Memory and Indigenous Trauma: Reading Natural Disasters in the Select Works of Manoj Das

The paper sets to analyze the construction of collective as well as individual memories in the context of natural disasters happening around the pre- and post-independence era in Odisha, particularly in North- Odisha. The select works of Manoj Das, a notable bi-lingual writer of Odisha, negotiate to depict the vulnerability of the village folks in the wake of natural calamities like cyclone and flood, followed by a famine and epidemic. The caused irreparable loss and displacement feed to the psychological trauma to the recurrent victims of the natural calamities. The notion of trauma and traumatic memory, as present in Das’s writings, contest the trauma models developed within a Western Freudian psychoanalytic framework as well as the contemporary trauma theories that advocate to scrutinize a different socio-cultural and geographical specificity. The context of natural calamities in Odisha and the indigenous traumatic experiences help raise an alternative non-Western framework through which the trauma can be viewed in a more pluralistic and inclusive meaning.