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Print This Article [ PDF ] Orality, Inscription, and the Creation of a New Lore Orality, Inscription …[The] peculiar temporality of folk- and the Creation of a New Lore lore as a disciplinary subject, whether coded in the terminology of survival, archaism, antiquity, and tradition, or Roma Chatterji in the definition of folkloristics as a University of Delhi historical science, has contributed to India the discipline's inability to imagine a truly contemporary, as opposed to a contemporaneous, subject… Folklore is by many (though not all) definitions out of step with the time and the con- Abstract text in which it is found. This essay examines the process by which Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, the discourse of folklore is used to "Folklore's Crisis" 1998, 283 entextualize and recontextualize the oral tra- dition in West Bengal through a discussion of two contemporary Bangla novels. Motifs from folk tales, myths, and popular epic po- n an essay that critically reviews ems are being re-appropriated by urban cul- folklore's disciplinary position vis-à- tural forms– both popular as well as elite – Ivis history and culture, Kirshenblatt- to articulate new identities and subject posi- Gimblett (1998) says that temporal dis- tions. I selected these novels by considering location between the site of origin and the mode in which orality is inscribed and the present location of particular cultural the time period. One of the novels attempts forms signals the presence of folklore. to re-constitute oral lore from a popular epic Kirshenblatt-Gimblett thus conceptual- composed in the medieval period, and the izes culture as heterogeneous, layered other re-inscribes an origin myth that is part and composed of multiple strands that of folk ritual into a new genre via the media- are interconnected in rather haphazard tion of folklore discourse that is responsible and contingent ways. This sense of con- for the first step in entextualizing the myth. tingency comes about through the jux- This essay concludes by suggesting that taposition of different time scales such folklore's conception of tradition as being that the idea of locality or location be- temporally disrupted has facilitated these comes the conceptual frame within new literary appropriations of oral lore. It is which the heterogeneous and circulating precisely because folklore's subject matter is strands that we call culture come to co- supposed to be out of sync with the times here, if only for a moment. However, as that allows for conceptions of culture that Kirshenblatt-Gimblett points out, even are porous enough for innovation. before location comes to be viewed as a spatial category it is a temporal one, and by constituting the present as a series of disjunctive moments, folklore creates a gap between the contemporaneous and the contemporary. Cultural Analysis 6 (2007): 71-90 ©2007 by The University of California. All rights reserved 71 Roma Chatterji In a different, though related, fashion culture aspects is, according to Sanyal, students of Indian society have made a still visible in the peasant societies of distinction between "Great traditions" these border regions, for instance in the and "Little traditions" (Redfield 1955, cultivation of particular genres of folk Sinha 1957); or between desha (regional, songs that can engage with forms of nov- provincial) and marga (sanskritic, global). elty. Sanyal says that many genres of folk Folk rituals, belief systems, and the cul- song in Bengal have been cultivated into tural institutions of rural India are popular forms that require different thought to reveal an interaction between kinds of performative contexts. He sug- the forces of globalization and gests that folk culture is constituted at parochialization, or margi and deshi as- three different levels: jana (local), desha pects (Marriot 1955, Sinha 1957, (regional), and marga (global or pan-In- Trautman 1997). For most scholars this dian). He says that the deshi or regional interaction is a long-term and largely level acts as a site of mediation between unconscious process. However, the his- the local and global levels. torian Hitesh Ranjan Sanyal (2004) holds Unfortunately Sanyal does not de- a somewhat different view. In his study velop this theme further. However, as of a small principality in one of the bor- several scholars have tried to show, the der regions of West Bengal, he shows conception of a cultural region is impor- how the semi-tribal Mulla court, in what tant in the study of folklore's engagement is now the Bardhaman district, produced with forms of modernity (Morinis 1982, political institutions that self-consciously Blackburn 2003, Chatterji 2005). Self-con- integrated aspects of what was then scious reflection on context, style, and the thought of as "high culture" – i.e. the cul- process of transmission actually occurs ture of the Mughal court in North India precisely at this level. Further, this is the –with indigenous