PRESERVING ORALITY IN THE MODERN ERA

Ever since the Macaulayite era, the oral has been misconstrued as rote, repetitive and redundant. But It actually invents variants around a standard narrative

- SHIV VISVANATHAN

SOMETIMES I feel like an "outdated" man while everyone is discussing and celebrating technology. I sit quietly, watching an array of technological spectacles. One has felt this way especially after Covid, when technologies were literally hawked as a solution to everything. Today, reform becomes a technical answer to a technical question, and progress a standard linear narrative. Anyone who questions these is seen as a Luddite. But I am not one. A luddite confronts you with an "either/or" vis-à-vis technology, while a pluralist seeks the music of alternatives. I want to question the recent hype surrounding technology, especially the craze behind AI and digital solutions. I want to see if we can broaden the narrative. I believe the idea of the oral and the spoken has to be revived to sustain a different creativity.

Firstly, one has to begin by questioning the idea of the oral as redundant. The oral is primordial. It brings voice to the innermost domains of modernity. Yet it sustains the intimacy of the voice and the encounter of face to face, defining intimacy and communication in a very different way. Orality demands the listener's attention and thus becomes an instrument for the community, while the printed word invites privacy. Simply put: When you read, you want to be alone. But it isn't the same when it comes to orality.

Ever since the Macaulayite era, the oral has been misconstrued as rote, repetitive and redundant. The oral is actually inventive. It sustains memory by inventing variants around a standard narrative. As the musicologist Sumithra Vasudev put it: "My music is oral and orality creates a new epistemic reality." She argued that music would not be music without the intimacy of the Guru-Shishya relationship. Orality, she suggested, has its own sense of pedagogy, invention and community. As a result, one can memorise a few thousand lines and seek different forms of meaning in them.