Nature Narratives in Northeast Indian Literature: Eco-Discourse and Cultural Perspectives

The region of northeast India supports many important primate species that live in this biodiversity hotspot.  The ongoing destruction of primate habitats along with animal hunting and rising human activities puts most primate numbers at high risk.  Ethnoprimatology reveals both cultural perceptions about protecting primates through research that analyzes how people and primates interact.  This research reviews all available studies on Ethnoprimatology in Northeast India to show how local beliefs and practices help save primates. This research examines how social customs impact monkey protection, especially through local communities' spiritual practices that include primate rituals.  Sacred groves and community-protected areas help protect habitats, while specific taboos stop people from hunting primates.  The evaluation examines harmful traditional practices that harm primates and recommends culturally appropriate ways to reduce these threats. Our study explains why it is hard to use indigenous knowledge today in conservation programs because of legal problems and changes in society, plus missing information about past practices.  Research shows that new conservation rules should let local people take part in conservation projects and must protect native rights.  It supports eco-tourism and community-led efforts as well as educational programming, which create lasting possibilities to save primates. This evaluation shows the path to creating ecological protection methods that match local values through the connection of old nature wisdom and scientific research.  Understanding human and primate relations in Northeast India lets us create conservation efforts that work well for the environment and residents.  

Microfinance through Self-Help Groups (SHGs) serves as a vital mechanism for delivering banking services, empowering women, and enhancing rural livelihoods across India. Meghalaya’s unique matrilineal system, in which women play a central role in the family and inherit property, makes it a distinctive context for studying these issues. This study examines how digital finance and matrilineal socio-cultural factors together influence microfinance through SHGs in the East Khasi Hills district, using only secondary information. The study method is a qualitative descriptive approach, where the study is based on secondary data analysed using government reports, MSRLM records, policy documents and peer-reviewed literature. To evaluate the growth patterns and the performance of the institutions, a five-year trend analysis (2019 20-2023 24) of SHG promotion and digital financial outreach is carried out. The paper also has policy implications because it reminds policymakers of how digital finance strategies can be reconciled with matrilineal socio-cultural organisations to enhance women-centred financial inclusion in North-East India. It draws on data from government reports, policies, research papers, and institutional documents related to digital finance, SHG performance, and women-focused microfinance in the region. In recent years, increasing digitalisation of financial services and the continued influence of socio-cultural structures have significantly shaped microfinance outcomes. The study focuses on outcomes such as access to credit, savings behaviour, participation in financial activities, and improvements in livelihoods. The findings indicate that digital financial services have helped SHGs expand their outreach and operate more efficiently and transparently, while matrilineal customs have encouraged women’s participation, leadership, and control over financial resources. However, challenges such as inadequate digital infrastructure, low levels of financial and digital literacy, and regional disparities still constrain the full realisation of the benefits of microfinance. Overall, by combining digital and cultural perspectives, the study enhances understanding of microfinance in North-East India and offers useful insights for policies aimed at strengthening SHG-based financial inclusion in matrilineal societies.

Purpose of the Study: The aim of this paper is to explore the portrayal of socio-cultural issues in Akhil Sharma’s novel, An Obedient Father and the issues of cultural identity tormenting situations and incidents in a family and in their relationship with one another.
 Methodology: The research paper proposes to make use of the writings of Akhil Sharma’s novel, An Obedient Father through ground study with references drawn from a cultural perspective. The secondary data included related articles and web sources related to diaspora and cultural studies. The secondary data obtained help the researcher arrive at important inference and conclusion. The present paper analyses the cultural issues and problems faced by the characters and concentrates on the specific techniques and styles used by the novelist.
 Main Findings: The finding of the study is that Sharma integrates conventional Indian ideologies born out of a colonial past with an unknown future, depicting the cultural trauma and the problems of survival It also brings out socio-cultural issues through the major characters particularly the protagonist Ram Karan reflects the contemporary modern man’s corrupted personality. It also focuses on how the modern man breaks away from the age-old Indian tradition and culture and how Indian politics failed to maintain the traditional socio-cultural values.
 Applications of the Study: When analyzing the cultural issues in An Obedient Father, the readers can understand that Sharma is a diaspora novelist and his characters face the problems of expatriation, immigration, dislocation, disorientation, and displacement. This study is very useful to the researchers in the field of Indian Literature, Diaspora Literature, and Cultural studies.
 Novelty/Originality of this study: This paper highlights a realistic picture of contemporary India is portrayed by recording the changing Indian social and political scene with carefully creating the fictional characters for creative purposes. Sharma draws an acid-etched picture of modern Indian society, in which the corrupt political system victimizes all citizens.

