Tribal Verse | Class 11 English Notes

'INTRODUCTION' TO PAINTED WORDS

G.N. Devy elaborates on the cultural and imaginative uniqueness of tribal communities worldwide. Tribal societies are cohesive and organically unified groups that show little interest in wealth accumulation or capitalist labor exploitation. Their worldview intimately links nature, human beings, and God, emphasizing intuition over reason, sacredness of space, and a personal sense of time. The tribal imagination is dreamlike and hallucinatory, allowing for a fusion of different planes of existence and time levels. In their stories, natural elements like oceans, mountains, animals, and stars can behave like humans, reflecting emotions such as anger or happiness. This contrasts with the secular mode of creativity where the creator replaces God and imagination becomes self-conscious. The tribal imagination is more fluid and associative, blending emotion and narrative motifs without strict spatial or temporal order. This fluidity is evident in their oral and visual arts, where boundaries between art and non-art blur, and narratives may mix episodes from different epics or combine traditional and modern imagery. However, tribal arts are not without conventions; they follow strict ordering principles based on tradition and convention, with creativity expressed through playful subversions rather than irony. The sacred and ordinary coexist in tribal arts, which are relaxed and not created for commercial sale. The oral and pictorial arts are performing arts involving text, performance, and audience reception, allowing for experimentation within tradition.

📊 Diagram: Once a society accepts a secular mode of creativity within which the creator replaces God, imaginative transactions assume a self-conscious form. The tribal imagination, on the other hand, is still, t

🔗 Connection: This section leads to a deeper discussion on the role of memory and time in tribal consciousness and the importance of oral traditions, which is explored in the following sections.