SOME ASPECTS OF ASIAN FOLKLORE

Author(s): Somanath Dhar

Source: India International Centre Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 4 (October 1976), pp. 294-298
Published by: India International Centre
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 Somanath Dhar

SOME ASPECTS OF ASIAN FOLKLORE

Comprising traditional creations of peoples, primitive as well as civilized,

folklore has come to mean folktales, songs, myths, legends, proverbs,
riddles and a variety of other forms of artistic expression whose medium is
the spoken word.
The word 'folklore' was coined in 1846 by the English anti
quarian, William John Thomas. Until then the expression 'Popular
Antiquities' had been used. In modern parlance, the term 'folklore' may
be ambiguously used for the voices of the 'folk', dealing generally with
their unrecorded traditions or, as a generic term to designate the customs,
beliefs, traditions, tales, songs, etc. that have been handed down through
from generation to generation.
Related closely to anthropology, folklore is also an important auxi
liary to philology, history, ethnography and to the history of religion."
Folklore has been called a historical science. It is 'historical', in so far as
it follows the scientific discipline, and with the sister sciences, folklore
aids in our understanding and knowledge of man's past life. Stories, of all
kinds, whether folktales, myths, legends or anecdotes, are held by folk
lorists to be of primary importance. Put succinctly "folktales are the
myths of the race" and, in the words of Max Muller, "Mythology and
folklore are a vestigal relic of an allegorical religious literature connected
with the worship of natural phenomena." Human society in different
regions of the world experienced almost identical or parallel stages of
cultural development and civilization, where myths and superstitions held
sway. This contributed to the interchange of folklore, of which folk
tales were the most popular, followed by ballads and folksongs.

Authenticity of Folklore

The folklore of India and the rest of Asia presents an amalgam of various
heritages and variegated cultures, blended over the centuries. A distin
guishing feature of most Asian folklore is that it flourished in oral tradition.
That is, it was related or sung from memory, and was listened to without
necessarily being recorded in a set form. Another remarkable common
trait of Asian folklore is that parochialism, whether chauvinistic or
romantic does not colour it, or lend it a pronounced bias. The brutalities,
which occur in the folktales and ballads of Russia, Italy, Spain, France and
many other European countries, are generally absent in Asian tales. The
cruelty that does appear in some narratives is superficial, or is introduced
merely to typify evil characters, who are cast as personifications of certain
vices.
Chinese folklore which claims the longest possible antiquity, is perhaps
the most authentic in the world. There are also Indian claims to antiquity
of folklore, set principally in Kashmir which was the home of learning

Summary of a talk given at India International Centre on May 25, 1976.

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Notes & News 295

and literature in the past. Gunadhya of Kashmir (1st or 2nd century

a.d.), who may be the earliest story narrator of the world, wrote his
monumental collection of stories Brihat Katha in Paisachi, a Dardic
language. The Brihat Katha (since lost) was recomposed by Kshemendra,
a great poet of Kashmir in the 11th century, under the title Brihat Katha
Manjari. He also wrote didactic and satiric sketches as well as treatises on
rhetoric and prosody in Sanskrit.

