Postcolonial and Eco-critical Readings of Identity, Culture and Environment from

Selected Works of Shillong Poets

Rituparna Mukherjee

Abstract:

Identity is a complex concept that envisages local, cultural, ideological, linguistic and

environmental affiliations. It is an amalgamation of the complex tapestries of the history of a

land and its people, along with considerations of present development. This paper tries to take

up the ecological issues highlighted in the poems of two Shillong poets, Desmond

Kharmawphlang and Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, who want to re-invigorate their traditional,

ancestral, simpler way of living. It tries to locate the motifs of Anthropocene devastation

carried out by a belligerent consumerist and capitalist culture, which tries to dislocate these

tribal entities from their ethnic roots, and undermine their identity. This paper uses the tenets

of eco-criticism as a literary tool to depict the attitudes of these tribes to nature, their way of

life, the human-non-human relationship, and how socio-political acts of development and

rapid urbanization have affected the hill landscape and the tribal mindscape. It also

problematizes a simplistic reading of these poems due to the complex nature of the socio-

political issues miring this area and attempts to eke out postcolonial leanings in the works

chosen.

Keywords: Eco-criticism, Post-colonial, Anthropocene, Identity, environment, North-East

India.

Introduction: Defining Post-colonial Ecocriticism

Eco-criticism as a literary theory has its advent in the recent times, as a fallout of the

incessant and aggressive capitalism that promotes over-exploitation of natural resources to

advance human needs. This genre of literary criticism tries to view literary works through the

eyes of ecological concerns that find reflection in the writings. The most famous definition is

perhaps that of Cheryll Glotfelty who defines eco-criticism as “the study of the relation

between literature and the physical environment” (The Ecocriticism Reader, 1996: xviii).

Laurence Buell in The Environmental Imaginationhas presented a guideline for works that

can be read in an eco-critical framework. The works must have nature as a firm presence not

just as a backdrop; the texts must reveal how the human impunity in destroying natural

resources has subverted the natural balance; it must also seek human accountability for

selfish actions.

Eco-criticism thus tries to study and look at literary texts and tries to search for ecological

concerns as well the literary attitudes to human and non-human life across ages. It tries to

locate anthropocentric, patriarchal and consumerist points of view towards non-human

entities, women, children and the poor. Murali Sivaramakrishnan (2011) states that the ideas

of ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ in the Anthropocene age are seen as binaries, with culture being the

rational counterpart to the emotional nature. This is a direct consequence of increasing

urbanization, and “patriarchal, west-centric, development-oriented, materialistic worldview”

(Sivaramakrishnan, 2011: iii) that has been steadily gaining hold.

Post-colonial eco-criticism is a comparatively new branch of eco-criticism that delves into

the notions of power and privilege embedded in the discourse of nature-culture binary. It

attempts to look into the politics of ecological terrain, especially in terms of homogenization

of spaces, people and individual cultural narratives as a part of neo-colonial practices. This

paper will examine through four representative poems how natural domains of land, people

and water become sites for political exploration and cultural conflict. In this frame of

reference, the next section elaborates briefly on the socio-cultural context of the North-East,

which will be indicative in the analyses of the poems.

The Socio-Cultural Context of the North-East:

The Northeastern Indian landscape is unique not only because of its topographical

primacies but also because of the populace that enriches the topography. The predominant

people living there are tribal communities of Indo-Mongoloid descent that are distinct from

the rest of the country in terms of their cultural and ethnic beliefs. We are a country of

diversity but nowhere is this quality more pronounced than in the North-East where in the

seven sister states, innumerable tribal entities dwell amidst nature in constant conjunction.

Birendranath Dutta explains this fact in his essay “North-East India and its Socio-Cultural

Milieu”:

The northeastern region does have a special character of its own: the socio-cultural

milieu of this region holds up in the present day, as it has done in the past, a picture

that somehow distinguishes it from the rest of India. As such, this special character

cannot be understood, much less assessed, in terms of the commonly accepted

standards of what is believed to constitute the Indian mainstream. (2011: 119)

The post-colonial attempts at homogenizing the states and their population, the steady and

rigorous language acculturation movements and challenges to their ethno-linguistic fabric and

way of life has left the tribes yearning for a simpler, natural way of life, as well as

existentially fearful of their cultural identity. Tilottama Misra notes in the introduction to The

Oxford Anthology of Writings from North-East India (2011) that:

An intense sense of awareness of the cultural loss and recovery that came with the

negotiation with ‘other’ cultures is a recurrent feature of the literatures of the seven

north-eastern states. (Misra, 2011: xiii).

