SMALL TOWNS AND THE RIVER by Mamang Dai

SMALL TOWNS AND THE RIVER

( A BRIEF CRITICAL ANALYSIS)

Mamang Dai is a modern Indian poet of the North -East region. She was born in the Adi tribal community of Arunachal Pradesh. She was raised up in a close vicinity of Nature and thus got an opportunity to understand the tribal life that was intertwined with all aspects of Nature. At the same time, she also observed the growing political unrest and suffering of the common people due to insurgency. All these issues find an expression in her poems.

The North -East region of India has been a site of political tensions for a long time. These tensions exist between the states and the central government as well as between the natives and the migrants from other parts of India. The violent clashes between the insurgents and the army also led to massive bloodshed. This is conveyed in the poem by the line: “Just the other day someone died.” This expression makes it appear as if such deaths due to insurgency are very common and happen almost every day. This is how the poetess conveys the intensity of people’s suffering. The expression “dreadful silence” refers to the curfews after such clashes.

The human life, therefore, is temporary and ephemeral because it ends so soon. The speaker contrasts this perishability of human life with the permanence of rituals and nature. The tribal rituals have been in existence since time immemorial. They have been passed down from one generation to another since thousands of years. Thus, they have a sort of permanence in contrast to the human life which is caught in a vicious cycle of life and death: “Life and death, life and death, /only the rituals are permanent.” The speaker also gives some instances of prevalent rituals. For example, she mentions the ritual of placing the dead with their head pointing westwards so that when their soul rises it would go towards the “golden east”, meaning, heaven.

She celebrates the rich culture and rituals of the North- East region. However, the speaker also expresses a feeling of lament because these perennial rituals and traditions are threatened by the so called modernization. Thus she says: “Small towns grow with anxiety for the future.” Through her poem, the poetess in fact tries to secure these rituals against the waves of time. In this process memory plays an important role. The North-Eastern tribal communities have largely followed an oral culture, in which their myths, folklores, conventions, and beliefs are passed orally from one generation to another. Dai tries to recall those memories from her “shrine of happy pictures” and tries to make her memory more permanent by giving it a written form in the form of this poem.

The speaker also contrasts the transient nature of human life and endeavors with the eternity of nature. In this poem, the world of Nature is represented, primarily, by the river. Whereas human deaths are so frequent, the river is immortal: “the river knows/ the immortality of water.” At the same time, while the human world is marked by sadness and stagnancy, the natural world is full of vigour and movement. This contrast can be observed in the very first stanza of the poem. While the speaker’s hometown lies “calmly” amidst the trees, and “is always the same”, the “dust” is “flying” and the “wind” is “howling down the gorge.”

The Adi tribe, just like Wordsworth, believed in the philosophy of Pantheism. For them the world of Nature was not dead, but alive with spirits. Thus, they worshipped the mountains, the rivers and the trees. Dai herself confessed that for her Nature is “a living presence” with which one can connect and empathies. This thought is reflected in the line: “The river has a soul”. In fact, the world of Nature also responds to the happenings in the human world. For instance, in this poem, the pain and suffering in the human world due to insurgency is echoed in the natural world by the river which cuts through the land “like a torrent of grief.” The erosion of culture and tradition in the North-East also saddens and thus, it “holds its breath” and seeks a land of fish and stars. The land of fish and stars refers to the river’s desire to escape into a mythical land, when the universe was being created and everything was pure. This can also be seen as an allusion to the Australian Aborigine’s folklores about the creation of universe.

From the stylistic aspect too, the poem is a masterpiece. First of all, it is a fine specimen of modern poetry. It has no specific metrical form and is largely written in free verse. But, there are some internal rhymes like: summer/ winter(stanza 1),flying/ howling(stanza 1). There has been an extensive use of repetitions and alliterations. An example of repetition is the line: “Life and death, life and death”(stanza 2). The line “The river has a soul” has been used as a sort of refrain for the stanzas 3 and 4. The repetition of ‘s’(Sibilant) sound is very prominent in the poem. This can be seen in the line: “seeking a land of fish and stars” in which the ‘s’ sound has been repeated four times. All these grant a musical effect to the poem. The poem also contains some beautiful imagery related to the world of nature: “wreath of tuberoses”, “mist on mountaintops”, “cool bamboo, restored in sunlight”. Commenting on the poetic beauty of Dai’s poetry, the famous Indian poet, Keki N. Daruwalla had rightly remarked that her poems are like a “race of fireflies bargaining with the night.”

The poem finally ends on an optimistic note, with the speaker finding a solution for the various problems of the North-East region in the adherence to their age old culture, rituals and spirituality. Thus she says: “In small towns by the river/ we all want to walk with the gods.”