TRIBAL VERSE (Woven Words)

 An essay by G.N. Devy

Marginalisation of communities

According to the Encyclopaedia of Public Health marginalised groups are the people who are placed in margins and thus are excluded from the privileges and power found at the centre. Marginalised groups can always be identified by the members of dominant society, and will face irrevocable discrimination.

accelerated pace- fast pace

canonized written texts is a set of text for a particular community or a tribe of people considered as their scripture.

tribal vision of life – life in the view of a tribe.

cohesive and organically unified group - organised and biologically interconnected group of people.

itinerant street singers- nomadic street singers

Oral tribal literature- Oral tradition, or oral lore, is an oral form of human communication, where knowledge, art, ideas are received, preserved, and transmitted orally from one generation to another. The transmission is through speech or song and may include folktales, ballads, chants, prose, or verse.

Hallucinatory- Hallucinations are where someone sees, hears, smells, tastes or feels things that don't exist outside their mind.

Motif-pattern or image

Spatial-dimensional (3 dimension or 4 dimension)

Folklorist- a person who studies folklore, especially as an academic subject.

Anthropologist- Anthropologists are scientists who study the development and behaviours of human beings throughout the world, present and past, to help better understand humanity as a whole. They examine biological, archaeological, linguistic or sociocultural traditions, depending on their area of expertise

Itinerant-nomadic, traveler

Subverting- weakening

Assimilate-integrate, take in

Inevitable- predictable, unavoidable

Animate world- living world

Trance-dream

Pretentious-exaggerated

benevolent and malevolent- kind and unkind(wicked)

Beseeching- pleading, requesting

Fowl- chicken

Emul – emulsion or medicine

Ridin - Ridin is a creeper that is supposed to have special medicinal qualities.

1. What does the author insist in this chapter?

The author insists on a new method to identify and read literature in which orality is not dismissed as casual utterances in different dialects. A vast number of Indian languages have yet remained only spoken, with the result that literary compositions in these languages are not considered ‘literature’. They are a feast for the folklorist, anthropologist and linguist but, to a literary critic, they generally mean nothing.


2. Identify the common characteristics shared by tribal communities all over the world.

Most tribal communities in India are culturally similar to tribal communities elsewhere in the world. They live in groups that are cohesive and organically unified. They show very little interest in accumulating wealth or in using labour as a device to gather interest and capital. They accept a world-view in which nature, human beings and God are intimately linked and they believe in the human ability to spell and interpret truth. They live more by intuition than reason, they consider the space around them more sacred than secular, and their sense of time is personal rather than objective. The world of the tribal imagination, therefore, is radically different from that of modern Indian society.


3. Give a brief note on Munda tribes.

The Munda tribes live in parts of Jharkhand, West Bengal, Assam, Tripura, Madhya Pradesh and Orissa. They are also known as Horohon or Mura, meaning headman of a village. One of the most studied tribal communities of India, they also have an encyclopaedia on them, Encyclopaedia Mundarica (16 Volumes) by Reverend John Baptist Hoffman (1857–1928) and other Jesuit scholars. The Munda are probably the first of the Adivasis to resist colonialism and they revolted repeatedly over agrarian issues. The Tamar insurrection of 1819–20 protested against the break-up of their agrarian system. In their quest to establish Munda Raj and reform their society to enable it to cope with the challenges of time, they organised the famous millennial movement under Birsa Munda (1874–1901) where their leaders used ‘both Hindu and Christian idioms to create a Munda ideology and worldview’. However, the uprising was quelled by the British.


4. What is the status of women in Munda society?

In Munda society, the women have a dominant role to play in the various economic, social and ritual activities.


5. Give a brief note on Kondh tribe.

The term ‘Kondh’ is most probably derived from the Dravidian word, konda, meaning hill. Divided into several segments and distributed over the districts of Andhra Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Orissa, these hill people speak the Kondh language though most of them are bilingual and so conversant with the major language of the state to which they belong. The Kondh religion is a mixture of the traditional faith of the Adivasis and Hinduism. They do not have any dowry system but they do fix a bride price that the groom pays to the bride either in cash or in kind.


6. Give a brief note on Adi tribe.

Adi is a generic term denoting hill people and it includes a number of groups. It may be applied to all the hill tribes around the Brahmaputra valley. The Adi are, however, concentrated in the East and West Siang district of Arunachal Pradesh. The Adi have two major languages that they use for two different purposes. The language for routine conversation is called Adi Agom. The second major language still in use is Miri Agom, highly rhythmic language used for chanting during their rituals.


7. Give a brief note on the belief system of Adi.

They believe that every object in the universe, be it human beings, animals, trees or birds, have a spirit that needs to be nourished and propitiated. Dependent on nature for many of their needs, they believe that equilibrium in nature must always be maintained. Even though hunting is considered not just a means of procuring food but also an expression of courage and skill, they still believe that human beings must hunt for survival and not for greed. The headman of the village is generally the best hunter.


8. What distinguishes the tribal imagination from the secular imagination?

They live more by intuition than reason, they consider the space around them more sacred than secular, and their sense of time is personal rather than objective. The world of the tribal imagination, therefore, is radically different from that of modern Indian society. Once a society accepts a secular mode of creativity within which the creator replaces God, imaginative transactions assume a self-conscious form. The tribal imagination, on the other hand, is still, to a large extent, dreamlike and hallucinatory. It admits fusion between various planes of existence and levels of time in a natural way.


9. How does G.N. Devy bring out the importance of the oral literary tradition?

Devy brings out the importance of the oral literary tradition by referring to the richness of the works of the tribes that have been handed down from one generation to the other orally. Devy advocates that proper recognition should be given to the oral literary tradition in view of its variety and richness.


10. List the distinctive features of the tribal arts.

One of the distinctive features of tribal arts is their distinct manner of constructing space and imagery, which might be described as 'hallucinatory'. In both oral and visual forms of representation, tribal artists seem to interpret verbal or pictorial space as demarcated by an extremely flexible 'frame'.


11. ‘New literature’ is a misnomer for the wealth of the Indian literary tradition. How does G.N. Devy explain this?

The songs and stories of the tribes have been transmitted orally and as these have not been written down so many people have been unaware of them. The essayist contradicts the views of the western literary critics who have termed tribal literature as 'New Literature'. The author says that it is not something new but it is something that already exist.