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Folklore is an expression of social, cultural, economic and political life of social groups. The transfer and preservation of folklore was done in various ways by different social groups using varied forms of literature prior to the existence of written forms. Some of these literary forms were oral traditions such as tales, customary lore, the forms of ritual practices, weddings, dances, songs, riddles, proverbs stories of a community and traditional beliefs, customs, the popular myths etc. The cultural heritage of a social group was disseminated and transmitted from one individual to another/other individuals, from one community to other communities or social groups informally through verbal instruction, imitation, repetition and demonstration. Literature portrays life as it is lived and experienced. Literature is true and faithful representation and record of life. Similarly, cultures are depicted through various art forms.

This work is particularly concerned with Suniti Namjoshi's use of traditional myths, fables, and fairy tale and their revision with specific purposes to re-construct and appropriate for feminist and deconstructive uses.

The term folklore has been coined by William J. Thoms in the mid-19^th century (1846) in English to replace popular antiquities and popular literature. Popular antiquities and popular literature include the manners, customs, beliefs, superstitions, proverbs, riddles and ballads. The word 'folklore' is a combination of two words 'folk' and 'lore'. 'Folk' refers to the 'specific community' and 'lore refers to the 'collective knowledge or wisdom on a particular subject'. Lore is often associated with myth. A. Taylor, an eminent American folklorist, has defined folklore as the material that is handed on by tradition either by word of mouth or by custom and practice. It may be folk songs, folktales, riddles, proverbs or other materials preserved in words. While elaborating folklore M. Islam says that folklore is the outcome of the human mind imbibed with creative feelings. Since ancient times two faculties of human mind have been responsible for the creation, preservation and transmission of folklore. These are creative ideas and the urge of aesthetic and artistic impulse. The lore or traditional learning was inspired by these two to help the creation of folklore (Islam, 1985:13).

Folktales, myths and legends are generally considered distinct types of narrative, or “folklore artifacts”. According to Bascom’s 1965 proposed typology of folktales, folktales are generally considered fiction by the teller and the audience. Folktales don’t have any historical origins. They often have a sense of timelessness about them. In contrast, myths are considered historically factual and therefore sacred. Legends are also considered factual. Legends can be either sacred or secular (Bascom 3-5).

Three Forms of Prose Narratives:

These distinctions between myth, legend and folktale may be summarized in the following table:

Form	Belief	Time	Place	Attitude	Main Characters
Myth	Factual	Antiquity	Different World	Sacred	Non-human
Legend	Factual	Recent Past	World of Today	Secular or Sacred	Human
Folktale	Fictional	Any Time	Any Place	Secular	Human or Non-human

from Bascom’s Typology

The headings Place, Attitude, Main Characters are added in attempt to indicate subsidiary characteristics. The definition of these three forms is based only on formal features (i.e prose narratives) and the two headings of Belief and Time (Bascom 5).  (Anecdotes and jokes or jests can be also other forms of prose narratives)

Folklore performs or does many functions in the social groups. American folklorist, anthropologist and museum director William Bascom tells that “Folklore performs five basic functions in the human society such as – amusement, validating culture, education, maintaining conformity to the accepted patterns of behaviour and instrument of social and political change” (Bascom 5).

Oral traditions in the form of myths, legends, folktales, folk songs, riddles, proverbs and idioms, either in original or in changed forms are abundantly used in literature. The great classical epics of the world have been spawned innumerable re-tellings, re-imaginations, re-constructions and re-visions down the ages. In the twentieth century, many authors have emerged in Indian literary scenarios like Volga, Madhavi S. Mahadevan, Rohinton Mistry, Manju Kapoor, Suniti Namjoshi, Amish Tripathi, Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik, Anand Neelakantan, Kavita Kane, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Kunal Basu and Amitav Ghosh who through their writing techniques and narrative methods which are fresh and different, giving readers a never-seen-before insight into the old stories have become messengers of new perspectives and change.

