This book reflects the nascent sensibilities at work in literature emanating from Northeast India. It takes into account the generic diversity in works derived from the region and discusses fiction, poetry, drama, folk narratives, film adaptations as well as early missionary narratives. It covers a wide spectrum of themes such as landscape, partition, World War, history, nationalism, violence and territoriality, memory and identity. The book looks at works in English and vernacular from Northeast India states. It contextualizes developments within intellectual history and display aspects that relate to the continuing force in the ongoing study of the relationship between literature and culture studies, within a broader framework.

This book showcases the diverse literary traditions from India’s Northeast and their shared connections and lineages. It critically analyses a selection of literary works from authors and poets from this region and the hegemonies of language, ethnicity and politics that have framed these voices. As a region with rich cultural and ethnolinguistic diversity, Northeast India’s literature is representative of varied histories, languages, socio-cultural and religious practices. The book highlights the distinct use of language, forms, cultural symbols and metaphors which articulates the unique experiences of conflict, beauty and culture in this area. Focussing on the translingual and transcultural aspects of these literary works it examines the dynamics between literature, language and their socio-cultural influences. The book pays attention to themes of representation, identity and power to showcase voices and perspectives of dissent, criticism and introspection. It explores contemporary critical approaches to literature from the Northeast, by re-examining the idea of the centre and the periphery and the position of subaltern literary voices. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of literature, language, cultural studies, postcolonial studies and South Asian studies.

Emerging Literatures from Northeast India is an amalgam of critical perceptions on writings emanating from the region on issues of identity construct, on hidden colonial burdens that refuse to leave and on the key role that oral traditions continue to play and will do so for some time in any study of the region. Within the ambit of 'emerging' literatures, this book takes into consideration not only the new writings in English and the vernacular being generated from the region, but also the already existing works in the form of translations, thereby making such works accessible for the first time to the rest of the world. Moreover, the book, in critiquing and calling attention to the emerging literatures of the region, is also playing the larger role of providing access to and facilitating the opening up of the region through the academia.

Essay from the year 2015 in the subject Literature - Asia, Banaras Hindu University, language: English, abstract: My study will seek to provide a cumulative aspect of the rise of the political insurgency and historical violence throughout years in North-Eastern India. I am going to analyse these different facets through the following eight sections – Reorganization of States at the time of British Raj and Second World War: Literary Representation of the Roots of Insurgency, Christianity and Missionary Education, Immigration Issue, Socio-political and Ethnical Crisis: Conflict between Tribes and Outsiders, Indifference of Government, Birth and prosperity of militants, Secession Movement, Literature of Protest. North-East India as we call it a land of ‘Seven Sisters’ consists of the states namely Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Meghalaya, Tripura, Mizoram and the lately added Sikkim with 250 social groups and more than 175 languages. This North–East part of India is connected to the rest of India through a narrow strip of 22 kms called the Siliguri Corridor or Chicken’s Neck. Interestingly, it also shares a great part of its border with the neighbouring countries like Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, China, and Nepal. So, it can be seen that the people of these states must have social, political, cultural and linguistic commonalities with its neighbouring countries and therefore the region embodies a rainbow of cultures and traditions that varies a lot from the rest of India. Unfortunately, the histories, cultures as well as the literatures of the North-East India have always been perceived as a monotonous and homogenous entity, without really pondering over the myriad problems that permeate the geographical, cultural, religious, literary and political borders within and outside the North East. It would do well to recall how J. B. Bhattacharjee’s Roots of Insurgency in Northeast India (2007) points out the ‘real’ insurgency and the ‘made-one’ while at the same time appealing not to homogenise. Similarly, as against such generalisations, we have certain North Eastern writers such as Indira Goswami, Temsula Ao, Mitra Pukhan, Mamang Dai, Easterine Kire, Sanjay Hazarika, to mention a few, who problematise and interrogate such oversimplifications and apathy of ‘mainland’ people, writers, leaders, even several other Indian and foreign governments.

Northeast India is home to many distinct communities and is an area of incredible ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity. This book explores the shared cultural heritage among the highland and river valley communities of Northeast India and mainland South East Asia, including South China, through oral traditions. It looks at these shared cultural traditions and suggests new ways of understanding and interpreting the heritage of Northeast India. Oral traditions often bring forward an unexpected twist in understanding historical and cultural links, and this volume explores this using local knowledge and innovative engagements with oral traditions in multiple ways, from folklore and language to performative traditions. The essays in this volume examine how communities build new meanings from old traditions, often as a recognition of the tension between conservation and creation, between individual interpretation and social consensus. They offer interesting parallels on how oral traditions behave in different socio-economic contexts, and also examine how oral traditions and memory interact with the digital world’s penetration in the remote areas. This volume will be useful for scholars and researchers of Northeast India, sociology, sociology of culture, cultural studies, ethnic studies, anthropology, folkloristics, and political sociology.

This book brings together essays on North East India from across disciplines to explore new understandings of the colonial and contemporary realities of the region. Departing from the usual focus on identity and politics, it offers fresh representations from history, social anthropology, culture, literature, politics, performance and gender. Through the lens of modern practices, the essays in this volume engage with diverse issues, including state-making practices, knowledge production and its politics, history writing, colonialism, role of capital, institutions, changing locations of orality and modernity, production and reception of texts, performances and literatures, social change and memory, violence and gender relations, along with their wider historical, geographical and ideational mappings. In the process, they illustrate how the specificities of the region can become useful sites to interrogate global phenomena and processes — for instance, in what ways ideas and practices of modernity played an important role in framing the region and its people. Further, the volume underlines the complex ways in which the past came to be imagined, produced and contested in the region. With its blend of inter-disciplinary approach, analytical models and perspectives, this book will be useful to scholars, researchers and general readers interested in North East India and those working on history, frontiers and borderlands, gender, cultural studies and literature.

This book is the first to consider the representations of the effects of political terror and survival in contemporary literature from Northeast India. Fictions from this polyglot region offer alternative representations that show the post-colonial nation-state to engage in acts of aggression that parallel colonial regimes.

Covering almost 60 years (since early 1950s) of literary activity, this two-volume anthology includes fiction, poetry, and essays by some of the leading writers from North-East India, comprising the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, and Tripura. Offering a judicious selection of writers from three generations of the post-Independence era, the state-wise arrangement allows a comparative analysis of the development of literature in the region. Alongside established practitioners, the anthology includes pioneering works that show a new awareness about the emerging social and intellectual concerns in the region. This volume is divided into two sections. Arranged state-wise, Section I includes 85 poems by poets who initiated new trends in the modern poetry of the region. Section II includes 15 essays, which range from the philosophical to the analytical and the descriptive, and discuss the various aspects of literature and culture of the region. They deal with the literature and culture of particular ethnic or linguistic groups of the North-East, along with studies that reflect on the different dimensions of the multi-ethnic and multilingual cultures of the region. Including some new translations commissioned especially for the project, the volume comes with a comprehensive Introduction by Tilottoma Misra that traces the roots of the literature of the North-East.