Sahitya Akademi

WHO NEEDS FOLKLORE? Ramanujan on Folklore

Author(s): Ramanujan
Source: Indian Literature, Vol. 37, No. 4 (162) (July-August, 1994), pp. 93-106
Published by: Sahitya Akademi
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23337198 .
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 WHO NEEDS FOLKLORE?

Ramanujan on Folklore

Why Folklore?

starters I for one need folklore as an Indian studying India.

FORIt pervades my childhood, my family, my community. It is
the symbolic language of the non-literate parts of me and my
culture. Even in a large modern city like Bombay or Madras,
even in Western-style nuclear families with their 2.2 children,
folklore is only a suburb away, a cousin or a grandmother away.
One of the best folk plays I've seen was performed in the back
streets of Madras city by Terukoothu troupes. When a friend of
mine in Bangalore, the capital city of Karnataka state, said to
me, "How can you collect folklore in a big city?" I asked him
to try an experiment. He was a professor of Kannada, and he
had a composition class that afternoon at his college. I asked
him to set a composition exercise to his class of urban students.
Each of them should write down a folk tale they had heard and
never read. That evening, my friend sought me out excitedly to
show me a sheaf of forty tales his students had written down for
him in class from memory.
I shall not speak here of Indian urban folklore, for wherever
people live, folklore grows—jokes, proverbs (like the new cam
pus proverb, "to xerox is to know"), tales and songs circulate
in the oral tradition. Similar to chain letters, Murphy's Law, and
graffiti, folklore may also circulate on paper or on latrine walls.
You don't have to go to Pompeii to see graffiti. Verbal folklore,
in the sense of a largely oral tradition with specific genres (such

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94/INDIAN LITERATURE : 162

as proverb, riddle, lullaby, tale, ballad, prose narrative, verse,

or a mixture of both, and so on) non-verbal materials (such as
dances, games, floor or wall designs, objects of all sorts, from
toys to outdoor giant clay horses), and composite performing
arts (which may include several of the former as in street magic
and theatre)—all weave in and out of every aspect of living in
city, village, and small town. What we separate as art, economics,
and religion is molded and expresséd here. Aesthetics, ethos,
and worldview are shaped in childhood and throughout one's
early life by these verbal and non-verbal environments. In a
largely nonliterate culture, everyone—poor, rich, high caste and

low caste, professor, pundit, or ignormus—has inside him or her

a large non literate subcontinent.
In a South Indian folktale, also tofd elsewhere one dark
night, an old woman was searching intently for something in the
street. A passerby asked her, "Have you lost something?"
She said, "Yes. I've lost some keys. I've been looking for
them all evening."
"Where did you lose them?"
"I don't know. Maybe inside the house."
"Then, why are you looking for them here?"
"Because it's dark in there. I don't have oil in my lamps. I
can see much better here under the street lights," she said.

Until recently, many studies of Indian civilisation have been

done on that principle: look for it under the light, in Sanskrit, in
literary texts, in what we think are the well-lit public spaces of
culture, in things we already know. There we have, of course,
found precious things. Without carrying the parable too far one
may say we are now moving inward, trying to bring lamps into
the dark rooms of the house to look for our keys. As often
happens, we may not find the keys and may have to make new
ones, but we will find all sorts of things we never knew we had
lost, or ever even had.

Regional Languages

Four centuries ago, just a century after Vasco da Gama

landed on the west coast of India, just decades after Gutenberg

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 ramanujan/95

had printed his first Bible in Europe, Christian evangelists had

begun to study our mother tongues, compile dictionaries, make
grammars and even print them in India. Yet, until recently,
Sanskrit almost exclusively represented India to most people in
the West.
In the 1971 census, more than 3,000 mother tongues were

