ABSTRACT
Writings from the North-East of India are generally referred to by the blanket term ‘North-East Literature’ or ‘Literatures from North-East India’. While these terms are not wholeheartedly accepted by many writers from the region, ‘North-East Literature’ has become a genre in itself with a uniform trend running through the corpus of literature of the region. Much of the literary discourse of the North-East revolves around the political issues of insurgency, counter-insurgency, marginalisation and alienation from the centre, thus creating a kind of a stereotype around the genre and making the term ‘Literatures from the North-East’ almost synonymous with ‘insurgency literature’ or ‘literature of violence’. This essay suggests the possibility of shifting the focus of North-East literary discourse from the stereotypically political to the dynamics of community life and folk culture as represented in some of the works. By using the examples of Mamang Dai’s The Legends of Pensam (2006) and Temsula Ao’s These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone (2006) as representing stories or narratives about the communities concerned, the essay argues about the possibility of using the term ‘community fiction’ for such works.
