A Socio-Semiotic Study of the Select Poetry of Temsula Ao

SHRUTI MISHRA

doi:10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i01.66946

A Socio-Semiotic Study of the Select Poetry of Temsula Ao

Author(s)	Ms. SHRUTI MISHRA
Country	India
Abstract	This paper undertakes a socio-semiotic analysis of the select poetry of Temsüla Ao to examine how signs, symbols, language choices and cultural codes function as carriers of social meaning in the representation of Naga identity, history, trauma and resistance. Drawing upon the theoretical framework of socio-semiotics as proposed by M. A. K. Halliday, Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, the study treats Ao’s poetry as a cultural text embedded in the historical and political realities of Northeast India. The poems are examined as semiotic systems that encode collective memory, indigenous consciousness and postcolonial anxiety. The analysis foregrounds symbolic clusters such as land, silence, folklore, ritual, violence, and the female body as signifying structures through which Ao constructs counter-narratives to dominant nationalist discourse. Indigenous oral traditions and communal memory function as semiotic resources that resist historical erasure and assert cultural identity. English, as a colonial inheritance, is refashioned into a hybrid space where native metaphors, local idioms and cultural imagery restructure its semantic field. Ao’s poetic diction destabilizes the binaries of centre–margin, modern–primitive and national–ethnic by foregrounding indigenous epistemologies. Further, pain, displacement and political conflict are encoded through silence, metaphor and recurring imagery, transforming trauma into a semiotic register of suffering and survival. Ao’s poetry thus emerges as a cultural archive documenting the emotional landscape of a historically marginalized region. The study concludes that Ao’s poetry is not merely literary expression but a socio-semiotic act of meaning-making that reconstructs identity, preserves cultural memory and challenges hegemonic narratives.
Keywords	culture, language, identity, poetry, tradition, semiotics
Field	Arts
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 1, January-February 2026
Published On	2026-01-19
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i01.66946

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A Socio-Semiotic Study of the Select Poetry of Temsula Ao

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