The region has seen continuous religious and cultural invasion in the form of the Bhakti

movement, colonialism and Christian missionary activities as well as the advent of the

insistent global culture that all of us are a part at present. This brush with several cultures and

ideologies has often created a problematic perplexity in the minds of the people, as one

cultural icon regularly dismantles another. Temsula Ao puts forward this sentiment in her

poem “For Christ and All”:

We are now a lost people

Groping for new selves

And frantic for new frontiers

Even as occasional rhetorics for peace

Dissipate in the universal angst

Plaguing a befuddled race.

Another problem of primacy in this region is one of rapid industrialization and tourism

development that is robbing the natural way of life for this region. Chingangbam Anupama

cites Namrata Chaturvedi of NEHU in her paper, who says:

Urbanization along with capitalist consumerism has threatened the cultural identity

of this region too. The character of the land has undergone fast changes with the

hegemonizing tendencies like much of so called Third world has witnessed. Within

India too, the centre vs. the periphery model has been established by the forces of

capitalism which look upon the entire North Eastern region as underdeveloped or

backward. (2014: 66)

The poets and fiction writers of North-East Indian states therefore try to hold on to their

native myths, legends, oral stories that speak of their communion with nature, with the

landscape and its flora and fauna, that seems to remedy a “Xenophobic fear” of an outside

intrusion (Misra, 2011: xiv). Esther Syiem expresses the deep connection of the people to the

oral tradition: “the oral has always posited a way of life and thinking that is inextricable from

the ecological codes and unspoken conventions of a sentient universe” (2016: 83). Syiem

reflects on the mystical nature of the oral tradition that has sustained through filial and

community dialogues that surrenders to the wisdom of a universe, seen “as an all-knowing

prescient being” (2016: 82).In another essay, she demonstrates the relation of the folklore

with the Khasi paradigm, calling it the “identity-giver, identity-shaper and identity-promoter,

the lifeline that, whilst manifesting old identities also revamps them” (Oxford Anthology

2011:128). Myths and legends of the Khasi folklore are built around and etched in the

landscape around the people, thereby permeating their physical lives through an all-pervasive

presence. Syiem calls folklore the “sub-text” of their “lived reality” (2011:132)that imbues in

the community a valued selfhood, “providing a multilateral scaffold for the constructs of the

racial imagination” (2011:132). Stuart Blackburn asserts that:

Oral stories present a culture’s reflection on itself, a commentary that has been

abstracted from everyday life, passed down from generation to generation, and

shaped according to local narrative conventions and taste. (2007:420)

It is with this socio-cultural context in mind that four poems of the Meghalaya poets,

Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih and Desmond Kharmawphlang have been analyzed.

Poems from Meghalaya:

Kynpham Singh Nongkynrih and Desmond Kharmawphlang are bilingual poets who write

both in their native Khasi language and in the language of commerce and greater

communication, English. Both poets display a deep, primal love for their land, a pride in their

socio-cultural identity and a zeal to uncover and hold on to their native lores and tradit ions as

a pillar amidst the constant flux of changing politics that governs the land.

Nongkynrih evokes the magic of the kind and gentle sun and the unpolluted air of

Cherrapunji in his poem “A Day in Sohra”. He talks lyrically about the gusts of wind, which

roam the hills, piercing cold, under a balmy sun, love-lorn and maddened by the absence of

trees. He laments the loss of life-giving trees in the area and watches haplessly while the old

trees die naturally and the new are not given a chance to survive. The following lines speak of

the deep impact of deforestation on his beloved land:

The wind rules the land

Howling like a maniac.

For where are the trees

To temper its wild laughter

Into romantic wooing?

The trees of the region are compared to the men of the region and almost instantly the

metaphor of dying trees and a young generation of men, dying to service the politics of the

land, comes alive. A fleeting, almost nonchalant, reference to the worrying state of political

affairs and constant state of internal strife is made in the penultimate stanza of the poem in a

striking simile:

This is the famed rain,

Making a fool of sorry umbrellas!

Zooming in like swarms of fighter planes!

Bouncing back metres high to the sky!

The beauty and intense irony of the simile lies in the fact that the rain is a natural and

regular occurrence in Cherrapunji, and the comparison bears an implicative that fighter

planes are a regular sight as well.

At the same time, despite the rampant felling of trees, nature in form of rivers and

waterfalls, continues to exist inexorably in its glory and in talking about the Noh-Ka-Likai

waterfalls in Sohra, the poet invokes the local legend of Ka-Likai, who gave her life in fury

and dismay after being tricked to eat her own daughter’s flesh. Ka-Likai, the wounded mother

of the lore, seems to embody nature herself around these parts, fleeing the bestiality of men:

And Likai, wild with suicidal fury,

Still plunges into its cerulean pool,

Forever fleeing from a destiny

Of beast-men and a wounded conscience.

