Kirin Narayan

Banana Republics and V. I. Degrees: Rethinking Indian Folklore in a Postcolonial World

The A. reviews British-based folklore studies in India, identifying a paradigm of self-contained peasant authenticity that viewed references to changing social realities as adulterations that must be edited out. He contrasts such suppressions of change with the conscious revamping of folklore materials to disseminate nationalist, Marxist, feminist, and development ideologies. He turns to contemporary examples of creative change in folklore, with a focus on urban joke cycles that are largely ignored by folklorists. He ends with suggestions for theoritical reorientations breaking down the rigid distinction between « us » as metropolitan analysts, and « them » as the folk enmeshed in tradition.

Moving Stories: Beyond the Local in Ethnography and Fiction

Brown eyes fizzing with mischief, a giant smile creasing her angular face, Vidhya twisted from side to side. She mimed Charity’s search for the crow, scanning the courtyard; the whitewashed stand for the sacred basil plant, the plastic chair and the low orange rim of marigold bushes. Then she laughed, throwing out a palm towards me. I touched her palm, sharing in the joke. This was 1994, and I had been visiting the Himalayan foothill region of Kangra, Northwest India, for almost twenty years: long enough to know that mentioning a crow’s polluting touch was a euphemism for menstruation among high-caste women. Charity, though, the fictional blonde anthropologist of Kangra whom I was trying to imagine into being, was for Vidhya clearly a misguided outsider, both childlike and earnest.