Review Of ‘Wanderings In The Northeast, And Elsewhere’

Edited by Pradipta Borgohain, Wanderings in the Northeast, and Elsewhere (Rupa) is a book about wandering, but not just wandering only. The focus of this work of creative non-fiction is what happens after a movement: what the street leaves in the traveller, what the river sweeps away and refuses, what stays back after the train passes by, after the mountain fades behind the window, after the city becomes a photograph.

In the introduction, Borgohain says, “Assam was the Northeast and the Northeast was Assam.” It is both historical and elegiac. It remembers a geography before geography became what it is now. The states were reorganised. Boundaries strengthened. Names changed. Yet, memory, being less obedient than the political map, retained its older borders. The past lies underneath the present like a subterranean river.

In ‘To Kohima’ by Padmanath Gohain Baruah, the body starts to feel the distance as one enters the hills. The Naga porter then says, “Not far, not far. Keep going, keep going.” The journey ends in recognition when Kohima becomes the place where memory takes on a human face, for the teacher waiting there belonged to the traveller’s past.

Nirupama Borgohain’s ‘Love in Arunachal’ has a richer understanding of place. Even years after visiting, she feels an “invisible tug at my [her] heartstrings.” Arunachal is no longer a place on the other side of a border. It is something inside her—an absence with a direction. To love a landscape, perhaps, means not to possess it, but to let it remain unfinished in us.

Nevertheless, the book refuses to transform the Northeast into an Eden-like landscape. The earth is sown with histories that resist beauty. In Siddharth Dev Verman’s ‘A Tale of Two Border Towns’ and Ankush Saikia’s ‘The River and the Frontier’, the border remains a human experience. Borders invade dwellings, language and thoughts. They distinguish individuals who are still able to identify one another despite political distance.

Arupa Patangia Kalita’s short story, ‘The Termite Hill’, deepens the collision between beauty and history. A geography can be hurt without changing its external shape. The hills are still lovely, but the act of looking is violent. Can a place remain the same after we know what happened there? This question, too, is about memory. Had they become “termite hills?” As the anthology suggests, the answer is no.

Nature becomes another memory in Arup Kumar Dutta’s ‘Monsoon Magic in Manas’. Here, Manas becomes “a temporary escape from the urban cacophony”. The traveller seeks a place where the self can become quiet enough to witness their connection with the world. No longer viewing the landscape as a mere picture, the traveller enters it.

Sanjoy Hazarika’s return to the Brahmaputra brings that intimacy to history and to ecology. In the Northeast, a river is never just a river. It contains settlements, livelihoods, childhoods, departures and deaths. However, the river is evolving. Ecological pressures, dams and development threaten the landscape that memory is trying to preserve. Without intention, the traveller gradually turns into a witness.

The second segment titled ‘Indian Experience’, broadens the circle. Krishna Nath Sarmah’s ‘Our Pilgrimage’ finds the known in Puri. At Jagannath, a person’s life dissolves into “a great ocean of humanity”. Such a metaphor transforms pilgrimage from a private religious act into an encounter with the multitude.

Nandana Dutta’s journey along the Leh-Manali Highway turns lonely. The assertion that the “arrival itself is an illusion” creates discomfort for the traveller. If to arrive is an illusion, the destination maybe was never it. The road is always changing, the weather, the mountain, the stranger by the road, and the self that keeps becoming somebody else.

In the tales of foreign lands, the world enlarges but does not diminish in intimacy. Bhupen Hazarika’s Kenya looks at people and histories, including colonialism. Toshaprabha Kalita’s Japan connects through culinary and daily encounters. Gobinda Prasad Sarma faces an old territory through history and cultural contrast.

Anima Guha’s ‘Pre-arrival’ traces an aspect of travel back further than travel. The places we visit (we imagine them before we get there) arrive with a version of that place. Mitra Phukan’s ‘Seeking Soundscapes, Sacred and Secular’ reminds us that places are also heard: a city has a voice, as does a temple and a street. The ear may turn into a map.

In Madhurima Barua’s ‘With Jhum, in Birmingham’, home gets complicated through migration. Friendship effectively translates identities, which are not fixed houses but rooms whose walls keep moving. Atanu Bhattacharyya in ‘On a Wooded Hill, among Goddesses and Snakes’ conjures up memory as Shillong unwinds a faraway landscape. The city that is remembered is “saturated, wounded and fulfilled”.

Borgohain as the editor is determined to not turn travel into a mere list of places. He engages in dialogue between landscapes and the self. Waterways turn into archives. Mountains become witnesses. Boundaries turn into wounds. Urban areas reflect. Travel helps one see one’s homeland with more clarity, and brings out the best in oneself.

The gaze turns here. The Northeast reflects on Europe. Those who write about the world travel into it, carrying with them their own narratives, tongues, recollections and perspectives. They do not desert the area by leaving it. They make it bigger. Kohima journeys to Assam. The Brahmaputra flows towards memories. Shillong travels across oceans. The Northeast goes to Paris, Birmingham, Kenya, Japan, and comes back changed.

Perhaps the journey is what travel finally means; not the distance between here and there, but the strange distance between who we were when we left and who we become while returning.

Somewhere below the new map, the old geography is still moving.

(Wani Nazir is the author of two collections of poetry: ‘…and the silence whispered’ and ‘The Chill in the Bones’. He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Education, J&K and writes prose and poetry)