Against the Waiting
Room: Reading River and Mountain Time in Mamang Dai’s “The Voice of the
Mountain” and “Small Towns and the River” through Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Critique
of Historicism
Sagnik Chakraborty
Guest Lecturer (UG & PG)
Narasinha Dutt College
Howrah, West Bengal, India
Abstract: Critical
scholarship on Mamang Dai’s poetry has predominantly viewed her works through
the lens of ecocriticism, Northeast regionalism and tribal ethnography. These
perspectives show Dai’s interaction with the landscape and oral traditions of
Arunachal Pradesh, but they reduce her poetry only to a cultural artifact and
even to an ecological lament. While
Dai’s poetry defies the linear modern time created by the state sponsored
development, it rejects the idea of reducing the indigenous people to something
“unspoiled” and premodern. A closer look at Dai’s work shows that her temporal
politics are aimed not only at preserving memory but also at disrupting
traditional historical narratives that do not take into account the
postcolonial frontier spaces. This paper will argue that Mamang Dai’s river
poems constitute a sustained critique of Historicism, the assumption that
societies move through a single, universal sequence toward Modernity. Drawing
on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Provincializing Europe”, it reads Arunachal Pradesh’s
representation as a “not yet” region, consigned to the “waiting room history”
as the developmental logic Dai’s poetry contests. Through close reading of “The
Voice of the Mountain” and “Small Towns and the River”, the paper makes it
evident, that each of the two poems relies on the cyclical recurrence process,
which means that people undergo changes but the rituals keep on repeating. The
river is marked by acceptance of this recurrence, while the mountain, although
accepting this recurrence, refuses to find consolation there.. Utilizing
Chakrabarty’s concept of History 1, which refers to the universal narrative of
capitalism and nation state, and History 2, which signifies the differing
lifeworlds that intervene between the two, the paper argues that Dai does not
reject modernity entirely, but rejects its authority as a measure of her
community’s value. In this context, subaltern studies has been taken beyond
colonial and states’ records into the realm of lyrical memory, addressing the
insufficiency of Northeast Indian literary research, as Chakrabarty’s analysis
of historicism has not been transferred to poetry. In summary, the paper
scrutinizes “minority time” as a concept in the evaluation of the marginal
literature of the Indian periphery.
Keywords: Mamang Dai, Arunachal Pradesh, Northeast Indian Poetry,
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Historicism
Introduction: Mamang
Dai’s poetry is frequently interpreted according to what it depicts, which
consists of rivers, jungles, mountains, and the life of the Adi tribes in
Arunachal Pradesh. Ecocritical evaluations highlight her sensitivity toward
nature, regional readings orient her within the emerging discourse of Northeast
India in literature, while the ethnographic perspective tokenizes her poetry as
a testimony of tradition and history of culture. Nevertheless, she is concerned
with the past that cannot remain in the past, rivers that flow again, and the
places that stay regardless of the arrival of roads, towns, and nations. This
paper applies the concept of preoccupation as per Dipesh Chakrabarty’s critique
of historicism. Chakrabarty, in his book “Provincializing Europe”, describes
historicism as that which believes in the unfolding of history in a single,
universal sequence first in Europe and then in other regions. This, has reduced
the developing non western societies to what one can call the “waiting room of
history” and a “not yet” space. Here, non Western societies are
“not-yet-modern,” “not-yet-developed,” and “not-yet-fully-arrived.” He further
states that there are two kinds of pasts. The first kind, termed history 1, is
the past that capital and the nation state consider as their precondition. That
includes the scientifically universal story of human progress. The second kind
comprises the multiple pasts and lifeworlds that are not part of the
universality of human history. It does not oppose History 1 from outside but
interrupts and influences that very history.
This is particularly relevant to Arunachal Pradesh, a
frontier region that is often referred to as being remote and developing.