recorded, including dialects and speech varieties. Fifteen of the

languages are written, read and spoken by about 95% of Indians.
Literature in a language like Tamil goes back 2,000 years, and
in several others, like Bengali and Gujarati, at least 800 years.
In addition to these literatures, there are oral traditions, riddles,
proverbs, songs, ballads, tales, epics, and so on, in each of the
3,000-odd mother tongues that we have classified under the 105
languages. It is true, as they say, a language is a dialect that has
acquired an army, but all these myriad dialects carry oral litera
ture, which is what I call folklore. One way of defining verbal
folklore for India is to say it is the literature of the dialects, those
mother tongues of the village, street, kitchen, tribal hut and
wayside tea shop. This is the wide base of the Indian pyramid
on which all other Indian literatures rest.
We have valued and attended only to the top of the pyramid.
Robert Redfield, the Chicago anthropologist who influenced
Indian anthropology in the 1950s and 1960s, said, "In a civiliza
tion, there is a great tradition of the reflective few and there is a
little tradition of the largely unreflective many." That is a famous
formulation and deserves to be infamous. Traditionally Indians
also make a distinction between marga the 'high road' and desi,
'the byway, the country road' in their discussion of the arts. The
'Great Tradition', with capitals and in the singular, said to be
carried by Sanskrit, is pan-Indian, prestigious, ancient, authorised
by texts, cultivated and carried by what Redfield calls, 'the reflec
tive few.' The 'Little Tradition', or traditions in the plural, are
local, mostly oral and carried by the illiterate (the liberal would
call them non-literate) and the anonymous 'unreflective many.'
Redfield himself and Milton Singer later modified these notions
and others have been critical of them. They were seminal at one
time, especially because they urged anthropologists not to
ignore the 'texts' of a culture in favour of 'fieldwork.

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96/INDIAN LITERATURE : 162

Cultural Performances as Texts

Now we need a new emphasis, a larger view regarding texts

themselves. Written and hallowed texts are not the only kinds
of texts in a culture like the Indian. Oral traditions of every kind
produce texts. 'Cultural performances' of every sort, whether
they are written, or oral acts of composition, whether they are
plays or weddings, rituals or games, contain texts. Every cultural
performance not only creates and carries texts, it is a text.
When we look at texts this way we can modify terms such
as great and little traditions and see all these performances as a
transitive series, a 'scale of forms' responding to one another,
engaged in continuous and dynamic dialogic relations. Past and
present, what's 'pan-Indian' and what's local, what's shared and
what's unique in regions, communities and individuals, the writ
ten and the oral—all are engaged in a dialogic reworking.
City and village, factory and kitchen, Hindu, Buddhist, and

Jaina, Christian and Muslim, king, priest, and clown, the crumbl
ing almanac and the runaway computer—all are permeated by
oral traditions, tales, jokes, beliefs, and rules of thumb not yet
found in books, i shall say more later about the dialogic relations
between folklore and other parts of this Indian cultural con
tinuum.

Interactive Pan-Indian Systems

In the view being developed here, even what's called the

'Great Tradition' is not singular but plural—it is a set of interactive
pan-Indian systems, Brahminism, Buddhism, Jainism, with tantra
and bhakti interacting variously with these. To be comprehensive,
we should add Islam, Christianity, et cetera, and modernity itself
as the other active systems that participate in this give and take.
Let's examine briefly the idea that some traditions are pan
Indian and some not. Sanskrit and Prakrit, though they have a
pan-Indian distribution, still originate in particular regions;
Sanskrit itself, though translocal and apparently a-geographic,
has varieties of pronunciation that can be identified as Bengali,
Malayali, or Banarasi. Nor are the so called 'Little Traditions',

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 ramanujan/97

especially folk traditions, necessarily or usually confined to small

localities or dialectal communities. Proverbs, riddles, stories, and
tunes, motifs, and genres of songs and dances are not confined
to a region, even though they may be embodied in the non-literate
dialects and may seem to be enclosed in those mythic entities
called self-sufficient village communities. It is well known that
folklore items, like many other sorts of items in cultural exchange,
are autotelic, that is, they travel by themselves without any actual
movement of populations. A proverb, a riddle, a joke, a story,
a remedy, or a recipe travels every time it is told. It crosses
linguistic boundaries any time it is told.
Neighbouring languages and regions have, therefore, a large
stock of shared folk materials. Collections, for instance, have
been made of the proverbs shared by the four Dravidian langua
ges. Similar ones can be made for other genres and for other nei
ghbouring language areas, and indeed for the whole subconti
nent. A proverb such as 'It's dark under the lamp' has been
collected in Kannada and in Kashmiri, at two ends of the Indian
subcontinent. The sentence is the same in each place, but it
means different things. In Kannada it means that a virtuous man,
like a lighted lamp, may have dark hidden vices. In Kashmiri,
I'm told, 'It's dark under the lamp' has a political sense—that a
good natured king may have evil counsellors. This is, of course,
characteristic of cultural forms.
Not only do folklore items travel within the country or culture
area, they are also part of an international network. Archer
Taylor's English Riddles gives as current English riddles and their
centuries-old written variants, as well as variants from Africa,
India, and the New World. One can collect today, as I know
from experience, oral tales from illiterate women in Kannada
villages that are similar, motif for motif, to the tales of the Greek
Oedipus or to Shakespeare's King Lear or All's Well That Ends
Well.
Here we begin to glimpse a paradox: where the so called
pan-Indian Hindu mythologies of Vishnu or Shiva, or the great
classics like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are unique to
India, folklore items such as proverbs and tales participate in an
international network of motifs, genres, types, and structure—

