"Fleeting Words and Imagined Bodies: Oral narratives and women" a talk by Prof. Malashri Lal at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 3pm on 26th November 2013

Time : 3:00 pm

Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)

Place : Seminar Room, Library Building, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML), Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg, New Delhi - 110011
Venue Info :  Events | About | Map | Nearest Metro Station - 'Race Course(Yellow Line)'

Event Description : The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library cordially invites you to the Weekly Seminar on ‘Fleeting Words and Imagined Bodies: Oral narratives and women’ by Prof. Malashri Lal, University of Delhi, Delhi.

Abstract : Oral traditions in India derive from ancient times and continue to be powerful even today, mapping a rich tapestry of folklore, mythology, poetry, music and performance.  Theories of orality and folk traditions in India were often attempted by colonial intellectuals such as William Jones in Bengal, James Todd in Rajasthan, or Jean Philippe Vogel in Chamba, Himachal, but while they gathered rare material from the field, they failed to enter the cultural mind and emotions of the people who articulated their imagination through the mode of the verbal. Moreover, western intellectual history has prioritised the ‘scripted’ over the ‘oral’ and this hierarchy is virtually reversed in the Indian context. For example, the Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are told with multiple variations in detail while retaining their core narrative. In the lived mythology that is played out seasonally during the religious festivals of Dushera and Diwali, the ethical complexity about good and evil is made relevant to contemporary times, adapted and retold to suit the audience. This sensitivity of direct address and the participative nature of oral poetic exchange has been little understood, or appreciated. This paper offers an Indian perspective on orality by citing instances from three parts of India: Bengal, Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan, and a pan Indian icon such as Sita.  The speaker’s summations are based on fieldwork and personal interviews with practitioners of folk narratives. The focus is on women, whose imagined bodies are subject to oral textualising, but in essence, the fleeting words of oral rendering have prevented stereotyping and allowed a continuous evolution. The Baul singers of Bengal were the context for Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry during an intense period in Shantiniketan. The Bauls sang of the divinity within (moner manush) while the body roams restlessly in the material world.  Tagore in a less known essay titled  ‘Indian Folk Religion’ relates an anecdote about how he came to respect the oral traditions. Embedded this tale is the eternal contrast between the scripted and the oral, the settled and the itinerant  communities, the notions of development and backwardness and such others which frame discourses in modern knowledge systems. The second example is from the mountainous ranges of Chamba in Himachal Pradesh.  In the research undertaken by Sukrita Paul Kumar and the speaker, the impulse was to discover the reality underneath a romanticized surface and to interact with the people of the city of Chamba and the rural area of Bharmour, specially the older women. And they found beautiful poems of faith and desire, myth and worldliness, living and dying. The most poignant poems belonged to the history of the region and the queen, Sui Mata, who sacrificed her life to bring water into the kingdom. Why did this story carry so much resonance for the women we met in Chamba? From descendents of the Raja to the needlewoman in the ‘rumal’ workshop, they heard various adaptations of a basic tale which saw woman as the initiator of a culture and dedicated lyrics to her memory. While it is said that oral poetry is located regionally, the speaker wishes to make an alternative point that orality in India shares certain characteristics, such as a reliance on religious tales and an affinity with music and performance.  The formal generic distinctions are erased in the final outpouring of poetry adapted to the moment of utterance before an audience. This transposition was witnessed by the speaker in Rajasthan during the renderings of the oral epic Pabuji ka Phar sung in the presence of a painted scroll. Interestingly, the pictures are not given in a linear sequence (as say in a cartoon strip) but suggest a unit of geography so that everything that happens at one place, such as a king’s court, will be grouped together no matter where in the  chronology such episodes might appear. The Phar therefore is difficult to “read” and it is up to the Bhopa, the poet–singer, which sub-story he wishes to link with which other one. Hence each telling is unique. The marriage motif in this long epic (rendered on five nights) has fascinating links with the Ramayana. Is the oral therefore simply local or is there a pattern to be deciphered in a pan Indian icon such as Sita. In the book, co-edited with Namita Gokhale, In Search of Sita: Revisiting Mythology, they tried to investigate such angles, and found that the immediate conditions of community living dictate the manner in which Sita is internalized in folk narratives. The speaker’s favourite is a tale from a village in Himachal which praises Sita’s extraordinary culinary skills.  The paper concludes with the observation that academia is at last formally accepting the erstwhile neglected category of oral traditions. Fortunately the traditional renderings had survived and adapted locally though they were not admitted to mainstream scholarship until recently. For the last fifteen years or so realization has dawned in India that oral literature must be captured, recorded or documented in some suitable fashion.  Debates occur about the method by which the oral becomes fixed to a page, and is no longer the fleeting, evanescent moment.  The questions asked are crucial.  Can the dynamism of orality be preserved in a book? Does critical analysis do more harm than good to the ever changing spirit of orality? 

Speaker : Prof. Malashri Lal is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Delhi, India. She is currently the Dean, Academic Activities and Projects at the University of Delhi and has held other senior administrative positions in the same University, including being Head, Dept of English (2000-2003), Director, Women’s Studies (2000-2006), and Jt. Director, South Campus (2006-2011).  As a recipient of several fellowships from the Fulbright, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Shastri-Indo Canadian Institute and the British Council, she has conducted research in prestigious institutions including Harvard University, USA, and Bellagio, Italy. Prof. Lal has authored The Law of the Threshold: Women Writers in Indian English  (1995, reprinted 2000), and co edited Interpreting Home in South Asian Literature (2007), The Indian Family in Transition (2008), Speaking for Myself: Anthology of Asian Women’s Writing (2009), and In Search of Sita: Revisiting Mythology (2009). Chamba-Achamba: Women’s Oral Narratives (Sahitya Akademi 2012) is her most recent work. Her contribution to women’s studies and academic reforms is internationally acknowledged.  She has served as a member of the international jury for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, London and is currently associated with the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, London and New Delhi. She was a member of several committees of the Govt. of India overseeing commemoration programmes for Rabindranath Tagore’s 150th birth year and she continues to take a close interest in intercultural literary forums. 

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