1st Sumi MT Literacy Development Workshop (Oct 2012)

For this special 200th post, I thought I'd cover something that I had the joy and honour of organising and running in Zunheboto last week. It was the very first Sumi Mother Tongue Literacy Development Workshop. The workshop ran from 23 Oct 2012 till 26 Oct 2012, and was conducted by the North East Literacy Network, represented by Palash Nath and Luke Horo, with the support of SIL International and also our wonderful benefactors in Melbourne, Inotoli Zhimomi and Nick Lenaghan.

Our very humble hand-written notice on the white board

It was hosted by the Sumi Literature Board and held at the Sütsah Academy in Zunheboto.

This workshop was meant to be a first step towards teaching Sumi as a subject in the private schools in Zunheboto (which mostly use English as the medium of instruction), with the further possibility of teaching content subjects in Sumi, along with a gradual transition to English. The philosophy here is that children learn better through a language they are familiar with. Importantly, they also learn to read and write more quickly in a language that they already know.

The first aim of this workshop was to introduce to the participants the importance and rationale behind the use of the mother tongue / home language in an educational setting. With a well-implemented program, research around the world has shown that children have the opportunity to to do better in school, and even learn other languages such as English better than children who are plunged into an all English-medium school from class 1, especially when they don't receive much exposure to English outside the classroom.

The second aim was to look at ways to develop a syllabus throughout the whole year. Here, the concept of a 'cultural calendar' was introduced, to get teachers to think about what the children are experiencing in the real world during every part of the calendar year, and using that to build the syllabus. Again, the focus is on moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar. This can then lead to 'reintroducing' children to more traditional practices that are no longer being transmitted from the older generation, and can serve as a kind of cultural revitalisation.

Participants on the 2nd day of the workshop. 2nd and 3rd from the left: Scato Swu and Hokishe Yeptho (Sumi Literature Board)

The final aim was then to bring the participants through the process of producing basic materials to teach children to read in Sumi. One issue that consistently pops up in these workshops, as noted by Palash and Luke, is that the first time people write such stories, they are usually suitable for adults. The stories are often too long, the language too difficult, and the stories don't lend themselves to being 'pictured' (having a picture accompany every line of text).

About half of the workshop was spent on producing materials that children would be able to enjoy. Other materials included: primers, riddle books, rhymes, posters depicting scenes familiar to them. Younger ones may not necessarily be able to read the words in the story books, but the pictures should be able to help them (and older non-literate speakers of the language) follow the story.

Here we have some teachers (along with the talented Mr Toino) writing and illustrating their own childrens' books.

Within just 4 days, the teachers managed to produce 10 books! Of course, they still need to be checked for spelling, grammar and punctuation, and also tested with children to see if the language used is appropriate, whether the pictures are able to tell the story etc. They will also eventually need to be graded by target age of the reader. 

The teachers told us that the books they were working on at home generated a lot of interest and excitement amongst their families and neighbours. This is the kind of excitement we hope to continue to generate, as people see their language written down in formats they are not used to.

At the end of last day, the workshop facilitators were presented with these lovely traditional Sumi shawls / aqhumu. Technically, I think this particular shawl used to be worn only by men who had killed a mithun / avi / Indian bison. But I suppose nowadays it could be a symbol of any kind of accomplishment.

From L to R: Luke Horo; myself; Jekügha Assümi (principal, Step by Step School); H S Rotokha; Nihoshe Jimomi (Sumi Literature Board); Palash Nath.

A VERY big thank you to the hosts, especially to H S Rotokha who came every single day for the duration of the workshop. And to the teachers: Sharon K Jimo, Aghatoli Jimo, Aviholi Kiba, Atoyi Awomi and Amento Achumi. Also special thanks to Toino, for helping us with the illustrations and kindly acting as our driver.

If you're Sumi and would like to help out with this project, please get in touch by leaving a comment below, or by contacting the Sütsah Academy. This is a long-term project that requires a lot of community support. We need people to come up with more stories - you may also want to ask your parents / grandparents for more traditional stories to draw inspiration from. We need people to do illustrations. We need people to help train others to create new materials, with the possibility for some people to be sent to Guwahati and elsewhere in India to receive further training from international and local experts.

