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Topics, Notes, and Comments

Folklore and the Civilizing Gaze of Modernity: An Indian Folklorist in Colonial Karnataka

Pages 300-310 | Published online: 12 Aug 2019
 

Abstract

Studies on the history of folkloristics in colonial India during the second part of the nineteenth century have been hampered by excessive focus on European folklorists who published extensive collections of Indian folklore. The role of the indigenous folklorists and their agendas, as well as their ways of knowing and constructing folklore, has been ignored. The present article examines the contributions of the indigenous scholar V. N. Narasimmiyengar, an Indian civil servant in Mysore. It seeks to trace, examine, and analyse his active contribution to the making of folklore studies. The case of Narasimmiyengar may be regarded as representative of an engagement with modernity that led to a view of folklore as traditional, rural, and in need of the touch of civilization.

Notes

Notes

1 I thank the editors, anonymous reviewers, and my friend Sharmila Sreekumar for their useful comments on this article.

2 N. K. Rajyalakshmi’s (Citation2009) article exemplifies this dimension, demonstrating the dominant paradigm of Orientalism in the writings of Charles E. Gover on Kannada folk songs (Gover Citation1871). However, Stuart Blackburn and Sadhana Naithani’s seminal works are exceptions. Blackburn focuses on the south Indian folklorist Natesha Shastri (Blackburn Citation2003), and Naithani on the north Indian folklorist Pandit Ram Garib Chaube (Naithani Citation2009).

3 I have been unable to find out the details of his birth and death dates.

4 Now Mysore is one of the districts in Karnataka. Before India’s independence in 1947, it was an important princely state.

5 Post-colonial critics and theorists of the cultural history of colonial India following Edward Said (Citation1979) and Tejaswini Niranjana (Citation1992) are preoccupied with the analysis of Western Orientalism as all-pervasive and universal. It is understood by them as a cultural strategy to produce knowledge for the colonized, in the interests of the imperialists.

6 The early issues of the journal were reprinted in 1984 by Swati Publications in New Delhi, with original pagination. It is openly accessible online, as are the original volumes.

7 The British describe it as the Sipayi mutiny (mutiny of the soldiers) against British rule, while the Indian nationalists consider it the first struggle for India’s independence.

8 Gover echoes this in the introduction to The Folk Songs of Southern India, saying that folk songs are ‘irrefragable evidence of the real feelings of the mass of the people’ (Gover Citation1871, vi).

9 VNN was also a Provincial Superintendent of Census Operations 1891. His bureaucratic positions provided him an opportunity to interact with the local people and collect details about their folk cultures and traditions. However, the only mention of VNN as the first folklorist of Karnataka is found in a small article by S. Shashikala (Citation2003). It contains few details about him.

10 Brahmins claim to be superior to all other castes. VNN was proud of his caste background and expresses his pride (‘As an Indian and a fellow-Vaishnava’) in a letter of 1909 written to R. Narasimhachar, a well-known archaeologist and epigraphist (in Extracts from Some of the Letters from Scholars to Praktana-Vimarsa Vichakshana R. Narasimhachar, p. 38 [publisher and editor unknown]; this booklet is in the library of the Kannada Department of the University of Mysore, India, without a shelfmark). There are three Brahmin subcastes: the Smartas, the Madhwas, and the Shri Vaishnavites, to which VNN belonged. The last differs from other Brahmins in the interpretation of the Vedas (ancient Hindu texts, rituals, and devotional practices), but the common thread that binds all three is devotion to the god Vishnu. Compared to non-Brahmin castes, Brahmins occupied modern spaces and dominated intellectually and culturally so that they were the first to reap the benefits of modernity, such as the education introduced by the British. They therefore occupied a larger portion of the bureaucracy in the princely state of Mysore. The first Diwan (Prime Minister) of the state, C. Rangacharlu, was a Shri Vaishnava. D. V. Gundappa, a well-known political thinker, mentions some of the famous Iyengar (a surname attached to Shri Vaishnavites) bureaucrats of the time in his biographical notes on VNN (Gundappa Citation1998).

