New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi President Vishwanath Prasad Tiwari believes “capitalist consumerism has adverse effect on folk culture” despite continuous efforts to preserve the culture and traditions.
Citing Mahatma Gandhi’s take on British education system that “Colonisation is uprooting the Indian tree of knowledge”, Tiwari said, “We are facing it right now. Capitalist consumerism has adverse effect on folk culture as it is pulling people away from the tradition.”
Speaking at the inaugural session of national seminar titled ‘Folklore: Tellings and Retellings’ at Sahitya Akademi’s Festival of Letters, Tiwari emphasised on the importance of the Indian oral tradition of storytelling.
“Indian society follows oral tradition. All these ancient mythological stories that we have today come from a longstanding oral tradition.
“Today we have several stories that are believed to be written literature like Vedas, Ramayana and Mahabharata, but their origin is also oral,” Tiwari said.
While Tiwari talked about the rich tradition of folk culture, vice President Chandrashekhar Kambar noted how researchers are causing a “crisis to folk traditions”.
“Only during this century the folk tradition is facing a crisis which is threatening its continuity, the crisis is not due to industrialisation, or growth of mass media. The folk tradition can survive all these changes. The crisis is in another form that is of self consciousness of the researcher,” Kambar said.
“The researcher’s attitude of feeling superior to his object of the study is objectionable as he turns everything into dead object of study,” Kambar said.
The first session of the three-day event was also attended by English author and columnist Tabish Khair, eminent folklorist Jawaharlal Handoo along with writer and Sahitya Akademi Fellow Manoj Das.
Handoo in his keynote speech highlighted the need to “revive and rewrite” history because most of it has been written without the “participation of people”.
“One wonders how we can write history without the participation of the people about whom the history is written.
Real history of India is still available in the form of folklore and requires our attention,” Handoo said.
PTI
