Page 192 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Memory and Social Protest 167

of other texts may be there; anyway, if such other text appears, it can
be suppressed, erased or misinterpreted.
While dealing with the hermeneutics of popular tales Paul Ricoeur
(1969) suggests that characters described in the tales have a nar-
rative identity. This narrative identity has a most rigid structure, but
it only causes the mobility of the tale. Through this, many elements
get attributed to these characters jointly. While interpreting them, it is
necessary to consider who is narrating the stories and to whom these
are narrated. It might be that the same narrative identity is received
in different ways by different people. In the folk tale of Reshma and
Chuharmal, I have tried to search some of the elements constitutive
of the narrative identity of the protagonists on the basis of the nar-
rative identities projected in the many popular versions of the folk tale
found in Mokama, the original place of the folk tale, and its neigh-
bouring areas.
Post-modern thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes and
others consider that every text is pregnant with meanings that are
delivered by the interpreter or rather the consumer of the text. In be-
tween texts and their interpretation, the veracity of the text only exists
with the interpreter. Through the process of interpretation, the text
originally meant to communicate something different, and it is this
interpretation that will be decisive according to these thinkers. Fur-
ther, the process of the interpretation of the text enlarges both the text
and its meaning. Therefore, a text interpretation carries greater weight,
for it is the interpretation that extends the scope of the texts.
The folklore of Reshma and Chuharmal, in praise of the latter
glorified as a lower-caste hero, is constructed after the structure of
the naranushanshi (praise of brave people and kings) tradition, which
has been used as a pattern. The popular veerakhyan (tales of bravery)
of Chuharmal are linked with naranushanshi. In the Indian akhyan
(tale) tradition naranushanshi is an oral tradition that was com-
piled in Vedic sahitya or Vedic literature (Rigved Samhita) later on.
A.K. Warder (1987) suggests that Indra gatha became popular on
account of its praise of the Vedic warlord Indra. Some gathas (tales)
are in praise of human heroes of which some tales were collected in text
and some transmitted from generation to generation by word of mouth.
Later on this resulted in the construction of a historical tradition.