Every nation has its tradition of folklore study, based in its political and ideological history. W. J. Thoms sought “manners, [etc.]… of the olden time”; Cosquin in France argued for Indian origin and diffusion; the Grimms aspired to fidelity to the voice of the German folk; all these traditions are distinct. Folklore studies in India are as bound up with political beliefs and ideological values as they are in every other nation. Northeast India was enclaved, fought over by the Raj, and neglected by central governments. This book presents fifty-seven tales from that spectacularly beautiful part of India, which foreigners hardly ever see. (For an exciting exception to the world’s blindness, see http://tribaltransitions.soas.ac.uk/researchdesc.html.) The region must, we think, contain “folk” in that classic definition, people who are politically irrelevant, economically backward, connected by numerous common factors. This book opens materials new to Western folklorists. In fact a good many local collectors have published books of tales and proverbs from the northeast, which can be found in university libraries, but these don’t enter the world conversation of folklorists as they should.
One reason is that Indian folklorists don’t often begin, as Western scholars do, by preferring the oral over the written. So in this book, though all the texts may have once been written down from the lips of informants, they are given to the reader in the words of the collector, who will stop to explain the meaning of a word: “nkhuk, a basket used for keeping treasured possession” (41), or of a custom: “she was forced to get married to Long Dili, according to Karbi traditional wedding ceremony called Adam Asar” (115). The style of most of the texts is smooth, literary, or ethnographic: “In due course of time, the population of the village increased and the people began to move out and settle in adjoining places forming the present village that they still claim to have dispersed from their original village or Viswema” (45). The narratives, in other words, have been dictated by informants to investigators, who then create new “texts” and add explanatory material. An exception appears to be the stories collected by the editor, whose poetic translations may be reflecting the rhythm and pace of live performances. Whether he has sought to emulate Dell Hymes or Dennis Tedlock he does not say.
Another reason this sort of book doesn’t enter the world conversation of folklorists is that Indian scholars don’t find it necessary to give biographical information about informants. Their names do appear here, as they do not in many another such collection. In other books, some general sociohistorical information may be given as background, but there is seldom any integration of social or political history with the folklore texts. Here, perhaps because the intended audience is regional and familiar with the history, the stories are asked to stand on their own.
Finally, as in most such small-scale Indian collections, the two things a Western folklorist would think most important are omitted. Comparative data from other parts of India, or from the rest of the world, are not present, and none of the standard indexing and bibliographical resources of the folklorist have been consulted. More than any other factor, it is the unwillingness of these collectors to ask whether their data may have counterparts or analogues outside their region that inhibits their conversation with the scholarly world. It is not difficult to spot international figures like the trickster and his dupe (102–3), the singing bone (127–28), the child promised to an ogre (142–46), or even Strong John the precocious hero (149–52). How these worldwide motifs have been localized to reflect cultural emphases in the northeast would have to be the subject of an analytic study. Modern narratives like those in this book deserve a place of equal honor with Ramayana and Mahabharata. Lacking sustained attention to orality until recent times, India has such a long tradition of elite literacy that “folk” can easily elide into meaning “ancient,” and there is no significant difference between folklore and literature. Oral performance, in storytelling and other genres, needs closer study. This editor’s Programme of Folklore Research and Archive, at North Eastern Hill University, is where that study will take place.
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[Review length: 701 words • Review posted on November 28, 2006]