Both Nongkynrih and Kharmawphlang evoke the legend of the Thlen in their poems

offering different perspectives. In “The Ancient Rocks of Cherra”, Nongkynrih speaks about

the limited opportunities for livelihood and sustained economy in the villages in Meghalaya,

the natural resources depleted and ravaged.

This land is old, too old

And withered for life to be easy.

Poverty eats into the hills and squeezes

A living from stones and catterpillars

Gathered for out-of town drunks

Each market day.

The metonymic use of ‘poverty’ refers to the poor weavers and potters of the region who

depends on the regional ecology for sustenance and refuse to give up their traditional and

ecological means of livelihood for easier means of sustenance. The words ‘eats into’ and

‘squeezes’ refer to the burden that the local economy has on the local ecology. The local

population sells tools and silk to the urban tourists who are ‘drunk’ with recklessness and

authority. It is a pejorative use. The poet remarks that

There is nothing remarkable here

Only this incredible barrenness.

The barrenness is not only that of the landscape but also of the economics of the place. In

spite of the hordes of tourists who throng the place, the villagers do not benefit from it. The

poet at this point invokes the legend of the Thlen, a gigantic man-eating python that devoured

men consumed with greed and power, reminiscing the “savagery and ruthless slaughter of the

malevolent creature” (Nongkynrih 2005:35). While the deep gorges remind the poet of the

deep wounds that the serpent inflicted on the land and its people in its death agony, one

cannot help but consider a revisiting of this legend as a political analogy to the insurgency

movements that engulf the people of this area like ‘desperate victims’. In the final stanza of

the poem, Nongkynrih talks about the mass exodus that has resulted in the barrenness of this

place. While trees have been cut down to make way for a vicious tourism nexus, the local

people have migrated to towns and alien cities in search of employment. However, this barren

and berated place still feels like home to the poet bespeaking his deep love for his land.

Another rendition of the Thlen legend comes in Desmond Kharmawphlang’s poem

“Poems during November”. He speaks fondly of the primordial nature of the land that was

born out of the tragedy of the Tethys Sea.

There is a hint of salty air,

Like a remembered past of trade routes,

Criss-crossing the giant curve

Of a heel, rimmed by mountains,

Thrashed by untold tragedy at

The sea’s straying ways.

The painful birth of the land, the story of origination and a sense of history suffuses this

poem. The land seems to have followed a divine destiny, much ahead of man, “printed along

with the early stars”, that sprung an entire culture within its folds. The lines also refer to the

long legacy and popular traditions that the land shares with its people, and in absence of

popular practice, this legacy stands at risk.

The second stanza remarks on the clear rarefied air in a land inhabited by beloved

tribesmen and ancestors. The waterfalls at Cherrapunji Kshaid Dain Thlen recall an ancient

folklore of the giant serpent which was put to death by the brave Khasi clansmen. The signs

of this terrible struggle lie deeply entrenched in the rocks and minds of the locality and every

visit renews that deep primeval association. The poet uses another birth metaphor in this

context.

Forgetfulness spawns a curse

Carried far across the eyes,

Linked like a coil of fear.

Referring to the Thlen legend and the story of the old woman whose forgetfulness in

consuming the snake meat and fear of being ostracized resurrected the snake that thirsted for

Khasi blood, the poet talks about the dangers of forgetting one’s own deep-seated culture in

preference for a mass culture, of rejecting one’s own legacy. It gives rise to uncertainty, lack

of clarity and alienation that an insufficient identity creates. The loss of rootedness and

specific identity is a curse that is ‘spawned’, like a serpent, it resides the minds of the people,

creating doubt and fear. The phrase ‘coil of fear’, which harks back to the resurrected snake

of the Thlen legend, can be read as the neocolonial conformist forces that constantly inhibit

the indigenous force of self-expression.The poet thinks about the conflicted minds of his

people, waging “private wars” in “the territories of mind”, people who battle their love of the

land and an impulse to move out, between belief and lore on the one hand, and a superstrate

culture on the other. While the indigenous people remain conflicted, nature carries on

primitive and unperturbed. The poet thinks with pride how even the most persistent inroads

of Christianity could not decimate entirely their native identity.

Although we could not refuse

The visit of religion, and the

Recorded centuries of an empire rests

Mutely in graves and monuments.

This particular stanza is significant in its connotation of a collective folk memory. As

Esther Syiem remarks in her essay (Oxford Anthology 2011:129-130), the folklore and

orature has had a ‘liminal’ existence that has survived the civilizing missions of Christianity,

that has dwelled in the corners of the Khasi mind, co-existed as memory and relics in the

Khasi landscape. The words ‘recorded’ and ‘mute’ acquire an antithetical significance in the

debate between orality and the written word. Temsula Ao points out (2007:100) that the

cultures having a long history of literacy and a written tradition often consider orality

scornfully, bordering on the illiterate and uncivilized. This would explain the civilizing

objective of the Christian missionaries as well as the need to standardize small sectorial and

clan differences. On the other hand, the local indigenous cultures ascribed wisdom to the

ability of memory, retention and the ‘sacral’ transmission of stories.

