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The Legends of Pensam
These words tell us in a nutshell what we ought to expect in this volume. It is not exactly a piece of fiction, but contains a mixture of fascinating portraits, folklore, historic incidents, and personal memorabilia woven around the remote Adis tribe of the valley of Siang in Arunachal Pradesh. We can even call it a journal with a premeditated ordered progression through its four sections: "a diary of the world," "songs of the rhapsodist," "daughters of the village," "a matter of time." With Mamang, we move along the chartered and not so well chartered trails of blood and earth. Through instincts, we come into contact with the remotest of our roots and, like Hoxo, the venerated and elderly tribesman, we remember only that we dropped on the Earth with an explosion of the Sun. Nature connives with this nebulous zone. In uncanny weather long, bloated, menacing, and shiny fruits grow from the aubergine tree and stung by its shade, Kalen the hunter goes berserk. Then come the Shamanic rites, fires, refrains, and dances. All this cannot be simply dismissed as an odd federation of superstitions, as a figment of weak and nervous imagination. When it rains and rains non-stop, survival is the basic question: "Astonishing plants with gills spring up in clumps. Delicate green shoots unfurl into monstrous fans and umbrellas with stinging hair. The wild berry covers itself with ants." When the British officers came, an exotic love story between David Ferguson and Nenem was added to the legends of the land. They built the famous and mysterious Stillwell road following the ancient trails of Marco Polo and Genghis Khan. The natives found indescribable the ways and energy of the English, who drove the elephants through the lashing rains and "many of the poor animals lost their footing and hurtled off the mountainside, bellowing like mythical beasts with their eyes rolled up skywards." The natives questioned tersely what had these roads given them—Thieves, diseases, misfortunes? The tribeswomen were daughters of solitudes and miracles. Through their marriages, clans were connected. When it rained ominously, they split the bamboos in their kitchens and long green snakes slithered out. If anyone asked how it all happened, they would retort: "Why reason?" They were the women of deep instincts, the upholders of the culture: mysterious themselves. They lived in the scent of the orange blossoms making their men stoic and strong. When Nenem died, Kao grew "stronger because he had accepted that he would remain inconsolable for the rest of his life." But life changes, even in the remotest nook. Tarred roads have generated a new township of Pigo-concrete buildings, electricity, daily bazaars, some smart travelling saleswomen, some singing stage sensations, and youngsters throttling up their new-fangled bikes. Amid this chaos, Menga, an old displaced artist, weakly protests: "But I want the old days back… it was the time my soul sang at its loudest and saddest." Mamang adds her note of bitterness: "We are peripheral people. We are not politicians, scientists, or builders of empires. Not even the well-known citizen or the outrageous one. Just peripheral people, thinking out our thoughts." She believes in the resilient power of the Adis: "What a place indeed. Hadn’t it survived for so long? Wouldn’t it survive these winds of change as well?"
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FOR Mamang Dai, the word "Pensam"
is a metaphor suggesting "hidden spaces of the heart where a secret garden
grows. It is that small world where anything can happen and everything can be
lived; where the narrow boat that we call life sails along somehow in calm or
stormy weather; where the life of a man can be measured in the span of a
song."