Content: Poetics and politics of the ‘everyday’: Engaging with India’s northeast (Issue 53)
Content: Poetics and politics of the ‘everyday’: Engaging with India’s northeast (Issue 53)
Posts tagged ‘Everyday Life’
Mar 21
Guest-Editorial: Negotiations with the ‘everyday’ in India’s Northeast
By Bhumika R and Suranjana Choudhury
Our attempt in this issue of Café Dissensus has been to explore the layered nature of everyday as articulated through literary and cultural narratives from Northeast India. Specifically, we have tried exploring various understandings of the everyday and its articulations across literary and cultural narratives from Northeast India.
“Multipartner Mud Dances”: The Uneventful Entanglement of Humans and Animals in Two Assamese Poems
By Amit R. Baishya
The two poetic texts I will be considering are Hafiz Ahmed’s “Murgi Jobai” (The Fowl Slaughter) and Anupama Basumatary’s “Saamuk” (Snail). What unites these two poems are not simply seemingly uneventful and ordinary acts of speciesist violence (the moments before the slaughter of chickens, eating a snail), but also ethical reflections on violence, killability, bodily vulnerability and contingent moments of relationality between human and animal.
Indigenous Cultures of the North Eastern Region of India: Revival and Preservation
By Esther Syiem
In effect, the mystiques of memory in its many dimensions fed the steady stream of material life in these communities to help them bridge the terrestrial and transcendental, the historic and the ahistoric, establishing connections with the spiritual universe embodied in the bush and jungle outside, and indicating boundaries: tangible ones and those intangible, that of the spirit world.
Popular Music Subculture and the Northeast Youth
By KB Veio Pou
Most people from other parts of India often ask me how it is that most young people from Northeast know how to play at least one musical instrument, especially guitar, apart from singing mellifluously. I don’t really have an answer for that but music is pretty much ingrained in the culture. Perhaps, musics flow in our veins!
All Khasi Women Need Representation
By Laiamon Naomi Nengnong
More often than not, writers who write about Meghalaya, or about the Khasi society only glorify or romanticize the picturesque beauty of this place (which is undeniable), and the system of lineage that exists here. As a Khasi and a woman, however, I cannot help but opine that there is a lot that is being neglected in such narratives. These narratives can be seen as consisting of one side of the story.
Memories of Songs: Words Lost and Found
By Lalremtluangi
An instant gush of childhood memories – early morning walks and cute sketches of landscapes – poured over me with a wave of fleeting nostalgia. She gestured me to sit on a bench near her bed and said in a mellow voice, “Every morning I stare outside this window fishing for long lost memories in those seas of clouds.”
Queering the Everyday: North East India and its Queer experiences
By Lede E Miki Pohshna
Focusing on the tragic aspect of their everyday is a disservice to the queer people and also to the actuality of their complex existence. Queer experience is not homogenous, fixed and one-dimensional. Their everyday life is also redolent with acts of falling in love, first heartbreak, and most importantly the ability to accept who they are when it comes to their sexuality.
A Day in Barkhola: Memory, History and the Fading Everyday in India’s Northeast
By Rongili Biswas
During the 1940s, Hemango Biswas was actively involved in the leftist cultural revival in Cachar. His closest companion there was Irawat Singh who was another legend himself. Irawat singlehandedly organized and consolidated leftist political movements in Cachar, especially among Cachar’s Manipuri settlements and tea-garden workers. He was a remarkable orator, dancer, singer, organizer, sportsman and cultural activist.
Promises of the Kwai: Discovering voices that sing
By Sebanti Chatterjee
On several occasions, after my scheduled interviews with musicians, researchers and heads of various organizations, I recall how I was served Kwai alongside tea and sometimes after food. Kwai has been my medium of engaging with my field; it has served as an entry point for me to be aware of the people, landscape and of course the choral practices.
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