Folktales of India. Image credit – Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain image

I am immensely happy to present this special feature in Muse India, titled ‘Folklore and the Alternative Modernities’. I am grateful to Shri GSP Rao, Shri Atreya Sarma, and the team at Muse India for giving me this opportunity.

The idea of alternative modernities has become progressively urgent in a world struggling to understand its own fractured futures. Modernity, once seen as a singular, linear project of progress, has revealed itself to be plural, contested and deeply embedded in local epistemologies. In this special feature in Muse India, Folklore and the Alternative Modernities, we turn to folk literature, performance and indigenous knowledge systems to uncover the intricate ways communities imagine, resist and reconfigure the idea of being modern while deeply engaged with the Mnemoculture. Folklore, rather romanticised and musimised as vestigial memory, emerges here as an active, political and aesthetic mode through which people articulate historical consciousness, negotiate identity and contend with the pressures of globality.

The issue opens with research articles that foreground archive, memory and the politics of documentation, setting the conceptual foundations for understanding folk as living practice rather than fossilised text. Debashis Mandal’s From Archive to Song - Folklore as Historical Consciousness pushes us to rethink the role of folklore not as nostalgic inheritance but as an alternative historiography. Paromita Das extends this conversation by positioning folk songs as living archives, demonstrating how oral traditions resist linear time and embody dynamic, ever-evolving community memory. These essays challenge academic archives by foregrounding vernacular ways of remembering, where emotion, rhythm and embodiment serve as counter-archives to dominant historical narratives.

Contemporary technological interventions further complicate the relationship between past and present. Mamta Sharma’s essay on ‘Sonchadi’ examines the digital reincarnation of a traditional folk-ballad as presented by Coke Studio Bharat, raising provocative questions about aesthetic translation, cultural commodification, and the algorithmic gaze that manufactures ‘here and new’ folk for mass consumption. Similarly, Priyanka Das’s essay, Rakkhosh Reloaded, Petni in the Feed, explores how monstrous female figures mutate into SEO-coded digital entities across social media platforms, revealing ‘platform folklore’ as a new site of everyday myth-making. Arijit Lahiri’s From Haunted Villages to Viral Tweets situates this phenomenon in a broader route, mapping how Indian folklore travels, mutates and thrives in digital ecosystems. These chapters illuminate how folklore crafts alternative modernities by entering the circuits of technology without surrendering its subversive edge. Indigenous knowledge systems remain central to many of the essays, offering ecological and ethical frameworks that diverge sharply from exploitative capitalist modernity. In Lifestyle and Wellness Narratives, Marvi Sharma and Neena Gupta Vij compare contemporary consumerist wellness cultures with the lived sustainability practices of Thial village, revealing how local knowledge traditions offer nuanced, community-rooted alternatives to corporatised well-being. Rahul Nijhara and Meenakshi’s eco-critical reading of the Punjabi folktale Chidhi te Pippal similarly underscores the ecological intelligence embedded in folk narratives, where nonhuman entities occupy moral and philosophical significance. These essays collectively argue that indigenous folkloric traditions, far from being relics, present robust ecological modernities that challenge the extractive logic of the Anthropocene.

Women’s voices, silences and resistances form another major thematic axis of this volume. Divya Gupta’s Rewriting the Script interrogates the structural silencing of female characters in folktales and the political act of repossessing their stories in contemporary re-narrations. Shibani Phukan’s Tejimola and Her Afterlives continues this thread by examining how a beloved Assamese tale transforms across versions to articulate resilience, agency, and cultural renewal. Amrita Ghosh, in Witch, Widow, Devi, traces female archetypes in Bengali folklore to reveal alternative feminist modernities that emerge from within bhasha cultures rather than through Western theoretical templates. Labiba Alam’s essay expands the conversation globally by exploring girlhood across cultures through the motifs of absent mothers and magical female figures, illuminating how folklore constructs emotional, ethical and imaginative spaces for young female subjectivities. Folk theatre and ritual performance traditions provide yet another window into community modernities that unfold outside the metropolitan gaze. Karunanithi Gopalakrishnan’s exploration of Therukoothu, the ritual folk theatre of rural Tamil Nadu, demonstrates how performative traditions serve simultaneously as entertainment, pedagogy, and cultural identity formation. Pavitra Kumari’s study of Thieves and Fakirs in Haryanvi Folk Theatre uncovers how marginal characters navigate, and sometimes overturn, moral hierarchies, offering a subaltern critique of social order. In a related vein, D. Snehsata and Siddhartha Pratapa’s comparative study of Shakuntala-Dushyant and Nal-Damyanti in Haryanvi Saangs places local theatre traditions in dialogue with Sanskrit and Greek classics, revealing the radical pluralism embedded in vernacular performance.