The present study focuses on exploring and highlighting Suniti Namjoshi's modern and postmodern techniques and approaches used to deconstruct, subvert, and appropriate the patriarchal, canonical narratives of the past. Namjoshi in most of her fables and reworkings of the classical mythical tales endeavours with alternative approaches and newer ways of interpreting the canonical literary texts of the ancient times. In re-visioning these mythical stories and legendary tales Namjoshi playfully makes the readers use their creative imagination to draw their own meanings and interpretations. Thus, it can be said that each retelling of the traditional myths and fables is a type of recreation or reappropriation depending upon the situation and needs.

 Suniti Namjoshi born in India and schooled in the Western education system is a fabulous fabulist, feminist, lesbian diasporic writer who has extensively and profoundly appropriated myths, fables and folklore in most of her literary works. Her feminist classic work is Feminist Fables. And other major works are like The Blue Donkey Fables, The Conversations of Cow, The Mothers of Maya Diip, Building Babel, From the Bedside Book of Nightmares and Sycorax etc. In these works, the author/Namjoshi has used re-vision, appropriation and sometimes transgression of the traditional myths, legends and fables. The present paper is an effort to trace the deconstructive appropriation of fables and folklore by feminists and postcolonial writers. Suniti Namjoshi has revised and recreated the traditional fables and myths to meet out feminist causes and goals. She is considered one of the most influential and transgressive Indian diasporic poets and fabulists and is credited with bringing the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic and literary discourse in the contemporary Indian context. She is a skilled, prolific writer, eager to experiment and brave enough to break the conventional boundaries of literary genres. And this act of transgression and bursting of barriers is her ingenuity earning her acclaim in literary circles worldwide. Abhay Ekka in his literary article "Cognitive Transformation: A Method of Chang in the Works of Suniti Namjoshi" writes, "feminist critics have identified acts of “revision, deconstruction, appropriation and subversion” as central to much of feminist writing (105). Namjoshi has been immensely influenced by Jonathan Swift, Lewis Carroll, Kate Millet, Adrienne Rich and postcolonial writers. Namjoshi is especially indebted to these writers for their modern techniques and styles of writing. She challenges the audience and readers to form their own identities by refusing to be defined by the parameters of social systems, religion, and home. Her goal was not to reject or repudiate the past and the conventional narratives but to “re-vision” them, a term coined and used by American scholar, lesbian feminist, poet-critic Adrienne Rich whom Namjoshi idolizes. She defined the concept “Re-Vision”, in a 1971 speech, as “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of interpretation/entertaining an old text from a new critical direction” (90).

Namjoshi as a feminist re-visionist, mythmaker, creative writer silently revolts against the patriarchal values through her life and the methodologies used in all her writings. Mythology and folklore are normative and used for varied purposes.  C. Vijayasree in her critical and analytical work Suniti Namjoshi: The Artful Transgressor locates the works of S. Namjoshi within the context of contemporary debates on feminism, postcolonialism and diasporic writings. Namjoshi’s work is considered in relation to the narrative techniques, formal experimentation, revisionist myth-making, diasporic experiences and gender-sexual politics. Myths, fables and folklore have represented women in stereotyped characters. Women have been given secondary positions, given second-class citizenship and the 'other' status in the society. For ages, women have been subordinated and have become victims of class, gender, sexual, ethnic, racial, and social inequalities and discrimination. The stereotypical images of women have been perpetuated by folklores, myths, fables and fabulations. Suniti Namjoshi probes, critiques, and questions the normative form of representation and also reverses the role of women and gives them completely new identities. Namjoshi represents the tensions of inhabiting and writing from margins and in-between spaces as a woman, as a lesbian and as a diasporic writer sophisticates the art of tapping the plural perspectives and possibilities afforded by her positioning in a fluid state to examine the existing systems of thought, to interrogate the texts and contents of male authority and offer alternate modes of cognition and perception. Some of these are among the prime concerns of Namjoshi’s creative work. Her re-visionist writing may best be viewed as a part of contemporary women writers’ rejection of traditional narratives. C. Vijayasree sees in Suniti Namjoshi: The Artful Transgressor, that "much of Namjoshi’s work is marked by artful transgressions of standard narrative in thematic, technical and narratorial terms. Such transgressions necessitate an ironic vision, an ability to imagine beyond the limits of the so called “notional” and “standard”, and an intent for transformational change (22-23). Namjoshi intends and desires that the feminist writers must refuse to be bound by conventional roles, and have a restless striving after reality, a quest for alternate modes of perception and expression in their works and endeavours. In this quest, fantasy works as a technique of defamiliarization. Here we can quote Rosemary Jackson: “The fantastic traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture; that, which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made absent” (Jackson 47).

