Folklore is one of the upcoming areas of research and pedagogy. The modular MAFCS Programme (the first year programme being PGDFCS: 32 credits) aims at creating a pool of specialized folklorists who can create a niche for themselves in fields of studis like teaching and research departments in colleges and universities, libraries, museums, archives, historical associations, culture councils, national centres of arts, publishing houses, funding agencies, and the central and state government institutions, Agriculture, Rural Sociology, Extension, Medicine and Nursing, Women's Studies, African American Studies, Popular Culture, English and Foreign Language/Literature Departments as translators, interpreters, curators, musicologists, teachers, artists, performers, and many more. Film industry and TV channels also have a high demand for follklorists. Folk Entrepreneurs are coming up in a big way as job creators/providers, and this programme aims at creating self-reliant scholars of folklore.
A significant trend that emerges from the review of folklore is that in any period of human history, knowledge about theory, data and method is insured by the socio-cultural conditions specific to that period. India is a country with incredible cultural diversity. Each culture has its own traditional knowledge system. We are right when we say that people in the new- millennial , the denizens of the digital societies have a notoriously short-span attention and memory, and folk traditions are a part of endangered and dying cultures. Given such a situation, folklorists and folklore researchers are vulnerable to multiple challenges with regard to archiving, documentation and dissemination of the folk material. MAFCS sincerely aims at filling that gap and is dedicated towards the preservation of a dying/endangered traditional knowledge system. India’s National Education Policy(NEP) and the University Grants Commission(UGC) pay a lot of importance to culture, languages and folklore and MAFCS maintains a balance with the points accentuated by the NEP and UGC.
MAFCS argues that all our classical art and literary forms have a folk background. Starting from our universities’ syllabi to our coffee tables, classical literature always asserts its position, though we have failed to pay the due credit to folk literature. A literature, the product of and is a representation of mass culture, is definitely authentic and full fledged. Since there is this aspect of faithful representation of the ways of life of communities at the core of folk literature, MAFCS considers folk literature as autonomous. Folk is not something out there in a museum, it is a part and parcel of our lives, and thus,is fit enough to be our mainstream research. The modern texts that have made explicit use of the folk traditions to make it available to the readers today are also treated at par with the folk texts that have only the oral tradition, called the ‘pure folk’.MAFCS experiments with that idea. The key idea of the MAFCS Programme is—folklore is flexible and inclusive.