Several essays bring attention to folklore as a political archive of communities rendered invisible in mainstream narratives. Rupkatha Ghosh’s empirical study on Dhediya Folklore documents ritual and performance traditions at risk of extinction, emphasising the urgency of culturally sensitive preservation. Utpal Baishya, in Folklore and Oral History, turns to the ‘unsung heroes of nation building,’ highlighting how oral traditions safeguard alternative nationalist imaginaries often absent from institutional history. Devendar Randhawa’s work on Victorian Narrative in Punjabi Folklore demonstrates how the colonial encounter becomes embedded, resisted, and reinterpreted in local storytelling practices, thus offering yet another version of modernity born in the crucible of cultural negotiation.

The intersections of gender, globalisation and commercialisation emerge powerfully in Pooja Mann’s essay on the global transformation of Haryanvi women’s folk songs. By examining how technology, migration and market forces reshape performance, aesthetics, and gendered visibility, the essay raises important questions about agency, representation, and cultural ownership. This is echoed in Parthasarathi Sahu’s reflections on The Aesthetics of the Folk, which illuminate the symbolic, ritualistic and narrative codes that give folk traditions their enduring potency even as they encounter and reshape modern cultural grammars. The issue closes with Nandini Sahu’s profound meditation on menstrual myth and ritual embodiment in the contexts of Kamakhya and Raja Paraba. Her work demonstrates how folklore encodes cosmologies that challenge biomedical, patriarchal, and globalised narratives of womanhood, offering instead deeply rooted alternative modernities shaped by the rhythms of land, body, and ritual. Sahin Shah’s essay, Sacred Shores and Flying Heads, similarly reminds us that folklore across the Indian Ocean world operates as a cartography of myth, fantasy and mobility, generating transregional imaginaries that defy national boundaries.

These research articles make a compelling case for folklore, and they certainly have enriched me while I edited the issue. Folklore is not the opposite of modernity; it is its constant interlocutor, critic and interpreter. The ‘alternative modernities’ do not reject evolution or devolution; they redefine its contours from vernacular, ecological, embodied and ritual epistemologies. Through song, theatre, rumour, ritual, dance, digital feeds, ecological knowledge and reimagined myths, folklore continues to shape the ways communities dream of their futures. It is my sincere hope that this special issue encourages readers to see folklore as a remnant of the past and as a vital, evolving force that challenges dominant narratives and opens pathways to more inclusive and plural visions of modernity. I have been serving the cause of folklore since the year 2007, by designing academic programmes on folk literature, writing books on the subject and delivering a series of lectures on folklore. Folklore is my passion.

Inclusivity and flexibility, compassion and empathy are the motifs of folklore.

Creation of folk minds is the key to this special feature of Muse India.

I am grateful to all the contributors of this very precious volume of Muse India for trusting me with their work. The issue is going to be of academic value to the researchers and teachers of folklore. A few contributors have informed me that they have used AI for editing their papers, purely for educational purposes.

I express my gratitude to Dr Joly Puthussery, Professor& Head, Centre for Folk Culture Studies, School of Social Sciences, University of Hyderabad, for sharing his invaluable comments for this special issue:

“I am excited and delighted to know that Muse India is on the verge of publishing a special issue titled “Folklore and the Alternative Modernities,” which truly celebrates academic as well as critical revelations on folklore under the editorial supervision of Prof. Nandini Sahu. Deliberations on folklore and its relevant presence in the post-truth world are the most apt area to be dealt with at this point in time. I am also sad that I missed an opportunity to be part of the excellent, diverse team of contributors. I cherish the moment and wish the issue would reach the maximum readers.” (Dr Joly Puthussery)

Also, I am humbled to share the opinions of Dr Dhurjjati Sarma, Assistant Professor, Department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies, Guwahati University, Assam, about this special issue of Muse India:

“This special issue of the journal Muse India on ‘Folklore and the Alternative Modernities' brings together a scholarly collection of articles exploring the multimedial and multivocal universe of folklore, with special emphasis on the contemporaneous dynamics of the discipline. As an intricately conceptualised domain of studies, folklore has an amazing range of engagement from the field to the laboratory to the classroom and beyond. With the onset of the digital age and AI, folklore has evolved and expanded to engage with newer forms of expression and identities. This issue of Muse India represents a complex yet happy bonding/blending of approaches and ideas, determining the scope and outreach of folklore studies. Tradition and modernity are strange yet compatible bedfellows, both attesting to the fact that change is the only constant in life. Likewise, the domain and discipline of folklore have passed through various intersections with the competing forces of preservation and modernisation; yet the pulsating energy has always remained as that of sustenance and reinvigoration. The submissions compiled in the volume deal with the varied aspects of folklore that reflect the spirit of resilience and regeneration. Archiving the indigenous is crucial, for it is only upon a trajectory of continuity that transformations could be located, mapped, and understood. This issue of Muse India will be a rich source of reference and research repository for present and future scholars and enthusiasts of folklore and folk studies.” (Dr Dhurjjati Sarma)

As always, in the immeasurable ocean of folklore studies, I remain but a solitary grain of sand, continuously shaped by the tides of learning that wash over the indigenous knowledge systems of the world. Each encounter, including this issue of Muse India, deepens my journey and enlarges my understanding. I stand simply as a humble seeker of folklore, ever aware of the vastness that surrounds me.

Wish you happy reading!