A sharp distinction is commonly drawn between “learning” and folklore, “high art” and popular art; and it is quite true that under present conditions the distinction is valid and profound. Factual science and personal or academic art on the one hand, and “superstitition” and “peasant art” on the other are indeed of different orders, and pertain to different levels of reference.
We seem to find that a corresponding distinction has been drawn in India between the constituted (samskrta) and provincial (desî) languages and literatures, and between a highway (mârga) and a local or byway (desî) art; and what is samskrta and mârga being always superior to what is desî, an apparent parallel is offered to the modern valuation of learning and academic art and relative disparagement of superstition and folk art. When, for example, we find in Samgîtadarpana, I. 4-6, “The ensemble of music (samgîtam) is of two kinds, highway (mârga) and local (desî); that which was followed after by Siva (druhinena)1 and practicsed (prayuktam) by Bharata is called ‘highway’ and bestows liberation (vimukti-dam); but that which serves for worldly entertainment (lokânurañjakam) in accordance with custom (desasthayâ-rityâ) is called ‘local,’” and when similarly the Dasarûpa, I. 15, distinguishes mârga from desî dancing, the first being “that which displays the meanings of words by means of gestures,”2 it is generally assumed that the modern distinction of “art” from “folk” music is intended. It is also true that the modern ustâd looks down upon what are actually folk-songs, very much in the same way that the academic musician of modern Europe looks down upon folk music, although in neither case is there an entire want of appreciation.
A pair of passages parallel to those above can advantageously be cited. In the Jaiminîya Brâhmana, II. 69–70, where Prajâpati and Death conduct opposing sacrifices,3 the protagonists are aided by two “armies” or “parties,” Prajâpati’s consisting of the chanted lauds, recitative, and ritual acts (the sacerdotal art), and Death’s of “what was sung to the harp, enacted (nrtyate),4 or done, by way of mere entertainment” (vrthâ). When Death has been overcome, he resorts to the women’s house (patnîsâlâ), and it is added that what had been his “party” are now “what people sing to the harp, or enact, or do, to please themselves” (vrthâ). In the Sukranîtisâra, IV. 4. 73-76, we find that whereas the making of images of deities is “conducive to the world of heavenly light,” or “heavenward leading” (svargya), the making of likenesses of men, with however much skill, is “non-conducive to the world of heavenly light” (asvargya). The common reference of vrthâ (lit. “heretical” in the etymological sense of this word) and asvargya here to what is connoted by our word desî, previously cited, will be evident.
A similar distinction of sacred from profane musical art is drawn in Satapatha Brâhmana, III. 2. 4, in connection with the seduction of Vâc, who is won over from the Gandharvas by the Devas; Vâc, the feminine principle, turns away from the Vedic recitations and the hymnody and lauds in which the Gandharvas are occupied, and turns to the harp-playing and singing with which the mundane Devas propose to please her. It is significant that whereas the Gandharvas invite her attention by saying, “We verily know, we know,” what is offered by the gods is to “give you pleasure” (tvâ pramodayisyâma). And so, as the text expresses it, Vâc indeed inclined to the gods, but she did so “vainly” (mogham), inasmuch as she turned away from those who were occupied with celebration and laudation, to the dancing and singing of the gods. And “This is why women even here and now (itarhi) are addicted to vanity (mogham-samhitâh), for Vâc inclined thereto, and other women do as she did. And so it is that they take a liking most readily to one who sings and dances” (nrtyati, gâyati).5 It is quite clear that mogham here corresponds to vrthâ in the Jaiminîya text, and that in both cases the worldly and feminine arts of mere amusement are contrasted with the sacred liturgical arts. It is also perfectly clear that the worldly arts of mere amusement are regarded literally as “deadly”—it must not be forgotten that “all that is under the sun is under the sway of death” (mrtyun-âptam, Satapatha Br. , X. 5. 1. 4)—and that such disparagement of the arts as can be recognized in Indian thought (especially Buddhist) from first to last is a disparagement not of the arts as such, but of the secular arts of mere amusement as distinguished from the intellectual arts that are a very means of enlightenment.6
Before going further it will be desirable to examine more closely some of the terms that have been cited. In connection with the passage quoted above, Dr. Bake has remarked that “The religious value of art music—mârga—is clearly apparent from this quotation, and actually this music, as conceived by the highest God and handed down through a succession of teachers, is felt as a means of breaking the cycle of birth.” Apart from the questionable rendering of mârga by “art,” this is absolutely true. The doctrine that human works of art (silpâni) are imitations of heavenly forms, and that by means of their rhythm there can be effected a metrical reconstitution (samskarana) of the limited human personality, dates at least from the Brâhmana period (Aitareya Brâhmana, VI. 27, etc.), and is implied in the Rgveda. “Sanskrit” itself is “constructed” (samskrtam) in just this sense; it is something more than merely “human” speech, and when the corresponding script is called devanâgarî this undoubtedly implies that the human script is an imitation of means of communication in the “city of the gods.”
