Book Review | Magical Folktales From Arunachal Pradesh’s Peaks And Forests
The first story is of a boy, learning from his father to hunt, to track his prey and use his strength and his bow and arrow. Then the boy comes across a tiger, and, in its formidable presence falters
In this collection of short stories collected from tribes across the length and breadth of Arunachal, Ms Subi Taba speaks of the ethos of the tribes, of their relationships with their environment, with predatory animals that coexist with them in those forests, and with the spirits of those predators that live on in the villages long after the animals themselves have died.
And thus she takes you into a twilight world of charms and sorcery and lakes and rivers in the mountains where killing a tiger brings bad luck to the entire village of the killer, and where giant pythons inhabit a world where the separation between dreams and reality blurs into disturbingly real fantasy. Magic realism, in short.
The first story is of a boy, learning from his father to hunt, to track his prey and use his strength and his bow and arrow. Then the boy comes across a tiger, and, in its formidable presence falters. The tiger prepares to attack, and the father shoots the tiger with his gun to save the boy. It’s doubtful that a single shotgun cartridge can bring down a tiger at any range, but this one does. The boy is saved, and he and his father discover that the tigress has milk, but they don’t find her cub.
The father just wastes away after this, and the boy, too, is haunted afterwards. In surreal visions, the tiger cub, now fully grown, attacks the boy, and, after the boy dies, takes over his spirit…
In another story, a headhunter tells of how he became one. As a boy from a small tribe, he watched the arrival of his brother’s beautiful bride-to-be. This girl has been “claimed” by the son of the chief of a “big” tribe of headhunders. The boy is impressed by her beauty, and takes the youngsters of the tribe into the jungle to make a new log drum for the bride. The headhunters attack the defenceless village while the youngsters are away, and the groom-to-be is decapitated. Unable to bear the guilt of this, the boy hunts for the headhunter who wanted the girl, and decapitates him in turn...
Another story covers the arrival of a Christian missionary, and another the first bus service, so the reader gets a sense of the changes in Arunachal over the centuries, and of its similarities with that of the Nagas.
Ms Taba, a published poetess, says of the title of her first book in an interview with The Arunachal Times: she first named it ‘Tales from the Hinterlands’, but, at the suggestion of her editor, changed it to what it is. That tells of perhaps the only significant weakness in her storytelling: that English doesn’t seem to be her first language, and that she falters in its usage from time to time. Her unfamiliarity with English shows through in the odd clumsy word or phrase: “A tiger sounded small and harmless in fables, but it reality it was enormously sickening!” Or, “Abo aimed at the birds with his gun and shot, thundering the sky with a loud blast…” These niggles aside, though, this is a good read.
Tales from the Dawn-lit Mountains
By Subi Taba
Penguin
pp. 235; Rs 399