People are Still Hungry for Kings: folklore and oral history

"Knowledge no longer requires application to reality; knowledge is what gets passed on silently without comment, from one text to another. Ideas are propagated and disseminated anonymously; they are repeated without attribution; they have literally become idées reçues: what matters is that they are there to be repeated, echoed, and re-echoed uncritically." Edward W. Said, Orientalism. p.116.

In this brief paper my main argument is to focus on the traditional paradigm (I prefer to call it ‘palace paradigm’) of history writing and the weaknesses of this paradigm, which include falsehood, exaggeration and the hegemony of power politics. This hegemonic paradigm has not only misled generations, but has also obscured the story, the real story, of mankind and to a great extent perpetuated the power politics of this paradigm. The discovery of the writing system might have helped mankind in many ways but it certainly has also harmed mankind in many other ways. History-writing has completely depended upon the written metaphor and as such has added to the idiosyncratic expressions of the writing system. One could also add the dimensions of distance both in time and space that written systems create between the speaker-subject and the writer, between the historian and the human being. Linguistic and other evidence, such as the notions of dialects, standardization, diaglossia etc. support the above viewpoint. One must also keep in mind that the paradigms of writing history and writing literature have not only coexisted but have remained in free variation and more often than not interchangeable. This paper will also show how the basic characteristics of this paradigm such as chronology, archives and textuality are highly illogical and hegemonic in nature.

Tribal studies have been and still remain the main domain of anthropological studies in India and elsewhere. However, the bias of anthropological theory, which has been extended to tribal studies, has in recent times not only raised questions about the relevance of anthropological theory itself, but also of its relevance for tribal studies. The tribal and non-tribal question, therefore, needs to be viewed in terms of its relationship to basic resources (economic and other) and their management. In other words, rather than treating this problem as an economic problem and a problem of sharing resources and technology, it has been, because of the borrowed colonial paradigm, treated as a problem of ethnicity and racism by scholars. So, given the wrong paradigm, it is not surprising to find this problem being treated as diachronic rather than a synchronic problem in conditions where we find the processes of tribalisation at work even now. How tribal people view the oral historical discourse in India and Africa will finally show us the weak foundations of this traditional paradigm of thinking history, writing history and perpetuating ‘history’.