Since the Rg Veda has to do only with what is incessant (nityam), it is evident that all its terms are symbols rather than signs, and must be understood in their transfigured senses. Now the word mârga, rendered above by “highway,” derives from mrg, to chase or hunt, especially by tracking.7 In the Rg Veda it is familiar that what one hunts and tracks by its spoor is always the deity, the hidden light, the occulted Sun or Agni, who must be found, and is sometimes referred to as lurking in his lair. This is so well known that a very few citations will suffice. In RV. VIII. 2. 6 men are said to pursue (mrgayante) Indra, as one pursues a wild beast (mrgam na), with offerings of milk and kine (which may be compared to bait); in RV. VII. 87. 6, Varuna is compared to a “fierce beast” (mrgas tuvismân); in RV. X. 46. 2 the Bhrgus, eager seekers after Agni, track him by his spoor (padaih) like some lost beast (pasun na nastam). Mârga is then the creature’s “runway,” the “track to be followed” (padavîya) by the vestigium pedis. One sees thus clearly what values are implied in the expression mârga, “Way,” and how inevitably that which is mârga is likewise vimukti-da, since it is precisely by the finding of the Hidden Light that liberation is effected. Desî, on the other hand, deriving from dis, to “indicate,” and hence dis, “region” or “quarter,” is “local”; cf. desam nivis, to “settle” in a given locality, desa vyavahâra or desâcâra, “local custom,” “way of the world,” and desya, “native.” But these are not merely terms that could be derogatively employed by city people or courtiers to countrymen in general, but that could be employed by dwellers in the city of God or in any Holy Land with reference to those beyond the pale. Heaven lies “beyond the falcon,” the worlds are “under the sun,” and “in the power of death”; loka “world,” is etymologically Latin locus, a place defined by given conditions; and laukika, “mundane” is literally “local”; it is precisely here (iha) in the worlds that the kindreds are “settled,” “localized,” and “native.” “From the celestial or solar point of view, desî is thus mundane, human and devious, as distinct from super-mundane, divine and direct; and this distinction of mârga (= svargya) from desî as sacred from profane is in full agreement with the sense of the expressions rañjaka (pleasing, impassioning, affecting, etc. ) and vrthâ, (wanton, random, “as you like,” etc. ), by which the value of desî has been explained above.
If we now consider the terrestrial analogy, then, looking at the matter from the Brahmans’ point of view (who are “gods on earth”), whatever is geographically and/or qualitatively removed from an orthodox center, from a Holy Land (such as Aryâvarta) where the heavenly pattern is accurately imitated, will be at the same time geographically and spiritually “provincial”; those are pre-eminently desî who are outer barbarians beyond the pale; and in this sense desî is the equivalent of “heathen” or “pagan” in the primary sense of “pertaining to the heaths or wastes,” as well as “pagan” in the secondary sense of worldly or sentimental (materialistic).
