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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the Karbi concept of parallel reality and the associated narratives that highlight a non-binary association and interplay between dream worlds, agency of nature, and human intentionalities, through the analysis of ethnographic fieldwork materials from Karbi Anglong.

Paper long abstract

In Karbi Anglong, Northeast India, folk narratives render nature and culture fluid and interwoven, disrupting structuralist binaries. My fieldwork reveals Karbi Anglong as a nexus of multiple cosmologies, where vernacular narratives of the human and other-than-human continuum animate the landscape. By foregrounding the ‘marvellous’ in everyday life—dreams, parallel realities, and intentionalities—the study, with a folkloristic and engaged approach, examines the conceptualisation of the Karbi notion of parallel reality and how its narrativization co-constitutes the Karbi ecology.

The Karbi parallel reality, superimposed on the perceptible environment, calls you in your dreams, tests the purity of your intentions, and makes you earn your way back into your own reality. Furthermore, as an interlocutor explains, “you only get to visit if the place and its people decide you are worthy of it,” underscoring the Karbi conceptualisation and interactions between human and other-than-human agency. Thus, visiting the space entails a deep engagement with the agency and intention not only of the people but of the space itself. Stories of the space enact an alternate epistemology: the empirical and the sacred become porous, aligning the mundane and wondrous in a single narrative order. Through emergent and storied Indigenous landscapes of superimposed geographies, dreamscapes, and spatial agency, this paper presents a perspective that reveals landscapes as entangled assemblages of affect, memory, and meaning, offering a critical counter-narrative to monolithic modernity that transforms the hills into multivalent landscapes, eroding the conventional nature/culture dichotomies.