And thereby hangs a tale
Indigenous storytellers from remote corners come together with urban professionals.
This is the first time in his 38 years that Ketham is travelling outside his village in Gudalur, the tea plantation district in the Nilgiris in Tamil Nadu. He went through the alien, nausea-inducing bus ride for another first — to recount the stories of the gods he and his forefathers have worshipped to someone other than his villagers. Ketham is one of the nine indigenous storytellers who have come to Fireflies Ashram, a tree-filled sanctuary around 30 km outside Bangalore, for a three-day festival of indigenous story tellers. Titled “Confluence,” the festival is the result of the efforts of Acoustic Traditional, a city-based non-profit battling the odds to preserve the story-telling tradition of mountain and forest communities.
Salil Mukhia, the founder of Acoustic Traditional, does not look like the battle is weighing heavily on him though. The bespectacled 32-year-old is excited that he and his team of five have managed to bring together storytellers from the Nilgiris, Andhra Pradesh, Sikkim, Darjeeling and Karnataka who might otherwise not venture out, as well as urban, professional storytellers and others interested in the dying tradition. In a sense, it’s mountain-and-forest meets urban mainstream.
Acoustic Traditional has its genesis in the mid-1990s when Mukhia was trying to trace the origin of tribal stories being retold musically — and realised this was something that could easily be lost forever. The festival, now in its second edition, is one part of the efforts to conserve them.
There are several challenges to Mukhia and his team’s efforts, though, one being that certain stories are not supposed to be written down, while some can be retold only by certain people. “This is also because it contains sacred knowledge. The stories would get diluted if they are not retold the way they are supposed to be and by the right people,” says Mukhia.
At the festival, a bigger hurdle appears to be language. It does not pose a problem for the group that has registered for a session with Eric Miller, director of the World Storytelling Institute in Chennai, since English is the lingua franca there. But at the parallel session with the indigenous storytellers, one of the volunteers, bandana-sporting MPhil student Abhishek KR, struggles to translate everything first into Tamil for the Kurubas and Paniyars, then into Telugu for the Naikpodus from Andhra, and what they say back into English for the rest of us. Ketham, the Kuruba storyteller, confesses later that he feels he cannot tell his stories in this setting as well as he would back home, surrounded by his tribesmen. But contrary to what one might think, he adds that his children are still carrying on the tradition of retelling their stories, despite the distraction of television sets in the village provided by rival Tamil Nadu governments.
While the Paniyars and Kurubas might be spending their days on tea estates and in factories with the stories reserved for the occasional evening or festival, the urban storytelling world is slightly different. “It is very, very slowly gaining acceptance as a profession,” says Usha Venkatraman, a teacher-turned-professional storyteller from Mumbai, who conducts sessions using hand puppets. And in the West, it is a profession that doesn’t pay too badly. Tim Bowley, a British storyteller and theatre artist based in Spain, who has his audience hanging on to every word of his animated tale of King Arthur and an eskimo folktale, says storytellers can make between €400 and €700 for a session. That’s far removed from the situation in countries like India though, he cautions.
But whatever the obstacles, linguistic or otherwise, the folks at Acoustic Traditional are buoyant. As Mukhia says, “Meitei meets Kuruba meets Lepcha might ordinarily be a recipe for a disaster. But here, we are all weaving a collective story.”