Essays - 4. Tribal Verse

Tribal communities all over the world share common characteristics. They live in groups that are cohesive and organically unified. They show very little interest in accumulating wealth or in using labour to gather interest and capital. They accept a world-view in which nature, human beings and God are intimately linked and they believe in the human ability to spell and interpret truth. They live more by intuition than reason, they consider the space around them more sacred than secular, and their sense of time is personal rather than objective.

The tribal imagination, unlike the secular imagination, is dreamlike and hallucinatory. It admits fusion between various planes of existence and levels of time in a natural way. In tribal stories, oceans fly in the sky as birds, mountains swim in the water as fish, animals speak as humans and

stars grow like plants, which is highly unlike the secular imagination. Spatial order and temporal sequence do not restrict the narrative in the tribal imagination.

G.N Devy, through his essay, attempts to highlight the richness of the oral literary tradition. He believes that literary compositions in many Indian languages are not considered as literature because they have remained only spoken. These languages are a feast for the folklorist, anthropologist and linguist but, to a literary critic, they generally mean nothing. Many nomadic Indian communities who are spread over long distances still survive as communities because they are bound by their oral epics. He emphasizes the enormity of wealth and variety of these works. G.N. Devy, for many years, collected songs and stories that circulate in India’s tribal languages, and was overwhelmed by their number and their profound influence on the tribal communities. He advocates that the deserved recognition be given this rich literature.

G.N. Devy lists certain distinctive characteristics of tribal arts, one of which is their unique manner of constructing space and imagery, which might be described as ‘hallucinatory’. In both oral and visual forms of representation, tribal artists seem to interpret verbal or pictorial space as demarcated by an extremely flexible frame. The boundaries between art and non-art become almost invisible in tribal arts. Tribal paintings merge with living space as if the two were one and the same. There is no deliberate attempt to follow a sequence. Tribal paintings also contain a curious mixture of traditional and modern imagery.

Classifying tribal literature as ‘new literature’ is comical, at least to the literary community in India. It is a matter of being unaware of its existence, with absolutely no fault of the tribals themselves. The literature itself isn’t new, it is the attempt to see the imaginative expression in tribal language that is new. G.N. Devy thus emphasizes the need to hear tribal speech not as a dialect but as a language.

Literature should no longer be considered as something written. It is necessary that we remind ourselves that any depiction with a meaning, whether written or not, should constitute as literature. A failure to do so, as G.N. Devy said, will lead to a silent decline of Indian oral traditions. The numerous tribes and their oral compositions will be lost in our stubborn attempt to limit literature to something written.

Tribals arts, being non-commercial in purpose, helps in the growth and preservation of tribal arts. They are usually a unique mixture of the sacred and ordinary. They often carry a playful tone, although sacred to a certain extent. In fact, listening to tribal epics can be great fun as heroes are not spared of artist’s humor. The tribal artists do expect a certain amount of patronage from the community, like artists in any other context. But, since those performing rituals are very often artists themselves, there is no element of competition in the patron-artist relationship. The tribal arts are, therefore, relaxed, never tense.

Many fail to notice that all of India’s tribal communities are basically bilingual and that all bilingual communities have an innate capacity to assimilate outside influences into their own language. It is indeed a highly evolved mechanism for responding to the non-tribal world. In fact, the tribal oral stories and songs employ bilingualism in such a complex manner that a linguist who is not alert to this complexity often dismiss the tribal languages as dialects of India’s major tongues.

Although the tribal communities didn’t quite possess the scientific temper, their way of living teaches a lot. Their close relationship with the nature and its offerings is appreciable. They are untouched by the evils of the society that haunt us today. The Kondh tribe for instance do not follow the practice of dowry, instead they fix a price for the bride which the groom pays in cash or kind. Their simple way of living and their proximity with the nature is a lesson for the modern societies.

A Munda song is known to be sung at the birth of a son or daughter and it invariably communicates their close association with nature. The birth of a daughter is associated with a cowshed full of cows and that of the son with its depletion. It is therefore clear that the daughter is considered to be a more precious asset than the son. This is probably because, in Munda society, the women have a dominant role to play in the various economic, social and ritual activities.

The Kondh tribe believes in the existence of gods and spirits. A Kondh song is usually sung at the death of a person beseeching the spirit of the dead to stop troubling the living. It is based on the Kondh belief that people love their homes so much that their souls are reluctant to leave the hearth even after death. These spirits, though generally kind, can become harmful at times since they are now unable to participate in earthly life. It is, therefore, customary to make generous offerings to the spirit. The song begins by saying that the dead spirit will be able to receive offerings only if the

others in the family continue to live and prosper. They reveal their willingness to do anything to make the spirit happy but, in return, the spirit must also promise not to trouble them with its visits.

Miri Agom is a highly rhythmic language which is used by the Adi tribe to chant their rituals. This is different from their regular conversational language, Adi Agom. The differentiated languages for routine conversation and chanting of rituals shows the high level of language sensitivity of the Adi. Such parallels can be observed in other modern languages like English and Hindi as well, where a difference in literary variety and colloquial variety exists.

The symbols of a Munda song σηοωτηεπροξιμιτψοφτηετριβαλσωιτηνατυρε.τηειρλιϖεσαρεσψνχηρονισεδωιτητηεχηανγινγρηψτημσοφνατυρε,τηεσεασονσ,τηερισινγανδσεττινγοφτηεσυνανδσοον.τηισισαχομμονασπεχτοφτηετριβαλωορλδωιδε.

Ridin is a creeper that is supposed to have special medicinal qualities. It is said that the Ridin creeper will tie the spirit of good health to the body to ensure its continued presence.

The author G.N. Devy, through his essay ‘Tribal Verse’ attempts to familiarise people with some aspects of the enormous wealth of oral tribal literature. It begins with an extract from an essay by G.N. Devy in which he discusses the need to create a space for the study of tribal literature within the framework of canonized written texts. He argues for a new method to identify and read literature in which orality is not dismissed as casual utterances in different dialects.