Naga women lacked a ‘strength’ required to be involved in household and community leadership, that Naga women should not be involved in the state’s politics and should not have the right to own ancestral land. These discussions almost always took place in groups of men without women present.
These views were common across a range of age groups but for different reasons.
Older Nagas tended to discuss the moral decay brought by young people, especially by women, leaving towns and villages and pursuing urban livelihoods. Younger Nagas, especially younger men, tended to discuss the personal risks and wider societal disruption associated with Naga women becoming involved with men who were not
Nagas, especially Bangladeshi migrants and ‘Miyas’3. There was a general consensus across age groups that there once existed a natural gendered balance in Naga society, and this balance was being upset by women’s newfound agency in workplaces, greater ability to travel independently, women’s romantic involvement with non-
Nagas, and women’s agitations for political and land-ownership rights. These were issues that have either emerged since ceasefire or have gained prominence since ceasefire. In other words, there seemed to be an immense gap in the experiences and ideals of people in Nagaland who grew up before and after the ceasefires, and
3 Referring to the ‘Miya’ Muslim peasant community that settled in Assam in the 19th century, used in Nagaland to refer broadly to dark-skinned Indians from the plains.
18 gender seemed to be critical, for different reasons, on either side of this gap. My interest in the wider social implications of conflicts coming-to-an-end was sparked by these discussions in Nagaland, where I found the ceasefire marked a pivotal moment for changes in the state and magnified generational and gender divides within the
Naga community.
Statement of Problem
In Nagaland, a prolonged state of ceasefire since the late 1990s has contributed to a two-decades long tense peace-conflict continuum. Various ceasefires in the state between the Government of India and Naga nationalist groups are tenuous and are occasionally broken. Violent encounters and crossfire killings printed in local newspapers and stories at markets and in local drinking dens about missing people and mysterious arrests are regular reminders of this. Nonetheless, ceasefires signify the state’s movement towards peace and stability and have ushered in a new era of ‘opening up’ for the state. New shopping complexes are being constructed, new goods and services are coming to Nagaland, jobs are being created, and for an emerging post-conflict generation who have been raised in the ceasefire era, life is more entangled with the outside world and especially with India than ever before. For younger people in Nagaland especially, life is lived in a context of new mobilities and new socioeconomic possibilities alongside anxieties regarding the future of the state and efforts by Naga nationalist groups, established elites, and tribal conservatives to maintain control and to preserve the socio-political constitution of Naga society.
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Gender, conflict and violence in Nagaland are themes explored in-depth by a number of scholars. In particular, discussions have focused on women’s victimization by Indian paramilitaries and extraordinary laws (Gill, 2005; Iralu, 2017); gendered and sexual violence within the Naga community (Kikon, 2015a; North East Network,
2016); and women’s roles as peacemakers between armed forces and nationalist groups during the conflict (Manchanda, 2004, 2005; Manchanda and Bose, 2011).
This focus is warranted. Nagaland is a patriarchy, Nagaland’s conflict was and is highly gendered, and in the post-conflict environment women continue to experience violence and marginalization from outside their communities and also from within
(Kikon, 2015a, 2017b). Less is known, however, about how Naga men experience the closing of conflict. Where Naga men are discussed, they are often abstracted as hyper-conservative, xenophobic, and as inextricably tied to archaic and patriarchal customary traditions. These understandings are present in academic literature and are also widely accepted in the Naga community. For example, when reflecting on discussions with relatives and other Naga women about sexual violence in the state,
Kikon (2015a, p. 70) mentions a number of masculine stereotypes that are widely accepted in the Naga community:
I remember many instances when aunties and well-respected
Naga women, along with their husbands and sons, would justify all
kinds of violence against women by saying ‘but it is the trait of a Naga
man to be like this. We have to adjust and forgive them’. Such
justification and naturalization of violence as part of Naga culture,
compounded by a colonial framework that continues to define Naga
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men as ‘fierce warriors’, ‘hot headed men’, or ‘blood thirsty people’
must be interrogated. However, at times, it appears that we accept
this violent construction as the foundation of our values and morality;
as though Naga identity, being a Naga, the core of our Naganess is built
on violence, disrespect towards the young and vulnerable, and a
culture where the rich and powerful get away with everything.
In this thesis, I attempt to transcend these stereotypes, to explore the complexities of men’s experiences in Nagaland and the complex ways men respond to changes in Nagaland as decades of armed conflict are being brought to a close.
Through extensive fieldwork and multiple visits to Nagaland, interviewing Naga men including combatants, former combatants, entrepreneurs, journalists, activists, and government employees, this thesis attempts to answer the question ‘how do men in
Nagaland experience ceasefire and its associated changes?’ In answering this question, this research unpacks the ways men experience ceasefire and its associated changes in a context where conflict has officially ended, but insecurity and violence continue to be present, and where patriarchy and rigid gender roles tied to indigenous traditions and systems are preserved as foundations of Naga society. By looking at the experiences of men in Nagaland, insight can be gained into the myriad and often contradictory roles men fulfil in sites that are emerging from prolonged conflicts. This is important because masculinities are informed by conflict, and these conflict-informed masculinities continue to exist and shape politics and social relations after conflicts end.
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Research Aims
This research has two aims. First, I aim to provide a deeper understanding of men’s lives and of masculinity in Nagaland that transcends narrow colonial and post- colonial stereotypes. As I expand on in the following chapter, literature on men in
Nagaland has typically taken two forms. The first are colonial anthropologies that focus on tribal stereotypes and vague traits such as simplicity, closeness to nature, and violent tendencies (West 1994). The second are more contemporary discussions that implicitly treat Naga men universally as combatants and as active in armed conflict associated with a broadly drawn construction of a disordered and violent
‘Northeast’, a category that locates the Northeast Indian region in reference to (and in the possession of) India as an aggregation of different sets of problems (McDuie-
Ra, 2017). This stereotyping is experienced at home in Nagaland when encountering
Indian armed forced at roadside checks, during bus and vehicle searches, and when
Indian paramilitaries are patrolling around army camps and bases. Stereotyping is also experienced when travelling in other parts of India where racist stereotypes of violent, rebellious men from Northeast India abound (McDuie-Ra, 2012b, 2012c).
Men’s experiences and aspirations outside of ethno-nationalist homeland pushes are rarely mentioned, if at all (McDuie-Ra, 2013; Longkumer, 2015; Wilkinson, 2017a).
While conflict does have a role in men’s lives in Nagaland and understandings of masculinity, conflict is one part of life in a frontier that hosts a multitude of dynamics, anxieties, and possibilities that affect men’s lives. By discussing the ways Naga men experience the closing of conflict and by engaging with a wide range of voices from
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Nagaland, I aim to present a fuller picture of masculinity and men’s experiences of ceasefire and change in Nagaland.
Second, by exploring the experiences of men in Nagaland, I aim to shed further light onto the complexities involved in liberalization and change at post- conflict frontiers more generally. As I also expand on in the following chapter, liberalization is a highly gendered process that has profound effects on men’s experiences and on masculinities, and these effects are made more visible in frontiers. As frontiers ‘open up’ to closer economic and political connections with surrounding states and with the wider world through new investments, resource extraction efforts, and state-making projects, men’s roles in frontier societies are challenged and often are perceived as being under threat. For example, Perry (2005) approaches this issue when discussing the ways liberalization, state disengagement, and the formation of rural weekly markets in Senegal’s ‘Peanut Basin’ undermine and disrupt patriarchal traditions and men’s roles as heads of the household, as wives are more able to secure incomes and gain a degree of independence working at markets rather than depending on their husbands. This has encouraged the emergence of a discourse among male farmers that associate women and markets with immorality and social decay (Perry, 2005, p. 216). Referring to similar processes linked to globalization, Hautzinger (2003, p. 94) argues that ‘men's prerogatives to dominance are increasingly being questioned on a global level, and this continues to shape attitudes and practices surrounding male violence’. By looking at men’s experiences of post-conflict change, including liberalization and market expansion in the wake of
23 conflict in Nagaland, I aim to offer further insight into the ways men experience changes associated with liberalization in the frontier.
Thesis
In this thesis I make two arguments. First, I argue that ceasefire in Nagaland challenges conflict-informed masculine norms that portray men as guardians of Naga territory, culture, and society. The liberalization of the economy and the fragmentation of Naga nationalist groups has undone many of the links between involvement in nationalist groups and men’s self-assumed guardianship roles.
However, changes taking place in the state, emerging from ceasefire and liberalization, provide new avenues for men to affirm these social guardianship roles.
An influx of migrants into the state, encouraged by perceptions of stability and the growth of the post-conflict economy has become a symbol of invasion and the threat posed by plains populations to Naga society. In light of these changes, groups of Naga men, especially conservative men and elites, have found new ways to affirm conflict- informed masculine norms in the post-conflict environment by targeting migrants coming into the state and policing the movements and relationships of Naga women.
In other words, two decades of ceasefire has not undone conflict-informed masculine norms, but has shifted the arenas that these norms appear in.
Second, I argue that changes experienced by men in the ceasefire era have encouraged the emergence of a new gendered conflict within the Naga community.
This conflict takes the form of a ‘patriarchal backlash’ against Nagas agitating for
24 women’s political agency and women’s rights to own ancestral land. The patriarchal backlash involves large-scale protests against inclusive social and political change in the state, as well as household level violence and discrimination towards women who pursue political involvement and political agency. While some of the agents of this backlash are Naga women, the patriarchal backlash is overwhelmingly led by Naga men and espouses an ideology of preserving a highly patriarchal social order. This takes place in a context of social and political change where the ‘opening up’ of the state has expanded the space for women’s economic empowerment and has granted
Naga women new forms of independence. Concurrently, many Naga men feel a sense of marginalization by social and political changes in the state linked to unemployment, and a sense of threat emerging from migrants coming into the state.
In this context, Nagaland’s rigidly gendered customary institutions and traditions are some of the few stable and distinctly recognizable pieces of Naga culture that remain.
Women and men who agitate for inclusive social change are thus perceived to be threats to the survival of what many Nagas see as a fragile social and cultural order.
Contributions
In making these arguments, this thesis offers original contributions to studies of men in post-conflict societies, studies of frontiers, and studies of masculinities.
First, this thesis contributes to a deeper understanding of how men relate to the legacies of conflict in a state where violence continues, but conflict as it was known is largely disappearing. Gendered studies of sites undergoing long, drawn out
25 ceasefires focus on the insecurities faced by women and children, and tend to focus on men and men’s roles in conflict as combatants (Woodward, 2000; Trenholm et al.,
2013; Maringira and Carrasco, 2015), as politicians (Mukherjee 2014) or as leaders, elites, or otherwise agitators in ethnic and communal conflicts (Cleaver, 2002;
Vandekerckhove, 2009). Following this trend, discussions of masculinities in conflict sites tend conflate aggression, dominance and hegemony, and assume that hegemonic forms of masculinity are embodied in the most aggressive and most dominant men (Myrttinen, Khattab and Naujoks, 2017, pp. 107, 108). As Ni Aolain,
Cahn, and Haynes (2016 n.p.) argue, this:
fails to account for the many ways that hyper-masculization
inherent in hostilities continues to affect societies and
underestimates… the ways in which pre-existing conceptions of
masculinity influence the transition process… Thus, while armed
conflict between combatants may end as a result of a peace treaty or
ceasefire agreement, violence may remain a persistent feature of the
social and cultural landscape of post-conflict societies.
In other words, the immense focus on combatants in studies of men in conflict ignores the majority of men in conflict sites who are non-combatants (Myrttinen,
Khattab, and Naujoks 2017, 104). While there has been some discussion of former combatants and the ways men who have taken part in combat adjust to the post- conflict context (Kimberly, 2009; Maringira and Carrasco, 2015; Flisi, 2016), there is less discussion of conflict-informed masculine norms in post-conflict contexts on a
26 larger scale, involving non-combatant men and other men whose lives may have been shaped by conflict, but who did not directly take part in conflict. This is a significant gap in understandings of men and masculinities in conflict and post-conflict sites. By offering ethnographic insights into the ways men in Nagaland experience ceasefire and post-conflict liberalization, this thesis opens further discussion of the ways men define themselves after conflict and how men operate in a context where violence continues but is waning, and where men’s identities are less associated with conflict.
Second, this thesis contributes to the study of frontiers and the ‘margins’ of the state. Frontiers challenge the state’s sovereignty, invoking the limits of state capacities (Migdal, 2004, p. 7). At frontiers the state’s presence ‘thins-out’ and multiple ideological and political projects meet, overlap and coalesce (Korf and
Raeymaekers, 2013). Frontiers are most often understood as sites marked by extractive economies (Côte and Korf, 2016), primitive accumulation (Eilenberg,
2015), and places that are generally considered to be rural (Peluso, 2018). However, frontiers also host emerging urban spaces, growing towns and cities, and flows and circuits that challenge understandings of the frontier as peripheries (Sarma and
Sidaway, 2020), as exclusively zones of extraction (Kikon and McDuie-Ra, 2021), and as oppressed (Scott, 2009). Throughout this thesis, I observe the liberalization and urbanization of the frontier through Nagaland’s expanding urban hubs, in particular,
Dimapur. I unpack the ways this change is experienced by men, and offer insights into how people, gender norms, and politics interact around emerging urban sites in the frontier. In doing so, I offer contributions to understandings of the ways frontiers are urbanizing and becoming connected and cosmopolitan spaces, and the ways this
27 urbanization and cosmopolitan shift affects gender norms, shapes politics, and encourages contestation and conflict.
Finally, this thesis offers contributions to studies of men and masculinities more generally. Frontiers are sites where gender is magnified. Frontier conflicts, militarization in the frontier, extractive regimes, traditional and customary institutions, and differential property regimes at frontiers involve and encompass gender to a great degree (Castañeda, 2003). Men at frontiers stand at the intersections of multiple overlapping systems of authority and control, and most of these systems of authority and control have ways of constructing and encouraging particular forms of masculinity and masculine behaviour. Hence, unpacking the ways these systems shape the lives of men, and how men experience changing systems of authority and control in the frontier is an important and significant contribution to studies of frontiers and for coming to a fuller understanding of how men and notions of masculinity are related to custom, politics, and conflict. By looking at the ways masculine norms are shaped by changes in Nagaland, this research contributes to a greater understanding of masculinities in the wake of conflict. In this case, the ways that masculine norms associated with guardianship and protection of Naga territory, culture, and society inform new forms of conflict in the state. This is an important contribution to understandings of masculinity because it suggests that the masculine norms shaped by pervasive conflict may continue to be relevant in new ways after the end of conflict.
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Outline
This thesis constitutes ten chapters divided into three parts. Part One,
Introduction, consisting of chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4 provides an essential introduction and background to the research, discusses the concepts that are the focus of the research, and discusses the methodologies applied. Part Two, Liberalization and Post-
Conflict, consisting of chapters 5, 6, 7, discusses the changes taking place in Nagaland in the wake of conflict, and the ways these changes have affected different groups of men in the state. Part Three, Nagaland’s Patriarchal Backlash, consisting of chapters
8 and 9 discusses the ways men in Nagaland respond to changes in the frontier through (Chapter 8) targeting outsiders and controlling Naga women’s relationships with outsiders, and (Chapter 9) targeting Naga women agitating for change. Chapter
10 offers summary of the thesis’ findings, discusses their implications, discusses the limitations of the research, and postulates future research emerging from this thesis’ findings.
Chapter 2, ‘Men & Masculinities, Frontier, Conflict’, provides a literature review for the thesis. I discuss the state of knowledge regarding the three issues this thesis is concerned with – frontier, ceasefire, and masculinity. I conceptualize the frontier as an out of the way place where sovereignty is unsettled and questions of power, agency, and authority are being ‘worked out’. Masculinity encompasses a diverse array of perspectives on gender and men. I loosely and roughly frame masculinity in this thesis as the thoughts, actions, and behaviours associated with men, borrowing heavily from the works of Connell (1995), Beasley (2008), and
29
Messerschmidt (2008). This is followed by a consideration of the ways the frontiers host distinct masculinities that are changed and shifted through the presence of valuable resources, conflict, and other frontier dynamics.
Chapter 3, ‘Methodology’, presents the methodology employed in this research and the methods used. In this chapter I offer a rationale for the ethnographic approach taken. This is followed by a discussion of the immersive ethnographic techniques I employed conducting field research, a discussion of issues of positionality and my own reflexivity when conducting field research, as well as clarifications regarding confidentiality, the role of language in this research, and ethical issues involved in conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Nagaland.
In Chapter 4, ‘Nagaland’, I present a background to and history of Nagaland.
The nature of men’s experiences in the wake of ceasefire in Nagaland is inextricably linked to Nagaland’s experience under British administration, and to a number of fundamental institutions in the state such as Naga customary institutions, that have developed over long spans of time across precolonial, British, and post-colonial Indian administrations. Hence, understanding the history of Nagaland is essential for understanding the arguments made throughout this thesis.
Chapters 5, 6, and 7 form the second part of this thesis, discussing the changes that have taken place in Nagaland since ceasefire. Chapter 5, ‘Nagaland Opening Up’, is the first empirical chapter in the thesis. In this chapter I discuss the changes occurring in Nagaland in the wake of ceasefire. I argue that Nagaland is opening up in the ceasefire era to greater economic connections with India and the outside
30 world. I engage with the question of how this opening up affects men in the state. To do so, I analyse the changing nature of Nagaland’s relationship with India in the ceasefire era in the form of new Indian investments in the frontier, new mobilities, and an emerging post-conflict middle class whose relationships with India are at odds with older ideas of a binary distinction between an oppressor/occupier India and an oppressed/occupied Nagaland. I employ interview data with young activists, entrepreneurs, and members of Nagaland’s post-conflict middle class who see India’s changing relationships with Nagaland as opportunities for new mobility and personal enrichment, and who hold de-territorialized ambitions.
In Chapter 6, ‘Legacies of Conflict’, I discuss changing perspectives of Naga national workers in light of the signing of ceasefires that mark an official end to conflict, and in light of the fragmentation of Nagaland’s nationalist movement.
Drawing from observations and interviews with Naga business owners, young professionals, and with Naga national workers in Dimapur and Kohima, I detail a shift in popular opinion against Naga national workers and the conflict-informed forms of masculinity they embody. This chapter puts forth two arguments. One, that throughout the conflict, the Naga nationalist push portrayed a nationalism-infused masculinity that celebrated Naga national workers as an idealized model of masculinity. The second argument is that in the ceasefire era this celebration of masculinity-infused nationalism is changing. Naga national workers are increasingly seen as extortive, as disruptive to peace and development in the state, and ultimately as legacies of a decades-long fight for independence that has not been realized.
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In Chapter 7, ‘Men at the Margins’, I discuss the ways a population of men in
Nagaland find themselves at new margins as the liberalizing post-conflict economy proves beneficial to some Nagas, especially younger Nagas who are familiar with cosmopolitan cultures, and excludes others, particularly older and lesser skilled Naga men. I employ interview data with older Naga men in this chapter to detail the nature of living in Nagaland’s emerging margins, and the role of idle time, isolation, drugs and alcohol in the lives of a significant number of older and lesser skilled Naga men.
Chapter 8, ‘Outsider Politics in Nagaland’, constitutes the first half of
Nagaland’s Patriarchal Backlash. In this chapter I employ observations and discussions with Naga men to detail the ways a perceived influx of non-Naga migrants from other parts of India, and from Bangladesh, offers an alternative front for men to present themselves as guardians of Naga territory, culture, and society in the wake of ceasefire-related changes in the state that uproot traditional notions of men as guardians and protectors.
Chapter 9, ‘Spinsters and Divorced Women’ constitutes the second half of
Nagaland’s Patriarchal Backlash. In this chapter I employ interview data with men in
Nagaland from various age groups and backgrounds, as well as observations made in the state, to detail the ways women agitating for change in Nagaland are framed as misled, as troublemakers, and as anti-Naga. Together with Chapter 8, the findings of
Nagaland’s Patriarchal Backlash are that in the wake of changes in the state that disrupt traditional notions of masculinity, the presence of outsiders and of a growing population of women agitating for change presents a new arena in which Naga men
32 can repatriate traditional and conservative versions of Naga masculinity. Threats from outside, in the form of migrants, and from inside, in the form of women’s groups agitating for changes to customary institutions, offer a front to restate and reify men’s roles as guardians of Naga territory, culture, and society. In other words, the
‘typical’ pathways for men and popular expressions of masculinity have changed, but only in limited ways. Men continue to be dominant in decision making and politics and continue to frame this dominance as essential for the survival of Nagaland and
Naga society.
Chapter 10, ‘Conclusion’, revisits the arguments made in this thesis and their significance, summarizes this thesis’ findings, states the contributions this thesis makes to studies of frontiers, post-conflict literature, and to studies of men in post- conflict, and discusses the thesis’ limitations and future research avenues.
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Chapter 2: Men & Masculinities, Frontier, Conflict
Outline
This thesis is concerned with the ways men in Nagaland experience prolonged ceasefire and its associated changes. I explore the ways local understandings of masculinity, the things that are typical of and considered natural for men in Nagaland, are affected, swayed, and shaped by the closing of conflict in the state through ceasefire. This chapter offers a review of three bodies of literature that are integral in understanding men’s experiences of ceasefire in Nagaland. In the first section, I discuss men and masculinities literature, beginning with early ‘men’s studies’ literature, followed by an overview of critical masculinities research and a description of my own approach to masculinities. In the second section, I discuss literature on the frontier. I introduce the concept of frontier and detail changing understandings of frontiers from Turner’s (1893) influential frontier thesis to more recent conceptualizations of frontiers as ongoing projects of interpreting space and framing spaces as open, unsettled, and remade in response to demands for resources in global markets. In the third section of this chapter, I discuss men and masculinities at frontiers and other contested sites, with the intention of justifying a gendered, and specifically a masculine-centric lens as a way of understanding frontier, conflict and post-conflict.
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Men and Masculinities
Studies of men and masculinities sit in an awkward place in academic literature. Men have historically been the implicit focus of academic discussion. The social sciences study a largely patriarchal world where men are the centre and where knowledge has typically been produced uncritically from the perspectives of men
(Connell 2008). The emergence of various branches of feminist studies and critical gender studies in the 1960s and 1970s marked a significant step in resolving the limitations brought by this almost exclusively male perspective (Komarovsky, 1991).
However, as feminist studies expanded and as the branches of feminist studies multiplied, explicit analyses of the lives and experiences of men became less common, with limited analytical engagement and discussion of men and men’s issues until the 1980s (Mellström, 2019). This limited focus rested, to a degree, on assumptions that to focus on men and masculinities was to overlook more urgent social issues such as men’s violence against women (Hautzinger, 2003), that a focus on men offered a forum that further embedded and empowered men’s perspectives in research (Ashe 2004), and that analysis of men’s experiences may serve to excuse men’s violence against women and inflate the forms of oppression experienced by men (Mellström, 2018). However, men and masculinities research offers gendered insights that are not necessarily contrasting or oppositional to feminist studies or critical gender studies. As Connell (2014b, p. 6) argues, the ‘unequal structure of gender relations means that knowledge construction in the two cases is asymmetrical’. In other words, that gendered experiences and perspectives are not oppositional or adversarial. Rather, studies of masculinities may also play a role in 35 unpacking stereotypes and assumptions about men that are inaccurate, limiting, and ungrounded. Chant & Gutmann (2000, p. 44) summarize the importance of studies of men and masculinities aptly:
[the] contradictions between men's actual lives and the public
stereotypes about men as fathers and husbands need to be the subject
of investigations that are grounded in local meanings and practices.
Such investigations are crucial in order for us to understand the
diversity of experiences among men in relation to questions of
sexuality, class, ethnicity, and generation.
Studies of men and masculinities thus offer valuable ways of unpacking the complexities of masculinity and the ways men adhere to, resist, subvert, and reframe various masculine constructions. In this section, I introduce and justify the approach to masculinity I take in this thesis in light of a multitude of possible approaches. In doing so, I offer a discussion of the emergence and development of studies of men and masculinity, key concepts in men and masculinity studies, and the ways I use these concepts in this thesis.
Early definitions of masculinity rested on explicit and implicit assumptions of masculinity as oppositional to femininity, the acquisition of attributes of power and dominance, and anatomical and innate traits and attributes attached to an imagined and ideal heteronormative male prototype (Cornwall and Lindisfarne, 1994, p. 11).
These definitions typically fell under the umbrella of ‘men’s studies’, encompassing populist and narrow understandings of masculinity associated with binary
36 oppositions between masculinity and femininity and highly restrictive sex-roles. In these approaches men were seen as a unified collective holding biological traits that were opposite to and complimentary of those held by a unified collective of women
(Connell, 2014b, p. 7). Where variation in masculinity was considered, it typically focused on divergence from a narrowly defined masculine ideal drawn from the collection of masculine traits (for example, see Brannon, 1976). Basically, these considerations of masculinity recognized some degree of variance, however, only in relation to narrowly framed and static attributes, ones that appear to be pre- eminent, and according to some early theorists were rooted in evolutionary biology
(Tiger, 1969, p. 209). Divergence from this heteronormative male prototype was not only deemed ‘un-masculine’, but for many theorists was considered pathological
(Pleck, 1981).
Critical masculinity studies challenges these simplistic biological perspectives, considering how power, authority and control often associated with masculinity are formed, questioned and subverted (Whitehead 2002). Critical masculinity studies argues that masculinity is not a biological given, rather, masculinity is context-bound, dynamic, subject to negotiation, and exercised with agency (West and Zimmerman
1987). Where men’s studies portrays men and masculinity in binary opposition to women and feminism (Butler 1988, 530), critical masculinity studies considers the subjective experience of masculinity, how masculinities shape and are shaped by context, and deconstructs theories attached to masculinity such as sex-role theories and masculine/feminine embodiment theories (Gorman-Murray and Hopkins, 2014, p. 3). This shift was led by what Connell (2014a, p. 119) refers to as the ‘ethnographic
37 moment’, a wave of ethnographic inquiry into men’s experiences and the social and institutional constructions of masculinity. This does not marginalize or ignore the physical aspects of sex and gender altogether, but focuses on the cultural, social and political aspects of gender - its construction, reception, performance, and attitudes and thoughts surrounding men and the concept of masculinity (Connell and
Messerschmidt 2005). Essentially, critical masculinity studies recognizes that gendered constructions, such as masculinity, are collective human projects that are individually lived out, reflecting Butler’s (1990) argument that gender is a wider social construct, one that is adhered to and ‘performed’, rather than biologically determined.
Of immense importance, critical masculinity studies recognizes the possibility of multiple masculinities rather than a single masculine norm that is either adhered to or transgressed. These ‘multiple masculinities’ are shaped by issues of class, race, sexualities, and economic and productive differences, producing a hierarchical gender order of various distinct masculinities (Connell 2005). At the apex of this relational gender order is a hegemonic masculine ideal (Carrigan, Connell and Lee,
1985). The hegemonic ideal may only correspond to the actual characteristics of a small number of men, but is an ideal to which the majority of men aspire, one that is considered normal and natural to aspire to (Ford and Lyons, 2012, p. 5). Hence, while very few men may themselves identify with the characteristics of hegemonic masculinity, very large numbers of men are complicit in sustaining the hegemonic model (Carrigan, Connell and Lee, 1985, p. 92). This hegemonic masculine construction is normative and defines other forms of masculinity as inadequate,
38 inferior, and subordinate (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 832). Hegemonic masculinities are context-bound, embedded in local understandings of gender and what is typical of men. However, there is a global hegemonic masculine model that hovers over and alongside local gender orders. This overarching hegemonic norm is made clear in interactions between existing gender orders brought about by their contact with each other and through the creation of new transnational spaces (for example, multi-national corporations, supra-state agencies, global media) where men reproduce concepts of masculine dominance and control (Connell 2005, 74).
Iterations of this global hegemonic masculinity are met with varying degrees of accommodation and resistance at the local level, as either reaffirming, or challenging, local masculine norms (Derné, 2002). When global masculine norms challenge men’s security or social standing, men may reassert themselves through living out local masculine norms, while also engaging selectively global norms that encourage and embed existing masculine constructions.
Understandings of men and masculinities have evolved significantly since initial conceptualizations of a biologically determined and singular 'masculinity' that was either adhered to or unsatisfied. Critical masculinity studies recognize masculinity as a social construct that is shaped by cultures, politics, and economies.
Early on, the possibility of multiple masculinities situated in relation to each other in a hierarchical gender order was recognized. At the apex of this order, a hegemonic masculinity embodies the most widely acceptable and normal masculine form. One of the assumptions of hegemonic masculinity is the existence of a global masculine order, involving interactions between a global hegemonic model of masculinity, and
39 local masculine constructions. Where the global hegemonic norm impinges on local masculine norms, men reaffirm local gender orthodoxies and hierarchies in response.
This approach does have limitations, in particular, that the distinct masculinities are more visible in insular and highly regimented contexts. studies that recognize multiple distinct masculinities and a ‘hegemonic’ masculinity are empirically constrained, more often taking place in rigidly hierarchical and insular institutions.
Connell’s initial research identifying a distinctive ‘hegemonic’ masculinity took place in Australian boys high schools with clearly distinct social ‘cliques’ and highly visible hypermasculine performances (Connell, Ashenden, and Kessler 1982). Other empirical studies of hegemonic masculinity also take place in similarly insular and regimented institutions such as prisons (Ricciardelli, 2015), private security companies (Johnston and Kilty 2015), private militaries (Higate, 2012), and state militaries (Kovitz, 2003). In other contexts, the distinctions between masculinities often prove to be fuzzy, unstable, and negotiable (Coles, 2009). For example,
Hollander (2014) found that, in a context of dramatic and widespread social upheaval, understandings of hegemonic, subordinate, marginalized and protest masculinities were disoriented, and men adopted victimized and effaced masculinities that coexisted in individuals simultaneously (2014, p. 435). Likewise, Guttman (1996) found that men simultaneously embodied and resisted aspects of a ‘machismo’ masculine prototype that was widely understood to be a hegemonic ideal. Despite this limitation, this thesis approaches masculinity in Nagaland from a critical masculinities perspective for the following reasons. First, recognizing masculinities as constructions that are attached to wider social phenomena allows insights to be
40 made into the ways masculinities are affected by changes to these phenomena, i.e. the ways masculine norms in the frontier are affected by prolonged ceasefire and its associated changes. Second, by recognizing a global hegemonic masculine norm that exists above and alongside local masculine orders, critical masculinities recognizes a central tenet of this thesis, that local masculine norms are remade in relation to and in response to changing global masculine orders emerging in the frontier. Finally, while distinct masculinities may be fuzzy, unstable, and negotiable in many contexts, there is a distinct overarching hegemonic masculinity in Nagaland, marked by roles of Naga men as guardians and protectors of Naga territory, culture, and society.
Similar themes, of men as guardians and protectors of a vividly understood indigenous culture are common in frontiers (Vandekerckhove, 2009; Myrttinen,
2012; Bijukumar, 2019).
Frontier
Frontiers are ‘in-between’ and out-of-the-way spaces, that host peculiar political, economic, social and cultural characteristics that are not found in the core areas of state control (Kopytoff, 1987, p. 11). At frontiers, the state’s presence ‘thins out’ (Ferguson, 2005, p. 379), and meets with multiple other ideological projects and political ideals (Korf and Raeymaekers, 2013, p. 10). The ‘frontier’ is made and remade through discourses of wilderness, statelessness, and disorder, and of the need to envelope these spaces into the state and into its associated markets.
Frontiers are also sites where gender is magnified. They are overwhelmingly masculine spaces in terms of their treatment by the state and the dynamics that take
41 place within them. State-making projects in the frontier are loaded with masculine discourses of ‘men’s work’ and heroic civilizing missions (Hogan and Pursell, 2008).
For example, India’s Border Roads Organisation (BRO), an integral piece of the Indian
Government’s efforts to extend road access to India’s frontiers, features the following quote from the Mirror Magazine, from July 1975:
Let us not forget that roads in this difficult terrain have been
built not only with mere cement and concrete, but also with the blood
of men of the Border Roads Organisation of India. Many lost their lives
for the cause of duty on the project. To these men, who always play
with danger and laugh at death, duty comes first. These fallen heroes
came from all parts of Mother India, to contribute their mite to the
defence of their mother land and prosperity of their neighbours
‘Highways to Adventure’ in ‘The Mirror’, July 1975.
Quoted in ‘About BRO’ (Government of India Border
Roads Organisation, 2019)
When state-making projects expand into frontiers, they also meet with frontier communities that have long-established gender-orders. These established gender orders often cast men as guardians and protectors of territory, culture, and society from outside encroachers from the state or surrounding plains, as ‘sons of the soil’ (Vandekerckhove, 2009). Women in the frontier are cast as in need of guardianship, often in the form of moral policing and enforcing strict and narrowly drawn social norms (McDuie-Ra, 2012d). As frontiers ‘open-up’ men migrate to the
42 frontier in order to find jobs and livelihoods attached to resource booms and state- making projects, living out hyper-masculine narratives of taming wilderness and
‘conquering’ the frontier (Hogg, 2012; Sabhlok, 2017). New settlers bring with them new ideas about gender and masculine norms, and produce anxieties surrounding land and resource ownership, sexual competition, and ultimately, the survival of frontier populations in the face of waves of migration. As I discuss in the following chapters of this thesis, this often provides new impetus to defend traditional masculine norms and patriarchal orders, to maintain rigidly gendered social customs and preserve traditions. However, as frontiers are made and remade in different forms according to the demands of states and markets, men in frontiers are also presented with new opportunities and possibilities to reify masculine norms and also to challenge these norms and rewrite masculine scripts through engaging with emerging and imported masculine constructions (Hillman and Henfry, 2006). Thus, frontiers are valuable sites to observe the making and remaking of masculinities attached to ethnic politics, notions of tradition, debates about indigeneity, and anxieties surrounding migration, relationships, and resource and land ownership.
Below, I conceptualize ‘frontier’ in light of myriad competing definitions and perspectives and discuss the ways this thesis engages with frontier.
Early conceptualizations of ‘frontier’ denote a chaotic and unspoiled space, with little in the way of legal order or effective governance (Eilenberg 2014). Works such as Turner’s (1893) frontier thesis were central to understandings of ‘the frontier’ as ‘the meeting point between savagery and civilization, where the challenge of expansion across wilderness acted to individualise, masculinise, and democratise a
43 white settler American society’ (1893, p. 3, 4). Likewise, Curzon (1907) described frontiers as ‘vacant spaces’ and ‘voids’ in-waiting to be colonized. In a similar vein,
Paxson (1910, p. 1) describes ‘a series of frontiers which the hand of man has reclaimed from nature and the savage’. These earlier approaches employed an evolutionary model that assumed a linear and natural progression from an uncivilized and disorderly space to a civilized and legible space by being brought into the fold of the state. Thus, frontiers were understood as having a distinct beginning and end, being ‘opened’ when two or more societies meet, usually one being European and the other ‘native’, ‘indigenous’, or ‘aboriginal’; being ‘closed’ when a single political authority established hegemony over the space (Howard and Thompson, 1981, p. 7).
Classical frontier conceptualizations thus assumed a linear progression from a state of ‘frontier’ roughly alluding to statelessness, lawlessness, and wilderness, to a state of civilization roughly meaning established states, codified legal systems, and landscapes marked by legible and organized resource extraction and monocropping projects (Scott, 1998).
While these considerations of frontier made significant contributions to the ways spaces that sit outside of the reach of the state are framed, and in postulating a role for state-makers as ‘civilizers’ that expand into and convert the frontier into a legible space, these conceptualizations also failed to account for multiple and changing configurations in frontiers that continue to reappear and hold relevance.
Turner’s (1893) conceptualization of the frontier as a chaotic, wild, and unspoiled
‘beyond’ space is unbounded. Hence, every space thought to be chaotic, wild, and unspoiled may be a ‘frontier’. Furthermore, Turner (1893) ignores inevitable forms of
44 order and systems of governance that do exist beyond the reach of the state – indigenous customary systems, satellite court centres, fugitive and pirate colonies, settlements of escaped and emancipated slaves. Scott (2009) explored these ‘frontier societies’ in detail, arguing that the distance from and methods used to evade centres and state structures themselves are forms of frontier-conversion, as state-evading peoples reimagine and remake ‘wild’ and ‘untamed’ upland sites into spaces of potential refuge, agriculture, and ultimately as ethnic homelands. Turner’s (1893) and Curzon’s (1907) conceptualizations also failed to account for the temporalities of frontiers, the ways centres and established states can quickly, and often do, dissipate and become frontiers themselves of other established state and court centres. A succession of precolonial kingdoms, city-states, and empires attest to the possibility of centres becoming frontiers (Sarma, 2014). Finally, in assuming the frontier is defined by an absence of and resistance to the state, Turner (1893) and Curzon (1907) both fail to account for the ways communities away from the centre, at the ‘frontier’, often call for the state’s presence and engagement and have such calls ignored
(Rasmussen, 2016).
Later scholarship challenged these classical assumptions of frontiers as innate or natural phenomena, waiting for the state to expand into and convert into legible spaces. The work of Kopytoff (1987), Tsing (1993, 1994, 2003), and Barney (2009), was seminal in reinterpreting the frontier and other ‘out of the way places’ (Tsing,
1993) as ideological projects produced through the demands of states and markets.
These alternative approaches focused on the ideological construction of ‘frontier’ in order to justify the capture of resources and the conversion of ecosystems and
45 communities in the frontier into resource pools and subject populations to meet the demands of states and markets (Barney, 2009, p. 147). Kopytoff (1987) chronicled the ways ‘frontier’ communities in Northern Nigeria employed a localized discourse of ‘frontier’ as a means of distinction and distance from surrounding predatory states, in turn emulating and replicating these states and the ways they function. ‘Frontier’ as Kopytoff (1987) frames it, was a tool used by communities to assemble local support and distinguish one community from another. Tsing (2003) captures this associational understanding, arguing that ‘the frontier... is not a natural or indigenous category. It is a travelling theory, a blatantly foreign form requiring translation. It arrived with many layers of previous associations’. Tsing’s (2005, p. 27) description of frontiers as constructions of ‘wildness’ for the benefit of some and not others offers a succinct description of this ideological project. Frontier, from these perspectives, refers to a legitimizing tool that justifies the expansion of the state and its associated markets into new territories, where ecologies are remade into resource pools according to the demands of states and markets, and where existing orders are undermined, disassembled, and remade according to the needs of the frontier- making project.
More contemporary readings of the frontier recognize that this ‘project’ is multifaceted and is produced by the overlapping of various inter-related phenomena linked to capital flows, security agendas, and territorial aspirations. In other words, frontiers are not ‘made’ by states per se, but emerge through the interaction of various state and market interests and actors in, over, and about a space. Eilenberg
(2014) utilises the concept of ‘constellations’ to explain the complex interplay of
46 interests and discourses that combine in processes of land colonization, resettlement, dispossession, and in the remaking of landscapes into forms and images the serve the needs of the market and reflect the sovereignty of the central state. In a similar vein, Cons & Eilenberg (2019) employ the concept of ‘frontier assemblages’ as a way of understanding the overlapping projects that transform peripheral sites and margins into frontiers. Frontier assemblages refer to the
‘intertwined materialities, actors, cultural logics, spatial dynamics, ecologies, and political economic processes that produce particular places as resource frontiers’
(2019, p. 2). Cons & Eilenberg (2019, p. 232) argue that approaching frontiers in this way, as assemblages, rather than as ‘self-evident things’, we can more thoroughly understand the actors and processes involved in making and remaking frontiers.
Despite the valuable contributions that novel perspectives of ‘frontier’ have delivered, especially in terms of understanding the role of states and markets in making frontiers, and of moving away from narrow understandings of frontiers as
‘stateless’ spaces, various approaches to frontier have also contributed to a confusing array of definitions and perspectives of frontier. Essentially, discussions of frontier evoke a physical space, a process of constructing and framing this space, an ‘edge’ or a ‘margin’ of space, and a vague state-of-being. Redclift’s (2006, p. viii) description of frontier exemplifies this confusion, describing the frontier as a ‘boundary and a device for social exclusion, a zone of transition and a new cultural imaginary’.
Likewise Fold & Hirsch (2009, p. 95) describe the frontier as simultaneously a multifarious state-of-being, a metaphor, and a material space:
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The frontier is thus in part a metaphor for national development
in its material and ideological senses, as well as in terms of spatial
expansion and delimitation…. The frontier can thus be seen as a kind
of ‘in-between space’… These are places of spatial and temporal
transitions – with all the contestations and tensions inherent therein.
Yet, the character and locus of this in-between space is itself a
changing and shifting entity. With the changes manifest in the
conventional frontier (the zone of transition between agricultural land
and forest) combined with the enhanced significance of new in-
between spaces, there are both metaphoric analogies and more
substantive similarities in the ways in which the frontier as a place and
time of transition can be employed as a heuristic to understand the
shifting geographies of hegemonic development in a variety of
contexts
In other words, the frontier is evoked when discussing places, the systems and mechanisms that produce these places, the ways these places are used to exclude and alienate groups of people, the dynamics that take place within, and the ways that these places are understood and imagined.
For the purposes of this thesis, I employ ‘frontier’ in a similar way to Cons &
Eilenberg’s (2018) ‘frontier assemblages’, as a site that has been constructed through various state and market processes and continues to be remade and reshaped through interactions with states and markets. Essentially, what makes a ‘frontier’ is
48 not the dynamics and events that occur in the place, such as extractive economies
(Kikon, 2019) and primitive accumulation (Eilenberg, 2015), although these dynamics do exist in frontiers. Rather, what makes ‘frontier’ in the sense that I discuss frontier are the dynamics that frame a space as open to extraction, ripe for primitive accumulation, and in-need of other forms of differential treatment by the state in order to bring the ‘frontier’ into the state, transform its social and political structures into those that are legible to and compatible with the state, and remove or contain resistance to the state-making project. By conceptualizing frontier in this way, I am able to highlight the ways Nagaland’s frontier dynamics are shaped by multiple competing agendas, such as Indian state-making projects, local forms of resistance and selective engagement with the Indian state, economic imperatives, and the ongoing presence of a parallel militarized state. Thus, Nagaland’s frontier status can be understood not as a list of ‘frontier dynamics’ that take place within Nagaland’s borders, but rather, as an aleatory outcome of multiple overlapping state and market projects that have for myriad reasons that I expand on below, constructed Nagaland
(and formerly the Naga Hills) as a space that is in need of differential treatment.
Highland Frontier at the India/Myanmar Border
Nagaland forms the lower part of the Patkai mountain range along the eastern border of India and Myanmar. These highlands constitute part of what Willem van
Schendel (2002b) terms ‘Zomia’, a contiguous mountainous region extending from
Indochina to Central Asia, defined by its difficult geography – mountainous, with steep cliffs and inclines, and deep valleys. Scott (2009) argues that this formidable
49 terrain has historically provided a sanctuary for state-evading people, acting as a
‘shatter zone’ where people have migrated to seeking shelter from aggressive plains- state expansion, corvée labour, taxes, conscription, and diseases common to the plains (Scott, 2009, p. 8). Communities in these difficult-to-reach places have ‘shared ideas, related lifeways, and long-standing cultural ties’ that greatly differ from communities living in the neighbouring lowland plains, including the forms of agricultural they practice and their religious, linguistic, and often physical differences to lowland settled populations (van Schendel, 2002a, p. 653). Early colonial accounts, and interactions between Naga communities and plains communities before and during the colonial era reflect the politics of Zomia. Pemberton (1827) describes Naga communities living in these highlands as,
this singular race of people… extending from the north-western
extremity of Kachar to the frontiers of Chittagong, from their poverty
and peculiar situation, have escaped the sufferings inflicted by a
powerful enemy on the more wealth occupiers of the plains below
them. With a sagacity which has at once insured them both health and
security, they have in every instance established themselves upon the
most inaccessible peaks of the mountainous belt they inhabit, and
from these elevated positions can see and guard against approaching
danger long before it is sufficiently near to be felt. Various attempts,
in the days of their prosperity and power, were made by the Rajahs of
Munipore [Manipur], Kachar [Cachar], and Tipperah [Tripura], to
reduce these savages to a state of vassalage, but uniformly without
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success – they steadily refused to acknowledge allegiance to either
power, and policy restrained the two first from using coercive
measures, where success was, at least, doubtful, and failure would
effectually have closed against them the only direct communications
between their respective countries
(quoted in Elwin, 1969, p. 42)
Nagaland’s frontier status has been remade through a multitude of state projects, beginning with protection of colonial interests in the Assam valley, to more recent state efforts involving the securitization of borders by quelling rebellious elements in the frontier. Many of these projects explicitly employed the language of
‘frontier’ in their dealings with Nagaland, while others encouraged peculiar political, economic, social and cultural characteristics that marked Nagaland as a distinct frontier space. By considering Nagaland’s frontier status as the outcome of various state and market projects, it is possible to unpack the ways Nagaland’s frontier status has evolved over time in response to various state and market imperatives, and the ways changes in frontiers shape men’s lives and masculinities.
Men, Frontiers and Conflict
Earlier discussions of men in the frontier took two paths. The first path focuses on ‘frontiersmen’, invoking similar understandings of the frontier as Turner’s (1893) frontier thesis. This path is concerned with men who either live at or have come to the frontier on imperial state-making and resource extraction projects. Men who had
51 come to the frontier, or men ‘of frontier experience’, were imbued with qualities of imperial frontier manliness associated with surviving and thriving in hostile environments, exercising stoic individualism and having the ability to sustain prolonged periods of isolation and hardship (Hogg, 2012; Kikkert and Lackenbauer,
2017). Engaging with this frontier/masculinity connection, Curzon (1907, pp. 56, 57) directly discusses the frontier as a site that produces and informs masculinities, arguing that:
Outside of the English Universities no school of character exists
to compare with the Frontier; and character is there moulded, not by
attrition with fellow men in the arts or studies of peace, but in the
furnace of responsibility and on the anvil of self-reliance… The breath
of the Frontier has entered into their nostrils and infused their being.
In other words, Curzon argues that the Frontier, in its lawlessness and perceived savagery, was a space that shaped moulded men through engaging with hardships and becoming self-reliant. These associations, between masculinity, hardship, and frontier continue to hold relevance, especially in state-making projects that promote conflict and hardship at the frontier for the sake of a nation as an ultimate masculine task (Sabhlok, 2017).
