08-04-2005, 10:43 PM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Folk Narratives of Nineteenth-Century India.
by Sadhana Naithani
<b>Abstract </b>
How did colonialism add on to the repertoire of Indian oral folk narratives? In its everyday life colonial society had to deal with inter-culturality at every level--from personal to social. The colonisers' narratives about this experience have been known in the vast variety of discourse termed "orientalism." What has remained obscured is the narrative expression of this experience by the colonised, specifically as oral narrative expression. This discourse of the colonised is contemporary with that of the European orientalist, but from the opposite point of view. It thus creates, as it were, an axis jump in our perception of colonial relations. In this paper are discussed some oral narratives of Indian folk about their British colonisers in the nineteenth century.
The nails of a European, like those of a Rakshasa, distil a deadly poison, and hence he is afraid to eat with his fingers, as all respectable people do, and prefers to use a knife and fork. (Folk narrative recorded in the 1880s in northern India by William Crooke [1892, 9]) Everything in the story relates to people (Rohrich 1991, 214).
<b>An Axis Jump </b>
Colonialism generated not only the discourse of the European orientalists but also a vast discourse amongst the colonised. They constituted the two sides of the same axis of discourse--the axis of colonial relations, perceptions and representations. In the context of colonial British scholarship of Indian folklore, this axis comprises the British folklore collectors and the Indian narrators. The scholarship of Indian folklore since its beginning in the mid-nineteenth century has proceeded on the basis of perceptions from the British side of the colonial axis. Colonial British officers and their Indian associates collected traditional folk tales in the second half of the nineteenth century from professional and nonprofessional storytellers. <b>This article argues that there was also another discourse in the folk narrative of colonial India which concerned itself with the colonial rule and rulers, i.e. with the contemporary reality. </b>
There is no exclusive collection of such narratives, but some instances of such oral folk narratives popular in the late nineteenth century in North India have come to my notice. Although these are few in number and can therefore provide only tentative arguments and conclusions, they are remarkable in the kind of discourse they generate. Their numbers are few because stories that portrayed the British were not documented as narratives but were considered to fall into ethnographic and anthropological categories. When they come to our notice, therefore, it is mainly by accident. However, it seems to me that they build a case for further search and research aimed towards identifying them. Lutz Rohrich's insight, "Everything in the story is about people" (Rohrich 1991, 214), offers an analytical tool; when applied to the narratives of Indian folk of colonial India, it could lead to new conclusions (Rohrich 1991, 214).
Some of the colonial British folklorists (like R. C. Temple and William Crooke) were conscious of the emergence and existence of contemporary tales, yet they did not include them in their publications of Indian folk tales. The history of folklore research has shown that, since the inception of the science, the definition of "folklore" flows from the scholar's definition of "folk," and that folklore collections cannot be defined only by what they include, but have to be defined also by what they exclude (Naithani 1996, 75). British collectors of Indian folklore were also administrators, and their narrators were their colonial subjects; their folklore collections had intentional, incidental and potential administrative implications. The collection of folklore was one of the "three systems of imperial ethnography" (Morrison 1984, 1). What was included and what was excluded was based on many non-scholarly considerations. In this context, even if without conscious design, the tales of the Indian folk, which depicted their colonial reality, were not included in the folklore materials.
This article discusses a selection of obviously colonialism -generated folk narratives. The selection is centred on one theme only--the portrayal of the British in the lore of the nineteenth-century Indian folk. The first section, "Fantastic Realities," presents two narratives of the nineteenth century that seem to comment on the reality through extremely fantastic plots. The second section, "Fantasising the Real," discusses some tales that were told about real people--British officers and Indian saints and rebels. The last section, "Tell-Tales," raises issues and questions derived from these select narratives, as well as expanding on the argument that these narratives constitute an axis jump in our perception of colonial representations.
<b>Fantastic Realities </b>
The following two narratives were heard and collected by the well-known "administrator-scholar," William Crooke, and classified as "belief in ghosts and spirits." They were found not only to be in existence in the nineteenth century, but also to be so popular that they determined people's behaviour.
