Social and Psychological Analysis of “Tapta”, A Manipuri Folktale

Abstract

This paper attempts to highlight the social and psychological aspects of Manipur’s folktale, “Tapta” and its variants. This simple folktale demands attention as it unearths the deepest layers of social behaviour and psychological interests of the Manipuris. The folktale portrays the biased understandings and misunderstandings in the anthropomorphic conversations heeding to the setting of its social environment. The folktale depicts the mental communication barriers of the characters and their cognitive processes. The folk story accounts for information transmission in a particular social context. “Tapta” is a dramatic narrative with a sequence of inventive conditions and social situations. In the tale, ‘Tapta’, an unusual name in context is misunderstood by a tiger who overhears it from a mother threatening her weeping baby. It reflects fear of the unknown creature or xenophobia in the tiger’s baseless fear and accentuates the human cognitive bias for socially disseminated negative information. In this slapstick comedy, the tiger and other animals take unthoughtful hurried decisions such that gradually accumulating inaccuracies lead to the amusement of the listeners. Folklores are naturally related to the dwellers of a particular place and age in one or more ways. They could colligate religiously, historically, ethnically, occupationally, stylistically, geographically, or culturally. A series of striking images provide symbolic references to the social fabric of the local society when mapped with the tale’s narration as a psychological and social activity. Multiple interpretations of the cultural symbols in the folktale provide ambivalent meanings. However, not all interpretations are equally relevant. The social-psychological dissection of the folktale reveals three partially intersecting systems: - 1) The tale, 2) The social system, and 3) The narrator-audience or author-reader interactions. The social system described in the folk story reflects familiarity regarding character selection and the extent to which the form and content of tales originating in the Manipuri society relate to features of the personality of the “bearers” of these tales. A clear understanding of the three systems and their interplay help us to value the tale’s images in their social-psychological reality. The folktale is also analyzed for discourse structure, and information headlining.

The broad object of this analysis is to understand human cognition, interdependence, and behaviour in their natural social context. Individual characters interact in a social group which forms an intimate part of the folktale. General and exceptional situations in folktales like everyday conversations, conflict, bullying, robbery, jealousy, hunger and so on offer a basic understanding of human existence in a particular region.