Paper short abstract:

The Garhwal Himalayas constitute an important area for oral Mahabharata traditions. Regional concepts of space and time are encoded in the oral texts in mythological language. The paper examines these concepts and their relevance for the communities in which these traditions are handed down.

Paper long abstract:

In many of his articles, Günther Sontheimer has stressed the intimate relationships between the immaterial heritage of a rural community - i.e. its oral traditions, festivals and rituals - and the community's engagement with its environment in order to sustain itself. In fact, there exist complex interfaces between such immaterial traditions and moulding of the environment e.g. in form of pastoral cycles and of cultivating sacred places and sacred periods. Statements about the character of time, space and environment that are hidden in the immaterial traditions are not necessarily "realistic" but are meant to propose relationships between the immaterial and the material world, e.g. how the surrounding world is structured in terms of purity and impurity or in terms of fertility and barrenness.

The Garhwali Panduan epic and other oral Mahabharata traditions in this area are ideal media for pursuing the question of the relationship between material and immaterial space and time. They continue to inform and guide the lives of Garhwali communities in numerous ways and they are much more than just epics and ballads. They are performed by low-caste professional bards who are, in some way, the mirror image of the high-caste Brahmins, they are performed for the members of the Rajput caste and for royal gods, and they are performed to link ideal invisible space with concrete landscape and to link past actions of the epic heroes - who were accompanied by the very same bards who were the "witnesses" of their deeds - with the present world.