Chakrabarty’s critique of historicism has not been applied to Dai’s poetry. The
current paper, thus, aims to fill this gap. The paper mainly focuses on two of
Dai’s “River Poems”. In the poem titled “Small Towns and the River,” we are
presented with a small town, a modernity in process, alongside a river that is
older and has been there for generations. The poem “The Voice of the Mountain,”
on the other hand, gives a voice to the mountain bringing into focus the landscape.
In a very clear yet emotionally resonant language, Dai’s appeal, grounded in a
deep sense of place, reaches beyond the merely local. To the end of the poem,
when it states, “I am the place where memory escapes/ the myth of time, / I am
the sleep in the mind of the mountain,” the speaker dissolves into the
landscape itself. The mountain moves from an active narrator telling a story to
an immortal land where human history, tribal folklore, and natural cycles rest
beyond the limits of time.
When read in conjunction, these poems juxtapose two modes
of time with the linear progression of development. The main aim of this paper
is to figure out how the poems “Small Towns and the River” and “The Voice of
the Mountain” utilize the river and the mountain to challenge the developmental
time of the nation state, and what this means for lyric poetry in subaltern
studies. The paper contends that Dai denies modernity the right to serve as a
yardstick for her community and that these poems create an “anti archive” of History
2 within lyric memories.
Theoretical Framework: Chakrabarty and the Waiting Room
of History:
Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Provincializing Europe” challenges
the standard concepts for constructing in the history of humankind. His
argument is that the historicist approach considers progress through the prism
of a single chronological timeline, according to which modernity begins in
Europe and non Western countries are just its followers. In other words, his
theory suggests that a variety of cultural and social differences is converted
into a period of “living in a waiting room of history,” where colonial and
post-colonial territories live through the state of constant deferred
modernity. Likewise, modern theories on development repeat the same error, evaluating
the processes of development only against the pre established endpoint defined
by the Western civilization.
Northeast India is especially exposed to this way of
thinking. Sanjib Baruah has shown how the region has been treated as a
frontier, a place of security worries and delayed integration of a place with
its own history. Arunachal Pradesh, often called remote and not developed is
near the center of the “not yet.” This gives the theory a place here.
Chakrabarty’s ideas are being used to understand a poetry written from inside a
region that the nation state has put in the waiting room.
Chakrabarty presents two concepts that are the basis of
this article. History 1 indicates the past is the basis that the capital and
modern state understands to be the history of the economic progress, of the
citizen, of the nation. History 2 indicates all the pasts that differ from the
progress story. They are the ways of life, the relationships with land,
community, gods, and memory that capital encounters and cannot involve. The
only thing Chakrabarty is careful about is that History 2 is not some kind of
alternative. It coexists with History 1, interferes in it and negates its claim
to be the history. Progress is relevant here because this is not the case of
looking back with nostalgia. I expect Dai’s poems to present the town, road,
the state as things. Chakrabarty’s “Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts” states
that some pasts cannot become history without changing.
This topic must be clarified because Chakrabarty is a
historian whose area of specialization is connected with texts, documents, and
archives. To start with, Chakrabarty claims that something related to time
becomes the object of the poem through the repetition of words, images, and
rhythm. Then there’s the point he makes about “minority pasts” being contained
in memories or stories but not in books so that poems by Mamang Dai could use
the past as a source of information. Lastly, various researchers have already
applied Chakrabarty’s ideas to literature.
From all mentioned above, the term “minority time” should
play the key role. It refers to the time structure where the elements of past
events exist in the present time. The term adds Chakrabarty’s concept of
“minority histories” but does not deny it. The term is introduced due to its
originality and should be used where the texts can be employed to prove it.
