Did you hear the story about the… as the Facebook page comes alive sharp at seven in the evening, the Nandi family goes into a standstill mode. Both the kids - aged 10 and six - are glued to the screen. Even the parents set aside their hectic work-from-home lives and happily settle in for an evening of 'grandma's stories'.
Everyone loves a good story session. And what could be a better time to revive the tradition than this pandemic, where everyone is more home-bound than they are used to. A Bangla story about biryani being influenced by politics.
A Khasi legend of Khlum, a goddess who avenged a village abusing the planet by giving them the plague. A Kannada folk tale on how a prince finds the love of his life. A personal tale in Parsi Gujarati about the nuances and playfulness of the dialect. There is a story for everyone.
When the Bangalore Storytelling Society (BSS) started a new digital series in March, little did they know that soon virtual would be the new normal. In an attempt to promote regional storytelling, they started Stories Sans Borders.
Storytellers from different parts of India share tales in their local languages and dialects, exposing audience members to words they have perhaps never heard before. The latest edition had storytellers sharing tales in Memoni, Bodo, Punjabi and Kodava Takk.
"Since its inception, these events have been taking place on Zoom and are live-streamed on Facebook on the third Sunday of every month. So when this month’s edition was slotted for a day after Independence Day, we made a conscious decision to include tellers from the length and breadth of India," says Vikram Sridhar, a professional storyteller himself.
He, along with other professional storytellers - Aparna Athreya, Aparna Jaishankar, Lavanya Prasad, Shylaja Sampath and Sowmya Srinivasan - form the core team. "We hope the event gives a platform to all languages in India, where they can be spoken and shared with people who don’t belong to their state alone," says Athreya.
Storytelling as an art form goes back centuries. And the pandemic has allowed this ancient art to flourish once more. For example, the traditional African storytelling has found an unlikely audience as the Play Africa Children's Museum in South Africa put its African Storytelling project online.
It now includes audiences from around the world. Indian storytellers are not far behind. On the lines of BSS and its focus on regional storytelling, famed storyteller Lavanya Srinivas now includes Telugu storytelling videos besides her trademark English ones on her Katha Kamamishu FB page.
With the lockdown making physical events difficult, Bengali storyteller Priyanka Chatterjee, popularly called Golpodidi, created #Uncancelled online involving children on a larger platform.
In BSS's case, the idea came from the realisation that even when the source of a story lies in a regional language, it was being delivered only in English, leading to a loss in translation. "We knew we had to go digital. It was the only way we could reach out to storytellers from across the country," explains Jaishankar.
The monthly initiative has covered more than 20 languages and dialects, including Awadhi, Bangla, Dharwad Kannada, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Khasi, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Marwari, Nepali, Odia, Parsi Gujarati, Punjabi, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Tulu and Urdu.