Summary of Small Towns and River by Mamang Dai:

 The poem, Small Towns and the River by Mamang Dai expresses the poet’s notion about the uncomplicated life  in the “Small Towns” of Arunachal Pradesh. The phrase “The River” refers to the river that flows through Pasighat, the hometown of the poet.

The poet starts the poem in a pensive mood asserting the fact that the river always reminds her of death. Her hometown resides amid the serenity of nature surrounded by huge trees. The climate of the place remains almost the same during summer and winter. The dust hovers in the air and the wind resonates through the valley of the mountain. When someone died the other day, the community endured the pain and mourned the loss of a dear one in ‘dreadful silence.’ Life and death form the cycle of human life and death is inevitable. Only the rituals and customs of a community are permanent, like offering a wreath of tuberoses to honour the deceased.

 The poet imagines that the river has a soul. In summer, it cuts through the dry chest of the land and flows like a ‘torrent of grief’. Sometimes, the river pines for the land of ‘fish and star’ which refers to the time of creation. The poet conceives the river as a sagacious entity, who witnessed the first raindrop on the earth. It was the first one to stretch through the towns. The river knows the mists on the mountain tops as well as the fact that water has immortality.

For the poet, the river is a repository of the sweet memories of her childhood, ‘a shrine of happy pictures. The anxiety of the invasion of all-engulfing foreign cultures foreshadows the poet’s happy memories. According to the traditions of the Adi tribe, the dead are buried in the west, so that when the dead enters into the journey of his or her afterlife, he or she can walk straight to the east to reach his or her ultimate destination, the abode of the sun. Like the pristine nature of the village of the poet, amid the cool shade of bamboo trees and sparkling sunlight, life is as simple and uncomplicated as that. All the people of her community have only one aspiration, to be united with their creator after death, or ‘to walk with their Gods.’

 The poem is a quintessence of Mamang Dai’s poetic caliber and brilliant use of imagery and symbols. It celebrates ethnicity, mysticism, and pantheism. The poet also broods on the transient nature of human life, the permanence of the traditional rituals, and the mutability and ephemeral nature of human life. The poem reflects the poet’s nostalgia towards tribal myths, mountains, and rivers of her native land. Moreover, there is a hint of resistance to foreign influence in her tone.

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