Animism and the Himalayan Folktales: Reading The Legend of Himal and Nagrai: Greatest Kashmiri Folktales

Abstract

The Legend of Himal and Nagrai: Greatest Kashmiri Folktales (2019) is an interesting collection of Kashmiri oral stories/folktales that seek to document the Kashmiris' indigenous knowledge system and culture. These folktales, retold and collected by Onaiza Drabu, a famous Kashmiri anthropologist, contain stories about indigenous Kashmiris interacting with animals, plants, rivers, and soil. In most of these narratives, human stories intertwine with tales narrated by animals and other elements of nature to form a knowledge system that foregrounds a worldview combining the conscience of humans and animals. For instance, in the story “Himal Nagrai”, the king of serpents, Nagrai falls in love with a king’s daughter, Himal and this relationship highlights the numerous sacrifices that both Nagrai and Himal make to develop an eternal bonding of love. In another story, “Katji Batchi te Ael Byol” a swallow helps an old and poor man to become rich because this old man once had saved the bird from dying. While critically reading these folktales from the perspective of animism, this paper shall use Robin Wall Kimmerer’s and David Abram’s insights to argue that these folk narratives contain a new ecological philosophy that emphasises, according to Abram, an “awareness of more-than-human world” (The Spell of the Sensuous 24). This philosophy generates a new sort of sensibility incorporating the “keen intelligence of animals …whose lives and cultures” associate with humans (The Spell of the Sensuous 24). Kimmerer’s animistic philosophy also directs the attention of humans to the “plants” that “can tell us her story” (Braiding Sweetgrass Kindle Edition 10).