Decoding Sense of Place and Contested Cultural Landscapes in Select Manipuri Poems

More often than not, a foregrounded physical landscape has the effect, intended or not, of concealing the reality of people who inhabit it. This is especially true of the idealised landscape descriptions one finds in Manipuri poetry. Scholarly analyses have focused on the aesthetics of this poetry’s consistent engagement with the physical landscape, but in the wake of Manipur’s ongoing ethno-territorial and ethno-nationalistic conflicts, revisiting Manipuri poetry from a revisionist perspective becomes germane. It is now more pertinent than ever to analyse Manipuri history and its infamous hill-valley divide through its poetry by adopting a spatial lens, as the notion of “homeland” itself is a contested construct. An exclusive focus on the aesthetics of the physical landscape is no longer relevant and, moreover, undermines the phenomenological underpinnings that these works bear. This paper, perforce, challenges the fundamental orientations that have dominated the analyses of landscape in poetry, a trend established in large part by the idealist traditions of the XVIII and XIX centuries. This will result in a problematization of the concept of “landscape,” shifting the focus from Manipur’s natural landscape to its cultural landscape. It further posits that landscape is, essentially, contested geography. Through the use of humanistic geography, this paper dovetails history, geography, spatiality and poetic language to decode the sense of place that emerges from selected poems of Rajkumar Bhubonsana, Saratchand Thiyam and Arambam Ongbi Memchoubi. It is hoped that this article will engender a novel perspective with which to appreciate and understand Manipuri poetry.