Course abstract

Human-nature interaction exudes various outcomes. One of them is folk arts. Folklore, among all the human sciences, is probably one of the rare fields of inquiry that transcends disciplinary boundaries tying all expressive forms together. It encompasses not just the formal and standardized forms but also the rudimentary and fundamental expressive modes. Folklore is a significant tool to arrive at credible nuances about what it means to be “human” and about human expressive behaviour. In a country like India where majority of the population resides in rural, technologically untouched societies, it is the folk lexicon that gives expression to their worldview. The two domains of knowledge—Science and Art are seemingly different. While the objective of Science is to arrive at absolute truth, for Arts it is aesthetic expressions. This course brings together these two distant domains of knowledge and explores the aesthetics of science through Indian folk art.