This slim volume with its colourful, woven tapestry-like cover, invites attention for a multiplicity of reasons. There is very little Bodo literature which is in circulation. Even a casual perusal of the book immediately draws one into a dialogue with the various authors, which goes beyond the mundane. Questions of gender and identity are highlighted of course, but the writings are rich with experience, which is unique, and yet paradoxically, also recognizable and familiar.
The introduction provides an excellent overview of the history and politics of Bodo language and literature. It is pertinent to think back upon the ramifications of the Assam Official Language Act of 1960 which deemed Assamese the official language of the State, ignoring its multilingualism. This attempt at the imposition of Assamese on all dwellers within the State of Assam had a detrimental effect on amity and unity within the State. The editors evoke this history briefly, preferring to look backward and then ahead, at the literature, both oral and written, which expresses Bodo consciousness.
The introduction provides an insight into the location of these writings within larger frameworks of local and global conflict and resistance. ‘Emerging from political and cultural conflict zones, Bodo women’s poetry addresses themes of loss, trauma, identity, and empowerment,’ say the editors. They add that ‘this collection voices the concerns and lived realities of historically marginalized, indigenous women.’ Thus, the collection marks an important intervention into both, women’s writings and culturally sidelined literature.
The women poets chosen for this anthology present their unique perspective of the world and politics around them. The particularity of their experience does not detract from the shared worldview of their readers. The poems induce intellectual contemplation, and perhaps even an emotional engagement. Even after the poems have been read and the book laid down, certain lines linger, for in these uncertain times, like Anju, we too ‘are no longer surprised/ By the tyranny of tyrants, and the betrayal of liars’. Along with her, we mourn our own lack of surprise in a world where headlines scream of doom and disaster, and ‘what was once habit has become a disease./ Reading the newspaper is a disease’, as Dhirjyu Basumatary laments.
Reading Bodo literature, one is forced to ask if the personal and the political can ever be separated. Questions of identity and language politics are inseparable from each other, evident in so many poems here. But the issues emerge subtly, linked to myriad other questions; Rita Boro’s poem, ‘The River’s Nostalgia’, or Shanti Basumatary’s ‘Dear City’ bear quiet testimony to the complexity of intertwined discourses in Bodo literature. Easily glimpsed within these poems are concerns about majoritarian oppression, indigeneity, and cultural assertion; the anxiety of erasure looms over these works. The poems in this anthology touch on these matters, sometimes lightly, but sometimes with anger, and a deep, searing sorrow.
The fact that these are poems written by women perhaps makes erasure and sorrow even more poignant, more relevant themes. On one hand lies the easily recognizable female experience, ubiquitous in Southeast Asia—the pragmatics of being a second-class citizen, othered and silenced; on the other hand is the experience of being Bodo—a double marginalization, an existential conundrum. Rashmi Choudhary’s ‘The Poem of a Woman’ and Rita Boro’s ‘Individuality’ probe the pain of this experience. Almost all of Indira Boro’s poems such as ‘Who will Give Recognition’ and ‘This is not your Father’s House’ express the harshness of life faced by women in the subcontinent. Anju’s ‘Do Not Ask Me How I am’, is piercing in its lament of, and for, ‘sorrow worn by/generations of grandmothers’. Most heart-rending is the yearning of the creative female mind, which does not even seek space to be heard, but merely space and time, to create. Indira Boro’s ‘Thrown into the Dustbin’ is a sharp and heartbreaking commentary on this situation.
Hey, blockhead!
This… this paper and pen
wont feed you!
My Husband scolds me,
snatching the paper I wrote on,
he throws it away—
tossing it into the dustbin.
If so many poems speak of the recognizable female experience, there are as many where Bodo identity takes centre stage. Sometimes it is assertive, deliberate; at other times, it slips in easily. Cultural markers are often retained, in certain words and phrases which cannot perhaps be adequately translated.
Multiple poems in this volume evoke the Bodo tradition on weaving textiles at home, especially by women. Virgin Jekovah Machahary writes of a ‘Hardworking Aunt’ in a poem rich with local references. Here too, weaving takes centre-stage. The aunt
rears silkworms…
nurtures them…
…crafts indi…
weaving them into…
dokhona, jwmgra, gamcha,
dima, aronia, and more…
The poem, ostensibly about elder women in a community, is also a testimony to the suffering and endurance of Bodo women. It documents their struggle to keep alive traditions and customs in a fast-changing, often violent world. Her poem ‘Mother Tongue’ is an assertion of the right to speak Bodo, and to keep it alive for future generations. The anger and anxiety of a suppressed community emerge poignantly in such poems.
In a way, Bodo history and politics is the foundational reality of the poets, the tension which keeps their poems taut, and gives their words, their language, a certain emotional urgency which demands acknowledgement, even if it lurks in the background of their writing. Anju’s ‘Women’s Bodies a Battlefield’ bears testimony to the ignominy borne by women in the Northeast; the reference to Manorama, and the mothers protesting at Kangla Fort (in Manipur, 2004) serves as a marker of indignity and atrocities borne by women there. Anger and agony swirl together in this searing poem.
The editors write that their attempt in this translated anthology is ‘not to distort or subvert but to re-centre indigenous perspectives by re-purposing or, as Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird call it, “re-inventing” the English language as a decolonial tool of communication.’ The poems in this volume are proof of that ‘re-centring’ as a successful project. Harjo and Bird argue that even though English carries a colonial baggage, it also serves as a vehicle for indigenous communities to reach a wider audience and also assert their identity; it helps them craft narratives that resist authority and simultaneously serve as vehicles of self-expression. The translated poems in this volume successfully and effectively serve the purpose of documenting and transmitting the Bodo worldview. The poems are rich with the sights, sounds, smells, and stories of that world, a world which is both unexplored, and yet vaguely familiar.
Sanam Khanna is Associate Professor, Department of English, Kamala Nehru College, University of Delhi, Delhi.