“Insides-Outsides”: Northeast Indian Anglophone Literature

Nomenclatures: Northeast Indian Anglophone Literature (NIAL)

This special issue of South Asian Review is on Northeast Indian Anglophone Literature which we refer to by the acronym NIAL. Defining the field of NIAL is imperative now as literature in English from this region, while emerging from diverse origins, constitutes a rich and substantial body of works distinct and different from Indian Writing in English.¹ Works in NIAL also share common thematic preoccupations and cosmological frameworks. We state clearly that we find both “Northeast” and “Anglophone” limited, but nevertheless strategically useful for our purposes. Our brief discussion of the terms does not dwell on their epistemic limitations, but more on why we find them useful to name and define the contours of the knowledge-field we are exploring. This field thus far has elicited scattered and disconnected close-ups, but no sustained and panoramic wide-angle view like we present here.

The region now called Northeast India has been a vibrant cultural ecumene and crossroads prior to the period of colonialism and of post-colonial nation states (Saikia 2004; Chatterjee 2013). The history of the “directional category” (Baruah 2006) called Northeast India can be located within three moments in 19^th-20^th century colonial/post-colonial history. The first is the “frontierization” of the region during the colonial period. Parallel to the establishment of the NWFP (North-West Frontier Province) in the colonial era, there was the simultaneous formation of the North-East Frontier Tracts (most of contemporary Arunachal Pradesh and some parts of Nagaland) (Baruah 2020, 2). The second moment was the period of WWII. The Japanese occupation of Myanmar and some portions of Northeast India (1940–44) was the critical episode that led the Indo-Myanmar border to emerge as the dividing line between South and Southeast Asia (Baruah 2004, 2–4). South Asia came to stand for the territories of British India (minus Burma).

The third moment is the legacy of “ad-hoc decisions” (Baruah 2020, 25) made by the post-colonial Indian state. Two pieces of Indian parliamentary legislation passed in 1971—the North-Eastern Areas Reorganization Act and the North-Eastern Council Act—consolidated this place name in the popular imagination. These spatial reorganizations came on the heels of enhanced militarization in this new “borderland” region of the post-colonial nation state (Baruah 2020, 25). The AFSPA (Armed Forces Special Powers Act) is the most durable and notorious instrument of militarization in the region and undergirds the precarity of the people, place, and its politics. Northeast India, now, comprises eight states, Sikkim being the latest member of the North-Eastern Council in 2001. While the region is an artificial spatial entity created by poorly thought-out ad hoc decisions largely made on the justification of “national security,” in recent years, an incipient Northeast Indian identity has come into being due to a shared history of militarization and experiences of racialization faced by denizens of the region (McDuie-Ra 2012). Racialization occurs both via the exoticized and security-centric gaze on the region by the post-colony, and the experiences of othering that populations from the region encounter in mainland India. These shared histories have been the smithy where a dominant narrative about NIAL has been forged. This is the first sense in which we use “inside-outside” in this issue—Northeast India is viewed as an integral, albeit peripheral, part of India’s sovereign territorial ensemble, but also as a borderland region inhabited by racially othered populations considered “outside” the national mainstream. Part of the rationale for reading this regional literature emerges from the social conditions that shape the “political” differently in this borderland region.

Like Northeast India, “Anglophone” has been a controversial term. We won’t delve into the politics of how “postcolonial” gradually transformed into “Global Anglophone” in the US academy (Srinivasan 2018). Instead, we begin with a discussion of two features for which we prefer NIAL to the clunky “Northeast Indian Writing in English.” First, English, as in South Asian Anglophone literature writ large, plays a translational role in NIAL. Discussing the South Asian Anglophone novel, Aamir Mufti (2018) writes that such works perform a “translation of non-Anglophone and vernacular social and cultural life-worlds into the novelistic discourse of English and its cultural system more broadly” (171). This is applicable to NIAL as well. The “politics of translation” operates in NIAL in two ways. First, this is evident, for instance, in the glossary of Tenyidie words that Avinuo Kire appends to the last pages of her novel Where the Cobbled Path Leads (2022). This glossary functions as an ethnographic-linguistic supplement that enables interfaces between the depiction of a Tenyidie lifeworld and the discourses of English and its cultural systems.

