AT the London Book Fair held between 20-22nd April, the special market focus was India. The pageant of publishers and writers from India was a feature worth waiting for at Earl’s Court as, apart from Indian writing in English, there was considerable presence of Indian literatures in translation. One of the highlights for me was meeting Temsula Ao, the Ao-Naga poet at North Eastern Hill University. She signposted what makes Indian literatures specifically unique – the oral tradition.

In the universe of market forces, the written story gets credence and the notion of authorship, agents and publishing spirals the status of literature as solely a written phenomenon. But, just rewind to a time before the printing press emerged in Europe, and immediately one realizes how, orality and the sound of language, fortunately still a continuing phenomenon in India and Africa, is essential to the craft of storytelling. Storytelling in the oral tradition is an act of composing a narrative in the moment of performance by the storyteller, and if it passes the test of time, place, action, and diction, it enters the cosmos of oral literature. Oral literature, the source of pre and postcolonial cultures is, however, today at a turning point. This essay is an attempt to share what in my view constitutes the anatomy of the oral tradition. In particular when it is considered a thing of the past, and a primitive practice not for the urban and metropolitan mind, I strongly urge they listen again:

‘The Ao-Nagas say that they once had a script which was inscribed on a hide and hung on a wall for all to see and learn. But one day a dog pulled it down and ate it up. Since then, the people say that every aspect of their life – social, political, historical and religious – has been retained in the memory of the people through the Oral Tradition.’ (The Old Storyteller, Temsula Ao)

Take one – Social context: The good thing about a recession is that it involves stock taking. Amidst the concern about betraying bankers and rising unemployment, at the moment in England we are witnessing a stock taking of another kind. It’s about reviewing what’s essential. Nothing vague; just a simple quest: What’s behind it all?

Interestingly, during the recession, new audiences have emerged for our Performance Storytelling events, forcing a new awareness of the question within a wider social context. The question itself has brought people, both from diverse professions and those facing joblessness together, forging an unknown future, attempting new personal business plans for a virtual outcome. In dealing with this quiet revolution in life, all of us practitioners are asking the same question about storytelling, one of the oldest questions that was ever asked when someone sat in front of a storyteller telling that tale: ‘What’s behind this story?’ And here begins the quest for meaning.

 

Take two: What’s behind it all – Storytelling? Fortunately, we are all programmed to find out the purpose or usefulness of things that we are involved in and subscribe to.

27th December 2004. It was 7 am. I was watching the sunrise off the East Coast Road (ECR) that runs from Chennai toward Mahabalipuram. The sunrise at this time of year after the monsoon shows dramatic variations with nimbus cloud and light as the crimson sun rises to gold and then to neon disc. For over 15 years we had looked forward to this ritual of waiting for the scattering of crows at dawn, as lean limbed coffee brown fishermen would heave a catamaran into the grey sea and then ride it like a sea horse, singing sea shanties. But this year we turned back because our ayurvedic yoga teacher had decided to meet earlier. It was a holiday and he wanted to make most of the idyllic weather.

Half an hour later we heard gun-shots in the distance and were told that it was the gypsies shooting bandicoots. Fifteen minutes later there was screaming and wailing and soon men, women and children came running into the house shouting: ‘Kadal pongee pocchi’, the sea has boiled over. The tsunami wave had struck at 8.30 am. The local radio news had no coverage of it. In the ensuing chaos of people fleeing, jumping into overloaded buses and lorries that had been commandeered for evacuation, we were standing by the embankment when one of the panchayat’s women representatives, Kanamma, came in and introduced me to the goatherd who was her neighbour. He looked at me directly and, in Tamil, said: ‘You know the story of the sage, Markandeya?’

I was wondering where this conversation was going, particularly at a time like this. He continued in Tamil, oblivious to my frown: ‘See, even our Tamil radio doesn’t know what’s happening. They can’t make sense of this because they say it hasn’t happened before. But last year, there was the Koothu (Travelling Storytelling Theatre) that told us a story. "Markandeya was sitting, thinking everything was fine – watching the cattle, goatherds, and cows, courtiers, women all go about their business with no thought for tomorrow, or even the next moment, as we all do, somehow knowing it will all go on forever. He blinked and when he opened his eyes, Markandeya found himself in utter blackness, tossed by a wave that lifted him with the grip of a mad elephant’s trunk. And when he tried to let go, he was tossed for days and days, and they say for days he was tossed on acres of ocean. As it was pitch black, he lost all sense of time…" It makes me think, this is how this deluge is. This wave, they call the tsunami.’

 

I was struck by his literal and metaphoric use of the wave within the Markandeya story. Literal, indicating the seismic shift of water and ravaged landscape by the tsunami, and metaphoric, for the panic and chaos that ensued from a very idyllic setting. It was also striking that here were people, grasping through their visiting performance storytelling theatre, Koothu (rather than televisual memory), a tapestry of narrative to make sense of what they had just seen.

