One of the good things about this year's Zee Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) is that it brings together speakers from remote and unexplored areas –both geographical and intellectual. Where else, but at the Zee JLF would you run into someone like Pradyot Bikram Manickya Deb Burman, the current "king" of the 800-year Manickya royal family of Tripura. Deb Burman, 36, was part of the panel on Day 1 that discussed a recent English translation of the memoirs of Binodini Devi, the eminent writer, who was also a Manipuri princess. Gargi Gupta caught up with the dapper young royal:
Q) How did politics happen for you?
A) My father Maharajah Kirit Bikram Manickya was an MP, and my mother Maharani Bibhu Kumari Debi was an MLA, a minister in the state and then an MP. But they gave up active politics in the 1990s, so I had to work my way up from scratch —I was part of the NSUI, then the block-level, the booth, youth Congress, and now the state Congress.
Q) You are president of the Congress in your state. Does the party have presence in Tripura?
A) The Congress got 47% votes last time, but we didn't win any seats because it was a straight contest with the Left parties. But, since the last elections in 2013, allegations of corruption against the Left have gone through the roof even though the chief minister himself has a very clean image. Last year, for instance, 150 people died of malaria and the reason was that the medicines were outdated. The rural and tribal population of Tripura is fed up of the Left and there have been large-scale defections to the Congress and the BJP, like in many other parts of the country.
Q) Is Somdeb Deb Burman a member of your family?
A) Yes, he is a cousin. Our family has always been very cosmopolitan. SD and Rahul Deb Burman were both family members. It is little known that they were part of the royal family of Tripura that gave Rabindranath Tagore the initial funding to set up Santiniketan, and also his first award Bharat Bhaskar, from my grandfather. It was also he who, on the advice of Tagore, funded Jagadish Bose's travel to London for research.
Q) Narratives of the Northeast hardly make it to the mainstream in India – Binodini Devi, for instance, is hardly known outside the region.
A) It's not that the narratives from the Northeast get lost. Narratives of successful people from Odisha, Wankaner, Trichupally, and so on also suffer the same fate. It's due to the dominance of the media in certain parts of India and not in others. My friends ask me why was Mary Kom played by Priyanka Chopra? Why can't they accept a northeastern face? I say, but they haven't even accepted a Rajanikanth or a Kamala Hassan. The more we have festivals like the ZeeJLF in different parts of the country the better it will get. I think it is very important for us from the Northeast to become successful on our own terms and then refer to our having come from the Northeast rather than saying that we are from the Northeast and making that a basis for our claim to success.
Q) You are also an editor of a magazine focused on the Northeast.
A) It's been running for the last eight years. I actually edit it, so after this is interview is done I will go back to my room and write an op-ed. The idea of The Northeast Today, TNT for short, was to disseminate positive stories about the region, so we've done stories on politics, music, football, sport, against mining, the displacement of people, the Yeti that was found in the jungles of the Garo Hills. For this issue we are concentrating on the issue of teenage pregnancies in the Northeast and how important it is for us to engage in dialogue between elders, parent and youngsters.
