Abstract
Abstract
This paper analyses two texts on a female legendary character from the North-East India, plain tribal community of Boros. The character’s name is Thengphakhri, an officer (tehsildar) in colonial Assam. One of the texts is a novel written by Bidyasagar Narzary’s Sword of Birgosri (2012). The other text is by Indira Goswami – The Bronze Sword of Thengphakhri Tehsildar (2013). Both texts were translated into English by Krishna Dulal Barua in 2004 and Aruni Kashyap in 2009. It highlights the moment of celebration of the heroic female figure, which the two novelists weaved from the oral narratives and deployed into writing community histories at the times of the Bodoland movement (a demand for a separate state from the state of Assam, which started in 1986) (Daimary, 1989). This act also helped in challenging the mainstream history, which misses both ethnic minority histories and women’s stories. My paper engages with the intellectual history of a ‘woman warrior’ figure recreated through historical fiction. The original texts were written in the authors’ mother tongues, Narzary in the Boro language Birgwsrini Thungri in 2004 and Goswami in Assamese Thengphakhri Tehshildar Taamor Toruwal in 2009, restoring kinship with their readers-audience. The paper argues that the voice of Boro women cannot necessarily be captured through politics of identity or the making of a hero figure, though both, when speaking to each other, may show a possibility to address the challenges faced in women’s everyday lives in the movement- of history-making.