From Oral Memory to Digital Screen: Reimagining Rajasthani Folktales through Literature, Cinema and Digital Media

Abstract

Rajasthani folktales form an important part of the oral cultural heritage of India, which preserves collective memory, regional identity, gender relations, belief systems and performance traditions. However, their contemporary circulation is increasingly happening outside the oral context in literary collections, feature films, stop-motion animation and digital platforms. At the heart of this movement is a question: what happens to a folktale when it moves to a new medium? This paper tries to answer that question through a comparative study of four cases: Vijaydan Detha’s Duvidha and its cinematic adaptation Paheli (2005); Detha’s Dohri Joon and its stop-motion adaptation Avaar Navaar Chhoriyaan / Every Now and Then Girls... (2025); the Dhola-Maru tradition and its cinematic version in Gujarati in 1983; and the audio-visual documentation of the Pabuji oral epic performed by Bhopa-Bhopi performers.

Combining adaptation studies, folklore studies, cultural memory theory and remediation theory, the paper argues, following Linda Hutcheon, that the movement of Rajasthani folklore across media is better understood through reinterpretation and cultural negotiation than through fidelity to a fixed original. Reading the corpus through a qualitative, comparative framework attentive to narrative structure, gender agency, language, landscape, music, the supernatural and performance, the paper shows that contemporary adaptations simultaneously preserve, transform, aestheticise and at times commodify Rajasthani cultural memory. It proposes the concept of folkloric remediation to describe this process, and concludes that the contemporary relevance of Rajasthani folklore lies not only in its preservation but in its capacity for renewed cultural negotiation as it travels across media, languages, technologies and audiences