तेलुगु और हिंदी लोकोक्तियाँ : Telugu and Hindi Proverbs (An Old and Rare Book)

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Study of Folklore is an excursion into forgotten times. Study of Proverb being a part of the mythic consciousness of a society is also part of the Folkloristic studies in general. Histories of cultures, whether studied as a synchronic continua in space or diachronic continua in time, compliment each other and yield similar insights. Insofar as all recollected experience is contemporaneous, past and present are co-existent. This continued contemporaneity 18 tradition and shares not only the present but also the future.

Scanning the cultural horizon, one finds that certain experiences are perceived as though they existed without history. These persisting experiences express themselves in a language which is simple and intense at the same time. They become idioms and not generally affected by the surface structural changes in the language concerned. It is only when the changes in depth make the experience indefinable that new clothes are given to the exrerience by some anonymous genius. Thus it would be clear that proverbs are epigrammatic condensation of the experiences of many through the wit of one.

Structurally, proverbs though simple, use such stylistic devices as contrast, alliteration, thyme and repetition. Content-wise, almost anything summing up everybody’s experience in a familiar world enters into the proverb. Yet proverbs are neither cliches, conventional phrases, nor blazon populaire. They are in a sense invariable and yet admit of local variations.

Proverbs vary from one sub-culture to another and yet they also define a Culture Area. In India, for instance, one can build a single model of mythic consciousness in spite of the divergent languages and ethnic groups. The variant of the Paragurama story obtained in Tamil Nadu, wherein Paragurama killed his mother and the protective Pariah woman in one stroke and later brought back both of them to life by switching the heads, is a pointer to the cultural miscegenation that has taken place in the country.

Comparison of subcultures on the basis of proverbs for establishing regional universals is not an easy task. It is relatively easy to find individual proverbs which have apparent formal cemantic echo in a proverb in another language. That is what most scholars do, including the author of this book when dealing with proverbs of two or more languages. However, no significant systemic conclusions can be drawn from such studies unless manifestations and abstractions are kept apart within each sub-culture and comparisons attempted at the abstraction level.

The present book, comparing Hindi and Telugu proverbs, provides a wealth of data and, though weak, attempts at generalisations at different levels. But it is far from presenting a theoretical model for structural comparison hinted above. Now that the data are made available, it is hoped that either the author or some scholar will work at building a model of systemic comparison of abstractions between sub-cultures and thus provice another basis for establishing India as one Culture Area.