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bivalent relation with the father) and that those elemental urges find indirect expression through folk liturature and folk-art, many folklorists discovered Oedipus Complex as underlying many a primitive. tales. But Jung, Fromm and a few other psychologists had serious reservations about the Freudian interpretation. They saw power and not sex as motivating jealousy between the father and the son and several folklorists found support for this point of view in numerous primitive tales.
Ramanujan, however, had contributed a paper entitled 'The Indian Oedipus', to the collection, 'Oedipus - a Folk-lore case took', which was based on a story he had heard years ago from a half-blind Kannada woman. The same story he has given in the sequel to him Introduction to 'Folk-Tales of India' (1989), and Indra Nath Chowdhuri, the Secretary to the Delhi Sahitya Akademi, alluded to it in his welcome address to the 'Seminar on oral tradition, written word and communication systems' held in 1992 at Delhi, the keynote address to which was delivered by Ramanujan. Chowdhury has given a very brief indication of the plot of the stoty :
A girl is borne with a curse on her head that she would marry her own son and beget a son by him... Then she hangs herself from a rafter with her sari used as a rope’. His conclusion is that 'literate tradition has more scope to hold orality in very low
