Literatures of the World--Panelist Francesca Orsini Presents Her Paper

Abstract

The invention of folk literature/loksahitya by Francesca Orsini (SOAS, London)

One of the tasks that world literature requires is to pluralise our assumptions about what literature is, and to widen its remit. Oral-performative genres feature significantly in our understandings of Indian literary history (whether devotional song-poems, Barahmasas/ “12-months songs” by all kinds of poets, including Urdu poets, tales, etc.). They stand at the beginnings of the process of “vernacularization” of Indian regional literary cultures between the second half of first and second millenniums CE, but also acted in dynamics of literary circulation, both across languages and scripts and also across oral and literate realms. The study of the production and circulation of these oral-performative genres has generated its own philological method (J.S. Hawley, K.S. Bryant, C.L. Novetzke et al.). Yet while some of the earliest colonial scholars of Indian vernacular languages and literatures (like George Grierson) recorded and studied a great number of these forms, they classified them as “folklore” rather than literature. Similarly Indian literary activists collected folk songs and sayings with verve, but viewed them as loksahitya, the expression of a timeless (and casteless) “folk”. The situation now is that oral-performative forms are studied largely by ethnographers (Ann Gold, Susan Wadley, Kirin Narayan) rather than as part of literature (exceptions like Stuart Blackburn and Rich Freeman and Narayana Rao notwithstanding). This paper will trace this development and ask how, with the pluralising of literature that comes with world literature, the process can be reversed, and what now counts as loksahitya can be viewed as part of sahitya or literature.