Northeast Indian Literature in Planetary Time: Creation Myths, Zones of Extraction and Anthropocene Heterotemporality in Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s Poetics

Anglophone Literature from the borderland region of Northeast India has a relatively short history with the major works comprising the oeuvre published in the last four decades or so. One of the most visible trajectories in Northeast Indian Anglophone Literature (NIAL)[1] is the reworking of myths and origin stories, especially by writers from indigenous communities.[2] NIAL writers weave myths to explore both deep pasts and contemporary conundrums about community and political identity. Furthermore, mythical mnemotechnics and their reworking in contemporary NIAL centers “indigenous literary knowledge production . . . [and] . . . counters the hegemonic project of the nation and the kind of postcolonial studies that focuses on the nation.”[3] The “post-colonial” does not appear as “post-” especially when considered from the vantage point of a borderland region that has been subject to militarization and treated as a resource frontier by the colonial and post-colonial dispensations. Literature from this borderland region, both in English and in other languages, often adopts a critical relationship towards hegemonic British colonial, Indian and Hinduized national narratives and foregrounds indigenous onto-epistemologies. They are immersed in what Lotha Naga writer Jasmine Patton calls processes that “decolonize the postcolonial.”[4] Decolonial poetics that attends to the representation of nonhuman life, existence and relationalities in the oeuvre of Northeast Indian literature is a complement to this political charge to decolonize the postcolonial. 

This post evaluates Khasi writer Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s poetic works as an exploration of myth/origin stories and its homologies with Anthropocene heterotemporality. Heterotemporality is “a series of coordinations across incommensurabilities or qualitatively different ontologies[5]” These coordinations “emerge historically, from relations that sediment, recur, endure, echo, extinguish, and lie dormant” (90). Nongkynrih, a Professor of English at North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU) in Shillong is well-known as a prominent figure of the group known as the “Shillong poets.”[6] He is a novelist, translator, dramatist and folklorist. I mention folklorist at the end because I consider his collection Around the Hearth to be the key text that refracts and reverberates kaleidoscopically in his poetry and fiction. In the “Prelude,” Nongkynrih talks about the “great (oral) storytelling traditions of the Khasis [that] goes back to the time of their creation myths.”[7] Around the Hearth is a retelling of these creation myths. These creation myths or khanatangs (sanctified stories), Nongkynrih continues, elucidate:

Khasi philosophical thought on every aspect of Khasi culture and make sure that it reaches and holds captive even the simplest of men. The stories are therefore invested with symbolical significance and deliberately rendered interesting so as to beguile listeners into believing that they are hearing a story and not listening to a sermon. (ix)

The khanatangs also have “geo-cosmological” functions, which as the editors of the collection New Earth Histories write impels us to ask, “how earth has been imbued with spiritual significance or consider the spiritual traditions that identify earthly sites as mediating between the material and divine planes.”[8] Nongkynrih gestures towards this concept presciently when he says—“Having realized the tremendous potential of the khanatang, the Khasis invented stories for everything. The phenomenon of lightning and thunder; a gigantic boulder that looks like an overturned conical basket; the name of a waterfall; a hill; a forest; a village . . . . To explain the inexplicable, to comprehend the incomprehensible, they always found a story” (x). These stories were passed down orally and became part of a shared heritage, a mode through which Khasis understood the world around them.

My purpose here is not to address anthropological-historical understandings of creation stories as “charters for life” or concretizations of collective identity; instead, I delve into specific ways in which Nongkynrih braids creation myths into his poetics to explore the heterotemporal dimensions of the Anthropocene.[9]  Nongkynrih’s literary oeuvre represents one of the best loci for this inquiry because of the intimate connections between his theoretical reflections and practices as a folklorist and the ways in which he mobilizes and adapts khanatangs to depict the vicissitudes of the Anthropocene. My wager here is that Nongkynrih braids deep temporalities and geo-cosmological dimensions immanent in the khanatangs with a critique of the short-term, syncopated temporal dimensions of extractive practices in a state that is “South within the South.”[10] Meghalaya is one of the poorest states in India. Unregulated mining for coal has significantly impacted the region and has been a major issue in the public sphere. “Rat hole” mining for coal has led to several well-documented casualties. The borderland state is also a hotbed for uranium mining.  Deforestation, too, has had a significant impact on the ecology of the region leading to decreasing rainfall in locations like Cherrapunjee.  The critique of such extractive practices in Nongkynrih’s works is placed within the larger and longer horizons of planetary temporality resulting in a knotting of heterogenous temporal scales. I will amplify this wager through a reading of the collection of poetry The Yearning of Seeds.

