Folklore Publication
National Folklore Support Centre (NFSC) is a nongovernmental, non-profit organisation, registered in Chennai dedicated to the promotion of Indian folklore research, education, training, networking and publications. The aim of the centre is to integrate scholarship with activism, aesthetic appreciation with community development, comparative folklore studies with cultural diversities and identities, dissemination of information with multi-disciplinary dialogues, folklore fieldwork with developmental issues and folklore advocacy with public programming events. Folklore is a tradition based on any expressive behaviour that brings a group together, creates a convention and commits it to cultural memory. NFSC aims to achieve its goals through cooperative and experimental activities at various levels. NFSC is supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation.
Self, Language, Landscape and Lore
M.D. Muthukumaraswamy
Since all the
interviews collected in
this volume are set in
the mode of personal
narratives the
introduction should
also be in the same
form. I undertook the
travels for these
interviews at a
moment in my life that
can be best described now as a spiritual catastrophe.
The inner devastation every writer experiences at one
point or other came as an avalanche in the year 2001 for
me and it maimed and paralyzed my ability to write in
Tamil. The injury caused eight years ago by the deaths
of very dear ones in the family would not heal and I
was completely emptied of life and its world of meaning.
Eight years of struggle against inconsolable grief took
away my language, my landscape and the possibility of
beginning my life anew. Ironically I was successful
professionally. The ordeal of parturition for establishing
National Folklore Support Centre was over in 1999 itself
and my attempt to find solace in excruciating work
schedule was yielding rich benefits for the Centre. It is
true that all these years I wrote occasional prose, poetry
and short fiction in English and regularly published
them in European little literary magazines but none of
my colleagues at the Centre even knew anything about
my writing except the editorial articles I wrote for
“Indian Folklife”. Neither do my friends nor my
relatives. Many Tamil literary articles that appeared in
the year 2001 mentioned about me as a young writer
who had shown great promise but fell into silence and
oblivion eventually. At sporadic literary gatherings I
chose to attend I imagined that people were suppressing
a smirk and tolerating my presence. I would spend
harrowing hours night after night staring into the blank
page, trying to compose a Tamil sentence and failing
miserably. I felt like a sparrow that could still fly with
borrowed wings but had lost its familiar sky. So the
innermost reason for me to undertake these travels was
to see whether ‘life is elsewhere’.
My first stop, Singapore did not offer me any consolation
despite the wonderful and doting hosts. Although the
material success of the city-state was visible for anyone
to see, it did not have anything to offer me culturally. I
read Kua Pao Kun’s plays, visited Practice Performing
Arts School and Singapore National Museum for the
Arts and had the privilege of spending one afternoon
with the visiting South Asian playwrights. In spite of
these moments of respite I found Singapore to be
nothing but a soulless shopping mall. For me,
Singapore’s suffocating humidity because of its
geographical vicinity towards the equator was not only literal but also metaphorical. Mandarin, Malay and Tamil
are official languages of the city-state but I could hardly
see any mixing of cultures. Television and press reflected
the lack of critical thinking and the virtual absence of
democratic opposition. Artificial landscaping, septic
cleanliness, all pervasive technological surveillance,
incredibly ruthless penal system and a powerful ruling
oligarchy of Singapore are all traits drawn straight out
of science fiction of ‘Brave New World’ variety and they
make the country frighteningly panoptical. My attempts
to see community life in the roadside music shows,
collective cooking in Chinese apartment complexes,
paper decorations and riverside nightlife soon met with
unknown despair as I could not envision anything
human behind the mechanical execution of deeds.
As I flew out of Singapore to Tokyo I had a sense of
relief, normally experienced by frolicking Singaporeans
who cross their borders to go into Malaysia essentially
to litter in the name of weekend parties. Though I had
established email contacts with Masatoshi Konishi,
Shibuya Toshio, Yoshitaka Terada and Peter Knect I had
not met them before and so practically I knew nobody
in Japan. Through Internet I made reservation in a hotel
located in the Asakusa district of Tokyo. On the flight I
had prepared a stream of conscious list of things I knew
about Japan: Kabuki, Noh, Ikebana, tea ceremony,
Geisha women, Sumo wrestlers, Samurai tradition,
Japanese pottery, miniature world of electronic
products, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Sake, Kimono and
Haiku. In the heyday of the advent of Tamil modern
poetry much of Haiku including Basho’s had been
translated into Tamil from English. Many of us who
functioned within the Tamil little literary magazines had
seen the films of Kurusowa and Ozu. My favorite
Japanese author was Yasunari Kawabata and his Nobel
Prize acceptance speech on ‘Moon and Snow in Japanese
literature’ had given me clues about the landscape.
Reading Kawabata had also introduced me to the wood
cut prints of Yoshitoshi whose works I was determined
to see. For the first time visitors Roland Barthes’
travelogue on Japan “Empire of Signs” may not be a
reliable guide but for me it gave the right orientation
towards the country.
