Of Being and Belonging: Contextualising ‘Cosubjectivity’ in Easterine Kire’s When the River Sleeps

Abstract

‘Cosubjectivity’ is the definitive hallmark of Naga consciousness and worldview. It forms an integral part of the structuring of the community, which, as I argue, offers a critique of the idea of subjectivity based on the supremacy of the power and agency embedded only in the ‘human’ subject. The absence of such varorisation defines the Naga consciousness as witnessed in When the River Sleeps, a representative text which establishes the fact that the Naga community is actually progressive as the Nagas were far ahead of the definitive and conclusive frameworks of western colonial enterprises based on the binary between ‘self’ and ‘other’.