Call Me By My Name: How ‘Miyas’ in Assam are reappropriating the slur

They are young, full of dreams, and are calling themselves the ‘Miyas’ of Assam. What does poetry, identity and the NRC offer them?

For three years every day at 5 pm, Mirza Lutfar Rahman’s voice would crackle on radios across Assam: “Nomoskar, Yuvabani’loi xokolu srotak’e moi Mirza Lutfar Rehman’e swagatam jonaisu” (Greetings, I am Mirza Lutfar Rahman, welcoming all listeners to the Yuvabani programme).

Soon after he started working as an “announcer” at the All India Radio (AIR) office in Guwahati in 2012, someone told him: “Do you know you are the first person from your community to be an announcer for AIR?”

That evening Rahman raced back to call his family who lived in a riverine island, called a char-chapori, in Boko, about 100 km away. “Aami aru Axomiya hoboloi baaki nai”, the young man had thought to himself with pride. “This is as Assamese as we get.”

Rahman grew up, like all Assamese children, listening to the music of Jyoti Prasad Agarwala and Bishnu Rabha. When he was older, it was Bhupen Hazarika on loop. For his char’s Bihu programmes, Rahman would edit its annual magazine. And yet, Rahman has keenly felt the question of identity throughout his life.

He is a “Miya”, a pejorative word used to describe Muslims who migrated from East Bengal to Assam over several decades, starting from 19th century. He recalls how a colleague at AIR had lashed out at him with that slur. Though poorer people from his community would quietly give in to routine abuse, Rahman didn’t. “I told him ‘What’s the difference between you and I? I came from a char, you came from elsewhere but we both got jobs here. The only difference is in our minds’,” recalls 30-year-old-Rahman.

***

Two weeks ago, a Guwahati-based journalist filed an FIR against 10 Miya poets. He alleged that Miya poetry — a newborn genre of poetry written by those like Rahman who wish to fight back against the slur — had the potential to create “communal disturbances in the state” and was painting the Assamese as “xenophobic”.

As a young Miya as well as a poet, Rahman was dismayed at the bitter debate that unfolded on social media and in newspapers. In the background were the anxieties triggered by the ongoing process to finalise the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam. “We initially thought that the NRC would end discrimination against us. But it has made matters worse,” says Rahman, “It has birthed a strain of ultranationalists in Assam who have no inhibitions. They target poets too.”

This article was originally published in The Indian Express in July 2019. Full article here.

The Girl Who Chases Time

This article won the PoleStar Foundation's Excellence in Journalism Award 2019, and was originally published in The Indian Express in July 2018.

For most of her life, Hima Das has faced life’s challenges by running. She has run in rage and joy, after brawls and victories, and as if her life depended on it. The story of a young athlete from a village in Assam who won’t stop, not till she has outrun the clock.

Hima Das never cries. But last week she did. Twice. The first time, silently, and in public, while millions watched her standing on the winner’s deck in Tampere, Finland, as the notes of the Indian national anthem played in the background. The second time, she bawled. This was the morning after her record-making victory, in the privacy of her hostel room.

The night before Hima had slept fitfully. When she woke up and checked her phone, she had gone viral. In this emotionally charged moment, the otherwise hardboiled Hima, picked up the phone and dialled Assam. On the other end was her coach, a nonplussed Nipon Das, who had never seen or heard her like this. “What’s wrong, are you okay?” he asked, as she sobbed uncontrollably.

A few days later, Hima gave an exclusive primetime interview to Prag News, a popular local Assamese news channel, from Finland. When asked about this rare spectacle of emotion, she giggled, embarrassedly and said, “Automatic ahi gol (The tears were spontaneous)”.

Actions like crying and emotions like fear and sadness aren’t typically Hima Das things. Though throwing your arms open before a camera and shouting “Mon jai”, is. Speaking a language you barely know without caring that you don’t, is. Taking to task boys who annoy you, or anyone else for that matter, is. And, of course, running like your life depends on it, is.

“I don’t think I even understand the full meaning of athletics. Sometimes I feel I don’t know even know how to run,” says Hima, earphones strung around her neck, fiddling with the drawstring of her hooded grey T-shirt. It’s early July and we are sitting on the stands of Guwahati’s Sarusajai Stadium, the athletic tracks on which a little over a year ago Hima had landed for her first training camp, straight from the pothaars (fields) of her village Kandhulimari in Dhing.

How does she do it then? Hima shrugs, points upwards, and says, “It’s just ‘god gift’.” Ten days after the interview, Hima clocks 51.46 seconds at the womens’ 400 m final at the IAAF World Under 20 Championship 2018, in Tampere, creating history as the first Indian woman to win a gold on track at a global event — not even two years since she started professional training.

***

In its history, Dhing has been in the national news on two occasions. In March, in one of its remoter villages, a 11-year-old minor girl was raped and set on fire. The next month, Dhing hit headlines again, this time in sporting circuits. The girl who had trained in its lush green rice fields had made it to the 400m womens’ finals of the Commonwealth Games (CWG) in Australia’s Gold Coast. She came sixth, after clocking her personal best of 51.32 seconds on an international track. The Dhing Express — as Hima soon came to be called by her swelling fan club in Assam — had arrived.