Reading Small Towns and the River: Ritual, Return and the
Refusal of Wait:
First, in its assertion about time, the poem gives
precedence to time over space. According to Dai “Small towns always remind me
of death,” and as it unfolds, this particular town is described as being
characterized by repetition. The town is described as “always the same, / in
summer or in winter.” An historicist analysis interprets this repetition as
indicative of stinginess, suggesting the town has refused to change from its
status as a frontier town. However, what this poem indicates is that “sameness”
could be interpreted positively as a continuity as it underpins the process of
mourning rituals. In a way, this is the first indication of what Chakrabarty
terms as History 2, the phenomenon of living in time that is characterized by
the lack of ability to compare oneself against universal history; that beckons
him “to more effective narratives of human belonging”.
Death counts as the main event of the poem where Dai
works with it via repetition instead of storytelling. Following a death, people
attending the funeral see “the sad wreath of tuberose” where the speaker
summarizes the situation in the form of “Life and death, life and death, / only
the rituals are eternal”. Thanks to this repeated thought, time takes the form
of a cycle. It explains the place of sustainability. It is in rituals, not in
progress or institutions or even future. The form demonstrates this. The short
lines of the poem, its refrains as well as the repeated “Sometimes, /
sometimes” in the third stanza lead not to progress but rather to repetition.
The river expands the idea of the poem beyond humanity.
The first and the second part start from the common statement, “The river has a
soul,” while the refrain emphasizes that river becomes the center the poem
returns to all the time. The river possesses cyclical knowledge. It knows the
path of the water “from the first drop of rain to dry earth / and mist on the
mountaintops,” so “the immortality of water”. Rain, river, earth and mist
create a closed circuit where nothing disappears. The river also cuts through
the land “like a torrent of grief” in summer, and at other times seems to hold
“its breath,” as if waiting (stanza 3). The river carries grief and continuity
together, which is why it works as a counter-archive. It stores what the town
cannot, in a memory that no document records.
The poem does not, however, pretend that linear time is
absent. In stanza 5 it records a pressure that belongs to the town and not to
the river: “Small towns grow with anxiety / for the future.” This is the poem’s
only forward looking line, and it is framed as anxiety. Here History 1 makes
its entrance, as the expectation that a place must develop towards something,
and the poem records it as a source of unease rather than promise. It is
significant that this line is between two images of ritual memory. Just before
it, “a shrine of happy pictures / marks the days of childhood,” and just after
it, the dead are laid out according to a cosmology. The shrine of pictures
deserves attention. Photographs are a modern technology of memory, yet the poem
folds them into a domestic shrine and so into ritual. Modernity is present, but
it is absorbed into a lifeworld that does not depend on it. This is what
Chakrabarty means when he insists that History 2 does not stand outside History
1. The two coexist, and the poem shows that coexistence in a single image.
The idea of the dead cosmology also goes further. “The
dead face west.” / When the soul rises / it goes toward the eastern sun”
(stanza 5). There is movement directionally, but no momentum. The soul moves
from west to east, from death to light according to a path predetermined by
ritual and faith. Time here functions as direction without a development. It
has an end that is also a coming back to the sun that rises regularly. In my
view, this is the poem’s strongest criticism of historicism, as it demonstrates
the community’s own understanding of where time goes that has nothing to do
with the national or market.
There is an obvious objection that requires addressing.
If the town is “always the same,” is Dai not portraying the stasis that
historicism associates with the frontier? The answer to the objection is in the
manner in which the poem perceives “sameness”. It does not portray sameness as
a deficiency, nor does the poem apologize for it or wait for the change to
come. The speaker grieves in it, makes sense of it, and concludes with an
affirmation of it. The poem does not deny that there is a change occurring. The
poem rather denies that change is the sole indicator of importance.
The affirmation comes at the conclusion of the poem. “In
the cool bamboo, / restored in the sunlight, / life matters, like this”. The
phrase “like this” is central to the affirmation. It places value in the
present, in these conditions, and in this light, without deferring it to some
future moment. The final line of the poem shifts from the speaker’s “I” to the
collective “we”: “In small towns by the river / we all want to walk with the
gods”. The verb “want” is in the present tense. It is a wish that is current,
shared, and not some aim to be fulfilled at some future time. No waiting is
required anywhere in this poem. It is in this way that it refuses the waiting
room. The town is no longer “not yet.” It is, by the end of the poem, a place
where life has meaning and where one may approach the gods.
