POSTscriptJ U L Y 1 5 , 2 0 1 2

SEVEN SISTERS

NELit review2

FIFTHWALL

UDDIPANAGOSWAMI

Literary Editor

THE reason NELit reviewreaches out to a majority ofits readers is the Internet. We

were compelled to build our site,www.nelitreview.com, because somany publishers, writers and read-ers outside the Northeast com-plained that they do not have ac-cess to the review in print but wouldlove to read more about the litera-ture being produced in the region.And NELit reviewwas conceived asa showcase of the Northeast ethosthrough its writings, a means ofbridging the gap between the‘mainland’ and the ‘periphery’. There are many scattered web-sites, blogs, e-magazines and whathave you on the Internet today.These do provide a taste of the lit-erature from the region for thosewho are interested enough. But thebottom line is that they are ‘scat-tered’ – there is hardly any com-mon platform, even for netizensfrom a single northeastern state orlinguistic group to highlight theirliterary past and present. A fewstates are, of course, better off thanmost and have even adopted theUnicode standard for their scripts.Enterprising individuals have or-ganised themselves in say, Assamor Manipur, to highlight their lit-erary heritage. However, a lot stillremains to be done even in thesestates which have a higher visibil-ity on the Internet. Other states like ArunachalPradesh have very little literatureavailable online – and it might verywell be for the lack of writtenrecords in their respective cultures.The Internet, however, offers muchscope for turning disadvantagesinto advantages. Oral literature, forinstance, can thrive on the audio-visual platforms available on theNet. Similarly, the geographical re-moteness of many places in theNortheast from the centre or the’mainland’ has often been the causefor the region lagging behind inmany ways. The virtual world doesnot distinguish between the cen-tre and the periphery. Every littleisland in cyber world can be thecentre of its own universe, becausethis universe has no spatial bound-aries. A few such islands have beencreated by committed individualsfrom the region. We need moresuch people to come forward. Inthe case of Assam, the diaspora hasbeen very actively involved in mak-ing Axamiya literature availableonline and they have been able todo it because they do not have toface the same infrastructural bot-tlenecks that people back homemight have to. Tech-savvy peoplefrom every state and every com-munity should come forward andhelp our peripheries cross overfrom the margins and create a Webof commonality. �

Northeaston the Net

THE Internet is becoming thetown square for the global vil-lage of tomorrow,” said BillGates, and rightly so. The Net

has over the last few years come to beaccepted as an indispensable part ofour lives; the information superhigh-way has opened up a wide array of pos-sibilities to educate and empower ne-tizens. With the rise of social media,more and more people, regardless ofgeographical boundary, are sharing in-formation on almost everything underthe sun. With bloggers and onlinegroups growing in numbers, the Webtoday is a valuable tool for performingand showcasing creative activity. InNortheast India too, people are join-ing hands, though not on a large scale,to promote and preserve the literatureof the region through the medium ofthe Internet.Thanks to Internet access in townsand cities, there has been a significantrise in the number of e-zines, websitesand blogs focusing on northeastern lit-erature and culture. Some of the pop-ular e-zines from and about the regionare Enajori (enajori.com), Nila Charai(nilacharai.com), Fried Eye(friedeye.com), The Thumb Print(thethumbprintmag.com) and The FourQuarters Magazine (tfqmagazine.org).Founded by Himjyoti Talukdar in2010, Enajori is a monthly bilingual e-zine that showcases the literature, eth-nicity and culture of Assam. Besidesbringing out monthly issues, the Ena-jori team maintains a database of di-rectors, movies, books, songs, and dig-italises rare photos. “When I started thewebsite, there was not much informa-tion on many famous Assamese per-sonalities. We provide short biographiesof such personalities and also hope tocatalogue 1000 books,” says Talukdar.Another e-zine dealing with As-samese literature is Nila Charai. FriedEye and The Four Quarters Magazine,though not Northeast-centric, give aplatform to talented writers to makeit big at national and international lev-els. Fried Eye also highlights the North-east before its global readers. The mag-azine, with its varied content, experi-ments with the multidimensional slicesof life through photography, dialoguesand expositions.“The Four Quarters Magazine wasstarted in 2011 as a non-profit pub-lishing venture by a few of us, friendsand acquaintances, mostly from Delhi,Kolkata and Silchar,” says Arjun Choud-hury. Published in both digital and printformats, the magazine’s primary aim isto provide a platform for creative writ-

