Knowledge Management in Oral Traditions

In one of the chapters of his book "Savarkar", author Vikram Sampath talks about the kinds of legends that went around in the Indian population about key figures of the Indian freedom movement. 

Mahatma Gandhi for instance, so meticulously planned and executed his strategy of non-cooperation that, the ruling British government could not keep him imprisoned for long. Among the population however, this understanding took on a rather literal form. There were legends of Gandhiji having "supernatural powers" that he could escape from any jail cell within moments of the jailor locking his door! 

Similarly, there was an account of a daring escape by Veer Savarkar at the port of Marseilles in France, where he jumped from the window of the ship in which he was imprisoned, and reached the shore. This episode, while resulting in his recapture, also lead to a major diplomatic controversy between Britain and France. Among the population in India, this episode took on dramatic forms, where Savarkar was thought to have swum across the English channel for several days to reach France! Savarkar himself recounts that when he told his prison guards in Andaman and Ratnagiri that his swim lasted only for a few minutes, he lost their respect and admiration as a hero! 

Those were times when there was minimal mass communication, and newspaper reading wasn't really a thing among the population. In fact, for much of our history, knowledge has been passed and diffused through the population by word of mouth-- and subject to distortions and hyperbole like the above. 

There are various reasons for this oral tradition of knowledge management, to have become the norm. Even though language and writing had developed greatly since ancient times, the technology for writing and record-keeping were crude and expensive to scale. Block printing did exist, but it was used mainly in the textile industry for fabrics, rather than printing of books. 

But more importantly, India also experienced several invasions where books, monuments and other recorded forms of knowledge were destroyed by the invading hordes. In just one example, in Nalanda University-- one of the world's oldest universities-- an estimated 9 million books were destroyed in the 1193 invasion of Bhaktiyar Khilji.

These invasions were followed by centuries of suppression and subjugation of the population, depriving them of opportunities to manage their collective knowledge and and understanding of their history. To counter this, the population developed a variety of oral techniques by which, common knowledge about our history and cultural values were sought to be preserved. These took different forms like stories, dramas, street plays, games, puzzles, harikatha (temple discourse), songs, etc. 

The challenge as we saw with oral traditions is that, it would be subject to great levels of distortions and subjective elements like the artistic freedom of the narrator. Over generations, these distorted accounts become established in the population and set in stone-- sometimes literally. 

For instance, in the Ramayana, Valmiki describes the tribe of Hanuman as Vanacharyah, which means "forest dwellers". But somewhere along the thousands of years of retelling of these stories, the term that has come to be associated with the tribe of Hanuman is Vanara, which means monkey! Not just that, there are even additional legends of Hanuman's tail setting Lanka on fire, and of Bheema from Mahabharata unable to lift Hanuman's tail because of his arrogance! In our temples, Hanuman is literally carved on stone in the face of a monkey, with a tail. 

Distilling and managing social and historical knowledge from such an oral tradition is a completely different ballgame, compared to how "mainstream" academic processes manage knowledge today. 

Take for instance, Wikipedia, that is supposed to offer a free (as in, freedom) way to aggregate knowledge from different cultures into a single melting-pot. 

There is no way we can incorporate social and cultural knowledge embedded deep within cultural practices and oral traditions, into Wikipedia. Wikipedia articles need to be based on "credible" sources, which in turn refers to knowledge constructs that are recorded in written form-- typically by third-party observers, who bring in their own biases and agendas in their narration, and are in turn ratified by other observers from the written tradition, with similar biases. 

It is no wonder then that, by and large, Indians find explanation of their history and culture recorded in books and on Wikipedia, to be so very different from their lived experience in this society and culture. 

On Wikipedia, a viewpoint published in a journal, written by an external observer, and peer-reviewed by a couple of other external observers with a similar viewpoint, carries more weight and credibility, than say a viewpoint expressed in a harikatha or a street play that has been witnessed and critiqued by hundreds or thousands of people, over several years! 

Clearly, we are not even aware of the biases and limitations in our underlying paradigm with which we strive to manage knowledge. 

As our formal education system relies more and more on written forms of knowledge (and by implication, on its aggregations like Wikipedia), we stand to lose out on the knowledge and worldview of our oral traditions completely. 

Although oral traditions contain a lot of distortion, the thinking population in the society had developed techniques to distill out a plausible essence from the narration, setting aside the hyperbole. For instance, regardless of the legends of a flying machine called Pushpaka Vimana in which Rama returned to Ayodhya after defeating Ravana, a quick search on Google maps will show us that it takes about 21 days to walk from Sri Lanka to Ayodhya-- which is exactly the number of days between Vijayadashami (commemorating the defeat of Ravana) and Diwali (commemorating the arrival of Rama in Ayodhya). Similarly, many would agree that Sita's Agni Pariksha  or "Trial by fire", was basically some form of intense cross-examination, like in a courtroom (which is no less demeaning), rather than a literal entry into a raging fire, to prove one's "purity". 

While epics like Ramayana are widely studied and also documented, they are just a small fraction of the body of knowledge that have been passed around through generations in our oral traditions. Many of these narrations contain rich insight into several matters, and many survival tactics. 

For instance, in most south Indian cultures, it is widely narrated and believed that a lone wild male elephant is likely to be extremely aggressive and would have been likely rejected by its herd. Many oral legends abound about "heroes" encountering a lone tusker and either escaping its wrath or fighting it valiantly. But my limited searches for documented knowledge about this, hasn't yielded anything so far. 

With our increasing emphasis on excluding anything other than written forms of knowledge documentation and dissemination, we may lose out on such important information, that may affect our survival someday. 

There is a need to not only preserve, but also reinvent oral traditions of knowledge dissemination for the connected generation of today, if we are to maintain our cultural connections with the past and learn from our history.