a quarterly newsletter from national ...1 indian folklife volume 3 issue 2 serial no. 15 march 2004...

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INDIAN FOLKLIFE VOLUME 3 ISSUE 2 SERIAL NO. 15 MARCH 2004

Volume 3 Issue 2 Serial No.15 March 2004

A QUARTERLY NEWSLETTER FROM NATIONAL FOLKLORE SUPPORT CENTRE

Chennai Conference Special

Folklore as Discourse

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h t t p : / / w w w . i n d i a n f o l k l o r e . o r g

C O N T E N T SEditorial............................................................ 3Conference Concept Note.................................... 7Conference Programme...................................... 8Excerpts from the Presentations.......................... 10Post-Conference Conversations:Observations .................................................... 13Folklore and Development.................................. 15Folklore and Identity.......................................... 18Folklore and Ideology......................................... 20Folklore and Contexts......................................... 23

Book Review...................................................... 26Recent Events.................................................... 27

National Folklore Support Centre (NFSC) is a non-governmental, non-profit organisation, registered in Chennaidedicated to the promotion of Indian folklore research, education,training, networking and publications. The aim of the centre isto integrate scholarship with activism, aesthetic appreciation withcommunity development, comparative folklore studies withcultural diversities and identities, dissemination of informationwith multi-disciplinary dialogues, folklore fieldwork withdevelopmental issues and folklore advocacy with publicprogramming events. Folklore is a tradition based on any expressivebehaviour that brings a group together, creates a convention andcommits it to cultural memory. NFSC aims to achieve its goalsthrough cooperative and experimental activities at various levels.NFSC is supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation.

S T A F F

Assistant DirectorT.R. SivasubramaniamAdministration

Programme AssistantsPrimadonna KhongwirRita Deka

LibrarianR. Murugan

Archival AssistantRanga Ranjan Das

Support StaffY. PavitraP.T. DevanP. SivasakthivelV. ThennarasuC. Kannan

C H A I R P E R S O N

Komal KothariDirector, Rupayan Sansthan, Folklore Institute of Rajasthan, Jodhpur, Rajasthan

T R U S T E E S

Ajay S. MehtaExecutive Director, National Foundation for India, India Habitat Centre,Zone 4-A, UG Floor, Lodhi Road, New Delhi

Ashoke ChatterjeeB-1002, Rushin Tower, Behind Someshwar 2, Satellite Road, Ahmedabad

N. Bhakthavathsala ReddyDean, School of Folk and Tribal Lore, Warangal

Dadi D. PudumjeeManaging Trustee, The Ishara Puppet Theatre Trust,B2/2211 Vasant Kunj, New Delhi

Deborah ThiagarajanPresident, Madras Craft Foundation, Chennai

Jyotindra JainProfessor and Dean, School of Arts and Aesthetics,Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

Molly KaushalAssociate Professor, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts,C.V. Mess, Janpath, New Delhi

Munira SenExecutive Director, Madhyam, Bangalore

K. RamadasDeputy Director, Regional Resources Centre for Folk Performing Arts, Udupi

P. SubramaniyamDirector, Centre for Development Research and Training, Chennai

Y. A. Sudhakar ReddyReader, Centre for Folk Culture Studies, S. N. School, Hyderabad

Veenapani ChawlaDirector, Adishakti Laboratory for Theatre Research, Pondicherry

E X E C U T I V E T R U S T E E A N D D I R E C T O R

M.D. Muthukumaraswamy

R E G I O N A L R E S O U R C EP E R S O N SV. JayarajanKuldeep KothariMoji RibaK.V.S.L. NarasamambaNima S. GadhiaParag M. SarmaSanat Kumar MitraSatyabrata GhoshShikha JhinganSusmita PoddarM.N. Venkatesha

I N D I A N F O L K L I F EE D I T O R I A L T E A M

M.D. MuthukumaraswamyEditor

Eric MillerGuest Editor (current issue)

P. SivasakthivelPage Layout & Design

C O V E R I L L U S T R A T I O NThe performers at the conference, from left to right:Aparna, Gandhi Arumugam, J. Vaidyanathan,Bharathi Thirumagan, Muthu Ganesan, Subbu Arumugam,Premeela Gurumurthy, S. Thirumugan and Akhila.

T H I S I S S U EThe focus of this issue of Indian Folklife is on the NFSC’sconference on Folklore as Discourse, which was held fromFebruary 2 – 4, 2004. This conference was organised incollaboration with the Centre for Indian Languages, Mysore,and the Department of Anthropology, University of Madras,Chennai.

All communications should be addressed to:The Editor, Indian Folklife, National Folklore Support Centre,7, 5th Cross Street, Rajalakshmi Nagar, Velachery,Chennai - 600 042 (India), Tele/Fax: 91-44-22448589 / 22450553,email: [email protected], [email protected],[email protected]

B O A R D O F T R U S T E E S

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E D I T O R I A L

In the 19th century, a good deal of Folklore scholarshiparound the world was carried out by people of thecolonial occupations, especially administrators andmissionaries. They perceived and collected folklore asobjects (such as stories) and classified these objects intopre-conceived genres (such as folktale, legend, myth,etc.). In the latter part of the 20th century, a group of USAFolklore scholars developed the performance centredapproach to folklore, which views folklore as a process ofcommunication, and this approach has been appliedaround the world with excellent results.

Now we have arrived in the 21st century, and a case canbe made that this might be the Asian century of Folklorescholarship. Some evidence that might support thissupposition can be found in the dialogue that occurredin and around the Folklore as Discourse conference thatwas held in Chennai recently. The current issue of IndianFolklife presents this evidence.

What are some factors that might suggest that we mightindeed be in the Asian century of Folklore scholarship?Situated between Africa and Oceania, with strong culturaland other links to both of those regions, Asia can besaid to be in one of the centres of the developing world.Many traditional forms of performance, and craftproduction, continue to exist in Asia. Although folkloricprocesses of communication and community continueto operate wherever people live, in the West most of thetraditional folk storytelling and theatre forms long agowere separated from ritual, and vanished. The fact that

so much traditional folklore — and oral-centric culturein general — continues to live here in Asia is a greatstimulant and advantage for Asian Folklore scholars, whoare living in the midst of the activity, and who have thelinguistic and other cultural knowledge necessary toinvestigate it.

Due in part to the wonderful contribution of the FordFoundation, Indian Folklore scholarship has hadespecially wide and deep exposure to the performancecentred approach, and there has been a great deal ofcommunication with members of the generation of USAFolklore scholars which originally developed thisapproach. People who might not appreciate the FordFoundation’s support of Folklore scholarship in Indiawill be pleased to learn that the Ford Foundation hasindicated that it will be reducing the level of this support.The time is coming for Indian Folklore to be more self-supporting, both economically and in other ways, andthis is all for the best. For one thing, the case will haveto be made to the Indian people that they should increasetheir support for Indian Folklore scholarship.

The Folklore, Public Sphere, and Civil Society symposiumthat was held in New Delhi in 2002 added a newdimension to Folklore studies. In that symposium, theconcept of the public sphere, which has been developedby the German social philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, wasapplied to folklore performance. The public sphere approachto folklore looks at the ways folklore performances raiseand discuss public issues, and at the interactions betweenthe performers and the societies around them. The publicsphere approach to folklore is now a vital part of the newAsian Folklore scholarship.

What might be some of the other hallmarks of Asian —and specifically, Indian — Folklore scholarship in thiscentury? Three themes that emerged at the Folklore asDiscourse conference were: 1) The need to see the datafrom the points of view of the people who produce it.2) The need to be open to new paradigms, models, tools,and theories that might emerge in the course of workingwith local data and social conditions (this might involveadding to and/or modifying already existing theoreticalapproaches). And, 3) the need to use Folklore scholarshipfor the benefit of the community that produced thefolklore, as well as for the benefit of Indian society as awhole. This might include applying knowledge fromfolklore (the activity) and Folklore (the discipline in whichthe activity is studied) to development projects (moreabout this below). This theme of the social responsibilityof the scholar to apply scholarship in practical ways forthe benefit of people was very prominent at theconference, and appears repeatedly in the pages thatfollow, in the transcripts of the post-conferenceconversations.

***What might be some practical applications of folkloreand Folklore knowledge? As mentioned, in the course

The Asian Century of FolkloreScholarship: Reflections on

the Chennai ConferenceEric Miller

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of the conference numerous scholars called for practicalapplications — but there was little in the way of specificsuggestions or proposals. Please permit me to state someideas regarding this matter here.

As Desmond Kharmawphlang very reasonably pointsout (on p. 19 of this issue): all sorts of people have usedfolklore, “but as folklorists, we have the responsibilityto just observe it.” Yes, we in the Humanities, andespecially we Folklore scholars, have been trained thatas much as possible we should avoid affecting the peopleand processes that we are studying, as our modernitymight pollute and corrupt the tradition bearers. Whilethis still holds true on certain levels, I believe it is alsotrue that the time has come for intervention. If nothingis done, the people of the earth are in danger of losingtheir connections to the past, and also to their ownhumanity. I submit that Folklore scholars need to acceptthe responsibility to help humanity not only to conserve,but also to help plan, cultures and communities.

Historically, ethical Folklore scholars have, with goodreason, been hesitant to participate in social engineeringexperiments. However, I believe that we now need todevelop a section of our discipline that would doprecisely this. For even in the remotest villages, even inplaces where there is no electricity, people all over Indiaare, day and night, listening to cinema songs on FMradios, and on audiocassette and CD players. It is notthat there is anything basically wrong with electronictechnology such as radio, TV, cinema, video games, andcomputers: the problem, from a cultural preservationpoint of view, is that at present the form and content ofof these media are being created almost totally outsideof the local communities.

Folk theatre, storytelling, and singing forms areendangered because the entire context of life — even rurallife — on this planet is changing. The old performancevenues and systems of patronage are often no longer inplace. The connection of folk performance forms withritual is often diminishing, in part because the old ritualsare often no longer being conducted in the same way.

To survive, the traditional forms of folklore performanceneed to be transposed into the new world, includinginto electronic aspects of this new world. This takes alot of thought, planning, support, experimentation,intelligence, and talent by all concerned. If people areleft to their own devices, what we are seeing is that thetraditional art forms are tending to be abandoned. In theUSA, things are left up to the “marketplace,” which isincreasingly dominated by a smaller-and-smallernumber of larger-and-larger multi-national corporations.There is little support for, or tradition of, scholarly orGovernment intervention in cultural matters. But Indiais different. Indian society claims to want to protect itspeople from an impulsive rush into the soulless oblivionof mass media and materialistic modernity.

The globe is an increasingly small and inter-connectedplace. Humans are beginning to plan life and culture inour soon-to-exist (and already existing) spaceships andspace-stations, and in our soon-to-exist colonies on themoon and on planets other than earth. No one is morequalified to participate in the planning of the culturalenvironments of these places — as well as of communitieson earth — than Folklore scholars, because we observefrom the inside how cultures work.

In the words of Roger Abrahams (my primary professorat Penn Folklore, where I am a Ph.D. candidate), cultureis composed of the formulaic use of conventional unitsof thought, language, and behaviour. (Links to thetexts of ten of Roger Abrahams’ early articles inwhich he discusses this theme can be found athttp://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/storytelling/RDAarticles.html). Following such principles, we Folklore scholars canhelp to set up the conditions under which cultures cangrow and flourish.

