Literary Cultures in North East India

The history of a community’s literature has usually been inseparable from the history of the language in which the literature is produced. In North East India, the problem arises in the case of those communities which have a rich and vibrant oral tradition, but no written texts. When writers from these communities adopt a literary language which is alien to their culture, they have to understand the historical conditions that enable them to use that language. The literary cultures in this region have witnessed a gradual shrinking of frontiers from the trans-regional vernaculars to a confined and limited regional space, where atomisation of cultures is more visible than development of cosmopolitan vernaculars.