Amidst the screaming children, the evacuees, the derelict villages, the radio repeatedly playing Tamil film music instead of providing factual information, the paradox of idyllic weather, and the fact that all of this took place without warning – the narrative enabled all of us, with help from the goatherd’s memory and articulation, to understand the impact of orality in storytelling. It placed our immediate dislocation in perspective. The Koothu had offered a collective and cultural memory from a narrative of the past that signified this sense of abandon, by Nature, in the present. Simultaneously, by virtue of narrative, the topical experience was transformed into what is accounted for as Epic. It made us as tsunami survivors and sympathisers across the world realize that we are traversing those polarities continually – the daily that becomes extra-daily and epic – unlike the way 9/11 did.

 

The beachfront village of Kuppum in Perur off the ECR had been destroyed by the tsunami. The villagers felt betrayed by the local government for not sending out a warning in time. Equally they were baffled that Amman, the sea-goddess, had let them down or maybe she was teaching them a lesson that they could not as yet understand. The few fishermen who were evaluating the loss met my husband and me as we took jerrycans of drinking water to them. They did not want food for now; they had coconuts, they said. Their collective plea was: ‘Kapatu, please tell people our story.’ Passing the story on was an act of giving and touching all of us who survived, to remind us of our humanity and be bridged by compassion.

I returned to Chennai in February 2005 on a University of Kent Humanities Teaching Faculty Award to convene storytelling workshops with tsunami survivors (the fisher community) and tsunami sympathisers (NGOs, social workers and arts practitioners). One of the fishermen, S.Kalaivanar, who had been sent by his NGO from Sirkali wondered what good the stories would do. ‘Kathai vidathai’ – stories are air and they fall apart, was very much his attitude. After the tsunami, seeing many of his neighbours killed and devastated, he had stopped sailing out to sea. This was serious as his family had been in the fishing trade for over four generations and he had no idea how he could transfer his skills elsewhere. Anger and depression were setting in.

His attitude posed a very serious challenge for me. Here I was, propelling my theories and belief in storytelling into the birthplace of oral cultures and already I had started facing resistance! The only thing he and I, and possibly the 28 others who had subscribed to this workshop, had in common was that over the last few months all of us had recurring dreams of being tossed around by sea waves , bodies, tsunami debris, falling off from boats, waking up wherever we were with the taste of sea salt in our mouths.

 

Through the intensive storytelling workshops, both the survivors (fishermen – numerate and literate in Tamil, living in coastal areas) and sympathisers (social workers, women, graduates and postgraduates in English and Tamil, living in Chennai) discovered a participatory voice in engaging with traditional stories that gave them the necessary distance and paradigm within which they could place the emotions of the fear, shock, betrayal, helplessness, rescue-relief that they had experienced during the tsunami and its aftermath. The stories that had been created during this period, with cross-gender and cross-caste/economic contexts, were then to be ‘performed’ in front of the refugee villagers at Kuppam village.

The children in the audience not only participated in the action, they were relieved to see their uncles and fathers in the workshop ‘act out how the wave came, but also survive it’ – as they now heard them tell the story of terror. Many women wept and said that while the storytelling performance ‘brought back the horror but that at least now there was space to talk about it collectively.’ The men said that, ‘It made them realize the scale of what had happened and how children can’t have fishing as the only means of livelihood and that education with technology for understanding weather patterns should be provided.’ Here was storytelling using a traditional form contemporized as context, enabling reflection on form, livelihood and communication as both leisure and information.

 

After the ‘performance’, Kalaivanar vanished only to return an hour later, urging all of us to partake of his gift. He had persuaded Kuppam’s villagers to provide him a catamaran and wanted to give us a treat by sailing us out to sea! He wanted to celebrate the fact that performing and storytelling had given him the space to work through his trauma of not being able to return to the sea. A great way to end a story by the sea, about the sea and her children. It was a salutary example of how orality works and how storytelling manifests the significance of the oral imagination.

Orality and the oral tradition of storytelling is about listening (not reading, or having it read out) to a story, remembering it as a part of cognition and recollecting it, in this case as a window and paradigm of aspects of life integrating the geophysical and the emotional; to be reassured that there is an individual and collective memory. Orality is also about telling a story so that it is shared as an experience to be identified and categorized as it could have happened before, and possibly to someone else in a similar situation.

Orality and literature are not mutually exclusive. They enable each other and, if I might stretch the case, oral literature enjoys greater receptivity due to its live performance capabilities. The performance of oral literature was a live and collective act even before theatre or literacy came into the public domain; it remains the most contemporary of art forms, making the extra-daily daily, and the daily distilled into the moment.

 

There are many forms of what I term as performance oral traditions of storytelling at work in India such as Kathavaad, Katha Kalakshepam, Kathai Koothu, Yakshagaana, Manganiyaar, Gayani, Baul, to name a few for those who are solely interested in narrative, with embellishments of song, scrolls, movement and limited accoutrements to enhance the story that could be legendary, or local myth with a spiritual significance.

