Page 156 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

The Donkey 131

Only instrumental to facilitating the play of the main protagonists, he
is, without his knowledge, too bound to find himself at times blessed,
at times victimized by his masters.

Conclusion: Whither?
Can the text still address itself to contemporary contexts? Re-
contextualization may find its markers in the recapitulative cognitive
mapping shown in Box 4.1.

Re-contextualization
A puzzling internal semantic contradiction opposes two emblematic
-
figures of identification, Hanuman and the donkey, and splits the nar-
rative in two semantically opposite directions. There is, at the start,
-
an identification with the hero Hanuman who dares to challenge the
gods as soon as he is brought to life. The jump to swallow the sun
testifies to an aggressive will of annihilation of the whole crowd of
-
heavenly deities. This is a characteristic feature of our corpus of Vadar
.
narratives. The same challenge is explicitly displayed in another story
-
(Vdr-18) where a hungry Hanuman, seeing in the sky a red roundish
thing (the sun), mistakes it for a fruit and jumps on it. Indra, king of
the millions of gods, once informed, sends an army to wage war against
-
the aggressor. Hanuman exterminates the soldiers with his tail. Indra
-
strikes with the thunderbolt. Vayu obstructs Indra’s thunderbolt, stops
-
blowing and hides himself in the body of Hanuman, who does not let
-
him go. All life on earth vanishes. Hanuman does not yield till Śankar,
.
-
of whom Hanuman is the eleventh manifestation, intervenes and brings
-
13
him to reason. Vayu is set free. The story was narrated to show how
-
the shrewd and powerful Hanuman makes fun of Indra, the king of
-
-
gods. The Vadar identify themselves with the Hanuman aggressive
.
deed and own it. The jump of Vdr-18 repeats the jump of Vdr-02 as an
attempt to challenge the god’s ascendancy. The same symbolic conduct
of aggressive assertion also recurs in Vdr-26 as the idiom of a struggle
of subordinate caste to uphold a claim to a symbolic status of solar
-
lineage. In short, the identification with Hanuman in Vdr-02 projects
the heroic utopia of a subaltern community symbolically challenging
-
its masters and their supremacy. However, today Vadars are altogether
.