Momiai wala Sahib
<!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> In India the popular idea about Momiai is that a boy, the fatter and blacker the better, is caught, a small hole is bored in the top of his head, and he is hung up by the heels over a slow fire. The juice or essence of his body is in this way distilled into seven drops of the potent medicine known as Momiai ...  It is further believed that a European gentleman, known as the Momiai-wala-Sahib, has a contract from Government of the right of enticing away suitable boys for this purpose. He makes them smell a stick or wand, which obliges them to follow him, and he then packs them off to some hill station where he carries on this nefarious manufacture.  A very black servant of a friend of mine states that he had a very narrow escape from this Sahib at Nauchandi fair at Meerut, where Government allows him to walk about for one day and make as many suitable victims as he can by means of his stick ... (Crooke 1896, 177-8; emphasis added). <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Dinapur wala Sahib
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> Another of these dreaded Sahibs is the Dinapurwala Sahib, or gentleman from Dinapur. Why this personage should be connected with Dinapur, a respectable British Cantonment, no one can make out. At any rate, it is generally believed that he has a contract from Government for procuring heads for some of the museums, and he too has a magic stick with which he entices unfortunate travellers on dark nights and chops off their heads with a pair of shears (ibid., 179; emphasis added). <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
These are the basic storylines of two spirit tales from North India, to which many stories were added. It is not only the brutality of the action in the plot which is striking, but also all the other constants and the variables of the spirit tales. Though the idea of the Momiai was definitely pre-British, in appearance they are both (Momiai-wala-Sahib and Dinapur-wala-Sahib) Englishmen; they both catch Indian men, wield deadly weapons, and are on the prowl.
The narrative is, however, not only comprised of action (kidnap and murder) but elaborates it by exploring the source of power of the spirits. And, while the action may be similar to those of many other spirits, the powers, the motivation, appearance and location of these Spirit Sahibs is rooted in the contemporary contextual reality of the tellers' and the listeners' world. An obviously fantastic action plot is woven into a network of realistic means and ends. The spirits are English gentlemen, practise their craft with the permission of the government (in the form of a contract), in places exclusively related to the British colonial rule in India--cantonment and hill stations.
The tale itself was being narrated in British colonial India. If we take these elements into consideration, we realise that an age-old idea had transformed itself in time. Momiai were no more evil spirits with motives best known to themselves. The cultural and linguistic coding of the narrative seems, judging by its effect, to have been apparent to its listeners. The image is such that any white man could fit into it, and thereby any real person could be the deadly spirit. The narrator claimed to be a witness of the spirit at the Nauchandi fair and to have himself narrowly escaped being captured. Many claimed to have seen this Sahib, and almost none doubted the Spirit Sahib's "existence" and capacity to harm. William Crooke reports further that the narrative had an effect.
The curious street urchins and onlookers around the entourage of a visiting British official would vanish at the mention of Momiai-wala-Sahib. One summer, all the porters disappeared from the hill station of Simla, because the surgeon in town was rumoured to be the Momiai-wala-Sahib. This combination--context-text-context--shows that the Spirit Sahib was definitely not being searched for inside the narrative, but outside it in the world of the narrators, in which the primary line of social division and hierarchy was between the Indians and the British. These fantastic narratives prove the point made by Lutz Rohrich, that everything in the story is about people.
