Indian Writing

The Legends of Pensam, by journalist, poet and former civil servant Mamang Dai, is an affecting work that intertwines myth, legend, history and memoir to record the life stories of the Adi tribe of Arunachal Pradesh. The stories, set in the beautiful Siang River Valley, are loosely structured around a family of Adis across several generations. The first story is about a “boy who fell from the sky”; at the end of the book, grown old, he sits with his granddaughter, peering through a pair of ancient binoculars. The intervening pages tell us what happened during these years and before them, harking back all the way to the Adi creation myths.

In the early part of the twentieth century, the first encounter between the British “migluns” and the Adis ended in a tragic massacre and a stone memorial; years later, a love affair between a young Adi woman and a British officer was also fated to end in sadness, but with happier memories. Meanwhile, the years go by like a river rushing through the landscape.

Dai’s sensitive, layered narration records the myriad details of life in this rain-drenched terrain: green shoots, wild insects, red clay, narrow footbridges across torrential streams, hard rain on tin roofs, green plaintain-leaf umbrellas. The land comforts her: “This is your land. Whatever happens, there is nothing to fear.”

But this is also a harsh, unforgiving terrain where women ache with the physical strain of walking up and down steep hillsides bearing baskets of wood on their backs. While the men go out on long and dangerous hunting expeditions, the women dream – of speaking English, of creating a flower garden on a rocky slope, of finding love. An old man tends his cabbages, a bitter woman yearns for life in a town choked with plastic, and young boys tear around on motorbikes in their yearning for the secrets of modernity.

“What happens to the people and the places we forget? Where do they go?” wonders Dai as she reflects on her project of recording the Adi life story. The forests contain generations of secret griefs even before they have been torn into by the implacable onslaught of modernity. With the building of the roads comes more sorrow. A road is built for the war – “a-man-a-mile road”, the Stillwell road “that wound through Asia like a giant serpent” for over a thousand miles across three countries. This rapacious enterprise swallows up the lives of trees, forest life, even working elephants – “many of the poor animals lost their footing and hurtled off the mountainside bellowing like mythical beasts with their eyes rolled up skywards”. “Legends of Pensam” is not only the story of a people but of their natural world, the world that we share.

(in Time Out)