The second path involved discussions of ‘frontier tribesmen’ - men indigenous to the frontier. These discussions focus on indigenous communities living in the frontier, viewed by colonial anthropologists and state-makers as relics of an ancient and timeless past who had either been left out of or had resisted European notions
52 of progress and civilization (Kuper, 1988). While discussions of frontier tribesmen span a number of geographies and eras, including discussions of the American frontier in the early 19th century, African frontiers and in particular nomadic tribes at the Somali, Tanzanian and Kenyan desert frontiers in the last 19th century,
Afghanistan, and Northeast India’s frontiers in the early 20th century and 19th century respectively, there are overarching similarities. Frontier tribesmen are discussed in ways that stress the contrasts between colonizers and communities indigenous to the frontier. Where frontiersmen were portrayed as rugged and embodying a colonial masculinity marked by enterprising attitudes, resourcefulness, and an Anglo-
Christian civilizing ethic, frontier tribals were framed as lazy, naïve, and primitive
(Younghusband, 1898; Kapteijns, 1995; Hodgson, 1999; Sharma, 2009). Men indigenous to the frontier were framed as lacking, whether that be the tribal warrior lacking the discipline and modern traits that were seen to be embodied in colonial officers, or the naïve and ‘noble savage’, lacking the intelligence, awareness, and discipline of colonial administrators. These portrayals of frontier tribesmen reflected a wider colonial discourse that promoted colonial interests as superior, and local systems, including gender, as inferior (Levine, 2007). This discourse served an imperial mission that juxtaposed colonizers and colonized people in terms of social and cultural advancement, political and economic development, and in many cases human evolution. This discourse justified the colonizer’s interventions in the frontier as a means of civilizing and protecting frontier communities from risks that emerged from their own perceived lack of development, lack of civilization, and self- destructive tendencies (Said, 1979; Skaria, 1997). Simultaneously, discussions of
53 communities in the frontier and the men from these communities served to satisfy colonial imaginations of a pure and natural frontier space that was untouched by modern influences. This was especially the case in the highlands of Northeast India, where colonial anthropologists and administrators saw tribals as especially primitive and in need of differential treatment to other communities (West 1994). The works of Fürer-Haimendorf (1938) and Elwin (1959, 1969) were immensely influential in framing India’s frontier tribes as primitive, backward, and as closer to nature (Baruah
2015).
Contemporary discussions of men in frontiers have abandoned problematic juxtapositions between colonizer masculinities and indigenous masculinities. Rather, frontiers are understood as sites that, through hosting unusual political phenomena, overlapping and competing modes of authority, and through the presence of valuable resources and economies that surround resource extraction, produce distinct masculinities. Frontiers shape masculinities through the isolation and hostility of the space, through the presence of few women and few young families, and through a widely shared sense of lawlessness and liminality. Hogan & Pursell (2008), for example, discuss the ways a distinct Alaskan frontier masculinity is conceived of in terms of tolerating exhaustive manual labour and hardship. Carrington & Scott (2008) observe the ways men in the Australian rural frontier perform acts and rituals that exaggerate physicality and brute strength, marked by violence and to ‘macho’ cultures of intense competition for resources and social status, in response to the destabilization of the rural/masculine archetype in light of changes to rural life. In a similar vein, Carrington, McIntosh & Scott (2010) argue that distinct frontier
54 masculinities that celebrate violence and aggression are shaped by a nexus of linked to mundane working and living conditions in an out-of-the-way space that hosts wider cultures of high-risk behaviours, competitive violence, and alcohol consumption (Carrington, McIntosh and Scott, 2010).
In these discourses masculinity in the frontier is informed by narratives of encroaching outsiders, exceptional laws, militarized regimes of extraction and control, and experiences of marginalization by extra-legal treatments at the hands of state militaries (Vandekerckhove, 2009). Perceptions of encroachment and incursion encourage a shared sense of duty on the part of men to resist outsiders (Castro, 2006) and adopt roles associated with everyday violence and shared loyalty to the frontier community (Hillman and Henfry, 2006). Anxieties related to encroachment into the frontier encourage an ‘exclusionary politics of belonging’ where localization and exclusion from ethnic homelands are fundamental themes (van Schendel, 2011, p.
29). Resistance to incursions by outsiders and state-making projects, and protection of land, resources, and communities is done through violent resistance to outsiders by frontier communities (Korf and Raeymaekers, 2013).
Extraction based economies at the militarized frontier are also hyper- masculine, dominated by male traders, strong-arm politicians, private armies and insurgents, and military structures embodying the masculine rhetoric of state- expansion (Mbembe, 2005, p. 148). In other words, while frontiers are marked by a sense of ‘open’ space and ‘virginal resources’ and host competitions and contestations for these resources, militarized frontiers are marked by violent and
55 often long-lived contestations over resources and territory, anxieties surrounding representation and control, the presence of militarized regimes attempting to pacify frontier populations and secure resources for extraction, and local efforts to resist encroachment and new regimes. Conflict is attached to all of these dynamics.
Conflict in the frontier creates its own salient and pervasive representations and expressions of masculinity. ‘Conflict’ is complex and difficult to define. The
Geneva Conventions draw a distinction between international and non-international armed conflict. International armed conflict is defined as conflict arising between
‘two or more… High Contracting Parties’, or states, with no need to consider on the length of the conflict or the number of casualties. Non-international armed conflict, referred to as ‘armed conflicts not of an international character’ are distinguished from ‘internal disturbances and tensions or isolated and sporadic acts of violence, and for these conflict the nature, intensity and duration of violence is taken into consideration (Balendra, 2008, pp. 2469, 2470). Stewart (2003), arguing in favour of a universal definition for armed conflict, concludes that armed conflict is ambiguous, determined by more than simply the presence of arms and of violence, and encompasses distinctions between organized armies and local gangs, considerations of the number of casualties, and of the presence of violence preceding a distinct conflict. Frontier conflicts are especially ambiguous because armed conflict is often entwined within border security concerns (Cons, 2007; Korf and Raeymaekers, 2013), debates about resources and ownership (Côte and Korf, 2016), real and perceived law and order deficits (Machado, Novaes and do Rego Monteiro, 2009; Watts, 2018),
56 and an overarching imagination that the frontier itself poses a challenge to the state’s survival (Scott, 2009; Wilkinson, 2015).
The ambiguities defining conflicts at frontiers are magnified by the difficulties of determining when a situation is a ‘conflict’, and when a situation is ‘post-conflict’.
As I argue throughout this thesis, ‘post-conflict’ does not necessarily indicate peace or the end of conflict, but rather, a process or several processes of transition. Lund
(2016, p. 1204) offers further clarification of the messiness of determining post- conflict, arguing that
when we use words like post-colonial, post-liberal, post-
socialist, or post-authoritarian, it is to suggest a dramatic break from a
previous social organization, without implying that all colonial features
have disappeared, all liberal freedoms have been curbed, all socialist
property forms are extinct, or all authoritarian edicts have been
superseded. Likewise, post-conflict is hardly the definitive end of
violence. “Post” is not necessarily “past”
In this thesis, I continue with Lund’s (2016) considerations of post-conflict.
Conflict in Nagaland has not ended, and this is visible in several violent confrontations between Naga nationalist groups and Indian paramilitaries that have taken place since ceasefires were signed. Despite this, Nagaland is more peaceful than it was before ceasefire, and as I argue, ceasefire marks a watershed moment dividing the period of conflict from the current period of post-conflict. Post-conflict in Nagaland encompasses new and different relationships between communities in Nagaland and
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India, a scaling down of armed conflict (though not a cessation of armed conflict), and a widely shared sense that conflict as it was known between the 1950s and 1990s has ended. Hence, ceasefire is the event that divides Nagaland’s conflict era from
Nagaland’s post-conflict era.
Discussions of men in conflicts, whether at frontiers or not, focus on men’s roles as active in violence - as soldiers (Woodward, 2000; Trenholm et al., 2013), as members of paramilitary groups (Watts, 2018), and as perpetrators of sexual violence
(Higate, 2007; Munn, 2007; Grey and Shepherd, 2012; Kirby, 2013). Soldiers and combatants embody militarized constructions of masculinity, shaped in military and paramilitary institutions where physical dominance, aggression, violence, and ideologies that valorise violence and assume men’s involvement in violence are promoted and normalized. These hypermasculine constructions link the use of weapons, the exercise of violence, and the performance of aggressive and frequently misogynistic attitudes with ideals of dominance (Kimberly, 2009). Militarized masculinities are portrayed as being hegemonic, and embodying the ‘ideals’ fantasies, and desires’ associated with privileged iterations of masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 838). They are grounded in a heroic narrative of combat and an imagination of martial violence that is privileged, powerful, and strongly normative (Millar and Tidy, 2017). Men’s roles in these constructions are linked with elements of risk, sacrifice, and performing violence on behalf of the group (Trenholm et al., 2013). These constructions are typically embodied in the figure of the soldier, insurgent, or freedom fighter. While the forms that embody militarized masculine norms may change, this embodiment remains persistent largely due to the grounding
58 provided by combat in widely shared understandings that link masculinity, armed conflict, and violence (Woodward, 2000). In other words, soldiers and paramilitary members in conflict sites embody masculine constructions that celebrate hypermasculine traits such as aggression and violence and are linked to sacrifice and risk on behalf of the group.
On the other hand, sites of conflict and upheaval often involve shifts in gender roles that threaten men’s abilities to conform to traditionally masculine roles. Men are ‘thwarted’, often denied the ability to live up to traditional roles as economic providers, decision makers, property owners, and heads of households. Men are
‘vulnerable’, in the sense that men living at sites of conflict are often suspected of involvement in armed groups, resistance movements, or belligerent gangs, especially men who move in groups and are young or of working age (Berman et al., 2011;
McDuie-Ra, 2013). As conflicts come to a close and frontiers change, some masculine norms and ideas of what it ‘means to be a man’, what men are expected to be and do, and the possibilities that are open to men are altered, while others may remain remarkably static. Masculinities at frontiers are thus formed in relation to, as much as resistance against, imported models of masculinity (Jolly, 2016). Norms and expectations attached to men’s roles are often challenged by the frontier’s economic, social, and political ‘opening up’, and the entry of new regimes and integration of new orders. Recent studies focusing on men that are non-combatants (Myrttinen,
Khattab and Naujoks, 2017) are disempowered by conflict and sudden violent ruptures (Hollander, 2014), the ways men stake their identities and forge agency in frontier spaces (Carrington, McIntosh and Scott, 2010), represent new and crucial
59 shifts in the focus on men and conflict and have shed new light on the multifarious and multifaceted nature of masculinity at contested and conflicted sites.
In South Asia especially, the influx of outsiders into the frontier, alongside attempts to adopt and adapt indigenous frontier institutions into the state, has contributed to decades of insurgency and extreme communal violence
(Vandekerckhove and Suykens, 2008; Shodhan, 2015). In these conflicts, men are often cast as ‘sons of the soil’ (Vandekerckhove, 2009) - guardians and protectors of territory, culture, and society from outside encroachers, whether that be states attempting to envelope frontier communities, or waves of migrants threatening to cause massive demographic shifts in the frontier. Women in the frontier are cast as in need of guardianship, often in the form of moral policing and enforcing strict and narrow understandings of social norms (McDuie-Ra, 2012d). Policy, development, peacebuilding, and academic discourses of gender and conflict endorse
‘stereotype[d] notions of gender differences which portray men as belligerents or perpetrators of violence while suggesting that women, as an undifferentiated, homogenized group, are either passive victims or peacemakers’ (Wright, 2014, p. 1).
This was highlighted by Kikon in an interview conducted by Jankus & Nyman (2015),
everything is geared towards the girl, and the woman, and also
by doing that I think we fall into a trap which is very insidious, that only
the biological body, the body that can reproduce another human
being, that can have a baby can understand what trauma is. So, what
about single fathers? In conflict areas?… we don’t talk about boys who
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are going through the trauma of being defined as losers in their
societies because of the kind of burden that they have to prove
themselves to be men, especially in traditional societies, is huge.
They’re supposed to grow up. They’re supposed to become members
in a council. They’re supposed to be the face of the family. But over
time what’s happened is in these hugely militarized societies across
Northeast India, Central India, Kashmir, is that a lot of women find
employment, for example, at the hospitality sector… men would say
we don’t find jobs to work in a salon, to work as a masseuse, to work
as waitresses. Women immediately do. If you are 18 and you’re
beautiful and exotic, of course the hotel manager would want you to
be serving their clients. Not boys. So over time, in this really
impoverished and militarized societies, women have been able to go
out, earn, and bring money. They go out today as far as Dubai,
Singapore, Hong Kong as domestic maids from Northeast India, from
Nepal, from the Himalayas. Who stays back? It’s [the] men.
Conclusion
The frontier is an out-of-the-way site where sovereignty is unsettled and where multiple ideologies, political projects, and populations meet, overlap, and coalesce. Frontiers are marked by multiple modes of authority and governance, where one (or several) orders might be dominant, but where undulating forms of influence push and sway lives and livelihoods, nonetheless. Hence, while the frontier may not necessarily be a lawless space, in the sense of typical frontier imagery 61 presented in films about the American Wild West, it is a site where the law functions differently, and often in ways that disempower and suppress frontier communities and protect the economic and political interests of the state and its associate populations. At these sites, masculinities are made and remade through ideas of difference and contrast. These include historical ideas about cultural purism, village democracies, and origin stories about coming ‘from the hills’, or ‘sons of the soil’, that marks strict differences to outsider populations. These narratives inform distinct gender norms in the frontier where women are disempowered and men are violent and overbearing, while also protecting and preserving rigid gendered roles and spaces and ceremonies that exclude women and place the burdens of protection, guardianship, representation and governance on men.
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Chapter 3. Methodology
In this thesis I explore the ways men in Nagaland experience a number of political and social changes taking place in the midst of prolonged ceasefire in the state. The motivations for investigating men’s experiences of ceasefire-related change emerged from time I spent in Nagaland in 2012. Through extended observations in towns and villages, conversations on long rides in Nagaland State
Transport (NST) buses, and meals shared throughout the state, a picture of men’s experiences in the post-conflict era emerged. The pieces that constituted this picture were subtle and were not discussed openly in the public sphere. There were no protests against men’s loss of direction as ancestral land, traditionally an anchor of identity that is held exclusively by men, is sold and leased off to cash cropping operations and local mining magnates. There were no marches to raise awareness for the large population of traumatized and injured ex-combatants in the state who often develop drug and alcohol problems, are unable to find meaningful work and while away years living at home. Nonetheless, in discussions with men and women in
Nagaland it became clear that the challenges Naga men face in the post-conflict era are subsumed into larger developments in the state. For example, the emergence of a post-conflict consumer economy threatens to disrupt village-based livelihood models that endorse rigidly gendered social norms. The criminal-turn of Naga nationalist groups from freedom fighters to extortionists has derailed many of the associations between masculinity and nationalist involvement, leaving many current and former Naga nationalist workers, referred to by Indian armed forces as insurgents, at the margins of a changing society and economy. Migration into the
63 state is also widely perceived to be a threat to Naga men and Naga masculinity as outsiders are perceived to be illicitly owning Naga ancestral land and ‘marrying into’ the Naga community. Increasing calls for inclusive governance by feminist Nagas, made possible in the relative stability of ceasefire, are seen to threaten highly patriarchal indigenous politics and rigidly gendered customary institutions. In other words, the changes men experience in Nagaland in the wake of ceasefire are subtle and often enmeshed with other social and political issues but are significant nonetheless and inform understandings of how men experience change in post- conflict frontiers. In this chapter, I introduce the methodological approach and the methods I employed to unpack men’s experiences of ceasefire and its associated changes in this complex environment. I also discuss the processes I used to ensure confidentiality, and the limitations encountered through this research approach, including ethical issues and issues associated with positionality.
Ethnography
This is an ethnographic research thesis. Ethnography is a research methodology that focuses on people’s actions and accounts in everyday contexts. It is a qualitative methodology that involves extended time spent in a place, engaging with, talking to, and observing people and events. Ethnography emerged from colonial anthropologies as a method used to understand and document colonies and the frontiers of colonial empires. Early works such as Mauss’ seminal Manuel d'Ethnographie (1926) attest to this legacy, being ‘intended for administrators or colonists who lack professional training’ (1926, p. 6). Similarly, Malinowski (1922, p.
125) argues that the purpose of ethnography is ‘to grasp the native’s point of view,
64 his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world’. In the post-colonial era, ethnographies have expanded dramatically, and ethnography has acquired a range of meanings, all of which are associated with qualitative inquiry (Hammersley, 2018).
Ingold (2014, pp. 383–385) argues,
ethnography has become a term so overused, both in
anthropology and in contingent disciplines, that is has lost much of its
meaning… there is the ethnographic encounter, ethnographic
fieldwork, ethnographic method, ethnographic knowledge. There are
ethnographic monographs and ethnographic films. And now we have
ethnographic theory! Through all of this runs the ethnographer. Taking
this as a primary dimension of identity, it would appear that everything
the ethnographer turns his or her hand to is, prima facie,
ethnographic.
This diversity can be attributed to two factors. First, to assumptions that ethnography is a loose term for any qualitative inquiry. Second, because ethnography is qualitative, that ethnography is often a solution to any of the limitations or criticisms of quantitative social research (Whitehead, 2004). It is not the purpose of this thesis to discuss the extensive debates of ethnography as a research methodology4, however, it is important to note that there are a number definitions and approaches to ethnography, and that because of this, a unifying definition of
‘ethnography’ is elusive. Hammersley and Atkinson (2007, p. 3) summarize five
‘features’ common to ethnographies: that ethnography studies people’s actions and
4 This is discussed in-depth by Hammersley (1992), and Hammersley and Atkinson (2007).
65 accounts in everyday contexts, rather than under conditions created by the researcher; data is gathered from a range of sources, where participant observation and/or relatively informal conversations are usually central; data collection is, for the most part, relatively unstructured; the focus is usually on a few cases, generally small scale to facilitate in-depth study; the analysis of data involves interpretation of the meanings, functions, and consequences of human actions and institutional practices.
Whitehead (2004) raises a number of similar attributes, arguing that ethnography includes both qualitative and quantitative methods; has ontological and epistemological properties; is the study of cultures from both ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ perspectives; is greatly dependent on fieldwork; and is an ‘open-ended emergent learning process, and not a rigid investigator-controlled experiment’ (p. 18). Overall, ethnography is widely accepted as involving observing, interacting with, and having discussions with people in their everyday contexts, is open-ended, and is not rigidly investigator-controlled.
Schatz (2009, p. 6) raises two themes that are important aspects ethnographic research - immersion and sensibility. Immersion refers to time spend immersed ‘in a community, a cohort, a locale, or a cluster of related subject positions’. Sensibility refers to ‘a sensibility that goes beyond face-to-face contact. It is an approach that cares – with the possible emotional engagement that implies – to glean the meanings that the people under study attribute to their social and political reality’. Discussing immersion, Gearoid (2018, pp. 62–68) argues that there are three crucial aspects that allow the immersed ethnographer to make valuable insights. These are: extended periods of time in the field, allowing the researcher to develop relationships and participate in the community; exposure to chance, allowing serendipitous encounters
66 and unexpected events to take place; and the opportunity to experience, observe, and investigate change. In a similar vein, Jonsson (2014) refers to ‘slow anthropology’ as an ethnographic approach marked by repeated trips to a field site over a period of years and becoming closely engaged in people’s lives, in ways that often blur the boundaries between being a researcher from the outside, and an adopted member of the community.
My ethnography borrows elements from all of the above descriptions. My ethnography involved months of observation and discussion over the course of three fieldtrips to Nagaland, between January and June 2016, December 2017 and January
2018, and October 2019 and January 2020.* Throughout these field trips I became embedded in everyday life in the state, learning rudimentary Nagamese, building trust and rapport with a wide variety of community members, and developing close associations and friendships. I stayed in cheap local hotels and dormitories frequented by locals. I used public buses for short and long trips, went to church with locals on Sundays, attended rallies and gatherings of civil society groups, and spent significant periods of time in areas that I knew people gathered in and that I had identified on earlier visits. These included local underground bars and taverns, local eateries, and well known ‘hangouts’ and ‘out-of-the-way’ spaces where men drink,
* Ethics approval was granted by Human Research Ethics Advisory (HREA) Panel B: Arts, Humanities, and Law, at the University of New South Wales for a five-year period on 15 October 2015, with a proposed starting date of data collection for 01 February 2016. Consistent with ethical guidelines, data is de-identified, and audio-visual materials are kept locked in a secure drawer, in the Morven Brown building at the University of New South Wales.
67 smoke, use drugs, and gossip, such as abandoned construction sites, out-of-season tourist sites, and disused army barracks (see Photograph 2). I read local newspapers and magazines and became a frequent visitor to several local newspaper offices, which also gave me access to prominent local business-people, commentators, activists, and politicians. Overall, my ethnography involved immersing myself in as many aspects of life in Nagaland as possible. Because of this immersive approach, I was presented with myriad chance and serendipitous experiences that shaped the research, and in this time and through such encounters, I witnessed changes in
Nagaland that may have otherwise been missed.
Spending time in ‘out-of-the-way’ spaces where people loitered, drank alcohol, and used drugs was especially productive for this research. Naga society is, broadly speaking, very relational. Communities are often closely linked, and people tend to know each other either directly or indirectly through family and friends.
Gossip and prying, and avoiding gossip and prying are significant parts of many Nagas’ social lives, especially younger Nagas. This has meant that people often have to be discrete when socializing informally or with people they might not want to be seen with, when drinking alcohol especially because Nagaland is legally a ‘dry state’,5 when experimenting with drugs (often over-the-counter pharmaceuticals such as
Spasmoproxyvon, a commonly abused anti-spasmodic, and ‘Kodex’ cough syrup), when smoking cigarettes, and when otherwise loitering and ‘timepassing’ (Jeffrey,
2010a). Hence, abandoned construction sites, disused infrastructure, and overgrown
5 While Nagaland continues to be a dry state with the alcohol ban pursued by the Church and the Naga Mothers Association in 1989 still enforced, alcohol is easily available throughout the state.
68 parks were excellent sites to meet and build trust with participants. These are sites that people gather in to get away from prying family and gossipy neighbours.
Spending time in these sites offered opportunities to meet with, observe, and talk to people about gender, their families and the expectations their families placed on them, and their hopes for the future. This immersive technique was invaluable as it meant I could be brought into networks and activities that are deliberately invisible to non-participants.
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Photograph 2: One research site where men gather to play cards. Kohima Town Hall (abandoned construction site), Kohima. 2016. Taken by author.
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Site Selection
Research for this thesis took place at a number of sites in Nagaland. The majority of data was collected and recorded in the city of Dimapur. Dimapur proved to be an ideal fieldwork site for studying the changes men in Nagaland experience since ceasefire for several reasons. First, Dimapur is the largest city in Nagaland. It is the only city in Nagaland that has a train station, and is also the only city in Nagaland that has an airport. Nagaland’s most reliable roads tend to connect to Dimapur and
Nagaland State Transport runs direct buses to Dimapur from most towns in the state, often six days a week. Hence, Dimapur is an easy site to access and is a place that many people from all over Nagaland often go to.
Second, and related to the first point, Dimapur is a migrant city. Dimapur was initially a Kachari settlement, then yielded to the Ahom Kingdom in 1536 (Gait, 1906, p. 244). The remains of the Kachari settlement are still visible in parts of Dimapur today. In the late 19th century, Dimapur became a supply node for tours of British forces into the Naga Hills, where Jain and especially Marwari communities established themselves as powerful traders to British administration (Hunter, 1879, p. 96). During Nagaland’s conflict, migrants from other parts of Nagaland came to
Dimapur, and as the city grew migrants from other parts of the subcontinent came as well (Kikon and McDuie-Ra, 2021, p. 12). Because of this history of migration,
Dimapur offers a space in which to engage with a diverse population of Nagas from different tribes and different parts of Nagaland, some of whom are new settlers, others who have come to the city long ago, and others who have been settled in
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Dimapur for generations. Diversity in Dimapur also offered discussants a degree of anonymity, and one discussant made special mention that they would have been less comfortable discussing many aspects of the research with me in their home town, where they would not have the privacy and anonymity afforded by living in a larger city.
Third, Dimapur is Nagaland’s fastest growing city, and as I discuss in-depth in
Chapter 5, although the statistics to show this growth are elusive and often flawed it is clearly visible that Dimapur is growing rapidly. The city itself is expanding, new buildings are being constructed, and new shops and businesses are being opened in the city often. This urban expansion takes place alongside ongoing anxieties that are also present in other parts of Nagaland such as Kohima, Phek, and Mokokchung, but not the same degree. These anxieties surround control and identity of the city and its surroundings, and are reflected in periods of heightened tension and violence towards non-Nagas, especially Bengali and Bangladeshi migrants. Anxieties rear themselves as central during negotiations about which laws apply to the city, such as the riots and bandhs that took place in the wake of the Guwahati High Court’s ruling that Article 234(T) of India’s Constitution, requiring Urban Local Bodies reserve 33 percent of seats for women applies to Nagaland’s urban areas, largely, Dimapur. This
I discuss further in Chapter 9. Essentially, the anxieties that are present in Nagaland are magnified in Dimapur, where a diverse population of Nagas and non-Nagas interact, and where rapid changes and developments are taking place.
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Other research took place in Kohima, and in the towns Phek and Kutsupo.
Kohima is the capital of Nagaland and is home to a large population of government workers. It is the second largest city in the state and as well as being the political centre of the state, acts as a thoroughfare for people moving between Dimapur and other parts of India and Nagaland’s ‘interior’ towns and villages. Phek is a town roughly a six-hour drive east of Kohima. It has a mostly agricultural economy and is surrounded by smaller villages that also depend on agriculture as their major economic activity. Kutsupo is one of these villages, about a day’s walk west of Phek.
In Phek and Kutsupo I made valuable connections with young men, members of village development organizations and customary leaders in 2012, which I revisited in 2016 for interviews and observation. A number of the people who I met and made contact with in Kohima, Phek and Kutsupo I also met again with in Dimapur. On these occasions, I found that discussants were much more comfortable and open to talk, and several mentioned that they were more comfortable speaking to me in Dimapur, where few people could recognize them and where it was easy for them to blend into the city’s population.
Meeting Discussants
Post-conflict sites, like Nagaland, are notoriously difficult spaces to conduct ethnographic fieldwork (Roll and Swenson, 2019). Accessing populations in these contexts is especially difficult, often due to fears associated with being seen talking to researchers, distrust of police and authorities, and anxieties associated with talking about experiences of conflict and violence. Because of this, accessing large numbers
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(large N studies) of populations and producing randomized participant pools is prohibitively difficult (Collier, 1996). In place of large N studies, snowball sampling methods (SSMs) are often used as a means of locating participants in post-conflict sites and spaces where distrust and risk may impede research progress (Cohen and
Arieli, 2011). While SSMs are not randomized methods of participant selection, they do offer a means to locate participants, quickly establish trust and rapport, and, in combination with observations and other methods, may form one part of a triangulation of methods to establish reliability (Young and Casey, 2018). One of these other methods, time-location sampling, where researchers identify places that are visited by the population of interest and either observing or engaging with participants in these sites, has been identified as a means to access participants in similar contexts (Pawelz, 2018). In an environment of distrust and fear, word-of- mouth and recommendations by earlier participants were invaluable for gaining trust and access to other participants. Employing SSMs, I made contact with local civil society activists, journalists, civil servants, Gaonburas6, village development board members, academics, members of the clergy, entrepreneurs and business owners, students, active and retired insurgents, school principals and teachers, and unemployed youth.
Selecting participants in Nagaland presented great challenges. As discussed in the introduction chapter, Nagaland is a militarized state where arbitrary arrest and detention, searches without warrants, and human rights abuses are committed by
6 Village headmen, a position introduced under British colonial administration.
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Indian paramilitaries with impunity. This occurs less than before, but continues, especially in smaller towns and isolated hamlets. There are also multiple insurgent groups in the state that extort shops, businesses, and households, and are known to respond to criticism violently. In the recent past, these groups have targeted journalists who are critical of their activities and ideologies.7 When initial fieldwork for this research began in January 2016, it had been nearly four years since my last visit to Nagaland, and while there were some locals I had met on my first trip to
Nagaland in 2012, most had moved away or had changed their phone numbers in the time since my earlier visit. I had compiled a list of the contact details and addresses of local government offices and NGOs that I had identified online, but this also proved to be of little use. Many of the addresses I had listed before my arrival had been replaced by new tenants or had been knocked down in the state’s ongoing urban construction boom. Many of the phone numbers I had listed had been disconnected or had been sold on to new users through India’s expansive ‘grey numbers’ trade, where working phone numbers are sold on to second and third users to avoid time- consuming bureaucratic complications when registering a new phone number. This presented an immense challenge for conducting research in Nagaland. I had begun fieldwork studying men and local understandings of masculinity with few, if any, local contacts. The challenge of finding people to interview was magnified by the legacies of decades of conflict in the state and ongoing tensions between the Naga public,
Indian armed forces, and Naga nationalist groups, which created an environment
7 Interview, ‘Mary’ (March 2016)
75 where the movements of foreigners are closely watched by armed forces and where many people are wary of being seen speaking to foreign researchers.
I also employed a number of other ad-hoc approaches to identify and locate discussants, build rapport and trust, and learn about men’s experiences and understandings of masculinity in Nagaland. These approaches often involved using cues and items in the surrounding environment, snowball sampling techniques, and spending extended time with discussants. One of earliest the contacts I made with local activists stemmed from noticing a sticker that appeared on a number of shopfronts in Dimapur and Kohima stating, ‘I am ACAUT’. On enquiry with shopkeepers, I learned that ACAUT was an acronym for ‘Against Criminal and
Unauthorized Taxation’, a local anti-corruption organization. I contacted members of the organization and was invited to their meetings and their homes often over the next four years. Through my association with its members, I was also able to meet with supporters of the organization. Another method involved inquiring at the offices of local English-language newspapers, and becoming familiar with local journalists who, on account of their involvement in local news and events, were familiar with influential local groups and were able to inform and guide me around current issues and events in the state.
Talking: Interviews
Over the course of the research, I conducted four formal interviews that were recorded, de-identified and transcribed using digital recording software and
Microsoft word. These interviews took place between January 2016 and January 76
2020. Ten informal face-to-face interviews were also conducted where recording was not permitted but taking short notes was. I also took part in an unknown number of discussions over the three field trips to Nagaland. For interviews and discussions, pre- written questions were not provided, as much of the earlier research was exploratory, and producing a ‘set’ of questions to be answered presented a risk that discussion would be limited to the issues in the questions. Rather, I opted to allow participants to discuss their own experiences and concerns and pressed for further inquiry where necessary. Formal interviews lasted an average of thirty minutes.
Informal interviews and informal conversations were not timed but lasted anywhere between five minutes to an entire day. Timing these conversations was difficult because some took place over periods of several days, weeks, or months, and some were revisited after several years. I also conducted one focus group session in
February 2016. The focus group session lasted 45 minutes and was not recorded. The session involved a loose question and answer session with roughly 20 participants, male and female, about insecurity and violence in Nagaland, and took place at an
NGO office in Dimapur.
The relatively small number of formal recorded interviews is a reflection of the legacies of conflict and the ongoing sense of insecurity in the state. The risk of arrest, torture, or enforced disappearance at the hands of Indian paramilitaries, or suspicious nationalist-insurgents, while less than it once was, is very real. For many
Nagas, memories of people being arrested, assaulted, or disappearing are ever- present. To quote a source in Nagaland, ‘everybody has a story’, and these stories often involve a father, uncle, or older brother either being a member or suspected
77 member of a nationalist group or suspected of being a spy, having been arrested and questioned by either the army or an insurgent gang, sometimes their own, and being beaten, killed, or simply disappearing. Aside from fears of being detained or arrested by Indian paramilitaries or Naga insurgents, fears of other reprisals are also present when discussing any issues related to Naga nationalist groups. People are scared of offending pro-nationalists and of being misquoted as offending pro-nationalists.
Hence, while participants were consenting and often eager to discuss their experiences and perspectives, participants were also hesitant to provide their names, signatures, and voices in recorded form. In the interests of the wellbeing of participants, and of the viability of future interviews and research in Nagaland, I quickly opted for non-recorded informal discussions focused on the themes of the research, rather than engaging in confronting sit-down interviews with recording equipment that could bring with it a sense of interrogation and fears of future repercussions. In the few cases of recorded interviews, I was only ever able to record participants that I had spoken with beforehand, had spent significant amounts of time with, and had built trust with. These interviews have all been de-identified and their data has been ‘washed’ using techniques that I discuss later in this chapter.
‘Saturation’ is the term used to describe when enough interviews have been conducted that the collection of new data will not shed any new light on the issue under investigation (Mason, 2010). Originally coined by Glaser & Strauss (1967, p.
61), Saturation refers to
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the criterion for judging when to stop sampling the different
groups pertinent to a category is the category’s theoretical saturation.
Saturation means that no additional data are being found whereby the
sociologist can develop properties of the category. As he sees similar
instances over and over again, the researcher becomes empirically
confident that a category is saturated. He goes out of his way to look
for groups that stretch diversity of data as far as possible, just to make
certain that saturation is based on the widest possible range of data
on the category.
Despite its acceptance as a general rule of thumb for determining validity in qualitative research (see Marshall et al., 2013), there are no specific guidelines on how many interviews constitute ‘saturation’, nor how to determine specifically when saturation has been reached (Fusch and Ness, 2015). In the most widely cited study of saturation and interviews, Guest et al. (2006) cautiously recommends saturation occurs within six to twelve interviews, but that this should not be used as a justification for ‘quick and dirty’ research, that is, research that deliberately selects a small pool of participants (2006, p. 79). Marshal et al. (2013), on the other hand, make more specific recommendations that ‘(a) grounded theory qualitative studies should generally include between 20 and 30 interviews; (b) single case studies should generally contain 15 to 30 interviews’ (2013, p. 21). Diverging from these prescriptions, Strauss & Corbin (2008) advise that it is the researcher’s task to make real-time judgements about whether further data collection is likely to produce any additional or novel contribution to the theory-development process and therefore
79 whether further sample acquisition would be appropriate or not, in other words, that saturation is at the researcher’s discretion. Taking a different perspective completely,
O’Reilly & Parker (2013) argue that a focus on saturation and the right number of interviews needed to form a theory needs to be critically examined itself, and echoing
Mason (2010), that ’the legacy of quantitative science appears to have left a cultural residue of larger numbers having greater impact. This is not applicable to qualitative work as more data does not necessarily lead to more information’ (O’Reilly and
Parker, 2013, p. 195). Thus, determining the ‘saturation’ point for studies of men and masculinity is complicated, and is shaped by myriad contextual factors. The simplest criticism to make, that sample sizes may be too small to glean any meaningful data, is specific to studies that seek to illustrate direct causal relationships (Roll and
Swenson, 2019). Studies that seek to identify complexity, explore possibilities of causality, and suggest trends, often have fewer sources (for example Philip, 2018). In other words, there is a difference in the points of saturation between research that seeks to identify stable trends and distinct causalities, and research that seeks to open up worlds to academic discussion and uncover niche areas for new enquiry.
In Nagaland, identifying saturation is a difficult if not impossible task. In the time spent in field research, new interactions, chance encounters, and new discussions opened-up the nuances of masculinity and the complexities and contradictions encountered in men’s lives on a daily basis. In lieu of a decisive figure for saturation, a point at which I can claim that no further light can be shed on masculinity and the complexities of men’s lives in Nagaland, I offer a cautious caveat to this research. Throughout my time in Nagaland, the themes discussed and focused
80 on in Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 reappeared in conversations with men and women often enough to indicate that they matter in people’s lives. Specifically, themes surrounding men’s assumed roles as guardians and protectors of Naga territory, culture, and society, often but not always linked to constructions of Naga head- hunters and to a romanticized image of the Naga freedom fighter. This merited a point at which I could glean nothing new to this construct, although the nuances it took and its relevance to people’s lives differed at the individual level. Thus, any specific ‘saturation’ point for understanding this construction more than I present it here, arguably, would require speaking to each and every Naga about these themes.
The four formal recorded interviews, ten informal interviews, one focus group, and an unspecified number of conversations, of varying lengths, with people in restaurants, tea shops, and in streets, as well as months of site observation, analysing media and news reports, visiting rallies and youth events, sufficiently gleaned enough information to confidently assert the arguments made in this thesis – that ceasefire in Nagaland is shaping men’s experiences and challenging masculine constructs in ways that affect local politics and gender relations.
Walking
Most interviews and discussions did not take place at a fixed location, except in a few cases in people’s private homes. Interviews and discussions usually took place sporadically, after meeting and while getting to know the discussant. This happened in chai (tea) shops, at roadside eateries, and at sites where people congregated to pass time and socialize. Most often, discussions took place when
81 walking in familiar neighbourhoods or in out-of-the-way places where participants felt comfortable being seen talking to a foreign researcher and where there was opportunity to move and leave surreptitiously if the need arose. Walking while discussing proved to be an invaluable research approach. Walking and other forms of
‘mobile investigation’ are by no means new forms of research but have enjoyed an increasing focus as methodologies in the last decade (Sarah et al., 2010; Lorimer,
2011). Walking is itself a practice that produces particular relationships with the environment (Solnit, 2000; Ingold, 2011), where walkers sense and learn about spaces, discover and transform spaces as they are moved through, interact with landscapes, and generally construct human-environment relationships (Middleton
2010; Pinder 2011). Walking is thus both an appropriation and an exploration, a way to connect time and space (Edensor, 2010) and a mode of experiencing place
(Wunderlich, 2008). Walking encompasses an ‘empathetic drift’, where encounters involve shared experiences and shared acts of trust through which a variety of anthropological questions can be explored (Malla, Kholina and Jäntti, 2017). Walking interviews elicit responses not only to the sights in the street or location that are waked past, they elicit responses to noise, smells, other potential habits, and the flows of everyday life are shared between researchers and walking partners (Ingold and Vergunst, 2016). By moving between spaces while engaging with people, walking offers opportunities to gain insights into how people relate to their environment, to learn about their routines and habits, and offers a ‘sounding board’ of sorts to discuss research themes and ideas. Walking generates rich data, because discussants – walking partners, are prompted by meanings and connections to the surrounding
82 environment, making the less likely to provide rehearsed or ‘right’ answers and more likely to provide natural responses (Evans and Jones, 2011, p. 849).
Walking while conducting interviews and discussions in Nagaland was highly productive. Participants were much more amenable to discussions when walking, especially if that meant that they could run errands at the same time, or if discussions could take place when moving between work sites or going to local events. Walking also handed much control of the discussion to participants, who became walking guides during discussions, and often led the way to significant sites where other people gathered or led detours to sites to illustrate points they were trying to make.
Walking in cities and towns such as Dimapur, Kohima, and Phek lent new understandings to the people I walked with, and the places we walked through. When walking, discussions flowed freely around the issues of men, political issues in the state, migration, corruption and other items of concern, often prompted by objects passed while walking, or scenes and sites walked through. For example, while walking with a companion in Kohima, we encountered a small piece of graffiti on a local paan shop (see Photograph 3). The graffiti elicited responses that gave insight into my companion’s perspectives on governance, migration, and gender. My companion initially commented on the state of the building and street the graffiti appeared on and the role of the state in maintaining and repairing it; then on migration, my companion thought the topic of the graffiti was probably illegal Bangladeshi immigrants (IBIs); finally on gender and society, as we passed the graffiti, my companion discussed the risks he perceived Bangladeshi migrants presented to Naga women and the wider Naga community and the role of Naga men in fighting the ‘IBI
83 menace’, both to protect the Naga women he saw as at risk of attack by IBIs, and to preserve the Naga society he saw as under siege by IBIs. While the graffiti itself was largely ambiguous, and it was just as likely that the graffiti was written on the door by children or teenagers with little meaning or political intention, the response that the graffiti elicited, seen and discussed while walking, brought to the surface insights and opinions that may otherwise have gone undiscussed. Visual cues and items elicited responses and discussions that were often revealing, insightful, and important.
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Photograph 3: ‘Nigger pan shop’ graffiti. Kohima. 2016. Taken by author.
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Walking alone and the responses it elicited also offered valuable insights.
Walking alone near Dimapur train station at night drew the attention of police, of taxi and auto (small, three-wheeler taxis) drivers, and concern from friends and associates. ‘You can’t walk alone there at night, it’s a dangerous place’ was a typical response by friends to my recounts of walking near the station or in the central parts of Dimapur after dark. Other responses to these warnings shed even more light on the nature of gender and space in Nagaland. Other commentators replied, ‘he can walk there, but women shouldn’t… it’s a dangerous place for women at night’. Thus, the act of walking alone itself and the responses to walking at night highlight the rules that govern spaces, the politics of access, gendered experiences, and the constantly shifting role of the immersed researcher themselves between observer, subject, and object of discussion. By walking, all of these issues were highlighted, and all of these roles were explored.
Method Assemblages
Ethnographic methods engage with complex problems. Law (2004) sums up the nature of these complex problems succinctly: ‘the world [is] an unformed but generative flux of forces and relations that work to produce particular realities’ (Law,
2004). In other words, the realities that ethnographers try to understand are ephemeral, indefinite, and irregular. These complexities often prove overwhelming and defy rigid methodological attempts at orderly accounting. Various iterations have been proposed to describe the often ad-hoc techniques employed by the ethnographer to make sense of these complexities their line of inquiry. Law (Law,
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2004) refers to this as ‘method assemblages’, borrowing from Watson-Verran &
Turnbull’s (1995, p. 117) description of assemblage as:
like an episteme with technologies added but that connotes the
ad-hoc contingency of a collage in its capacity to embrace a wide
variety of incompatible components. It also has the virtue of connoting
active and evolving practices rather than a passive and static structure.
In other words, method assemblages involve bringing together various components in an ad-hoc manner. In a similar vein, Sefcovic (1995) proposes ‘gonzo ethnography’, involving embedded interactions that blur the lines between researchers and research subject. O’Regan (2017) advocates for a ‘bricolage anthropology’, where ‘bricoleur anthropologists… make do with whatever is at hand to capture the complexity of the world… [the] bricoleur anthropologist seeks to undertake an inductive approach to research by getting more involved, using creativity to respond to the detail of a situation’. While they are referred to in a number of ways, which have subtle differences, ‘method assemblages’ refers to methodologies that are highly flexible, highly dependent on a variety interactions, and involve utilizing spaces, cues, and situations as a means of conducting research.
I employed method assemblages in this research in the form of various sources of information which were used as forms of data themselves and as items that prompted discussion, reflection, and reactions-to-be-observed with research participants. These included local newspaper reports, anti-migrant posters, street art and graffiti, and online sources such as blogs run by Naga activist groups and Naga
87 activist Facebook pages. These sources were used as talking-points with participants and helped to gain a broader understanding of the context that people experience in
Nagaland today. Anti-migrant posters, such as those discussed in Chapter 5 were particularly helpful because they could be pointed at and discussed almost everywhere, and often included the name of the associated organization printed on the poster, which allowed for further contact and inquiry.
Limitations, Positionality, Reflexivity
Until the 1970s, social science methodologies were held to the same strict empirical standards as other scientific methods. Enquiries were expected to be rigorous, objective, and replicable in the same ways as laboratory-based experiments
(McDowell 2010, p. 158). Interactions between researchers and participants such as interviews aimed to ‘minimize the local, concrete, immediate circumstances of the particular encounter – including the respective personalities of the participants – and to emphasize only those aspects that can be kept general and demonstratable enough to be counted’ (Denzin, 1978, p. 180). This ethic received stark criticism from feminist and post-structural scholars, challenging claims that research involving interactions between researchers and subjects could be objective and value free, arguing that power differentials between researchers and research subjects are an inevitability, and that those differentials affect the outcome of that research
(Mullings, 1999, p. 337). This shift is especially relevant for ethnography.
Ethnographic and other interaction-based methods are more than neutral tools of data gathering. They are active interactions leading to contextually based results
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(Fontana and Frey, 2000, p. 648). Ethnographic enquiries such as interviews
‘encompass the hows of people’s lives (the constructive work involved in producing order in everyday life) as well as the traditional whats (the activities of everyday life)’
(Fontana and Frey, 2000, p. 62). In doing so, the ethnographer does not only watch, listen, and respond, but ascribes meaning to the movements, words, and exchanges of and with the people, places, and things being researched. McDowell (2010) aptly summarizes this subjective process, stating that ‘in comparison to large scale quantitative techniques, interview methodologies typically aim for depth and detailed understanding rather than breadth and coverage… what distinguishes most interviews, however, is the scope they provide for probing meanings and emotions: interviewing is an interpretive methodology’ (158). This is referred to as the researcher’s ‘positionality’. Positionality encompasses to the relationships between researchers and research participants. It considers one’s standing as an insider or as an outsider to the group, place, or system being researched, and one’s shared traits and characteristics that may create or dissolve distance between them and the participants of the research (Mullings, 1999). Researchers occupy aspects of both the position of outsider and insider simultaneously, moving between various points along an insider-outsider continuum depending on various and constantly changing contextual factors (Simpson, 2020). In other words, ethnographic research involves power relationships emerging from the constantly changing insider/outsider status of the researcher that shapes the nature of knowledge produced.
Reflexivity refers to the recognition of one’s positionality, and constitutes efforts to make this positionality visible and open to scrutiny, debate, and critique
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(Rose, 2006, p. 309). Moss (1995, p. 445) refers to reflexivity as ‘those introspective aspects of thought that are self-critical and self-consciously analytical’. The fundamental question reflexivity engages with is not how to make research impersonal or how to remove the researcher in all aspects of the research except as a collector of data and information. Rather, reflexivity considers how to research and inquire with people the researcher may and probably will, eventually, know very well and very closely, and yet not have their personal involvement, their attachments, their feelings, and their role as an implicit friend and confidant affect their ability to see, hear, and understand with an explicit and pre-determined motive (Simpson,
2020). Merton’s (1973) arguments regarding ‘scientific ethos’ offers some guidance for achieving this. Merton (1973, p 270) first argues that all scientific research, social scientific as well, should be universalist, testing out ideas in terms of ‘preestablished impersonal criteria: consonant with observation and with previously confirmed knowledge’. Second, Merton (1973) argues that it should be disinterested, that is, independent of local, social, economic and personal interests (Law, 2004). Third, that scientific research should be sceptical, not taken on trust. Finally, that research should be communal, that is, published and disseminated (Law, 2004). In other words, research should test impersonal criteria that are pre-established, be independent, and be sceptical.
Regarding my positionality, being a foreign researcher and a male in Nagaland had an impact on the research. Living in and moving around Nagaland, making repeated visits to the state, talking, walking, and eating with the people this research is about, affected my access to people and places, and affected how people engaged
90 with me and the things I saw and heard. Extended exposure, trust, and openness encouraged people to share stories and experiences, open-up about their lives, and often bring me along for inquiries and site-visits. Drawing on Gearoid’s (2018) consideration of chance, by getting close, which takes time, I allowed chance to occur, and over this extended time in the field, and through this chance, witnessed change and developments in Nagaland that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. My positionality, as an obvious foreigner, as an educated researcher, and as male, served to both open-up some research possibilities and to close others off. Participants were often eager to ‘bring along’ the foreign researcher on errands, to events, and to meetings. My foreign status, skin colour, and Western education lent ‘weight’ in meetings with local bureaucrats, state officials, and businesspeople. This opened up a number of sites that were otherwise inaccessible. People were also often eager to talk to a foreigner and have their voices heard by somebody from outside of their community. After some time, many people were eager to share their own opinions about gender and change in Nagaland, in ways that I doubt they would have shared as openly if I were an ‘insider’ from their tribe or clan, or a Naga, or a woman, or any variation of those three. Essentially, being an ‘outsider’ brought with it a naïve impartiality that allowed people to share things they would otherwise be less willing to share.
