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The Colonization of South Asian Folktales
Stories are like nesting dolls. You open one and there’s another one inside it, you open that and there’s another one. But stories are also something very symbolic of human life, simply because they begin and end. And in between all that, just like humans, they embody lived experiences, struggles, hurt, hope, empathy and most of all, love. Stories are human and humans are stories. And just like humans, stories are also interconnected with other stories and cultures; they cannot exist in isolation.
In India, one of the oldest civilizations in the world, the history of storytelling has always been tied to the oral tradition. These stories were passed on from generation to generation but never written down. They were an intangible cultural heritage, a representation of culture and social values (lore) of the community (folk) where they came from — folklore.
Imagine a distant field in Punjab. An isolated banyan tree exists in that field. It’s an old tree that has probably been around for decades. It spends its days alone in the heat and cold. But at night, it becomes an audience to a performance, a dance of truth and fiction, because it is at night when everyone from the village sits under the tree, lights a fire if it’s winter, and spends their time telling stories of so, so long ago. The old tell stories from their childhoods and stories they heard in their childhoods, and the young gobble up every word in hopes of retelling them in the same way when they grow up. Stories of honour, valour, hope, and again, love.
The art of the folktale is much more than just storytelling. It is a way to educate, and inculcate the younger generation about the social and cultural norms of the community because it is these folktales that are a representation of us as a people, a testament that we were once together, and shared experiences, struggles, hope, faith and love, not just land.
The oral tradition of folktales has been mobile in nature. The moral lessons and messages encoded in these folktales are subject to change across regions and generations. But from the early days to now, there has been a significant change in the perception of these folktales because of globalization which has also led to the commodification of cultures. Because of the increase in urbanization and the nuclear family structure, this art of storytelling, these folktales have gotten lost. Globalization has begun to erase our intangible cultural heritage, the lived experiences of our ancestors, our customs, social rites, festivities and of course, oral traditions.
But much before globalization, it was another —ization that started this process of erasure. And that is colonization. It is in the context of colonization that there has been a dissociation, a lack of shared identity in the South Asian communities due to transnationalism.
Many studies look into the history of South Asian folktales and trace the beginnings of their compilation as written texts to British colonial rule. In the second half of the nineteenth century, folklore collection and publication was booming in Europe and the trend expanded to the British colonies like India, where gathering information about the “natives” became something more than a mere leisure activity and contributed to the academics of anthropology. But in reality, this colonial folklore collection functioned as part of a larger project of “ethnographic surveillance which strove to produce the space of British India in order to control it.”
In her thesis, Once Upon a Time in the Land of Five Rivers, Fatima (2019) writes that a year after the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857, the British monarch took charge of India from the East India Company and the British began to take their role as colonial agents (not just traders and profiteers) in India more seriously. This increasingly involved studying Indian people and their ways of life to control them more effectively. One way of doing so was to collect and analyze Indian folklore, to better understand the culture and beliefs of their subjects. Collectors from throughout the subcontinent sourced tales, transcribed, and translated them into English, and published them for British and Anglo-Indian readers, or an Indian cultural elite. In general, these works were intended for leisure reading, and/or for armchair folklorists to analyze “scientifically”.
But in the publication of these texts, now looked at from a post-colonial lens, problems with translation and transcribing are glaringly obvious.
iting down a previously oral form of media adds a layer of censorship, editing and a change in perception, understanding and identity. E.D. Lewis (1998), concerned about the demise of oral storytelling traditions, especially once they’re written down, coined the expression, Tyranny of the Text.
Second, a large number of these translated texts were published in India between 1860 and 1920, but the changes made during translation were from a Eurocentric lens to make the text more palpable for the Western reader, however, these changes not only compromised the authenticity of the text but defamiliarized the local reader with the text as well. For example, in many stories, the Indian anna, the currency of that time became the ‘Shilling’.