On orality

SATISH C. AIKANT

AN understanding of the contemporary culture will necessarily have to consider the pervasive existence of orality. Our relationship to the world about us is articulated and constructed in language, which is constituted not only by words or sentences, but by a variety of verbal and written forms ranging from spoken conversation, songs, stories, ballads, epics, novels, poems, proverbs and folklore etc. It is through such different kinds of verbal and non-verbal discourses in language that our knowledge of ourselves and the world is created, sustained, broken down, recreated and transmitted.

Although literature, generally, has come to be associated with written forms, yet many western as well as non-western cultures have produced an extraordinary range of verbal, or non-written ‘literary’ genres. Even though people may not be ‘literate’ in the sense of having reading and writing skills, it does not necessarily mean that they cannot respond to the diverse aspects of human life such as aesthetics, ethics, power, nature, social organization, religion, politics, economics, and art, etc. India is an example of a culture that has traditionally emphasized the primacy of oral/aural expression as against the written or textual.

Samuel Johnson described all European literature as a series of footnotes to Homer, as all western philosophy has been descried as footnotes to Plato. Plato’s writings come to us in the form of dialogues which preserve the contours of oral dialectic. In one of Plato’s dialogues called Phaedrus, Socrates discusses with Phaedrus the comparative merits of speech and writing as vehicles for the communication of truth. Socrates points out that writing, which at best only replicates ideas or serves as a mnemonic device, weakens the mind, and that the writers might make a pretense of wisdom without its having any basis in reality. He goes as far as to charge that writing is inhuman, deals with issues extraneous to the mind, and causes a confusion of knowledge and information with wisdom and understanding. He might have added with a foresight that writing is rather artificial, technology conscious and reflectively contrived. It is speech which is structured through the entire fabric of the human person.

In the West, linear thinking places a high premium on factual knowledge. The oral culture, on the other hand, places priority on relationships, which produces a concept of dynamic truth, not a focus on facts. A printed text encourages closure, a feeling of finality that was never present in oral storytelling, since orality is open ended. The fluidity of word meaning, social context, and collective memory gave the members of particular oral communities unity and solidarity, enabling them to wield what might be termed their ‘collective conscious’ that is not observed in written cultures.

Even though one may note that the written texts are necessarily surrounded by a penumbra of the oral, the manifestation of an oral narrative involves much more than the reading of a written text does: sound, sight, movement and language work simultaneously in a multidimensional, multisensory experience. The fateful illusion of modernism was the belief that the true and ultimate meaning and authority was lodged in the text, to be discovered by careful reading, and, conversely, that meaning could be once and for all put into the text in such a way that it regulated its own interpretation.

The fact of the matter is that writing distances the originator of a thought from the receiver by creating a discourse, which cannot be directly questioned or contested as oral speech can be, because written discourse is detached from the writer. The tension between eye and ear, the demands imposed by learning to alternate between understanding a text and understanding a spoken word gives rise to linguistic self-consciousness. Yet, the semantic autonomy of written discourse, and the self-contained existence of the written work, are ultimately grounded in the presumed objectivity of meaning of oral discourse itself. Modern folklore and ethnography grew out of an essentially hermeneutic insight that imposing western-literate categories on ‘oral literature’ resulted in a failure to understand both the nature of the language being analyzed, and the ways in which its immediate users understand that language.

Orality is used to describe forms of storytelling and knowledge sharing that characterize every epoch. Oral storytelling traditions were driven by a fluidity, spontaneity, and reflexivity in sharing knowledge. The form of sharing organically changes and evolves as it is reproduced through the spoken word, to listening publics who are aware that this evolving continuity is part of the essence of communicating knowledge.

