Indigenous Consciousness in the Writings of Mamang Dai: Land, Memory, Orality, and Cultural Identity

Abstract

Mamang Dai occupies a significant position in contemporary Indian English literature for her distinctive articulation of the cultural world of Arunachal Pradesh and the indigenous communities of Northeast India. Her poetry and fiction transform indigenous experience from a peripheral subject into a powerful literary discourse centred on land, memory, oral tradition, mythology, spirituality, community, and cultural identity. This paper examines indigenous consciousness in Dai’s writings, with particular attention to her poetry and works such as The Legends of Pensam, The Black Hill, and The Sky Queen. It argues that Dai’s indigenous consciousness is not merely an assertion of ethnic identity but an alternative epistemological framework through which relationships among humans, nature, ancestors, spirits, history, and community are understood. Her literary imagination challenges homogenizing narratives of nation, history, development, and modernity by foregrounding local memories and oral traditions frequently excluded from written historiography. Dai’s landscapes function as repositories of ancestral knowledge, while rivers, forests, mountains, animals, myths, rituals, and stories become participants in cultural remembrance. Particular emphasis is placed on her employment of oral storytelling as a strategy for preserving indigenous knowledge and recovering marginalized histories. The study further explores the tensions between tradition and modernity, written and oral cultures, centre and periphery, and indigenous knowledge and external representations. Dai neither romanticizes indigenous society nor presents it as culturally static; rather, she portrays indigenous identity as adaptive, contested, and continually reconstructed through memory and storytelling. Her writings ultimately establish literature as a space of cultural preservation and intellectual self-representation through which indigenous communities can narrate themselves rather than remain objects of external description.