Double Voiced Discourse: Karna Parampara Katha
Or the Orally Narrated Tale in Tamil

Sujatha Vijayaraghvan
Reader in English
Pondicherry University .
16.11.2004

       The orally narrated tale is a semi-literary genre, in the sense, it partakes of both the qualities of everyday speech as well as the artistry of the language in which it is narrated. It is perhaps the only literary genre which practically anyone can be a creator or receiver of. Even bare literacy is not imperative. Anyone can tell a tale, providing that he or she is able to speak and has a bit of imagination. Which is why the child that has begun to speak and respond to a situation with some feeling, becomes capable of 'carrying a tale', of making something out of something else, of interpreting. This is because the story-teller almost always wants to "tell" something, in the metaphoric sense of "telling", to the listener. But when the teller narrates a story what he does is far different from the writer of the story who sets out to create a piece of literature. The speech act combining with individual proficiency of 'telling', accesses the twists and turns of everyday speech and the more colloquial and close is the tale, to day to day reality, the more effective is the presence of the flavor of the spoken language in all it's variations. Freed from restraints of societal norms of speech, the teller of the oral tale has the license to create his own grammar for his narration. Combining with extra-lingual skills such as gesture, intonational variations, use of regional registers, idiosyncrasies in pronunciation and the judicious use of humor, the teller of the tale stretches the parameters of his artifact in such a way that finally the right use of a language becomes only one of its uses. Therefore the links and dependencies between the utterance and the language is never a simple one to one relationship. Rather, it becomes complex and dialogic.

      An orally narrated tale keeps changing from time to time, absorbing the social ethos and events of the age when it is told with the imaginary and linguistic warp and woof available to the teller. The changes in the details of the tale may be dictated to, by contextual needs: individual, social and political. Thus by its very nature this kind of a narrative is concentrically intertextual, moving backwards and forwards in its borrowings and yet keeping to itself. This flexibility which constantly opens up new shades of meaning every time it comes into being therefore makes it dialogic, so that the same story may signify new meanings of the older story or even create radically opposite meanings. Therefore the older the story the more complex it's 'history' and the older the culture the more the possibilities of dialogic subversions.

      For purposes of illustrating this contention some examples are taken from the Karna Parampara Katha (which forms the core of oral literature along with the folk-song) that circulate in the Tamil language. A remarkable feature of the Indian tradition (I am using words like "tradition" and "culture" only functionally and not in any nuanced way) is that no matter how philosophically grand an idea, it has its critique in one form or another. Every system of thought, one could say almost every seminal idea has a counter-system of thought, a counter-concept. The orally narrated tale excels in this function. Whatever the system of thought, or counter-thought, it targets foundational structures. Here are some illustrations: perhaps nowhere in the world does the guru or the master occupy so much of the life-space of a people as he does in this country. Yet his teachings are constantly subverted with a vigor that sometimes outweighs the original force which builds them up. The guru himself as a person becomes the butt of personal jokes and caricaturing. The orally narrated tale has often taken care of this subversive act, provoking the listener/ (now) reader to give the matter a second thought, as it were. A popular oral collect in Tamil known as the Paramartha Guru Kathaigal is fully devoted to puncturing the master-figure and the very idea of the master- disciple or the guru-parampara concept. A loosely sequential string of stories, this hilarious 'text' has six central characters, the master and his five disciples. The master is known as the Paramartha Guru or One who is the Embodiment of the Supreme Truth (parama+artha+guru). As such, the truth that he is a manifestation of, can never is understood through the tools of the mind and intelligence, for it is The Truth that must by its own definition, remain ideational with even the idea an approximated and hypothetical necessity. This means that the master is infallible in his most supreme wisdom, so much so, that any question of doubt is ruled out altogether. After all how can one question that which cannot be known? Thus acquitted of his shaming, the master wades through one escapade after another without a stain to his holy name. To begin with what makes the Paramartha Guru a master is that he has a following of five disciples (who are types or flat characters). They are given names such as Moorkhan, Matti, Muttal and so on. They behave as their names suggest because where the fool plays the wise man, the disciples must in reality be fools. Although there are variations of these tales from one version to another, by and large they are similar.

