Presenters
MORAL RAKHEE KALITA - Professor of English, Cotton University, GUWAHATI, IndiaPhom Manngai H - Department of English, Cotton University
Panel
76 – Discourses, Narratives, Stories and Contestations from the MarginsAbstract
The idea of freedom and autonomy has largely attended political and cultural narratives of Northeast India in the country’s post-independent history which witnessed, unwittingly the making of ‘centres’ of power and the birth of ‘peripheries’ that spiralled away from the national imaginary. In the literature that has poured out from this part of India, an affective subversion and angst typically frames the marginal world whose gaze back at the nation-state is clouded by loss of communication, mistrust and accidents of history that confront native societies. This paper seeks to bring to focus through select literary representations of two preeminent Naga writers, Temsula Ao and Easterine Kire, the Naga worldview prefigured in its villages and laws, customs and leadership that inhere in the community. Drawing upon historic events the memorialization of which in Nagaland iconizes sites, symbols and stories to erect a narrative honouring past contestations of control and dominion through tribal resistance even as an emerging consciousness about a composite Naga identity and its contemporary place in the nation-state turns via folklore, orality, memory and popular imagination to “new narratives” of belonging and inclusion. I argue that instead of reading the ‘margins’ in terms of just the alternative view does a new history of India’s northeast enable and accommodate a more contentious if resilient ontological reality?