ers from anywhere in the world. Con-tributors from all over the world con-tribute works of poetry, prose and trans-lations. The peer board of the e-zinecomprises authors from the UK, theUSA, Europe and South Asia. Another much-talked-about e-zine issevendiary.com. Though the site is notonline yet, its page is very active on Face-book with regular posts about the North-east. “It'll be a content-based websiteand interactive digital magazine pro-moting the unique cultures, lifestylesand tourist destinations in the region”,says founder and content head JohnHingkung. The site will also featurenortheastern literature with weekly bookreviews and authors’ biographies. With-in a short time the page has attractedlots of interest. There are also a number of bloggerswho are trying to popularise the regions’literature online. One such person isZualteii Poonte who maintains a blogcalled Mizo Writing in English (mi-zowritinginenglish.com). It containsMizo literature translated into Englishas well as original English pieces. Other individuals and collectiveshave also come together to maintainwebsites like e-pao (e-pao.net),itsmynortheast.com and assam.org,which concentrate on literature andallied aspects of the cultures and so-cieties in the region. The most important factor boostingthe online promotion of the languageand literature of a particular commu-nity is, of course, Unicode. Designed byUnicode consortium, it covers almostall the scripts in the world, many ofwhich are extinct. “Unicode provides aunique number for every character, nomatter what the platform or languageis. A standard for representing charac-ters as integers, unlike ASCII (Ameri-can Standard Code for Information In-terchange), which uses 7 bits for eachcharacter, Unicode can represent morethan 65,000 unique characters,” saysChetan Deka, UK-based software de-veloper and webmaster at enajori.com.So Unicode has huge potential for pre-serving and promoting various scriptsand even for creating a library for thefuture generation.

Enajori and Nilacharai use Unicodeto publish articles in Assamese, while

websites such as e-pao publish inMeetei. Meetei Mayek is the first North-east language to be included in Uni-code Standard. This is a breakthroughin the fields of technology as well as lit-erature. With English becoming themedium of instruction in most institu-tions, regional languages and dialectsare said to be under threat. It is herethat Unicode can come into play, for itprovides us with the scope to preserveour scripts, albeit in digital form.The e-book is another important im-provisation of the Internet age. It wasconceived by Michael Hart in 1971. Hewent on to found Project Gutenberg(gutenberg.org), one of the oldest on-line literary projects. It has over 20,000free texts and more than 100,000 books.Also, the site offers e-books in seven dif-ferent formats, including ePub, PDFand Kindle. E-books have revolutionisedthe way we read. Also, although tradi-tional institutions like libraries and uni-versities preserve old books, most ofthem have many drawbacks as com-pared to archiving e-books. In fact, atthe AANK-BAAK Upanyax Bota (AANK-BAAK novel awards) function in April2012 Kulendu Pathak, Assamese sci-ence fiction writer, talked about howthe electronic media was slowly butsurely taking over the print media. The debates whether e-books will re-place books in print has been raging fora long time now. Many believe that theInternet will supplant the print media

someday. Retailers who deal in booksalso sell e-books for tablets and e-read-ers. Amazon, Kobo and Barnes & No-ble (B&N) are selling more download-able e-books than printed ones. Thoughe-books are not very popular in India,it could be a matter of time. In Europeand USA, almost every book sells bothin print and digital format. Nowadaysmost aspiring writers publish their worksonline before approaching publishinghouses. “Most people are comfortablewith writing online,” says PramatheshBorkotoky, publisher for Fried Eye. After all, by publishing online, thewriter can reach a wider internationalaudience without depending much onfactors like logistics, marketing and bigpublishing names. Also, maintaining ablog or writing for an e-zine gives onequicker visibility. But this is the largerpicture. Where does Northeast India, aregion considered by many to be lag-ging behind when it comes to technol-ogy, stand vis a vis e-publishing?The first Assamese e-book was post-ed on miksijili.com in the early part ofthe last decade, previously maintainedby Jatin Mipun. But the author passedaway and the URL was not renewed.More recently, Mahapurush Madhab-dev’s Namghosha has been made avail-able on the Internet by Pratim PratapBaruah, a member of the group ‘Asomiy-at Kotha-Botora’. Tezpur University hasalso undertaken a similar project. Agroup called Nirvana Sutra is planningto convert all the works of famous As-samese author Bhabendra Nath Saikiainto e-books. “We will create e-booksout of his (Saikia’s) short stories, plays,children’s books, humour books, col-lections of essays and autobiographies.The first e-book, The Cavern and Oth-er Stories, is available in the Kindle e-book store,” says Bikash Kalita from Nir-vana Sutra. The e-book includes 10 shortstories of Bhabendra Nath Saikia, trans-lated and edited by Dhirendra NathBezboruah. The group is also workingon the second and third e-books. Theyare planning to make the e-books avail-able in other e-book stores like B&N,Kobo and iTunes. So far, mostly only