“I didn’t feel bad,” says Hima, “In fact, I danced a lot right after the CWG got over. My coach had told me to ‘go enjoy’. So I did ‘full enjoy’.” In a clipping from that evening, Hima can be seen dancing with abandon outside the stadium, oblivious to the cameras that panned in on her.

Back at her village in Kandhulimari, about 200 people had gathered in the porch of her house to see her run. A projector and a screen had been set up. A traditional Assamese band with dhul and pepa had been called. Minutes before the race, the power went off and Kandhulimari plunged into darkness. “But we had arranged for a generator, and, ultimately, we did get to see her run,” says Hima’s sister, 15-year-old Rinti. Last week, when Hima won the gold in Finland, the power played spoilsport again, and the family missed watching their Hima accept her medal.

But this is the reality of small-town Assam — an accepted fate where electricity doesn’t return for hours on end, where floods are regular, and phone networks not. The day after she won her first international gold, as media, relatives and friends milled around her house, Hima called her cousin, Joy Das, several times to speak to the family, but every time the network would drop. “There is something up with the connectivity today,” Joy says, standing at the edge of the paddy field where Hima’s father works everyday, waving around his phone, trying to catch the best angle for network. It doesn’t work.

In the small group of people that plays a role in keeping Hima connected to Assam as she travels around the world, Joy is the messenger who sets up a video call between her and her parents every other day. Hima’s father Ranjit, a farmer, who was a fast runner himself, doesn’t own a phone with those features. Jonali, her mother, doesn’t own a phone at all.

***

Hima grew up in a joint family of 17. Among her siblings and cousins, she was the one who stood out, the one who did things differently. When she was 15, she gathered the local village women and disrupted an illicit bootlegging business by one of her neighbours. The next day, the young man involved stood in front of Hima’s house and started shouting, “No one can stop me from selling alcohol”. Hima promptly went, picked him up and gave him a few solid swipes. The boy’s family lodged an FIR against Hima’s father, who, till very recently, would appear in court for this case.

Then again, she spent most of her early teen years pestering Joy to let her play football with the guys. “Even if I wasn’t a part of the game, I’d wait behind the goal. When the ball would come near me, I’d give it one solid kick and run off before they could see me,” says Hima.

Another time, when a local girls’ football tournament was underway at Dhing, she went to her father. “Get me to play,” she had begged him. “Yet at other times, when she was much younger, she would tell me how she would one day fly on an airplane, and maybe even visit a foreign land,” says Ranjit, “But I would tell her. For those things, Hima, you need to study well, you need to play well.”

Hima took her father’s words to heart. Later, as she raced around tracks across the world, she would discuss her timings and techniques with him. And her father would wonder to himself, how his daughter’s dreams had suddenly become a reality. Her mother, who says she didn’t understand the sport for very long, would worry about Hima’s safety and well-being. “When she first wanted to move to Guwahati, I did not want her to go,” she says. For Jonali Das, who rarely ever moves out of her tiny village in Dhing, Guwahati is a big city, rife with gondogul (trouble).

“But I would tell Ma that she shouldn’t worry, that very few things scare me,” says Hima, “And that I could always run off, even if they did.”

Because, running, for Hima, is second nature. She ran, in a fit of rage, when in Class III, a Tata Sumo — filled with village kids — was “too full” to accommodate her on a ride to school. She ran again, this time from her mother, when she reached home the same day, hair tousled and knees bruised from the fall that had resulted from her Sumo chase. And she continued running with steadfast determination — in tracks across Assam, in coaching camps in Patiala and Sonepat, and even in the rare races where she performed so poorly that she “wanted to give up midway”.

***

It’s perhaps because of the Assam’s politically sensitive history, its long fight to maintain its indigenous identity, it’s desire to be noticed by the mainland, that catapults its celebrities, be it sportsmen, actors or musicians, to legend-like status. The last big athlete Assam produced was Bhogeswar Baruah, who won a gold medal in the 800-m running event of the 1966 Asian Games. National attention to this part of the country is rare, and when a Bhupen Hazarika, a Zubeen Garg or a Hima Das emerges, Assam celebrates with fanatic obsession.

Hima’s last visit to Kandhulimari, in the first week of July, lasted less than 24 hours. About 2,000 people had gathered to see her. “Everyone wanted to meet her but she gave us time,” says Pinak Jyoti Bora, one of her closest friends. Bora met Hima a couple years ago when she was appointed the game secretary by the All Assam Student Union’s Dhing chapter. It was then that she also met Palash, Bhaskar, Bidanta, Rezaul, Jitu and Nayan. Soon, the eight of them became fast friends, who in their ripped jeans and shades, would play carrom, ride around their bikes, and basically “do mojja” (have fun). “But what really brought us together was Zubeen da. We are true Zubeen premis,” says Bhaskar. In Assam — urban or rural — the music of the outspoken, and often controversial, singer Zubeen Garg binds the populace in unprecedented ways. “Hima even led a bike rally for Zubeen da’s movie, Mission China,” adds Bhaskar.

