Surviving fieldwork: Coming home

I think the last time I came back from India I was feeling much more traumatised, and I'd developed some weird allergies that I hadn't before (like to the feathers in the doona which I had been using for a whole year in Melbourne). I just constantly felt itchy and dirty. Watching Slumdog Millionaire didn't help either, especially that scene when the male protagonist as a boy gets to meet Abitabh Bachchan.

I suppose after any long trip to a place that's different from home (doing fieldwork or not), coming back can be a little of a shock. Reverse culture shock, they say.

I don't think I've ever experienced (severe) reverse culture shock. Returning home - whatever 'home' means - has often been a relief for me. I suppose it also helps that I'm 'homeless' in that I often refer to both Melbourne and Singapore as 'home' but don't feel like I quite belong in either place. But coming back, there are things I often need to adapt to again. Some are 'nice' things to be reacquainted with, like potable tap water and meals not based on rice - things I pointed out in my previous post. Some are somewhat harder to readjust to.

The main thing I suppose is the price of stuff in general. Everything's started to feel expensive, and I'm only in Singapore now. Wait till I get back to Melbourne and have to pay A$3+ for crappy public transport or A$10 for a 'cheap' meal...

Also, yesterday as I was coming out of the pool, I had this sudden urge to cough and spit out some phlegm. I caught myself just in time and even choked a bit when I remembered I was in Singapore. Now, as disgusting as people find it (myself included after a period of time being home), I find being able to spit in public quite a liberating experience. I did it all the time in China when I lived in Urumqi, and I did it often in India - of course given the amount of pollution I was inhaling, I would rather have it go out than stay in!

But the hardest thing I think is the constant explanations to people about what I've been doing and where I was. There are some people I've been chatting with online who seem to ask the same questions over and over again. 'Are you still in Nepal?', 'Where's Nagaland?', 'What are you doing there?'. The questions certainly don't stop when I get back, and while I don't expect people to keep up with everything I do, it does get a little tiring having to explain myself over and over again. Some days I'm glad I'm not actually from Nagaland, if only because I'd get so tired of explaining where Nagaland was every time I met someone from abroad - it was bad enough having to explain to people in Europe where Singapore was all the time!

Oh well, at least I've got my little speech about what I'm doing and where I am / have been all prepared. And frankly, it's only when the small minority of people I find myself repeating basic stuff to that annoys me (like the person who thought I was doing 'logistics'). I'm usually more then happy to talk about what I've been doing and what I will be doing.

It ain't a meal if it ain't rice

Back in Singapore, there are two things I need to remind myself of. One, I'm once again in a place where tap water is potable! The whole idea seems so alien to me now. Two, rice does not have to be part of every single meal.

I'm aware that this is a sentiment shared by many people in Asia (a tour package Mum and I took to Paris offered rice at every meal except the last dinner, which was the only 'French' meal for the tour) and there are still people in Singapore who need rice in every meal. But I'd say they belong to the older generation, and it's certainly not the case in my family that we need rice at every meal.

Now despite being mostly on my own during my last few weeks in Assam, I was still subjected to rice at most meals. Take for instance the first night I stayed at the hotel in Guwahati. I ordered room service: fish and chips plus a serving of masala peanuts. I knew full well that the fish and chips would be crap, but I just wasn't in the mood for roti and rice (even the extremely oily Chinese fried rice). After the waiter had delivered the food and was about to leave, he asked me politely, "Sir will you be taking dinner?"

A little perplexed, I simply pointed at the tray he'd just deposited on the table and said "This is dinner." The waiter shook his head in the typical Indian fashion to connote agreement. He then appeared again later to pick up the tray asked me the exact same question.

Granted that by this point in the trip I just wanted to eat what I want, when I wanted and how much I wanted, I was more than a little miffed at having his concept of dinner imposed on me!

Farewell India

This afternoon I'm flying back to Delhi, where, with any luck, I'll catch my connecting flight to Singapore. I've given myself 6 hours between the two flights, but one never knows.

