Cultures of Peace: Festival of the Northeast

For several years Zubaan has been documenting and archiving women’s movements in India. We began many years ago by collecting posters of the women’s movement to create a visual history of nearly half a decade of activism. Our work then created an archive of interviews with women activists. 

Cultures of Peace: Festival of the Northeast is a project collaboratively begun by Zubaan and Heinrich Böll Stiftung/Heinrich Boell Foundation focuses on the Northeastern region, where we have built an archive of video interviews and podcasts with women, queer, non-binary and trans people involved in activism, the arts, music, theatre, literature and more. Our website will also house recordings of our webinars on photography, food cultures, music, and performance.  Through these forms of cultural production, this ever-evolving ‘festival’ has created spaces for dialogue within civil societies in the seven (+ one) ‘sister states’, highlighting present-day concerns. It has done this while historicizing the region’s relationship with ‘mainland’ India and bringing into public discourse the many vital issues that concern the region and the rest of India to work towards peace broadly.

 

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

Cultures of Peace aims to diversify mainstream conversation and knowledge production about the Northeast region of India by bringing together regionally relevant literature, art, photography, food, dance, etc. and making connections between cultures and peoples through these alternative avenues. Through highlighting cultural production, we also aim to expand the context in which the Northeast is spoken of, which is often limited to that of a region of conflict.

 

CURRENT PLANS

We plan to move to the next stage of this project by looking at another aspect of our movements – feminist institution building. In many areas, the last five decades have seen a move from street-level activism to creating ongoing campaigns, different kinds of collectives, and some more ‘formal’ institutions. What does it mean for movements or movement-related activity to move into a more formal ‘space’ and non-campaign-oriented methods of functioning? Are there compromises that have to be made? Does such functioning ensure longevity? How have feminist/women’s organizations dealt with the question of power, leadership, leadership transitions, of organizational growth?

As the first step in this exercise, Zubaan would like to work closely with a small number of institutions/groups in the northeast, to try to track their histories and to see what kinds of challenges they have faced. This kind of documentation, we feel, can be enormously valuable in tracing the history of feminist organizing and organizations, which is essential if we are to build feminist histories.

 

PROJECT ACTIVITIES

From November to December 2016, festival events were held in Guwahati and New Delhi. A two-day programme in Guwahati was hosted in collaboration with TISS-Guwahati and the North East Writers’ Forum. The first day comprised of discussions and performances, with contributions from Thingnam Anjulika and Lapdiang Syiem, concluding with a food festival hosted by students of the Peace and Conflict Studies programme. The second day showcased speakers from literary contexts of other states. In Delhi, the event was held at Bikaner House and had an audience of over one hundred through the whole day, with speakers including Easterine Kire, Bobo Khuraijam, etc.

2017 saw three locations for Cultures of Peace events: Delhi, Guwahati and Shillong. In Guwahati, a lecture with historian V Geetha and trans activist A Revathi was hosted in collaboration with TISS-Guwahati in October 2017. Shortly after, a day of panel discussions was held in Shillong, touching on themes of Partition in the context of Northeast India, queer identities and more. In New Delhi, we hosted panel discussions in partnership with the gender and women development cells of various colleges in Delhi University, including St Stephen’s College. The festival finale were the launches of the anthology Centrepiece: New Writing and Art from North East India, edited by Parismita Singh, hosted at a restaurant in New Delhi and at Ashoka University.

In 2018, festival events were held in Dimapur, New Delhi and Ahmedabad. In November, the first event was held at Tetso College and at Hotel Acacia in Dimapur. This two-day event saw speakers like Kalpana Sharma, Yengkhom Jilangamba, Tongam Rina and Dolly Kikon among others. In New Delhi, a panel on women’s contributions to cultural labour hosted speakers like Alana Golmei, Chinmayi Sarma and Navsharan Singh. In late November, we partnered with Natarani Amphitheatre of Ahmedabad, where dance performances by Babina Chabungbam and Rulee Phukan, and theatre performances by Lapdiang Syiem and Rosemary Kikon were hosted. 

For the year 2019, Cultures of Peace was held in Imphal, on 11th and 12th October 2019. The theme was ‘Highlighting Women’s Participation in Environmental Activism’, and included sessions on water (dam projects, river pollution, water conservation et al.), sessions on land (agriculture, land ownership, mining et al.), sessions on forests (wildlife conservation, deforestation, indigenous knowledge et al.). Film screenings on ecological concerns, directed by indigenous women, were also organised, followed by discussions.

The second event was held in Kohima in December 2019. This included lectures and participative sessions, with speakers from Naga and other neighbouring communities, mostly women, and include contributions from audience / participants. Due to the passing of the Naga peace accord and the citizenship amendment laws, the event had to be postponed (initially) and was eventually held in a much reduced capacity, keeping in mind travel and safety concerns.

In 2020-21, the festival proceeded in four quarters- two in June-August 2020 and September-November 2020. The themes of both these quarters were ‘Food Cultures of the Northeast’ and ‘Women in Music in the Northeast,’ respectively. Programs under these were curated in collaboration with Xonzoi Barbora, Associate Professor and former Dean of School of Social Sciences at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Guwahati, and Anungla Zoe Longkumer, a musician and writer based out of Dimapur, Nagaland.

Under ‘Food Cultures of the Northeast,’ the online panels included three engagements (including one documentary launch), five podcasts, and five essays. These addressed issues such as the politics of food production and consumption, creating a taste for Northeastern food outside the region, migration, and how women and queer people navigate this space of food and belonging, among others.

In the second quarter, the theme ‘Women in Music in the Northeast,’ in collaboration with curator Anungla Zoe Longkumer, provided a safe space for artists to speak about their music and their lived experiences as musicians from the Northeast with a focus on gender and indigeneity. The activities under this quarter include three online engagements, five podcasts, and nine essays.  The programming also included the creation of a Media Archive under which materials generated and developed by Zubaan’s projects will be consolidated and housed.

The themes for 2021 were ‘Ecology of the Northeast’ and ‘Ecology and Performing Arts in the Northeast,’ and programs were curated in collaboration with curators Angela Rangad and Thingnam Anjulika Samom. The program was split into two quarters over six months. All programming was online.

The first quarter was spent developing a schedule of events in collaboration with the curators, shortlisting artists and reaching out to resource persons and participants, and working to build inclusive platforms on zoom. The work on building and consolidating the Media Archive continued. Additionally, an online photo exhibition on the year’s theme and the ‘Through Her Eyes’ music video was created, which will also be part of the Media Archive. 

Ecology of the Northeast was devised to encourage conversation and discussion through different aspects of sustainability, infrastructure and development, and peoples’ movements through three online engagements (webinars), five podcasts, four feminist lab sessions, and ten essays. Ecology and Performance in the Northeast looked at how performers, musicians, theatre practitioners, and creative writers engage with issues of ecology and environment in the Northeast. 

 

Essays commissioned under Cultures of Peace, 2020-21:

As mentioned above, several essays were commissioned under the Cultures of Peace Project through the years. In 2020, authors from the north-east contributed essays on diverse topics related to food and music from the region. To explore and engage with these essays, click here.

 

Media Coverage of some of the events:

 

2011

2013

2015

2016

2018

2019

 

VIDEOS:

Cultures of Peace- Zubaan’s Annual Festival, 9 January 2016

 

 

ANI News: Writers from Northeast come together at ‘Culture of Peace’ festival, December 2016

 

To read more of our projects in the Northeast, please click here.