THE CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTION OF FOLK TRADITIONS IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA: BETWEEN CULTURAL RIGHTS AND COMMERCIALISATION 

Folk traditions — oral epics, ritual performances, textile weaves, wall paintings, and craft techniques transmitted across generations within identifiable communities — occupy an uneasy space in Indian constitutional and legal thought. The Constitution of India recognises cultural plurality through Articles 29 and 30, the fundamental duty under Article 51A(f), and an expansively read Article 21, yet it vests no enforceable proprietary right in a community over its own folklore. Meanwhile, the market has discovered folk aesthetics: Warli motifs appear on factory-made garments, Madhubani strokes are licensed for home décor, and Pattachitra patterns are digitised into wallpaper, frequently without the originating community’s consent or any share in the resulting revenue. This paper examines the gap between constitutional recognition of cultural rights and the absence of a corresponding proprietary or benefit-sharing mechanism. It traces how India’s intellectual property statutes — the Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act 1999, the Copyright Act 1957, and the Biological Diversity Act 2002 — have been pressed into service to fill that gap and identifies where each instrument falls short of protecting the interests of the practising community itself. Using doctrinal analysis of constitutional text, statutory provisions, and comparative sui generis models from Panama and Peru, the paper argues that India’s folklore-protection regime is a patchwork sustained by proxy legislation rather than a coherent right and proposes a community-trust-based sui generis framework anchored in the cultural dimension of Article 21.