For the second mode, consider the following passage that zooms in on the protagonist Vilie, a renowned hunter, from Easterine Kire’s When the River Sleeps (2015):

And you buried your mother in that village and made the forest your home, but you always think of that village where your mother is buried as home, your real home, and you long to go back, at least in your dreams if not in your waking moments. (143)

This seemingly innocuous passage requires a knowledge of Angami Naga cosmology for interpretation. Michael Heneise (2017) writes:

In a well-known Angami creation-myth Kepenuopfü (birth-spirit) corresponds to the mother of three children—man, tiger and terhuomia (a kind of spirit-like, non-physical being). In the tale, the mother dies and is buried under the hearth, and the man and terhuomia conspire against the tiger for the possession of the house. The tiger is thus unjustly forced to live in the wilderness. In the novel, an interesting passage (quoted above) hints at this myth, though with an interesting twist—it is Vilie himself who, like the tiger, leaves his home and lives in the wilderness—though never losing the sense of home…(11)

Moments like the above from Kire’s novel can be glossed in a surface-level reading that focuses on Velie’s quest for the stone. The focus on the quest, without attending to the embedded mythical intertext, renders the text transparent and the reading strategy “universal,” much like the example of the Greek tragic hero that is utilized to interpret Okonkwo’s fall in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1994). These readings are plausible but limited. Kire’s “politics of translation” (this episode does not have an authorial gloss) asks us to dig deeper and perform the necessary labor of understanding the “other” culture on its autonomous terms.

This observation about translated realities can be complicated further. Akshya Saxena (2022) criticizes the formulations of Mufti and his ilk that assume that works like the South Asian Anglophone novel are always “born translated.” Saxena argues that such a view assumes that “translation is always unidirectional (from other languages into English)” (49). The corollary of this view is that since we assume that the characters in an Anglophone work do not speak in English “this formulation also obfuscates the moments when English is supposed to be English” (49). This observation is pertinent for many parts of Northeast India where English is a major language at the official levels and is used for both speech and writing in quotidian ways. English is the official language of Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland, and one of the official languages of Meghalaya. The historical reasons for the spread of English in the region are complex and will need a state-by-state analysis that we cannot attempt here. Suffice it to add that the role of English literature in educational systems and the role of Christian missionaries (of varying denominations) played a major role in the institutionalization of English in the region. Anglophone education and the standardization of modern forms of the vernacular in the region also proceeded conterminously [see Kar (2008) for a critical reading]. The status of English as a link language in a polyglot region and its relative acceptability vis-à-vis other hegemonic languages like Hindi and Assamese have also been major factors in its spread and use. English cannot be considered an “elite” language in the Northeast, although the obverse that it is a demotic language here is also not correct. The truth lies somewhere in between and necessitates familiarity with the colonial/postcolonial histories of the region.

To illustrate and extend Saxena’s claim that recent scholarship on the Anglophone hardly considers moments when English is English, let us turn to a curious passage from Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s epic novel Funeral Nights (2021):

…Bah Kynsai interrupted us to say, ‘I think, of all the strange ways of disposing the dead, na, the Torajans’ is the strangest.’

Bah Kynsai used the word ‘na’ as many people in the Khasi Hills would use the word ‘em,’ or ‘no,’ as in this sentence: ‘Kane ka jong phi, em?’ (This is yours, no?). Obviously, this is something a native English speaker would not say, but among the Khasis, ‘em’ is liberally used at the end of sentences, sometimes even in the middle” (31).

Although Bah Kynsai liberally peppers his speech with Khasi phrases and expressions, this is an example where English is English. A curious reversal occurs here though—instead of a unidirectional flow from the “vernacular” to English, it is Bah Kynsai’s idiosyncratic English that is explained to the reader via a recourse to Khasi. The specter of the “native English speaker” appears as a figure of cultural difference. They (the hypothetical native speaker) wouldn’t speak like Bah Kynsai, but the use of the idiosyncratic “na” in his speech is explained by translating it into an expressional modality that is uniquely Khasi. The Anglophone, we suggest, is a useful term to analyze such transactional and multidirectional translational encounters. There is no Northeast Indian literature, but literatures from Northeast India (Baishya 2018); however, in a paradox we present as a provocation for deliberation, if there is a Northeast Indian literature possible or imaginable, it occurs only via the route of the Anglophone. The Anglophone is neither an inside nor an outside, but is born out of complex transactions in the threshold space that is NIAL.