Most importantly, we need people to advocate for the use of Sumi in schools, at least in the Zunheboto district where Sumi is the predominant language used in households. We are certainly aware of the need for English (and possibly Hindi) to get a job in India, but what we are trying to make people understand is that by introducing English through the mother tongue, children can actually go further (than simply parroting what is being taught in class and regurgitating it during exam time).

Zunheboto Roads

Back in Dimapur now after another trip to Zunheboto, this time to help run a workshop on Sumi Mother Tongue Literacy, which I'll be blogging about as soon as I recover from the journey.

It's really sad that the roads to Zunheboto are all so terrible (see my previous post here), especially the Kohima-Chozuba-Zunheboto Road which has been abandoned now because they started expanding it, stopped work, then the rains came and you know...

Then once you get to Zunheboto town, the roads don't get any better. The roads aren't always resurfaced every year, and even when they are, they aren't done properly.


So during the monsoon, the main road through Project Colony becomes a mini-river whenever it rains.


Then when winter comes round and it stops raining, all you get is dust.


My friends came up to Zunheboto for the first time last week, and they were impressed by the natural beauty of the area, especially the neighbouring Tizu valley. I believe the phrase 'just like paradise' was used.

But they really weren't impressed by the road conditions! I know people from Zunheboto read my blog occasionally, so come on Zunheboto, you can do so much better!

Million Dollar Bill

The past two week I've been receiving messages from an Assamese guy who used to work at the guest house I was staying in in Guwahati. (I've found out that he's since been fired.)

It started with half a dozen missed calls on my phone after I'd just gotten back from a trip to Nagaland. He then left a message asking if I could give him a minute of my time.

When I rang him back, he asked me if I 'knew about a million dollars'. It took a while before he told me that his brother had in his possession a 'US one million dollar note'. He wanted me to see if it was real or a 'duplicate'.

Although novelty million dollar notes are allowed and have been printed out (according to Wikipedia), but none are legal tender. I told him there was no such thing as a 'US million dollar bill', and that you can't have a duplicate of something that isn't real.

A few days ago, I got this second message:

Brow right now i m having 1 million doler... (united kingdom) brow can u seck that note pz.. pz met me...i will go to ur place

[Note: seck means 'check' - 'ch' becomes 's' as a result of influence from Assamese]

The Chinese are coming

Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of the start of the 1962 Sino-Indian War, which saw fighting between India and China over two disputed border territories in the Western and Eastern parts of the Himalayans. There was probably more to the war than the border dispute (Tibet had been annexed, the Dalai Lama had also recently been granted asylum by India) - the Wikipedia page has a list of references about the war.

The conflict was never actually resolved, and Arunachal Pradesh / South Tibet just to the north of Assam is still claimed by both India and China. Even today, while other NE Indian states have removed the need for foreigners to obtain Restricted Area Permits (RAPs) or Protected Area Permits (PAPs), visitors to Arunachal still need a permit.

Here're some articles about the 50th anniversary:

50 Years Since Sino-Indian Battle: War Never Begets Peace (International Business Times)

Half a Century ago - October 20, 1962 (Times of Assam)

Lessons of the Sino-Indian War (Japan Times)

The other night I was sitting in a friend's house in Guwahati listening to her friend, a former DCO (district coordination officer) who'd worked all over Assam. He was telling a little joke / anecdote (of dubious historical authenticity) about the war. 

The story went like this. A Marwari (Rajasthani) trader had a business in a town near the border between Assam and Arunachal. One day, on the eve of the war, he caused a massive panic in town when he was heard saying, "Chini ahise." Everyone thought he'd meant 'The Chinese are coming.' or 'The Chinese have come.'

Of course, he just meant that the 'sugar' had arrived.

Gender agreement in Hindi

I was telling the story that I blogged about in my previous post to someone in Guwahati. When I got to the part where I was saying 'I don't understand Hindi', I told her I'd said:

मुझ को हिन्दि नहिँ आती है।
mujh ko hindi nahiin aatii hai.
(lit. 'To me Hindi does not come').

