Introduction :      The study of the past in Northeast India has always required a close and productive relationship between History and Anthropology. Unlike many other parts of South Asia where written chronicles, inscriptions and administrative documents form the backbone of historical reconstruction, much of Northeast India developed sophisticated systems of memory and knowledge transmission without extensive written records. For centuries, communities across the region relied on oral traditions, ritual performances, clan genealogies, sacred landscapes and customary practices to pass down information about their origins, migrations and political structures. When British colonial officials entered the region in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they produced a large archive of ethnographic writings that attempted to document tribal life. Over time, archaeology also emerged as an important discipline, revealing material evidence that allowed scholars to push ...

Introduction : The book 'Oral Tradition As History’ is a notable work in the field of study about Oral History and Oral Tradition. The book was originally published in 1985 and published by the University of Wisconsin Press of Wisconsin, England. The book contains a total of 256 pages divided into seven chapters, each chapter again divided into various sub-sections. As the name suggests, the main discussion of the book is basically on Oral Tradition as a source of history.     In the preface, the writer Jan Vansina put forward his consideration of Oral Traditions not only as the documents of past, but also the expressions of present as the Oral Traditions carries a message that are told in the present. To convey this idea of Oral Tradition as a fusion of past and present , he used an African proverb “Tete are ne ”(ancient things are today), which beautifully depict his idea. Keeping the view in mind that “all human thought and memory operates in the same way everywhere an...