Published with permission from the author and Penguin Random House India.
Header Image: Penguin Random House India
Published with permission from Commonwealth Essays and Studies
ces-9124 (1)Header Image Courtesy:
National Gallery of Art, Washington (Public Domain)
This is an introductory list of texts on Northeast India. The list attempts to cover
ground in a wide array of thematic areas and debates that consist of oral vs. textual literature,
whether literature and representation can be useful to understand the making of the socio-
literary cultures of the northeast, and texts that critically look at writings in English emerging
from the region. The list also incorporates two texts that methodologically engage with how
literature from the region can contribute to the field of social sciences. Individual works of
literature, whether poetry or prose, are selected because they cover a vast array of themes that
one can engage with methodologically – firstly, translated writings by women and the
question of self-representation, secondly, the works do not follow a linear trajectory and
move between spaces and time and expand ways of thinking about planetary concerns, or
even the idea of how a novel is supposed to work (or not) and lastly, a critique of myths, that
deems people as outside of history.
Ao, Temsula. “Writing Orality,” In Orality and Beyond: A North-East Indian Perspective.
Edited by Soumen Sen and Desmond Kharmawphlang. Sahitya Akademi, 2005, pp. 99-112.
Aruna, Nahakpam. “Contemporary Manipuri Short Stories.” Eastern Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 1,
2008, pp. 12–23.
Baishya, Amit R. Contemporary Literature from Northeast India. Oxon: Routledge, 2019.
[Chapter 1: Necropolitical Literature from Northeast India, the Everyday and Survival, pp 1-
49.]
Barma, Bijay Kumar Deb. “Ekalavya of the Longtarai.” Indian Literature, vol. 49, no. 5
(229), 2005, pp-33-34.
Barma, Bijay Kumar Deb. “A Frenzied Dance.” Indian Literature, vol. 49, no. 5 (229), 2005, pp-
33-34.
Das, Prasanta. “Anthology-Making, the Nation, and the Shillong Poets.” Economic and
Political Weekly, vol. 49, no. 42, 2008, pp. 19–21.
Kashyap, Aruni. “The Fiction of Assamese Augusts.” Seminar 650, 2012, pp. 73-77.
Kashyap, Aruni. How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency. HarperCollins India, 2020.
Matta, Mara. “The Novel and the North-East: Indigenous Narratives in Indian Literatures.” In
Indian Literatures and the World: Multilingualism, Translation and the Public Sphere,
edited by Roseela Ciocca and Neelam Srivasrava. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 223-
44.
Haripriya, Soibam. “Poetry and Ethnography: Tracing Family Resemblances.” Society and
Culture in South Asia, vol. 5, no. 1, 2019, pp. 126–146.
Hussain, Shalim. Betel Nut City. Rlfpa Editions, 2018.
Indian Literature: Special Issue on Tripuri Literature, vol. 49, no. 5 (229) Sahitya Akademi,
September-October 2005.
Nongkynrih, Kynpham Sing. Funeral Nights. Context, 2021.
Zama, Margaret Ch, “Locating Trauma in Mizo Literature: The Beloved Bullet” In
Emerging Literatures from Northeast India: The Dynamics of Culture, Society and Identity,
edited by Margaret Ch Zama. Sage 2013, pp. 65-75.
Misra, Tilottama. “ Women Writing in Times of Violence.” The Peripheral Centre, edited by
Preeti Gill. Zubaan, 2010, pp. 249-272.
Moral, Rakhee Kalita “ Beyond Borders and Between the Hills: Voices and Visions from
Karbi Anglong or, Whose Hills Are These Anyway?” In Emerging Literatures from
Northeast India: The Dynamics of Culture, Society and Identity, edited by Margaret Ch
Zama. Sage 2013, pp. 65-75.
Pou, Veio. “Of People and their Stories: Writing in English from India’s Northeast.” Modern
Practices in North East India: History, Culture, Representation, edited by Lipokmar
Dzuvichu and Manjeet Baruah Routledge, 2018, pp 225-49.
Samom, Thingnam Anjulika. Crafting the Word: Writings from Manipur. Zubaan, 2019.
Singh, Parismita. Centrepiece: New Writing and Art from Northeast India. Zubaan. 2017.
Zou, David Vumlallian “Raiding the dreaded past: Representations of headhunting and
human sacrifice in north-east India.” Contributions to Indian Sociology, vol 39, no. 75,
2005, pp 75-105.
-Soibam Haripriya
Assistant Professor
Department of Social Sciences and Humanities
Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology-Delhi
Syllabuses are a way of tracking the development of an area of study. North East Indian writing in English, also often termed Northeast Anglophone literature, has been around for a couple of decades now. But the shape and direction of this literature has only gradually begun to be discerned. The institutionalisation of Northeast Indian Anglophone Literature began with the inclusion of English texts by writers from North East India in English Literature syllabi of several universities in the region. Initially this was in the form of individual authors or texts in IWE courses. The debate over inclusion as a separate course took a while to resolve, with concerns being raised about the availability of supplementary material and indeed about whether we really knew what kind of material was needed. Would it suffice to follow the method of ‘doing’ the core English literature courses where a nodding acquaintance with ‘background’, that might include some information about the time, the author and the form, was considered enough before moving on to the actual nitty gritty of the text itself? Or should we go out into the field and find material from the ground, the archives and the collective memories of communities? And of course, most importantly, which texts would qualify to be taught alongside Shakespeare and Melville and Dickens? (Despite our awareness about the devaluing of the canon, our doubts about the slim texts emerging rather sporadically from some regions, lingered) These, and similar questions ensured that we remained hesitant about what then appeared a radical departure from tradition.
Today, however, most of the universities in the NEI and their affiliated colleges offer complete courses on NE Anglophone writing within their English Literature programs. A survey of some of these shows an interesting commonality – while the genres are represented with separate units on each and often an introductory unit that might contain background essays on politics, literature and history or the introductory essays from poetry and short story collections, there is virtually no reference to the study of formal literary qualities. The pieces selected for such introductory units establish the terms under which the literatures are expected to be studied. The emphasis is mostly on themes of identity, ethnicity, indigeneity, diversity, society, and politics etc. This is admittedly a heavily political literature, as all of these terms would suggest, even where, or perhaps especially where, the political is denied or sidestepped. Once these become part of a systematic program of study, the challenges of teaching and research push them into the popular frames of interpretation circulating within the discipline at a given time. On the other hand, because Northeast Anglophone writing has been an active component of and contributor to, what one can now see as a discourse about North East India (made up of external perspectives and internal responses to them), issues from the socio-political and historical realities of each state often tend to become part of the tacit assumptions underlying the selection of texts and the classroom engagement with them (the latter evident from selection of topics for doctoral research and the enthusiasm demonstrated in discussions of historical neglect, stereotyping, violence). So, for example, the concern with identity in much of the readings of this literature neatly ties in with the international human rights discourse and the overwhelming interest in literatures from conflict regions. The result might be research proposals that flag trauma as a major trope, setting it against violence and conflict that each of the NE states has experienced and that many writers choose to represent.
Institutionalisation and formal disciplinary practice however does not just happen. The preliminary scaffolding made up of textbooks, anthologies, histories, and background material is essential for serious study. The decision to include texts in translation, following the example of courses on European texts in translation that have unquestioningly been part of English syllabi, is part of the conversation that continues.
Concerns that result in such decisions point to the shaky ground that we are on with regard to the idea of the Northeast itself that is now the condition for literary productions which also at the same time carry the flavour of the specific place of formation. We come round once again to the choice of the term Northeast as a label for this literature. Should we look at the literature of individual states and place them in separate units in a course or offer separate courses? Or should they be listed without these distinctions as they have been so far? What should be listed as “Recommended Readings” to enhance the literary experience? Cotton University in its newest MA syllabus features a paper titled “Assamese Literature in Translation” and then goes on to another titled “Writings from India’s Northeast”. The list of Readings recommends books on the various literatures but also suggests a few on conflict and ethnicity, as well as one on the “Indo-Naga war”–works that help supplement cultural information and familiarise students with the NE’s fraught relationship with the Indian nation.