What I am speaking of here is not only social and culturalreform, but also social and cultural creation, design, andengineering: that is, community planning anddevelopment — in terms of both physical design andcultural activities — based on folklore principles,activities, and processes. We as Folklore scholars and ascitizens of the earth need to help pass on practices bywhich — and help to create environments in which —authentic cultures can grow. As ridiculous as this maysound, we need to help people to understand whatculture is, and we need to help people make culture.

Three keys to avoiding exploitation of folklore are:

1) People should receive training primarily in folkloreprocesses (of production, composition, performance,dialogue, etc.), and only secondarily regarding particularfolklore objects (specific stories, motifs, symbols, etc.).

2) People must be allowed generous amounts of free timeand space, to digest the larger society’s structures and toformulate responses to these structures. Pockets of non-structure need to be incorporated into the design of everystructure.

3) Critical voices must be permitted to speak and be heardin public spheres. Healthy cultures are self-correcting:if something even possibly objectionable is going on,someone is likely to bring it up in public performanceor discussion, and the group has the opportunity to makecorrections. A primary way to improve societies isthrough inclusion of critical points of view. For the goodof all, people must be given the ability to publiclycomment upon the leading discourses of a society.

These principles may be difficult for some authorities toaccept and accommodate in practical terms, and thusnegotiations must occur. Community and cultural designand implementation are best done in teams, including(this is an incomplete list) community members, social

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psychologists, engineers, and Government officials. WeFolklore scholars should be members of such teams, inwhich we could help to apply the above-mentionedprinciples. Folklore scholars have the potential to beinvaluable conflict resolution facilitators on these teams,as we know and have appreciation for both the languageof the folk, and the language of institutions.

How can a community be designed? To begin to answerthis question, one must ask: What is a community? Whatis a neighborhood? How can such things and processesbe fostered? Let us not be naïve: such efforts to shapesocial environments are going on, in both the privateand public sectors. To ignore such efforts is to permitthem to occur without our participation.

More than ever before, it is time for Folklore scholars toapply their skills to projects in fields such as education,ecological- and educational-tourism, water management, energyproduction, and agriculture (including agri-forestry). Thereis a need to apply folk knowledge and perspectives, andFolklore scholarship methodologies, to sustainabledevelopment projects of all sorts. This would help toensure that these projects are grounded in the humanityand cultures of the communities, that the present islinked with the past, and that the new technology islinked with humanity. It would also help people to locatethemselves, and to develop their individual andcommunity identities, in our rapidly changing world.Cultural conservation and preservation strategies shouldbe applied alongside efforts to protect physicalenvironments. The folk, and scientific engineers share alove for ingenious and economical engineering processes,and once again, Folklore scholars can act as go-betweensto help these two parties to apply their wisdom together.

The folk — whether defined as rural and oral-centric, orin any other way — are not simple. They are often veryshrewd and sophisticated about the ways of the world.As such, community members should, as mentionedabove, be playing real, active, decision-making roles incommunity design processes. Culture does not justhappen by itself. There are many internal and externalfactors that may shape and influence the developmentof a local culture, and people in that local communityshould be having a large and conscious say regardingthis matter.

Fields such as the design of public space, and urbandesign, are eminently respectable. These fields involvethe study of social psychology. Thus, however, they arepossibly related to the potentially scary field ofbehavioural psychology, and to the less-than-respectablefields of brainwashing, propaganda, and manipulativecultural programming. The dangers of these abuses arethere, and we as Folklore scholars also have theresponsibility to train people to be able to immediatelyrecognise the appearance of such practices.

***

Speaking of designing communities and cultures: Asthe topic of the conference involved discourse, it wasonly natural that at times the participant scholars wouldturn their analytic gaze on themselves, and consider theirown methods of discourse.

“Please don’t let this turn into a conversation!,” said onevery well-meaning moderator to two speakers during anend-of-panel discussion period. And I thought, “Whyin the world not?! Good public conversation is preciselywhat we need at a conference!” Spontaneous comments,follow-up statements, and unfettered dialogue shouldbe allowed during defined sections of the proceedings.However, good public conversation requires of itsparticipants a great deal of ongoing self-discipline andconcern for the good of the group. People must take careto limit themselves appropriately, to speak in ways thatwill be interesting to all, and to seek to hear the voices ofthe quieter people present. It is my firm belief thatgenerally people have the maturity to do these things inpublic, given the proper context.

A standard practice at academic conferences is to allowthirty minutes per presenter, with three presenters on apanel. Typically, twenty minutes is allocated for thereading of the paper (or the giving of the talk), and tenminutes is allocated for discussion. Sometimes thescheduled ten-minute discussion periods are held aftereach paper, sometimes they are held together after allthree papers have been presented, and sometimes thereis a combination of these approaches.

The problem is that twenty minutes is invariably notenough time to read an entire paper, and we as anacademic community need to really face this fact andfind solutions. Because what happens at present is thatpeople invariably go overtime in reading their papers,leaving little or no time for discussion — and makingthe final presenter on the panel very nervous! Thenumber one complaint I have heard from fellow scholarsregarding conferences in general is that there was notenough time for discussion, for the material to bedigested by the group. I suggest that we as an academiccommunity need to change the paradigm, from seeingdiscussion as an expendable extra, to seeing it as thecentral thing that needs to happen in a panel session.

Scholars often arrive at conferences with two differentobjectives in mind: 1) to present a paper that will bepublished, and 2) to initiate and lead a good discussion.The trick is to devise ways of achieving both of theseobjects at once. To this end, there have been numerousexperiments in shaping and structuring discourse atacademic conferences.

One way to make conference sessions more interactiveis for the papers to be available for reading in advance.Then, during the conference session, only an abstract isread, and discussion can ensue. Another approach might

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be for the presenting scholar to read a brief statement(say, two minutes or less), and then lead a discussionabout this statement. This statement-and-discussionprocess could be repeated five or six (or any othernumber) of times in the course of a thirty-minute session.In the case of this practice, the paper for publicationwould be submitted separately.

The subject of how we communicate — how we conveyinformation and relate to each other — at conferences isa very important one. The form of our communicationcomes to affect the content of our communication, aswell as our entire worldviews. Moreover, at academicmeetings, as at all social gatherings, people are constantlycreating society and culture anew, and in so doing weare perpetuating certain social practices and structures,omitting others, and inventing others. We need to veryconsciously and seriously take responsibility for this actof social creation , as there are always consequences as aresult of what is created.

***As I write this editorial in Chennai, on the other side ofthe globe the Folklore Program of the University ofPennsylvania (also known as, Penn Folklore), in whichI am a Ph.D. candidate, is holding its 40th anniversaryconference. M.D. Muthukumaraswamy, the Director ofIndia’s National Folklore Support Centre, is giving theconference keynote address. Before he left for this trip,I had the chance to ask M.D. Muthukumaraswamy abouthis thoughts relating to the work of the National FolkloreSupport Centre.

He spoke of the metaphor of the coffeehouse, a placewhere citizens can go to discuss public issues anddevelop public opinion. He said he had come to realizethat there are a multitude of public spheres, and spheresthat are combinations of public and private. He expressedhis fondness for the discipline of Folklore, saying that itdoes not reduce things to abstractions, but rather that itpays attention to multiple versions of things in multiplecontexts.

He noted that the New Delhi symposium (in 2002) hadlooked at the interactions between folklore performancesand the societies around them. An output of that eventhad been the realisation that there was further need tostudy the internal processes of the performancesthemselves, and this was the purpose of the Chennaiconference. (In a symposium, the emphasis is ondiscussion; in a conference, the emphasis is on thepresentation and consideration of papers.)

He mentioned that two other scholarly gatheringsorganized by the NFSC (and others) in recent years haveconcerned 1) documenting and archiving folklorepractices; and, 2) ways of presenting folklore to the publicin exhibitions and workshops. It struck me that in asmall number of years, the NFSC has done a verythorough and brilliant job of investigating many aspectsof the Folklore scholarship process.

M.D. Muthukumaraswamy expressed the desire to takefolklore documentation back to the communities thatcreated the folklore, and to discuss both the folklore andthe documentation practices with the folk artists, and inthis way help to build up the cultures being studied. Heis interested in the question of how to put recording,archiving, and communication technologies at the serviceof folklore communities.

He also mentioned that the NFSC is planning to offertwo courses in Chennai: one regarding video-makingand other methods of documenting folklore; and theother regarding uses of folklore in education (this coursewould be designed especially for teachers, and wouldbe held on weekends). Interested parties are encouragedto contact the NFSC regarding these courses.

It has been an incredible honour to guest-edit thisissue of Indian Folklife, and I hope I have begun to dojustice to the task. My thanks beyond words toM.D. Muthukumaraswamy for enabling me to have thisexperience.

A final note: The term, context, is used a good deal in thefollowing pages, and I would like to add the clarificationthat two kinds of context are: the event context, and thesocio-historical context. The event context is composed ofall the aesthetic things that occur during an event,including the interactions between participants; whereasthe socio-historical context concerns all of the practices ofthe society, both in the present and in the past. Just asother disciplines can benefit from adopting Folkloremethodologies — such as observing and documentingthe mechanics of practices of production andperformance, and discussing these processes with thedoers of them — so Folklore work is always enriched bythorough historical and sociological research.

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National Conference on

"Folklore as Discourse"

We are inviting faculty, scholars, and students to participate in the conference to addressthe various issues of folklore. The formal description of sets of words beyond the level ofthe sentence is known by the word ‘discourse’ in modern linguistics. Although it hasbeen a subject of traditional rhetoric also it is difficult to give a single definition of discourseanalysis as a research method. Indeed, numerous “types” of analyses ranging from Derrida’sdeconstruction to Foucault’s genealogy are grouped under the rubric of ‘discourse analysis’.However the contribution of the post-modern discourse analysis is the application ofcritical thought to social situations and the unveiling of hidden politics within the sociallydominant as well as all other discourses. Given such contribution, discourse analysis ismeant to provide a higher awareness of the hidden motivations in others and ourselves bymaking us ask ontological and epistemological questions.

With this background on discourse analysis when folklore (both the material and thediscipline) is seen as a discourse it immediately brings to focus the general frame ofunderstanding of the material on the one hand and the intellectual foundations of thediscipline on the other. By focusing on folklore as discourse the conference seeks toaddress the following questions:

• What is the status of folklore as discourse in the changing world?

• What are all the epistemological breaks that have occurred in India in understandingthe discourses of folklore?

• How exactly the relationship between orality and literacy gets defined through theuses of folklore discourses?

• How do the underlying concepts of tradition, ethnicity, authenticity, individuality,creativity and folk determine the course of folklore discourse?

• How do genre specific qualities, say the qualities of verbal arts contribute to theunderstanding of folklore as discourse?

• What are the processes by which folklore becomes the enveloping phenomena ofother forms, say, Indian cinema?

• How does the understanding of performances, legends, spaces and specific societaland historical phenomena as discourses contribute towards the development ofgeneral theory of Indian culture?

While the above list exemplifies the directions the conference can help to define, it no wayconstrains the emergence of new thinking in the discipline.

Hopefully this conference will become a pace setter in defining or changing the course ofthe discipline of folklore.

In addition to the stated objectives the conference, the gathering of the scholars for threedays would greatly facilitate to do the preliminary work towards the preparation of adirectory of Indian folklore scholars. This may be treated as one of the supplementarygoals of the conference.

The National Folklore Support Centre will stand committed to the publication of thepapers presented in the conference in collaboration with the participating institutions.

