The importance of Temsula Ao

GJV Prasad

Hindi cinema has always othered people of various tribes as the other — exotic as well as villainous. They are also comic relief. I remember a crass Hindi film song, ‘Mera naam Ao mere paas ao, Tera naam Ao to mera naam Jao.’ This was in the film ‘Yeh Gulistan Hamara’ and the song immediately and naturally provoked opposition and calls for a ban from Naga student federations and gave rise to a question in Parliament. As a result, the song had the references to the Ao tribe removed before being shown in movie halls. But as we know, the states of the Northeast were and still are too far from the daily struggles of the rest of India (what the people of the Northeast states still refer to as the mainland), and we have no awareness of either the people who live there, our fellow Indians, nor do we know about what they have had to suffer in this urge of ours to keep them in our fold.

I am not going to look at what led to insurgencies in many of these states but I want us to be aware of what the people suffered as a consequence. There are horrific tales of torture, killings, illegal detentions, rapes, and destruction of villages that took place during those years. We know how the memory still lingers and how some militant group or the other can still and does attempt to stoke the fires now and then. It took remarkable decisions from both sides to work out peaceful settlements and to ensure that we could go beyond those years to a life of peace and possibilities. This project is still not complete as we know, and we also know that things can slip back fairly quickly.

It is in this context that I want to write about Temsula Ao (1945-2022). She was born and died in October, and I began to write this last month. She is one of our major writers in English, and would always introduce herself as an Indian English writer. She was our first Naga writer in English, and this is significant because her Naga identity is a major preoccupation in her poetry, fiction and non-fiction. To read Temsula Ao is to read the Northeast (but she hated this homogenisation of all tribes and lands of the region) and our tangled and violent history. Temsula Ao speaks to us with clarity and compassion even while she records what has been done to the region and its peoples.

You have to read her collections of short stories — ‘These Hills Called Home: Stories from the War Zone’ (2005) and ‘Laburnum for my Head’ (2009) — to understand how violence rocked their world and had a lasting impact on ordinary people. In the first, she writes with great simplicity, directly, as if she is simply reporting as an observer on events as they happened during the war that laid waste to her land and countless lives. She shows us the actions and instruments of the state with an unblinkered and unblinking vision. No one can read this book without being affected by it, especially, I would think, those who participated in the conflict from one side or the other. The second collection is about the effect of all this on ordinary people. In her third collection, ‘The Tombstone in my Garden: Stories from Nagaland’ (2022), Temsula Ao depicts the heritage of the Naga people, their myths and practices.

The last is the subject matter of her seven collections of poems. She gives us intensely personal poems even as she forges connections to the past and present of her community, to its myths and culture. It is the community that offers succour to the individual with her trials and tribulations, the community that must be celebrated. But it is that very community that had faced so much violence, including in colonial times with the coming of the missionaries.

Temsula Ao gave voice to the Nagas, to their suffering, to their sense of identity, to the violence inflicted on them. But in doing so, she forgives, she moves on, showing true generosity of spirit. She has a simple lesson — never forget because there are lessons to be learned. But forgive. And celebrate your uniqueness.  

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