East By North East

EAST BY NORTH EAST

By Ajit Chaudhuri


I am sometimes asked about the nicest place I have been to! My standard answer no. 1 is – easy, it’s the place I’m visiting next. No. 2 is – I like very much at least something about every place I go to – as a travel principle, even hell has its silver linings (and heaven its flaws) – and can therefore extol the virtues of places like Maharajganj, Mehboobnagar and Mumbai that in reality have very little to recommend themselves. And no. 3 is – home!


All three standard answers are somewhat true. In a candid (or a drunken) moment, however, I would confess that the niceness of places follows a statistically normal distribution, with about 95 percent of places falling within two standard deviations of the average (ranging from ‘liking very much’ to ‘ticked my been-there-done-that list but never again’) and 2.5 percent falling into the category of hardcore shit-holes. It is the positive outliers, the 2.5 percent of places that grab me by the heart and have me looking for any hint of an excuse to visit again, usually because of the wildness of their scenery, the niceness of the people (and the beauty of the women), the quality of their cuisine, and that extra something, that keep me going on the road.


India’s North East, for those who haven’t been there, is a homogenous hilly landmass in a forgotten corner of the country, and it is full of tribals, insurgents and bamboo dancers, with a few footballers, drug addicts and musicians interspersed within. For those who have, it is socially, culturally and linguistically one of the most varied parts of the country, with each of its constituent states, the ‘seven sisters’, completely different from each other and completely different within themselves as well. I am fortunate to have spent a fair bit of time roaming around in this region, not all of it pleasant, and can vouch for the fact that, while it has its share of dull spots (such as Guwahati and Silchar) and shit-holes (Dimapur comes to mind), the North East is tilted broadly towards really nice places that are a pleasure to visit. And even with this overall skew towards the positive, there are some places in the North East that are far and away in a category of their own.


The corner-most of the seven sisters, Mizoram, is one. It is possibly the most difficult to reach (unless one does it the boring way, by air from Kolkata or Guwahati), with a road coming in from Silchar that enters Mizoram at Vairangte, which hosts the Army’s renowned jungle warfare school, and continues through the Lushai Hills into the state’s capital, Aizawl. It is also possible to come by road from Tripura via Khedachhara and Damchhara, and from Manipur via Churachandpur and Tipaimukh, both not normally done by outsiders because of the remoteness, the difficulty of the terrain, and the fact that the adjoining areas are insurgent controlled – at least, they were in 1998 and 2008 respectively, when I had done them – a great pity, because they are both journeys of remarkable beauty and splendour. The highlight journey, however, was one I did in 2008 to exit Mizoram – Aizawl to Tipaimukh by road with a night halt at Sakawrdlai, and then 10 hours by boat down the Barak river to Lakhipur in Assam in a journey reminiscent of the film “Apocalypse Now”, on and on in rushing waters with heavy jungle on both sides.


So much for getting in and out of Mizoram! The journeys within have been fun as well, more so the ones undertaken with my friend PL Liandinga who’s travel philosophy, that the joy is in the journey rather than in reaching the destination, is one I share. Pu Liandinga is a civil servant by day and a social worker, traveller, scholar and carpenter in non-work hours who has, inter alia, translated the entire Sherlock Holmes series of Arthur Conan Doyle into Mizo. Our first journey together was in 1996 to and from Ngopa, a village along the border with Myanmar, for the annual general conference of the Young Mizo Association, to which I was an invitee. Pu Liandinga’s official vehicle (he was then the General Secretary of the YMA) was stopped outside Ngopa by the conference security and his bags checked for booze (Mizoram is a dry state) and other contraband stuff in full view of about four busloads of conference delegates. He later explained that this was done because Ngopa was expecting about 5000 delegates for the conference, and security’s bag-checking exercises would be rendered more acceptable if people knew that the General Secretary’s bags had also been checked. Some traits like this, and the expectation in Mizo society that a person should put more in than s/he takes out, differentiate Mizoram from the rest of the country.


