Oral Traditions as Living Archives: Storytelling and Memory Preservation in Northeast Indian Tribal Communities

Northeast India, home to over two hundred tribal and sub-tribal communities, possesses one of the richest reservoirs of oral tradition in South Asia. In the absence of extensive pre-colonial scripts among most hill tribes, storytelling, chants, proverbs, genealogies, and ritual speech became the principal vehicles through which history, law, cosmology, and cultural values were transmitted across generations. This paper examines oral traditions as "living archives"—dynamic, performative repositories of knowledge that function simultaneously as historical record, moral pedagogy, and social glue. Drawing on folklore theory, ethnographic scholarship, and community-based literature from Naga, Khasi, Mizo, Apatani, Bodo, and Karbi contexts, the study analyzes the mechanisms through which oral narrative preserves memory, the socio-cultural functions of storytelling, and the pressures of literacy, migration, evangelization, and digital media that now threaten these traditions. The paper argues that oral archives are not static relics awaiting extinction but adaptive systems capable of renewal through community-led documentation, performance revival, and selective digitization. It concludes by proposing an integrated framework combining ethnographic fieldwork, community ownership, and digital humanities tools for the sustainable preservation of Northeast India's intangible heritage.