Retelling Indian katha through 3,000 years of stories has been the most marvellous adventure for me as a 21st-century inheritor of our storytelling tradition. Naturally, this effort made me look closely at the nature of this inheritance. Here are some points that struck me, and I would love to know what you think.
My top point: we’re very lucky to have had many master storytellers. The two outstanding examples are Valmiki, the author of the Ramayana, and Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata. They’re subtle, they love detail, and they’re kings of suspense and irony, especially Vyasa. My second point: the oral tradition through which their stories were passed on is actually an experience of theatre. These stories were in fact turned into myriad forms of regional theatre that flourish even today.
Even in informal settings, anyone who tells these stories instinctively drops or raises their voices, stops at a crucial moment to increase its drama, and asks leading questions like “What do you think happened next?” These storytellers could be granny at bedtime, the pauranikar or kathakar—the traditional storyteller at the temple—or a campfire artiste. It could be someone on your screen or in print. Professional storytellers also use songs to heighten a dramatic moment and give listeners time to experience an emotion, be it sad, happy, afraid or ablaze with wonder.
In particular, I like the emotional responsibility our religious story-telling tradition shows towards its listeners. This is how I think it works. Firstly, why are these stories told in our religious tradition? They’re told to heighten awareness of the complexity of life in listeners, the nature of relationships, and the seasonal beauty of nature. The story aims to stimulate the listener’s capacity to think. A deeper purpose is to instil and increase God-love, and through it, fellow feelings for humanity.
The goal is to increase the listener’s Emotional Quotient, not merely the IQ. These stories want us to know how to respond to various situations; in fact, they’re a directory of responses.
Now comes the moment of utmost emotional responsibility. At the end, a master storyteller reconnects the listener gently with real life. Dreadful things may happen to the characters but usually, the Indian fabulist likes to stop at a hope point so people go home touched, pleased and energised. This comes from the very basis of ‘Hinduism’—ananda or happiness, a gladness of being in thought, word and deed that comes from ‘realising God’.
So far, we’ve ticked off skill, delivery, broad areas of engagement and deeper purpose. We’ve ticked off the key principle. What about content? What’s actually there in an Indian katha to make people want to remember and retell it as they have done with katha these 3,000 years—not only in India but right around the Bay of Bengal and mainland Asia, across West Asia and Europe?
The answer: a good story. Let’s take a look at Ramayana, the ultimate Indian katha that does not end happily but caught so many hearts that it became the ‘Epic of Asia’. Scholarly opinion has it that there is no other story on earth that comes close to the Ramayana in the extraordinary way it lives on through myriad tellings. Over the millennia, people had problems about the ambivalences—the seemingly less-than-perfect behaviour of Sri Rama in the episodes of Vali, Surpanakha and Sita’s Agnipariksha. But these issues are present in the very first Ramayana, by Valmiki. They were not edited out but allowed to stay; Valmiki himself explains these situations. And yet, unlike the Vedas, which had to be memorised exactly with not a word changed, the Ramayana was treated as a beloved epic open to re-interpretation.
Why was it so important to make sense of the Ramayana and hang on to it, despite its few seemingly grey areas? In my view, it’s because it touches the heart so deeply it is recognised as truth. There are apparently over 300 versions of the Ramayana and hundreds of oral narratives. Scholars say there are broadly two kinds. Ramayanas that deal with happiness in union and those that deal with the sorrow of separation. Sita is either banished or there’s a mangalam ending. There are said to be more Ramayanas with a happy ending.
But sadness is truer to life, perhaps? Rama is never happy after Sita’s banishment. Last month on Ram Navami, when I was in Ayodhya, I made my way down to the Sarayu to put water on my head. My local auto rickshaw driver took me through back lanes to a quiet stretch of the river, away from the crowds. I stood for a few minutes just looking at the river. I was suddenly overwhelmed by the thought that Sri Rama took jal samadhi in the Sarayu. My eyes filled with unbidden tears at the poignant memories that the Sarayu brims with, like the Ganga and Yamuna. If
just the sight of the river had such a strong effect, we can understand the lasting impact of this luminous story and the extraordinary character of Sri Rama, the exemplary love of his brothers and the loyalty and grit of Sita, a princess who embraced stark hardship out of love.
In the north, there is an anthology of devotees’ questions to Tulsidas called the Shankhavali that asks things like ‘What did they eat in the forest’, ‘Which mother did they bow to first’, and so on. Every region has some format in which the details of this epic are repeatedly raised. The Ramayana is but one stupendous example of the vast and fluid narrative tradition of our land that we are fortunate to take part in.
(Views are personal)
(shebaba09@gmail.com)
Renuka Narayanan