Waiting for a Christmas Gift

January 21, 2023 33 Views No Comment

First hand impression of an ‘outsider’

Morung Express News
Dimapur | January 21

A collection of essays by academic and author Vikas Kumar, titled— Waiting for a Christmas Gift, was released on January 20 in Dimapur. The book, published by Heritage Publishing House, contains “Essays on Politics, Elections and Media in Nagaland,” written over the years by the author, who is a Professor of Economics in the Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. He has also authored Numbers as Political Allies: The Census in Jammu and Kashmir and co-authored Numbers in India’s Periphery.

As admitted by him during the launch, today, he has intently followed the political and social happenings of Nagaland and the book is his first hand impression of the Nagaland and the northeastern region, in general, from an “outsider’s perspective.” According to him, it was the culmination of a ten-year long “engagement” with Nagaland as an observer.

As an academic, he said that Nagaland and the Nagas became a subject of interest to him, an interest that eventually drove him deeper to understanding the political, social and media landscape here, besides the evolution of literature on Nagas and the Naga political discourse. He charted how the writings on Nagaland would be traced back to the British colonial era and the missionary literature to the Naga Memorandum to the Simon Commission, which he said was the first contemporary “Naga expression.” This was followed by what he ascribed as a period of “intense literary activities and public debate” in the forties and fifties culminating with the Naga Plebiscite. This phase, he said, was followed by a lull, except for some accounts written by some bureaucrats, and the nineties happened headlined by the writings of Sanjoy Hazarika and the emergence of Naga writers like Charles Chasie, Dr Temsula Ao, Easterine Kire, and Monalisa Changkija.

Chasie wrote the Foreword to the book. He wrote, “The title itself is an allusion to the Naga people waiting for the final settlement of the Naga Political Issue coming before Christmas and, therefore, as a ‘Christmas Gift!’”
Editor of Nagaland Page, Monalisa Changkija, who released the book, described the book as the author “correctly and succinctly” grasping the situation in Nagaland. She said that the Nagas cannot assume to exist in isolation as a people, way beyond the glare of the world outside. She said, “Although we live and breathe in our little pond as if there is no world outside it, the fact is, we have always been under the world’s scanner one way or the other; now more so with scientific and technological advancements.”

According to her, there are people, who note and record both positive and negative legacies of “our existence.”