In 2017, Hima went to meet Garg in Guwahati as part of a fan club visit. “She came to me as a fan, left as friend,” says Garg, “I realised that she was a khatra bostu(dangerous thing) the day I met her.” Garg, who sees himself in Hima, often gives her advice about life. Just last week, when Garg expressed in public “how Hima should eat beef for strength”, it stirred up a controversy in Assam. “You think she will conquer the world on chicken soup?” Garg says, “For sport, you need to leave your jaati, dharma and bhagwan.” Right before she boarded her flight to Finland, Hima met up with Garg in Delhi. The selfie they took went viral in Assam afterwards.

Even when abroad, far from the paddy fields of Dhing, thoughts of home keep Hima centred. Minutes after her victory in Finland, as the Tricolour is handed to her, so is the traditional Assamese gamusa. A panting Hima tells a reporter, pointing at the scarf around her neck, “This is my state’s tradition.” Her now-famous catchphrase, “Mon jai”, which in Assamese, means “I feel like”, is Hima’s way of acknowledging her roots. “There is something nice about saying an Assamese phrase outside,” says Hima, adding, “Even back when I played football in Assam, too, I would throw open my arms and maaro a mon jai after every goal.”

Today, “mon jai” is a hashtag she generously uses in all her social media posts, but if you delve deeper, it is so much more. It’s the name of her favourite song by her favourite Zubeen da, it’s her unfailing determination in her weakest moments, it’s her fearlessness and confidence, but, more importantly, it’s her way of describing anything she holds dear — a pet rabbit, a picture of her parents, or the Whatsapp group with her gang of seven.

“We talk every day on the Mon Jai group about sport, music, food, but we also talk about important things. I know they have my back,” says Hima. Before she enters the Asian Games in Jakarta next month, her friends, too, are planning to streak their hair blonde Hima Das style. “She keeps asking us if we have done it,” says Bora. A few weeks ago Bhaskar gave it a test run. “But the colour turned out all wrong! Then I had to put Super Vasmol 33 Kesh Kala (a colouring agent) on it to get my original colour back,” he says. That incident made Hima laugh herself silly.

Talking like boys, acting like boys, hanging out with boys — did tongues ever wag in the conservative village of Kandhulimari as Hima grew up? “Let’s not get into that,” sighs Hima, “Let’s just say, my mind is different. My attitude is different. And no one understands me the way my friends do.”

***

On her last visit to Assam, Hima was felicitated by the state’s Governor in Guwahati’s Raj Bhavan. In this closed-door by-invitation-only private ceremony, Hima sat next to the Governor. And as the men and women from various ministries of the government discussed her diet, her passion, style, and her in-born talent, Hima remained unusually quiet.

Or so you would think. Across the table, Hima was in the middle of a roaring non-verbal conversation of her own. She would wink surreptitiously and show the thumbs up sign, when she thought no one was watching. These signs were directed at the two men who were sitting diagonally across her: her coaches Nipon Das and Nabajit Malakar.

Later, she admits, “It’s like the three of us have the same heart. Like, I can tell you right now what’s going in their heads.” Das and Malakar spotted Hima during a trial camp in Guwahati in January 2017. “I didn’t even know her name, but I knew her as the girl who would keep calling me about hostel accommodation for new entrants to the camp,” recalls Das, “I ended up saving her number as ‘Trial Camp’ and whenever ‘Trial Camp’ flashed on my phone, I knew it was that girl calling about accommodation.”

But, slowly, Das couldn’t help notice that there was something different about Hima. “It was the way she did her exercises, the way she ran — that energy was something else,” says Das. The next month Hima competed in her first national competition, Khelo India in Gujarat. “She won the bronze medal in 100 m and clocked in a timing of 12.42 seconds,” says Malakar, “We asked her to come train with us in Guwahati.”

“I told them ‘moi ready Sir’ and I packed my bags and moved to a one-roomed rented accommodation in Guwahati,” says Hima. Those were the tough days: money was a problem, spikes were a problem, the leaky roof of her tiny room was a problem. “When I came to Guwahati, I knew nothing. I didn’t know how to wash clothes or cook, I was never into household chores. I hated all that. But I loved running,” she says.

And that made the difference. “She was supremely dedicated. No matter what she went through the night before, she would be at the tracks every morning, on time,” says Malakar. Over the past year, Das and Malakar have become Hima’s strongest support system, they are the people she texts every single day, whichever part of the world she is in.

***

During her first few games across the national sporting circuit, Hima became famous as the girl from Assam. She would wear her shades, her patchy jeans, tie her hanky around her knee — “and walk around bindaas, completely ‘yo’ type,” says Malakar, who continues to tease Hima about that. After her first trip abroad to Bangkok, where she had gone to compete in the second Asian Youth Athletics Championships, the streak of blonde in her hair became more pronounced. “We asked her — ‘What on earth have you done to your hair?’,” says Malakar. To which, Hima had said, “Sir, just you wait, this will become a trend one day.”

Her relationship with her coaches has been the cornerstone of Hima’s discipline. Before heading into a race, Hima always gives them a rough estimate of how she will fare. “And rarely has she been off the mark,” says Das. In November 2017, when Hima got selected to train in the Senior India Camp in Patiala, Russian Olympic bronze medallist Olympian, Galina Bukharina, took over as Hima’s coach.“It’s true Hima still speaks to us every day about her sport , but we do not interfere with how Galina ma’am is guiding her,” says Das.

