Tarun Bhartiya was the best husband I have ever met. Other obituaries will begin with other vocations: poetry perhaps, or photography; he was most famous as a maker of movies. He received and returned the National Award. But I met him first, and knew him best, as Angela’s husband. Tarun was also an excellent and very enthusiastic father, tho’ my dad is naturally the best one in all the possible worlds.
Tarun loved his wife and his kids so deeply and so well that being around them convinced me, no fan of husbands, that acquiring one need not have hazardous consequences. I wish I was at home today, playing cards with Abia, and that he was telling us stories about socialist poets while insisting Maian and Kyntang eat their dinner instantly. I promised Angela long ago I would never describe domestic life in published prose, so I will remember here the teacher— Tarun did so love a lecture— I shall miss most in the world, and not Tarun, kinsman and comrade.
I first met Angela with Kong Agnes in Shillong’s district court complex in summer 2017. All of us were following the hearings of a sexual harassment suit that had been filed in city courts by nurses from a local hospital. Agnes and Angela, indefatigable feminists that they are, were there with the nurses’ union. I was there chatting up lawyers and judges and being a nuisance. Angela invited me home for what I later realised was a test of sorts: Tarun quizzed me, gently but insistently, until they prised the politics out of my wary conversation, after which we all got on famously. Later that evening someone took me to the library downstairs, and I knew I had come home. I began living at the Rangads in February 2020, and would now be scandalised if anyone suggested I live anywhere else in town. I wouldn’t survive the experience in any case.
Tarun’s pedagogy was expansive and sporadic. I would tell him what I was reading and thinking about, he would offer more context, assign further research tasks, I would report back, and we would do it all again the next day. It worked remarkably well to orient a research agenda set adrift by the lockdowns of 2020, tho’ admittedly I am a surly student at the best of times. Anything I know about Shillong today, and I know a whole fucking lot, I know because one of the Rangads told me to figure it out and even more because they helped me search. My dissertation would quite simply not exist if it had not been for Tarun’s wisdom, his generosity, and his strategic brilliance as a political thinker.
Tarun taught me how to live with my convictions. He learned this himself, he once told me, from Kong Spelity Lyngdoh, who died in 2020. I rarely recorded conversations with Tarun, but we did a formal interview when she died in October 2020. I am posting a short profile I wrote for Zubaan (because the Rangads told me to ofc) based on that interview in their joint memory. It lasted the better part of two days, and this short essay doesn’t capture Tarun’s distinctive discourse or the thrilling tale he wove out of her long life. One day, when I am less disconsolate, I will publish the far longer profile from the dissertation.
May he be mourned as well as he mourned her
The Spirit of Kong Spelity
Kong Spelity Lyngdoh Langrin, one of Meghalaya’s most inspiring ecological crusaders, died in October 2020. She had witnessed many things during her long life— the world at war, the great waves of decolonization, the ascent of neoliberalism— from the village of Domiasiat in the West Khasi Hills. Other events, while perhaps less world-historical, had shaped the rhythms of her life: the birth of her seven children, the deaths of her missionary parents, the rise and fall of seasons on her land, the drawing of borders both large and small. When she was born, the West Khasi Hills sloped into Sylhet; two decades later, a border was sketched on a map and the rivers and fields of her home suddenly divided between rival nations.
It was in 1980 that Kong Spelity, who lived in a small hamlet accessible only by bus, came to the attention of the Atomic Minerals Directorate (AMD). Their surveys indicated her land was rich in uranium and they approached her to lease a part of it in order to explore further. She consented. A decade previously, the new state of Meghalaya had been carved out of Assam. This was one part of a broader spatial and political reorganization of what we now call northeastern India, and further indication of a shift in national policy towards the region. The hills of Assam had been ignored by Delhi in the early decades after Independence, but this was to change in the years following the creation of Meghalaya and the war in Bangladesh. Central policy towards the region got increasingly interventionist, first in military terms and then in economic ones. By the turn of the millennium, the small hill states of northeastern India, Meghalaya included, were firmly dependent on federal aid, and so they remain. This process was partly motivated by the political turbulence, both in Delhi and in the region, but also by the northeastern India’s abundant natural resources— such as Kong Spelity’s uranium-rich fields. The alleged “backwardness” of the hills, once an excuse for neglecting them, was now to be the justification for “developing” them instead.
