Widows in the weave of folklore: Postmemory and resilience in Northeast Indian narrative

The Northeast region is home to multiple tribes like the Adis and the Nagas, where widows remain stagnant figures within the dynamic folkloric paradigm subject to these tribal communities. Memory, which serves as a tool for bridging the present and the past, preserves the oral tradition through the intergenerational reiteration of folklore. Marianne Hirsch’s (1996) concept of Postmemory enables a nuanced exploration of the relationship between personal and collective memory within the literary domain. Similarly, Ellis & Bochner (2000) describes Autoethnography as a method that employs personal narratives to examine cultural and historical experiences in literature. The confluence of these theories could be extended in the folkloric works of Mamang Dai in The Legend of Pensam (2006) and Temsula Ao in These Hills Called Home (2006), which delineate a realistic portrayal of widows by intricately weaving the narratives of their hardship and resilience. This study examines the position of widows in folklore through the short stories ‘Pinyar, the Widow’ and ‘The Last Song,’ focusing on the marginalised characters Pinyar and Libeni, who endure the travesties of being a widowed mother within the folkloric paradigm