Even a storyteller needs to listen .....to her own heartbeat

I had learnt a beautiful song in Scotland from an Italian storyteller which went
Rest for a while now, the night is young , Time is short and the road is long.......]
 I experienced this bliss and the feel of the air as I traveled through Tripura and Agartala.....
Tripura is a magical land not because it has the blue waters and castles but because the people are
amazing. There is a sense of calmness and beauty in the way they are. They just seem to be accepting of things that come their way. I wondered why I felt so relaxed despite traveling over 100 kms each
day and also training at the National School of Drama. Went to a beautiful place up the mountains
towards the old capital of Tripura and stopped by the way side deep inside the mountains .Why? I saw a woman weaving and watched her face as she did so. The little children were watching from the windows and she kept weaving a bright orange and red wrap around. I bringing in my urban air asked if I could buy one of them and she answered my colleague Surajid in the Kokporak language one of the main languages here besides Bangla that nothing was for sale. She was weaving it for herself.

Amongst the beautiful sights and sounds that I observed I came across a lane called LOVE STORY
BAZAAR LANE. All the competition, jealousies aggressiveness and envy that the urban environment was trying to create within me seemed to completely mellow down.

The 18 students at the NSD centre were amongst the best I had ever trained so far. Their body language, expressions and innovative thoughts of creating stories was unimaginably wonderful. While all of them included songs music and folklore in their presentations many of them used just the local materials around to tell their tales. There were stories of Why we wear shoes and How the knife became the onion’s mentor when the onion asked why people cried while peeling it?

There were stories of the Red Panda and the Grimms besides the Arabian tales that added to the
repertoire of the story collection.

When I met an Ayurvedic doctor to discuss a little problem we ended up chatting for an hour and half and he narrating tales of people who settled in spaces like Mother Teresa or foreigners in Benaras who just went by their heart and not the head. I came back healed refreshed and alive. Even a storyteller needs stories.

Geeta Ramanujam, September 29,2014

Aspects of storytelling in India

                      In India speech and everything it conveyed was considered to be highly sacred, a goddess indeed.  So naturally India has a long history of storytelling. The oral tradition in India was and is a powerful, creative force that expresses the mysteries and miracles of existence, the assorted peculiarities of what it means to be alive. Stories help communities grasp and express in words the true nature of being.

                       Every generation in India for the past 4000 years has been adding to the country’s retentive folk memory. Storytelling has helped preserve ancient aesthetic and cultural artefacts which are intangible in nature. All over India, varied storytelling traditions and styles existed in different languages. Indian storytelling traditions have a symbiotic relationship with the philosophical, sculptural, music, dance and literature traditions of the regions they originate from.

Randy Kloetzli and Alf Hiltebeitel say, 'For a combination of antiquity, volume, and ingenuity, there is nothing like it - so much so that folklorist Theodor Benfry could imagine India as the 'home of storytelling and of tale-types''.

Much that is formative in these oceanic storytelling traditions is anchored in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the two Sanskrit epics.'

            The form and content of most Indian performing art traditions reflect the beliefs and philosophical and spiritual beliefs of their performers. Stories told by tellers in India are often extracted from mythologies, folktales, vedic legends and puranic legends, as well as from the two epics or Itihasas – the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Storytelling performances were and are still held in temples, weddings and in social gatherings.

                      

                       Traditionally storytelling has played an important role in education and it was used both to explain abstract philosophical concepts as well as very practical statecraft, administrative and political science or Raja Niti.

                       Again, ethics play an important role in storytelling traditions. The purpose of storytelling is often to expound on morality or dharma, to help audiences distinguish between righteous and unrighteous action. Storytelling has served a social purpose, acting as a medium wherein various difficult social issues such AIDS, dowry etc are presented; hence storytelling almost always reflects social reality and often seeks to improve it.

The bhakti or devotional movement helped spread regional variants of puranic legends among the vernacular languages and to communities who did not have access to such stories. 1850-1950 was the golden age of storytelling India wherein storytelling developed in vernacular languages in the various regions all over the country.  

On storytelling

Storytelling is an integral part of daily life. It happens everywhere – where a group a people come together, to do something, to share something, to just be together. All families are of stories, and it is a fact universally acknowledged that all grandmothers are natural storytellers. Teacher too tell stories to pre-schools and every corporate is full of its own special stories. Newspapers are full of stories – extraordinary and sometimes horrific. Human beings are natural storytellers. It is a natural urge, like breathing perhaps. When people share stories, they make sense of their experiences while rediscovering their identity through the narratives they tell and hear. 