On the other hand, my position as an outsider, as obviously not Naga, was also initially met with suspicion. Meetings with groups of men were often interrupted by exchanges in Nagamese or village languages, which were either too quick for my own rudimentary understanding, or completely unknown to me. Sometimes these
91 language-swaps were accompanied by rough and short translations that obviously omitted many details, or dismissive statements such as ‘they’re talking about something else, it’s not important’. Being an outsider also presented the risk that conversations and responses to questions may also have been shaped by motives to please me as a foreign researcher, to provide the researcher with perspectives or insights that discussants felt were what I might be looking for, or to confirm what participants may have perceived to be a hypothesis. Middleton & Pradhan (2014) refer to the tendency of hosts, subjects, and research assistants to accede to the assumed motives of the researcher as ‘delivering ‘mumbo-jumbo’, in other words, playing along with assumptions that researchers come to investigate the most stereotypical, loudest, and most ‘exotic’ parts of a culture. This was encountered on several occasions, with many respondents providing unprompted and extended retellings of Nagaland’s nationalist struggle and histories of headhunting in the state.
Responses may also have been exaggerated to understate issues that might be considered negative, embarrassing, or offensive. Furthermore, working in a space where armed conflict occasionally occurs, and occasionally interviewing current and former insurgents, there was a risk that responses would be affected by perceptions of risk and fears of retribution for speaking critically about police, insurgents, politicians, or more likely, affected by fears of being perceived as doing so. While all ethnographic work poses some risk of reliability as responses are tied to personal experiences, this was controlled as much as it could be by follow up interviews, by discussing similar issues with as many participants as possible, and by consulting non- verbal sources such as media reports, local writing, and observing local political
92 posters, witnessing political rallies, local graffiti, and discussing the research with local academics, students, and journalists.
Confidentiality
In the interests of respecting the privacy and confidentiality of participants, all participants have been given pseudonyms with only relevant information attached. For example, ‘David, 24 years old’ if an age is necessary, or simply ‘David’ where age and other details are not relevant. To protect respondent confidentiality,
I follow the methods described in Kaiser’s (2009) summary of the ‘dominant approach’ to confidentiality in sociology: (i) seeking ethics approval before beginning the research project; (ii) gaining informed participant consent and discussing how the data and research will be used with participants during data collection; (iii) ‘data cleaning’ or removing identifiers to create a ‘clean’ set of data that does not contain information that identifies respondents such as names, addresses, and aliases
(Kaiser, 2009). Kaiser (2009) identifies a weakness of this approach as well, which is addressed in this research’s approach to confidentiality. While ‘data cleaning’ may achieve what is referred to as ‘external confidentiality’ (Tolich, 2004), participants may be able to be identified by other contextual factors and deductive reasoning based on what is said. This is especially high-risk in contexts of conflict and post- conflict, where participants’ discussions may put them in danger, where participants may admit to committing violent acts or crimes, or where participants may be hiding or in exile. This research addresses this risk by adopting what Kaiser (2009) refers to as the ‘alternative approach’. This involves considering participants as part of the
93 audience of the research. In other words, I assume this research will be read by its participants, and because of this, attempt to ‘clean’ data to the point that its sources cannot be identified by name, address, other details, or through contextual give- aways and deductive reasoning. In doing so, I attempt to maintain the integrity and relevance of the data. Where data could not be ‘cleaned’ in a manner that maintained the relevant details to the study, that is, where data is inextricable from details that identify its source, I have taken a cautious approach in favour of the security and privacy of participants, and opted not to include that data in this thesis. As part of my approach to de-identifying discussants, I employ anglicized names throughout this thesis when quoting or referring to discussants. I have chosen anglicized names, rather than Naga names because Naga names are very common in the state. Names such as ‘Temjen’, ‘Mo’, or slight variations of are encountered often. Because of the common use of a short list of Naga names, quoting sources is problematic. It is not unusual for a small town or village to have several men or women of the same age group with the same names, and often even within the same families. Hence, in some areas quoting a source with a Naga name may produce the effect of mistakenly identifying another. Several respondents, when asked, chose their own aliases to be used in this research, and those names are used when quoting those sources.
Language
English is widely spoken in Nagaland. English in Nagaland is linked to the state’s long history of Christian involvement. This began with initial excursions into the Naga Hills in the mid-19th century to ‘tame’ and ‘civilize’ the ‘wild’ Naga tribes,
94 led by American Baptist Christian missionaries and actively encouraged by British colonial state-makers. By the late 19th century, there were several English language
Christian schools in the Naga Hills, and English language Bibles had been dispersed widely alongside Bibles translated into tribal dialects (Thong 2012). Following independence, Nagas were discouraged from learning their tribe and village languages in school, and the curriculum is typically presented in English or Hindi
(Kikon, 2003). By 1967, English was listed as the official state language. An overarching creole language, Nagamese, is also widely spoken in the state, which is derived from Assamese, English, Hindi and Bengali. Although not the official state language, Nagamese is spoken more frequently in everyday interactions at marketplaces and at local trade. While many people in Nagaland speak some English and English is the state language, arguably more people speak more fluent
Nagamese. Although I attempted to speak Nagamese during fieldwork, discussants often preferred speaking to me in English, as my Nagamese is poor. Nonetheless, making an effort to speak the creole language was well received and often encouraged further interactions with discussants. Nagaland is also home to several other languages. ‘Naga’ itself is a loose designation that includes a disagreed-upon number of distinct tribes. Tohring (2010) lists 66 Naga tribes, while the 1991 Indian census recognizes 35 groups as Naga tribes: 17 in Nagaland, 15 in Manipur, and 3 in
Myanmar (Burma) (Shimray 2007). Each tribe has at least one dialect, and in many cases several dialects that are spoken by its members. Although it is common for many people in Nagaland to speak more than one dialect, these dialects are considered mutually unintelligible. Because English is widely spoken in Nagaland, this
95 did not cause a problem for the research, and local associates were able to translate in the few cases where I met people who only spoke village dialects. In all cases these were very elderly people who had not moved far from their home villages in their lifetimes.
Writing Ethnography
Maanen (1988, p. 37) argues that ‘an ethnography is written representation of a culture… It carries quite serious intellectual and moral responsibilities, for the images of others inscribed in writing are most assuredly not neutral. Ethnographic writings can and do inform human conduct and judgement in innumerable ways by pointing to the choices and restrictions that reside at the very heart of social life’.
Writing ethnography thus involves navigating complex politics of power and representation. Ethnographers exercise power in the ways they choose to report observations, present discussions, and overall in the ways ethnographers frame the people, places, and cultures that are the subjects of study. The long shadows colonial anthropologists have cast on communities attest to the risks associated with representing cultures in narrow and politicized ways (Pels and Salemink, 1994).
Representations and ethnographies written by outsiders is an especially sensitive issue in Nagaland, as Naga tribes traditionally do not have written histories, and the written records of colonial anthropologists were, as was the case in many other colonies, politically motivated (Zou, 2005; Thong, 2012). In the interests of fair representation, where local voices appear in this thesis, I have endeavoured to present them as they were presented to me. There are a number of quotations taken
96 from discussions and interviews in Nagaland. Some of these quotations were tape- recorded, however most were written down during discussions in Nagaland. I have presented these quotations verbatim. I have not edited or amended these quotations except where some insertions have been necessary for clarification purposes, or where sections have had to be amended or excluded to protect the identities of discussants. Hence, the quotations in this thesis, in parts, do not meet grammatical standards, and often confuse singular and collective nouns (for example ‘these things’ and ‘this things’). Presenting quotations unedited, unamended, and verbatim is a deliberate attempt to resolve issues of representation, and to avoid speaking on behalf of discussants. The initial motivation of this thesis was to bring men’s lived experiences in Nagaland to the fore, to critically unpack these experiences, and overall, to emancipate Naga men’s voices from a literature that often overlooks their insecurities and presents their lives in simplified and abstract terms. This thesis explicitly draws these men’s stories and experiences out, and as such, I have endeavoured to allow them to speak for themselves, in their own terms, without interrupting to correct or standardize their words.
Conclusion
In this chapter I discussed the methodological approach taken in conducting the research for this thesis. This approach is informed by two aspects of ethnography raised by Schatz (2009), immersion and sensibility. Immersion took the form of interviews in Nagaland conducted from 2016 to 2020. These interviews usually took place while walking in towns in Nagaland, although a few took place in private
97 residences. Discussants were selected using snowball sampling methodologies and were also met while observing sites such as markets, parks, and sites frequented by young people. Employing method assemblages, these interviews were semi- structured, and I often used surrounding posters, graffiti, news items, and the state of the surroundings to guide discussions. This was of great value to the research, as discussants were often much more receptive to interviews that could be conducted as discussants ran errands, and that handed much control of the interview over to participants. Sensibility in this research encompassed my own positionality, which was controlled by consulting a wide variety of local sources, triangulating methods, and casting a wide net in fieldwork. Confidentiality has been maintained by employing Kaiser’s (2009) ‘alternative approach’, changing names, ages, and other contextual details which could be used to deduce participants’ identities. In the interests of protecting participants’ identities, data that could not be ‘washed’ in a way that protects participants’ identities has not been included in this thesis.
Interviews and discussions were conducted in English, which is widely spoken in
Nagaland. In the following chapters, I discuss the changing notions of masculinity in the Nagaland, linked to ceasefires signed in the state in the late 1990s and early
2000s. The outcomes of the methodology I have described in this chapter, namely, talking, walking, and employing method assemblages, produced the information that informs the following chapters.
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Chapter 4: Nagaland
Photograph 4: Nagaland/Manipur Border Gate, Khuzama, Nagaland. 2012. Taken by author.
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This chapter offers an introduction to Nagaland and a history of the state. The chapter is critical for understanding the arguments made in this thesis. Men’s experiences of ceasefire and liberalization at the post-conflict frontier are naturally rooted in context. Men’s experiences of ceasefire and liberalization in Nagaland are rooted in an especially complex context. Nagaland has been shaped by colonial policies of exclusion, the preservation of traditional customary institutions, legacies of decades of armed conflict, ongoing questions over sovereignty, and an inefficient and dysfunctional state government. In this chapter, I offer a history of Nagaland, beginning with initial colonial expansion into the Naga Hills and the ways colonial administrators governed the area differently to other parts of India. Following this history, I recount Nagaland’s conflict beginning with India’s independence in 1947.
Finally, I discuss Nagaland’s present situation, involving a tense peace/conflict continuum, ongoing questions about sovereignty, and a political landscape marked by contestation and overlaps between Indian paramilitaries, Naga nationalist groups, the Nagaland State Government, and Naga customary institutions.
Nagaland
Nagaland was formed in 1963 as India’s sixteenth state, bound by the Indian states of Assam to the west, Arunachal Pradesh to the north, Manipur to the south, and India’s border with Myanmar to the east. Before statehood, Nagaland was governed as the Naga Hills District of Assam (formed in 1866) and the Tuensang
Division of the North East Frontier Agency (formed from the Naga Hills District in
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1948).8 The Naga Hills District was granted special status under a succession of policies by British and later Indian administrations to allow the area to be governed in a largely ad-hoc manner, where the laws governing other parts of India did not apply. In the lead-up to and during India’s Independence, various Naga nationalist groups sought to secure independent sovereignty for the Naga Hills, citing the district’s history of differential treatment, and the cultural, language and religious differences between Naga communities and other communities in India. These calls were rejected by the Government of India, leading to a decades-long insurgency, the longest in South Asia’s history, beginning in 1947. India’s paramilitary wing, the
Assam Rifles were stationed in the Naga Hills in 1956, establishing permanent camps and bases. In 1957 the Naga Hills District and the Tuensang Frontier Division of the
North East Frontier Agency were combined to form the Naga Hills Tuensang Area.
This combined district became the state of Nagaland in 1963 as a concession to calls for independence made by the Naga National Council (NNC), the sole Naga nationalist group at the time. Statehood failed to resolve Nagaland’s conflict, and various groups in the state as well as communities in neighbouring states continue to reject the borders drawn in 1957. This includes Nagaland State Government and the state governments of Assam and Manipur, who contend for resources and towns along the border that they see as their own, often citing the ethnicity of those along and across the border as a justification (Agrawal and Kumar, 2017). Naga nationalist groups endorse an alternative map, Nagalim, that includes the territory of Nagaland today
8 In this thesis I refer to both as the ‘Naga Hills District’, except where the Tuensang Division is specifically mentioned.
101 as well as Naga inhabited territories in neighbouring Arunachal Pradesh, Assam,
Manipur, and Myanmar (Baruah, 2007a).
Nagaland’s conflict also spilled over the state’s borders into neighbouring states and countries. Naga nationalist groups have at various times received arms, funding, and training from China, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (Farrelly, 2009; Glancey,
2011; Mukherjee, 2014). Several nationalist groups have established permanent camps across India’s border with Myanmar, and cross the border to launch attacks on Indian paramilitaries (Keenan, 2014). Naga nationalist groups have also provided arms, support, and training to other insurgent groups in surrounding Indian states, most notably the United Liberation Front of Assam/Asom (ULFA) (Mahanta, 2013). In the 1970s and 1980s, Naga nationalist groups divided along ideological and tribal lines, with the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (NSCN) breaking away from the
NNC in 1980, and the NSCN breaking into two factions, one under the leadership of
Isak Chichi Swu and Thunglaih Muivah (NSCN-IM), and one under S.S Khaplang (NSCN-
K) in 1988. In 1997 and 2001, ceasefires were signed between the Government of
India and the NSCN-IM and the NSCN-K, respectively, bringing an official end to conflict in Nagaland. Since ceasefire, Nagaland has been in a prolonged peace-conflict continuum. The Indian army maintains a visible presence in the state, while various insurgent groups, militias, village vigilante groups and neighbourhood gangs vie for control of territory and extort communities. Although ceasefires are occasionally broken, the intense and open conflict that the state witnessed between the 1950s and the 1990s has largely ended and a sense of stability has come to the state.
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Nagaland is home to approximately 2.2 million people (Government of India,
2011). Tribal communities constitute 86.5 per cent of this population, almost all being from between 14 and 17 Naga tribes (ibid).9 The remaining 13.5 per cent includes migrants from neighbouring Assam, Bengal, Bihar, a large community of Marwari traders, communities from Nepal and Bhutan, and an unknown number of
Bangladeshi migrants. In contrast to the established Hindu populations in the Assam plains and other parts of India, Nagaland is a predominantly Christian state. 90.2 per cent of the state population identify as Christian (Government of India, 2011).
Christianity was brought into the Naga Hills by colonial administrators in efforts to subdue resistant tribal communities and to discourage headhunting and slave-taking between tribes (Longkumer, 2018a). The state is divided into twelve administrative districts, each of which has a correspondingly named township. In chronological order of establishment these are Dimapur, Kohima, Mokokchung, Tuensang, Wokha,
Zunheboto, Mon, Phek, Kiphire, Longleng, Peren, and Noklak. Nagaland’s capital is
Kohima, and its most populous city is Dimapur, a commercial hub two hours south of
Kohima and the only ‘lowland’ or plains district in Nagaland. Dimapur contains
9 Tribal recognition in Nagaland is contentious. Recognition of a distinct tribe brings with it rights over land and resources, political recognition, and often brings with it special reservations in lucrative public jobs. The number of tribes and what constitutes a ‘Naga’ tribe is an unsettled issue. Some scholars recognize over 65 distinct Naga tribes on either side of the India/Myanmar border (Tohring, 2010), India’s 1991 Census recognizes 35 Naga tribes, including 17 in Nagaland, 15 in Manipur, and 3 in Arunachal Pradesh (Shimray, 2007). The Government of Nagaland Department of Personnel and Administrative Reforms (2016a) recognizes 14 Naga tribes in Nagaland, as well as 4 non-Naga tribes who also reside in Nagaland.
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Nagaland’s only train station and only airport. The state hosts a significant rural/urban divide in terms of infrastructure, education, income, access to health services, and job opportunities. Western districts such as Dimapur, Kohima, Wokha and Mokokchung have tarred roads, hospitals and specialist clinics, schools, and relatively reliable electricity supplies. Nagaland’s ‘interior areas’, the north and east of the state, constituting the districts Phek, Kiphire, Tuensang, and Mon, are very different. Roads are poorer and, in many cases, practically non-existent. There are fewer commercial buildings and apart from subsistence farming or small-scale logging and mining operations, very few livelihood options. In these interior areas the state’s presence is visibly thinned, with less police and fewer government services.
The few government buildings that are present in these areas are often unattended and in a state of disrepair.
In terms of GDP, Nagaland is one of India’s poorer states. For the year 2014-
2015, Nagaland’s per capita GDP was roughly ₹78,526, or 22nd out of India’s 33 states and territories (Government of India, 2017). India’s national average GDP for the same period was ₹86,545 (ibid). Despite this low GDP, Nagaland’s human development indicators are encouraging. The state has a relatively high literacy rate,
79.55 per cent overall (Government of Nagaland, 2016b), compared to India’s average 62.8 per cent (UNDP, 2011, p. 160). Male literacy in Nagaland is recorded as
82.75 per cent, and female literacy as 79.55 per cent (Government of Nagaland,
2016b), compared to India’s male literacy rate of 82.14 per cent, and female literacy rate of 65.46 per cent (Government of India, 2011). The state’s Human Development
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Index (HDI)10 overall has grown from an average 0.59 (2001-2010), to 0.63 in 2011
(Government of Nagaland, 2016b). For comparison, India’s average HDI in 2011 was
0.547 (UNDP, 2011). Nagaland’s Human Poverty Index (HPI)11 in 2001 was 40.02, which dropped to 28.89 in 2011 (Government of Nagaland, 2016b), although the
2011 census that recorded this HPI result is contentious and in some parts was found to be falsified (Agrawal and Kumar, 2012). India’s last HPI report indicates the national average to be 28.00 in 2009 (Government of India, 2010). Nagaland’s economy is primarily agricultural. 61 per cent of the population are engaged in subsistence agriculture as a primary occupation (Government of Nagaland, 2016b).
The state also has a sizeable informal economy, including smallholder and household farms, informal resource extraction operations such as roadside coal mining, people working for and with ‘the underground’ and insurgent groups, people drawing income from smuggling alcohol and selling contraband on the black market, and working in precarious day-jobs as labourers or short-term hires. While the economy
10 The Human Development Index (HDI) is a summary measure of average achievement in key dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, being knowledgeable, and having a decent standard of living. The HDI is the geometric mean of normalized indices for each of the three dimensions
11 The Human Poverty Index (HPI) looks at deprivations in the three basic dimensions captured in the Human Development Index: a long and healthy life, as measured by the probability of not surviving past the age of 40; knowledge, or exclusion from it, as measured by the adult literacy rate; and a decent standard of living, or lack of essential services, as measured by the per centage of the population not using an improved water source and the per centage of children underweight for their age. The Human Poverty Index was replaced by the Multidimensional Poverty Index by the UN in 2010, which makes comparisons with
Nagaland difficult.
105 is small, Nagaland’s public sector is exceptionally large (Government of Nagaland,
2016b, p. 53). Nagaland State Government directly employs approximately 140,000 people (Government of Nagaland, 2016b). Jobs in the public sector are considered a lifelong career, and there are few jobs outside of the public sector. Hence, government jobs are highly valued, bringing with them social status, long-term security, and the opportunity to earn extra income through under-the-table money- making schemes such as selling lucrative public works contracts (Kikhi, 2006;
Zarenthung, 2012). Although Nagaland has a large public service, the state’s internal revenue mobilization is very weak. Residents of Nagaland are exempt from paying tax on income, dividends or securities as part of Section 10(26) of India’s Income Tax
Act (1961). This revenue shortfall is met with loans and grants provided by the
Government of India. In 2015-16, Nagaland received 92.5 per cent of its funding from the Indian Centre (Morung Express, 2017). Baruah (Baruah, 2007a, p. ix) describes this as ‘subsidy as a permanent condition’. Essentially, Nagaland State Government provides secure employment to a significant proportion of the state but cannot afford to do so without federal grants and loans from the Government of India. This creates complicated relationships between a state that is historically at odds with the Indian centre but simultaneously depends on that centre for its very survival.
Colonial Encounters
The establishment of the Naga Hills as a part of India has roots in the British annexation of Assam and the subsequent conversion of Assam into a resource pool for the British East India Company. Prior to the colonial era, the Naga Hills were
106 largely outside of the ambit of the Ahom kings who ruled the Assam valley, with the exception of posa tax, occasional raids and some trading relationships that brought salt, cotton, herbs, ivory, beeswax, mats, and daos (large knives) from the Naga Hills into Assam (Das, 2011). Beginning in 1817, three invasions of Assam by Burmese forces took place, ejecting much of the Ahom leadership from the Assam valley.
Between 1819 and 1824 Assam fell under Burmese rule. Burmese aggression at
Assam’s borders with Bengal, Chittagong and Sylhet encouraged a stern response by
British forces, resulting in the first Anglo-Burmese war between 1824 and 1826.12
British forces pushed Burmese troops out of Assam and into Burma, ending the war with the signing of the Treaty of Yandabo on 24 February 1826 between the British
East India Company and the Kingdom of Ava (Burma). The Treaty ceded control of
Assam, Manipur, Rakhine (Arakan) and Taninthayi (Tenasserim) to the British East
India Company (British East India Company, 1826). Assam was subsequently made a part of Bengal under the Bengal Presidency.
On acquiring Assam, the Company was presented with a varied topography stretching from the plains surrounding the lower Brahmaputra in the southwest to the highlands of present-day Arunachal Pradesh to the northeast. The southeast was bounded by the hill tracts of the unmapped Garo Hills, Khasi and Jaintia Hills, Cachar, and Naga Hills. In the northwest the districts Goalpara, Kamrup, and Darang formed
12 This thesis does not delve into the Anglo-Burmese war in-depth, rather, it is discussed incidentally as an event that led to British annexation of Assam from 1826. A thorough and widely cited history of the Anglo-Burmese war is offered in Wilson, H. H, (1852) Narrative of the Burmese War in 1824-26, London, W. M. H. Allen & Co.
107 a mountainous border with Tibet. Years of Ahom isolationism and Burmese occupation had left much of the Assam valley in between the mountain ranges to waste. The Ahom mint was defunct and Assam’s economy was reduced to subsistence rice agriculture and a small yield of opium and mustard seed (Guha,
1967b). Large parts of the province had been abandoned and many areas were effectively uninhabited (Gait, 1926, p. 222). What little infrastructure existed under
Ahom leadership had been left in disrepair (Sharma, 2011, p. 2). In the first thorough survey of Assam following the signing of the Yandabo treaty, M’Cosh (1837, p. 13) describes the new acquisition as:
This extensive valley, though some centuries ago richly
cultivated by an industrious and enterprising people, is now
throughout six-eighths or seven-eighths of its extent covered with a
jungle of gigantic reeds, traversed only by the wild elephant or the
buffalo; where a human footstep is unknown, and the atmosphere
even to the natives themselves is pregnant with febrile miasmata and
death. The ruins of splendid temples are discovered in wastes and
forests long forgotten: large tanks overgrown and chocked up with
brushwood, point out the situations of once populous cities: and the
furrows of the wild hog or the bear turn up the foundations of
buildings unexpected and unknown.
The Company endorsed a succession of expeditions to document Assam’s potential wealth, led by Captain John Neufville (1828), Captain R. Pemberton (1835),
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John M’Cosh (1837), William Robinson (1841), and John Butler (1847). Assam’s timber potential was already well known, as expeditions and observations made during the Anglo-Burmese war, such as those of Lieutenant R. Wilcox (1832) and
Adam White (1832) had uncovered a complex forest economy trading in lac, ivory, various timbers, rubber, coal and oil deposits (Saikia, 2012, p. 23). Coal and oil were observed in upper Assam as early as April 1825 when Lieutenant R. Wilcox noted coal seams on the Disang River near Borhāt, and subsequently observed a seam of coal in the bed of the Buri Dihing near Tumong Tikrang: a ‘thin strata of coal alternating with blue clay in the sandstone rock’. Wilcox was also credited with the first official sightings of oil at nearby Supkhong (Wilcox, 1832, p. 415). In 1828, Robert Bruce quarried 5,000 mans of coal, which after being trialled in Calcutta was praised as ‘the best ever found in India’ (Mallet, 1876, p. 272). Natural rubber had been reported in
Assam as early as 1810 (Kar, 2009, p. 131). In short, Company expeditions found what the Company had suspected since its earliest interactions in Assam – that the territory was rich in forest resources and mineable wealth that had largely been untouched by the Ahom regime. However, Assam’s lack of roads and the considerable expense incurred in reaching, extracting, and transporting these resources, left much of Assam out of reach to the Company. Coal remained unviable until the Bengal Government allowed coal mining in 1867, due to the poor returns the Company made on ninety-nine year leases for coal land (Saikia, 2014, p. 67). Oil also proved to be a slow-moving resource, not being commercially viable until the
Assam Railways and Trading Company was granted a lease of 30 square miles in
Assam for petroleum exploration in 1881 (Saikia, 2011, p. 51). Assam’s rubber
109 industry depended on sourcing naturally occurring latex from Assam’s forests, which proved to be difficult to monitor and a source of conflict among rubber prospectors
(Majumder, 2016, p. 26).
Assam’s fortunes changed dramatically with the discovery of tea. In 1823
Scottish trader Robert Bruce met with Bessa Gaum, chief of the Singpho tribe in
Rangpur, Upper Assam (present Sibsagar). Bruce had learned from the Assamese noble Maniram Datta Barua that the Singpho cultivated and brewed tea much like the Chinese, who at that point held the monopoly over tea production (Bruce, 1840).
Following confirmation of tea plants growing in Upper Assam, in 1834, a committee was appointed to enquire into the possibility of tea cultivation in India
(Superintendent of the Assam Secretariat, 1896, p. 32). Successful experimentation of tea plantations took place in the districts Kamrup, Nagaon, Darang, Sibsagar, and
Lakhimpur (Sarmah, 2016, p. 19). By December 1837 the first successful batches of
Assam tea were exported to London (Guha, 1967a, p. 137). The Assam Tea Company was established in 1838 and Wasteland Grant Rules were finalized in that year, allowing plantation investors to rent ‘wasteland’ from the Company at especially low rates. This ‘wasteland’ included communal forests, grazing land, jungle, and land used for jhum cultivation. As a result, tea plantations expanded dramatically throughout
Upper Assam, with large plantations established at Jaipur, Dibrugarh, and on the
Tingri River (Shakespear, 1914, p. 67). By 1840, two-thirds of the East India
Company’s tea gardens had been transferred to the Assam Company free of rent for first ten years (Guha, 1967b, p. 139). Plantation acreage increased from 2,311 acres
(1841), to 8,000 acres (1859) (Guha, 1985, pp. 145–159). When the foothills were
110 found to also be suitable for tea production, plantations were extended to the lower reaches of the Naga Hills, the foothills that divided the Assam plains from the highlands (Baruah, 2003, p. 325).
As plantations moved closer and eventually encroached into the Naga foothills, Naga raids on plantations and lowland communities ensued. In response, ten expeditions were sent into the Naga Hills between 1835 and 1851 to dispel raiding tribes. These expeditions were exceptionally costly for colonial authorities and achieved only a short-lived peace. Lieutenant Bigge’s 1840 expedition into the
Angami Hills aimed to establish permanent posts to ‘[assert] colonial authority over the Nagas… bringing them under a system of administration suited to their circumstances and gradually reclaiming them from habits of lawlessness to those of order and civilization’ (Misra, 1998, p. 3276). Bigge’s expedition, however, failed to establish any permanent presence or dispel any raids. Likewise, Captain Butler’s 1845 expedition into the Naga Hills to establish a permanent military post at Samagutung
(present day Chimukedima), the closest foothill site to the Angami territories of the
Naga Hills, gained little in terms of territorial control or any substantial respite from
Naga raids. Continued Naga raids necessitated a demarcation between the plains and the hills, at least to mark the ends of British jurisdiction (D. Das, 2018). In 1866 the
Naga Hills District was carved out of portions of North Cachar and the Angami Hills
District. The new District headquarters was sighted at Samagutung, with the goal of discouraging Naga raids on Assamese plantations while being as little involved in the everyday matters of the Naga Hills as possible. Possession of the Naga Hills was not the intention of the new headquarters. The Naga Hills were said to bring ‘no profit
111 and would be as costly as it is productive’ for colonial state-makers(Lord Dalhousie,
1851, p. 203). Summed up by Mackenzie (1884, p. 105), ‘[the government] had never contemplated anything more than the exercise of a general political control over the hill tribes, and, if necessary, the establishment of a military post to overcome the ill- disposed and give protection to the peaceable. Anything beyond this was not desired’.
The colonial project in Nagaland involved navigating a complex landscape constituting steep hills and valleys, dense jungle and jagged terrain; complex social orders where identities were often multiple, overlapping, and fluid; multiple language groups that were mutually unintelligible; and small populations dispersed across vast distances. Highland villages were often in conflict with each other, and tribes constituted clans, families, and village networks that were often also in conflict with each other. Essentially, for British administrators the Naga Hills were complex, fluid, and needed to be managed with very few resources. In order to achieve this, governance of the Naga Hills was ad-hoc, almost entirely in the hands of commissioners on the ground. In a telling example of this approach, the Naga Hills
District’s first commissioner Lieutenant Gregory was advised that his ‘line of action may advantageously be left in great measure to his own good judgement’
(Mackenzie, 1884, p. 120).
Several state technologies were employed as a part of this securitizing project.
In order to subdue raiding Naga tribes attempts were made to control movements between the hills and the plains. On the western side of the Naga Hills, along the
112 foothills border with Assam, the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulations (1873) were established to formally divide the plains of Assam from the Naga Hills District. The
Regulations enforced stringent controls over relations with frontier tribes, stopping rubber speculation and trading by colonial subjects with hills tribes, and restraining the spread of tea gardens outside of the fiscal reach of the Empire where taxing and protecting plantations was difficult. These Regulations constructed two lines of demarcation in Assam - the Inner Line, and the Outer Line. The Inner Line marked the limits of regular administration, where the state’s reach largely ended. The Outer Line vaguely marked the ends of the Empire entirely, although its borders were deliberately vague so as not to limit the possible future territories of the Empire or give them away to neighbouring states (Chakravarti, 1971). The territories between the Inner Line, the limits of regular administration, and the Outer Line, the limits of the Empire, were referred to as Inner Line territories. Mackenzie (1884) notes the approach to governance in these Inner Line territories: ‘Beyond the line [sic] the tribes are left to manage their own affairs with only such interference on the part of the frontier officers on their political capacity as may be considered advisable with the view of establishing a personal influence for good among the chiefs and tribes.
Any attempt to bring the country between the settled districts of British India and
Burma under our direct administration, even in the loosest way… or to govern it as
British territory is to be steadily resisted. No European planter is to be allowed to accept any grant beyond the line or under a tenure derived from any chief or tribe’
(Mackenzie 1884, pp.89–90). The Regulations mandated special permits for subjects of British India visiting Inner Line areas in order to limit contact between hills
113 communities and plains dwellers. Communities beyond the Inner Line were seen as
‘not yet suited for the elaborate legal rules laid down in the procedure codes… they had to [be governed] in a dissimilar and more personal manner than those of the more civilized and longer settled districts’ (Gait, 1926). The Line thus represented more than a delineation between the legible, ordered and taxable plains, and the complicated and uncharted frontier. The Line marked a temporal and civilizational divide, where ad-hoc modes of governance allowed and often encouraged the maintenance of local forms of order and customary institutions due to the difficulties encountered trying to administer the space. The Inner Line was shifted several times as communities were brought into the Empire and plantation land and lucrative resources were identified and secured, and confusion as to where the actual Line stood was common among officials - whether it coincided with the boundaries of revenue surveys, or the limits of regular cultivation, or the line of police outposts in the north of Assam (Kar, 2009).
Nagaland’s eastern border was unmapped and its demarcations from Burma were much vaguer. The boundary between Assam and Burma was unsettled, but there was an acceptance that the border was geographically determined by the Naga
Hills, Cachar Hills, and Manipur (Das, 2014, p. 64). Beyond the eastern border was un- administered territory, making the delineation of the Naga Hills’ border with
Myanmar unclear (Mills, 1935, p. 419). Despite the British annexation of Burma in
1885, bringing Burma into British India as a Lieutenant Governorship in 1897 (His
Majesty’s Secretary of State for India in Council, 1909, p. 29), the India/Burma border, especially in the case of the Naga Hills, remained unmapped well into the 20th
114 century.13 The Government of Burma Act (1935) firmly separated British India from
Burma. Even following this separation, the Naga Hills District’s border with Burma were a matter of debate. The present-day border was officially mapped in 1958 by aerial survey and recognized by India and Burma officially in the 1967 Burma-India
Boundary Agreement.
Other colonial technologies were employed within Nagaland’s borders to control the territory with few resources. From 1874 the Naga Hills fell under the purview of the Scheduled Districts Act. The Scheduled Districts Act (1874) conferred extensive authority to local governors to enforce laws and regulate as they saw fit in parts of British India that were hard to govern, including the Inner Line territories.
The Act empowered local governors to appoint and regulate officers, determine boundaries between Scheduled Districts and run administration separately to regular administration in the rest of India (Government of India, 1874). These Scheduled
Districts marked spaces that ‘had never been brought within, or had from time to time been removed from, the operation of the general Acts and Regulations and the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts of Juridacture’ (Government of India, 1874).14
Essentially, the Scheduled Districts Act (1874) allowed the territories it was applied in to be governed according to different and often more relaxed and ad-hoc means
13 For reasons of brevity this thesis cannot detail the annexation of Burma in-depth. A thorough discussion of British involvement in Burma, and the history of Burma, is presented in Myint-U (2001), The Making of Modern Burma, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
14 Later on, this legislation became the Government of India Act of 1919, which empowered the Governor General in Council to declare any territory to be a ‘Backward Tract’ where ‘laws passed by the Indian legislature would not apply’ (Baruah, 2007b, p. 188).
115 than other parts of India were governed, seen as necessary due to the ‘backward’ nature and the difficulties faced when applying common forms of governance in these areas. In light of the Scheduled Districts Act (1874), various structures in the
Naga Hills were altered and colonial forms of governance and order-making projects were brought in. Two revenue surveys of the Naga Hills were commissioned in 1874.
The first, led by Lt. Holcombe, Assistant Commissioner of Lakhimpur, Capt. Badgely and Capt. Samuells of the Revenue Survey, worked from Sivasagar, Upper Assam. The second, led by Capt. Butler and Lt. Woodthorpe, proceeded from Samaguting. These early surveys not only paved the way for further expeditions into the Naga Hills, but also proposed that a British political agent should be placed in the Naga Hills to organize rice and supplies for expeditions, and require Nagas to carry provisions for
British detachments in the future (Barpujari, 1978, p. 667). In 1878, the Naga Hills
District headquarters was shifted from Samaguting to Kohima, bringing the British presence well and truly into the upland sections of the District and further into tribal territories, rather than being left at the foothills as it was at Samaguting. The following year, an administrative sub-centre was also established at Wokha, closer to the plains of Assam. As a means of extending their reach into the more isolated pockets of the District, colonial administrators introduced new political structures to the Naga Hills. The offices of Gaonbura, or village headman, and Dobashi, Assamese speaking intermediaries were introduced, forming a bridge between village politics and colonial administration. Where officers were officially ordered to interfere in internal affairs as little as possible, on the ground officers were often called on by
Naga communities for protection, alliances, and to negotiate disagreements and
116 conflicts between tribes. Johnston’s (1896) accounts detail common instances of communities’ local level alliances with colonial officers, voluntary subjecthood, and colonial profiteering through tribal alliance-making:
Towards the end of March 1874, a deputation came to me from
the village of Mezeffina begging for protection against Mozuma, with
whom they had a feud, and from whom for some reason or other they
daily expected an attack. They offered to become British subjects and
pay revenue in return for protection. I considered the matter carefully
and before I had given my decision, crowds of old people, and women
carrying their children, came in asking me to save their lives. I at once
decided to grant their request, and promised them what they asked,
on condition that they paid up to a year’s tribute in advance. This they
at once did, and I immediately sent a messenger to proclaim to
Mozuma that the people of Mezeffina were British subjects, and the
threaten them or anyone else with dire vengeance if they dared lay
hands on them… I did not underrate the grave responsibility that I
incurred in going against the policy of Government, but I felt that it
was utterly impossible that I, as their representative, could quietly
stand by and see a savage massacre perpetrated, within sight of our
station at Samagudting…. I might have used my influence with
Mozuma to prevent a raid in this particular instance, but that would
have been giving protection, and I argued, if we give protection, let us
get a little revenue to help to pay for it? Why should all the advantage
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be to one side?... The tide in favour of asking for our protection had
set in in earnest, and must be taken at the flood. ‘Vestigia nulla
retrosum’, there was no retreat.
(Johnston, 1896, pp. 40–42)
Essentially, the Naga Hills District was formed to cordon off a troubled zone, as cheaply and efficiently as possible, to protect tea plantations in Assam while being as little entangled in the complex tribal politics that abounded in the Naga Hills and other highland regions around Assam. These communities had resisted state incorporation before and were seen as having little prospect or value for incorporation into the colonial state in the near future. Colonial administration in the
Naga Hills District set out to establish a loose control over the territory and prevent raids on the increasingly important resource hub that was the Brahmaputra valley.
To achieve this, various state technologies were enacted. The Bengal Eastern Frontier
Regulations (1873) drew an ‘Inner Line’ between the plains in Assam and the Naga foothills, across which movements were limited. The Scheduled Districts Act (1874) officially handed commissioners and governors free rein in the Naga Hills, creating a space where the laws that applied in the rest of India were re-interpreted and reconfigured according to the needs of local administrators, or simply did not apply at all. Finally, with few resources available, customary institutions and networks of village elites were brought closer into the fold of the state through the introduction of Gaonburas and Dobashis. The effect of these colonial technologies was the creation of a highland district that was distinct geographically and culturally, but also
118 cartographically and legally, from the rest of the Empire, where customary modes of governance were recognized and further empowered as adopted pieces of the colonial state.
Independence, Conflict, Statehood
India’s 1947 Independence brought with it expectations of dramatic political change for large sections of the subcontinent. Frontier sites including the Naga Hills
District, that had been governed differently under British administration, held hopes for greater autonomy, various degrees of independence, and in some cases complete severance from the Indian Union. Many communities in Northeast India made calls for independence from India and for various forms of autonomy within the Indian
Union. In 1945 the Hill Leaders Union and the Tribes and Races Association were formed at Shillong to represent and protect the interests of various tribal communities and to articulate tribal political aspirations (Haokip, 2012, p. 307). The
Praja Sangh political party was formed in 1946 with aims of achieving an independent democratic Manipur (ibid). Karbi and Dimasa leaders from Assam articulated demands for functional autonomy to the Indian National Congress (Barbora 2008:
317). The Mizo Common People’s Union was formed in Mizoram in 1946 with the goal of achieving Mizo independence, and in 1947 the United Mizo Freedom
Organization was formed opposing a union with India (ibid). Naga nationalist actors, however, made some of the earliest, loudest, and most sustained of these calls. As early as 1929, the Naga Club submitted a memorandum to the Simon Commission requesting the Naga Hills be given the option for self-determination after the British
119 departure from India. In 1946, the Naga National Council (NNC) was formed out of the Naga Hills District Council at Wokha demanding complete autonomy from India.
In June 1947 a negotiated settlement was attempted between the NNC and the Governor of Assam, Akbar Hydari, to set up an interim politico-administrative agreement in the form of the Naga-Hydari Accord. The Naga-Hydari Accord detailed nine points, covering (1) an independent judiciary, (2) executive roles, (3) legislative functions, (4) land rights, (5) taxation, (6) boundaries of the Naga Hills, (7) arms laws,
(8) boundary terms upholding the Bengal Eastern Frontiers Regulations Act, and (9) a ten year period of the agreement after which ‘the Naga Council [NNC] will be asked whether they require the above agreement to be extended for a further period or a new agreement regarding the future of Naga people arrived at’ (Naga National
Council, 1947). Although the Accord handed significant control of administration to the NNC, the final point was contentious, and ultimately was the undoing of the
Accord. Elements within the NNC pushed for the ninth point to allow the Naga Hills to secede altogether from the Indian Union. The Government of India interpreted the ninth point as an option to negotiate changes in administration, but not to secede altogether (Haokip, 2012, p. 310). This marked a critical juncture in Nagaland’s independence push. The NNC, formerly a moderate actor in negotiations with the
Government of India, began agitating for full independence without compromise under the leadership of A. J. Phizo (Haokip, 2012, p. 310). Phizo declared Naga independence on 14 August 1947, one day before India officially declared its own independence from British rule. The Naga independence claim was vehemently rejected by the Government of India. In 1951 the NNC held a plebiscite to determine
120 local support for independence, where 99 per cent of Nagas voted for separation from India (Joshi, 2013, p. 182). The following year, Naga communities boycotted the first Indian parliamentary election (Kikon, 2005, p. 2833). In September 1953 an official declaration of sovereignty was made in Tuensang District of Nagaland, with the ‘Khunak Kautang Ngeukhum’nt’ (People’s Sovereign Republic of Free Nagaland) being established by the NNC (Singh, 2004, p. 60). By 1956 Phizo had raised the Naga
Federal Army and Naga Federal Government, acting as a state of its own in the Naga
Hills.
The campaign of agitation led by the Naga National Council (NNC) threatened not just India’s hold on the Naga Hills, but if allowed to continue unabated threatened to inspire, and as it did later on, actively encourage other separatist rebellions in neighbouring states and in other parts of India. The rebellion in the Naga Hills was thus seen as a threat to the wider integrity and survival of the newly independent
India (Kotwal, 2008). In response to this resistance and to other rebellions, the
Government of India issued a number of exceptional laws and ordinances applicable to areas it deemed as ‘disturbed’. First, the Government of India re-constituted the
1942 Armed Forces (Special Powers) Ordinance, developed as an attempt by Viceroy
Lord Linlithgow to suppress the Quit India movement. The Ordinance bestowed
‘special powers’ on ‘certain officers’ of India’s armed forces, including paramilitaries, to deal with the ‘emergency’ situation of growing resistance to British administration.
These special powers included the use of force (even to cause death) on any person who fails to halt when challenged by a sentry or appears to damage any property or resist arrest. Most importantly, the Ordinance provided complete immunity to
121 officers - their acts could not be legally challenged, by anybody, except with the prior approval of the central government. The Ordinance was re-constituted in the form of four new ordinances - the Bengal Disturbed Areas (Special Powers of Armed Forces)
Ordinance (1947); the Assam Disturbed Areas (Special Powers of Armed Forces)
Ordinance (1947); the East Punjab and Delhi Disturbed Areas (Special Powers of
Armed Forces) Ordinance (1947); the United Provinces Disturbed Areas (Special
Powers of Armed Forces) Ordinance (1947). The Armed Forces Special Powers Act emerged from these ordinances in 1948. The Act was repealed in 1957 and resurrected a year later due to the deteriorating security situation in Assam from the
Naga rebellion as the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (1958) (AFSPA). The Act grants the Indian Army extensive rights to search, detain, and to ‘fire upon or otherwise use force even to causing of death’ on suspicion of committing an offense or suspicion that one is ‘about to commit’ an offense (4(c)). Section 6 states that no prosecution, suit or other legal proceeding can be instituted without sanction of the
Central Government (4(6)). In effect, the Act suspends any rights in the areas it is applied to, giving full impunity to the army, its officers, and ‘any other officers of the
Union [of India] so operating’ (Government of India, 1958).
Second, the Sixth Schedule was introduced to the Indian Constitution in 1949 to grant scheduled tribal communities in Assam various degrees of autonomy and reservations in India’s political system. Under the Sixth Schedule some groups, scheduled tribes, are allowed a degree of autonomy and self-government within an established framework of district and regional councils (Hausing, 2014). Sixth
Schedule territories became autonomous districts and autonomous regions within
122 those districts. Elected councils within sixth schedule districts were granted powers to levy taxes, constitute courts for administration of justice involving tribals, land allotment, occupation or use of land, regulation of shifting (jhum) cultivation, appointment of chiefs, inheritance of property, marriage, and social customs (ibid).
Classification as a Scheduled Tribe governs access to a number of political and institutional reservations depending on which tribe an individual belongs to. This program of social categorization has outcomes for the recognition of autonomy and rights for tribal groups, for the creation of district and regional councils in Scheduled areas, and according of special provisions to Scheduled areas (Barbora, 2008).
However, the Sixth Schedule does not protect all the Scheduled Tribes of Northeast
India. Only those that were considered to be relatively concentrated in the formerly
‘excluded’ and ‘partially excluded’ areas, and for which the Constitution uses the term ‘Tribal Areas’, come under the purview of the Sixth Schedule. This is limited to two sets of tribal areas in Assam: the districts of the United Khasi and Jaintia Hills
(excluding Shillong), the Garo Hills, Lushai Hills, Naga Hills, North Cachar Hills and the
Mikir Hills and the North East Frontier Tracts (present day Arunachal Pradesh)
(Baruah, 2007a).
The Schedule did not address a key demand of Naga nationalists - recognition of their self-determination claim at the end of a ten year period, and was rejected by the NNC (Hausing, 2014, p. 91). In response, on 26 July 1960, a Sixteen Point
Agreement was signed between the Government of India and the Naga People’s
Convention, granting specific forms of autonomy, and statehood, to the Naga Hills.
The first point of the Agreement forms the state of Nagaland out of the Naga Hills
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District and the Tuensang Area. The seventh point of this agreement details that no act or law passed by the Indian Union Parliament shall have legal force in Nagaland, unless specially applied to it by a majority vote of the Nagaland legislative assembly.
On December 1, 1963 Nagaland was officially made the sixteenth state of the Indian
Union by merging the Tuensang Frontier Division and the Naga Hills District of Assam.
Point seven of the Sixteen Point Agreement was enshrined as Article 371(A) of the
Indian Constitution. Article 371(A) gives Nagaland a special status where the
Nagaland Legislative Assembly has veto power over any law passed in India pertaining to or affecting Nagaland. The Article insulates communities in Nagaland State from
Indian Government resolutions regarding (1)(a)(i) religious or social practices of the
Nagas, (1)(a)(ii) Naga customary law and procedure, (1)(a)(iii) administration of civil and criminal justice involving customary law, (1)(a)(iv) ownership and transfer of land and resources. Furthermore, the Article places special responsibility with respect to law and order in the state of Nagaland in the hands of the Governor of Nagaland.
Essentially, Article 371(A) grants specific exclusions to Nagaland from the
Constitution of India that effectively entrench a negotiated sovereignty in the state.
Under the provision, Nagaland Legislative Assembly can make inapplicable any law passed by Indian Parliament pertaining to the above items. The Article is thus both a compromise on the demands for Naga independence, and an inheritance of decades of differential treatment of the Naga Hills.
Statehood did little to allay conflict. Rather, in the decades following statehood and Article 371(A), myriad insurgent groups formed from splits and divisions of earlier groups and formed from town and village-based movements.
