Negotiating Representation: The Self and Community in The Story of a Tribal: An Autobiography

Literature as a means of representation and understanding selfhood and identity was oral based for the Khasis prior to colonialism but the coming of education via the proselytising efforts of the Welsh Mission led to the development of Khasi literature by the end of the 19th century. As mode of representation, literature for Khasis became a space of negotiation and of adaptation of foreign modes of expression and representation to reclaim an identity which has been suppressed by the colonial rulers via their discursive practices. This is clearly seen in the trend of the literary production of the community. The loth century saw a mushrooming of literary production by Khasi writers, with most of them preferring to write in their own language and about their oral tradition. Interestingly, despite this trend, the first autobiography by a Khasi, B. M. Pugh's The Story of a Tribal (1976), was written in English. The title of the text itself alerts the readers of the highly politicised term 'tribal' as Pugh himself points out in his Preface and along with the fact that it is an autobiography the implication of issues of representation in terms of identity and selfhood cannot be missed. The text is also historically significant because of the author's articulation of his understanding of identity making in the midst of the cultural and political forces of colonialism and later Indian nationalism especially because it provides a glimpse of the hill state movement that surged in the Northeast immediately after Independence. This text thus gives an eye-witness account of the struggle that the hill tribes of Northeast faced to maintain their political and cultural identity.