“In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”: Weaving Matrilineal Yarns in Easterine Kire’s A Terrible Matriarchy and Tilottoma Misra’s Ka Meikhar Ghar/High Wind

Abstract

This paper reads two contemporary novels originally written in two different languages (English and Asamiya), A Terrible Matriarchy (2007) and Ka Meikhar Ghar/High Wind (2013/2020), representing contiguous traditions (Naga, Asamiya, Khasi) that share some of the cultural tropes of the landscape called Northeast India. Contemporary fiction about this land has largely concentrated on the violence that marks this space in media imaginary. While it is significant that writing about violence in itself may embody protest, it is equally important to engage with textual imaginations that eschew direct representation of violence but nonetheless capture historical processes that gesture toward alternative possibilities of shared histories among diverse communities living in this topography. This paper argues that thinking through matriliny, at a time of major armed conflicts, initiates a debate that may not be summed up in neat categories of hills/plains, self/other. I argue that an engagement with women’s everyday work of weaving as a matrilineal motif (taking cues from Alice Walker’s womanist prose) in literatures produced across different languages and cultures could serve as a key to unravel a complex tapestry and a possible template for “imaginative activism” (Evans and Spivak 2016).

Keywords:

• Matriliny
• womanist prose
• gender
• weaving
• Northeast Indian literature
• Easterine Kire
• Tilottoma Misra

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the editors of the special issue, Amit Rahul Baishya and Rakhee Kalita Moral, and the anonymous reviewers of South Asian Review for their discerning comments on this paper. Many thanks to Esther Daimari, Reetamoni Narzary and Pratishi Hazarika for their support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Ralte 2017.

2 This section heading echoes celebrated writer Temsula Ao’s short story collection These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone (2006). Professor Ao passed away in October 2022. I would like to dedicate this paper to her.

3 In the novel, the name is spelt as Bonelly Khongmen. However, in some other historical sources it is Bonily Khongmen (1912 – 2007). Khongmen was the Deputy Speaker in the Assam Assembly between 1946 and 1951; she was also elected to the Lok Sabha in 1952.

4 See Nongbri (2008). Patricia Mukhim (Editor, The Shillong Times) and Monalisa Chankija (Editor, Nagaland Page) are some of the leading voices from Meghalaya and Nagaland who challenge this structural inequity; they have been writing articles in newspapers and speaking in different forums about the need to address the gap. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzuwf-JjnSE.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hemjyoti Medhi

Hemjyoti Medhi is Associate Professor, Department of English, Tezpur University, Assam, India. She has coordinated a SEPHIS, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, “Preserving Social Memory” project to create a digital archive of select mahila samitis in Assam (2009–12). Her recent monograph is titled Gendered Publics: Chandraprava Saikiani and the Mahila Samitis in Colonial Assam (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).