South Asian Folklore in Transition: Crafting New Horizons is a collection of essays from the Folklore and Mythology symposium that took place at Harvard University, entitled “Celebrating Another Harmony: South Asian Folklore in the 21st Century.” The essays were originally published in South Asian History and Culture in 2017.
The book consists of eleven chapters. The first chapter, “Introduction: Locating the Study of Folklore in Modern South Asia Studies,” is written by Frank J. Korom. It briefly introduces a set of papers, pointing out both the problems and prospects of returning to the folkloristic project. The next three chapters appear in Part I: Historicizing Folklore. The essay by Margaret A. Mills, “How Stories Lodge in Lives,” reviews South Asian and related ethnographic literature from the 1970s to the present, describing the oral performance of narratives of various kinds. Adheesh Sathaye’s article, “The Scribal Life of Folktales in Medieval India,” analyses the “fluid” textual dynamics of Twenty-Five Tales of the Animated Corpse, a medieval Sanskrit anthology of riddle-tales peppered with proverbial verses. The next article, “Nameless in History: When the Imperial English become the Subjects of Hindu Narrative,” is by Leela Prasad. This essay analyzes an intriguing, unfinished long narrative poem published in 1984 about the origin and rise of the English empire in India.
The next four chapters are grouped in Part II: Materializing Folklore. The first article, “Standing in Cement: Possibilities Created by Ravan on the Chhattisgarhi Plains,” is by Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, who frames her work with an interest in the agency of materiality, then focuses it through a performative-ethnographic lens, revealing questions raised by cement images of Ravan, the antagonist of the Ramayana epic tradition, found throughout the plains of the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh. The following chapter, by Kirin Narayan and Kenneth M. George, “Tools and World-making in the Worship of Vishwakarma,” suggests that attending to mythology, the ritual care of tools, and the worship of Vishwakarma illuminates artisanship, manufacture, and the role of materiality in religious life throughout the Indian subcontinent. In her essay, “Pavitra Hindu Homes: Producing Sacred Purity in Domestic Diasporic Settings,” Puja Sahney examines the Hindu terms pavitrata (sacredness) and pavitra (sacred powers) that are extremely significant in Hindu devotion. In the next essay, “Shrines, Stones, and Memories: The Entangled Storyworld of a Goddess Temple in Assam,” Ülo Valk explores the place-lore of a temple in Slighat in Nagon District, Assam. The essay is based on fieldwork conducted during four site visits, from 2009 to 2016. Valk argues that, since collective and personal dimensions of tradition conflate and reveal an entangled storyworld, both imagination and factuality have a creative role to play.
The next three chapters are gathered in Part III: Politicizing Folklore. In her essay, “Criminal ‘Folk’ and ‘Legal’ Lore: The Kidnap and Castrate Narrative in Colonial India and Contemporary Chennai,” Shakthi Nataraj considers kidnapping narratives, hijras, and the historical repetition of Kanu’s narrative and the events that followed. The next chapter, “Folklore, Politics, and the State: Kutiyattam Theatre and National/Global Heritage in India,” by Leah K. Lowthorp, is a study that offers a national and global intervention in the relationship between folklore and the state in South Asia. The last article in the book, “The Amplified Sacrifice: Sound, Technology, and Participation in Modern Vedic Ritual,” by Finnian M. M. Gerety, explores the religious soundscape of Hindu traditions in Kerala, India, by examining the role of sonic amplification in the sacrifices of Nambudiri Brahmins.
In conclusion, by attending to Muslims, material culture, diasporic horizons, global interventions and politics within South Asian folklore studies, South Asian Folklore in Transition: Crafting New Horizons provides fresh and new models for studying both the lore and the life of everyday people in South Asia, as well as their engagement with the world at large. The chapters treat cultural traditions with a new sense of relevance that will be of interest not only to areal specialists but also to folklorists and anthropologists in general.
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[Review length: 669 words • Review posted on December 12, 2019]