Village stories open virtual chapter

Chennai: Dancing to the beats of the parai and narrating tales of fictitious regional characters, folk artist Mani Maran Magizhini has been in touch with his urban audience through Facebook Live, YouTube videos, and online classes all through the lockdown.

"Most folk stories we narrate have supernatural elements intertwined with everyday stories. This makes each story fascinating," says Maran, as he narrates the story of a man who pursues a woman named Mohini, depicted as a beautiful and evil supernatural being. "She is just a strong woman who confronts a man she is not interested in," he laughs.

The lockdown triggered by Covid-19 has been a huge blow to rural communities dependent on the tourism and recreational industry. As income streams have thinned, several communities have stepped on to

digital platforms

to sustain their livelihood. Storytelling or teaching the parai is among them. "I have never imagined teaching parai or narrating stories for students who live abroad," says the Vedanthangal-based parai artist who began teaching parai through platforms such as Zoom since the lockdown began.

"Urban dwellers can leverage digital tools while maintaining social distancing, but rural India continues to be held back by the lack of digital skills and opportunities," says Shivya Nath, founder of travel blog, The Shooting Star. Her initiative, ‘Voices of Rural India’ (VoRI) — a digital platform sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic — provides space for rural communities to curate and deliver their stories in their own voices.

Launched on August 15, VoRI works with rural communities in Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh,

Uttarakhand

, Kerala, Maharashtra, and Gujarat and is expected to expand to other states. Nath says VoRI owns what is possibly the country’s first Instagram channel run by a rural community.

For Soniya Thakur, a 21-year-old student from Tirthan Valley in Himachal Pradesh, sharing her community’s culture through VoRI has been exciting. "Magh Mahina is a special month where we come together to cook local delicacies such as bhalla (fried lentil doughnuts) and babru (sweet fritters). I was thrilled I could share the story about this ancestral festival with everyone," she says, adding that this is the time of the year when every family gathers together in the chilly evenings, lights a fire and roasts walnuts over it.

Staying connected to people’s lives is crucial, in times where tourism has taken a knock, explains Malika Virdi, co-founder of VoRI. "We want to draw people into our lives and not just be a feel-good tourist destination," says Virdi, who is also a farmer and sarpanch of Sarmoli Jainti Van Panchayat in Uttarakhand.

During the pandemic, rural communities are slowly learning to negotiate available spaces, re-skill, and use the interim period to bridge the urban and rural divide, believes Virdi.

Arjun Narayanan

, co-founder of Chennai-based Simply Stories, says, "Bringing rural stories to the urban crowd and in turn, involving in the grassroots-level revival of folk culture and lifestyle is important in keeping their stories alive." He believes the need of the hour is the digitisation of oral folklore to help preserve them.

According to Eric Miller, director of Chennai-based World Storytelling Institute, the role of traditional storytellers is different from new-age urban storytellers as they narrate their stories to reinforce their community identity and to educate and entertain outsiders. "Those with access to technology in these communities are mostly young individuals who aren’t necessarily those with the utmost knowledge about local customs and cultures," he says adding that finding the most suitable representatives to be the community’s storytellers is delicate, yet crucial to preserving the culture.

Tribal and rural storytelling is a way of transferring indigenous knowledge to the next generation, says P

Subramaniam

, Director of Tribal Research Centre, Government of Tamil Nadu. "It is not communicated just for the sake of entertainment. Storytelling is a vital method of communication for most tribal groups."

Subramaniam explains that one of the issues that can arise in communication is the difference in the cultural context. "For instance, taboo topics such as sex are openly discussed through dances and songs, however, they might be perceived in an inappropriate manner when communicated to an urban audience."

Documenting tribal cultural values should be encouraged, he says. Recently, for instance,

All India Radio, Ooty

, hosted sessions where oral stories were narrated by the vulnerable tribal groups of Nilgiris themselves. A few writers have also been documenting oral folklore from this region in a written format, he says.

Rekha Rautela, a 40-year-old from Sarmoli in Uttarakhand, is one such storyteller who aims to document untold and forgotten stories from her community through VoRI. "I am now working on a story exploring the evolution of love and relationships from ancestral times to the present, in my community. This is the ‘pyaar kahani’ of my people," she says.


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