Most other university English departments either have just one dedicated paper on NE literature where texts from all the NE states, of poetry, fiction and drama, and sometimes non fictional pieces, appear, with a deliberate inclusion of translated texts alongside Anglophone ones (as in the Gauhati University paper). In Assam University, Temsula Ao’s “Lament for an Earth” and Mamang Dai’s Legends of Pensam feature with texts from around the world in a paper on “Literature and Environment”; while Ao’s poem “The Old Storyteller” and two novels, Siddharth Deb’s The Point of Return and Aruni Kashyap’s The House with a Thousand Stories sit alongside Soyinka, Walcott, Achebe, Coetzee, and Naipaul in a paper on “Postcolonial Literature”. Dibrugarh University titles its course, “Northeast Literature”, and states in its Course Objectives that texts will “specifically locate the Northeastern region as a distinct socio-cultural and political space”. While the course includes poetry and fiction, a unit on non-fiction contains several pieces that clearly discuss political issues, like Sanjoy Hazarika’s Writing on the Wall, Udayon Misra’s The Periphery Strikes Back and Sanjib Baruah’s Durable Disorder. Mizoram University, among the earliest to introduce NE writings in its English Syllabus, now has a paper titled, “Narratives of North East India” featuring poets (poems are not named), fictional texts (Malsawmi Jacob’s Zorami, the first Mizo novel in English appears here along with Ao and Dai) and a set of essays on social identity, the history of indigenous peoples, folklore and gender. The list of “Recommended Readings”, as in other cases, is again a blend of the literary and the socio-political and historical. Manipur University takes what appears to be a circuitous route by offering a course on Cultural Studies and Folklore, that might be seen as preparatory (given the increasing focus of NE literature on folklore and myth), then choosing two Manipuri texts in English translation for a paper on Translation while also offering an IWE course with no NE texts. The course from North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU) is titled “Northeast Studies” (interesting choice because this is a growing field where the literatures contribute significantly) and this would seem to refer to the long list of suggested readings where themes of marginality, the frontier, colonial exploitation etc. appear alongside books on folklore and the history of tribes. While Kire and Ngangom appear as in the others, here you also have the poetry of Esther Syiem, Kynpham S. Nongkynrih and Mona Zote, Ratan Thiyam’s Nine Hills and a Valley and fiction by Kaushik Barua, Jahnavi Baruah and Arup Dutta that have so far not appeared in any of the courses from the other universities and that introduce a significant complication into the field, with Barua’s novel Windhorse having nothing to do with NEI, being about the Tibetan struggle and set in India, Nepal and China.
The components of NE courses, as this somewhat sketchy account shows, point to a number of issues that accompany institutionalisation of the area. First, the political underpinning of this literature is obviously unavoidable – literary texts represent political-historical themes and the way the texts are framed by statements of Objectives and Outcomes suggests that teaching strategies must emphasise political-historical and cultural issues equally, and with the National Education Policy in view, focus on questions of diversity and inclusivity. Secondly, the choice of texts is determined by availability. The two Ngangom and Nongkynrih volumes, Anthology of Contemporary Poetry from the North East and Dancing Earth appear often because of easy availability, while the two-volume Oxford Anthology of Writings from North-East India edited by Tilottoma Misra is listed only in a couple of courses since, quite surprisingly, it is not currently available. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, institutionalisation, which is both inevitable and desirable, requires that a discipline or area is practised consciously; in other words, that it works systematically towards enhancing the experience of doing the subject. This would entail teaching the history, types, and context of literatures, which in turn would demand the writing of histories of the literature, the making of anthologies and textbooks that will establish a culture of reading appropriate to the material, and the gathering of a vast amount of additional material from each of the communities/states/cultures that produce this work (So far, if the current courses are any indication, the extra-literary material mostly consists of history and politics, folklore and some sporadic sociological studies. It would not be surprising to find that there is still some dependence on colonial era ethnographic studies – P. R. T. Gurdon’s book on the Khasis being a preeminent example, often cited in research, though mercifully not listed in courses).
What then are the challenges that the making of a course on NE Anglophone literature presents? As the somewhat messy scene presented above would suggest, there is firstly the issue of resolving what exactly is meant when the term NE is used. How is its dual sense, of a single region made up of many diverse entities, to be represented in the course? What should determine text and author selection? Those that contain all the commonly acknowledged themes? A variety of forms and types? An author who has a body of work or an exceptional sense of place? But even as all this is sorted out, it is time for these courses to get out of the spirit of randomness, use a chronology, get clarity about what they seek to present as NE literature and offer a clear perspective on the field for the prospective student that will address the where, when and why questions essential in any course of study.
— Nandana Dutta
Professor of English, Gauhati University
Jobeth Warjri: Thank you very much for being part of this interview. I want to start by commenting on
the vast repertoire of books you have written—six books of poetry, a large collection of fiction, and critical readings. What makes you so prolific?
Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih: I would like to hold my restless energy responsible for making me attempt so many things. But I know it is not as simple as that. The truth is, I have found peace and a sense of
fulfilment only in my creative and literary endeavours. And that is not only about the
cathartic nature of literature. My firm conviction is that I can be most serviceable to society,
contribute the most to it, only by doing what I can do best. Perhaps, here is the real reason
why I have done so many things—because I can. Without talent or knowledge, no one can
write anything.
But, at times, I also think, what if I had focused only on a genre or two? Would I have
accomplished much more? I certainly regret not writing my novels sooner. Working in two
different languages and on too many forms can take away so much of your free time. And I
regret, too, that I cannot be a full-time writer.
JW: After all these years, do you think there is more to to be said, and, if so, why?
KSN: It will be a sad day when a writer has nothing more to say. Fortunately, I still have a
few stories and ideas to share that have already developed into clear outlines. As for poetry,
as long as my heart feels strongly about something, it will always come knocking. If a writer
writes about what he knows best, he will always have things, and new things, at that, to say.
Writers, with their vast knowledge gathered from life’s varied experiences, have a duty to
share their wisdom, to speak out and voice their conscience. My worry is time, ‘flashing
through / our lives like a shooting star across the sky.’
JW: I think readers of English know you as a creative writer, but you have also written quite
extensively in criticism. Do you perceive a connection between the two seemingly distinct
fields? If so, what is it?
KSN: The creative and the critical are not as distinct as they may seem. The first known
critic, for instance, was a poet—Aristophanes, the famous Greek comedian. The two faculties
are inextricably intertwined. Horace beautifully brought out the connection between them:
‘I’ll serve as a whetstone which, though it cannot cut of itself, can sharpen iron. Though I
write nothing, I’ll teach the business and duty of a writer’. A good critic is a whetstone that
can sharpen the iron of a creative writer. I don’t consider myself a critic, but I do believe that
the better the critic you are of your creative work, the better your work will be.
JW: Funeral Nights is a tome of a book in which material from your research is quoted quite
frequently as part of the narrative. What made you think of integrating research material as
part of the book?
KSN: Initially, I conceived Funeral Nights as a form of writing back. I wanted to counter the
misrepresentations and the slander spread by outsiders about the Khasis. But that was not all.
Even more appalling to me is the ignorance of my own people. I remembered what Achebe
said about the novelist as a teacher: I wanted to teach and educate them. And when a writer
sets out to educate, and Hamlet-like to tell the story of his people, to clear their ‘wounded
name’, he must first become as near a master of the subject as possible. How does one
achieve such mastery? The experiences of life are not enough. He must search and explore far
and wide, dig deep into the past and scrutinise the present intensely like someone sifting rice
in a winnowing basket, separating it from the husks. That is why I have braided into the
novel’s narrative materials from my research and reading.
JW: You are also an editor of anthologies. The first poetry anthology from the Northeast,
Anthology of Contemporary Poetry from the Northeast, was co-edited by you. How has being
engaged with the craft aided (or impeded) your profession as an editor?
KSN: You are right; I have edited a few poetry and prose anthologies in Khasi and English.
Among the latest are Late-Blooming Cherries: Haiku Poetry from India, to be brought by
Harper Collins later this year, and Lapbah: Stories from the Northeast. I’m co-editing them
with my colleague, the poet and writer Rimi Nath.
The craft, as you put it, has only assisted me in many ways. It has acquainted me with some
of the best literary works written in the country and thus affording me the opportunity to learn
from them. And editing them has also helped me edit my own work much more efficiently.
As you know, no creative piece can shine in its splendour without some rigorous and
competent polishing.
JW: You have often said that the purpose of storytelling is ‘to teach with delight’
(particularly, in the Prelude to Around the Hearth: Khasi Legends). If we understand the
classroom as one of the places where critical reasoning is taught, how do you see this statement
play out both within and outside the classroom?
