13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

NAITHANI, Sadhana

Wildly Ours: a new Panchtantra

This paper documentats and analyses contemporary animal stories that have been narrated orally as well as through print and electronic media. Excluded from these are stories about pet/domesticated animals. Under consideration are stories about wild/free animals that live at different distances from human beings/habitat. Some stay rather close and keep invading the newer and newer defence systems invented by humans. Some stay further away, are feared, and have also been the subject of stories. They sometimes stray into human habitat due to the shrinkage of their own or come into accidental contact with human beings. All such encounters, whether those that appear more casually or those that are rare sights, generate stories and are narrated. Every now and then, some individual story or community experience grows to an extent that it has to be narrated publicly. An analysis of these establishes the narrators' relationship with nature, history and culture on a new plane. In this age of science and technology, the tales about nature and natural phenomena do not perform the simplistic role of their predecessors, because science can, and already has, answered many more questions. Yet tales about natural phenomena are still told, and abound in popular discourse. The nature of tales about nature and animals is simultaneously reflective of the traditional and the contemporary consciousness on the subject. For example, the treatment of monkeys in popular narratives in India is often a metaphorical comment on socio-political phenomena and reports on the migrating elephants annually recount the history of deforestation.