Emerging Literatures from Northeast India: The Dynamics of Culture, Society and Identity (SAGE Studies on India′s North East)

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. Cover 1 Contents 8 Acknowledgements 10 Introduction 12 Part I: Building Literary Paradigms for Northeast Discourse 22 1 - Articulating Marginality 24 2 - Speaking, Writing and Coming of the Print Culture in Northeast India 35 3 - An Emerging Genre of ‘Political’ Literature in India’s Frontier 49 4 - Towards an Appreciative Paradigm for Literatures of the Northeast 58 5 - Sign Forces of Culture 68 Part II: Specifics of Literary Paradigms of the Northeast 84 6 - Locating Trauma in Mizo Literature 86 7 - Selected Oral Poetry of Northeast India and the Ecological Space 97 8 - The Phawar in Context 111 9 - Some Petite, Some Powerful 119 10 - Culture Makes People What They Are As Much As People Make Culture 129 11 - Beyond Borders and Between the Hills 137 12 - An Assessment of Northeastern Sensibility in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss and Mamang Dai’s River Poems 143 13 - Northeast Outside the Newspaper Pages 155 Part III: Caste–Tribe Paradigm Beyond the Northeast 170 14 - Culture As a Site of Struggle 172 15 - Alien Construct and Tribal Contestation in Colonial Chhotanagpur 181 About the Editor and Contributors 198 Index 202 Within the ambit of 'emerging' literatures, this book takes into consideration of the writings in English and the vernacular being generated from the region, and 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.