Folk Spatiality in the Digital Age: Virtual Platforms as Sites of Performance for Dislocated Folk Groups

Abstract

The tremendous growth of the digital world has led to reconceptualisation of ‘place’ as fluid. This becomes important for folkloristics where spatiality has been one of the key elements defining traditional folk identity. Members of a folk community dwell in close proximity, such as a village, leading to frequently shared narratives. These folk practices and narratives, in turn, depend on interaction and performance by members of folk groups for transmission and survival. Where such performance is hindered due to factors like dislocation, folk narratives move into oblivion and folk practices lapse. The digital world, however, now provides folk groups alternative sites for interaction and performance, rendering geographical location and distance immaterial and allowing dislocated folk groups to re-imagine lost homelands. Academics like Anjali Gera Roy have dwelt on these new ‘free-flowing cartographies’ of the digital world. This paper uses the example of Sindhi and Punjabi folk communities to understand how the digital world is helping displayed communities reclaim lost narratives. The Indian Partition in 1947 divided the western half of the subcontinent- that had been a cultural continuum for ages - drawing a hard political boundary were none had existed. While Punjab was divided into Ugda (East) and Lehnda (West), Sindh went entirely to the newly created Pakistan. Many Sindhis, however, chose to come to the Indian side and were thus dislocated from their land forever. Similarly, many Punjabis from the Pakistan side chose to come to India and were relocated across the country, once again being cleaved from their land. This paper will attempt to look at how the members of the two communities are now using digital platforms to document, preserve, and disseminate their fading folk narratives.