Aesthetics of Jackal’s Judgements in the Folktales of Tribal Communities of Jharkhand

Aesthetics, the philosophical perspective that guides the interpretation of an art or its elements for beauty and taste, is not as a simple tool as it appears to be, and its complexity rests on its association with multiple principles and concerns. As located by Immanuel Kant in his The Critique of Judgement Kant (1790/1928), the presence of faculty of judgement consists two parts: ‘critique of aesthetic judgement and critique of teleological judgement,’ and there is a discussion on the ‘aesthetic purposiveness’ in judgement which is presented immediately after the discussion on the ‘logical purposiveness’ in the introduction. In handling the aesthetics of art, it is not merely an expression of the feeling or the sense of taste; rather it is a judgement ascribed to it. Teleology, on the other hand, moves on the regulative or heuristic path in achieving a goal or purpose of the object Bird (2023). However, this article moves away from the core philosophical dialogue on the nature of aesthetics to evolve a framework for contemplating the aesthetics associated with the presence of animal characters in the folktales of judicial/judgement belonging to the tribal communities of Jharkhand. A few judgement tales are taken for this study, not with any specific reason, but these tales have been identified as a matter of convenience in addressing a strong message that is constructed using the popular animal motifs that are quite common and particular to tribal communities in the state. By employing literary tools in delineating and portraying the animal characters as folk motifs and their aesthetic representations to effectively construct and convey the notion of moral judgement on the narrative events that are conditioned with the narrative requirements as per the narrative programme, this article attempts contemporize the dialogue on the moral and ethical attributes as well as to signify the existence of oral tradition with greater responsibility for human beings with amusement as a mere camouflage technique.