Tsüngchi Samanir Ka

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Easterine Kire

 

A review – part one


Uncle Lanu Toy’s biography came in the post yesterday. This beautifully bound book weighing a little more than a kilogram has a warm photograph of a smiling Uncle Toy on the cover. A big welcome-to-my-world smile.

 


To have men with the life experience of Uncle Lanu Toy still among us, and to be able have their lives documented is a blessing to all of us in more ways than one.

 


The biographer and translator, Repalemzüng Longkumer, writes that he was encouraged to take on the project of translating the book by Dr Tali Imsong’s words on the work at hand: ‘Repa, there is an untilled field. The soil is very rich. Start clearing the land and work on it. Whatever you harvest will be for the people.’ Indeed, it is a rich harvest for the Naga people.

 


People like Uncle Lanu Toy who have seen different eras of life in the Naga Hills are doubly blessed. I have always thought of such people as living books of history because they carry so much historical information in their bodies. That they would submit that history to print and allow a new generation to receive its treasures is a precious gift that we would receive best by reading the book, making notes, and introducing its riches to educational institutions, colleges, universities and schools. Our textbooks do not have enough information on our history. Our children are always surprised to find out undocumented history from oral sources about our past. When more precious information is made so readily accessible in the form of a book, there is no reason why it should not occupy a prominent position in libraries as recommended reading.

 


Born in 1927, Uncle Toy’s long career as an electrical engineer is well known in Nagaland. He retired from government service as the Chief Electrical Engineer. Not many people know he had a crucial role in the Umiam Hydel Project at Barapani, Meghalaya. Combining scientific knowledge with Naga daring, he and his crew installed a twenty-ton crane boom onto the crane track rails using four Sal poles. It was a dangerous enterprise, and they got no help from senior officers who were in fact quite critical of the plan. Had the great risk taken by Uncle Toy failed, then the work on the Umiam dam would have been delayed by years. 

 


After the crane was installed, three men from the Toshiba company of Japan came to work separately on the turbine, generator, and control panel. None of the men spoke English and Uncle Toy was the only person they could communicate with since he had some working knowledge of Japanese thanks to his six-months training period in Japan where he had also received basic Japanese language training. That it would come in use at a later stage was not anticipated by him at all. Thanks to his linguistic skills, the Japanese workers were able to perform their work at the site. 

 


Prior to the Barapani project, Uncle Toy was involved in the first hydroelectric power project in the Northeast called the Umtru Hydel project. It was at a time when Gauhati, the largest town in the Northeast, was dependent on ‘a diesel engine generating power station of a few hundred-kilowatt capacity.’ Hard to imagine what that was like when one pictures present-day Guwahati. He worked as Assistant Engineer having trained under the Madras Electricity system, where he received ‘practical training on the construction of high-tension transmission lines, low tension distribution lines, energy metering systems’ and the fundamentals of electrification projects. 

 


This is the story of the man who can narrate to you the genesis of electricity, not only in Nagaland, but in the whole of the Northeast, having been a vital part of the project to bring electrification to the region. Not just as a bystander, but as an active participant. It is formerly undocumented accounts like this that inform us of the highly significant roles the first educated Nagas played in the whole of the region. In his schooldays, he was a top student, winning scholarships that helped finance his further studies. The book follows his long journey from Impur to Mokokchung, and then on to Kohima, Jorhat and Calcutta and Japan and back to Assam and Nagaland. It is a life richly lived, and a life lived unto the community. (Part two follows).