Ancestral Rituals & Encroaching Modernity: Mamang Dai's 'Small Towns and the River'

In this episode of Beyond the Verse, the official podcast of PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+, hosts Maiya and Joe explore 'Small Towns and the River' by Mamang Dai, a deeply resonant poem that blends cosmology, animism, and the intimate experiences of life and death in India’s northeastern hill communities.

Together, they unpack how Dai—drawing on her Adi tribal heritage and deep environmental consciousness—uses the imagery of a flowing river to explore permanence, transience, and the cyclical nature of life and grief. The hosts examine the significance of animistic belief systems, the personification of the natural world, and how rituals provide both protection and continuity for communities facing modern encroachment.

From the evocative opening line—“Small towns always remind me of death”—to the river’s symbolic immortality, Maiya and Joe discuss how Dai crafts a vision of death not as an end, but a transformation woven into ancestral and geographic memory. They also analyze how the poem’s structure mimics the flow of water and how it reflects Dai’s subtle anxieties about cultural erosion in a modernizing world.

Download exclusive PDFs on Small Towns and the River, available to Poetry+ members:

• Full PDF Guide
• Poetry Snapshot PDF

Tune in and discover:

• How Dai’s Adi heritage and environmentalism shape the poem’s core message.
• Why the river becomes a metaphor for both grief and ancestral continuity
• How oral tradition and mythology intersect with poetic form.
• What the poem reveals about the tension between rural identity and urban expansion.
• How Dai uses timeless natural symbols to explore mortality, memory, and renewal.

Transcript

Ancestral Rituals & Encroaching Modernity: Mamang Dai's 'Small Towns and the River' (Transcript)

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Maiya: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Beyond the Verse, a poetry podcast, brought to you by poemanalysis.com and Poetry+. I'm Maiya and I'm here today with my co-host Joe to talk about Mamang Dai's small towns and the river. Now, this poem is absolutely beautiful, and throughout the course of this episode, we're going to be looking at how Dai explores boundaries, cosmology, and the relationship between permanence and transience in this poem. Now, Joe, can you tell us a little bit about Mamang Dai's background, where she comes from, what her writing is rooted in, and a little bit about the poem itself.

Joe: I’d love to.. So Mamang Dai was born in 1957 in the state of Arunachal Pradesh, which is a state in Northeast India. She became a civil servant. She was one of the first, or indeed the first person from her state, to become a civil servant in 1979. But she then left the civil service to work as a journalist, including work for the World Wide [00:01:00] Fund for Nature.

She actually didn't publish her first collection River Poems until 2004 when she was 47. So a relative late comer to the poetic world. And it's from that collection that this poem is taken. 

Another important thing to be aware of, we're gonna talk about the significance of this later on in the episode, is that Mamang Dai's family was from the Adi tribe, which is a major indigenous group in the state that I mentioned earlier. We're gonna talk a little bit about how the cultural inheritance of that.

Tribe is really, really significant for this poem. She's since published two further collections, Bone of Time, and Midsummer Survival Lyrics, and her poetry, including this poem, is now widely studied in Indian schools. Now, in terms of the poem itself, what we effectively have here is a description of a nameless river, but it's pretty clear that this is, taken from Dai's homeland, taken from the state in which she grew up, and a series of small towns that are populated along the river for, but let's get into the poem itself. So Maiya, let's start us off. Read that first line for the benefit of listeners, and tell us why that first line is so impactful and how it [00:02:00] frames the rest of the poem.

Maiya: Well, Joe and I were talking before this podcast and this first line is one that is an absolute standout, especially in a lot of the poems you read recently because it is immediately so impactful . It opens with this, small towns always remind me of death. Now, there are two things that I'd like to pick up on in this first line. The first is the word always. Now what we have is a real focus on the present moment. Of course, You are looking at this small town through the eyes of the speaker, so you are immediately present and kind of assuming that you're going to be entering this poem. In the present day. However, the use of that word always brings in one of the key themes that we're going to be talking about throughout this poem, which is the relationship between permanence and transience. You have the permanence of the town of the fact that you are looking at a built structure, a community of people, but you also get that impression that there is something greater at play.