<b>The social and political power of the British in India, and the relationship between (British) individuals and the state seems to have involved the folk in an intense manner. The narratives, being that of oral tradition whereby continuous change and growth are inherent aspects of its existence, show not only an updating of the image of a spirit idea, but also a way of explaining, understanding, and then relating back to reality. </b>
<b>Fantasising the Real </b>
The narrative representation of the colonial state and its relationship with British individuals, especially officers, appeared not only in abstracted spirit tales, but also in the explanation of real official measures. George A. Grierson, for example, known for his voluminous works on Bihar peasantry and their agricultural terminology, was perceived and portrayed differently by the peasants themselves. The following "rumours" spread during his linguistic-ethnographic survey of the villages:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> Grierson Sahib is counting boats and cattle in order to take them away for the Government's war in Egypt. He is counting the wells because he is aware of an impending famine when these would be reserved for the British families. Children are being counted to be buried in the foundation of the bridge that the government is constructing over the Gandak river. Adults are being counted for use in war (based on Grierson 1885, 4). <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
These tales reflect an extreme mistrust of the colonial government, its officials and its measures. The insecurity regarding personal possessions and natural resources manifests itself in all the narratives, and the tellers seem to be convinced that any act of the Government could be in its own favour alone. These would not only be disadvantageous to the tellers but might even deprive them of their people and goods; in time of crisis, the Government would surely desert them. Whether the widespread effect of these stories, resulting in resistance to Grierson and his assistants, was based on an intended effectivity in the narratives is difficult to determine, but their power as communication cannot be overlooked. Tales in connection with real people show ways of coming to terms with the reality, and also of immortalising people in different ways. For example, the famous folklore collector Sir R. C. Temple cited a few examples of "folklore in ascendance" (Temple 1899, 5), one of them being about himself:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> A miracle in India does not strike much wonder, and is to some extent looked upon as a natural incident in everyday life ... They are frequently believed to have happened to Europeans themselves. Sir Henry Lawrence is thus believed to have been compelled to compliance with a saint's behest by terrifying occurrences, induced by the saint during sleep. Almost precisely the same story is current in the Ambala Cantonment about myself (Temple 1899, 340). <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
A third instance is connected to the public hanging of a hero of the 1857 Revolt, the Nawab of Loharu:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> The body of the Nawab of Loharu, who was hanged for encompassing the death of Mr. Frazer at Delhi some fifty years since, no doubt swung around, as is related, after death to the direction of Mecca (Makka). This may be called a fact of history, but when you add, as the natives of Delhi, that this was because he was innocent and a martyr, you are repeating a fact of Folk-lore (Temple 1899, 5-6). <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Temple acknowledges and identifies this as "folklore in ascendance." The tale, however, signifies also a discourse, which portrays not only the empirical phenomenon but also the narrators' judgement of it. <b>The discourse is partisan, not superstitious. It belongs to a time when such narratives were brutally suppressed.</b> How far is the narrative situation responsible for its form? This is a question made relatively redundant by the clarity of the message in the narrative. Conclusion: Tell-Tales
<b>When juxtaposed against the portrayals of the administrator-scholars, the narratives of the colonised folk contradict the British folklorists' many claims: that the lore of the Indian folk was ancient, spiritual and traditional; that it did not have any historical consciousness; that it was "completely" untouched by European influence; and that the narrators were incapable of any literary conception and representation of their contemporary socio-historical reality (Gordon 1909; Naithani 2001). </b>
Instead, they reveal the narrators' perception of the intrinsic relationship between the individual Englishmen and the colonial government of India. Secondly, they show the "self" as vulnerable to the powers of the state and its representatives; and thirdly, and rather surprisingly, they reveal a knowledge of contemporary phenomena, like the construction of museums in England, which was beyond the empirical observation of the narrators.
Instead of being passive bearers of a repertoire of tradition, the narrators emerge as self-conscious subjects whose narratives performed multiple functions in social communication. They were carriers of change and growth; as such, they did not possess live traditions so much as have a live relationship with tradition. This probably explains the use of traditional and archetypal images to define contemporaneity as well as to intervene in its processes. Thus, both--the traditional and the contemporary consciousness--mix to create a single image; for example, the deadliness of an Englishman is explained by identifying him with a Momiai, while the image of the Momiai changes to that of a European man.
<b>The vast body of this discourse remains undiscovered; further collections would show more aspects of its ideological leanings. </b>This selection and analysis is primarily meant to argue that the oral narrative expressions of the colonised folk have potential to create a new perspective on Indian folklore. The oral folk narratives discussed in this article represent the undiscovered and unrecognised side of the axis of colonial relations, perceptions and representations. <b>The colonised had to understand and define the coloniser in every area of their life. The narrative expressions of their cognitive processes reflect observation from close and afar, participative exploration, judgemental action and inaction. </b>
On the basis of these observations, I propose the following hypotheses:
* that, although a large number of these stories may be lost or may be found in unknown sources or only through extensive field research, many are already available in British sources under non-folkloristic categories like superstition and belief;
* that these narratives often conform to culturally and folkloristically well-established tale-types, and as such also represent the modernisation of traditions;
* that research into these narratives would bring forward new materials both for folklorists and for historians.
