Thread by @LudditeNed

<27/11/2020 WORLD WITHOUT KONG SPELITY> Kong Spelity Lyngdoh Langrin of Domisiat, #Khasi Hills, #Meghalaya is no more. She left us yesterday night at 11.30pm. Kong Spelity - Matriarch of Domiasiat, refused to allow #Uranium to be mined on her land.

Offered 45 Crore rupees for a 30 years lease of her land, she said, "Money will not buy my Freedom."
Today as I try to figure out your absence, I want to tell the story I tried telling the world sometime ago:

"I have a story. Many years ago I was in Domiasiat village in West Khasi Hills. Domiasiat sits on top of India’s biggest Uranium deposits.

Those days you took the only bus to Phlangdiloin from Shillong in the morning and after eight hours and fifty odd kilometer journey go off at Wahkaji in evening and then walked for an hour to reach a village of seven households.

I wanted to meet Kong Spelity Lyngdoh Langrin. She had refused to lease her land to Uranium Corporation of India (UCIL) even after being offered 1.5 crore rupees annually for thirty years.

She was instrumental in chasing out the ‘dkhars’ who came with Atomic Minerals Division(AMD) from her village to prospect and test mine for uranium. When we reached Domiasiat, she wasn’t there. She had gone to the forest to gather pepper and bay leaf for market.

No one in the village could tell us when would she be back. We were lucky that she came back the next day. As I was in West Khasi Hills, I had gone with a friend from Mawkyrwat thinking that he would be able to translate for me with his knowledge of Maram variant of Khasi.

I asked Kong Spelity about her land, amount of land she owned all sociological documentary kind of crap. She did not get the translation of friend, as in we realised although she was from west, she was not so conversant with Maram.

So it became a double translation English-Maram and then translated by the headman into the local variant of Khasi and back again. She described herself as not well to do although she owned two hills.

I asked her then why didn’t she lease her land to UCIL, she didn’t reply but started walking briskly towards a clump of trees. We followed her. Clump of tree actually hid a small waterfall and pool.

She stopped and turned to me (lit by dappled forest light) and said something about freedom, something about how selling the land would be like selling her freedom and can the money buy this river, this land, this waterfall. O

bviously it took time for me to get it all but standing there in some sort of an Edenic silence I was stunned with tears of clarity.

Few months later, I managed to con my way in to an exposure trip to Jadugoda which UCIL was organising with some local Khasi notables (politician, contractors, youth leaders, you get the idea).

This was to counter the so called false narrative that anti Uranium movement was supposedly spreading with screenings of Buddha Weeps in Jadugoda in Khasi dub.
A senior Bengali technocrat of UCIL liked me, you know how it is about culture etc.

I haven’t talked so much Tagore in life. So one day I asked him about uranium mining displacing people. He looked at me amazed - What displacement, we will rehabilitate them - it is so easy. How many have to be rehabilitated maximum thousand.

We will pay them even make houses for them, give some of them salaried employment, they will become ‘reach’ and anyway they are such unproductive people, they may have land but they don’t know the value of that land, people work hard but don’t get remunerated for it.

It was Freedom which comes out of monetising ownership vs Freedom which comes out of belonging.
In most of the debates about the ‘xenophobic’ north east we from the land of feudal landlessness and exploitation have no idea

how to deal with people who think of land not as merely a factor of production but as an imagination, an Eden to live in.
The conflict of interpretation which a Marwari, Bengali or Bihari has with a Munda, Khasi or Naga is this mismatch of history.

For people who have lived with land being privatised, expropriated, labour being turned into commodity, hierarchy being sacralised find it difficult to understand Kong Spelity.

It is a conflict between those who think a bigha of land makes you finally free and those who think many hills don’t make you rich.
It is the world of productivity against the dream of commons lived.
It is population dense societies against the population sparse communities."