References to extractive practices, and the syncopated timescales of immediacy that they inhabit, recur regularly in The Yearning of Seeds. The first poem of the collection, “The Parking Lot,” scales down from the global to the local—talk about the first ever Earth summit in Rio (June 1992) hogs the airwaves, but in the Nan Polok area in Shillong, Meghalaya’s capital city, “the parking lot/humbled down/hundreds of our proudest/pines.”[11] The felling of pine trees recurs in the poem “Kynshi” (also the name for the largest river in the Khasi hills). Victoria Saramago writes about “the mimetic rift that results from the threatening, painful perception of environmental loss, often codified in narrative modes such as elegy and tragedy…that strengthens the public’s nostalgic engagement with these places.”[12] Mimetic rift is evident in the evocation of a pastoral scene in the West Khasi Hills in “Kynshi,” which shifts into elegiac mode as the poet contends with the depredations of extractive practices: 

Inevitably, however, here too,

time has left its ugly wounds.

Pines like filth are lifted from woodlands in truckloads.

Hills lose their summer green,

blasted into rocks,

into pebble and sand

and the sand is not spared. (Nongkynrih, Yearning of Seeds, 44) 

While the proudest pines are humbled by human activity in “The Parking Lot,” in “Kynshi” the perspective shifts to the deanimated corporealities of the arboreal forms that are lifted “like filth” into trucks. The portrayal of extractive practices accentuates via enjambment. Rocks are blasted and the sand is “not spared.” The “shock” of extractive capitalism, its short-term syncopation, encapsulated in the lines: “This is the sadness with us all/who cannot think beyond possessions/and live but for a single season” is contrasted with the “sovereign” rhythms of planetary time as the mobile Kynshi keeps moving “as an arrow laying claim/on new territories, forming new seas…” (45). Moreover, the Kynshi’s constant mobility and dynamism over time contrasts with the eventual sessility of extraction—“we lose ourselves here/not going anywhere . . .” (45).

The shocks engendered by anthropogenic short-term syncopation is connected to the arrival of “strangers” and “strange ways” during modernity. The antidote to such forgetting is a deeper affective connection to the land. “Enlightenment we seek around the world/That of the Land’s we know but nought”—so begins Nongkynrih’s translated version of “The Golden Grain” by U Soso Tham, whom he describes elsewhere as the “chief bard of the Khasis.”[13] Soso Tham’s lines serve as a dialogical foil to “Rain Song 2000: (To the Poets who have Left).”[14]“Rain Song 2000” explores a predicament that Sarah Dimick characterizes as climate arrhythmia—“an achingly absent rhythm, the want of a known pulse . . . [that] occur in relation to the loss of a familiar environmental rhythm.”[15] Unseasonal and unceasing April rain makes the poet scour the newspapers for an explanation, but what he finds there are “no more than fillers:/so why is the sky weeping/a river of unseasonable tears?” (Nongkynrih, Yearning of Seeds, 39). Newspapers, to evoke Walter Benjamin, flatten everything into “information” (“no more than fillers”) as opposed to the depth and affective charge of transmissible “experience” in storytelling.[16] When the poetic persona asks a learned man, he drones on about the usual scientific reasons—“Global warming, charcoal burning,/the ozone layer, polythene bags . . .” (Nongkynrih, Yearning of Seeds,39). Religious men say that such arrhythmia occurs because the world is “too riddled with sin” (39). But as the poet processes these affect-less, rote inputs and listens to “the rain/sizzling on the roof” a realization dawns that “the hills are spurning too many/of those who love them/for a baneful breed of migratory men” (40). While Soso Tham is an example of someone who loved the hills, or as the subtitle alludes to, a “poet who left,” a representative of the “baneful breed of migratory men” is David Scott, the infamous British “conquistador” of the Khasi hills who also brought pears to the region. Nongkynrih addresses this floral colonization directly in “Only Strange Flowers have Come to Bloom” where the pear tree and its blossoms functions as a metaphor for the loss of relationship to the land. The pear trees have supplanted “the natives everywhere” (Nongkynrih, Yearning of Seeds, 6). While these pear trees look dreary in winter and are superficially charming when they blossom in spring, “Like them we shed our old ways/and having shed them we find/no spring to bring the flowers back” (6). The forgetting of the “old ways” is amplified in the concluding tercet which echoes the closure of “Rain Song 2000”: “Like flowers, only strangers/and strange ways have come/to bloom in this land” (7). Banu Subramaniam makes an important distinction between the “native” in settler colonial discourses and the “native” in indigenous studies. “Native,” as it is used in invasion biology is “the ‘native’ of settler colonialism, of stolen land, commodification of plants, and short-term profits . . . .”[17] The “native” of indigenous studies refers to “affective ecologies, relationality, and attachments nurtured over long periods of time” (196). Nongkynrih’s lament about “strange ways” can be placed in this latter connotation of “native”—like the colonizers, the pear trees lack a deeper, affective connection with the land.

