Folklore as Ethnic Archive

Burhi Aair Sadhu is an ethnic archive that safeguards the cultural identity, ethics, and collective experience of Assam. This article examines the moral undercurrents in selected folktales collected by Bezbaruah in Burhi Aair Sadhu (Grandma’s Tales), situating them within the contexts of Assamese ethnic identity, postcolonial resistance, and indigenous ecological knowledge. Based on Nie Zhenzhao’s Ethical literary criticism and Spivak’s Subaltern theory and Ecocritical frameworks, the study argues that these narratives serve multiple purposes: constructing ethnic identity, offering coded critique of colonial modernity, and preserving subaltern modern knowledge. Through a close reading of “Tejimola,” “Champawati,” “The Monkey and the Fox,” “The Sly Fox,” and “The Tale of the Cat’s Daughters,” the article maps out the moral patterns (virtue under oppression, ecological reciprocity, kinship ethics, and strategic cunning) that articulate cultural responses to colonial resistance, patriarchy, and environmental disturbances in Assam. The results show that the collection of the folktales as a whole form the ethnic moral archive in terms of extra-institutional justice, relational ecological ethics, moral complexity, and indigenous female epistemic authority, thus highlighting their wider applicability in the field of postcolonial and environmental humanities. The study synthesizes literary criticism and environmental ethics with subaltern sociology and engages with oral tradition, ethnic marginalization, and Indigenous environmental ethics across South and Southeast Asia.