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This article proposes a maternal-postmemory framework to examine intergenerational trauma, truth-telling, and land-based resilience in the poetry of two contemporary Indian Indigenous writers: Jacinta Kerketta (Oraon, Jharkhand) and Aruni Kashyap (Assam). Drawing primarily on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory and Gerald Vizenor’s survivance, it argues that maternal figures and more-than-human kin (trees and rivers) serve as embodied transmitters of cultural memory and agents of Indigenous futurity amid ongoing dispossession and state violence. In Kerketta’s Angor (2016) and Land of the Roots (2018), Oraon mothers and sacred forests resist extractive mining in Sârandâ. In Kashyap’s There Is No Good Time for Bad News (2021), Assamese mothers navigate the repetitive grief of the ULFA insurgency, with the Brahmaputra River embodying both trauma and transformation. These poetics function as polyphonic testimonios that contest necropolitical erasure while asserting land’s pedagogical and resilient agency. The comparative reading contributes to postcolonial studies by foregrounding Indigenous maternal knowledge in India’s internal-colonial regions.
Ms. Jaspreet Kaur. “Maternal Postmemory and Land Resilience in the Poetry of Jacinta Kerketta and Aruni Kashyap.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 4, August 2026, pp. 440-460. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n4.27.
Open Access · CC BY 4.0 · Crossref DOI ·
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