Poetics of Conduct: Oral Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town

Prasad, Leela: Poetics of Conduct: Oral Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. xvi, 291 p.

No form of South Asian folklore has captured as much scholarly attention as the narrative. In the nineteenth century, this interest was largely comparative and philological; based on the antiquity of the Sanskrit and Pali story collections, for example, the 'Indianist' hypothesis of Theodor Benfey went so far as to imagine India as the birthplace of all European folktales. Contemporary folklorists of South Asia continue to be interested in oral narrative, but the analytic emphasis has shifted from text to context. The question at stake in the writings of A. K. Ramanujan, Stuart Blackburn, Kirin Narayan, and now, Leela Prasad, is not 'What is the origin of this story?' but 'What does this story do when certain people teU it in certain situations?' Prasad's context-centered approach makes Poetics of Conduct a compelling read for folklorists of any specialization, but what makes it especially compulsory for folklorists and anthropologists of South Asia is her emphasis on the role of oral narratives in the shaping of moral norms on the level of individual, lived experience.

Prasad's ethnographic method provides the reader with a lively and intimate view of Sringeri, a small South Indian town where she conducted her field research, and which has been dominated for over a millennium by a famous and politically influential monastery ('matha'), established in the ninth century by the Hindu philosopher Shankara. One of the primary activities of the matha is to interpret the shastras, a set of normative moral codes written in Sanskrit over 1500 years ago. These exegeses have provided the monastic community an air of moral authority on a pan-Indian scale. On the other hand, Prasad's study finds that there is more to Sringeri moral life than the madia's dominant presence. "How", she asks, "do people living in the vicinity of a powerful institution, wim a local and...