Ethnicity and Otherness in Culture-Meghalaya

Abstract

The marginalized identities, their language and form, their cultural background, reflect their call as they narrate their everyday lives.
The Northeast writers write in ‘Khasi’ language to signify the Khasi hills, their dwellings and culture, as an originated exposition to be formulated and projected.
De Bonald states ‘Literature is an expression of society’, as quoted by Liza Charavarty in her work, ‘Marginalization And The Indian English Literature’.
The poet Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s works make it comprehensible, his “Khasi” identity to have long been marginalized in councils and forums at the national levels and he often claims his people, his language and his place to have been kept so, as to become non-dominant social identities.
The political discrimination of their community makes them feel abandoned. They face alienation in their own dwellings. Their region has a complex identity crisis.
Where the North-eastern part is home to numerous ethnic communities, Nongkynrih keeps his contribution through a rich narrative account of his Khasi ethnicity, in the inclusion of literary texts and represents Indian literature.
Nevertheless, his works have been translated into Welsh, Swedish and many Indian languages too.