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Paper short abstract

This study will explore the way in which these oral traditions serve as a means through which Santhal people can voice their concerns and reclaim their historical identities.

Paper long abstract

This study investigates the ways that Santhal oral traditions disrupt the conventional historiography of India by providing counter-narratives that challenge both the racialization and developmentalist narrative of Indian historiography. Traditional histories of indigenous peoples, at best, present them as fragmented and incomprehensible within the official historical documents that serve as the primary evidence for how the official archives are constructed. Such fragmented and incomprehensible documents are the result of centuries of colonial ethnographic writings, the expertise of missionizing agents, and the contemporary bureaucratic imposition of official postcolonial historical representations. These archives thus portray Santhal communities as readable subjects of the government, with corresponding concepts of "primitive," "tribal," and "ahistorical." Therefore, within the current research project, the ways in which Santhal communities have used myths, “ritual” narratives, collective memory through landscape, and performance storytelling to create an alternative way to construct knowledge and understanding are documented. The current study builds on these first-person accounts to demonstrate the usefulness of Santhal narrative methods as a powerful way of reinterpreting the past. Storytelling in India serves a dual role. It is not simply a way of preserving and passing on culture but also a way for marginalized communities to assert their rights to land, their histories, and their moral authority in the face of increasing political disenfranchisement. This present study also builds on the concept that highlighting the margin in a narrative representation provides a powerful way to illustrate the epistemic violence that exists in the representation of official history and academic knowledge.