‘Tales from the Dawn-lit Mountains’: Observant and deeply empathetic stories from Arunachal Pradesh

“I wanted to write a book that entertains people while educating and informing them about the landscapes, culture, myths, and quiet philosophies embedded in the lives of the people from Arunachal Pradesh,” said Subi Taba in one of our exchanges. True to her maxim, the ten tales about the dawn-lit mountains of Arunachal Pradesh become an excursion into the volatile yet extraordinary lives lived on the margins of time and space. These stories reiterate that the co-existence of man and nature is as essential as it is primitive. Any attempt to disrupt this equilibrium creates a cleft, insurmountable and sometimes, irreversible.

The people of the hinterland

For Taba, the stories included in the collection Tales from the Dawn-lit Mountains have emerged out of longing. The fondness for home, elders and community tie most of the stories together. Yet, they retain their individuality. In the story, “A Night with the Tiger,” Taba hints at the animosity of harming nature quite early on, replaying the same theme in many other stories where nature eventually haunts the hunter. What starts off as surreal becomes believable because of the foretelling of elders. At once, therefore, the story conjures up a past that relies on the community’s knowledge of omens...

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