Linguistic Effacement and Women’s Translational Agency in Arunachal Pradesh during the COVID-19 Lockdown: Reading Mamang Dai’s The Inheritance of Words

Abstract

With the rise of missionary, Hindi and English medium schools in Arunachal Pradesh, there is an everyday effacement of local language and literature. The familiar vernacular has slowly become defamiliar to the local people and this demands the need for translation. This is a very practical problem as expressed by Mamang Dai in her literary endevours. Covid lockdown brought the intellectuals of the state together to write down their literature which is continually getting lost. In this paper, I have discussed the role of women writers and their contribution towards the development and revival of tribal folklore of Arunachal Pradesh. Their work adds to the corpus of literature of North East and English literature on the whole. Mamang Dai in her edited book 'The Inheritance of Words' (2021) discusses the writings of different writers and their uniqueness lies in the fact that they look at the tribal life of their regionthrough their lived experience and the special outlook and knowledge they have inherited from their mothers and grandmothers. Most of these writers have taken the recourse of English as their language of expression but their ethos can be placed in their mother tongue which is specific to their tribe.