{"product_id":"beyond-the-episteme-bodo-literature-indigenous-thought-and-the-making-of-a-theory","title":"Beyond the Episteme: Bodo Literature, Indigenous Thought, and the Making of a Theory","description":"\u003cp\u003eWhat does it mean to theorise from the margins — not merely to describe Indigenous life but to let Indigenous thought restructure the very frameworks through which literature, culture, and humanity are understood? Beyond the Episteme answers this question with rare intellectual ambition, offering the first sustained theoretical intervention grounded in Bodo\/Boro indigenous knowledge from Northeast India. Deepak Basumatary’s landmark study does not treat Bodo literature and oral tradition as objects of analysis. It treats them as sources of theory. From this foundational premise emerges a work that is at once a literary history, a philosophical manifesto, and a methodological revolution. Across six thematic parts and seventeen chapters, the book constructs four original theoretical frameworks — Feminist Disability Poetics of Indigenous Thought (FDPIT), Indigenous Performance Theory (IPT), Layered Cosmology Theory (LCT), and Global Indigenous Environmental Humanities — each forged from the aesthetic, spiritual, and ethical resources of the Bodo episteme itself. The book traverses an extraordinary range of cultural and critical terrain. It reads disability not as deviation but as cosmological presence, recovering the Bodo figure of the differently- abled as a site of sacred power that colonial modernity violently suppressed. It theorises performance through the living ritual forms of Bodo ceremonial life, arguing that indigenous theatre constitutes its own dramaturgy – one that collapses the Western distinction between spectacle and participation, between the human and the more-than-human. Through the framework of Global Indigenous Environmental Humanities, it situates Bodo ecological philosophy within a worldwide network of Indigenous environmental thought, demonstrating that what Western theory calls the “new materialism” has long been embedded in Bodo oral cosmology and that this knowledge speaks powerfully to planetary crises of the present. And it examines Bodo women’s writing and folk narrative through a feminist lens that refuses to subordinate gender to either postcolonial nationalism or Euro-American feminism, insisting instead on the specificity of indigenous womanhood as a theoretical category. From oral poetry and myth to contemporary fiction, from ritual performance to Bodo- language cinema, Beyond the Episteme maps a literary tradition that has survived colonial erasure, linguistic suppression, and academic invisibility — and emerges from that survival not diminished but theoretically generative. This is a work of profound consequence for postcolonial studies, Indigenous literary criticism, disability humanities, performance theory, ecocriticism, and the emerging field of Global Indigenous Environmental Humanities. More than that, it is a challenge to the discipline itself: a demonstration that the epistemic hierarchies organising literary study cannot hold once Indigenous thought is recognised not as data for Western theory to process, but as theory in its own right. Beyond the Episteme is essential reading for scholars, students, and all those committed to the decolonisation of knowledge.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eDr. Deepak Basumatary\u003c\/strong\u003e is an Associate Professor of English at Kokrajhar University, Assam, India. A scholar at the intersection of Critical Disability Studies, Queer Theory, and Indigenous Literatures, his work is animated by a sustained commitment to voices long marginalised by the mainstream literary academy. His research spans literature and disability, human rights, migration, film and cultural studies, and the literatures of Northeast India. He is the translator of Unfinished Chapters, Unforgettable Stories (2025), a landmark anthology of twenty-one Bodo short stories rendered into English – a labour of literary recovery as much as translation. His scholarly essays have appeared in leading national and international journals, and he has presented his research at conferences across India and abroad. Beyond the Episteme is his most ambitious work to date: a book that does not merely study indigenous literature but thinks with it, alongside it, and through it.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Mittal Publications","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50927491088551,"sku":null,"price":2100.0,"currency_code":"INR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0436\/7984\/2471\/files\/Front_17.jpg?v=1782890412","url":"https:\/\/mittalbooks.com\/products\/beyond-the-episteme-bodo-literature-indigenous-thought-and-the-making-of-a-theory","provider":"Mittal Publications","version":"1.0","type":"link"}