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Disagreements over the authority to make collectively binding decisions were a significant factor in this factioning. As early as 1957 the Naga National Council (NNC) split along ideological lines between its moderate members, open to dialogue with the government of India, and members following Angami Zapu Phizo, opposed to negotiations. In 1967, Kaito Sema, Commander in Chief of Phizo’s NNC faction, and his brother Kughato Sema resigned from Phizo’s NNC and formed the anti-communist
Revolutionary Government of Nagaland (RGN). Throughout the 1960s and early
1970s, a series of further splits within the NNC and the Naga Federal Government
(NFG) took place, largely along tribal lines. In response to rising violence between
Naga nationalist factions, the Nagaland Peace Council was founded as a church-led initiative, with aims of persuading underground leaders to take part in peace talks with the Government of India. Five official rounds of talks were attempted between
1968 and 1975, culminating in the Shillong Accord (Das, 2011, p. 75).
The Shillong Accord, signed on 11 November 1975, was a pivotal moment in the Naga nationalist push. The Accord was signed between breakaway members of the Naga National Council (NNC) and the Government of India in Shillong in the state of Meghalaya. Under the Accord, representatives of some Naga nationalist groups agreed to accept, without condition, the Constitution of India (Shimray, 2005, p. 102).
However, NNC leadership including Phizo, Khodao Yantham, Isak Chishi Swu, and
Thunglaih Muivah were not present. The Accord thus marked a significant divide within the founding Naga nationalist group, and distinct from earlier divides, it involved a breakaway faction acceding to the demands of the Government of India.
At the meeting of the Naga National Assembly on August 15 to 16 1976, the Shillong
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Accord was rejected and denounced (Lotha, 2009, pp. 47, 48). Many Nagas today view the Accord as an act of treason against the nationalist movement and a ‘selling out’ of Naga independence.
In the wake of the Accord, violence between Naga nationalist factions increased dramatically. This violence took on tribal aspects, with many pro-Accordist members being from the economically dominant Angami tribe, and anti-Accordist members being a consortium of Konyak, Thangkhil, Khiamniungon, Sema, Ao, Mao, and Yimchung tribes. Following years of tension and infighting between pro-Accordist and anti-Accordist factions, Isak Chishi Swu, Thuingaleng Muivah and other anti-
Accordists sheltering in Myanmar formed the ‘National Socialist Council of Nagaland
(NSCN)’ on 31 January 1980 in the Eastern Naga Hills (Upper Myanmar) to establish a ‘People’s Republic of Nagaland’ based on Mao’s communist ideology (Das, 2011, p.
75) In 1988, the NSCN split again following open conflict between Hemi-Konyak Nagas of Burma, allied to S.S. Khaplang, and Tangkhul Nagas of Ukhrul, allied to Isak Chishi
Swu and Thuingaleng Muviah. This conflict led to the emergence of the two largest competing nationalist factions in Nagaland today, the National Council of Nagalim under Isak Chishi Swu and Thuingaleng Muviah (NSCN-IM), and the Nationalist
Council of Nagalim under S.S. Khaplang (NSCN-K). In this period, Naga nationalist groups continued attacks on Indian paramilitaries while also attacking each other and enforcing a violent hold over Naga communities. The 1980s and early 1990s were an especially violent period in the state, marked by conflict between nationalist groups and summary executions by nationalist groups of suspected spies and traitors, as well as public executions of drug dealers and drug users (Kikon, 2017a).
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Ceasefire
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Government of India sought to engage with its Southeast and East Asian neighbours in the form of new trade deals and closer economic ties. In December 1988, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi visited Thailand,
Myanmar, Vietnam, and China in an effort to nurture stronger trade connections. In
1991 the Government of India adopted a liberalized export-oriented economic model that depended to a great degree on closer economic and political ties to Asia. From the early 1990s the increasing focus on trade ties to Asia lent new weight and urgency to resolving pervasive conflicts spread throughout Northeast India. The failure of earlier agreements to pacify the Naga insurgency, and the limitations of military campaigns to contain the armed struggle combined with post-liberalization efforts to strengthen ties with Asian trade partners, through the northeast, compelled the
Government of India to engage in new negotiations to end conflict in the Northeast
(Longchari, 2016, p. 240). Ceasefire in Nagaland was a crucial component in these negotiations. The processes leading to this ceasefire began, roughly, in June 1995, when Prime Minister PV Narismha Rao met with Isak Chishi Swu of the NSCN-IM, seeking to resolve the ‘Naga problem’15 through political dialogue rather than military means. In November 1996 Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda sent former Union
Minister for State, Rajesh Pilot, to meet with NSCN-IM members in Bangkok.
Following this meeting, on February 03, 1997 Deve Gowda met with NSCN-IM leaders in Zurich. In August 1997 the NSCN-IM ceasefire agreement with the Union
15 The ‘Naga problem’ and ‘Naga issue’ are commonly used terms for Naga insurgency.
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Government of India was finalized. On April 9, 2000, Nagaland’s second largest nationalist group, the NSCN-K, announced its own unilateral ceasefire with the
Government of India on near identical terms, with the ceasefire period beginning in
2001.
Nagaland’s Current Predicament
Ceasefires signed in 1997 and 2001 mark the beginning of a complex peace- making process in Nagaland. Agreements between various Naga nationalist groups and the Government of India have been attempted in this time, with ceasefires occasionally being abrogated, re-negotiated, and in some cases abandoned completely. Nonetheless, the ceasefires signed in the late 1990s and early 2000s do mark the end of open hostilities between Naga nationalist groups and the Indian state. In the wake of ceasefire, Nagaland is a complex amalgamation of sovereign actors including India’s paramilitary, the Nagaland State Government, Naga customary institutions, and a number of shadow governments associated with Naga nationalist groups. In effect, public authority is shared between these actors. The overlapped and ambiguous nature of sovereignty is met with a degree of tolerance by the central and state governments. This tolerated plurality has been established through ceasefires signed between underground groups and the Government of
India, through special provisions in India’s Constitution enshrining customary village institutions and authorities, and through selective tolerance of overlapping territorial claims and illegal taxation, creating a tentative peace in the state that is only occasionally disrupted (Singha, 2017).
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Nagaland’s ‘disturbed’ status has been renewed every six months since the
AFSPA was enacted in September 1958. Indian paramilitaries continue to patrol communities and act with impunity throughout the state. The continuing presence of
Indian paramilitaries under the AFSPA creates a ‘parallel state’, described by Baruah
(2007a, p. 61) as ‘a parallel political structure that works outside the rules and norms that govern India’s democratic political institutions’. Essentially, the powers held by
Indian paramilitaries creates an alternative state system with its own rules and laws.
Using similar terms, Gaikwad (2009) refers to the Indian state’s treatment of the areas of Northeast India that are under AFSPA as a form of ‘quasi-colonialism’, where the post-colonial Indian state functions in ways similar to that of British East India
Company and British Crown treatment. Whether it’s described as a quasi-colony, or as a form of parallel statism, the impunity enjoyed by Indian forces in Nagaland, under AFSPA, and their existence on a different legal plane is clearly visible. Alongside this parallel state, Naga nationalist actors continue to operate and often breach the terms of ceasefires when leaving their designated camps, collecting illegal taxes and donations from business owners and government workers, and have ambushed
Indian paramilitaries on several occasions. The Nagaland State Government is somewhat caught in the middle of India’s efforts to undo Naga nationalist groups and establish a permanent peace in the state, and the close connections and overlaps between Naga nationalist actors, local elites, and politicians. As Wouters (2018, pp.
165, 166) argues, the image of the Naga underground and Nagaland state government as two opposed and discrete entities is in reality cut through by mutually
129 beneficial networks that contest any clear boundaries between state functionaries and national workers.
Simultaneously, Naga customary institutions govern local laws, oversee dispute resolution in towns and villages, and manage the ownership and transfer of land. These institutions are rarely codified but are passed on through lineage and oral histories and differ between tribes, clans, and villages. For example, the Ao Naga tribe’s customary decision-making body is the ‘Putu Menden’. Its members are nominated from each Ao tribe for a period of thirty years. The Angami tribe makes decisions through the ‘Chapi’. Western Rengma use the Kukhugu (king) along with a
Tsononyu council (southern Rengma groups), while the Eastern Rengma use the
Kekho’ong (king) along with a Pa’onga council (northern Rengma groups) (Devi, 2005, p. 80). In interior towns and villages especially, where Nagaland State Government is less visible, customary institutions function as embodiments of the state. Efforts to place these institutions into a framework for the state has created ambiguous overlaps between state and customary institutions. For example, the Nagaland
Village and Area Council Act (1978) formalizes Village Councils in Ch1. S5(b): ‘Provided further that Village institutions which were traditionally established like the ‘Putu
Menden’ in Ao Area and recognized as Village Council shall continue to function as
Village Council according to respective custom and usage’. Section 12 of the Village and Area Council Act (1978) details an exhaustive list of powers and duties held by
Village Councils, covering development, water supply, power, roads, forests, sanitation, education, and ‘other welfare activities’ (section 1), as well as helping other government agencies carry out development (section 2), and taking on
130 development works under their own initiatives (section 3). Essentially, the presence of Indian armed forces, paramilitaries, a poorly resourced state government, and customary institutions whose structures and legitimacy differs between urban and rural areas, tribes, clans, and villages has contributed to a complex and ambiguous sovereignty in Nagaland. The result is a dysfunctional governance marked by endemic and widespread corruption, unreliable or absent services, and broken infrastructure.
Conclusion
This chapter provided an introduction and background to Nagaland, previously, the Naga Hills District of Assam. I argued that Nagaland’s frontier status has roots in its difficult geography, being a part of ‘Zomia’, and in differential treatment by British colonial administrations. Following India’s independence in
1947, expectations of dramatic political change and independent sovereignty held by many Naga communities were quelled. Separatist pushes in Nagaland were met with draconian measures by the Indian government. Indian paramilitaries, the Assam
Rifles, were stationed throughout the Naga Hills District, permanent military camps and bases were established, and extraordinary laws were enacted in the form of the
Armed Forces Special Powers Act (1958) and the Disturbed Areas Act (1972). In 1963, the state of Nagaland was formed by combining the Naga Hills District of Assam with the Tuensang Frontier Division. Statehood included a special amendment to India’s
Constitution, Article 371(A), granting exclusions to Nagaland from Indian laws and protecting and preserving Naga customary institutions. Despite statehood and constitutional provisions, conflict in Nagaland continued, and throughout the 1970s
131 and 1980s a number of splits in Nagaland nationalist movement, first involving the
NSCN’s split from the NNC in 1980, and then the NSCN’s division into two warring factions, the NSCN-IM and the NSCN-K in 1989, resulted in a dramatic increase in internecine violence in the state and surrounding areas. In the 1990s, amid Indian efforts to liberalize the economy and strengthen connections with its Asian neighbours especially, resolving insurgent conflict in the Northeast gained new weight and urgency. A ceasefire was signed between the NSCN-IM and the
Government of India in 1997. In 2001, a near identical ceasefire was signed between the NSCN-K and the Government of India. While these ceasefires did not end conflict between Naga nationalist groups, they did mark the beginning of a prolonged peace- making process in Nagaland and the opening up of the state to greater political, economic, and cultural connections to India. In the following chapter, I discuss the ways that the state’s opening up, following ceasefire, has shaped new opportunities in Nagaland and the emergence of a nascent post-conflict middle class for whom
India is less associated with draconian violence and military occupation, and more associated with job creation, opportunity, and mobility.
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Chapter 5: Nagaland Opening Up Chimukedima. Dimapur
Photograph 5: Wall at Chimukedima. Dimapur. 2017. Taken by author.
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The above photograph was taken at the township of Chimukedima in
December 2017. Chimukedima was founded as a British outpost to ward off Naga raids on the foothills in 1866 and was the British headquarters of the Naga Hills
District until the headquarters was moved uphill to the present capital, Kohima, in
1878. Today, Chimukedima is considered by many to be the last point of foothills
Nagaland. It is at Chimukedima that Nagaland State Police check domestic travellers for the Inner Line Permits (ILPs) that are required to enter Nagaland beyond the foothills, giving the site significance as a bureaucratic marker between the foothills and the rest of the state. It is also at Chimukedima that travellers stop to pick up snacks, charge phones and buy phone credit before the three-hour uphill drive to
Kohima. In recent years, Nagaland’s largest city, Dimapur, has expanded significantly, and Chimukedima is quickly being enveloped into Dimapur’s outer suburbs. It is increasingly difficult to distinguish where the city of Dimapur ends, especially
Dimapur’s outer suburb, 7th Mile, and where Chimukedima begins. This rapid urban expansion is a result of closer economic, political, and cultural connections between
Nagaland and India in the wake of ceasefire. Towns and cities are growing, markets for goods and services are expanding, and more work is available in better connected urban areas.
The wall at Chimukedima offers an indication of some of the ways Nagaland, and especially Nagaland’s urban sites, are ‘opening up’ in the wake of ceasefire, involving new capital coming to the frontier, migration, and interactions with the
Indian state that are not exclusively militarized. At the top of the wall the poster
‘wake up Naga’s [sic], no time to pretend we have our fundamental rights in our land’ is one of a series of five posters placed throughout Dimapur and Dimapur’s surrounding suburbs and towns in late 2017 by the civil society group The Indigenous 134
Naga (TIN). The posters focused on illegal migration and perceptions that migrants, in this case illegal Bangladeshi immigrants (IBIs) are coming into Nagaland in growing numbers, working for cheaper wages, leasing and buying land illicitly, and marrying into the Naga community. Below The Indigenous Naga’s poster is advertising for
Airtel India’s 4G network. In the last decade especially, Indian connectivity technologies like Airtel have expanded immensely in Nagaland, and even isolated villages in the state’s interior have some degree of network access. To the left, instructions on how Aadhar [Aadhaar] holders can link their Aadhaar number to their
PAN card, their Sim card, and their Jio or Airtel account. Aadhaar is a Government of
India initiative under the Unique Identification Authority of India, created to apply a twelve-digit identity number to all residents of India linked to biometric data such as fingerprints and iris-scans. At the bottom of the wall, the poster from the Animal
Husbandry and Veterinary Services, Government of Nagaland, encourages small livestock holders to care for their livestock, and features a silhouetted image of a
Naga man, made distinct by his feathered headwear.
In this chapter I argue that closer economic and political connections between
Nagaland and India, the state’s ‘opening up’ in the wake of ceasefire, has encouraged the emergence of a post-conflict middle class who have different relationships with
India to older generations, have greater mobilities, and hold de-territorialized aspirations where ideas of a ‘good life’ are less reliant on Naga independence and in many ways are more dependent on closer ties to India. For this post-conflict middle class, the state’s opening up and liberalization challenges earlier binary distinctions between an oppressive militarized Indian occupation, and an oppressed and occupied
Nagaland. These distinctions overlook long histories of engagement between some
135 plains-based migrants in Nagaland, such as Marwari traders who have been established in Nagaland since the 19th century and Bengali migrants who worked building railroads from Assam’s plains to Dimapur, but are widely accepted and politically charged nonetheless.
In making this argument I employ observations made in Dimapur, Kohima, and Phek, as well as interviews with students, activists, and entrepreneurs in Dimapur and Kohima that took place between January 2016 and January 2020. As I discuss in later chapters in this thesis, the ways liberalization takes place in Nagaland creates new opportunities for some groups, marginalizes others, and encourages renewed resistance to migrants coming to the frontier and renewed assertions for preserving rigidly gendered Naga customary institutions. This offers critical insights into the ways post-conflict liberalization is experienced by men and the ways liberalization shapes gendered politics in frontier sites. In this chapter, I first conceptualize ‘opening up’ and detail some of the ways the processes and dynamics of opening up manifest in
Nagaland. These include new tourism initiatives, migration flows, urban developments, and cultural imports. Tourism, migration, urbanization and cultural imports is not an exhaustive list of changes that have taken place since ceasefire, and do not detail a complete description of the complex flows between Nagaland and the outside world since ceasefire. Rather, I discuss some aspects of these flows that are important in Nagaland, that are salient and that have relevance to the topics in this thesis. Following this, I discuss the emergence of a post-conflict middle class in
Nagaland, made possible by greater economic opportunities in the wake of conflict, and for whom India is more accessible and is engaged with in ways other than through experiences with Indian paramilitaries. As I discuss below, this is significant
136 in a frontier space that has, until very recently, known India almost exclusively through a draconian military presence and exceptional state violence.
‘Opening Up’
Throughout this thesis I employ the term ‘opening up’ to refer to liberalization taking place in Nagaland in the wake of conflict. Liberalization is a phenomenon marked by the rapid expansion of consumer cultures, the emergence of a consumption-focused middle class who have disposable incomes, and the increasing availability of a large variety of commodities in the market targeted towards this consumption-focused middle class (Mathur, 2010). Liberalization has far-reaching social and cultural effects, extending beyond the availability of goods and services and new livelihood opportunities, to shape identities, relationships, and cultures according to market-focused norms and values (Zabiliute, 2016). ‘Opening up' evokes liberalization in the sense that markets are expanding and new forms of capital are appearing in Nagaland, however, ‘opening up’ also evokes a more symbolic transformation involving new ways of interacting with, understanding, and imagining the Indian state, people and cultures from the plains, and the world outside of
Nagaland. This transformation encompasses infrastructure (Dzuvichu, 2013), resources (De Maaker, Kikon and Barbora, 2016), religion (Joshi, 2007), and identity
(Longkumer, 2018a). Many of these connections existed during Nagaland’s conflict
(von Fürer-Haimendorf, 1972). However, in the ceasefire era connections between
Nagaland and India are increasing and interactions are accelerating dramatically.
Since ceasefire, restrictions on entry into the state have been relaxed, especially for foreigners as the Government of India and Nagaland State Government attempt to
137 encourage a lucrative tourism industry. New businesses are opening and attempting to establish themselves in the emerging post-conflict economy. Goods and services that were previously less available across the state are much more available than ever before. Indian development funds are coming into the state with the goal of upgrading connective infrastructure and promoting peace-through-development’ through greater regional engagement (Baruah, 2007a, p. 17). Importantly, the easing of restrictions on entry and investment in the state, perceptions that ceasefire has leant a degree of stability to the state, and the emergence of a post-conflict economy
- all related, have also encouraged the further growth of interactions and connections between Nagaland and the outside world, especially India, thereby further accelerating the state’s opening up. This is a significant development in a frontier state that has historically been isolated from the outside world by protectionist policies, has vehemently rejected its inclusion in India, and where people’s experiences of the Indian state have typically been of an unwelcome and oppressive military occupation.
These changes are difficult to show on paper. Reliable figures that indicate
Nagaland’s economic, cultural, and political ties, as well as other changes taking place in the state, are elusive. Record-keeping of population growth, urban growth, business and trade in Nagaland is poor at best. While Nagaland has recorded India’s highest urban growth rate in the past two censuses (Eastern Mirror Nagaland, 2017), official statistics and figures for census and for elections in Nagaland since the 1970s have consistently been inaccurate or incomplete, and have often been doctored
(Wouters, 2015). The 2001 census in Nagaland was marred by disagreements over borders, jurisdictions, and inflated numbers between tribes attempting to secure greater representation in political bodies and access to development funds based on 138 population data (Das, 2017). Likewise, the 2011 census was highly contentious and reported population changes that were greatly divergent from earlier figures and local estimates (Agrawal and Kumar, 2013). Nagaland also hosts a large informal economy, which also adds to complications of rendering changes and developments legible. The informal economy involves off-the-books sale of licit goods and services, as well as a substantial trade in illicit goods such as drugs and alcohol, often through insurgent groups and military officers, and rumoured to also involve corrupt government officials.16 Migrants, often perceived to have come into the state illegally from Bangladesh, as well as a large population of Bihari and Bengali migrants, form an undocumented workforce that is difficult to count and assess. This only adds to
Nagaland’s statistical ambiguities and the difficulties of assessing the state’s post- conflict changes.
Nagaland’s opening up may be difficult to document but is widely understood to be taking place and is plain to see in Nagaland’s urban hubs and larger towns.
Below, I discuss Nagaland’s ‘opening up’ in through a discussion of some of the more visible emerging phenomena in the state. These include Nagaland’s emerging tourism industry, urbanization and the material changes to Nagaland’s towns and cities, migration outflows, and new cultural connections to Southeast Asia. This is not an exhaustive list of the ways Nagaland has changed in the period of ceasefire, but is a consideration of some of the more salient and impactful ways that ‘opening up’ manifests itself in the state.
16 This was often brought up in conversations with anti-corruption activists in Nagaland between 2016 and 2020.
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Nagaland’s Tourism Industry
Photograph 6: Mannequin of Naga man and woman at a row of tourist shops. Super Market. Dimapur. 2016. Taken by author.
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Tourism throughout Northeast India developed alongside efforts to subdue insurgencies and state-resistance in the region, and to open up the Northeast to greater economic engagement with the rest of India. India’s Ninth Five Year Plan
(Planning Commission, 1997) specifically focused on developing the tourism potential of the Northeast region. This was further promoted by India’s National Tourism Policy
(Department of Tourism, 2002), which argued for the development of cruise- tourism, ecotourism, and village-tourism in the Northeast. Following this, India’s
Tenth Five Year Plan (Planning Commission, 2002) further encouraged the development of professional tourism operators throughout the Northeast, and funded two new Hotel Management Institutes in the Northeast (Longkumer, 2008, p.
52). Nagaland’s tourism industry closely followed these wider trends, also developing in parallel to the ceasefire processes in the state. Prior to the 1997 ceasefire,
Nagaland had an especially small tourism industry, a result of decades of armed conflict, poor infrastructure and access, and of difficulties entering the state presented by the Restricted Area Permit system (Government of Nagaland, 2016b, p.
84). There were some cultural events that closely resembled tourism events. For example, in 1993, corresponding to the International Year of the World’s Indigenous
People, ‘Naga Week’ was organized by the Naga Peoples Movement for Human
Rights (NPHMR) and the Naga Students Federation (NSF) on the local Kohima ground, a large sports field and viewing platform in the centre of Kohima (Longkumer, 2013).
Naga Week involved twenty-seven Naga tribes from Nagaland, Assam, Manipur and
Burma gathering and constructing morungs (large dormitories) in a celebration of
141 their indigenous cultures (Longkumer, 2013). However, besides a small group of politicians, military officers, and botanists who came into the state for short periods, often under strict conditions and with specific invitations, tourism in Nagaland was practically non-existent.
Following the 1997 ceasefire, Nagaland’s tourism industry grew significantly.
In the year 2000 the Nagaland State Government adopted the Nagaland Tourism
Policy in response to growing tourism interest in Nagaland, making tourism a ‘priority area’ in the state’s governance (Government of Nagaland, 2016b, p. 84). Also in 2000,
Nagaland State Government inaugurated the Hornbill Festival at Kohima local ground. The Hornbill Festival is an annual event organized by the Nagaland State
Tourism Department and Nagaland Art and Culture Department. The festival was established with aims to revive, protect and preserve Naga heritage and to attract tourism (Hornbill Festival, 2015). The festival involves Naga dancers dressed in traditional clothing, live theatre, morung tours, selling wooden figurines and souvenirs, food and clothes stalls, acrobatics, pig-chasing, wrestling, a motor rally, the Hornbill International Rock Contest, the Miss Nagaland Beauty Pageant, and chili- eating contests (Longkumer, 2015). In 2003, the Festival was moved to its current location of Kisama, 10 kilometres south of Kohima, a ‘Naga Heritage Village’, designed as a mini-village and was commissioned by the State Government of Nagaland featuring amphitheatres and stages, traditional morung and small trade and food stalls. The Hornbill Festival is the dominant tourism event in Nagaland, and its calendar, in late December, marks Nagaland’s tourist season.
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Tourism in Nagaland involves contested and overlapping process of politicized history-making, and competing claims of authenticity. State tourism promotions involve selective histories that omit as much of the insurgency history of Nagaland and greater Northeast India as possible, and where mentioned, contextualize such history within a bigger picture of ‘warriors’ with a historical resistance to control
(Patil, 2011, p. 1000). Within Nagaland, the Hornbill Festival has had a mixed reception, and as . Longkumer (2015) argues, has taken on multiple layers of meaning. The first is that the Festival educates young Nagas and is a form of Naga cultural revival. Second, the festival reinforces a sense of Naga community, attracting participants from all districts, except for Naga communities living outside of the state of Nagaland. Third, the festival attempts to supersede local variants of identity and to encourage a state-wide Naga identity. Fourth, the Festival is a reconfiguration of the Naga identity to rewrite Naga history on its own terms, rather than being spoken for by Colonial sources and distant academics (Stockhausen, Wettstein and
Wettstein, 2008, p. 73). The Hornbill has also become a space of contentious representation of control and authority. The ten-day Festival is opened with the
Indian National Anthem, and the presence of the Indian Army is highly visible (Kikon,
2005). State promotions are also highly gendered, using male imagery of warriors, headmen, chiefs and headhunting and featuring women as passive items engaged in
‘traditional women’s activities’ and wearing ‘traditional women’s dress’ (ibid).
Similarly, private tourism companies also present nuanced histories of the Northeast, while occasionally mentioning the politically contested nature of the region.
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In many senses, Hornbill, and the wider tourism discourse in Nagaland are a negotiation of local practices and representations of Naga culture and society that appeal to a domestic and international audience (Wilkinson, 2017a). Despite the contentious nature of Nagaland’s tourism industry, and of the Hornbill Festival, the growth of tourism in Nagaland does mark a significant part of the state’s post- ceasefire opening up. People coming into Nagaland from other parts of India bring business to local traders and artisans (Keditsu, 2014). Besides the economic benefits,
Nagaland’s growing tourism industry has brought Nagaland, or ideas of what
Nagaland is, into a growing national awareness that the Northeast, Nagaland included, exists as a part of India.
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Urbanization
Photograph 7: 'Big Bazaar', Dimapur. 2019. Taken by author.
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Nagaland’s opening up is an especially urban phenomenon. Nagaland’s cities and towns such as Dimapur, Kohima, and to a lesser degree Wokha and Mokokchung are growing rapidly. These urban areas have more concentrated populations, are more connected to the plains through better though not necessarily good roads, and already established trading hubs. In Nagaland’s larger cities new buildings are being constructed and once-abandoned buildings are being repopulated by shops offering a wide variety of goods and services that were once unavailable in the state.
Nagaland’s largest city, Dimapur, is undergoing an urban boom, involving the construction of new multi-storey shopping complexes, the expansion of residential areas, and higher-density residential complexes extending to the city’s outer suburbs
(Morung Express, 2011). Nagaland’s capital, Kohima, is experiencing a similar transition. New multi-storey buildings have been constructed at an accelerating pace, with all of the single storey shopfronts that lined the ‘centre’ of Kohima, Old NST
Stand, in 2012, being replaced by four-and-above storey shopping complexes and office blocks by 2017. Trading hours for many businesses in Nagaland’s larger cities have also expanded, a result of general perceptions that it is safer to travel around the city after dark, and serving a consumer base that have more disposable income to spend at bars and restaurants.17 Notably, new consumer and investment spaces in
Nagaland’s larger cities appear to target a younger market with tastes that reflect global consumer cultures. Cafes serving espresso coffee have multiplied several-fold
17 Several Dimapuri shop-owners made special note in 2017 that they can stay open for later now because more people are comfortable being in the street at later hours.
146 in Dimapur and Kohima, as have higher-end fashion stores and electronics shops.
Consumer services that are targeted towards populations with more disposable incomes, such as dog-training services, car washing services, and travel agents offering international tourism packages, have also emerged recently. Urbanization does take place in Nagaland’s interior. In smaller towns and villages new construction projects are also taking place, albeit at a smaller scale. In Phek town, six hours east of
Kohima, primarily made up of single-storey wooden houses with red-rusted tin roofs, a new concrete shopping complex is under construction which brings with it the promise of consumer goods and conveniences on a scale that the town has not seen before. At four storeys tall it will be the tallest structure in the town, a claim that until
2018 was held by the Phek Town Baptist Church.However, these smaller towns and villages such as Phek, Kiphire, Meluri, Tuensang, and Mon remain poorly connected and serviced.
Indian capital plays an immense role in this change. New buildings such as modern shopping complexes are built using Indian capital and rented or owned by large corporations based in India. For example, new shopping complexes such as S3
Shopping Mall, constructed in Dimapur 2017, Big Bazaar constructed in Dimapur in
2018, and S2 Shopping Mall, constructed in Kohima in 2018, are owned by Kolkata- based Tirupati Group, Mumbai-based Future Group and Kolkata based Tirupati
Textrade Pty Ltd respectively. Indian mobile network providers such as Airtel and Jio cover most of Nagaland’s urban centres and are extending their coverage into
Nagaland’s interior. Indian car manufacturers such as TATA and Suzuki Maruti have
147 opened new shopfronts in Dimapur and Kohima. Other investment from other parts of the world also comes to the frontier. Chinese department stores such as Miniso, and Japanese Usupso, both opened shops in Dimapur and Kohima in 2019, and
Korean Gas Corp has made several attempts to establish a liquid-natural gas exporting unit in Nagaland since 2017. However, India’s presence is much greater, much more visible, and takes place alongside Government-led efforts to bring
Nagaland more closely into India’s fold in an attempt to encourage peace-through- development (Baruah 2009).
Importantly, the forms of India that are emerging in the frontier in the wake of ceasefire are not militarized and not associated with force and control. This represents a significant change. As discussed in the previous chapter, Nagaland has been a resistant frontier state since India’s 1947 independence. In 1951 a state-wide
Naga plebiscite voted in support of complete secession from India. From 1956, the
Naga National Council (NNC) led an armed resistance against India, which continued following Nagaland’s 1963 statehood. Essentially, Nagaland’s inclusion as a part of
India rested on militarization and exceptional laws used to curtail secessionist elements in the state. However, in the wake of ceasefire and as this conflict is brought to a close, India’s presence in the frontier is much more diverse and multifaceted.
Indian paramilitaries are present and continue to be a source of insecurity in the state, albeit less so than before. Indian capital investment in Nagaland is increasingly the mode through which India is experienced and understood. This is markedly
148 different from the ways India was experienced and understood in the period before ceasefire and especially in the 1950s and 1960s.
India’s growing commercial presence in Nagaland is also distinct from local infrastructure and local business. Indian capital at the post-conflict frontier stands out. Newer Indian commercial and investment spaces such as shopping complexes, car-shops, and office buildings are bigger than the surrounding infrastructure and reflect a global consumerist aesthetic. They are typically made of concrete, glass and polished chrome, often standing several storeys above surrounding buildings (for example, see Photograph 7). This new commercial infrastructure does not have visible rebar rods on rooftops or exposed on other parts of the building like many other structures in the state do. Inside, staff often wear uniforms or in some cases suits and ties, and standards of neatness and professional presentation are apparently enforced. Local enterprise, on the other hand, is of a much smaller scale.
Typically, locally owned businesses in Nagaland are sited in one and two storey concrete complexes, with large metal roller doors for security at entrances, and rusted rebar rods exposed on rooftops. Open-hours are often unpredictable, as owners may close at any time of day to run errands, take rest, take lunch at home, or because business has been slow that day. Uniforms are typically not worn in these shops, and demeanours are usually more relaxed and slower paced. Staff are often relatives of the owner and school-age children are occasionally found standing in for the owner or for other workers. Other locally owned enterprises are marketed towards a burgeoning tourism industry and adopt building styles that reflect a ‘pan-
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Naga’ tribal aesthetic - made with bamboo or local timber, with thatch roofing and featuring Naga head-hunter/warrior motifs and hornbill sculptures. The effect of the contrast between Indian commercial infrastructure and that of local enterprise is felt.
Indian capital in the frontier is monolithic, it evokes an image of modern development marked by high-rise construction, clean streets, and functional infrastructure that stands in stark contrast to the dysfunctional infrastructure of the surrounding city.
Not all development in the state is Indian and not all Indian development is monolithic or modern, but larger and more modern consumer and investment spaces are almost always Indian or funded by Indian investment, and this Indian commercial infrastructure replicates an ultramodern aesthetic that local development is unable to emulate.
Naga Out-Migration
Nagas are leaving Nagaland to work, study, and live in India’s larger cities for periods of their life. This is not a phenomenon limited to Nagaland. People from
Northeast India, especially younger people, come in large numbers to India’s larger cities – Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore especially, to study at universities and colleges that have better reputations and offer more courses than those in the Northeast, to work in a number of different fields, and to live in a more connected and cosmopolitan city (McDuie-Ra, 2012c). This is also not a new phenomenon. Migration from Northeast India has been occurring and increasing since India’s Independence
(Angelova, 2015, p. 155). However, since the late 1990s, migration from Northeast
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India to other parts of India has accelerated, and migration from Nagaland to other parts of India has reflected this acceleration especially since ceasefires were signed in the state (ibid). Indeed, when doing fieldwork for this thesis, it was common to meet with Nagas who had ether lived for periods of their life in Delhi, Mumbai,
Kolkata or Bangalore, or who regularly travelled between Nagaland and other parts of India. This was especially the case with younger Nagas, many of whom maintained close contact and friendships with people in India’s larger cities and visited regularly.
When in larger Indian cities, Northeastern migrants, Nagas included, experience racism and discrimination. Nagas and other Northeast Indians look distinct when in larger Indian cities. They are often mistaken for foreigners, from
China, Japan or Korea. Associated with their appearance, racist taunts such as ‘Chinki’ are commonly experienced by Naga and other Northeast migrants. Landlords often will overcharge Northeast migrants for rent, and neighbours often complain about the smell of traditional Northeast Indian cooking, such as Axone.18 Women from
Northeast Indian communities are often assumed to be lascivious, available, or prostitutes when walking alone or in groups in larger Indian cities, and face harassment because of these assumptions (McDuie-Ra, 2012c). Men from Northeast
India live with a higher risk of being attacked, and murders of men from Northeast
18 The experience of Axone-related discrimination in particular is commonplace among many Northeast Indian communities in Delhi and other Indian cities, to the degree that it was the central theme of the 2019 film Axone, which premiered at the 2019 London Film Festival.
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India in street fights or other confrontations in Indian cities are often racially motivated in some way (McDuie-Ra, 2015).
Despite incidents of racism and discrimination, Nagas and other people from
Northeast India continue to come to India’s cities in growing numbers (Hazarika,
2018). India’s larger cities offer opportunities for study, work, and for living away from towns and cities in the Northeast that, while more peaceful and connected now, continue to be militarized and offer less livelihood opportunities than larger Indian cities do. While living in Indian cities, Naga and other Northeast Indian migrants do experience racism, but also forge connections and friendships, build relationships and bonds, and form identities that are adjacent and overlapping (McDuie-Ra, 2016a).
Migrant communities from Northeast India encourage further migration, and professionals who have established themselves in India’s larger cities in hospitality and other service-oriented industries have in some cases returned to the Northeast to establish training colleges and work placement services that act as bridges between Northeast Indian communities and larger Indian cities. In Nagaland, several training colleges specialized in providing hospitality and flight attendance training, and offer placements in large hotel chains and airlines in Delhi, Mumbai, and
Bangalore as a part of the training program. Hence, out-migration from Northeast
India, Nagaland included, since the late 1990s has encouraged a strengthening of connections with ‘main’ India, albeit alongside experiences of racism and discrimination.
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Youth Cultures and Nagaland’s ‘Hallyu Wave’
Photograph 8: "Clown Crew", a KPop-inspired Naga dance troupe active between
2009 and 2017. Dimapur. 2016. Taken by Author
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In the wake of ceasefire, other forms of cultural exchange outside of tourism mark the opening up of the state to new cultural exchanges and expanding possibilities for identity. This is highly visible in the Hallyu wave, or Korean wave in
Nagaland beginning in the late 2000s, involving the adoption of South Korean fashions, consuming South Korean media including Korean soap operas and KPop
(Korean Pop) music, and overall closely identifying with South Korea and other
Southeast Asian cultures more closely than with Indian culture (Yimchunger, 2020).
In larger towns in Nagaland such as Dimapur and Kohima, as well as some of
Nagaland’s smaller urban centres such as Phek and Tuensang, the influence of
Korean, Japanese, and other Southeast Asian cultures is clear. Local supply shops commonly stock a small shelf of South Korean soap operas on DVD or saved onto USB flash drives, local youth dance troupes are often seen, or heard, practicing with
Korean KPop music, and South Korean second hand clothes are in growing demand especially in Kohima and Dimapur’s central market areas (Kuotsu, 2013). Since the mid-2010s, a number of KPop bands have included Dimapur in their touring schedules, and have made appearances at the annual Hornbill Festival (Gupta, 2019).
More recently, a Japanese influence has followed the South Korean lead. A number of smaller retail stores in the state emulating the distinct white-plastic minimalistic shopfront style of the Japanese chain store Daiso, although following inquiry into these shops in 2019/2020, I found that they are Chinese-owned chain stores that only resemble the Japanese Daiso chain. Regardless, it is clear that there is a significant and in growing interest in closer economic and cultural ties between Southeast Asia in Nagaland. Communities in Nagaland, especially Naga youth, connect to cultural
154 icons and trends in Southeast Asia. Likewise, conglomerates and exporters throughout Southeast Asia see Nagaland as a site where their goods and services are in demand and where opening a chain store, or licensing a franchise are worthwhile endeavours (Dhawan, 2017).
Ghosal (2012) argues that the fascination with emulating Korean, Japanese and other Southeast Asian cultural trends among younger Nagas is the outcome of two phenomena. The first is the effective ‘closing off’ of Nagaland during the most violent years of the insurgency, which fostered a receptive connection to the outside world in Nagaland through connecting to Asian television networks and digitally connecting to the outside world. Essentially, when the world could not come to
Nagaland, Naga communities brought the world in through TV, radio, and pirated tapes and DVDs from Southeast Asia. The second is the tension between Indian culture and Nagaland, where the Naga experience of the Indian hegemon is rooted in decades of differential treatment and exceptional violence at the hands of the
Indian state. The Hindi language has only recently become widely spoken in Nagaland
(Kikon, 2003), and the dramas and issues explored by Bollywood and Indian music are considered to be alien (Ghoshal, 2012). In light of this cultural difference, non-Indian forms of entertainment such as Korean soap operas and KPop music, as opposed to
Bollywood films and Hindi music, for example, offers a connection to a society that resonates with young Nagas, with celebrities that more closely physically resemble
Nagas , and an aspirational link to the Asian economic powerhouse as Indian economic gains have failed to reach the Northeastern states (ibid).
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Cosmopolitan Aspirations in the Post-conflict Frontier
Hannah and I sat in her kitchen discussing her business. She runs a small shop in central Kohima but leaves her two assistants in charge for much of the time the shop is open, while she travels back and forth between Delhi, Mumbai, and
Bangalore. Before opening the shop, Hannah worked in Bangalore for a global IT corporation, earning a comfortable wage and enjoying many of the freedoms associated with living away from Nagaland. Three years ago, she left Bangalore to open the business in Kohima, where she can set her own hours and spend more time close to her family. The business is quiet most of the year but is busy during
Nagaland’s wedding season, between November and the end of December. Outside of those weeks, Hannah is free to visit friends in other parts of India and spend time with her family in Kohima. That Hannah spends long periods outside of Nagaland is nothing particularly new. While the state is changing, Nagaland continues to be very much cut-off from India, and feels isolated and out-of-the-way with poor infrastructure and limited opportunities for education, livelihoods, and leisure and recreation. For decades, Nagas have had to leave the state to access opportunities for education and work. This was especially the case during the heights of Nagaland’s conflict, when many Nagas travelled to the nearby states of Assam and Meghalaya for work and education. However, in the wake of ceasefire, accelerating flows between India and Nagaland have encouraged even more movement into and out of
Nagaland. Importantly, not only are Nagas moving between Nagaland and India more often, but they are increasingly travelling farther, not only to other parts of Northeast
156
India, but to more distant and larger cities in India such as Bangalore, Mumbai, and
Delhi. This is a recent development. As Hannah described it in her own words:
You need to understand, we are the first generation. My parents,
they never could go to places like that [Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi]. For
us now, it’s nothing, but for them, it’s such a big deal, and that’s for
most of us here.19
These different experiences with India do not only take place through Nagas travelling to other parts of India, although this has a large role to play in changing relationships and understandings between Naga communities and India. Greater mobility and freedom to move, and move farther, is indicative of the changes taking place and new possibilities emerging in the frontier in the wake of ceasefire. The frontier is changing, and while Nagas are going to larger Indian cities more often, the
Indian hegemon is also coming into the frontier at an accelerating rate and in different forms than before. Encouraged by these accelerating flows between
Nagaland and other parts of India, and alongside the changes taking place in the state in the wake of ceasefire, relationships between Nagas and India are changing. This leads to the second argument I make in this chapter. As Nagaland opens up and liberalizes in the wake of ceasefire, through state and market penetration, and as the circle of stakeholders in Nagaland’s economic and political incorporation into India expands, ceasefire and liberalization have accelerated the conditions for the
19 Interview (December 2019)
157 emergence of a post-conflict middle class. A middle class in Nagaland is not new.
While, many local and outside voices argue that Nagaland is an egalitarian and classless society (Shimray, 2002; Lotha, 2009), Nagaland has a well-established elite class that have maintained their status through dominating customary institutions and sections of the government as well (Sema, 2018). However, Nagaland’s post- conflict middle class is distinct in terms of their urban location, education, qualifications, relative wealth, job opportunities, and cosmopolitan values. They move between Nagaland and other parts of India more regularly and benefit from closer relations with India in ways that older generations of Nagas did not. This post- conflict middle class hold de-territorialized and cosmopolitan aspirations, delinked from pushes for Naga independence and informed by new possibilities brought through closer connections to India and new opportunities appearing at the post- conflict frontier. While this post-conflict middle class may support Naga autonomy and may sympathise with a wider push for Naga nationhood, they are also more attached to India, materially benefit from closer economic incorporation and greater political integration of Nagaland as a part of India, and are more likely to identify as
Indian and to see Indian identity and Naga identity as not being mutually exclusive.
The nascent post-conflict middle class is distinct from the elites that captured large sections of the state government and economy during Nagaland’s decades of conflict. Groups such as the NNC derived a support base in a context where India was known almost exclusively through engagements with Indian paramilitaries who occupied large portions of the state, acted with impunity, had no local accountabilities, and were associated with human rights abuses and targeted sexual
158 violence. Atrocities at the hands of Indian paramilitaries were especially rife during the years of initial militarization through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. From a population of Nagas living under this draconian occupation, a miniscule but influential tribal elite of Christian, Western educated Nagas emerged, many of whom had political connections and resources gathered through associations with Naga nationalist groups and through capturing sections of the conflict economy, while others had established themselves through accessing opportunities outside of these systems and outside of the state. This tribal elite was anchored to customary institutions and notions of reviving a loosely drawn traditional Naga society and defending a romanticized tribal way of life, marked by rigidly gendered customary institutions, utopian visions of Naga village democracies, and a social model of
‘equality as tradition’ espousing dogmatic gender roles and strict Christian moral sensibilities (Longkumer, 2018a). However, in the ceasefire era this imagined tribal utopia is open to challenge as many younger Nagas have a different relationship and different experiences with the Indian state. As Manchanda & Bose (2011, p. 55) argue, ‘Phizo’s imagined tribal utopia is threatened, especially after Naga statehood and the entry of the market economy. A small but ‘new’ middle class comprising bureaucrats, businesspeople, lawyers, teachers, student unions and women’s groups has emerged with consequences for reshaping Naga national aspirations’. While abductions, crossfire killings, rapes, and sexual abuse do continue to take place at the hands of Indian paramilitaries (McDuie-Ra, 2012d), the organized village and granary burning, summary executions, and systematic sexual abuse at the hands of Indian paramilitaries that took place in the earlier years of the conflict do not occur in the
159 state anymore. Importantly, as Naga insurgent groups fragmented in the 1980s and
1990s violence committed by Naga nationalist groups within the Naga community has become more commonplace, blurring the lines between heroic Naga freedom fighters and parasitic tribal and clan-based gangs (Kikon, 2017a).
This emerging post-conflict social configuration has accrued the benefits of the Indian state structure and of market expansion into the frontier in ways that earlier tribal elites and older generations of Nagas have not. They are more likely to be exposed to national and international ideas about democracy, governance, and citizenship that are at odds with the tribal and clan-based patronage systems of governance in Nagaland, shaped through decades of conflict and state-dysfunction
(Manchanda and Kakran, 2017, p. 65). This post-conflict middle class engage more with the world outside of Nagaland through new mobilities and new technologies and live more urban and connected lifestyles that are entangled with Indian commerce, cultures and politics. As discussed in the section above, interactions with
India are now more often marked by new consumer spaces and Indian investment in the frontier. Expanded markets and new goods and services available in the frontier, through greater access to Indian cities such as Delhi and Mumbai, make aspirations involving pan-global consumer cultures more realistic and possible. Urban lifestyles involving gainful employment and consumer options are more possible, offering livelihood options other than agriculture or highly competitive government jobs.
Careerism, though still limited, is increasing in urban hubs where new commercial and investment spaces hire local workers and more capital is available to spend on consumer goods and services. Hence, this small but growing social grouping of
160 educated and professional Naga men and women ‘straddle both the traditional tribal institutions and modern socio-economic structures [and are] expanding the Naga public sphere and reshaping its society and politics’ (Manchanda and Kakran, 2017, p. 64). Hazarika (2017) sums up the generational nature of this change aptly, arguing that:
a new generation of younger people from the northeast [is]
engaging with India and Indians, not as fighters against Delhi’s Raj but
as equals seeking acceptance of these rights and entitlements.
Perhaps it is here that the core conditions of the region have
changed—that a generation of young Indians from this area,
exhausted by conflict and bloodshed, by ill will and stress, now seek to
carve a new way for themselves based on the laws and systems of
‘mainland’ India. This is a remarkable change from an earlier time
when their forebears, perhaps even their parents, were involved in
political and armed fights for independence or autonomy against
India.
In this context of opening up, this small but growing social grouping navigates the traditional tribal institutions and patriarchal customs that aim to insulate and preserve a perceived natural order in the state, and modern socio-economic structures that challenge these institutions and norms through the disruptive potential of new economies and closer connection to the world outside the state. In other words, in the space of two generations, and in many cases just one, attitudes
161 to and relationships with India have changed immensely, and young Nagas are very cognizant of and involved in this change.
Importantly, the above discussed changes in Nagaland, some visible manifestations of ceasefire, run parallel to Naga nationalism and support for Naga autonomy in the state. As I discuss further in the following chapter, Naga nationalism continues to enjoy a degree of widespread support, even though Naga nationalist actors themselves have lost popular support. However, alongside support for protected Naga autonomy especially, Indian capital and closer ties to India are actively pursued. New commercial and investment brings jobs into a frontier state that has a very high unemployment rate and where there are few livelihood opportunities outside of agriculture or highly competitive jobs in the public sector.