KSN: I have always believed in teaching through illustrative examples and amusing
anecdotes relevant to a point I happen to be making. I practise this technique not only in
teaching but also in my writing. I find it to be quite rewarding. Students enjoy the little stories
I tell them, and outside the classroom, whenever I read or talk about poetry, people have
come to me and have said, ‘We never knew that poetry or criticism could be so entertaining.’
JW: You are one of the very few writers who treat Khasi philosophy as equal to any other
philosophy around the world (canonical literature in English usually adores the Greeks or, in
the case of India, Sanskrit philosophy). How is your celebration of Khasi philosophy
significant to your understanding of literature and the craft of writing?
KSN: I’m not much of a believer in any organised religion, but I do admire some aspects of
Khasi religious philosophy, in particular, three. One of the three Commandments in Khasi
religious philosophy says, ‘Tip briew, tip Blei’ (‘Know man, know God’), meaning, ‘Live in
the knowledge of man, in the knowledge of God’. It would take pages for me to elucidate on
the significance of this Commandment. But very briefly, as I wrote in Funeral Nights, in its
deepest connotation, the knowledge of man forms the basis of all human actions. It teaches
man to be prudent and urges him to ponder his every move carefully. He thinks things
through—both the task and its outcome—and only then takes a decision on whether to
proceed.
In this manner, a person guided by the knowledge of man is also guided by his conscience,
which, by its very essence, weighs all things on the scales of virtue and truth. Therefore, a
person blessed with conscience, or the knowledge of man, is also blessed with the knowledge
of God because God stands for virtue and truth. By placing, in the Commandment, the
knowledge of man before the knowledge of God, the Khasi faith indicates two things. One,
that man must serve God through service to his fellow man. In other words, service to man is
service to God. Two, man must always be guided by his conscience.
I also admire the Khasi philosophy’s anti-anthropocentric attitude. This attitude is crucial.
The Jews, for instance, believe that God made man so that he might populate the earth with
his countless hordes. ‘Go forth and multiply,’ he said. This assertion places man at the
pinnacle of all creation. This kind of anthropocentrism encourages man to indulge in all sorts
of earth-wrecking activities in the name of progress and development. He tears down trees in
the forest, he quarries the earth, destroys hills and rivers, land and sea, earth and sky, and thus
places all species of living things (himself included) and the entire planet in terrible danger.
But the old ones who formulated Khasi thought, in their compassionate wisdom, stressed the
fact that man was sent to earth by God, not to multiply himself, but to be the honourable carer
that Ramew, earth’s guardian spirit, pleaded for. They did not believe that man was the crown
of creation. To them, everything that breathes, and even those without life, like sand and
stones, are equal creations of God. Because of this, the old Khasis held nature in great
esteem. They never indulged in acts of wanton destruction. For instance, when they went to
the forest for tree-cutting or hunting, they bowed low and explained themselves, they prayed
and appealed, they asked and pleaded before God.
These principles have shaped my attitude to life and, thus, my writing. And I rue the fact that
we have become so different: truly a generation kaba bam duh, one that eats till extinction.
Survey Essays
Interviews
Kynpham Sing NongkynrihCourse Notes
Course Note on Writing in English from Northeast India
Soibam Haripriya
Primary Texts
Jobeth Warjri: Thank you so much for agreeing to take part in this interview. I want to start at the beginning—with Oral Scriptings. What made you think of oral narratives and oral storytelling as sources for your creative work?
Esther Syiem: Memory has played an important role in my life. Maybe because I was always told stories by my grandmother, my mother, my father and the innumerable visitors who were never part and parcel of the city of Shillong, but who came from the suburbs, who belonged to far away villages and told us things they saw that we never did.
I was always conscious of my oral antecedents and when I was young, I mined my stories from anyone I met and looked for books everywhere but found that books in Khasi were very few. There was always a sense of something that had to be done for the community in terms of retrieval, recordings, anything that would make these stories come alive. I was unnecessarily burdened with the thought that there were no books in Khasi on Khasi subjects that ‘mattered’ (the situation is different now).
I suppose my first collection of poems was an attempt to bridge the past; I found that these memories were, to my surprise, meaningful and that they had a significantly contemporary relevance. It was my first attempt and I was still feeling my way around but realising more and more that so much had to be retold, reinvented, re-made, updated and understood. I was not looking to write about the daffodil, as I told Professor Temsula Ao in one of my innumerable conversations with her. I was looking to the bamboo and the scuttling rodents who were generating stories of other worlds and other modes of being.
JW: How does the oral shape your style and your understanding of the literary?
ES: My world view has always been oral: by that I mean my consistent affirmation of the world in which words had the power to shape, to rule, to be sourced for their wealth of knowledge and ability to empower a community. In the course of my journey, anything to do with words and word-making seemed to reach out to me in a very essential way. And I responded by listening or reading or immersing myself in these world-views that constituted a very important part of my identity. This was reinforced by constant meetings that I had with those who lived far away from the city. Strangely, I still meet such people on a regular basis and my perceptions and understanding have become stronger – not that I idealise them – but that I find strength in their words and philosophy; where life and death are concurrent to each other and there is acceptance of the pace that life must take – no hurry there, nothing forced, nothing smart or clever about it.
So, stories in one way or another always struck a chord within me. As I said earlier, I swallowed them whole for they provided much food for my thoughts. Inevitably this formed the basis for my entry, if you could call it that, into the “literary” world of attempting to write. Of course, my education was in English Literature and I learnt a good deal about other cultures, but not about my own. This has always made me feel disadvantaged. Besides, there was always within me this sense of belonging to a community that had this uncanny ability to use the spoken word in a way that could move the universe. This has guided my attempts to put it down on paper, and it has always been my attempt to replicate its spirit, incurably candid and independent.
JW: I think, in The Oral Discourse in Khasi Folk Narrative, you also speak of the oral as a way of interrogating the literary, a hermeneutic that unravels what it means to belong to a particular community. What does this mean for you—to have your cultural identity also be part of the way you interpret the world?
ES: Yes, the oral tales needed to be unravelled and unpacked to find out why they had not disappeared from the face of the earth, given the amount of discussion that went on about how the Khasi community had begun to lose its intangible heritage. Even though I always felt disadvantaged, I saw the oral as an asset that needed new ways to disseminate it productively in the present; to show the oral for what it really is, within Khasi society – not as a set of traditions or practices or sayings to be learnt by rote, but as a philosophy that feeds a particular way of life. One example is the practitioner of herbal medicine. There are no notebooks to be followed, only gut instinct and knowledge handed down (sometimes, not always) and an almost mystical sense of healing. When we talk about the oral it also implies this communion with the universe; the reason why, time and again, I have referred to our indigenous world as the “speaking universe.” It is within this context that the tales speak louder than anything else.
JW: The oral seems to resist a single interpretation. This is especially noticeable in Many Sides of Many Stories where a single poem is open to multiple points of view. How did you achieve this development in your craft?
ES: By listening intently to the same story being retold multiple times and to the hidden nuances and inflexions in the voices of those telling me stories. However, I am not aware of this kind of development in my poems. If there is one, then I’m very happy about it.
The oral goes through multiple retellings. These are like multiple edits. Each edit reinforces the other. All of them are equally important. For example, there is the story of Manik Raitong: some sources speak about an affair that he had had with the king’s wife. Some speak about the liaison after her marriage to the king. Tales from each region are embellished differently, but the implicit story line remains the same. And we pick them up one by one without disputing which one is the right one.
JW: I want to dwell a little on the translatability of the oral into print. How do you strike a balance between the forms of the oral (which are largely in Khasi) with English in which most of your books are written?
ES: I suppose this has not been difficult for me because I move in out of both languages quite easily. When there are words that are difficult to translate, that I think would add to the meaning or texture of the poem, I usually rely upon the original Khasi words. I use them in the midst of a thought process in a poem or to make the Khasi-ness of what I am writing about, stand out etc. In this way I feel assured that I am communicating my own world-view to the rest of the world in an authentic way; and I provide a glossary at the end.
JW: I think gender, as a way of understanding the literary, has been a recurring theme in your work—several of your poems and Memoir in Water: Speaks the Wah Umkhrah come to mind. What, do you think, are the ways in which stories told from the perspectives of women in Northeast India (yours, Temsüla Ao’s and Easterine Kire’s, to name a few) transformative in the way that the literature is understood?