As Walter Benjamin says, 'The storyteller takes what he tells from experience - his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale.'

We listen to stories to experience that special ‘moment of becoming’ when we can learn something about ourselves and the world around us. Storytelling more than any other cultural act produces and transforms our ideas of identity and belonging. 

New Year Thoughts

 

There was a big bang ! and that's how I would start my story. The story of a relationship between a Huge Mountain and a tiny bird. Our new year has begun with a big bang. News of women rape and violence. They have always existed but it is good that it came to light after all these years!. How many women suffer in so many ways - verbal abuses,  disrespect, arrogance of gender superiority, class caste rules, religious rituals and many more which the Mother earth bears and we bear as women in innumerable silent ways. Again the biggest promoter of all which makes everything seem OK -films and TV serials playing a huge and massive role in reinforcing them. Slapping beating and raping on screen showed again and again in different languages and styles through songs, item nos. et al. So, where does one begin to address these issues. At the root shoot, bark, flower or fruit levels?

 

Perhaps if we remember the story of Athena we would remember that when Poseidon got the war horse as a gift for building the first city in the world it was Athena who touched the earth or the chasm from where the horse came up and from there grew the tree Olive tree bearing the fruits of peace. She was then allowed by Zeus to build the first city on Earth based on Peace called Athens. Perhaps that is what we need today. To bridge all the chasms and to begin the Peace crusade which means a lot touching things in silence and yet being able to build cities and bridges. Storytelling could be a bridge.

 

If we can touch talk and feel the emotions and feelings of one person we have made a great difference. Its so wonderful listening, telling and sharing stories. A great healer indeed and a great need.

 

Workshop at IIM Bangalore

If seeing is believing, then reading is perhaps accepting!! While I have seen people from all walks of life get trained as storytellers in the past 15 years, it was wonderful to read the first story written by an MBA  student after I conducted a brief workshop on storytelling at IIM, Bangalore. Nothing can be more gratifying for a teacher than watching her students come out with flying colours. Maybe the lush greenery and the peaceful environment too play a role in learning, but nonetheless, the result is there for everyone to see.The story has all the ingredients to make communication a success : twists and turns in the plot, high drama, smooth flow of ideas.

The culmination of this workshop is the story given below which is not only very interesting, but also reflects the importance of communication with a little twist and turn.

Delhi incident

The whole nation is shamed and angry. The gang rape and subsequent death of a 23 year old paramedic student in a chartered bus in Delhi has once again brought out the activists and the common man onto the streets in protest. While a few politicians have tried to defend the state of affairs by blaming it on the women themselves, is it right on the part of any human being to bully another in such a derogatory manner?

What could have been going on in the minds of the five men and a minor who attacked the woman and her friend in such a brutal manner when they were so helpless? Was it just for fun; momentary pleasure, without a thought for the consequences? Was it done just to establish their control over a physically weaker species? Whatever the reasons for the crime, the culprits need to be brought to book quickly, so that there is fear of the law, there is a reason to think twice before another set of goons attack another sister, daughter, mother or friend.

Myth transplantation need not be performed by masterminding mass conversions from our culture to another, or by accepting all living alien traditions uncritically. All traditions are not equally worthy of revival; the Aztec tradition and its hunger for human sacrifice, for example, is one heritage which should most likely remain dead and buried. Let us instead open ourselves to healthy, life enhancing traditions, activities which may help us revive ourselves. - Dr Robert E. Svaboda

In a strange tale that is unique to the Oriya Mahabharata, Krishna decides to play a trick on Arjuna while he is in the forest. He approaches him in the form of a monster, the Nabagunjara, a creature that is a composite of nine animals - serpent, horse, bull, tiger, elephant, horse, peacock, rooster and man. Instead of getting frightened, Arjuna sees the lotus flower in the human  hand of the creature and recognises Krishna. - Dr Devdutt Pattanaik in Jaya, An illustrated retelling of the Mahabharata.

While tracing the contours of the philosophical ideas of a Vedic seer, it is to be borne in mind that these ideas are the products not so much of reasoning as of seeing. Reasoning here only follows seeing. This is the common feature of almost all the ideas put forth by the Vedic seers who are seers, rsis first and thinkers only next. It is little truer of Dirghatamas whose life history hinges on the problem of how he happened to see. – The philosophy of Dirghatamas by Satya Prakash Singh

Myths are things which never happened but always are. - Sallust

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” -
Italo Calvino

Hanuman - An Introduction

In a caste-ridden society like India, the affection of the high born prince Rama for a lowly but devoted monkey fired the imagination of people...

