Indian Folklore
The folk religion of the Indian subcontinent — village goddesses, the Sanskrit epics, the yakshas, the vetalas, the bhuta of the Adivasi heartland, and the Buddhist and Jain story cycles that feed them.
In this section
Vetala Stories
The vetala of Indian folk tradition, the Baital Pachisi frame narrative, the twenty-five riddles, the rakshasa, the churel, the pichal periya, and the vetala in modern Indian cinema.
Yakshas and Nature Spirits
The yakshas and yakshis of Indian folk tradition, the treasure-guarding nature spirits, Kubera, the Vettah legend, the yakshi of the Buddhist and Jain texts, and the yakshi statues of early Buddhist art.
Indian folklore is the most continuous in the world. The Rigveda, the oldest of the Sanskrit hymns, is older than the Homeric epics by several centuries, and the two great epic poems, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, are still recited, performed, and revered in village India. Around these great texts lies an enormous mass of folk material: the local goddess of the village shrine, the snake-spirit of the well, the yakshas of the forest, the vetalas of the cremation ground, the bhuta and preta who wander the dark. The folk world is not a survival of an older India. It is, in many respects, the older India, and the great Sanskrit traditions have been continuously fed by it.
The Folk Hinduism of the Village
The Hinduism practised in the great temples of the cities is not the only Hinduism, and arguably not even the older one. The village forms of the faith are often simpler, more local, and more concerned with the welfare of the household, the field, and the village boundary. The presiding deity of the village may be a goddess with no obvious equivalent in the Sanskrit pantheon — a smallpox goddess in some regions, a cholera goddess in others, a Mariamman, a Manasa, a Sitala — and her annual festival, with its processions, its animal sacrifice, and its all-night drumming, is the central social event of the year.
The boundary of the village is marked by a shrine, often no more than a small stone smeared with vermilion and surrounded by a low wall. The goddess of the boundary (Gramadevi) is honoured at the planting and harvest, and she is invoked in the rituals of protection. The banyan tree at the village edge is sacred to her; the water tank or step-well at the village centre is sacred to the rain and the river. The household itself is a small shrine, with a tulsi plant growing in the courtyard, a small altar in the corner, and the family lineage hung on the wall in the form of photographs of the ancestors.
The great gods of the Sanskrit pantheon are honoured in this village Hinduism, but they are honoured in village form. Vishnu may be the god of preservation, but the village Vishnu is also the one who watches the cattle; Shiva is the great ascetic of the mountains, but the village Shiva is also the lord of the cremation ground and the protector of the village against demons. The goddess Durga becomes the fierce protector of the village, the goddess of the smallpox, the goddess of the war. The pantheon of Chinese folk religion and the eight million kami of Japanese Shinto are parallel systems in which the older local cult and the official religion sit on top of each other. The Slavic household spirits and the Roman lares and penates are the European equivalents.
The Two Great Epics
The Mahabharata and the Ramayana are not just two poems. They are two vast compendia of story, philosophy, legend, and folktale, in which the great Sanskrit tradition meets the older folk material on its own ground. The Mahabharata, running to about 100,000 verses, tells of the great war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, the eighteen-day battle of Kurukshetra, and the long moral aftermath. The Bhagavad Gita, the Song of the Lord, is embedded in the sixth book of the Mahabharata and is one of the foundational texts of Hinduism. The Ramayana, attributed to the sage Valmiki, tells of Prince Rama of Ayodhya, his exile in the forest, the abduction of his wife Sita by the demon king Ravana of Lanka, the alliance with the monkey king Sugriva and the monkey general Hanuman, the war on Lanka, the recovery of Sita, and the long, melancholy aftermath. The story is shorter, simpler, and more popular than the Mahabharata, and it has been translated, retold, and performed across the whole of South and Southeast Asia.
Both epics live in the folkloric world. In Tamil Nadu, in the month of Adi, the entire Ramayana is read aloud in temples and households over a period of weeks. In the great coastal states of Andhra Pradesh and Odisha, the folk performers known as Kuchipudi and Odissi dancers act out the great scenes of the Mahabharata at the village festival. The Jataka tales of the Buddha’s earlier lives, the Puranic stories of the great gods, and the regional epics of the South — the Cilappatikaram of the Tamil, for instance, and the Kathasaritsagara of the Sanskrit — are read aloud in much the same way. The oral storytelling traditions of West Africa and the Norse skalds of the Viking world are different in idiom but similar in their dependence on the reciting voice.
The Ramayana Across Asia
The Ramayana is the most widely travelled of the great Indian epics. Its earliest translation into a non-Indian language was the Chinese, made in the sixth century, and from there it passed into Tibet, Mongolia, and the Buddhist world. In Southeast Asia, the Ramayana became the national epic of Thailand (as the Ramakien), of Indonesia (as the Kakawin Ramayana), of Cambodia (as the Reamker), of Laos, of Myanmar, and of the Philippines. In each, the story has been modified to local taste: the monkey Hanuman, for instance, takes on a particularly heroic role in the Thai and Javanese versions, and in Bali the masked dance-drama of the Ramayana is one of the central art forms.
