History of the Last Born/ Lesser One through the ‘Trickster’ in the Select Indigenous Oral Historical Narratives of India

Abstract

This article, based on the oral historical narratives of the Lepcha and Limbu communities of Darjeeling and Sikkim regions of India, is a search for alternative indigenous knowledge and ethno-philosophy that one obtains from the tribal folktales through their alternative use of the younger/lesser ones as trickster, confronting the ‘mainstream’ notion of the character. This study is aimed at emphasizing how the alternative histories of the tribal communities manifested through the tribal tales provide alternatives, which violate the dominant ethos of the ‘mainstream’ in two major ways: firstly, in providing importance to the younger/lesser one unlike the ‘mainstream’s’ obsession with the eldest among the royals; and secondly, in an alternative reading of the ‘trickster’ as a model for emancipation through which the indigeneity seems to subvert all the attempts that have been programmed by the ‘mainstream’ to impose majoritarian values and statist cultural standards on them. This socio-cultural reading of oral histories tries to validate that the notion of ‘evil’ in the form of a ‘criminal trickster’ is a rather motivated construct of the ‘mainstream’ in order to ostracize the nonconformists who are situated in and rebelling against  the ‘mainstream’.