The Hill They Climb: Contemporary English Poetry from Northeast India

About the event

Northeast India is a term for the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram, Tripura, and Sikkim. The roots of poets from this region in their land, people, culture, tradition, oral culture, and myths are found deep in their poetry, as a free form of expression. In the English-language poetry of the Northeast, with its emphasis on myth and oral traditions, we find an alternative to the poetry pioneered by the metropolitan poets of the 1960s and their present-day descendants. We may read this ethnopoetics as a non-western "decentered" poetics representing the aesthetics of Indigenous people. Some of the most important of these contemporary poets are Mamang Dai, Robin S. Ngangom, Nabina Das,  Achingliu Kamei, Namrata Pathak, T. Keditsu, Jharna Choudhury, and Malsawmi Jacob. In the spectrum of complex historical identities and marginalizations offered by their work, an intense awareness of cultural loss and recovery accompanies a negotiation with other cultural contacts. Poetry from this region chronicles both the past and a present experiencing change and transition, and we witness zorami  of individuals' desires for freedom from multiple levels  of social and political oppression.

Bio

Jaydeep Sarangi is an Indian poet and Principal of New Alipore College, Kolkata. He has published eleven poetry collections in English, the latest being  Notes on the Rock of Job Charnock (2026), and his poetry has been widely anthologised and reviewed. His scholarly work focuses on dalit studies,  postcolonial studies, and Indian writing, and he serves on the editorial boards for several journals devoted to marginal studies and poetry criticism. With Rob Harle he has edited six anthologies of poems from Australia and India, and with Amelia Walker, he guest edited a special issue of TEXT.  Sarangi has delivered talks and read poems at the University of Western Australia, the University of Wollongong, RMIT, and other Australian universities. His recent books include Within Her Home and Out Side: Essays on Indian English Poetry (Black Eagle), Mapping the Mind, Minding The Map: Twenty Contemporary Indian English Poets (Sahitya Akademi),  and A Life Uprooted: A Bengali Dalit Refugee Remembers (Sahitya Akademi). The recipient of both national and international awards, Sarangi is the President of the Guild of Indian English Writers, Editors and Critics (GIEWEC) and Vice President, EC, Intercultural Poetry and Performance Library, Kolkata.