The Battle of Belonging: A Study of Contemporary Shillong Poets

Abstract

The British colonialisation, the partition of India during independence, growing urbanization and increased human mobility led to the growth of migrant settlers belonging to a number of cultural, racial, ethnic and religious groups in the state of Meghalaya, particularly Shillong which is the state’s capital. These factors contributed to the transformation of the city into a multi-cultural centre. However, contradicting this development was the increased desire of the indigenous tribals of the state to exclude and otherise the non-tribal settlers by way of promoting the ‘sons of the soil’ policy. Though in the recent decades, statistics depicts (2011 census) more out-migration with a decreased share of the non-tribal to the state’s population, yet a perceived notion of increased in-migration was fed by the indigenous tribal belonging both to pressure groups and political parties leading to issues of insider-outsider the concept of belonging and un-belonging. Sigmund Freud and Abraham Maslow were the early psychologists who recognized that humans strive to belong. However, it was Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary’s seminal work “The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation” that contributed to the theoretical understandingof belonging. Belongingness in today’s multicultural society has become all the more relevant wherein the questions of belonging and un-belonging and the complex politics of belonging are issues that confront us. This in turn has led to ‘belonging’ emerging as a subject of interest and interrogation across multiple disciplines. The un-belonging felt by the people of the Northeast which results from their being ‘othered’ by their fellow Indian citizens of mainland India has been well documented but there is also a need to study how the same is reversed and how it is enacted and experienced in the context of the Northeast. This paper intends to analyse the select works of contemporary Shillong poets to depict how this otherisation and battle for belonging is enacted and experienced by the non-tribal settlers living in Shillong. In doing so, an attempt will be made to trace the complex working of the politics of belonging and how it manifests itself in present day Shillong.