THE ADVENT OF ASIAN CENTURY IN FOLKLorE - Wiki - National ...

FOLKLORE AND CREATIVITYtheir house looks. The best way to protect people anddocument their potentialities is, first, to reveal theirnames and identity as individuals with reference to theirenvironment, instead of hiding them under emptygeneralisations or deleting their personal lifefeatures. Extractinga performance outof the performer’slife space andsocial relationsc a n n o tapprehendindividual’screativity. Aperformer’screativitylies in theirrapport.Secondly,with regard to theperformance itself, no tune repeatsitself two times absolutely equal to itself. A storyonce repeated will adapt to each particular situationand only variants exist. The storyteller’s creativity isrealised when we listen several times to the same storyin different moments and situations. The tale is affectedby the interaction of the teller with his audience, andthe ethnographer as well, while being narrated.Creativity is the function of interaction. There is nopure, original folk-tale. The text of a tale or song thatremains with the ethnographer is only an abstract, anemblem or a short sample of the reality of the singerand his culture.Kherati Ram Bhatt’s homeAll theories arebound todisabuseFolklore is notan anonymouscultural item.We oftenassume thata folktraditionsuch as asong or atale is acollectivewealth and has nocomposer. Even when the composer’sname is not known, a great poet composer willbe credited with the song creation, as is the case inIreland. It was felt that the issue of the individual versusthe collective in respect of oral traditions should not beviewed only with reference to a western approach tofolklore, in which the concept is applied to modernpractices and innovations which are launched byindividuals before becoming popular in the opinion; asAt Ghazi Khan’s Institute-Bharnaa consequence legal questions of authorship andcopyright are to be acknowledged once the product hasbecome a commodity. The example of a song composedby a Rajasthani traditional singer and shared by thewhole community of Manganiyar singers for decades inRajasthan before being commercially appropriated bymass media with an immense and profitable successbecomes a legal question of authorship and copyrightin a modern context only. The previous popularity ofthe song was not credited to an individual’s rights andconsciousness against the collective consciousness ofhis community. This does not mean that folk songs inIndia are cultural goods, which belong nowhere andstand as nobody’s property; the performers own themas the common heritage of their community. Even whenno name can be mentioned as the author of a givenfolklore, this does not mean that the latter can beconsidered as an aesthetic item isolated from mooringsin a concrete community and surviving withoutperformers or carriers.This issue of individual carriers or performers versus acommunity was unsatisfactorily discussed. Let us referto two instances of traditional practices. The story-tellerof an oral narrative will put his name as being thenarrator or carrier but not the author of the tale or mythwhich the whole community owns as his wealth; thenarrative does not stand by itself as anybody’s ornobody’s story, but neither as a singular individual’sproperty. Similarly, the formula of identification andthe signature of authentification of the collectivetradition of the grind mill songs in India are spelt outby the phrase: I tell you, woman. This implies a sharedappropriation of the tradition by an individual womansinger in the performance itself, through embeddingherself and incorporating her testimony within thecommon heritage; the question of ascribing the song toan individual artist’s name never occurs and would seemincongruous. Artist’s anonymity points simultaneouslyto a commonly shared heritage and a deeplypersonalised identification of oneself within the commonheritage in the moment it is received and commonlycarried over.Should we not conceive of a process of individualisationor personalisation growing abreast with an increasingsymbiotic interaction of each carrier with the othermembers of his community, each one reaching in eachperformance a deeper stage of himself/herself or shapinga new a material heritage through his/her identificationwith the very collective heritage of the community? Theindividual and the collective seem to be better construedinteractively and communicatively than antitheticallywhen we deal with traditional forms of tangible orintangible culture. This issue is crucial as it has adeterminant bearing on methods and procedures ofdocumentation. It calls for further elaboration as thecreativity and fate of people’s traditions dependconstitutively on the interaction of all members throughmodes of symbolic communication and systems of oral17INDIAN FOLKLIFE VOLUME 1 ISSUE 5 APRIL 2001