The Department of English, Baptist College organized the Lecture Series-3 on 1st March 2025 with Dr.Inakali Assumi, Author, Researcher and Educator as the resource person for “Dramaturgy and the Nuance of Cultural Representation”.
The program was chaired by Ghunato Neho, with a prayer from Loly Chophi and a short note from Dr.Tsenbeni.
Dr.Inakali started her lecture on how colonization has replaced our cultural identity with western culture, which continues till the present day where youngsters are mostly disinterested in Naga authors or artists. The development that came with western culture is at the cost of our ideology and identity. So far, colonialism has distorted our identity, because our representation comes from outside perspective, as our history has mostly been written by outsiders and have portrayed us how they saw us and not how we see ourselves. Self representation is very crucial to undo the assumed identity, which can be done through literature. Though Naga literature does not have a lot of drama, many of the complexities of cultural representation can be achieved through dialogues in dramas. With the example of Dr.Inakali’s drama ‘The Arrival of Rice Mill in our Village’, the author explained the nuances of cultural identity and conflict which is represented through the voices of the characters, as dramas allows the liberty to create a realistic view of the world and to recreate scenes from the past with the usage of costumes, props and setting. The challenges of writing in one’s own dialect is the lack of words and the technicalities of drama but there is hope for drama to thrive if there is audience, and to improve the scene of Naga literature. As literature offers a vast variety of genre for self representation, delving into the unexplored field of drama in Naga Literature will surely be a way to document and understand our history, culture, roots and ourselves.
The lecture ended with an interactive Q&A.
