Paper short abstract:

I propose to look at the ways in which an oral tradition asserts, reinvents, or alternately struggles with issues of survival, in contemporary Indian scenario, with the Mirasi folk form as my case-study.

Paper long abstract:

I wish to showcase this oral tradition, not merely through its textual content but via its performative resonance - the framework of the performance, rooted in the community it performs for, which allows satire as strategy. The performative space allows it a vibrancy where its humor can be semantic, syntactic, phonetic or contextual, but the utterance is contained within the community it works within, and very often decries.

The Mirasi oral tradition is simultaneously formulaic and subversive, encyclopedic and parochial, mimetic and carnivalesque, invocative and subversive, ritualistic and secular (even scatological). What is the syntax of such a performance that is full of dichotomies? Is it that the audience appreciation comes from the recognition of the same, or is the location of the performer community lending them this unique role - that of the lowly jester as well as the wise keeper of larger community values.

While what lends the oral performative tradition its rigor and plausibility, its survival ultimately hinges on who do so for that specific tradition - its recipient audience. Therefore, moving beyond inward structural analysis, I'd like to investigate how a lived tradition, where the absence of context means absence of the tradition itself, attempts to survive while maintaining its core aesthetic.

An oral performative tradition like this one thus treads the fine line between past and present, incident and its narrative, and the abstract and the real, and I seek to understand the performative space that defines it as such as well as its potential in contemporary scenario.