Eleanor Sangma, 28, recalls how she and friends would fold the leaves from a jackfruit tree into windmills, birds, boats and bulls. She used this memory to fuel a storybook called The Bull Comes Home, illustrated by Arak Sangma, for The Forgotten Folklore Project (TFFP) by the Sauramandala Foundation.

In Meghalaya, TFFP has been collecting stories and trying to capture a way of life that is fast disappearing. Research assistants trek across the state’s three main regions – the Garo, Jaiñtia and Khasi hills – in search of stories they can translate, and add to books that are distributed at schools across the state, aimed at children aged three to eight.

“We found that early childhood development texts for children had no context or relevance to their lived experience,” says Nazarene Jyrwa, 26, a research assistant on the project, from the Khasi hills. “Even in the rural areas, children were learning nursery rhymes such as Twinkle, Twinkle and London Bridge. There were no contextualised stories from the state.”

Over a few months, starting in October 2022, research assistants like Jyrwa met and spoke to elders in communities spread across the three regions. They brought back stories from the hills and collated them into 45 illustrated children’s books that capture folklore, beliefs and customs.

These stories were then commissioned to writers and illustrators, and digitally published in four languages – English, Garo, Pnar and Khasi – on the online StoryWeaver platform, where they can be accessed free.

The fist story they put together was the Ilari’s Jaiñsem, written and illustrated by Samanda N Pyngrope, about a girl named Ilari who learns to drape the traditional Jaiñsem, the traditional attire of the tribes of the Khasi hills.

Ambi’s Little Things, which is one of five stories written for the project by Eleanor Sangma, is about introducing the idea of death to young readers, partly by explaining the rituals that help communities accept death as part of the circle of life.

Melody March, also written for the project by Eleanor, explores the musical instruments from the Garo hills, including the wind instruments illep and otekra, string instruments dotrong and sarenda and percussion instrument dama.

“When we took this story, Ban’s Journey in Music, to a village in Wahkhen, the children were very intrigued,” Jyrwa says. “Seeing that, we felt like we had accomplished something. We weren’t just extracting all this knowledge from the communities, we were also giving it back.”