We undertook several other journeys together and it is the last one, around the southern part of the state in 2008, that was memorable for me. Southern Mizoram is inhabited by tribes that are less ‘Mizo’, tribes like the Lai, the Mara and the Chakmas (who are Buddhist in this predominantly Christian state), all of whom are afflicted with the North East disease of struggling for independence from everyone else. Southern Mizoram in 1996 was one district, called Chhimptuipuii after the river that separates it from the rest of the state – physically so for three months every monsoon, when it would be in spate and render crossing impossible. In 2008 it had been trifurcated into three autonomous councils, one for each of the dominant tribes, and there was an all-weather bridge across the river as well. Lawngtlai, the district of the Lai, is also where Mizoram’s highest mountain, Phawngpui, is located and this, seen in the early morning sun with a dash of mist and cloud from the nearby village of Sangau, where I had stayed the night, is a sight to behold.


Every Mizo village has a road leading to it, a functioning school and health centre, and basic infrastructure. People in the development business may wonder, how is it that a remote place like this has basic services functioning while villages much closer to Delhi do without? I have two answers! The first is that the village infrastructure was created during the Mizo insurgency of 1968-1986, when the Indian Army adopted strategies used by the British during the Malay insurgency that included pulling people out of their original villages and resettling them on hilltops where movements could be watched, a strategy that served to separate the insurgents from the community and deprive them of rest and recreation. Difficult to do today because of the human rights violations that it entails, but it had the positive externalities of ensuring roads into every village (at the time, to enable troop movement), the heights had less malaria than the areas closer to the river, and basic infrastructure was built as a sop. The other is that the Mizo community is such that, unlike the rest of India, it would be unacceptable for a doctor or teacher to be absconding – for both the doctor or teacher and the community.


For development sector types like me, travel here entailed some rethinking of basics. It was unacceptable to attend a village meeting in anything less than a coat, tie and black shoes – old jholas, kurtas and pseudo-poverty be damned. In meetings with women groups, it was done to make eye contact with the women, including the young and beautiful ones. And when I was travelling around in 2008 in the aftermath of the flowering of bamboo (the flower is an aphrodisiac for rats, who multiply rapidly and attack grain supplies) looking for signs of malnutrition among children in times of food shortage, I couldn’t see any even though I knew that there were severe food shortages. My food security expert friend, Biraj Patnaik, subsequently explained the contradiction – saying that in a society with strong safety nets, everyone sinks slowly together rather than the weak first and the strong not at all. The difficulty of this otherwise admirable trait is that, when the community does cross danger lines, it is in a sudden deluge rather than in a trickle.


A word about my favourite subjects; food and women! Mizo food is a little different – everything that moves is eaten, and it is cooked a little differently to what one is used to. In my initial travels in the state I found that eateries would make assumptions from my Indian features and produce some rice, some potato, and two fried eggs for me, all while everyone else tucked into a variety of meats. I later would have none of that, and ate what others were eating – yes, for those who want to know, including frog (a bit like chicken), dog (unremarkable), bees (tasted like chips) and monkey (truly yuk). On the whole, not a cuisine that has one’s mouth watering with anticipation – food here is to be endured rather than enjoyed.


The same can’t be said of the women, who are beautiful, hard working, and educated, and who manage to get that difficult combination of working and looking after their man absolutely correct – all of which combine to make Mizo men (and others who marry them) subjects of envy. They have a right to choose, and a right to indulge themselves while making choices, and it is normal for young men to visit an unattached lady’s home with their guitars, and to take them off after dinner. Evening meetings with village women’s groups would invariably turn interesting, with the older biddies jokingly telling me to spend the night in their village because the younger women were beautiful. And the formal meetings, in which all the women wore traditional puans, beautifully designed and crafted wrap-arounds, were paradise for one’s eyes. An interesting trait among Mizo women was that of re-tightening their wrap-arounds in a flicking motion that, if one anticipated and watched carefully, one got a glimpse of what lay beneath. As you can imagine, I spent a fair bit of time hanging around in market places watching the ‘Mizo flick’.


I would like to conclude here by saying that my many visits to Mizoram have not been by accident; I have worked hard to ensure that this remarkable state has remained part of my beat over the years despite its forwardness and general state of development. And I would like to thank those who have joined me on these journeys and contributed to making them memorable – Sanjoy Ghose and Sunil Kaul, Pu Liandinga and Pu Vanlalzawma, CP Jayalakshmi and John Pudaite. Things wouldn’t have been the same without you!