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Inaugural Session

WELCOME ADDRESS: Prof. V. Sudarsen,Professor and Head,Department of Anthropology,University of Madras, Chennai

INTRODUCTION: Prof. J.C. Sharma,Professor cum Deputy DirectorCentral Institute of IndianLanguages, Mysore

INAUGURAL ADDRESS: His ExcellencyMr. Sumith NakandalaDeputy High Commissioner ofSri Lanka, Chennai

KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Prof. Jawaharlal Handoo,President,Indian Folklore Congress,Mysore

VOTE OF THANKS: Prof. M.D. Muthukumaraswamy,Director,National Folklore Support Centre,Chennai

Session 1:

FOLKLORE AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

V. SudarsenChairperson

Jawaharlal HandooThe Palace Paradigm and Historical Discourse

Arupjyoti SaikiaLiterary History, Orality, and Discourses of Madness:

A Note on the Social History of Assam

Sadhana NaithaniColonial Hegemony and Oral Discourse

Session 2:

DISCOURSE OF FOLKLORE THE DISCIPLINE

Guru Rao BapatChairperson

Peter ClausFar and Near:

The Advantages of Studying Folklore as Discourse

K.M. ChandarCritical Regionalism and Contemporary Discourse

Session 3:

DISCOURSE OF DANCE, MUSIC AND FESTIVAL

Saugata BhaduriChairperson

Molly KaushalRitual Spectacle and Enactment of the Self

Premeela GurumurthyMusical Components in Discourse

Venugopalan NairJagor as a Discourse: Past, Present and Future

Music and Dance Performances by Students of the Department of Indian Music,

University of Madras

Tuesday, February 3Session 4:

DISCOURSE OF LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY

Sadhana NaithaniChairperson

National Conference on

"Folklore as Discourse"PROGRAMME SCHEDULE

February 2 – 4, 2004

Monday, February 2

C O N F E R E N C E P R O G R A M M E

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Chandan Kumar SharmaGeneology Contested:

Oral Discourse and Identity Construction

Vanishri S.P.Folklore as Linguistic Discourse

Desmond KharmawphlangPoetry, Lore, and Language: The Khasi Phawar Tradition

Session 5:

DISCOURSE OF LEGEND AND MYTH

Peter ClausChairperson

Kishore BhattacharjeeThe Legend, Popular Discourse, and Local Community:

The Case of Assamese Legends

Laltluangliana KhiangteDiscourse in Oral Society of the Mizos

Pulikonda SubbacharyCaste Myth: A Multi Voice Discourse

Session 6:

FOLKLORE AND THE DISCOURSE OF GENDER

Deborah ThiyagarajanChairperson

Lalita HandooDiscourse of Gender: Power and Practice

Subbalaxmi DasGender Biases in Vrata Katha: A Study

Eric MillerPublic Presentation of Folklore:

Politics of Technology, Culture, and Discourse

Session 7:

DISCOURSE OF FOLK THEATRE AND DRAMA

J.C. SharmaChairperson

Guru Rao BapatPerformance as Discourse

M.D. MuthukumaraswamyDiscourse of a Blurred Genre:

The Case of Draupadi Kuravanchi Koothu

D.R. PurohitFolk Theatre of Garhwal:

Formulating a Dramatic Discourse

Demonstration of Three Storytelling TraditionsA Story from Mahabharatha:

“Karna Moksham”(“Karna Attaining Salvation”)

HarikathaPremeela Gurumurthy

VillupattuSubbu Arumugam

Therukoothu KathakalaksepamMuthu Ganesan

Wednesday, February 4

Session 8:

DISCOURSE OF IDEOLOGY,RELIGION, AND WORLDVIEW

Molly KaushalChairperson

Nirmal SelvamonyKalam as Heterotopia

Saugata BhaduriThe Ideology of Discourse in the Folk Sacred Space

Raghavan PayyanadReligion, Native and Alien: Interaction, Assimilation,

and Annihilation — A Study Based on Worldview

Session 9:

DISCOURSE OF PRINT,ADVERTISING, AND CINEMA

Kishore BhattacharjeeChairperson

V. Bharathi HarishankarInterstitial Discourses: A Case Study of

Printed Single Sheet Material in Tamilnadu

Theodore BaskaranThe Discourse on Tamil Cinema

G. Sandhya Nayak and J.C. SharmaAdvertising as a Folk Discourse

Panel DiscussionPreliminary work towards the preparationof a directory of Indian Folklore scholars

Valedictory

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Arupjyoti Saikia: Scholarship on colonial psychiatry opens a new and important window,revealing a great deal about what psychiatric practitioners, judges, police, families, andneighbors considered pathological in the colonial context, thereby shedding light on the normalas well.

All of the presentations were centred on the conference concept of Folklore as Discourse. Excerpts fromthe presentations are presented here...

Jawaharlal Handoo: The paradigm of thinking, writing, and perpetuating history is essentiallya powerful civilising discourse based on the stories of kings, and more often than not, on theexaggerated or false stories of kings and their palace surroundings. I call this the “palaceparadigm.” It has misled many generations the world over, and has blurred the story — the realstory — of humankind, and has helped the hegemony of power politics and domination.

Sadhana Naithani: Colonialism generated space for many kinds of new oral discourses: thecolonisers talking about the colonised (which is largely known and studied), and the colonisedtalking about the colonisers. The latter area of research remains almost untouched.

K.M. Chandar: Five essential attitudes of Critical Regionalism are love of: 1) Place,2) Nature, 3) History, 4) Craft, 5) Limits. The emphasis is on establishing a meaningful dialogue,a synthesis, between one’s tradition and innovation, the specific and the universal, the transitoryand the enduring.

Peter Claus: Excessive professionalism in scholarship — which encourages the distancingtheories of the social sciences — entails an elitist irrelevance and rapidly diminishingunderstanding of precisely what one wants to know.

Molly Kaushal: The symbols and images that are displayed in the public domains of traditionalsocieties are used to legitimate authority. My goal here is to explore the cultural spacesgenerated by folklore in a number of instances to see how, if at all, numerous distinct voicesare permitted to articulate separate and possibly conflicting aspirations in these domains.

Premeela Gurumurthy: The Kirtan (the Marathi term for Harikatha) was very entertaining,featuring many lilting tunes along with histrionic presentation of various characters in thestory, which was given prime importance. The philosophical and upanishadic focus becamesomewhat diluted with the music and the humorous anecdotes, thus enabling the Kirtan tobecome a popular entertainment which could appeal to a larger and less learned audience.

Venugopalan Nair: Jagar refers to a night-long performance, an ardent vigil to commemmorateand worship the village protector who is believed to invoke countless blessings on the peopleof the village. Performed in the mand (an open space in the village, which through traditionaluse has become sanctified), Jagar is accompanied by the indigenous musical instrument, ghumat,a semi-circular earthen vessal, the front of which is covered with lizard skin, the back of whichis open.

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Pulikonda Subbachary: A caste myth, or kulapurana, is basically a folk narrative. In the eyes ofthe people whose caste’s origin, identity, and status is discussed in a kulapurana, this narrativeis sacred, as it tells the story of their caste originators, heroes, and deities.

Desmond Kharmawphlang: The Khasi form of storytelling known as phawar is often performedat festivals, workplaces and other gathering places, hunting and fishing expeditions, andduring participation in games and archery. The phawar master is acutely aware of the effecthe has on audience members, and responds with enthusiasm to their reactions, especiallyin contests. This performer/audience interaction provides scope for the development of call-and-response, or leader-choral antiphony, which is the most salient feature of the phawartradition.

Laltluangliana Khiagte: The most memorable personality in the world of Mizo folk literaturewould naturally be the great Chhurbura, the unchallenged hero of Mizo folktales. There is agreat paradox in his character. He can be considered to be the silliest of all simpletons. At thesame time, he can also be considered to be the cleverest of all wise men, as all of his actionsand behaviour by which he was considered foolish were, in fact, due to his abiding love andaffection for his elder brother, Nahaia, who happened to be one of the laziest of all men.

Lalita Handoo: A discourse is a system that determines the production of knowledge andthe distribution of power. A society’s gender discourse becomes a ritualized practice of ideologythat shapes the natures of both men and women, and defines their relationships to eachother and to their surroundings.

Vanishri, S.P.: The study of discourse has developed in Anthropology, Folklore, Sociology,Linguistics, (Social) Psychology, and other disciplines. Thus, discourse analysis takes differenttheoretical perspectives and analytical approaches, such as speech act theory, interactionalsociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, pragmatics, conversation analysis, and variation analysis.All of these approaches view language in the context of social interaction.

Kishore Bhattacharjee: The major concern of legends is the construction of the history oflocality and local geography, public places, and the lives of saints. The plots of legends tend tobe simpler than those of folktales and myths. Members of local communities spin these storiesto glorify their places, and to communicate local identities and worldviews. The mythologicalelements in legend discourse are used for negotiation with the dominant discourses.

Subbalaxmi Das: We find that mostly women are supposed to keep vratas [a ritual involvingfasting and storytelling] for the prosperity and long life of the husband, children, and othermembers of the family. But husbands, sons, and other males in the family seem to rarelyobserve vratas for the longevity of their female relatives.

Chandan Kumar Sharma: History writing is a construction created from the vantage pointof the present. The socio-political environment of the present plays a vital role in determiningthe ‘history’ of a particular people, leading to different and contested discourses.

Saugata Bhaduri: Three areas in which the vrata katha narratives challenge normative gender,class, and caste assumptions are: 1) gods and goddesses are anthropomorphized, often to theextent that their divinity itself is jeopardized; 2) rituals and practices that are animistic in natureare presented; and 3) the possibility of Hindism-Muslim syncretism is shown.

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Nirmal Selvamony: A kalam is a geometrically designed space associated with various activities,such as worship, fortune telling, acting and dancing, combat, and threshing. It is not on raisedground, but rather is marked off by a diagrammatic figure. It is the prototypical dramatic stageof antiquity.

Theodore Baskaran: The questions I would like to raise are: How was the new art form ofcinema received in Tamil Nadu? What were the responses of writers? In other words, what wasthe nature of the discourse that followed, and how did that discourse affect the development ofcinema, and of cinema appreciation? I would like to argue that the nature of a cinema is in partshaped by such a discourse, and that the filmmakers themselves are not the only people whocan be held responsible for the quality of what the tradition produces.

V. Bharathi Harishankar: In studying the use of printed single sheets — including invitationsand greetings, drama and movie notices, and pamphlets — in Tamil Nadu during the late 19th

and early 20th centuries, one finds that their publication by individuals for personal/commercialuses displaces numerous binaries, including: technology vs. tradition, high vs. low culture,print vs. orality, public vs. private spheres, and coloniser vs. colonised. One binary does notreplace the other, but instead there is a negotiation between the binaries.

G. Sandhya Nayak: The resurgence in interest in preserving and celebrating ethnic and linguisticidentities, traditions, and histories has resulted in a close link between mass culture, advertising,and folklore in India.

Raghavan Payyanad: In Teyyam worship, man is completely submissive before the power of Godand tries to appease it by several means, including by singing praises. God is pleased by thepraise, and arrangements are made for its appearance on a divine stool. Later, it transfers intothe body of the performer through rice, fire, and sword. In the end of the ritual, it returns to thedivine stool and disappears.

Guru Rao Bapat: In India today, many performance traditions — and the discourses that theyproject — are undergoing radical changes. These changes have to be understood in the contextof the fast-changing Indian society as a whole.

M.D. Muthukumaraswamy: In the storyteller’s art, the thin membrane separating fictionand reality breaks many a time, assisting the audience to traverse through both realms.

Eric Miller: The very people who should be here, who should be taking an active part in thecentre of these deliberations and explaining many things to us, are not here: I am speaking ofthe grandmothers who live in small villages, a kilometre or two away from the main road.

