NEW DELHI:
A sublime initiative to resurrect the age-old art of story-telling that appears to be slipping into oblivion got underway in the national capital as a bunch of professional and passionate raconteurs from India and other parts of the globe assembled here for the three-day ‘Kathakar 2019’ – India’s only and increasingly popular annual storytelling festival.
Now in its 12th edition, Kathakar took the centre stage at Sunder Nursery, located amidst the looming shadows of the imposing Humayun’s tomb complex, last evening as the story-tellers began showing their craft to underscore the fact that the template of story-telling is similar across the continents and cultures.
With a faint whiff of winter in the air, the event got off to a crackling start with the rhythmic and mesmerising chants of Grammy Award-winning Buddhist monks, all in ochre coloured robes, belonging to the Paulong Sherabling Monastery near Dharamshala in Keori district of Himachal. The monastery is the seat of the Tai Situ Rinpoche, a renowned Buddhist monk of the Karma Kagyu sect and their chants are oral traditions preserved from the 7th century.
“These sacred chants survived due to their oral traditions which had originated in the monasteries,’’ a monk explained. These prayers in the form of chants are observed at the beginning and end of the day at the Sherabling monastery. The evening fiesta then opened up on the treasured legacy of story-telling which is organised by Nivesh, a cultural forum along with HHACH (Himalayan Hub for Art, Culture and Heritage), Babaji Music and Agha Khan Trust for Culture as festival support and venue partners.
The festival, which strives to unravel the mystic and intricacies of story-telling traditions of divergent cultures, has been conceptualized by sisters Rachna, Prarthana and Shaguna Gahilote and was first launched in 2010 under the aegis of UNESCO as part of Ghummakkad Narain, a travelling literature festival in memory of ardent reader Thakur Vishva Narain Singh, the first Braille editor in India.
The 2019 edition was formally inaugurated by Shir Kiren Rijiju, Minister of State for Sports & Youth Affairs and renowned actor Padma Shri and National Awardee Manoj Bajpayee and singer-songwriter-composer Mohit Chauhan, the patron of the festival.
The Delhi-based actor oozed love for the capital but lamented that much of the historical relics had begun to crumble. Speaking in chaste Hindi in a session moderated by Prarthana Gahilote, he said, Delhi is a great city and many parts of it contain the still imposing gates or Darwazaas surviving to this date. The Delhi Gate, especially, had been witness to many a historic upheaval.
“Now people pass by that gate nonchalantly without even realising its historic importance. These oral traditions and story-telling will help bring alive much of the heritage and rich tradition,” the actor said.
Mohit Chauhan, the well-known singer who is also the chief patron of the festival, gave into the demands of friend Manoj Bajpayee and enthralled the audience with a Himachali Song, Shimle.
Kiran Rijiju spoke on the richness of the oral tradition. The minister said the modern lifestyles with it gadget culture have diminished the outreach of the oral tradition, but now there seems a revival of this age-old art form of the spoken word, which has been especially reflected in the festival. An over 800-strong audience which had gathered had well-known faces in the audience like actor Ratna Pathak Shah, Delhi MLA Saurabh Bhardwaj, and Ambassadors of Suriname and Mongolia.
The inaugural day also saw Uncle Larry Walsh of Australia connecting and bonding with the audience. The celebrated story-teller, who is a member of the Tauragurong aboriginal tribe of Australia, underlined the fact that the oral story is an important expression of the aboriginal culture.
“I want to make communities, especially aboriginals, to be stronger. Aboriginal people must live as much in the modern world as intimately connected to their past,’’ he stressed.
Calling himself a ‘’cultural educator’’, Ron Murray, an aborigine with Scottish blood, used the traditional musical instrument ‘’Didgeridoo’’ to lend his stories about native fauna a lilting touch that enthralled the crowd.
Ron, who has an international reputation as Didgeridoo soloist, is from a Wamba Wamba region in Central Victoria, Australia. He spoke about how aborigines used to live and how they continue to practice their traditions even today. As a Didgeridoo musician, Ron began his session by playing the long uneven wooden instrument as a tradition of welcome, talked about how it is made and demonstrated how to make animal sounds from it.
Renowned harpist and story teller Emilia Raiter from Poland gave an exhilarating rendition of Slavic myths revolving around the origin of the universe. She expressed optimism that story-telling would survive. ’’People love to tell stories,’’ she quipped.
Fascinated by Indian mythology, Emily Parish from the University of Kent said she has always been astounded by the character of Goddess Kali worshipped in its several avatars. The goddess could be extremely violent at one point and take the shape of a benevolent mother at the same time. ‘’She is one of the fearsome female warriors as a goddess of death and at the same time an embodiment of feminine energy, of motherly love, ‘’ Parish said before she began her melodramatic story-telling of the goddess replete with the expressions of hunger for blood and the act of slaying of the demon Rakthabija.
As the night wore on, the enthusiasm amongst the crowd, with a fair sprinkling of children, magnified, testifying to the fact that there is definitely a surge in storytelling. It seems oral tales are becoming even more relevant as these stories are worked and reworked, polished and adapted to varied places and times in a way that is not possible for the written word. Storytelling not only teaches you lessons or entertains; it goes beyond that by offering you a ray of hope.
The festival so far has been addressed by the likes of (Late) Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, Dr. Shashi Tharoor, Margaret Alva, Sunil Shastri, Nandita Das, Sushma Seth, Emily Gravett, Joanne Blake, TUUP, Joseph Baele, and Xanthe Gresham, among others.
