Collected Essays of A K Ramanujan

- Information and the arts are becoming increasingly democratized. New media removes the
limitations of face-to-face communication (465)
- Oral traditions carry counter-traditions, critiques of every major cultural form and idea – theu
are truly out of the reach of censors (467)
- Tales confront many problematic aspects of culture, and give voices to people who are deemed
voiceless and underprivileged (469)
- Both oral and early written texts were ‘published’ only when they were presented to a worthy
audience – textual community
- Art and literature enclose in a finite form that what is infinite and amorphous, reality (483)
- Rural composite performing arts vs Urban separation of art, religion and economics (532)
- Every cultural performance not only creates and carries texts, it is a text (535)
- Classical vs folk, written vs oral, fixed vs fluid. The classical, written and fixed do not necessarily
belong together (539)
- When the written form is only a mnemonic, a score to be performed, it is used freely for
improvisation (Yaksagana and Kathakali). Orally transmitted texts have fixed components,
formulae, refrains, obligatory descriptive passages, and traditionally defined motifs and narrative
structures (540)
- Folk-renditions of pan-Indian epics not only bring the gods home, making their daily world
mythic, they also contemporize them (547)