I absolutely love that. The other thing is this slightly more [00:03:00] abstract relationship between death and joy. And this is something this poem touches on fiercely. It's absolutely wonderful. It explores it in such fantastic way because of course, if your opening line is, small towns always remind me of death. You’re immediately going to assume, especially from a Western perspective, that death is something to be mourned, to be lamented. But this poem is not one of lament. Yes, it touches on grief and destruction, but by the end of it you have this truly uplifting and beautiful way to look at things like afterlife. And of course, part of this falls into the Adi cosmology and pantheon of gods and how they view the afterlife and being reborn. But this is such a fascinating line to start working on.

But Joe, I'd love to know your thoughts on that. 

Joe: I absolutely love this opening line, and I love it for several reasons. One is how perceptive that comment is. It's such a simple remark, and yet it captures something about what it means to live in a small community because of course. Nobody is suggesting that the death of somebody inspires less [00:04:00] reaction in their friends and family, when they live in a big city or a large conurbation.

But there's something about the intimacy of small spaces that the death of somebody affects everybody because everybody, you know, everybody in the entire conurbation in some cases is intimately linked with the individual who has died. So there is a sense in which a death, a birth, a wedding, whenever these events occur in a smaller space, the entire village, the entire small town seems to kind of move along with that event, whether it's tragic or whether it's something to be celebrated.

And I love the perceptiveness of that comment, that it's almost as though the town itself is responding to the death, not just individuals who live in the town. But the other thing I love about this line is how it's able to establish the essence of the voice by what it doesn't say. Small towns always remind me of death only makes sense if you have experienced life outside of small towns.

this informs us immediately that this speaker is somebody who has left and has returned. They have experience of other places because otherwise, if small [00:05:00] towns is all they ever knew, the comment wouldn't make any sense. They're only aware that small towns inspire this feeling in them because they have experienced cities and large nations, and I love the, subtlety with which that information is revealed to us.

The idea that the speaker Yes. Is somebody intimately connected with these small towns, but is also somebody that has left, has experienced the wider world.

Maiya: Absolutely. and not only that, but a few lines later we have this understanding town is always the same in summer or winter Now for any regular listener, Joe and I often talk about how the seasons will impact certain poems.

It comes up in a lot of our previous episodes, but here you have a really different understanding of what it means to be permanent because of course the seasons go in a cycle. They refresh and renew and change, but they always also return here to tell the reader that it is always the same, whether it's summer or winter, tells us there's something a little bit deeper at play when it comes to what is eternal in this space. And we'll come to understand that what that [00:06:00] is is nature. what I'd really like to touch on before we go into the main body of poem is Adi mythology because it's absolutely critical to our understanding of this poem.

now in Adi mythology, they believe in animism. Animism is the belief that all natural things are imbued with a spirit, whether that's of the gods, whether that's of guardians. And in Adi mythology, this is absolutely critical because the things that remain in this poem are natural elements.

it is the trees, the gorge, the river, even down to the smallest rocks now I'd like listeners to keep that in mind as Joe and I go through this poem because of course there will be parts where we touch on slightly more Western ideologies, the belief system that is at the core of this poem is Adi mythology. Now Joe, I do have a question for you to kind of kick off the real exploration of this poem, and it centers around the second paragraph. We are told by the speaker that just the other day someone died. Now what we find is that there's not really much focus on the body or the spirit of that person, but really more so everything [00:07:00] that happens around that death.

Can you elaborate a little bit more on how the poet explores this? 

Joe: Yeah, I'd love to. I think it's along the lines of what you mentioned in your introduction, which is that tension and that relationship between transient and permanence. Because every time an individual dies. Their impermanence, our fragility, our mortality is never more evident. It's revealed, and yet in many ways, somebody dying is also the latest and a long link of people dying throughout civilization.

Everybody dies. It's one of the only things we share. It's one of the only things that is permanent. Again, it's slightly cliched, almost not when you put it in those beautiful terms that Mamang Dai does. But the only thing that's permanent is impermanence change is the only true constant. And I think the reason that she doesn't focus on the body or on the individual that's died, I mean, it's a very ambiguous description.

Someone you know, The use of that word is deliberately vague, is because she's actually much more interested in the ritual. In the kind of processes that surrounds the death of a person because there lies the permanence, especially for these kind [00:08:00] of traditional communities that have been performing these rituals that have been responding in the same way to the death of somebody for hundreds or in some cases thousands of years.

