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Jatroduction ‘Anyone studying the culture of India needs to study not only its written classics but its oral traditions, of which folklore is an important part. Folklore pervades childhoods, families, and communities as the symbolic language of the nonliterate parts of the people and the culture. Even ina lange modem city like Madras, Bombay, or Calcutta, even in Western-style nuclear families with their well-planned 2.2 children, folklore—proverbs, lullabies, folk medicine, folktales—is only a suburb away, a cousin or a grandmother away. Authentic folk theater flourishes in the back streets of a city like Madras; festivals, with all their attendant folk performances, like that for the elephant-faced god Ganapathi in Bombay, are major annual events. When a friend of mine, a professor ‘of Kannada in a big city college, said to me, ‘How can you collect folklore in a big city these days?’ I asked him to assign his class of| turban students an exercise: to write down from memory a folktale they had heard and never read. That evening, my friend sought ‘me out excitedly to show me a sheaf of forty tales that his students had transcribed. ‘Wherever people live, folklore grows; new jokes, proverbs (like the new campus proverb ‘To xerox is to know’), rhymes, tales, and songs circulate in the oral tradition. Chain letters and Murphy's laws circulate on paper and graffiti on latrine walls. Verbal folklore, in the sense of a largely oral tradition with specific genres (such as proverb, riddle, lullaby, tale, ballad, prose narrative, song), nonverbal modes (such as dances, games, floor or wall designs, artifacts from toys to outdoor clay horses in villages), and composite performing arts (such as street magic and street theater, which fon, Ihave nse materials from my ealer writing, empecaly (1) 1m ing this neo fs the Fst Raa Who Net Fe? Th Reo rl raion Seat An Sl arama Disingised Lc om I sponsored by the Center St in March 1048 anys then as mer 1 af her Sut a scoala ‘Series, University of Hawaii at Manos: (2) "Telling Tales,’ Daedalus, Fall 1888 th ian Studies - Introduction ~ combine prose, vers, songs canee, various loeal objets coy, ‘etc. }-all of these expressive folk forms weave in and out of gy" ge, and small-town life. Both public culture ind aspect of city, vila soonest culture cannot be fully understood without a knowl ofthe folkidiom. Every kind of Indian cultural practice, every in ig cultural performance, whether itis the classical epic and theater, modern film and political thetoric, is indebted to oral tradition sand folk forms. What we separate as art, economics, and religion appear intermeshed as aspects of the same performance. The ‘aesthetics, ethos, and worldview of a person are shaped in childhood and throughout early life, and reinforced later by these verbal and nonverbal environments. Ina largely ngniiterate culture, everyone— whether poor o rich, high caste Or low, professor, pundit, or ignoramus, engineer or street hawker—everyone has inside hima Jarge nonliterate subcontinent. Ina South Indian folktale, also told elsewhere, one dark night an old woman was searching intently for something in the street.A passer-by asked her, ‘Have you lost something” She answered, ‘Yes, I've lost my keys. I've been looking for them all evening,’ “Where did you lose them: “I don’t know. Maybe inside the house.’ “Then why are you looking for them here?” “Because it's dark in there. I don't have oil in my lamps. 14? see much better here under the streetlights.” conatl scent many studies of Indian civilization have been a a Principle: look for it under the light, in. — precious things aed know. There we have, of course: a this we may ey we oe nse parable too fax: 2 oe culture ofthe howe nevi indoors, into the expres emay not find the hep ank Our keys As ier hapPe ew one, but ee ang ME ate looking for and may have 1 We had ae oe Wil find al sors of other things we never BP ever even had. ~ Indian Regional Languages! Whoever speaks of Indian’ or India’ aswe this book, must hasten tc care doing in the title of id that India contains many Indias fen major script 5 : ipt systems an minor ones, many old religions with innumerable on err a le sects and cults, racial mixtures over millennia, nia, a variety of landscapes Haiscates ‘sand climates and so on have contributed to an ineredibly complex braiding of traditions and countertraditions. It has been said more then exe an once _ exact opposite with equal truthfulness. Nothing exemplifies the variety of the Indian scene better than the languages. In the 1961 census, 1,652 mother tongues were recorded with the names of speech varieties that the speakers said they spoke. Linguists have classified these speech varieties, or dialects, and subsumed them under 105 or so languages, which belong to four language families." Of these 105 or so languages, 90 are spoken by less than 5 percent of the entire population; 65 belong, to small tribes. To these should be added Sanskrit, the father tongue, the language of religious texts, literary classics, and native sciences— and also the English of colonial and postcolonial India, a widely used second language. Fifteen of the languages are written, read, and spoken by 95 percent of the people of India, and each of them is spoken by several million people. “The literatures of these fifteen languages,” some of which have long histories, are just beginning to be taught and translated in the Over a hundred languages, t ia, exchning tose of sve confined myself tothe languages of tn 3 ata. Neither the languages (ef Bengal Pn Tach politcal boundaries: The " Somewhat axbitraily, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lank rd, ‘Famil) nor cu ions lke folklore respect tales inthis book have Sau Aa The four language: ‘Gajrati Hin, Kashi Mi fifteen literary languages se ‘sind leven belong tthe Indo-Aryan are the major Dravidian Hiterary this book, lang nd Didayie Dravidian ones 1 oral express sates i all these es are Indo-Aryan, Dravida re Assamese, Beng ‘Urdu, Kannada, Malayalam Ts sof the tnxdor ETOP Tangages: (Kas and Austeo-Aiati. arti ranch Femalining fo under Dare oF ls the Anstro-Asiatie Santall Introduction ~ sami goesback e such as Tamil goes back two th West Lite uch as Bengali and Gujerati, ae years and it rs In addition to these written iteranure thy eight eae “neti ddles, proverbs, songs, ballads. tales, epig, are OF ra ch of the 1,600-0dd dialects or mother tongus a aya classified under the 105 languages. Indeed those mother tongues of village, street, kitchen, trib hat and wayside tea shop. This is the wide base of the Indax dayan ones like Konkani and Rajasthan are also represented. Th recently they were mx: shcos languages hog Ta di bein to get writen a foe centurcs go) The leet he numberof people who speak each, according tothe 1971 census Assamese 9milion pin is Bengali 48 illion in tds, 70 milion in Bangladesh, and 4 million ins Didayi or Gta a negligible number one hens ‘mn See al sd 40 milion lad leven Langage hie . Sona anguage a MO Se: Hindi spoke in aie tates: ange, Sanat state, in addition other "© Fe¥ion, language, religion, and #e ~ Introduction ~ pyramid on which all other Indian Hteratures rest. Students of Indian civilization have valued and attended oy, to the top of the pyramid. Traditionally, Indians have make, distinction between tiangasstheehnigh roads anc desin'the bywayreh, qwuntrymroadipin their discussion of the arts. In American anthropology, Robert Redfield, the Chicago anthropologist who influenced the study of India in the 1950s and 1960s, said, ‘na civilization, there is a great tradition of the reflective many and there isa little tradition of the largely unreflective many."* The GRR (GaaMition said to be carried by Sanskrit, is seen as pan-Indian, prestigious, ancient, authorized by texts. The EiG0STFaIGOH? or really the ‘Little Traditions’ in the plural are seen as local, most oral, and cart nonliterate)—the anonymous ‘unreflective many.’ Redfield himself and Milton Singer later modified these notions, and others have een critical of them. They were seminal at one time, especially because they urged anthropologists not to ignore the ‘texts’ of culture in favor of ‘fieldwork." Now we need a new emphasis, a larger view regarding the ‘tex themselves. Written and hallowed texts are not the only kinds of textsin a culture like India’s. OFA ERCITOnSOREveRkineproducs Bou OF games, contain texts, written and oral. In a sense, tural performance isa text in itself. _ When we look at texts this way, we need to modify terms + responding to one another, en, er, engaged dlialogic relations, Pa ee st and present, w Indian’ and what® local, the writ ; ‘pan-Indiat eal i ‘ten and the oral, the verbal and the nonverbal? Tae IP Yeworking and redefining relevant ote “Robert Res a ines Chia en, a MMM Rd hat Saiyan Ce (Ca: UO interacting continuum, Tex: the tes: norte now nennchcse es and place folk texts in this everpresent network of intertecee ne For folk texts are pervasive, behind, under and around Te ; the nonliterate, City and village, factory and kitchen, Hind Buddhist, and Jaina, Christian and Muslim, every caste and clase, the crumbling almanac no less than the runaway computer_all are permeated by oral traditions, tales, jokes, beliefs, and rules of thumb not yet found in books. ~ Interactive Pan-Indian Systems In the view being developed here, even what's called the Great ‘Tradition is not singular but plural—it is a set of interactive pan- Indian systems like Brahminism, Buddhism, and Jainism, with ‘Tantra and Bhakti interacting variously with these. To be |, we should add Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, | y itself as the other active systems that participate in this give-and-take.’ Folklore participates in all these systems. For instance the oral tales in this book are drawn from several ‘communities, and so have literary analogues in Hindu, Buddhist, Jaina, and Islamic as well as Christian texts Let us examine briefly the idea that Great Traditions are pan- Indian and Little Traditions are not. Sanskrit and Prakrit, though they have a pan-Indian distribution, still originate in particular itself, though translocal and apparently geographic, has varieties of pronunciation that can be identified as Bengali, Malayali, or Banarasi® Nor are the ‘Traditions necessarily or usually confined to small loc regions; Sanskri on indian ology of Relec AK. Ramanijan, "Where Mirpors Are Windows: An AntheloB 989 ventures: Hatory of Rego ebay} eae (The Hague: Mouton, "Brits. 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PAIEYS 2sO"p 19K "WAUNUODGRS 2p 30 suoio1 wesip pue pareredas Afppim o1 uoururo> sae pure S>IpPU squanoxd yo apeut aq we> ston997]09 ‘sfeLareU 0} PAXEYS JO POS ‘ime ‘suoyarayp ‘2ney eIpUy ut suoLRos pure soBendie] aL gy sreay 10 11 sj[av wosiad yenSurrq, oun Aue sourepunog apsinBury s9ssoxo yy “ppor st af au 41962 spaen adpoas e 10 Xpauras v ‘Lions v ‘ayo! e ‘app e “qraAoud ¥ suonemndod yo yuaurasous Aure (uoyjo) mnoypEe sanfastuotp Aq AE “oBueupxa peanayno ur sod yo 1408 1210 uion axopyfog Yons EY UNO [OM sta “SHHUTUNIHOD 24e quazogns-yfos pazfeo sonnua arpdu asoup Ut PISP NP a” aa eur pue sioyep avesonquou atp Wt Papoms? on ma Inoy uaa ‘uorZai Bo} paUTJwOd 1011 AE /sa0uep pues 108 J Pure ‘sjnour ‘soum pure sauiors pure ‘sa[pPH SHA spate _ woyamposntel - q ~ xi ~ xs from Alvica, India, and the New World, One can col 51 know from expetince, orl tals from village teller ig India thatare similar, motif for motif tothe taleswe know i, the English-speaking world asthe Greek Oedipus or Shakespeare ‘Lear® Ina story told about Aristotle in Europe, and about an Indi Bea in India, the philosopher meets a village carpenter hhas a beautiful knife and asks him, ‘How long have you had is knife? The carpenter answers, ‘Oh, the knife has been in our iy for generations. We have changed the handle a few times the blade a few times, but itis the same knife.’ Similarly, in a "folktale that goes on changing from teller to tele, the structure of he tale may remain constant while all the cultural details change. "parts of different tales are combined to make a new tale which pressesnew aesthetic and moral form characteristic ofthe culture. "When the same tale is told again ina different ime or place it may come to say fresh and appropriate things, often without any change in the story line

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