The Mahabharata has a similar, if slightly less intense, diaspora. Its tales appear in the puppet theatre of Thailand, in the Mahabharata paintings of the Balinese palaces, in the carved reliefs of Angkor Wat, and in the modern Indonesian and Malaysian adaptations. The folkloric kinship between the Indian epics and the older heroic poetry of Europe — the Iliad, the Beowulf, the Nibelungenlied — is a long-standing subject of comparison, and the cross-pillar page on oral storytelling across cultures places the Indian reciters in their wider context.
Yaksha, Yakshi: Spirits of Forest and Water
The yakshas and yakshis of Indian folk tradition are an ancient and many-sided class of nature-spirits. The male yakshas are, in the older Sanskrit texts, the guardians of treasure hidden in the earth; they are the servants of Kubera, the god of wealth, and they live in the roots of the banyan tree, in the clefts of the mountain, and in the deep places of the forest. The female yakshis are the more dangerous of the two: they haunt the water, the flowering tree, the crossroads, and the ruined temple, and they are given to seducing the unwary traveller. The yakshi of the Vettah legend, the yakshi who lived in a tree at the gate of the city of Kotivana and who ate every passer-by, is one of the more alarming of the type.
The yakshas have a respectable place in the Sanskrit tradition. The great stupa of Sanchi, in Madhya Pradesh, is decorated with yakshi statues from the second century BCE; one of them, the Sanchi yakshi, is one of the most familiar pieces of Indian art. The yakshi is also visible in the Buddhist and Jain texts, where she is sometimes converted, sometimes exorcised, and sometimes simply left as the beautiful and dangerous creature of the older religion. Kubera, the king of the yakshas, is honoured in temples and shrines, and the yakshas of the South Indian folk tradition are a major subject in their own right. The parallel between the yakshis and the huli jing of China, the kelpies of the Scottish lochs, and the rusalka of the Slavic world is a fruitful one for the comparative folklorist.
Naga: The Snake Spirits
The nagas, the snake-spirits of the Indian folkloric world, are closely related to the yakshas in function but very different in character. A naga may be a cobra, a python, or a great mythical serpent of the underworld, and it may be a protector of treasure, a guardian of water, an ancestor of an entire clan, or a deity in its own right. The Naga Panchami festival, in which snakes are honoured and offered milk, is one of the great popular festivals of the Hindu year. The Naga is the same figure as the Buddhist Naga, who sheltered the meditating Buddha from the storm and who, in the older Indian world, was the king of the deep water.
The Naga has its widest mythological scope in the great epics. The Naga king Vasuki, the serpent used as the rope to churn the ocean of milk in the Mahabharata, is one of the central figures of the older cosmology. The Naga is also a major figure in the Buddhist world: the Mucalinda, the great Naga king who spread his hood over the meditating Buddha during a storm, is venerated throughout Southeast Asia, and the temples of Angkor and Bagan are full of Naga imagery. The water-and-serpent theme of the Indian naga has parallels in the Chinese dragon and the Japanese ryū; the wider kinship of these beings with the dragons of the world is an old subject of comparative mythology.
Bhuta, Preta, and the Restless Dead
The dead, in the Indian folk tradition, are a permanent concern. The Sanskrit texts divide the dead into a great many categories, but the two main ones are the preta, the recently dead who are still attached to the household, and the bhuta, the older spirits who have lost their way and are now wandering. The preta is honoured at the shraddha ceremony, the fortnight of rites performed annually for each deceased relative; the bhuta is honoured, propitiated, and if possible exorcised. The bhuta is often a violent spirit, capable of possession, of haunting houses, of causing sudden illness; the bhuta shrines of coastal Karnataka and Goa are one of the most distinctive features of the regional folk religion.
The southern bhuta cults, the Tantric traditions of cremation-ground worship, and the Buddhist and Jain stories of the hungry ghost (the peta of the Pali texts) are all part of the same complex. The Indian bhuta is the functional equivalent of the Chinese hungry ghost, the Japanese yūrei, the European revenant and the Slavic upir. The detailed Indian vampiric figure, the vetala, is treated in its own page.
The Vetala and the Baital Pachisi
The vetala (also called baital) is one of the most distinctive of all the Indian folkloric beings. It is a spirit that inhabits and animates a dead body, often a corpse hanging in the tree of the cremation ground, and it possesses a sharp intelligence and a sardonic wit. The most famous collection of vetala stories is the Baital Pachisi, or Vetālapañcaviṃśati, “Twenty-five Tales of the Vampire,” a Sanskrit frame narrative of uncertain date. In the frame, a king named Vikram is sent by a tantric sorcerer to capture a vetala that hangs in a tree in the cremation ground. The vetala agrees to come with the king on condition that the king answer his riddles. The king, an upright and clever man, struggles; the riddles, often disguised as stories, are difficult and morally pointed. The vetala escapes each night and the king must begin again, and the twenty-five tales of the title accumulate as the king’s quest continues.
