This article attempts a post-pastoral reading of Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s The Yearning of Seeds through the concept of reconnection in the context of contemporary socio-political and environmental conditions of Meghalaya. The traditional Khasi belief system considers the physical environment as sacred, but at the present time the Khasi Hills are experiencing reckless plundering of natural resources as commodities for consumption. Nongkynrih probes deeply into the present relationship between the Khasi Hills and the Khasi culture, and engages in a complex negotiation with this society and its environment. This negotiation leads to the realization of the need for establishing a renewed relationship between the Khasi Hills and the Khasi culture in the present context of a changing environment and the withering of the traditional culture. A post-pastoral reading of Nongkynrih’s poems exposes the complexity of the negotiation that leads to this realization, of a new sense of Khasi experience and identity.

No abstract

No abstract

In this article I attempt to show the Ao-Nagas’ experience of living in the hills under pre-industrial and industrial systems as represented in the poems of Temsula Ao, an award-winning poet from Nagaland, India. Ao represents the pre-industrial cultural landscape as peaceful, simple, and harmonious and uses the devices of idealization, nostalgia, and return and retreat, and represents the industrial cultural landscape as discordant and as constituting a struggle for survival. I argue that the powerful critical tool of post-pastoral reveals the dynamic ecopoetics in Ao’s poems.