‘Lapbah: Volume One and Two’: A rare voyage across the cultures and languages of North-East India

The fifty-seven stories contained within the two volumes of Lapbah: Stories from the North-East are testimonies of what it means to belong from the region, often homogenised and reduced to parochial. Much like the sound of the heavy rain of Sohra, the lapbah, the deluge of such stories carries with it truths that otherwise remain hushed. In their Introduction to the anthology, editors Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih and Rimi Nath elaborate on the issues that readers might expect to encounter across the narratives. What the stories end up offering is the rare experience of a voyage, one taken across cultures and languages as distinct as they are dense.

Structurally, the anthology is divided into two volumes. Volume one contains 29 short stories, while volume two has 28. These include writings originally in English as well as translations into English from the regional languages. Dividing the anthology into two parts seems desirable when one realises the plurality of cultures that mark the region. Each story included here has its distinct autonomy, a kind of independence as vast as the landscapes it belongs to.

The familiar and the unfamiliar

Written by 52 writers of different ethnicities, these stories evoke the familiar and the unfamiliar with seamless precision. 23 out of the 52...

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