There is that sense of comfort to be derived from the fact that a dead person is being treated in the same way as their parents, their grandparents, and indeed generations before that. So I think the reason that Dai is much more tightly focused on the process of grief, the process of mourning, is because she derives great comfort from that.

She derives it I think from the processes, the rituals, and the energy that is poured into those processes and rituals because they help tie her to those who came before her.

Maiya: I couldn't agree more. And I think this is, never more evident than when that focus shifts because it shifts from the death of this singular person to the sad wreath of tuberoses. Now, tuberoses in literature are a really unique flower to actually bring up in this poem Because not only are they well known for actually having a very short life, but they are [00:09:00] night blooming. Now. Joe and I have often spoken on this podcast and I believe we did so in our episode on Chino Achebe's love cycle about how the day, the process of the sun rising and sun and moving into the nighttime Yes, a cycle is often used as a greater allegory for human life. Now of course, if you are in the nighttime of your life, you are reaching the end, you are reaching the moment at which you are about to be reborn as the sunrise rises again. So I think it's a fascinating choice to use the tuberoses, which bloom in the nighttime to represent the death of this person because

again, as Joe mentioned in that kind of first line, The way that Dai weaves in very subtle clues about the greater context of the poem is absolutely excellent because here the nighttime of your life, I'm immediately assuming that when this person has died, it's not been because their life was cut short. It is because they are older, they are in the later stages of their life.

This is a natural passing. And as such, it is treated in a natural way. It is treated as them [00:10:00] returning to the earth. And I really love that. something as simple as a flower, a wreath, which might I add, is also a circle, is, interpolated into the, fictionalization of this person's life. And I really love it.

but Joe, what do you think? Do you have anything else to add to that florals and, the cyclical sense of life in this poem?

Joe: Well, that was fantastic, Maiya, first and foremost. I'm sure our listeners are gonna love hearing that explanation. That was really, really interesting.

I think I would just circle back to that point about impermanence and change, because obviously there is a very practical reason for having a flower like this around the body. I mean, this flower is often used in perfume, has a very, very strong smell. A smell that can often be overpowering.

And after death, bodies quite quickly begin to spoil, begin to decay, and begin to smell. And that process is even faster in a hot country like India. So. The thing I find really interesting about this, on top of all the abstract things that you've mentioned, which are brilliantly expressed, is the practical purpose served by that strong smelling flower.

Because the decaying nature of a body [00:11:00] is a stark reminder of impermanence, the body begins to break down almost immediately after death. So you have this odd juxtaposition between the permanence of death. Death is inescapable, and once death occurs, it cannot be undone against the fact the actual manifestation of that permanence, which is almost immediate change.

Bodies look different. They smell different, they appear different immediately after death, and obviously if bodies weren't buried or cremated, we would see that change daily, weekly, monthly.

But Maiya, we've spoken already on this episode a little bit about ritual, and can you explain a little bit more about what that means in the context of this poem? What are these rituals that Mamang Dai is so drawn to?

Maiya: For sure. I think one of the things that always stands out to me with this poem when we talk about ritual. More often than not, whether that's, your own personal ritual as you wake up in the morning, something that gets you ready to go to work or school or out for the day, or whether that's a funeral ritual, something that brings your family together, brings the village together. All of these rituals, to me, [00:12:00] are protective in many ways. They prevent chaos. And I really love the idea that in this poem, what Dai is actually driving towards is the absence of chaos. Because of course, death as it stands, can be chaotic. It can be stressful and upsetting. But rituals are built around the deaths of the people in this village to protect them from the chaos of that moment. They instead offer peace and solace and gratitude and. Really a very positive way to process things like grief, because of course, as I mentioned earlier, when the belief system is built around animals and this belief that nature holds spirits and that there will be an afterlife and a rebirth of sorts, makes it much easier to believe that death isn't this chaotic moment, but instead a passing on to a new form of life. and I think one way to kind of draw that from this poem is really the embattlement of the village itself. we have these really beautiful descriptions of the landscape, but it's also very pressured by dust flying [00:13:00] or wind howling down a gorge or the river cutting through the land.

