Text and context in chindu Bhagavatham

Abstract

The symbolic and expressive forms, which one can call folklore have their primary existence in the action of the people, and are rooted in the social and cultural life of those people. This study will be significant because, the emphasis will be on the aspects of context, which invariably based on field work, with primary focus on "oral tradition". The significance of the contextual variation of the performances can be grouped notably into three types ; functional, situational and cultural. They are denotative of the inter-relationship that exists between the chindu performers and their intra and their intra and inter cultural groups Depending on the context, the texts concomitantly vary in tune with the situations. The analysis of the texts manifest three types of texts which exist in the narrative tradition of chindus. They are - oral text, performance text, and written text. The segmentation of these texts into three do not categorically deny the inter-play between them and infact some times appear correlative and in some other times, remain parallel. The community's existence from the time immemorial shows the dynamics of texts and context inter-play, which potentially communicate poly-meaningful performance tradition