Myths, Tales and Folklore: Exploring the Substratum of Cinema

POPULAR film is a form of story-telling, and traces a linear descent from r tual and myth, folklore and traaitional tales. Even wh n this link is obscured, as it often is in the West, sociologists have been quick to notice that both the cinema and the older narrative traditions stand to society in a relation of functional equivalence. The teller of tales, the bard and the strolling minstrel were as much vehicles for the expression of emotion and society's beliefs about morality, as the cinema is today. This is particularly clear in India, where the cinema has actually overlapped with these traditions and displaced them. Unlike in the West, no long intervening literary culture separated the oral traditions of peasant society from the advent of cinema. Indeed, that the cinema actively set out to displace folk entertainments is suggested by the fact that the cinema appropriated its forms, transposing its ingredients and often its subjects, into the standard fare of the Indian screen. Yet apart from the appropriation of its forms and an apparent similarity of function, the precise nature of the traffic in ideas and inspiration between the oral narrative traditions and Indian popular cinema is not at all clear. There are huge gaps of information. It is possible to view cinema, on the one hand, as part of a vast historical osmotic process in which the creative juices have passed slowly through the bardic traditions and epics, the miracle plays and urban Vaishnav theatre, suddenly to emerge in the neon glare of a great urban mass entertainment. Opposed to such a theory of continuity is a view that stresses the newness of popular cinema. The nature of its technology, the Western influences, but also, the very fact of its transregional appeal, are all cited as evidence of the cinema's discontinuities with traditional culture. At any rate, for any exploration of popular cinema in India, an important dimension of understanding may be served by exploring the substratum of oral narrative traditions that have functioned as popular rural media for centuries. Pradip Krishen talks to Komal Kothari whose main field of work is the folklore and ethnography of Rajasthan.