These are quite visceral and violent images. Despite all of that, you really do get the impression that in these moments of ritual, the village is cut off from those and protected somehow. And I'm, sure there's so much more to say on that, but it really offers me at least a, sense of comfort. And I'm sure for a lot of readers as well, they, draw something a little bit more positive despite those more negative illusions to being embattled.

But Joe, what you think about that? 

Joe: I think You're absolutely spot on, and I think some of those descriptions really lend weight to that influence We spoke about from the Adi tribe and the way in which nature is imbued with energy, sometimes a very human energy. We get a description later on the use of personification, about the river holding its breath, but earlier on in the poem, the energy that is afforded to nature and to natural events is much more kind of animalistic.

We're told that the wind is howling, which is much more evocative of some kind of a wolf. and is often the case with belief systems that [00:14:00] view nature as being imbued with spirits. In many ways, those belief systems feel more akin to our actual experience of the natural world.

The wind can be incredibly aggressive and loud, and so it makes sense that it is imbued with that animalistic energy. I think what the poem is doing is, on the one hand, it's paying tribute to that cultural tradition from the Adi tribe about imbuing these natural elements with energy, with voice, with human, and sometimes animalistic vitality. But it also feels really akin to our experience of those natural elements.

You know, there's something about the howling wind that works. It feels reminiscent of our genuine experience of a gust of wind and. The kind of rawness of the natural world, I think creates a sense that these communities are all the more tightly formed. That sense from the first line that these communities experience the death of one member in their entirety, that closeness, that tight bond that exists in these small communities, I think is at least in part [00:15:00] shaped by the kind of rawness of their environment.

We've got descriptions of dust flying, wind howling, and I know Maiya, you want to talk about this line, about how the river cuts through like a torrent of grief. there is a sense that the intimacy of these communities is at least in part a response to the raw nature of their surroundings.

Maiya: I think you've absolutely struck on something there. the impression that I get from at least the river in this poem is that, as you say, it is full of energy and vitality, but it also moves onwards Usually when we would discuss a torrent of grief coming from a singular person, you would get the impression that it's kind of unstoppable.

It really has no end, and yet here translated onto the river, it provides a slightly different image for readers. it serves to both strengthen the grief that is felt. It makes it much more universal because, as you say, the land and the people are kind of intertwined and in a kind of mutual relationship with one another, they impact the land.

The land also impacts life. and yet, to revert to a very basic [00:16:00] understanding of water, it continues to move. The river will move on. And this again speaks to that relationship between permanence and transience, because grief, of course, is permanent.

If you lose someone, you never get over it. It just gets easier every day to not feel the heaviness of that grief. But that doesn't mean it disappears entirely in the same way, of course this river cuts through the land and leaves a physical mark and is constantly changing, but. It continues to move. There is a sense of onward movement here, and I think it just again, relates to this greater sense of life that we're talking about. because as we get to the end of this poem, we come to understand that the buried dead, are believed to rise again as spirits and begin their new life.

So the river again becomes something representative of this cyclical movement of this new life, new birth, despite being imbued with grief not only that, it is not just imbued with grief and upset and anger. And yes, the word cut is very visceral here, but it also speaks in tandem with the [00:17:00] happiness and the joy of this village.

So the river to me becomes almost deposit for all of these very human emotions. And that's why we get this understanding that it has spirit and energy and movement. as Joe mentioned, there's lines in here that really personify the river. The river has a soul. It knows, so there's a real impression that the river almost has a sense of tribal knowledge, of history and presence. And I love that throughout this poem. The river is what cuts through. And again, a very simple way to reflect this in this poem is the fact that the entire poem is enjambed .

So you can have this. Constant flowing of the words through the poem that again, lend themselves to the ongoing nature of emotion itself.

Joe: I think that's so interesting, Maiya. Thank you. And just to jump off from that, because I mean, this is such a fascinating symbol. Rivers in literature and art are so often used to represent the concurrent presence of change and consistency. there's that cliched phrase.

You can't cross the same river twice. The [00:18:00] idea that even though you might be crossing the same river bed and the same bridge ultimately because the water is constantly flowing, you're constantly crossing a slightly different river, it's permanent, is defined by its ability to constantly change and reinvent itself.

And that symbol touches on so much of what's going on. for me, the further into this poem you read, especially once you are reading about the river, it changes the way that I reinterpret that opening line. And again, I'm, returning to this opening line because it's so powerful.

