The Timeless Art of Storytelling in India
From grandmothers' tales to temple carvings, storytelling has always been India's way of preserving wisdom. This piece traces how an ancient art evolved from courtyards to social media without losing its soul.
A Modern Revival of an Ancient Art
As we scroll endlessly today, one must have encountered videos on the "art of storytelling." Storytelling has found a glamorous revival on social media as a skill. But is that it? Is it just another trend that one should master and benefit from?
If one assumes that storytelling is a modern art, our ancestors would definitely chuckle. India has always been a land of stories. Telling tales was never limited to entertainment; they were great sources of knowledge and communication. Every courtyard was a stage to deliver wisdom and preach. One did not have to be a literary elite or master the art of storytelling to be good at it. In fact, even our generation is not too far from that, considering the first storytellers we witnessed as children were our grandmothers.
Turning back the pages of history once again, the traditions of Shruti and Smriti, meaning "what is heard" and "what is remembered," formed the very foundation of how India preserved its wisdom.
Oftentimes, storytelling was accompanied by other art forms or expressed through different mediums. Think of the wandering bards, the Kathavachaks of the North, the Haridasus of the South, or the Pardhans of Central India, traveling from village to village performing tales of gods and heroes with the help of music and gesture.
Storytelling was not just oral. In fact, we find evidence of visual storytelling in every corner of Indian art and architecture. Pattachitra is a beautiful example to quote, an endangered art form that once flourished in Odisha and West Bengal. It is a traditional scroll painting on cloth or dried palm leaves depicting scenes from mythology and folklore. In many ways, the Patua (scroll artist) was India's first graphic novelist.
From the carvings on the temple walls of Khajuraho and Hampi to the puppets of Rajasthan, the art of storytelling was embedded everywhere.
Storytelling did not arrive in India with social media; it merely changed its form. What was once told beneath banyan trees is now spoken into microphones. What was once memorized through Shruti is today written as scripts and captions.
Storytelling has evolved over time, but never lost its essence. It shall always remain a thread connecting humans through time, tales, and emotions.