Highway and local or byway cultures can be pursued at one and the same time and in one and the same environment; they are not so much the cultures of ethnically different peoples or of given social strata as they are the cultures of qualitatively different kinds of people. The distinction is not nearly so much of aristocratic from peasant culture as it is one of aristocratic and peasant from bourgeoisie and proletarian cultures. Mughal painting, for example, even when more refined than Hindu painting, is a byway rather than a highway art; it is essentially an art of portraiture (from the mârga point of view, then, asvargya), and a “dated” art, which is as much as to say a “placed” (desî) art, for we cannot logically restrict the idea of “local” to a merely spatial significance, and indeed the two commonly associated words kâla-desa imply one another. From the Indian point of view, then, it is not the “primitive” (but abstract) art of the American Indian, or the peasant cultures of Europe or India, but rather the anti-traditional, academic, and bourgeoisie culture of modern Europe, and the proletarian culture of Soviet Russia, that can properly be called a devious and “byway” culture, “not heavenward leading.” A traditional must not be confused with an academic or merely fashionable art; tradition is not a mere stylistic fixation, nor merely a matter of general suffrage. A traditional art has fixed ends and ascertained means of operation, has been transmitted in pupillary succession from an immemorial past, and retains its values even when, as at the present day, it has gone quite out of fashion. Hieratic and folk arts are both alike traditional (smârta). An academic art, on the other hand, however great its prestige, and however fashionable it may be, can very well be and is usually of an anti-traditional, personal, profane, and sentimental sort.
We think it has now been made sufficiently clear that the distinction of mârga from desî is not necessarily a distinction of aristocratic and cultivated from folk and primitive art, but one of sacred and traditional from profane and sentimental art.
We may then very well ask what is the true nature of folk and peasant art, and whether such an art differs from that of the kavi and âcârya in any other way than in degree of refinement. In traditional and unanimous societies we observe that no hard and fast line can be drawn between the arts that appeal to the peasant and those that appeal to the lord; both live in what is essentially the same way, but on a different scale. The distinctions are of refinement and luxury, but not of content or style; in other words, the differences are measurable in terms of material value, but are neither spiritual nor psychological. The attempt to distinguish aristocratic from popular motifs in traditional literature is fallacious; all traditional art is a folk art in the sense that it is the art of a unanimous people (jana). As Professor Child has remarked in connection with the history of ballads, “The condition of society in which a truly national and popular poetry appears ... (is one) in which the people are not divided by political organizations and book-culture into marked distinct classes;9 in which, consequently, there is such community of ideas and feelings that the whole people form one individual.”
It is only because we regard these problems from the narrow standpoint of present circumstances that we fail to grasp this condition. In a democratic society, where all men are theoretically equal, what exists in fact is a distinction between a bourgeoisie culture on the one hand and the ignorance of the uncultured masses on the other, notwithstanding that both classes may be literate. Here there is no such thing as a “folk” (jana), for the proletariat is not a “folk,” but comparable rather to the outcaste (candâla) than to a fourth estate (sûdra): the sacerdotal (brâhmana) and chivalrous (ksatriya) classes are virtually lacking (men are so much alike that these functions can be exercised by anyone—the newsboy, for example, becoming a President); and the bourgeoisie (vaisya) is assimilated to the proletarian (candâla) masses, to form what is in effect an unanimously profane “herd” (pasu) whose conduct is governed only by likes and dislikes, and not by any higher principles.10 Here the distinction of “educated” from “uneducated” is merely technical; it is no longer one of degrees of consciousness, but of more or less information. Under these conditions the distinction of literacy from illiteracy has a value altogether different from its value in traditional societies in which the whole folk, at the same time that it is culturally unanimous, is functionally differentiated; literacy, in the latter case, being quite unnecessary to some functions, where, moreover, its absence does not constitute a privation, since other means than books exist for the communication and transmission of spiritual values; and, further, under these circumstances, the function itself (svadharma), however “menial” or “commercial,” is strictly speaking a “way” (mârga), so that it is not by engaging in other work to which a higher or lower social prestige may attach, but to the extent that a man approaches perfection in his own work and understands its spiritual significance that he can rise above himself—an ambition to rise above his fellows having then no longer any real meaning.
