Translation as an Act of Reading the Folk-Narratives of Koch-Rajbangshis

This research would attempt to question how translation of myths is re-reading of history/s of
a tribal culture, how the study of myths resist the mainstream intervention, how the folkrituals can help to protect the cultural position of the tribals, and finally, how environment
and the vanishing trends of narratives are closely related. With specific reference to
Rajbangshi community, the projects aims at studying the oral narratives of their culture and
observe if narrative takes the role of meaning-making, whether it can go beyond the culturespecific structure and assume a role of pan-global structure that can connect the humans.
Therefore, even if we dont understand the cultural specificity, we can comprehend the story
that a narrative offers. In case of folk-lores and mythic narratives, the discourse comprises of
both real and imaginary events, but as White proclaims that there is no obligation to keep
these two orders of events distinct from each other. When meaning is shifted from one social
space to another by narrative means, the reality also makes a shift. Therefore the former
reality tends to come to a close.
The objective/s of this proposed research are collecting and studying the myths and folk
rituals associated with Koch-Rajbangshis, archiving the collected myths thereby archiving
indigenous knowledge systems of these endangered tribals, and to study the tension between
the marginalised and mainstream narratives. This project will follow both ethnographic and
narrative methodologies. The narrative enquiry will look into the pre-knowledge, the
knowledge that was there before the translation or rewriting work took place. It will also
examine if the gaining of knowledge has resulted any shift in the meaning of knowledge that
have been derived and to observe if the tension exists within the myths itself or it has been
created by the author or it exists within. On the other hand, ethnographic methodology will
help to understand the myths from an outsiders position. The narratives collected will be
studied by applying exegetical (understanding the meaning of rituals explained by the
insiders), operational (recording the rituals and observe the behaviour of the insiders) and
positional (relating the symbols found in the rituals to other communities) dimensions. How
the indigenous knowledge can be collected and brought into the global world through
translation activities? The fundamental trait of indigenous knowledge is that it is local and
orally transmitted. Hence the researcher has to gather the undocumented data from diverse
sources that contain both functional and non-functional symbols. The information or
knowledge encoded in the religious beliefs, rituals, ceremonies and myths hold the
inseparable rational and non-rational parts. To decode the symbols, the researcher has to

undergo both formal and informal communication with the people which can be broadly
divided into three types: firstly, with people (via exchange of goods/ message/ women/
power of word); secondly, with nature (via Traditional Knowledge System); and thirdly, with
Super Nature (via performances that could be cultural/ social/ magical/ religious/ agriculturalseasonal).1 The project will look through the verbal and non-verbal nature of the folklores,
which will eventually identify the problems of translation in the project. The non-verbal
aspects would require an explanatory structure. So the challenges in translation will range
from the idea formation to the expression of language. But the question that inevitably arises
on translating folklores, is how to translate transfer the belief that are associated with folk
practises from one culture to another. The attempt is to understand the conception of the
insider and go through the folklores or myths through three different phases. The first is
preparatory phase, followed by the liminal period and finally the separation phase.
The researcher hypothesises that the colonial and post-colonial laws on forest land and forest
products restricted the tribes unlimited rights to forests. The translation or rewriting the
forest myths constitutes an attempt to narrate the thoughts of the tribals and thereby, the
process becomes a political strategy to construct an awareness that would help to resist the
disappearance of their culture along with the forests in the contemporary period.
The research plan is to collect folk narratives of the Rajbangshis of West Bengal, Assam and
documenting them for further purpose and analysis as stated above. Now the question may
arise that why a study on the myths and folklores of Rajbangshi community is needed. Spread
across the states of West Bengal, Assam, Nepal, Meghalaya, Tripura, Bihar, and Bangladesh,
the Rajbongshis are an ancient tribe which originated from the Cooch kingdom. Relating their
communitys heritage of being the kings of Cooch Kingdom, they call themselves the
Kshatriyas and a part of ancient Hinduism or Sanatana. The communitys history traces back
to the ancient Puranas, to the legend of Parasurama. When Parasurama started killing the
Kshatriyas, those who escaped, came and started their habitation in these northern regions.
However, the Rajbongshis were primarily animists, which imply that their religion observed
worshipping the natural entities like plants, animals, or inanimate objects. The identity crisis
of this community is not only a result of their ethnological denomination debated over the
concept of Kshatriya or Mlechchas, but also an impact of their linguistic identity being
Das Gupta emphasized these three types of communication in The Relevance of Indigenous
People: A Case Study of the Rajbanshi Community of North Bengal in Environment and
Sustainable Development in India and repeats it in his essay Way to Study Indigenous Knowledge
and Indigenous Knowledge System.
1

defined as a sub-group of Assamese or Bengali in India. . Their language has been stamped
as a dialect of Bengali or Assamese depending on their communitys existence in a specific
linguistic nation-state.2 From the studies related to origin of Rajbangshi language, the
researcher has observed that the Rajbangshi language is an evolved form of Bodo and
Kamrupi Prakrit. However, the Bodo Group consists of consists of multiple languages like
Bodo, Rabha, Garo, Koch, Mech etc. to look into the origin of the word Mleccha in the east,
an identification can be drawn from Mech tribe, a non-Aryan tribe living in Terai region of
Bengal and Bihar3. To study further on the origin of the word Mleccha, reading Robert
Shafers Ethnography of Ancient India helps us to understand the relationship between the
Indo-Aryans and Tibeto-Burmans at an early stage. According to Shafer,
Mleccha, referring to the indistinct speech of some non-Aryans, is taken from proto-Bodish
(proto-Tibetan) *mltse "tongue," Old Bodish ltse, Kukish generally *mlei, the combination of
initial consonants (*mlts-) being simplified hi various ways in different Tibeto-Burmic
languages.(Shafer 23)

