Miya Poetry and identity politics: poetics of resistance in North East India

Resistance literature in third-world countries became the voice of dispossessed people against the cultural hegemony of colonial powers. However, in postcolonial Indian context, resistance literature has evolved into a powerful tool of political dissent in at least two ways. First, it has moved beyond the framework of resistance against European colonialism. Second, it has shed its underground nature to become a public spectacle. Within this new theoretical formulation, this essay examines Miya poetry as a problematic category in the context of resistance literature from North East India. This study contends that Miya poetry could become a faux pas, that can result in religious polarisation. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s idea of ‘closure,’ the essay argues that although Miya identity’s formation of subject position is attempted through discursivity, it is based in closure. This closure consolidates the common cultural and religious factors of a homogenous group that has a ‘constitutive outside.’