This book is a collection of primary source material on the myths and legends of origin of the tribal people of Orissa, along with a section on the procedures of reading myths. The myths and legends presented here are all new field collections.
The purpose of the book is twofold. First, it will try to correct the popular urban belief or the belief of the educated-elitist belief to be exact-that our tribal people are ignorant, uneducated and uncultured and that the little "culture etc." They have is the gift of the "mainstream" civilization. And second, it will attempt to bring out the richness of tribal culture, carried in their myths and legends, and to establish its antiquity in the context of the prime civilizations of the world: the Mesopotamian, the Babylonian, the Hindu, the Egyptian, the Greek and the Judeo-Christian. The book introduces a competitive reading to evaluate degrees of being civilized, if such things are possible.
Finally, it examines myths as a fossil field, which is layered and in which ancient facts are trapped and held as fossils. The book suggests ways of identifying, recovering and studying these fossils in order to construct the tribe's prehistory and ethos. The main body of the book consists, of primary material on creation myths, myths of origin and history, and myths on the making of gods.
Dr. Biyotkesh Tripathy, with degrees from the Universities of Calcutta and Wisconsin, retired as the Professor and Head of the Department of English, Utkal University in 1996. He had also headed the English Departments of Himachal Pradesh University (Shimla) and Berhampur University (Berhampur). He is widely travelled and has lectured at the Universities of Buffalo, Wisconsin, Hong Kong, Trier, Cambridge (Downing College), and Taipei (Center for European Studies). Since retirement he has engaged himself assiduously in collecting the intangible oral heritage of the tribal ,people of Orissa. He has now the single largest collection of tribal myths, legends, tales, songs and lore, which is housed in The National Museum of Mankind (Bhopal) and The Archives of Traditional Music and Folklore, University of Indiana (Bloomington). He has books on D.H. Lawrence and on the American novel. He is also a creative writer in Oriya and English, with two novels and a short story collection in Oriya, and two novels in English (Baba Bug; and The Vagrant). His last book, English-English-Oriya Dictionary (Oxford University Press) was released in 2004.
This book is the first book based on my collection of tribal myths, legends, tales, songs and lore. While my collection was the product of my conviction that the intangible cultural heritage of our tribal people needed to be recovered and preserved, this book is the result of the affection and urging of fellow scholars headed by Dr Kishor K. Basa, Dr Spriya K. Ghosemaulik, and Dr Birendra Kumar Nayak to whom I am indebted forever. By offering to organize its publication, The National Museum of Mankind, headed by Dr Basa, gave further fillip to the effort.
A researcher is like a hunter in pursuit of his game. The pleasure is in the pursuit. The results are another matter, another ball game. During the pursuit a scholar leads a blinkered existence, looking ahead at the trail and moving on, following the evanescent game. Desires to stray, to look this way and that and to follow other spurs and scents are strong. Despite being thus beset, however, I am trudging on. My pursuit is not over yet; far from it. There is so much work to be done, so much material is out there, that the thought of it is often overwhelming. There always appears to be so little time. But one must push aside these thoughts and go on doing what grabs one's imagination.
I am a student of literature with strong inputs of mythic studies. I have now strayed into folklore or oral literature, if you may. I had to learn everything from fieldwork modalities to classification and documentation from a scratch. But my real learning came from the field where my methodology formed itself one evening at a village called Oringi. And thereafter I have not faltered.
Many friends have helped in this work, in the field and, afterwards, in the documentation of the material. To all of them I am deeply indebted.
For the preservation of the original material I am immensely grateful to the Indian Archives and to the National Museum of Mankind.
This book is a collection of primary source material. It presents Creation Myths and Legends of Origin of the tribal people of Orissa. It, however, contains a section on the procedures of reading myths because I wish to suggest new ways. The myths and legends presented here are all new field collections.
The purpose of the book is twofold. First, it will try to correct the popular urban belief or the belief of the educated-elitist belief to be exact-that our tribal people are ignorant, uneducated and uncultured and that the little "culture etc." they have is the gift of the "mainstream" civilization. Second, it will attempt to bring out the richness of tribal culture through their myths and legends and establish their antiquity in the context the myths and legends of the prime civilizations of the world: the Mesopotamian, the Babylonian, the Hindu, the Egyptian, the Greek and the Judeo-Christian. We shall introduce a competitive reading to evaluate degrees of being civilized, if such things are possible.
