
Aheli Moitra
There are lines everywhere. The thick line between rich and poor, the fine line between truth and fiction, the sticky line between order and anarchy, the primitive line between man and woman, the time line between your generation and mine, the border line between one people and the other. Lines have come to embody our aspirations, to define us.
The line was introduced by ancient mathematicians to represent straight objects without any dimension of width or depth. Today, a line defines, with great authority, our identity depending on which side we find ourselves on. And from one side of a line to the other, our identities could change dramatically. On one, we could be flowering hippies, pixies with crutched imaginations of a world that does not exist. On the other side of this line, we are white collared corporate Mafiosi with no time or space for imagination to exist.
When an exam result is announced, a line tells us if we are fit to inhabit a said society or not. Are we on that side of the line that will make society fall down at our feet or on that side which will have us kicked out just as easy? A line, a cut off mark, decides this. We are not equal unless the scale judges us to be so.
The line divides us, and we accept it. We fight each other, exclude, include, drown and save at the mercy of a line.
Today a few lines define the Naga that you might be.
If you are a Naga of Nagaland, the strongest advocate of the most divisive line, the borderline, you have come to be defined by your propensity inwards. Being exclusivist, a Naga elite, by justifying the borderline negating countless years of Naga history is your forte. To soak in a given set of rights without having to extend it to others, or have anyone share off the pie. The golden jubilee and the gold shoes you will not share, unless on your terms.
Finding yourself east of the Nagaland equation, you want another line that sharply defines your political or development-related identity as that of the Naga, the other more real Naga, but not the very other Naga who is across the international borderline, in Burma.
If you are a Naga from outside this line called Nagaland, then you define yourself vis-à-vis the Nagas of Nagaland state. You justify the other divisive borderline that separates your people between India and Burma—you work hard, very hard, to bring the advantage of land rights to you too. Just like the Nagas of Nagaland.
And then, having survived the onslaught from the chauvinism of the west, if you are a Naga from Burma, you are probably perceived to revel in donations of salt and soap, and just have to bear the burden of the Naga identity with its Naga homeland without your rights ever addressed by those who can. And won’t. But say they can’t.
There are many other types of Nagas defined by many other lines. Before, it was someone else justifying these lines, today we justify them ourselves. We convince ourselves that existing parameters of human recognition, and thereby division, is what must define us as a community, a peoples, as a generation, a gender, an individual. As human beings, we have lost our depth and width to the line.
Can lines be re-defined? Can there be holes in these lines? Can linked circles of identities exist?
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