Beyond Narita airport nobody conversed in English and
so except for the interviews I was effectively without
any language. I walked through the streets of Tokyo
with the help of maps and discovered the city to be of
extraordinary charm. In the Asakusa area, in the vicinity
of my hotel I chanced upon Sensui-ji Buddhist temple.
Luckily it was the time of their annual festival. The whole temple compound had adorned the look of a village
fair. Toys, Japanese fans, paper balloons, flowers and
incense sticks sold by street hawkers created a colorful
festive ambience. I wanted to learn more about the
festival but all my questions in English were returned
with overwhelmingly polite gestures. I visited the
temples several times to observe the festival and its
attendant rituals. On the third day when I was listening
to the Buddhist chanting I suddenly I found myself
reciting a passage from “Manimekalai”, a Tamil Buddhist
epic:
Prema Nandakumar’s translation of “Manimekalai”
renders the same passage as follows:
“But when ignorance goes, action ceases;
When action is not, consciousness ceases;
When consciousness goes, name-form ceases too.
When name-form ceases, sense organs withdraw.
When sense organs cease, there is no contact.
Where contact goes, experience is not.
Where experience ceases, thirst is not.
When there is no thirst, attachment ceases
When there is no attachment, existence
Is not. Absence of existence leads to
Non-birth. With the cessation of birth forms
Rebirth is gone! and with this birth, sickness,
Old age, death, distress, lamentation and
Helplessness as also ceaseless sorrow
Will all be destroyed. This is cessation.”
What surprised me was my unexpected discovery of
my inner Tamil voice and the compulsive urge to write.
I was discovering that human memory could rise to an
occasion with its available linguistic and cultural
resources to create or make sense of the world. Ever
since that moment in Sensui-ji temple through out my
travels I was remembering, recalling and recollecting
innumerable passages from Tamil literature, folk tales,
folk songs, poetry and mythology according to the
demands of the situations. Or in other words, I was
behaving exactly like a Tamil verbal folk artist. This
realization of my personal experience made me
understand relations between self, cultural memory,
language, identity and expression. I also understood
migrations, Diasporas, exiles and displacements. I
thought I knew how tales and tunes travel and freely
mix. The copious notes I wrote in Tokyo charted out
the kind of approach I was going to adopt for the
interviews. I would abandon impressionistic acceptance
of cultures and their expressions. No more stream of
conscious lists. I would use personal narratives, literary
texts, disciplinary engagements, artistic expressions,
observations on landscape and national movements to
understand folklore, other cultures, cultural practices
and cultural studies in general. The idea was to see the
full sweep of the discipline of folklore. When I started
putting together pages and pages of notes I suddenly
stopped for a while remembering the Jataka tale of the
tortoise that talked too much.
At the remembrance of this tale I decided to be a man of few words as an interviewer. My mission would be
to bring out the artistic, scholarly and professional
achievements of the interviewees. This is of special
importance to the readers in India where respect for
personal achievement stands considerably eroded.
Regardless of my plans for the interviews and the
discovery of my inner voice, my fascination for Japan
grew day by day. I traveled to Osaka and Kyoto, watched
Kabuki Theater, participated in a tea ceremony, visited
the museum of Japanese history and ethnology and
went through an exhibition of ‘Ghosts and apparitions
in Japanese folk tales’. To my dismay I could not find
the woodprints of Yoshitoshi. Instead I found people
reading picture book novels almost everywhere- in the
train stations, on the trains, in the bus stations, on the
buses, in the airports and on the planes. Cell phone
carrying schoolgirls, who seemed to be everywhere,
were managing multiple tasks of traveling, talking
through the cell phones, handling schoolbags and
reading picture books. In my language less status the
picture books came as great relief and I found them not
to be simple comic books but serious novels. I managed
to buy a picture book edition of Kawabata’s novel
“Beauty and Sadness” and imagined that the
illustrations were historical derivatives of Yoshitoshi’s
works. Whenever I carried a picture book in my hands
or leafed through one in public places people around
me began to make eye contacts or smile. Slowly I began
to make friends and soon discovered that despite its
phenomenal economic growth Japan remained a mono
cultural society. I was a total foreigner and my otherness
was not even a matter of curiosity. Except from the
interviewees I could not make headway in learning more
about Japanese society. Japan remained a collection of
fascinating but undecipherable signs.
To reach Santa Fe from Tokyo I had to make two
stopovers: one at Seattle and another at Denver.
America’s South West introduced me to the incredible
natural beauty of the land, Native American Indian
population, their arts and culture. The expansive
landscape, dramatic sky with wild clouds, virulent
lightning and fearful thunders, rivers of great strength
and rocks of mystic quality enraptured me completely.
I read in the guidebooks “From coral reefs to glaciers,rain forests to high desert, grasslands to wetlands, sand dunes to snowfields, the grandeur of the landscape surpasses even American superlatives. A diversity of eco-systems, flowers, trees and creatures great and small await any naturalist who has ever dreamed of the American wilderness. For those who like their nature
laced with adrenaline, the beaches, forests, mountains,deserts and rivers cater to every conceivable outdoor pursuit, from surfing to ice climbing, fly-fishing to competing in triathlons.”