Let us start by examining these beliefs of the elitists about our tribal people. "Ignorant, uneducated and uncultured," they say. Ignorance is lack of knowledge. We can take it a little further and say that ignorance is the lack of knowledge of the world we live in. Now the knowledge about the world is fairly vast and vague. We may say this knowledge about the world can be subdivided into the knowledge about the environment we live in, to be able to manage and respond to it, on the one hand, and the knowledge about far things like the cosmos and such specialized matters, on the other. So far as the knowledge of the environment is concerned our tribal people have very specialized knowledge about it and have been managing themselves in it very well, at least as well as we do in terms of our environment. Specialized knowledge they may not have about the cosmos and such things as we know them, but then how many of our ordinary people have such specialized knowledge? Therefore, our tribal people are no more ignorant that we are.
As for being uneducated, we must understand that education is a disciplining of the mind to think in a systematic way and of being able to draw conclusions following certain epistemological procedures. The tribal mind is no less disciplined than ours. Only the knowledge inputs are the variables in terms of which "they" and "we" are differentiated. But these inputs are receivable and keep varying with time. We all know how much our knowledge of the cosmos has changed in the last five hundred years. And modern knowledge cannot still deal with the Dogons' knowledge of Sirius, the Dog Star, nor explain the ancient Hindu knowledge of the precise movement of stars and constellations and of cosmic time, nor of the Mayan calculation of stellar distances to astounding accuracy. With our tribal people, the knowledge input may vary, but the ability to think systematically or logically is not lacking. They may be illiterate in terms of our "written culture," but they are not uneducated.
And "uncultured" they are most certainly not. There is a richness and complexity in their life which has to be encountered to be understood. This was the wine that people like Verrier Elwin drank. Tribal people have very rich and complex rituals spanning the whole year. Their myths are fully as rich as those of any "elitist" culture. Their legends teach us how history is written and preserved in the microchips of mythic images, symbols and rituals. Their songs are every bit as lilting and swinging as of any other culture at any time in history. And these are plentiful and readily given. And they have tales galore. But, of course, tales travel and travel far and wide. It is difficult to take them as endemic to a tribe. But that they have a fund of tales is a cultural characteristic. So, let me leave it for you to decide whether these people could be called uncultured.
Such being my beliefs, I cannot accept the placement of these people at the margin while we occupy the centre. The idea of margins and centres are geometrical concepts erroneously applied to the human situation by the divisive thinking of Marx-derived Ideology and played with by Critical Theory pundits. In human culture there is no centre and no margin, there is only a continuous movement in a free field. In the cultural genetic pool what culture-gene will penetrate what culture-ovum to spawn new forms to take us forth is unknown. When the fourteen-inch Bonda skirt would be flaunted on the streets of New York is unknown, but that it has happened is known well enough. And this skirt appeared on the streets of Mumbai via New York. It is a free field. What culture genes will mate which other is anybody's guess. But that cultures will meet and mate and innovate is the law. New Historicists, Feminists, Subalterns and other such may take a welcome holiday and not break their backs to carry politics into culture for the dynamics of the two are entirely different.
As for this book, we start with a brief description of the tribes, followed by three chapters that present the primary source material collected by us. The first of these (Chapter II), presents material on "Creation Myths," the second presents "Legends of Origin and History," while the third presents material on "The Making of Gods." All this material has been translated into English from the transcripts of the oral material recorded by us. All translations have been done strictly as it has been received in the field. All editorial interventions have been clearly indicated as material placed in square brackets. In respect of each item presented the complete field information has been given at the beginning, including the transcript page number and field note page number for anyone who wants to go to the source.
These three chapters are followed by two in which we offer procedures for the study of myths and legends. The first among these is "Comparative Mythology" where tribal creation myths are studied in comparison with those of the major myth-making cultures of the world: the Mesopotamian, Babylonian, Sumerian, Egyptian, Indian and Judeo-Christian. For the tribal creation myth we have taken a "control" outside our work from P. 0. Bodding's cache of Santala creation myth, collected from the Ranchi area of the present Jharkhand state nearly eighty years back. We do not repeat our material, which is already given in the previous chapters, for these will appear interactively in the readers' mind. But, of course, we present variant traditions of the Santala myth so that a complete perspective emerges. This chapter ends with two comparative charts which are self evident and are not further discussed, as the results are discussed in the chapter that follows, which studies "Fossil Field Archaeology of Myths," where we study myths as a fossil field where many ancient facts lie fossilized with which we can make an archaeological reconstruction of the prehistory and history of the tribe. Facts trapped in myths and rituals become fossils and can be recovered, identified and studied to help us understand our history and culture.
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