ShodhPatra: International Journal of Science and Humanities

Reimagining Marginal Voices: A Postcolonial Reading of Veio Pou’s Waiting for the Dust to Settle

Abstract: The history of North-East India has often been silenced or relegated to the margins of mainstream cultural and national narratives. Some of the most decisive conflicts and events, such as the Second World War, the Indo-Naga conflicts, insurgency movements, Operation Bluebird, and the Oinam incidents, have largely remained unknown or misunderstood by the rest of the country. These histories have largely been neglected, ignored, or only partially told, and even when documented, they are often narrated by those outside the affected communities, resulting in limited, incomplete, and fragmented representations. Such omissions not only obscure the realities of violence and survival but also shape and distort Naga history, identity, memory, and cultural consciousness. In this context, Veio Pou’s Waiting for the Dust to Settle reimagines the turbulent decades of the 1980s and 1990s and seeks to reclaim the suppressed histories by engaging with inherited memories, oral traditions, and intergenerational storytelling. The novel foregrounds the voices of ordinary people, whose lives were deeply affected by prolonged conflict. This paper examines how Pou’s work reconstructs history and articulates notions of belonging, identity, and memory by situating the narrative within a postcolonial framework that interrogates power, marginality, and the politics of representation. Keywords: Postcolonial, Insurgency, Naga, Northeast India, History, Operation Bluebird.