scattered pieces of Assamese literaturewere available online in scanned ver-sions. Sauravkumarchaliha.org is alsoworth mentioning here. A group of fansof noted Assamese writer Saurav Ku-mar Chaliha – the Saurav Kumar Chal-iha Anuragi Sanstha – have devotedthemselves to translating the writer’sworks into other languages and post-ing his original and translated works inPDF and doc formats on the Internet.Publishers from the Northeast, how-ever, are yet to explore the market fore-books. Universal concerns like pira-cy and Digital Rights Management lawsare of course there. More than that, how-ever, one of the major reasons why e-publishing has not caught on in the re-gion is that many, particularly in therural areas, are not computer literate.Nor do they have Internet access, whichis mainly restricted to towns and cities. Talukdar feels lack of technical aware-ness is another contributing factor.Technical knowledge and research onthe international e-book market are re-quired for publishing e-books. Mar-keting is another key factor. Groupssuch as Nirvana Sutra encourage writ-ers to publish e-books by providingthem with technical support.Audio books have also made a sig-nificant development in Assam overthe last few of years. A group of As-samese youth have produced onlineaudible versions of some Assameseclassics. They launched LakshminathBezbaruah’s play ‘Godadhor Roja’ in2011. It received tremendous responsefrom readers all over the world. Now,they have brought out an audio ver-sion of Padmanath Gohain Baruah’s‘Tetun Tamuli’. The other northeastern states canboast of a rich cultural and literary her-itage, but they have not made best useof modern technology. Kalita says lit-erary circles from the other northeast-ern states are not as active online. According to LR Sailo, press secretaryto the chief minister of Mizoram, thereare not many online literary groups inthat because of poor Internet connec-tivity. “BSNL is the only Internetprovider in Mizoram,” he says and addsthat Mizos are literate but due to thelack of technology, not much is beingdone on the Internet. Often, powershortage in the northeastern statesmakes it almost impossible to maintaina website.Robin Ngangom says that the Inter-net is not widespread in other north-eastern states as it is in Assam. Howev-er, Manipur and Meghalaya are catch-ing up. But e-books and audio booksare still new concepts for these states.“Another reason for this lag is that inmany states literature is still in itsnascent stage,” argues Ngangom.“There has been little development ofliterature in Arunachal Pradesh,” saysnoted author Yeshe Dorjee Thongchi.He adds that Arunachal Pradesh, whichdoesn’t have its own script, still has along way to go before it becomes activeon the Internet.Every northeastern state has its ownliterary heritage which can be popu-larised through the Internet. Audiobooks, for instance, can go a long wayin preserving the Northeast’s oral tra-ditions and bringing them closer to awider audience. But sadly not many ef-forts have been seen in this direction.All said and done, however, the Inter-net is here to stay. And it has heraldeda new chapter in the history of litera-ture of the region. Twenty years fromnow, the Northeast could well be partof a new digital world. �

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AUDIO books can go a longway in preserving the

Northeast’s oral traditionsand bringing them closer toa wider audience. But sadlynot many efforts have been

seen in this direction

Thingnam Anjulika Samom

IFEEL the Internet is very useful forwork purposes. But in Manipur, elec-tricity cannot be availed for more

than four hours every day. Even withlaptops, it is hard to access the Internet.Reading something online is very diffi-cult. But nowadays the youngsters arebecoming aware of the need of the Net.There are a few people who write onlinebut their writing is in English. No doubtthe Meetei Mayek was included in Uni-code Standard. But there is a huge prob-lem when it comes to preserving thescript. The ancient script is being pro-moted by some young people. But mostof Manipuri literature is in Bengali. Evenin Manipur, the rich Manipuri literatureis not getting much exposure. When wewere children, we had to study Manipuriin Bengali script. When it comes to pub-lishing e-books, Northeast publishersare not exploring this area; there are al-most no publishing houses in the re-gion. Most of the publishing houses arein Delhi and the marketing of the booksis also done from there. There are nopublishing houses in Manipur either.Most books published here are by thewriters or groups of people committedto promoting literature. Even publish-ing 500 books is a huge burden. The fewpublishers that we have in Manipur aremostly interested in publishing schol-arly works.

