'Acceptance Does Not Come Easy': An Interview with Uddipana Goswami

‘Acceptance Does Not Come Easy’: An Interview with Uddipana Goswami. Babli Mallick Research Scholar Department of English Banaras Hindu University A dexterous author, a fearless journalist and a passionate Researcher, Uddipana Goswami from Assam has marked her place in the field of literature. Starting her career as a journalist with tehelka.com and India Today, she has worked in diverse fields including sociological research and teaching. Her noted works starting from We Called the River Red: Poetry from a Violent Homeland (2009), Green Tin Trunk (2014), Conflict and Reconciliation: The Politics of Ethnicity in Assam (2013) to Where We Come from, Where We Go: Tales from the Seven Sisters (2015) make her stand as writer with a distinct authority. Here Babli Mallick is in conversation with Uddipana Goswami. Babli : Tell us what inspired you to come to the literary field? Uddipana : I don’t remember a single spark or moment of inspiration when I can claim I started writing. It’s something I’ve been doing for as far back as I can remember. Maybe that is what comes from being born in a household where both parents are writers – my father was a noted folklorist and writer, my mother is a poet. They encouraged us siblings to write and translate from our earliest childhood. My father would also encourage us to publish. And because my parents moved in the literary circles, I was exposed to the greatest minds of our times. Some of the greatest names in Axamiyā literature were regular visitors. All of this contributed to my interest in literature and writing. Babli: What challenges have you met as a writer? Uddipana: Every writer faces so many different challenges in life, but a successful writer is one who can overcome them and continue writing. At many points in my life, I have faced so many challenges. The very fact that I write across many genres and disciplines also gives me kind of an outsider feeling everywhere. Acceptance does not come easy. When I was starting out as a researcher, I was a young woman in Assam, doing fieldwork in a conflict zone. I was moving freely in society, interacting with different actors and agencies. This naturally raised many eyebrows. In Delhi, I was a Northeasterner writing about my identity and politics and trying to get published. These issues were taboo to the publishing industry till a few years back (now it’s the ‘in’ thing). But most of all, these days, just finding time to write is one of the greatest challenges. A single mother of a five-year old who also has a full-time job never has it easy. But then, if it weren’t for these challenges, our lives would be rather dull, don’t you think? Babli: You did a great job in collecting the circulating oral folk fables in Where We Come From, Where We Go (2015) as Mamang Dai did in The Legend of Pensam (2006). Do you think refocusing on folk fables and myth can change our modern life’s complexity? Uddipana: As a child I used to translate folktales from different parts of the world into Axamiyā and they were published in the children’s journals. I have been associated with folk literature for a long time and have grown up watching my father doing his field research in folklore as a part of his daily interactions with people. I inherited his rich collection of folk literature from the Northeast. Adding my own collection to his, I compiled and retold the tales in Where We Come From, Where We Go (2015). Having been thus closely associated with folklore for so long now, I cannot believe that the folk imagination is at all ‘simple’ or naïve. It is a very complex network of thoughts, experiences and worldviews that go into the making and telling of the tales that I have enjoyed reading since early childhood. The simplicity and dexterity with which this complexity is presented in folk literature is what we need to understand and internalise. The aim should not be to undermine the complexities of life, but to approach them, engage with them, in a simple way. There is much beauty in simplicity. Babli : In your book, We Called the River Red: Poetry from a Violent Homeland and the recent one No Ghost in the City you have shown how common people are caught between the two forces - Indian Army and the militants. Can you please enlighten us more? Uddipana : The struggles of living alone in a far away city and working hard day and night to make my mark as a journalist were all that I knew till then. Suddenly, when it all got to me, I left my job with National Geographic Television and returned to ‘do something’ in and for my land of origin. I turned to research. Nothing in my elitist schooling in Guwahati or privileged education in Delhi University had prepared me for when I started doing my fieldwork in Bodoland in 2004. I was started by studying the indigenous-settler conflicts in the conflict zone, and what I saw in the next two years of my research there changed me forever. Especially when I visited the IDP camps and saw the plight of the people caught in the crossfire between the armed agencies of the State and the non-State actors, I was traumatised. Out of this trauma flowed most of the poetry in We Called the River Red: Poetry from a Violent Homeland. The stories in No Ghost in the City also came from my experience of living and working in a conflict zone. Many of the stories in this collection are inspired by narratives and nuggets of information that I collected during my fieldwork; these are stories and anecdotes that I could not include in my academic study Conflict and Reconciliation: The Politics of Ethnicity in Assam. Babli: What do you say about the intolerance of Assamese towards outsiders in the context of Assam Movement and Nellie Massacre? Uddipana: The Nellie Massacre is a sad episode in Assam’s history. My forthcoming book deals with the Assam Agitation in details and discusses how it changed the course of ethno-nationalist politics in Assam. Intolerance in any form, under any pretext, needs to be condemned. Babli: It has been seen that the illegal infiltration is still going on especially in Assam. What do you say about that? How to overcome this crisis in present scenario? Uddipana: I think it’s high time we adopted a new vocabulary where it comes to population movement. Can human beings ever be ‘illegal’? Then why do we term some of them as ‘illegal’ migrants? How is