ES: The stories coming from these women writers are different. In Easterine Kire’s novel, When the River Sleeps, the forest is identified as a protagonist; a protagonist that has been sidelined so often that we’ve failed to hear her voice. The narratives that we hear from these women writers come from a place never seen or heard of before. Another example is Temsüla Ao’s These Hills Called Home, which has brought a human face to the Naga struggle. So, women do have a transformative role in wielding their words and stories to a readership and an audience that is still untaught in the resources of a female imagination rich with associative memories and perceptions that have never really been sounded out to the rest of the world.
The river Umkhrah for instance, is the protagonist that has given my book its name. This body of water had often been described to me by those of the older generation who were closely linked to it. Then it had beauty and power and the ability to make itself heard through its raging waters or clear translucence in autumn or winter. It forms the backdrop to my consciousness; I hate it because it’s filthy but I love it too. And I’ve come to understand it almost as woman to woman: the stories that it has carried through the ages, the effluents that plague it now, its ability to clean itself in the monsoon, its faithfulness to all of us by simply flowing onwards, its ability to nurture life, its insistent presence in my consciousness. If this isn’t a woman telling her story then what is? The narrating voice of the woman has many layers . . . to be teased out with each new reading. And the woman’s voice has never been trained to speak in certain way. It is the voice of impulse, imagination, emotional certitudes that have never been discussed, never brought to life . . .
JW: How are the notions of the “oral” and the “literary” affected with the telling of stories that have gendered perspectives?
ES: For me the oral fashions the narrative; in that, I am always conscious of a certain way of story-telling, a certain way of looking at life, that particular inflexion that always brings out the oral strain. By “literary” I understand it to mean the qualifying mark for acceptance in academia. Under the sway of the oral, any thought of the “literary” seems to fall away (for me at least); for when I write I only have one thing in mind: and that is to emulate what comes to me by way of memory, through the stories that close around me all the time. The women in my stories and poems have a keen sense of the oral, never of the literary, and I find that once they take over, their stories take on a life of their own, following their own path of grass-root telling.
Jobeth Warjri: Thank you, Janice Pariat, for being a part of this interview. I would like to talk to you about an important element in your writing—the diasporic sensibility. How has calling multiple places “home” shaped your sense of aesthetics and, also, the affective components related to your craft?
Janice Pariat: Calling multiple places “home” has indeed contributed to my “diasporic sensibility”, but I think even more than that my exceedingly mixed ethnic heritage—of Khasi, Jaintia, Portuguese, British. I grew up in pockets of Assam, where my father was transferred from one tea estate to another, but I always had Shillong to call “home”. Except, I grew up in a mixed maternal household—my grandmother was Jaintia, my grandfather Portuguese, so even if I had a place to call home, I was never quite an “insider”. And then, of course I left, to study in Delhi, in London, I lived “outside” here and there for a long while, and I think because of this, along with my mixed heritage, I have felt unmoored, unanchored. At first, in a not entirely positive way—after all, who doesn’t wish to fit in? But I’d ask myself these questions: Who am I? Where do I belong? Where is home? And be quite disquieted by not having a clear answer. Only recently have I learned to embrace this—to acknowledge that I am a child of vast historical processes, of vast movements and migrations across the globe, that my story, as all our biographies, began a long time ago. That I carry the stories of my ancestors. And this has opened me up to the world in a way that I didn’t think possible. I appreciate the abundance of “homes”, I appreciate the complicated, entangled stories that have created my ancestral history—and I think this has permeated into my fiction now. My novel, Everything the Light Touches, intertwined a quartet of stories set across geographies and across centuries. Somehow, I cannot really bring myself to only consider the miniscule anymore. All is open. All is complicated. The past very much alive in our present.
JW: I think that you, along with Anjum Hasan and Jahnavi Barua, were among the first writers from the Northeast to express a fully developed idea of the diasporic in your writings. Formalistically, such as is the case with Seahorse: A Novel and The Nine Chambered Heart, it has resulted in a style that draws from an ephemeral sense of place and the people associated with these places. Was this intentional?
JP: Perhaps it wasn’t quite intentional at the time—we also are able to draw these observations in retrospect. Seahorse, my first novel, very much followed a geographical trajectory that echoed my own—Nem moves from an unnamed small-town to Delhi University’s North Campus, and then is in London/the UK for a year or so on a fellowship. Looking back now I think this allowed, for me, some safety in the intimidating exercise of writing a first novel. These were familiar places—in fact I was living in London at the time of writing the book, and while all else felt unfamiliar, the process of working on a much vaster canvas than the stories in Boats on Land, at least there was the familiarity of these locations and settings to fall back on. In The Nine-Chambered Heart, the unnamed protagonist also follows a geographical trajectory similar to mine, but this was more so I could explore love, desire, relationships, in a variety of settings. To see how we leave stories of ourselves wherever we go—and in a book like this we are able to gather them and place them together.
JW: Contrary to popular understanding of the diasporic as something associated with drifting and wandering, the term also touches upon a sense of a symbolic belonging to place. I think we see this in The Nine Chambered Heart where objects, such as paintings and sculptures, mark the character’s belonging to a certain place in time. What is your understanding of place as a symbolic feature in your writing?
JP: I think we carry home with us wherever we go—be it in the form of a coffee press, a dried flower, a pine cone, food stuff, a pendant, a photo. No matter how nomadic we might be, I suppose we are also only able to appreciate that movement, that journeying, if we are able to recognise some fixities, some anchors. And those anchors can themselves be movable—but they carry meaning within them—a particular place, a particular room or home—that becomes embedded in that object. It’s in the nature of the social lives of things to carry meaning in this way…
JW: In relation to the question above, in Everything the Light Touches, you ground the nomadic experience with the idea of the Nongïaïd. What made you think of connecting the travel and the diasporic experience to one of the cultures you’ve inherited?
JP: Travel in Everything the Light Touches is used as a vehicle to explore the tussle between worldviews—those that hold on to fixity and those that call for fluidity. My characters are travellers caught in movement, just as the novel leans strongly towards supporting a worldview that acknowledges the constant motion of life and the universe. Travel also serves as a useful tool to “unlock” characters—they are placed in unfamiliar settings, dealing with unexpected occurrences, and we see the decisions they make in those situations. Just as in life—I think how people travel is very revealing of their characters. The Nongïaïd as you know are a fictional community—but they play an incredibly important part in the novel as a whole. They symbolise everything that the nation-building project, or any project that seeks to fix and calcify, cannot control. The inclusion of the Nongiaid speaks very directly to the tussle between fixity and fluidity. They are the unsettled, wayward, wild, unruly and untamed that the Linnaean way of seeing is constantly trying to suppress, isolate, manipulate, tame, and eliminate.
JW: Do you see yourself continuing with exploring the diasporic theme in your writing? What’s next for Janice Pariat?
JP: To be honest, I’ve never quite imagined it as the “diasporic theme” until you mentioned so! I am looking to tell more stories that acknowledge these vast timelines and storylines we all belong to—the immense sweeps of history that go into me, my characters experiencing certain things and seeing life, the world in a certain way. I cannot undo this “long perspective”; it will continue to inform my writing from now on.
Cite this Essay
MLA:
Warjri, Jobeth Ann. “An Overview of Writing in English from Northeast India (the 1980s to the Early 2020s).” Indian Writing In English Online, 21 March 2024, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/an-overview-of-writing-in-english-from-northeast-india-the-1980s-to-the-early-2020s-jobeth-ann-warjri/ .
Chicago:
Warjri, Jobeth Ann. “An Overview of Writing in English from Northeast India: The 1980s to the Early 2020s.” Indian Writing In English Online. March 21, 2024. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/an-overview-of-writing-in-english-from-northeast-india-the-1980s-to-the-early-2020s-jobeth-ann-warjri/ .
This essay provides an overview of the Writing in English from Northeast India from the 1980s to the present (the early 2020s). The aim is to give the interested reader an historical and a temporal account of the major literary trends during this period along with perspectives on how the literature has been read. The critical perspectives will shed light on what distinguishes Writing in English from Northeast India from the canon identified as Indian Writing in English, while also providing a possibility for examining the ways in which Writing in English from Northeast India can be read within the purview of Indian Writing in English. I take, as my point of departure, the 1980s since it is around this time that a sense of what distinguishes the literature in English from the Northeast, as a unique literature, emerges. While the use of the term “Northeast” is not without contention, it is used in this essay as a nomenclature that writers from the region grapple with in their relationship to the imaginary called “India.” It is, by no means, my attempt to dilute the diversity of the region in terms of the literary perspectives and output that characterise this often-fraught relationship. The aim, here, is to foreground English as a medium for writing with geographical locales being the contexts from which the language is used. Both the language and its contexts are relevant inasmuch as languages are imbued with the histories of the people who speak them (Ngangom unpaginated).