In democratic societies, then, where proletarian and profane (i. e. , ignorant) values prevail, there arises a real distinction of what is optimistically called “learning” or “science” on the part of the educated classes from the ignorance of the masses; and this distinction is measured by standards, not of profundity, but of literacy, in the simple sense of ability to read the printed word. In case there survives any residue of a true peasantry (as is still the case in Europe, but scarcely in America), or when it is a question of the “primitive” culture of other races, or even of traditional scriptures and metaphysical traditions that are of anything but popular origin, the “superstitions” involved (we shall presently see what is really implied by this very apt term) are confounded with the “ignorance” of the masses, and studied only with a condescending lack of understanding. How perverse a situation is thus created can be seen when we realize that where the thread of symbolic and initiatory teaching has been broken at higher social levels (and modern education, whether in India or elsewhere, has precisely and very often intentionally, this destructive effect), it is just the “superstitions” of the people and what is apparently irrational in religious doctrine that has preserved what would otherwise have been lost. When the bourgeoisie culture of the universities has thus declined to levels of purely empirical and factual information, then it is precisely and only in the superstitions of the peasantry, wherever these have been strong enough to resist the subversive efforts of the educators, that there survives a genuinely human and often, indeed, a superhuman wisdom, however unconscious, and however fragmentary and naive may be the form in which it is expressed. There is, for example, a wisdom in traditional fairy tales (not, of course, in those which have been written by “literary” men “for children”) that is altogether different in kind from such psychological sense or nonsense as may be embodied in a modern novel.
As has been justly remarked by M. René Guénon, “The very conception of ‘folklore,’ as commonly understood, rests on a fundamentally false hypothesis, the supposition, viz., that there really are such things as ‘popular creations’ or spontaneous inventions of the masses; and the connection of this point of view with the democratic prejudice is obvious ... The folk has thus preserved, without understanding, the remains of old traditions that go back sometimes to an indeterminably distant past; to which we can only refer as ‘prehistoric.’” What has really been preserved in folk and fairy tales and in popular peasant art is, then, by no means a body of merely childish or entertaining fables or of crude decorative art, but a series of what are really esoteric doctrines and symbols of anything but popular invention. One may say that it is in this way, when an intellectual decadence has taken place in higher circles, that this doctrinal material is preserved from one epoch to another, affording a glimmer of light in what may be called the dark night of the intellect; the folk memory serving the purpose of a sort of ark, in which the wisdom of a former age is carried over (tiryate) the period of the dissolution of cultures that takes place at the close of a cycle.11
It is not a question of whether or not the ultimate significance of the popular legends and folk designs is actually understood by those who relate or employ them. These problems arise in much higher circles; in literary history, for example, one is often led to ask, when we find that an epic or romantic character has been imposed on purely mythical material (for example in the Mâhâbhârata and Râmâyana, and in the European recensions of the Grail and other Celtic material), how far has the author really understood his material? The point that we want to bring out is that the folk material, regardless of our actual qualifications in relation to it, is actually of an essentially mârga and not a desî character, and actually intelligible at levels of reference that are far above and by no means inferior to those of our ordinary contemporary “learning.” It is not at all shocking that this material should have been transmitted by peasants for whom it forms a part of their lives, a nourishment of their very constitution, but who cannot explain; it is not at all shocking that the folk material can be described as a body of “superstition,” since it is really a body of custom and belief that “stands over” (superstat) from a time when its meanings were understood. Had the folk beliefs not indeed been once understood, we could not now speak of them as metaphysically intelligible, or explain the accuracy of their formulation. The peasant may be unconscious and unaware, but that of which he is unconscious and unaware is in itself far superior to the empirical science and realistic art of the “educated” man, whose real ignorance is demonstrated by the fact that he studies and compares the data of folklore and “mythology” without suspecting their real significance any more than the most ignorant peasant.12
All that has been said above applies, of course, with even greater force to the sruti literature and, above all, the Rgveda, which so far from representing an intellectually barbarous age (as some pretend) has references so far abstract and remote from historical and empirical levels as to have become almost unintelligible to those whose intellectual capacities have been inhibited by what is nowadays called a “university education.” “ It is a matter at the same time of faith and understanding: the injunctions Crede ut intelligas and Intellige ut credas (“Believe, that you may understand,” and “Understand, in order to believe”) are valid in both cases—i. e. , whether we are concerned with the interpretation of folklore or with that of the transmitted texts.