I quote from a guidebook to demonstrate how commonplace, knowledge of natural beauty of American landscape should be. Nevertheless,
the popular images of the United States outside the
country, especially in India do not give a clue to the
panoramic wealth of the country.
Trained in the milieu of little Tamil literary magazines, I
have always mistrusted popular and commercial
mainstream strands of any culture and their modes of
representations. On the other hand I tend to think lore
and literature of a land construct and define the inner
lives of the people and give significance to otherwise
meaningless nature. Without William Faulkner I will
not understand America’s South. Without Mark Twain,
Mississippi will not make any sense to me. Without
Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Emily
Dickinson, Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme,
Ronald Sukenik, Jack Kerouc, Henry Miller, Alan
Ginsberg and Tony Morrison –to name only a few of
my most favorite authors- American consciousness, its
history and its relationship to the landscape will be
elusive to me. But America’s South West, its Hispanic
heritage and Native American Indian life were
underrepresented in the literature I knew of and I was
really struggling to understand the experience I was
going through. In this context I should express my
eternal gratitude to Peter Mattair who with his generous
hospitality and brilliant conversations introduced me
to the folklore, people and institutions of the region.
With his generous help, I was able to see an opera, a
Broadway musical, Pow-wow festival, Pueblo pottery,
Museum of International Folk Art and meet with a wide
range people in Santa Fe. Thanks to his guidance I could
see an exhibition of Yoshitoshi’s woodprints (which I
failed to find in Japan) on the “One hundred faces of
the moon” at the Museum of International Folk Art. It
was a sheer coincidence that the Yoshitoshi exhibition
was opening on the very next day I was in Santa Fe. It
was an immensely satisfying experience to go through
the exhibition and to listen to informative lectures
especially after being in Japan only 48 hours ago. Why
did I think that Japan was a collection of undecipherable
signs when I do not actually need any meaning beyond
lore and literature?
Santa Fe experience brought me into focus the limitations
of my attempt to grasp a country and its culture only
through its lore and literature- the limitations imposed
by the disciplinary constraints of my own reading on
the one hand- and my inability to grasp anything further
even if there had been an opportunity. For instance, I
never wanted to know how the United States had become
the wealthiest nation in the world although I was all the
time observing from the west coast to the east coast its
telling signs of material success. Since I left Washington
DC in 1993 the changes that had come about in terms of
its phenomenal economic growth in the United States
were also clearly evident. Moreover, the economic
depression of the 1930s, end of cold war era, new world
order, business at the speed of light and Internet
commerce were some of the topics that were all the time
there as an underlying layer of any discourse regardless
of the fact whether it is literary or not. My mind failed to
make sense of these details.
Reflecting back now, I realize that my sensibilities are
severely conditioned by classical Tamil poetics that intimately links up human emotion, landscape and
expression. Added to that there was a persistent and
incantatory Tamil dialogue with my inner most self all
through out the travels. These features ordered the way
I carried out these interviews. I kept my understanding
of the relationship between land, lore and literature
always at the background and elicited responses in order
to see the connections between personal histories and
disciplinary engagements. I never questioned the
ideological basis of the concepts discussed. One of the
topics that enormously interested me especially in the
United States was the public presentation of folklore
and the monumental efforts that had gone into it. So I
constantly pursued in my interviews the ways the public
sector folklorists functioned. In a way these interviews
need to be seen as products of instances and contexts
rather than well carried out research projects. Because
of such flexibility it deemed necessary to include
interviews of personalities who are not folklorists per
se, but whose views illuminated certain important topics
of concern. Although products of contexts and instances
these interviews are nonetheless ultimately artifacts of
reflections on what it means to do folklore or to be
engaged in the broad field of culture. Conjuring the
promise of personal histories intersecting with national
histories and disciplinary engagements of their time,
these interviews chart out an alternative cartography
of the discipline. Set in the mode of personal narratives
public programming, engagement with other cultures,
multiculturalism, intellectual foundations of folklore,
cultural identity, issues of cultural funding, nation
building and negotiating cultural otherness become
issues of current interests in these interviews. As
colleagues in conversation the interviewees expand the
discipline of folklore to have valuable bearing on cultural
studies. Perhaps this volume will stand as an eclectic
testimony to the fact that the folklorists are the new
public intellectuals of the twenty-first century addressing
issues of integrity and representation, cultural freedom
and justice, aesthetics of tradition and change and
contributing to the development of civic republicanism.
England and France were holidaying when I landed
there in August 2001. So I could not carry out as many
interviews as I initially planned. Since notes on my
travels to these countries do not seem to be relevant to
the present collection of interviews I avoid presenting
them now. I have also avoided presenting folklore
discussions in these pages of introduction, as the
interviews are full of them.
Because of these travels and interviews, my consciousness has become nomadic, my inner voice has become awakened and I have become acutely aware of the importance of folklore and its practices in the public domain. I have not yet started writing in Tamil again but I am no longer anxious about it.