Temsüla Ao

Temsüla Ao (25 October 1945 – 9 October 2022) was an Indian poet, fiction writer, and ethnographer.

On 25 October 1945, Temsüla was born to Imnamütongba Changkiri and Nokintemla Longkumer in Jorhat.

She had five siblings.

When her youngest brother was only beginning to crawl, her parents died within nine months of each other.

Thereafter, her youngest two siblings were taken to their ancestral village Changki village in Mokokchung district to live with their father's younger brother.

The four eldest siblings–Khari, Tajen, Temsüla, and Along–stayed at Jorhat under the guardianship of Khari who was temporarily employed in Jorhat Mission Hospital.

Soon, the youngest among the four, Along, was also taken to Changki.

When Tajen got appointed as an assistant teacher in the village primary school, he took on the responsibilities of the younger siblings at Changki.

Ao summarises her difficult childhood and adolescene in her memoir Once upon a Life as 'fractured childhood.' Her ancestral family were involved in the early settlement of Changki village and her visits and affinity to the village helped her "reaffirm the sensibilities that have given me my intrinsic identity."

She studied in Golaghat Girls' Mission for six years as a boarder.

She studied in Assamese-medium there until class 6.

For her matriculation exam later, she even wrote two papers in the Assamese language.

She spoke the language fluently.

She completed her matriculation from Ridgeway Girls' High School in Golaghat.

She received her B.A. with distinction from Fazl Ali College, Mokokchung, Nagaland, and M.A. in English from Gauhati University, Assam.

From English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, she received her Post Graduate Diploma in the Teaching of English and PhD from NEHU.

Ao began teaching English in NEHU as a lecturer from December 1975.

She completed her PhD in May 1983 under the guidance of Dr. D. P. Singh.

Titled The Heroines of Henry James, her thesis examined female protagonists in James' stories who emerge victorious in their sophisticated and civilised society.

For this, Ao analysed the following works of Henry James: The Madonna of the Future, Daisy Miller, Madame de Mauves, Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl.

She served as the director of the North East Zone Cultural Centre between 1992 and 1997 on deputation from NEHU.

She was awarded the Padma Shri award for her contribution to literature and education.

Her book Laburnum For My Head received the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in the short story category.

Her works have been translated into Assamese, Bengali, French, German, Hindi, and Kannada.

From 1992 to 1997 she served as Director, North East Zone Cultural Centre, Dimapur on Deputation from NEHU, and was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Minnesota 1985–86.

Ao received the Padma Shri Award in 2007.

She is the recipient of the Governor's Gold Medal 2009 from the government of Meghalaya.

She was widely respected as one of the major literary voices in English to emerge from Northeast India along with Mitra Phukan and Mamang Dai.

Her works have been translated into German, French, Assamese, Bengali and Hindi.

Ao conceded to Paulo Coelho's reflection in The Zahir that writing can be a lonely endeavour.

However, "there are also times when words are flowing and seem to offer themselves happily to articulate one's thought."

The resulting mood of exhilaration and joy, Ao suggests, lends a strange feeling of not being alone.

It provides a sense of completeness similar to a fellowship felt in the company of equally happy people.

Ao stated that she wrote for such rare moments of "completeness."

This inner urge compels her to write along with her need "to probe, to question, and also to acknowledge that I exist in the one-ness with my fellow human beings."

Reflecting on writings from Northeast India, Ao explained,"It is about the life we know, and want to share with our fellow citizens who have somehow always looked at us through the prism of 'otherness' and suspicion. Accepting the difference can also mean transcending the 'local' to discover the 'universal.' In that sense, these writings deserve more than the cursory perusals as 'categories' that they are subjected to at the moment."She resisted clubbing of the Northeast as a composite identity.

She called the North-eastern identity as a misnomer "because the region is home to a multitude of people with diverse languages, cultures, costumes."

Using the term, "defaces the real identity" of the communities and people living in the region.

She was a professor of English at North Eastern Hill University (NEHU) from where she retired in 2010.

In 2010, Ao retired as a professor and dean of the English Department at NEHU.