Not folklore but literature

Many Indian languages are only spoken, never written down. So their great works are not called 'literature', and critics ignore them.

Yet these oral works matter deeply. Nomadic communities, scattered across great distances, survive as communities because their oral epics bind them together. Devy admits sadly that some songs he heard as a child are already lost.

He no longer thinks of literature as something that must be written. Unless that narrow idea changes, he warns, India's oral traditions will go on declining.

Because tribal people are bilingual, outsiders often wrongly dismiss tribal languages as mere 'dialects' of the regional language, when they are languages in their own right.

Adivasi (tribal) literature is not a 'new' trend, Devy says. It is very old; it is only newly noticed. In fact, scripts and printing are recent inventions in human history, and every written work carries layers of orality, the spoken traditions it grew from.

Literature is much more than writing.