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INTRODUCTION

These essays were presented at the Seminar on Indian Folklore held at the Central Institute of Indian Languages in August of 1980. Together with the workshop discussion reports, published as Indian Folklore : Volume I, they constitute the proceedings of the Seminar.

It was intended that these papers were to be regarded as "Working Papers", and, in an effort to speed their rapid dissemination to folklorists in India, they were to be published as soon after the close of the Seminar as possible, without extensive revision. Production delays have unfortunately come between good intentions and reality. Some of the papers have already found their way into print (in revised form) by other, faster routes. Nevertheless, it is only here, in these two volumes, we are able to get an idea of the full range of ideas, methodologies and materials which were shared at that memorable meeting.

Several of the papers (Ramanujan, Mahapatra, Pande and Datta) bring to our attention the value inherent in folklore. A.K. Ramanujan's paper places the question "Why Folklore?" in the broadest context, listing a number of features of folklore which make it especially useful for intellectual inquiry. He then leads us through several areas where folk materials stands to revolutionize our understanding of Indian conceptual orientations. Trilochan Pande's paper speaks of the usefulness of folk media to the needs of contemporary communication and information dissemination. Mahapatra and Datta speak of the valuable role of folklore in rapidly changing society, struggling to integrate new ways with old and a variety of ethnic and regional cultures with one another.

Other papers use folk material as a tool to uncover aspects of Indian culture sometimes too subtle to perceive directly. Brenda Beck's paper scans an enormous number of folktales in search of specifically Indian oicotypes, themes or patterns in tales which express general cultural attitudes. Peter Claus' paper proceeds in an almost opposite direction - from an inter-cultural to intra-cultural comparative study of a game, from a surface structure shared by many cultures, to a covert metaphoric structural meaningful only in the context of an ecstatic religious cult.

Some of the papers concern themselves primarily with the analysis of formal structures of folk material. The most innovative of these is Stuart Blackburn's study of performance structure. Performance sequence, he demonstrates, has a form capable of analysis just as surely as does the textual content of a folk tradition. More than that, he argues, performances serve as behavioral (as opposed to verbal) models for organizing cultural meaning. Jawaharlal Handoo makes a similar cult traditions. Mazharul Islam and Dulal Chaudhuri reveal structures inherent in poetry and proverbs, respectively. Although in neither of these cases is there a specific context in which text and performance are associated, both authors take pains to relate the structure to phenomena outside the text: to the poet's experience, on one hand, and to the culture, on the other.

All of the papers represent thoroughly modern approaches to folklore. In fact, with regard to each of the folk forms with each they deal, the essays all constitute significant advances over earlier studies. Gone are the days when folkloristics meant merely the collection of folklore. And, although the several of the papers make use of large collections and incorporate the concerns of an earlier school of historical-geographic studies of distribution, all go well beyond simply identifying and locating variation and into sophisticated analysis. Folkloristics is rapidly catching up with - and even going beyond - the advances made in other humanistic sciences.

In this regard, it is difficult to discern any significant differences between the papers by Indian scholars and by North American Scholars. There are differences between structuralists and those who favour a "soft-hearted" structuralism, as Ramanujan calls it (p. 86). There are differences between those who adhere to a narrow definition of folklore and those who allow a broader one. There are differences in regard to the way the authors treat the relationship between text and context. But these differences reflect no international boundaries. What is gratifying in making this observation is that one can see a great potential for on-going collaboration between the scholars of both regions. In this, the Seminar thus points to a bright future of South Asian folklore.

Peter J. Claus

A NOTE ON ORTHOGRAPHY

The transcription of words in Indian languages used in the various essays in this volume are, by and large, those suggested by the particular author. There has been little attempt to standardize the papers to a common orthography. Titles of classical texts (e.g. Mahabharata), names of deities (e.g. Siva, Krishna, etc.) and places are generally left in the form used by the author, with the exception of a few instances of radically unconventional usage. Indian words commonly used in English (e.g. Brahman) have been treated as English words.