Folklore can hardly be taken as the relic of the past. In fact, it has quite successfully adapted to the modern digital world. Emphasizing the pivotal function of folklore as a source of knowledge acquisition, Alan Dundes, the famous folklorist, maintained it as ‘autobiographical ethnography’ that allows a view ‘from the inside-out rather than from the outside-in’ (1975, xi). Tenali Rama’s tales, often considered bedtime stories for children, has been celebrated for centuries. Provocative and perceptive, the stories invite a wide range of interpretations. Besides being popular among kids for his wit and humour, the character of Tenali Rama intrigues adult readership for his scholarly role as an advisor to the King Krishnadeva Raya (1509-1529) of Vijayanagara Empire.

This article attempts to unpack the tales of Tenali Rama to study the intrinsic ideologies they propagate, which otherwise seem naïve and innocent enough for children’s read. Borrowing from Gramsci’s understanding of the senso commune (common sense), this article aims to study the stories as political narratives which provide the masses a transit from knowledge to opinion and determine a cardinal role in the shaping of the social order. Although the tales of Tenali Rama, like other folk tales, have traversed to us mainly through oral tradition, the thrust of my paper is to problematize how Tenali Rama is projected in popular culture, especially in graphic novels and cartoon shows.

One of the most celebrated graphic narratives in the Hindi heartland, Amar Chitra Katha came up with its 523^rd issue titled Raman of Tenali – The Birbal of the South (1978). While it is easy to comprehend why Birbal is often used as a parameter to study Indian court jesters given the importance of Mughal Empire in historical scholarship, one can find an underlying pattern of identity politics in the figures of these court jesters across medieval India. Raman of Tenali begins with a wandering sage rebuking an indolent Rama, but, out of pity, teaches him a mantra to please Goddess Kali. The story unfolds portraying Rama as an arrogant lad who not only ridicules divinity, but also tricks his way into the royal court by deceiving people. While there is no mention of his childhood struggle, as accounts from south India attests, Raman of Tenali focuses on select parts of Rama’s life highlighting him as a wickedly ambitious man who deserves no honour and succeeds only through resorting to immoral ways.

While critics still debate the historical existence of Tenali Rama, few accounts, like Panchapakesa Ayyar’s Tenali Rama (1957), strongly advocate some oblique facts of his life. Owing to multiple rejections by Vaishnava pundits due to his Shaivite ancestry, Rama was never fortunate enough to receive any formal education. But his undying hunger for wisdom aided him to whet his intelligence and become one of the ashta-diggajas [eight poet laureates]  in the royal court.

While folk tales, inarguably, nourish our understanding of the community’s past, they also serve, to borrow Althusser’s terminology, as tools of ideological state apparatuses through which a child is interpellated. As crucial as it is to pay heed to the viability of folk tales, presenting monochromatic version, on the other hand, can contribute to concretization of stereotypes about certain communities or races in a child’s psyche.

The second point of reference is the cartoon show, The Adventures of Tenali Rama (2003), which depicts the legendary figure in a fairly positive light. One cannot fail to notice two things in Rama’s projection. First, the image of a devout Brahmin in a traditional veshti, with a tuft of hair. Many of his stories are rooted in ironic reversals coupled with strong satire of Brahminical rituals. A similar trajectory is found in various versions of his encounter with the raj purohit [royal priest] where he subverts the latter’s customary inheritance of the royal position. Two prominent stories to evoke in this context would be – ‘Golden Mangoes’ and ‘Black Dog.’ In the first, he challenges the traditional ritual of Brahmana bhojanam [Brahmin meal], while in the second, he mocks the Hindu ritual of ablution and ceremonies. While the first portrays him as a witty iconoclast whose acuity is directed against conventional forms of privilege and entitlement, the second re-establishes him as an upholder of caste discrimination as he vehemently reaffirms the abysmal rift between a Brahmin and a barber and also employs a derogatory analogy to compare the figure of the barber with that of a black dog. There is a stroke of Derridean absence-presence here. On one hand, the rejections pushed Rama towards his Dunkirkian pursuit of knowledge and made him come back stronger to reclaim his space amidst entitled Brahmins. On the other hand, it is also the ultimate victory of Brahminism. The child-viewers recognize Rama as a devout Brahmin and not as a subversive figure. Much of his glorification is foregrounded in his Brahminical identity and this is where Brahminical supremacy triumphs through appropriation.

The second remarkable feature about Rama is his unparalleled witticism. One can argue that the kernel of his stories lies in his wit, much like the European court jesters. In this respect, one cannot help evoking the cherished jester of 18^th century Bengal, Gopal Bhar, one of the nav ratnas at the court of Raja Krishnachandra. Born into a lower caste Hindu family, Gopal has been a direct victim of casteism. Showing exemplary wit and intelligence from childhood, Gopal would often be ridiculed and challenged by envious upper caste courtiers. While Birbal has been widely celebrated as one of the brightest jewels in Emperor Akbar’s court, he also faced similar challenges from the non-Hindu courtiers. It can very well be argued that witticism, for the jesters, has evolved almost like a defence mechanism. In the face of terror –mortal or divine – they had to contrive epigrammatic humour to escape punishment or, at times, death. Jokes become their tools of resistance and humour takes the form of self-assertion. Historical or fictitious, their existence lies in their wit. Wit becomes their talisman, while they become the totems of folk culture.

Works cited

I. Primary Sources
Chandrakant, Kamala. Raman of Tenali – The Birbal of the South.  Mumbai: Amar Chitra Katha. 1978. Print.
Dondis, Roger, creator. The Adventures of Tenali Raman, written by Ariel Prendergast, Cartoon Network (India) and Toonz Animation Studios, 2003.

II. Secondary Sources
Ayyar, P. Tenali Rama. Madras: The Madras Alliance Co., 1947. Print.
Dundes, Alan. Analytic Essays in Folklore. The Hague: Mouton, 1975. Print.