Kong Spelity herself was quickly disillusioned by development. Uranium, benign under the earth, is a killing mineral once it is mined, and even the exploratory mining had horrifying consequences: Kong Spelity watched her cattle bloat with unlikely diseases while the rivers turned grey and dead and birds fell from the sky, gasping for air. When the AMD approached her for a further lease, she declined, and she walked to the district capital of the West Khasi Hills to meet Hopingstone Lyngdoh. Bah Hoping, as he was locally known, was a stalwart of the statehood movement, and remained an influential politician: he had been elected to the State Assembly and the Khasi Hills Autonomous District Council multiple times. (The KHADC is an institution set up under the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution to protect the autonomy of the tribal inhabitants of the Khasi Hills.)
Bah Hoping was easily persuaded. As he told the anthropologist Bengt Karlsson two decades later, he had been deeply moved and outraged when, as a boy, he had witnessed the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He wanted the state he had fought so passionately to attain to have no part in the production of such weapons of indiscriminate destruction. Bah Hoping, in turn, brought Kong Spelity’s concerns to the state capital of Shillong, where he mobilized the leaders of the Khasi Students Union (KSU)— which is, like other student organizations in northeastern India, a very powerful pressure group— who agreed to support the fight against uranium mining in the West Khasi Hills.
Members of Bah Hoping’s political party, the Hill State People’s Democratic Party, and Kong Spelity’s family helped set up a special outpost for the KSU in the area, and the Langrin Youth Welfare Association was founded in 1992. Bah Hoping also took it upon himself to spread awareness about uranium mining and its effects, travelling across the world to address audiences about nuclear power and nuclear weapons as well as the deleterious consequences of the industrial mining of uranium. Kong Spelity, meanwhile, stayed at home, steadfast in her conviction: “not on my land” she first said in 1987, and she would continue saying that until the day she died more than three decades later. She was offered more money— several crores in compensation over several years— and she refused. “Money cannot buy freedom” she repeated. She was threatened, her family and neighbors turned against her, and yet she resisted.
Bah Hoping’s travels acquainted him with similar struggles around the world, such as the opposition mounted over several decades by the Najavo people of the United States to mining in their lands. The fight against uranium mining, he would repeatedly say, was a global struggle waged on the local scale. This perspective, and its emphasis on indigeneity as an identity shared by disparate communities in many different countries, infused Bah Hoping’s Khasi nationalism. The KSU, too, adopted this hybrid approach– at once local and global– in its rhetoric, and its leaders now routinely cite international resolutions on indigenous rights in their campaigns and demands. This has had a profound impact on Meghalaya’s politics ever since, not all it progressive, even less of it feminist. It has led to a renewed interest in “traditional” political institutions, which often exclude women and deny them franchise. It has been used as a justification to exploit and ostracize women in the name of tribal purity. If only, one sometimes thinks, Kong Spelity had been a politician, and forced Khasi Nationalism to taken women seriously, not merely as icons, but as thinkers and citizens.
The principle that indigenous land belongs to the people, not the state, has often been interpreted in recent decades to suggest that the tribal inhabitants of Meghalaya have an exclusive right to destroy their land and that the state must not interfere with this monopoly. In the best iterations of this rhetoric, however, indigeneity offers a powerful tool for solidarity for dispossessed people: you are not alone, it reassures such communities, and you too can resist. By the turn of the millennium, however, the front against uranium was fraying. India, only recently a nuclear power, was desperate to increase domestic production of uranium. National policy towards what was now firmly “the northeast” was only getting more interventionist by the turn of the millennium. Several new institutions and funding agencies to promote large scale infrastructure and state planning initiatives were set up, and the extractive economy was ramped up: oil production increased, a wide variety of minerals were being mined furiously, forests were steadily depleted. Roads and railways were proposed to bolster trade, and factories and hydropower power projects across the region multiplied.