The 1980s: Colonial Legacies, Lyric and the Shillong Poetry Circle
As with most literature written in English in India, Writing in English from Northeast India began with the recognition that English was not a foreign tongue. The first literary circles in the region comprised, largely, of writers who were educated in mission schools where English was the medium of instruction. Reflecting on the literary climate of the 1980s, Dhruba Hazarika writes, “[C]reative writing in English in the North East of India…began albeit hesitantly, a bit cagey in Shillong itself” (293). The secrecy with which literature in English began has to do with the fact that there were not too many people who had been published in English. The lack of organised literary fora in the region also compounded the difficulties that people writing in English faced where publicity for the literature was concerned. Although some literature in English had been published in the 1960s and the 1970s, such as Murli Das Melwani’s Stories of a Salesman (1967), Jyotsna Bhattacharjee’s Shadows in Sunshine (1965) and Amaresh Dutta’s Captive Moments (1971), the lack of a critical readership to the writing meant that engagement with the literature was limited. Melwani’s Stories of a Salesman was the only book that attracted critical attention during the time it was published (See Archer 488). Four writers took on the responsibility of building a readership to literature in English from the region. They are regarded as the progenitors as far as literature in English in the Northeast is concerned—Desmond Leslie Kharmawphlang, Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, Robin Singh Ngangom and Ananya Shankar Guha. Tarun Bhartiya, who was also part of the group, wrote in Hindi. Except for Kharmawphlang and Nongkynrih, the poets traced their roots outside of Meghalaya. They called themselves the Shillong Poetry Circle and their platform was a literary magazine called Lyric.
Ngangom’s Words and the Silence (1987), published during the time that the Shillong Poetry Circle was still in existence,[1] reflects the position of a poet who, living in exile, has found a second home in Shillong. The poem “Hynniew Trep”, is contemplative in the way that Ngangom’s “poetry of feeling” coalesces with his new-found affection for the city:
Denuded and sweet-smelling hills, it is here
among your boulders and pines that thatched huts
will lie with concrete balconies, and the material
hand, poised on the trigger is forever betrothed
to the artisan or carpenter who has nothing.
…
Seven Huts of my solitude, my first love
Your rain, your wind searched my face for signs
of guilt when I disembarked; a fugitive
fleeing from ties of blood and desire. (Ngangom 29)
The Shillong topography, with its wind and rain, complements the poet’s sense of loneliness which he also identifies as the origin of his poetry, his “Seven Huts…of solitude” (Ngangom 29). The poem shows Ngangom at ease with his adopted home, going so far as to comparing his journey as a poet with a Khasi origin myth. Ngangom’s language reveals a cosmopolitanism characteristic of literature that has been allowed to thrive in a multi-ethnic environment. This is not to say that the homeland, for the migrant poet, is forgotten. Ngangom re-imagines Manipur as the historical Kangleipak, once “beneficent and fabled” but now given to violence (Ngangom, “I am Sorry to See Poetry in Chains” 70).
Much has been said about the political overtones of Writing in English from Northeast India. Ananya S. Guha opines that the “cult of violence” associated with the literature has made writings from the Northeast marketable to Indian readers in the “mainland.” Guha points out, however, that the writers from the region speak of violence in order to point the way for peace (“Violence to What End?: Literary Expressions in the North East” 1-5). As a theme in Writing in English from Northeast India, the colonial legacies of violence can be traced to these early beginnings in the literature.
Lyric was eventually discontinued due to the lack of funds to pay for its publication (Guha unpaginated). In 1989, however, the Shillong Poetry Society, with the help of M. C. Gabriel,[2] published a calendar containing poems accompanied by artwork done by local artists Apart from the members of the Shillong Poetry Circle, poems from other regions in the Northeast, too, were published (See Fig. 1).
Fig. 1: Easterine Kire’s poems published in the 1989 calendar of the Shillong Poetry Circle
Source: raiot.in
The poems, such as Kire’s “The Mist” and “For Justin-Pierre,” demonstrate the ideological stance that the writers had in relation to literature which was to distinguish the anglophone poetry of the Northeast from that which existed in the mainland. In his book, Words and the Silence (1987), Ngangom expresses this position. He writes that his is a “poetry of feeling” that is not “mere cerebral poetry” (Ngangom unpaginated). The resultant literature is one that is experiential, impressionistic and lyrical even as the feelings which the writers communicate derive from cultural, political and social heritages. In this regard, English was the preferred language to give voice to the silences both in terms of how literature from the Northeast was viewed as well as the lack of an informed audience to appreciate the literature.
The 1990s: The Northeast Writers’ Forum, English as Bhasha and Women Writers
The 1990s saw a concerted effort from the writers living within the region to establish a consortium, bringing together various writing communities into a common fold. The Northeast Writers’ Forum registered as an official literary body in 1997. The aim of the Forum was “to promote creative writings in, and the translations of regional literary works to, and vice versa, in English” (NEWF unpaginated). English was perceived, by the Forum, as a common ground upon which solidarity across writing communities could be established. The founding members—Meenaxi Barkataky-Ruscheweyh, Indrani Raimedhi, Srutimala Duara, Mitra Phukan, and Dhruba Hazarika—regularly contributed to English dailies in Assam, particularly, The Assam Tribune and The Sentinel (NEWF unpaginated).[3] A significant number of these early writings were vignettes and stories which reflected day-to-day life in Assam during the time. The writings are replete with raconteurs, chance encounters, wry observations of human behaviour and philosophical musings of the place of literature within the context of the everyday. The stories also contained memories of Shillong, a first home for many of the writers. The story “A Plain Tale from the Hills” (1990) by Dhruba Hazarika, written for The Sentinel, juxtaposes the memories of the first home (Shillong) with Guwahati, the place that the author has made his second and permanent home:
Back home in the hills we would go crazy…There was no dust, no heat, no mosquito. Even the sweat was good sweat, sweat brought about by honest, carefree labour and not idle sweat, brought about for no effort of yours but simply because of the glands opening because the sun was harsh. (Hazarika 1990, page unknown)
Although Hazarika later says in the story that the plains “can be more rewarding in terms of experience” than the hills (1990, page unknown), his memory of the hills in Shillong are nonetheless bathed in a nostalgic glow such that the past he speaks of was “honest,” “good” and “carefree” in comparison to the present (ibid.). His nostalgia for Shillong is characteristic of a “diasporic intimacy” that tends to idealise the past, particularly childhood, despite the dystopic realities present in the remembered past (Boym 251-258).
There also emerged, in the Christian dominated regions, a distinct aesthetic as far as literary influences were concerned among the writers. While the writers who were men were more likely to be influenced by Federico Garcia Lorca, Giorgos Seferis, Pablo Neruda, Mahmoud Darwish and Tudor Arghezi, the women writers took recourse to oral traditions and the Bible as sources for the literary. Temsüla Ao’s “The Serpent and I” and “The Healing Touch,” published in Songs that Tell (1988, 2013), re-imagine biblical narratives from the perspective of a woman. “The Healing Touch,” for instance, re-imagines the biblical narrative of the bleeding woman in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke (See Matt. 9.20-22; Mk. 5.25-34; Lk. 8.43-48). Ao’s treatment of the narrative, in opposition to the one told in the Bible, carries sexual undertones:
What if, instead of the hem
I had touched the Body? (Ao 36)
Womanist interpretations of biblical narrative is also seen in Ao’s later poems such as “The Creator” in Songs of Many Moods (1995, 2013) where the biblical God is reconstructed as the woman as Creator.[4]Ao writes:
The Caverns
In another woman’s body
Fashioned and
Nurtured me
And pushed me out
To breathe and fight
In a man’s world.
…
The true self
Of the woman in me
Declared.
I am a woman,
And woman creates.
Therefore
I shall create
The real me
And a brave new world. (Ao 128-129).