Hima is very close to her “Galina ma’am” too. They communicate in English, a language that does not come naturally to her, but that’s hardly a deterrent for someone like Hima. On the sidelines of athletic tracks, she interacts with reporters with disarming aplomb, her Assamese conversation is peppered with English words, and she listens to English songs even if she, by her own admission, “doesn’t understand all the lyrics.”

“Before a public appearance, she sometimes jokes to me ‘English mari diu niki?’ (Shall I wing it in English?),” says Malakar, who adds that Hima always mentions them both at every opportunity she gets. “She once told me, ‘If I am going to fly, I am not going to fly alone. I am going to make you fly with me.’”

***

On Thursday night as Hima created history in Finland, in his small home in Assam’s Morigaon district, a man name Md Shamsul Hoque shed tears of joy. “I had to keep replaying the video because I was weeping so much,” he says. In 2012, Hoque was a physical education teacher at the Navodaya Vidyalaya in Nagaon. In one of the inter-school camps, which included yoga programmes, PT sessions, “lozenge” races and dodgeball, Hoque noticed a girl who would reach before practice started, sometimes even when the gates were closed. “In the ten days that followed, the girl went on to win all the races we had organised,” says Hoque, who then called up the Nagaon Sports Association and informed them about Hima. “This girl can run. Invest in her,” he told the authorities.

It’s Hoque’s intervention that got Hima into athletics, who, till then, was playing football in local tournaments around Assam. After her first national medal, Hima came back to Nagaon, and went straight to Navodaya Vidyalaya, and strung it around Hoque’s neck.

Before her Finland game, too, Hima called up Hoque, as she does all her coaches, to seek his blessings. In the race that followed — the one that got the world to sit up and take notice — every one talks about Hima’s sudden burst in the last 100 m stretch where she shot ahead like a catapult. But this trend of judiciousness in the beginning followed by mad speed in the last stretch is fast becoming Hima’s style. “Even in the game before the Finland one, in Guwahati, it was in the last 60 metres that she caught up and passed her opponents,” says Das.

Time and again, Hima has insisted that what she cares about is timing, not medals, not laurels, not world rankings. “The only thing I fear is time. I am not running after gold medals, I am running after time. And once I get that, gold medals will run after me,” she says. Currently, Hima’s personal best on a domestic track for 400m is 51.13 seconds, which she clocked in Guwahati’s Sarusajai Stadium in June. A few days later when we meet in the same stadium, she admits “When I am on track, I am a different person.” Between the squatting on the starting block and the shot of the starting pistol, Hima hears nothing, sees nothing. “All I know is that I need to run,” she says. “The people around me could be Olympian gold medalists. But I don’t take tension. If I do, how will I run my race?”

Neither is she distracted by the 9,000 posters of her that dotted Guwahati on that visit. “My father once told me: ‘Don’t let fame get to your head. The day you do, it will be the end’,” she says, adding that the posters, instead of making her feel grand and self-important, makes her feel “nervous but motivated.”

At her aggressive best, and only to her closest friends, Hima is known to use an Assamese colloquialism “Phali dim” which loosely translates to “I will own it/I will conquer it”. She types it out on the Mon Jai Whatsapp group before she heads into a race, she whispers it into Malakar’s ear before she speaks at a public function, she says it to herself in her head before any reporter asks her for a byte in English. The magical bit about Hima Das is that right after she says it, she actually does it.

 

Find Me On a Hill in Imphal

This article won the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award 2020, and was originally published in The Indian Express in August 2020.
Several British and Japanese soldiers died in the hills of Manipur during some of the fiercest battles of WWII. They do not lie there forgotten. A team of “battlefield diggers” has been scouring this terrain to find their remains — and bring some closure to the families seeking answers about their final days in a foreign land.

On a full-moon night, atop a hill in Manipur, Yumnam Rajeshwor Singh reads the names of the dead. They may have been gone from this earth for 76 years, but time is relative for Rajeshwor, a man with a plan — and dozens of maps.

“We are on this ridge,” he says, tracing a finger along a route on an A-4 size copy of a map from 1944. “And there — there were the Japanese bunkers! From where they fired.” He points a little further away, in the direction we had trekked from — carrying everything from pressure cookers to metal detectors, tents and canned fish — earlier that morning.

Of the 10 who had embarked on this journey, only nine made it, after one took ill en-route. The nondescript hill, about 15 km from Imphal, isn’t for the faint-hearted. It was after all, one of the many battlefields of the Siege of Imphal, where the Allied and the Axis powers fought between March and July, 1944, in some of the fiercest battles of World War II.

Rajeshwor gets back to reading his list of the dead soldiers — aided by the flashlights of three phones — before he stops at one. “Private Tod D,” he says, “This is the guy we are looking for.”

***

In early March, when Rajeshwor drives me to the hill to look for the remains of David Tod, a British soldier who had died in the war, the skies are blue and the days are glorious. The newspapers have some news about the virus from China entering India but few in Manipur think of it as a threat to them. If China is far away, Delhi and Mumbai are probably even farther. Rajeshwor, who works in a telecommunications company in Imphal, has his itinerary chalked out. “I will be on my tour from March 28 — UK, France, Belgium,” says 43-year-old.

