W here do stories come from? Is it about people making sense of their past, their history, the world around them? For the Wancho tribe of Arunachal Pradesh stories are part of the texture of their life, passed down from generation to generation. The Wancho tribe have lived in seclusion in the remote upper Wancho area nestled in the verdant green Patkai hills bordering Myanmar.
These stories are fascinating in their diversity, variety and scope. They come together to give us a sense of the rich, complex worldview of the Wancho tribe. The ancestors of the Wancho tribe were warriors. The elders are known as knowledge keepers, libraries in which the entire tribe finds all its stories-about their relationships with the community, the forests, hills and rivers, and with the world of plants, trees, insects, animals and supernatural beings. They share these memories about life, love and belonging; and about the age-old cultural traditions that are unheard and unknown beyond the region.
The Wancho have been self-sufficient since the time of their ancestors, but their way of life is changing quickly now. As the Wancho saying goes: Kahon munboy pohon boi (everything except words come to an end).
began animating Indian tribal stories for The Tallest Story Competition (2006) and the following year she screened the films to ten thousand children in Central India.
Tara has been awarded a Professional Doctorate by Bournemouth University (UK) for Tales of the Tribes: Animation as a Tool for Indigenous Representation. She has organised workshops for artists and storytellers in Central and North East India. Her documentary film The Journey of the Tales of the Tribes (2018) was broadcast in India on Doordarshan. She has done post-doctoral research at North-Eastern Hill University for the project The Stories of our Ancestors. Tara is a co-founder of Adivasi Arts Trust (UK).
JATWANG WANGSA
is a teacher in Longding district, Arunachal Pradesh. He is a founding member of Wancho Literary Mission and a member of Wancho Cultural Society, Jatwang is the son of late Ngamchai Wangsa, who was a well-respected storyteller in the village of Kamhua Noknu.
The oral tradition of the Wancho community, who are settled in North East India, is an unfamiliar area of research even within the region. My background in animated film and interest in translating indigenous tribal folklore for new audiences, and some previous experience of the cultures of neighbouring communities in Arunachal Pradesh and in Nagaland, first drew my attention to the exemplary artistic traditions of the Wancho. Several folktales were included in Myths of the North East Frontier of India by Verrier Elwin (1958); however, no anthology of Wancho folklore has been published to date. The oral transmission of the traditional narratives was essential for sustaining the collective knowledge that belongs to the community in a format that is accessible and easy to recollect. A communication gap is expanding between the generations, as the elder ones are less able to pass down their knowledge to attentive listeners. Drawing on interdisciplinary fields of research, this book reviews the interlinking themes of kinship, social order, tradition and cultural change that emerged in the encounters to locate storytellers and to record, transcribe and translate the tales in collaboration with members of the Wancho community.
The Wancho people are a population of 56,866 (recorded by the 2011 census), residing in the secluded landscape of the Patkai range located at the fringe of India, an area that extends from the edge of Assam to beyond the point where the international border with Myanmar divides the community. In Arunachal Pradesh, 73 Wancho villages are in Longding district and 5 are in Tirap district; a further 39 Wancho villages are located in Nagaland; 4 in Assam and 23 Wancho villages are across the border in Myanmar. According to their oral tradition, the Tangjan and the Tsangjan are the two major social divisions of the community, based on the places from where they migrated (Ralongham 2008). Language plays a role in determining local identity, specifically in relation to two Wancho dialects: lower and upper Wancho, that correlate to the geographical areas of the lower Wancho hills that border Assam, and the interior region administered by the sub-districts of Wakka, Pongchau and Longding circles. The stories presented in this collection were recorded from this locality in the upper Wancho dialect using the script that has been recently developed.
The culture of the Wancho people is most frequently cast as a warrior tradition due to the historical practice of beheading their enemies that was carried out in a similar manner to the neighbouring Naga tribes including the Konyak, with whom the Wancho share many cultural affinities. When Verrier Elwin visited the area in 1949, he noted that the Wancho denied any sense of unity with the Konyaks. Wanchos admit that they would prefer to remove the 'Naga' tag from their identity. They have suffered excessively as a result of the political movement for a greater Nagalim, designed to encompass and unite all Naga groups, which brought the infiltration of insurgents into the region.
According to their remembered accounts, the villages sometimes clashed fiercely with one another over claims to territory and natural resources. The strategic position of Wancho villages that are perched on hilltops therefore once served as defence against surprise ambush. The extreme geographical isolation deterred most intrusions into the Wancho region during the British colonial period in India. The single recorded history of the Wanchos by the British administration was the infamous incident of the Nyinu massacre in 1875, in which 80 members of a survey party to the area were killed in a surprise attack by the warriors of Nyinu village. Since the creation of the state of Arunachal Pradesh in 1971, and the recent separation of Longding from Tirap, various initiatives have been directed towards the inclusion and integration of the local communities; however, to date this remains a largely unknown and unvisited part of India.
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