An old Mizo proverb holds that a woman’s wisdom takes her only as far as the village stream. Such proverbs and beliefs have weighed heavily on the journeys of Mizo women such that even today, more than a century after the introduction of the written alphabet in Mizoram, there are barely any narratives by women in the existing body of published texts. Women’s limited access to speaking out in the time or orality sadly did not transform into opportunities to write and publish. And yet, when the editors of this volume—perhaps the first ever such anthology in the state—set out to search for writings by women, they were delighted and surprised to find a wealth of stories, narratives, personal accounts, poems, art and more. These now grace the pages of this remarkable first-of-its-kind book.

This book is written in Mizo, a language spoken in the Indian state on Mizoram. The book traces the origin of the Mizo ethnic group through linguistic analysis and also discusses the close ethnic relationship with other Tibeto-Burman speakers in Asia. English version of the book is not available. He lehkhabu-ah hian tawng zirna Linguistics atanga Mizo hnam tobul chhuina leh Zo hnahthlak hnam hrangte inlaichinna chhuina a awm a. Tin, Mizoram leh Zo hnam thil tawn mek hrang hrang commentary leh hnam kalsiam chungchang thusep engemaw zat tarlan a ni bawk.

In these phenomenal essays, 14 scholars take stock of the effects and response to identity, and culture studies within Mizo literary narratives. The essays address issues that contextualize the development of subaltern and postcolonial studies and the quest for identity within the Mizo perspective. This book offers a multidisciplinary perspective, with insights from history, memory studies, cultural studies and attempt to locate and situate dynamics that are related to orality, history and narrative. Linking the concern with identity to popular literature, individualism, and the need to draw borderlines, the essays identify the most important topics in individual and collective identities in the Mizo. The illuminating essays contextualize developments within Mizo intellectual history, and display aspects that relate to the continuing force in the ongoing study of the relationship between literature, ethnography, and ethnic and cultural studies. From orality, colonial, and postcolonial parameters, the book analyzes the ways in which colonial struggles have continued to contribute to postcolonial discourse in the Mizo, by producing fundamental ideas about the relationship between non-western and western cultures.

Folklore Studies in India: Critical Regional Responses is an interesting compilation of twenty-eight critical articles on the beginning of folklore studies in the different parts of India. In the absence of a book that could map the history of Indian folklore studies single-handedly, this book can be deemed as the first-of-its-kind to feature the historical development of folklore studies in the different states of India. This book succinctly introduces the readers to the folk culture, folk arts, and folk genres of a particular region and to the different aspects of folkloristic researches carried out in that region.

This collection assembles significant research papers on the concept of orality, theoretical approaches, and oral traditions juxtaposed with writing, culture, and folklore. Many of the essays also deal with issues of gender in oral cultures like those of Northeast India. The collection serves as an introduction to the varied ways in which the analysis of oral traditions has revitalized the quest for meanings in orality.

Black magic, occult practices and witchcraft still evoke huge curiosity, interest and amazement in the minds of people. Although witchcraft in Europe has been a widely studied phenomenon, black magic and occult are not yet a popular theme of academic research, even though India is known as a land of magic, tantra and occult. The Indian State of Assam was historically feared as the land of Kamrup-Kamakhya, black magic, witchcraft and occultic practices. It was where different Tantric cults as well as other occult practices thrived. The Khasi Hills are known for the practice of snake vampire worship. The village of Mayong is the village, where magic and occult is still practiced as a living tradition. This book is one of the rarest collections where such practices are researched, recorded and academically analyzed. It is one of those collections where studies of all three practices of Black Magic, Witchcraft and Occult are comibned into one single book.