Waiting To Exhale

Senti Toy and Nagaland have both fallen off the maps of our imagination, and a pity it is, says ARIJIT SEN.

“It is worthwhile to remember that as early as in 1929, the Naga Club (a political platform of unified Nagas) submitted a memorandum to the visiting Simon Commission of British India in Kohima, demanding that the Nagas be left alone and free as they were before being conquered by the British Empire”

— The Case Of Naga Insurgency — Ethnic Life-Worlds in North-East India by Prasenjit Biswas & Chandan Suklabaidya

In my mind, the images of Sentienla Toy Threadgill and that of her home state Nagaland often fuse together. I have never met Senti Toy, only spoken to her. But I have visited her hometown Kohima, known its people, seen the mountains and followed the goings on in the state for a few years now.

I believe Toy is one of the best singer-songwriters around these days. In the Summer of 2007, her album How Many Stories Do You Read On My Face was in the Wall Street Journal’s Top 5 listings in the ‘alternative pop’ category. Some steps up or down in that space stood English rock band Radiohead and Canadian singer-songwriter Leslie Feist. So far, that’s the only album she’s released.

When we spoke, I asked Toy about the song ‘Kohima’ on that record. “I was born in Kohima and grew up there,” she said. “And growing up, I have always felt lucky to be there. When the violence escalated in Kohima—this was when I was in college in Bombay—I wrote that song in a moment of hopelessness.

I was trying to sort of cling on to whatever I could of the place I knew, in the only way I could really.” The song talked about the mountains of Japhu, and the gunshots that would kill many in her state. It helped her smell the mountains and feel the rain—in Bombay then, in New York later.

A decade after her song, Nagaland continues to remain where it was—in underdevelopment, in confusion and hopelesness. Any change? In 2010, the Indo-Naga peace talks has a new interlocutor, RS Pandey, a 1972 batch retired IAS officer--appointed on 11th February.

And Indian Home Minister P Chidambaram has ‘welcomed” the decision of the two icons of the Naga movement, Isak Chisi Swu and Thuingaleng Muivah to walk towards South Block in New Delhi this April.

They are apparently going to sit across the table and talk. Like always, there is no clarity on how the leaders accepted India’s invitation and who is going to talk to whom. In fact on their 30th Raising Day, this 31st January, Muivah’s speech was read out in Dimapur.

Muivah has been clear that the peace process is being held at the Prime Ministerial level between Government of India and NSCN as two entities and participation of non-mandate groups in the talks of the settlement issue under the axis of Home Ministry of India will only dilute what has been achieved so far.

So, much before any incremental movement on the Indo-Naga ceasefire agreement signed in 1997, India, it seems, already has started going around in circles. Something that is unfortunate and yet not surprising.

There have been no less than 50 rounds of talks held between New Delhi and NSCN(IM) from 1999. Yet, no party has been able to achieve any breakthrough.

It is also not just absence of clarity on the April-talks, that is worrying. There are a host of other issues that remain unresolved. Swu and Muivah’s faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland maintains that they and only they represent the hopes and aspirations of the people of Nagaland. But in these thirty years after NSCN was formed, many factions have hit the headlines. Each group maintains, ‘we represent the Naga people”.

SS Khaplang, who was part of the original trio of the NSCN, moved out in 1988 to form the NSCN-K—another prominent faction. And in 2008, when I was in Dimapur, Azeto Chopy had just formed the NSCN-Unification faction. Lost in all this complexity of talks, of conflict resolution, of pride, of one tribes supremacy over the other, of history, of stereotyping, are the people of Nagaland.

For sixty years, the Nagas have refused to budge from their idea of independence as opposed to the idea of freedom imposed on them by India (see Box). In all these years, in the name of controlling insurgency, village after village in Nagaland have witnessed violence.

Many Nagas maintain that there have been mass murders and rape of Naga women in the name of counter-insurgency operations by the Indian army. Kaka D Iralu, grand-nephew of AZ Phizo ( founder of the Naga National Council) records such horrific violence in graphic detail in his book, Nagaland and India — The Blood And The Tears.

Often a one-sided account, yet it’s also probably the only one that gives voice to the silence of many who suffered — a book I found in Kohima in 2008. In all these years, life in Nagaland has got trapped between underdevelopment, corruption, so-called democracy and an armed movement against the Indian state that still exists.

Also, in this time of friction, an incredible amount of wealth has accumulated in the hand of a few Nagas, both working for the Indian state and outside it.

The Naga movement many believe have been hijacked by such group of elites—within the outfits and within those who believe in Assembly and Parliamentary elections of the Indian state. So, these certain group of people travel from place to another--- Paris to Geneva to Bangkok---talking peace, talking progress, while not an inch of development takes place on the ground. Behind all the high-pitched discourse, there have come up a next generation of young Nagas, who laugh in exasperation when asked about violence.

“There is more to violence and your visit to Camp Hebron (where the NSCN-IM is stationed)”, Vibou Ganguly, former student Presidency College, Calcutta, now a resident of Kohima belonging to Naga-Bengali parentage, told me. Probably, true. “People have started local businesses, handicraft, textile, floral/horticultural industries to think of some. Even in terms of music, artists are looked at as professionals that get paid,” says Senti. However, “unemployment of the educated is at an all time high as well,” she adds.