A Small History of NIAL (Focusing on Fiction)

Critical anthologies of writings from Northeast India have titles like “Emerging Literature” (Zama 2013). NIAL though is neither “emerging” any longer nor concerned with exploring peripherality at all points of time. In the last three decades, we have seen a profusion of works—especially in fiction and poetry—which explore a wide diversity of themes. For reasons of space, we focus here on only on a mapping of fiction (both novels and short stories), as it has been the most prominent mode available through publication. We begin with the proviso that any attempt at mapping the territory is necessarily incomplete and provisional. A different starting point, such as a focus on poetry, may result in alternative cartographies.

Taking the lead from Anshuman Bora’s distinction between post-colonial and decolonial in his essay in our issue, we suggest a tripartite map of fiction in NIAL: the post-colonial, the decolonial and the planetary. While we follow chronology, this map is not intended to be linear: intimations or echoes of each phase are already present in earlier or later stages. We call the early phase of fiction in NIAL post-colonial because it grapples with the vicissitudes of post-colonial nation building and explores the complicated relationship inherent in the mainland-borderland binary. Militarization, necropolitics, ethnic polarization and the impact of political violence on everyday life in a borderland region are some of the major touchstones. The narrative frameworks that explore the impact of violence and necropolitics vary—quest narratives [Siddhartha Deb’s An Outline of the Republic(2005)], mnemonic exercises [Temsula Ao’s These Hills Called Home (2005), Aruni Kashyap’s The House with a Thousand Stories(2013)] and urban noir [Bijoya Sawian’s The Shadow Men(2010)], among others. Moreover, many fictions, based particularly in Shillong, portray facets of life and living in small towns along with an exploration of ethnic violence between “indigenes” and “outsiders,” complex legacies of both colonialism and the partition. Deb’s Point of Return (2004), Anjum Hasan’s Lunatic in my Head (2012) and Daisy Hasan’s The To-Let House (2010) are notable examples, ratifying Avner Pariat’s (2014) claim that there is a developing “Shillong Canon” in Anglophone fiction, echoing the prior tradition of the “Shillong poets” (Das 2008).

We label the second phase decolonial. Bora deploys Walter Mignolo and Anibal Quijano to read the works of Janice Pariat. We look at decoloniality discursively following critics closer to “home” like Joy Pachuau and Willem van Schendel (2022) who abjure the word “ontology,” but instead focus on shared “‘cosmologies’, ‘world views’ and ‘lifeworlds’” in the area they designate as the “Eastern Himalayan triangle” (Northeast India is included here) (65). While evidence of decolonial approaches can be found in the works of Temsula Ao and Mamang Dai [especially The Legends of Pensam (2006)], for the sake of economy, we shall focus on the “turn” in Easterine Kire’s recent fiction. Kire’s early career traversed historical fiction [A Naga Village Remembered (2018); Mari (2010)] and portrayals of politicized violence in the post-colonial period [Bitter Wormwood (2013)]. However, her writing changed track after When the River Sleeps. In later novels like Son of the Thundercloud (2016), Spirit Nights (2022), Don’t Run my Love (2017) and Journey of the Stone (2022), Kire turns toward Naga mythical narratives and cosmology featuring were-tigers, the power of dreams, and agential objects (such as the lithic in When the River Sleeps and Journey of the Stone). Roderick Wijunamai (2023) puts his finger on the originality of Kire’s later oeuvre. Kire, he says,

…inaugurates, for those interested in the environmental humanities of the Nagas, the

indigenous discourse on “connectivity ontology” or “relational ontology”… a convergence of multiple realities, a reality where the Nagas “conflate the abstract and immutable dualities of modernist ontologies”…By introducing her readers to the Nagas as a part of a larger living system, including humans and other-than-human entities, Kire lucidly ushers in an aspect that has been long due in Naga studies. (35)

Kire’s foregrounding of such connectivity necessitates an immersion in an indigenous relational worldview that includes humans and other-than-human entities. Wijunamai terms Kire’s works “ethnographic fiction” while Heneise calls it “magic realism.” We term Kire’s recent works a trailblazing exemplar of decolonial fiction. While Kire’s decolonial fictions seem to avoid contemporary political issues while framing an esthetic with a distinctly Naga worldview, younger writers inspired by her, like Avinuo Kire, show how the decolonial approach can be fused with post-colonial imperatives. Where the Cobbled Path Leads, for instance, fuses an exploration of myth (the sentient speaking tree referred to as Kijṻbode, who is also a portal to another dimension) with a contemporary setting of militarized terror based on the Naga-Indian armed conflict.