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C O N V E R S A T I O N S

ObservationsMolly Kaushal, Associate Professor, Indira

Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi.<[email protected]>

V. Bharathi Harishankar, Dept. of English,University of Madras, Chennai.

<[email protected]>

Premeela Gurumurthy, Professor and Head,Dept. of Indian Music, University of Madras,

Chennai. <[email protected]>

Sadhana Naithani, Centre of German Studies,School of Language, Literature, and Cultural

Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University,New Delhi. <[email protected]>,

<[email protected]>

Kaushal: First of all, I would like to thank the NationalFolklore Support Centre and Muthukumaraswamy forinviting me over. For me it has been a continuation ofthe dialogue we began in New Delhi at the Indira GandhiNational Centre for the Arts at last year’s symposium onFolklore, the Public Sphere, and Civil Society. There alsofolklore was appearing as a discourse of a certain kind,and what I have experienced in these past three daysmakes me think of the linkages and the continuitybetween the two conferences. Definitely what emergeshere is that folklore is a specific kind of discourse, andthat this discourse needs to be investigated on its ownterms. Probably we do need to develop new paradigmsin order to understand this discourse in its context.

There was lot of information pouring in, a lot of newethnographic materials, and a lot of interestingdiscussions were taking place. What kept emerging was

that — even when we were talking of this discourse interms of alternate discourses, and in terms of discoursesof different competing voices — there is a strongtendency for negotiation of space by the differentcommunities, caste groups, or competing ideologiesinvolved. So, rather than looking for some exclusivespace, the effort seems to be to find one’s own placewithin the broader framework of the general community.

And then if we move out from there we found, inBharathi’s paper, a mention of negotiation betweenmodernity and tradition. And emerging new forms —when you talk about advertisements, those are emergingnew forms. I also think that whether one is talking ofcolonial or post-colonial interpretations, we need todiscuss the whole construct of Folklore as a discipline,and categories such as folk, tribe, orality, textual — theseare constructs and they have their own socio-politicaland historical baggage, some of which is very muchrooted in the ways practitioners of colonial methodologieswere creating new disciplines as they were encounteringcultures outside their own countries — and maybe evenwithin their own countries — that seemed involved withdifferent levels of discourse than what industrializationwas engaged in.

Probably at some level there is a need for us to unlearnour categories of discourse. And, as was very well putby Prof. Peter Claus, there is also the need to go nearerto the discourses of the communities that we arediscussing. We should be aware of academic agendasand discourses, and of the discourses in and aroundparticular disciplines, be they Folklore or Anthropologyor Cultural Studies and so on. Whether it is structuralismor psychoanalysis or post-colonialism, intellectualframeworks tend to remove us from those who arepracticing the tradition. While deconstructing anddecoding folklore events, we must take care to keep sightboth of the empirical data and of local communitymembers’ ways of looking at that data.

These are some of the very fundamental issues that thisconference has thrown open. Hopefully we will continueto engage in this discussion, and eventually arrive atsome better understandings of the discourses of thecommunities with which we are engaged, as well as ofour own discourses.

Harishankar: I came to this conference from a differentperspective: that of a literary theorist. During these daysof deliberations, one thing that became clear to me isthat we should look into those inter-disciplinary nuancesthat can provide better insights into the specificities.Another point that interested me is that even though wehad multiple voices, they were still mostly talking fromone end of a binary or the other. My commitment —both in terms of theory, and in terms of the way I look atfolklore — is to an interstitial position. This doesn’t meanthat I am avoiding commitment to any one binary, but

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rather that I am focusing more on the ‘how’ of things. Ifwe juxtapose, rather than oppose, polarities we can learna great deal. This is an approach that I would like to seemuch more of at such gatherings and meetings.

I have been working for some time now on cross-culturalinfluences. This has involved my personal engagementwith native peoples of Canada, the Mauritius islands,Australia, and New Zealand. While some similaritiesare emerging, the differences are equally drastic. Thus,it may be a good idea to include discussion of morecross-cultural approaches to folklore in the near future.But overall it has been one of the most rewardingconferences that I have attended in recent times.

Gurumurthy : Initially I should thankMuthukumaraswamy, Professor Sudersen, and EricMiller for inviting me to read a paper on Katha Kalaksheba,also known as Harikatha. This is a form of religiousdiscourse, and can also be considered a form ofstorytelling. I became acquainted with the term,discourse, when I first started working for my Ph.D. onKatha Kalaksheba. Discourse is understood differently invarious contexts, and it was good to hear about this atthe conference.

On the second night of the conference, I gave a briefdemonstration of Katha Kalaksheba. Demonstrations oftwo other storytelling traditions — Villupattu andTherukoothu Kathakalaksepam — were also on theprogramme, and this gave me the opportunity to seesome of the differences between these various genres,and how the story is depicted in the various styles.

It was also very interesting to hear about other culturalstyles of story narration, which are available in stateslike Assam. And also, about other ways of approachingthe epics. Many traditions are trying to interpret theheroes and incidents of epics in different contexts,although some traditions are not open to criticalcomments in certain areas. This has made me more awareof the importance of anthropological and other points ofview, regarding both the study of oral folklore, and oftraditions that involve written texts.

In general, I felt that there could have been a little moretime for discussion. Because, after all, we are cominghere to take part, not just to listen. So I felt that sometimesyou can just read the synopsis aloud and then openeverything for discussion. That’s what we did recentlyin one of our seminars in the Department of IndianMusic. We already had the papers, so people could readthem in advance. We need time to digest the information— there is so much coming up.

One point I want to put forth pertains to whatMr. Theodore Baskaran was saying yesterday aboutresearch regarding Tamil films. Anuradha Sriram wasone of our students. She went to Wesleyan University,and there she has worked on Ilayaraja’s Mannan. She tookit up there. So you see, the American universities aregiving equal importance to the areas of film and classical

music. I also have started to guide students to give equalimportance to film music, and one of my students fromKerala, she worked on Devarajan as a music director inMalayalam films. So, we have to have an open mind —every aspect of culture has to be viewed in the context ofthe whole.

Another point was that traditional themes in Harikathawere also presented in dramas, and in the early films.Srinivasa Kalyanam is one theme which came as a filmalso. So, the technology and contexts have beenadvancing, but aspects of the texts remain the same. Iwould like to point out that Carnatic musicians havecontributed a great deal to the film field, especially inthe early days of the film medium. For example, in 1932my father-in-law, who was a Carnatic musician, acted inthe film, Seetha Kalyanam.

So, in these ways these sessions were very useful, and Ihope we will all be interacting more in the future. Wewould like our students — they also performed hereyesterday — to understand and appreciate, and reallyfeel the importance of folklore.

Naithani: The seminar was good. It was very hearteningto see that there are so many scholars, especially youngerscholars, in the country who are working on folklore asdefined traditionally and also in post-modern terms.Folklore has been defined for the last 200 years acrossthe world, and it continues to be defined and redefinedtoday. I think its definitions will always remainimportant, because they have political implications.Because the moment we are talking about folklore, weare talking about the folk — we are talking about majoritypopulations in any given cultural zone. And folklore asdiscourse is an important subject. In the context of ourown country it is especially so, in reference to thewidespread orality and oral cultural expression, as wellas to the problem of illiteracy.

15



Conversation 1:Folklore and Development

Raghavan Payyanad, Coordinator, Centre forFolklore Studies, University of Calicut, Kerala.

<[email protected]>

R. Venugopal Nair, Lecturer, Dept. of History,Goa University.

<[email protected]>

Guru Rao Bapat, Principal, L.B. and S.B.S.College, Sagar, Karnataka.

Pulikonda Subbachary, Professor and Head,Dept. of Folklore and Tribal Studies, Dravidian

University, Kuppam, Andhra Pradesh.<[email protected]>

Subbachary: Generally, how are you looking at this issue,folklore as discourse? You mentioned in your paper thata lot of confusion has been created in the name ofdiscourse. Everything is brought under the subject. So,how would you limit the meaning of the word, discourse,in this context?

Bapat: To begin with, the word, discourse, is being usedin several disciplines, not only in Folklore. And in eachdiscipline it is used with a slightly different meaning.Particularly now when we come to folklore, the questionof discourse becomes important because, in the firstphase, folklore items were collected. In those days wehad a romantic notion of folklore, but now we realizethat folklore also has a very fundamental contemporaryrelevance, not merely to our cultural self, but also as apolitical force, as a social force, especially in regard toits potential for helping to correct the imbalance betweenthe subjugator and the subjugated, between those who

rule and the vast mass of our society which has beensuppressed. I see folklore as one of the ways by whichthis subjugation can be delineated, confronted, and evenpossibly alleviated. The worldview and native wisdomof a vast section of our society manifests itself in folklore.I believe this should be the main thrust of how one looksat folklore as a discourse: that it is a discourse of thesuppressed, the weak, the oppressed. Sometimes veryclearly and sometimes in very symbolic terms, folklorediscourse subverts the official discourse, or at leastcomments upon it. These are the ways in which manycommunities have learned to live.

It is a very healthy development that Folklore isbecoming inter-disciplinary. There was time when onlystudents in Literature and Linguistics used to participatealong with self-identified folklorists. Now, it is becomingmore open, and people from disciplines such as Historyand Sociology are also participating. In all of thesedisciplines there are similar questions, for which answerscan be found only in the study of folk-systems.Ultimately, the aim of all of these disciplines is thebetterment of society.

Subbachary: In recent times, we have begun looking atfolklore as an ongoing process in a live event. Now weare also calling this process a discourse. How do youfeel about this concept?

Payyanad: There is a lot to it. A performance is also adiscourse between two generations — that part we neverconsidered here. Another point I would like to make isthat most of the papers referred to oral discourse: wedid not give very much attention to pictures, dramas,music, dance, gesture, and so on. If an activitycommunicates, if it transfers a message from one personto another, it is a type of discourse.

Subbachary: Many scholars want to give importance totexts. They think in terms of analyzing texts under theterm, discourse analysis. What does this have to do withthe whole gamut of folklore activity that you mentionedjust now? And what about ritual? How do you look at aritual as a text? It seems that now–a–days, in modernFolklore theories, it is said that a text need not be literary:they are looking at entire social events as texts.

Payyanad: Yes, the term, text — just like, discourse —is being defined by different disciplines in different ways.Literate people are so dominant in many areas, and tomany of them, only a piece of literature can be called atext. But in folklore this is not true. Because, as you know,in folklore, the spoken words occur within a context.Whatever we get in the context — gesture, movement,interaction between people, everything — all of thisdiscourse is part of the text. That is the definition of textas far as folklore is concerned.

Subbachary: Our senior folklorist has stated that discourseanalysis should help with the development of our society.How do you react to this comment?

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Nair: Actually, in my paper I have sided with this notion.Rather than bringing up pure theoretical frameworks, Ihave argued that we should look at things from thepeople’s points of view — or at least, that we shouldpresent and discuss those points of view.

The authors who created the theoretical notions hadcertain social conditions which prompted them to thinkand write in that way. Our condition is totally different.For one thing, we have a condition of ruralism. For usphilosophy is different. The meaning, the function ofphilosophy is different from what it is the West.

So, in this way I have always had the feeling that weshould not be looking at folk discourse from a merelytheoretical point of view. We should look at it differently.Let the people of a community speak and say whateverthey want, and let their voices be heard. And in thisthere is a big problem, as Dr. Payyanad has pointed out:“Where do I locate myself?” As an author I have to locatemyself somewhere. This is a problem I have been tryingto analyze in my paper, and at this conference.

