Why Vernacular Stories are Historically Significant​?

Vernacular stories look mythical and miraculous to us today, but people believed in them during those years. That is why vernacular stories became popular in early times. These were the media of its time. People told stories to exchange information, knowledge, and experience in social contexts. But to many historians, vernacular literatures are merely fables and mythical stories, and they can not be used as historical sources. The aversion to vernacular pieces of literature by historians in the entire twentieth century was largely due to the influence of Leopold von Ranke. He was a nineteenth-century German historian who laid the foundation of ‘source-based history’. His idea of writing history on certain primary documents and archeological sources became very popular in the later years, and in the words of Walter Benjamin it was a ‘narcotic of the twentieth century’. The Rankean notion of fact as history became so well recognized in history writing during the late nineteenth and twentieth century that causation and reasons for occurrence were looked for in all history. Following his positivism, the Orientalists in India, by branding Indian society as devoid of historical sense, began writing about Indian history. After independence, Indian Marxist scholarship took up the task by emphasizing socio-economic transformations. Their greatest contribution was in terms of beginning a new discourse on economic history but in order to achieve that they remained inadvertently committed to the Rankean notion of primary sources and objectivity. In the light of such progression in Indian academia the history writing inherited the basic premise of the Rankean dichotomy between objective and subjective, and in the process, vernacular literatures were branded as mythical, which are otherwise very significant as a source of history. This tendency of the historians has resulted in historical amnesia in terms of regional histories. The mythical stories found in orally transmitted vernacular songs are very significant in terms of their context. These stories are a form of cognition. They are so because stories have capacities to articulate problematic issues in our everyday lives. Through it the storyteller intends to manipulate the attention of listeners and induce them to take a certain perspective on a phenomenon. So the context, time-period and the language of the stories become very important aspects for historians. Many vernacular stories were composed in the second millennium and they were transmitted as knowledge in oral form to the intelligible audience. We tend to get an impression of myth and hyperbole in them because the idea was to keep the audience interested in this form of media in medieval and early modern times.