Ao’s re-writing of biblical narratives showed that English, far from being a foreign tongue, was also comfortable enough for the writers to re-invent its theological meaning. Ao was also one of the earliest women in Nagaland to advocate women’s empowerment through education and played a key role in the development of the Ao Naga script (Kashyap, unpaginated). Belonging, as Lanusanga Tzüdir observes, comes from retrofitting biblical narrative with previously held beliefs in the Ao Naga oral traditions (Tzüdir 265-293). Biblical narrative, in this instance, served to position the self within the ambit of a “mother” tongue—one that drew upon women’s heritage while simultaneously engaging with the global through the English language and English texts (Nic Craith 76).
The 2000s: Mainstream Recognition, the Northeast “Diaspora” and the Other
Except for the Writers’ Workshop, which had published literature in English from the Northeast since its inception, mainstream publishers were—by and large—slow to recognise the literature from the region. By the early 2000s, however, the tide was turning. Publishing houses such as Zubaan, Harper Collins, Penguin, and Katha were at the forefront of bringing out literature in English from the region. The interest of mainstream publishers in Writing in English from Northeast India coincided with the institutionalisation of the literature in the form of research being carried out in universities across the country. A market and readership for the literature was created through this academic interest (Bargohain 1-38; “Northeast India: A New Literary Region for IWE” unpaginated). Notable works that were published during the time included The Collector’s Wife (2005) by Mitra Phukan (mentioned above), Esther Syiem’s Oral Scriptings (2005), These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone (2006) by Temsüla Ao, The Legends of Pensam (2006) and River Poems (2004, 2013) by Mamang Dai, The Desire of Roots (2006, 2019) by Robin Singh Ngangom, Anjum Hasan’s Lunatic in my Head (2007) and Neti, Neti: Not This, Not This (2009, 2016), and Jahnavi Barua’s Next Door (2008). While writers such as Syiem, Ao, and Dai reflected what Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih and Robin Singh Ngangom term a “rootedness” to place and folklore (xii-xiii), Hasan and Barua complicated the idea of “rootedness” by writing from the margins of indigenous worldviews that had, hitherto, dominated the literature.
The concept of the “other” is important in Writing in English from Northeast Literature. On the one hand, the region and its peoples are characterised by an “other”-ness in relation to the rest of India. While on the other, the non-indigenous groups in the region find themselves contending with otherness in relation to the social, political and cultural structures within the region itself. The relationship can often prove to be bewildering and complex as Nongkynrih expresses in the poem “Sundori” in The Yearning of Seeds (2011):
Beloved Sundori,
Yesterday one of my people
Killed one of your people
And one of your people
Killed one of my people
Today they have both sworn
To kill on sight.
But this is neither you nor I,
Shall we meet at the Umkhrah River
And empty this madness
Into its angry summer floods?
I send this message
Through a fearful night breeze
Please leave your window open. (12).
Written in 1992, Nongkynrih’s poem can be read as a reflection of the ethnic strife that pervaded Shillong during the 1980s and 1990s. There is a clear demarcation between “us” and “them” affecting the relationship between the poet and his beloved. The latter, as is evident from the poem, belongs to a non-indigenous community in the city. Yet, despite the political manoeuvrings that would have these divisions be as they are, the poet feels that the love he shares with Sundori exceeds group affiliations. But he is not sure of this fact. There is a hint of pleading when he says, “Please leave your window open” (Nongkynrih 12; emphasis added). Othering breeds suspicion, even within the communities that share the same cultural values and heritages, as Ao writes in the short story “The Curfew Man” in These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone (2006):
While all normal activities came to a halt after the curfew hour, for some individuals the real work began only after dark. These were the informers…paid to gather information about those whose sons or relatives had joined the underground. They monitored the people who visited these houses; kept watch on where they went and also tried to find out what they told their neighbours and acquaintances. There was another group of people whose activities too, were constantly monitored. They were the sympathizers of the [Nagalim] movement, many of them government servants, doctors, teachers and even ordinary housewives. (Ao 34-35)
To circumvent state surveillance, the people living under its shadow live through their wits and wiles. Khatila, of the story “The Jungle Major,” for instance, counts upon her husband’s physical unattractiveness for him to escape the clutches of the Indian Army and the informers. She hurls abuses at him pretending as though he were her servant:
“You no good loafer, what were you doing all day yesterday? There is no water in the house even to wash my face. Run to the well immediately or you will rue the day you were born.” …[S]he gave a shove to Punaba with some more choice abuses and he hurried out of the house and on to the path leading to the third well. Soon he and his small party vanished into the jungle and out of the cordon set up by the soldiers. (Ao 6-7)
In what can be called a moment of signifying,[5] Khatila rightly assumes that the way she treated her husband, Punaba, would disorient the soldiers of the Indian Army, making them believe that he was not the Nagalim Major they were after.
Into this context of mutual suspicion of Writing in English from Northeast India, a new group of writers entered the scene. They brought a diasporic sensibility to the literature in a way that was hitherto unexplored. Anjum Hasan, Jahnavi Barua and later, Janice Pariat,[6] spearheaded an understanding of Writing in English from Northeast India from a diasporic perspective.
Hasan’s Lunatic in My Head (2007) is set in Shillong. It evokes, as a blurb on the book reveals, a “provincial milieu.” With its rain drenched streets, pine trees and rock music enthusiasts, the novel certainly captures the atmosphere in Shillong during the 1990s. The novel, however, exceeds its provincial setting through the introduction of characters whose inner lives are thrown into turmoil by their being outsiders or “dkhars” to the dominant Khasi population in the region. Sophie Das’ parents, for instance, trace their origins to North India and West Bengal. Sophie’s mixed cultural heritage results in a dilemma:
Sophie was odd because she was a Das, yet could only speak a few sentences in Bengali and could not, therefore, be friends with other Dases (and Chatterjees and Ghoshes) in the class. “I’m not Bengali,” her mother would say as an explanation for this aberration. “I’m from the north. Your father is Bengali.” She never explained what this made Sophie. (Hasan 23)
In a context where ethnic lines are so carefully drawn, a multi-racial identity such as Sophie’s poses a problem where belonging-ness is concerned. It does not help that the term “dkhar,” used by the dominant Khasi community as a blanket term for all Indian non-tribal communities, erases the cultural specificities and heritages that these communities have and belong to. As Paramjit Bakhshi writes in the essay “I, Dkhar” (2018):
Ours is a story, rarely told: a tale so politically incorrect, it has no takers…we are invisible and unheard of—different “strangers in the mist”—minorities but not of popular description, or ones who have suffered discrimination down the ages. (135)
The absence of a history to make sense of their discrimination and the political occlusion of their marginalisation, result in a self that is defined only by the category of being “outsiders” (Bhakhshi 136). Hasan’s novel delves into the psychological effects of such exclusions. Sophie’s narrative, which reappears in Neti, Neti: Not This, Not This (2009), arrives at a belated—if unsatisfactory—resolution. Sophie, now grown up and living in Bangalore, realises “She was alone from now on. She was her own context” (Hasan 236). The question remains as to what this “context” is that Hasan speaks of. In an interview with The Punch Magazine, Hasan clarifies her position in relation to Shillong:
[B]y the time I myself embarked on Lunatic, I wasn’t really thinking of the Brontës. I had moved to Bangalore by then and Shillong itself seemed like a mythical place to me, it didn’t need another literary source to illumine it. And it’s usual for the comparison to run in one direction—Shillong is like the Yorkshire Moors or Scotland or whatever. But the Yorkshire Moors could also be like Shillong. (Hasan and Roy unpaginated; emphasis added)
Shillong had become, for Hasan, a place she could enter through the literary. It had become a home that, by virtue of its inherent fictional qualities and literariness, could contain other homes, elsewhere.[7] Home as an entity which exists within the literary would complicate a theme that has been prominent in Writing in English from Northeast India since its inception—of land and the writers’ belonging to it.
The 2010s to the early 2020s: The “Return” to Land, Orality and the “Northeast”
Tracing the idea of the picturesque to the nineteenth century concept of the Concordia discors, Pramod K. Nayar dwells on the representation of land in the Northeast Indian imaginary:
The picturesque in NE poetry presents a curious tension. On the one hand it maps the land as a site of harmony and picturesque beauty. On the other it also represents a land in tragic transformation where fissures, disunity and chaos reign. (Nayar, “The Postcolonial Picturesque: The Poetry of Northeast India” 11)
He calls the “fissures, disunity and chaos” in relation to landscape the “savage/d picturesque,” a postcolonial development in the way land is imagined (Nayar “The Postcolonial Picturesque: The Poetry of Northeast India” 12). In Nabanita Kanungo’s poetry, the “savage/d picturesque” draws from the Sylheti immigrant experience. The poem “The Unreal City,” in A Map of Ruins (2014), represents the harmony of the picturesque as a lie that obfuscates the experiences of the immigrant in Shillong. Kanungo writes:
The unreal city merely continues,
living an awkward romance with trivia and mist,
a profound seclusion amidst multitudes of faces,
the politics of weather,
the tea and the fleeting headline;
gesticulating with its proportions hurled beyond,
a plot deepening with red possibilities.
