Locating the “Northeast”: Global, National, Regional and Local Novels of Siddhartha Deb, Mamang Dai and Anjum Hasan

Abstract

Well into the 1950s and 60s, literary critic K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar was still wondering whether “Indo-Anglian” literature, as it was called then, should be evaluated as “a minor tributary of English literature” or as another tributary of Indian literature. By the 1970s, Meenakshi Mukherjee, another emerging stalwart, made a compelling case for evaluating “Indo-Anglian” novels not as part of the wider tradition of the English novel but independently as a “branch of Indian fiction”.