She burst into laughter and exclaimed, "But you're not a woman!"

This raised a rather interesting linguistic question for me. The issue here was that I had used the feminine participle of the verb 'to come': आती aatii where she had expected the masculine singular form आता aataa.

Now, what I'd learnt in my few weeks of Hindi lessons from a tutor from Lucknow was that in Hindi, all nouns have grammatical gender (like other Indo-European languages such as French and Russian) and that verbs agree with their subject in gender and number. In French, for instance, some verbs agree with their subject for number and gender in the passé composé 'compound past tense', e.g. Le jour de gloire est arrivé. 'The day of glory has come', but Les pluies sont arrivées. 'The rains have come' because jour 'day' is masculine and singular while pluies 'rains' is feminine and plural. (Note that the difference is only visible in the written language.)

In a clause like mujh ko hindi nahiin aatii hai, the grammatical subject is actually hindi, which I am told is a feminine noun. The form of the 1st person singular mujh ko has an oblique case, which translates to something like 'to me'. Therefore, what I was doing was making the verb agree in gender with the noun in subject position. However, I've been told that outside the main Hindi speaking regions of Uttar Pradesh (including Lucknow where my  tutor was from), and outside what is prescribed as 'grammatically correct' Hindi, subject-verb agreement is not as strict as how I'd applied it.

It's also obvious from my friend's reaction that the verb needed to agree with the 1st person singular mujh ko (who is male), even though morphologically it was marked for the oblique case.

This is not to say that what I had said was wrong, or that my friend was wrong, it's just that there are various varieties (and registers) of Hindi that are spoken across India. In some varieties, agreement of the kind I used is expected, but in others, it sounds either pretentious or just plain silly!

Responsibility, Racism and Recharging a prepaid SIM card

As you can guess from the title, this post is about responsibility, racism and trying to recharge a prepaid SIM card (with a phone company whose name starts with 'R' incidentally).

It happened about 2 weeks ago at a little shop in Paltan Bazar. The credit on the SIM card that I use for my 3G mobile internet had expired after just one month and I needed to buy more credit. Now, this wasn't the first time I've had to recharge a SIM card - it's something I have to do constantly when I'm here, especially since I'm only ever here for a few months at a time and don't have a fixed address in India.

The shop I had gone to previously wasn't opened, since it was still 9am, so when I walked past an open shop, I asked the guy there (in Assamese and English) if he could recharge my SIM. He said he could, so I thought, why not. As is common practice here, I gave him the number to recharge, he paid the phone company using the credit on his phone as a dealer, and he got a reply message saying the amount I'd asked for had been credited. So I handed over the Rs 1,099/- (which is not a small sum for monthly internet) plus his service charge / fee.

The only problem: I didn't get a confirmation message immediately, and couldn't get connected to the internet. I told the guy, and he said it would take 15 minutes, which in my experience, shouldn't have been the case. I sat there next to the shop and waited 15 minutes, and still nothing. He then said it was a 'system error' and would take half an hour.

Yeah right, I thought. But I needed breakfast, so I went to get something to eat.

Half an hour later, still nothing. So I went back.

I told him I still hadn't received a message and that my internet still wasn't reconnected. He checked the number of the SIM on my computer, and the number I had given him was correct.

He said he'd done the top-up and that "This is not my problem". I told him that he needed to call customer care to find out what went wrong, but he kept repeating that this was no longer his problem. I told him in my best Assamese (with bits of English thrown in) that I was supposed to receive a message, and that I didn't. I'd given him my money, but received nothing. He insisted that he had done the top-up, then started speaking to me in Hindi.

At this point, I raised my voice and said in broken Hindi that I didn't understand Hindi, which is true - I'd only done a few classes of Hindi with tutor about 4 years ago. He grumbled, saying something about how I could speak Assamese, but not Hindi.

Eventually, I dialed the customer care service number and got him to speak to them. He started speaking to the lady on the phone in Hindi. I heard the word 'tribal', followed by 'doesn't understand Hindi', said in Hindi, which ironically I could understand, because that's one of the first phrases I learn in any language. He hung up shortly after, with absolutely nothing resolved.

