ABSTRACT
In a post-independent India, the colonial ideal of maintaining queer/straight and pathological/normal binaries in the name of preserving a ‘natural’ order and revolutionising all other traditional nonnormative perspectives has been adopted. My search for an Indigenous ideal that would also assist in moving beyond sex/gender binaries has persuaded me to come across genderqueer figures in Rabha folktales. This chapter is a study of select Rabha tribal tales. The Rabha community is also known as Koch. The genderqueer people depicted in the selected Indigenous tales are important Indigenous, decolonising models to be emulated by all who find themselves victimised in their present struggle against taboos and neocolonialism. It has been argued that these Rabha folktale characters should make us aware of the genderqueer absence in the present epoch and that they should be revived in future to overcome contemporary gender role fixations.