Bapat: For too long — at least for the last twenty years— Western theoretical models have dominated our mindsso deeply that perhaps we have not asked certain salientquestions. To what extent are these theories really relevantin the Indian context? Can we apply them wholly? Ordo we need to make certain changes or additions? I thinkthe time has come for Indian folklorists to get out of thisstraight-jacket of Western models. Because the situationin India, the kind of tensions in which we operate, thekind of problems that Indian society faces — ourtraditions, our modernity, our caste system — all of theseare very different from conditions in the West, which iswhere these models emerged. So I think it is high timenow that Indian folklorists should think of things indifferent terms. In my paper I have given just one ortwo hints in trying to evolve certain theoretical positionsfrom the performers themselves, the kind of conceptsthat they make use of. But can we term such concepts astheoretical postulates?

Nair: That approach itself is a theoretical postulate.

Subbachary: Discourse analysis is a meaning-makingprocess. A scholar deciphers a discourse and brings outa meaning from it. He says what he thinks it means —that is his meaning. Then, you need to look at the issueof subjectivity — the socio-cultural background of thescholar. For example, when I am analyzing a caste mythand discussing its meaning, my social background isbound to affect my theoretical and social concepts. Shouldthe scholar’s point of view be the dominant voice in thediscussion?

Bapat: No doubt the scholar has a major role to play,but what should it be? I think the real makers of themeaning are the people who participate in the folkperformance. The performers as well as the spectators— together they are the folk. Whether it is the telling of

a folktale, the performing of a ritual, any kind of folkitem — they continue doing it only because they find itmeaningful. Otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it. So Ithink the task of the folklorist is to humbly try to findout what the meaning is according to the participants ofthe folk item, instead of trying to impose our meaningson it. But sometimes scholars have the ego or the prideto decide, “I am the meaning-maker.”

Payyanad: We are in an international social-politicalsituation. We are loaded down with all these canons.And then we have this idea of development. What isdevelopment? We are for the development. Our countryis for development. So it is easy to go away from whatwe have inherited from the West and make our ownapproaches. Only if we make such a decision confidentlycan we change this academic system, this knowledge-creating system, this knowledge industry. Whom isknowledge for? What is it for? These are the questionswe need to ask and answer.

Bapat: I think that as a nation, we should grow confidentenough to say that we will create positions which aremore relevant to us. We may not succeed in thebeginning, we may not be heard in the West, but I thinkthat if we, as a scholarly community and as a nation, arestrong enough, we can make ourselves heard.

Payyanad: No. We are instruments in the hands of apolitical system. What they suggest, what they request,we do. That is all academicians can do. When we preparethe syllabus, the syllabus is coming from this sector.Everything is by this. We are accepting even globalization.So what we are discussing is a political issue also, andnot just a purely academic one.

Subbachary: Regarding developing our own theoreticalmodels: Do you think that our Indian Shasthras might behelpful in analyzing some folklore genres?

Bapat: In the Kavya Sasthra there are certain methods tounderstand the meaning. Let us say, Lakshya Sasthra, andAvidha Lakshya. But when we make use of either theWestern paradigms, or paradigms taken from Sanskritcritical cannons, particularly in the South Indian context,we find that all of these cultures are in a kind of a tension,a kind of a give–and–take, love–and–hate, relationship.Anyway, we should try to find the meanings of folkactivities from within the community itself. The task ofthe folklorist is to find out what needs the folklore itemis fulfilling in a community.

Payyanad: Aesthetic needs.

Bapat: Yes. And ritualistic needs.

Payyanad: They have their own measurements. When aperformance or a performer is considered amazing bypeople, people have their own idea and criteria for that.You have to discover that criteria and apply it accordingly.

Subbachary: Just now we were hearing that some Folkloredepartments are in crisis in some other countries. In the


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Third World countries, new Folklore departments arecoming in, whereas the established Folklore departmentsin the developed countries are not receiving funds. Howdo you look at the future of the Folklore discipline inIndia, and around the world?

Payyanad: We in India are always behind. After twenty-five or thirty more years, our departments may also bein danger. When we reach the level of those people, thesame thing might happen in India also. The other thingis that now in the world everything has to have financialpotential. So, subjects that have no financial potentialwill be discarded.

Subbachary: But the question of financial potentiality isapplicable to every Humanities discipline.

Payyanad: Yes. And look at what is happening to mostLinguistics departments. Then, Philosophy.

Subbachary: Regarding Folklore, there is a differencebetween the context which is there in the developedcountries and in India. In America, they may not haveenough material for their studies in their own country.In Finland, no road singer is living. But India is stillrich in folk traditions. So, don’t you think there is a lotof scope, there are a lot of chances for survival of Folkloredepartments in India in contrast to West?

Payyanad: If our nation defines what is our nation’sobjectives, and defines the development — then onlydisciplines that fit within that development can sustain.

Bapat: Folklore studies are also political statements.Within India, you will find that Folklore departmentsare very strong only in certain regions — for example, inthe South, in the Northeast, in the regions which try todefine themselves as different from what may be calledthe mainland of India, the Aryan–Brahmanical belt. Youwill find that folklore is a strong assertion of these otherregion’s identities — identities that are different fromthe pan-Indian identity that is being projected by somepeople. It seems that Folklore departments are not verystrong in any of the Hindi-speaking states.

Subbachary: Do you see any kind of threat to Indianfolklore, or Folklore studies, by Western patronization?

Bapat: Just now I spoke of Indian political statements.Western patronization is an international politicalstatement. If we believe international funding agenciesare innocently providing for the survival of a discipline,that will be too naïve. A variety of factors are involved.But even before the Ford Foundation arrived, Folklore asan academic discipline was the pursuit of certaincommitted scholars who have developed very strongly,especially in South India.

Payyanad: And Bengal.

Subbachary: The discipline of Folklore is looked downupon by some people in the other social sciences. You

are from History. Some anthropologists do not evenrecognize Folklore as an independent discipline, evenafter hundreds of years. How do you see the future ofFolklore in India?

Nair: Folklore studies will remain. It has its main idea.It is a discipline also. There is no doubt about it. What Iand many anthropologists and historians have done isthat we have borrowed from Folklore. Because if youstick to your own discipline, it will be very difficult tounderstand certain processes. So when you come to aFolklore conference such as this one, there is adissemination of knowledge. Ideas are presented, andsome of them are very strong.

You know, many people in the sciences look down onall of the social sciences. That is in part because of themarket forces we were discussing, and the whole notionsof globalization and development. So, many disciplinesare in crisis, and not only in social sciences, but indisciplines such as Mathematics and Physics also.Everyone is going for disciplines which are job-oriented.So, there is a general crisis in education.

Bapat: There is no doubt that Folklore studies willcontinue. Whether or not it will continue to beprominent academically depends on many variables, oversome of which perhaps we don’t have very much control.We should remember that Folklore studies is notrestricted to academics only. There are a good numberof people outside the universities who are also doingserious work in this area.

Payyanad: Folklore has within it different ideologies thatare colliding with each other, and wanting to saysomething. These diverse ideologies, these different waysof understanding the universe, make up folklore.And the balance has to be arrived at. Then only will wedo justice. Because if we are looking only from thetop, we will see nothing from below. More of aparticipant model has to be brought out, so that whenproblems arise they can be discussed from different pointsof view.

For example, when I presented my paper, the personconcerned did not ask me any questions, but whenI came out she told me that she belonged to a particularcommunity and she asked me why, in my opinion, hadthe performance not been done in the night. I gave ananswer that it was done by an agrarian community andthat is why it was not done in the night. She suggesteda reason that was different from mine: she said that mostof the Brahmanical gods are present in the morningbut the others, the gods of the marginalizedcommunities, are present only in the night. So, there isa participant’s view, which is not given its due. Weshould do something about it. Instead of looking at asituation from theoretical assumptions, when we lookat it as a ground reality, a lot of things will come out andthat is what we need.


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Conversation 2:Folklore and Identity

Desmond Kharmawphlang, Program of FolkloreResearch (and Archive), Centre for Cultural andCreative Studies, Northeastern Hill University,

Shillong, Meghalaya.<[email protected]>

Arupjyoti Saikia, Lecturer, Dept. of History,Cotton College, Guwahati, Assam.<[email protected]>

Laltluangiana Khiangte, Reader and Head, Dept.of Mizo, Mizoram University, Aizawl, Mizoram.

<[email protected]>

Chandan Kumar Sharma, Dept. of CulturalStudies, Tezpur University, Naapam, Tezpur,

Assam. <[email protected]>

Saikia: In response to the conference in which we havejust participated, I think it is essential that we should sitand take up issues that have been raised during the lasttwo days, and engage in a dialogue especially in relationto the region that all of us come from — Northeast India.Let us start with Chandan. He has contributed a lot toFolklore studies. So, what areas do you take up for studyin Tezpur?

Sharma: Folklore constitutes a very important componentof our department. Our department in Tezpur Universityis the Department for Cultural Studies. As you know,Cultural Studies is coming up as a kind of inter-disciplinary field, and Folklore itself is emerging as akind of inter-disciplinary field. Apart from folklore, wealso study art, aesthetics, language, performing arts, andliterary and other cultural theories — so it really is quiteinter-disciplinary.

Kharmawphlang: When did your department start?

Sharma: 1996.

Khiangte: What school are you in?

Sharma: We are in the School of Social Sciences.

Kharmawphlang: It has been a trait of NortheasternFolklore studies that Folklore studies has come to besynonymous with the study of literature in manyrespects. In Khasi Literature departments, fifty per centof what they are studying is actually folklore. The sameis the case in Assam.

Khiangte: In my department also — the Department ofMizo — we have the category of folk literature. We call itfolklore literature. Of course we deal with all folklorematters. This is a compulsory course. We trace right fromthe beginning of oral cultures to when writing appears.

Sharma: From what I have seen in this conference, thisis not something that is unique to the Northeast. It seemsthat many Folklore scholars are based in Literaturedepartments.

Saikia: Also Sociology. And I am from History. Peoplefrom many disciplines are coming and working in thefield of Folklore.

Kharmawphlang: One feature of Folklore studies is thatuntil very recently our job has mainly been the collectionand compilation of data. There has not been very muchanalytical, scientific, or theoretical analysis of thematerials. I think now some changes are taking place.People are getting trained, they are getting exposed.Scholars are travelling, they are reading, they have accessto the Internet. So, some very promising people arecoming up to take up this job of taking Folklore as avery serious discipline.

Khiangte: In that sense I feel that the present conferenceis very important. At least we can meet all these popularfolklorists, experts in their fields.

Saikia: Personally, I am open to all kinds of disciplines.The question is, “How can folklore help us to understandways to improve society?” Folklore provides a largelandscape. It provides a landscape of material located indifferent forms, and awareness of folklore can helpscholars to understand any subject in the Humanitiesin a much more dynamic way. For example, I’m writingabout the social journey of a legend over the last fivehundred years. The different components of folklore arehelping me to understand the social history of Assam.

A problem in the Northeast is that most of the folkloristsare primarily antiquarianists. They are trying to collect.There are other groups also, who are on theoreticalplatforms. I think there should be a better mixture ofthese groups. As has been mentioned, most of thetheoretical formulations that have been created over the


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last ten or twenty years were primarily grounded inEuropean or other Western epistemologies. I think wehave a responsibility now to reformulate those theoreticalapproaches, and to formulate different kinds of questionsand definitions in our own context. For example, thisquestion of hegemony and resistance. We don’t speak inthese exact terms in our society.