The last time I left India feeling completely traumatised. One of the reasons was that I'd spent a few days in Guwahati and was paranoid about bed bugs from below and mosquitoes from above, so I didn't get to sleep much for 2 days. Then I had to go to Kolkata for another night before flying back, and I really just wanted to get home by then.

In contrast I'm a little sad to leave this time, though I'm planning to be back later this year. In fact, part of me can't wait to come back to the NE next time to see all the friends I've made and to do all the projects I need to do. Even if it hasn't been completely smooth sailing, I've had an amazing last 3 months in India, and a fantastic month and a half in Nepal before that.

But I'm not going to jinx it too much, since a lot can still happen between now and my flight back to Singapore, like having to push a car on the highway, a delayed flight, a cancelled flight, or luggage getting cut (all of which have already happened on this trip!).

So farewell India for now.

Shibboleths in North-east India

Most students of linguistics (and sociolinguistics) will be familiar with the term shibboleth or shibboleth test which refers to a word or phrase that is used to prove a speaker's membership to a particular group, usually along national or ethnic lines - members of the opposing group are identified by their different pronunciation of this word or phrase. Such tests have been used in times of war to determine 'friend from foe', and are still being used quite controversially by immigration departments to test people seeking refugee status, since its use assumes linguistic features must correlate with nationality or ethnicity.

At the NEILS conference I was told of two such shibboleths used in the NE India in recent times. In Assam, at the height of the 'Assam Agitation' nationalist movement from 1979 to 1985, people were often made to count from 1 to 7 to see if they were 'Assamese' or an illegal 'Bengali'. The idea is that in Assamese the number is 7 is pronounced [xat] with a velar fricative [x] (I reckon it's closer to a velar approximant), while in Bengali / Bangla the number is pronounced [sat] (a much more conservative pronunciation if one compares it to Hindi and Nepali [sat]). The instant the speaker said [sat], they were hit and taken away (or worse).

Another NEILS conference participant from Mizoram recounted a similar story from a time when the Mizoram government was trying to stymie illegal immigration from the Burmese side. From memory, it was members of the Ralte tribe moving into Mizoram from Burma. The test involved them saying the word for 'chicken'. The main difference between the dialects spoken on the Mizoram and on the Burmese sides was that one group said the word with a lateral sound [l] while the other used the rhotic [r].

Apparently there was a man who had crossed over and upon being told to say the word for 'chicken' (I assume someone pointed to the actual animal and asked him to say what it was), he asked the border guard if he could say the word for 'pig' instead.

Around Tezpur

No conference is complete without a little sightseeing excursion around the local town. On the second day of the NEILS conference, we got a chance to see visit a few scenic spots around the town of Tezpur. Leaving at 3.30pm wasn't ideal (especially when the sun sets around 4.30), but it was still a pleasant little trip.

We started at Bamuni Hill, where the ruins are said to date from the 10th to 12th centuries. From my rather sketchy knowledge of the history of Assam, I think it means they were built during the time of the Kamarupan Kingdom which precedes the Ahom Kingdom which was founded by invading Tai speaking people from what is now Burma / Myanmar.





The thing is, most of the 'ruins' were just lying exposed to the elements, with people allowed to walk all over them. Given the yearly monsoon, most of them looked surprisingly unweathered. It seems a tad bit silly to excavate them just TO lay them out in the open for people to trample on. But I suppose it makes more sense than shipping them off to some faraway museum.

The second stop was a place called Agnigarh - agni means 'fire' and garh means 'fort'. There was a story associated with the place, something about an asura who wanted to keep his daughter from the rest of the world but she ended up marrying someone in secret anyway. I think the 'fire' bit is because the fort was said to have been surrounded by fire. (The Wikipedia article seems to agree with what I was told.)

There was a lovely view of the Brahmaputra River from the top of the hill, even if the water level was very low. I'd love to see the Brahmaputra right after the monsoon. (Though I can't say I'd love to have to deal with local flooding, especially in Guwahati.)





There's something I just love about the sunset here in Assam. Every evening, the sun just looks like a big red ball. It's probably the same dust that's been giving me grief, but it makes the sun look so pretty.



