Traditional land, postcolonial development, and indigenous ecocriticism in Esther Syiem’s poems

ABSTRACT

Traditional land is the source of subsistence and location of culture for the Khasi indigenous community of Meghalaya, India. During the post-Independence period, this community has been losing traditional land to development activities that are primarily infrastructural, such as road construction. The inconsiderate imposition of development without consultation with the community has resulted in the dispossession of traditional land and resources and the deprivation of traditional means of sustenance. Esther Syiem, a prominent Khasi poet, is concerned about the development initiatives that have put her culture in crisis. She questions such a development ideology that shows no concern for her community and exploits the physical environment of the Khasi Hills. This article analyses Syiem’s poems through the critical lens of indigenous ecocriticism. In doing so, it applies the key analytics of development aggression, unimagined community, and diffuse wars to unravel her representations of the indiscriminate imposition of infrastructural development on Khasis.

KEYWORDS:

• Esther Syiem
• Khasi culture
• indigenous ecocriticism
• development aggression
• imagined community
• diffuse wars

Acknowledgements

I thank the anonymous reviewers, and JPW editors, Dr Anastasia Valassopoulos, Dr Jenni Ramone, and Professor Janet Wilson for their feedback which helped me revise this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Dedication

For Professor Susan Stanford Friedman. Your angelic touch has bloomed the flower in my life.

Notes

1. India’s Northeast constitute eight states: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura, and Sikkim (Dikshit and Jutta 2014). For privatization of communal land in India’s Northeast, see Nongkynrih (2008).

2. Definitions and representations of indigeneity are contentious and the claim to be indigenous is fundamentally a political question. Indigeneity implies connections of a community with locality, and connotes belonging, origin, and emotional attachment and identification of the community with the place of origin (Merlan 2009, 304). As a political movement, advocacy, and legal claim, indigeneity refers to the strategic tool of indigenous people in fighting against exploitation and dispossession, their struggle for control of traditional land, and their right to self-identification (Castree 2004, 152; Gomes 2013, 7–8; Trigger and Dalley 2010, 46–50).

3. “Claim–1” was originally published in Syiem (2010a) as “Whose Is It Anyway”.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sayantan Chakraborty

Sayantan Chakraborty is an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, Dubai Campus, UAE. His interdisciplinary research interests include environmental humanities, geographical humanities, and medical humanities.