The latest phase is the planetary. While evidence of the planetary can be found in Easterine Kire, Mamang Dai, Esther Syiem and Temsula Ao’s works (a project on myth and its homologies with Anthropocene temporality in NIAL remains to be written), two recent works—Janice Pariat’s Everything the Light Touches (2022) and Nongkynrih’s Funeral Nights—herald new possibilities for NIAL fiction. Our herald of a new turn may seem premature based on the thin evidence of two texts alone. However, both Pariat and Nongkynrih’s novels are big (in ambition, size and scope; NIAL novels tend to be smaller in length) and formally inventive. Further, these fictions deal with the region’s uniqueness with an eye on the planetary. As such they are exemplary texts that depict the vicissitudes of the Anthropocene, and also participate in a locally apprehended experience of planetarity. Pariat’s novel on arborophilia is, like a lot of Anthropocene novels, multiscalar and heterotemporal. It also embeds the contemporary history of Meghalaya in a global, interconnected history predicated on the geological grids of time now referred to as the “Meghalayan” age, the cosmology of which permeates Pariat’s nature fiction and her representations of the deep ecology of its living world (Moral 2022). Echoing Marder’s (2013) observation that plant-thinking impels us to begin from the middle (63), the novel sets its antagonistic foil—the narrative of Carolus Linnaeus—as a single chapter in the exact center. Both “above” and “below” this center, there are two chapters each devoted to Goethe, the Romantic poet and dilettante botanist, Evelyn, an Edwardian era botanist inspired by Goethe, and Shai, a contemporary Khasi woman, who travels from Delhi to rural Meghalaya to visit her ailing, aged former caregiver, Oiñ. If the colonial narrative of Linnaeus, an epitome of the Enlightenment-era zeal to name, classify and control, is the “seed” or “ground,” the symmetrically paired oppositional narratives of Goethe, Evelyn and Shai, are the “branches” and the “roots” that reveal alternative possibilities to the dualist epistemology of the Enlightenment.

Unlike the globe-trotting Everything the Light Touches, Funeral Nights is firmly anchored in place. Based on a journey of a group of friends to the West Khasi Hills to witness Ka Phor Sorat or the Feast of the Dead, the more than thousand-page long text is a provocative experimental exercise in writing a “plotless” novel. Instead of a plot, what we get is an exchange of stories over ten nights about the history of the Khasis over the longue durèe combined with a deep geobiohistory of the land. Consider here the long exchange about Khasi memorial monoliths on the Ninth Night (899–912). The lithic facilitates the irruption of deep geological time into the present (Cohen 2015). For Nongkynrih, the encounter with the lithic becomes a mode for pondering temporalities before that of anthropos. His novel considers not only the ritual-symbolic importance of monoliths for the Khasis but looks at lithic temporality as a modality of planetary dwelling and a repository of deep memory. Thus, Ap Jutang, the “protagonist,” says: “Just think of the stories that the monoliths and memorial stones can tell us! Think of the history they may reveal if we delve deep into the events behind their planting…It is because we cannot erase our past and implant a brand new one on top of it that (Soso) Tham (an early Khasi poet)…reminds us that the present and the past have a symbiotic relationship, supporting one another like mother and child” (910, emendations in parantheses ours). To look beyond the “surface” and plumb lithic “depths” is to encounter another modality of temporality where the present and the past have a “symbiotic relationship.” The engagement with the history of a place reveals the deeper temporalities of the planet and facilitates alternative imaginaries of dwelling.

To reiterate, this tripartite mapping is not comprehensive. How do we fit Dhruba Hazarika’s Bowstring Winter (2022) in the “Shillong canon”? Where do we place, Luck (2009), his idiosyncratic collection of animal short stories? What about representations of queer sexuality in works like Pariat’s The Nine-Chambered Heart and Aruni Kashyap’s His Father’s Disease (2009) or for that matter, the lesbian sensibilities in a story from the former’s Boats on Land? How do we map the nascent trajectory of the graphic novel within the oeuvre? These are questions that should be raised, and it is our hope that the preliminary mapping we propose here stimulates further conversations about genre and literary history in NIAL.

