الإنجليزية 1442

Karbis are one of the major ethnic groups in Northeast India, especially in the hill regions of Assam. Like many other tribes of the Northeast, Karbs did not have a written language and hence there is no written history about their origin, migration and settlement. It is indeed a hard task to find out where the Karbis came from and how their identity is formed at present. Historiography of Northeast is obscure regarding the origin of Karbis even today. However, a few prominent Karbi scholars have attempted to document the vast oral sources and bring their past alive. It is true that ethnic history can be reconstructed from oral tradition in the absence of any written history. The same views can be seen in Paul Thomson's The Voice of the Past: Oral History (1978). He argues that “the discovery of oral history by historian… is not only a discovery but recovery. It gives a future no longer tied to the cultural significance of paper documents…” Thus, memory and metaphor are not a passive depository of facts, but an active process of creation and attribution of historical meanings to ethnic identities. This book is divided into five thematic sections on the basis of major themes (General History, Culture & Literature, Politics, Economy and Ecology & Indigenous Knowledge) covering twenty five papers by scholars, researchers and other experts from Karbi community; each section touches upon the central theme of the book. Apart from the major themes the main objective of this book is to cover all the broad academic research areas in order to construct an inclusive history of the Karbis in the contemporary academic discourse of Northeast India. Thus, this book is expected to spur the young scholars for continuing further research on Karbi history from the past and present perspectives.