ABSTRACT
The anarcho-dissidence, reflected in Toto folktales, attracts the dissident ‘mainstream’ queer to participate in an anarchist ‘perverse reading’ of these tales. To identify the psychological motifs of the projections by decoding metaphorical usages, the Toto folktales have been categorised under three broad themes. The folktales of the first section, ‘From leading grandmother to misleading witch’, reveal the ambivalent apprehension regarding the queer grandmother–youth sexual intimacies that emerged out of the compulsion exerted by external agencies to normalise the Totos. And Indigeneity is unable to entirely overcome the appeal of the suppressed tribal ethos embedded in the collective unconscious. The three tales included under the section ‘Dissident intimacies’ while unmasking the undercurrent of ‘deviant’ desires by using magic real instruments and an apparently normalised plot, impart a metahistorical trajectory of external repression and internal phantasies. The three tales included under the last section, ‘Evil as emancipation’, reveal how the tribal community has given a neotraditional turn to the treatment of evil so that the Toto are able to oppose both the ‘mainstream’ aesthetics of modernism and the usurping politics of modernisation that has been imposed on Indigeneity.