Small towns always remind me of death. the thing I love about that is the line is not suggesting that somebody is dying every day. It's the reminder, the residual memory of death that sustains itself, even if the act of death is not occurring regularly.

And that really is the same kind of tension that we see in the river. The river is constantly flowing. The individual droplets of water will likely not pass that river again for millions of years. And yet the river itself is a residual symbol of permanence. I think this is especially important for these communities because the river in many ways [00:19:00] is kind of the foundation on which a lot of these communities were built. just to explain a little bit more about some of the geography and the politics around Arunachal Pradesh, the state in which this poem is set, it's a border state in northeast India.

It borders Bhutan, Myanmar and China. And crucially, the border with China is a contested border. And for decades now, there has been a political instability. There have been incursions into the state. And I think this. Geographical and political context is really important when it comes to understanding the poem because if you live in that community, you are much more likely to feel a sense of reassurance, a sense of permanence evoked to you by the physical landscape that immediately surrounds your town or your village than you are to any kind of larger geography.

I mean, in a world in which state and national borders feel so permeable, feel so contested, you end up going much more localized to kind of derive your sense of self and derive your sense of home. the thing I find really moving about that is the fact that Mamang Dai's poem is.

[00:20:00] Really tight in its scope. It's very much interested in a small geographical area around one village, or of course there are other villages evoked in the title. But really we then zoom in on the hometown, the relationship between the people in that hometown. We don’t know how many people it would be, but we're talking about hundreds, perhaps thousands, but not a large group of people and their immediate environment, not their state, not their country, but their patch of the river.

And that connection to a physical location and that connection to the people who preceded you, who also felt a connection to that place. Superseding national and state borders, I think is a really interesting reminder of permanence. And there's a real anxiety in the poem as it goes on that that connection between the towns and the river and the towns and the land that surrounds them is being threatened.

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Maiya: so before the break, Joe was exploring the significance of the river itself. And there's another thing that I'd really like to draw on here, which is the fact that the river becomes a carrier, not just of history, but also of language. I'm actually thinking here about one of Mamang Dai's other poems, which is called The Voice of the Mountain. And I'll just read a small extract from that to give listeners a sense of kind of what connections I'm drawing here and the lines go. The other day, a young man arrived from the village. He could not speak. He brought a gift of fish from the land of rivers. It seems such acts are repeated. We live in [00:22:00] territories forever, ancient and new. And as we speak in changing languages, I also leave my spear leaning by the tree and try to make a sign. And what I find here is that there is a dialogue throughout a lot of Dai's. Poetry about cultural heritage and inheritance. And despite the fact that as Joe delved into there are thousands and thousands of years, there's ancestral memory throughout many of these small villages along the river. There are ways of communicating that aren't necessarily written. Oral tradition is an absolutely huge impacting factor on mythology, especially within small towns and rural communities. So I find that, as in the Voice of the Mountain and as in this poem, there is a sense that the river is something not just separate from the tribes and the villages that live along its path, but it is interwoven into their cultural history. And I love the idea that inheritance doesn't necessarily need to be spoken. What the line that I'm kind of calling to mind from small towns in the river is the immortality of water. Just the [00:23:00] simple act from the Voice of the Mountain of bringing a fish to a neighboring village is an act of welcome. You don't need to be able to speak, you don't need to be able to even write the same language. It is something that provides bounty and gifts and generosity and, the fact that that can happen between communities shows that this river is a spirit that links as opposed to separates.

And I love the idea that it can be deposit of history and memory and mythology, and of course, just adding to the fact that they believe it also has a spirit. The belief system further cements this fact, and I just love the idea that The river has so much power in this poem.

Joe: I think that’s spot on. And Just to go back to the other poem Voice of the Mountain, an important detail I think here is that the word Adi actually translates to hill or mountain. So when we take a poem, like Voice of the Mountain, we could also look at that as to be voice of my ancestors. So the idea of that cultural inheritance. That oral tradition is front and center and it's imbued within the geography and it's the geography that's so crucial [00:24:00] here.

You mentioned Maiya, how the river forms a kind of bond between these different towns. And again, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact. As I mentioned, that job in this poem. The river is so rich with symbolic resonance. And you mentioned the line about the immortality of water, of course, that on the one hand is the very symbolic claim that the river will never go.