      In a well-known episode, the disciples set out to get a horse for their aging master to ride on during his travels. They are conned by an unlettered peasant who sells them a pumpkin, at a very high price, assuring them that it is a through-bred horse's egg. The disciples carry it slowly and carefully, stopping often in their journey so that the colt inside the egg is not traumatized by the movement. During one such interval, they rest the pumpkin in the thick foliage of a low tree and sit down beneath it. A stiff wind topples the pumpkin into a bush behind where a hiding rabbit takes off in a terrified sprint, followed at once by the disciples who wish to retrieve the escaping colt. But the story does not stop here as a mere parody of foolishness. The disciples return empty-handed to the master and narrate their misadventure. The master is at first disappointed but soon recovers to pronounce philosophically that it was a good thing after all. He argues that if a prematurely born colt is so high-spirited than what would the nature of the adult horse be, not to speak of the plight of the rider upon it? The disciples are consoled when they see the matter in a new light. But the listener/reader is puzzled by the ending of the story. In accepting the ridiculous Pumpkin Horse-egg adventure the master shares the idiocy of his disciples to the full and thereby becomes the complete subversion of the traditional concept of the master. But in suddenly taking shelter under a fairly sound system of logic, he disturbs the subversion that he represented only a moment ago. So a simple tale that ran counter-wise seems to become complementary. At the same time the extraordinary use to which the system of Logic has been teased into is no small matter. The tale can therefore turn back on itself while turning things around thus leaving its meaning indeterminate. The conceptual defiance must come to its logical finish if the tale is to make its point. As it happens in this tale, this collection poses several impossibilities only because our sense of the possible is disturbed. A well injected vein of satire on several cardinal philosophical concepts runs through story after story. This tale laughs at the voluminous exegeses on cosmogenesis. At the same time the language and principles of logic, demystify themselves by their employment in incongruous settings.

      In another tale which is well known all over India , the Paramartha guru and his five disciples cross a river in spate. On reaching the other bank the master counts the others leaving himself out. The others do the same. Always failing to count up to six the whole group collapses on the river bank weeping for the comrade lost in the waters. A passing fisherman enquires and sizes up the situation. He then lines up the six fools and instructs them to shout their serial number as he gives them a hard knock on the head, thus reuniting the band once again. A grateful master pays the fisherman a large amount of money. Actually, this story is used by Sankara in his commentary on the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad in a context that remarks on how man forgets his self and looks at everything and everyone else around him. In the case of that text, the preceptor using this analogy, reminds the disciple of his self. Here, the fisherman helps the master to recover the lost student not through any elaborate metaphysical teaching but by a quicker and more direct method. This is what makes for the use of the tale in one context and another. Much of the satire lies not only in the method of retrieval but also on what is retrieved. In the one it is the wisdom of the self and in the other, it is the foolish disciple. Moreover, as it happens in the case of the Pumpkin Horse-egg story, here also, the outsider figure who arrives into the context is the total opposite of the master -disciple group. If they represent wisdom he is either a simple villager or an illiterate. Yet it is he who finally gets the better of them. One could give a number of examples where the narrative imagination effects this kind of a defamiliarization.

      The carnivalesque success of the tale and its enjoyment lies in the shared knowledge both the narrator and the listener have of the original, traditional matrix of the meaning of words as well as its subversive and creative possibilities. However the two meanings can never be seen as separate entities, because for each to function effectively the other must act as a foil. Therefore the orally I narrated tale exploits the inherently dialogic nature of words, here for instance 'master'. Dialogic readings of the word impressing upon lived experience make the tale possible, providing, that the cultural context allows this alliance. So using the same set of words to decode known systems of thought, new discourses come into being, always questioning the neutrality of words.

      One can think of a number of collections of the orally narrated tale constructed like the Paramartha Guru Kathaigal using binary divisions, like the Akbar-Birbal tales or the Tenali Ramakrishna -Krishnadevaraya tales. While history texts accord Akbar a high rank among the Moghuls, substituting the claim with reference to the efflorescence in art and learning, it is always Birbal who gets the better of the two, offering commonsensical solutions to tricky situations. Similarly in the Tenali Ramakrishna -Krishnadevaraya tales, the court jester outwits not only his patron but all the scholars of the court. He has the special gift of fathoming a riddle or revealing what is hidden from sight and understanding. Some of the finest specimens of temple art and architecture in south India were the product of Krishnadevaraya' s zeal and he was himself a poet of repute. But in every encounter with Tenali Ramakrishna he eats the bitter fruit. In such tales it is not the king who is the hero but the vikata kavi or the vidushaka whose special talent is his use of language in newer and unprecedented ways. The term kathasesha refers to a person who exists only as sesha or residue in the stories and legends about him. While the official canons of history define exhaustively the life and achievements of legendary heroes and kings, the orally narrated tale upsets conventional hierarchies, reads history cynically and redefines categories. Thus a historic figure like Krishnadevaraya is reduced to 'kathasesha'.

