Writing Orality as a Postcolonial Strategy

A Reading of Janice Pariat’s Boats on Land

Abstract

Like other tribal communities, the oral tradition forms an integral part of the communities of North East India. With the advent of the English missionaries and the introduction of the written script, the oral form was generally identified with the illiterate and even the uncivilized. However, orality is now perceived as an important link between the past and the present and a form of preserving community values through writing. Interestingly, for many writers of North East India, written literature introduced by colonialism has become an effective tool for reviving the oral tradition, thus further preserving the authenticity of tribal communities. Hence, writings from this region in recent years often engage with themes of orality in their narratives in order to reclaim their ethnic identity and retrieve their pre-colonial history and values. ‘Writing orality’, then, becomes an effective strategy in rebuilding tribal practices and values in the midst of westernization, advancement in digital technology, and capitalism in contemporary society. The paper aims to examine the interaction between orality and writing in Janice Pariat’s short story collection, Boats on Land (2013). It looks at how the stories in this collection disrupt the hierarchy of the textual over the spoken, a binary that Pariat believes is a colonial construct. The paper aims to show how the valorization of the Khasi oral tradition in the text challenges the pre-established dominance of written literature.