‘Voices in the Wind’: Monument of memory
In this anthology edited by Namita Gokhale and Malashri Lal, what strikes you immediately is how deeply the natural world is woven into these tales — not as scenery but as ancestry
Voices in the Wind: Folktales, Folklore and Spirit Stories from the Himalaya, edited by Namita Gokhale and Malashri Lal. Penguin Random House. Pages 336. Rs 999
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Book Title: Voices in the Wind: Folktales, Folklore and Spirit Stories from the Himalaya
Author: Edited by Namita Gokhale and Malashri Lal
Some books you read. And some books read you. ‘Voices in the Wind’, edited by Namita Gokhale and Malashri Lal, belongs to the rare second category — a book that doesn’t sit quietly on a table but rises like the Himalayan winds it so lovingly invokes, stirring you, unsettling you, whispering truths that have travelled centuries to arrive at your door.
To open this book is to step barefoot onto sacred ground. The first thing you hear is not words, but breath — of mountains, the hush of pines, the murmur of ancient storytellers calling you to gather closer. The Bhutanese incantation Dangphu Dingphu — meaning the eternal once upon a time — arrives like a spell, an invitation to remembrance itself.
And from there, the stories begin their ascent. Immediately, the senses populate with characters that belong to both myth and marrow: ogres and princesses, serpents and shapeshifters, jackals who howl out of betrayal, forests that behave like guardians, rivers that hold the echo of every grief and every crossing.
This anthology is far more than a curated collection. It is a reclamation. A revival. A resistance. Across Jammu, Kashmir, Ladakh, Sikkim, Bhutan, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Manipur, among others, more than 35 scholars and storytellers bring together folktales that survived not because they were written down, but because someone cared enough to remember, to retell, to respond with that ancient affirming — mmm — that says: I hear you; continue.
As Gokhale reminds us, folktales “do not belong to an individual storyteller” but to the entire community that carries them in the telling, generation after generation.
In this way, ‘Voices in the Wind’ becomes less a book and more a ceremony of collective remembering. To read it is to return, as the introduction says, to the “earnestness of a child at play”, a maturity measured not in cynicism but in wonder.
What strikes you immediately is how deeply the natural world is woven into these tales — not as scenery but as ancestry. The Himalaya is not a backdrop; it is a protagonist, deity, witness. Nature is not passive; it grows impatient, curious, furious, tender.
In these tales, the world is alive with intention. Water turns to gold, forests whisper warnings, and mountains themselves shape destinies. Jackals debate treachery across centuries of dusk-lit howls. Ibex mothers choose sacrifice. Nagas — those ancient half-serpent beings — coil through Kashmir’s springs, reminding us that transformation was once a sacred possibility, not a metaphor for self-help. The stories do not shy away from death or the grotesque; instead, they remind us that life itself is edged with wildness. These are not the prettified bedtime tales of urban India. They are fierce, unsentimental, beautiful in their brutality, clear-eyed about suffering and equally generous in their mercy.
Threaded through this landscape is the unmistakable pulse of women. If the Himalaya is the body, women are its heartbeat. They appear as goddesses disguised as farm labourers, as witches with golden combs, as sisters decapitated for staining an odhni, as mothers who birth calves and crocodiles alongside human children. Yet, most powerfully, women appear as storytellers — the original custodians of oral tradition.
Even in the introduction, we learn that it was women who added the final shimmer to each tale: the sigh, the growl, the shake of earrings that punctuated emotion and altered meaning forever. Storytelling becomes an act of feminine inheritance — one that empires, wars, and patriarchy could not silence. I enjoyed all the stories, especially Pramod Kapoor’s ‘Madho Singh Bhandari’ and ‘A Tale of Pema’ by Gyalyum Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck — a cherished story traditionally told to children in the Bhutanese royal family.
What makes ‘Voices in the Wind’ extraordinary is that it does not flatten the diversity of Himalayan cultures into a single tone. Each region’s tales carry their own weather, their own anxieties, their own music. Ladakh’s stories are shaped by an unforgiving geography — poison, hunger, endurance, an ever-present danger. Jammu’s stories blend Hindu and Islamic motifs, revealing a syncretic tradition of goddesses, sages, shapeshifters and magical combs.
Kashmir’s folklore, with its ancient connection to the ‘Kathasaritsagara’, is lush with imaginative generosity, absorbing influences from Central Asia, Persia and beyond.
Mongolian echoes appear in the epic of Gesar. Balti culture surfaces in stories of ibexes and polo games played with decapitated heads. And yet, through all this diversity, the book keeps returning to a single truth: humans are interdependent with nature, community, consequence. The tales remind us that every action — greed, kindness, violence, sacrifice — echoes beyond the individual, shaping landscapes, families, entire futures.
Gokhale and Lal’s editorial vision is astonishingly sensitive. They do not merely gather stories; they contextualise them, honour them, and restore dignity to communities often excluded from mainstream cultural narratives. They acknowledge the paradox of “freezing” oral tales into text, but emphasise that not preserving them at all would be a far greater erasure. In a time when languages are dying and mountain cultures are being bulldozed — literally and metaphorically — this book becomes a monument not of stone, but of memory.
While reading, there is a moment when you begin to sense the deeper purpose of this work. It is not nostalgia. It is not anthropological fetishisation. It is a reaching back to something essential — the clarity with which earlier civilisations understood the world. They knew that forests have moods. Rivers hold grudges. Animals possess intelligence beyond our comprehension. They understood community not as a hashtag but as survival. They believed that stories were not entertainment; they were instruction manuals for living.
When I closed ‘Voices in the Wind’, I felt the way one feels after a wise elder has spoken — quieted, steadied, humbled. These stories do not allow you to remain who you were before you opened the book. They remind you of the smallness of your modern anxieties. They anchor you in something far older than nation or news cycle — something communal, primal, necessary. They restore the sense that you are not alone in the world; you are part of an ancient continuity.
If you want to understand India — not the India of breaking news but the India of heartbeat — read this book.
If you want to understand the Himalaya — not the postcard mountains, but the living, mythic, breathing Himalaya — read this book. And if you want to understand yourself — not the curated self you offer the world, but the instinctive animal self, the dreaming child self — read this book.
It will change your prana. It will echo in your bones. It will speak long after the final page is turned.
This is not just a collection of folktales; it is a homecoming.
— The reviewer is an acclaimed author
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