Katha Sarita Sagar

Around the mid-11th century, another great Kashmiri scholar, Somadeva,

rewrote the Brihat Katha Manjari in beautiful Sanskrit verse. He gave it
the apt title of Katha Sarita Sagar, which translated literally, means
'Ocean of the Streams of Stories'. This tome was 21,388 verses, divided
into 124 chapters and 18 sub-chapters. It contains hundreds of tales and
at least three novels. The collection synthesizes innumerable streams of
mystery, myth, legend and fact, which had 'flowed' from ancient days,
down to Somadeva's time. Tales are compared to rivers because their
volume swells as they flow further from their source. Just as the ocean
is the repository of all the rivers, so also Somadeva suggests in flowery
Sanskrit, a work of fiction should gather unto itself most of the fables and
stories that have been current in the past.
Through the Panchatantra tales, taken from the collection, and which
have since been translated into many languages of the world—the Katha
Sarita Sagar was to become the source material of folktales on almost
all Indian languages. Significantly, Somadeva rebuilt a number of
Jatakas on a new scaffolding. His classic evokes familiar images of cities
like Pataliputra, Mathura, Kausambi, Amaravati, etc. and of heroes and
heroines whose names along with the setting, are representative of India
as a whole. The work has been acclaimed as "one of the world's great
masterpieces of fiction". It is no doubt the largest single collection of
stories in the world : the massive volume being twice the size of the Illiad
and Odyssey put together. Many authorities have testified to the consi
derable influence that this treasure of folktales has had in countries of
the Asian mainland and in those of the West with which India had contacts
in the Middle Ages and after.
According to the famous American folklorist, Stith Thompson, the
Katha Sarita Sagar and the Jatakas "appear eventually in the literature
of medieval Europe, often through the intermediation of learned Jews".
The versions of Panchtantra tales as these passed into Persian, Arabic,
Syrian, Hebrew, Greek and European medieval tradition have been traced
with definite dates and places. Katherine Luomala in Funk and Wagnall's
Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend states that
local beliefs of primitive origin were incorporated into the Indonesian versions
of the Katha Sarita Sagar, Panchatantra and Jatakas as well as into the
Arabian Nights. In his introduction to Folk Tales of Thailand, P. C.
Roy Chaudhury has observed "Many of the ^folktales of Thailand

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296 Somanath Dhar

showing the wisdom and sagacity of Brahmins and the Buddhist monks,
the hero's deeds, the fate of the too clever merchant, the fowler's archery,
the king's generosity, the value of a friend or a brother, are drawn from the
Jataka stories." He added that many Thai folktales are taken from or
are based upon the Ramayana stories.

Travellers

Inspite of physical barriers, the common people of the ancient world were
interlinked through the wanderings of travellers. Exchange and inter
mixture of literature including largely what we may call folk culture, or
what is called folklore, and of art and science, was implicit in, and
accompanied, the very process of invasions and conquests. The Greeks
imbibed the fables and other lore of India, and themselves enriched the
Indian mind with the immortal Greek fables.
Chinese travellers and Buddhist monks from India, many of whom
were Kashmiris, covered widely separated territories in Asia, during
their long and arduous travels. These travellers helped to link up the
literatures and beliefs of the peoples of Asia, and beyond. Chenghiz Khan,
for instance, carried eastern and especially Indian tales to Europe. These
were then translated into Persian, Turkish and Arabic in the Middle
East and also into some other Asian languages. The Arabs in turn
carried these stories to the remotest corners of Europe. It is believed that
Aesop found inspiration for his fables directly from the Hitopadesha, or
through the Arabs. Interestingly the pattern of Aesop's fables is to be found
in Sanskrit as well as in Persian tales.
Travelling in the reverse direction most of the folktales and ballads
of the Phillipines are of Spanish derivation. There is of course a substantial
survival of indigenous folklore for the inventive faculty of the folk mind
worked in much the same manner in eastern as well as in western countries.
The argument, started by W. Grimm, as to whether folktales and other
folklore comprise an inheritance from a common Indo-European mythology,
will of course go on. Most evidence however suggests that the common
source was India.

Cross-fertilization

Fiona Macleod wrote in Winged Destiny many years ago "These old
myth-making tales—whether we call them Greek or Aryan or what else—
are as the grass that will grow in any land". In folktale study, polygenesis,
the doctrine of independent origin of similar tales, does not have so much
credibility as the theory of diffusionism, which maintains the spread of tales
from a source of common origin, such as India. The unmistakeable
similarity in folktales of different lands, as far apart as Kashmir and
England, or China and Finland, leads to the latter conclusions.
There was constant cross-fertilization. Merchants, missionaries,political
adventurers, soldiers returning home from distant campaigns, and even

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Notes & News 297

prisoners taken in war, made their contribution to this exchange. It is

possible that the stories lost some of their original flavour in the process of
being re-narrated but in the bargain they acquired new dimension and
local colour. Even before Chenghiz Khan and his hordes transported
tales of the East to western countries, the Arabs and the Persians had
picked up the stories from the Katha Sarita Sagar and the Jatakas, and
had passed them on to the Turks. This precious but invisible cargo was
'ferried' from the busy markets of Contantinople to Venice and Naples.
Thus, the central theme of many stories in Boccaccio's Decameron owes
its origin to Somadeva's classic collection. The process of transmission
went on : from Boccaccio to Chaucer, from Chaucer to Shakespeare, to
Marlowe and La Fontaine, and so to the eastern romances of Voltaire—
an exotic journey in time and space from the early translations into Persian,
Arabic and Turkish. As a conseqence many interesting common elements
and themes are to be found in the folktales of East and West.

