By Anna Notsu
Alongside the familiar temperature drop, Shillong once again welcomes its festive season. The Shillong Literary Festival is one such event that marks its warm, celebratory moment in the city’s otherwise cold winter. As Kong Patricia Mukhim noted in her coverage of the opening day in the Shillong Times, the Festival has already sparked inspiring conversations and connections through panel discussions, activities, performances and book launches.
This year, my own Biate picture book, Khâmnu Khah A Vâr Im?/Is She Wise?, became part of that moment. Although I could not attend in person, editor Monica Thomas, illustrator Gladinia Pyrtuh and Biate translator and co-founder of this picture book project, Anthony Durpui, witnessed something historic—our picture book being launched by the 2025 International Booker Prize Winner, Banu Mushtaq, and later discussed in a panel moderated by Moushumi Chakraborty.
For all of us, this affirmed one thing above all: this book is truly collaborative.
Yet, as Kong Patricia pointed out in her article, many still did not know who the Biates are—even within Meghalaya, even within spaces celebrating “local” voices. Reflecting on the launch ceremony and panel discussion at the Festival, Anthony messaged me late at night:
“In those years around 2008, when I used to speak with Moushumi on the radio, I would introduce myself as Anthony Biate, because I wanted people to hear the word Biate. And now, having met Moushumi again—this time to speak about the Biate community on such a big platform—how things have turned out in my favour is truly a wonder.”
For my team and me, what matters most is ‘how’ we speak of the Biate community. While still little known, those who have heard of the Biates often frame them through narratives of neglect, isolation, or unchanging tradition. These tropes flatten a living community into the past and, worse, take away their own agency to tell who they are today. This led me to think of my research work, of which this book production is part.
Explaining a community is intricate work, more so when the narrator is an outsider. It raises questions of responsibility and authorship. During my time in Saipung, both as a researcher and through the making of this picture book, I came to understand that writing about the Biate community must be a mutual act. It is a relationship, a practice of attention. It grows, not given, in the space between what we come to learn and what others allow us to see – an elder’s hesitation before speaking of heritage, a friend’s sharing of personal stories. In that space, the distance between researchers (we) and research collaborators (them) begins to narrow, and learning becomes shared.
In academic work, we often talk about knowledge: who holds it, how it circulates and who gets to speak for whom. But in Saipung, those questions were not abstract. Knowledge was exchanged through daily gestures, glances and silences—lived, not theorised.
When we speak of knowledge co-creation, perhaps what we really mean is learning to listen: to stories that do not ask to be recorded, to insights that do not demand citation. What institutions call participation is, in practice, a willingness to listen before we speak. Yet, greater attention must be paid to the fact that we are always entering someone else’s story midway. Research, then, starts not at arrival, but at the point of mutual listening.
At the book launch, Monica, Gladinia and Anthony were called onto the stage as the authors of Khâmnu Khah A Vâr Im?/Is She Wise? Later, during the panel discussion, Monica clarified that the author is me. Watching the live stream on YouTube, I pondered for a moment, Is this a mistake? It made me wonder who the author truly is after all.
In Saipung, I shared not only a roof but daily challenges with the Biate community: enduring weeks-long blackouts, washing clothes in a nearby stream when water was scarce, and managing without markets or regular medical facilities. Life there was sometimes difficult, but these shared experiences forged a strong bond of trust and belonging that no one else could have earned.
Water scarcity, constant blackouts and limited infrastructure – while real – offered only a partial picture of Biate everyday life. What I observed and experienced was not marginality, but the ways people continually manoeuvred towards the futures they envisaged. I realised that this, too, is the story of who they are.
These small daily practices tell a story of contemporary Biate-ness: not confined to the past, nor reduced to an external tale of neglect. The shared realisation of the need to narrate everyday life led to the birth of the Kîrzâi Project—an initiative to show how the community lives today and how they envisage the future, where their reflections and perspectives take centre stage.
As part of this project, Biate schoolchildren were invited to collect stories about their environment from parents, neighbours and elders. From folktales to short narratives, they were free to gather any story, on one condition: it had to be original and undocumented. The second phase was a drawing workshop, exploring how the children imagined the environment through the stories they had collected.
During the drawing workshop, the room was filled with a low hum of concentration, occasional laughter and the scent of paints, with pop music coming out of a large speaker in the background. Children bent over sheets of large paper, all of them trying to fill the entire space with colour. One painted a mountain under a blue sky with their houses on the side. Another drew a couple walking through a forest. Their drawings were not simply illustrations—they were interpretations, ways of thinking through the stories they listened to.
The collected stories and paintings from Saipung have now become the first-ever Biate children’s book. Looking back, this book stands as a symbol of my relationship with the Biate community—a proof of mutual trust and collaboration. It shows that collaboration is not merely about taking on a task together, but about acknowledging differences, interpreting what matters, and sharing responsibility for what we collectively imagine.
The co-creation process enabled by the Kîrzâi Project extended beyond collaboration between the Biate community (as research participants) and me (as the researcher). The circle of trust, relationality and responsibility expanded within the community itself. As schoolchildren engaged with elders, new collaborations formed, and existing relationships deepened. Through this process, I contend, ‘research participants’ become equal contributors to producing knowledge.
I learned that storytelling, whether oral, literary or visual, lies at the core of how knowledge lives. But more importantly, long-term engagement forms the foundation of collaboration. Returning to Saipung for feedback, creating opportunities to reflect together and exploring what we know, desire and strive for—these were all crucial for sharing and sustaining what we came to know together.
With deep gratitude to the Biate community, I remain responsible for finding more ways to narrate—together—stories that resist simplification, romanticisation and exoticisation. As I look at the Biate picture book, I am reminded that knowledge co-creation is, above all, about relationships with those who make our process of knowing possible.
Perhaps, then, the future of this kind of collaboration depends less on our institutional strategies and more on our willingness to imagine otherwise—to pause at the hearth, to listen to stories, to trust the quiet, relational work that sustains both research and life. The end of the book, after all, is not the end of their story. It is only the beginning of a shared one, told and retold, as we continue learning what it means to know together.
Academia may continue to demand that we demonstrate ‘impact’ or ‘participation,’ but the deeper measure of collaboration lies elsewhere: in the mutual recognitions that happen off record, in the unspoken stories that testify to trust. To co-create knowledge is not simply to invite participation into researchers’ interests; it is to risk transformation—to be changed by those who let us in. Lived collaboration teaches us to be included. Between those two lies a path forward—one where research no longer merely extracts meaning but listens its way into it.
For all its talk of inclusive participation, we still seem to cling to ownership. It is time to release that grip—to see collaboration not as inclusion, but as shared authorship.
(The author is a PhD scholar from Leiden University, The Netherlands currently doing research in Jaintia Hills. Her PhD research is part of a five-year project, Futuring Heritage: Conservation, Community and Contestation in the Eastern Himalayas, initiated by Leiden University and Ashoka University. Her research is funded by NWO and the Delta on the Move Foundation).