<b>References Cited</b>
Crooke, William. The Popular Religion and Folk-Lore of Northern India. 2 vols. Westminster: Archibald Constable and Co., 1896.
Gordon, E. M. Indian Folk Tales: Being Side-Lights on Village Life in Bilaspore, Central Provinces. London: Elliot Stock, 1909.
Grierson, George A. Bihar Peasant Life. Calcutta: The Bengal Secretariat Press, 1885. London: Trubner and Co., 1885.
Morrison, Charles. "Three Systems of Colonial Ethnography. British Officials as Anthropologists in India." In Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, ed. Henrika Kuklick and Elizabeth Long. Vol. 5. New York: JAI Press, 1984.
Naithani, Sadhana. "Political Ideology and Modernization of Folklore." Jahrbuch fur Volksliedforschung 41 (1996):71-5.
Naithani, Sadhana. "The Colonizer Folklorist." Journal of Folklore Research 34 (1997):1-14.
Naithani, Sadhana. "Prefaced Space: Tales of the Colonial British Collectors of Indian Folktales." In Imagined States, ed. Luisa Guidice and Gerald Porter. Utah: University of Utah Press, 2001.
Rohrich, Lutz. Folktales and Reality. Translated by Peter Tokofsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1978.
Temple, Richard Carnac. "The Science of Folklore." Folk-Lore Journal 4 (1896):193-212.
Temple, Richard Carnac. "The Folklore in the Legends of Punjab." Folk-Lore Journal 10(1899):414-43.
<b>Biographical Note </b>
Sadhana Naithani is Assistant Professor at the Centre of German Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her doctoral thesis, Politik der Liebe (Jawaharlal Nehru University, 1994), is an interpretative study of German folk songs. Her post-doctoral research work concerns the relations between colonialism and folklore research, between the British and the Indian collectors, and between the narratives and narrators in late nineteenth-century India. <!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
by Sadhana Naithani
<b>Abstract </b>
How did colonialism add on to the repertoire of Indian oral folk narratives? In its everyday life colonial society had to deal with inter-culturality at every level--from personal to social. The colonisers' narratives about this experience have been known in the vast variety of discourse termed "orientalism." What has remained obscured is the narrative expression of this experience by the colonised, specifically as oral narrative expression. This discourse of the colonised is contemporary with that of the European orientalist, but from the opposite point of view. It thus creates, as it were, an axis jump in our perception of colonial relations. In this paper are discussed some oral narratives of Indian folk about their British colonisers in the nineteenth century.
The nails of a European, like those of a Rakshasa, distil a deadly poison, and hence he is afraid to eat with his fingers, as all respectable people do, and prefers to use a knife and fork. (Folk narrative recorded in the 1880s in northern India by William Crooke [1892, 9]) Everything in the story relates to people (Rohrich 1991, 214).
<b>An Axis Jump </b>
Colonialism generated not only the discourse of the European orientalists but also a vast discourse amongst the colonised. They constituted the two sides of the same axis of discourse--the axis of colonial relations, perceptions and representations. In the context of colonial British scholarship of Indian folklore, this axis comprises the British folklore collectors and the Indian narrators. The scholarship of Indian folklore since its beginning in the mid-nineteenth century has proceeded on the basis of perceptions from the British side of the colonial axis. Colonial British officers and their Indian associates collected traditional folk tales in the second half of the nineteenth century from professional and nonprofessional storytellers. <b>This article argues that there was also another discourse in the folk narrative of colonial India which concerned itself with the colonial rule and rulers, i.e. with the contemporary reality. </b>
There is no exclusive collection of such narratives, but some instances of such oral folk narratives popular in the late nineteenth century in North India have come to my notice. Although these are few in number and can therefore provide only tentative arguments and conclusions, they are remarkable in the kind of discourse they generate. Their numbers are few because stories that portrayed the British were not documented as narratives but were considered to fall into ethnographic and anthropological categories. When they come to our notice, therefore, it is mainly by accident. However, it seems to me that they build a case for further search and research aimed towards identifying them. Lutz Rohrich's insight, "Everything in the story is about people" (Rohrich 1991, 214), offers an analytical tool; when applied to the narratives of Indian folk of colonial India, it could lead to new conclusions (Rohrich 1991, 214).