It is also a fact that in 2009, at least 17 people where killed in clashes between one underground group with another in Dimapur, Kohima and Wokha. A much reduced number of fatalities, yes. But the clashes stay on. This suffering has been captured beautifully in the lyrics of Senti Toy’s songs.

Sentienla, herself might have moved on to a better life, yet she hits the nail on the head. “Kohima tell me the old old story of the sweet simple way you once knew”, she sings.

About a decade after she wrote and sang that song, Toy had moved to New York. Her brother, back in India, wanted to hear it again and asked her if she would record it for him. By her own admission, Toy is not “tech-savvy” and so decided to enlist the help of a semi-professional home studio in her neighborhood. That decision set off a series of lovely accidents and collaborations. Toy met with sound engineer Dick Kondas at the studio.

He was so taken with her unusual use of time that Kondas worked to get her a record deal with Intoxicate Records owned by Tower Records, Japan. “That was pretty much it,” says Toy, in an understatement that appears to be her way of talking. When the record company representative finally did meet her, he looked quite surprised, Toy said. “The way, I looked [Asian] was unexpected and he wanted to know where I was from,” she explains. “But by then it was a done deal anyway, so it really didn’t matter.”

Serendipity does seem to rule Toy’s life. In 1992, as a student at Bombay’s Sophia College, she met American jazz artist Henry Threadgill. In 1994, she married him and made New York her home. By 1995, she was playing with Very Very Circus, Threadgill’s band.

So when Toy plucked up the courage to say yes to the album deal in 2006, “some other things seemed to just fall into place rather serendipitously, like meeting old musician friends asking me about my music”. The collaborations on her very first album are an artistic dream: a young Anandan Sivamani on percussion;  Pianist/accordionist, Tony Cedras, who had worked with Paul Simon in Graceland ; Fernando Saunders, who had played with Jeff Beck, John Mclaughlin and Joan Baez, on bass; and Brandon Ross, known for projects with Arrested Development and Jewel, on guitar. Holding the lot together is Toy’s indescribably beautiful voice and her ability to tell powerful stories.

Music critic, Jim Fusilli, called it “one of the best of 2007” in Wall Street Journal. John Mcluaghlin said, “it’s one of the most refreshing recordings he has heard in many years”. Tower Records, though, gave her album only a limited release in the US and Japan. So far, not one Indian music company has shown the least interest.

The Tower Records website calls her music “unclassifiable”, and Toy herself is unwilling to try and define it. “Much as I want to stay rooted to my heritage, I find I walk a fine line,” she says. “The kind of music I do—which is really Western-style music—is the music that I grew up with; it really is ‘native’ to me.

I don’t fit in the popular stereotypical image of artists [from India], at least in this part of the world [the West/USA]. I can’t even think of competing in that world. So I find the freedom to do just what I want and that’s actually a good place to be.” Typically, Toy is not judgmental about the content that floats on the airwaves currently.

“A lot of so-called popular music has its roots in political commentary, like rap, hip hop, and plenty of rock and pop,” she says. “There are all kinds of music that serves different purposes: entertainment, poetry, art, politics and so on. They all remain relevant and have their audiences, but the corporation-backed system is such that the most listened-to songs today are the ones backed by big money.”

And so, in a world where new musical stars are born every week, Toy’s sparkling debut is barely remembered. Away from the studios, she stays up all night in her room in New York City, writing up her submission for a PhD on ethnomusicology. On the New York University website, Toy is the only PhD candidate without a listed email ID. She’s settled into a complex obscurity, much like Nagaland.

I thought back to 2008. I was waiting outside the Kohima War Cemetery for Theja Meru—a tall gentle, Angami with a soul-deep addiction to music. I was covering the Nagaland elections, looking specifically for ideas and people that would bridge the gap between Nagaland as a proud, vibrant state and Nagaland as a part of India. Meru, I’d been told, was a bridge-builder of just that sort.

He runs the aptly named Dream Café, known to play only independent bands and oldies, and is a painter the rest of the time. He has also set up the music project Rattle And Hum, which strives to bring good music to Nagaland and promote good home-grown music in the rest of the country. On the bitterly cold morning I met him, Meru gifted me a copy of Sentienla Toy’s album. That year, I would play it on heavy rotation.

On that trip, I met people from the underground, politicians and young musicians. I despaired at ever being to capture the complexity of the issues in a television story or even an article.

As Toy’s Nagaland continues to battle its problems, she understands the frustration of communication only too well. “I can’t say that I necessarily react to news of violence as a musician first—my first response comes as a concerned Naga, and simply as another fellow-human in this world,” she says.

“One person dead is already too many, and it’s never ever a solution; nothing is ever worth killing for and nothing can convince me otherwise. It’s been a long complicated journey for the Nagas with deep historical roots. If it is violence that defines the Naga nationalist movement, where is the hope?”

[via Tehelka ]