              If such poems are elegies about forgetting, alienation and the loss of relationship attending the short-term temporality of extractivism, khanatangs represent a mode of countercolonial and hetereotemporal mnemonics in the Nongkynrih-verse. This is evident from the way in which Nongkynrih adapts the tale of “Ren and the River Nymph,” included in Around the Hearth, in his poem “Ren.”  In the folktale, Ren, a fisherman from the East Khasi Hills, falls in love with a river nymph and eventually follows her into the river. Before leaving, he tells his grieving mother that as long as she hears the river roar, she will know that he lives. The mother strained to listen to this sound during her lifetime. But after she died, Nongkynrih says in his rendition of the folktale, “nobody cares about the sound of Ren’s life” (Nongkynrih, Around the Hearth, 63). The poem begins with a dramatization of the scene of the fisherman’s missive to his mother to listen just prior to his departure but then fades-out slowly from this “faraway” scene to the present: “Times have changed/few care to listen/many only wish to be left / to their respective dreams” (19). Echoing those “who cannot think beyond possessions/and live but for a single season” in “Kynshi,” the “many” in “Ren” are content with their insular conception of the world, while only “few” listen to the vocalization of the river. For the poet though, his “respective dreams” transmogrify into the nightmare of securitization, the diabolical twin of extraction in Northeast India: “mine / always end / with alien policemen / their eyes longing / to eat us up” (19). Aural receptivity to the nonhuman other is upstaged by the ocular greed and insatiable hunger of the “alien” in the guise of the policemen.  
            Alimentary motifs also serve to emphasize the truncated timescale of extractivism in Nongkynrih’s masterpiece “The Ancient Rocks of Cherra” which is set in Cherrapunjee (or Sohra), one of the wettest places on the planet. Nongkynrih is from Sohra. This masterful poem braids the timescale of extraction with mythological and geological time. Temporality is announced as the main concern of the poem in the opening line—“The land is old, too old” (84). The proximity of “old” with “withered” makes the land hostile to “life.” We begin with a history of the present, the durations of extractive capitalism. Alimentary motifs provide a connective tissue between both stanzas emphasizing its initial presentation as a death-scape. The second stanza continues:

Poverty eats into the hills and squeezes
a living from stones and caterpillars
gathered for out-of-town drunks
each market day. (84)

