Identity in Northeast Indian Literature: rereading selected writings from Meghalaya

Ethnoreligious and ethnocultural affinities are socially cohesive forces in Punjab and in Northeast India that shapethe internal dynamics of the region. The orthodox approach in practicing these factors destabilizes the regional fulcrum of peace in the mindset of nationalists, but contrary to it, practicing these values are pride and glory in the mindset of regionalists. The nexus of politics, religion, culture, and the stream of regionalism in transnational northeast India and in Punjab paints an agitating picture of tribes riven by atrocity and menace. Both regions, despite their distinct sociopolitical histories and cultural contexts, have utilized English literature as a medium to articulate their identities, confront marginalization, and navigate the complexities of tradition and modernity. The regional extremism on display is at odds with the dignified piety commonly linked with religion and culture. Opportunists stoke the flames and label the regional tribal community as extremist and regionalists, conflicting with the national interest of mainland India. Treating northeasterners as alien, savage, and uncivilized within India has become a default response in the state, which was not new to them, as missionaries also believed that the arrival of Christianity was the arrival of light to this dark world.Multidimensional identity remains a major question in India. In Indian English literature, R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, Arundhati Roy, Temsula Ao, Kiran Desai, Anita Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Vikram Seth, and Khushwant Singh are some of the most remarkable names who contributed their work directly or indirectly to identity as a serious phenomenon in diverse India. It is widely believed that the ‘Indian Freedom Struggle’ and ‘Imperialism’ generated sentiments of nationalism that brought together diverse religions, languages, and lifestyles to demand a home from colonizers. However, during the decolonization process, Punjab divided, and Sikhs suffered more than the rest of India. This paper will highlight how the concept of identity transits throughout Indian English literature after decolonization in Punjab and Northeast India via indigenous and diasporic writers. This study further aligns ethnoreligious and ethnocultural identities in Punjab and Northeast India and their transnational impacts on regional identity in regional literature. We will explore these concepts to examine how regional English literature has served as a platform for articulating and redefining regional identities, particularly within the contexts of Northeast India and Punjab, with a focus on the literary contributions of Easterine Kire and Khushwant Singh. The article will provide an in-depth examination of literary works, unearthed thematic undercurrents, illuminate the nuanced struggles and lived experiences that define the identities of these regions.

Infamous throughout both Indian and western literature as a land of black magic, violent ritual, and tribal superstition, the region of Assam in northeast India has long been imagined to be the heartland of the secret and licentious practice of Tantra. Yet, despite their infamous reputation, the Tantric traditions of Assam have seldom been explored in any serious way by modern scholarship but have instead typically been dismissed as a thin veneer of Brahminical Hinduism over a substratum of indigenous tribal religion. This article suggests a fresh approach to the study of Assamese Tantra by looking at the deep relations among Tantric ritual, political power, and kingship in ancient Assam. Using insights from Michel Fou-cault and Georges Bataille, this article argues that much of Assamese Tantra centers around the unleashing and harnessing of power {śakti) in all its forms—social, political, and spiritual alike. Above all, Tantric ritual involves a systematic transgression of the normal laws of purity in order to release the dangerous power that lies bound up with impurity and violence. As such, Tantra was naturally very attractive to many of Assam's kings, enmeshed as they were within the dangerous, often impure world of statecraft, military struggle, and the inevitable violence of political power. You are the Primordial Supreme sakti, you are all power.It is by your power that we are powerful.

This chapter looks at the English language as part of global protest vocabulary where it is used to speak back to the Indian state. In a 2004 landmark protest against years of army presence in the state of Manipur in Northeast India, twelve women stood naked in front of the army base to protest the rape and murder of a young woman named Manorama by members of the armed forces. Raising the English-language slogan of “Indian Army Rape Us / We Are All Manorama's Mothers,” they used the language of the democratic state to challenge its authority. Northeast India as a geopolitical category and Northeast Indian literature as a body of work both become legible in the postcolonial state's use of English. The chapter argues that the women's political and phonological—figurative and literal—voice offers a decolonial lineage of a mother tongue in English. With a discussion of contemporary literature by northeastern writers like Temsula Ao and Yumlembam Ibomcha, it also reveals the emergence of the English language as specifically aural—an instance of speaking English, of Anglophony—as it represents the nonvocal and vocal soundscapes of military violence and human suffering.