But of course we also know it matches up perfectly with our broad understanding of the way water works in our ecosystems. The idea that water is replenished over thousands and millions of years and eventually, finds its way back into the same rivers, streams, and lakes that it was taken from initially.

But the thing I think is really interesting about this. Is that she says that the river knows its immortality. That sense that the natural world is in some kind of active partnership with the mortal world, with mankind, with the tribes and communities that survive and thrive because of the presence of this river.

It implies that the river has a kind of choice. It implies that the river is willing to kind of engage with these people and these communities. The holding its breath is almost a sign of [00:25:00] respect after the death of a person in the area. And I find that it casts the relationship between the people and their environment in such an interesting light because the relationship becomes more symbiotic.

It's not simply people relying on the natural world, it's the natural world showing an awareness of the people living in it.

Maiya: That's a really beautiful way to explore that, Joe. So thank you. just as you were talking, then something came to mind, especially when you were focusing on the temporal link of the river. Because one thing that I think stands out in this poem is, you know, partially what I mentioned earlier about how. the town feels a little bit protected, but it also feels a little bit out of time. And I know that might sound a little bit strange, but I will explain myself. I'm actually really focusing on the penultimate stanzas of this poem and primarily the exploration of the Sun and the Golden East. now, on my first few readings of this poem, don't think it really stood out to me until you were speaking just then about how time is interpreted in this poem, because of course you have ancestral time and you also have the present moment. But here I. Where the dead are placed pointing [00:26:00] west, that tends to be a relatively western natural journey. We see the rising of the sun in the east as the start of the day and the setting of the sun in the west as the end. But here, when the soul rises, we are told that they will walk into the east. now generally when coming from kind of a western canon.

I would understand that to be walking backwards and when we talk so much about the importance of the past in this poem, the ancestral memory that these towns, the river, the nature holds, it's fascinating to me that Dai has chosen her spirits to walk back into the past. In a temporal sense, but also back towards a second rising. And I really love how that changes your understanding of the present moment that we're exploring because I don't think it feels as if it could be one specific day, in one specific year. We really could be in any time. We could be a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, we could also be in the future.

And I'd love to know if you have any thoughts on how [00:27:00] time is, really explored through the use of that sun and, specifically the Golden East.

Joe: Well, I think it's the promise of renewal, and I think that you're absolutely right. There is a kind of timeless quality to this poem. Mamang Dai is able to achieve that timeless quality while exploring the passage of time, which is an incredibly impressive thing to have done. I think the Golden East is the embodiment of tomorrow and the way that tomorrow can be rich and perhaps even.

Something more fulfilling than today was there is something really restorative about the way that the future is portrayed, a future in which the present continues to participate in the same way that the past participates. In our experience of the present, there is a sense that the story does not end with death, which is one of the reasons that this poem is such a, powerful and, moving reminder of the relationship between the living and those who are no longer with them. 

Maiya: A hundred percent. And I think what we are left with is the powerful notion that when Dai says. [00:28:00] towns remind me of death. What they actually remind her of is the faith of her small town community. At the end, the dead are left walking with the gods. It's a desire, it's a want, and I think that's such a beautiful sentiment to end the poem with.

Joe: I completely agree. I think one of the things that is kind of, it's relatively softly done in the poem, but I'd love to get your thoughts on it, Maiya, is that, broadly speaking, this poem offers a fairly positive, a fairly promising. View of what death represents, because on the one hand it pays tribute to the voices, the stories, the geography of the past, implying of course that we will one day be the past for a new generation and generations beyond that, and we can participate in that ongoing cycle.

But there is a fear as this poem goes on, and I'd love to get your thoughts on these lines from one of the latest stanzas, small towns grow with anxiety for the future because that really to me stands at odds with this kind of very hopeful view of the golden [00:29:00] sun, the golden tomorrow, the tomorrow.