“Poverty,” monster-like, eats into the hills, accentuating the poem’s generic presentation as a “necropastoral.” Joyelle McSweeney, who coined this term, defines it as a reframing of the “pastoral as a zone of exchange, shading this green theme park with the suspicion that the anthropocene epoch is in fact synonymous with ecological end times.”[18] Given Cherrapunjee’s touristic status as a watery theme park, Nongkynrih’s choleric vision of ecological end times is a shattering of the pastoral’s cordon sanitaire—a “manifestation of the infectiousness, anxiety and contagion occultly present in the hygienic borders of the classical pastoral” (McSweeney 3). In Nongkynrih, meager forms of subsistence are “squeezed” out of from stones, symbolizing a process of collection or extraction. The use of enjambment in the stanza above sustains the impression of a slow, slithering movement—a proleptic intimation that a reptilian form is soon going to figure in the poem—that eventually squeezes the life out of its victims. “Squeezes” echoes with and intensifies the attribution of “withered” to the land in the second line (84). 

The spacing between the second and third stanza takes us back to the realm of the khanatang. Nongkynrih explains the allusion to the “serpent’s death throes” in the first line of the third stanza in a footnote: “Legend has it that the immense gorges of Sohra or Cherrapunjee, the wettest place on earth, were caused by the death throes of the Thlen, a gigantic man-eating serpent that once supposedly stalked its wilderness” (84). In Around the Hearth, Nongkynrih narrates that the man-eating Thlen was eventually killed when he was tricked into swallowing a hot iron-ball. Thlen’s death throes are part of a geo-cosmological narrative, as his “death throes were so powerful that they made deep cracks in the land and created one of the most famous gorges in Sohra” (Nongkynrih, Around the Heart, 63). His death made the earth shake, caused the hills to tumble down with the debris blotting out the sun for a brief while.  In “Ancient Rocks of Cherra,” the sudden turn to local geo-cosmologies amplifies the alimentary motifs in the necropastoral. If poverty actively eats into the hills, here the deep gorges wait like yawning mouths to claim their victims. The gorges themselves are wounds on the earth’s surface created by the gigantic serpent’s death throes. The insistent energy of the present (poverty eating into the hills) is scaled up to fuse with the dynamic tectonic churnings of geology over a longue durée.  

However, the epic temporality of deep time in stanzas two and three is undercut by the evocation of banality and ordinariness in the fourth stanza:“There is nothing remarkable here/only this incredible barrenness.”  The paradoxical juxtaposition of “nothing remarkable” with “incredible barrenness” jars as we are presented with a close-up of the landscape. We end at the threshold space that separates the narrator (“me”) from the scene presented. What do we see here? “Incredible barrenness,” a landscape inimical to the presence of humans and trees (Cherrapunjee is known as a wet desert) (84). These presentations chime with the establishing scene of the poem—the “old, too old” and “withered” land. But, amid this desolation, there is something that provides solace—the contemplative aspect of the “dark grey rocks like sages” (84). The poetic persona anthropomorphizes these ancient geo-beings via simile—they are “like sages.” Sages with their putative sessility and inexhaustible patience function as a representation of inhuman scales of geological time. The facticity of the lithic can be captured as a being-there, waiting and watching patiently as human time passes fleetingly by, much akin to the “sovereign” time of the Kynshi river. This scalar comparison makes the inhuman temporality of the lithic approachable within the fleetingness, ephemerality and finitude of human existence. 

Nirmal, a central character in Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide says that there is a homology between mythological stories and geological narratives about deep time:

It’s not just the goddesses—there’s a lot more in common between myth and geology. Look at the size of their heroes, how immense they are—heavenly deities on the one hand, and on the other the titanic stirrings of the earth itself—both equally otherworldly, equally remote from us…And then, of course, there is the scale of time—yugas and epochs, Kaliyug and the Quaternary…in both, these vast durations are telescoped in such a way as to permit the telling of a story.[19]

The use of the simile in “Ancient Rocks of Cherra”—“like sages”—performs a similar function. Vast durations are telescoped to permit the telling of the individual encounter even as these concrete presences gesture towards deep time in the “old, too old” topography. These contemplative presences “spell home” for the poet, despite the desolation spurred both by topographic history and extractive practices. The ancient rocks are inhuman witnesses gesturing at longer planetary temporalities that predate anthropos, simultaneously providing the ground and foundation for the contemplation of a sense of home in the world.