Secondary Tales of the Two Great Epics

Author(s): Rajendra I Nanavati
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

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Introductory
“.... a more and more conscientious attempt was made to record tales exactly as they are current orally among the people, especially in countries (Ireland) where conditions of tale-telling are favourable.''32
Penzer says: “India is indeed the home of story-telling. It was from here that the Persians learned tho art, and passed it on to the Arabians. From the Middle East the tales found their way to Constantinople and Venice, and finally in the pages of Boccaccio, Chaucer and La Fontaine .... In warm latitudes the temperature has naturally produced a general laxity in the habits of the people, and in Eastern countries the often exaggerated code of hospitality, coupled with the exclusion of women and consequential gatherings of men in the cool of the evenings, has given great impetus to story-telling. So much so, indeed, that it has produced the Rawi, or professional story-teller, an important member of the community unknown in cooler latitudes, where the story-telling is al nost confined to the family circle,"33 The dialogue-form of the MBh, the innumerable ungrammatical or archaic forms, various idiomatic expressions and metre-filling devices so facilitated by the peculiarity of Sanskrit language which abounds in synonyms - all this goes to prove that the epics, and their secondary tales alongwith them, have been recorded for us as they were once current orally.
"Students of folk-tale are primarily concerned with problems of two kinds : (1) the origin and dissemination of tales and (2) the folktale as an art."34 (The first kind of problem naturally leads to the comparative aspect of the tales which, generally, we are not going to touch.) “The latter problem.... concerns the conditions of folk-tale telling (the kinds of people that tell tales, the circumstances of the telling, the reception by the audience, the way they are handed down), as well as the stylistic effects characteristic of this oral art,"35 Later on, we shall have occasions to consider these conditions in some details in the context of our epics. Here we may point out only briefly, that the tellers of these tales were mostly either Bardic singers, or the Brāhmin custodians of the Purānas - the Paurānikas-; the circumstances were sacrificial; the audience was characterised by religiosity; and the whole literature was, for the most part, handed down in oral tradition which is exemplified in the manner in which the larger epic is narrated first by Sanjaya, then by Vaišampāyana and finally by Sauti Ugraśravas.
"Oral narrative art of this kind abounds in repetitions, formulas, and other wellknown conventions. Often long passages recur .... most often ..... in threes and
32 Dictionary of World Literary Terms, Ed. J.T. Shifley, 1970, p. 125. 33 The Ocean of Story, Vol. I, Tr. Tawney, Ed. Penzer. Introduction, pp. xxxiv-xxxy & xxxvi. 34 Dictionary of World Literary Terins, Ed. J.T. Shipley, 1970, p. 125. 35 ibid.
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