Some of the colonial British folklorists (like R. C. Temple and William Crooke) were conscious of the emergence and existence of contemporary tales, yet they did not include them in their publications of Indian folk tales. The history of folklore research has shown that, since the inception of the science, the definition of "folklore" flows from the scholar's definition of "folk," and that folklore collections cannot be defined only by what they include, but have to be defined also by what they exclude (Naithani 1996, 75). British collectors of Indian folklore were also administrators, and their narrators were their colonial subjects; their folklore collections had intentional, incidental and potential administrative implications. The collection of folklore was one of the "three systems of imperial ethnography" (Morrison 1984, 1). What was included and what was excluded was based on many non-scholarly considerations. In this context, even if without conscious design, the tales of the Indian folk, which depicted their colonial reality, were not included in the folklore materials.
This article discusses a selection of obviously colonialism -generated folk narratives. The selection is centred on one theme only--the portrayal of the British in the lore of the nineteenth-century Indian folk. The first section, "Fantastic Realities," presents two narratives of the nineteenth century that seem to comment on the reality through extremely fantastic plots. The second section, "Fantasising the Real," discusses some tales that were told about real people--British officers and Indian saints and rebels. The last section, "Tell-Tales," raises issues and questions derived from these select narratives, as well as expanding on the argument that these narratives constitute an axis jump in our perception of colonial representations.
<b>Fantastic Realities </b>
The following two narratives were heard and collected by the well-known "administrator-scholar," William Crooke, and classified as "belief in ghosts and spirits." They were found not only to be in existence in the nineteenth century, but also to be so popular that they determined people's behaviour.
Momiai wala Sahib
<!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> In India the popular idea about Momiai is that a boy, the fatter and blacker the better, is caught, a small hole is bored in the top of his head, and he is hung up by the heels over a slow fire. The juice or essence of his body is in this way distilled into seven drops of the potent medicine known as Momiai ...  It is further believed that a European gentleman, known as the Momiai-wala-Sahib, has a contract from Government of the right of enticing away suitable boys for this purpose. He makes them smell a stick or wand, which obliges them to follow him, and he then packs them off to some hill station where he carries on this nefarious manufacture.  A very black servant of a friend of mine states that he had a very narrow escape from this Sahib at Nauchandi fair at Meerut, where Government allows him to walk about for one day and make as many suitable victims as he can by means of his stick ... (Crooke 1896, 177-8; emphasis added). <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Dinapur wala Sahib
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> Another of these dreaded Sahibs is the Dinapurwala Sahib, or gentleman from Dinapur. Why this personage should be connected with Dinapur, a respectable British Cantonment, no one can make out. At any rate, it is generally believed that he has a contract from Government for procuring heads for some of the museums, and he too has a magic stick with which he entices unfortunate travellers on dark nights and chops off their heads with a pair of shears (ibid., 179; emphasis added). <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
These are the basic storylines of two spirit tales from North India, to which many stories were added. It is not only the brutality of the action in the plot which is striking, but also all the other constants and the variables of the spirit tales. Though the idea of the Momiai was definitely pre-British, in appearance they are both (Momiai-wala-Sahib and Dinapur-wala-Sahib) Englishmen; they both catch Indian men, wield deadly weapons, and are on the prowl.
The narrative is, however, not only comprised of action (kidnap and murder) but elaborates it by exploring the source of power of the spirits. And, while the action may be similar to those of many other spirits, the powers, the motivation, appearance and location of these Spirit Sahibs is rooted in the contemporary contextual reality of the tellers' and the listeners' world. An obviously fantastic action plot is woven into a network of realistic means and ends. The spirits are English gentlemen, practise their craft with the permission of the government (in the form of a contract), in places exclusively related to the British colonial rule in India--cantonment and hill stations.
