Exploring Global Indigenous Voices of the North-East Santhals in Rejina Marandi's Becoming Me (2014)

Abstract

Rooted in the lived experiences of an often-overlooked Indigenous group from North-East India, Rejina Marandi’s narrative offers critical insight into the socio-cultural challenges faced by Santhal women navigating identity, gender, and tradition within both local and global contexts. This paper explores the global Indigenous voices of the North-East Santhal community as represented in Rejina Marandi’s Becoming Me (2014). Marandi’s work captures the nuanced experiences of Santhal identity in a rapidly globalizing world, emphasizing the tensions between tradition and modernity, marginalization and empowerment. Through an intimate narrative, Becoming Me gives voice to the struggles, aspirations, and resilience of Santhal individuals, particularly women, as they negotiate cultural survival and self-definition. By situating Marandi’s storytelling within broader discourses of Indigenous literature and postcolonial studies, this study highlights how local experiences of the Santhal people resonate with global Indigenous movements for recognition, rights, and cultural affirmation. Using a qualitative methodology grounded in literary analysis and postcolonial Indigenous theory, the paper conducts a close reading of Becoming Me, with particular attention to themes of selfhood, cultural resistance, and trans-generational memory.