Alright, enough blogging for today. I've got to be up by 5 tomorrow to catch my ride back to Guwahati.

NEILS 6 - Last Day

I've been asked to write this year's conference report for the Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area (LTBA) journal, so I probably do want to make some more notes while the impressions are still fresh in my mind. I don't think the Vice-Chancellor's opening speech I mentioned in my last post will make it into the report.

The past three days have been really inspiring. Sure, the quality of the papers hasn't always been the most desirable, but I got to meet a number of native speakers working on their own languages, as well as people who are doing really exciting things in minority language education (MLE). People who are interested in linguistic theory to various degrees, but who certainly haven't forgotten that people are the ones who use language.



It's heartening to see so many local students in attendance, even if most of them are doing courses in EFL training and the only reason many of them come up to talk to you is to ask to take a photo with you. (They just want photos with the foreign visitors.) I even had a few people take photos 'with me' without even asking.



Of course, there are advantages to being one of the 'foreign scholars' (and therefore more 'senior'). This morning I was sitting at a talk and suddenly choked on my saliva, resulting in a extended bout of coughing. Within minutes, one of the volunteers had come up to me with a bottle of water!

I really shouldn't get used to such service.

With any luck, I'll be at NEILS 7 next year with a whole lot of exciting work to present.

NEILS 6 - Day One

Today was the first day of the 6th annual North East Indian Linguistics Society (NEILS) conference taking place this year at Tezpur University just out of the town of Tezpur, Assam. It's a great place for people for linguists and language workers and teachers working in the region to come and meet.

Now, the last time I came for NEILS it was held in Shillong, Meghalaya. It was a bit of a last minute trip and I'd only decided to attend at the last moment (I actually ended up spending half that conference at Cherrapunjee near the Bangladeshi border, hiking down to see the Khasi root bridges made by 'training' ficus trees to grow their roots across rivers. It was a trip I had planned to do anyway, but it just so happened that someone else from the conference was going there at the time.)

So today was my first time presenting at NEILS - I gave a talk on verb nominalisation in Sumi and how monosyllabic, disyllabic and sesquisyllabic verbs behave differently with regards to such nominalisation. I got some pretty good feedback. It's also always nice to present on the first day of a conference. It means you can relax for the rest of the conference and actually focus on what everyone else is talking about. In my case, it also meant having only one sleepless night.

It was quite an invigorating day for me, given that I got through the paper with no major hiccups. Outside the talks, I also had a few meetings with other participants regarding developing minority language educational materials. The sort of work being done is something I found truly inspiring. It just made want to head back to Nagaland and get a team together to do this sort of work now.

Of course there were a few really painful, though quite amusing moments. The first was when the vice-chancellor of the university, who knew nothing about linguistics, gave his ridiculously long welcome speech at the opening ceremony in the morning. All the while trying to sound like he knew what he was on about. He kept referring to 'the linguistics' and I couldn't tell if he meant 'linguistics' as a discipline or if he just got the wrong word for 'linguists'. For some reason he assumed that the majority of participants came from Nagaland, which was odd because there's only one Naga participant here (unless you also count me, as an adopted Naga). Then he went on for a bit about Nagamese and how to his ears it's like Assamese but 'without the Naga influence' (or something like that). There were a few terrible anecdotes he shared, before he mentioned the fact that he had spent 4 years in Germany and learnt that there are German words like tschüss which aren't found in the dictionary because they're 'slang words used by the young people'! (see Wiktionary entry here)

It's moments like these when I'm glad I'm just a nobody at these conferences and not sitting on the stage having to contain myself in front of the whole crowd.

The second incident happened when a presenter was asked how old the language she was working on was.

Given that languages are constantly changing, the question of a language's age seems quite absurd. I was told later that the Indian government takes the 'age' of a language very seriously, as it is one of the criteria used to judge where a language should be considered a 'Modern Indian Language'. Scott DeLancey clarified that what they really mean is 'How long has the language been written / had a written script?' The belief is that a language is only 'born' when it is codified in some written form.

That means that many languages here are still in their infancy, while most are still unborn!