Producing Urban Space

This chapter analyses the efforts to make Dimapur more city-like. Beginning with attempts to hold municipal elections with reserved seats for women in 2017, we navigate the deeply contentious politics around the classification and re-classification of space in the city. As the largest city in a tribal state, Dimapur is an experiment in the production of legible urban space in areas with customary law and constitutional protection. At present the experiment is provoking deep anxieties. Producing legible urban space from the collection of settlements, villages, barracks, commercial zones, ceasefire camps, encroached tracts, and wastelands under various socio-legal regimes is rarely coherent and often chaotic. We argue that the city is a space to challenge and transgress customary law in ways unthinkable at the village level. However, transgression was a catalyst for crisis, a scenario likely to remain constant in urban politics for the conceivable future.

Huntingscape

This chapter explores the recasting of Naga hunting traditions in the city. Dimapur is an enclave of tribal territory surrounded by Assam on three sides. Hunting expeditions bring hunters from the city into Assam’s territory, where they come into contact with different security forces, other hunters, insurgents, and otherworldly spirits. And while intergenerational change and urbanization have reduced the desire to hunt, for many urban residents hunting is a way to maintain their connections to the village, blurring urban and rural boundaries. Meanwhile in the city, the debate on selling dog meat has reconfigured human–animal relationships in a different way. The pressure to ban the sale of dog meat and make Dimapur more city-like has been met with both opposition and approval. The dog meat debate demonstrates that the fringes (where hunters live) and the centre (of trade and market) are both founded on tribal authority and identity, with the urban landscape taking form around these.

Dying in Dimapur

This chapter examines living and dying in Dimapur as a place-making practice. The ambiguities of belonging emerge in death, as relatives want the bodies sent back to ancestral villages. In this sense, Dimapur remains a migrant city where a sense of impermanence always dwells among the numerous tribal residents settled here. Increasing numbers of Nagas living in Dimapur are not associated with their ancestral villages in their everyday lives. Yet, conversation about dying in the city presents a compelling portrait of tribal alienation, exclusion, and disenchantments of modern living. The chapter explores death in different locations and sites within the city, from a tribal women’s association meeting, to reflections on an NSCN-IM leader’s funeral, to the memorial schools and parks (dedicated to the deceased) that have been built across the city, to the philosophy and life-story of one of the city’s coffin-makers.

Audible City

This chapter follows the sounds of Dimapur through the lives of musicians and the nascent music industry. Dimapur has become a home for Naga musicians to establish music schools and recording studios and to hold events across many genres. Dimapur is also the subject of the city’s music. Musicians write and sing about the city, giving the urban landscape a presence in popular culture. The city also appears in music videos, circulated digitally through YouTube and other platforms, putting the city ‘on the map’ for the consumers of contemporary Naga music, whether in the frontier, in cities in other parts of India, or in diaspora. Through these networks, Dimapur is experienced as sound and image, some of which draw conspicuously on the past of militarism, though much eschews the past to project notions of a future, a capitalist future of wealth and conspicuous consumption played out in the urban landscape.

Migrant City, Tribal Territory

This chapter unravels the core tensions at the heart of Dimapur’s urban politics, the growth of a migrant city in a tribal territory. Beginning with the public lynching of rape accused Syed Farid Khan, we analyse the centrality of the incident to Dimapur’s demographic anxieties. Dimapur is a space settled from multiple directions by different communities (tribal and non-tribal) that engage in a variety of tactics turning settlements into neighbourhoods. We focus on place-making in Dimapur to explore the ways in which different communities from within and outside Nagaland create a sense of belonging in patches of the city, arguing that the tensions between migrant city and tribal territory produce and reflect a spatial order particular to Dimapur. This order appears cosmopolitan, though as the lynching showed, it can also be extremely fragile.

Epilogue

The ‘Epilogue’ draws together the two parts of the book: the meanings granted and contested in particular spaces in the city and the embodied experiences of the city by its residents. We use a description of a single site as the catalyst for drawing these parts together: the collapsed bridge over the Chathe River at Naga United Village, a large locality skirting the eastern edge of Dimapur along its border with Assam. In 2017, the site of the collapsed bridge had become a magnet for protest signs bemoaning development failure and corruption, as well as attempts at DIY urban development by citizens. At the collapsed bridge, the visions of Dimapur as a cohesive urban space, as city-like, meet the reality of its patchwork of places demarcated and governed as almost distinct units. The common spaces in between fall into disrepair and become a locus for community frustrations; frustrations materialized in concrete slabs collapsed into the riverbed and an ornate village gate leading nowhere.

Introduction

Dimapur has a limited public history, rarely features in popular culture, and has failed to capture the information of scholars. This chapter addresses the question ‘why Dimapur’ and offers six answers that serve as the book’s argument. First, Dimapur is the largest city in a tribal majority state. Second, Dimapur gives us the opportunity to frame frontier urbanism as a research agenda in India/South Asia. Third, more than just a city, Dimapur is a spatial experiment, a zone between the hills and plains, between tribal and non-tribal space. Fourth, Dimapur is a city governed under extraordinary laws with a substantial military presence and two camps of surrendered militants on its outskirts. Fifth, Dimapur has been both a city of conflict and a city of refuge. Finally, Dimapur allows the opportunity to begin an account of the Northeast, and Nagaland in particular, with urban modernity.