Saikia: All of the tribal societies have their ownepistemologies about these theoretical questions, and Ithink we should be more inward looking. Also, we needmore rigorous academic training to understand thesubject. In the Northeast region some time back therewas a seminar in Gauhati University’s FolkloreDepartment: “Folklore and Oral History.” As a practicinghistorian, I had a serious problem. Some scholars wereconsidering oral tales as history.

Khiangte: Oral traditions do have some history in them.

Saikia: Yes, but sometimes there is a gap between thetales and the history. We have to develop techniques inorder to use oral traditions to understand our societybetter.

Sharma: And for the socialization of our people. I thinkMr. Desmond also should share some information. Heis from Meghalaya. Your experience please.

Kharmawphlang: In Shillong state, there are splendidexamples of how myth and legend are combined to createhistory. In our undated myths, the gods, goddesses, andother supernatural beings from that particular discoursehave percolated down to a legend which has nosupernatural beings, but rather only human beings. Andthen you have written history.

Saikia: We need to collectively develop some kind oftheoretical frameworks to understand the Northeasterngenres, including those that occur in everyday life. Thereis a lot of folklore in people’s everyday lives.

Kharmawphlang: I’ve never come across any scholarstalking about rice myths. In Khasi folklore, rice mythsconstitute a very important part of the discourse. [Pleasesee the book review on page 26 of this newsletter.]

Saikia: In fact, the folk-world of the Northeast is largelyoutside of the pan-Indian folkloric world. For example,a Bharata Katha has not touched Assamese society. I don’tthink we have Bharata Katha to a large extent.

There is another important point that we should notignore: Folklore practices have been given an importantrole in the recent politics of Northeastern India. Folkloreis becoming an important weapon for the middle class,as well for other segments of society. How do weunderstand this process? I think this issue appears inthe Northeast in a much more vibrant way than it doesin most other parts of the country.

Sharma: Many people in adversity are using folklore interms of their origins, the past.

Kharmawphlang: Nagas are using Christianity. Khasisare calling themselves Hynniew Trep, which means, sevenhuts, which is referring to the past. This is an attempt tounify all of the tribes and sub-tribes that fall under theumbrella of Khasis.

Kharmawphlang: Nagas have different ways of imaginingthemselves, because of their heterogeneous character.Nagas are dispersed over a large area. But Khasis aremore homogenous, more cohesive, and it is easy for themto imagine a kind of unity. And now the Government isalso using folklore. And those protesting againstGovernment policies are also using it, in a different way.Folklore was important for the 1857 rebels, and againduring the freedom struggle. And the Britishmissionaries, that is, the administrators, they had theirown uses of folklore. Hitler also used folklore. But asfolklorists, we have the responsibility just to observe it.

Sharma: I’ve not seen much political use of folklore inAssam, apart from the Boro case perhaps. I think thatthe insurgents may also be using folklore for propagatingtheir goals.

Saikia: In this way the gamocha [a traditional cloth] hasbecome a symbol of the Assamese society.

Sharma: No, I am referring to the militants.

Kharmawphlang: A friend of mine was taken from hishome by an insurgency group, taken to a camp ofinsurgents. They asked him to stay there for two weeksto talk about folklore of the Khasis in order to inspiresome sort of unity among the cadres.

Sharma: In Meghalaya also folklore is being used. Andin Assam. The symbols are being used. Bodos are doingit, but not the militant groups. Bodo middle-class leadersare very consciously involved in the construction of theirown community identity. Elements are there in their folktradition, and they trying to build up a new identity forthemselves. People have different ways of imaginingthemselves as communities.

Saikia: The Karbis are also doing that. They areorganising folk festivals that become a space for theassertion of their rights and authority.

Kharmawphlang: I’ve been to one of the KarbisAssociation conferences, at Taralanshu. They also areconsciously making use of folklore. They are giving theirown interpretations, and they are developing new modesof expression, which is important.

Sharma: All kinds of methods are being used toemphasize particular points and ideologies. For example,we see the legend about Krishna from Dwaraka marryingRukmini from Sadiya. And Krishna’s grandson,Anirudha, marrying Usha from Tezpur. You see, Assamis primordial. These legends attempt to emphasize thelink with mainland India.


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Saikia: I think the pan-India idea began in themid-19th century, with the advent of modern scholarship.They were trying to manipulate the entire localknowledge and connect it to their vision of a pan-Indianlandscape. It is quite interesting.

Sharma: These materials are being used to try toauthenticate institutions and prove versions of history.“This has happened, so this is a fact!”

Saikia: I think that we need a platform encompassingthe entire Northeastern region in regard to all of this.Perhaps a journal. Maybe we can have an annualmeeting where scholars of the Northeast can interact.

Khiangte: Folklore is very deep-rooted in our states, andpeople are very interested in folk literature and in theother arts also. Whenever we have literatureconferences, they are busy with their dances and allkinds of expressive forms. I support the idea of having aforum in the Northeast region. We don’t haveany seminars particularly for discussion of folklore, andwe should. Refresher courses and awarenesscampaigns are also needed in my state.

Khiangte: Well, to begin with, I suggest that wheneverone of us has a programme that relates to folklore —whenever some paper is going to be presented — wecan invite each other and other scholars who areinterested in Folklore studies. In this way, we can buildup a region-wide discussion.

Sharma: Yes, whenever we organize an event, we shouldsend invitations to all. That is the way we shouldfunction.

Conversation 3:Folklore and Ideology

Kishore Bhattacharjee, Reader and Head, Dept.of Folklore Research, Gauhati University,

Guwahati, Assam. <[email protected]>

Saugata Bhadhuri, Associate Professor, Centre ofLinguistics and English, School of Language,

Literature, and Cultural Studies, Jawaharlal NehruUniversity, New Delhi. <[email protected]>

K.M. Chandar, Academic Staff College,University of Mysore, Manasagangotri, Karnataka.

<[email protected]>

Bhattacharjee: We have assembled to discuss the Folkloreas Discourse conference. Since the middle of the 20thCentury, numerous ways to understand discourse, andthe role of discourse in society, have been developed. Ibelieve Folklore as a field of study might approachdiscourse in a fundamentally different way than otherdisciplines, and I am interested to know your opinionabout this.

Bhadhuri: I agree! The fundamental difference arises fromthe fact that folklore activity initiates primarily fromwithin the masses, and this affects all of the work donein Folklore scholarship. At the same time, it is true that,to my knowledge, all academic theories of discourse,including those used in the field of Folklore, are parts ofan ideological apparatus that has been developed mostlyby the members of elite classes. But now we are in thepost-Gramcian, post-Althusserian, post-Saussurean Age.We must seek to understand what all of these greatscholars — not to mention Foucault and Derrida — hadto say about discourse, but for us — as Indians and asFolklore scholars — this should be just the starting point.


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Chandar: It seems to me that Folklore scholars tend todefy all pre-conceived notions, because on certain levels,folklore activities do the same. Earlier we were talkingabout canons, about the notion of a canon, and theapplicability of this concept to folklore, and I would liketo take the stand that Bakhtin takes as far as norms areconcerned, and try to apply it here. What I am saying isthat on some levels, the folklore process defies all canons,defies the determinations of the powers-that-be and ofthe institutional frameworks through which those powersoperate. Because the folklore process involves dialogue,questioning, commenting, mimicking — it does notallow the powers-that-be to have the last word. So I amthinking of folklore as something which has its owncanon, a canon of practices, although it is not really acanon, for it keeps evolving. It is almost like the conceptof Brahman in our Indian culture — the moment youdefine it, it is not that, it is something else.

Bhattacharjee: Yes, definitely. It doesn’t have to getcanonized. It can’t be canonized.

Chandar: The moment you think it is within your graspand you attempt to grasp it, it is not there. But yet italways seems to be there within your grasp. I think thisis the finest quality of folklore.

Bhattacharjee: One issue I think we can relate this to isthe question of ideology. An ideology is a system. It maybe a dominant system. Folklore, on the other had, as wehave just stated, is dialogic. So what happens whenfolklore comes in contact with an ideology? Does itnecessarily critique that ideology? I think not. Ideologiescan also penetrate into folklore. Perhaps the point is thatideologies sometimes use folklore objects, and seek toavoid or suppress the dialogic aspect of folklore.

Sauguta: We must also keep in mind that power doesn’toperate by brute physical repression alone. There is agenerative aspect of power. People themselves consentto be exploited. The colonizers did not shoot every Indian.I mean, they came with their English language — therewere many apparatuses through which we consented tobe ruled by them. We are all subjects of our ownobjectification.

Chandar: There is a beautiful folktale episode of Ramayanain which Ravana, infatuated with Sita, learns that Sita iscompletely committed to Rama, so he devises a strategy.He decides he should come disguised as Rama, to cometo take away Sita. But the moment he puts on the maskof Rama, all his infatuation disappears, and so he goesback empty-handed. So he can come only as Ravanna,and not as Rama. One thing that this story illustrates isthat if you have a preset ideology, and it doesn’t work,then you have to think of some other strategy. So thingsare defined, predetermined, only to a certain extent, butfrom that point onwards, you know, the whole world isat your disposal, and you have to evolve, you have tosearch for some other new discourse to emerge at thatpoint in time.

Bhattacharjee: Folklore used to be defined wholly interms of tradition. A tradition is an ideology, in a sense.But if you take the new definition of folklore — that it issomething dynamic, something that questions everything— then folklore it seems would not fully accommodateany ideology, including any tradition. There would bereactions to traditions and other ideologies, andinteractions with them. What would result would be avery interesting and fascinating field, I believe.

Bhadhuri: I think the problem arises in reconcilingideology and multiplicity only if you look at all ideologiesas being very monolithic and orthodox. Ideologies canalso be flexible in certain ways. You know, insisting onfolklore as a discourse of subversion and resistance, assomething that continuously undercuts dominantnarratives — this itself is an ideology that we areimposing upon folklore.

Bhattacharjee: Well, I am speaking from an empiricalpoint of view, and I am saying that, empirically, we mustsee how these things operate in reality and not just intheory. What happens to political structures in a folklorecontext? There is that which comes from outside thecommunity, and that which comes from inside — Ibelieve these are called the etic and the emic, or theexoteric and the esoteric, but let us avoid jargon. Let ussay that political structures, or aspects of them, are comingfrom the outside, and are being imposed on the localcommunity. Some local people might accept it, othersmight object — but inherent in the process of discourseis that the local people will be recasting it and making ittheir own.

Bhadhuri: This is where people can appropriate thedominant means, and try to use it for their own purposes.If people do object to what they are perceiving is beingimposed, two ways they can fight it are by trying to alterthat structure, or by trying to ignore that structure andbuild their own.

Take feminists, for example. Some feminists say thatwomen have a different discourse altogether, that womentalk and write differently, and that if they are in contactwith men it is inevitable that they are going to beexploited. Other feminists say, no, the only way womencan be liberated is by infiltrating the patriarchal structure,by taking advantage of the opportunities for educationand employment that the patriarchal state offers, and byappropriating, subverting, and transforming things fromwithin the system.

Folklore cannot — especially in this current capitalistic,globalised world of ours — folklore can no longer beseen as something which is insulated from the outside.It is continuously being taken within the academic fold.It is continuously being engaged by the electronic media,by the business world, and by other forces of civilizationand modernization. But, folklore can live within thesemodern institutions and discourses and work totransform them.


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Chander: Sometimes working in a very subtle way. I amreminded of another folktale episode of Ramayana — onewhich Ramanujan told us. Rama has to leave for theforest with Lakshmana and others. He tries to dissuadeSita from accompanying him. Sita, being a very devotedwife says, “No, No! I must go with you.” And Ramasays, “No, you are a princess. You are acclimated topalatial comforts, you need that tenderness.” But Sitasays, “But how can you deny me now?” And so youhave what we are talking about: someone continuouslytrying to extend the boundaries of a framework. Youknow, in many of these folk upakathas [sub-stories], aframe is challenged. The boundaries are explored,sometimes even extended, but only to return to the framein the end. So in the frame you have this elasticity.Canons can be elastic in this same way.

