In front of me, the Kabuliwala, in his colourful attire, is telling stories, his attention focussed completely on the children assembled around him. He’s telling them of distant lands and exciting adventures, and his voice rises and drops and changes dramatically, reeling his audience in. A loud infectious giggle punctuates the story, and a father, his son’s backpack resting against his leg, leans towards me and asks in a hopeful whisper, “Does this happen every Saturday?”
Kamal Pruthi's “Kabuliwala” has rapidly made parents, and children, want more. A fairly recent project, Pruthi’s project is hardly four months old. “Since it started, there have been around 17 events,” Pruthi says, adding that they’ve been attended by close to five hundred kids.
Pruthi’s background in theatre and acting (he's a recipient of ATSA (Art Think South Asia 2014) fellowship in the field of Arts management and Goethe’s Scholarship for young theatre practitioners of the world in 2006), has also inculcated in him a desire and passion for storytelling. While active in the field of theatre since 1999, it was in early 2012 that Pruthi turned to storytelling. “When I first started, I did many experiments, trying to find alternatives to the conventional style of storytelling.” “Kabuliwala”, too, is one of Pruthi’s experiments. “The idea behind this was that kids are acquainted with older figures like Santa Claus, but unlike Santa, the Kabuliwala doesn’t come just once a year. They can engage with him through the year. He tells them stories and carries a bag full of goodies and tales that the kids are always curious about.”
Pruthi feels that the character of the Kabuliwala has immense potential, but has been underutilised so far. “His character has not been revisited in terms of just him, it’s always been though Rabindranath Tagore’s story.” And so, Pruthi says that in his project, he makes no mention of this story, or Tagore. Instead, he focuses on the Kabuliwala himself. “In some areas, where I do shows frequently, the kids recognise me as just Kabuliwala. They don’t know me as Kamal.”
While currently Pruthi is dedicating all his time to storytelling for children, he has also been involved in the same for adults. “One of my experiments included holding storytelling sessions for adults where I’d tell them stories written for children. And it was received very positively by grown ups.”
Also intent on pushing the envelope further, Pruthi has been conducting storytelling workshops with teachers and parents, where he underlines the move away from the conventional, didactic method of storytelling. “The idea is to weave in the morals and teachings within the story, not make them explicit, like a moral lesson after the story is done. Children are smart, they don't need everything spelled out for them.” For each story, Pruthi researches and reads an immense amount, to find what he feels would engage the children best.
There is a slow, but steadily growing audience for Pruthi’s shows. But sometimes, there are difficulties. “I was invited to a private party to do a show, and just a few days before, the organiser called and said that since the show was on 20th December, they’d like me to dress up as Santa Claus instead.”
For Pruthi, this would be against the ideology he works with, which involves letting kids identify with and understand both Kabuliwala and his heritage and background. “I had to let go of the assignment, even though the money was good.”
With each experiment, Pruthi has kept the central idea alive. His work is intended to be lively, entertaining and engaging. Using his acting techniques with storytelling, Pruthi adds layers to his one man shows, becoming several people at once.
“I just want the kids to remember what they hear, and now, without me needing to tell them, they have started sharing these stories with their friends and family.”
Right now, “Kabuliwala” is still fairly unknown, still making his way to the thousands of kids waiting to be entertained by his bag of stories. “I have decided that once ‘Kabuliwala’ is known across Delhi only then will I move on to another character.”
