Who Needs Folklore? The Relevance of Oral Traditions to South Asian Studies* by A.K. Ramanujan In the last few years I’ve been writing a series of interlocking papers on the subject of Indian folklore using Kannada and Tamil examples from my field notes. Now I will touch on a number of issues I’ve touched on before, refine them further, relate them to other issues, and generally bring them into a unified perspective. My theme is not folklore in general but Indian folklore within the context of Indian studies. I wish also to do several things: (1) give a state-of- the-art report on the field of Indian folklore; (2) clarify some notions and add some; and (3) generally ask and answer questions about what the study of folklore, as a subject matter and as a discipline, would do to some of the notions of humanists and social scientists about Indian civilisation. When some years ago I first approached this subject—the place of folklore in the study of Indian civilization—I heard a little skeptical voice from my past say “Folklore? Who needs folklore? Old-wives’ tales and peasant superstitions, who needs them?” As you know, the past never quite passes. We may hear that voice again. Here, I’m going to take that question literally and answer it. Why Folklore? language of the nonliterate parts of of Karnataka state, said to me, “How For starters I for one need folklore me and my culture. Even in a large can you collect folklore in a big city?” as an Indian studying India. It modern city like Bombay or Madras, I asked him to try an experiment. He pervades my childhood, my family, my even in Western-style nuclear families was a professor of Kannada, and he community. It is the symbolic with their 2.2 children, folklore is only had a composition class that a suburb away, a cousin or a afternoon at his college. I asked him *This is the text of the first Rama Watamull grandmother away. One of the best to set a composition exercise to his Lecture on India delivered at the Univer- folk plays I’ve seen was performed in class of urban students. Each of them sity of Hawaii in March 1988. The author the back streets of Madras city by should write down a folktale they had is a professor in the Department of South teruk-kuttu troupes. When a friend heard and never read. That evening, Asian Languages and Civilizations at the of mine in Bangalore, the capital city my friend sought me out excitedly to University of Chicago 2 MANUSHI show me a sheaf of 40 tales his the house to look for our keys. As students had written down for him in often happens, we may not find the class from memory. keys and may have to make new ones, I shall not speak here of Indian but we will find all sorts of things we urban folklore, for wherever people never knew we had lost, or ever even live folklore grows—new jokes, had. proverbs (like the new campus Regional Languages proverb, “to xerox is to know”), tales, Four centuries ago, just a century and songs circulate in the oral after Vasco da Gama landed on the tradition. Similar to chain letters, west coast of India, just decades after Murphy’s Law, and graffiti, folklore Gutenberg had printed his first Bible may also circulate on paper or on in Europe, Christian evangelists had latrine walls (Dundes and Pagter begun to study our mother tongues, 1978). You don’t have to go to Pompeii compile dictionaries, make grammars, to see graffiti. Verbal folklore, in the and even print them in India. Yet, until sense of a largely oral tradition with recently, Sanskrit almost exclusively specific genres (such as proverb, represented India to most people in riddle, lullaby, tale, ballad, prose the West. narrative, verse, or a mixture of both, In America, it was only about 25 and so on), nonverbal materials (such years ago that universities began to as dances, games, floor or wall study Indian regional languages. At designs, objects of all sorts from toys least three or four major languages, to outdoor giant clay horses), and such as Tamil, Hindi, and Bengali, composite performing arts (which began to appear in course listings. may include several of the former as Both linguists and anthropologists in street magic and theatre)—all went to these language regions, weave in and out of every aspect of studied the languages in the field, and living in city, village, and small town. wrote about the texts and the cultures. What we separate as art, economics, These languages are only a minute and religion is molded and expressed fraction of those spoken in the here. Aesthetics, ethos, and worldview subcontinent. In the 1971 census are shaped in childhood and more than 3,000 mother tongues were throughout one’s early life by these recorded with the names of the speech verbal and non-verbal environments. varieties that the speakers said they In a largely nonliterate culture, Deepalakshmi, Madurai, Crafts spoke. Linguists have classified and everyone—poor, rich, high caste and Museum Delhi (From Aditi) subsumed these speech varieties, or low caste, professor, pundit, or dialects, under 105 languages or so ignoramus—has inside him or her a “Because it’s dark in there. I don’t which belong to four language large nonliterate subcontinent. have oil in my lamps. I can see much families. Of these 105 languages 90 In a South Indian folktale, also told better here under the street lights,” are spoken by less than 5 percent of elsewhere, one dark night an old she said. the entire population; 65 belong to woman was searching intently for Until recently many studies of small tribes. Including Sanskrit, 15 of something in the street. A passerby Indian civilisation have been done on the languages are written, read, and asked her, “Have you lost that principle: look for it under the light, spoken by about 95 percent of the something?” in Sanskrit, in literary texts, in what people. We, in universities outside She said, “Yes, I’ve lost some we think are the well-lit public spaces India, have just begun to study a few keys. I’ve been looking for them all of the culture, in things we already of these 15 languages. evening.” know. There we have, of course, The literatures of these 15, some “Where did you lose them?” “I found precious things. Without of which have long histories, are just don’t know. Maybe inside the house.” carrying the parable too far one may beginning to be taught and translated. “Then, why are you looking for say we are now moving inward, trying Literature in a language like Tamil goes them here?’ to bring lamps into the dark rooms of back 2,000 years, and in several others, No.69 3 like Bengali and Gujarati, at least 800 anonymous “unreflective many.” 1933) re­sponding to one another, years. In addition to these literatures Redfield himself and Milton Singer engaged in continuous and dynamic there are oral traditions, riddles, later modified these notions and dialogic relations. Past and present, proverbs, songs, ballads, tales, epics, others have been critical of them. what’s “pan-Indian” and what’s local, and so on, in each of the 3,000-odd They were seminal at one time, what’s shared and what’s unique in mother tongues that we have especially because they urged regions, communities, and classified under the 105 languages. It anthropologists not to ignore the individuals, the written and the oral— is true, as they say, a language is a “texts” of a culture in favor of all are engaged in a dialogic reworking dialect that has acquired an army, but “fieldwork.” and redefining of relevant others. all these myriad dialects carry oral Cultural Performances as Texts then are also contexts and literature, which is what I call folklore. Texts pretexts for other texts (Ramanujan One way of defining verbal folklore Now we need a new emphasis, a 1989). In our studies now we are for India is to say it is the literature of larger view regarding texts beginning to recognise and place folk the dialects, those mother tongues of themselves, as text theory in literary texts in this everpresent network of the village, street, kitchen, tribal hut, criticism and philosophic analysis intertextuality. For folk texts are and wayside tea shop. This is the urge us to do. Written and hallowed pervasive, behind, under, around all wide base of the Indian pyramid on texts are not the only kinds of texts in the texts of our society, and in all its which all other Indian literatures rest. a culture like the Indian. Oral strata, not merely among the rural and We have valued and attended traditions of every kind produce texts. the illiterate, the “unreflective many.” only to the top of the pyramid. Robert “Cultural performances” (Singer City and village, factory and kitchen, Redfield, the Chicago anthropologist 1972:47) of every sort, whether they Hindu, Buddhist, and Jaina, who influenced Indian anthropology are written or oral acts of composition, Christian,and Muslim, king, priest, in the 1950s and 1960s, said, “In a whether they are plays or weddings, and clown, the crumbling almanac and civilization, there is a great tradition rituals or games, contain texts. Every the runaway computer—all are of the reflective few and there is a little cultural performance not only creates permeated by oral traditions, tales, tradition of the largely unreflective and carries texts, it is a text.