Namjoshi’s works poetical as well as fictional, despite its overtly political designs is more than literature of protest. It is simultaneously provocative, engaging and entertaining. Fantasies, excursions into strange places, free traffic between animal and human worlds, outrageous inversions of all accepted notions of order are delightfully inventive and hallmark of a process of appropriation and new creation. Feminist critics have identified acts of “revision, deconstruction, appropriation and subversion” as central to much of feminist writing. The retelling of the myth articulates the silenced – the plight of women as objects of male gaze and erotic desire. The conventional fairy tale plots usually consist of youthful princes falling in love with poor maidens followed by their marriage as consummation of their love. Thus, the poor girls marry rich handsome princes and live happily and comfortably ever after. The young girls are illustrated as a paragon of beauty, innocence, docility, and femininity. to illustrate this further Sumita Puri in her book, Indian Diaspora Writer Suniti Namjoshi: A Voice of Radical Feminism writes, “What happened after the prince married Cinderella? Elizabeth Green gives us a sequel to the tale in a different tone and a not so happy ending.” Green’s fairy tale, “Cinderella’s Daughters” does not begin conventionally ‘once upon a time’ (59).

In “Re-viewing the Life and Times of Little Red Riding Hood,” Gretchen Sankey refers to Jack Zipes and writes:

Jack Zipes disputes that the writers of fairy tales “were men who were interested in preserving patriarchal norms, and therefore, Little Red Riding Hood’s image must be seen as a male creation and projection,” and that the widespread and friendly reception of the fairy tale owes to the “general acceptance of the cultural notions of sexuality, sex roles and domination embedded in it” (54).

Why Namjoshi chooses fables over other forms, she offers an “Explanation” in the form of a short poem from The Blue Donkey Fables:

Why do you write about plants and animals?

Why not people?

Because

no daffodil shrieks to be plucked,

no lily rages, admire my bower.

And dogs go about and shit

Their shit at least it mixes

With the stones and mud…Someone explains,

‘A tree is not a person. A boy is not a cat.’

‘Yes’, I reply, striving for patience,

‘that is the problem. Precisely that’ (BDF 6).

As a consequence, for Namjoshi the strictly human activity of ‘making stories’ is where agency lies: “Every re-telling of a myth is a re-working of it. Every hearing or reading of a myth is a re-creation of it. It is only when we engage with a myth that it resonates, that it becomes charged and re-charged with meaning” (BB xi). This writing and re-writing, reading and re-reading, is Babel, the endless and fragmentary flow of human culture: “Building Babel is what people do” (xvi).

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3. Ekka, Abhay Leonard. “Cognitive Transformation: A Method of Change in the Works of Suniti Namjoshi,” Akshara: An International Refereed Research Journal of English Literature and Language, No. 13, May 2021, pp. 97 – 108.

Ekka, Abhay Leonard. “Cognitive Transformation: A Method of Change in the Works of Suniti Namjoshi,” Akshara: An International Refereed Research Journal of English Literature and Language, No. 13, May 2021, pp. 102-03.

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7______. Goja: An Autobiographical Myth. Spinifex Press Pvt. Ltd., 2000.

8______. Building Babel. Spinifex Press, 1996. .

9______. Feminist Fables. Spinifex Press, 1993.

10______. The Mothers of Maya Diip. The Women’s Press,1989.

11______. The Blue Donkey Fables. The Women’s Press, 1988.

12______. The Conversations of Cow. Women’s Press Limited, 1985.

Puri. Sumita. Indian Diaspora Writer Suniti Namjoshi: A Voice of Radical Feminism, 2020, pp. 59-60.

13. Rich, Adrienne. “When we Dead Awaken: writing as Re-vision,” Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose, ed. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and albert Gelpi. New York: WW Norton, 1975, Pp. 90-99.                                                                    

14. Sankey, Gretchen. “Re-viewing the Life and Times of Little Red Riding Hood,” Room of One’s Own: A Space for Women’s Writing. 17.1 March 1994, p.54.

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