This of course led to more yelling on my part. I was furious. He said I had to go to the customer office myself. I told him I didn't have time for that - I was going to be late for a meeting at the university. I started to blame him - I mean, I've given him all that money and got nothing in return. It was his job to top up my credit, and that job hadn't been done. What's worse, as a foreigner here, it's much harder for me to locate offices and other addresses here (given the lack of a proper address system) and there's the language barrier to consider when I'm trying to ask people on the street for directions.

Eventually, I left the guy and made it to the customer service office, which was in the opposite direction from where I was meant to be heading, but at least I knew where it was because I had previously spent half a day looking for it a month and a half before. When I got there, I explained that the top-up had been successful. The problem was that the first shop where I'd purchased the SIM card out in Adabari hadn't submitted my documents to the main office. I told them I'd already managed to recharge the card successfully at another shop in Paltan Bazar a month before, and didn't see why it should fail now. They said that it sometimes happened when the documentation wasn't submitted.

I didn't quite see the logic, but after a second trip to the office they managed to get me reconnected within two days. Given the amount of time I had to spend at the office (which only opened at 10am), and the distance to the university, I pretty much had to write off those two days.


Now looking back at the situation, I knew it wasn't the guy at the shop's fault - the amount I'd paid him had been deducted from his phone and he received the confirmation message from the company. But what else could I do? And let''s not forget that he just kept making stupid excuses at the start, then chose to shirk all responsibility afterwards, while referring to me as a 'tribal'.

And that's the first thing I want to examine: responsibility. So many things are mired in bureaucracy here, that it's so easy to push the responsibility to someone else. From his perspective of the shopkeeper, he'd done his job - it was now the phone company's problem. From my perspective, it's like I've paid a waiter to take my order to the cook, who is supposed to deliver the food to a window where I can collect it myself, but fails to deliver the order. The waiter says he's done his job, but I'm still waiting hungrily by the window. The only way I can get my food, is to go straight into kitchen. So what's the point of having the waiter in the first place?

And it's so easy to shirk responsibility, the more layers of bureaucracy you have, and the more middlemen you have. It's one reason why so much public funding can get siphoned off here to personal accounts. It's one reason why security forces here are so ineffectual. To take a slightly different example, I told my brother that I found it ridiculous that at Kathmandu Airport, they would do a baggage scan at the entrance, then before the departure gate, and finally on the runway just before you board the plane (for Jet Airways flights at least). He pointed out that that was a terrible security set-up, because the guards at the start would feel like they could slack off, since they think the guards after them will catch whatever they miss. But then the guards at the end would also feel like they could slack off since they think that the guards before them would have caught anything worth catching.

But moving on from the issue of responsibility (or lack thereof) there's the use of the word 'tribal' here. Some might argue that terms like 'tribal' and 'backward caste' are simply appellations for different groups of people, but this context, it was absolutely derogatory.

Most people assume I'm from this area, but I can see the change in the way I'm treated once they realise I'm actually a foreigner. Suddenly, I'm judged on a whole different set of criteria, whether justifiably or not.

The other day, this article by Walter Fernandes, former director of the North Eastern Social Research Centre in Guwahati, appeared in the Seven Sisters Post: The Idea of India. One quote that stuck out was:

"A major cause of division is the feeling in much of India that the Northeast is different from the “mainstream” and should merge with the “mainland” on the terms of the “mainstream”."

There's a sense of cultural superiority here, with the 'tribals' still needing to be civilised by the 'mainstream', which is an Aryan-Dravidian culture that I would say is primarily Hindu.

The irony here is that back home, a lot of 'mainstream' Hindu culture is seen as antiquated, like women needing to be accompanied by a male companion when they travel, or at best, 'quaint' or 'charming', when looking at the constant stream of religious festivals. In comparison, a lot more of my 'tribal' friends are much more well-versed (for better or worse) in Western culture.

In the end, I was furious at the shopkeer. But at least at the end of the day I can assert my foreigner status when I'm here. Most of my 'tribal' friends in other parts of India have to deal with this sort of racism for as long as they have to live there.