11 VNN was also well versed in Sanskrit. On many occasions he praised the progressiveness of his own community by quoting hymns from Sanskrit literature. See his article ‘Tonsure of Hindu Widow’ (Narasimmiyengar 1874c).

12 Gundappa remembers that VNN was very radical for his times. VNN believed that the sea voyage was a marker of human progress and rationality under the British rule at a time when sea voyages were seen as taboo among the orthodox sections of Indian society, specifically among the Brahmins (Gundappa Citation1998, 343). S. Srikantaiya, a long-time friend of VNN and a Kannada critic, opines that VNN ‘was, as he says, the first Mysorean who started on a prolonged tour through the classic north, with the object of enlarging his experiences of the world and of looking at things with a critical eye, uninfluenced by any superstitious notions’ (Srikantaiya Citation1950, 149).

13 The report also admires VNN’s criticism of orthodoxy and the ‘irrationality’ of the Brahmins in every aspect of their lives.

14 It is not certain whether he personally collected the folk legends and beliefs in the field or if someone else procured them for him.

15 They are European contemporaries of VNN who collected and published Kannada folk songs in English. For more information, see Boratti (Citation2015).

16 VNN calls bhutas ‘demons’ who are worshipped by lower-class people in order to appease them, to avoid their haunting, and to prevent any malicious acts on their part towards the inhabitants of Malnad, a thickly forested and mountainous area in western Karnataka. Abominations include, in his words, slaughtering of pigs, sheep, fowls, sprinkling the village with rice mixed with their blood, dancing around the stones, and other things. Traditionally, these bhutas have quite different connotations for the local people. Over twenty such bhutas are now worshipped as folk gods and celebrations are held for this purpose in several regions of Malnad and coastal Karnataka.

17 Chandragutti is famous for the temple of Renuka or Ellamma (situated in a hilly region of Sorab, a district headquarters in central Karnataka). A rite among the devotees of this goddess involves certain women (of non-Brahmin background) stripping and dressing themselves in the leaves of the neem tree and going around the temple to fulfil their previously registered vows. VNN remembers that, until a few years previously, there had been a tradition that barren women used to make a vow on the occasion of the festivals of the temple at Chandragutti to have illegal sexual intercourse so that the goddess might bless them with children.

18 For further reference, see Boratti (Citation2015).

19 The Marasa Vakkaligas are a dominant subcaste among the Vakkaligas, a non-Brahmin farming community in Karnataka. They are also one of the three most economically and educationally advanced castes in contemporary Karnataka. According to VNN, they were chiefly found in the southern regions of Karnataka: Nelamangala, Doddaballapura, Chikkaballapura, Malur, Hosakot, Kolar, and Bangalore.

20 In Hindu mythology, Bhasmasura (or Brahmasura) is an asura (demon) who was granted the power by the god Shiva to burn up and immediately turn into ashes (bhasma) anyone whose head he touched with his hand.

21 After narrating this legend, VNN gives a long description of the practice in the life of the Vakkaliga women.

22 This tale appears in the Bhagavata Purana, or Śrīmad Bhāgavata Mahā Purāṇa, which is one of the eighteen Great Puranas (Mahapuranas, ‘great myths’) of Brahminical Hinduism and also an ancient collection of religious and philosophical texts.

23 The word mangala means auspicious and sutra means thread. The groom ties the auspicious thread around the bride’s neck on their wedding day to symbolize their holy relationship. This auspicious thread is called taali or mangalya.

24 The curse of ‘rotting’ is hurled at the children of the Vakkaligas who were hidden in their houses. The ‘children of the streets’ here refers to those belonging to lower castes.

25 Rama is one of the gods particularly worshipped by the Brahmins across India, including the Shri Vaishnavites.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vijayakumar M. Boratti

Vijayakumar M. Boratti is an assistant professor of English in the University Evening College of the University of Mysore, India. He has been researching issues related to colonial literary and cultural history with specific focus on Karnataka. He has published articles in Folklore, Journal of South Asian Studies, South Asia Research, Studies in History, and Economic and Political Weekly, and in several edited books.

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