The literature of India’s North-east and her poetry in particular, is characterized by a strong ‘spirit of place’ and the vast ecological variety in the region strewn with rivers, hills, gorges and ravines, with a mesmeric charm of the flora and fauna, has ever actuated creative imagination in the poets and writers of the land. A confluence of various tribes and communities with their respective belief-systems, rituals and folklores, North-east has ever retained her exotic charm not only for mainland India but also for the rest of the world. After Independence, the region also had to undergo some territorial re-alignment of some states due to socio-political necessities and as a result of the emerging realities of urbanization, deforestation, industrialization and mechanization for the cause of development and also of the flip side of these changes in the forms of partition-violence and cross-border terrorism (with its bases operating mainly in neighboring countries); a genuine concern for the ecological well being of the land has developed over the years into a major vein of poetry in the North-east. To put it in simple terms, the persona which had so long been used to singing the naivety of existence amidst the plenitude of nature in a state of perfect bliss with the surroundings, now feels as it were perturbed by a gnawing awareness of something ominous lurking in ambush round the corner. The present article attempts for a synoptic overview of some representative works of the indigenous poets of two major states so as to trace how an acute eco-conscience marks the poetic sensibility in North-east where nature, as per the systems of faith and understanding enshrined by folk and literate traditions, is a vital force equipped with human emotions and having the potency to help poetic imagination.

In the aftermath of Partition, north-east India emerged as a landlocked and increasingly disenfranchised area where the springing-up of ethno-nationalist movements and guerrillas has elicited a process of growing militarization by the Indian state. Although keenly aware that it is actually problematic to club a very heterogeneous corpus of literary writings together under the label ‘north-east’, this article critically employs this label as a functional working definition to discuss and compare different authors from ‘the region’ and analyse the way their novels are contributing to delineate a tentative mapping of the complex reality of indigenous India.

Soso Tham (1873–1940), the acknowledged poet laureate of the Khasis of northeastern India, was one of the first writers to give written poetic form to the rich oral tradition of his people. Poet of landscape, myth and memory, Soso Tham paid rich and poignant tribute to his tribe in his masterpiece The Old Days of the Khasis. Janet Hujon’s vibrant new translation presents the English reader with Tham’s long poem, which keeps a rich cultural tradition of the Khasi people alive through its retelling of old narratives and acts as a cultural signpost for their literary identity. This book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in Indian literature and culture and in the interplay between oral traditions and written literary forms. This edition includes: • Original text • English translation • Critical apparatus • Embedded audio recordings of the original text

The representation of women in Northeast Indian literature reflects the complex interplay between biological determinism and cultural constructs. While biological factors often dictate gendered experiences, cultural frameworks shape the identity, agency, and social roles of women in the region. This paper examines how women are portrayed in selected Northeast Indian literary works, focusing on their negotiations between tradition and modernity, patriarchy and autonomy, and nature and nurture. By analyzing texts from prominent writers such as Indira Goswami, Mamang Dai, and Temsüla Ao, this study highlights the tensions between biological essentialism and cultural influence in defining women's experiences. Through a close reading of primary sources, the paper reveals how literature becomes a space for contesting, redefining, and asserting female identity in Northeast India.

This presentation focuses on the emergence of contemporary North East India’s tribal anglophone fiction that portrays the co-constitutive associations, links and relations between the Angami indigenous tribe in Nagaland and their surrounding environment. It engages with Naga tribal writer Easterine Kire’s novels, Son of the Thundercloud (2016) and When the River Sleeps (2014) in order to argue how Indian tribal writing conceptualizes the ‘Indic-indigenous’ environmental imagination in the twenty-first century. The presentation shows how Kire’s writing evokes the philosophy of kincentric ecology where the boundaries between the tribals and their environment overlap to form a coalescent continuum of mutual existence. It analyzes and studies the Angami tribals’ perception of the environment as an ‘existential imperative’ or a ‘kin’, an internal psychosomatic presence that never ceases to be a part of their consciousness. The presentation elucidates the importance of Indian anglophone writings, in the context of tribal ecologies, that cultivate awareness about indigenous ecological perspectives and showcases the emerging corpus of Kire’s works as a vital portion in the study of Indian environmental literature in the Anthropocene. This presentation argues that kincentric ecologies provide an affective model of theory and praxis that engages with ideas of natural contract and paves a “new approach to ecological discourse” (Ferri 2019, 68). The new approach focuses on inter-relations and encourages the replacement of homocentric ideas of land ownership and possession with values like stewardship and respect for the non-human world.

