An Approach to the Cultural Mapping of North-East India in Respect of Tribal Tales by Pratibha Mandal is a significant contribution to the growing interdisciplinary interest in oratures in India. Mandal’s sensitivity in her detailed study of folktales from the Northeast, especially in terms of her methodology, is noteworthy. She articulates a response against the homogenized, monolithic concept of the “North-Eastern” as simply a geographical space in the northeastern part of India.
The concept of the northeast in India is problematic. On the one hand, it indicates a geographical space; on the other hand, the term introduces one to different levels of “otherness.” It epitomizes years of struggle against the imperialistic motivations of neighboring states, and by extension, a tendency to homogenize the cultural attributes of the so-called seven sisters as all simply northeastern. Given the multiplicity of communities amongst the seven sisters, it would be presumptuous to consider all cultural attributes under this umbrella term. In her book, Mandal is able to negotiate the tension between the term as a geographical designation and as a homogenization of cultures.
The book is divided into six chapters, viz., i) “The Prologue,” ii) “The Land and the People,” iii) “The Tales,” iv) “Motifs Identified in the Tales,” v) “Folktale Maps,” and vi) “Epilogue.” Besides this, the notes section provides answers to any queries which may arise from the reading of the earlier chapters. The treatise also includes “Information on the Tellers,” “Glossary of Non-English Terms,” and “References.”
The prologue discusses the background of the research as an extension, to the Indian context, of Clark Wissler’s study of Amerindian stories and N. K. Bose’s material and non-material cultural mapping across India under the aegis of the Anthropological Survey of India in 1959-1960. The prologue also provides a comprehensive trajectory of the history of folklore studies in India, with particular reference to the Northeast. The prologue, which further describes technical concepts, the nature of the data, and the methodology of the study, can serve as a useful handbook for any scholar embarking on research in the folklore of northeastern India.
The second chapter, “The Land and the People,” enumerates the physical features of the seven states of India’s Northeast along with short ethnographic reflections on twenty-two indigenous communities of those states. While the chapter offers a vivid description of the geographical space of the Northeast, it also raises questions about the author’s intended readership. An anthropological approach interwoven with a cultural mapping should have ideally been more sensitive to the dangers of being trapped as a researcher in the Western discourse of the Other, which is accentuated through “institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles.” [1] The people of the Northeast belong to dynamic, ever-changing communities, and the movements of transition and modernity within these communities require more attention. A note on the politics of the word “tribal” would also have helped the reader to gauge the history of exploitation meted out to these communities in India.
The third chapter, “The Tales,” and the fourth chapter, “Motifs,” are the most successful chapters in the book. “The Tales” compiles sixty tales while “Motifs” enumerates as needed the motifs identified in the tales. Discussing world-origin myths, other origin myths, and other tales, the author delineates motifs based on Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk Literature (1955). Tale 23 on “Tatara-Rabuga” from the Garo community, “Tale of the Jatinga Birds” from Dimasa, the Karbi tale of “A Hornbill Boy,” and the Tripuri tale of “The Amlaibati Maiden” are wonderful treasures collected by the author.
The fifth chapter, “Folktale Maps,” is the longest chapter in the book. It not only contains maps but also describes the methods used to generate them. Tables giving a state-wide distribution of motifs in other origin myths of Assam-Meghalaya-Tripura from a database of twelve tales collected by the author, help identify incomplete areas in northeastern Indian folk traditions as a semantic field.
The epilogue, the final chapter of the book, offers an interpretation of the maps in chapter 5 divided into five broad sections: i) Maps of Simple Complete Tales, ii) Maps of the Non-Motif Features, iii) Maps of Thompson Motifs, iv) Global Distribution of the Motifs Identified, and v) End Remarks. The chapter offers a point of intersection between Wissler, N.K. Bose, and A.K. Ramanujan, thereby developing a post-contact approach to folktales. Mandal reviews the historical progression of the folktale from imperialist collections to Tibeto-Chinese Buddhist influences, and more contemporary, ethnographically situated folktales of the Northeast.
One of the most commendable contributions of the book is the section which provides detailed information on the storytellers. Maori writer Linda Tuhiwai Smith has written that “Research,” intertwined with diverse forms of imperialism “is probably one of the dirtiest words in the Indigenous world’s vocabulary. When mentioned in many Indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful.” [2] The appropriation of indigenous cultures by non-indigenous explorers, missionaries, politicians, and modern day academicians testifies to a painful history of negation of everything related to “indigeneity.” In this context, Mandal’s acknowledgment of the original storytellers is a sterling example of ethical methods of representation. An Approach to the Cultural Mapping of North-East India in Respect of Tribal Tales not only interrogates the signifiers, signs and processes that circulate around such knowledge-formation but also explores multi-disciplinary contributions and interventions arising from folktale traditions of the Northeast across diverse media.
NOTES
1. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Vintage Books, 1978), p. 2.
2. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Dunedin, NZ: University of Otago Press, 1999), p. 1.
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[Review length: 948 words • Review posted on November 17, 2011]