Pluralities of History: Carrying Folklore Across Languages and Cultures

Abstract

If history is a distilled collection of stories that was handpicked by colonisers, victors, and those in power, then folklore is a pool of abundant and overlapping remembered pasts from the common person. My research considers the possibility of folklore being a truer, more relevant version of history by analyzing written and oral stories from the province of Sindh. Research took place in two simultaneous phases: 1) Interviews in Karachi with people in the cultural sector, such as a literary scholar, author, musician, dancer, and archeologist to investigate the relationship between folklore and artistic and cultural practices; 2) Field visits to archaeological sites, shrines, and historic monuments that involve talking to locals about the presence of folk stories in their communities. Methods of carrying on folklore are interdisciplinary and overlapping. They include singing verses that detail stories at shrines, incorporating stories into new music, interpreting stories through dance and theatrical performance, and preserving archaeological sites. Folk stories are allowed to be multiple, overlapping, and contradicting, as the reality that they present is of a plural, collective memory. They belong in literature as much as they belong in anthropology, music, performance, and other disciplines. These pluralities are present in the interviews and field research, which will be shared and discussed, showing how the version told by an expert in the field of literature was just as valid as the story shared by a villager in interior Sindh.