Bhadhuri: Yes, if the canon is not elastic, people mayseek to abandon it and create an alternate canon.

Chander: You know, in rural Karnataka we have a veryfamous folktale, Male Malleswara. The telling and singingof this story is a living tradition, and scholars arecollecting versions of it, of course. One time we werelistening to this gentleman singing, telling us the tale.There was a reference to a princess living in a palace —and he knew that we were from a university office, fromour dress and from the way we were talking in Englishamongst ourselves now and then, and we were recordingtoo. And he said, “Sir, do you know where this palacewas? It was the very place where your administrativeoffices all function today!” That was the palace of thisprincess! I couldn’t tell him that this building is justeight years old, whereas he was narrating a tale whichwas 800 years old. This item was fascinating to me! Theprocess is so alive that anything can be appropriated! Auniversity administrative corporate hall can become thepalace of this princess who lived 800 years ago! Thisalso relates to the subject of extending boundaries.

Bhattacharjee: I want to give some instances. In certainfolktales, women take the dress of men, and along withthat they take the male discourse and use that discourseto subvert the system and to create a space for themselves.And in the case of many Rajasthan women’s songs, thedominance of men is questioned and criticized — theychallenge the discourse. So, a great deal of contestingthe system can be permitted within the overall discourse.And, of course, folklore is not monolithic: even withina single genre, multiple discourses, multiple points ofview, are often given voice.

Bhadhuri: It is not just that social institutions give riseto discourse, positive and negative. It is also the casethat discourses can come to constitute social institutions.So, I think we have to look at the relationship betweeninstitutions and discourse in a two-way manner.

Bhattacharjee: There is another dimension. I am workingon legends, and I find that there are often a multiplicityof discourses in them, and some of these discourses are

not necessarily consciously stated. This has to do withthe psychological dimension of folklore.

Bhadhuri: I’m a little wary about psychoanalyticalapproaches to folklore. It seems to me that folklore cannotbe used for understanding individuals’ personalconditons, because folklore is not the discourse of oneperson. It is a collective creation. So the only thing thatcan possibly be analyzed is the common socialpersonality, and the collective unconscious, as Jungcalled it. Anthropologists like Ruth Benedict say thatculture is individual psychology writ large.

Saugata: We do have to look at the tension between theindividual and the collective. Because obviously,individuals comprise the collective. And, collectivedesires and beliefs come to constitute the individual. Soit is not that one approach should be suppressed in favorof the other, but rather that there should anunderstanding and interaction between the two.

In society, groups are differentiated. And folklore groupsmay emerge in the course of performance itself. So whenpeople negotiate, contest, challenge, aspire — again itinvolves the dynamics between individuals and thecollective. One cannot keep the individual out of thisdiscussion.

Chander: You were saying that you were interested inlegends. Down South we have so many rituals to beobserved. Each day we have them: rituals forSathyanarayana, Lord Ganesh, Goddess Gowri, andothers.

Bhattacharjee: Everything is Sanskritised.

Chander: Yes. You have the head of a family and his wifewho observe these rituals — they observe the whole thingin Sanskrit. But in the evening there is a kind ofstorytelling. It takes place in community centres, andeveryone is invited. Some one hundred people maygather. And this storytelling — it is Sanskritised, yet notSanskritised. It is in Kannada, it is in Tamil, it is in mostof the regional languages. People read out the story —little folktales — and then there is often a rider, that ifyou don’t do this, if you don’t listen to this, somethingwill happen. And if you do do it, Lord Ganesha willbless you. In the early part of the day, people wouldcome only for lunch but not take part in the ritual, butin the evening they take part in the ritual because theywant to listen to the story and learn why the ritual isobserved.

Saugata: I think this is an excellent example of how theorthodox and the folk aspects of culture may worktogether! The folk culture is storytelling — it is practical,participatory, and dialogic — and in this case it seemsthat it is being used by the orthodox system to conveymessages. All of the points that we have been talkingabout are here! The Sanskrit monologue of the morninghas somehow to be transposed into the local folk dialogueof the evening. The same ritual has both sides to it. Thankyou for this excellent example!


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Conversation 4:Folklore and Contexts

Jawarlal Handoo, President, Indian FolkloreCongress, Mysore, Karnataka.

<[email protected]>

Peter Claus, Professor Emeritus, Dept. ofAnthropology, California State University,

Hayward, USA. <[email protected]>

Eric Miller, Ph.D. candidate, Folklore Program,University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA.

<[email protected]>

Miller: The Folklore as Discourse conference has just cometo a close, and we — myself, Dr. Handoo, and Dr. Claus— are sitting in the Anthropology office and having abrief discussion on the topic of folklore as discourse. Weare discussing the field of Folklore and the future of thefield. So, whoever wishes to begin must do so.

Handoo: Well, this has been a very important experiencefor me, in terms of being an Indian folklorist. It took somuch time to reach this stage of treating, and convincingpeople and scholars also to treat, folklore in totality as adiscourse. I find it is very relevant, for, in all my life’swork, finally I feel there is no other way except to treatfolklore as a discourse. This is not to question theimportance of any other discourse that is already availablefor study in this country. But culture has to be viewedin totality. All of the different strands of culture need torecognised, so that we can perceive the kind of messageswe are looking for in a society which has very complexsystems and which is very ancient and highly hegemonicalso. This was what I kept thinking was the purpose forwanting such a conference on folklore as discourse.

Miller: You were mentioning earlier that much of Indiansociety is oral-centric and that this is often ignored byscholars, who often are more interested in studyingprinted materials. You said that it would benefit all of usto acknowledge and understand the oral nature of muchof Indian society.

Handoo: Yes, by and large India is an oral society. Thewritten discourses, and the other kinds of discoursesthat are available — I feel that most of them are highlyhegemonic. I understand the hegemony of writtendiscourse, whether it concerns the caste system, or sacredspaces, or the great architectural marvels of this country,or anything else. There are so many illiterate people inthis country. They have no written languages. What abouttheir discourse? I am talking about that discourse as oraldiscourse and that is very powerful. And it will makethe picture of Indian civilization complete in every respectif we add this oral discourse dimension to all of theother existing discourses in India.

Claus: I am a little disturbed by the fact that people tendto take the term, discourse, in a very narrow sense, assimply referring to political phenomena, as if the politicalis the only function of discourse, or as if that is the onlydimension of discourse worth talking about. As GuruRao Bapat illustrated in his paper, performance analysisis also part of discourse analysis.

And as Muthukumaraswamy pointed out, discourse isalso studied by sociologists: Erving Goffman, for one,looks at frames, and how we shift from one frame toanother, what kinds of cues there are for this.Muthukumaraswamy explained how in the rituals hewas studying, legitimacy and authority are given by apriest to the actors who will be playing the five Pandavas— only then can they start the performance. We need tolook at the transitions from first person enactment tothird person narration, and back again to the first personenactment; at how after twenty days of participating inall of these stages of discourse, all day and all night, youbecome merged in it, you become a part of it. And thatis a different dimension of discourse than merely thepolitical sense of the term.

Miller: The style of discourse always does have politicalimplications though. For example, if one person isspeaking for a long time and every one else has to listensilently — I believe that is what Dr. Handoo has beenreferring to as the “palace paradigm.” Whereas, ifeverybody is taking turns, that is the paradigm ofdemocracy.

Claus: The actors need to be legitimized for them toportray the Pandavas, and for the performance to begin.That’s not a palace paradigm. It is a theatrical device. Itenables a discourse to happen and become meaningful.

Handoo: We are not denying the existence of thesemechanics of discourse, of the built-in systems of thisdiscourse. All we are trying to say that oral discourse isimportant in this country. It has been ignored or it has


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not been recognised as a part of the bigger, holisticdiscourse of our society.

That is one point. A second point has to do with thequestion of how particular types of discourse may tendto promote specific ideologies. For example, today wehad Baskaran’s paper on Tamil cinema. He made specialreference to the growth and development of the medium.We could see that through the medium of cinema, adiscourse was generated which created what he called ademocratic space, in which now any people who had alittle money could sit down together. This was not thepractice before.

Claus: I would have liked more papers about oraldiscourse. Very few people actually looked at folkperformances, and at what takes place within thatdiscourse. As Subbachary’s paper pointed out, oral folkdiscourse takes place within small groups, and as soonas you look at a printed text — even if it is a transcriptionof what was said — you are no longer dealing directlywith the oral discourse.

Handoo: Yes, that is true. And as you know, in thiscountry, knowledge, and the mediums of expressing thatknowledge, have been used as very strong tools to depriveothers and for the benefit of whosoever was interested touse it for his own benefit and his own ideology.

Claus: Newspapers are discourse. Especially the editorialpage.

Handoo: But I would say that historically the mostprestigious discourse generated in this country waswritten discourse coming out of the palaces. That is myfeeling.

Miller: When you use the term, palace paradigm, what Ithink of is one person transmitting and everyone elsereceiving. This sort of hegemony can occur in anymedium. However, in oral discourse, there is alwaysthe possibility that the listeners might try to break out ofthis frame and speak, that is, that they might try to createa different social situation. For this reason, championsof the palace paradigm tend to be very careful about howpublic speech events are managed. Because everycommunication event, every discourse event — eveneveryday conversation — not only sets a model for newsociety, it is new society. It is society emerging. And assuch, the producers of it might be making a bid for whatthey are doing to be acknowledged as normal, standard,mainstream behavior. Such bids are, of course, oftencontested. One way champions of the palace paradigmmay deal with a style of discourse that they do notapprove of is to forbid it; or if it has already occurred, topunish the producers of it, or — often most effective ofall — they may ignore that it occurred and encourageothers to do the same. So I believe that the ways in whichpeople are allowed, or not allowed, to take turns — tojump in and take the floor — is a key to the structure notonly of a particular discourse event, but also to the generalstructure of the society.

Claus: Very few scholars have really collected the cuesthat are inherent in genres, the cues which allow peopleto indicate when they would take a turn.

Handoo: Society cannot afford to be guided by a discoursethat has no possibilities of interruption. But socialregulations are backed by a very strong power. Haven’tthe Dalits been denied the chance to even enter thetemples in this country? The Dalits were not having theright to sit in the public space. How was this created inthis civilization? There must have been some powerbehind that kind of discourse.

Claus: That’s what I liked about Eric’s presentation. Byinviting his research assistants to attend and to speak atthe conference, he brought the discourse that he has beenhaving in the field, and allowed us to join that discourse.Most of us keep our data collection on one side. Thenwe control the discourse amongst us, and what we saygets printed and read by thousands around the world.But we change that discourse. And we control it in ourdiscourse — very often particular communities are called‘high’ and others are called ‘low,’ and histories areimagined. The origins and migrations of Dravidian andother societies and races — all of these are imaginedsituations. These imagined situations are taken and thenused to control the discourse.

Handoo: What is happening in this country now, in myopinion, is that a paradigm shift is taking place at variouslevels. Of course, at the mass culture level, we haveexpressive systems like cinema and secular pop music.At the same time, oral discourse remains a very strongdiscourse of this country. We must understand the roleit plays, and see how it functions. There can be no pre-supposed frame. By doing this we can help folklore tofind its place as a discourse and interact with otherdiscourses, and see what it can do for the country.