Now the question may arise that why the identity of Rajbangshis should be seen in a
backdrop of Mleccha or non-Aryan community? And secondly, how is it relevant in the
project of reading folklores and myths from the forests? The concept of Mleccha originates
from the differences between Aryans and the others on four basic parameters: speech (vac),
language (bhasa), country (desa) or community (jati). The concept of otherness in ancient
India was imposed to the people who deviated from the structure of four Varnas, and were
considered to be the uncivilized or uncultured. These uncultured or barbaric communities
often referred to the people who lived in association with forests and followed a religious
system where totems associated with forests played a major role instead of the Vedic Gods
and Goddesses. As Aloka Parashar observes from the readings of Arthashastra, the term
Mleccha is often used to describe the forest tribes. The practices of Rajbangshi community
are closely associated with the forests since agriculture was an indispensable part of their
living. Reading the folklores and the rituals is, thereby, an attempt to understand the margin
between purity and pollution when we discuss about the identity of a community by
analysing the discourses of cultural symbols. These symbols play the most important role
here as the meanings associated with them continue to deviate in temporal and special
2

From an interview conducted by Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay

This is a reading from Aloka Parashers Mlecchas in Early India where she borrows the idea of B.Liebich who
has explained that the term Mleccha does not occur in Early Vedic literature. So the origin of the term Mleccha
can be searched in the East.
3

contexts. According to Turner, a symbol as the smallest structure in rituals which connects
the unknown with the known (Turner, 48). We can find such symbols in the basic livelihood
of a community beginning from their food, clothing, occupation etc. Let us take the example
of food. The importance of understanding the discourse of food can be aptly understood from
Mary Douglass words. According to her, if food is treated as a code, the message it encodes
will be found in the pattern of social relations being expressed. The message is about
different degrees of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, boundaries and transactions across
the boundaries (Douglas, 61). Therefore,the discourse of food is a major factor for cultural
analysis, because consumption is highly associated with purity and impurity. Now if there is a
fine line between the pure and the impure, the sacred and the non-sacred, the consumable and
the non-consumable, a researcher may ask where and how this line exists within the notions
of same community.
Looking at the censuses from 1872 to 1921, it is interesting to note that how the
communitys identity was being defined by themselves and others. While in 1872s census,
the indigenous population of North Bengal was divided between Kochs, Paliyas and
Rajbangshis, the crisis arrived when in 1891, Hunters Statistical Account stated that Kochs
and Rajbangshis are one and same. At this juncture, colonial modernity served as an impetus
to multiplicity of their religious positions. The religion was an instrument of bringing out the
identity dynamics that on the one hand classified themselves from the Kochs, and on the
other hand echoed the objectives of the aspirations of the educated middle-class to unite the
classes among the community. The religious movement of Rajbangshis was more of a social
movement where the claim was equal share with others in the opportunities thrown upon by
the colonial government. Assembly for the Upliftment of the Fallen Kshatriyas of Rangpur,
under the leadership of Haramohan Roy Khazanchi, attempted to locate the community
within the four-folds of Hindu Caste structure by petitions to the District Court Magistrate.
Though their goals of establishing the facts that all Rajbangshis were Kshatriyas and they are
different from Kochs were not accomplished, the turn of the twentieth century gave a new
momentum to the movement as Rajbangshi lawyer Panchanan Berma tried to unite the precolonial literate class and newly educated middle class for a coherent political activism.
Imparting modern education became a part of the agenda of the Kshatriya movement led by
Panchanan Berman and at the same time, to fulfil the wider interests of the community,
democracy was endorsed. The caste nomenclature shifted its emphasis from Kshatriyas to
Rajbangshi-Kshatriya and added a new dimension to their identity assortment.