Common Elements and Themes

The demon or the lion or the tigress, who gives a tuft of hair or some
such token to the hero, as a useful charm, is a device common to eastern
and western tales. The charmed ring of Alladin has many interesting
variants in the tales of Asia. And, Phoenix, that legendary bird known as
Feng-hwang to the Chinese, Anga to the Arabs and as Huma to the Indians,
is also to be found in many Asian tales. Some folklorists have claimed to
find resemblance between the Phoenix and the Garuda of Hindu mythology.
The singing mystic fowl, whose eggs were held to be priceless is another
common theme as is the dragon. In European folklore the dragon is feared
and has to be killed while in Chinese and other Asian folklore, it is a
harbinger of good fortune.
In every country there are legends of man-eating monsters, whom
the hero kills by ingenious means. These cannibal demons, or vampires,
might well have symbolized some mythical animal which aroused fear
universally in the common man. And there are tales of wolves or tigers
which raised children of human beings The story of Romulus and Remus
brought up by a wolf, and who, according to legend, founded the city of
Rome, finds its counterpart in Indian and Asian mythology and folklore.
Then there are the fairies. The good ones and the bad ones are to be
found in Asian tales just as we come across them in Grimm's Collection,
in a setting of a never-never land where all kinds of supernatural events
take place.
The common themes are galore. Take for example, the Hatim or
Harishchandra type of king, whose charity is unflagging even in the most
trying circumstances, which recurs in many European, and Asian folklores.
There is also the story of the clever tailor-woodcutter-goldsmith, who
solves riddles that none else can unravel and who gets amply rewarded.
The tale of the hero-by-accident and the warrior-inspite-of-himself is also

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298 Somanath Dhar

widely familiar. Delightful replicas of the Robin Hood type of the open
handed robber are to be found in Dravidian, Indonesian, Malaysian,
Afghan, Japanese and Chinese tales as well as in European and Norse
tales and ballads.
Metapsychosis—transformation of the soul of a human being at death
into a new body of the same or different species—as the result of a curse
by a saint or a chaste woman, forms the central incident of many folktales
of Asia. Metamorphosis—transformation or the change of shape from
one form to another—of human beings, mythical characters, animals or
even inanimate objects into a different form, is a literary device common to
some Asian and North American Indian tales.
Another common Asian folk theme is to be found in snake legends.
These "played an important part in the Asiatic and ancient Egyptian
symbolism, partly because it was thought that the heavens form a curve
like a snake and partly because lightning, or the 'fertility fire', flashed upon
the earth in a snake-like zigzag." The taming of Kaliya the serpent, by
the Hindu god Krishna, is not only current in South Asian lands, but is
also found in Ireland.
Ophiolatry caught the imagination of primitive folk to such an
extent that it led, in some parts of Afro-Asia, to the sacrifice of humans
to propitiate the snake gods. Folklorists have even attempted to establish
a connection between the serpent Kaliya and the dragon killed by St. George.
Cosmogonical myths and legends, also form part and parcel of Asian as
well as Greek folklore.
Most Asian and European folk stories especially those that have a
historical or mythological origin—contain a moral or a lesson, following the
tradition set by the Jatakas, Hitopadesha and the Katha Sarita Sagar, as
well as by the tales of ancient Greece.
The folklore movement is not yet well organized in India. There is a
folklore monthly which was started in Calcutta in 1961. Folktales and
songs have been collected, and published. Some books date back to the
1880's. Collections of folklore materials have appeared in regional langu
ages too. Conferences on folklore have been held at the state and the all
India level, but a national folklore society that would identify the move
ment, is still to be founded. Nevertheless, the folklorist in India—and in the rest
of Asia—has to use the ethnographic approach to field work, to ensure that
authenticity is not sullied in the process of recording. Only then will folklore
studies in Asia attain the full academic status as they have in the West.

Somanath Dhar

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