Everyday life and Nationalist Credo

“It is customary for a work to have an explanation of the author’s aim, why he wrote the book, and the relationship in which he believe it to stand to other earlier or contemporary treatises on the same subject.. However, such an explanation seems not only superfluous but, in view of the nature of the subject-matter, can even be inappropriate and misleading”- G.W.F. Hegel
Can do no better but with some hesitance quoted the giant in hope that it would be excused. Nevertheless the book asks basic question- what does it meant to be Naga? Perhaps this deceptively simple query and yet on which extraordinary volumes of creative attempts have already been made available by many esteemed thinkers and scholars on the subject. As such, this single illustrious word ‘Naga’ is as Renan terms daily plebiscite. The sum total is a great sense of ‘ontological security’ in the form of belongingness among its imagined community. This produced and reproduced belongingness is said to have traversed the wheel of History; of its people for almost a century now past. Yet as they also say that, this ‘History’ is not always pleasant but continues in bittersweet. Despite of which belongingness is always an elusive feelings without praxis i.e. introspection, retrospections reflexions and action. As such one is impelled to reflexively ask the uncanny question such as the above. It is here the essays were put together into the book.
This book titled ‘Everyday life and Nationalist Credo – An ethnographic study of Naga identity’, explores into the popular Naga discourses and discovers that it had long been dominated by what author roughly locates as ‘High Political’. It was discovered that the Naga discourse from high politics is largely the story about an obsession to ‘Make’ or ‘Making History’. Hanna Arendt once remarked this saturated word ‘Make’ or ‘Making’ always tends to produce a symptoms, whereby entire imagined community gets dangerously pushed towards its brink. This symptoms in Naga context is as if Rene Girard almost pointes it out; a story of mimetic desire and mimetic revelry. In other words, do we in our time have an answer to the question we pose for ourselves? At present, there seems to be a rousing reply from all possible corners of the popular that says, I think not at all. Therefore, the point of departure in this book is a participant observation in the perception of dreary and yet extraordinary anonymous world of mundane. The book largely dealt with the themes you find in the taken for granted quotidian world- from rituals to theatre and from history to Jokes. It was done by taking great care not to trivialise anything at all. It should be seen as written only as an attempt to open up the question a new from the perspective of the real people, in the world of quotidian and not necessarily from its representatives. The book tries to locate and recover the anomaly between the discourses and practises of ordinary Naga and it’s extraordinary. The book may therefore be an interest not only to those who are interested in banal theme of everyday life but anyone trying to understand Naga.
Dr Heroka K Yepthomi,
Faculty, SJU, Chumu