The tale itself was being narrated in British colonial India. If we take these elements into consideration, we realise that an age-old idea had transformed itself in time. Momiai were no more evil spirits with motives best known to themselves. The cultural and linguistic coding of the narrative seems, judging by its effect, to have been apparent to its listeners. The image is such that any white man could fit into it, and thereby any real person could be the deadly spirit. The narrator claimed to be a witness of the spirit at the Nauchandi fair and to have himself narrowly escaped being captured. Many claimed to have seen this Sahib, and almost none doubted the Spirit Sahib's "existence" and capacity to harm. William Crooke reports further that the narrative had an effect.
The curious street urchins and onlookers around the entourage of a visiting British official would vanish at the mention of Momiai-wala-Sahib. One summer, all the porters disappeared from the hill station of Simla, because the surgeon in town was rumoured to be the Momiai-wala-Sahib. This combination--context-text-context--shows that the Spirit Sahib was definitely not being searched for inside the narrative, but outside it in the world of the narrators, in which the primary line of social division and hierarchy was between the Indians and the British. These fantastic narratives prove the point made by Lutz Rohrich, that everything in the story is about people.
<b>The social and political power of the British in India, and the relationship between (British) individuals and the state seems to have involved the folk in an intense manner. The narratives, being that of oral tradition whereby continuous change and growth are inherent aspects of its existence, show not only an updating of the image of a spirit idea, but also a way of explaining, understanding, and then relating back to reality. </b>
<b>Fantasising the Real </b>
The narrative representation of the colonial state and its relationship with British individuals, especially officers, appeared not only in abstracted spirit tales, but also in the explanation of real official measures. George A. Grierson, for example, known for his voluminous works on Bihar peasantry and their agricultural terminology, was perceived and portrayed differently by the peasants themselves. The following "rumours" spread during his linguistic-ethnographic survey of the villages:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> Grierson Sahib is counting boats and cattle in order to take them away for the Government's war in Egypt. He is counting the wells because he is aware of an impending famine when these would be reserved for the British families. Children are being counted to be buried in the foundation of the bridge that the government is constructing over the Gandak river. Adults are being counted for use in war (based on Grierson 1885, 4). <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
These tales reflect an extreme mistrust of the colonial government, its officials and its measures. The insecurity regarding personal possessions and natural resources manifests itself in all the narratives, and the tellers seem to be convinced that any act of the Government could be in its own favour alone. These would not only be disadvantageous to the tellers but might even deprive them of their people and goods; in time of crisis, the Government would surely desert them. Whether the widespread effect of these stories, resulting in resistance to Grierson and his assistants, was based on an intended effectivity in the narratives is difficult to determine, but their power as communication cannot be overlooked. Tales in connection with real people show ways of coming to terms with the reality, and also of immortalising people in different ways. For example, the famous folklore collector Sir R. C. Temple cited a few examples of "folklore in ascendance" (Temple 1899, 5), one of them being about himself:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> A miracle in India does not strike much wonder, and is to some extent looked upon as a natural incident in everyday life ... They are frequently believed to have happened to Europeans themselves. Sir Henry Lawrence is thus believed to have been compelled to compliance with a saint's behest by terrifying occurrences, induced by the saint during sleep. Almost precisely the same story is current in the Ambala Cantonment about myself (Temple 1899, 340). <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
A third instance is connected to the public hanging of a hero of the 1857 Revolt, the Nawab of Loharu:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> The body of the Nawab of Loharu, who was hanged for encompassing the death of Mr. Frazer at Delhi some fifty years since, no doubt swung around, as is related, after death to the direction of Mecca (Makka). This may be called a fact of history, but when you add, as the natives of Delhi, that this was because he was innocent and a martyr, you are repeating a fact of Folk-lore (Temple 1899, 5-6). <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Temple acknowledges and identifies this as "folklore in ascendance." The tale, however, signifies also a discourse, which portrays not only the empirical phenomenon but also the narrators' judgement of it. <b>The discourse is partisan, not superstitious. It belongs to a time when such narratives were brutally suppressed.</b> How far is the narrative situation responsible for its form? This is a question made relatively redundant by the clarity of the message in the narrative. Conclusion: Tell-Tales
<b>When juxtaposed against the portrayals of the administrator-scholars, the narratives of the colonised folk contradict the British folklorists' many claims: that the lore of the Indian folk was ancient, spiritual and traditional; that it did not have any historical consciousness; that it was "completely" untouched by European influence; and that the narrators were incapable of any literary conception and representation of their contemporary socio-historical reality (Gordon 1909; Naithani 2001). </b>
Instead, they reveal the narrators' perception of the intrinsic relationship between the individual Englishmen and the colonial government of India. Secondly, they show the "self" as vulnerable to the powers of the state and its representatives; and thirdly, and rather surprisingly, they reveal a knowledge of contemporary phenomena, like the construction of museums in England, which was beyond the empirical observation of the narrators.
