13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

SABARIMATHU, Carlos

Textualisation of the Difference of Gender, Age, Caste and Religion in Indian Folktales

This paper attempts to analyse how differences of gender, age, caste and religion are textualised and highlights the problems involved in this process.

A field collection of a few folktales and their versions from different classes or cohorts of people, say, male and female, elders and children, upper caste and down trodden, Hindus and Muslims, enables us to understand how folktales present these differences. Although Indian society is a multi-racial and multi-layered one, differences in relation to gender, age, caste and religion are not overtly represented in these folktales.

For example, two versions of a particular tale told by two men display certain changes. Almost the same changes are noted between the two versions of the tale even when subsequently they are told by members of the opposite sex - male or female informants. This is also the case with regard to age, caste and religion. Why social difference is not reflected in these tales is the question that I want to address in this paper.

A theoretical study of this absence of difference in terms of gender, age, caste and religion shows that the absence is covert. Another point is that when compared to the folktale structure told by a male, stories told by another male or female tend to keep intact generic boundaries, allowing deviation from the earlier form only in minor details. This generic sanction of minor differences is also allowed to occur between two tales told by two people with different social backgrounds. Here the difference is sanctioned to the extent that the earlier tale structure is retained, however, it is important to explore further the distinction between generic and social difference.

Another relevant question is how these two types of difference are accommodated inside the textual space of folktales. What are the strategies that these tales adopt to present this difference of gender, age, caste and religion, if another set of strategies go to account for the generic differences that operate in each telling of a tale. Are there covert representations of social and gender differences?

A new method of study needs to be developed in order to answer these questions. This new approach needs to be able to unravel the deeply structured techniques of a covert representation. Such a study would put the relationship between the referant and textualisation strategies in a new light.