Notes on legends and beads in Arunachal Pradesh, India
1Stuart Blackburn
No one knows, with any certainty, when or by what route the people of Arunachal Pradesh came to their current homelands.
2Isolated on the southern flank of the eastern Himalayas, outside the control and beyond the interest of the civilisations and empires surrounding them, these Tibeto- Burman tribes are nonetheless central to an understanding of the cultural and linguistic history of Asia. The first attempt to write down the history of Arunachal Pradesh, William Robinson’s account of 1841, referred to the ''dark veil which conceals the origin of the tribes'' and the several histories written during the succeeding 150 years have not yet dispelled that obscurity.
3A major problem is the scarcity of written records: before British records began in the early nineteenth century, only two sets of sources refer to the hill tribes of Arunachal.
4First, we have Tibetan texts that mention contact, beginning in the fifteenth century, between Tibetans and tribes along the northern border of present-day Arunachal Pradesh. The other documents are Ahom chronicles, which again refer to conflicts with tribes, this time along the southern border with Assam from the seventeenth century. Two other possible sources, Sanskrit texts and archaeology, contain little useful information.
5The tribes themselves have no indigenous writing.
6The initial motivation behind this essay was to shed some light on the history of the people of Arunachal; and as a folklorist, I naturally turned to oral traditions, to the legends that describe the migrations of the various tribes of the state. Fortunately, oral legends from almost all tribes have been recorded by researchers since about 1900; unfortunately, most of these sources provide only summaries, although a few recent studies do include genealogies and maps. Another limitation is that, as far as I know, there are no published descriptions of the performance or other social use of these oral legends; indeed, my own fieldwork and the available information suggest that, in contrast to oral traditions elsewhere in India, migration legends are not often or regularly recited. Rather, in Arunachal oral performance is dominated by ritual texts, which refer to ancestors and mention early history but do not tell a history of migration. Still, memories of migration are strong, and most people have a clear sense that they are not native to the region, that they arrived from ''somewhere else.''
European Bulletin of Himalayan Research 25/26: 15-60 (2003/2004)