Summary Of Garos In Garro

MYTHS AND ARCHETYPES IN GARO (A∙CHIK) FOLK NARRATIVES:
A SELECT STUDY

LUCY R. MARAK

(Publishing House)

This work is dedicated…

To my beloved father, the Late Mr. Francis Cheran who valued art and education and inculcated the same in me!

Foreword

This work is revised version of the Thesis submitted by the author to the North Eastern Hill University, for which, she was awarded the degree of the Doctor of Philosophy in the department of English.
Ever since the first contact of the Europeans with the Garos in the second half of the 18th century, there had been spurt of interests among the European and later Indian Administrators and Scholars in studying and doing researches on various aspects of Garo life and culture. Out of the multitude of the publications, mention can be made of John Eliot’s “Observations on the inhabitations of

He realized that scholarly work on materials of folklore was being carried on under various names such as ‘Popular Antiquities’ or ‘Popular Literature’ and therefore needed to be categorized with single label to designate this important area of enquiry. He, therefore, suggested “a good Saxon Compound Folk – Lore – the lore of the people” to replace all other somewhat cumbersome terms, in a letter to the Athenaeum (see Jawaharlal Handoo, 2000, 1).
Handoo, however, observes that folklore had been studied with scholarly interest long before Thoms coined the term. Though Thoms coined this term, he did not give a definition of folklore. But he certainly had some kind of specific view of folklore in mind. His words and phrases such as ‘manners’, ‘customs’, ‘neglected customs’, ‘fading legends’, ‘fragmentary ballads’, etc., do present a clear picture of his increasing awareness of folklore which was “closely associated with nineteenth century intellectual currents of romanticism and nationalism” (Dundes, 1965,