Book review: Kaustav Chakraborty,Queering Tribal Folktales from East and Northeast India

In India, same-sex relationships were considered a crime, until the reading down of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code on 6 September 2018, by the Supreme Court of India. Even then, contemporary mainstream India considers queerness as an abnormal mimicry of the West. There have been scholarly works to counter this myth, seeking to show how ancient India has been tremendously queer-friendly. However, this book, for the first time, tries to offer a queer reading of the oral narratives of four tribal communities in East and Northeast India: Toto, Rabha, Lepcha and Limbu. Hence, this book pioneers the study of the queer indigenes of India as well as the queering of oral narratives, to assert that the queer Indian culture is neither a colonial aftermath nor an interpolation by outsiders into a written text.

There are seven chapters in the book, whose introduction tries to demonstrate how the categories of the tribe as the ‘other’ of the mainstream, along with the category of folk, seen as the ‘other’ of the classic, ironically, are more gender-fluid and thereby more friendly towards the queer who is located in and censored by the mainstream. It also presents the discourses of the left and right arguments on the queer question. It tries to read the feasibilities of a queernormative antiquity to depict an empowered queer, who can redefine the heteronormativity of left- and right-wing politics. It further elucidates that this book is not essentially a collection of folktales, but focuses on their interpretations, aiming to provide a socio-historical account of queer tribal mentalities.

The second chapter deals with methodological issues and theoretical frameworks. As the lengthiest chapter, it critically engages with the debates and concerns related to mnemocultures, oral storytelling vis-à-vis history, transgression, translation and affective bonds. The author employs a ‘globalectical reading’ mechanism for understanding the links between an otherised self and an-other. Drawing together all the principal theoretical aspects related to agency, translation, memory, the story as history, queer transgression, folktale as a literary genre, the methodology of selecting and interpreting folktales and community formation, the chapter underlines the book’s interdisciplinarity.

Chapter 3 offers a psychological analysis of select folktales of the Toto communities who can only be found in the village of Totopara in Northern West Bengal. The chapter shows how Toto folktales illustrate the scope for subversion of all the ‘mainstream’ norms and celebration of all that is considered as queer in terms of desire, intimacies and food habits. Chapter 4, ‘Discord as Defilement: Consensual Incest in Limbu Folktales and “Mainstreaming” the Feminine’, examines incest initiated by Limbu women, as reflected in their folktales from Sikkim and the Himalayan districts of Bengal. It argues that by trying to impose taboo while addressing incest entirely from the perspective of the male, as it is usually understood in mainstream India, where women are mostly the victims, governmental machineries are actually limiting the rights of Limbu women. The nonconformist desire initiated by a female has been eventually labelled as queer by the trespassing mainstream, where the Limbu female can no longer exercise her agency, as reflected in the folktales.

Chapter 5, ‘Stages of the Proscription of Homoeroticity: Lepcha Folktales and Mythistory’, is another extremely interesting chapter. Based on four tribal narratives of the Lepcha communities of Darjeeling and Sikkim, the author has provided the history of the gradual eradication of same-sex desire, prevalent in the ethnic domains, by the colonial and neocolonial regimes. ‘Manly Women, Womanly Men: Genderqueer in Select Rabha Tales’ is the title of Chapter 6, which focuses on the Rabha people of East and Northeast India. As the title indicates, the chapter brilliantly delineates the gender fluidity of tribal folklore heroes and heroines.

The last chapter is a radical attempt at correlating queer Indians with the Dalits of India. Considering Dalit as a political category, the author looks forward to the emergence of the Indian queer community as neo-Bahujan through the realisation of their affliction. There is hope that they might form a ‘communitas of the ex-centrics’, based on effective intimacy, as both Dalit tribal people and queer communities in India represent the wretchedness of the Indian mainstream.

The book is a significant contribution in several ways. It shows how the traditions labelled as ‘little’ are very big storehouses of alternatives, with the help of which one can resist the mainstream idea of queer as an import. It illustrates how the habits, codes of conduct and desires that are excluded by the majoritarian state are easily accepted in the tribal modernity of traditions. Thus, the tag of backwardness that often gets associated with tribalism has been challenged, since their folktales reveal an inclusive counter-culture of queernormativity unlike the mainstream tabooed notions of gender and sexuality.

Folklore studies in India have hardly taken into account the possibility of a queer analysis, and this book seems to open up a new area of academic investigation. Moreover, apart from same-sex desire, all that is perceived as ‘non-normative’ by the mainstream, for example, the issue of incest and Dalit consciousness, have been tried to be associated with queer culture, thereby, extending the scope of queer studies. Further, by studying the queernormative antiquity of tribal communities, the book also creates space for a class analysis of the queer subject. The only drawback of the book is the extensive use of academic coinages which might become a little too complex for common readers.