And somewhere, huddled around that narrative,
you will find a café, a few poems,
besotted with claims;
broken characters
of ambivalent lines.
Often, on tired evenings,
it refuses to leave my eyes;
the grey colour of its segregated walls
that crept stealthily
into the insufficient metaphors of my time,
forgotten words like old, week-long rains and pines;
the banality of fear, its exclamations. (Kanungo, “The Unreal City” 17-18)
The harmonious picturesque which is preserved as an emblem of the city—its “week-long rains and pines”—are contrary to what Kanungo experiences as a third generation Sylheti immigrant. Her poetry is, at best, filled with “broken characters/of ambivalent lines” and “insufficient metaphors”—a deficiency in language to capture the historical legacies of the Partition. The vestiges of Partition are kept in place by a landscape that is marked with “segregated walls” and “red possibilities” that question her citizenship (Kanungo 18; 42-43). Kanungo’s postmemory[8] is framed by the threat of violence that could erupt at any moment to disturb the apparent peace that prevails in Shillong, a legacy that she proclaims in 159 (2018) as “history’s slip of birth” (Kanungo 7). In the poem, “Surma,” Kanungo expresses longing for the home her ancestors had left behind:
You shall be all the poems I chance upon
my mildewed file of poetry,
every ache I cultivate
in the plagued plains of our past,
our battles and pacts with the sky.
I have grown so bitter remembering you
they say I was born old.
But I know I was born dead,
perhaps blind or
you have walked so far away
I cannot trace you in the forlorn map.
…
I see my fugitive ancestors
falling on their knees on an imagined shore.
A part of me, that’s still your daughter
makes an impossible wish:
Surma, flow backwards one day
and undo all of this. (Kanungo, “Surma” 38-39)
Kanungo’s poem captures Nayar’s “savage/d picturesque” in its entirety: the landscape is anthropomorphised and imbued with feeling (often chaotic and traumatic) that emerges from the literature of a subject whose past has been overshadowed by colonialism (Nayar 11-19). But Kanungo’s poetry also reflects a subjectivity that is “caught in an in-between of real and imagined identity… more pronounced in second and third generation Sylhetis who were born in independent India” (Bhattacharjee 248). In her plea to the Surma to “undo all of this,” Kanungo entertains the possibility of an imagined self that is whole and not bound by the historical and collective trauma that dictates her reality. Any real sense of home, Kanungo reasons, is to be found in language: “For meaning is all there is” she writes in “What I’ll Take With Me When I Leave Shillong” (Kanungo 70).[9] Where Writing in English from Northeast India is concerned, this language is also influenced by orality and oral traditions.
The oral traditions practised by the indigenous communities within the region are closely connected to land as an indispensable part of self-identity. Mamang Dai’s River Poems (2004, 2013), for instance, draw upon folk practices of indigenous communities in Arunachal Pradesh to position the self within a network of social and cultural relationships. In the poem “Song of the Dancers,” Dai draws upon the Ponung dance of the Adis to reflect on the significance of cultural identity rooted in land:
The cloud is in love with the mountain.
The blue crest wrapped in stillness
bears this addiction of air and water,
the mark of rain on the steep jungle
the mysteries of the path of her valleys,
and the silence space of her memories.
…
We danced so long
we broke all our bracelets
to please a fancy.
In the dark I heard all your stories,
listened to your songs;
In empty space dreaming desire
vivid in the sun’s embrace
once, our eyes beheld lakes of fire. (Dai, “Song of the Dancers” 19)
In an interview with Thanal Online (2008), Dai explains the indigenous worldview that informs her writing:
The traditional belief of the Adi community to which I belong is full of this union. Everything has life—rocks, stones, trees, rivers, hills, and all life is sacred. This is called Donyi- Polo, literally meaning Donyi- Sun, and Polo- moon as the physical manifestation of a supreme deity, or what I like to interpret as “world spirit.” (Dai unpaginated)
In a landscape that is subject to various developmental projects by state and private entities alike, indigenous worldviews such as those expressed by Dai, can be a bulwark against deforestation and resource extraction. By treating all forms of life as sacred, indigenous philosophies and worldviews have been known to resist anthropocentric conceptions of environmental solutions and sustainability (McGregor et. al. 35-40). Indigenous worldviews, however, represent precarious[10] knowledge systems that are imperilled due to the historical effects of colonialism and, more recently, neo-liberal developments (Karlsson 4-7). There is also a caveat—most of the ethno-nationalist groups in the region that rely on indigeneity as an authentic parameter for belonging do so at the expense of women and other minority communities in the region. As Nandana Dutta points out, “The separatist discourse is also a nationalist discourse” (Dutta, “Nationalism and Otherness: Reading Nation in the Literature Classroom” 76). For this reason, ethno-nationalist movements within the region are often called out by the writers for being parochial and for betraying the very people they claim to serve.[11] In Jahnavi Barua’s Undertow (2020), the separatist discourse embedded in land, would have tragic consequences.
Undertow begins with an infraction. Rukmini Goswami, one of the characters in the novel, has decided to marry a person who is not from her caste. In fact, Alex, her fiancé, is not even Assamese. He is
[T]he wrong man…A man who was not of her religion, let alone her caste, nor of her race, not from any region remotely near hers, and a man whose skin was dark, to make matters worse. (Barua 5)
On the day of her wedding, Rukmini’s choice of a partner, is framed against the student agitations in Assam in the 1980s. Central to this narrative is the Brahmaputra, a river that, Barua reveals in succeeding chapters, carries the history of the Assamese people (147-149). When Loya, Rukmini’s daughter, “returns” to Assam, it is this heritage—that has spurred nationalist sentiment in the region—that Loya confronts. Barua is careful to portray the Brahmaputra as a living entity that embodies all of the sentiments (nationalist and otherwise) that the people living close to it have. Rukmini, on the way to her wedding, muses,
Once she was at the river, she was safe. Here she often dawdled. The water was so close she could smell it. On hot summer afternoons, the heat rose off in its swells, and in the winter, a cloying clamminess touched her skin, teasing out goosebumps. And always, the sense of being part of a larger heart beating that ran invisible leads into her own timid one, charging her with energy. (Barua 15)
The Brahmaputra, therefore, reminds the people belonging to it, of their connectedness to the past and their duties toward it. When, twenty-six years later, Loya makes it to her grandfather’s house on a hill beside the river, she feels the river’s presence watching her: “She sensed, in a distracted way, the river behind her…” (Barua 38). This same river, however, also exacts a price. When Loya is caught in a bomb blast in a market close to her grandfather’s house, she is pushed into the waters of the Brahmaputra by a crowd of people where she drowns.
Barua’s narrative unravels the double-edged sword of history. While history, like the Brahmaputra’s, can sustain and support life in the form of a steady identity, it can also—like the river—swallow the lives of those who do not conform to, or follow, its diktats. And it is, perhaps, such contradictions and antagonisms within the same narrative that makes Writing in English from Northeast India a body of writing that escapes any one categorisation.
Conclusion
Writing in English from Northeast India reveals a complexity that resists any single perspective. The Literature, as has been demonstrated in this essay, is as diverse as the people who write and the heritages they draw from. In the interest of critical insight, it may be concluded that it is a literature of the margins in the same way as bell hooks, in her reflection on marginality, writes that “To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body…We could enter that world but we could not live there” (hooks ix). This makes the body of literature, analysed here, not only a literature of the “Northeast” but Indian literature as well (See Chandran unpaginated). Apart from the writers whose works are mentioned in this essay, other writers in English from the Northeast include Mona Zote, Lalnunsanga Ralte, Parismita Singh, Avinuo Kire, Prajwal Parajuly, Tashi Chopel, and Nini Lungalang.
Works Cited
Ao, Temsüla. Book of Songs: Collected Poems 1988-2007. Heritage Publishing House, 2013.
—. These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone. Zubaan/Penguin Books, 2006.