Indian capital in the frontier brings with it new construction projects and commercial spaces that Nagaland-based investors cannot build and that make urban lifestyles and consumer aspirations appear possible in ways that, without Indian investment, would not be possible. As one discussant, David, offers his own perspective on India’s more recent commercial and political involvement in Nagaland,
Nagaland needs India to give us money. So much money comes
in. What if they didn’t? Look around, how much of these clothes are
made in Nagaland? Nothing. Nothing we can make. How would people
do? What? Will we all go back to the jungle? (laughs) All those big men
who want independence, it’s like [name removed]… They talk about
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villages and traditions. They don’t work, don’t jhum [slash-and-burn
agriculture]… People in Dimapur, young people, we want to do
business. We want it like Singapore. We can do business. Speak
English. It’s just the development, that’s all. We can do call centres,
selling jobs. It’s better than the Indians can. It’s just no development.20
Until very recently, conflict in Nagaland discouraged private investment except for a few extractive industries, which themselves were disrupted by nationalist groups, disagreements over land rights and ownership, and the state’s poor infrastructure (Kikon and McDuie-Ra, 2017; Wouters, 2018; Kikon, 2019). In the wake of ceasefire, Indian capital investment is coming into the state at an accelerating rate. Indian investment and the growing presence of Indian consumer and investment spaces in the frontier make forms of development seem possible in ways that are hard to imagine happening otherwise. This is especially the case in
Nagaland’s urban hubs, where more investment from the outside, most often India, enables new urban developments to be constructed at a very fast pace and new businesses to open up. These newer forms of India are, unlike earlier forms, not militarized and not associated with force and control. These forms are also distinct from the images of independent village democracies espoused by Naga nationalist actors. This ‘opening up’ and the state’s liberalization in the wake of ceasefire has also fostered the emergence of a post-conflict middle class, whose experiences with
20 Interview (December 2017)
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India greatly differ from those of older Nagas, and for whom closer ties to India are more likely to be beneficial and demanded, rather than oppressive and resisted.
As well as being at odds with the ideas and ideals of nationalism and citizenship of older generations, Nagaland’s post-conflict middle class also has different gender dynamics. New opportunities for Naga women that were much less available in the years before ceasefire have appeared, including the opportunity to travel to other parts of India for work, to start a business at home in the frontier, and to invest time and effort into careers with the potential for promotions and upward mobility. In many senses, women in Nagaland have been especially able to reap the benefits of the state’s post-conflict economic expansion, often having more positive experiences when working and studying in larger Indian cities and accessing opportunities for higher education that many men in the state appear to forego
(McDuie-Ra, 2012c; Das, 2019). These opportunities reflect the possibilities offered by expanding markets in Nagaland in the wake of conflict and a greater ability to travel outside of Nagaland, shared by everyone, including Hannah in the example above. These opportunities have the potential to challenge conflict-informed ideas about gender and the rigidly gendered structure of Naga society in ways that were not challenged before, in particular ideas that women are unable to participate in politics in Naga society, and men hold a ‘natural strength’ that is inclined towards protecting, representing, and leading Naga society. In Chapter 8 of this thesis, I expand on these ideas and the ways they are changing. The purpose of this section is to clarify that these changes are taking place in the frontier, that ceasefire and the opening up of the frontier is the major contributor to these changes, and as a result
164 a new social configuration is emerging in Nagaland comprising of younger Nagas who engage with India in different ways and benefit from closer ties to the Indian hegemon.
Emerging Urbanities in the Post-conflict Frontier
At the beginning of this chapter, a collection of posters at Chimukedima was presented. The posters offered an insight into some of the ways the Indian state, markets, and technologies are expanding in Nagaland in the wake of ceasefires signed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and are indicative of wider changes taking place throughout the state. These changes are led by Indian private investment occurring alongside efforts by the Indian state to bring Nagaland and the wider Northeast
Indian region closer into the Indian fold. This process is difficult to document, but is visible in the state, and especially visible in Nagaland’s growing urban areas.
Businesses and trading hours are expanding. New consumer spaces are emerging, and markets are selling goods and services that were not available before. India is attached to almost all of these changes. Overall, people in Nagaland are interacting with India in ways that are different to the almost exclusively militarized interactions that took place during ceasefire. While India's presence in Nagaland is still marked by military occupation and an ongoing state of exception, India is also increasingly experienced as new development, new commercial spaces, and new goods and services in the frontier. As new Indian capital and non-militarized forms of the Indian state emerge in the frontier, understandings of India are also changing. The state’s conflict with the Indian centre shaped a popular imaginary of India as a hegemonic military power that exists in opposition to and as a threat to Naga territory, culture,
165 and society. As some of the discussants in this chapter alluded to, more recent Indian investment and capital challenge this binary distinction. The image of an oppressor- occupier India and an oppressed-occupied Nagaland that has been the mainstay of the Naga nationalist movement since the mid-1950s has become much less clear.
Although much of the economic stagnation, state dysfunction, and isolation of the state has roots in decades of armed conflict with India and in India's exceptional treatment of the state, people's immediate experience with India today is very different. Indeed, for many, closer attachment to India brings benefits, freedoms, and opportunities that are simply not possible in India’s absence.
Nagaland’s opening up has fostered the conditions for the emergence of a post-conflict Naga middle class who are more urban, have more options in terms of employment and livelihoods, travel between India and Nagaland more often, and overall have different attitudes to India than older generations. Through these mobilities and through interacting with new capital in the frontier, members of this nascent middle class are exposed to national and international ideas and developments about citizenship, agency, and gender that are very much at odds with older norms and sensibilities (Manchanda and Bose, 2011, p. 55). In particular, the aspirations of this middle class are de-linked from pushes for independence and detached from the visions for independent village democracies imagined by Naga nationalist groups. Rather, aspirations among this post-conflict middle class are more closely linked to consumer cultures and individual notions of success through career opportunities and new mobilities, made more possible by Indian capital coming into
Nagaland. This is a significant shift for a frontier society that is emerging from decades
166 of conflict that was aimed at resisting and repelling the Indian state and Indian influences.
The changes taking place in Nagaland as the state opens up in the wake of conflict offer two insights into the nature of liberalization in the frontier. First, these changes are indicative of the ways post-conflict liberalization is experienced in other frontier areas in India. The typical focus of discussions of liberalization in India has been on India’s central regions and ‘global’ cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and to some extent Kolkata (Lahiri, 2010; Ramakrishnan, 2014). India’s post-1991 liberalization in these sites is approached as a transition from socialist-style development embodied in monolithic public infrastructure projects such as dams, highways, factory-cities, and massive agricultural projects. Fernandes (2006, p. 37) argues that ‘if the tenets of Nehruvian development could be captured by symbols of dams and factories, the markers of Rajiv Gandhi’s regime shifted to commodities that would tap into the tastes and consumption practices of the urban middle class’. For many communities in India’s frontiers, however, this monolithic state-led development is lacking and has been since before Independence. Rather, in these peripheral sites, ‘development’ has historically been securitized, either oriented towards the military, or provided by the military (McDuie-Ra, 2008). Hence, where liberalization for many people in India’s central hubs has meant a shift from socialist- style centralized development to less-regulated export-oriented markets, for India’s frontier sites, liberalization means a much more sudden encounter with Indian capital, goods, and services in a context of militarization and occupation, insecurity, and governance shaped by pervasive conflict and the presence of multiple competing modes of authority.
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This is especially the case for other Northeast Indian states. Large sections of the Northeast have until recently been relatively untouched by the monolithic development projects of post-independence India. Rather, development in
Northeast India follows securitized priorities, where state resources and state-led development projects either aim to establish, or at least take into consideration, the maintenance of a hyper-modern military and the logistics of enforcing state-authority onto resistant populations. Since Independence, the states of Assam, Arunachal
Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura have all hosted separatist conflicts, have been militarized to various degrees, and continue to host a noticeable and significant military presence. Liberalization in Northeast India takes place adjacent to state-violence, state-resistance, and overall what Vajpeyi (2009) refers to as a ‘resentment’ of the Indian state. In places like Nagaland, especially in interior villages, this resentment is widespread. Nearly every household has a story of an uncomfortable interaction with Indian paramilitaries, of somebody being temporarily detained, or forced to provide identification details, or otherwise delayed or inconvenienced by Indian paramilitaries. Many households have stories of a father, brother, or uncle who was taken by Indian paramilitaries for questioning and returned beaten, injured, and in many cases did not return at all. Many keep vigilant and frustrated silence about a mother, sister, or aunty who was raped, sexually assaulted or harassed by Indian paramilitaries. Some Nagas have, at great personal risk to themselves and their families published these stories for a wider audience (for example Ao, 2013, 2014b, 2014a; Kikon, 2015a). New investment in the frontier and the opportunities associated with engaging with India’s economic opportunities does not ‘undo’ this resentment (McDuie-Ra, 2016a). This chapter has made no argument that this is the case. Rather, the negotiated closing of conflicts in Northeast Indian 168 frontier states, attempts to develop new functional infrastructure, the expansion of markets, and otherwise strengthened ties to the Indian ‘centre’ coexist with a resentment of the Indian state. Karlsson (2013, p. 329) offers some insight into the co-existence of resentment of the Indian state and calls for more Indian engagement with the frontier with reference to the wider Northeast Indian region:
People in [the] Northeast India seem to straddle between a kind
of longing for the state and the opposite, that is, a rejection of it… Most
insurgent organizations… seek legitimacy by referring to the failure of
the Indian state to deliver development. People hence hope for a state
that can provide functional transport, education, health services, and
justice. The controversy rather relates to whether one believes the
Indian state, that far away centre or Delhi, to be interested in or
capable of delivering that.
Likewise, McDuie-Ra (2012a, p. 40) argues, with reference to the wider
Northeast region, that ‘the mistrust of the past and present lingers, but is assuaged by a mixture of necessity and opportunity’. Liberalization and economic opportunities are presented, and delivered, alongside continuing military occupation, exceptional laws, and state-violence. In this sense, liberalization in the frontier encourages complex relationships between frontier communities and the central state, where resentment and distrust exist alongside new opportunity and connection.
Second, liberalization in Nagaland offers insight into the way liberalization at the post-conflict frontier creates new divisions and distinctions. Liberalization has created an environment where the emergence of a middle class defined by a
169 cosmopolitan consumerism is more possible. This middle class reflects wider middle class norms, linked to an ‘increasing dynamic in which commodities are seen as positive social identifiers, and where visible, aspirational consumption has become a key signifier of middle class status’ (Nielsen and Wilhite, 2015, p. 383). The consumer middle class can be accessed and middle-class status achieved through consumption and through navigating the new economic landscape to scale old social and cultural barriers (Osella and Osella, 1999). Young people in India today actively seek to cross these social and cultural barriers, constructed around caste, class, and gender, and build new identities through engaging with consumer cultures. This is done through buying the right clothes (Gilbertson, 2014), through owning cars (Nielsen and Wilhite,
2015), through eating middle class diets (Sahakian, Saloma and Ganguly, 2018), through collecting qualifications and degrees from various legitimate and illegitimate institutions (Fernandes, 2006, p. 92), and through engaging with and immersing themselves in cosmopolitan sites such as large shopping malls and showrooms
(Zabiliute, 2016). The idealized depiction of the new Indian consumer discussed by
Fernandez (2000, 2006) is typically north Indian, is formally educated (Kumar, 2008) and is able to speak, read, and write in Hindi and English (Jayadeva, 2018). There is little representation, or recognition, of groups that do not match the image of Aryan
Indians (Wouters and Subba, 2013).
At the post-conflict frontier, however, decades of conflict have hindered the development of consumer markets. The closing of conflict in the frontier involves a rapid ‘opening up’ of these territories to new investments and to new markets. This has the effect of magnifying the inclusive and exclusive aspects of liberalization. The ability to access the opportunities presented by new capital in the frontier depends
170 to a great extent on age, on one’s fluency in English and Hindi, on an individuals’ mobility and on an individual’s ability to appeal to a market-oriented aesthetic that is very much at odds with rural and village livelihoods and sensibilities (McDuie-Ra,
2012a). This change is youth-oriented, and is especially gendered, presenting Naga women in particular with opportunities to be more mobile, become more economically empowered, and gain new forms of independence that decades of conflict in the state had discouraged, and which challenge a conflict-informed patriarchal social and political structure in the state that assumes the survival of Naga society depends on the maintenance of a rigidly gendered social and political order.
As I expand on in the following chapters, the experiences of ceasefire, liberalization, and the new forms of Indian capital and the Indian state emerging in the frontier have given rise to new social divisions, new forms of marginalization, and new assertions and contestations that are linked to the ways that this typically younger urban middle class have been able to capture the benefits of ceasefire and liberalization in the frontier while other groups such as former combatants, older and lesser skilled men, and Naga conservatives, have been unable to or are threatened by.
Conclusion
Since ceasefire, new Indian capital and non-militarized forms of the Indian state are appearing in the frontier at an accelerating rate. Indian investors are building super-modern shopping and office complexes, opening businesses that sell goods and services that were previously unavailable, and providing jobs in a state with high unemployment and few opportunities for work outside of the public sector.
People’s interactions with the Indian state are not exclusively militarized, and involve
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Indian development and welfare programs, and overall a clearer sense of Indian citizenship. The effect of these closer ties to India is significant. Indian-led capital investment in the frontier especially makes ideas of modern development and functional infrastructure more possible, and has given rise to a post-conflict middle class for whom India is less associated with draconian violence and military occupation, and more associated with job creation, opportunity, and mobility.
Throughout this thesis I discuss the ways emerging social configurations in the wake of conflict are attached in important and significant ways to the loss of popular support for Naga nationalist groups, to new forms of marginalization emerging in the post-conflict frontier, and to new assertions, contestations and new forms of conflict appearing in the wake of ceasefire in Nagaland. In the following chapter, I discuss the fragmentation of the Naga nationalist movement and broader experiences in
Nagaland of extortion and violence at the hands of Naga national workers, and the ways the shift of Naga national workers from ‘freedom fighters’ to criminals and extortionists has shaped men’s aspirations and associations with Naga nationalism and nationalists in the wake of ceasefire.
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Chapter 6. Legacies of Conflict
Chedema Peace Camp, Kohima. March. 2016
Photograph 9: NNC Guard at Chedema Peace Camp, Kohima. 2016. Taken by author.
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March 22, 2016 marked the 60th Nagaland Republic Day recognized by
Nagaland’s oldest nationalist-insurgent group, the Naga National Council (NNC). The day celebrates the establishment of the Federal Government of Nagaland on March
22, 1956. Other Naga nationalist groups, such as the NSCN-IM celebrate their own republic days on different dates, marking the day that their respective governments were founded. The NNC’s Nagaland Republic Day involved an assembly of supporters at Chedema Peace Camp, the headquarters of the Federal Government of Nagaland on the outskirts of Kohima. NNC president Viyalie Metha opened the event in a similar fashion to most public events in Nagaland, with a series of Christian blessings and prayers, and extended thanks given to the speakers and special guests at the occasion. Following the prayer and welcome, Metha delivered an extended recounting of the difficult circumstances that the Federal Government of Nagaland was founded in. As with most nationalist histories of Nagaland, his speech started with the events of August 14, 1947, and guided the audience through the hardships and injustices endured by Naga communities at the hands of Indian paramilitaries in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. This chronological history was broken up with occasional mentions of traditional Naga governance systems and a widely discussed
‘pure Naga democracy’ marked by a vague but widely understood model of village sovereignty, Christian devotion, and independence from outside rule. Metha closed his speech with calls for a resurgence of the nationalist spirit and a reunification of
Naga territories outside of the state. The speech was followed by a series of other speeches by prominent NNC leaders, by the nephew of one of the founders of the
Naga nationalist movement the late Angami Zapu Phizo, and by Kaka Iralu, a revered
174 writer and historian of the Naga nationalist movement. All of the speeches followed a familiar and somewhat repetitive format, beginning with prayers and blessings, thanking notable members of the panel and crowd for their presence, presenting a chronological history of Nagaland’s conflict with India, and calling for revival of a
‘traditional’ Naga society and unification with Naga communities residing outside of the state. The event ended with a performance by a troupe of young Naga dancers and a lunch of pork, rice and local greens.
As I sat in the audience listening to the speakers regale Nagaland’s long fight for independence and reflecting on the injustices and hardships placed on the Naga nation at the hands of Indian paramilitaries, I took note of the crowd and the speakers. Aside from the troupe of dancers standing behind the stage and a handful of armed guards patrolling the perimeter of the open lot, there were very few young people at the event. Most of the audience appeared to be in the forties, fifties, and sixties. Most of the assembled NNC cadres were also of advanced ages. Many appeared to be very elderly. This was not unexpected. The NNC is Nagaland’s oldest nationalist group, and although its members are known to exercise some local authority, tax businesses in territories it controls, and generally exercise some political influence, it has officially been inactive and restricted to its territory at
Chedema since the signing of the Shillong Accord in 1975. Other groups have emerged since then, namely the NSCN-IM and NSCN-K, who actively recruit members and are more attractive for young people looking to join a nationalist group.
Essentially, while it is the original nationalist group the NNC simply does not have the clout and magnetism that it once held.
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After the speeches and the lunch, the audience dispersed, and a caravan of
Mahindra Bolero four-wheel-drives and Suzuki-Maruti jeeps made the tedious journey back to Kohima, navigating the dirt road between the camp and the town. I returned to my hotel in the centre of Kohima mostly disappointed. I had flyers listing the speakers and scribbled notes of the speeches they gave, detailing the same chronological history of Nagaland’s nationalist movement that I had been given by almost every other nationalist supporter I had met over the past three months. It was rich in facts, and often impassioned, but nothing new and nothing surprising.
I leant over a table in the lobby making small talk with the hotel staff as I flicked through my notes looking for anything I had written down that might have offered something new or interesting. The three boys working in the lobby asked about the camp and what I thought of the event. None of them had been to Chedema.
Not sure if I would offend them, I tried to keep the discussion light. We talked about the history in the speeches and about the history of the nationalist movement. The boys were polite but did not seem to be interested. They were much more curious about the road leading to Chedema. They asked if the rough road had made me sick, if I was ever worried that the car would fall off the side of the mountain, and if we had roads like that in Australia. Our conversation ended abruptly when the power went out. Two of the boys went to start the generator, and one had other work to do.
It was not explicitly mentioned in our conversation, but for the boys in the hotel, the long histories given at the Republic Day event were not a concern. When
176 attempting to discuss my experiences at the Peace Camp, the boys showed little interest in the events of the day, nor the substance of the speeches. When discussing nationalist groups with other younger people in Kohima, Dimapur, Phek, and
Tuensang, a similar polite disinterest was discernible. It was apparent that the history of Nagaland’s struggle for independence, while entrenched in Naga identity, was old news for many younger people in Nagaland. Long recounts of a nationalist struggle such as those told at Chedema, about a declaration of independence that was made long ago, and about hardships and abuses that happened to their grandparents, were clearly less relevant. The imagery and rhetoric that appeared in the NNC speeches, of
Naga village democracies, timeless traditions, and a non-specific sovereignty that lacked further clarification outside of being generally ‘free’, seemed to be of little interest to younger Nagas.
This lack of enthusiasm was understandable. The village burning and systematic sexual violence that defined many Naga communities’ experiences with
Indian expansionism in the 1950s and 1960s, while horrific, was the realm of elders and is far outside the experience of Nagas today. For younger Nagas who have grown up in larger urban hubs such as Dimapur and Kohima, many elder accounts of organized state violence took place in villages they do not visit often and are told in languages that they do not speak at home. Furthermore, as discussed in the previous chapter, India in the frontier is much more diverse than the almost exclusively militarized forms it was known by at the height of Nagaland’s conflict. ‘India’ for many of these younger Nagas is synonymous with high speed internet connections, television programs presented in Hindi, new consumer items, job opportunities, and
177 people from the plains who have come into Nagaland and have arguably for the most part become friends, neighbours, and other unassuming and inconspicuous people in the state’s growing towns and cities. While there is tension related to outsiders coming into the state, much of this is directed towards specific ethnic groups. The binary India vs. Nagaland rhetoric that fuelled much of the popularity of nationalist- insurgency is now multifaceted, fuzzy, and narrowed to a few influential concerns involving land, crime, and sexual politics. I expand on these issues in chapters 7, 8, and 9.
In the previous chapter, I argued that the ‘opening up’ of Nagaland in the wake of ceasefire has encouraged the emergence of a post-conflict middle class for whom closer ties with India are in many ways beneficial, who hold de-territorialized aspirations, and who are less interested in Naga independence. Cosmopolitan goals and neoliberal aspirations that were previously unattainable for most people are now realistic for a much wider population in the state. In many cases these new possibilities rest on closer ties with India, rather than independent sovereignty. In this chapter I explore the ways the changing nature of Nagaland’s conflict has affected popular perceptions of nationalism and Naga nationalist groups in this environment.
I ask, ‘how have popular perceptions of Naga nationalist groups changed throughout the ceasefire era?’ Drawing from observations and interviews with Naga business owners and young Naga entrepreneurs and professionals, I argue that attitudes
178 towards Naga nationalist workers21 and the masculine norms they embody are changing and being challenged. I detail a shift in popular opinion against Naga national workers. Once celebrated independence fighters, today Naga national workers are seen as extortive, disruptive to peace efforts, and ultimately as legacies of a decades long fight for independence that has not been realized. Decades of conflict in Nagaland informed men’s self-perceptions as guardians and protectors of
Naga territory, culture, and society from outside intrusions. Naga national workers espoused this masculine ideology during the state’s conflict as embodiments of a hyper-masculine Naga nationalism and as active opponents of Indian militarization in the state. However, in the ceasefire era attitudes towards Naga nationalist workers and the masculinities they embody is changing.
In making the argument that attitudes towards Naga nationalist workers and the masculinities they embody are being challenged in the wake of ceasefire, this chapter is divided into four sections. First, I discuss how decades of conflict in the state have embedded rigid gender norms and understandings of Naga men as inherent fighters and guardians of Naga territory, culture, and society. These roles have long histories in Naga communities, but became more relevant in an environment of militarization and extremely gendered forms of violence. Second, I discuss the ways Naga nationalism has changed since ceasefires were signed. I give particular attention to the ways factioning and fragmentation within the Naga
21 Often referred to as Naga insurgents. The participants that took part in interviews for this research all referred to Naga insurgents as Naga national workers. Because of this, I use the term ‘Naga national workers’ more often, and use ‘insurgent’ only in a few specific sections.
179 nationalist movement has contributed to the emergence of a multitude of nationalist groups, the aggressive enforcement of overlapping nationalist taxes, and a shift in the discourse of nationalist collection from ‘support’ and ‘donations’ to ‘illegal taxation’ and ‘extortion’. Third, I detail the experiences of business owners and shop- keepers in Kohima with Naga nationalist groups, collected through discussions between January 2016 and June 2016, and between December 2017 and January
2018. Finally, I discuss the changing popular perceptions of Naga nationalist workers and how these changing perceptions unsettle dominant notions of Naga masculinity that were shaped by conflict.
Militarization, Conflict, and Masculinity in Nagaland
Nagaland’s militarization by Indian paramilitaries contributed to a sense of occupation and abuse at the hands of the Indian state. In the 1950s and 1960s the
Assam Rifles and earlier, the Assam Police, committed massacres throughout
Nagaland and especially in the state’s interior towns and villages. Many villages were forcibly regrouped in attempts to flush out insurgents (Hazarika, 2018). Village burning campaigns and efforts to ‘starve out’ communities was also common in the state’s interior, forcing many communities to live in hiding in Nagaland’s jungles, in some cases for several years (Iralu, 2009). Some discussants in Kiphire district reported witnessing beheadings committed by Indian paramilitaries during this period.22 From the 1950s to the 1990s, counter-insurgency operations targeting Naga
22 This was raised in discussions with villagers in 2012, and followed up in 2016.
180 nationalist fighters resulted in immense civilian casualties. While the lines between civilians and combatants were often blurred and reliable figures are elusive, estimates range between 3000 and 200,000 total deaths (Phillips, 2004, p. n.p) since the conflict began. With the impunities granted under the AFSPA (1958), Indian paramilitaries were able to adopt a ‘shoot-first and check-later’ strategy. Many civilian casualties were sparked by sudden responses by Assam Rifles soldiers to vague suspicions of insurgent activity or reactions to mundane events. For example, in 1995 a convoy consisting of the sixteenth battalion of the Rashtriya Rifles passed through B.O.C Point in Kohima outside Hotel Japfu when a burst tyre in the convoy provoked an hour of indiscriminate firing by the Rashtriya rifles into surrounding buildings. The firing resulted in the deaths of six civilians, including two minors, and twenty-six serious civilian injuries (The Morung Express, 2016). Many discussants mentioned that similar incidents were common throughout the heights of the conflict although often went unreported, especially in rural and isolated villages.
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Photograph 10: Assam Rifles camp, Kohima. 2016. Taken by author.
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Militarization in Nagaland extends beyond incidents of extreme violence. Life in Nagaland is lived under the close watch of a highly visible and invasive military- state apparatus that operates outside of and above Naga society and state law
(Baruah, 2007a). Most large towns contain army bases or have bases nearby. High walls surrounding camps and bases are strewn with barbed wire, often with liquor bottles tied together on the wire that jingle when the wire is touched, acting as an alarm in case barbed wire is scaled, but also giving the conspicuous message that the army and its members are held to different rules than the communities they patrol
(see Photograph 10). Convoys of masked and heavily armed soldiers patrol the streets surrounding camps and bases in jeeps and pickup trucks. Most towns and cities have military checkpoints at town entries, along larger roads and at intersections, where people are forced to identify themselves and often asked about where they are coming from and where they are going. The impunities granted to Indian paramilitaries under the AFSPA (1958) mean that interactions with Indian paramilitaries, an unavoidable part of life in the state, are fraught with anxiety and a sense that anything can happen. It is clear to many that arrest, harassment and death are not unrealistic possibilities. There is a sense of invasiveness when being stopped and interrogated by paramilitary soldiers who are considered by locals to be ‘foreign’, who look different, often do not speak any local dialects or Nagamese, and represent a hegemonic Indian masculine order that is in many ways at odds with local customs and cultural norms. One former combatant discussing his own motivations for ‘going
183 underground’,23 detailed his experiences being stopped and checked while growing up in interior Nagaland:
Back home, whenever we came back home, whenever we came
back home we suddenly felt different… Indian guys are checking us in
our land. Know what I mean? Suppose in our village gate, nobody is
supposed to ask me who I am, everybody is supposed to know, but a
black guy24 comes and asks me, I’m not being racist here, a foreigner
comes and asks, ‘who the Hell are you?’ How would you feel? That sort
of thing gets implanted in my mind when I was a kid and so I ask dad,
why are they asking us who we are, don’t they know this is our village,
not their village?25
Conflict itself in Nagaland was, and continues to be highly gendered.
Militarization involves encroachment and subjecting Naga communities to the rule of a nationalistic hyper-masculine military occupation that has no local accountabilities, in the form of male soldiers from far away who act with impunity and function outside of the reach of state laws and customary laws. Several discussants described
23 A common phrase used to describe joining a Naga insurgent group
24 ‘Black’ was often used by interview participants and discussants to refer to Indian soldiers and Indians living in Nagaland. While in many contexts, ‘black’ has racist connotations and is considered offensive, when raised in my own interviews, ‘black’ was employed by participants as a metonym for Indian, highlighting the physical distinctions between Nagas and Indians.
25 Interview (December 2017)
184 interactions with stop-checks as involving empowered and domineering Indian soldiers leering into vehicles and making suggestive and sexual comments about female passengers. As argued by McDuie-Ra (2012d, p. 332) referring Northeast
India’s ‘disturbed zones’ overall, ‘women’s bodies have become the territory on which this culture of violence is marked’. This is especially the case in Nagaland.
Violence against women in Nagaland is not only committed by Indian paramilitaries and outsiders - women are targeted in intra-tribal feuds, and attacks on women within the Naga community are often excused and women victims quickly silenced and moved away (Kikon, 2015a). However, sexual violence by Indian paramilitaries against Naga women was especially widespread and continues to occur (North East
Network, 2016; Iralu, 2017). Rapes and sexual attacks were especially common during village patrols and searches of people’s houses by Indian paramilitaries (McDuie-Ra,
2012d). Some discussants argued that this was systematic, aimed at humiliating and degrading Naga women and emasculating Naga men by undermining their abilities to protect the women around them. In this context, men were placed at the forefront of the struggle to protect Naga territory, culture, and society from the incursions and abuses of Indian paramilitaries. The Naga nationalist struggle involved the emergence and promotion of a hyper-masculine Naga nationalist movement that stood at odds with the occupying Indian hegemon and reified men’s self-styled roles as guardians and protectors, in many ways reflecting traditional men’s roles in Naga communities as fighters and village defenders that were discussed in Chapter 4. The Naga Freedom
Fighter, otherwise referred to as the Naga National Worker, was mythicized and popularized in Naga literature as the masculine embodiment of nationalist duties to
185 oppose the Indian military occupation and liberate Nagaland from outsider encroachments (see Iralu, 2009, p. 218, for the most explicit example).
Naga nationalist groups are overwhelmingly male in their membership and masculine in their ideologies, linking male-dominated customary institutions with rigidly gendered Christian traditions that involve men as leaders and guardians, and women as followers and in need of guardianship (Longkumer, 2018a). Women did take part in the Naga conflict, and Nagaland’s larger nationalist groups, the NSCN-IM and the NSCN-K have actively encouraged women to join their ranks for decades
(Banerjee, 1999, p. 138). Women’s involvement in Naga nationalist groups has often been celebrated and used to highlight the support of the wider Naga population for resisting Indian incursions, with much of the imagery used by Naga nationalist groups in media and promotional materials featuring women fighters. However, women’s activities in Naga nationalist groups typically reflected rigid gender norms that reappear throughout Naga society. As Gill (2005, p. iv) clarifies, ‘these women worked as informers, bearers of loads and rations, cooking and sheltering [male] cadres as even among rebel groups the duties of men and women vary… they often find themselves trapped into doing the same chores and household jobs that they would ordinarily take on in their homes’. With few exceptions, women’s involvement in
Nagaland’s conflict has been limited to two forms: either as victims of sexual violence at the hands of Indian paramilitaries (Kikon, 2015a), or as peace-promoters, conforming to understandings of women as mothers, carers, and peace-makers
(Bora, 2017). The gendered nature of violence in Nagaland itself reproduced an ideology that conflict and public life were the realm of men, while limiting women’s
186 movements and involvement in public life to being carers or victims of outsider aggression. This rigidly gendered order was further embedded by attempts to compromise Naga calls for independent sovereignty. Constitutional guarantees of protecting customary laws and institutions, in the form of Article 371(A), discussed in detail in Chapter 8, endorsed and preserved men’s dominance in politics and decision making in the state (Changkija, 2017; Manchanda and Kakran, 2017). In this sense,
Nagaland’s conflict and the cultures surrounding the conflict reified and celebrated men’s roles as fighters and guardians of Naga territory, culture, and society, embodied in the form of the Naga freedom fighter.
Serving Smoked Pork to ‘Thugs’
They take 25% of my earnings when I’ve got customers. If I don’t
[have customers], they’ll come, eat, not cause trouble, and leave.
Sometimes they bring guns, but I always give them what they ask. I
usually don’t allow alcohol in my restaurant. If they get drunk they do
mischief.26
In 2012 I came to Noah’s restaurant looking for cheap food and an escape from incessant traffic noise in the street. Noah emerged from the kitchen to greet me. Outside of the tourist season in December few tourists come to the restaurant, which is relatively hidden from the street and can be passed without notice, so my presence provided an unexpected break for Noah from sweeping the kitchen. Noah
26 Interview (February 2016)
187 served smoked pork with rice and sat with me while we drank Zothu (rice wine) from his home village. We discussed my plans to take Nagaland State Transport public buses further into the interior of the state. Noah advised the bus to Phek was a more reliable bus than many of the others that were running at the time.
In 2016 I returned to Noah’s restaurant. I ordered his smoked pork again, and again we sat down to drink Zothu and talk about future plans. I had been spending time with members of Naga nationalist groups and civil society actors in the weeks before, and had a lot of questions about Noah’s experiences with these groups.
Although I hadn’t pointed them out, some of the paraphernalia around the restaurant suggested Noah or his staff may have been supporters of the Naga nationalist cause
- small Nagalim flags and stickers bearing the common phrase ‘Nagaland for Christ’.
While other restaurants and businesses occasionally had a blue Nagalim flag or bore a ‘Nagaland for Christ’ sticker, Noah’s restaurant had a lot more paraphernalia than other businesses I had been to. As a small business owner, I suspected Noah probably also had to pay his dues to the national cause from time to time, whether he supported the nationalist movement or not, which would involve interacting with
Naga national workers.
Noah was apprehensive to go into detail about his interactions with
Nationalist groups and the Naga underground, but indicated having mixed feelings about the nationalist cause. As Noah described it, underground members had been coming to his restaurant for years, even though Noah had opened the restaurant after the ceasefires. In the first few years, men would come, eat for free, and ask for
188 a contribution to the national cause. Noah said that although he did not like them carrying guns in his restaurant, or drinking alcohol27 in the restaurant, he supported the cause and they generally did not cause much trouble. For Noah, these men represented the ongoing push for Naga nationhood, a cause he was happy to contribute to. However, as myriad groups have emerged in the ceasefire era, Noah’s patience and support had worn thinner. Visits by groups occurred more frequently.
As the ceasefires continued, albeit interrupted by violence from time to time, the push these groups tended to advocate for was less realistic and less widely supported. The men visiting his shop were increasingly thug-like. Noah mentioned men from these groups often lifting their shirts when asking for donations to surreptitiously reveal gun hilts and knife handles. Noah also mentioned that occasionally men came into the restaurant openly carrying weapons and threatening violence for payment. At least once, national workers threatened his family and staff directly. Despite these experiences, Noah explicitly stated his support for what he saw as a genuine push for Naga sovereignty. Noah adamantly mentioned the importance of Naga sovereignty and independence. However, when pressed about whether he believed this sovereignty could be achieved, which I phrased as a ‘free
Naga homeland’, Noah clarified that a lot had to change before that was possible. In light of ongoing ceasefire and the disintegration of a once strong nationalist front, sovereignty in the sense of an independent Naga homeland appears increasingly
27 Although rice wine and rice beer are alcoholic as well, it is common in Nagaland to distinguish traditional alcoholic drinks such as Zothu from imported spirits such as rum and scotch, which are often together referred to as ‘alcohol’.
189 unlikely. Nationalists coming and demanding money, while they represented the dimming push for some version of Naga sovereignty, could not and would not deliver that sovereignty. The men demanding free food and contributions were extortionists first, and nationalists, second.
Noah’s experiences being held up by multiple insurgent groups is increasingly common since ceasefires were signed. In the ceasefire era, a multitude of nationalist groups have emerged as larger groups faction and fragment into smaller competing units. While factioning and fragmentation are not a ceasefire phenomenon, the wider
‘unravelling’ of the Naga nationalist push has taken place after the 1997 and 2001 ceasefires (Kolås, 2011). Prolonged ceasefire in Nagaland is marked by even more divisions between Naga nationalist groups, a further de-centralization of the nationalist push, a further expansion of extractive regimes, and a general fall in the support of the public. Panwar (2017) identifies three splits in the nationalist push since 1997: In 2007, the NSCN-Unification (NSCN-U) was formed by Azheto Chopy,
Akhoota Choppy, Khekiye Sumi, and Nukki Sumi and 200 former NSCN-IM cadres. In
June 2011, Kitovi Zhimomi, Khole Konyak, and Azheto Chopy split from NSCN-K to form NSCN-Khole Kitovi (NSCN-KK) along with 500 former NSCN-K members. In 2015 the NSCN-K was split again as the NSCN (Reformation) was formed by Wangtin
Konyak and P. Tikhak along with 200 former members of the NSCN-K based in
Chakhesang District, with some members in Wokha district. However, within each new faction there are also less formal loyalties and networks, sub-factions, and renegade members (Cline, 2006). There are also smaller local militias and village
190 defence organizations that claim some degree of distinct authority, often claiming legitimacy through Article 371(A) of the Indian Constitution (Wouters, 2017).
Funding comes from diverse sources, including smuggling operations, grafting from state budgets and development projects, and kidnapping. The majority of funding, however, is from illegal taxation operations (Kashypa, 2014). Underground members either leave notes at business doors overnight demanding contributions, or demand contributions on-the-spot and out-of-the-till as businesses are closing at the end of the day. The presence of myriad rivalling Naga factions also encourages cultures of impunity, enabling state officers to graft from development funds under the guise of paying underground taxes, a phenomenon Wouters (2018) refers to as the ‘underground effect’. National workers operate in conjunction with the existing state framework, laying claim to its resources and funnelling state resources towards nationalist shadow governments that nationalist workers report to (Wouters, 2018).
While there is a popular sense that funds from extortion and taxation are used to fund the lifestyles of the elite leadership of Naga nationalist groups, there is also a widely held belief that the men who collect illegal taxes and extort communities are unable to find work elsewhere. Several discussantsmentioned that they believed nationalist extortionists were often drug addicts, older unemployed men, or were
‘non-locals’ who weren’t educated or did not have skills to find employment. As groups have multiplied, and as the Naga community have had to accept overlapping demands to fund these groups, everyday discussions of insurgency draw a clear distinction between a first generation of ‘Naga freedom fighters’, who taxed
191 communities but presented a somewhat legitimate push for Naga sovereignty, and the rent-seeking partisan nationalists that have emerged since the late 1990s. These newer nationalist workers are widely viewed as extortionists and as profiteering from the ongoing political tensions in the state. New nationalist groups need funding for arms, but also, to pay their members and to feed the often opulent lifestyles of their leaders and high ranking officers. As Ao (2002) argues, ‘it is reported that many Naga underground people are now enjoying the most luxurious life in urban areas [after they] returned from the jungle’. Likewise, Bendangjungshi (2011, p. 68) states that
‘in the name of Naga sovereignty, they use better cars, buy better houses, and live in better conditions’. Imchen’s (2017) interview with Tiajungla Soya, a former NNC cadre, similarly reports that ‘at present they (people in the underground) join because they are lazy and do not want to work at home’. Longchari (2016, p. 243) notes ‘with the number of stakeholders increasing in the Naga situation, the conflict has become an industry where various state and non-state groups try to extend the conflict for their own benefit’. Essentially, there are now more Naga nationalist groups than at any time during the conflict, and members of these groups are widely perceived to be criminals and extortionists rather than freedom fighters.
Legacies of Conflict in the Frontier
Throughout Nagaland’s conflict, Nagaland’s nationalist push was widely revered as a resistance to inclusion in an Indian federation that Naga communities felt infringed on their own sovereignty and independence. Calls for Naga independence were met with by a militarized occupation of the Naga hills by Indian
192 paramilitaries who espoused a masculine-nationalist rhetoric of state-expansion into the frontier and employed systematic sexual abuse and rape as a weapon in order to intimidate, degrade, and humiliate Naga communities. From the perspective of Naga communities, men from far away who were heavily armed, looked different, held greatly different religious affiliations and spoke different languages came into the
Naga Hills and established control over movement, resettled communities, burned crops, and committed rampant violence. In this environment, Naga nationalist actors stood at odds with the occupying Indian hegemon and drew support from long- established associations between masculinity and guardian and protector roles.
Nationalist groups such as the NNC espoused a masculine script drawing from histories that framed Naga men as fighters and warriors, and framed Naga women as mothers of the national movement and as victims of Indian aggression. Since ceasefires were signed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the scenario in Nagaland has changed. While Indian paramilitaries still occupy the state, and gendered violence still occurs often, India’s presence in India is now not only marked by militarization and state-led violence. Young people growing up in the ceasefire era are less connected to the nationalist cause for an independent Nagalim than their parents were. Naga independent sovereignty and pan-Naga nationalism do continue to enjoy widespread support and are common themes in political rallies, cultural extravagances and in the Naga press, but for many Nagas, especially younger Nagas, the anti-India rhetoric that surrounds the Naga nationhood project and the focus on secession and founding an independent Nagalim is less relevant. For many Nagas, especially for shopkeepers and small business owners, interactions with Naga national workers typically involve being extorted or held up for money. In light of
193 these changes, once revered Naga nationalist workers are now themselves sources of insecurity. Ao (2013, p. x) describes this shift aptly: ‘Nagaland’s story of the struggle for self-determination started with high idealism and romantic notions of fervent nationalism, but it somehow got re-written into one of disappointment and disillusionment because it became the very thing it sought to overcome’.
This chapter has shown that changing perceptions of Naga nationalist groups are rooted in a nexus of changing conflict dynamics. First, since ceasefires were signed, Nagaland’s nationalist push has fragmented into a collection of warring factions. Some of the newer factions include the NSCN-KK, NSCN-NK, NSCN-U, and
NSCN-R, as well as myriad local groups that are active along the Nagaland/Assam border, the Nagaland/Manipur border, and the Nagaland/Myanmar border. New nationalist groups appear to be more focused on fighting each other for control of lucrative territory in which to tax communities and for control over roads to toll vehicles on. Second, and related to the changing nature of conflict, these factions place overlapping demands on communities to pay contributions to the group, often under duress and using implicit and explicit threats of extreme violence. For example,
Noah described men from various groups regularly coming into his restaurant and lifting their shirts to reveal weapons tucked into their pants while asking for donations. Similar experiences were recounted by other shopkeepers in Kohima and
Dimapur, who described the increasingly violent means used to extract ‘donations’ and ‘taxes’ since newer nationalist groups have emerged. Discussants were often hesitant to discuss the men who collect taxes on behalf of Naga nationalist groups in- depth, and this may have been out of concern for being targeted by groups or
194 individuals or may have been due to the stress and anxiety involved in revisiting experiences of being threatened and intimidated into giving donations. What was made clear, however, was that men who collect illegal taxes today differ in demeanour and ideology from the Naga freedom fighters discussed by older Nagas.
These men were increasingly ‘thug like’ in their behaviour. Many discussants also speculated that the funds these groups and their members collect are diverted directly to the leadership of nationalist groups to pay for the opulent lifestyles of a conflict-economy elite. Finally, there is a popular sense that men who do join nationalist groups today do so because they do not want to work or cannot get work.
As I discussed in the previous chapter, in the wake of ceasefire new livelihood opportunities in the frontier offer a younger generation of Nagas a wider array options for their futures, including getting jobs in Indian corporations that are expanding into the frontier, attaining higher education qualifications, or going to large and modern Indian cities to find work away from the frontier. The prospect of taking a job in an urban centre or another city, earning a stable and predictable income, and being able to take part in consumer cultures is more attractive than joining a nationalist group, living in fear of being arrested or killed by Indian paramilitaries, and spending long periods of time in jungle camps. This is compounded by the loss of popular support for nationalist groups in the ceasefire era. In this context, several discussants speculated that drug and alcohol problems have encouraged many of the younger members of these groups to join, seeking
‘easy money’ to pay for their habits. Some evidence suggests that, at least in larger groups such as the NSCN-IM and NSCN-K, this is unlikely, as these groups do enforce
195 stringent punishments for drug users and dealers in the Naga community and also within their own ranks. Nonetheless, the popular perception of these groups has changed, within the Naga community groups are less popular and members are looked upon with increasing suspicion, and ceasefire marks a point where insurgency has become a less heroic and less celebrated path that some men take.
That ethno-nationalist movements fragment into warring factions following peace agreements is well established (Vandekerckhove, 2011). This is especially the case in ethno-homelands conflicts in the highlands along the India/Myanmar and
Bangladesh/Myanmar borders (Farrelly, 2009). These conflicts have roots in overlapping demands for recognition and autonomy by myriad ethnic groups in the wake of independence and the cartographic division of Assam (Barbora, 2008;
Middleton, 2013). As peace agreements have been signed, many signatory groups have divided on the terms of ceasefire, and several autonomy and independence pushes have devolved into factional turf-wars, involving fewer engagements with encroaching state armies and structures, closer entanglements with plains economies and cultures, and increasing violence and predatory extraction by ethno- insurgent groups against local communities (Wilkinson, 2015; Panwar, 2017). Less is known, however, about how the changing nature of conflict in these sites affects the ways the men who are members of these groups are perceived and understood by the communities that host them. This is an important aspect of these conflicts, because these conflicts are typically highly gendered, involving men’s claims to ownership of ethno-homelands, and the systematic targeting of women from other tribes and ethnic groups as a part of frontier conflict (Vandekerckhove, 2009).
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Combatants in post-conflict societies also occupy tenuous and complex positions. As discussed by Ashe & Harland (2014) referring to Northern Ireland, former paramilitaries remain both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the political apparatus. Former combatants have limited opportunities for social mobility yet are also empowered through processes of violent and informal social control.
Nagaland offers a slightly different scenario. In Nagaland, decades of conflict have encouraged the emergence and celebration of a mythicized Naga freedom fighter that embodies local gendered sensibilities of Naga men as fighters and Naga women as mothers of the national movement. However, in the wake of ceasefire, these masculine constructions face new challenges as conflict in the state changes and new ideas and possibilities emerge in the frontier. Conflict has not ended, rather, it has unravelled into a multitude of competing insurgent groups. The Naga nationalist conflict in the ceasefire era is divided between tribal loyalties within nationalist groups, and networks of profiteering factions in a conflict economy through taxation and extortion regimes, smuggling, and taking funds from Central development programs. Summed up by Wouters (2018, p. 131) ‘The 1997 ceasefire… did not disrupt political disorder and violence, but provided an alternative arena for armed conflict’. In this alternative arena people’s everyday experiences with Naga nationalist groups involve being harassed, assaulted, or at the very least inconvenienced by men who do not have jobs and are associated with intra- community violence more than combating an Indian hegemon. Importantly, this does not suggest that Naga independence or Naga nationalism has lost popular support, although many of the younger discussants I spoke to were visibly disinterested in
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Naga independence, and some argued that an independent sovereign Nagalim was not something they considered to be in their interests. Rather, Naga nationalist workers themselves have lost popular support, especially since the Naga nationalist movement, with some exceptions, has moved towards an emphasis on a political solution to the ongoing question of Naga autonomy and sovereignty (Kikon, 2015b).
In light of this, where once insurgency and insurgents were seen as freedom fighters and participants in a nationalist struggle, insurgents are now more often seen by their communities as members of criminal enterprises that extort, smuggle, rob, and kidnap. In light of this, the heroic imagery that once surrounded insurgency and was propagated by various interpretations of Naga history and men’s roles (Thong, 2011), has given way to legacies of a decades-long fight for independence that has not been realized, and that, to many young Nagas especially, is irrelevant and obsolete. This perspective is reiterated by Holland & Rabrenovic (2014, p. 749), attesting that
‘because ex-combatants are the most visible concentration of everything that people feel about the conflict, including resentment and blame’. Naga freedom fighters, though mythicized, are embodiments of Nagaland’s push for independence. In
Nagaland, current and former combatants are embodiments of the failure of the conflict to deliver independence, of the devolution of the independence push into extortive factions, and of the dysfunction that continues to pervade the post-conflict state.