It should not be supposed that it is only on Death’s side that there is singing to the harp, enactment (nrt), and a doing (kr); the point is that all of these acts are done by him vrthâ, “wantonly,” for mere pleasure, and not in due form. As already remarked, the sacrifice is mimetic by nature and definition, and it is for this reason that we render nrtyate by “enacted” rather than by “danced”; for though there can be no doubt that the ritual, or portions of it, were in a certain sense “danced,” (as “Indra danced his heroic deeds,” RV. V. 33. 6), this expression would hardly convey to a modern reader the significance of the root nrt as employed here as well as in later stage directions, where what is intended is a signification by means of formal and rhythmic gestures. That the ritual must have been, as we said, at least in parts, a kind of dance, is evident from the fact that the gods themselves, engaged in the work of creation, are compared to dancers (nrtyatâm iva, RV. X. 72. 6), and that in KB. XVII. 8 the sacrificing priests are spoken of as “dancing” (ninartyanti), Keith justly commenting that this implies a “union of song, recitation, and dancing”—that is to say, what is later called the ensemble of music, samgîta. It may be added that ritual dancing survived in the Christian sacrifice at least as late as the eighteenth century in Spain.
The contests of Prajâpati with Death parallels that of Apollo with Marsyas, as to which Plato says that the man of sound mind will “prefer Apollo and his instruments to Marsyas and his” (Republic 399 E).
Cf. Luc-Benoist, La Cuisine des Anges, 1932, pp. 74-75. “L’intérêt profond de toutes les traditions dites populaires réside surtout dans le fait qu’elles ne sont pas populaires d’origine ... Aristote y voyait avec raison les restes de l’ancienne philosophie. Il faudrait dire les formes anciennes de l’éternelle philosophie”—i. e., of the philosophia perennis, Augustine’s “Wisdom uncreate, the same now as it ever was and the same to be for evermore.” As pointed out by Michelet, V. E., it is in this sense— viz., inasmuch as “les Maîtres du Verbe projettent leurs inventions dans la mémoire populaire, qui est un réceptacle merveilleux des concepts merveilleux” (Le Secret de la Chevalerie, 1930, p. 19)—and not in any “democratic” sense, that it can properly be said, Vox populi, vox Dei.
The beast fables of the Pañcatantra, in which a more than merely worldly wisdom is embodied, is unquestionably of aristocratic and not of popular origin; most of the stories in it have, as Edgerton says, “gone down” into Indian folklore, rather than been derived from it (Amer. Oriental Series, III, 1924, pp. 3, 10, 54). The same applies, without question, to the Jâtakas, many of which are versions of myths, and could not possibly have been composed by anyone not in full command of the metaphysical doctrines involved.
Andrew Lang, introducing Marian Roalfe Cox’s Cinderella (1893), in which 345 versions of the story from all over the world are analyzed, remarked, “The fundamental idea of Cinderella, I suppose, is this: a person of mean or obscure position, by means of supernatural assistance, makes a good marriage.” He found it very difficult to account for the world-wide distribution of the motive; of which, it may be added, there is a notable occurrence in a scriptural context in the Indian myth of Apâlâ and Indra. Here I will only ask the reader, of what “person in a mean or obscure position” is the “good marriage” referred to in the words of Donne, “Nor ever chaste until thou ravish me?” whom did Christ “love in her baseness and all her foulness” (St. Bonaventura, Dom. prim. post Oct. Epiph. II. 2)? and what does the ierós gamos imply in its final significance? And by the same token, who is the “dragon” disenchanted by the fier baiser? Who emerges with a “sunskin” from the scaly slough, who shakes off the ashes and puts on a golden gown to dance with the Prince? Pra vasîyânsam vivâham âpnoti ya evam veda, “More excellent is the marriage that one makes who understands that” (Pañcavimsa Brâhmana, VII. 10. 4)!