Inheriting Voice: A Gynocritical Reading of Mamang Dai’s The Inheritance of Words

Abstract

This paper studies Mamang Dai’s The Inheritance of Words in the light of Elaine Showalter’s idea of gynocriticism, with particular attention to women’s writing, memory, and cultural inheritance. Literary history has often sidelined women’s voices, and feminist criticism emerged as a way of questioning these exclusions. Showalter’s work is important in this context because it encourages readers to look at women writers as creators of their own literary traditions rather than as responses to male-centred narratives. Using this approach, the paper reads Dai’s text as a space where women’s voices, experiences, and cultural memories come to the foreground. Drawing on indigenous traditions and the lived realities of women from Northeast India, The Inheritance of Words presents language as something passed down through generations, especially through women. The paper argues that the text functions as an alternative archive of memory and experience, one that challenges dominant literary frameworks and affirms the idea of a woman-centred tradition, or what Showalter describes as “a literature of one’s own”.