Describe the natural beauty of shillong by nizzim ezikeil
Answers
Explanation:
Shillong has been the muse to many poets and writers from the Northeast. And yet, literature emerging from the city transcends narrow regional preoccupations
Contemporary Indian literature in English, it would appear, owes to Shillong some of its strongest voices and finest literary talent. The hill town, literary hub of India’s Northeast, has produced poetry and fiction that are keenly aware of a complex politics of location and have ushered in a place-centered poetics. In the 1980s, when Modern Indian Poetry had already been hosted as a genre by Nissim Ezekiel’s scrupulous efforts, in Shillong, poets Ananya Guha, Robin Ngangom and Desmond Kharmawphlang founded the now-defunct Shillong Poetry Circle and they were soon joined by Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih and Anjum Hasan. The poetry conglomeration gained visibility in literary circles as Shillong Poetry Society with the publication of its bi-annual poetry journal, Lyric, in 1992. In 1995, the first and only anthology to date devoted to select poetry and essays on music from Shillong, Gwalia in Khasia, edited by Welsh poet and dramatist Nigel Jenkins, was published by Alun Books from Wales. Over eclectic poetry readings that made them discover deeper resonances for their literary worlds in Pablo Neruda, Czeslaw Milosz, Mahmoud Darwish, Yehuda Amichai, Federico Garcia Lorca and Constantine Cavafy, and through discussions on the works of their contemporaries from the rest of India, these poets sought in regional material a new value for poetry.
The pulls of geography, illuminated by the poets’ Third World literary bias and their distinct relationships with Shillong’s hill-ethos and cosmopolitanism, intricately texture the poetry. Robin Ngangom, poet and poet-maker who has honed the writing of a couple of generations of young poets and more recently anthologised them, reveals an enduring preoccupation with the violence of parochial ethnicity-based territorial demands in Manipur:
When I listen to hills
I hear the voices of my faded life.
Whisky and Mehdi Hasan and
Billie Holiday
make for strange fruit on non-descript evenings …
I’ll leave the bamboo flowering
in the groves of my childhood.
Let rats gnaw at the supine map
of what was once my homeland.
(“First Rain”)
The pulls of geography, illuminated by the poets’ Third World literary bias and their distinct relationships with Shillong’s hill-ethos and cosmopolitanism, intricately texture the poetry
However, the fine-drawn tension that is at the heart of his lyrical-confessional verse derives from the exilic distance between his “homeland”, Imphal, and Shillong, his “adopted” home of the “seven huts” with which he shares an ironic relationship. A poet of deep feeling, Ngangom epitomises his desire to be liberated from the claustrophobia of cartography in a quest for a beloved to be “maples lovers from ancient pasts”.
Desmond Kharmawphlang’s sense of estrangement from his native Khasi culture subsequent to his education in missionary-run institutions occasions poetry of a divided self:
Tyrchiang, the wind among your
pines shames me with its
simplicity, I whose roots draw
deep from books to prop up
my tribal bones. (‘Tyrchiang’)