My interest in researching storytellers is in seeking their ‘presence’ in the performance. Presence is about totality and unison of all energies within the performance of the storytelling. This is an underlying truth in all oral traditions that I have worked with from Africa, Scotland, Ireland, Scandinavia and France. In identifying ‘presence’, there is an encounter with the anatomy of storytelling.

The external features of storytelling as an oral tradition comprise of hand gestures, movements in diagonals and arcs, facial expressions emoting moods and characters within the narrative, and eye contact. The internal features of storytelling comprise of voice and intonation, imagery and diction in narrative, characterization, and pacing.

While these form the internal and external features of the anatomy of storytelling, another vital component that is regarded as the essence of Indic and African storytelling is emotive intention. In the Indic traditions, this emotional consciousness is rasa, the aesthetic that is the ‘juice’, heartbeat and essence of all performance arts – dance, music, storytelling and theatre.

‘Presence’ in a performance storyteller/ing is the culmination of the emotive intention/rasa of the character within the story and the emotive intention/rasa that the teller wants to communicate about the significance of the story. The significance of the story is further divided into two parts – the craft of narrative in telling the story and the interpolations the storyteller makes from contemporary references into the selected story. It is this second part that marks out the verve and presence in a storyteller who serves the story.

I have categorized storytellers into the reciters and the interpolators. The Indic oral tradition is in part vibrant because it is kept alive by rituals and rites of passage, but much more by the interpolations of contemporary references into the old stories by the ‘presence’ of the storyteller who can invoke the past as a collective cultural memory and make meaning of it in the 21st century for the individual listener. This is not magic; it is intellectual athleticism, spiritual and emotive connected-ness, and dexterity of linguistic and performance language with the sheer intention to connect. It is vital that at an early stage of preparation the storyteller discovers the type of imagination that he or she is most comfortable with, textual or visual.

 

The performance forms of storytelling act like servers. Kathavaad or Tolubommalatu, among others, tell stories of local lore, or in the case of the epics, use narratives like the Ramayana to create analogies, meta-texts and variations. It captures the audiences attention by foregrounding the familiarity of the story, but simultaneously remaining attentive to the twist or surprise at the end of the story that thereby unravels a new meaning.

The chemistry of the oral tradition of storytelling works like jazz. The storyteller selects a story that could be familiar, but he ‘knows’ rather than ‘learns’ it from a script. While performing, the storyteller is connected by ‘wavelength’ to the mood of the audience, the time of day, the social context, and he fine-tunes it to his or her own physical and emotional energy; he is also open to ‘gifts’ of accidental occurrences within the performance, incorporating them into the telling. At one level it is about improvisation, though it needs a very stable foundation. But, above all, it is about remembering what Duke Ellington once said about an oral tradition: ‘It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that swing.’

 

In England now, the storytelling movement is gathering force as there is a great demand to listen to a story, given the mounting pressures of life and an unstable economy. The Society for Storytelling, Vayu Naidu Company, The Cric Crac Club, the Barbican and Storytelling Festivals, among others, promote and advocate performance storytelling. I recently started a series in the Leathermarket pub called Licence to Tell. While at first the marketing gurus advised me that the storytelling would have to be only for entertainment, bordering more on comedy, over time the rigour of developing new storytellers who prepare their stories from a worldwide collection has brought in audiences, sitting in pin-drop silence, waiting to know what happened next to whom, and why stories, like people and life, are so different in their expectations and endings.

At the British Museum we are performing stories from the Puranas, transposed into English, bringing the Indian Summer exhibition alive across June to August. My new work, Bhakti and the Blues (featuring jazz vocalist Cleveland Watkiss), integrates poems, bhakti stories and Afro-American folktales evoking the connection of a shared inheritance of the longing to belong to an infinity, will be out on tour this autumn with the intention of travelling to India.

 

To conclude, storytelling as performance, a profession, for leisure and as a livelihood, is empowering. The storyteller, through the story within the oral tradition, creates a parallel universe which, like the margins of our arithmetic exercise book, offers a rough space to work out our fears, fantasies, enter other experiences to evoke the delectable and the diabolic and make our choices about life. It is the space and key to free will, and this is where we must tread with confidence and humility, as the oral tradition is a great responsibility to be a container of the past, chronicling references for the present that will inform the future.

And here is Temsula Ao in Songs From the Other Life (Grasswork Books, Pune, 2007):

I have lived my life believing

Story-telling was my proud legacy.

 

But now a new era has dawned.

Insidiously displacing the old.

My own grandsons dismiss our stories as ancient gibberish.

Who needs rambling stories

When books will do just fine?

 

So when memory fails and words falter

I am overcome by a bestial craving

To wrench the thieving guts

Out of that Original Dog

And consign all my stories

To the script in his ancient entrails.

                                                  (The Old Story-teller)