The way memory works can be painful or restorative but always a dynamic process of seeking, recollecting and re-making. Memories act as cultural repositories and play a significant role in identity construction. What we are and know depends on what we remember, and the past is often revisited and re-imagined to suit the present context. In her poems, Mamang Dai creates a counter-memory of Arunachal Pradesh against India's official memory and advocates for an ethnic attachment to ecology, myths and oral narratives of the past. This essay explores the significance of memory, its types andfunctions, notes Mamang Dai's descent into the depths of historical memory to excavate individual voices, and explore collective memories and cultural traumas. This paper uses the methods and theories of memory studies to investigate the complex relation between memory and postcolonial literaturewhile analysing and interpreting the multi-layered deployment of memory in Mamang Dai's poems from her poetry collection, River Poems (2004).
Bhavika Sachan (Sun,) studied this question.