MYTHOLOGY
In between the worlds
RANJITA BISWAS
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Mamang Dai gives us a glimpse of a tiny corner largely unknown to the outside world.
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The Legends of Pensam; Mamang Dai, Penguin, , pages 192, Price: Rs. 200.
IN many vernacular languages sprouting from Sanskrit, adi means the first, the beginning. The stories of the Adi tribe of Arunachal Pradesh encompassing myths, oral histories but echoing to the present as in Mamang Dai's The Legends of Pensam exude the same kind of feeling, as if they have been flowing in seamlessly from time immemorial to this day.
Middle ground
The word pensam has a special meaning too, as the author explains: it means "in-between" — a middle ground — "but it may also be interpreted as the hidden spaces of the heart where a secret garden grows." Here nothing is out of the world, anything can happen. For, life is but a little boat that traverses through a gentle stream as well as a river in spate, and man has to accept it.
The Adis are one of the 26 major tribes (not counting numerous sub-clans) of Arunachal Pradesh, formerly known as NEFA, lying at the foothills of the Himalayas and sharing international borders with Bhutan, China and Myanmar. Being adherents of the animistic faith, the Adis believe in co-existence with the natural world and the spirit that is part of the forests, rivers and the vales. Thus their stories reflect a half-revealed and half-concealed world, sometimes to be felt by the subconscious rather than seen with ordinary eyes.
Violence too lurks behind the serene hills, true to Nature with its two facets. Witness the story about the sudden and mysterious death of Kalen, the hunter, or in the way Kamur, a perfectly normal man, suddenly takes up a dao (machete) and hacks his baby-girl and lunges at his wife (Pinyar, the widow). Later overcome with remorse at what he had done he asks for forgiveness pleading that he had no memory of those "black moments". Though the people condemn him, they also know that "it was a nebulous zone that divided the world of spirits and men" and that "real could well be an illusion".
The mythical stories of the tribe is linked to the present by the presence of a city-dweller, or a high profile journalist — a distraught mother of a child who suddenly stops speaking; she now travels to meet another woman like her in the far away hills ("The Silence of Adela and Kepi") whose child also suffered from the same affliction `due to a spirit' and in the process learns to accept it because `these things happen".
Different feel
This device gives the book a different feel from a straight narrative of folk tales and the reader becomes both an observer — looking from a distance at a lifestyle that seems alien and quaint, but at the same time a participant mesmerised by the legends.
It is an interesting way of presenting an ethnic group's cultural ethos and beliefs, which would seem unreal to modern sensibilities. But then one suddenly realises that such oral traditions reflecting a people's values and beliefs have been part of every community through the ages though they may have been submerged in the clatter of the machine-age. It is from this view too that a book like Dai's is valuable because while it gives readers the glimpse of a tiny corner of a world largely unknown to the outside world, it also preserves in print nuggets of oral history.
Mamang Dai is a poet too and her lyrical quality runs eloquently through her narration. "When Huxo first opened his eyes to the world, he saw green. A green wall of trees and bamboo, and a green waterfall that sprayed his cheek and washed the giant fern that seemed to be waving to him." ("The boy who fell from the sky"). The beautiful cover design adds to the charm of the book.
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