Undoubtedly we are a culture of storytellers. Our day to day living, our performing arts, our literature all are filled with fascinating stories that take us on journeys, uphold values, preach morality, pose riddles and also offer profound philosophy questioning the very nature of life and living, and mirroring the purpose of our existence.
Story telling is as old as civilization itself. Our need to connect with our world is linked to our need to tell and listen to stories. With as primary a function as this, it is unlikely that the art of story telling will ever die. Like a tough gene it will survive with mankind. It may mutate and change its form depending on the needs and resources available to the tellers but its basic characteristic will remain.
Story came to us even before the word or probably even before speech. Primitive man felt the same urge to narrate as we do today maybe in a bar or under a banyan tree when the fields have been ploughed. But before speech the primitive man relied on sounds, gestures and pictures. Very soon these sounds, gestures and pictures developed into symbols. With greater sharing these symbols then evolved into a language. It is because of our need for story that we have the gift of speech and the gift of the written word. Language and literature are not inventions of man but a part of his evolution.
Stories come to us from childhood. Not just the ones we hear from our grandmothers but also the accounts from our peers about what happened on the way, or what we did on vacation. They are all stories because we choose to listen to what we consider worth listening to and we choose to tell what we think might impress or entertain. There is a natural evolution in story telling. Through a process of elimination, we know which stories work and which don’t.
Very often we love to listen to the same story over and over again. I remember as a child I loved to hear my sister narrate the stories from Chandamama, a magazine that brought out a collection of stories from the Panchatantra, the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Stories that were all too familiar to me but I didn’t mind hearing them over and over again. My sister would encourage me to read the magazine but I would much prefer her narration. She would bring in her own description of Sita and Rama in the forest. I would wait for the moments of great emotions. The exile of Ram, the abduction of Sita. When these great moments arrived my sister would improvise. One narration would have Ram crying with tears as big as berries when Ravan abducts Sita. Another would be from Sita’s point of view. A third would have Jatayu weeping at his own failure to save Sita. Same story with different punctuations. That was indeed my first introduction to dramatization but I didn’t know it then.
Our fascination for stories stays with us even as our intellect matures. As young adults we are encouraged to read. In some ways it is a kind of weaning process. As we form memories of the stories we heard, we choose to read what evokes those memories in us. Our engagement with story has a lot to do with our memories. Just as an actor relies on sense memory to evoke truthful emotions, the reader relies on the memory of images to evoke a response to reading. It is interesting that the word ‘imagination’ has the same source as the word ‘image’. From the Latin ‘Imago’, used in psychoanalysis for a mental image of an influential person. Very often, as young adults and even as children, we reject the pedantic approach to literature because it fails to engage our imagination. What is imagination after all but evoking a memory of an image that existed in our minds? It is surreal and subliminal. All our senses recall stories and that is why we attach emotions to it through association. A gentle touch may remind us of the incident when our mother caressed us during our sickness and alleviated our pain. We may not be aware of it, but subliminally we are connecting a present stimulus with a past experience. Similarly, the fragrance of cooked rice comforts us with the memory of the delicious lunches that were served every day to us. Virginia Woolf said that words by themselves are not a single entity. They are a part of other words. It is only in relation to one another as in sentences that they gain some meaning. I think that may be true of sentences too, at least in story. They only find meaning for us in relation to images.
We can read and enjoy a great work of literature like Dr. Zhivago without having been to Russia. Indeed, the time and place of a great work may be completely alien to us. And yet we make the connections because at the heart of these great works is a story we have heard before. If Dr. Zhivago was only about the October Revolution in Russia it would interest only a few who have some interest in that period. But it is a great love story. Love is something we all have associations with. Love, loss and longing. We are familiar with those through the stories of Radha and Krishna. Stories we have heard for hundreds of years.
It is these images that bind us to works of literature. We make a good story our own when we read it, because literature is a code of sounds, gestures and pictures, the very primitive expression from which civilization has sprung. Our very primeval forms of communication, codified like strains of DNA with our genetic history deeply embedded in them. And every writer presents us with the code and our imagination provides us with the key to break that code.
Cinema is considered to be a modern form of story telling. Actually what is modern is the technology. But the form of moving images is as we have seen among the oldest forms. Sounds, gestures, pictures. Today the world is ruled by moving images not because we have discovered something new. It is because we have re-discovered something old. By changing words back to images, cinema uses the tools that we started off with.
Some great filmmakers look to literature for inspiration. Satyajit Ray, Alfred Hitchcock, Rituparno Ghosh, David Lean have all made memorable adaptations of novels and plays. In one sense they are breaking the code for us when they provide us with startling images that stay with us forever. That is why they are called auteurs, the French word for ‘author’. In one sense they are doing what our imagination does for us when we read. But what they provide in return is just as valuable. While they fulfill our desire to revisit the stories we believe in, they also give us new sensory experiences that stretch us beyond our imagination. They rouse our curiosity and wonder. They make us children once again receiving new images.
Mahesh Dattani
Avid Learning 