Santhal Oral Narratives and the Rewriting of the Indigenous Past as Counter-History in a Polarised India

Abstract

This research examines how Santhal oral traditions challenge conventional approaches to writing history in India through counter-narratives that contest racial and developmental representations of Indigenous peoples. Santhal histories have long been marginalised, fragmented, or distorted by colonial ethnographic and bureaucratic archives that constructed them as primitive, tribal, and ahistorical. Drawing on oral traditions, landscape-based narratives, and performance, this article demonstrates how Santhal communities employ alternative epistemologies to understand and represent their past. It highlights silences and distortions in official records and shows how oral traditions reconstruct alternative histories while serving political functions, enabling marginalised communities to assert claims to land, history, identity, and moral authority amid social exclusion and political divisions.

The article argues that Santhal oral narratives are not merely instruments of cultural preservation or supplementary sources but conceptual interventions that expose the epistemic violence embedded in dominant historical scholarship. Grounded in memory, identity, and community attachment, these narratives challenge prevailing accounts of colonialism, nationalism, and development while contributing to broader debates on decolonial methodologies, subaltern epistemology, and Indigenous historiography. By treating Indigenous narrative practices as theoretical work, the study challenges historical models that marginalise alternative voices and opens possibilities for more inclusive understandings of the past and future.