For months, I have been persuading Rajeshwor to let me join his World War II excavation expeditions — where he and his friends travel the hilly Manipuri countryside, unearthing relics and remains, stories and memories from the twin World War II Battles of Imphal (Manipur) and Kohima (Nagaland). Initially, he tells me that these are “secret” things that happen in the “complete absence of media.” But earlier this year, when I send him my customary monthly WhatsApp message asking him if he has changed his mind, he finally relents, but with a caveat: “Please don’t mention the exact location in your news.”

He did not need to worry — with my despicable sense of direction coupled with the wilderness of the hills, I have no idea where we are. “People talk about things they see and read in books, but neither of these battles have been included in school curricula,” says Rajeshwor, at the wheel of his “rickety but reliable” Chevrolet UVA, which takes us to the base of the hill we are meant to climb.

Ten minutes into the climb, I understand why Rajeshwor had told me: “I hope you are healthy.” The hill is far from kind: my running shoes are not equipped for the terrain, and I slip, stumble, fall, and on certain portions, comically crawl up the hill. To think of men vying for each others’ blood, with guns and bayonets in hand, seems a ridiculous idea. But I am less amused when I see the 72-year-old member of the group, trotting up the hill, way ahead of me, with the support of one thin stick.

Rajeshwor hangs back to tell me his story. Like many others, he grew up in ignorance about the WWII battlegrounds. More than seven decades ago, this hill was one of the many sites in Imphal that the Japanese and the British skirmished in — the Japanese lost more than 30,000 men in a defeat so decisive that it ended their imperial pursuits in Asia. But it was only in 2013, when a vote by the National Army Museum of Britain termed them “Britain’s Greatest Battle” that the Battles of Imphal and Kohima entered public consciousness.

Till then, the battles were buried in the hills of the Northeast, unknown, save for some literature by military experts, war veterans and historians. In 2005, Rajeshwor chanced upon one such book: The Forgotten Army’s Box of Lions: The True Story of the Defence and Evacuation of the Largest Supply Depot on the Imphal Plain (2001) by Christopher D Johnson. “It was set in Manipur and focused on the battle of Kanglatongbi, I was surprised that I knew nothing about it. Growing up, we only knew what our grandparents told us…that there was a war…the Japan laan (war),” recalls Rajeshwor.

Over the years, he struck up an unlikely pen friendship with Johnson, whose father fought in the war. “Christopher started sending me books, war diaries — material I would devour late into the night,” he says. Soon, with Johnson’s cross-continental guidance and encouragement, Rajeshwor graduated from books to battlefields. “They were all around me . . . all these years, I had no idea,” he says.

In time, many friends joined in. Before they knew it, weekends or holidays became sojourns into history. “We would go from battlefield to battlefield, spades and shovels in hand. Even years later, there were things to find: helmets, shrapnel, cartridges, personal artefacts such as buckles and combs and even bones,” he says. In 2013, Rajeshwor and his friend, Arambam ‘Bobby’ Singh, founded the Second World War Imphal Campaign Foundation to formalise their weekend expeditions in digging up a forgotten battle. Since 2017, the Japan Association for Recovery and Repatriation of War Casualties has been collaborating with the foundation on missions to recover the remains of Japanese soldiers killed in the war. “But I am not allowed to talk about that,” says Rajeshwor.

What he can talk about are the personal requests he gets. Through Johnson, Rajeshwor was introduced to descendants of a number of war veterans seeking information about the last days of their family members. “It started with someone wanting me to lay a wreath at their grandfather’s grave in the Imphal Cemetery,” says Rajeshwor.

Over the years, the requests became more elaborate: someone from the UK enquiring about the location of a tank blast their grandfather died in (“Could you please find that spot and lay a wreath there?”); another 78-year-old from the UK whose dying wish was to locate his father’s remains in Imphal. “I have done all that — climbed a hill, laid a wreath, put a poppy cross,” says Rajeshwor. When last June, Sharon Gibson, a 40-year-old nurse, reached out to him from Edinburgh, with a request to “find” her long-dead great-grandfather, with only a name (David Tod) and a photograph (black-and-white and faded), he told her: “No problem. This is a big thing for you, but a small thing for us. We will do it.”

***

When we reach the top, Rajeshwor and his team get to work at once — the metal detectors and shovels are out, tents are being pitched, wood is being collected to cook lunch, and “toilets” are being “constructed” — unperturbed by the fact that it is raining, a bitter cold wind sweeping away the glorious summer day we left behind at the base of the hill. The British codenamed it the Pimple (because it resembled one), and Rajeshwor and his friends refer to it by the same name.

It is a terrain he has studied for a year — first, through documents he sourced from the British Library, then through a drone he flew over it and by trekking to the spot last November. “We followed the exact route mentioned in the British war diary of the time. It maintained the events of the episode — who shot whom, the direction of the attack, etc,” says Rajeshwor. According to records, 16 Allied soldiers had fallen at the Pimple. “According to protocol, they were buried with crosses. But when the Imperial War Graves Commission unit came two years later to collect the remains, the area was an overgrown jungle and the markers were gone,” says Rajeshwor. “Of the 16 bodies, only 12 were recovered, and four were left behind.”

One of them was of Tod, Gibson’s great-grandfather. The family believed that he was “lost in the jungles of Burma (now Myanmar)”, since these battles fell under the British’s “Burma Campaign”. “That the battlefields transcended the boundaries of Burma is something they have come to understand now,” says Joseph Longjam, a Directorate of Information and Public Relation employee in Imphal, who works with Rajeshwor.

