Oral traditions in South India

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This volume examines three oral epic traditions in the Tulu language, a Dravidian language, that continue to thrive in the Tulu-speaking coastal districts of Karnataka. It gathers Indian, European, and American scholars, including folklorists, anthropologists, and Indologists, to explore these living performance traditions. The texts discussed belong to the indigenous Tulu genre known as pāḍdana, which includes everything from short invocations of local deities to epic narratives. Due to their exclusive oral transmission until the 19th century, assigning a specific historical period to their composition is challenging, though some may reflect a late medieval social context. One epic tradition has been collected over nearly 150 years, from the mid-19th century to the early 2000s, with two papers focusing on this oldest collection. The popular epic of the Baṇṭ heroine, Siri, gained scholarly attention only from the 1970s, and its tradition is analyzed by several contributors. Additionally, Peter J. Claus introduces Kōḍdabbu, a champion of a Dalit community. This volume enables systematic comparisons of different texts within the same tradition and explores narrative elements and cultural concepts across traditions, while linguistic analysis begins to uncover unique textual features.