ABSTRACT
Remembrance practices have been an integral part of culture for the Naga tribes in India, as they have a rich heritage of oral narratives. The traditional Naga way of life was reduced to a cultural taboo via modes of systemic marginalization with the advent of the British colonialists during the 19th century, and subsequently the missionaries. This encounter created a rupture from their past. To unearth the cultural identity of a people, it is important to delve into their past. Since the culture the Nagas now possess is not completely their own, this task of unearthing their past becomes more complex. It is in this context that the task of an author practicing “memory-writing” gains relevance. This chapter focuses on one such Naga author, Easterine Kire. Through memory-writing, Kire lets her works open up a play between what is conventionally regarded as personal and public-political. A whole new dimension is added to the significance of memory-writing in the context of the violent conflict situation existing in Nagaland since India’s independence. Practices of remembrance, in such conflict-zones and militarized spaces, may provide an insight on how pasts are imagined and constructed in popular consciousness, thus helping in the process of writing and rewriting of history. This chapter, through the study of two of her novels Bitter Wormwood (2012) and Sky Is My Father: A Naga Village Remembered (2018), intends to examine how the Naga women writers deploy storytelling methods to weave a narrative that attempts to excavate as well as comprehend the history of a people hijacked by Colonialism and subsequently repressed by the State of India.
