In the Northeast of India the folk and the contemporary coexist, each sustaining and transforming the other. This routine interface traces the journeywork from functionality to abstraction while maintaining the rooted character of the crafts of the communities, which ensures its own distinctive identity. The rich diversity of arts, crafts and music of the area with its multi ethnicity provides us with fresh spectrum of colours, motifs, sounds and designs ensconced in materiality-in objects and figures. This exploration of    the possible transformations in the proposed modern adventure of colours and motifs in designs empowered by historical and ethnographic studies of the extant and continuing arts and crafts of the communities of the area is already making inroads into traditional bastions.

The communities have specific colour and form preferences that vary in different geo-physical conditions and in different seasons.   The black and red stripes of the Nagas are almost uniform but the motifs they work into their fabric are strictly hierarchical as, Rajasthani women can be identified with their black barfi-bandhni and Rajasthani men with their coloured headgear.   Specific practices followed by a community are, more often than not, identity specific and form a culture and with retainment and changes in time make a tradition. Geographic locations and environmental variations obviously influence the process to give them the values the community will continue to uphold. These religious and ritual practices protect the character of a society.

The phenomenon of ethnic culture, in almost its entirety, is tied to beliefs, myths and legends that give them a sense of an abiding community.

'Human intelligence begins with conception, the prime mental activity; the process of conception always culminates in symbolic expression. A conception is fixed and held only when it has been embodied in a symbol. So the study of symbolic forms offers a key to the forms of human conception. The genesis of symbolic forms - verbal, artistic, mathematical, or whatever modes of expression there be- is the odyssey of the mind.'

In Indian tradition colour used as symbol while practicing rituals such as Red colour symbolized Shakti and Green is a symbol of fertility. But in Northeastern textiles, as in the shawls from the Misings and the Karbis, black is the hue of the damsel who has come of age. Ritual symbols to perform certain rituals in Naga and Mizo culture. They use human and animal skulls, bones and horns as their symbolic representation with different colour applications (fig 4)

An exploration with refined and contemporary application of traditional elements, direct application of features symbol Extract/Exploration of elements for contributing to contemporary design (fig 5)

A myth is no more and no less than an explanatory account, which may or may not be historically accurate, but seeks to give ultimate significance to some event. Myths are the product of man's unceasing effort to interpret meaningfully the world around him. This is further evidence of the contention that man cannot live for very long without meaning. Some of the constituent states of the Northeast of India are almost hundred per cent Christian. So, let me illustrate this with an instance from the Bible. The Tower of Babel shows in simple fashion the multiplicity of languages that the Amorites (later to be the Hebrews) encountered in their travels.