Tribal women of North East India have long endured the compounded burdens of colonial intrusion, postcolonial state violence, and patriarchal traditions. Yet their voices and lived experiences often remain marginalised in both historical narratives and literary discourse. Temsüla Ao’s These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone (2006) intervenes in this silence by foregrounding the stories of Naga women caught between insurgency and militarisation. This paper argues that Ao portrays Naga women as doubly colonised—subjugated by both patriarchal customs and militarised repression—while simultaneously reclaiming their agency through resilience, memory, and acts of defiance. Drawing upon postcolonial feminism and trauma studies, the paper analyses selected stories to show how Ao resists the reduction of women to silent victims and instead recasts them as witnesses, survivors, and cultural agents. Through close readings of narratives such as “The Last Song,” “The Jungle Major,” “The Night,” and “The Curfew Man,” the paper demonstrates how Ao’s fiction unsettles stereotypes and contributes to a feminist re-imagining of North East Indian literature.

Indigenous Eco-Legends in Contemporary North East Indian Literature: Lessons in Ecological Conservation and Preservation

North East Indian Literature is marked by a unique presence of nature and environment. The beauty of the landscape enriched with different species of flora and fauna, mighty rivers, high mountain ranges add on a vibrant culture and tradition existing among the tribal of North East. It shows rich ethnic diversity of the region. The relationship between man and nature in Indian English writing, more specifically from North East, has been depicted by a handful of writers of the region. Mamang Dai’s The Legends of Pensam is written in lyrical prose and evokes the memories of an entire community of people. It represents the predicaments of the sensitive young minds of the contemporary Arunachal Pradesh. They find difficulty to come in terms with the inevitable break with the enchantment of the past and to re-model their lives according to the demands of the changing times. Through this paper the researcher will make an attempt to study how the people who practiced animistic faith in community-oriented setups suddenly came face-to-face with the realities of Western modernity, the Christian religion and individualism as a way of existence.

This Research paper aims to investigate the violence against women and the repercussions of political upheaval as reflected in Mitra Phukan’s The Collector's Wife and Arupa Patangia Kalita’s novel Felanee in the northeastern Indian literature. Women have long endured social injustices based on patriarchy and experience a range of socially imposed discrimination. Society regards women as mere by-products of sentimental domesticity, whereas males dominate and sphere head all the public domain as the rightful inheritors. Women are the worst affected by these geopolitical manoeuvres and are more physiologically affected. Not only do these acts of discrimination jeopardise public safety and tranquility, but they also have a profound impact on the lives of women. The literature of North-East India has several instances of this exploitation. This paper also highlights the radical feminist theory, Mitra Phukan and AP Kalita clearly explained the patriarchal system, which is based on gender roles and is characterized by prioritizing men's domination and interests over women's and reinforced by sexuality and motherhood while valuing female sexuality and fertility in Assam culture.

Hailed as an “Iche” (elder sister), Irom Sharmila is the subject of many genres—poetry, songs, documentary films, and artwork. This chapter looks at the activist-poet’s collection Fragrance of Peace (2010) to examine the paradoxical way her body is seen as a site of resistance, her naming and identification through the kin term “sister,” and her status within Manipuri literature. It is significant that Irom is a rarely anthologized poet. Her work cannot be found in any anthologies on the literature of Northeast India, while, ironically, writings about her activism abound. Though her oeuvre is much more than protest poetry, this collection of poems foregrounds the political role of her poetry. The chapter juxtaposes Irom’s own self-representation through her poetry with works written about her. Through this exercise, the intention is to explore the place of women in the construction of a collective resistance and its conscious self-representation in literature.

Breastfeeding, both in its literal consequences on a woman’s body and its symbolic associations with attachment, highlights the simultaneously powerful yet servile position of the maternal figure. I trace this ambivalence in Mahasweta Devi’s story “Breast-Giver,” exploring women’s literal and metaphorical hungers, as well as the hunger their children experience, arguing that breastfeeding often serves as a means of showcasing a woman’s physical limitation based on her familial status as “feeder.” However, I also argue for a profoundly embodied version of the breastfeeding trope, one that negates prior conceptions of breastfeeding as a “taking” and establishes it as a “giving” that not only nourishes one’s family, but also one’s self, as mothers circumvent hierarchical systems of cooking and food preparation. Ultimately, I both lay bare the interconnection between a woman’s body and food-based labor systems and reveal literary methods for their extrication, through narrative instances of breastfeeding.

Identity in Northeast Indian Literature