Instead of being passive bearers of a repertoire of tradition, the narrators emerge as self-conscious subjects whose narratives performed multiple functions in social communication. They were carriers of change and growth; as such, they did not possess live traditions so much as have a live relationship with tradition. This probably explains the use of traditional and archetypal images to define contemporaneity as well as to intervene in its processes. Thus, both--the traditional and the contemporary consciousness--mix to create a single image; for example, the deadliness of an Englishman is explained by identifying him with a Momiai, while the image of the Momiai changes to that of a European man.
<b>The vast body of this discourse remains undiscovered; further collections would show more aspects of its ideological leanings. </b>This selection and analysis is primarily meant to argue that the oral narrative expressions of the colonised folk have potential to create a new perspective on Indian folklore. The oral folk narratives discussed in this article represent the undiscovered and unrecognised side of the axis of colonial relations, perceptions and representations. <b>The colonised had to understand and define the coloniser in every area of their life. The narrative expressions of their cognitive processes reflect observation from close and afar, participative exploration, judgemental action and inaction. </b>
On the basis of these observations, I propose the following hypotheses:
* that, although a large number of these stories may be lost or may be found in unknown sources or only through extensive field research, many are already available in British sources under non-folkloristic categories like superstition and belief;
* that these narratives often conform to culturally and folkloristically well-established tale-types, and as such also represent the modernisation of traditions;
* that research into these narratives would bring forward new materials both for folklorists and for historians.
<b>References Cited</b>
Crooke, William. The Popular Religion and Folk-Lore of Northern India. 2 vols. Westminster: Archibald Constable and Co., 1896.
Gordon, E. M. Indian Folk Tales: Being Side-Lights on Village Life in Bilaspore, Central Provinces. London: Elliot Stock, 1909.
Grierson, George A. Bihar Peasant Life. Calcutta: The Bengal Secretariat Press, 1885. London: Trubner and Co., 1885.
Morrison, Charles. "Three Systems of Colonial Ethnography. British Officials as Anthropologists in India." In Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, ed. Henrika Kuklick and Elizabeth Long. Vol. 5. New York: JAI Press, 1984.
Naithani, Sadhana. "Political Ideology and Modernization of Folklore." Jahrbuch fur Volksliedforschung 41 (1996):71-5.
Naithani, Sadhana. "The Colonizer Folklorist." Journal of Folklore Research 34 (1997):1-14.
Naithani, Sadhana. "Prefaced Space: Tales of the Colonial British Collectors of Indian Folktales." In Imagined States, ed. Luisa Guidice and Gerald Porter. Utah: University of Utah Press, 2001.
Rohrich, Lutz. Folktales and Reality. Translated by Peter Tokofsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1978.
Temple, Richard Carnac. "The Science of Folklore." Folk-Lore Journal 4 (1896):193-212.
Temple, Richard Carnac. "The Folklore in the Legends of Punjab." Folk-Lore Journal 10(1899):414-43.
<b>Biographical Note </b>
Sadhana Naithani is Assistant Professor at the Centre of German Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her doctoral thesis, Politik der Liebe (Jawaharlal Nehru University, 1994), is an interpretative study of German folk songs. Her post-doctoral research work concerns the relations between colonialism and folklore research, between the British and the Indian collectors, and between the narratives and narrators in late nineteenth-century India. <!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->