Reading “The Voice of the Mountain”: The Mountain’s Time:
Where “Small Towns and the River” speaks from inside a
community, “The Voice of the Mountain” Begins above it. The speaker sits on
“the high platform” and looks at “ferry lights crossing / criss-crossing the
big river”. This is modern flow viewed from above and below, with
communications laid out. The speaker can “outline the chapters of the world”.
The use of ‘chapters’ implies history as narrative sequence, History 1 in
Chakrabarty’s terms, surveyed from a vantage point which sees it, but is not
part of it.
The poem turns to an encounter. A young man arrives who
“could not speak’ and brings ‘a gift of fish”. The speaker’s response is the
poem’s clearest statement of coexistence: ‘
“such acts are repeated: / We live in territories forever
ancient and new”. A territory here is neither ancient nor new, but both, which
is Chakrabarty’s point that History 2 does not stand outside History 1 but
interrupts it. The languages are ‘changing’, so repetition is not stasis. The
speaker’s own response is not refusal. He leaves his “spear leaning by the tree
/ and try to make a sign”. Contact with the outside is met by translation and
disarmament.
The voice changes as the poem states “I am an old man
sipping the breeze / that is forever young” joins age and youth together in one
image, and “In my life I have lived many lives” makes plurality a feature of
the self. Historicism narrates one life-course for a people. This speaker has
many. The voice then becomes geological: “My voice is sea waves and mountain
peaks,” and it is “the chance syllable that orders the world / Instructed with
history and miracles”. Order is achieved by “chance,” which negates teleology.
And “history and miracles” are placed side by side, with history not given higher
priority. Chakrabarty makes a similar argument in “The Time of History and the
Times of Gods,” where gods and spirits turn up as actors in lifeworlds that
historicism can only file as belief. The poem presents them as part of the
record.
The poem’s knowledge is bodily, not archival. “The past
that recreates itself” is a past that is not finished, and the speaker knows
“these things / as rocks know, burning in the sun’s embrace”. The well known
line “a cloud is a cloud is a cloud” states irreducibility and breaks into
feeling: the cloud is “this uncertain pulse / that sits over my heart”.
Meteorology and affect are held in one image, which is how the poem sticks to a
register that a documentary archive would have difficulty recording. At this
point the poem complicates any reading of the mountain as serene continuity.
“In the end the universe yields nothing / except a dream of permanence. / Peace
is a falsity”. This unsettles my reading of the river poem too, where “only the
rituals are permanent.” The mountain distrusts permanence, so History 2 here is
not a consoling timelessness. What comes next is loss and violence: “a moment
of rest comes after long combat”, the warrior returns “with the blood of
peonies”, and the speaker is “the child who died at the edge of the world”. The
frontier’s injuries are inside the voice. The last figure is the most striking:
“the woman lost in translation / who survives, with happiness to carry on”.
Translation into another language costs something, and this is the cost paid by
anyone whose life must be rendered in the terms of History 1. Yet the woman
survives. The poem does not deny the loss, and it does not treat the loss as
the end.
The closing lines carry the argument. The speaker is “the
place where memory escapes / the myth of time”. Time is called a myth, so the
linear, developmental time of the nation-state becomes one story among others.
Memory does not overcome that story, it “escapes” it, from a confinement. The
final line, “I am the sleep in the mind of the mountain”, fits this well. Sleep
is not death. It is a dormant presence that persists under the cover of waking
life and may interrupt it, which is close to what Chakrabarty means by History
2.
The mountain gives the counter archive a different
character. The river carries continuity through ritual and return. The mountain
carries layered, plural memory that includes conflict, and it distrusts the
very permanence that the river seems to offer. Together they suggest that
“minority time” is not a single alternative rhythm but a field of pasts, some
consoling and some wounded, none of which fits the waiting room.