elements taken from level at which the local is conceived of local tribal and peasant communities. as such and thus also is the level at which Many such peripheral principalities "metadiscursive practices for creating, were declared to be tributary states ow- representing and interpreting" folk dis- ing formal allegiance to the great, though courses are developed (Briggs 1993). In distant, Mughal Empire. The geographi- this essay I examine some contemporary cal distance between the central author- attempts at producing new kinds of folk ity and these border states gave the lat- discourses in a deliberate attempt to ter some degree of autonomy. Thus, they empower certain marginal groups in were able to selectively adopt elements West Bengal. These attempts, as I will of Mughal culture while retaining much show, are part of a larger movement for of what was traditionally available. The the articulation of a distinctive regional Mughal presence was thought to be alien identity in which folk culture plays a cen- but distant enough to be non-threaten- tral role. ing, and could therefore become a site The idea of region is not necessarily for experimentation with novelty. Traces restricted to a geographical unit, but re- of this self-conscious adoption of high fers rather to a social field formed "by a 72 Orality, Inscription, and the Creation of a New Lore network of governmental processes, cul- becomes the location for creative experi- tural flows and forms of popular trans- mentation with the oral literature found mission shaped by oral, print and visual there. Traditional folk themes begin to media" (Chatterji 2005,1). In this sense circulate among new publics in popular my field is carved out of a set of overlap- urban spaces. I will examine two Bangla ping political regions–the states of West novels that reinterpret folk myths as part Bengaland Jharkhand as well as the erst- the ongoing project of the Bengali intel- while province of undivided Bengal of ligentsia to find contemporary signifi- the colonial era; parts of which are now cance in traditional lore. independent states in India, including In an important paper on the Grimms' the independent nation-state of Bangla anthology of fairy tales, Charles Briggs Desh. (1993) says that folklore discourses use entextualizing strategies to produce au- Folklore and the Literary Canon thentic folk voices. These texts are cre- Even though the folk have played an ated with a political agenda in mind and important part in articulating ideas about the task of the folklorist is to deconstruct Bengali culture and tradition, there have these texts for the powerful effects that been no significant grassroot reformist they produce. Unlike the texts that folk- movements of the kind that have taken lorists usually analyze, the texts that I place in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu.1 present here are explicit in laying out West Bengal, governed as it is by a com- their political agenda. Both novels draw bination of communist and socialist par- upon the mother goddess complex to ties for three decades, is typically identi- frame their stories. The fact that mother fied with a kind of middle class radical- goddess worship (shaktaism) is an impor- ism. Most reforms have been top down, tant religious tradition in Bengal may including those that were initiated by an have influenced the choice of subject to "enlightened" elite in the colonial period some extent, but more importantly, the (Basu 1992). Instead the folk are per- significance of the mother goddess as a ceived as an abstract category–an aid to mediator between the "Great traditions" the process of "traditionalization" – a and "Little traditions" of Hinduism, or term coined by Shuman and Briggs between local religion and textual, or (1993) to identify "aspects of the past as shastric, religion gives this theme its sym- significant to the present" (ibid. 1993, bolic charge (Beane 2001, Humes 1998). 109). Folklore comes to represent the au- Coburn (1988) says that even though the thentic voice of the folk, a living museum origin of the mother goddess complex from which Bengal's history may be ex- lies in India's non-Aryan pre-history, con- cavated. tinuous interplay between various reli- gious streams–local/tribal, Buddhist, In a previous paper I have shown and Hindu–has produced the mother how the discourse of folklore, reinforced goddess complex as we know it today. by state policy, comes to constitute parts A point of significance for my argument of Bengal as a folklore region (Chatterji is that the mediating position occupied 2005). Once constituted, this region then 73 Roma Chatterji by the mother goddess tradition allowed was serialized in a Bangla literary maga- Bengali nationalists to claim a distinctive zine called Desh in 2004-2005. It is a cre- place for Bengal's culture within the ative re-telling of some of the myths as- civilizational mainstream (Chatterji sociated with Bhadu, a local goddess cult 2003).
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