Narratives

I recently saw a cartoon, where a hunter and a lion are depicted.  The text said something like, ‘Until the lion learns to write, the hunter remains the hero of the story’.  It reminds you that things do not look the same from both sides of an action or a conversation. That narratives are usually in the hands of the powerful, the victors, the governing bodies that guide the life after the story.

It was Henry James who said that life was all-inclusive and confusing and art had to be all discrimination and selection.  The particular angle of vision, the prejudices and inclinations of the person who reports it, all change the narrative.  And very often the narrative is taken over by people who control whatever medium is being used, be it a social conversation, a narrative in the media or an official finding.  Facts have a protean way of changing shapes in narratives even when such a thing is not specifically intended by the narrator.

Story-telling is sometimes the easiest way to communicate ideas and ideals.  And a familiar story takes away part of the strain since the outline is already familiar to the teller and the listener.  Of course old stories change shapes, add new characters, lose old ones and get new back-stories which give new motives and so on.  Sometimes, in the hands of a master, they become beautiful poetry and profound philosophy as we see happen to some of the stories retold by a writer like Shakespeare.  Legends which live in the folk memories also change with the location and time where they are retold.  Because, narratives are not just story-telling, they explore and confirm the truths and illusions of the society they are part of.  To me, the Ramayana is one of the clearest examples of this. And it is apt at this time, because this is the month when many Hindu households in Kerala echo with the Malayalam version of the Adhyatma Ramayana.  The basic story of the Ramayana is available in many societies, all over India and in a number of South East Asian countries.  While the broad outline of the story is similar, the incidents, the importance given to characters, the way they interact with each other – all these change.  They reflect the mores of the society they grow in.  But, of course that story is set in a far-off time.

But sometimes, the narratives that are shifting belong to an era much closer to our days. And this usually happens in the political arena.  While other narratives take a long time to morph into something else, those in the political arena are much quicker. There is active encouragement for the shift.  Sometimes the correction is a necessary one and worship has to yield place to questions.  Sometimes the corrections are driven by agendas and become dangerous.  Because, some narratives make us question our own memories and memories of others who have handed them over to us.  That is something that could erase history and replace it with just a narrative that is sufficiently close to history to pass muster.

An important date that comes just now is the Independence Day of our nation.  All such days, anniversaries and remembrance days, are not just celebrations, they are also times for taking out our memories and those passed on to us and examine them.  Find out whether time and further information have changed them. Once again narratives, narrators and their perspectives become important.  Here, the shifts are much more delicate.  Sometimes, the names that had been heard constantly a couple of decades before have vanished from the public space, a road is renamed, a government programme is now called by another name while it remains the same in essence.   Peoples we thought villains become martyrs and the people we thought above reproach are shown in all their flaws.  Some of what we find out are true facts that were not available at the time the stories were heard for the first time, but some of it are also facts recalibrated to suit a fresh narrative, one that fits the needs of the teller.

It is important that we keep our own narratives and do not allow others to alter them that we do not hand over our memories to others to edit.