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98/INDIAN LITERATURE : 162

using them all, of course, to say something particular, local and

unique. One arrives at the paradox that the classics of a culture,
like the well wrought epics or plays and poetry, are culture-bound
forms, but large portions of the so called little traditions are not.

Written and Oral Media

Folklore also raises and makes us face other central ques

tions; for instance, questions regarding the differences and rela
tions between written and spoken media in Indian oral culture.
The relations between oral and written traditions in any cul
ture are not simple oppositions. They interpenetrate each other
and combine in various ways. Written traditions live surrounded
by oral ones and are even carried by oral means. As in many
other languages, in Kannada, the word for writing (bare) is the
same as that for drawing; and until recently to read meant to
read aloud. I've heard of a granduncle who would say he couldn't

read a novel because he had a sore throat. So too, to write meant

to write down. Writing was an aide memoir, a mnemonic device
for materials to be rendered oral again. Speech lies dormant in
writing until it is awakened again by one's own or another's
voice, like these words on this page as you or I read them.
Sometimes it is thought that the so-called classical texts are
fixed and the so called folk texts are constantly changing. Simi
larly, writing is thought to be fixed and speech constantly chang
ing. One often identifies the 'classical' with the written and the
'folk' with the oral. But, for India, we should distinguish between
three sets of independent oppositions. The three are classical vs.
folk, written vs. spoken, fixed vs. free or fluid. The classical, the
written, and the fixed do not necessarily belong together.
Oral and written forms in a culture often wish to be like
each other, like the two sexes, male and female, each envying
what the other has. Yet, each defines and marries the other. In

the oral forms, in folklore, many devices such as refrains, for

mulae, and memory training exist to give the relative permanence
of writing. From time to time, in writing traditions, writers wish
to return to the freshness of speech and imitate it, as in modern
Indian poetry. It was Flaubert who said that style should be

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 RAMAN UJAN/99

adjusted to the rhythms of respiration.

In all cultures, and especially in the Indian, the oral and the
written are deeply intermeshed in another way. A work may be
composed orally but transmitted in writing, as Vyasa said he did
with Ganesa as his scribe. Or it may be composed in writing, as
Kumaravyasa (Vyasa junior) said he did in Kannada, but the text
kept alive by gamakis or reciters who know it by heart and chant
it aloud. There are of course texts, such as proverbs and tales,
that are usually composed orally and orally transmitted, many of
which never get written down. And texts, like newspapers—writ
ten, printed, and silently scanned or read—never go through an
oral phase. Thus, over a long history, a story may go through
many phases. An oral story gets written up or written down in
the Jatakas or the Panchatantra. Then the written text may reach
other audiences who pick up the story and retell it orally, maybe
in other languages, and then it gets written down somewhere
else, perhaps starting another cycle of transmissions.
In a folktale told about Aristotle in Europe and about a
philosopher in India, the philosopher meets a village carpenter
who has a beautiful old knife, and asks him, "How long have
you had this knife?" The carpenter answers, "Oh, this knife has
been in our family for generations. We have changed the handle
a few times and the blade a few times, but it is the same knife."
Similarly, the structure of relations may remain constant, while
all the cultural details change, as in a folktale that goes on chang
ing from teller to teller. Any fixity, any reconstructed archetype,
is a fiction, a label, a convenience.

