REFLECTIONS: The Folk and the Classical: Interrogating the Boundaries
Author(s): K. Satchidanandan
Source: Indian Literature , January/February 2010, Vol. 54, No. 1 (255)
(January/February 2010), pp. 6-12
Published by: Sahitya Akademi
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23344124
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REFLECTIONS
The Folk and the Classical: Interrogating the Boundaries
One day when Rama was sitting on his throne, his ring fell off.
When it touched the earth, it made a hole in the ground and
disappeared into it. His trusty henchman, Hanuman, was at his feet.
Rama said to Hanuman, 'Look, my ring is lost. Find it for me.'
Remember Hanuman can enter any hole, no matter how tiny
and had the power to become the smallest of the small and larger
than the largest thing. So he took a tiny form and went down the
hole.
He went and went and went and suddenly fell into the
netherworld. The women who saw him fall caught him and and
placed him on a platter as the King of Spirits living in the
netherworld loves to eat animals. So Hanuman was sent to him as
part of his dinner, along with his vegetables. Exactly at that time
Rama entered river Sarayu as his mission on earth was declared
over by the god Brahma and the sage Vasishta. The King of
Spirits heard Hanuman repeating the name of Rama sitting on the
platter and asked him who he was. Hanuman revealed his identity
and said that he had come to fetch Rama's ring that had fallen
into a hole.
The King looked around and showed him a platter. On it
were thousands of rings. They were all Rama's rings. The King
asked Hanuman to pick out his Rama's ring. Hanuman was at a
loss as all the rings looked the same. The King of Spirits then told
him that there had been as many Ramas as there were rings on
that platter. He said Hanuman would not find Rama when he
returned to earth as Rama's ring falls down only when an
incarnation of Rama is about to be over. He had collected and
kept all those rings. At this Hanuman left.
This story is usually told to suggest that for every such Rama
there is a Ramayana. We know that there are several versions of the
Rama story in each of almost all the Indian languages besides
Annamese, Balinese, Cambodian, Malayasian, Thai, Khotanese,
Laotian, Sinhalese, Tibetan and Chinese. In short Ramayana is not
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really a text, but a whole tradition; it does not belong to a single
country or religion but is spread all over the South and Southeast
Asia and has existed and evolved over the last twenty-five hundred
years or so. But the moment we accept one Ramayana, let it be
Valmiki's or Tulasi's or any other, as the 'authentic' Ramayana and
elevate it to the status of a classic, we are silencing and
marginalising a whole tradition of oral and folk versions of
Ramayana and turning it into a monolith. This exclusivist approach
can also spell the doom of the democratic textual culture in India.
Perhaps what happens in the transition from the 'folk' to the
'classical' is not dissimilar. The 'folk' is ever vibrant, evolving, flexible
while the 'classical' is conceptualised as ordered, rigid and inflexible.
That is why every attempted reform or change in a classical form
of music or dance, for example, gives rise to heated debates
around the legitimacy of the change sought. This process is akin to
what the sociologist M. N. Srinivas called Sanskritisation though
different in its method and emphasis. Sanskritisation means the
process by which castes placed lower in the caste hierarchy seek
upward mobility by emulating the rituals, customs, habits and
practices of the upper dominant castes, not very different from what
anthropologists call 'passing'. It also includes the exposure to new
ideas and values appearing in Sanskrit literature, especially theological
ideas like dharma, karma, papa, maya, samsara and moksha. This
adaptation of the cultural values of the so-called upper castes
happened not entirely due to Brahmins; the castes who wanted to
move up also at times consciously adopted them. The British rule
in India and English education helped popularise the upper caste
cultural values. Offering such virtual mobility and positional change
was also a sure way of preventing structural change. In fact
Sanskritisation, instead of subverting the varrta-jati system only helped
reinforce and consolidate it. Srinivas gives the examples of Khas,
Newars and Magars of Nepal and the Indian tribes like Bhils,
Oraons and Gonds who tried to upclass themselves in this fashion
either by adopting the upper caste manners or, as in the case of
the tribal people, simply by claiming to be castes thus joining the
caste hierarchy of which they had been kept out as the panchams or
the 'fifth varna—that is, outside the four recognized varnas—so far.
