Jnanpith award winner Girish Karnad traced the tradition of storytelling to its evolution as a folklore and ballad to eventually form the bedrock of culture.
In this context, he highlighted the contribution of poet and folklorist A.K. Ramanujan for his scholarly pursuit of oral traditions and for systematically studying them.
Mr. Karnad was delivering the inaugural lecture of the Mysuru Literature Festival here on Sunday. It was organised by the Mysuru Literary Forum Charitable Trust and Books Club-2015.
The theme was “Adige Maneya Ajji Kathe, Aramaneya Mahakavya” and hence the thrust of Mr. Karnad’s talk centred around storytelling as an art form emanating from the kitchen to enter the public space weaving a tapestry of new experiences, assuming new forms to finally emerge as folklore and enter public discourse.
“Ramanujan collected the tales, studied and classified them, and drew a distinction between classical tales like the epics in which women were chaste. However, those in folklore would be deviant morally in the conventional sense but were enterprising who would save their husbands often depicted as wimps,” Mr. Karnad said.
The playwright recalled his own experience as a child listening to stories from elder women of the family in the kitchen the objective of which, Mr. Karnad said, was not to merely infuse morality but to make the listener more complete with experiences of life.
“When stories originate in the kitchen, they are bare without any names or personalities but transform and become part of the public discourse and become richer with characters during the transformation period and acquires details as it enters public sphere,” he said, highlighting Ramanujan’s study of this transformation. “Folk art is normally equated with beating of drums and dancing in villages but for Ramanujan it was part of a grand oral tradition, and he enriched the field through his collections and classifications, Mr. Karnad said.
Ridiculing American anthropologist Robert Redfield’s view that culture was the creation of a handful of people, Mr. Karnad endorsed Ramanujan’s criticism of this opinion, saying that culture was created by people where they live and underlined the role of women in the art of storytelling and its conduit from kitchen to folklore to form the basis of culture.
Tributes were paid to Kannada writers Gopalakrishna Adiga and M.K. Indira.
