Karbi History, Past and Present

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The tribes of northeast India are viewed by different scholars from different perspectives. These communities are very complex in nature because of their unexplored nature of identities, dichotomy in identity formation and diverse social formations Similarly, the history of Karbis tribe is an unexplored territory in academic discourse Karbis are one of the major ethnic groups in northeast India, especially in the hill areas of Assam Like many other tribes of the northeast, Karbis community did not have a written language and hence there is no written history about their origin, migration and settlement. It is indeed a hard task to find out where the Karbis came from and how their identity is formed at present Historiography is obscure regarding the origin of Karbis even. Today however, a few prominent personalities/oral narratives generated their past through memory and metaphor from historical perspective. But even these memories started getting distorted. However, in the recent past, scholars from Karbis community have taken initiative to explore the memories and metaphor which are available in oral narratives by deploying historical tools. That is the reason why oral sources are so important for writing of Karbis history In many societies, history has replaced folklore, must also be true for the Karbis. Due to this reason memory, metaphor and folklore have become vital sources of information. It is true that ethnic history can be reconstructed from oral tradition and in the absence of any written history, the numerous myths, legends and tales, as well as other aspects of the tradition have been the only link between the historic past and the present. The same views are also reflected in Paul Thomson's The Voice of the Past: Oral History (1978). He argues that "the discovery of oral history by historian... is not only a discovery but recovery. It gives a future no longer tied to the cultural significance of paper documents... Thus, memory and metaphor are not a passive depository of facts, but an active process of creation and attribution of historical meanings to the ethnic identities.

This book is divided into five thematic sections on the basis of major themes (General History, Culture and Literature, Politics, Economy and Ecology & Indigenous Knowledge) covering twenty five papers by scholars, researchers and other experts from Karbi community, each section touches upon the central theme of the book. Apart from the major themes the main objective of this book is to cover all the broad academic research areas in order to construct an inclusive history of the Karbis in the contemporary academic discourse. Keeping in view of these topics, one has to initiate a dialogue between the past and the present which certainly would help for constructing the history of the Karbis. One can only generalize that the historical experiences would be as variable for different communities as their interactions with their environment and the socio-political forces that they might have encountered from time to time. This book tied to deconstruct the existing 'Meta narratives' or 'hegemonic ideas' of non-Karbi scholars in the present academic discourse and strongly considers oral sources as an important source to counter the distorted histories or subjective experiences of Karbis. Thus, this book is expected to spur the young scholars for continuing further research on Karbi history from the past and present perspectives.

**Contents and Sample Pages**