Revisiting Naga Club

Witoubou Newmai

 

Re-reading the sentiments and spirits of the Naga Club of 1918 loudly into the ‘present’ has become extremely necessary today. 


Since all the ‘commentaries’ left from the Naga Club of 1918 strike to the bone or closer to it, dilating this discourse from the remnants is what every concerned Naga needs to take it as responsibility.


The founders of the Naga Club were, indeed, votaries of justice. The “epoch-making” event—the formation of the Naga Club, perhaps is the base of the Naga journey which the present generation should keep locating it as a way of reminding ourselves where we should head to. In short, the ‘language’ of the Naga Club of 1918 needs to be re-discovered so that those ‘new languages’ playing the diverting role are replaced.


In this way, the present generation will also be brought to understand that the formation of the Naga Club 100 years ago also meant that the founders of the Club did not want to be defined.


No one withstands if he/she is allowed to be defined and redefined to the labyrinth of charms and baits for this long. As the person fails to locate the exit door he/she is likely to land up in the centre of the maze. The principal issue is more than this. We are not talking about this even today, and this has become even more of a problem than anything else. 


Announcing its preparation for the commemoration of the Naga Club last year, the Naga Students’ Federation (NSF) had succinctly put it that “the coming together of our elders to form the Naga Club was epoch-making for the Nagas to realization of identity and to social and political consciousness.”


The Naga people should “celebrate the glorious legacy and take time to retrospect and introspect and thus find inspirations to continue our journey with renewed vigor towards finding our rightful place in the world,” NSF then averred in its statement last year.


Retrospecting and introspecting, can the Naga society accommodate this in its ‘discourse’ as a serious menu? 
100 years ago Naga men who were part of the Labour Corps during World War I, recognizing the significance of nations, formed the Naga Club in 1918.


In celebrating the Naga Club spirit, this generation of the Naga society needs to take a bow and retrospect on the 100-year track of the Naga journey and find out whether the vision and aspiration of the Naga Club founders have been upheld or slowly fading away.


Most importantly, it is pertinent to retrospect on how the responses of the Naga society to various circumstances along these 100 years have spawned numerous power centres, and thereby further assaulting the foothold of the Naga discourse.


One wonders whether our lack of capacity to even admit our inability to withstand the onslaught of ‘packages’ or weakness for ‘conveniences’ is a glaring sign of conclusion that we have already crossed the last distant frontier, that frontier where we can have a faint view of the base of the Naga Club of 1918.