The reconstruction of Rajbangshi communitys religious identity needs to be looked

along with the temporal frame of introduction of Western modernity in India. In 1835,
Macaulays Minutes negated the necessity of Sanskrit and Arabic as languages of law or
religion and promoted English as the educational equipment for modernity among the new
Indian middle-class. On the contrary, thinkers like Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay
emphasized on the need of reforming Hinduism and making it a foundation of forming a
nation-state. This approach aimed to appropriate the marginal religious practices into
Hinduism. Therefore, observing Rajbangshi communitys religious practices allow us to find
the multiplicity where this reformation movement tries to decentralise the already existing
caste-structure, and at the same time, building a space for their regional deities in the
boundaries of Hinduism.
Taken into consideration that the Rajbangshi community constantly feared the threats from
dominant groups of rulers, and they lived as a marginal community in the north east frontier
of India, the next question arises is that was it only the human intervention that made them
anxious of their living, or even the super-natural power menaced them constantly? The
practises of worshipping Mashan, Gohini, Hudum Deo are the examples of how they
depended on pleasing the supernatural entities to defend themselves from diseases and natural
calamities. The concern for livelihood is reflected in the discourses of religious practices as
well. In the process of othering, Rajbangshis were always considered as a semi-civilized
society and according to Arnold van Gennep, to the semi-civilized mind no act is entirely
free of the sacred (Gennep, 3). Therefore the acts of farming and harvesting also opened the
path of deriving the magico-religious symbols for them. The practise of worshipping Hudum
Deo, where women pray in nude for the annual rain on a new moon night, is an example of
such symbols. Mashan and Gohini are the Gods who are believed to curse the human beings
with diseases if they are offended. According to Devendranath Varma, the Rajbangshis are
the descendents of the tribal society who worship nature and believe in enchantments to
protect themselves from the curses of gods, ghosts, spirits, jinnis etc. The ancient beliefs have
been transferred from generations not only by telling and re-telling of folklores but also
manifestation of the beliefs by continuing the traditional practices.
This project aims to sustain the linguistic and cultural survival of Koch Rajbangshis by
reading, archiving and translating their folklores. According to the Ethnologue report, the
Koch language falls in the category of vigorous, i.e, it is used for face-to-face communication
by all generations and the situation is sustainable. But since the practise of this language is

limited only within small social circles, the probability of its status to fall in the category of
threatened languages is high. It is enlisted as one of the definitely endangered languages in
India. The marginalisaltion of their language by the constant threats from mainstream
languages like Bengali and Assamese has resulted in endangerment of Rajbangshi language,
since it has no written script and it primarily exists as an oral language. Hence, this project is
an attempt to document this language by documenting their myths and at the final stage
translating them.
As a part of this proposal, the researcher has divided the project into chapters and subchapters. The introduction will familiarise the readers with a brief history of KochRajbangshi community, their socio-political history, the impact of Kshatriyaisation and at the
same time will also present the alternative picture of their rich preservation of oral culture
which mostly gets reflected through their ritual processes.
Chapter 1: Reading, Translating and Language Documentation
This chapter will look after the secondary sources of knowledge available to us. By this, the
researcher implies that the folk tales and narratives from Koch-Rajbangshi community that
already have been documented in some written forms. These written literature is available to
us in both Assamese and Bengali script. While they are read and later on translated into
English, well try to comprehend the scope of knowledge transference.
Chapter 2: Comparative Study of Koch-Rajbangshi folktales and folk rituals from North
Bengal and Assam
As it has already been referred that the available secondary sources of knowledge are in
Bengali and Assamese, the next major step in this project is to gather the information from
primary sources. In this chapter not only the folk tales and folk rituals from two linguistically
and culturally different backdrops will be discussed, but a comparative analysis of primary
and secondary information will also be done. In other words, the already available knowledge
will be reviewed along with the new knowledge and the changes that has occurred along the
passage of time and space will be recorded in this chapter.
Chapter 3: People, Nature and Super-nature
This chapter will discuss how the folklores and folk rituals are connecting people with nature
and super-nature. Since Koch-Rajbangshis are primarily animists, most of their rituals and

tales goes back to worshipping of natural entities. When the need of human beings merges
with the sacred, and what we find is that the super-nature is invoked through the natural
objects to fulfil them. This chapter will observe the multi-vocality of the symbols found in the
rituals. For example, when an invasion comes from a supernatural identity, what are the
possible ways of averting or counteracting towards them will again bring the security back?
This chapter is a reflection on the magico-religiousness of the ritual practices observed in
Koch-Rajbangshi community.
Chapter 4: Oral Narratives and Oral History
When we record the folktales and folk rituals, the events represented in this process comprise
of both real and imaginary elements. This chapter will observe how people narrate the events
and the events narrate themselves and thereby help to form a plot in the oral history. Here we
will discuss how the influence of other communities have exercised in the narratives of their
culture. In other words, since the movement of this community is dynamic, how the transcultural traits have stimulated the cultural memory of the community?
Chapter 5: Narration, Narratives and Meaning Making:
Narratives when take the role of meaning making, it goes beyond the culture-specific
structure and assumes the role of pan-global structure that connects the human beings.
Therefore even if we dont understand the cultural specificity, we can still comprehend the
story that a narrative offers. As we are intending to look after the historical narration, the
project demands a multiplicity in the act of meaning making, and thereby multiple versions of
reality can be presented. When meaning is shifted from one social space to another by
narrative means, the reality also makes a shift. Therefore, the former reality may or may not
come to a closure. This chapter will bring in parallel the acts of narrating oral history and the
act of meaning making in a particular culture.
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