As scholars have repeatedly argued, rarely did this developmental activity benefit the people of the region, who were displaced and dispossessed at exponential rates. The heightened intervention served, rather, to enrich the few at the expense of the many: “state-led” development quickly resulted in a coalition of regional and national elites. It was also in the nineties that conservation concerns were first taken seriously in India, most prominently in the context of forest rights and resources. In Meghalaya, especially in the West Khasi Hills, timber logging had long been a lucrative trade and a mainstay of the local economy. The national “timber ban” imposed by the Supreme Court in the late 90s devastated the district economically, and the KSU’s support of the ban eroded its support in the area. Bah Hoping had been marginalized from state politics: his party, while still powerful in the West Khasi Hills, was losing its hold elsewhere. The KSU, which had become the dominant voice of Khasi nationalism, was internally fragmented. Kong Spelity, however steadfast, was alone.
It was in this political atmosphere that the Uranium Corporation of India (UCIL) took over from the AMD and submitted a proposal to mine uranium at an industrial scale in 2003. They planned to extract seventy-six million tons of uranium over a period of twenty-two years, which would result, as local activists pointed out, in thirty-five thousand tons of waste that would have to be cleaned up. Even the exploratory mining had resulted in considerable pollution: the resulting waste, six hundred and fifty tons of “tailings,” had taken nearly a decade to clean up, and that only after considerable organizing and systematic pressure on the AMD. UCIL’s reputation for neglect was even worse, as the film Buddha Weeps in Jadugoda had emphasized with its portrayal of the benighted adivasis living in the vicinity of its uranium mines in Jharkand: nuclear waste dumped into their ponds and fields, children dying of radiation-related diseases, and vast clouds of poisonous dust settling on their homes and farms. This was the fate Kong Spelity wanted to avert for her kin, but it looked increasingly unlikely for most of the first decade of the twenty-first century, when Meghalaya’s political establishment seemed firmly united in their support for uranium mining as a way to “develop” the West Khasi Hills, which remained a remote and impoverished district, especially in the wake of the timber ban.
The face of the pro-uranium faction in Meghalaya was the late H.S. Shylla, a prominent local politician who died a few months before Kong Spelity in 2020. A strong advocate for “mining-led development,” Shylla argued that the UCIL would bring roads and factories to the area and provide employment as well as revenues for the exchequers of various state institutions— not least among them the KHADC, of which he was the Chief Executive Member for several years. UCIL, too, made many seductive offers: floating ambitious plans for infrastructure development, and making generous offers to landowners in the villages surrounding Domiasiat. Several of them accepted, including one of Kong Spelity’s children. She would not budge. Her primary ally at this time was a faction of the KSU, which framed the issue less as one of land rights and more in terms of nationalism. India, they said, would not benefit from Meghalaya’s resources. In response, HS Shylla argued that India was, in fact, Meghalaya’s financial lifeline. The state depended heavily on the national government for aid, how could they deny the country self-sufficiency in this vital mineral that would secure the national interest?
As the debate raged on, a new government came to power in Meghalaya. Bah Hoping’s political fortunes reversed, as did HS Shylla’s. The KSU faction that opposed uranium mining regained some of its lost legitimacy in the West Khasi Hills with its unwavering stance on the matter and coalesced internally. The earlier government had granted environmental clearance to UCIL’s proposal, a process that had attracted widespread criticism for the undemocratic and secretive manner in which was conducted. The new one backed away from the project, and formally withdrew the clearance in 2008. Ultimately, however, it was Kong Spelity’s staunch refusal that won the day: under the current interpretation of the Sixth Schedule, land in Meghalaya cannot be acquired or alienated without the consent of the landowner. This principle remains unevenly applied, but in a situation as contentious and politically fraught as uranium mining it won the day— a rare case of the Sixth Schedule being interpreted to protect the people of Meghalaya rather than exploit them. Kong Spelity died last year, but her implacable refusal continues to inspire environmental movements in Meghalaya, such as the women spearheading the protests against the damning of the river Umngot in the Jaintia Hills. Reforms to the Sixth Schedule are currently being debated heavily in Meghalaya, and one can only hope that the spirit of Kong Spelity will continue to animate its evolving interpretation within the state.