(Thingnam Anjulika Samom is a freelancejournalist and writer based in Manipur)

Tumter Riba

THE Internet can definitely playa pivotal role in popularisingnortheastern literature. In this

modern, busy world switching onyour computer seems to be mucheasier than going to a book shop. In-ternet access means that the worldis just a click away. We can reachmore people worldwide through theNet. In Arunachal Pradesh we don’thave any literature preserved by ourforefathers. Even if we try to find outour history, there are no writtenrecords of that. It’s just folklore thathas been passed down through gen-erations. Now some of our intellec-tual people are working to preserveit and some books in Tani Lipi havealso been published.

We are lagging behind others as theInternet arrived very late in our area,but I believe in a year or two we toowill catch up with them. I hope pub-lishers from the Northeast will alsouse this medium to reach out to therest of the world. Unicode is relatedto computer. It’s a computing indus-try standard for consistent encoding,representation and handling of textsin most of the world’s writing systems.I am sure it will bring about manygood changes. I am planning to bringout e-books and pictorial books of thefolk tales that I grew up listening tofrom my grandparents and parents.

(Tumter Riba is the director of ArunachalNews Network)

Debarshi Prasad NathTHERE are literary traditions in

the Northeast that can be pop-ularised through the Internet.

For this, we have to think in terms oftranslating these texts or of retainingthese in original. But then we have tothink of the target readers. If we en-courage a unidirectional flow of ideasinto one global language, our own lit-eratures and languages will lose outon many fronts. There needs to be abalance. Assamese literature has thelargest number of followers in the re-gion. However, all the communitiesof the Northeast have strong oral tra-ditions, but the focus has been somuch on the written form. There is

still a sense of distrust about e-books.There is a sense of romantic associa-tion with books that will continue fora long time. This is particularly trueof literature. Unicode will bring abouta lot of positive changes in our litera-ture and languages. It will help rekin-dle interest of young people in our lan-guages. I see that many prefer to com-municate in their mother tongues insocial networking sites such as Face-book. We are planning to bring out ane-journal very soon.

(Debarshi Prasad Nath teaches cultural stud-ies at Tezpur University. Earlier he was withRajiv Gandhi University, Arunachal Pradesh)

Mrinal Devburman

THEInternet is playing a lead-ing role in popularising lit-erature. Sites like musein-

dia.com, poetrytranslation.organd many others are becomingpopular. What the Net is doing forIndian languages, including Hin-di, is simply fantastic. It hasopened up avenues for more thanjust Northeast literature in Eng-lish. It took 10 long years for As-sam to have e-zines, websites,blogs, etc., but it does now thanksto a group of young writers andnetizens of the state. For other

states of the Northeast, the mainproblem is language/dialect. Thecommon belief that ‘English is theonly Internet language’ is re-sponsible for this stagnation. Butthe number of Mizo bloggers/writ-ers is increasing. I am also hope-ful for Tripura. You can visit kok-borok.com for a taste of Kokborokpoems or to learn the language.E-books, however, cannot replacethe original texts. Books will al-ways have their own place and Ihave observed that the GenX is re-turning to books. Also, e-booksare not free at all. Downloading isnot cost-effective and it gives goodreturns only when you have yourown site with dynamic uploadingfacilities. It may take some timein the Northeast, but publisherswill prefer the Net for placing busi-ness orders at best. The Assamesescript needs Unicode recognitionto build a distinct identity. But90% of the other northeastern lan-guages/dialects are in Romanscript only! More work needs tobe done for Unicode to changethings drastically; in particular,emphasis has to be laid on shap-ing the fonts as per choice.

(Mrinal Devburman is assistant direc-tor of programmes at the office of theadditional director general of All IndiaRadio, Northeastern Region)

Web of writing: Internetand the Northeast

Gitanjali Dastakes a close look

at the presenceand potential of

Northeastliterature on the

Internet. She alsofinds a few

pitfalls along the way

FRONTIS PIECE