Memory and Conflict in Temecula Ao’s Death of a Hunter

Abstract

The Nagas, a distinct tribal race, were people who had their customs and traditions and were deeply rooted in those structures of living. The Western culture sowed quite a different set of principles and structures of living among the people, which includes education, the tradition of formal learning, and Christianity, a new belief or doctrine quite different from their own. The colonisation or the intrusion of Westernism came to an end in the 1950s, i.e. after the world wars. The post-war Naga society was culturally framed with two sets of ideologies. The in-betweenness of living led to conflicts in memory. Such episodes are captured, individualised, and narrated by Temsula Ao in her short story collection. The story Death of a Hunter is the second short story from Ao’s collection, Laburnum for My Head. Here, Ao narrates the hunting experience of the central character, Imchanok. Imchanok has been engaged in three peculiar hunts in the past. After every hunt, Imchanok loses his spiritual valour and collapses, while the village celebrates him as a brave hunter. The collective and individual consciousness overlaps his memory after each hunt. The reason for such a crisis in his mind is the cultural transformation that the Naga society has undergone in due time. At the outset, the paper tries to discuss the accumulation of collective and individual memory in an individual. Second, the paper explains the conflict that arises between the memory of the past and the present, with the help of the story Death of a Hunter. Third, the cultural Naga society is picturised with examples for a better understanding of the protagonist's mindset in the story. The paper ends with the theoretical conception that the collective memory in an individual is subject to reframing from time to time.