      Institutions are also pulled down at times. Recall for instance, tales celebrating the wisdom of Mariyadai Raman. A runaway peasant boy, Raman emerges as the finest judge of the Chola kingdom. He assesses every case with exceptional insight and objectivity which is why he is known as Mariyadai Raman. Since law and justice are generally incompatible, Raman posits an alternative figure to the judge in his society. In these tales the corrupt judges of the court stand in opposition to Raman who does not have scholarship but rather a deep sense of righteousness. The oral tale becomes an alter world where things are set right in a language that is known to the common man.

      In all the three collections mentioned so far, humor laces every episode pungently and while serious reversals are effected, no ill will is meant. The orally narrated tale is irrepressible and nothing contains it. The teller of the tale stands outside the language he is using and manipulates the speech of the characters to project his own subversive intentions in a refracted way. The comic, ironic utterances of parody create the 'double-voiced discourse' which serves at the same time two speakers, expressing the direct intention of the character within the fictional context and the refracted intention of the story-teller. In carnivalised literature such as the orally narrated tale, nothing is a high or true utterance that is also not at the same time low and false. Signifiers such as 'master', 'king' and 'philosopher', to refer to the examples given above, are released from official contextualization and regenerated by the au~or through the characters so that, what results is " a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousness, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices"(Emerson trans. of Bakhtin 1984 : 6) Whether these kinds of tales were started off and set in circulation as a satire of formalized thinking or simply for the sheer fun of it -like school boys nick- naming the headmaster because they cannot defy him openly-is left for us to guess at. Whatever the motive, it is clear that the 'author' must be learned in life. ,~ This takes us to another important question: who really is the author of the tale, for it depends on the narrator and the listener for its survival. Every time a narrator appropriates a tale to suit his need and imagination he creates it and every time the listener hears it and appropriates it into his individual or social context, he creates it too. A knowledge of the listener's social and personal identity, gives the teller of the tale has an edge over the writer. Constantly provided with a feed-back from the audience even as he narrates the tale, he can rapidly modify items of information, shift the focus of the tale to suit the audience's mood or even provoke the listener to enter into the tale by making the references recognizably personal. Thus he receives, creatively, certain benefits which the writer of the story does not. This is why the oral tale has an existence that challenges time. As the social situations change, as the listeners change, as the language changes, the tale keeps changing too, to come into being relevantly.

      Therefore the orally narrated tale is known as the Kama Parampara Katha or to I translate literally, The Ear-Tradition Tale. It cannot have an author in the sense of a text being written by the author. Compilations and editions in print make these tales available to many, but we find quite often (see my reference list to my paper) that editors print their own name under the head of author. Leaving aside the question of publication ethics, a more serious point is to be considered. The very forte of an oral tale lies in its anonymity, its defiance to closure, its availability to all people at all times and its endlessly self-generating power. Being antique, no authentic claittl can be made to its authorship. The absence of a manuscript does not facilitate verification. Many versions of the same tale as well as the simultaneous existence of the same tale in several traditions only complicate the matter. So the privilege of the authorship of the orally narrated tale lies with all people of all times, owing itself to a shared matrix of the knowledge of life as well as the incurable human impulse to pull things apart and upside down to know it better. The orally narrated tale is thus a spacious literary genre which enables epistemological and semantic conversions, both delighting and instructing at the same time. W4ile scholars and philosophers present counter-systems of thought in elaborate, theses, the orally narrated, tale prefers the fisherman's straightforward tactics- of a 'hard blow, not caring even for the written word.

*************************

Reference:

      Bakhtin, Mikhail.(1984) Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Ed. and Trans.Carl .Emerson, with an Introduction by Wayne C. Booth. Theory and History of Literature, V 01.8. Manchester : Manchester University Press.

Balaguru. (2002) Paramartha Guru Kathaigal. Chennai: Sri Indu Publications.

------------ (2002) Tenali Ramakrishna Kathaigal. Chennai: Sri Indu Publications.

Devasenapathi. (2002) Mariyadai Raman Kathaigal. Chennai: Sri Indu Publications.

************************