The Poetic Imagination of Mamang Dai: Landscape, Memory, Myth, and Indigenous Sensibility

Abstract

Mamang Dai occupies a distinctive position in contemporary Indian English poetry through a poetic imagination deeply rooted in the landscapes, memories, oral traditions, myths, and indigenous cultures of Arunachal Pradesh. Her poetry transforms mountains, rivers, forests, rain, mist, birds, trees, stones, and ancestral stories into an imaginative vocabulary through which questions of identity, belonging, history, spirituality, ecological interconnectedness, and cultural survival are articulated. This paper examines the major dimensions of Dai’s poetic imagination, with particular attention to collections such as River Poems, The Balm of Time, and Midsummer Survival Lyrics, while drawing connections with the broader imaginative world represented in The Legends of Pensam. The study argues that Dai’s poetic imagination is fundamentally relational: it resists rigid divisions between human beings and nature, past and present, history and myth, and material and spiritual existence. Her landscapes consequently function not as decorative settings but as living archives containing ancestral and communal memories. The paper further investigates Dai’s transformation of indigenous oral traditions into contemporary English poetry and her use of restrained lyricism, symbolism, mythic consciousness, ecological imagery, silence, memory, and spiritual suggestiveness. Particular emphasis is placed on the river as a recurring imaginative presence that embodies movement, continuity, memory, cultural inheritance, and the relationship between community and place. Dai’s poetry simultaneously records anxiety concerning modernization, cultural erosion, violence, and historical forgetting without romanticizing indigenous existence as static or untouched. Her poetic imagination ultimately creates an alternative literary cartography of Northeast India in which indigenous landscapes become centres of knowledge, memory, and creative consciousness rather than peripheral spaces within dominant national narratives.