Ora! Traditions: The Difference They Make

Thus anyone concerned with written texts has to reckon

with the oral materials that surround it. This contrasts strikingly
with modern America, where the end of any formal oral com
munication is a written text. You speak in Congress so that your
speech may be read into the Congressional Record; everything
anybody says in a court is typed up; and at the end of what's
supposed to be spontaneous conversation on a TV talk show,
you get the message, "Send three dollars and you can get the

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transcript of this show." And finally, the most popular TV game

show, Wheel of Fortune, has to do with spelling words and
phrases. Every letter is cashed into dollars, every phrase into
furniture and a trip to Hawaii. In a culture like the Indian, how
ever, and certainly in villages and certain communities to this
day, writing lives within the context of oral traditions. Even news
papers are read aloud. If you have been near any primary school
in a small town or even in Madras, you would hear the pupils
a mile away, for the classes recite their lessons in a loud chorus.
Not only the alphabet and the multiplication tables, but every
major religious or literary text like the Ramayana is memorised
and chanted aloud. As a proverb in Kannada says, "Why do we
need a mirror to see a blister on our hands?" Yet, we seem to,
for we believe in the mirror of writing, or even better, the mirror
of print.
Oral traditions thus enlarge the range and they complicate
and balance the texts we know. Yet we ignore the oral. Take

mythology for instance. At present, in all our anthologies of Hindu

mythology there is not one folk myth. Every text is from the
Sanskrit, though myths occur in Tamil and Bengali and every
other language. They even occur in scores of written texts like
the sthalapuranas, (place legends), or the mangalakavyas.
Oral traditions give us alternative conceptions of deities that
balance and complete, and therefore illuminate the textual con
ceptions. For instance, the goddesses of pan-Indian mythologies,
like Lakshmi and Saraswati, rise out of the sea churned by the gods
and the antigods; Parvati is the daughter of the King of Mountains.
They are consort goddesses; their shrines are subordinate to those
of their spouses, Vishnu or Shiva. Their images are carefully
sculpted to the fingertips. They are usually saumya or mild and
docile. They preside over the normal auspicious cycles of life,
especially marriages, prosperity, and such.
But look at the village goddesses and see how different they
are. Their myths tell us of ordinary human women who were
cheated into marrying untouchables, or raped by a local villain,
or killed and buried by cruel brothers. Out of such desecrations
théy rise in fury, grow in stature to become figures that span hea
ven and earth, with powers of destruction that terrifythe village

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into submission, sacrifice, and worship. Theirs are not myths of

descent or avatara, but of ascent from the human into divine

forms. They become boundary goddesses of the village, give it

their name, or take their names from the village. While the Sanskri
tic Breast Goddesses (as I call them because they give us their
breasts) receive vegetarian offerings of fruit and flowers, these
village goddesses require animal sacrifices and a sprinkle of blood
on their devotees. The Tooth Goddesses represent the other side
of the mother (as stepmothers do, in folktales), who punish, afflict
people with plague and pox, and when propitiated, heal the af
flicted. They are goddesses of the disrupted lifecycle, deities of
crisis: they preside over famine, plague, death, and madness.
Their images are often pots and pans, faceless stones, sometimes
only a severed head. They dwell outside the village boundaries
and are brought in only for special worship, often in times of
crisis. Without them, life is not complete, nor is the Hindu view
of the divine.
The goddess Kali, as the Sanskrit texts present her, is a Sans
kritised version of hundreds of village goddesses all over the
country and certainly partakes of their fierce aspects. Yet, in the
Sanskrit puranas (encyclopedias of Hindu myths) and myths
based on them, Kali is created by the gods pooling their weapons
and powers and let loose on the Buffalo Demon whom the male
deities cannot destroy, the emphases, details and major themes
of the village mythologies are quite different. The village mariyam
man goddesses arise out of human deception and tragedy. If the
Breast Goddesses are.consorts to their male spouses, the Tooth
Goddess is often a virgin and, if married, she tears her villainous
male consort to pieces. He is" later symbolically offered as a
buffalo or goat sacrifice to her images. The consort goddesses
are auspicious, consecrated. The village goddesses are ambiva
lent; they afflict and heal.
Such a conception of divinity is not confined only to female
deities. Consider the village gods, such as Muttuppattan. He is
a Brahmin who falls in love with a cobbler chieftain's daughters,
marries them, skins and tans cowhides, eats cow's flesh, dies in
battle defending his village against robbers, and becomes a god
to whom his community of cobblers makes offerings of gigantic

