Published Online:December 2025
Product Name:The IUP Journal of English Studies
Product Type:Article
Product Code:IJES051225
DOI:10.71329/IUPJES/2025.20.4.43-50
Author Name:Dharmendra Kr. Baruah
Availability:YES
Subject/Domain:Arts and Humanities
Download Format:PDF
Pages:43-50
This paper explores “The Jungle Major”, a short story by Temsula Ao, one of the key Anglophone writers from northeast India, as a commemorative collective memory text. It examines how the story under review, while revisiting the painful postcolonial history of the Naga Hills, offers a certain kind of literary-cultural resistance to a burgeoning and fatal tendency of amnesia. Instead of aiming at exploring the nuances of such a politics in its entirety, the paper focuses on one single text authored by Ao to illustrate the consciously undertaken literary-cultural project of creating a new kind of critical collective memory by resisting aporias and re-centering subjectivities that otherwise remain on the margins of history and memory narratives. The emerging view of history and historiography as a crossdisciplinary and open-ended knowledge form offers further justification of this attempt to read the text as historical memory.
This paper examines a short story by Temsula Ao, one of the key Anglophone writers from northeast India, as a literary-cultural site of collective memory making.