“We were really expecting a jungle in Burma and not a hill in Imphal,” says Gibson later, over an email. Last year, she dreamt of a man, who she thinks was her great-grandfather, telling her: “Find me in Burma.” Gibson got herself on a Facebook group, comprising families of war veterans, scholars and historians. Her queries led her not to Burma, but to a man in Imphal. That month, Rajeshwor pored over war diaries, got in touch with researchers in the UK and managed to track down Tod’s regiment, and, finally, the location where he died, by painstakingly superimposing map references of the time to Google Earth to pinpoint the rough location of 25 yards. Finally, in November last year, they did their first trek.

“We just started digging anyway in the location we identified. Suddenly, we found the personal effects of soldiers in a pit. For us, it was a eureka moment because it meant that the four remaining bodies were around that area,” he says. At Gibson’s request, Rajeshwor had lugged up a memorial plaque and a remembrance poppy cross. In a small ceremony, the team laid the plaque at the spot where they believed Tod was killed, and livestreamed it to her in Edinburgh. “It was a very emotional sight. I was afraid to even blink in case I missed any of it,” she recalls. “Rajeshwor dusted off the layers of time and brought a little-known part of history to light. It is amazing what he has done for me, a stranger from across the globe.”

***

Even before his first climb, Rajeshwor was certain about one thing: he wasn’t here to make money off dead people. The excavation expeditions involve trekking up various hills (the Pimple is one of the more accessible ones), arranging for food, shelter and equipment for digging — but they are funded entirely by the members.

“While Sharon did insist on paying for the memorial plaque, I did not charge her for anything else. I do not want to earn a single penny off this,” says Rajeshwor, after a long day of digging. At night, a small bonfire has been lit, a few glasses of rum are had before a dinner of pork, rice and boiled vegetables.

“For me personally, I do not care much about historical dates,” says Longjam, the DIPR employee, “But if what we do makes people visit Imphal, it means a lot.”

In recent years, Manipur has seen the beginnings of “war tourism” — initiatives to map the war through battlefield tourism tours, perhaps the first of its kind in the country. “WWII battlefields in Europe are mapped to the T; the Indian part of the war and the sites of fighting around Manipur and Nagaland have always been hazy,” says researcher and author Hemant Singh Katoch, on the phone from Yangon. In 2013, he founded and conceptualised the “Battle of Imphal” tours, the first in the state. In the three years he spent in Imphal, Katoch led many tourists — often families of war veterans — on these tours. “It is a way to connect to their family’s past. In some cases, it is not a grandfather or granduncle, but the father who has fought the war.”

For example, Johnson has spent decades unravelling his father George Johnson’s role in the war. He tracked down families of those who served with his father in Imphal. In time, he found out that George had to kill one of his wounded orderlies, Howard, in the war. “It was a case of mercy killing — my grandfather never spoke about it, but carried with him years after the war,” says David Westgate, Johnson’s nephew, over a video call Rajeshwor sets up for me that night from the hill.

In 2017, Johnson managed to track down Howard’s family, and in April last year, during the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Imphal, his great granddaughter, Ellie, flew down to Imphal. “We were there too, and with Rajeshwor’s help we had a small funeral ceremony, bugles and all, where her grandfather died,” recalls Westgate. “I don’t mind admitting it but I started crying. I walked up to her and apologised. She told me, there was no need to say sorry. ‘Your grandfather did what he had to do.’”

***

“Searching for a person’s remains is like looking for a needle in the proverbial haystack,” says Rajeshwor, leaning on his spade. The next morning, the hill is abuzz with the beep-beep of metal detectors, and the scraping of shovels. Around Rajeshwor, are Longjam, and Ratan, both longtime members of the group. “All these years, we have not recorded our work but I am thinking of making a video repository on YouTube and naming the channel ‘Battlefield Diggers’,” says Rajeshwor.

“We have never felt the need to,” says Longjam, “Our satisfaction comes from connecting people to their forefathers. Some families just want to know where their fathers or grandfathers went, what kind of places they stayed at, what they did. For them, this is a part of the world they know very little about.”

Last October, the team chanced upon a mass burial site, the recovered remains of which they have handed over to the Japanese. “But personal bone collection missions, like that of Sharon’s great-grandfather, can take years too,”says Rajeshwor.

At the end of the dig, they have shrapnel, a few buckles, a comb, parts of a bullet, tail fins of mortar shells, but no bones. Before the team starts their descent down the Pimple that afternoon — unaware that a pandemic will keep subsequent ones on hold for some time —Rajeshwor calls up Gibson, and informs her that the excavation was unsuccessful. “That’s okay,” she says, “At least, we now know where great-grandfather Tod is. He is no longer lost.” 

Children of Assam’s NRC: ‘Will They Take Me Away?’

This article received a Special Mention at the RedInk Awards 2021, and was originally published in The Indian Express in February 2020.
Assam National Register of Citizens list hangs in a limbo. So does the fate of children out of it.