Conclusion
The focus of this chapter was on the ways popular perceptions of Naga nationalist groups, and especially of the men who are members of these groups have
198 changed since ceasefires were signed in Nagaland in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
When discussing the Naga independence movement, and especially when discussing
Naga national workers, older Nagas were often eager to regale me with stories of heroic Naga freedom fighters, with their own associations with the nationalist movement, and with accounts of Indian atrocities committed in the state in the 1950s and 1960s especially. Younger Nagas, below 30 years old, were for the most part disinterested. On the occasions that younger Nagas did discuss nationalist groups, they would typically discuss the problems associated with these groups such as extortion, corruption, and graft within the systems of the state suspected to be committed by Naga nationalist groups and their associates. The distinction was marked. Older Nagas I had spoken to in villages, especially in Nagaland’s interior discussed Naga national workers as freedom fighters. Younger Nagas, especially in
Nagaland’s growing urban hubs discussed Naga national workers as extortionists. In this chapter, I sought to understand why this disjuncture exists. I argue that the change in perspectives regarding Naga national works, from freedom fighters to extortionists, is linked to recent division of nationalist groups and the increasingly violent means groups employ to extract payments from the Naga public. This does not suggest that support for Naga nationalism itself has waned. Rather, this suggests that current Naga national groups are considered to have diverged from the original nationalist cause. In the following chapter, I unpack another emerging dynamic in ceasefire Nagaland, emerging forms of marginalization faced by older men in the state, some of whom are ex-combatants, though many are not. The plight of this population of men, commonly referred to as Nagaland’s ‘lost generation’, further illustrates widening social divisions within Naga society in the wake of conflict.
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Chapter 7: Men at the Margins
State Stadium, Dimapur. January. 2018
Photograph 11: State Stadium, Dimapur. 2018. Taken by author.
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It was approaching midday in Dimapur. I had been visiting the city’s incomplete State-Stadium over the past two weeks, coming at different times of day, taking note of who spends time there, what they do, and where possible sitting and talking to locals about their use of the space and what led them to the stadium. State-
Stadium is as a part of Dimapur that a wide variety of people congregate at during the day, and at night is a notorious site for drinking, drug use, prostitution, and violence. The site, previously known as Lalmatee, has a chequered history. In the
1980s and 1990s the site was a dumping ground for the bodies of suspected spies, drug dealers, and drug addicts executed by Naga nationalist groups. One discussant mentioned that for a period in the early 1990s, a body was found at the site every other week.28 Since the mid-1990s, the Nagaland State Government has attempted to remake the site and change its seedy reputation. These efforts involved turning the large vacant lot into a multi-sports complex, complete with a colosseum-type stadium, athlete accommodation, indoor badminton courts and an indoor gymnasium. However, construction was left incomplete amid speculations of embezzlement and graft which were especially rife in the early 2000s. Various attempts have been made to resume construction, although thus far these have been delayed, resumed, and delayed again as funds are either suspended by Nagaland
State Government or embezzled by construction contractors. Ironically, the half- constructed efforts to cleanse State Stadium of its reputation for crime, moral
28 Interview (December 2017)
201 corruption and vice have themselves become landmarks to embezzlement, corruption and dysfunction.
Despite the presence of some unsavoury elements, State Stadium is an important part of Dimapur. The city has grown rapidly since the early 2000s.
However, with the exception of some vacant lots near the railway tracks and an abandoned Assam Rifles camp near Zeliangrong Village in the city’s south there are very few open public spaces in the growing city. The city centre is crowded and loud.
People spending time in a shop or outside of a shop in the city centre for long periods without good reason are looked upon with suspicion and are quickly moved on by shopkeepers or security guards. The city’s surrounding suburbs are made up of close- knit communities who are often from the same tribe. Neighbours notice, are suspicious of, and talk about any new visitors or sordid activities in their neighbourhoods. State Stadium, on the other hand, is open, flat, and interspersed with concrete ruins and overgrown bushes that offer relative privacy. People can spend time at State Stadium without standing out or drawing attention. The site is located close to the city centre, but is relatively quiet and, aside from teenagers occasionally learning to drive in and around the site’s dirt-topped parking lot, has no traffic. Because of its location, openness, and the lack of alternative sites in the city,
State Stadium has come to fulfil a number of important roles for various groups. In the early mornings, local residents jog its perimeter, and a Zumba dance class is held on the grassy field at the front of the stadium. In the afternoon and at night, teenagers bring their love interests to the stadium to evade prying relatives and gossipy neighbours, and college students smoke, drink, and loiter around the parking
202 lot near the entrance. In the hours in-between morning and evening, the stadium hosts a rabble of cows and goats owned by Bihari herders and a regular rotation of older men who come to the site to drink, use drugs, and socialize away from home.
These men are not homeless, but have few other alternative places to congregate.
I had stopped at the Stadium’s parking lot, a dirt patch surrounded by large, shady trees, to take shelter from the sun. It was approaching 35 degrees Celsius, and humid. Nearby, three middle-aged men were sitting under an Amilisu tree. The younger of the three was leaning over a folded newspaper, mixing loose tobacco with cannabis. One of the men was smoking a homemade bong fashioned from a plastic
Mirinda (orange soft drink) bottle and a Kingfisher beer can. The eldest looking of the group was watering down Old Monk rum, the cheapest available in the state, in a plastic glass while gesturing at the graffiti scrawled on the wall across from us, a cartoon of a naked woman with her legs spread. I made small talk with the men, mentioning the heat, asking what they do for a living, whether they are married or not, and how often they come to the stadium. One of the men was married and employed in a government job in a town several hours north of Dimapur. We joked about working remotely from Dimapur, as he clearly implied that he rarely goes to his work posting. The other two men were unmarried and not working. I asked them what they do with the free time. One of the men raised both arms in the air and loudly exclaimed, ‘timepass, what else to do?’
The circumstances of the men at State Stadium reflected that of many other men I had encountered in Nagaland of similar ages. These men could be easily found
203 in disused peri-urban sites like the Stadium, in dark taverns serving cheap and often adulterated liquor, and in cheap local hotels dotted throughout the state. Although not all were unemployed, these men appeared to experience long periods of idle time, were somewhat disconnected from Nagaland’s recent economic expansion, and spent long periods drinking, using cheap and easily sourced drugs, and sleeping.
During months of fieldwork it became clear that a significant number of households in Nagaland host at least one man in a similar situation – often being long-term unemployed and with substance abuse problems. While Nagaland has a high unemployment rate (Kikhi, 2006), and drug and alcohol abuse is widespread
(Kermode et al., 2007, 2009), these men appeared to constitute a distinct population who are recognized as problematic, unemployed or underemployed, and prone to substance problems. This was recognized by other Nagas as well. Several discussants, on various occasions, mentioned a population of older men who have difficulty finding work, and are reputed as alcoholics and addicts. These men were often referred to as Nagaland’s ‘lost generation’, a term that surfaced repeatedly in discussions in Nagaland between 2016 and 2020, often without prompting. The men being referred to were of similar ages, between forty and fifty years old. It is important to note that this ‘lost generation’ by no means constitutes all men in this age group in Nagaland. Indeed, the men that this chapter is concerned with constitute a minority, albeit a sizeable minority, of men from these ages. There is a much larger population of men in Nagaland who have built livelihoods, are active in the church and community, and have adjusted well to life since the closing of conflict in the state. Some of this larger population are discussed in McDuie-Ra & Kikon’s
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(2021) ethnography of Dimapur. My focus on Nagaland’s ‘lost generation’, however, draws out the men who have not adjusted or otherwise do not ‘fit’ in Nagaland’s post-ceasefire context. This is a deliberate focus on a group of men who are marginalized in many senses in the changing frontier. These men often had less relevant skills to sell in the emerging post-conflict economy, were less in-demand by employers due to their age, and, whether a cause of or result of isolation and idle time, were prone to substance abuse problems and ennui, spending long periods of time living at home, sleeping, and drinking.
This chapter engages with the question of how this population of men engage, and disengage, with Nagaland’s opening up in the wake of ceasefire. I make two arguments. First, I argue that changes taking place since ceasefire are marginalizing for men in Nagaland in particular ways. These men experience a general sense of being ‘out of place’ in the changing frontier. They encounter problems accessing new commercial spaces, experience difficulties finding work, and spend long periods of idle time loitering, drinking, using drugs, and sleeping. This will be explored through the lives of three men in this chapter. Second, I argue that the marginalization that these men experience has been obscured by the presence of patriarchal customary institutions in the state that perpetuate the idea that men in Nagaland are inherently empowered and protected. Nagaland’s masculinized political culture, emphasizing men’s roles as heads of their households and communities, runs counter to post- conflict realities of unemployment, idle time, boredom, and cheap and easily sourced drugs and alcohol. In this context, these men are less able to live up to masculine ideals that involve getting married, having children, becoming breadwinners in the
205 household, and taking on leadership roles in their communities. These are general and widely understood masculine ideals but are especially stressed as parts of adulthood and manhood in Nagaland. To make these arguments, I first discuss the ways Nagaland’s recent changes have encouraged the emergence of new margins in
Naga society. Following this, I discuss the struggles older men in the state face when seeking employment from the margins, and how the lack of employment is marginalizing in various ways. Finally, I discuss how ‘timepassing’ for this population of men especially is tied to ennui and alcoholism, and ultimately, exacerbates the distance between Nagaland’s ‘lost generation’ and a quickly changing post-conflict
Naga society.
Emerging Margins in the Frontier
Since ceasefire, Nagaland has opened up and economies, governance, and everyday life in the state have become more entangled with the outside world and especially with India. The frontier is being redefined and reoriented from a space marked by isolation, conflict, and especially few livelihood options towards a more connected and commercially engaged site with new mobilities and a wider selection of livelihood opportunities. This process is uneven, and occurs alongside ongoing militarization, bandhs (general strikes) announced by non-state armed groups, and continuing state dysfunction, but it is ongoing and accelerating, nonetheless. Younger
Nagas have especially benefitted from the changes taking place in the state since ceasefire. Their mobility, English speaking skills, and Western cosmopolitan dispositions are in high demand by Indian corporations based in larger Indian cities,
206 and also by corporations expanding into the frontier (McDuie-Ra, 2012c; Angelova,
2015). However, for a large population of older men in the state, Nagaland’s post- conflict changes are witnessed from the sidelines. The emergence of a more connected and youth-oriented post-conflict economy relegate these older and lesser skilled men to the margins of the post-conflict economy and society.
Throughout this chapter, I use the term ‘margins’ when describing the plight of this population of men in Nagaland. I employ margins to refer to the margins of a changing economy and society in Nagaland. Marginality in this sense involves a limited ability to engage with the changing context that surrounds one’s life. This is closely linked to processes of liberalization and the changes associated with the rapid expansion of markets, urban spaces, and technologies associated with liberalization.
Zabiliute (2016, p. 271), when describing these changes, argues that ‘new urban spaces are oriented towards a consuming public, and everyone who falls outside of this category is excluded, as cities become gradually enclosed along the lines of class and caste’. This exclusion is not only limited to urban spaces, but also takes place in rural areas where, for example, traditional and communal land is being converted to individual lots and where agriculture is being oriented towards a global market, and those who cannot adapt to these changes are in many senses left behind (De Maaker,
Kikon and Barbora, 2016). Di Nunzio (2019, p. 2) offers an insight into this form of marginality through the experiences of two men, Haile, aged forty-nine, and Ibrahim, aged thirty-nine, in Addis Ababa:
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As their country seemed to flourish and high-rise steel-and-glass
buildings began popping up in Addis Ababa’s wealthier
neighbourhoods… Haile’s and Ibrahim’s condition of marginality
persisted. For them and many of their peers in inner city Addis,
marginality was no longer an experience of a widely shared condition
of scarcity but a sense of being out of tune with history.
The men discussed in this chapter experience marginality in both of these ways. Life at the margins of the Indian state is marked by experiences of extreme state violence and of lacking individual agency, being powerless to create change in one’s own life. This limited agency emerges from decades of militarization and insecurity, the immense risks associated with agitating for grassroots changes that are not in the interests of elites and politicians, and repeated experiences of development initiatives, government programs, and pushes for change being co- opted by elites and actors linked to conflict, or fizzling out as funds disappear and change-makers are discouraged, threatened, or themselves become corrupt. One discussant summed up this marginality aptly: ‘I think it bothers many of us, what the prospective future looks like, but what is more bothersome is that feeling of helplessness in a dysfunctional place like ours… because law, justice… it just works differently here. Small people get no say’.29 Simultaneously, though, the men that appear in this chapter are marginalized in a changing Nagaland as the state’s economy and as much of Naga society is reconfigured in the wake of ceasefire.
29 Follow up discussion over phone (July 2019)
208
Structural changes in Nagaland in particular, as paid work becomes more common and especially as women’s incomes increase, has encouraged a widening gap between Nagas who are able to access and engage with the expanding market economy, and Nagas who cannot. For those who are less able to take part in the expanding working economy in the state or who are unable to work in other Indian cities, this gap is marked. It is marked in cultural differences between those who are more engaged with Indian and global markets and hence more engaged with Indian and global consumer cultures. It is also marked by how people spend their time and where they spend their time. For example, new shopping complexes and the higher- end bars, restaurants and coffee shops that have appeared in Nagaland’s urban areas are directed towards an emerging consumer class who have disposable incomes and consumer tastes that reflect a pan-Indian cosmopolitan urban lifestyle. Older men in particular are less able to engage with and be included in this cosmopolitan culture, and thus, are relegated to its margins.
Life at the margins is marked by a distinct temporality. This temporality involves boredom, stillness, and a sense of waiting without end. ‘Timepass’ is often colloquially used to refer to this temporality, a common refrain throughout South
Asia. Jeffrey (2010a, 2010b), in his work with unemployed youth in Meerut, Uttar
Pradesh, uses the term timepass to discuss the ways young unemployed men fill time, and the sense of ‘waiting’ that is experienced by young unemployed people in India.
There are similarities between the way Jeffrey (2010a, 2010b) uses ‘timepass’ and the ways I use ‘timepass’. Both refer to a frustrated sense of being in limbo, of idleness and inertia that is closely attached to failing to meet masculine norms. Both
209 are also closely linked to neoliberal changes taking place in India. People ‘timepass’ when they are unable to meet social and cultural demands that are increasingly linked to competitive markets for jobs, housing, and consumer goods (Zabiliute,
2016). However, in this chapter I focus on the experiences of older men, which often involve a distinct form of timepass. When discussing young men timepassing in
Meerut, Jeffrey (2010a, p. 472) describes men as studying ‘several degrees in succession while also searching the informal economy of educational credentials for other sources of distinction… many unemployed students demonstrated a type of
‘subaltern cosmopolitanism; they imagined themselves as between two spheres – rural UP and metropolitan India – and uniquely able to straddle these distinct spaces.
Timepass was not a passive activity: It offered an opportunity to convey a youthful adaptability to circumstances’ (Jeffrey, 2010a, p. 472). Observing the timepass activities of urban poor young men in a squatter settlement on the outskirts of Delhi,
Zabiliute (2016, p. 273) describes how ‘young men wander and explore the city, they are cultivating commodity-oriented aspirations and pleasures, promising inclusion and participation in an otherwise segregated city’. This is a wholly different form of timepass to the timepass experienced by the older men in Nagaland. Timepass for older men in Nagaland involves napping at home, visiting friends at their homes, and wandering neighbourhoods and peri-urban sites where drugs and alcohol can be consumed in relative privacy, and where they will rarely be moved along or ejected.
While some of these men did engage in small-scale moneymaking ventures, these rarely involved any significant or long-term engagement. In essence, timepass as discussed by Jeffrey (2010b, 2010a) and by Zabiliute (2016) is active, involving
210 collecting credentials and qualifications, engaging with consumer spaces, and attempting to access job markets. Timepass for older men at the margins in Nagaland is passive, involving sleep, alcohol, and idleness. Discussions with three older unemployed Naga men, ‘Thomas’, ‘John’, and ‘Simon’ between 2016 and 2020 illustrate the ways many men in Nagaland experience the margins and more generally, the ways the liberalizing of post-conflict frontiers creates new forms of marginality.
Thomas
Thomas exemplifies much of the frustration, idleness, and isolation that this
‘lost generation’ of men in Nagaland embody. Thomas was in his later forties and divided his time between living with his wife and children in a village in interior
Nagaland and living with his mother in one of Nagaland’s larger urban areas. He has married, and has children, two significant aspects of masculinity in Nagaland, informed to a great degree by traditions that divide household labour into men’s and women’s tasks, and by the influence of the Church in endorsing nuclear family models as superior and essential for a functioning society (Shimray, 2004). He is educated with a bachelor’s degree and has worked for Nagaland State Government in the past.
He has told me he works in a government job, and that his position is very important, involving regular meetings with high-level bureaucrats, being driven in a new Bolero four-wheel-drive, and regularly taking helicopter rides between villages. His family has told me none of this is true, and that he has been jobless for the last decade.
Thomas’ family have informed me that they do not think he has any intention of
211 getting a job and that they are perplexed as to why he is at peace living off his mother while only sometimes staying with his wife and children. Discussions with those close to Thomas revealed their own frustration and confusion with his scenario. One of
Thomas’s family members rhetorically asked ‘why does he come and stay here? He has a home, his wife is waiting for him… no job, no nothing, I don’t know what he’s doing here all the time’.30 Over several discussions it became clear that Thomas is also very agitated with his situation, but has also come to terms with what he refers to as his ‘plot in life’. As Thomas describes it, he has worked before, and is now spending time on various projects. These projects were not given further detail and when asked to elaborate, Thomas changed the topic quickly.
While living with his mother, Thomas drinks throughout the day. He usually drinks cheap scotch alone in his bedroom. One wall of the bedroom is lined with empty bottles of Officer’s Choice, a cheap and often adulterated scotch that is easily sourced throughout the state. Thomas spends most of his days watching daytime
Hindi soap operas and listening to 1980s American ‘hair-metal’ bands including
Poison and Warrant. He is often eager to run errands for people in the house, and whether sober or intoxicated regularly climbs into his car, a rusted Maruti hatchback that needs a few attempts before it starts, to buy milk powder, soap, or other small groceries from local shops. When Thomas is very intoxicated, he often becomes violent. Several family members and neighbours have had tense confrontations with him about how loud he plays his music and about his habit of wandering the
30 Interview (January 2018)
212 surrounding streets late at night. When asked about fights in his home, Thomas says that they have ‘disrespected me, I do my life, they need to do theirs’.
I had spent the late morning walking with Thomas in his neighbourhood as he pointed out some of the places that were once used by Naga insurgent groups and sites where the military once kept large gun emplacements. Later in the day, I needed to go to Dimapur’s city centre to buy groceries and new notepads. To break the silence while we walk, I asked Thomas where I could get decent writing pads. As we walked, Thomas listed some of the smaller shops around Church Rd, in Dimapur’s centre. He mentioned that I could probably find better quality paper at Big Bazaar.
Thomas then told the story of his own experience with Big Bazaar.
Thomas has attempted to buy goods from Big Bazaar before but was turned back by security at the entrance. The security guards asked Thomas whether he had been drinking, which he had. They told him he cannot come in if he has taken alcohol and escorted him down the stairs in the front of the complex. Thomas believed the alcohol policy was an excuse to deny him entry. By his own assessment, Thomas believed the guards did not want him there because he does not, in his own words,
‘dress like church’, and that he looks too casual for the store. While Big Bazaar does not have an explicit dress code, Thomas is adamant that his appearance was key to being denied entry to the shopping complex. As we walked back to his mother’s house, Thomas talked about other new shops opening up in Dimapur, and who they are targeted at. He made a special point that new shopping complexes, bars, and restaurants in the city are for ‘those rich folks, not for guys like me’. At one-point
213
Thomas exclaimed ‘all of these bars, fancy restaurant, Big Bazaar, how many normal folks are in [these places]? It’s just for the rich… can’t dress like them, small stain on your tooth, you’re outside’.
Thomas’ response was telling of some of the more banal ways exclusion takes place in the liberalizing frontier. While he has failed to find work, and spends significant lengths of time drinking and running neighbourhood errands, Thomas has also directly encountered marginalization and being left out of the emerging post- conflict economy in Nagaland. New commercial spaces, such as Big Bazaar and other shopping complexes in Nagaland’s growing urban hubs are not explicitly exclusive.
However, these spaces are marketed towards a consumer class with disposable incomes who embody the sensibilities and etiquette of a pan-global cosmopolitan urban resident. This cosmopolitan resident dresses and behaves in a way that reflects a vaguely cosmopolitan model. This is especially the case with standards of hygiene, and oral health, which Thomas refers to as ‘small stain on your tooth’. In other words, liberalization in the frontier, as experienced by Thomas, involves being denied access to new consumer spaces based on his appearance, standards of dress, and likely, his alcohol consumption habits.
John
I can’t look for a job, nah. What do I say? I mean, there’s nothing
I can say though. There’s a gap nah? From when I graduated what did
you do? I was in the bloody underground… You can’t say that nah. No
214
experience, no nothing… that’s basically the thing, there’s a big gap in
my life, hard to fill.31
John was unemployed and spent most of his time either drinking cheap rum or looking for money to buy rum when I met him. His last few years had been especially difficult. John had joined the Naga nationalist struggle straight out of high school in the mid-1990s. At the time, young Naga men especially in interior towns had limited options for the future. In many interior towns this continues to be the case, although a trend of younger Nagas moving to larger urban areas has meant that being born and raised in a smaller town is less limiting than it once was. In John’s case, having failed the public service exam, it was to either stay at home and farm with his family, or join a Naga nationalist group. Joining the nationalist group gave
John a sense of accomplishment. As he tells it, his peers praised his decision, and he gained a sense of camaraderie with his fellow cadres. As an organized parallel government, the group presented opportunities to climb ranks, take on more responsibilities, and earn more money, a benefit that even the public service in
Nagaland has struggled to provide for many of its workers.
Following an injury, John’s scope of abilities within the group shrank significantly, and eventually he was unable to continue to work in the group. Now approaching middle age, John has fought in the name of a popular insurgency and had earned success and acceptance in his fighting years. However, John has come
31 Interview (December 2017)
215 overground32 into a post-conflict society where his alliances in the underground meant little for getting a job, finding a place to live, and meeting people outside of the group. This has been a difficult and emasculating journey, involving moving back in with his parents, alcohol and drug abuse, post-traumatic stress, and increasing isolation as old ties to the underground are cut, and the few friends he had on the outside grew tired of his drinking and borrowing money. In his own words,
I have no support from outside, nah, support in social media
sometimes, I can write articles, but I don’t even have a proper job...
It’s embarrassing sometimes, but no other option, no job, nothing. So
it’s frustration on frustration, but they’re calling me back. I don’t know
how to answer them. If I go back, I know, I’ll be put back into that
regimented space, nah, where I won’t be able to say what I like.
Since leaving the underground group and ‘coming overground’, John has eked out an existence in the outer suburbs of Dimapur. He has attempted to get work through friends, however, as several mutual friends have informed me, his drinking habits have often led to offers for work fizzling out, or his quick dismissal from work.
In John’s own words:
So either I open a business or do something like that, that’s all I
can do. And then the problem with me is money. I have no control over
money. I just cannot hold money in my hands. I’ve held money. I mean,
32 Left the underground group.
216
I’ve been in charge of huge amounts of money in my life, OK. Huge
huge amounts. Not [inaudible]. But I never kept it with me. I’ve been
in charge. But I never keep it with me. Someone else carries it. Cause I
know I don’t know how to use the money. It’s there one minute in the
pocket, next minute it’s gone. I know where I spent it. I know I drink it.
(Why do you think?)
I mean, I just all bullshit, it’s suddenly gone. That’s why I’m
scared of opening a business. Unless I get a good partner who can
handle money well. He gives me pocket money a bit, then handles the
rest.
(What will you do next then?)
Nothing, nothing in my mind. (inaudible). Thing is, the talks nah.
If you can shut this…’ [recording ended]33
When asked about his future plans, John discussed the upcoming negotiations between one of the larger Naga nationalist groups and the Government of India. He has been overground and outside of the group for nearly a decade, however, John seemed to be transfixed on the idea that his future was largely determined by the success or failure of negotiations between the Government of India and several larger
Naga nationalist groups. It seemed doubtful that these negotiations would affect
33 Interview (January 2018)
217
John in any material sense, and as several mutual connections made clear, there was no prospect of John coming back to the underground or being otherwise attached to the group.
John’s experience living in the margins is tied up in his youth spent in the underground. As he describes it, years spent living in the jungle, and travelling throughout India and across borders either illegally or to carry out tasks set by the group, cannot be written on a CV or job application. John’s personal history and the ways people in the community can identify him have thus compounded his difficulties finding work. In an insular society like Naga society, where people are often known through several mutual connections in tribes, clans and families, it is easy for John to be ‘outed’ as a former combatant. As several mutual connections pointed out, his associations with the underground are widely known. While some higher-ranking members of nationalist groups have leveraged their positions and connections with the underground to secure government contracts and build significant wealth, lower ranking members, including John, are more often associated with predatory violence within the Naga community, such as extorting Naga business owners and running illegal road tolls. This has added to a sense that former combatants are unwanted and unwelcome. Hence, leveraging his connections to the underground may be more harmful than helpful in John’s case. Unemployment, and the difficulties securing employment following involvement in an insurgent group, committing violence in one’s own community, and years spent drinking, has relegated John to the outskirts of both the underground and the overground, with few dependable connections in either.
218
Simon
It was 11:30am. Simon and I were sitting in an eatery in Dimapur, sharing a plate of fried pork and dried chillies. This was a welcome back meal. I had known
Simon for several years, and it had been a long time since we have spoken. I asked about what Simon was doing with himself and what I had missed since my last visit.
The last time we spoke, he was attempting to convert his mother’s house into a bed- and-breakfast to rent out to tourists. It seems that project had been postponed. Now,
Simon was considering a new business, a food cart. He was nervous about it. Simon once worked in a large Indian city, and says he was successful there. But since returning to Nagaland nearly fifteen years ago he has not been able to find a job, has gotten by with little to no income, and has lived with his elderly mother. In these years, some of Simon’s peers had left the state, and others have found secure work in Nagaland’s public service, while Simon has stayed at home and attempted various money-making projects including a restaurant, a travelling band, and a food delivery service. The bed-and-breakfast had sat unfinished for years now as a concrete skeleton and piles of rusted rebar rods and rotting bamboo on his mother’s roof.
Simon’s failed attempts to pull together an income have left him somewhat despairing, and it is apparent that with each new project, a pessimism has crept in.
Each venture seems less realistic, and the efforts taken to pursue each business venture seem more lack-lustre. The risk of business failure, or more accurately, business fizzling-out, is compounded and self-fulfilled by Simon’s habit of drinking throughout the day and his difficulties maintaining regular hours. Other discussants
219 had also occasionally mentioned these failed projects, humorously saying that if
Simon is involved in a business, they want nothing to do with it.
As the last morsels of smoked pork disappeared from our plates, Simon looked up at me with a grin. ‘Peg?’ he asked. By ‘peg’, Simon meant a shot of cheap rum or whisky, popular in Nagaland because of its potent alcohol content, relative availability, and low price. Simon, and men like Simon, are some of its largest consumers. I paid our bill and we walk across the main street and down a slim alleyway. An unassuming shop populated by a table and lined with water bottles is our first stop. Otherwise empty shops with a conspicuous number of water bottles is often a sign that alcohol is available there or very close by. Simon talked to the two boys at the table, and one ducked behind the shop and returned with a black plastic bag. Inside the bag was a bottle of Old Monk rum and two plastic cups. Simon turned to me to pay for the liquor.
We flagged an auto down and went to the site of Simon’s prospective business venture, a lawn behind a row of shops on the outskirts of Dimapur. Simon twisted the bottle open and poured a generous peg in each plastic cup. As Simon discussed the big plan, to wheel the food cart to local fairs and festivals, there was an optimism in his voice. However, it was already January, so most of the big events in Dimapur had already been held. I attempt to change the topic, rather than raise questions about the new business venture. I told Simon about the men I met earlier at the stadium, about how I had noticed a lot of older men in the state time-passing. I asked
Simon why so many men spent so much time timepassing in Nagaland. Simon’s
220 response brought together his own recognition that timepassing is common, that it is a generational activity, and that it involves alcohol, limited options, and a sense of security rooted in men’s rights to inherit ancestral property:
Us Naga guys, you know why we time-pass, [not] because we’re
lazy, it’s because we have the property, we’re the bosses, even for a
jobless man, he’s the boss in his house. All of these men staying at
home, they get their food cooked, they get some money for booze,
and they have the house and the land to own. What extra can you get
from working then? Especially here. Do you think I’m going to go and
work in a shop? Selling jeans? Imagine a Naga man doing this things.
We just don’t have that culture, can’t tell us what to do. As long as we
have the land though, whatever happens we’re OK... All these men,
all the drinking, jobless, but whatever happens I have land, we have
land, a house, it’s security. Why would you work? If you knew you’d be
OK? Here, you wouldn’t.34
Simon and I continued to discuss his future business plans. The bottle of Old
Monk was emptied over the next hour. Simon lit a Gold-Flake cigarette while I asked him what he was doing with the rest of the day. Mimicking a hand grenade, Simon took the empty bottle of Old Monk and threw it across the lawn, landing next to a
34 Interview (October 2019)
221 pile of about half a dozen empty Old Monk bottles while exhaling loudly and exclaiming ‘I don’t know bro, timepass ase35?’
Men at the Margins
The men’s lives discussed in this chapter in many senses exemplify marginality in post-conflict Nagaland. Discussions with Thomas, John, and Simon, discussions with other older unemployed men in Nagaland, and discussions about the state’s ‘lost generation’ with local journalists, activists, and other members of the Naga community repeatedly brought a number of issues to surface. The first was employment and unemployment, and the inability and the lack of intention of men from this group to secure employment. Thomas, John, and Simon have all struggled to find work, and in some cases have become complacent and demotivated when it came to looking for work. The second issue was timepass. Timepass is a term used widely to describe boredom and passing time in South Asia. Timepass, however, also carried undertones of class, gender, and age. Jeffrey (2010a, 2010b) framed timepass as a phenomenon specific to a young middle class, a liminal period of 'waiting’ experienced in-between adolescence and adulthood. Timepass, beyond its colloquial use, is marked by exclusion, futility, and a sense of waiting without end. Finally, alcohol and alcoholism was central to all discussions with and of this group. When discussing Nagaland’s lost generation, ‘alcoholics’ was commonly used by discussants
35 In Nagamese, depending on its inflection ‘ase’ (pronounced ah-sey) is often used as a question or an exclamation at the end of a sentence.
222 as a metonym for these men. When meeting men of this lost generation, alcohol was often being consumed in excess, at any time of day. Several arranged meetings throughout fieldwork had to be cancelled because men were too intoxicated to meet, had slept through arranged times because they had been intoxicated earlier, or arrived at meetings too intoxicated to understand questions or coherently answer.
These three issues are co-constitutive. Unemployment, whether by choice or due to circumstances outside of their control, leaves these men with long stretches of idle time. Idle time in Nagaland is especially tedious. There are few options for recreation, there are few opportunities for older men to reskill and re-train, and because many of these men have rights to ancestral property that prevent them becoming destitute and that do provide a small amount of income through renting or selling land, there is little immediate motivation to find employment or to reskill or re-train outside of the state. With few other ways to fill idle time, life at Nagaland’s new margins is often spent drinking cheap and often adulterated alcohol, sourcing cheap and easily available drugs, sleeping, and watching television at home.
Emerging forms of marginalization experienced by groups of men in Nagaland in the ceasefire era are also compounded by understandings of Naga society as patriarchal and as inherently structured for the empowerment of Naga men. In many senses these understandings of Naga society are accurate. Nagaland is without argument a patriarchy - men possess rights to hold political positions and own ancestral property that women do not. However, as Nagaland opens up, the appearance of new commercial infrastructure, new markets, and new forms of mobility in the frontier are empowering, for younger Nagas especially, but also
223 exclusionary, for older Nagas and older Naga men in particular. Marginality is hidden and exists alongside patriarchal customary institutions and cultural norms of men being ‘heads of the household’ and authorities in public and private matters. The men in this chapter experienced this exclusion in different ways. Thomas may have been empowered in his own household, but was excluded from the emerging consumer sites of the city. John, an ex-combatant, had engaged with the underground throughout his youth, but found himself on the outskirts of post-conflict society, a space where his skills in the underground and his connections were of little value and in some ways worked against him. Simon engaged with the post-conflict economy, but was unable, or unwilling, to find and maintain a role in the economy, leaving his entrepreneurial efforts as half-baked and half-constructed home projects. None of this suggests that these men were lacking in any way. On the contrary, the men featuring in this chapter were intelligent, able to maintain a conversation, and highly aware of their own exclusion from the post-conflict economy its associated cosmopolitan cultures.
These forms of marginalization are visible in other post-conflict contexts.
Discussing emerging non-state networks in Goma, a contested ‘boom city’ in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, Buscher (2012, p. 497) finds that ‘urbanisation and urban development emerging from hybrid forms of governance and structured by hybrid institutions are lacking any integrated global vision and are characterised by contest, inequalities, contrasts and exclusion’. In other words, developments in the city during and in the wake of conflict are dominated by elite groups who are best positioned to capture the state and other state-like networks, while excluding and
224 further-marginalizing groups who did not have this access in the first place. As Utas
(2012) finds, it is most often ‘Big Men’, influential and elite actors empowered through conflict, who take part in this exclusionary state and market capture. For others, ‘small men’, who lack such connections, exclusion and marginalization is magnified. Maringira & Carrasco (2015) find that these ‘small men’ are often ex- combatants, men like John in this chapter who carry the trauma and ostracism associated with conflict, but were unable to capture economies, utilize their connections, or otherwise become ‘Big Men’. It is these small men who struggle to secure lucrative niches of the state and the market, while also lacking the cultural capital to take part in emerging post-conflict economies, where employability is a central concern (Maringira and Carrasco, 2015).
The close links between masculinity and employment have been discussed in myriad ethnographies of men (Guttman, 1996; Fuller, 2001; Walter, Bourgois and
Loinaz, 2004; Elmhirst, 2007). The ability to find and maintain employment is, almost universally, a fundamental aspect of masculinity. While in many contexts women may do more work, men’s work is afforded a higher status and a central place in men’s identities (Connell, 2005, p. 78). Reflecting on the earlier research by Gilmore (1991),
Connell (2005, p. 32) postulated that ‘the cultural function of masculine identity is to motivate men to work’. However, structural changes in the global economy have led to greater participation by women in paid work, and simultaneously to increasing rates of under-and un-employment among men. This has severely undermined and displaced many men’s identities as providers and, on a larger scale, as the turning cogs at the centre of a patriarchal economy and society (Cleaver, 2002). Being unable
225 to work does not only mean being unable to satisfy masculine norms of having employment and bringing resources into the home. As cities and frontiers globalize and liberalize, urban spaces especially become even more oriented towards consumer consumption and the cultures that surround consumption. Being able to buy new goods, especially new technologies such as mobile phones and to pay for internet access is increasingly important. Meeting sites and spaces of leisure and recreation increasingly take place in consumer spaces such as shopping complexes, cinemas, restaurants, and cafes. While cosmopolitan fashions are often marketed towards younger demographics, standards of dress are linked to an ambiguously
Western urban style that is legitimated by its association with consumer cultures and is difficult to emulate locally. Men without work are less able to engage with consumer cultures as workers and as consumers, and through this inability, are often relegated to a growing liberalization underclass (Zabiliute, 2016, p. 271). Thomas’s references to not dressing like church and to stained teeth were allusions to this emerging class divide in the frontier.
Some scholars have suggested that when unable to satisfy work as the central tenet of masculinity, men resort to ‘hyper-masculine’ and destructive acts in the household, including refusing to share domestic duties and childcare responsibilities, drinking more, domestic violence, withdrawing their financial contributions, divorcing their wives, abandoning families, taking mistresses and in some cases second wives, or returning to their natal families (Elmhirst, 2007; Kabeer, 2007;
Guiness, 2009; Nasir and Rosenthal, 2009). Others have found that, in cases where wives leave to work overseas and men’s roles as the primary breadwinner in the
226 household are up-ended, ‘left behind’ men adopt other roles in the household, taking on wives’ former caring roles, taking on more household based work, and differing greatly from social norms in many contexts where masculinity is premised on distance from caring roles (Hoang and Yeoh, 2011, p. 731; Hollander, 2014). In an in- depth ethnography of emasculation and sudden unemployment in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, Hollander (2014) found that men’s inability to work was, in all cases, emasculating, and men’s destructive or constructive responses to the sudden loss of work was not determined by their ability to cope with the loss of work, but by their ability to cope with emasculation. In this sense, men’s responses to a lack of work may be largely dependent on wider patriarchal cultures and alternative avenues to satisfy masculine norms.
However, the ability to find work is not the exclusive tenet of masculinity in
Nagaland. As I discuss in the following chapter, masculinity and men’s roles in Naga society are enmeshed in a nexus of customary titles and decision-making roles, land- ownership, and authority in the household, along with the ability to work and provide for the household. However, as Nagaland’s economy changes and as life in the state is more entangled with Indian and overseas markets work has become more central, and other tenets of masculinity, arguably, more tenuous. For the purposes of this chapter, the lack of work for older men in Nagaland’s emerging post-conflict economy is marginalizing. Being less able to take part in Nagaland’s new economy, older men in Nagaland are, in many senses, being excluded, not only from new urban spaces, but from the cultures associated with these spaces. Due to their lack of work, they are less able to take part in the consumer cultures attached to these expanding
227 markets. Being left behind does not only entail not working and being unable to take part in the new economy and consumer culture that is a bigger part of life in the frontier than it was before. For example, new consumer spaces, higher end restaurants, cafes, bars, and shopping complexes may not explicitly deny access to these men but are clearly spaces that these men do not fit in. Hence, these men are excluded, in terms of their ability to take part in emerging consumer cultures, and in the spaces they can access.
Second, timepass was often referred to explicitly by men in this group.
Timepass is distinct from ‘passing time’. In many contexts, especially frontier sites such as Nagaland where government jobs are very secure, and often involve relatively little work (see Bhaumik, 2009, pp. 232–240), long periods are spent ‘passing time’.
Clerks work slowly and break often to drink chai, run personal errands, or visit friends and family. Police officers play cards and carom board, in some smaller towns and villages all day. This is often colloquially called ‘timepass’. ‘Timepass’ as I conceptualize it in this chapter is different. Timepass is almost always approached as a liminal period in-between adolescence and adulthood, a period of vigilant waiting to enter the workforce. It is framed as an educated, middle-class, English speaking activity that is distinct from ‘ill-kempt illiterates engaged in useless loitering’ (Jeffrey,
2010a). Timepass is thus marked by a sense of ‘waiting’, of aimlessness and ennui. I conceptualize timepass as an outcome of economic shifts associated with neoliberal capitalism that create new margins and new forms of marginality, especially linked to ideas of redundancy, usefulness and uselessness, and as Mbembe (2004) phrases it, self-identification as a ‘surplus people’ who are made redundant in a neoliberal
228 economic order. ‘”Timepass” is a plastic term to describe both unproductively passing the time as well as people’s efforts to build social ties, gather skills and seek out opportunities while not working’ (Jones, 2012, p. 101).
Literature discussing timepass almost always focuses on the experiences of younger men, and almost always students or recent graduates. Jeffrey’s (2010b,
2010a) study of timepass focused on male graduate students at Meerut, Uttar
Pradesh, who spend most of their time sitting and socializing at tea stalls in and around the Meerut University campus. In Senegal, unemployed educated young men
‘kill time’ with continuous tea-making and tea-consumption rituals (Ralph, 2008).
Likewise, in Ethiopia, young male graduates spend years out-of-work, chewing Chat
(a mild stimulant plant) and notably, refusing work that is considered to be beneath their skillset and that brings a sense of shame, referred to as yilu˜n˜nta, to their families (Mains, 2011, p. 660). Timepass involves unemployment but is also distinct from unemployment. O’Neill’s (2014) ethnography of unemployed and homeless men in Bucharest, for example, details ennui and boredom associated with unemployment and homelessness. However time for unemployed and homeless men in Bucharest is also spent seeking work, moving between shelters and public spaces where homeless people are not harassed or moved along, and attempting to access basic necessities such as toilets, showers, and soup kitchens. Timepass as I witnessed it among older unemployed men in Nagaland, on the other hand, does not involve seeking employment. Rather, timepass encompasses activities and interactions that pass time when work is not being sought. For Nagaland’s older and lesser-skilled men, timepass is a chronic state. Work is not available, and often due to the low costs of
229 alcohol and few other options for older men to spend resources, is not immediately necessary. This group is bored and have resources, albeit few, that are used to fill this boredom with cheap alcohol, filter cigarettes and biri cigarettes, and drugs although to a lesser degree than in the 1980s and 1990s.
The new economy is proximate but also distant, new commercial infrastructure is exclusive, and in the margins of this development there is little else to do but timepass, drink, and smoke. Men with alcohol related problems were not targeted for this study. However, it proved very difficult to find men between their later 30s and early 50s in urban and rural Nagaland who were both not working and also did not drink often and heavily. In other words, middle aged men who do not work, in Nagaland, tend to drink, and tend to drink a lot. The three men discussed above all drink heavily, and either identify as alcoholics (in John’s case) or who mutual connections assert are alcoholics. Timepass was often referenced when drinking alcohol or using drugs to fill idle time. Other activities also constituted timepass, including socializing, smoking filtered and unfiltered biri cigarettes, running errands, sleeping, and watching television. However, alcohol, mostly cheap rum and whiskey, appeared to be attached to timepass in all of its forms. Socializing at almost any time of day involved drinking alcohol. Sleeping late was often due to being up late at night drinking, either alone or with associates. The effects of drinking as timepass were well known to all discussants, and during timepass drinking sessions, many discussants mentioned health problems they had suffered due to their drinking, and especially associated with drinking adulterated alcohol, which much of the cheaper alcohol in
Nagaland is. One participant mentioned he believed drinking ‘bad drinks’, referring
230 to adulterated alcohol, caused him nerve damage.36 Another participant discussed his liver problems related to chronic drinking.37 After these discussions, it was not uncommon for discussants to raise one hand in the air and turn their wrist while exclaiming ‘what to do?’, a common refrain in Nagaland often used humorously when encountering a hopeless or futile situation.
Conclusion
This chapter began with encountering three older men mixing tobacco and cannabis under a tree at State Stadium, one of Dimapur’s few relatively private open spaces where, among other groups, men with little else to do gather and, in their words, timepass. The men who I encountered at State Stadium and at other similar sites such as the hidden drinking dens dotted around Dimapur’s railway station area appeared to be a distinct group in terms of their age, employment status, and their distance and exclusion from the newer businesses and expanding consumer cultures associated with Nagaland’s post-conflict liberalization. When discussing these men with others in Nagaland, a popular discourse of a group of older men left behind from
Nagaland’s post-conflict developments appeared. These men were commonly referred to as a ‘lost generation’, who had, as some discussants described it, just missed out on the benefits associated with Nagaland’s recent developments. This group of older men appears to have been relegated to new margins at the changing frontier. In this chapter, I presented three case studies of men who are members of
36 Interview (April 2016)
37 Interview (October 2019)
231 this ‘left behind’ group. These men, though from varied backgrounds and living in somewhat different circumstances, nevertheless find themselves at the margins of
Nagaland’s post-conflict liberalization. They are too old, they have few in-demands skills, and do not live up to the cosmopolitan moulds of Northeastern and Naga employees that are sought after by Indian corporations in the frontier, and businesses in larger cities in other parts of India. My argument in this chapter is that, for older men at the post-conflict frontier, liberalization and the changes brought with it are marginalizing. These men’s lives at the margins are marked by long periods of unemployment and idle time, being excluded from new commercial developments and consumer cultures, and timepass constituting ennui, drinking, and sleeping. The experiences of these men at the margins offer crucial insights into new forms of marginality that take form at the post-conflict frontier. Nagaland’s ‘lost generation’ reveals that liberalization creates new margins, that often assumedly empowered groups, such as men of ‘middle-adulthood’ living in a patriarchal society, find themselves in. In the wake of ceasefire in the frontier changes are taking place that are marginalizing in ways that often challenge established ideas of patriarchy, status, and masculinity. In the following chapter, I discuss the ways insecurities surrounding gender and masculinity in the frontier have contributed to a patriarchal backlash in
Nagaland. I consider, among other things, men’s tenuous place in Nagaland’s changing economy, and the ways men’s anxieties related to control of the changing frontier are manifest in violent resistance to agitations for inclusive change of patriarchal customary institutions. In other words, the following chapter explores the ways men resist changes in the frontier through targeting non-Nagas and Naga women agitating for change, and through increasing surveillance and control over the movements and relationships of Naga women. 232
Chapter 8: Outsider Politics in Nagaland
‘Our Fight is Against IBIs and Not Against Religion’
Photograph 12: The Indigenous Naga poster. Dimapur. 2018. Taken by author.
233
The Indigenous Naga, a grassroots civil society organization based in Dimapur, placed a series of posters around Dimapur and its surrounding villages in October and
November 2017. The posters agitate for more stringent checks on migration into
Nagaland, the introduction and enforcement of policies to restrict migration into
Nagaland, and the expulsion of illegal Bangladeshi migrants in particular. The five variations of the posters were: ‘Our fight is against IBIs [illegal Bangladeshi immigrants] and not against religion’; ‘Wake up Naga’s [sic], no time to pretend we have our fundamental rights in our land’; ‘Restore back Inner Line Permit at Dimapur district’; ‘State government you have slept too long, deport illegal Bangladeshi migrants’; and ‘It is our rights to protect our land: [1.] Stop renting out to IBIs. [2.]
Stop employing IBIs. [3.] Stop harbouring IBIs. They are not your family members’.
Such anti-migrant rhetoric is commonplace in Nagaland. Opportunities presented in the wake of ceasefire have encouraged new settlers to come to the frontier seeking work on construction projects, in new businesses, and on commercial farming and extraction operations that have expanded as Nagaland state government emphasizes cash-cropping and resource extraction as a means of developing the state (Baruah,
2007a, p. 183; also see McDuie-Ra and Kikon, 2015, p. 6). Settlers from India’s plains have been coming to Dimapur since the 19th century, first as colonial state makers encouraged Marwari traders to settle in the foothills and the highlands to supply
British expeditions, and since 1971 especially, migrants from Bangladesh and Assam have moved into the state. However, in the years since ceasefire, and since the state’s
234 opening up, the issue of outsiders coming into Nagaland has become especially tumultuous and politically divisive.
References to the problem of ‘outsiders’, and specifically to IBIs appeared regularly in local newspapers, in public forums and events, in discussions on streets, in eateries, and in tea shops. IBIs, often referred to collectively as the ‘IBI menace’ seemed to be attached to almost all political issues in the state in some way and was co-opted into various other political problems and projects. Public forums discussing unemployment and self-employment often segued into discussions of IBIs living in
Nagaland and speculations that IBIs were the source of Nagaland’s high unemployment rate by offering cheaper labour than locals were willing to work for
(Nagaland Post, 2019). Conversations in underground bars and taverns often touched on a popular conspiracy theory that IBIs were slowly trying to take over the state’s economy by starting businesses that only hired Bangladeshis and ‘breeding out’
Nagas in their own state. Violent crimes, especially rapes, were often initially at least suspected to have been committed by IBIs. Whenever a Naga woman was attacked by a non-Naga who is not a member of the Indian paramilitaries, the IBI menace was brought up almost immediately in newspaper opinion pages and in conversations on the street. While these theories were specious, and often were the loud opinions of a few influential community members who had a devoted local following, the rhetoric against IBIs was commonplace and seldom challenged. The IBI, and by extension any outsider who may have looked Bangladeshi, was Muslim, or spoke Bengali even, was under suspicion. The implications of this environment of suspicion were also very
235 serious. People who are thought to be IBIs have been harassed, attacked, and lynched on many occasions by angry crowds of locals, often for suspected sexual attacks or sexual involvement with Naga women (Laskar, 2015; Thyrniang, 2015).
