In Kamal Pruthi’s Confused Bhagwan , loads of hyperactive, spiky Coronavirus stick out from a character’s head and have an ambling conversation.
Kamal, also known as Kabuliwala, performed this storytelling act online on June 12 from his home in Delhi sending schoolchildren in Varanasi into fits of laughter. This was his way of entertaining the children while keeping them informed of the current medical crisis. In Corona Ka Khatma , performed a week later to a 1,500-strong audience of mainly schoolchildren, he again staged the story of the virus in a fun way.
Also in the national capital, Rituparna Ghosh, who founded Your Story Bag in 2015, teamed up with eight members of The Delhi Storytellers Tribe to raise funds for The Kutumb Foundation, a not-for-profit providing COVID-relief to underserved communities in Noida. “We are currently creating a campaign to raise funds for COVID-relief. We raised over ₹80K so far,” says Rituparna. “We tell stories for our livelihood, for joy and with our artistry we could do something for the society,” she adds, on the role of the storytelling community during the current crisis.
Storytellers have been modifying their medium and content to reach out to children and adults with entertainment, information and talk therapy during the lockdown.
Many improvised and performed online, made videos to be screened by NGOs for underprivileged children, undertook campaigns to raise funds for displaced migrants, or reached out to restive kids locked indoors with tales of comfort and hope.
Entertaining restive kids
When the lockdown led to cancellations of storytelling acts, Priyanka Chatterjee, popularly called Golpodidi (Golpu means talk in Bengali) created #Uncancelled online and encouraged children to talk about themselves in the future. “Every child spoke of schools re-opening,” says Priyanka.
She also organised a storytelling show based on Satyajit Ray’s Septopasher Khide (The Hunger of the Pitcher Plant) , in which children from India and across the world participated.
Recognising that families are now spending more free time together, Ahmedabad-based Yogita Bansal Ahuja, who founded Story Circle by INM Learning Services, is offering a 15-hour certification course to “create consciousness about storytelling and waking people to its power.”
Another community-building initiative, which began on June 27, is The Weekly Story Soup. “This is a collaboration with storytelling representative bodies in the North, South, West and East India to create more bonding,” says Yogita.
Stories for all
The current evolving storytelling culture is slightly elitist, according to Bengaluru-based Vikram Sridhar who used the lockdown to reach out to underprivileged kids and adults with recordings that he disseminated through NGOs.
Vikram calls himself a sit-down, as opposed to a stand-up performer, as he narrates classical folk tales in the traditional Indian style with the audience seated around him. “Unlike dance or martial arts, storytelling is the easiest form to be digitised and hence the space has suddenly become crowded,” says Vikram.
During the lockdown, he conducted a workshop for adults based on the Panchatantra and other folk tales. In May, he collaborated with Aparna Jaishankar in ‘Lahe Lahe’, which featured 60 practising story educators, to narrate 120 mythological stories. He also performed acts like ‘Lores of the Fools’, which was about the legendary jokers and jesters of India, on social media.
“The screen is the future,” states Kamal, who has been in the industry for 20 years and has performed in nine Indian languages and German. “We are all improvising. I could see the comments from the audience on the screen as I performed.”
Up until now, Chennai-based Janaki Sabesh, who is known for playing the screen mother in over 20 South Indian films, says she consciously fought the virtual method of storytelling. She began by recording stories and sing-a-alongs on audio cassettes in 1995. In 2014, she started Golpo Tales Unlimited and held sessions on the terrace of a friend’s home. But the lockdown changed that.
Along with Avanti Natarajan’s Lil Trails, she began a creative on Instagram and moved to a bigger platform with Zoom, for World Autism Day.
“I had a mental block about missing the live energy of the physical audience but the lockdown has proved otherwise,” says Janaki, adding “The storytelling community will emerge stronger from this crisis.”