Hanuman's 'monkeyness' ensures that his awesome power does not intimidate. He is earthy and tangible not ethereal or transcendent. Through him, the divine comes within reach. Hence, the popular North Indian saying: first Hanuman, then God, pahle Hanuman, phir Bhagvan.

- From Hanuman - An Introduction by Dr Devdutt Pattanaik.

It would be difficult to overstate the significance of performance in Bharat, that ancient civilization now known as India. Performance infuses the culture still, as is apparent from from its innumerable forms of music and dance, its active celebration of festivals, and its engagement with images and icons, both on the altars and in the streets. All forms of performance are not created equal in this or any culture,but its centrality in Indian life cannot be challenged. - Susan L Schwartz in Rasa - Performing the divine in India.

Esoteric symbolism of Aditya Hridayam

The Aditya Hridayam of the Ramayana could be a reference to the heart lotus that Ramana Maharishi refers to as the seat of the soul. The heart lotus is on the right side of the body (and corresponding to the left brain) which is the solar side in yoga physiology, thus it is aditya in nature. Hridayam is of course the heart. So the lotus heart Ramana Maharishi that laid so much emphasis on in his teachings could well be understood as the aditya hridayam.

This heart lotus according to Ramana Maharishi is the supreme seat of the self, the consciousness from which everything else emerges. Once this is realised the ego is eliminated. If the Ramayana be read as a an allegorical tale of the supreme awakening of the infinite I consciousness (Ram) eliminating the limited, contracted egotistic existence (Ravan), then the Aditya Hridayam which the sage Agastya teaches Ram in the Yudha Kandha of the Ramayana can be read as a symbol for the awakening of the lotus heart and the supreme I consciousness after which the yogi remains immersed in the infinite consciousness-energy field and ceases to identify with the conditioned egoistic existence. Ram is the knowledge of the cosmic self that removes Ravan, ignorance born out of egotism.

There are also references to this in the Bhagvad Geeta, ‘Cutting this doubt in the heart, born out of ignorance by the sword of knowledge of the Self, arise, O Arjuna, and engage in Yoga, ‘ and again, ‘Spilt is the knot of the heart; the doubts are removed.’



The Sri Ramana Gita published by the Ramana Ashram explains the significance of the heart lotus, ‘The body is the embodiment of ignorance, conditioned by time and space and characterised by inertness. It is suffused with the light of the notion of ‘I’. Its dealings of knowledge and action, like I know, I do etc. result only from the origination of the I activity. Therefore it is proper to infer that the place of the I-activity, the root of all activities of knowledge and action, pertaining to the body should also be somewhere, pertaining to the body....

Although egoism is surpassed by the I-activity, and all activities having their root in egoism resulting in the culmination in the I-activity, there is nothing wrong in indicating a location as the practice of tracking down to the root of the I-activity culminates in the accomplishment of the Brahmanic state in the form of the throbbing I. As regards the I activity, the bodily site conditioned by time and space, called heart is pointed out. As the true form not being conditioned by time and space etc., being the supporting base of the origin of the I activity is self accomplished there itself, in the groundless, in the unsupported, it becomes established that the same is also the location of knowledge, in the form of the I-throbbing. Thus become appropriate the authoritative statements that proclaim that the knowledge located in the heart itself destroys the ignorance located in the heart....

The place is on the right portion of the chest; not the left side. From here effulgence flows through Sushumna to the Sahasrara.’

One can see that this is a reference to the realization of the atman removing all limited thought constructs which obstruct the same.

- Swetha Prakash

Storytelling as a ritual

What is a ritual? It is established or prescribed procedure for religious, magical or other rites, a system or collection of religious or other rites, and observance of set forms in public worship. Basically ritual means certain action or set of actions which gives certain results. Man believed that if certain action or series of actions are performed in a correct sequence certain results follow. A ritual is explained by myth. Myth is incorporated in a ritual and gradually the myth-ritual unit grows and evolves further together. - M.L. Varadpande in a History of Indian Theatre.

'This search led to the mystery of a ubiquitous power that worked like a supreme faculty of self-transmutation. It was called maya. It was then understood as a supernatural force, magical force with the power to change form and appear under innumerable deceiving masks producing illusionary effects.
During the period of Brahmanas, the task of fathoming this mysterious maya was approached through pictographic reasoning of mythology and theology. Superhuman gods and demons were believed to be wielding this magical power and directing the world. Soon, the whole series of masks that could possibly be assumed by this magical power was identified and comprehended and a vast pantheon of gods emerged.' - Rajarshi Muni in Yoga - A synthesis of Psychology and Metaphysics.