Can Naga Folktales Hope Back?

Situating Select Naga Anglophone Novels

Abstract

Indigenous vision of hope is fed by intellectual, cultural, environmental, medicinal, and spiritual knowledge system. It is a precolonial repertoire of hope, which pertains to individual or/and community sustenance, resilience and wellness. It is strategically preserved and transferred from one generation to another throughfolktales. However, due to several forms of environmental violence to indigenous peoples, folktales have undergone cultural erasures at various levels. Consequently, the present-day indigenous peoples, devoid of indigenous hope, feel intellectually and culturally displaced.Therefore, folktales must be reclaimed and regenerated. This study proposes to create a roadmap to retrieveindigenous frameworks of hope (pertaining to ecoethicalsustenance, resilience and wellness at community-and-individual level), which are embedded in the modern-day representations of folktales. For this, it takes up Naga folktales as delineated in select contemporary Naga Anglophone novels and seeks to retrieve Naga hope stories with a commitment to connect Naga peoples to their ancestral eco-conscious wellness frameworks.