This resistance and violence to outsiders in Nagaland presented a dilemma.
As discussed in Chapter 4, Nagaland is opening up and becoming more economically and politically incorporated into India. Much of this is welcome, even demanded.
New Indian commerce in the frontier, the opening up of the state to greater flows of goods, services, and capital offers an emerging Naga middle class new opportunities and new mobilities. Jobs are being brought to the frontier by Indian corporations.
New buildings are being constructed throughout the state by teams of migrant labourers who work for Naga landowners and construction firms owned by Naga elites. As Nagas travel between Nagaland and India in growing numbers, young Nagas especially are working with and making friendships with non-Nagas (McDuie-Ra,
2012c; Angelova, 2015; Hazarika, 2018). As discussed in Chapter 5, these closer connections take place as Nagaland's nationalist movement dismantles itself and loses an immense amount of popular support, as many of the cultural purist underpinnings of the nationalist movement become less relevant to a more worldly younger generation of Nagas. Yet, simultaneously, outsiders are looked upon with great suspicion. Violence against outsiders is commonplace and this violence often extends to members of the Naga community. Naga women who have relationships with or are suspected to have relationships with non-Nagas are especially at risk of being ostracized, shamed, and even violently attacked by other Nagas (McDuie-Ra,
236
2012c, p. 130). As recently as 2019, Nagaland’s Chief Minister Nephiu Rio raised the possibility of stripping Naga women of their tribal status if they marry non-Nagas
(Karmakar, 2019). In other words, while Nagaland’s opening up has encouraged mutually beneficial entanglements between Nagaland and India in terms of economies, politics, and even personal relationships, simultaneously outsiders are looked upon with great suspicion, violence is common and widespread, and seems to be accelerating. The idea of the IBI menace is central to all of this.
Resistance to the IBI menace is highly gendered. As discussed in Chapter 2,
Nagaland’s political landscape is overwhelmingly masculine. Naga customary institutions are exclusively men’s spaces, and the cultures of men as decision makers extends into the state’s modern political institutions and Naga civil society as well.
While some political issues such as the state’s drug and alcohol problems have been championed by women’s civil society groups, particularly the Naga Mothers
Association, issues related to outsiders and migration into the state have firmly fallen into the realm of men’s politics, being closely associated with territory, land, and ideas of invasion. Rallies opposing outsiders settling in Nagaland, and more recent efforts to enforce a Register of Indigenous Inhabitants of Nagaland (RIIN) are overwhelmingly dominated by Naga men. Calls for the expansion of strict migration laws such as the Inner Line Permit system to Dimapur, which were successful in
February 2019, were made by male customary leaders and debated in Nagaland’s all- male legislative assembly. At the village and town level, student unions and community groups lead drives to enumerate and expel illegal immigrants from towns
237 and villages with the assistance of all-male Naga customary leaders such as
Gaonburas and Dobashis. Riots and demonstrations in the wake of IBI-suspected sexual attacks are typically crowded with men of various ages. Women attended riots and demonstrations as well, although in much smaller numbers. Anti-migrant posters and graffiti baring racial slurs are common sights in urban areas, usually placed by young men at night-time. For example, a 2017 video of The Indigenous
Naga documented only men placing posters around Dimapur at night. Vandalism of shopfronts suspected to belong to Bangladeshis and non-locals occurs at times of heightened Naga/non-Naga tension, and is almost exclusively carried out by groups of Naga men.
In this chapter, I consider the ways that the IBI menace has become a fundamental issue in debates about gender, identity, and men’s roles in Naga society in the wake of ceasefire. I make two arguments. First, I argue that as Nagaland undergoes immense and often difficult-to-predict changes, resistance to outsiders has become a highly gendered practice that offers men in Nagaland a means to reassert legitimacy as guardians and protectors of Naga territory, culture, and society. Second, I argue that the influx of outsiders has provided a means for men in
Nagaland to place responsibility for social issues that have either emerged or become more prominent in the two decades since ceasefire onto non-Nagas. To make these arguments, I first introduce and detail Nagaland’s ‘IBI menace’ in light of a wider
‘outsiders discourse’ in Northeast India, and in light of observations, discussions, and interviews held in Nagaland between January 2016 and January 2020. Second, I
238 describe the ways the IBI menace has become a symbol of invasion and an impetus for the assertion and continued support for men’s roles in Nagaland as guardians and protectors of Naga territory, culture, and society from outside intruders. Finally, I explore the ways the IBI menace is utilized to justify surveillance and control of Naga women.
The Outsiders Discourse and Nagaland’s ‘IBI Menace’
Resistance to outsiders is not unique nor new to Nagaland. Among tribal communities in Northeast India especially, an ‘outsiders discourse’ is pervasive
(McDuie-Ra, 2007a). This discourse is rooted in a nexus of insecurities and anxieties associated with precarity and marginality. McDuie-Ra (2007a) identifies five common aspects of the outsiders discourse in the Khasi Hills, Meghalaya. These five aspects are nearly parallel in the case of Nagaland as well. First, there is a fear within tribal communities of being dominated by ‘plains cultures’ through being overwhelmed by non-tribal migrants. While tribals are typically the overwhelming majority in their own home states, tribal communities in Northeast India are a miniscule population in comparison to the populations in the plains. Because of this, the plains are seen as a source of encroaching hordes of migrants, who can easily move into tribal lands and become the majority. This fear of cultural domination is often enhanced by the conspicuousness of non-tribal migrants living in highland communities. Migrants from the plains physically look different, form enclave communities where they often live together and where shops and services emerge that serve migrant tastes and
239 demands, often do not learn tribal languages, and send their children to separate schools. Hence, the process of ‘migrant domination’ is often highly visible. This fear of cultural domination is compounded by a perceived vulnerability of many tribal cultures. Tribal communities are numerically smaller, but also have few cultural outlets, have only relatively recently adopted written histories, and to a huge extent are defined by oral histories that are passed down in dialects and languages that appear to be less widely spoken than they once were.
Second, religious differences between highland communities and plains communities play an integral role in perceptions that tribal and non-tribal communities are culturally incompatible, and that non-tribals are a threat to the survival of tribal communities. Tribal communities are most often Christians, typically of Baptist, Evangelical, or Catholic denominations. Some are Buddhist, however this is more common in Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh on the other side of the
Brahmaputra Valley. In the states Meghalaya, Mizoram, Manipur, and Nagaland,
Christianity was established early on by colonial administrators, has come to represent a progressive and globally connected faith community, and has also become a part of tribal identity (Longkumer, 2018a). While the earliest conversions to Christianity were led by American and British pastors, tribal pastors and missionaries led much of the conversion of tribal communities from Animist faith systems to Christianity (Joshi, 2007). Hence, Christian faiths represent both a progressive and worldly religious community, while also being very much locally embedded and attached to indigenous histories (Mepfhü-o, 2016). Plains
240 communities, on the other hands, are more often Hindu or Muslim. The contrasts between highland Christianity and lowland Hindu or Islam are significant. Hindus and
Muslims have specific dietary, etiquette, and behavioural standards that are incompatible with tribal diets, standards of dress, and etiquette. The expansion of many seemingly innocuous aspects of these cultures, especially Hindu ayurvedic medicines and yoga, has thus been met with a significant degree of apprehension and suspicion in Nagaland (Longkumer, 2018b). Essentially, religious differences between tribal communities and plains communities are attached to wider cultural differences and histories of suspicion and conflict between these groups.
Third, the fear of economic domination by non-tribals is a widely shared concern. The fear of economic domination by non-tribals in Nagaland takes several forms. The highly visible presence of outsiders, especially Bihari, Bengali, and
Marwari labourers and traders has fed a perception that outsiders from the plains are taking jobs away from Nagas and slowly taking control of large sections of the state’s economy. It is very hard to prove or disprove this perception. Marwari traders in particular are well established in the state, having been encouraged to settle in the
Naga Hills in the 19th century to supply British expeditions (K. Mukherjee, 2014, p.
153). Bihari and Bengali labourers have also been coming into Nagaland for decades, especially the foothills and the Dimapur area where Bihari and Bengali communities have established themselves as reliable sources of cheap manual labour (Lacina,
2013, p. 1003). Much of this assumption also rests on the visibility of non-tribals living in tribal communities. Non-tribal migrants often find work as auto and taxi
241 drivers or as truck-drivers and deliverymen, congregate in commercial parts of cities, and are well placed to use connections in the plains to import goods into the frontier.
Hence, non-tribals are encountered when using taxi services, when buying goods in central areas of the city, and when importing goods from the plains. The presence of
Indian armed forces, and the securitized nature of development in the state, has also fed a perception that a large section of the state’s economy is controlled by outsiders.
Finally, colonial stereotypes that portrayed tribal communities as ‘childish’ and
‘naïve’ and in need of protection from ‘cunning’ and ‘sly’ non-tribals were common throughout the highlands of Assam and Bengal (van Schendel, 1992; Wilkinson,
2017b). In the postcolonial era, these understandings continue to hold weight.
Distrust of outsiders using trickery or other underhanded methods to gain an economic foothold are rife. In some ways this perception overlooks the capture of many sections of the state government and the economy by elites within the Naga community (Wouters, 2015, 2018; Sema, 2018).
Fourth, the outsiders discourse encompasses a fear of land loss to non-tribals.
Land is discussed more in the following chapter. For the purposes of this chapter a cursory overview of land and outsider politics in Nagaland is offered. In Nagaland tribal and clan affiliations are rooted in ancestral lands. Even for Nagas who may have been born outside of their ancestral lands, identity is closely tied to one’s home village and the land that surrounds it. Land is managed by Naga customary institutions and patriarchal structures. Most of this land is communal land, which is managed at the village level. Customary institutions, chieftainships, and village
242 councils divide communal land between families and decide when and where jhum
(slash and burn) farming will take place. Individual landholdings are held by individuals and families but are subject to the rules and laws of village councils and customary institutions. Despite these strict traditions, many of which are enshrined in state laws and protected under Article 371(A) of India’s Constitution, there are widespread perceptions that outsiders are taking possession of land through fabricating identity documents, through marrying tribal women and producing tribal offspring who can then own land, or through informally buying land from tribal owners. These perceptions are difficult to empirically prove, but it is popularly accepted that non-tribals have found ways to take ownership of tribal ancestral land, and this is often cited as a reason for violence targeting non-Nagas in the state
(Mazumdar, 2017).
Finally, Bangladesh and the illegal Bangladeshi migrant (IBI) are central to the outsiders discourse. Bangladesh is associated with overpopulation, landlessness, and extreme poverty. There is a popular perception that hordes of Bangladeshi migrants are spilling across India’s porous border into the northeast in search of jobs, land, and livelihoods. These migrants are perceived as willing to work for lower wages, eager to marry into tribal families in order to gain access to land, and open to take part in myriad underhanded deals to take ownerships of land. The nearby state of Tripura is often cited in discussions of the IBI menace as a place where this has happened. The
Indian state of Tripura is bordered on three sides by Bangladesh. There is a popular sentiment in many other parts of India as well as by many communities in Tripura
243 that the state has been taken over by migrants from Bangladesh and the offspring of migrants from Bangladesh. Thus, Tripura is evocative of an infiltration and invasion by hordes of Bangladeshi migrants, a ‘worst case’ scenario where tribal communities have been relegated to a minority in their homeland. The outsiders discourse in
Nagaland encompasses all of the above narratives. Below, my discussion with ‘Mark’, a Naga shopkeeper in Dimapur is illustrated of the ways the IBI Menace permeates into any discussions of outsiders, land, and gender in Nagaland.
‘Like Tripura’
Mark and I sat in his shop in Dimapur in late 2017. I had been conducting follow-up interviews with shopkeepers in the area that I had spoken with in early
2016. I mentioned to Mark that in a number of the other shops, I noticed more Bihari and Bengali workers. Mark was quick to point out that I could not know if they were
Bihari, Bengali, or if they were Bangladeshi migrants. He emphasized that recently more migrants had come into Dimapur from Bangladesh and that parts of the city are completely dominated by Bangladeshi migrants. Mark’s suspicions were somewhat valid. There is a population of Bangladeshi migrants in Nagaland, and Dimapur especially. However, the part of town I assumed he was referring to, ‘Marwaripadi’ and the ‘New Market’ area, was dominated, as the name suggests, by Marwari traders, a migrant population that has roots in the Indian state of Rajasthan, many of whom have been in Dimapur since the late 19th century. There is a large Muslim community in Marwaripadi, with four mosques in the immediate area. Many
244 residents and shopkeepers in Marwaripadi speak Bengali, but also Bihari and Hindi.
Because of this, Marwaripadi, the New Market area, and the neighbourhoods to the south of Marwaripadi are often thought to house a significant number of IBIs. Traders in Marwaripadi are often suspected to be IBIs and shops and businesses in
Marwaripadi are often vandalized at times of heightened ethnic tension. Most recently, in 2015, during a riot in Dimapur following the rape of a Naga woman by a suspected IBI, several shops in Marwaripadi were set alight and a number of shop- owners were threatened by gangs of Naga youths. Mark and I discussed the IBI population in Marwaripadi, and the tensions surrounding IBIs in Nagaland. I brought up the March 5, 2015 riot as an example.38 Mark summarized the anxieties surrounding the IBI menace aptly while describing the riot and the motivations for the riot:
(If he was a Naga man, would it have been the same?)
No, it wouldn’t have been the same. Wouldn’t be the same. Just
because he was an outsider, and an outsider doing something to a
woman like this, was not good. That’s what the people thought. They
[IBIs] enter, now slowly outsider is enter… Nagas are alert. They know
what’s going on now. They’re conscious about this migration. But they
38 Following the ‘Dimapur lynching incident’ on March 05, 2015, it has been revealed that the lynching victim, Syed Farid Khan, was born in Assam, not in Bangladesh as many Dimapuris had assumed at the time of the lynching.
245
still get the land. All over Dimapur, all Miyas [people of Bengali and
Bangladeshi appearance] own. And then they’re everywhere. These
Bangladeshis have seven, eight, ten children, then more, then more.
It’s always growing. More coming… Before now, we never even had
this problem. Rapes were very rare, sometimes, sometimes, but very
rare, almost none. It will be like a Tripura. Look at Tripura, sad
condition. And then, at that time, everything got exploded. Everybody,
men, women, everybody got crazy… Tripura, is, the local people are
like tribes, ok like us, Tripura, but actually the President, Chief
Minister, is ruled by Bangladesh. It’s a very sad thing.39
Mark’s assertions that it was impossible to know whether Biharis or Bengalis were in fact IBIs was a caution commonly shared. Illegal migrants are believed to counterfeit or otherwise procure Indian birth certificates and other documentation with ease. Because of this, and because of the difficulties distinguishing Assamese,
Bihari, Bengali and Bangladeshi migrants, the term IBI is applied to a much larger population of non-Nagas than just illegal Bangladeshi migrants. Anybody who may be
Muslim, may speak Bengali, or is darker skinned is associated with the IBI Menace, and is placed under the IBI category. Likewise, the appearance of new mosques, as well as Hindu temples and shrines, such as those in the Marwaripadi area, is often referenced as one barometer for the influx of IBIs into Nagaland and their growing
39 Interview (December 2017)
246 influence in the state. Resistance to this growing influence is predictably politicized, and encompasses pushes for indigenous rights, is influenced by Naga elites and used by elites to pursue their own political ends, and adopts the IBI menace into a number of social issues. Sexual politics surrounding the IBI is particularly volatile. The IBI is imagined simultaneously as a sexually deviant rapist, and as a charming provocateur who tricks and seduces Naga women as a means of ‘marrying into’ the Naga community. Below, I discuss some of the sexual politics that surround the IBI Menace and the ways Nagaland’s post-ceasefire opening up has place more emphasis on the
IBI and perceptions that IBIs are marrying into the Naga community.
Sexual Politics and the IBI Menace
It’s these Miyas40, they come in for the land. These Naga girls,
from village, they’re naïve, they don’t know anything. Then slowly,
slowly, he works his way in. Then as soon as marriage, he takes
everything, everything he can get. Then what can she do? He will take
over before she even knows what’s happened.41
40 Miya refers to outsiders of Bengali or Bangladeshi appearance. While the term is often applied widely to dark-skinned migrants in Nagaland, it has also become synonymous with IBIs. Depending on context, Miya is used to refer to the Marwari traders who control a large portion of trade in Nagaland, the Bihari migrants who sell manual labour cheaply, and Bangladeshi migrants living in Nagaland.
41 Interview (January 2018)
247
Gabriel interrupted himself to relight his biri cigarette, furiously struggling with the lighter as he did, his shaky hands were a result of years of drinking adulterated alcohol that had, as Gabriel described it, damaged his nervous system. I had known Gabriel for two years, in which time significant changes had taken place in his life. When I first met Gabriel, he was approaching forty years old, had found a secure government job, and after a period of regular and heavy drinking had recently completed a stay in a rehabilitation facility. Now, Gabriel appeared to be in a much better situation. While his hands still shook and he had problems with fine motor skills such as using a lighter, as many recovering alcoholics do, he was focused on work, had lost a noticeable amount of weight, and by his own account had managed to stay sober for almost three years. I asked whether Gabriel had thought about getting married in the near future, because for most men and women in Nagaland once secure work and a sense of stability has been found in life, marriage and rearing a family are seen as natural next steps. Gabriel had been struggling with this ‘next step’, however. Gabriel was in his forties, and many of his friends and peers married at much younger ages. Women in Gabriel’s age group had already been ‘married off’, and, as such, Gabriel’s prospects were growing dimmer. As we discussed the complex politics of marriage in Nagaland Gabriel grew agitated. He talked about outsiders coming into the state, and surmised that it is harder for Naga men to marry Naga women now because Miyas are taking over the economy, taking work away from
Naga men, and through deceitful methods of seduction were marrying their way into the Naga community in large numbers in order to take over the state. We had not
248 started our discussion on the topic of Miyas in Nagaland, or people of darker and typically Bengali appearance. However, Gabriel’s sudden pivot to the topic of outsiders and migrants was somewhat expected.
I had heard similar assertions before, during fieldwork in 2016 and while travelling in Nagaland’s isolated eastern districts in 2012. Discussions of the IBI menace often began with concerns with changing demography and the overwhelming numbers of people in the surrounding plains who may migrate into
Nagaland, but then quickly turned to the issues of IBI men. IBI men were portrayed as destitute, dirty, and underhanded in their business dealings. There was a widely shared perception that male IBIs were coming to Nagaland in order to take ownership of land in the state. Strictly speaking, outsiders cannot buy land in Nagaland.
However, outsiders do, some of whom have come from Bangladesh. This is thought to be done either through Naga intermediaries, or, especially anger-inspiring for men in Nagaland, through marrying Naga women and either taking on Naga names through marriage or having children and giving those children Naga names, passing
Naga ancestral land onto the children of an outsider (Manchanda and Kakran, 2017, p. 74). The general consensus was that migrants, specifically Bangladeshi migrants, were coming into Nagaland in large numbers, and charming and seducing Naga women so as to marry their way into the Naga community and own land in the state.
Words such as ‘cunning’ and ‘trickster’ often appeared, or other references to IBI men marrying Naga women, in discussions about IBIs. Bengali and Bangladeshi women were rarely brought up in discussions about the IBI menace, except where their ability
249 to produce large numbers of the children of IBI men is referenced. Naga men’s relationships with Bengali and Bangladeshi women were also given much less scrutiny in discussions of the IBI menace, and Naga men who did marry women outside of the
Naga community were rarely mentioned. This was not due to Naga men marrying women of Bangladeshi or Bengali heritage being rare. Naga men also marry non-
Nagas, including women of Bangladeshi or Bihari heritage. Rather, the issue of concern was that Naga women would lose their Naga heritage when marring a non-
Naga, reflecting an ideology that when Naga women marry, they adopt the identity of their husband and surrender their own cultural heritage.
This resistance, however, does not only target IBIs and other outsiders.
Concerns that Naga women are engaging with non-Nagas has stoked concentrated efforts to monitor and intervene in the movements and relationships of Naga women, to discourage intermarriages with outsiders and the ‘breeding out’ of Naga society.
This was recently raised during a speech by Nagaland’s Chief Minister, Neiphiu Rio on
January 12, 2019. Rio addressed a crowd at Loyem Memorial, in Tuensang, one of
Nagaland’s more isolated interior districts, to clarify the Government of Nagaland’s position on the Citizenship Amendment Bill 2016. The Bill aims to provide citizenship to non-Muslim migrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh living in India who have been forced to seek refuge in India because of persecution or fear of persecution in their home countries. The bill is suspected by many communities in
India to be an effort to grant citizenship to Hindus and other groups closely aligned with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, and to deny citizenship to
250
Muslims and other communities not historically aligned with the BJP (Poddar, 2018).
In Nagaland, this has raised concerns that, should the Bill pass, non-Nagas may be able to settle in Nagaland easier and in greater numbers, adding to the perceived influx of outsiders coming into the state. During the speech, Chief Minister Rio made special note of public interest in measures to confiscate Naga women of their tribal status if they marry non-Nagas, effectively rescinding their identities as Naga.
While the Chief Minister’s comment about Naga women’s tribal status being forfeited if they marry outside of the Naga community was brief, the context it appeared in is illustrative of the ways Naga women’s relationships with outsiders, and particularly with IBIs and people suspected to be IBIs are framed. Rio’s speech sought to allay anxieties surrounding a bill that may allow non-locals to settle in Nagaland in greater numbers. Naga women who marry non-locals forfeit their identities as Naga.
Similar bills have been considered in Nagaland’s neighbouring tribal states. In August and September 2019 in Mizoram, the Mizo student union, Mizo Zarlai Pawl (MZP), led an awareness campaign in Mizoram’s schools and colleges warning of the impacts of Mizo/non-Mizo unions and dissuading Mizo women from marrying non-Mizo men
(Chakraborty, 2008). Likewise, in the state of Meghalaya pushes to debar Khasi women of their tribal status if they marry outsiders and to refute tribal status to children of those unions have continued since the 1970s, most recently in the form of the Khasi Hills Autonomous District (Khasi Social Custom of Lineage) Second
Amendment Bill (2018) (Chhakchhuak, 2019). These Bills and similar legislative attempts at debarring tribal women of their tribal identities as a punishment for their
251 involvement with non-tribal men rarely, if ever, pass. However, the enduring support for these laws among a significant number of people in Nagaland is informed by a wider discourse outsiders, women, and identity. Naga women who marry or have relationships with men outside the Naga community are perceived to be traitors and threats to the survival of Naga society, and are often ostracized from their villages and families (Kikon, 2019).
Masculinity and Nagaland’s IBI Menace
As discussed in Chapter 4, the state’s opening up has encouraged the emergence of a post-conflict middle class who hold de-territorialized aspirations and for whom India in the frontier is not limited to its militarized forms. As discussed in
Chapter 5, nationalist groups have fallen out of favour, and the men who remain involved in these groups are more often perceived to be thugs and extortionists.
Some men in Nagaland who are left behind in this environment, specifically, lesser- skilled men of ‘middle adulthood’ for whom Nagaland’s opening up has created new margins and has exacerbated the problems of idle time, isolation, and alcoholism.
Amid these changes, migrants from the plains surrounding Nagaland are coming into
Nagaland in increasing numbers. Many of these migrants are suspected to be from
Bangladesh, and specifically to be illegal Bangladeshi immigrants (IBIs). A number of factors have contributed to this increase. Bangladesh has experienced immense population growth alongside immense land loss, driving landless Bangladeshis in- particular across the India/Bangladesh border into West Bengal and Northeast India.
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Not all migrants are Bangladeshi. Long-settled communities of Bengali and
Bangladeshi heritage are also targeted by ethno-nationalist groups in Assam, and this may be another factor encouraging migrants from the plains to migrate further uphill
(Kiho, 2015). Changes that have taken place in Nagaland in the wake of ceasefire have undoubtedly played an immense role in the movement of people from the surrounding plains into the state, especially into the Naga foothills. These migrants have come seeking work in resource extraction projects, cash-cropping farms, construction work in urban centres, and to find other opportunities in the expanding post-conflict economy. In light of this, outsiders living in Nagaland, and particularly
Bangladeshi migrants and migrants who ‘appear’ to be Bangladeshi, being darker skinned, Bengali speaking, and often Muslim, have gained prominence in protests and political discourse in the state.
Discussions about illegal Bangladeshi immigrants (IBIs) with Naga shopkeepers and business owners in Dimapur on three field trips between January 2016 and
January 2020 raised a number of issues related to IBIs in Nagaland. First, the term IBI was often applied to a much wider population than just Bangladeshi immigrants. IBI evokes a discourse of infiltration and invasion by outsiders who look different, speak different languages, have different religious and cultural sensibilities, and are most importantly not tribal and not Naga. Mark’s, Gabriel’s and similar assertions that outsiders, or IBIs, are flooding into the state, that they bring with them crimes that previously did not occur in Nagaland, and that they pose a demographic threat to the
Naga community, are liberal in their use of the term IBI. As Mark highlighted in the
253 second section of this chapter, it was often very difficult to determine an IBI from an
Indian citizen of Bengali descent, or for that matter, an Indian citizen who speaks
Bengali. Terms such as ‘outsiders’, ‘Miyas’ and ‘Bengalis’ were often used as synonyms for the IBI menace. This distinction mattered little. The IBI menace, though couched in clarifications such as The Indigenous Nagas’ ‘our fight is against IBIs and not against religion’, often constituted any non-Naga outsider, especially Bengalis, and especially Muslims. Second, the discourse of the IBI menace was shown to be highly gendered and co-opted into a larger gendered discourse in Nagaland. Resisting outsiders in Nagaland is tied up with a masculine discourse involving men as protectors Naga territory, culture and society from outside encroachments, and Naga women as victims of encroachment, of lacking agency, and in need of protection through surveillance and control over their movements and relationships. Grassroots movements that focus on the IBI menace were and are overwhelmingly attended by men, and often involve a discourse that frames IBIs as a risk for Naga women, and
Naga men as guarding against and resisting that risk. As Gabriel asserted, IBI men in particular are using trickery and underhanded methods to marry into the Naga community and ultimately to take ownership of land in the state, displacing Nagas in their own land and, eventually, rendering Nagas as a minority in Nagaland. As such, protecting Naga society involves increasing surveillance and intervention in the movements and relationships of Naga women, under threat of their identities as
Nagas being forfeited if they marry an outsider, more specifically, an IBI or suspected
IBI.
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Similar politics have been identified and discussed in other contexts, often also involving outsiders coming into tribal majority states, and often involving
Bangladeshi migrants in particular coming into tribal majority states. In Meghalaya,
McDuie-Ra (2006, 2007b) identifies an outsiders discourse where the issue of migration and resisting migrants dominates social and political life and is co-opted by civil society actors and political actors into a vast array of issues and insecurities.
Where a cause of insecurity can be politicized in terms of the outsiders discourse, it is contested, debated, and addressed by the state and civil society actors. Where a cause of insecurity is not politicized in terms of the outsiders discourse, it is marginalized or co-opted into the outsiders discourse as a problem itself (McDuie-Ra,
2007b, p. 371). Likewise Chakraborty (2008) details an emerging gendered politics of othering in the Northeast Indian state of Mizoram, where Mizo women, as marginal members of a patriarchal Mizo society, have found new forms of empowerment by opposing and policing non-Mizos and outsiders in order to justify their own role in constructing an ‘ideal Zo Christian state’ (2008, p. 34). The IBI menace in Nagaland is an outsiders discourse, invoking ideas of an invasion of outsiders and the need to protect Nagaland from these invaders by emphasizing rigid gender roles in Naga society and surveillance and control over the movements and relationships of Naga women. In Nagaland specifically, the IBI menace is a means to politicize women's bodies in a context where women are becoming more liberated and the rigidly gendered ideas that underpin Naga patriarchy are increasingly open and are being challenged. As Nagaland opens up, similar to other surrounding tribal states,
255 women’s bodies have become central in debates about continuing tribal bloodlines, ethnic purity, and the politics of reproduction (McDuie-Ra, 2006; Kikon, 2017b; Gani,
2019). Essentially, in a changing and liberalizing Nagaland, men are no longer sole breadwinners and women are becoming more independent, leaving the state, and exercising greater agency over their friendships, relationships, and livelihoods. This is much more the case in urban centres, and arguably, may be largely limited to urban centres. Nonetheless, the IBI menace is integral to patriarchal authorities, to men and women who support patriarchy in the state, for controlling women, and especially younger women, through ostracism, violence, and shaming. The debate about outsiders in Nagaland has become co-opted with the gendered debate. Migrants are opposed and resisted in various ways. Many of these ways involve male leadership and are dominated by men. Importantly, the discussion of outsiders taking over
Nagaland has become closely entwined with the question of women's agency in
Nagaland. The IBI menace thus informs a politics of closer surveillance and control of
Naga women's relationships, with threats of ostracism and the loss of tribal identity for transgressing tribal/non-tribal lines.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I argued that in an environment that is undergoing immense and often difficult-to-predict changes, outsiders have become scapegoats for a number of issues in the state, and resistance to outsiders has become a highly gendered practice that offers men in Nagaland both a means to reassert legitimacy
256 as guardians and protectors of Naga territory, culture, and society, and a means to place responsibility for social issues that have either emerged or become more visible in the two decades since ceasefire onto non-Nagas, such as unemployment and land- loss. Thus, changes following liberalization, through challenging masculine norms, may encourage new assertions, contestations and conflicts as men seek to re-assert authority and dominance. The IBI menace represents a collection of ideas about migrants in Nagaland, many of which are contradictory but are nonetheless greatly influential in terms of resistance to IBIs or people heaped into the IBI category. The
IBI is unemployed and destitute, but is also stealing jobs from Nagas and is attempting to take-over the Naga economy. The IBI is an unhygienic sexual deviant and a rapist, but is also charming and seducing his way into the Naga community. The IBI menace is a highly gendered construction, almost always spoken about in terms of a Bengali speaking male, that has gained relevance in Nagaland since ceasefires were signed and since the state has liberalized and opened up. Outsiders are perceived to be coming into the state, marrying and having children with Naga women and this has magnified fears that Nagas will be 'bred out' and become a minority in their own state.
In the next chapter, I discuss a patriarchal backlash against women in
Nagaland agitating for change to Nagaland’s patriarchal customary institutions. This forms part two of my argument regarding men’s responses to change in the state. I discuss the ways women’s agitations for change have been met with mass resistance, with denigrating comments about women change-makers, and with threats of and
257 actual violence committed against women leading pushes for inclusive change to
Nagaland’s customary institutions. I argue that changes in the frontier and the closer entanglement of life in Nagaland with the Indian hegemon have placed new primacy and importance onto of Naga customary institutions and the patriarchal cultures they embody as fundamental pillars of Naga society and identity. The IBI menace represents a collection of ideas about migrants in Nagaland, many of which are contradictory but are nonetheless greatly influential in terms of resistance to IBIs or people heaped into the IBI category. The IBI is unemployed and destitute, but is also stealing jobs from Nagas and is attempting to take-over the Naga economy. The IBI is an unhygienic sexual deviant and a rapist, but is also charming and seducing his way into the Naga community. The IBI menace is a highly gendered construction, almost always spoken about in terms of a Bengali speaking male, that has gained relevance in Nagaland since ceasefires were signed and since the state has liberalized and opened up. Outsiders are perceived to be coming into the state, marrying and having children with Naga women and this has magnified fears that Nagas will be 'bred out' and become a minority in their own state. In light of this, women agitating for change to customary institutions are widely seen as agitating to change a foundational pillar of Naga identity, in a context where pushes for Naga independence have failed, and where life is both lived under an Indian military state and where men a large population of men especially hold few forms of alternative authority. Hence, as the frontier changes, new migrants in the frontier are seen as threats to Naga dominance in the state, to Naga women, and sexual competition against Naga men – threats
258 coming from the outside. Simultaneously, Naga women agitate for changes to institutions and customs that, in light of the changing frontier, are seen by many as fundamental to the survival of Naga society, and hence are seen as threats to the survival of this understanding of Naga society – threats from the inside. Together, these arguments reveal the ways that men in the frontier resist change, and the ways that patriarchal norms reassert themselves in the wake of the closing of conflict and the opening up of the frontier in new ways, and in doing so, how liberalization in the frontier encourages new assertions, contestations and conflicts.
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Chapter 9: ‘Spinsters and Divorced Women’
‘Bad things happened’. April. 2016.
Photograph 13: Overpass at Dimapur Train Station. Dimapur. 2020. Taken by author.
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On April 1, 2016, I travelled from Dimapur to the Nagaland State Vigilance
Commissioner’s office in Kohima with members of a local civil society group. We were hoping to submit a Right-to-Information request to the Commissioner’s office regarding a road being built through a farm near Dimapur. Unrelated to our case, the night before, a violent attack had occurred near the Dimapur train station. A Naga woman was sexually assaulted and subsequently dumped barely clothed on one side of the overpass, about 100 metres east of the station. It was not the first time that a woman had been dumped in that spot in recent history. Halfway through the three- hour drive, we stopped to drink tea and eat at a roadside teashop. We discussed the news, including the assault from the night before.
While our first cups of tea were being poured, we discussed the dangerous nature of the area at night – the poor lighting underneath the overpass, the sparse foot-traffic in many of the surrounding streets after dark, and the high crime rates already reported surrounding the train station. Dimapur train station is notorious as a high-risk area, where bag-snatching is common and where several kidnappings and abductions have occurred in recent history. While there is a police presence in the train station and occasionally in the parking lot attached to the train station, the streets surrounding the station are rarely patrolled, and the poorly lit areas under the overpass are patrolled even less.
As our second cups of tea arrived, questions about the woman’s reasons for being in that area at night were raised, why she was travelling alone, and whether
261 she was knowingly putting herself at risk being near the station after dark. Although the only evidence available was that the woman was left near the overpass, and there was no information in newspapers about where the woman might have been abducted or picked up from, my discussion partners had decided that if the woman was not near the station or overpass originally she must have been in the general area. My partners rhetorically asked each other ‘why did she go there alone?
Everybody knows it’s the dangerous part of town’ and exclaimed ‘there are taxis and autos [three-wheeler taxis] at the station, if she was going somewhere, she could have taken one’. Whether the woman’s attackers were Naga or not Naga was never questioned by my discussion partners. They had decided that she had been attacked by Indian men, who were assumed to be members of the Assam Rifles. This assumption was not baseless. Attacks by Indian paramilitaries on Naga women and women in other ‘disturbed areas’ of Northeast India are common, and that particular part of Dimapur, near the station, hosts a large army presence.
Our discussion grew heated, and well into our third cups of tea, my partners were becoming animated, slapping their hands on the table and raising their voices.
I noticed some of the other people in the teashop turning their heads to see what the fuss was about. The discussion had shifted from initial concerns with the safety of the area at night to assertions that the woman was careless for being in the area alone and speculations that she might have been drinking or had otherwise left herself vulnerable to attack. A section of the overpass near the station is also reputed to be
Dimapur’s red light district, which added to their speculations and suspicions of the
262 woman’s reasons for being near the station alone after dark. One of the discussants exclaimed ‘she left out at night, and then bad things happened, what did she think?’
The tone of the conversation was that the woman chose to be in a dangerous place for women at night, with poor lighting and no police. The area has an unsavoury reputation, associated with drugs, alcohol, and prostitution. The responsibility for the attack was laid on her.
In many ways the conversation had similarities with victim-blaming rhetoric that follows violent assaults against women in any city. It is not uncommon for victims of violent attacks, especially sexual attacks, to have the responsibility heaped on themselves, often being accused of carelessness or even of encouraging their attackers through salacious dress and by giving off ‘rape signs’ inviting an attack
(Kikon, 2015a). In light of a string of highly publicized assaults including the 2012 Delhi rape case, this rhetoric is particularly common in South Asia, especially in Nagaland and other ‘disturbed’ areas of India where sexual violence is often associated with conflict and cultures of impunity (Kikon, 2015a, 2016). Although the discussion was disagreeable and off-putting, there was nothing that was especially surprising or unusual about its tone or content. However, the discussion raised themes that also surfaced in other discussions about men, women, and social order in Nagaland, and these themes were not limited to issues surrounding sexual violence. Understandings that the public domain is for Naga men, that Naga women belong in the home and attached to home duties, and that when these rigid gender roles and spaces are transgressed ‘bad things’ happen permeated into other aspects of life in Nagaland.
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For example, in Phek District several weeks after the discussion described above, I sat in on a Village Development Board (VDB) meeting. VDBs in Nagaland reserve 25 per cent of seats for women (Government of Nagaland, 1989, sec. 4(b)), yet these reservations seem to have done little to ameliorate the gendered nature of decision making in Naga villages. Men in the meeting discussed budgets and debated which local roads needed re-laying the most, while the two women invited to the meeting served food and tea and otherwise sat quietly throughout. Months after the VDB meeting, James, a politician in Kohima, mentioned that politics were not a woman’s place in Nagaland, and that men held a ‘strength’ that was suited for ‘doing politics’.
In other words, in Naga society there is a widely accepted understanding of a natural gender order marked by rigid assertions of men as inhabiting social roles as guardians and decision makers in the public sphere, and women as relegated to passive roles in the private sphere. When women step outside of these roles and these spaces, vague
‘bad things’ are thought to be inevitable consequences. These ‘bad things’ may range from harm faced by women transgressing these social norms, to larger disruptions to and destabilisation of Naga society.
In this chapter, I engage with emerging challenges to these rigidly gendered understandings of politics and life in Nagaland and, in doing so, I build on my argument in Chapter 8, that post-conflict changes in Nagaland have encouraged new contestations and assertions of gender and identity in the frontier. The focus of
Chapter 8 was migrants. The focus of this chapter is Naga women. Women in
Nagaland are becoming more economically empowered and more independent. In
264 many households in Nagaland the woman may be the sole breadwinner. Naga women are making calls for rights to take part in politics and to own ancestral land. I argue that a patriarchal backlash is taking place in Nagaland in response to these changes. The patriarchal backlash takes the form of amplified support for highly patriarchal customary institutions and for men’s continued dominance of politics in
Nagaland. These issues are linked to customary traditions and cultural and indigenous rights, and involves resistance to women’s efforts for political and land-ownership rights, vehement defence of patriarchal customary traditions and institutions, and increased surveillance and management of the movements and relationships of Naga women. Men in Nagaland do continue to be the centre of political life, but this once established norm and the idea of ‘equality as tradition’ is challenged now more than it ever was. This is significant, because looking at the ways post-conflict changes in
Nagaland have encouraged a patriarchal backlash offers an insight into the ways that changes at post-conflict frontier and the liberalization of the frontier encourage new forms of contestation and conflict along gendered lines. This chapter is divided into three sections. In the first section, I discuss the ways land, patrilineal traditions, and customary institutions are embodied in a widely understood sense of ‘equality as tradition’. Following this, I discuss women’s pushes for political involvement in the state since ceasefire, and the backlash to women’s increased participation in politics and the labour force. Finally, I discuss the ways Nagaland’s patriarchal backlash can be understood as a wider effort to protect indigenous traditions in a post-conflict frontier that is facing immense economic, social, and political changes, where rigidly
265 gendered traditions are seen by many as a fragile and essential piece of ethnic identity.
(In)equality as Tradition
Naga patriarchal customary institutions, patrilineal traditions, and land are inextricably linked. In Nagaland, land is the anchor of identity, it is an integral part of one’s clan, family, and village (Jamir, 2014). Even for Nagas who may have been born outside of or live far away from their ancestral lands, identity is closely tied to one’s home village and any plots of land that family in the village owns. This is not unique to Nagaland. Other highland tribal communities in Northeast India closely link identity and land. Owning land, especially in one’s home village, is an integral aspect of identity, and furthermore, of masculinity. Men own land on behalf of their families and ancestors, and keeping this land is a crucial part of maintaining links to tribe, clan, and family identity (Karlsson and Kikon, 2017). In Nagaland, the relationships between land, identity, and masculinity are especially significant. Article 371(A) of the Constitution of India, besides granting special powers to Naga customary institutions, also states that no Act of Parliament ‘in respect of the ownership and transfer of land and its resources, shall apply to the State of Nagaland unless the
Legislative Assembly of Nagaland by a resolution so decides’. This has been a point of contention, especially surrounding who ultimately controls valuable resources such as coal within Nagaland’s borders, whether land and its resources are controlled by local communities or by the Nagaland State Government, (McDuie-Ra and Kikon,
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2015). Besides issues of personal identification and the complexities surrounding the legal ownership and rights over land, Nagaland’s decades-long armed conflict was ultimately a struggle for an ethnic homeland, a homeland that is made distinct by its unique geography, by the ways people interact with the land through jhumming and other forms of highland agriculture, and the highly gendered political institutions that govern the land, its ownership, and its uses.
Most of this land is communal. This includes common village land comprising graveyards, community platforms, churches, monuments, and reserved forests; clan land comprising specific plots of land allotted to clan groups; and lineage land, a sub- division of clan land allotted to families. Communal land is managed at the village level by Naga customary institutions, including village councils and chieftainships.
These village-based decision-making bodies are rarely codified and differ between tribes, clans, and villages, however, they do share common characteristics. With few exceptions these institutions are either restricted to men or are overwhelmingly dominated by men (Khutso, 2018, pp. 146–147). In most villages women are forbidden to enter the morung where men discuss politics and make decisions on behalf of clans and villages. In some villages women are not allowed within a particular distance of the morung where men make political decisions (also see
Manchanda & Kakran, 2017). In some villages women do have access to decision- making institutions, however that access is often limited to watching and listening in on discussions while being discouraged from speaking or taking part, and often also involves providing food and tea to male decision-makers. Other land takes the form
267 of individual landholdings held by individuals and families but are also subject to the laws of village councils and customary institutions, especially regarding rules of exchange and inheritance. Long established patrilineal traditions determine that men can inherit individual ancestral lands but women cannot (Hutton, 1921, p. 137). A
Naga woman may construct a house, and may buy land, however upon marriage those become the property of her husband (Niumai, 2015, p. 357). If a husband and wife divorce, according to customary traditions, the children and property belong to the husband. These patrilineal traditions emerge from a rigidly gendered social order where men carry the legacies of tribes, clans, and families, while women’s identities and legacies are tethered to those of their fathers or husbands.
According to these traditions men are the embodiments of tribe and clan identities, and women are liabilities through which ancestral property can be lost to other tribes and clans following marriage. Naga men are held in high-regard as leaders, guardians, and custodians of Naga territory, culture, and society, and are seen as naturally adept to carry the legacies of their respective tribes and clans. Land is an integral part of these legacies, and to the survival of tribe and clan groups.
According to customs, Naga women are attached to their respective tribes, clans, and villages through the dominant men in their lives, typically fathers or husbands. The prevailing ideology is that through women’s changing attachments to tribes, clans and villages, land can be lost to other tribes and clans. Hence, land is passed through patrilineal lines. When the father dies, land is divided between sons, or if the father has daughters, between the next male heirs in his lineage – brothers, cousins, or
268 other male relatives. This arrangement is seen as a reflection of innate strengths and weaknesses attached to gender.
This rigid compartmentalization of gender roles and responsibilities, where men act as heads of their clans, villages, and households, and where women are tethered to the identities of their fathers and later to their husbands is commonly referred to as ‘equality as tradition’. Equality as tradition reflects perceptions that men have a natural propensity towards leadership and ‘serious issues’ such as managing land and resources and conducting warfare, and women are naturally destined for roles associated with maintaining the household, raising children, and supporting and obeying the men in their lives. This is sometimes colloquially referred to as men being ‘heads of the household’ and women as being ‘heads of the kitchen’.
One discussant, Isaac, described this ethic with reference to village labour and an idea of married men and women forming a ‘whole’:
You have to see, women and men, we’re different people. Men
can do the harder tasks, really harder, chopping, building, making. We
used to be head-hunters, warring always. Women don’t have that
strength. They are for other things. In Naga traditions, women have
rights, much more than in other places, but it has to be a balance. The
man can’t go out to work, all day, hard work, like in village, and then
cooking, cleaning, while the wife does nothing. Not working. They have
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respect, they have their rights, but a husband and wife make a whole.
Each has a strength.42
References to equality as tradition are typically followed by a list of positive indicators of women’s empowerment and independence in the state relative to
Indian indicators. These include Naga women having higher rates of literacy than women in other parts of India; Naga women being more likely to be gainfully employed; female feticide being very uncommon in Nagaland; Naga society not having a dowry system; ‘Eve-teasing’ being less common in Nagaland. Discussions of equality as tradition are also rife with clarifications that Naga women are given protection under customary law. As one discussant, ‘Esther’ argued ‘if a husband is beating his wife, fighting, hitting, hitting, then the village council will come and tell him not to do it again, make sure he doesn’t do it again… She will be protected’. In other words, equality as tradition promotes an argument that men and women in
Nagaland are considered equal, that Naga women are treated better than women are in other parts of India, and women have consideration, but not representation, in issues of governance and community decision-making.
In the two decades since ceasefire, amid changes to Nagaland’s economy and the opening up of the state, and especially amid the new opportunities presented to a younger generation of Naga women, new questions have been raised about
42 Interview (October 2019)
270 women’s place in Naga society. Women in Nagaland are ‘coming up’. They are more able to earn their own incomes, often taking on entrepreneurial pursuits at home in the frontier or thriving in larger Indian cities where Naga men face more difficulties
(also see McDuie-Ra, 2012c). In many households the woman has become the primary breadwinner, while husbands, brothers, or uncles struggle to find work or have given up the prospects of getting work altogether. As women in particular in
Nagaland become more economically empowered and independent, challenges to this rigidly gendered model are becoming more prominent. Manchanda (2017, p. 74) observes that women in Nagaland are increasingly taking on important roles and responsibilities in Nagaland’s expanding post-conflict economy, arguing that ‘this generation of professional women create wealth and are blocked by the men of the clan from disposing of it’. One discussant, Tabitha, exemplifies this situation. Tabitha lives with her younger brothers in her family home. Her parents have both died, leaving the house to the eldest brother according to custom. As both brothers have not found work, Tabitha has had to take on work in a local shop. Aside from her shop work, she occasionally takes on catering jobs for friends and family for a small fee.
Tabitha described her situation as:
I have to do it all… I get up at 4, I have to do the cooking, keep
the house together, I do the cleaning. Then, I’m the one that works. I
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come home, I make the lunch, then more housework. If it’s people
coming, who prepares? I do it. It’s just exhausting.43
Tabitha’s case is not exceptional or unusual. While the state’s opening up has brought new opportunities for work to the frontier, as discussed in the previous chapter, there continues to be a pervasive sense that ‘real’ work is done by Naga men. ‘Real work’ often means government work, which has traditionally been much more secure in a state with a small economy and few secure livelihood options.
