Adaptation
Retelling culture
RIZIO YOHANNAN RAJ
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The retold narratives here, through Eraly's interventions, serve at once revivalist and revisionist purposes.
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Tales Once Told: Legends of Kerala,
Abraham Eraly, Penguin India, 2006,
p. 208, Rs. 200.
SOME stories never leave you. They linger so unobtrusively in your blood that you may never think of how they have entered you, or how they have managed to remain so inconspicuous through your demanding day. Yet, at a moment when all else that seemed to hold your eventful day together fall apart, they appear in your vision, slowly unfolding for you the scenes from your own ignored belonging. Such are the times when tales told once upon a time are invoked and retold, in the hope of reflecting native perspectives that had been overlooked in other versions of history.
Abraham Eraly attempts to throw light on such long-forgotten spaces in the cultural history of Kerala through his English adaptation of selected stories from Ithihyamala (Garland of Legends). Ithihyamala is a collection of century-old stories from Kerala that cover a vast spectrum of life, personalities, events and skills. It is a fascinating assemblage of legends numbering over a hundred, which offers matchless reading pleasure by bringing to life a whole lot of conjurers and nymphs, weird rulers and conceited poets, martial art sensations and compassionate outlaws, unrivalled practitioners of medicine and witty courtiers; scheming gadflies, gallant brigands, clever elephants and kind-hearted mahouts.
Remarkable simplicity
The original stories are remarkable for their simplicity, lucid style, richness of humour and charm. Kottarathil Sankunni, a renowned Sanskrit-Malayalam scholar who lived in the latter part of the 19th and early part of the 20th century in Kerala, started documenting these stories in 1909. They were published in the renowned Malayalam literary magazine, the Bhashaposhini, and were collected in eight volumes and published in the early 20th century. The National Bookstall brought out collections of these stories in 1974. After an interval, from 1991 it has remained in print till today in Malayalam.
Do retold stories have a larger contemporary relevance in a pluralistic society beyond the subjectivity of the narrator and the collective nostalgia of a people? How does a compilation of fables set in a long-lost land matter to an urbanite? This is the discourse that emerges from Abraham Eraly's adaptation of stories from Ithihyamala. Beyond evoking the reader's aesthetic acceptance of each story's diegesis through suspension of disbelief, the modern retelling of the fictional world of Ithihyamala also demands an entry into such a discourse.
Stories most often serve as introductions to cultural heritage by transmitting shared allusions and experiences that express a society's central values, aspirations and assumptions. A retelling of a story can modify this heritage and produce socially relevant results. It is while examining such possibilities of retellings that one comes across the forces of motivation and processes of interpretation apparent in retellings.
It is evident that the stories that Eraly had selected from Ithihyamala and retold in English obviously for an urban/cosmopolitan audience offer patterned narratives expressing significant and universal human experiences. This selection implies that the ethical dimension within which the moral judgments of these stories are made can interlink the lived truth of modern life and a cultural heritage. Thus these retellings become metaethical narratives when re-presented to an audience removed from the time and space of their source stories. For instance, the question of marital fidelity as seen in the story "The Other Woman", the concept of justice as in the Kayamkulam Kochunni stories, the vision of detachment of the divinity as in Tantric Miracles and all remind the new society of a value system that was integral to the past, and the revival of which might be of help in bringing together a people torn apart by various forces of disintegration.
Interesting interventions
Apart from this general motive that is evident in the collection, there is an interesting intervention that Eraly makes in one of the stories, "A Test for Wives" that describes a test given to the wives of two sons of sage Vararuchi. Each of the eleven sons of the sage born of his liaison with a low-caste woman and abandoned by him at birth is said to have been brought up in a different place by foster parents of a different caste. Agnihotri was the upper caste brother whose wife was reluctant to violate social taboos and attend to his brothers of the lower castes. She used to shield herself from their sight with an umbrella. Pakkanar, the low caste bother, was out to prove that the real virtue of a wife was in absolute obedience to her husband and gives a test to his own wife and to Agnihotri's wife in which the latter fails. Kottarathil Sankunni had attached a comment to his story which stated that a quarrelsome wife is not a helpmate but a hell-mate.
Eraly intervenes here and adds his own comment: "True indeed. But we should today add that the maintenance of marital harmony is as much the responsibility of the husband as of the wife. If a quarrelsome wife is a hell-mate, so is a quarrelsome husband."
Such an intervention turns Eraly's retelling of Ithihyamala into a whole discourse on ethics, and gives the reader a clear insight into the processes of culture framing that happens through retold stories. The retold narrative at once serves revivalist and revisionist purposes. More of such interpretational exercises that salvage and revise classics from the bygone era are welcome. Close studies on such efforts may reveal many a space for ethical discourse of contemporary relevance within socio-cultural histories.
Abraham Eraly's commendable narratives have found their visual counterparts in the effortless, yet suggestive illustrations by Jayachandran. An evocative collection.
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