Translating Orality: Pictorial Narrative Traditions with Reference To Kaavad and Phad

Walter J. Ong’s work is crucial for the study of orality, and highlights that a great majority of languages are never written despite the success and power of the written language and that the basic orality of language is stable (Ong 7). When A. K. Ramanujan claims that everybody in India knows The Mahābhārata because nobody reads it, he is also emphasizing the power of orality and oral traditions in India (qtd. in Lal). Transmuting oral forms into new mediums and genres is not unknown to Indian narrative traditions. Orality when transmitted or deciphered imbibes a portion of its social/cultural contexts and resembles a nomadic metaphor that finds new meaning with each telling/re-telling/transcreation. My paper deals with the role of translation and its relationship with orality, as embodied in the folk legacy of Rajasthan with reference to the oral traditions of storytelling like Phad and Kaavad. The paper looks at the intersections between orality and translation, the structures of individual and collective consciousness, convergences and divergences in translating orality