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Indian Literature: Of oral lore and beyond
In an age of machine-curated world views, how do we preserve the diversity that has defined what it means to be human?
New information technology, especially artificial intelligence, now performs tasks once considered exclusively human, touching on cognition, creativity, and even wisdom. Our increasing reliance on these modes of machine-driven intervention casts a doubt on the very essence of human existence. For millennia, diverse worldviews, cultural exchanges, and distinct linguistic perspectives constructed our sense of identity, social cohesion, and spiritual affinity. Now, humanity is inundated by a machine-curated, artificial worldview — apparently empowering, yet veritably sapping. This trend could foster a robotic social order that suppresses individuality and effaces our inherent creativity.
The immediate casualty is the human habit of finding solace in books and stories rooted in culture, the mainstay of our existence. This annexation of cerebral activity calls for deep introspection and the creation of a mental bulwark. The critical question remains: How can we resist a society in which technology executes our core intellectual processes? How do we preserve the vibrant, diverse world views where knowledge, art, history, and culture are organically brewed, defining what it means to be human?
Creative minds across the globe are pondering these existential challenges. The Sahitya Akademi has weighed in with its secretary, K Srinivasan Rao, and Sukrita Paul Kumar, poet, artist, and guest editor of Indian Literature, the Academy’s bimonthly journal, exploring the intricate issue by focusing on a foundational form of human communication: oral lore.
Oral tradition — the most widespread mode of communication in history — remains a vibrant part of our collective cultural memory. Comprising folk stories, chants, nursery rhymes, songs, proverbs, riddles, myths, and legends, oral lore coexists with social, electronic, and written media. It serves as a constant affirmation of collective memory, and crucially, as a continuous challenge to mainstream, often theology-driven or colonial, historical accounts.
For Sukrita Paul Kumar, oral traditions, which flow dynamically through memory with an air of freedom and ease, must be showcased to preserve culture, social justice, national diversity, and territorial identity. She dedicated two consecutive issues of Indian Literature (348 and 349) to acquaint readers with the stunning depth of the relationship between these traditions and cultural identity, which continually reshape both the past and the present.
Mapping the terrain of India’s myriad oral traditions, she emphasises the beauty of resistance inherent in their diversity. As she states, “The fascinating plurality of languages and regions in our part of the world has churned out a fantastic array of oral traditions over many centuries. They have blossomed in their dynamic flow, creating an extraordinary repository of cultural material that is constantly lived and practised by tens of communities, tribes and people across class and caste.” She urges us to immediately create our own aesthetic paradigms to understand this vibrant cultural domain. While technology (audio-video recordings and digital transmission) facilitates the documentation of these ancient narratives, the editorial in the July-August 2025 issue makes clear the stakes: “the oldest strings and knots, the symphonies and rhythms of distant times, flowing in oral traditions, become available all at once in contemporary times. This dynamic, memory-fused, pluralistic form of communication has the potential to create a bulwark against the ever-increasing robotic monoculture that overwrites the complex, diverse, and fundamentally human experience.”
Two issues of Indian Literature offer a candid glimpse of oral culture across different parts and languages, fully intertwined with nature, rituals, festivals, relationships, birth, death, and the like. Far from being relics of the past, Oral lore is a vibrant embodiment of identities, worldviews, and creative outpourings in dialects such as Gorboli, Irula, Gondi, Kuvi, Gadaba, Kodava, and Tulu. Beary Konkani, spoken in the southern regions and included in section one of Indian Literature, articulates it well. Manglaamkali songs in Malayalam, songs of celebration and rhythms of the seas in Tamil and Vacchans in Kannada that present cultural legacies and social values are presented. Songs from Gujarat in Kumhari, Bunkari, Chamari, Bhili and Saurashtri dialects are also covered.
Oral traditions in Maharashtra are made accessible through Ovee, an ancient genre of Marathi poetry sung by women while grinding at dawn. The songs question the patriarchal mindset without rhetorical flourish: “… how can a daughter be inferior to a son/ if both are gems of the same womb?”
The issue also carries oral lore from Bangla and Rajasthani and three articles by distinguished authors recapitulate oral traditions across the country. Barahmasa, (trans. 12 months), a widely admired song form that describes emotions through the seasons that is popular in Bundeli, Bhojpuri, Kashmiri, Tamil and Awadhi, is perceptively analysed by Vinita Agarwal, while Vislavath Rajunnayak discusses the epistemological connection between oral tradition and memory. Udayan Vajpai focuses on the tales of Pardhaans, one of the largest tribes of central India. Shivangini Tandon unveils the dynamics of social conflict and coexistence in a Hindavi Sufi romance, ‘Madhumaltai”.
Still, one feels compelled to ask, ‘What can save us from the looming threat posed by ChatGPT and tech oligarchs like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk?’ For noted critic Sachinandan Mohanty, it is poetry alone. Through the endless, unrelenting search for meaning, immediacy, and authenticity, the poet seeks new visions of man and of human existence. While this conclusion might sound too optimistic, the deep concern for culture is praiseworthy.
The second issue highlights the oral traditions of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Awadh, Punjab, Haryana, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Tripura, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, and Jharkhand. At the outset, the editor points out that, in the common lore of people across the country over the centuries, there have been spiritual mystics and social guides who have sung and spread words of wisdom. These include Sufis and sants such as Bulleh Shah from Punjab, Akka Mahadevi, and Dasimayya from Karnataka, and Kabir from Varanasi. In their quest for the deeper meaning of human existence, they belong to India’s great metaphysical tradition, which offers answers to the spiritual dilemmas of the world. Most of the translations are proficient. In sum, both issues delve into the world of oral lore and demonstrate a tangible, multifaceted cultural strategy for preserving human complexity amid algorithmic uniformity.
Shafey Kidwai, a bilingual critic, is the director of Syed Academy, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh.
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