Northeast Indian Literature

The life of tribal groups in the Northeast India abounds with the tradition of folklore, myth, superstition and a strong belief in the co-existence with the supernatural world. Writing in English has offered a global ground for the Northeast writers to express their rich culture, beliefs and knowledge, which in the past was limited to the community. The act of writing also serves another purpose as well, to preserve them. In the wake of mass conversion and political tension, certain beliefs and rituals of the oral past are perishing and in some parts of the region, lost. Therefore, the writers of this region are representing the fading tradition of their respective tribes prior to conversion to Christianity and the arrival of the script. This paper is an attempt to show the transition and, at the same time, to revisit and understand the important bearings of that oral past through their works.

Literature is a consequential medium that refl ects human phenomena through artistic mode. It helps in recalling past traumatic experiences though more oft en in a masked form. Th e memories of the bellicose confl icts are recounted by the victims long aft er the harrowing events get safely buried in history and no longer accessible to the present. People conventionally forget the source of the trauma yet they recollect it through literary betokens like poems, musical compositions, plays, novels, stories, etc. Th e literary texts play a vital role in recalling and understanding a particular confl ict through the wounded psyche which no historical or any other narratives can reach as effi caciously. Th is is one of the main reasons why literary discourses rather than historical narratives are comparatively more effi cacious in portraying confl icts. Th is manuscript highlights what literature tells us about a particular confl ict that social science literature has missed on. It additionally accentuates how literary discourses of select women writers from Northeast India proved to be more reliable representations of confl icts because they endeavor to capture the unknowable and inexpressible far more effi caciously through tropes and images. Th e manuscript is unique in the sense that it attempts to establish a periscopic understanding of identity, confl ict, and trauma within literary prisms and for this, the manuscript

This paper is a gendered analysis of structures and cultures of violence that characterize both public political and private domestic spaces in Northeast India, one of the most sustained conflict zones in South Asia. It links the violence at home with the political violence generated by the idea of ethnic homelands. While illustrating how domestic and political violences intersect, the paper questions the very idea of home as safe haven, or refuge from the outside world. It also parallelly raises reservations about the ethno-nationalist demand for territorial homelands as the solution to political conflicts between communities. The paper does this by juxtaposing the specters of fear and manifestations of violence in both the public and private domains as depicted in the fiction of Anglophone writer Jahnavi Barua. It analyzes Barua’s characters who are at the center of this violence to understand her depiction of home and homeland. It then relates text to context by drawing on media reports, policy documents, domestic violence handbooks and manuals, field reports and reports of fact-finding missions among other primary sources. The sociology of conflict literature and an attempt to illustrate the value of the witness fiction writers bear to violent conflicts underpins the analysis.