Historians and ethnologists are not unaware of this
phenomenon. Bernard Cohn, for example, traces this process to the
colonial period. In 1772, Warren Hastings, the Governor of Bengal
decided that the East India Company's courts would administer
K Satchidanandan / 7
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Hindu law for the Hindus and Muslim law for the Muslims. One
of the ramifying consequences of this decision was the
popularisation of the notion that Indian civilization was founded on
particular Sanskrit texts. "The idea of the primacy of the Sanskrit
component became the determinant of action, policy and structure,
not only for the rulers but for many of the ruled. What had been
fluid, complex and even unstructured, became fixed, objective and
tangible" (Bernard S. Cohn, An Anthropologist among Historians and
Other Essays, New Delhi, 1994, p.46) While this was certainly an
important moment in the history of Sanskritising Indian civilization,
the process in fact had started much earlier with the spread of
what Edward Said later came to call the Orientalist ideology where
written Sanskrit texts were considered the basis of Indian religion,
philosophy, ethics and aesthetics. Even the epics like Ramayana and
Mahabharata had actually been codifications, retellings and
elaborations of folklore and legends, say, around the Soorya, Kuru,
Puru and Naga clans; but the texts by Valmiki and Vyasa came to
be looked upon as the 'authentic' versions and every other oral,
performed and even written, texts were considered 'deviations' from
the set norm. The fact of the existence of several oral epics—other
than the written Ramayana and Mahabharata—, like Male Madeswara
of Kannada, (See English translation by C N Ramachandran and
L N Bhatt, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 2000), for example, was
completely neglected and kept out of the epic canon. Ancient texts
like Panchatantra and Kathasaritsagar both attributed to Somadeva,
Brihadkatha attributed to Gunadhya, Brihadkathamanjari attributed to
Kshemendra, and Vasudeva Hindi which were nothing but
anthologies of folktales collected by the so-called 'authors' were also
considered Sanskrit texts. This is also the case of the Puranas.
Romila Thapar too has noticed this elite nature of India's cultural
identity: "The cultural identity which we have forged in recent times
has been that of a Sanskritic upper caste or else its equivalent in a
Persian upper caste. Yet, these identities are as elitist as the English
speaking identity of contemporary Indians. For, a very small
percentage of the population spoke Sanskrit or Persian itself. Even
the royal ladies in the court were not permitted to speak Sanskrit
in the classical plays and convesed entirely in Prakrit." (Romila
Thapar, The Past and Prejudice, New Delhi, 1994, p.60) Thapar has
also traced the recognition of Kalidasa's Sakuntala as an Oriental
masterpiece to the Orientalist perception of India and Indian
woman as weak, innocent and vulnerable. (Romila Thapar, Sakuntala:
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Texts, Readings, Histories, New Delhi, 1999) Ranajit Guha too points
to the new identity imposed on the peasant by the colonial rulers
and the feudal lords: this identity amounted to the sum of his
subalternity. "He learnt to recognise himself not by the properties
and attributes of his own social being but by diminution, if not
negation, of those of his superiors" (as quoted by Yogendra Singh,
Indian Sodo/ogy: Emerging Patterns and Sodal Conditioning, New Delhi,
1973) The historians who rejected verbal evidence from oral texts
as 'imprecise' and 'unreliable' and the literary critics who placed oral
literature below written literature creating a hierarchy of values and
early Indian literary historians like Albrecht Weber and Maurice
Winternitz (whose histories of Indian literature appeared in 1852 and
1907 respectively) kept oral literature completely out of the canon
and even of their survey. Orientalists like William Jones, George
Griers and Max Mueller helped to consolidate the notion that
Sanskrit literature was the true Indian literature .
The case of the 'folk' becoming 'classical' is a clear case of
appropriation through a process similar to 'Sanskritisation'. All the
so-called classical forms were once confluential, hybrid, mixed,
demotic, folk; only they got taken up by the elite. Once absorbed
into the upper caste/class discourse, their disruptive energy and
subversive world-view came to be smoothed out, their contours
stylised and fixed for all time and subjected to a canon. The forms
thus appropriated by the elite from the subaltern classes and castes
came to be re-circulated at another social stratum consisiting chiefly
of middle and upper classes and castes. With the original authors,
creators and practitioners left out in the cold. The nationalist
ideology which had many elements of the colonial Orientalist
ideology in its constitution, helped legitimise, rationalise, project and '
popularise this appropriation. Both folklorism—by which I mean a
kind of folk fundamentalism that denies further changes in
folklore—and classicism that upholds the so-called 'purity' of the
'classical' arts helped naturalise and sustain this clean categorisation.
Folklore, which was part of the daily life of our people and also
changing with its changing patterns, now became a mere ethnic
curiosity to be preserved in museums and archives and taken out
and exhibited on special occasions.
