Women's writing from north-east India: narratives of indigeneity ethnicities and aesthetics

Abstract

India is listed as a country with one of the largest populations of indigenous peoples in the world. The largest concentration of indigenous peoples are found in the eight states of North-East India and the ‘central tribal belt’ stretching from Rajasthan to West Bengal. North-East India, considered as one of the most culturally diverse regions’ of the world, is a land with a high concentration of tribal population. The region shares geographical borders with four countries - China, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Bhutan of Asia. In physical and geographical terms, only four percent of the region is contiguous with India whereas the remaining ninety six percent of the North-East borders the other countries.The significant cultural resource of the individual states, defined through the rich cultural heritage preserved in the form of oral traditions and artifacts has a huge influence on literary works of the region. Literature from the North-East incorporates an expansive thematic range that covers a large number of engaging themes on borders, boundaries, identity, location of home and culture and the oral tradition. The themes are often indigenous in nature that extensively and often exclusively discusses community-specific indigenous knowledge and ethics. However, these thematic features are reflected in the following ways: 1) the popular and media-driven narratives that exclusively focus on the region’s political conflict and unrest and, importantly for my thesis, 2) the spillover of these narratives that directly and indirectly affect the scholarship of the literary works. Hence, the literary works produced from the region get defined on two problematic premises, 1) of the region’s political implications and 2) the wide spectrum of a particular ethnological narrative. In this thesis, I argue that while both of these are important elements, they are disproportionatelyrepresented in the discourse of North-East literature to the exclusion of other aesthetics and literary parameters. The thesis recognizes and tries to locate a literary gap through a critical examination of aesthetic questions that are important and has not been addressed in the scholarship of North-East literature.