That promises to be restorative and beautiful and enriching. So where does that anxiety come from, do you think,

Maiya: well, you know what? I think it roots back to actually what you were saying right at the start of this episode, Joe, which is the sense that. We cannot forget that the speaker of this poem is returning. They are coming back from a bigger city, a bigger town, a different location, and returning to this small cultural moment. And I think what I see through a lot of Dai's poetry. And I would absolutely recommend that listeners who have enjoyed this episode to go and read some more of her work, Go check out our poems on PoemAnalysis.com because they truly are really beautiful kind of odes to cultural memory. And what I find is that so many of her poems. Do hold a very small and, very kind of subtle anxiety towards the encroachment of modern life on these small towns. And I think that's what the anxiety in this poem is focused on. It's focused on [00:30:00] the breaking down cultural rituals, the breaking down of town boundaries and the things that we understand to be rural communities because of course, Dai is writing in the 1990s, early 2000s and into the modern day.

So, you know, we're not talking about someone who is writing hundreds or thousands of years ago. We're not talking about someone who's even writing in a kind of underdeveloped, non-industrial town. She has lived through the massive exponential growth of big cities in India. So when we talk about small towns in this context, we can't forget the, impact of urbanization because the boundaries of cities are constantly growing larger and larger and larger communities and populations are constantly building. So no wonder that there's a fear in this poem about your rural small town way of life being encroached on. I think it's a really subtle nod to both, you know, the environmentalism that that Dai is trying to perpetuate the. awareness that [00:31:00] nature and the river and the trees and the forests have a life and a vitality, and that we shouldn't be cutting them down and ruining them and poisoning them. But it also speaks to the fear of the people who, potentially don't want that urban way of life. They don't want their rituals to be disrupted.

And, it really reminds me of, a poet that I think I've mentioned in previous episodes, , which is Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, who has written this fantastic collection called Swims. And she effectively mediates, an understanding of ecology and environmentalism through wild swims.

She writes as if she's moving through those waters, and those waters are full of ancestral memory. She's writing from the UK, but she also swims in the Aegean Sea, for example, And all of those seas and oceans and rivers and wild swims that she undertakes become part of the story building in Burnett's case for, the Black community in the UK, but also this sense of general cultural pride and heritage.

And I think that's what Dai does so brilliantly here, is that she mediates all of these anxieties through the [00:32:00] natural landscape. And that's where I think this fear comes from.

Joe: I think that was fascinating. While you were talking there, it made me think of something, because you're right that at face value. The kind of apprehension, the anxiety about change is about encroachment. It is about the outside world. I mean, obviously, as you said, this poem was published in 2004.

You know, globalization, being the, buzzword of the naughties in terms of the way that the world was becoming more homogenous, the world was expanding constantly. Not to mention the geographical realities of, this state, as I mentioned earlier on, there is kind of an existential threat for people who live in this state because the very border of the nation with China is contested.

So in theory, whether it's a case of globalization or whether it's a case of the contested boundary, the threat is external. It is about something encroaching.

And yet the way she describes it is that it's going to grow. The line specifically, she says, is small towns grow with anxiety for the future. And that almost suggests that the anxiety, the driver of those changes that [00:33:00] threaten this traditional way of life are not external, but are instead inside these small towns and villages.

it's such an interesting tension between pressures from the outside world that threaten to inspire unwanted change within these communities. There might be people growing up who do want to change, who do want to modernize, who do want to move away from these traditional Adi route.

Mamang Dai, I think, is advocating for these communities to retain the things that make them unique. I.

Because ultimately those are the things. As someone who has been away and has returned, she derives real satisfaction, real comfort from the things about these towns that is distinct from the rest of the country and indeed the rest of the world.

And I think that that line is her attempt to kind of implore the new generation of people in these towns to not lose sight of the things that make them different. And indeed to celebrate the things that make them different. Because ultimately, once they are gone, they cannot be reclaimed.

Now, unfortunately, that's all we have time for today. I really enjoyed that conversation. Maiya and I could have spoken [00:34:00] about Mamang Dai's poem for a lot longer. And again, as you mentioned, I would implore any listeners who've enjoyed this episode to go and read more of her poetry because she really is a remarkable voice.

Now, this is our final episode of Beyond the Verse, season Two, but fear Not, we will be back for season three. And if you've enjoyed the podcast either over this series or back in series one, we would really appreciate it if you rated Reviewed, liked the podcast wherever you get them, and of course, continue to recommend to friends and family.

We can't wait to be back for a whole new range of poems to discuss in season three, but until then, it's goodbye from me.

Maiya: And goodbye from me and the team at poemanalysis.com and Poetry+. See you next time..