two hundred tribal languages were spoken, where the colonizers themselves came from at least three different nations, each with its own language, the demand for literacy in English has naturally proved problematic. (I use a very conservative figure; both D'Arcy McNickle and Alvin M Joseph Jr. estimate that there were actually five hundred to a thousand mutually intelligible languages in North America in preColumbian times.) purports to mean simple competence in and the ability to communicate through the reading and writing of language. In actuality, however, it is a much more complicated issue, one with a myriad of political, social, cultural, and even moral implications. As C. H. Knoblauch has noted, Literacy never stands alone ... as a neutral denoting of skills; it is always literacy for something (75). Through the decades the promotion of and resistance to the acquisition of literacy or the accoutrements of literacy by Native American people have actually been tied to issues that go far beyond the reading and speaking of the English language. Although generally not viewed in these terms, the history of the relationship between the United States government and Indian nations has frequently revolved around issues of literacy. The making of treaties, for example, involved an assertion of the dominance of the English language over tribal languages and the dominance of the written over the oral. Treaties resulted in misunderstandings and deliberate deceit in the translation and recording of meaning, and they privileged a signature any signature on a document over the recognized verbal authority of legitimate leaders. Like the treaties, the policy of allotment involved the apparent owning and selling of land with the testimony of a signature or its substitute accepted in the place of true comprehension and willing participation in transactions. In these cases, as in the oil-payment thefts and the fraudulent incompetency declarations in Oklahoma Indian history, any written evidence, whether actual, manufactured, or produced through force or threat of force, was privileged in the legal interpretations of events. Other government policies of assimilation included forced education at English-only boarding schools where the use of tribal languages was forbidden and punished. Tribal languages were also invalidated by the wholesale renaming undertaken by the colonists, the renaming in English of individuals, tribes, places, and geographic features. Tribal identities themselves had to be and still must be legitimatized and quantified through written government records of tribal enrollment and BIA identification cards. Finally, t ibal identities continue to be appropriated when the accounts of Indian people collected and written by outsiders are accorded more status than those spoken or written by Native peoples themselves; when pieces of Indian lives and even their very bodies become the artifacts of literate culture bartered for, captioned, and displayed; and when Indian history is told only from the perspective of colonial culture. Given that Indian history is informed by issues of literacy, it is natural to find the reflections of these li racy struggles in the writing of contemporary Native American authors. Whether pictured as helpless victims of a system of literacy designed to eliminate or immobilize them, pictured struggling to resist the assimilation implied in literacy and to preserve tribal cultures, pictured working for the competence in English necessary in the battle for political power, or pictured as masters of the English language who have turned the weapons of literacy back on the colonial system, many of the protagonists of Native American literature are engaged in confrontations with literacy and its attendant circumstances. From D'Arcy McNickle's Archilde and Frank Waters's Martiniano, both of whom become alienated from their own culture when forced to attend government boarding school; to N. Scott Momaday's Abel, who struggles with the voicelessness which symbolizes his general powerlessness; to Linda Hogan's Greycloud a d Blanket families, who have their income, their land, and their identity as competent individuals taken from them by various types of legally documented swindling; to Jack Forbes's Indian basketball players, whose very Indianness is invalidated by their fa lure to produce BIA enrollment cards the issues of literacy are presented both overtly and more subtly. What follows is an examination of selections from the work of Leslie Marmon Silko, Diane Glancy, N. Scott Momaday, Linda Hogan, and Gerald Vizenor that illuminate various angles from which the historical struggle with literacy can be viewed.

This research paper explores the intersection of tribal identity and women’s voices in contemporary fiction from Northeast India, focusing on the works of Temsula Ao and Mamang Dai. Employing an ethnographic approach, the study investigates how novelists use storytelling to document traditions, cultural rituals, social hierarchies, and the lived experiences of women in marginalized communities. Texts such as These Hills Called Home and The Legends of Pensam are analysed to illustrate the ways authors combine folklore, oral history, and intricate depictions of landscape and kinship. The findings reveal that these literary works not only preserve cultural memories but also foreground strategies of female agency and resilience amid patriarchal constraints and historical change. By situating literature as both an archive and an act of interpretation, the paper highlights the important role women writers play in expanding and challenging the representation of tribal life in Indian literature.

