A SEMIOTIC AND CULTURAL READING OF ADI TRADITIONS, BELIEFS, AND PSYCHE IN SELECT VISUAL NARRATIVES BY MAMANG DAI

Abstract

India’s northeast region is a fascinating land inhabited by various tribes who practice different cultural tradition. Most of these tribes have a rich legacy of oral narratives, which in recent times, to a certain extent are being recorded in the written form by contemporary authors. These folklores serve the purpose of bringing to light the ways of life of these tribes, their beliefs, and traditions, much before the advent of the British colonizers and the impact of Christianity, education, urbanization, and modernization on these people. In an attempt to popularize these tribal folklores and keep them alive for the current generation of readers, several publishing houses are bringing out these stories in the form of visual narratives, which are many a times ear-marked as children’s literature. A closer and more serious academic reading of these visual narratives, however, convey much deeper insights to the signs and symbols used in these texts. This study, therefore, is dedicated to a semiotic and cultural reading of two visual narratives by Mamang Dai – The Sky Queen (2005) and Once Upon a Moontime (2005). The focus of the semiotic study of the two texts is to establish a connect of the interplay between the words and images used in these narratives. The visual elements of colour, form/ shape, tone, and texture will be analyzed to understand the correlation of images with the Adi tribe’s culture and psyche. The cultural reading of the texts will be based on Aldous Huxley’s philosophy of “the art of seeing” and John Berger’s ideas on “the ways of seeing”.