The varied use of Thlen legends by the Khasi poets suggests the adaptability and

flexibility of oral folklore. Jan Assmann (1995:130) talks about the rich potential of the

folklore manifested in collective cultural memory to reconstruct and regenerate itself. The

Thlen legend of a vicious snake that thirsts for Khasi blood might signify any enemy of the

clan and can be adapted in the present times to portend colonial or the neo-colonial forces of

change or the clash of the western and the indigenous cultures. Assmann opines that

collective memory of a cultural unit exists in two forms- one in the archival memory of the

orature and the other in the “mode of actuality, whereby each contemporary context puts the

objectified meaning into its own perspective, giving it its own relevance” (1995:130). The

use of this legend therefore to speak of a present urgency is a device to hold on to the

collective narrative of the Khasi people, that provides the poets not only a group identity but

also a community and a cultural identity. It foregrounds a sense of history and shared

association to a racial past.

In “Letter from Pahambir”, Kharmawphlang dwells on his yearning to learn and restore

the ways of indigenous living from existent tribes. He talks about a trip to the village tribal

headsman, leaving the arrogance of the ‘church’ behind. He talks in peace with the clansman,

specifying his intention of ‘learning’ not ‘teaching’, a reversal of the Evangelist movements

of the colonial period that denounced the lives of these tribes.

‘We come,’ I plead, ‘to learn, not to teach,

We come with longing, we are the

Forgetful generation, our hearts tapping

A rhythm spawned in shame, a shame

That splits our present from our past.

The poet again uses birth and origination imagery in the use of the words ‘spawned’ and

‘suckled’, regretting that they have been a generation born out of a time when Christian

hegemonic forces removed the semblance of their past history and left a generation of people

incomplete, confused and in search of their roots. The “wisdom of falsehood” brought about

by the dominant Christian texts does not answer their deep-rooted search for holistic identity,

which can only be answered by the collected native wisdom of the oral folklores and tradition

of telling, a return to the cultural roots of the Khasi peoples. The poet feels at home, enjoying

the company of his own people, amidst laughter and oral songs, his feet joining automatically

to the primeval dance of the land. And as he observes the ecological, more organic way of

life, the poet adds more fuel to the quest of regional knowledge.

Laughter swells like moonlight

Someone breaks out in song

And hardened feet tap unsteady punctuations

Around the weird tune.

Voices intone, hands fashion leaf plates

To hold food for the men

From the big city. I shove more brushwood

Into the fire.

Conclusion:

The most common filaments of thought found in the poems taken for analyses are a threat

to the complete erosion of a way of life that has been the practice of the Khasi people from

time immemorial and is built on a keen love for their land and its legends. These tribal

communities are dealing with not only the challenges to their natural surroundings by steady

deforestation and poaching of birds and animals, but also facing a disavowal of their ethnic,

linguistic and cultural identity. They also face tremendous ethnic violence that corresponds to

the natural violence. The poets thereby forecast the possible extinction of an entire cultural

entity, which if not immediately reclaimed and resuscitated, much like the nature around

them, is direly endangered and on the verge of absolute dissimilation. A revalidation of the

ecological traits laid out by Laurence Buell in a work of literature can be found in these

poems. Nature and the local ecology generously intertwined with local legends and folk

wisdom looms large against the failings of collective humanity in all of the poems analyzed

here. However, the dominant theme of the quest for ethnic roots and an inclusive cultural

memory that has been consistently threatened by colonial and neo-colonial forces seems to

justify a reading of the poems not merely as eco-critical texts but also as poems that have

substantial post-colonial underpinnings to them, as put forward by Swarnalatha Rangarajan:

Post-colonial ecocriticism builds on the insights of diverse domains such as

environmental justice, ecofeminism, political ecology and other discourse of

decolonization. Its main objective is, however, to resist and critique the

homogenization of spaces, which is a result of the practices of colonialism as well as

global capitalism....post-colonial ecocriticism, like other forms of eco-criticism, has

a unique advocacy function which confirms an environmental ethic encompassing

socio-economic justice as well as environmental justice.(Eco-criticism, 2018: 90,

100-101)

The poems chosen and analyzed in this paper can be said to harbour the post-colonial eco-

critical thought as they deal not only with the danger to the ecology that sustains so much of

life in Meghalaya but also deals with the usurpation of power and agency of the indigenous

people in colonial and post-colonial times. The poets talk not only of revival of the older

ecological way of living but also resist and challenge the mainstream discourse of power,

privilege and prestige in post-colonial India.

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