Government work brings status and security. Hence, men will often wait for opportunities to be presented for government work, whether that is waiting to take the Civil Service Exam in the state or seeking alternative ways to enter into the government workforce. Alternative pathways may include seeking out or waiting for influential friends and family to help gain-entry into a government office. Women also work for Nagaland state government, and it needs to be made clear that taking some form of government-entry exam is common practice for high school graduates throughout the state. However, with less pressure to find a government job than men traditionally have faced, women in Nagaland, are more likely to take on work that is available. Not having the security of political representation, or of owning ancestral lands, has meant many Naga women have had to find their own forms of empowerment in the emerging post-conflict economy, in higher education, or have left Nagaland to seek better alternatives elsewhere (Das, 2019). In some cases, mostly
43 Interview (October 2019)
272 limited to Nagaland’s larger urban hubs, women have inherited property from parents and elder relatives, although this is limited to newly acquired property and not ancestral land (Y. S. Das, 2018). Essentially, as women in Nagaland do find employment either in the frontier, or outside in larger Indian cities, rigidly gendered social and political traditions face new challenges. As these women take on a greater role in a market economy that is increasingly important in Naga society and as they engage with ideas of democracy and citizenship outside of the state, demands for equal rights and political representation have grown.
While interviewing men in several smaller ‘Roxy’ (local rice wine) dens in
Dimapur between 2017 and 2020, a number of men’s perspectives on this change emerged. One discussant, Isaac, exemplifies the wider attitude that many Naga men hold towards the emerging questions and challenges towards Nagaland’s rigidly gendered social models. As Isaac, mentioned above, alludes to, the maintenance of these highly patriarchal traditions is attached to the defence and maintenance of indigenous rights, which since the loss of popular support for Naga independence, has become much more contested within the Naga community. Isaac, aged in his mid- forties, regularly came to the Roxy dens to buy cheap (often adulterated) scotch, which he preferred to drink at home. He described himself as ‘educated unemployed’ when I inquired about what he does for a living, which was a common scenario for many of the men drinking in the Roxy dens. While making small talk about my reasons for being in Nagaland, Isaac invited me to visit him at his house in the north of the city. When visiting, Isaac and I discussed changes in the city since the 1990s, and
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Isaac’s perspective of the future of Nagaland amid some of the changes that have taken place since the 1990s. Isaac’s answers betray a common sentiment among men in similar positions surrounding legacies, respect, and rigid gender roles:
The younger people, they are educated now… they want this
development. They go outside, to Bangalore, to Delhi, to Dubai, to
Europe, Australia, and they see how it is there. They hear all these
things, different to the village and different from customs, and they
want that development. They don’t want old men telling them what
to do… But, also, this is tradition. This is who we are, as Nagas. They
need to respect that, their elders. It’s what we’ve had to fight for, for
our rights… This is my house. My property. Yes, my ama44 lives here,
but my father left this to me. I have to keep this, for the future. The
man and the woman have roles to play, and the man here, is to guard
this for the future [pointing at the linoleum floor]. That’s what the
younger people won’t understand. They want it all now. It’s about
future this thing.45
The discussion with Isaac, although brief, reflected similar discussions I have had in Nagaland since 2012. Isaac held firmly to a model of respect that is rooted in
44 Mother.
45 Interview (December 2019)
274 gendered roles of protection and guarding land for the future. Nagaland is undergoing significant change in the wake of ceasefire. Some of these changes, as discussed in Chapter 5, involve the state ‘opening up’, and new opportunities presented to an emerging post-conflict middle class. Many of these opportunities offer Naga women in particular new freedoms, mobilities, and forms of empowerment. The ‘issue’ of youth, as Isaac and many of the other men I held discussions with in the state, is that they seek forms of empowerment and representation that defy this rigidly gendered model of a ‘traditional’ Naga society, one where men have representative and decision-making authority and where women, although independent in many senses, do not have an equal stake in land ownership, in family and tribe legacies, and in the future of Naga society. Below, I discuss a patriarchal backlash that has emerged in response to these challenges, which embeds patriarchal traditions within a broader push for indigenous rights and for the survival of a distinct Naga identity in the face of a number of social and cultural changes as the state opens up in the wake of ceasefire.
Nagaland’s Patriarchal Backlash
Challenges to Nagaland’s customary institutions and norms have met with vehement and violent resistance. Resistance to change to Nagaland’s customary institutions came to a head in 2017 over women’s reservations for Urban Local Bodies
(ULBs). Starting in 2011, the Gauhati (Guwahati) High Court made efforts to pressure
Nagaland State Government to hold ULB polls within the requirements of Article
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234(T) of India’s Constitution, that is, reserving 33 per cent of ULB seats for women.
While this requirement had been postponed on request of the Government of
Nagaland, in April 2016 the court admitted a petition, filed by members of the Naga
Mothers Association contending that Article234(T) did extend to Nagaland. In
November 2016, following pressure from the Gauhati High Court, the Nagaland State
Assembly revoked its earlier opposition to Article 243(T) of India’s Constitution, requiring municipal bodies reserve 33 per cent of seats for women. This was widely read as Article 234(T) superseding Nagaland’s constitutionally protected autonomy enshrined in Article 371(A). Throughout the High Court deliberations tensions flared in Nagaland. Any rules reserving seats for women, in any political body, were viewed as contravening Article 371(A) and upsetting Nagaland’s long held patriarchal customary traditions. On January 31, 2017, two youths in Dimapur were killed by police firing while protesting the enforced reservations, and twelve others were injured. On February 2, violence erupted throughout Nagaland in response to the
High Court’s decision and motivated by the two deaths. Naga civil society groups opposing the High Court’s decision blockaded streets and rampaged through Kohima,
Dimapur, and several other urban centres throughout the state. In the ensuing violence 21 government buildings were burned down and 11 vehicles were set alight.
Nagaland’s Chief Minister, T.R. Zeliang, was forced to resign as a result of the protests and the Civic Body Elections were postponed indefinitely.
The protests were a response to a perceived overstep of Indian law into
Nagaland. There were and continue to be widespread fears that the protections
276 granted to Nagaland’s customary politics under Article 371(A) are tenuous and under attack. However, the extreme violence associated with resisting women’s pushes for political inclusion in Nagaland was also a response to a perceived challenge to traditional notions of a rigidly gendered Naga social order. Dhillon’s (2017) interviews with Naga men and women in Kohima in the week following the February riot brought to surface a consensus among several Naga conservatives that the pushes for Article
243(T) were led by ‘trouble-making’ women, ‘spinsters’ and ‘divorced women’ who have been influenced by outside actors. Furthermore, protests and riots took place in rural areas of the state that were not subject to the ULB elections, and in parts of
Nagaland that were not having elections. Several tribal bodies held the Naga Mothers
Association responsible for the deaths and the protests, arguing that women’s agitations for political change had triggered the initial violence (Parashar, 2017). The protests were a reflection of a wider patriarchal backlash that has been taking place in Nagaland since women’s pushes for greater political have accelerated in the late
1990s and early 2000s and are seen as threatening to a number of institutions.
This patriarchal backlash is not limited to spectacular outbursts of organized violence. It occurs in a number of spaces, from state-level policy making to household and kitchen politics. It varies in form but is often performed through chastising women who speak out against patriarchal traditions or who speak in favour of inclusive change. The patriarchal backlash involves, among other practices, ex- communicating women who overstep their traditional roles as non-speaking and non-political subjects. This backlash is especially visible in Nagaland’s interior towns
277 and villages. For example, in 2017, eight women in Phek District were excommunicated and banished from their villages for defying the community’s
January ULB resolution and attempting to contest seats in Urban Local Bodies. As well as ex-communicating women who overstep traditional gender roles and chastising outspoken women, the patriarchal backlash involves intensive efforts to monitor, police, and control the movements and relationships of Naga women. In doing so, the nexus between outsiders, identity, Naga women, and land is made clear. As discussed in the previous chapter, women who defy traditions of having relationships with and marrying within the Naga community, and instead form relationships with and/or marry outsiders, especially those of Bengali or Bangladeshi heritage, are subject to intense social rapprochement and ostracism. In other words, by exercising greater forms of independence and overstepping rigidly cast roles as docile, obedient, and non-speaking subjects, by leaving the kitchen, Naga women face a patriarchal backlash that threatens their security and, ultimately, their identity as
Naga.
There are other contributing factors to the patriarchal backlash in Nagaland.
There are men and women in Nagaland who defend patriarchal politics and rigid gender norms and recognize these forms as a reflection of an ideal Naga society and as key components of Naga identity. There are also elites and conservatives who benefit from Nagaland’s customary arrangements, and for whom changes to these arrangements may threaten their political empowerment, may reduce or dissolve opportunities to personally benefit from licit and illicit economies, and may threaten
278 their social status. Conservatives and elites, however, are often already in empowered positions, and liberalization offers opportunities to many of these actors to further exploit opportunities associated with new markets for land and resources.
Wouters’ (2018) has discussed in depth the economics of Nagaland’s ceasefire politics, where elites profiteer enormously as gatekeepers to the state for local communities. Likewise, Karlsson (2011) has discussed in depth the ways elites in neighbouring Meghalaya profiteer as gatekeepers to the state’s resources for outsiders. Alongside changes in the state that are perceived to threaten fundamental institutions, and ultimately, are perceived to be threats to the survival of Naga society itself, the idea of equality as tradition perpetuates a popular idea of a natural and ideal gendered order in Nagaland. Those who challenge this order are often assumed to misunderstand their own histories and to have been corrupted by outside ideas of
Western feminism that are at odds with traditional understandings of Naga society.
As one discussant, Jacob phrases it:
It’s controversial to say it, but this feminism, everywhere, all over
the world, it’s not good. All these riots, problems, pushing for change,
it’s all because of this feminism. In Nagaland we can’t have it, can’t
allow it. Of course, to you, you’re a Westerner, it sounds so primitive,
but you can see it too. But with all this feminism, all this political [sic]
correct, it can’t fit here. Naga women have the rights, and they are
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respected here. But it’s a tribal system, we’re an indigenous people,
this isn’t like Delhi, or in the West, not like in that way.46
In other words, Nagaland’s patriarchal backlash is a response to a number of anxieties surrounding the future of the state, as long held patterns of land use are disrupted by expanding markets, as traditional gender constructions are challenged by new opportunities presented to women in Nagaland, and as an influx of outsiders coming into the state are perceived to threaten Naga hegemony in the state. This occurs in the midst of a growing crisis of masculinity, where many Naga men feel emasculated under a disempowering military occupation and Naga women are exercising greater degrees of economic empowerment, independence, and have more agency in their life decisions. Furthermore, ideas that agitators for inclusive change are corrupted or are otherwise influenced from the outside are a popular refrain to calls for change. Because of this, a new and mutually exclusive binary has emerged in Nagaland, between inclusive feminist models of citizenship, and the essence of what it means to be Naga.
Patriarchal Backlash in the Post-Conflict Frontier
This chapter began with a conversation about an assault that occurred in
Dimapur in 2016. A Naga woman had been sexually attacked in the night and dumped unconscious near the town’s train station at an overpass, a site where other women
46 Interview (December 2019)
280 were said to have been dumped before. The discussion began with concerns about
Dimapur’s poor security situation and the problematic infrastructure that leaves parts of the town dark and poorly patrolled by police at night. Within minutes, however, the discussion had swayed to concerns of why the woman was alone in that part of town after dark. By the end of the discussion, the focus had shifted again, to the woman’s carelessness and suspicions that she may have been drunk, may have been a prostitute, or may have otherwise been putting herself at risk. The general theme that the discussion ended on was that the woman had been in a dangerous place at a dangerous time, and if she had stayed in her home or had travelled with a male guardian, harm would not have come to her. By stepping outside of her home she had taken a risk and had been sexually assaulted and dumped near the overpass as a result. My discussants alluded that the sexual assault was a punishment for the woman’s transgression, for being somewhere that she should not have been. The overarching ethic of the discussion was that when Naga women step outside of their pre-ordained spaces and roles, as one discussant pointed out, ‘bad things happen’.
This ethic was not limited to the case of the sexual assault, however. The themes that surfaced in this discussion, of rigid gendered roles and spaces, of risks associated with women’s exercises of independence and agency, and of a perverse justice for transgressions of these roles resurfaced in myriad conversations and interactions in
Nagaland, on a much larger scale. These issues have gained prominence at a time of great change in Nagaland.
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In the wake of ceasefire, as the state opens up, as markets expand, and as new possibilities are presented to a generation of younger Nagas, Nagas and especially Naga women are transgressing their traditionally gendered roles and spaces. Women in Nagaland are increasingly economically empowered, are exercising greater agency over their lives, and are agitating for political access and property rights. Anxieties among Naga conservatives that these changes spell ‘bad things’ in the future abound. These bad things include the destruction of Naga cultural traditions, the loss of land and by extension the loss of identity, and ultimately to the state of Nagaland being overwhelmed by non-Nagas and Nagas becoming a minority in their own state. In response, a patriarchal backlash has emerged in an attempt to safeguard a ‘traditional’ and rigidly gendered understanding of Naga society from change, marked by patrilineal inheritance customs, men’s exclusive control in decision making, and the maintenance of gendered hierarchies in public and private spaces. Nagaland’s patriarchal backlash involves violence towards women agitating for change, excommunication and in some cases death threats, assaults and physical violence. This patriarchal backlash also encompasses agitations for greater controls over women’s movements and relationships through moral policing and attempts to strip tribal status from women who marry outsiders.
Various iterations of patriarchal backlash have been discussed in gender and masculinity literature. Faludi (1991) coined the term when describing a counterassault in popular media, as well as in political administrations, against
282 women’s rights movements in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. According to Faludi (1991) a patriarchal backlash was motivated by a women’s liberation movement that successfully breached traditional ‘women’s spaces’ and encouraged women to transgress home-based roles. Faludi’s (1991) ‘backlash’ hypothesis postulates that when women take non-traditional roles, there is a trend of resistance through media, in politics, and at the household level in an attempt to ‘resubjugate’ women. Other studies have provided some support for this thesis. Avakame (1999) found that the backlash hypothesis offers a compelling explanation for increased rates of violence against women as women’s participation in the workforce increases.
Ethnographic studies have provided further insight into this backlash violence. One of the most widely cited examples is Guttman’s (1996) ethnography of Mexican
Machismo cultures, lending in-depth insight into the ways men in Mexico City use violence against other men and against women to retain and regain control in a context where men are less secure in terms of employment and fulfilling social masculine ideals, and where women are exercising greater agency and independence. Likewise, Carrington & Scott (2008) found that amid ‘sweeping social changes to rural life’, men in rural Australia, an interior frontier in many senses,
‘resort to violence as a largely strategic practice deployed to recreate an imagined rural gender order’ (Carrington and Scott, 2008, p. 641). While, on the whole, violence against women is negatively correlated with rising women’s wages and economic activity (Christy-McMullin, 2006; Vieraitis, Britto and Morris, 2015), in cases where women transcend established gender norms and become more
283 independent and more empowered than the men in their lives, especially husbands, de-facto partners, and siblings, that a backlash takes place in the form of domestic violence, stringent checks and controls over movements, and increased surveillance of women has wide consensus (Carrington and Scott, 2008; Hunnicutt, 2009; Morrell,
Jewkes and Lindegger, 2012).
Despite the insights offered by the literature above, literature discussing patriarchal backlash is narrow in its understanding of violence and the agents of violence. Literature typically focuses on men’s individual acts of violence at the household level. Intimate partner violence, especially as women in households find work, enjoy increased incomes and to some degree become more independent, has dominated discussions of patriarchal backlash (see Okum 1986, p.90; Levinson 1989,
15; Avakame 1999; Stanko 1985). These discussions reflect the tenets of
Messerschmidt’s (1993) hypothesis that violence may be employed as a means of reversing subordinations of masculinity. Overall, the argument is that the patriarchal backlash is a masculine response to challenges, by women, against established gender norms within the household itself. Less is known, however, about the ways men respond to wider institutional shifts in political and gendered orders on a greater societal scale. In other words, the ways men and women, en-mass, respond to transgressions of gender norms that displace local patriarchal structures. While
Connell (1995, p. 82) argues that ‘a gender order where men dominate women cannot avoid constituting men as an interest group concerned with defence, and women as an interest group concerned with change’, this change is much more
284 complex than men feeling threatened by women staking a greater control over household resources and exercising some forms of employment-linked independence. Hautzinger (2003, p. 93) recognizes this complexity, stating that
‘insecurities linked to masculinities are not just about the erosion of male status, power, or identity, but the way in which gendered aspects of social organization are structurally threatened by much larger historical destabilizations, and the complex psycho-social reactions of men to these events’. In other words, the patriarchal backlash not only stems from women’s empowerment relative to men at the household level, but encompasses wider disruptions to established gender norms, concerns about identity and ethnicity, and attachments to gendered systems which, while being oppressive, provide a clear sense of purpose and place. Lopes (2018) refers to this as a post-feminist backlash, marked by enforcement of patriarchal gender norms by men and women onto any person breaching these well-established norms.
Backlash is especially relevant to frontiers and post-conflict sites. Frontiers and conflict/post-conflict sites are highly gendered spaces, where the presence of conflict often serves to further embed patriarchies, discourage the movement and public involvement of women, and inform hypermasculine constructions that normalize men’s violence in a number of domains. As frontiers and conflict/post- conflict sites change, especially through the expansion of markets and liberalization in the frontier, patriarchal structures and systems are increasingly being questioned and challenged. As such, responses to changing gender norms, the transgression of
285 pre-existing norms, and challenges to rigidly gendered resource control regimes are magnified at these sites. The ways patriarchal backlash takes place in the frontier suggest that backlash is closely tied to wider social changes, anxieties, and insecurities. Some research indicates that this may be the case, that patriarchal backlash may be closely linked to wider insecurities and anxieties surrounding masculinity, control, and disempowerment. Nagaland’s patriarchal backlash offers new insights into these understandings of backlash. In the wake of ceasefire many patriarchal norms and customs are being questioned and challenged by groups within the state, such as Naga women, and groups outside of the state, namely, the
Government of India. This takes place in a context where decades of militarization and economic stagnation, although changing, leaves limited avenues for Naga men to satisfy masculine norms involving finding and keeping work and acting as guardians of Naga territory, culture, and society from outside incursions. Aptly stated by
Manchanda (2004, p. n.p):
In a society that traditionally was locked in endemic war cycles
(involving headhunting) male value was marked by the physical
prowess to fight. The protracted experience of living under the virtual
rule of the Indian security, has emasculated Naga men’s self-
perception of their role as protectors. There is a crisis of ‘masculinity’
that is reinforced by the opening up of new roles of agency for women.
It also predicates a backlash.
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Understanding the deeper roots of Nagaland’s patriarchal backlash, the ways that defence of patriarchal institutions is attached to changing land use patterns, women’s agitations for land rights, and the perceived influx of outsiders in the state, offers insights into the ways change at the post-conflict frontier encourages new forms and new justifications for patriarchy and subjugation, and ultimately, forms of violence that emerge from change. Nagaland’s patriarchal backlash is closely tied to efforts to preserve indigenous rights, embodied in patriarchal customary institutions and a rigidly gendered understanding of Naga society. A change to one is seen as a threat to the other. The legacies of conflict in the state, involving the state’s ongoing militarization are reminders of the tentative position of Naga society. Changes in the state in the wake of ceasefire, as discussed in chapters 5 and 6, have in many ways further upset Naga cultural norms and a narrowly drawn understanding of what Naga society is. In light of these changes, patriarchal norms in Nagaland are considered by many as a stable bedrock of Naga society that cannot be compromised, and hence, when challenged, attracts a widespread and violent backlash.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I analysed a patriarchal backlash taking place in Nagaland as a response to a changing post-conflict environment where Naga women in particular are becoming more empowered and making demands for political representation and the right to inherit and own ancestral property, where outsiders are coming into the state and buying land and often forming relationships with Naga women, and
287 where a significant population of Naga men struggle to find work and establish themselves in the emerging post-conflict economy. I found that rigidly gendered understandings of Naga society have become new focal points in what many Nagas see as a fight for Naga autonomy and cultural survival in light of these changes. There are a multitude of reasons for this, including fears that extending political rights and property rights to Naga women will eventually place land in the hands of non-Nagas, fears that outsiders are coming into the state and may overwhelm the state, anxieties surrounding the Indian state’s attempts to extend its laws into Nagaland, and concerns that Naga women may form relationships with outsiders and ‘dilute’ Naga bloodlines. The preservation of ‘equality as tradition’, or as I have named it in this chapter ‘(In)equality as tradition’, is seen as commensurate to the survival of Naga society in general. The prominence and greater emphasis on Naga patriarchal customs and the rigidly gendered cultures that customary institutions espouse is an outcome of anxieties associated with change in the state, and this has led to new assertions and contestations over men’s roles in Naga society. The patriarchal backlash emerges from a sense that the rigidly gendered order of Naga society is both fundamental and tenuous. For conservative groups in Nagaland, patriarchy is Naga society, and for men experiencing the state’s opening up and the liberalization of the post-conflict frontier, at the edge of India, challenges to patriarchy are commensurate to challenges to the essence of Naga society. The findings of this chapter offer insights into the ways the opening up of post-conflict frontiers, like
Nagaland, may also contribute to the emergence of new forms of conflict, especially
288 gendered conflict. The following chapter offers a conclusion for the findings of the thesis and their contributions to the literature on frontier, post-conflict, and masculinity, drawing on the findings of this chapter and the previous four empirical chapters.
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Chapter 10: Conclusion
In this thesis, I sought to answer the question ‘how do men experience ceasefire and its associated changes?’. To answer this question, I inquired into the ways that ceasefire is experienced by men in Nagaland, a state in Northeast India that has been subject to a number of ceasefires since 1997. This was an important inquiry to make for three reasons. First, Nagaland exemplifies a contemporary frontier emerging from conflict. Much like many other frontier sites, especially highland frontiers that constitute large parts of van Schendel’s ‘Zomia’ (2002b), Nagaland has a long history of resisting incorporation into a larger state structure. Naga territories, under different forms, were brought into India in various ways since 1866. However, inclusion in India has been vehemently resisted by many groups in Nagaland. This resistance grew strongly following India’s independence in 1947. Nagaland experienced an extremely violent conflict involving human rights abuses, militarization, exceptional laws that grant impunity to the Indian army and Indian paramilitaries, and pervasive state-dysfunction. As this conflict is being brought to a close, however, communities in Nagaland are becoming economically, politically, and socially more connected to India, and India is being experienced and understood in ways that are less associated with militarization, and more associated with economic opportunity and political inclusion. This is somewhat consistent with Scott’s (2009, p. xii) assertions that frontiers are quickly being enveloped into states by ‘distance- demolishing technologies’ and an increasing urgency on the part of state centres to secure borders and exploit resources in the frontier. In other words, Nagaland is a
290 site which embodies the dynamics of isolation and distance that mark frontiers, and
Nagaland’s post-conflict ‘opening up’ is occurring in ways that reflect other frontier- opening projects.
Second, as frontiers such as Nagaland are ‘opened up’ through state-making projects and experience various types of liberalization through the expansion of markets, communities are presented with a changing context, new opportunities, and new precarities. Processes of liberalization have profound effects on the ways people engage with the state (Weiss, 2005), the way state officials engage with the public (Chalfin, 2010), and on aspirations (Zabiliute, 2016), understandings of self
(Mathur, 2010), and relationships between generations (Philip, 2018). Some research has shown that liberalization in frontiers is contested and involves selective processes of engagement and resistance (McDuie-Ra, 2016b). The ways liberalization in the frontier shapes masculinities and men’s roles in frontier communities, however, is only beginning to be understood. Coming to a deeper understanding of how men in frontier communities imagine, engage with, and experience liberalization is important because these communities often host long-established patriarchal traditions and hyper-masculine cultures associated with frontier conflicts (Faludi,
1991; Hokowhitu, 2012; McDuie-Ra, 2012d; Myrttinen, 2012; Bijukumar, 2019). This research attempted to shed some light on men’s experiences of liberalization in the frontier, revealing that men’s experiences of liberalization in the frontier involve disempowerment and marginality on the one hand, and exertions of traditional control and power on the other.
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Third, studies of men in conflict and post-conflict contexts, like Nagaland, conceptualize men narrowly as combatants or otherwise as sources of insecurity and violence. Notable examples of this male combatant focus include Ashe’s (2012) research on post-combatant men in Northern Ireland, Trenholm, Olsson’s, Blomqvist
& Ahlbergh’s (2013) research on former child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Maringira & Carrasco’s (2015) research on exiled Zimbabwean soldiers living in South Africa. Discussions of masculinity in conflict and post-conflict contexts reflect these combat-oriented roles, often assuming hegemonic models of masculinity to be inextricably linked to hypermasculine exercises of violence
(Hoffman, 2011), misogyny (Stern and Eriksson Baaz, 2009), and skills in combat and handling weapons (Myrttinen, 2003). This is problematic because the focus on conflict-oriented, militarized and other ‘hyper’ masculinities associated with violence and conflict is at the expense of understanding the lives of non-combatant men and male peacemakers who make up the majority of men in conflict sites (Myrttinen,
Khattab and Naujoks, 2017). The fixation on men-as-combatants and as masculinity derived from conflict also ignores the complexities experienced by combatants and former-combatants, the contradictions of masculinity and competing ideas of manhood these men face (Maria, 2012). Hence, research into the experiences of non- combatant men in conflict and post-conflict sites presents an opportunity to come to a more complete understanding of masculinity in these sites from an alternative perspective.
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Thesis and Findings
This thesis proposed two arguments. First, that ceasefire in Nagaland challenges conflict-informed masculine norms that portray men as guardians of Naga territory, culture, and society. This challenge takes place as new layers of India appear in the frontier, encouraging perspectives of and relationships with India that are a stark contrast to experiences of India in the frontier throughout decades of militarization and conflict in the state. For an emerging post-conflict middle class especially, India’s presence is marked not only by militarization, but also by employment creation, access to consumer goods, and new opportunities to move to large Indian cities for work, education, and to live away from the frontier state. The opening up of the state and the fragmentation of Naga nationalist groups in the wake of ceasefire has undone many of the links between involvement in nationalist groups and men’s self-assumed guardianship roles. As discussed in Chapter 7, Nagaland’s post-conflict liberalization is marginalizing for older men, a group typically considered to be empowered through Nagaland’s patriarchal customary institutions and
‘strongman’ political culture. These men, due to their age and their lack of marketable skills, have been excluded from many of the changes that have taken place in
Nagaland in the post-conflict era. However, changes taking place in the state, emerging from ceasefire and liberalization, also provide new avenues for men to affirm these social guardianship roles. An influx of migrants into the state, encouraged by the state’s newfound stability and the growth of the post-conflict economy has become a symbol of invasion and the threat posed by plains populations to Naga society. Naga women’s calls for representation in Naga 293 customary institutions and for the rights to inherit and own ancestral lands have become emblematic of the disruption of Naga traditions in a new era. In light of these changes, groups of Naga men, especially conservative men and elites, have found new ways to affirm conflict-informed masculine norms in the post-conflict environment by targeting migrants coming into the state and policing the movements and relationships of Naga women. In other words, two decades of ceasefire has not undone conflict-informed masculine norms, but have shifted the arenas that these norms appear in.
The second argument this thesis makes is that changes experienced by men in the ceasefire era have encouraged the emergence of a new gendered conflict within the Naga community. Changes associated with ceasefire and liberalization at the post-conflict frontier are conducive to new forms of conflict. Despite the emergence of a post-conflict middle class with de-territorialized aspirations, and despite the marginalization of some men, ideas of men as guardians and custodians of Naga territory, culture, and society find new ways to be relevant in ceasefire
Nagaland. This continued relevance is rooted in two assertions, (i) that new settler populations in Nagaland’s urban hubs are threats to Naga communities and are producing a demographic shift in the state, and (ii) that Naga society is under threat internally from groups seeking to undermine and transgress long-held and rigidly gendered social and political norms and institutions. Chapter 8 discussed the first of these assertions. In Chapter 8, I showed that resistance to outsiders, popularly referred to as the ‘IBI menace’, is employed as a means to justify men’s continued dominance of public space and politics in the state. The IBI menace is seen as a
294 demographic threat to Naga society, one that, if unchecked, will grow in the state until Nagas are a minority in their own homeland. Tripura was often deployed as shorthand for this scenario, as a means of illustrating the possibility and the proximity of the encroaching IBI menace. Chapter 9 discussed the second of these assertions.
In Chapter 9, I found that as Naga women especially have become more economically empowered and independent, and increasingly demand representation and access to decision making bodies and rights to inherit ancestral land, conservative groups in
Nagaland make new assertions that Naga society is under threat. The effect of these assertions is a justification, by Naga elites and conservatives, for the continued enforcement of rigid gender roles and the uncompromising maintenance of exclusively male customary institutions. Any threat, perceived threat, or potential threat to these gender roles or to these customary institutions is interpreted as a threat to the foundations of Naga society and is resisted violently. In short,
Nagaland’s customary institutions and the patriarchal cultures that surround these institutions have gained new prominence in the ceasefire era as changes in the frontier and women’s agitations for political inclusion challenge a rigidly gendered social order.
Contributions
Men and the Legacies of Conflict
This thesis explored the ways the legacies of conflict have shaped experiences and perspectives of men who grew up in the period of intense conflict in Nagaland, between the 1960s and 1990s, and men who are growing up after the ceasefires of 295 the late 1990s and early 2000s. For older Nagas, the atrocities committed by Indian paramilitaries at the heights of the state’s conflict were experienced first-hand, and are easily conjured memories. As one former combatant highlighted, Indian paramilitaries were encountered regularly, and encounters were fraught with anxiety due to the knowledge that detention, arrest, or death were very real possibilities. In the post-ceasefire era, this situation has significantly changed. New opportunities emerging from the post-conflict economy mean that young men’s lives are less focused on joining and working for the insurgency and being members of the underground. As Naga nationalist groups have factioned and divided in the period following ceasefire, people’s experiences with these groups predominantly involve heightened risks of extortion and being ‘taxed’ by men who are widely perceived as unwilling or unable to find ‘real jobs’ and who are often suspected of being drug addicts or alcoholics, although the evidence that supports these suspicions is scant.
Young people are also exposed to a ‘lost generation’ of older men including many ex- combatants who have been maimed and traumatized, and are struggling to adjust to an environment that doesn’t demand professional fighters anymore.
Research into the generational effects of conflict transformations is limited.
Discussions of post-conflict youth typically portray young men in particular in one of two ways. On the one hand, young men are at-risk of resuming conflicts if not provided with adequate support in the form of education, training, and employment programs (Urdal, 2006; Kurtenbach, 2012). On the other hand, young men, and youth overall are peacemakers and agents of change who are well positioned to lead reconciliation efforts and contribute to resilient post-war communities (Schwartz,
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2010; Hromadžic, 2015; Wollentz, Barišić and Sammar, 2019). Izzi (2013, p. 103) describes the positioning of youth in discussions of post-conflict as ‘alternatively referred to as a ‘force for peace’ or a ‘threat to peace’’. Overall, discussions of youth and post-conflict portray youth as closely engaged and involved with conflict, the causes of conflict, and the legacies of conflict, whether that engagement involves contributing to conflict or resolving conflict.
This thesis takes an alternative perspective. Younger Nagas interviewed in this research often had little interest in nationalist conflict, or in reconciliation and post- conflict justice. Rather, the younger Nagas I interviewed, had discussions with, and had focus-group sessions with were disengaged from the state’s conflict. For Nagas growing up in the era following ceasefire, conflict and its legacies are experienced every day, in the form of seeing Indian paramilitaries patrolling towns and cities, being denied access to large parts of cities and towns that house army camps and barracks, being forced to pay higher prices for goods and services from businesses that have to pay extortive illegal taxes, and in some cases knowing relatives or friends who are members of Naga nationalist groups. However, the Nagas I met with and discussed with were less concerned with and involved in conflict, and more focused on building livelihoods either in the post-conflict economy or outside of Nagaland altogether. Aspirations and goals were attached to getting education and qualifications, finding work, travelling, and building livelihoods in a context of exception and conflict, but delinked from conflict. As I discussed in Chapter 5, in the wake of ceasefire new livelihood opportunities in the frontier offer a younger generation of Nagas a wider array options for their futures, including getting jobs in
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Indian corporations that are expanding into the frontier or going to large and modern
Indian cities to attain higher education or qualifications, or to find work away from the frontier.
Young people do continue to join the insurgency, albeit less than before.
While membership numbers and statistics on enlistment are self-reported, rough, and the number of actual members of these groups is hard to reliably ascertain (Cline,
2006), the evidence that young people are continuing to join Naga nationalist groups is visible. Camps such National Socialist Council of Nagalim’s (NSCN-IM) Camp Hebron outside of Dimapur, as well as smaller local camps and dormitories frequented by insurgent members at Kiphire and Mon Town, contain young members. Young people are often arrested for collecting illegal taxes on behalf of insurgent groups, and young people continue to get abducted, maimed, and killed as members and associates of groups. However, the popular perception of these groups has changed. Within the
Naga community groups are less popular and members are looked upon with increasing suspicion, and ceasefire marks a point where insurgency has become a less heroic and less celebrated path that some young people, usually young men, take.
This speaks to the divisions of aspirations and possibilities that are emerging and expanding in the post-conflict era, a phenomenon not limited to Nagaland.
Frontier
This thesis offers an original contribution to studies of frontiers and the
‘margins’ of the state. Frontiers are ‘diffuse zone[s] of transition from one set of social, political, and economic geography to a different set of geography’ (Korf and
298
Raeymaekers, 2013, p. 12). Frontiers are thus marked by contestations over land, resources, and legitimacy (Rasmussen and Lund, 2018). Frontiers are also, however, highly gendered sites where contestations also surround questions identity, gender, and control. Frontier communities often cast men as guardians and protectors of territory, culture, and society from outside encroachers – as ‘sons of the soil’
(Vandekerckhove, 2009), while women are often cast as in need of guarding against outside encroachers, often in the form of moral policing and enforcing strict and narrow understandings of morality (McDuie-Ra, 2012d). From the state’s perspective, frontiers are historically imagined as spaces needing to be conquered and tamed by men (Hogan and Pursell, 2008). National efforts to ‘tame the frontier’ are loaded with masculine discourses of ‘men’s work’ and heroic efforts of conquering wilderness and civilizing missions (Sabhlok, 2017). Men migrate to the frontier in order to find jobs and livelihoods attached to resource booms and state- making projects, living out hyper-masculine narratives of taming wilderness and conquering the national frontier (Hogg, 2012). Frontier masculinities are also shaped by the intersections of multiple overlapping systems of authority and control. These may include customary institutions where men are the ultimate and often only authority holders, acting alongside more inclusive institutions of the modern state, where men may not be the ultimate authorities by default of gender. In other words, the meeting of multiple ideological and political projects in the frontier also involves the meeting of multiple forms of masculinity.
As these sites undergo transition from isolated fringes to connected resource pools, or in Nagaland’s case, from sites of conflict to sites of relative peace, multiple
299 ideas about masculinity and gender roles intersect. Men are presented with options to reify and conform to existing norms through politics of resistance and reiterating distinct frontier identities, and also to challenge these norms through engaging with emerging and imported cultures and gender norms (Hillman and Henfry, 2006). Thus, as frontiers change, some masculine norms and the typical ideas of what it ‘means to be a man’, what men are expected to be and do, and the possibilities that are open to men are altered, while others may remain remarkably static. Changing aspects of conflict, changing relationships with surrounding state structures and emerging state structures, and changing economies in the frontier present men with myriad new opportunities and possibilities in the face of massive social, economic, and political upheaval, both to reify and conform to existing masculine norms and also to challenge these norms.
Masculinities
Finally, this thesis offers insights into the ways masculine norms and hegemonic forms of masculinity are disrupted and change with the closing of violent conflict. Looking at men in Nagaland reveals the complexities of masculinities in a space that is undergoing rapid changes related to the closing of conflict and economic, political, and social changes taking place in the frontier. Discussions of men in conflict and post-conflict contexts tend to conflate violence, militaries, dominance, and hegemony, and assume that hegemonic masculinity is embodied in the most violent and most dominant men (Myrttinen, Khattab and Naujoks, 2017, pp. 107,
108). This conflation is part of a wider misunderstanding in the masculinities
300 literature, highlighted by Connell (2005) and Messerschmidt (2019), where
‘hegemony’ in masculinity is often attributed to masculine traits which are most dominant, most violent, and/or most exaggerated. Second, as Ni-Aolain, Cohn, and
Haynes (2012) argue, discussions of masculinity in post-conflict contexts ‘fails to account for the many ways that hyper-masculization inherent in hostilities continues to affect societies and underestimates [after conflict]… [and] the ways in which pre- existing conceptions of masculinity influence the transition process… Thus, while armed conflict between combatants may end as a result of a peace treaty or ceasefire agreement, violence may remain a persistent feature of the social and cultural landscape of post-conflict societies’ (p. 235). This thesis contributes to a deeper understanding of how men relate to the legacies of conflict in a state where violence continues, but conflict as it was known is largely disappearing.
Exploring the experiences of men in Nagaland offers lessons for how men redefine themselves after conflict, and how men build livelihoods in a state where violence continues but is waning and where men’s identities are less associated with conflict. Specifically, the ways men experience ceasefire and its associated changes in Nagaland suggest that post-conflict involves the re-emergence of conflict-informed masculine norms in new social arenas and attached to new issues such as migration and post-conflict feminist movements. While Nagaland is a highly specific case study, one where traditional roles of men (hunting, warfare, social guardianship) and contemporary issues (insurgency, insecurity, drugs, alcohol) intersect, the ways men’s roles and ideals are changing, and other ways that men’s roles and ideals are staying the same, offers a window to understanding how masculinity is shaped in the
301 wake of conflict. Post-conflict changes in the frontier involves a reordering of possibilities for men and for women, but also, attempts to maintain the fundamental social roles that are seen as defining an ethnic group, as foundations of identity, and for many as unable to be compromised. In Nagaland, this reordering includes movement away from insurgency and towards new forms of political action, and an opening up of pathways between Nagaland and India, and overseas, for study and work. This has also involved, however, a renewed push for protecting customary institutions and resisting a perceived influx of outsiders in the form of Bangladeshi migrants.
Limitations and Future Research
Some of this thesis’ findings are transferable, especially to other frontiers, post-conflict regions, and borderlands. However, the thesis is specific to Nagaland, and though key findings are applicable to many sites, the specifics of Nagaland need to be given consideration. Nagaland hosts a number of key variables that shape the nature of politics and gender roles in the state. Customary institutions are exclusively the domain of men, and men’s central role in politics is considered natural by a large population of Nagas. While this ethic is being challenged, especially in the ceasefire era by ideas and people coming from outside, and by the growth of civil society activism, the strong links between masculinity and politics continue. This ethic is reinforced by constitutional laws in India, namely, Article 371(A) of India’s
Constitution, which effectively insulates Naga customary institutions from changes that apply to the rest of India and makes Nagaland stand-out even compared to
302 neighbouring tribal states. This is very different from many other frontier sites, where traditional and customary institutions are often under threat or challenged by the expansion of state regimes (Lund, 2011; Lund and Rachman, 2018). In short, while the findings of this thesis may be applicable to other frontiers emerging from conflict,
Nagaland is a post-conflict frontier that is also different to other post-conflict frontiers in its treatment under constitutional laws, and in the length of the state’s conflict, being the longest ongoing independence struggle in Asia.
Two areas of possible future research are presented by the findings of this thesis. First, this research was largely limited to Nagaland’s urban centres. While smaller interior towns such as Phek, Meluri, and Tuensang were visited during fieldwork for this thesis, conducting fieldwork in these areas was made difficult by poor transportation infrastructure in Nagaland’s interior, and by the difficulties reaching participants who were often working on farms far away from villages, or who were often moving between farms and markets to sell produce. Some discussions in Phek and Tuensang suggested that, in the wake of ceasefire, divides between urban centres and rural towns and villages are exacerbated. Urban centres in the state are experiencing rapid economic growth, closer connections to Indian markets, and an urban boom in-light of post-conflict investment made possible by ceasefire. For Nagaland’s smaller interior towns, however, much of this change continues to be elusive. Young men in these towns especially live with a dogged sense that change is constantly coming, that opportunities lay elsewhere, and that the mobilities that are possible in Nagaland’s urban hubs and in India’s larger cities are not possible in one’s home village. An emerging market in agricultural land, led by
303 village councils and elites selling land and leasing land in the state’s interior in order to move to Nagaland’s larger towns has exacerbated a sense of being left behind, as villages experience a flight of able-bodied and educated youth and wealthier landowners away from villages and towards cities. Essentially, ceasefire in Nagaland is a factor in new divides and new forms of exclusion, as urban centres in the state
‘open up’, and rural towns and villages are in many ways ‘left behind’. The expanding rural/urban divide in Nagaland was not a focus of this thesis, but presents an opportunity for future research that may shed light on post-conflict changes in other frontiers.
Second, in the process of researching this thesis, while discussing employment and time-pass with former-combatants, I uncovered feelings of personal isolation, of lacking direction in life, of emasculation, and a general sense of not belonging in a post-conflict environment as motivators at the individual level for resuming roles in insurgent groups. One discussant explicitly stated that he hoped to go back to the underground because overground life was difficult and depressing.
While it is not a deliberate focus of this thesis, some of the ethnographic data in this thesis indicates a link between post-combatants feeling emasculated and unable to make the post-conflict environment ‘work’ for them, and resuming their role as combatants. The return to conflict is most often referred to as ‘spoiling’ in literature on post-conflict environments. Spoiling activities are discussed as being related to either utility maximization, or ongoing grievances being unresolved through the peace process. The discussion of spoiling continues to be dominated by Collier’s
(1999) ‘Doing Well out of War’ thesis, and Hoeffler’s (2002) ‘Greed Versus Grievance’
304 debate. Very few studies of spoiling have focused on conflicts in Northeast India, but those that do engage closely with the Doing Well out of War thesis and Greed Versus
Grievance debate (Wilson, 2017). Reflecting this discourse, policy approaches to conflict in the Northeast, by the Government of India, typically frame conflict as a problem of under-development and poverty, and propose development programs and economic stimulus as the means to resolve conflict (Baruah, 2007a). Academic discussions have framed conflict in Northeast India as products of cultural and historical differences between the Indian centre and frontier communities (Wouters and Subba, 2013; Hazarika, 2018). Essentially, approaches to conflict in Northeast
India, and by extension, approaches to spoiling activities and the return to conflict largely rest on either greed – economic motivators, or grievance – social and cultural motivators. Discussions with some ex-combatants in this research suggest that spoiling and returning to conflict may also involve gendered considerations, where ex-combatants struggle to satisfy masculine norms in ‘overground’ life, and hence, are encouraged to return to ‘underground’ life by re-enlisting in underground groups.
The links between masculinity and spoiling activities in Nagaland are under- researched and present a case in need of further research and discussion.
Closing
Reflecting on what has been an immense research journey, one that has involved numerous trips to a welcoming and beautiful but troubled part of the world, some closing and final remarks and clarifications need to be made. These remarks and clarifications serve as my way of, somewhat apologetically, thanking and crediting countless people in Nagaland who, over years, aided me in understanding 305 life in a place that is very different to where I am from and showed immense care, tolerance, and patience as I often struggled to understand life in Nagaland and the complexities of Nagaland.
First, this thesis has not been an attempt to critique or criticize men in
Nagaland. The purpose of this thesis was not to chastise or shame men in Nagaland who oppose women’s political involvement, men such as those who took part in the
2017 Urban Local Body election riots, or the men who expressed reservations about women’s property rights in Nagaland, women’s sexual agency, or feminist and inclusive ideas about citizenship. Rather, in this thesis, I have attempted to show how
Nagaland’s patriarchal backlash is shaped in a context of immense and rapid social, political and economic changes, ongoing insecurities, and ideologies that place women’s political involvement and Naga identity as at-odds with each other. Ongoing support for patriarchal institutions in Nagaland is not a matter of conservative men and elites safeguarding their own social empowerment. It is a matter of conflicting ideologies and anxieties in a contested and insecure frontier. In the years I have been visiting the state, I have been fortunate to meet and spend time with welcoming, insightful, and intelligent men. Some of the men discussed in this thesis have brought me into their homes and families, have trusted me to hear and tell their stories, and on several occasions have shared secrets with me that could put them at great risk.
Many of the men I spoke to have had extremely violent histories, and their openness and willingness to sit with me, share, and reflect is telling of the complexities that living in conflict involves. Throughout this thesis I have presented the perspectives of these men as they were presented to me. I have, at no point, supported any political
306 movement in Nagaland, and have made that clear to discussants and other interested parties in the state.
Second, this thesis has from its outset attempted to show and discuss how men in Nagaland experience ceasefire, and the changes that have come with ceasefire. This is a very difficult thing to do. Ceasefire has shaped people’s lives in
Nagaland in myriad ways, which are often difficult to ascribe directly to ceasefire and its changes. The ongoing support for Naga autonomy in Nagaland suggests that, to a degree, resistance to India has never really ended. Overall though, for men in
Nagaland ceasefire means that joining a Naga nationalist group, going ‘underground’, and taking part in armed conflict is a less realistic livelihood option, and the economic and social changes that ceasefire has brought to Nagaland has brought jobs and livelihood options into Nagaland that are greatly beneficial. Conflict has not entirely ended, but men living in Nagaland today are less likely to be killed or maimed in conflict than at any time before and have greater agency in their lives than during the conflict as well. Some men, who became close friends with me during this research, are denied many of the benefits of the changes in the state and find themselves at the margins of Nagaland’s post-conflict economy and society. It is difficult to say if these men would have been better off had ceasefires never been signed, but it is doubtful. Overall, and despite the gendered insecurities and emerging forms of conflict discussed in this thesis, life for men in Nagaland has improved as a result of ceasefire.
Finally, this thesis has called for a wider consideration and more nuanced discussion of masculinity in the wake of conflict and during ceasefire. As I have discussed throughout, conflict shapes understandings of masculinity, the thoughts,
307 actions, and behaviours associated with men. These understandings often associate hegemonic forms of masculinity with involvement in conflict, violence, warlordism, and strongman politics. This is very visible in Nagaland, where conflict has contributed to the maintenance of, and arguably has also magnified, a rigidly gendered social order where men are guardians and protectors of Naga territory, culture, and society, and women are non-political subjects who both need to be protected but also present immense risk to this social order when exercising agency and transgressing narrowly drawn gender norms. However, throughout this thesis I have also shown that the closing of conflict has allowed voices to emerge that question and challenge these rigidly drawn understandings of Naga society. New discussions and debates are taking place, and in light of these discussions and debates, change is occurring in the public and private sphere. This change is slow, and as I have discussed, marked by ongoing tensions and resistance, but it is occurring, nonetheless. Recognizing that in the wake of conflict new debates about gender and discussions about how a society works has wider implications, suggesting that even prolonged periods of disarmament and conflict-ending, as is the case in Nagaland, represent critical points of reflection and change in host societies. Further research in gender, conflict, and frontiers must continue to unpack these nuanced discussions and debates at the local level, as crucial moments of change that do not only take place between conflict actors, but take place on streets, in people’s homes, in churches, and in everyday interactions that are easily overlooked.
308
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