Oral Traditions in South India
Essays on Tulu Oral Epics
edited by Heidrun Bruckner and B. A. Viveka Rai
The present volume studies three oral epic traditions in the Tulu language. They have been living performance traditions in the Tulu speaking coastal districts of Karnataka up to the present day. For the first time, Indian, European and American scholars working on Tulu oral epics, folklorists, anthropologists as well as Indologists are brought together.
The present volume studies three oral epic traditions in the Tulu language (a Dravidian language). They have been living performance traditions in the Tulu speaking coastal districts of Karnataka up to the present day. For the first time, Indian, European and American scholars working on Tulu oral epics, folklorists, anthropologists as well as Indologists are brought together. All texts discussed belong to the indigenous Tulu genre called paddana, which ranges from shorter invocations of local deities to texts of epic dimensions. Because paddanas had been transmitted exclusively orally until the 19th century, it is very difficult to assign their composition to a particular historical period. The social universe described in some of them may reflect a late medieval setting. Texts of one of the epic traditions have been collected over a period of almost 150 years, from the mid-19th century to the early 2000s. Two papers (H. Bruckner / V. Rai and V. Nandavara) deal with this tradition which is part of the oldest collections. In contrast, the popular epic of the Bant heroine, Siri, only attracted the attention of scholars from the 1970s onwards. In this book, the Siri tradition is studied by C. Gowda, A. Alva, and P. Schuster-Lohlau. Peter J. Claus’ important paper introduces Koddabbu, the champion of a Dalit community. The wealth of texts and versions reflected in this volume allows, for the first time, to make systematic comparisons between different texts of the same tradition as well as between narrative elements and cultural concepts found in different traditions. Linguistic analysis, too, is just beginning to reveal possibly unique textual and narrative features.
- Edited by Heidrun Bruckner
- Edited by B A Viveka Rai
Other Titles in this Series
‘Leaving the Country, I Shall Be Free’
The South Indian Siri Tradition as a Source of Identity
Volume 19
Similar Books
Economic Trends in China During the Age of Confucius (1000–250 BC)
The Archaeological Evidence
Volume 10
Punning in Odd or Elegant Constructions in Jeremiah
The Convergence of Linguistics, Rhetoric, and Textuality in the Hebrew Text of Jeremiah
Conceptualisation as a Biocognitive Phenomenon and Part of the Faculty of Language
Cross-linguistic Evidence from the Preposition Category
Gender in Gandharan Art
Representations and Interactions in the Buddhist Context (1st-4th centuries CE)
Language Assessment Across Cultures
From Intercultural Communicative Competence to Artificial Intelligence
Language, Semantics, and Cognition in Ancient Egypt and Beyond
Proceedings of the International Conference, Yale University, April 16-18, 2021
Volume 14
Liberating the Repressed Self among Contemporary Chinese
A Theoretical Study Involving Tu Weiming and Jürgen Moltmann
Volume 41
Linguistic Fragmentation and Cultural Inclusion in the Middle Ages
Translation, Plurilingualism, Multilingualism
Volume 22
Love and the Danish Worldview
A Cognitive Ethnolinguistic Study of the Concept of Kærlighed ‘Love’ in Danish
LSP Teaching / Fachbezogener Fremdsprachenunterricht
Practices, Innovations, Technology / Praxis, Innovation, Technologie
