From “A Flowering Tree” to Cheluvi: Context Sensitivity of an Indian Folktale

Abstract

Down the ages, vernacular narratives are circulated and retained among the common-folk, forming a substantial part of Indian literature in the oral tradition. They also serve as tools of edification, the primary auditors being young children thirsting for listening to elderly narrators whose storytelling deftly interweaves lived experiences into these tales. Thus, traditional storytelling serves a dual purpose: as entertainment for the listeners and a mechanism of education deployed by the tellers. This makes the narratives repositories for academic analyses. A.K. Ramanujan was among the pioneers in the field of folklore studies in India, drawing global attention to the multifaceted nature of these tales, by collecting, documenting, translating and analysing some of them. The proposed article shall focus on one such story, “A Flowering Tree”, collected by A.K. Ramanujan. It is a folktale, the context-sensitivity and self-reflexive nature of which has accommodated multiple telling in different forms. This story has been the source text for many audio-visual adaptations across the globe: animation films, an opera and a movie. The first two forms have been faithful to the original story, with the girl getting reunited with her estranged husband, as is common in folktales. However, Girish Karnad did not end Cheluvi, the movie he directed, in that way. Cheluvi, drawing upon the same folktale, carries a message from its maker. Karnad’s deep concern about deforestation is brilliantly presented in the movie in order to contextualize the folktale from the perspectives of dislocation and environmental sustainability while falling back upon Ramanujan’s theories related to folklore at the same time.