Mapping the Territory: The Special Issue

This special issue consists of eight essays. We begin with two essays dealing with methodology and frameworks. Nandana Dutta poses the question of what a literary history of NIAL would look like. A provocative claim that she makes concerns the relationship of the oral and the written. The oral and the written are usually viewed as isomorphic and discrete and the “translation” process is presented as moving from the immutable oral into a new written form. However, she argues that the “local” is usually returned to after multiple detours to invent a tradition—much like what happens with the inscription of orality into written forms in NIAL. Dutta proposes that the three “tropes” of “objects, place and history” can function as touchstones for framing robust literary histories of NIAL that captures the simultaneity of both the oral and the written. She conducts a bravura reading of the “guerrilla tactic” of incorporating and enlivening the virtually untranslatable Khasi expression “Ka ktien” in Janice Pariat’s short story “A Waterfall of Horses” as a mode of subverting colonial and contemporary ways of fixing and understanding otherness.

Pariat also features in Anshuman Bora’s essay. Bora suggests that the stereotypical post-colonial optic used to study NIAL (the mainland-borderland binary) can be complicated by a decolonial lens. Bora deploys Walter Mignolo’s concept of gnoseology to argue that the constantly mutating oeuvre of Pariat introduces a self-reflexive and diffusive dimension of representation to NIAL. Reading Pariat’s productions prior to Everything the Light Touches, Bora studies both the relationality of the human and the nonhuman and the constant spatial moves “in” and “out” of the Northeast that leads to diffusive traces of presences that are “supra-regional” in her fictional worlds.

The next four essays focus on local traditions and productions within NIAL. Poetry written by women are central here. The first two essays are from Manipur. Soibam Haripriya, a noted English-language poet herself, draws from her experience of being gender trolled for her online poem, titled “Dear Nationalists.” Her essay is a disturbing report on how language and gender are played out in politically contingent borderland spaces. She explores the relationship between NIAL and the role of language in its reception and considers the dynamic between English and other local languages/mother tongue (Meitelon in her case) to understand its emotive appeal. NIAL, in the subnationalist regional/native milieu is read as a mark of disloyalty to the mother tongue, and rootlessness thereof. Soibam’s sensitive response to the adverse reception of her poetry unfolds through the very act of reading, mediated by gender and its cultural engagement.

Loiya Leima Oinam maps Anglophone women’s poetry in Manipur published in the last decade, arguing that this oeuvre critiques the repressive traditions embedded in the twice-born patriarchy of her state, the colonial and the present. Zooming in on six contemporary women poets (including Soibam Haripriya) whose works highlight female subjectivity, Oinam claims that, collectively, these works constitute an emerging feminist poetic tradition in Manipur. Some of these poets write back to custom, adopting testimonies not unlike that of the voices of Native American female poets. Despite multiple locations and the varying creative idiom of each poet, their poetry converges on contiguous issues and amplify one another’s voices, offering intimate glimpses of women’s trysts with everyday structures of patriarchy. The poets attempt to also recast previously inscribed taboos and cultural practices—some by reimagining tropes of body, female desire and myths that have weighed against just representation of women, and others by breaking the cycle of abuse and shame through testimonial poetry.

Contemporary Naga writing invites attention to the intricately woven cosmos of Naga lifeworlds—the subject of our next two essays. Haidamteu Zeme Newme’s paper examines indigenous epistemologies and the ways in which oral/verbal forms constitute people’s archives. Focusing on the sixty-six communities who identify under the exonym “Naga,” her essay centers on the literature of the Nagas caught between speech and writing. Theyiesinuo Keditsu’s approach offers a different viewpoint to Newme toward the orality-literature question. Originating in an ethnos that traditionally told stories to their young, Keditsu considers the practice of earlier women writers who insert themselves into the realm of public discourse by negotiating both inherited patriarchal structures as well as the demands of the world literary market. Creative writing is a space patriarchy “allows” them to engage the violence and trauma that characterizes the neo-colonial encounter of Nagaland with the Indian state. The younger generation of Naga writers, currently labeled as the “ceasefire generation,” demonstrate either a desire to forget or display a new set of memories that seemingly circumvent the conflict and violence of life before the 1990s. Keditsu also examines self-publishing as a mode of mediating state censorship and the esthetic demands of the world literary system, a practice that necessarily again poses the question of gender and what women writers across the regional spectrum experience for writing the body and the land. The current crop of emerging writers also questions the canonical indoctrination of the Naga colonial past as well as mainstream taste for conflict and magic realism cultivated as representative of Naga literature in English, thereby creating new narrative expectations.

