Mamang Dai (born 23 February 1957) is an Indian poet, novelist and journalist from Arunachal Pradesh who writes in English. Her books draw on the landscape, myths and history of the Adi people of the Siang valley, and she is the best-known literary voice of her state. She received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2017 for the novel The Black Hill.
Quick Facts
| Full name | Mamang Dai |
| Born | 23 February 1957, Pasighat, East Siang district, Arunachal Pradesh |
| Age | 69 |
| State | Arunachal Pradesh |
| Community | Adi |
| Education | Pine Mount School, Shillong; Gauhati University (English literature) |
| Occupation | Poet, novelist, journalist |
| Notable works | River Poems, The Legends of Pensam, Stupid Cupid, The Black Hill, Escaping the Land |
| Awards | Padma Shri (2011), Sahitya Akademi Award (2017) |
Early Life
She was born at Pasighat, the oldest town of Arunachal Pradesh, on the Siang river, as the Brahmaputra is called where it comes down from Tibet. Her family belongs to the Adi tribe. Her father was among the first of his people to enter government service. She was sent to school at Pine Mount in Shillong and studied English literature at Gauhati University in Assam.
Civil Service and Journalism
In 1979 she was selected for the Indian Administrative Service, the first woman from Arunachal Pradesh to qualify. She gave up the career to write.
She worked as a journalist, as a correspondent for The Telegraph and the Hindustan Times and for newspapers in the North-East, and in radio and television. She was for a time a programme officer of the World Wide Fund for Nature, working on the biodiversity of the eastern Himalaya, and has been president of the Arunachal Pradesh union of working journalists and a member of the state’s public service commission.
Writing
Non-fiction
Arunachal Pradesh: The Hidden Land (2003), an account of the customs and history of her state, received the state’s first Verrier Elwin Award. Mountain Harvest is about its food.
Poetry
River Poems (2004) established her as a poet. Later collections include The Balm of Time, Hambreelmai’s Loom and Midsummer Survival Lyrics. Her poems are quiet and exact, about rivers, rain, forest and memory, and about a people whose history was carried in song and not in writing.
Fiction
- The Legends of Pensam (2006): linked stories of an Adi village across the twentieth century. “Pensam” means “in between”, the middle ground where the old world and the new meet.
- Stupid Cupid (2008): young women from the North-East making their lives in Delhi
- The Black Hill (2014): a novel built on a real event of the 1850s, the journey of a French priest who tried to reach Tibet through the Mishmi hills and was killed, told through the lives of a tribal woman and the man accused of the murder. It won the Sahitya Akademi Award for English in 2017.
- Escaping the Land (2021): a long novel of Arunachal Pradesh from the frontier days to the present
She has also written books for children retelling the folk tales of her state.
Themes
Her work records a way of life in which every hill and stream has its story and its spirit, and asks what becomes of such a world as roads, dams, schools and the pull of the cities reach it. She writes of her people without exoticism and without lament.
Recognition
- Verrier Elwin Award of the Government of Arunachal Pradesh (2003)
- Padma Shri (2011)
- Sahitya Akademi Award (2017)
Life
She lives in Itanagar, the state capital. She is regularly invited to literary festivals in India and abroad, and her poems are taught in universities.
With Temsula Ao of Nagaland and the Assamese novelist Indira Goswami, she belongs to the generation of writers who brought the literature of the North-East to readers across India.
Featured image: Mamang Dai at the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, March 2023. Photo by Gazal world, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
