Interrogating Cultural and Identity Negotiations in the Poetry of North- East Tribes

Abstract

History of a society is the history of its culture – its religious, moral and ethical beliefs, languages, dialects, mythologies and cultural practices. With the 1970’s a new generation of the poets emerged on the literary map of Indian writing in English where majority of them were taking native cultures and roots to a never seen height. This new-found confidence that attempts to erase the boundaries between subaltern traditions and ‘Great Traditions’, however, in itself, is an assertion of a poetical awareness on the part of these communities. Significantly for mainland India, the region known as the North-East has never had the privilege of being at the centre of epistemic enunciation except perhaps at some ancient time when Assam was recognized as the centre of occult knowledge associated with tantric worship, magic and astrology, and, strangely enough the imagination of the ‘mainland’ has even today not outgrown those constructs of the mysterious ‘other’. Contemporary poetry in English from India’s North-East has multifaceted voices. It is an expression of an individual poetic self as well as the saga of the tribal people of the region in general. It presents a vista of images of the mountains, hills, rivers, myths and legends, tradition and culture, and multi-ethnic people of the region. Identity crisis, a sense of alienation, increasing globalization and migrancy are some of the dominant features of contemporary politics in the North-East. There has also been a conscious use of folklore as a means for an assertion of identity in the different works of the poets of this region.