For people without a (written) history of their own, memory becomes an essential instrument against both the accidental and willful erasure of history. The history of northeast region of India, predominantly written by colonial administrators and western ethnographers, marginalises and silences the voices of the tribals inhabiting the region. The literary fiction by the Sahitya Akademi Award winning author Mamang Dai, from the Adi tribe of Arunachal Pradesh, India, attempts to address and rectify this by reimagining and reconstructing the historical events from an insider’s perspective.

The paper draws from Aleida Assman work "Texts, Traces, Trash: The Changing Media of Cultural Memory" in which she discusses about different routes to access the past by bypassing texts and traditions, and concentrating on non-textual traces such as ruins and relics, fragments and sherds, and songs and tales of a neglected old tradition (129). By engaging in a close reading of Mamang Dai’s novel The Legends of Pensam (2006), the paper aims to illustrate how the past can be accessed and reimagined through various mediums including texts (in the form of official records, archives, historical works), individual and collective memories (that are often passed down orally), traditions (such as ritualistic performances and oral folklore), or through other traces (such as dilapidated structures, memorial stones, photographs). The paper concludes by stating how through these diverse traces of the past, the author successfully presents a more cohesive view of the past that includes the marginalised voices.

Authors:
Shilpy Jain, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India

About the Presenter(s)
Shilpy Jain is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India. She is currently working on Anglophone Northeast Indian Literature.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Monday Schedule

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