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102/INDIAN LITERATURE : 162

leather sandals. It is one of the most moving long poems of South

India. Until recently, no record or translation of this tragic story
was available.
Oral epics embody a theory of emotion different from that
of rasa, explore ranges in the emotional spectrum like shame,
terror, fury, and disgust that are not usually explored in the Sans
krit poems and plays. And how can we, mere mortals, do without
them?
The oral traditions offer us also a different view of the female
from the views found in the written texts. When the Ramayana
is sung by the Tamburi Dasayyas of Mysore, the centre of attention
is Sita, her birth, marriage, exile, sufferings and final disappear
ance into Mother Earth. In the Tamil story of Mayili Ravanan,
set in a time after Rama has defeated the ten-headed Ravana, a
new thousand-headed Ravana arises to threaten the gods and
this time Rama cannot handle it. It is Sita who goes to war and
demolishes the impossible demon.
See what happens in an oral folk purana sung ceremonially
on Madeswara hill (Karnataka) every year by several bardic
groups during the festival devoted to this hero/saint/god called
Madeswara. The purana begins with a creation myth.
The Primordial Goddess is born three days before everything
else. She grows up very quickly, attains puberty, and wants a
man to satisfy her. Finding no one around, she creates out of her
self, Brahma, the eldest of the gods, and asks him to grow up
quickly and sleep with her. But as he grows up and she urges him
on, Brahma says, "You are my mother. How can I sleep with
you?" She gets angry, calls him a eunuch, and burns him down
to a heap of ash with the eye of fire in the palm of her hand.
The next day, she creates Vishnu, who is very handsome. She
can't wait for him to grow up and satisfy her. But he too will not
sleep with his mother. So, in a rage, she burns him down to a
heap of ash. On the third day, she creates Shiva, and urges him
to grow up and become her lover. He too has misgivings until
she says, "Look around and see what happened to your brothers
who refused me." He turns around and sees the two heaps of
ash that were once his brothers. He sizes up the situation and
says to his mother, "All right, I'll do as you say. You want me

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to be your husband, dorv't you? Don't you want your husband

to be at least equal to you? Don't you want to teach him all your
skills and give him your powers?" The Mother Goddess, Ammav
aru, is delighted and says, "Of course, I want you to have every
thing", and teaches him all her magic arts and bestows on him
all her powers. Then Shiva, now grown up, says, "Let's dance.
You must do whatever I do. Let's see who is better." They whirl
around in a fantastic cosmic dance together, each mirroring the
other, until suddenly, Shiva puts his hand on his head in a dance
movement. His mother, following him, puts her hand on her own
head and the eye of fire in her palm begins to burn her. As she
burns, she curses Shiva, "You, you refused a woman. May one
half of your body become female, may you never get rid of her!"
That's how Shiva came to be the lord whose one half is woman.
Then as his mother burned down and became a heap of ash, the
eye of fire that lived in her hand came to Shiva and said it had
nowhere to go. So he took it and slapped it on his forehead.
That's how he got the third eye.
After his mother had gone up in flames, Shiva looked around
and found the two heaps of ash that were once his brothers.
With his newly learned powers, he revived them. Now the three

gods, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, said to each other, "There's

work to do. We must create the worlds." One of them said,
"How can we create without women?" Then Shiva sees the third
heap of ash that was once their mother, divides it into three
smaller heaps, and gives them life. Out of these portions of their
mother's ash, come Lakshmi, Saraswati, and Parvati, the three
consorts of the Hindu trinity, who then marry them. Creation
begins.
In the Sanskritic myth, the male gods create the goddess
and give her their powers. In the foregoing myth it is exactly in
reverse. She gives Shiva his powers. In the Sanskritic myth it is
the father figures that lust after the daughters. Here the female
too has her share of sexual desire, made explicit. She is cheated
out of her powers by the male god who uses them to destroy
her. Farther more, her sons still end up marrying portions of their
mother—both Jung and Freud would be interested in that! But
the male gods marry her only after fragmenting and domesticating