In India we have the hallowed tradition of the oral, sabd, loosely translated as Word, being elevated to the level of Brahman. Anadi nidhanam brahma sabdatattavm yadaksharam, meaning that the beginning-less and endless Brahman is the essential nature of the Word. The two great epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana composed in Sanskrit were initially orally transmitted, before being written down and preserved in the form of manuscripts. Although these ‘Pan-Indian’ epics continue to exist as written texts down to the present day, both epics have innumerable ‘versions’ both in written and oral forms. In various versions the plot, events and characters of the Sanskrit Ramayana are significantly altered. Paula Richman has done considerable work on it. A.K. Ramanujan has alluded to 300 Ramayanas. Similarly, the Mahabharata is found in diverse religious and performative contexts in northern, western, and southern India. These are the versions and not garbled copies of the Sanskrit text. It is better to imagine these different versions as existing simultaneously side by side produced and received in an interactive process that continues even today. The singers and performers of these regional Mahabharatas do not completely rely on written texts: the knowledge they have of their Mahabharata is oral, drawing inspiration from their own traditions.

The oral is ubiquitous. Vyasa and Valmiki can be found everywhere in the art and literature of India, ancient and modern, as several characters, tropes and narratives that invariably appear to us as familiar are nonetheless different in different contexts. Drawing upon a basic cultural register they hardly require introduction to any given audience, and at each site where they turn up, an interpretive community and space emerge, to make them pertinent for the occasion. This simultaneous process of reading and writing is always ongoing, unfolding within a framework that often blurs the boundaries between the two.

The alternative, ‘other’ traditions of producing, storing and transmitting knowledge are still prevalent and indeed valued in India in ways that constitute and illustrate aspects of our cultural diversity. Most famously, it was the four Vedas, commonly dated from 1500 BC, and thus probably the oldest extant scriptures in the world, which were orally transmitted from generation to generation until the coming of writing and, subsequently, print, and continue to be so transmitted in some small priestly communities even today.

The fact that texts of such length and complexity have been orally preserved for three and a half millennia with phenomenal accuracy, is remarkable enough in itself. The Rigveda alone contains 1028 hymns in over 10,000 verses of four lines each. No less remarkable is their mode of transmission. In the case of these scriptures, not only do the words need to be repeated exactly, but there is a particular rhythm, cadence and sonority that need to be faithfully replicated if the verses are to carry their spiritual charge.

According to Walter Ong, the orality of a culture totally untouched by any knowledge of writing or print is ‘primary orality’. It is primary in the context of the ‘secondary orality’ of present-day high technology culture, in which a new orality is sustained by telephone, radio, television, and other electronic devices that depend for their existence and functioning on writing and print. Today even though writing has become the dominant mode of expression in every culture, even in high technology ambiance, the resonance of primary orality exists and is preserved.

In the post-literate world, there is a noticeable shift to a new, or secondary orality, generating new media forms. The present generation learns and processes information in terms of media such as television, radio, telephone and computer. The Internet, while information oriented, is also oral in its focus and format. The secondary orality has created new communities that articulate emergent personal and social concerns. Blogging, for example, which is situated somewhere between orality and textuality, provides an opportunity to resist mainstream culture’s construction of information and knowledge in an attempt to challenge the authority of traditional modes of communication. It is also conversational in format, as the speaker is very much present, while the audience is conceptualized and negotiated.

Opinion on the internet may be spontaneous and tentative, but increasingly shows signs of becoming organized, leading sometimes to unprecedented consequences. Much like primary orality, secondary orality fosters a strong sense of membership in a group. Unlike primary orality, however, secondary orality is essentially more deliberate and self-conscious, based on the use of writing and print, and the groups produced by secondary orality are much larger than any produced by primary orality.

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan called ‘secondary orality’ as a fulfilment of history, a return of what had been exiled or repressed for a long time by writing and printing. We listen, we watch, somewhat as our people used to do before radio, before television, before satellites and computers. Yet our modes of thinking and of using language and conducting discourse are still very much sounded and cadenced and projected by the older habits of orality. Orality did not just happen a long time ago. It survives and lives on.

The boundaries between the oral and the written have become much more fluid. In a globalized, and technology driven world, we are better equipped today to capture and record performative acts, that are both temporal and lasting in the domain of the oral, bringing plurality of perceptions. Perhaps the best thing about orality-based formats and media is that these are cultural unifiers in the modern world.

Digital technologies can provide platforms for preserving and revitalizing oral traditions as well as enabling new forms of storytelling and expression. However, threatened by the constant assault of technology, orality faces the countervailing prospect of a digital dystopia.