it that population movement from certain countries into others is termed ‘infiltration’ whereas, if it is the other way round, it is simply ‘migration’? These are questions that need to be asked of the media which uses these terms liberally and without thought, of policy makers who use these terms as the frameworks of their policy-making and of the people at large who adopt these terms without question. Those who are overly worried about a crisis brewing over continued mass migration from Bangladesh should visit the country and witness firsthand the progress they are making in every field today. I have met many individuals who have revised their opinion about Bangladesh posing a threat after just one visit there. I believe that if we, in Assam, were as hard-working and enterprising as the people of Bangladesh, if we could sacrifice as much as they did for the love of their nation (and survive), we would not have to worry about being silently invaded by them. Babli: Do you think the successive governments have done enough to get over this imbroglio? Uddipana: Like I said, we need to revaluate our concerns where it comes to illegal migration. We need to rethink the current situation and not play politics over what is now perhaps a historical phenomenon. Vested political interests, of course, will not allow this, but many eminent scholars have tried to redefine the situation. These include people who have studied the region for decades now, like Sanjoy Hazarika and Subir Bhaumik. Babli: Your married life was not a very happy one. Was it due to the conflict between Bengali and Assamese culture or something more? Uddipana: Cultural differences can never be the reason for conflict – it is people who are intolerant of differences that cause conflicts at individual levels. I cannot endorse that there is, indeed, a ‘conflict between Bengali and Assamese cultures’. Babli: Please share your experience with the Centre for Northeast India, South & Southeast Asia Studies (CENISEAS). Uddipana: CENISEAS laid the foundation of my research career: my interest in sociology dates back to the days when I was a Junior Research Fellow there. My association with Sanjib Baruah through the centre helped me shape my early research interests. Although I was trained in English Literature at Delhi University, in the two years that I was with the centre, I found that I was more interested in studying the sociology of literary texts than in literature itself. My interest in ethnic conflicts also dates back to my days at CENISEAS. Later, with the work that I was doing alongside my PhD, I began to combine my research interests with my formal training, first in English Literature (at Delhi University) and then in media (at IIMC). Now, my PhD in sociology (from JNU) has established me as a sociologist who studies the production of literary texts and media content in the context of ethnic conflicts. The gender concern in my work gives it an additional intent. Babli: You have done many translations of literary texts. What difficulty have you faced while doing this? Uddipana: Translation is always a difficult task. One has to find a way to be true to the author, the text and the self all at the same time. It is a balancing act, negotiating between the two cultural contexts of the original and the translated text, remembering the original audience while pandering somewhat to the intended audience of the translated text. There are so many other decisions that need to be taken, it is indeed exhausting. Babli : Do you think the literature from Northeast India is somewhere still not accepted broadly by people and the noted publishing house in comparison to the literature from the mainland? Uddipana: I think, these days, literature from the Northeast is widely accepted by readers and publishers alike. The problem, however, is that it is accepted as ‘literature from the Northeast’, not as ‘literature’ per se. Such compartmentalisation is not healthy. Babli: As you have pointed out in the essay ‘Insurgency and Assam Literature’ that not many writers deal with it. While doing my research work on this perspective I too have faced it. There are numerous books in the field of social science but why not from literature? Uddipana: This is changing: there are currently a lot of creative writers dealing with conflict and insurgency in the Northeast. At the time that I started out looking for a publisher for my first book – my poetry collection – none of the mainland/mainstream publishers were willing to touch politically sensitive literature from the Northeast. Over the last few years, the scenario has changed drastically: now everybody wants writers from the Northeast to write about conflict and politics. It is as if there is nothing in the region beyond conflict. What is still missing, perhaps, is academic interest in the literature from the Northeast. We need more literary criticism of conflict literature as well as sociological studies dealing with insurgency and literature from the region. Babli: Are you still researching on the ethnic reconciliation? Is there any hope? Uddipana: My search for ethnic reconciliation has been through my research, my writing, and through everything else I have ever done. It is not just a concept or a research subject for me – it is a way of life, one that I live from day to day. The hope that all ethnic groups of the Northeast will unite and live together peacefully never dies. Babli : How is your experience as the editor of Northeast Review? Share the difficulty of this job while maintaining the responsibility to present the true narratives. Uddipana : Creating the Northeast Review and editing it has been a most rewarding experience. It is a work of passion that I, and a few friends, got together to translate into practice. However, since all of us are otherwise engaged in various jobs, and since this is a very time consuming and demanding responsibility, many a times, we have struggled to get an issue out in time. Each time, though, we have had an overwhelming number of submissions and the reader response has also been tremendous. Babli : You have the multiple roles as writer, journalist and editor. Which role you loved most and why? Uddipana : I am, and always have been, a writer. That is how I see myself, whatever other role I might be playing from time to time. When I am writing, I am not playing any ‘role’ – I am in my essence.