Sneha Khaund reads the comparative aspect immanent in the Anglophone through an innovative treatment of English and Assamese texts. Khaund examines the Assamese short story “Xomoi-Xeema” by Saurav Kumar Chaliha and the English poetry collection, “Street on the Hill,” by Anjum Hasan to propose an expanded notion of Anglophone writing through multilingual readings of regional Indian literature. She examines the role of English in Northeast Indian literary texts in articulating cosmopolitanism from a marginalized space while probing the linguistic frontiers of the postcolonial nation-state. Through this comparative reading, fashioned, a la Francesca Orsini, as reading together, she re-envisions the relationships between region, nation, and world through a series of overlapping linguistic exchanges. Linguistic interchangeability and the vernacularity of English figure in Khaund’s essay as markers for an Anglophone hybridity, evident in both translated realities in English works and in the presence of English in Assamese works. The latter adds a different dimension to the transactional space noted earlier and may well attract new research in this direction in the future.

The final essay by Hemjyoti Medhi reads two contemporary novels originally written in English and Assamese respectively: Easterine Kire’s A Terrible Matriarchy and Tilottama Misra’s Ka Meikhar Ghar (High Wind), representing contiguous traditions (Naga, Assamese, Khasi) that share some of the cultural tropes of the landscape called Northeast India. The quilt motif conventionalized in American feminist history takes indigenous form and flavor in Medhi’s central metaphor of weaving that harks at the politics of matrilineal societies. Medhi unearths a less abrasive “imaginative activism” that is no less sensitive to the question of gendered labor across linguistic/ethnic groups in the region. The essay also brings the reader back to a sense of place that is inscribed by converging passions born out of protective and preservationist frontier impulses, borderland anxieties and the sense of community bestowed by shared pasts.

NIAL is a historical product forged through the complex transactions of history, politics, and global/local readerships. Place, environment and people remain the reigning representational foci allied with the insider/outsider perspective that writers adopt. To read and theorize its unique trajectory is to acknowledge NIAL as a distinct and specific oeuvre in the larger corpus of creative works and traditions from the global South.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amit R. Baishya

Amit R. Baishya is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Contemporary Literature from Northeast India: Deathworlds, Terror and Survival (Routledge, 2018). He is the coeditor of two volumes–Northeast India: A Place of Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Postcolonial Animalities (Routledge, 2019)–and two journal special issues–"Planetary Solidarities: Postcolonial Theory, the Anthropocene and the Nonhuman" (Postcolonial Studies, 2022) and "Insides-Outsides: Anglophone Literature from Northeast India" (South Asian Review, 2023). He has translated Debendranath Acharya’s novel on the forgotten long march from Burma to India, Jangam (Vitasta, 2018), from Assamese to English and is currently completing his second monograph Fictions of Attunement: The Anthropocene in Contemporary Indian Anglophone Literature.

Rakhee Kalita Moral

Rakhee Kalita Moral is Professor of English at Cotton University, Guwahati, India. She has authored Once Upon the Hills: A Handbook of Naga Women’s Voices and Visions (Heritage Publishing House, 2022) and has published on postcolonial studies and Northeast Indian literature and cultures. Her co-edited volumes include At the Frontier and Beyond: Literature and its Relations (Macmillan, 2005) and Gender and Society in Northeast India (Cotton College Publications, 2011), while her monograph, Under the Shadow of the Red Sun: Women Rebels, Mobilities and the Politics of Gender is forthcoming (2024). A former Fellow of Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Teen Murti, New Delhi, she has edited the South Asian Review’s special issue on Northeast Indian Anglophone Literature (2023) and has earlier translated Saurav Chaliha’s “A Game of Chess” for the special volume on Assamese literature, Splendor in the Grass (Sahitya Akademi, 2010) and Purabi Bormudoi’s “When the Birds Come to Nest” in Earth Songs: Stories from NE India (Sahitya Akademi, 2005).

Notes

1 This point about distinctiveness and difference has been made for poetry by Das (2008) and Ngangom and Nongkynrih (2009).