This appropriation happens when, for example, the dance of
the Devadasis is taken by the Brahmin women and turned into the
'eternal' art of Bharatanatyam, sanitising it of all that is natural and
erotic and leaving the Devadasis, the real creators of this dance
K Satchidanandan / 9
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form, to their predicament of patriarchal and theocratic exploitation,
poverty and disease. This happens when the Dasiyattom of Kerala,
with its beautiful and charming movements is transformed into
Mohiniyattom, with its reformist exponents declaring that it is a
pure and divine dance form that has nothing to do with the Dasis
and deriding the original practitioners of the dance calling them
thevidicbis,—a distortion of devadasis—which today has come to mean
just prostitutes that entirely leaves out the devotional aspect of their
practice. This happens too when Kathak is taken out of the kotis
leaving those women dancers to fend for their own in the red
streets of Mumbai or Delhi. Ottan Thullal was created by Kunchan
Nambiar in Kerala based on elements from the Parayan Thullal,
Pulayanattoms and Padayani, all subaltern forms of ritual dances, as a
challenge to the elitist Koothu where a Chakyar interprets Sanskrit
slokas (verses) to an upper caste audience within the temple. He
had done it outside the temple, for the common people of all
castes, but it was immediately stamped a 'classical' art and taken
back into the temples. Classicalised arts like Kathakali also have a
lot of folk elements which are seldom acknowledged. This is
equally true of classical music. The ragas, both Carnatic and
Hindustani are but systematised tunes available in the folksongs, a
connection that has been dwelt with examples by some
musicologists, like the gurjari thodi coming from a peasant girl's song.
Both are in fact based on natural sounds. Singers like Kumar
Gandharv and more recently Sultan Khan, vocalist and sarangi
player from Rajasthan, have through their practice revived and
reinforced this organic connection between the folk and classical
music traditions. The strangest of all is the category called 'semi
Massical' to which a lot of dances and music belong: it is as if
these forms had left the 'folk' tradition and not reached the
'classical', thus kept in a limbo or a purgatory waiting for their final
elevation to the classical heaven!
A K. Ramanujan was one of the first folklorists to be aware
of the dangers of this categorization. One of his far-reaching
contributions to the study of Indian folklore was to reconceptualise
the debate about the 'Great' and 'Little' traditions. This concept, as
originally developed by Robert Redfield and applied to India by
Milton Singer in the 1950s and 60s, suggested that a great
civilization such as India evolved from local folkroots in the process
of urbanisation. Over time however, largely because of the ill-chosen
labels, 'great' and 'little', the concept became synonymous with
10 / Indian literature: 255
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division, hierarchy, and a bias in favour of the written, brahmanical,
Sanskrit traditions; in response many anthropologists in India began
to explore the 'little' traditions. Ramanujan moved beyond the
dichotomy altogether to develop a theory of Indian civilization as
'context-sensitive', pluralistic and reflexive. In his vision, folklore is
one of the several systems, languages or registers that people use
depending on the particulars of context and audience. Sanskrit,
classical literature, bhakti, folklore, are all systems that comment on
each other and cannot be understood independently of each other.
According to him these expressive codes are carried not so much
by the civilization as by the individuals. In short folklore to him
was not a precious preserve safe from pernicious modern influences
nor a culture of the little people, but a full-fledged collaborator in
the production of cultural meaning. Folktales for example present a
counter-system to the hegemonic karma-dharma system.
Ramanujan found continuities, as well as alternatives, between
folklore and classical traditions. Instead of mechanically applying
Western norms and concepts, he divided Indian folk into akam and
puram, the domestic and the public, in the Tamil tradition. Even
when he made use of Proppian morphology and Freudian and
Jungian psychology, his emphasis was not whether the Indian tale
fits into European categories but whether certain specific oicotypical
features of the Indian tale—in this case Kannada tale—bring into
prominence typical characteristics of Indian (in this case Kannada)
culture. Instead of attempting to conform to ethnocentric, etic,
classificatory systems proposed outside of India, Ramanujan
undertook the tough task of showing how these systems failed to
apply adequately to Indian data. As in his seminal study of the
Indian Oedipus where he rethinks the tale-type as told from the
mother's, instead of the son's, point of view. Ramanujan's approach
was eclectic which helped him employ both structuralist and
psychological insights to illuminate folktales and to appreciate works
like the late Bengt Holbek's Interpretation of Faity Tales that combines
several approaches in his analyses of Danish folktales. Also under
the partial spell of metalinguistics he taught the folklorists to let the
stories speak for themselves as he believed they had their own tales
to tell. Here the genre was commenting on the genre itself. The
stories he told were repositories of cultural content as also aesthetic
forms enacting their meaning in speech.
What we need to do today is to go further ahead, expose
the class/caste nexus that is still at work to sustain the hierarchical
K. Satchidanandan / 11
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division, both sociological and aesthetic, between the 'folk', the
'classical' and 'the modern', point out the inadequacy of these and
other hegemonic Western categories to comprehend and interpret the
art and literary scenario in South Asia, bring out the inter-textual
and overlapping nature of our art and literary forms where one
form informs the other and evolve our own methodologies derived
from our practices to analyse our traditions. We also need to save
folklore from the puritanical attitudes that tie them down to fixed
forms preventing them from responding to the actual discourse of
life and history thus updating themselves and attaining vibrancy
instead of museumizing them, and persuade the academies and
departments of culture in our countries to help our arts flower
without degrading them into export-worthy ethnic curios and without
harming their autonomy and uprooting them from their own soil
and milieu.
K.Satchidanandan
Guest Editor
12 / Indian Literature: 255
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