Archer, William H. Review of Stories of a Salesman by Murli Das Melwani, Books Abroad, vol. 42, no, 3, 1968, p. 488. PDF download.
Bakhshi, Paramjit. “I, Dkhar.” Insider Outsider: Belonging and Unbelonging in North-East India, edited by Preeti Gill and Samrat, Amaryllis, 2018, pp. 135-148.
Bargohain, Rajashree. Echoes from the Hills: Poetry in English from Northeast India. 2017. Indian Institute of Technology, PhD dissertation.
Barua, Jahnavi. “Home.” Insider Outsider: Belonging and Unbelonging in North-East India, edited by Preeti Gill and Samrat, Amaryllis, 2018, pp. 81-101.
—. Next Door. Penguin Books, 2008.
—. Undertow. Penguin Random House, 2020.
Bhattacharjee, Jyotsna. Shadows in Sunshine. Alpha-Beta Publications, 1965.
Bhattacharjee, Sukalpa. “Narrative Constructions of Identity and the Sylheti Experience.” The Oxford Anthology of Writings from North-East India: Poetry and Essays, edited by Tilottama Mishra. Oxford UP, 2011, pp. 245-258.
Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2001.
Chandran, K. Narayana. “English in India: An Overview.” Indian Writing In English Online, 05 Apr 2022, www.indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/english-in-india/.
Dai, Mamang. The Legends of Pensam. Penguin, 2006.
—. River Poems. 2nd ed., Writers’ Workshop, 2013.
Dai, Mamang and Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal. “Fusion of Journalism and Poetry.” Thanal Online, vol. 2, no. 4, May 2008. http://www.thanalonline.com/Issues/08/Interview2_en.htm
Dutta, Amaresh. Captive Moments. Writers’ Workshop, 1971.
Dutta, Nandana. “Nationalism and Otherness: Reading Nation in the Literature Classroom.” The Global South, vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 2008, pp. 71-90. PDF download.
__. “Northeast India: A New Literary Region for IWE”, Oxford UP, 18 September 2018. https://blog.oup.com/2018/09/northeast-india-new-literary-region/
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Oxford UP, 1988.
Guha, Ananya S. The Shillong Poets and the Poetry Society. 19 June 2023. E-Pao. http://e-pao.net/epSubPageExtractor.asp?src=reviews.books.The_Shillong_Poets_And_The_Poetry_Society
__. “Violence to What End?: Literary Expressions in the North East.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 49, no. 7, 2014, pp. 1-5. PDF download.
Hasan, Anjum. Lunatic in My Head. Zubaan/Penguin Books, 2007.
—. Neti, Neti: Not This, Not This. India Ink, 2016.
Hasan, Anjum and Sumana Roy. “The Lyrical Expression of the Ordinary Attracts Me: Anjum Hasan.” The Punch Magazine. 1 October 2015. https://thepunchmagazine.com/the-byword/interviews/the-lyrical-expression-of-the-ordinary-attracts-me-anjum-hasan.
Hazarika, Dhruba. “Creative Writing in Northeast India and the Northeast Writers’ Forum.” GUINEIS Journal, vol. VII & VIII, 2020-2021, pp. 292-299.
—. “A Plain Tale from the Hills.” The Sentinel. 1990.
Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. Columbia UP, 2012.
Holy Bible: New International Version. Broadman and Holman Publishers, 1997.
hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. South End Press, 1984.
Kanungo, Nabanita. A Map of Ruins. Sahitya Akademi, 2014.
—. 159. Poetrywala, 2018.
Karlsson, Bengt G. Unruly Hills: A Political Ecology of India’s North East. Berghahn Books, 2011.
Kashyap, Adrika. Temsula Ao: Celebrating a Legacy of Literature and Advocacy. 8 March 2023. Feminism in India. https://feminisminindia.com/2023/03/08/temsula-ao-celebrating-a-legacy-of-literature-and-advocacy/
Kharmawphlang, Desmond L. Touchstone. J. Kharmawphlang, 1987.
Kire, Easterine. “For Justin-Pierre.” 1989 Calendar of Shillong Poets and Artists. 16 April 2016. Raiot: Challenging the Consensus. https://raiot.in/1989-calendar-of-shillong-poets-artists/
__. “The Mist.” 1989 Calendar of Shillong Poets and Artists. 16 April 2016. Raiot: Challenging the Consensus. https://raiot.in/1989-calendar-of-shillong-poets-artists/
McGregor, Deborah et. al. “Indigenous Environmental Justice and Sustainability.” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, vol. 43, 2020, pp. 35-40. PDF download.
Melwani, Murli Das. Stories of a Salesman. Writers’ Workshop, 1967.
Nayar, Pramod K. Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture. Routledge, 2019.
—. “The Postcolonial Picturesque: The Poetry of Northeast India.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 5-21.
Ngangom, Robin S. Alternative Poetry of the Northeast. 13 November 2018. Sahapedia, https://www.sahapedia.org/alternative-poetry-of-the-northeast.
—. The Desire of Roots. 2nd ed., Red River, 2019.
—. Words and the Silence. Writers’ Workshop, 1987.
Nic Craith, Máiréad. Narratives of Place, Belonging and Language: An Intercultural Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Nongkynrih, Kynpham Sing. The Yearning of Seeds. Harper Collins, 2011.
Nongkynrih, Kynpham S. and Robin S. Ngangom. “Introduction.” Dancing Earth: An Anthology of Poetry from Northeast India, edited by Kynpham S. Nongkynrih and Robin S. Ngangom, Penguin Books, 2009, pp. ix-xv.
North East Writers’ Forum (NEWF). About. January 2023. North East Writers’ Forum, https://www.newf.co.in/about-newf/.
Pariat, Janice. Boats on Land. Random House, 2012.
—. Everything the Light Touches. Harper Collins, 2022.
—. Seahorse: A Novel. Penguin Random House, 2018.
—. The Nine-Chambered Heart. Harper Collins, 2018.
Phukan, Mitra. The Collector’s Wife. Zubaan/Penguin Books, 2005.
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticisms 1981-1991. Granta Books, 1991.
Syiem, Esther. Oral Scriptings. Writers’ Workshop, 2005.
Tzüdir, Lanusanga. “Appropriating the Ao Past in a Christian Present.” Landscape, Culture, and Belonging edited by Neeladri Bhattacharya and Joy L. K. Pachuau, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 265-293.
1989 Calendar of Shillong Poets and Artists. 16 April 2016. Raiot: Challenging the Consensus. https://raiot.in/1989-calendar-of-shillong-poets-artists/
[1] The Shillong Poetry Circle was disbanded in 1990 (Guha unpaginated).
[2] M. C. Gabriel was a poet associated with the publication cell of the North Eastern Hill University. His whereabouts are unknown (raiot.in).
[3] Due to the difficulty in accessing the archives, this portion of the essay, particularly the writings of women in The Assam Tribune and The Sentinel, will be developed as a separate essay.
[4] Compiled in Book of Songs: Collected Poems, published in 2013.
[5] A term originating from the African American community, signifying refers to the ability of language to mask literal meaning in favour of the fictional and metaphorical in order to upend power relations (See Gates 55-56). In using abusive language against her husband, Khatila signifies on the nationalist, gendered and class divisions present in Naga societies and creates this fictional moment. Thus, she secures a safe passage for her husband into the forest.
[6] Except for Boats on Land (2012), Janice Pariat’s remaining books—Seahorse: A Novel (2014, 2018), The Nine-Chambered Heart (2017) and Everything the Light Touches (2022) —have diasporic themes and convey diasporic sensibilities (See Pariat 67; 179; 3-7).
[7] In the essay “Home” (2018), Jahnavi Barua writes that her initial displacement from her home in Shillong enabled her to create many homes elsewhere such as Delhi, Guwahati, Manchester and Calcutta (Barua 100-101). Here, Anjum Hasan also expresses the same sentiment.
[8] A term coined by Marianne Hirsch in The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012), “postmemory” refers to presence and creation of memories relating to historical trauma in the works of second and third generation writers and artists (Hirsch 5).
[9] Here, Kanungo expresses Salman Rushdie’s view that home, for the exiled writer, can only be subjectively imagined through language (Rushdie 10).
[10] I understand precarity as the preponderance of neo-liberal technological interventions that render indigenous belonging redundant (See Nayar 137-149).
[11] Writers who have expressed disillusionment with subnationalist movements include Robin Sing Ngangom, Temsüla Ao and Monalisa Changkija, among others.