Storytelling, & Karanth’s magic

Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry

“Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.” — Salman Rushdie

Reading and sharing stories when we were children, was as important as breathing. An oral tradition of storytelling existed before books were written and published. Mothers sang songs to their children to lull them to sleep, and stories of adventure, valour, romance and bravery fed our imagination.

Enid Blyton’s ‘Malory Towers’ was devoured and ‘The Famous Five’ were our undercover agents in crime detection. ‘The Panchatantra’ had us lamenting the naïveté of monkeys who hope to ride crocodiles unscathed, and ‘Aesop’s Fables’ made us cheer for the tortoise, and reject the arrogance of the hare.

These stories ignited our imagination and created combustion in our souls.

Is there any moment when we are not telling a story? Our body tells a story. How we sit, how we walk, how we eat, how we interact, how we dress tell a story. As we grow up, we read, we see films, hear each other’s stories and through experiencing these stories, we make them our own.

The artist combines and edits material that already exists in order to create something new. Every work of art bears a reference to another work. It then becomes a remix, processed and combined, and new stories and fresh ways of working are generated.

Shakespeare, despite the imperial and classical baggage, was first and foremost a storyteller. I recall hearing about a game that children played. One child starts a story, the other adds or subtracts, and the rules of the game are that the story must never end. As the myth goes, this story became the Mahabharata. True or false, I don’t know, and does it really matter? What interested me was that no story has single authorship and multiple voices can be dovetailed in the narrative.

To tell a story you need something to say. You need craft and passion. When I think of a storyteller, immediately the image of BV Karanth comes to mind, who was the ultimate raconteur. “As long as I am alive, I will do theatre, and I will only stay alive if I do theatre” was his refrain.

He embodied the radical spirit of the times, and re-fashioned modern Indian theatre through hard questioning, rigorous training and storytelling. It’s important to share his story, as stories get lost if not shared across linguistic boundaries, with cultural details being transferred and transformed during the telling.

Who was Karanth? Was he this or was he that? I would say that he was the freest man that I had met; a nomad. Like all nomads, a trifle aloof and suspicious.

It’s important to tell his story, as he taught us that the primary purpose of theatre was to “bring a story alive” for yourself, audiences, a character, for history, or simply as a conceptual thought. He also instructed us that “bringing alive” needed instinct, patience, creativity, knowledge and, above all, effort. Theatre, he discoursed, was not flimsy, whimsical nonsense.

For Karanth, man, milieu and moment coalesced, enabling the emergence of regional voices, genres, and local impulses. The training in most drama schools in the late Sixties and Seventies was derived from western forms. But, a decade later, concepts, ideas and training tools changed. Folk and traditional forms began to be explored and valorised, based on the assumption that there existed in these forms a theatrical vocabulary that would enable urban theatre to establish links with its past.

He believed that Indian culture was a conglomeration that could trace its roots to varied sources, enriching itself in the process. “Indian realism has to be redefined and to achieve this, there must be a dialogue between contemporary theatre practitioners, folk artistes and traditional practices” was his belief.

Karanth’s impact on modern Indian theatre cannot be gauged independently from his relationship with musical compositions. He called his music “sound plans”. He loved sound — from the chirping of the birds to the human voice, the sneeze, the burp, gurgling, laughter, whispers and shouts. The sound of mourning and chanting, the raucous call of hawkers selling vegetables and other wares and sports commentary on radio and television all became inspirational tools to be transformed into a theatrical moment.

Karanth’s music was never performed by a soloist, but always through group singing, alongside assorted instruments; bottles to bamboo sticks, metal bowls and any object that made a sound was a valid and effective musical instrument.

His constant instruction was “speak as if you are singing and sing as if you are speaking”. In his theatre making, he linked the past with the present, the urban with the rural and creatively articulated contemporary realities, taking into consideration training tools that had local origins, vernacular moorings and regional sensibilities.

A Karanth story that never ceases to fascinate me was his passion for curd. It was not unusual to see him mix hakka noodles with spoonfuls of curd. He would scoop up curd from a bowl, bring it close to his lap, doubling over, proceed to pour the curd onto his palm as he slowly slurped from his cupped hand. I was convinced that there was a story behind this.

“My family lived on the farm of a wealthy landowner. Once a week, a bowl of curd was gifted to the family, and it was my job to deliver it. My mother would make buttermilk for our family of eight. I wanted to taste the curd and would funnel a portion, and the remaining curd was patted into shape, making the theft my private secret,” he confessed disarmingly.

Stories exercise a powerful influence over the human imagination and the most powerful aspect is their fluidity. No two storytellers will tell the tale in the same way. When a story is shared, it carries some of its cultural context within it; it is also a travelling metaphor and with each telling fresh meanings emerge. And, it’s not always enough to tell a story; there must be someone to listen and carry it forward.