Memory and kinship across the Indo-Myanmar border: A study of the lived experiences of displaced Kuki families

Abstract

The crisis of India’s north-east is intertwined with the contestation of its history and memory. Its colonial spatial strategy and administrative policies – inherent in a series of ethnographic works – continue to have repercussions in the post-independence era. Therefore, memory as a border device is an important means of understanding the experiences and manoeuvres of the borderland communities. This article seeks to understand the challenges of violence and displacement faced by the Kuki community, which lives along the Indo–Myanmar border, in a conflict that has separated many families living in the north-eastern region. Following the independence of India, the dispute over territories in this region took a violent turn, leading to forced displacement and aggravating the problems of the borderland community. Based on a qualitative study among different generations of displaced Kuki families, this article argues that the intergenerational transmission of memories can be creatively used to generate responsibility and adjustment to the challenges of poverty and separation caused by the international border. It was also found that embodied memories of violence and displacement are transmitted across generations and that these memories can be creatively fashioned in the families’ everyday lives. Despite the challenges of mobility, elders continue to sustain a familial relationship across the border as the narratives they transmit to younger generations are often saturated with affective meaning, which foregrounds a mode of habitation and understanding of spatial imagination that is different from the present-day, hardened border.