Contemporary Indian Poetry

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. 2^nd 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.