A Counter-archive: Answering the Objection:
The two poems share a cyclical logic in which persons are
changed while the pattern remains. “Small Towns and the River” states it
directly, “only the rituals are permanent” and the river knows “the immortality
of water”. The Voice of the Mountain has the same view, in its own terms. When
a mute young man comes with “a gift of fish” the speaker looks on and says, “It
seems such acts are repeated”. The arrival, the gift, and the attempt “to make
a sign” are ritualized gestures that outlast whoever performs them. Faces
change from the young man to the old speaker who has “lived many lives” to the
returning warrior, while “the past that recreates itself”. The difference the
mountain makes from the river is in what it does with this pattern. The river
takes consolation from recurrence. The mountain accepts recurrence but refuses
comfort, “the universe yields nothing / except a dream of permanence. / Peace
is a falsity”. What returns in the mountain poem is not calm but arrival,
exchange, combat, and loss “the child who died at the edge of the world”, “the
woman lost in translation”. The river poem gives the pattern and the mountain
poem shows what the pattern carries.
This is where Chakrabarty’s framework does work that
ecocritical and ethnographic readings cannot. These approaches would read the
endurance of ritual as a sign of a stable, pre-modern culture. The poems resist
that reading, the river town is anxious “for the future” the mountain’s
territories are “forever ancient and new” and its speaker lives in a “transfer
of symbols”. Cyclical time here is not a survival from an earlier stage. It’s a
contemporaneous past, present in the same moment as the ferry lights and the
state. The waiting room assumes that a community’s past is behind it. Dai’s
poems place that past beside it.
The lyric form is what turns this into an archive. A
document records events. These poems store a way of holding events, and the
mountain’s line about “the place where memory escapes / the myth of time” shows
they know it. They preserve the shape of a temporality, which no collection of
documents could. In this sense they extend subaltern studies past its usual
materials. The tradition has worked to recover voices from official records,
and Dai’s poems suggest some pasts were never going to be in the records, and
lyric is where they were kept.
The obvious objection to this is that it makes Mamang Dai
a poet who rejects modernity. The text does not support that. Her speakers
watch ferries, accept presents from strangers and leave their spears “leaning
by the tree”. What the poems refuse is more narrow and radical, modernity’s
authority to measure. They admit it as a fact of the landscape and deny it the
right to rank the lives within that landscape as early, late, or incomplete.
The river town’s last line states a present tense desire, “we all want to walk
with the gods” and it is complete as it stands. That is the case for “minority
time”: a community living fully inside a history it did not author and
answering to a measure of its own.
Conclusion:
Reading “Small Towns and the River” and “The Voice of the
Mountain” via Chakrabarty’s critique of historicism shows their temporal work.
The river poem seeks permanence within ritual and return, yet the mountain poem
keeps that recurrence while rejecting comforts and bearing loss, combat, and
translation costs. Neither poem places its community inside history’s waiting
room. Both claim a persisting past acts as a current condition, existing near
ferry lights, the town’s anxiety regarding its future, and the state itself.
This work’s main offering defines “minority time,” naming
the temporal shape of groups whose histories reside within History 2. This time
loops yet remains unstatic, injured yet undefeated, living alongside modernity
while rejecting its metric. Dai’s verses prove such forms fit into lyric
shapes. Subaltern research mostly finds pasts inside records and spaces between
them; these poems imply certain pasts remained unwritten and lyric memory held
them. Thus the poems function not merely as examples for a theory. They broaden
it.
This framework additionally welcomes broader testing.
Poets including Temsula Ao, Robin S. Ngangom, and Kynpham Nongkynrih compose
from areas sharing Arunachal’s standing within the national imagination, and
inquiries into how their verses manage time could merit comparable focus. The
essential task such labour must accomplish involves determining if minority
time constitutes one unified model or numerous distinct ones.
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- Mar. 6, 1998), pp. 473+475-479
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