In Subi Taba’s stories, bullets or the swing of a machete may kill a tiger but it will live again. The spirit of a dead animal can go looking for its hunter, turn him into a tiger, and get him killed by other men.
The usual signs of a finish or calamity – a dead brother, a marriage ended with widowhood, a man’s friendship with a python – are repeatedly tied in her work with ideas of mortality and immortality, death and its denial, idylls and their violation. In her endings are her beginnings, but she can flip it the other way around as well.
For her uncannily beautiful stories of lives lived like fairytales, Subi Taba, a poet and writer from Arunachal Pradesh, has won the Ramnath Goenka Sahithya Samman (RNGSS), 2025, for Best Fiction for Tales from the Dawn-lit Mountains (Penguin). The RNGSS citation has hailed her “capture of the moral universe of mountain communities negotiating change”.
In Arunachal, the natural world is not benign or decorative, says Taba. “It watches you back. Forests, rivers, animals, and spirits coexist with humans in ways that are not always comforting. Eeriness is also a way to approach trauma indirectly. Certain experiences—especially those shaped by violence, silence, or isolation—cannot be addressed head-on,” she says.
Gothic tenderness, violence
But in her prose, there has been no holding back. In her story, ‘Love and Longing in Seijosa’, a young widow looks back on nights of passion in a house on a lake still as a funeral; nature seems to be in the know of what is to follow:
The ghosts of the past crept into her dreams like a silent scuttling spider with beady eyes. She and her husband are newly married, alive and breathing together inside a boathouse floating on a small lake. It is nighttime…Below their bed, under the web of reeds and water hyacinths, the fish are eavesdropping on their conversations…
The second son, in another story, who turns belatedly into a headhunter to avenge his brother’s death, a death he almost made sure by leaving him without guards, says with macabre self-awareness: “I lived my brother’s life. I married my brother’s wife, I inherited my brother’s chieftainship, maybe I earned it, or maybe I stole his fate.”
The art of ambiguity
The collection also shows Subi Taba’s use of one of the oldest tricks of a writer – the art of ambiguity – when commenting on troubled histories. In her story, ‘A Man from China’, she piques the reader’s curiosity with the title, to pen a tale not about a man from China, but about one who strays into China by accident. In Tibet, Tade Ishneya gets married until circumstances force him to return. At some point in the story, he asks: ‘‘Does it matter which land I originally belong to and which I eventually fall in love with?”
“When I made him say these lines,” says the writer, “it was my way of trying to experiment a bit with situations of how people can fall in love with other places and then from thereon have discussions about migration, of people loving and losing things in their life due to geography, a marked boundary. In Tibet, Tade desired to be a man…. Now, if I were to come and live in Chennai because I fell in love with the culture there, would it matter that I am from Arunachal Pradesh?”
The collection also tucks in stories of other unresolved questions—the question of religion and ‘modernity’, and whether the Christian evangelising mission in the northeast was God-driven or an arm of colonialism, or both.
Says Taba: “Christian missionaries, in many tribal areas, brought literacy, healthcare, and a language of dignity—but they also disrupted indigenous belief systems. Similarly, the headhunter [in her stories] is neither glorified nor condemned. He is rendered tragic because history has no place for him anymore.”
The artwork
Tales from the Dawn-lit Mountains is also a window into the land of Arunachal’s tribes, some of whom have been illustrated in the book by artist Jompi Ete. Taba is from the Nyishi tribe. “We have limited written texts. Most of our myths and legends have been passed on through oral traditions. So, the main agents of our fables are either the village shaman, orator or village elders.”
Nyishis draw the idea of what is heroic, romantic or moral, from Abotani, a mythical character with various stories of bravery and misadventures, and who had conjugal relations with different entities of nature, including animals.
In Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’, a man wakes up as a giant beetle, a metaphor for his alienation and entrapment within family and society. But the man-animal relationship in Taba’s book rotates on a different axis. The way she looks at animals and animality has some affinity with the modernist literary genre of marvellous realism in Latin America and other parts of the post-colonial global south.
“The man-animal relationship in my work reflects my love and fascination for animals, and imagining the world from their point of view. In our indigenous cosmologies, the boundary between humans and animals is fluid. Animals are friends, messengers, witnesses and part of the cultural life and language as well. My use of animality often gestures toward kinship. It asks: what happens when humans forget to take care of our animal brethren? What violence emerges from that forgetting?”
Why write?
Taba was born in a small town named Seppa in Arunachal Pradesh. She grew up in a village named Pampoli, surrounded by mountains and the tubulent Kameng river. When her family shifted to another small town near Itanagar, her father took up a university job. She later moved to Nagaland to pursue her studies, earning a Masters of Science in Agriculture from SASRD, Nagaland University.
Subi was awarded the 100 Inspiring Authors of India Award 2018 for her poetry anthology Dear Bohemian Man. She has also won the New Asian Writing Short Story Prize 2020.
Being an agriculture development officer is her day job; she says she tries to write whenever she gets the time. “I find the act of world building the most interesting part of being a writer,” she says. And what fascinating worlds they are, indeed.
The story is reported by Paramita Ghosh of The New Indian Express