The Baital Pachisi is a remarkable piece of folk literature. The stories are short, sharp, and often cruel; they bear on the politics of the small kingdom, on the duties of kings, on the relations of men and women, and on the question of what it means to be good. The vetala is, in some of them, the moral superior of the king; in others, the king finds a way to silence the spirit. The tradition is part of a wider Indian vampiric complex that includes the rakshasa of the Sanskrit epics, the churel of western India, and the pichal periya of the Tamil south. The vetala has been the subject of several modern Indian films, including the productions of the Ramsay Brothers, and the figure reappeared in the Netflix series Ghoul. The page on vetala stories discusses the type in more detail.
The Folk Religions of the South and the Adivasi Heartland
The South Indian folk religion is a deep and ancient system of its own. Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam-speaking regions each have their own local pantheons, festivals, and ritual specialists. The Tamil village goddess, the Amman, is honoured in the small shrines at the edges of the fields and is invoked for rain, for the safety of the children, and for the welfare of the cattle. The Tamil folk religion also includes the fierce god Aiyanar, the village guardian who is honoured at the boundary of the settlement and whose shrines are often surrounded by rows of terracotta horses. The Thevar folk tradition, the ancient Sangam literature, and the bhakti poetry of the Alvars and the Nayanars are the literary counterparts.
The Adivasi, or tribal, traditions of central and eastern India are even older. The Santal, the Bhil, the Gond, the Munda, the Oraon, and a great many smaller groups each have their own folkloric traditions: the creation myths of the Bhuiya and the Munda, the world-tree and the earth-mother of the Santal, the ancestor-cult of the Baiga. The Adivasi folk religion has been influenced by Hinduism in many regions, but the older stratum of animism, the reverence for the forest and the river, and the role of the shamans and the village elders have all survived. The kinship of the Adivasi traditions with the forest spirits of the wider world and the sacred trees of Eurasia is a major subject of folkloristic comparison.
Buddhist and Jain Folk Material
The Buddhist and Jain traditions have contributed a great deal to Indian folk material. The Jataka tales of the Buddha’s earlier lives — 547 stories in which the future Buddha appears as a deer, an elephant, a lion, a wise minister, or a clever rabbit — are a vast anthology of Indian folktale. They were taken into the folk traditions of Tibet, Mongolia, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia, and they are still read aloud in village monasteries of the Theravada world. The Eight Immortals and the Chinese folk Taoist tradition absorbed many of the Jataka motifs, and the Japanese and Korean versions are a major part of their own folkloric heritage.
The Jain tradition contributed its own folk material: the stories of the great Jain kings, the tales of Mahavira’s previous births, the legends of the great Jain merchants of Gujarat and Rajasthan, and the long narrative poems of the Hindi-speaking heartland. The Buddhist and Jain narrative traditions share with the Hindu a great reservoir of stories about the previous lives of the great teachers, and the parallels with the Hindu Puranic tales and the Celtic and Norse hero tales are striking.
Folk Dance, Folk Music, and the Performing Arts
The Indian folkloric world is also a performing one. The folk dances of India — the Garba of Gujarat, the Bhangra of the Punjab, the Bihu of Assam, the Chhau of the eastern states, the Kathakali of Kerala, the Kuchipudi of Andhra, the Bharatanatyam of Tamil Nadu — are all part of the same great tradition, in which the older folk material is taken up into classical form. The folk music of India is similarly continuous: the baul singers of Bengal, the sarangi players of Rajasthan, the drums of the southern temples, the pan-pipe ensembles of the Adivasi hills, the long-necked tambura of the classical south. The relationship between the folk and the classical forms is one of constant exchange, and a great many of the older Indian classical forms have their roots in the older folk material.
The Indian folk performing tradition has had a long reach. The Indian folk dances have been adopted into the diaspora communities of Trinidad, Mauritius, Fiji, and Guyana. The Bollywood and Tamil film industries have drawn on the folk material for nearly a century, and the modern television serials are part of the same long tradition. The wider context of the oral transmission of folk material is treated in the oral storytelling page, and the kinship of the Indian epic with the European medieval romance is a long-standing subject of comparison.
The Living Indian Folk World
The Indian folkloric world is not a museum piece. The village goddess, the bhuta shrine, the snake-spirit at the well, the family ancestor at the household altar — all of these are a part of the daily life of rural India, and they continue into the cities. The annual festival of the village goddess is still the social centre of the year in many parts of the South, the vetala stories are still the spooky tales of the village elder, and the great Sanskrit epics are still the central narrative literature of the household. The continuity between the older and the newer is a feature of the Indian folkloric world that few other cultures can match.