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 article studies the evolution of Northeast Indian tribal literature, tracing its journey from oral folk narrative to modern fiction. Folk literature is the collection of cultural, religious, and social values that give the unique identities of the region’s distinct tribes. Apart from the mainland of India, the Northeast is home to different communities with distinct customs, traditions, and practices. These oral traditions, also known as folklore, consist of myths, poems, songs, plays, proverbs, riddles, and stories that were historically passed down verbally in societies without written records. By upholding and passing along their collective knowledge and beliefs, every community or tribe has added to this storytelling tradition. Folktales were often composed and shared in native languages and have a powerful influence on the imagination of local communities, with many folk heroes being honored and glorified in various ways. The transition from oral to written literature was influenced by historical events such as colonial intervention and modern literary practices. This transformation allowed folk traditions to adapt and thrive in new forms, eliminating the gap between traditional storytelling and contemporary narratives. The combination of folklore with modern fiction has also provided a platform to address contemporary social issues while preserving the cultural vitality of these tales. By connecting with modern audiences, regional writers ensure the survival of these traditions in a rapidly changing world. This study discusses several aspects of Northeastern literature, such as the role of oral traditions, the adaptation of folklore in contemporary fiction, and the thematic continuity from oral to written narratives, in relation to the development of modern fiction in Northeast India.

This research paper explores the themes of identity and self-discovery in English short stories from Northeast India, with a particular focus on Jahnavi Barua's "Next Door." The study examines how authors from this region use their narratives to delve into the complex issues of personal and cultural identity in a rapidly changing society. Northeast India, with its diverse ethnic groups and unique cultural landscape, provides a rich backdrop for storytelling. The paper analyzes how writers like Barua capture the essence of this region and its people through their characters and plotlines. "Next Door" serves as a prime example, offering insights into the struggles and triumphs of individuals as they navigate their sense of self within their community and the wider world. The research highlights the importance of these stories in giving voice to the experiences of Northeast Indians, often under-represented in mainstream Indian literature. It also discusses how themes of identity and self-discovery resonate with readers beyond the region, touching on universal human experiences. By examining Barua's work and other short stories from Northeast India, this paper aims to contribute to the growing body of literature on regional Indian writing in English and its significance in understanding the complexities of modern Indian society.

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.

Urban imaginaries in Indian literature have become pivotal in deconstructing not only the spatial organisation of cities but also the lived experiences and embodied resistance of those navigating them. This chapter examines how gendered and caste-based urban experiences are articulated in literary representations of Indian cities, drawing upon the spatial theories of Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Doreen Massey, Edward Soja, and David Harvey. These theorists underscore the city as a palimpsest — a contested site of social production, symbolic control, and resistant imagination. Through a close reading of selected Indian English literary texts—including Meena Kandasamy’s The Gypsy Goddess and Anjum Hasan’s Lunatic in My Head—this chapter foregrounds how informal settlements, gendered geographies, and public/private dichotomies function as terrains of negotiation. The works reveal how marginalised communities (Dalit, working-class, and female protagonists) inscribe the urban landscape with narratives of trauma, desire, and survival. The “walking subject” of de Certeau (2011) finds its Indian counterpart in the defiant female flâneur, who tactically appropriates urban space despite its patriarchal surveillance. Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) notion of “the right to the city” echoes through these literary voices, asserting space not as an inert backdrop but as a site of ongoing struggle and redefinition. The contested spatialities in Indian cities, especially in Bangalore, Delhi, and small-town Northeast India, reflect a dynamic interplay of neoliberal urbanisation, ecological precarity, and socio-spatial inequality (Harvey, 2008; Massey, 2005). Simultaneously, Soja’s (1996) “thirdspace” emerges in feminist speculative fiction by authors like Samhita Arni, where mythic and futuristic cities become spaces of both rupture and reimagination. This chapter argues that Indian English literature reconfigures the city not merely as a setting but as a character that bears witness to fractured identities and subaltern aspirations. It highlights how gendered, caste-inflected, and ecologically burdened urban sites can no longer be treated as peripheral in urban theory or literary discourse. Rather, they are essential to understanding how cities in India are constantly being re-read, rewritten, and reimagined.

The Journey is a short story by Indira Goswami, a literary legend of late 20th century Assam. She was one of the most influential figures in Indian literature who was popularly known as Mamoni Raisom Goswami or Mamoni Baideo in Assam. Through her style of storytelling she reshaped Assamese literature and left it with deep social and intellectual impact. With her remarkable creations she has left indelible impressions in Assamese, English and in other languages through translations. She was the first hand witness of a long period of Assam history with violence, militancy, murder, kidnap and some undesired military terror. Her Parasu Pator’s Well and The Journey are some fictional stories through which she traces the troublesome history of several decades of an insurgent Assam of late 20th century North-East India. The study aims to see how Goswami’s stories reflect a violent and troubled North-East and give us the impression of her deep concern over the contemporary socio-political issues and their resolution.

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