Limhachan Kikon
Duncan Bosti
Memory is strange. It does not behave like an archive. It behaves more like a dream. It moves associatively—one fragment calling up another, one remembered wound altering the meaning of an earlier event, and one inherited story making a later moment appear inevitable.
Collective memory behaves much the same way. It carries not only what happened, but what an experience came to mean. Over time, event, interpretation and inheritance can become difficult to separate. What began as an experience may become a story; the story an identity; and the identity eventually defended as though it were the event itself.
Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), a major French philosopher, offers a useful way into this difficulty. One of his deepest questions was: How do human beings understand themselves through the stories they tell about themselves?
We encounter the past through memory, narrative, testimony and interpretation. As our standpoint changes, so can our understanding of what happened. The task is not to rewrite the past, but to examine how it came to mean what it means to us. That is what retrospection makes possible.
We are trying to bring a collective political consciousness back into conversation with its own documentary memory—to place what we remember alongside what was recorded, what was imagined alongside what became possible, and what was experienced alongside what was subsequently made of it. Perhaps this moment allows us this indulgence with labels like betrayal by so and so flying about.
Fortunately, this is not a journey without signposts. The Naga political experience, unlike oral traditions, has left behind written memoranda, agreements, correspondence, administrative records, political statements and constitutional documents. The 1929 memorandum of the Naga Club itself, and its surviving transcript, allow us to hear political actors before their words were absorbed into later narratives. Documents have contexts, omissions and limitations. But they offer something memory alone cannot: testimony. The archive need not be a warehouse of grievances. It can be a pathway back into understanding.
The 1929 Naga Club memorandum is one such signpost. Its words remain striking: “We have no unity among us and it is only the British Government that is holding us together now.”
The sentence deserves to be read carefully.
Before colonial administration and the subsequent spread of Christianity altered the political and cultural landscape, Naga life was organised through tribes, villages, kinship, customary authority, inter-village relations, conflict and security. These were not fragments of a failed nation waiting to be assembled. They were forms of social and political life in their own right.
The significance of the 1929 “we” lies here. It was not the discovery of an ancient political wholeness. It was the imagining of a larger political community across an existing plurality.
And perhaps that is where Eden begins.
Eden, in this sense, is not the Naga past. It is the unrealised political possibility that the past allowed people to imagine. That distinction matters, because fidelity to an inheritance does not necessarily mean reproducing the form in which that inheritance was first expressed. It may mean asking what possibility that inheritance was reaching towards—and what it now demands of us.
Our Eden was not a paradise we fell from. It was a possibility we glimpsed ahead in 1929. What followed was not a simple passage from an imagined unity to fragmentation. Colonial administration, Christianity, new political forms, the encounter with the Indian Union, constitutional negotiations, the formation of Nagaland, questions of territory and integration, and competing political trajectories all altered the field in which that larger “we” could develop.
And this is where the language of betrayal needs to be examined rather than simply inherited.
How did integration come to be experienced as betrayal? What expectations preceded it? What possibilities were opened, narrowed or closed? And what did that experience subsequently do to the Naga political imagination? The wound may be historically real. But it does not make every later response inevitable.
The record also contains bridges that memory can make invisible. The Sixteen-Point Agreement of 1960 recorded the Naga leaders’ view that other Nagas inhabiting contiguous areas should be enabled to join the new state of Nagaland contemplated. The Government of India referred to Articles 3 and 4 of the Constitution but explicitly said it was not possible to make any commitment at that stage. That distinction matters. RS Chiten Jamir representation carried the invitation in person to Nagas in Manipur. A bridge was contemplated. It was not crossed. And a bridge not crossed is not necessarily a bridge that was never there.
We in this generation now possess something earlier generations did not possess in the same measure: education and hindsight. They do not make us automatically wiser, but they give us a greater capacity to pause—to ask where idealism was necessary, where it exceeded the institutional capacity of its time, where circumstances closed possibilities, and where possibilities were perhaps abandoned too soon—from the British period, through the Nehruvian and Congress eras, to the present political dispensation.
This is not superiority over those who came before us. It is simply responsibility to what comes after us.
We can inherit the courage without inheriting every constraint. We can retain the horizon while changing the road. And here Duty to Eden acquires its meaning.
If Eden were a completed political form, duty would mean reproducing that Eden in the present. But if Eden was a possibility glimpsed in the future in 1929—the possibility of a larger political “we” emerging across an already plural world—then fidelity asks something harder:
Can we preserve the possibility without being imprisoned by the form in which an earlier generation expressed it? To be faithful to the inheritance may require us to change how we carry it.
That responsibility, conceived then, becomes concrete in the present.
The Framework Agreement of 3 August 2015 belongs to a very different historical moment. The memorandum records an early political imagination; the Framework Agreement records a later negotiation.
The Government of India stated in 2017 that details of the final settlement were still being worked out within its parameters, and later stated that the Framework Agreement had laid down broad parameters while the Final Accord had not yet been signed. Nothing here is yet resolved—not into acceptance, nor dismissal.
But potential is not reality. And eleven years later, that distinction can no longer be avoided. The question is not simply whether to continue or abandon the journey. It is whether we can continue the political journey with dignity and self-respect while remaining honest about the limits of power, capacity and negotiation.
Political maturity may require holding two truths together: an aspiration can remain legitimate without every means of achieving it remaining available; recognising a limitation is not the same as surrendering an aspiration.
We cannot simply desire the future and expect it to appear in the present. We are not the Genie in the bottle. The living cannot stop at potential. Potential has to find its way towards realisation.
Nor should the Framework Agreement become a final draft imposed retrospectively upon the entire journey from 1929 to 2015. It is a political possibility within an unfinished process, not a completed historical verdict.
The question is no longer only: Who failed us? It is also:
What have we done with what was achieved—and what remains for us to do?
The Government of India has its responsibilities; the political actors who claim custodianship of this inheritance have theirs. The documentary record must tell us where agreement existed, where interpretation diverged, and where negotiation remained unfinished.
The future cannot be a recovery of some imagined political purity. The text from the 1929 Naga Club memorandum does not support that. Whatever institutional and legal architecture eventually emerges will have to be broad enough to accommodate difference, inclusive enough to enlarge the political “we”, and grounded in the territories, communities and institutions in which people actually live.
This is clear. Political inheritance is not merely something to be possessed.
It is a task to be carried.
We are not examining the journey merely to decide who was right. We are reaching back into it so that the present can become more responsible for what it does with the inheritance it claims.
Understanding it cannot guarantee reconciliation or resolution either. But it can make the present more intelligible.
Once accumulated choices, constraints and possibilities become visible, other choices become conceivable.
The historical record becomes a shared experience, and shared experience can become shared intelligibility.
Of course, shared intelligibility does not become automatic agreement. But it creates the possibility of a conscious choice. And the choice remains ours to make.
Perhaps that is the real duty to Eden: not to recover a paradise that never fully existed, but to recover the courage to imagine together. Eden was never behind us. It was the horizon.
