LAPBAH — A Literary Voyage into the Soul of the North-East
Sometimes, literature does what history books and news reports cannot. It enters the private rooms of people’s lives. It captures fear, memory, identity, joy, humour, trauma — not through grand speeches or political essays, but through human stories.
LAPBAH: Volume One and Volume Two — jointly edited by Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih and Rimi Nath — is one such landmark. This two-volume anthology from Penguin India brings together 57 stories from across the North-East, written originally in English or translated into English from regional languages. It is not just a collection. It is a cultural map.
For decades, the North-East has been treated like a monolithic block in mainstream imagination. LAPBAH deliberately breaks this illusion. It shows eight states, eight histories, eight emotional climates — each with its own distinct voice.
Beyond Stereotypes: Entering Eight Worlds
The anthology draws from Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram, Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim.
Assam has the largest representation — partly because its literary infrastructure and English translation tradition has been stronger for longer. But what makes LAPBAH important is that it also features voices from states that rarely get mainstream publishing space — especially Arunachal, Mizoram and Sikkim.
This is not a tourist brochure-style depiction.
It is rooted. Dense. Specific.
It is how people from the North-East see themselves — rather than how outsider media frames them.
Themes that reflect real life
This anthology explores:
- memory and heritage
- belonging and displacement
- ethnic faultlines
- gender and emotional trauma
- nature as both healer and destroyer
- the tension between modern identity and ancient tradition
In the North-East, rivers, hills and forests are not backdrops. They are characters. They decide life and death. Floods repeatedly erase homes, and the land constantly shapes the psychology of its people.
Stories like the Manipuri writer Nee Devi’s “Dead Child” open the door into inner wounds — particularly the silent suffering of women.
Temsula Ao’s “Laburnum for My Head” reflects how the desire to not be forgotten becomes a private rebellion against the erasure of heritage.
These are not abstract creative writing exercises. They come from lived history.
Why this anthology is so necessary now
Even today, the North-East remains under-discussed in mainstream Indian culture, except during elections, ethnic violence, a disaster, or a conflict headline.
But people are more than the traumatic events that make national news.
They have childhoods, lovers, dilemmas, jokes, family feuds, secrets, pride, shame, ambition. And the anthology re-humanises a region that has been reduced too often to “security problem” or “remote frontier”.
True national integration does not happen through official speeches.
It happens when we begin to read each other’s stories.
The honest weakness — and the future potential
The Scroll review points out a structural imbalance — some states have far more representation than others. This is not necessarily the editors’ fault — this reflects real disparities in translation funding, visibility, and publishing access.
But at least LAPBAH has opened the channel. It has laid down the pipeline. The next step is to widen it — include younger voices, include more women, more writers from remote districts, more stories in endangered languages.
This anthology should not be the end. It should be the beginning of a series of North-Eastern literary excavations.
LAPBAH as Cultural Resistance
In many ways, LAPBAH performs a quietly radical act: it recentres the North-East as a producer of culture, not an exotic fringe region.
It refuses the stereotype that the North-East is a single identity. It shows it as a continent of micro-identities — each with its own moral logic and emotional world.
This is the power of this anthology.
It shows India that the North-East need not always be understood through conflict, insurgency, border politics or electoral narratives. It can be understood through the mind of a child, a mother grieving silently, an old person remembering a lost landscape, a village wrestling with its own traditions.
Literature achieves what no policy document can:
it makes us feel the interior life of other people.
LAPBAH Volume One and Two is more than an anthology. It is a cultural mirror held up to a vast region that has always been diverse inside itself. It invites readers from the rest of India to step inside those worlds — slowly, respectfully, and with curiosity.
It may not solve the political misunderstandings, but it performs a deeper function: it builds empathy. And empathy is the foundation of any genuine understanding.
If India wants to see the North-East not as “the other”, but as part of its shared self — then reading these volumes is not optional. It is necessary.
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