Tribal Myths and Legends of Orissa: The Story of Origins

This book is a collection of primary source material on the myths and legends of origin of the tribal people of Orissa, along with a section on the procedures of reading myths. The myths and legends presented here are all new field collections. The purpose of the book is twofold. First, it will try to correct the popular urban belief or the belief of the educated-elitist belief to be exact-that our tribal people are ignorant, uneducated and uncultur-ed and that the little “culture etc.” they have is the gift of the “mainstream” civilization. And second, it will attempt to bring out the richness of tribal culture, carried in their myths and legends, and to establish its antiquity in the context of the prime civilizations of the world: the Mesopotamian, the Babylonian, the Hindu, the Egyptian, the Greek and the Judeo-Christian. The book introduces a competitive reading to evaluate degrees of being civilized, if such things are possible. Finally, it examines myths as a fossil field, which is layered and in which ancient facts are trapped and held as fossils. The book suggests ways of identifying, recovering and studying these fossils in order to construct the tribe’s prehistory and ethos. The main body of the book consists, of primary material on creation myths, myths of origin and history, and myths on the making of gods.