Malati Mem

• The North East Regional Centre (NERC) of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (INGCA) staged Malati Mem recently.
• It is a multilingual play based on the life and the revolutionary zeal of Mangri Orang, an Adivasi with roots in central India.

ABOUT MANGRI ORANG

• Mangri Orang is an unsung hero of India’s struggle for freedom from British rule.
• She was a woman labourer in the Lalmati tea garden of Tezpur.
• She was gunned down in 1921 for leading a fight against foreign liquor and opium pushed during the colonial period.
• She is considered to be the first woman martyr of Assam in the freedom struggle.
• Fellow plantation workers used to call her Malati Mem, the second word being a shorter form of memsahib.