Another point is that you cannot be guided by only theperformance itself. A folktale as a text does not tellanything unless it is seen in the whole context, unless itis connected to the other phenomena of the same society.Only then can it become meaningful. We have to developall kinds of methods, models, and frameworks to try tolook at folk discourse from a holistic point of view, tosee what it means in its whole context.

Claus: Yes, in its larger socio-political context. But youknow that this larger socio-political context is now beingdominated by a different phenomena than old feudalism.It is being dominated by global capitalism — a secular,liberal, democratic capitalism — that is going aroundand giving rationales for invading countries, and givingpraise to those countries that engage in civilized, rationaldiscourse — meaning, you know, that they are acceptingcapitalist expansion of markets. What paper evenmentioned this context, which is relevant to all of us?

Handoo: Well, we made a mistake in that we shouldhave had this Folklore as Discourse conference first, andthen gone on to Habermas, to the Folklore, Public Sphere,and Civil Society symposium. But circumstances of all


25


kinds of led us to hold the Public Sphere symposiumfirst, so much of the material presented at this conferencehas not yet been digested and applied to the largercontexts.

Globalisation may be good for certain countries in termsof money and all kinds of economic orders, but, I thinkwe are passing through a very dangerous phase when itcomes to the possibility of people losing their identities.Habermas himself — not being the typical folklorist, butbeing a thinker and philosopher — says that the mark ofa healthy society is that individuals take part indiscussions about the important matters of the day, andmake up their minds for themselves. So, please go toyour community and talk, examine and comment andquestion, and spread your thoughts through your ownmeans. There is no way we can trust any media. Even iffolklore discourse is not perceived as being strong inmodern times in certain countries, especially in societies


that are mostly literate, I believe Habermas wouldrecommend folklore discourse to be used as a veryimportant medium for the dissemination and discussionof information.

Miller: And I hope that when we consider people talkingamongst themselves and sharing their thoughts, we areincluding their ability to participate in discourse witheach other through interactive telecommunicationpractices such as e-mail, because through suchtechnology individuals can speak to their friends or tothe world.

Handoo: This was a very well-managed conference, andI’m sure that when the papers are published it is goingto be a landmark in the future growth and developmentof Folklore as a discipline and a very strong one in thiscountry.

Miller: From your mouth to G-d’s ear.

THIRD ISSUE

ISSN 0972-6462

Indian FolkloreResearch

Journal (IFRJ)Volume 1, Issue 3,

December 2003

Send DD / IMO drawnin favour of

National FolkloreSupport Centre

payable at Chennai(India)

C o n t e n t sA r t i c l e s

Challenges to a Folk Theatre in Tamil Nadu Hanne M. de BruinCross-Cultural Relations between DravidianIndia and Central China: New Evidences from theTradition of Martial Art Mathew VargheseEcological References in the Folksongs ofthe Kurichiyan Tribe of Kerala Bindu RamachandranSaddle (Silence): A Study of Mylaralinga Epic Manjunatha BevinakattiMyth and Identity II: Narrative Construction ofOne’s Social Entity by Par≠Ê Communities in Maharashtra Guy PoitevinLanguage and Identity in Saurashtra Harald Tambs-LycheMithila Paintings: Women’s CreativityUnder Changing Perspectives Kailash Kumar Mishra

B o o k R e v i e w s

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LACHMI JAGAR: GURUMAI SUKDAI’S STORY OF THE BASTAR RICE GODDESS○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

Gregory, Chris A. (transl.) and Harihar Vaishnav (collectorand transl.). Lachmi Jagar: Gurumai Sukdai’s Story of theBastar Rice Goddess. Illustrated by Khem Vaishnav.Kondagaon, Chattisgarh, India: Kaksad Publ., 2003. Pp.XVIII+147. ISBN 0/646/422154.

Review by Heda Jason, a freelance scholar who hasworked on the genres of folktale, sacred legend, and epic,in the fields of semiotics and classification of oral literature.Her publications include Ethopoetry: Form, Content,Function (1977), and Motif, Type, and Genre: A Manual forCompilation of Indices (2000).

We have been given a wonderful present: a newgreat work of Indian oral literature has beenfound and is on its way to publication for both

national and international readership. The work is a myth,sung and enacted by speakers, mostly women, of theHalbi language of the DandakaryaPlateau region, which is drained by theIndravati River, a tributary of the GodavariRiver, in the region of Chattisgarh, inthe state of Madhya Pradesh.

The story was performed by Ms. GurumaiSukdai Koram, a member of the localmusician/watchman community, who isaccustomed to singing it as part of therelevant rituals. It was recorded andtranscribed in 1996 by Harihar Vaishnav,a poet and writer in Hindi and a nativespeaker of Halbi. Chris A. Gregory (ofthe Australian National University,Canberra), is the co-translator of the text.

As the transcription of the performanceis 31,000 lines long, its scholarlypublication (in the original language andEnglish translation, with commentaries) will be a multi-volume affair, and it will take a while for the work to bepublished. Therefore the collectors have decided topublish a preview with a detailed summary of the storyfor the benefit of the lay reader, especially the Halbispeakers of Bastar. The summary is published in Halbi,Hindi, and English (in parallel columns).

In the Chattisgarh area, northern Indo-Aryan and southernDravidian-speaking people live side by side, and Westernmillet growing and Eastern rice-growing economiesmingle. The myth is performed during the cold season;other similar myths are performed in the neighboringdistricts during the wet season (Tija Jagar or Dhankul)and the hot season (Bali Jagar in Orissa). These three (andpossibly more) works are performed by women who usea two-meter long hunting bow as a musical instrument.(This genre is not to be confused with the “bow songs”of the South, whose stories are not myths and whichoccupies a different position in the religious system ofthe community; see Blackburn 1989, pp. 208-211). TheChattisgarh region is also the home of the secular semi-epic story of Candaini and Loriki (see Blackburn et al. 1989,pp. 212-215).

The Lachmi Jagar myth tells a family story: two divinefamilies cooperate to introduce rice cultivation. Meng

(meaning, cloud) the husband, and Mengin, the wife,descend from the upper world to the human world andare enthroned by people. Mahadev and Parvati, while inthe upper world, invent rice cultivation and they bothgrant to Mengin a pregnancy. She gives birth to a babygirl who is named Mahalachmi (Lachmi in Halbi,Lakshmi in Hindi). On the allegorical level, this girlrepresents rice. Mahadev obliges the parents to marrythe girl to Narayan, Mahadev’s younger brother. WhenMahalachmi comes of age, Narayana has already twenty-one wives (who represent various kinds of millets andpulses), but he still insists on marrying Lachmi. Astruggle starts among the wives in which Lachmi (rice)gains the upper hand over the other wives (millet andpulses).

Lachmi Jagar can be classified in several frameworks. Itbelongs to a group of works which form “scripts” for

rituals. Many such works have been foundin India; consider the Tulu Siri story ofnorthwestern Karnataka (Honko et al.1998), and the Telugu Palnati Virula Kathaof southern Andhra Pradesh (Roghair1982). The ethnopoetic genre of these threeworks is not identical. Palnati Virula Kathais a martial epic about the struggle forpower and property between two groupsof relatives, modeled after the Mahabharata.The other two works are not of the epicgenre. Lachmi Jagar is a myth about theintroduction of rice cultivation. The Siristory, which is sometimes classified asan epic, is in fact a sacred legend aboutthe punishment of sinners (who did notfulfil a vow), and the establishment of atemple.The collectors and editors of these works

tell us much about the “lives” of these works in theirrespective societies, including: who performs the worksfor whom; when, where, and how the performances takeplace; the chains of transmission and ways of learning,etc. We would like to also learn about the socio-psychological functions of the works. Such analysisrequires enthnographic investigations, and this is not atask for philologists, but rather for ethnographers, be theyanthropologists or folklorists. We hope that ethnographerswill be found who are interested enough in these ritualsto participate in the investigations.

References:Blackburn, Stuart H., Peter J. Claus, Joyce B. Flueckiger,and Susan S. Wadley, eds., Oral Epics in India, Berkeley:University of California Press, 1989.

Honko, Lauri, Chinnappa Gowda, Anneli Honko, andViveka Rai, eds. and trans., The Siri Epic, as Performed byGopala Naika, Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia,Academia Scientiarum Fennica (FF communicationsno. 265-266), 1998

Roghair, Gene H., The Epic of Palnadu: A Study andTranslation of Palnati Virula Katha, A Telugu Oral Traditionfrom Andhra Pradesh, India, Oxford and New York:Clarendon Press, 1982.

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“At first all was water; the earth was below. Even the rocks were soft as wet mud.It was very, very difficult to create life on it…” – Beginning of Adi Creation Myth

Chronicling Culture and Nature

An Exhibition on Eco-Friendly lifestyles,Arts and Crafts of North Eastern India

MARCH 3 — 7, 2004

Venue: DakshinaChitraMuttukadu, East Coast Road, Tamil Nadu 603 118

National Folklore Support Centre, Chennai

cordially invites you for the inauguralcordially invites you for the inauguralcordially invites you for the inauguralcordially invites you for the inauguralcordially invites you for the inauguralfunction of a Five Day (23 to 27 March, 2004)function of a Five Day (23 to 27 March, 2004)function of a Five Day (23 to 27 March, 2004)function of a Five Day (23 to 27 March, 2004)function of a Five Day (23 to 27 March, 2004)

Design Workshop forFolk Toy Makers of South Indiato be held at 10:30 A.M. on March 23, 2004, at the

Alliance Française Auditorium: 24 (Old No. 40), College Road, Chennai - 600 006

ALL ARE WELCOME

Workshop sponsored by: Office of the Development Commissioner, Handicrafts, Southern Region,Ministry of Textiles, Government of India

Two recent events:

MADRAS CRAFT FOUNDATIONG3, Maduram Flats,6, Urur Olcott Road,

Besent Nagar,Chennai 600 090

Email: [email protected]: www.dakshinachitra.org

Sponsored byThe Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Government of India

PURBASHREE EMPORIUMNorth Eastern Handicrafts and

Handlooms Devp. Corp. Ltd.(A government of India Undertaking)

35-36, Greams Road, Thousand Lights Chennai – 600 006.

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Chennai 600 042Email: [email protected]

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Published by M.D. Muthukumaraswamy for National Folklore Support Centre, No.7, Fifth Cross Street, Rajalakshmi Nagar,Velachery, Chennai - 600 042 (India), and printed by M.S. Raju Seshadrinathan at Nagaraj and Company Pvt. Ltd., # 22 (153-A),Kalki Krishnamurthy Salai, Thiruvanmiyur, Chennai 600 041. (For free private circulation only.)

Jawaharlal Handoo

Arupjyoti Saikia

Sadhana Naithani

Peter Claus

K.M.Chandar

Molly Kaushal

Premeela Gurumurthy

Venugopalan Nair

Chandan Kumar Sharma

Vanishri, S.P.

Desmond Kharmawphlang

Kishore Bhattacharjee

Laltluangliana Khiagte

Pulikonda Subbachary

Lalita Handoo

Subbalaxmi Das

Eric Miller

Guru Rao Bapat

M.D. Muthukumaraswamy

Nirmal Selvamony

Saugata Bhaduri

Raghavan Payyanad

V. Bharathi Harishankar

Theodore Baskaran

G. Sandhya Nayak

sTym ev jyt esTym ev jyt esTym ev jyt esTym ev jyt esTym ev jyt e

Indian Folklife Regd. No. R.N. TNENG / 2001 / 5251ISSN 0972-6470

a quarterly newsletter from national ...1 indian folklife volume 3 issue 2 serial no. 15 march 2004...

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