Authors: Joyshree Saikia. Assistant Professor
Abstract: The representation of North East India has been colonial and ethnographically reductive and there has been a gross misrepresentation of the heterogeneous traits of the region under the faulty homogeneous label of 'Northeast'. It is undeniable that the region is a treasure house of unique traditions, cultures, languages and dialects. However, the only obvious trait of homogeneity among them is reclaiming their indigenous oral tradition/s in present time. Within any colonial discourse, the oral form “is generally identified with the illiterate and even the uncivilized” (Ao 104). Hence, tribal oral culture has oftentimes been misinterpreted by colonial discourse, which leads to identifying the communities as illiterate, ignorant, and backward. The study will examine how the concept of writing orality is accomplished in Boats on Land, a short story collection by contemporary Khasi writer Janice Pariat. The stories in this collection attempt to disrupt the hierarchy of the textual over the spoken, a binary that Pariat believes is a colonial construct. The study aims to show how the valorisation of the Khasi oral tradition in the text challenges the pre-established dominance of written literature.
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