Jajabori Mon: Barenaked ladies

by Uddipana Goswami

Saturday , July 21, 2012 at 11 : 41

There is nothing novel about a group of grown men stripping and/or molesting a woman in public, while the said public looked on. Indian mythology tells us about (self?) righteous kings and warriors who also happened to be husbands allowing something like this happen a long time ago. In contemporary times, one hears of women Dalit women especially being similarly humiliated in many parts of India. But then that is mainland India, right? We always do love saying that in the North-East, we women are treated with greater dignity. Apparently, that's a myth as well. The public humiliation of a teenage girl in Guwahati captured on camera recently has everybody talking the media, the activists, the online forums, the person on the street, you name it. With even international TV channels picking up the video that went viral, it has very nearly become the 'event' of the year....Read more...

Jajabori Mon: Identity in exile

by Uddipana Goswami

Thursday , June 21, 2012 at 16 : 32

I grew up amidst an atmosphere of ultra-nationalism generated by the Assam Movement of the late '70s and the early '80s. And then, there was the romance of insurgency, the fire of idealism that inspired an entire generation of Assamese youth. That fire, though dimmed to a great extent, was still burning when I left home in 1996: 'home' has always been equated with Assam - and Northeast India as a whole - in my vocabulary. And that was my first time away from home, away from everything held fanatically dear.

I was eighteen then and romanticism at age eighteen is permissible. With juvenile simplicity I wrote in a poem how 'after cradling me for nine months in her womb, my mother planted me a tiny seed in the soil of my birth'; very idealistically, I wrote of myself as the tree that...Read more...

Jajabori Mon: Conflict and resolution in Assam

by Uddipana Goswami

Monday , May 21, 2012 at 15 : 09

Since the formation of the Indian State in 1947, the Northeast region of the country has seen numerous violent conflicts of varying intensity. As a region where the perception of 'colonial' exploitation is still alive in certain pockets despite significant assimilation into the 'national' mainstream, the nature of these conflicts have ranged from mass civil disobedience movements engendered by long-standing grievances against the Indian State, to armed militancy aimed at secession from the State.

Instead of addressing the underlying causes of these conflicts, the State has often responded to them with large scale militarisation and a strategy of co-option of the ethnic elites within the conflict parties. This has led to the manifestation of new conflicts and exacerbation of old ones rather than to their resolution or transformation. These new conflicts have been directed not just against the State...Read more...