“Gaari, Gaas Gujali, fuler bagan (Cars, trees and flower gardens)!” says Fatima, 12, her face lighting up at the memory. That morning, more than a year ago, her 15-member family hired three autos for a trip to Boitamari. It was Fatima’s first time outside her village. The furthest she had ever ventured was her school, a 3-km walk from the family’s small thatched house in Borpara village, in Assam’s Bongaigaon district. Sitting by her side was her niece, neighbour and best friend, Narzina, and they watched paddy fields fly past the window over a 30-km journey that took nearly two hours.

The evening before, the girls had been told by their elders to answer every question clearly. “What if they catch you there itself? Don’t make mistakes,” they were warned.

Narzina and Fatima giggle at “the great time” they had at the National Register of Citizens (NRC) hearing. The grim purpose of their visit — to prove Narzina is Indian — hasn’t registered, though the 10-year-old is acutely aware of the value of the plastic folder holding her “nothi potro (documents)”.

On January 6, Attorney General of India K K Venugopal assured the Supreme Court that children excluded from the Assam NRC will not be sent to detention centres for now if their parents feature in the list.

This month, answering a question in the Lok Sabha on the status of such children, Minister of State for Home Affairs Nityanand Rai said they would “not be separated from their parents and sent to detention centres pending decision of their application”. Rai also mentioned that the Supreme Court had directed the government to file a reply. “The next date of the hearing is not fixed,” he said.

To Narzina’s parents, such assurances mean little. The final draft of the Assam NRC came out more than a year and a half ago, and included Narzina’s parents, grandparents, but not her and her younger brother, 7. The family attended four hearings in four different towns. At each, officials assured them “it will be okay” — rules say parents who are in the NRC need to only give “oral/written” testimonies for children under 14. But Narzina or her brother didn’t figure in the final NRC list, published on August 31, 2019.

Narzina’s mother recalls that night of August, Narzina waking her up. “Will they take me away?” she sobbed. Her mother, who is in her mid-20s, says she did not know what to say. “I just hugged her and we slept.”

***

Nearly five months later, the narrative has moved on to the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) and a possible nation-wide NRC, even as the fate of the Assam list lies tangled in politics.

In Borpara too, the NRC has been pushed away into an uneasy corner. The village is one of 146 in Boitamari Revenue Circle, 70 per cent of whose population is minority. Borpora’s 150 households are equally divided between Muslim and Hindu families, with the Muslims mostly Bengali-speakers, the group most vulnerable to the NRC exercise.

“Most people in our village are in, but those out worry,” says Ahmed Toweb, 29, an engineering graduate who is out of the NRC too. The NRC Seva Kendra in Chalantapara (2.5 km away) has been shut since August 31, Tawab adds. “No one from our village has been sent to detention but 5 km away, in Jogighopa and Kochudola, there are several.”

For Narzina and the others, this means no end to the uncertainty. Any day could bring them rejection slips, making their exclusion official, followed by summons to the overburdened Foreigners’ Tribunals (FTs), and maybe even detention camps.

The NGO Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), whose petition led to the government assurance in the Supreme Court, listed 61 cases of children across Assam who were out of the NRC even as their parents had made it. There are no confirmed figures regarding how many of the 19 lakh out of the NRC are children. As per an Assembly Question Hour reply, at least one minor, 45-day-old Nazrul Islam, died while in detention (his mother was later held to not be a foreigner).

Assam Chief Secretary Kumar Sanjay Krishna directed all queries on the matter to NRC State Coordinator Hitesh Dev Sarma. Sarma said he had given his response on the CJP petition to both the Central and state governments. “At this point, all I can say is this.” Sarma also claimed that they were in “the final stages” of readying the rejection slips and would issue them soon.

Narzina’s father shrugs when told of the Centre’s promise to the Supreme Court. “Every day someone says something new. I am uneducated, I do not understand this,” he says.

Narzina and Fatima go to government-run lower primary schools nearby and, later in the afternoon, to a madrasa for Arabic lessons. After that, their days are free, to play doura dori (catch) or utha boha (sit-ups).

It is here that Narzina says she is often reminded of the NRC. An elder child may tease, “You and your brother are out. Uthai loi jaabo (They will pick you up).”

Fatima says often Narzina bursts into tears and runs back home. “What if they really do take her away to that place?” she asks.
For the two, “that place” is Bangladesh — wherever that may be. “We have not learned about it in school,” explains Fatima.

***

Across the field, Khadija, 10, is the only member of her family out of the NRC. Last July, when she accompanied her family to a hearing at Jogighopa, 30 km away, the officer asked her her father’s name. She replied confidently. Two more hearings followed, in Abhayapuri (Bongaigaon district) and Baghbar (Barpeta district). But while all the others in the 15-member-family are in the NRC, Khadija isn’t.

Having just returned from school, the Class 5 girl rattles off all she does there. “We go at 8.30 am, we pray, we sing the National Anthem, we study and we come back home,” she smiles.

“Khadija is very smart,” says her proud father, a daily wage labourer and father of two, including a six-year-old son. The 30-year-old suspects that though they have not told her, “from our behaviour, Khadija has guessed something is wrong”.

Now, as he talks about a hearing they attended last year, Khadija suddenly bursts into tears. “They won’t take you away, don’t cry,” he consoles her, putting her in his lap.

Khadija wipes her face with the hem of her red frock, and refuses to speak further.

