Using oral storytelling for education, conservation, and therapy: Meet the taletellers of Bengaluru

Although oral storytelling is not the most popular or profitable performing art, it has a considerable niche following in Bengaluru

The latest edition of ‘Stories from the Mahabharata’, on July 16, at the performing art space Lahe Lahe in Indiranagar, Bengaluru, had an unusual audience member. A guy from the Netherlands. The co-founder of the space, Mansee Shah Thard, had not, until now, seen a foreigner participating in Aparna Jaishankar’s storytelling session on the Indian epic on every third Saturday. Mansee found out he was about to fly back home the following day. “Of all the things he could have done on his last day in Bengaluru, he chose to buy a ticket for a storytelling session!” she says.

Although oral storytelling is not the most popular or profitable performing art, it has a niche following in Bengaluru. The availability of performing art spaces such as Lahe Lahe, Ranga Shankara, Atta Galatta, Shoonya and Bangalore Creative Circus among others is an important reason for this, reckons Vikram Sridhar, who has been a professional storyteller for about a decade now. 

“Two weeks ago when I did a show at Lahe Lahe, I had 55 people coming in. It is a considerable number for a storytelling event,” he says. “For an art form to flourish, you need artists and spaces. Bengaluru has both.”

“You can call Bengaluru the capital of storytelling (in India),” says Geeta Ramanujam, who is considered among the pioneers of contemporary storytelling in the country. The Kathalaya International Academy of Storytelling, which she founded in 2003, has trained about 90,000 people in storytelling. The academy in BTM Layout offers a beginner’s certification course and a diploma. “For the first 9-10 years since we started, there were no professional storytellers. From 2012 onwards, we started witnessing them one by one — and most of them had taken up our course.”

Vikram was one of them. He has entertained children and adults across India. Although he tells tales from diverse genres, a recurring motif in his stories is wildlife. “For me, stories are are a way to look at wildlife, especially when we are slowly losing it. Today, we predominantly have human stories but forget that nature is a part of us,” he says, “Stories are an important part of our conservation activities.”

Apart from wildlife, they also help us sustain our cultural heritage, adds Vikram. Aparna’s ‘Stories from the Mahabharata’ sessions are an example of this. “Usually when people ponder on the Mahabharata, they think of Pandavas vs Kauravas, good vs evil. But it is not black and white at all,” says Aparna, “For instance, Duryodhana, who is usually considered a villain, has temples in Kerala and Himachal. They worship him because he was against caste discrimination. The epic is also so fascinatingly complex. It talks about ethics, morality, and other areas of philosophy.”

“Even our folktales, which were passed on from one generation to the next, carry a lot of our heritage. Once people started migrating, they got lost lost. We, as storytellers, are reviving them in a form that is palatable in today’s age,” she adds.