The Novel and the Northeast: indigenous narratives in Indian literatures

In the aftermath of Partition, north-east India emerged as a landlocked and increasingly disenfranchised area where the springing-up of ethno-nationalist movements and guerrillas has elicited a process of growing militarization by the Indian state. Although keenly aware that it is actually problematic to club a very heterogeneous corpus of literary writings together under the label ‘north-east’, this article critically employs this label as a functional working definition to discuss and compare different authors from ‘the region’ and analyse the way their novels are contributing to delineate a tentative mapping of the complex reality of indigenous India.