AMBIVALENCE AND RESISTANCE: THE COMPLEXITIES OF POSTCOLONIAL AGENCY IN MAMANG DAI’S THE LEGENDS OF PENSAM

Abstract

A powerful voice in Indian Anglophone fiction and Postcolonial literature, Mamang Dai spotlights Postcolonial themes throughout her corpus like no other. Ostensibly, she treats local and indigenous issues; however, an in-depth analysis of her structures prefigures her as a voice of the voiceless marginalized, Dalits, subalterns and the oppressed social classes. Dai projects Northeast India as exotic Other in terms of culture, social setting and thought patterns. Her novel, The Legends of Pensam, highlights the significance of indigenousness and nativism; however, at the same time, her focus is on the colonizers and truly inclined towards colonial legacies as well. Consequently, it creates various ambivalent and in-between spaces. The present study, therefore, critiques her novel as an ambivalent text: simultaneously directed against colonial as well as aboriginal legacies in terms of culture, religion, race and language. The study concludes that the novel projects religious, cultural, social, racial and linguistic ambivalence and the ambivalent behaviours of the colonized towards the colonizers. The present work exploits qualitative mode of inquiry where textual analysis and close-reading have mainly been focused up to last possible extent. As for the hermeneutics of the study is concerned, Homi K. Bhabha and Frantz Fanon’s theory of ambivalence has been applied as theoretical and critical tool to give fresh interpretations to Dai’s scholarship by new modes of reading.