The Fireflies Kindle Their Lights to Seek Darkness: Scripting Ecological Concern in Some Select Poets of North-East India

Abstract

The literature of India’s North-east and her poetry in particular, is characterized by a strong ‘spirit of place’ and the vast ecological variety in the region strewn with rivers, hills, gorges and ravines, with a mesmeric charm of the flora and fauna, has ever actuated creative imagination in the poets and writers of the land. A confluence of various tribes and communities with their respective belief-systems, rituals and folklores, North-east has ever retained her exotic charm not only for mainland India but also for the rest of the world. After Independence, the region also had to undergo some territorial re-alignment of some states due to socio-political necessities and as a result of the emerging realities of urbanization, deforestation, industrialization and mechanization for the cause of development and also of the flip side of these changes in the forms of partition-violence and cross-border terrorism (with its bases operating mainly in neighboring countries); a genuine concern for the ecological well being of the land has developed over the years into a major vein of poetry in the North-east. To put it in simple terms, the persona which had so long been used to singing the naivety of existence amidst the plenitude of nature in a state of perfect bliss with the surroundings, now feels as it were perturbed by a gnawing awareness of something ominous lurking in ambush round the corner. The present article attempts for a synoptic overview of some representative works of the indigenous poets of two major states so as to trace how an acute eco-conscience marks the poetic sensibility in North-east where nature, as per the systems of faith and understanding enshrined by folk and literate traditions, is a vital force equipped with human emotions and having the potency to help poetic imagination.