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KM/INDIAN LITERATURE : 162

her into a nice tame threesome—feminists would be interested

in that. This is a way of looking at male/female power relations
very different from anything we know from the better known
written texts.
I could go on to talk about alternative views of the gods,
karma and chastity, as well as why tales themselves are told.
Since I have talked about them elsewhere, I shall content myself
with giving you some short examples. The gods in the puranas
and the heroes in the epics have bodies without bodily functions.
They do not blink their eyes nor do their feet touch the ground.
But in folk traditions, they have bodies, they are embodied,
localised, domesticated. In the place legend oí Gokarna, Ravana
prays to Shiva and receives from him the boon that Shiva, with
all his goblin attendants, shou-ld go with him to Lanka. Shiva
gives him the boon, but doesn't really wish to go. He tells Ravana
that he can carry him as a linga all the way, but that he should
not put it down anywhere until he reaches Lanka. Ravana agrees.
When he gets to Gokarna, he must answer the call of nature.
He cannot hold the sacred linga in his hands while doing that,
can he? So he puts it down, and the linga begins to grow down
wards and take root. Ravana hurries back and tries to twist it out
of the earth, but he is not able to. That's how Gokarna has a
linga and they say that, if you dig under it, you'll find that it's
twisted. Aldous Huxley once complained that, even for a realistic
novelist like Tolstoy, the heroines never go to the bathroom nor
do they menstruate. In the village oral traditions, they do. Gods
like Ganesa, heroes like Bhima, demons like Ravana, or even
poets like Vyasa cannot help going to the bathroom, and goddes
ses like Ganga and Gauri menstruate. As the bhakti poem says:

Bodied, one will hunger,

Bodied, one will lie.
O you, don't you rib and taunt me
again for having a body:
body Thyself for once like me and
see what happens.
O Ramanatha!

Folklore that is in many ways close to bhakti traditions, gives

to them and takes from them, sharing genres, motifs, and atti

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 ramanujan/105

tudes, and seems not only to ask the gods to embody themselves,
but actually envisions them as having bodies with all the needs
and ills that flesh is heir to.
Folk renditions of the pan-Indian epics and myths not only
bring the gods home, making the daily world mythic, they also
contemporise them. In village enactments of the Ramayana,
when Sita has to choose her bridegroom, princes from all over
the universe appear as suitors. In a North Indian folk version, an
Englishman with a pith helmet, a solar topee, and a hunting rifle
regularly appears as one of the suitors of Sita. After all, since the
eighteenth century the English have been a powerful presence
in India and ought to have place in any epic 'bridegroom choice'
or svayamvara.
In a Karnataka performance, Rama is exiled, and as he takes
the little boat on the river Sarayu to go to the jungle, all of
Ayodhya follows him in tears. He bids them farewell from his
boat, making a short speech: "O brothers and sisters, please go
home now. I take leave of you now but I'll be back in fourteen
years." Then he leaves, and wanders through the forests. Sita is
abducted by Ravana, Rama gathers the monkey army, kills
Ravana, and returns victorious with Sita. When he arrives at the

spot where he had bid his people farewell fourteen years earlier,
he sees a group standing there, their hair grown grey, their nails
long and uncut, their feet rooted to the banks of the Sarayu. He
asks them who they are. They say, "O Rama, you forgot us when
you took leave. You bade farewell only to the men and women,
calling them brothers and sisters, We are the eunuchs of Ayodhya.
We have waited for you here all these fourteen years." Rama is
very touched by their devotion and, feeling guilty at his negli
gence, gives them a boon: "O eunuchs of Ayodhya, may you
be reborn in India again and rule the country as the next Congress
party!"
I can go on forever," detailing what happens to karma or
chastity in the oral tales, retelling the bawdy tales of the villages
about clever women who cheat on their husbands and get away
with it, unlike all the chaste women of the epics who never cheat
or the unchaste ones who are chastened by their infidelity, like
Ahalya. But I think I've said enough to argue the essential rele

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■(OS/INDIAN LITERATURE : 162

vanee of folklore to Indian studies and the alternative views and

systems folklore carries. Folk materials also comment continually
on official and orthodox views and practices in India. Ifwe listen,
we can hear the voice of what is fashionably called the subal
tern—the woman, the peasant, the non-literate, those who are

marginal to the courts of kings and offices of the bureaucrats and

the centres of power. □

[Excerpted from the first Rama Watamull Lecture on India, delivered at the
University of Hawaii in March 1988.]

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