In a town called Bijni in Chirang district, 55 km away, a 14-year-old is dealing with his and his 10-year-old brother’s exclusion from the NRC by keeping it a secret at school. “They might tease us, say something bad,” says the teenager. The other members of his Hindu family, including his married sister and parents, are in the list.

So far, the plan has worked. At school, they discuss books, cars, music, even the news, but rarely topics like the NRC. Once back, the teenager mostly stays in, painting.

When the list came out, the 14-year-old asked his father a number of questions — “Why is my name not in it? What happens now? What benefits come to those included?”, etc. His father, who works in a nursing home in Siliguri, tried to patiently answer. “I said he was ‘Indian’ by birth and nothing could happen to him,” says the 43-year-old.

While the CAA, which makes citizenship process easier for Hindus, could help his sons, the father admits that doesn’t make his wait less taxing. “How does the CAA work in a secular country like India?” he asks. “And moreover, for my sons, all this has no meaning. All they understand is that they are out of the list while everyone else they know is in.”

***

One of the important documents during the Assam NRC updation exercise was birth certificate, especially in the case of those under 18 who had not gone to school. According to the National Family Health Survey, while one in four children under age 5 in India (166 million) continue to not be registered at birth, Assam has seen an upsurge in numbers.

Still, in many cases, including Khadija’s, the document proved inadequate in proving a child’s lineage to his/her parents.

“In many cases, families submitted a ‘delayed’ certificate — not made within 90 days of birth. Many of these were rejected,” says Guwahati-based activist Abdul Kalam Azad.

For example, Ashrab, a Baksa district-based pharmacist. “When my son was born in 2006, we only picked up a receipt and not the birth certificate. In 2015, when the NRC started, we went to get it, but there was a huge crowd, almost like a stampede. We finally managed to get it in 2018. We submitted that, but still he is out,” says Ashrab.

His son, a Class 6 student who wants to become an engineer, realises this, often worrying too that he will be “taken away”.

Guwahati-based counselling psychologist Dr Sangeeta Goswami warns of the trauma facing children when it comes to the NRC. “It creates insecurity, of what is going to happen, of being separated from parents.” There should be adolescent health care centres at block and district levels manned by trained professionals to deal with such cases, she adds. “But that is not happening.”

Lawyer Aman Wadud says the NRC limbo has made matters worse. “The Home Ministry order states that no one — adult or child — will be sent to detention just because they have been excluded from the NRC… Unless the Court specifically says no child will be sent to the FT, it means nothing,” he argues.

Azad talks of the reverse too, of children being left on their own with parents in detention centres. “In one case, a girl in Class 10 had to give up studies to take care of her three younger siblings, who also ended up dropping out of school.”

Some take to begging or become daily workers at brick kilns to support themselves. “An entire generation has been destroyed,” says Azad.

“Before the NRC execution started, the state should have taken into consideration the children. Has it made special provisions for children going to an FT? Have they made child-friendly courts? Are the judges sensitised or trained in dealing with children?” asks Miguel Das Queah, a child rights activist based in Guwahati. “It is complete callousness on the part of the state. You go to hearings after hearings… you miss school.”

Dr Sunita Changkakoti, Chairperson of the Assam State Commission for Protection of Child Rights, says they have not received any complaint with regard to children and the NRC so far. “If there are cases like this, and this comes to our notice, we will definitely take over and try to do something about it,” she says.

In Morigaon district’s Bhurbhanda village, Shoriful, 7, lost his mother a few months after the draft NRC list was published in July 2018. His father, a daily wager, insists his wife died because of “NRC tension”, after their son’s name did not figure in the draft. Shoriful has stopped attending school, and barely talks to anyone. “He was always a quiet child but now he has become paagal (mentally ill),” says the father, as he urges Shoriful, who is clinging to him, to tell his name.

Last year, he took Shoriful to a doctor in Morigaon, he adds. The doctor said the seven-year-old would become “alright” once he grows up.

***

“Isn’t Bangladesh a country like ours? With people like ours?” asks Faruna of Goroimari village in the district. The daughter of a farmer, the 15-year-old wants to become a teacher when she grows up. A few months ago, when her name was dropped from the final NRC, a neighbour told her, “You are a Bangaldeshi, they will take you away to Kokrajhar Jail.”

For three days straight, Faruna says she wept, refusing to eat or talk. Several months later, attending an NRC awareness drive at the Nagabhanda gaon panchayat, the burqa-clad Faruna is reflective. Accompanying her is her 12-year-old brother, who has made it to the NRC. Their father, a daily wager, who would come with her earlier, is now working in Arunachal Pradesh.

Faruna talks about her Class 10 exams in April 2019, where she got a first division, and how she would have performed much better but for the NRC stress.

“My family told me, ‘Dua kora, ahi jabo (Have faith, your name will come in the list)’. But yet, it didn’t… We gave such bhaal certificates (good documents). So how can my name not be there?” she says, tearing up.

Her brother, who barely understands the NRC more than that “if you are on the list, it is good”, tries to console her. “Don’t worry, ahi jaabo (It will come),” says the 12-year-old.

An elderly neighbour, sitting besides them, has better luck with her. “Don’t worry, even mine did not come,” he smiles. “We can go to Bangladesh together.”

Faruna laughs, despite herself.

(The last names have been dropped to protect identity)