Prema Jayakumar

‘I cannot tell how the truth may be; I say the tale as it was said to me.’ That was Walter Scott who has told us some exciting stories. But, that was about the books. Telling stories was once the occupation of families. It might be stories from the scriptures or the puranas, it might be legends connected with a place or a family, it might be anecdotes that amused the hearers. There is magic in the air and everyone listens. All children I know love listening to stories. And they take away and store for ever in their memories not just the hero and the demon and the princess and the manipulating villain, but something beyond that. The stories not only entertained but they conveyed something more than that, maybe information, maybe instruction. They brought an understanding of life that went beyond the actual narrative. There is something that a present narrator and his or her voice gives that reading a book cannot provide, when the story is simple. The circle around the story teller must have existed even in prehistoric times, with caves resounding to narrations in rudimentary language. Grandmothers and elderly aunts who had plenty of time to spend with the children of the household are things of the past. Of course, reading books and seeing movies is an extension of this, but a later find in anyone’s life. In this time of isolation when the children cannot go in search of stories or story-tellers, the new media have taken up the task with real enthusiasm. Many channels have taken up the task of story-telling, with verve.
It must be a very human instinct to tell stories because every human civilization that we know of has left behind myths, legends, stories in short. Stories entertain, instruct, explain so that even the slower brains can absorb the information being conveyed. The Panchatantra which migrated beyond the boundaries of India is an example. The background story goes that the old brahmin instructed the lazy and unintelligent princes, who had been the despair of their father, in statecraft by telling them stories about animals and some humans. He explains how you bring fissures in the unity of strong enemies, how you get new allies, how you deal with the unexpected and the traitorous. The princes are supposed to have turned over a new leaf at the end of a few months! Religions too have always used stories to keep the interest of their followers while the teacher spoke and to get certain principles into their minds.
It is in stories that the valour of kings and their wisdom survive. While the painstaking narratives of the historians, and the flattery of the minstrels, glorifying the wars fought and the wise rule that made the land prosperous, are lost in time, the stories of the age survive, handed over by word of mouth and told by each generation to the next. Shakespeare said to bards of forgotten rulers, ‘This is your thoughts that now must deck our kings.’
In our own small Kerala we have the legends of the children of the brahmin scholar Vararuchi and the low-caste woman he married, each child being picked up by a couple of a different caste and yet recognizing each other and getting together on occasion even while they live their separate lives. How better to bring it home that all human beings are really born of one set of parents, circumstances deciding how they’ll live, none being superior and none being inferior. And very often the wisest of them all is the man in the lowest position in the caste hierarchy.
Stories do change with the age and experience of the reader. The book you read at ten is not necessarily the same when you read it at the age of sixty, even if you still enjoy it. No story really remains the same to a reader over a period of time, whether it is a fairy tale, a novel or the Mahabharata. This is because we interpret as we read and we who read it now are no longer the same persons who read it years back. While the story and the narration remain, we have, hopefully learnt something of life and can bring a small measure of wisdom to our interpretation. Anyway, more power to the tellers of stories, may their tribe increase.