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. 

Strength of character and the ultimatum game

In an increasingly globalizing world, we often need to interact with people who hold a completely different world view, often diametrically opposed to ours in specific respects. Differences of such nature often lead to misunderstandings and traumatic situations.

One such issue is this elusive thing called strength of character. Almost every culture agrees that as people, we need to develop a "strength of character" as part of our growing up. And as the saying goes, "the devil lies in the details" it is only when we get to definitions, there are serious differences. Often these differences are conflicting, but not contradictory to one another. It is hence important to understand such differences and reconcile conflicts in order to develop a better understanding of other cultures and mutual respect.

Here are some specific cases where I've seen conflicts emerge because of differing world views in my setting, (which basically is a place where what is termed as the Western world view often needs to co-exist with a traditional south Indian world view).

* In the outskirts of the city where I work, it is often commonplace to find children from nearby villages walk several kilometers to their school daily. For several years, this has been the norm as infrastructure was scarce. However, in recent times the IT boom has brought a large influx of highways and cars. Unfortunately, the benefit of this boom has not exactly trickled down to everyone and it is still commonplace to see children walking several kilometers to their school. Two colleagues of mine were traveling by car when they saw some children trudge along with heavy bags on their shoulders. Seeing this, one of them suggested that they stop the car and give the children a drop to their school. The other colleague (who has returned from the US) immediately stiffens up, saying, "Oh no! Don't do that!!" Seeing the horror on her face, the other colleague realized what she was thinking -- basically, terms that are too unscrupulous to be put up on a blog like this. You can only imagine the hurt that he in turn would have felt on even being associated with such things.

* On a recent visit to Europe, I was invited to the country house of my host where the conversation veered to cultural practices. And his wife said, "I have an Indian friend who still lives with his parents even after he is married!!" And as before, looking at the expression on her face, I could imagine her thinking "Where is his strength of character? Why can't he act like a man and stand on his own feet?" or something such. And to think when I wanted to shift to a different house from that of my parents because of the long commute to office, they were so depressed at the idea. And to add to it, others started "showing sympathy" (!) with my parents, and started saying things like "Oh, he has grown too big, after returning from foreign.." making them feel even more depressed! Sigh :-) Unfortunately, there is no smiley for head banging! :-)

Obviously, it is clear that what constitutes goodness in the behaviour of a person is very different in different parts of the world. And if development of character means development of goodness, what then is the way to develop character? Or more fundamentally, what then constitutes strength of character?

In the Western world, strength of character is predominantly (note the emphasis) defined by our ability to stand up to adversity and face it bravely. A person of strong character does not break his/her integrity under pressure, and fights for his/her rightful place in this world.

This can perhaps be epitomized by the quote by Ayn Rand: Nobody can make you a victim without your consent.

Of course, I am aware that Western society is far more complicated than Ayn Rand who is now basically seen as the philosopher for teenagers.. :-) But, the predominant definition of strength of character that seems to drive people's world view is one of standing up to adversity.

In India (and perhaps in other Eastern countries), strength of character can perhaps be epitomized by Mahatma Gandhi's quote: A man's strength of character is determined by how he treats people (and other animals) weaker than himself.

In the society that I was brought up in, a man of strong character is someone who is humble and genuinely cares for others, especially towards those who are in a weaker position than himself.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to work out how the above differences in world views can explain the case study misunderstandings mentioned earlier.

It is not like the alternative views have not been valued in the other cultures at all. For instance, Abraham Lincoln once said: Any man can face adversity. To really test a man's character, give him power.

Analogously, Swami Vivekananda once said: If there is sin, this is the only sin to say that you are weak.

However, the predominant emphasis in the Western world view seems to be that of facing adversity and in the Eastern world view to be that of acting with humility.

As it turns out, differences like the above are far from being superficial traits and have shown to be innate characteristics of cultures around the world. This is demonstrated by a nice little experiment in game theory called the Ultimatum game. The game is as follows:

Two players, A and B have to divide a sum of money between them. They are given the following scheme. Player A has to propose a division (like 50:50, 80:20, etc). If player B accepts the scheme, then the money is split according to the proposed scheme; and if player B rejects the scheme, then both players forfeit the money.

So what should player A do when given such a commanding position, and what should player B do when put in such a defending position?

It turns out that cultures differ vastly in the way the two players act^1,2.

In some cultures, players in the A position try their luck in getting more than a "fair" (50%) share and try to convince player B that if he rejects the offer, he would not get anything, and something is better than nothing. And in some other cultures, players in the A position have a strong sense of a reputation for fairness and propose a 50-50 cut or sometimes even a discount for themselves.

Similarly, in some cultures players in the B position seem to just accept what they get as long as it is not nothing. And in some other cultures, players in the B position simply reject anything that is even a little unfair to them ("to teach A a lesson"), even if it means that they forfeit all the money.

Even more interestingly, chimpanzees are rational maximizers, meaning that they don't value fairness when in a position of B and accept anything they get as long as it is more than nothing.

Coming back to our two definitions of "strength of character" we can see that player A's dilemma is a test of character in the Gandhian sense (what do you do when in a position of power and how do you view people weaker than yourself?); while player B's dilemma is a test of strength of character is the Ayn Randian sense (nobody makes a victim out of you unless you consent to it, do you teach him a lesson if he is unfair or do you give in and acquiesce?)

In real life though, we occupy positions of A as well as that of B in different situations. And if we have only one predominant world view of what constitutes goodness in behaviour, it can be very confusing.

For instance, someone in a position of A going by the Gandhian definition, may want to genuinely do good to others. But for someone who is immersed in the Ayn Randian definition, who only thinks of fighting for rights, such goodness may appear suspicious, causing them to stiffen up and bristle. Similarly, the defiant nature of an Ayn Randian strength of character, may be construed as arrogance and abuse of power by someone in the Gandhian definition of strength of character.

It is futile to argue as to which is the "better" definition. There is no such thing -- we will be in positions of player B as well as in positions of player A in different points in our life. And it is good to have both definitions in mind and use them judiciously.

1. Henrich, Joseph, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, and Herbert Gintis (2004). Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies. Oxford University Press.
2. Oosterbeek, Hessel, Randolph Sloof, and Gijs van de Kuilen (2004). "Differences in Ultimatum Game Experiments: Evidence from a Meta-Analysis". Experimental Economics 7: 171–188. doi:10.1023/B:EXEC.0000026978.14316.74