IF YOU GREW UP IN INDIA IN THE ’80S OR THE EARLY ’90S, YOU MIGHT NOT REMEMBER YOUR FIRST BRUSH WITH CRICKET BECAUSE IT WAS, WELL, ALL AROUND
harder, with a greater punch, and as you got used to it over the season, almost mellifluous.
It was also a happy time for Indian cricket because the team was going through an international awakening. In the 1970s, India realised it could compete abroad by winning matches in England and West Indies, but the patchy run solidified a decade later through the game’s shorter version. If Kapil’s Devils on the Lord’s balcony in 1983 put India on top of the world, the champagne-drenched players taking a victory lap inside and on top of Ravi Shastri’s souls and change us in ways we are not aware of,” says Sushmita Singha, co-founder of the festival. Raghunath points out that storytelling, as we see it now, started taking shape across the world 30 years ago. The effect was visible in India too. People in different regions began performing tales from mythology and other genres. While Raghunath was honing her craft in Chennai, Geeta Ramanujam established the Kathalaya academy of storytelling in Bangalore. Mahmood Farooqui and Danish Husain, among others, popularised the art of dastangoi in north and central India.
“Initially, a majority of storytellers catered to children. Then storytelling moved to corporate houses. Literary festivals followed suit, taking the art form to their audiences. It is not a struggle anymore to be a storyteller,” says Raghunath.
FEAST’S latest conference was in Singapore in November. Its 2019 meet is scheduled in Bengaluru where the theme will be myth, legends and epics.
“What we see now is part of a larger trend of going back to our roots or culture. There was a period, in between, when there was no talk of it. Now, we see college students reading Manto, Bulle Shah and Kabir,” says Delhi-based dastango Syed Sahil Agha, who learnt the skill by observing his grandfather as he recounted tales of Partition to relatives and guests. Every story does not lend itself to storytelling though. Neither is there any trick to finding a tale worth narrating. Says actor Vicky Ahuja, “Mostly, the story chooses you, and not the other way round. The story has to talk to you, do something to you. That is the one worth sharing. But the same story can work for me, and not for someone else.”
While selecting a story, the only thing a storyteller must ensure is that it’s well written. “Then the story works even if the performance is not up to the mark,” adds Ahuja.
Almost every storyteller has come across at least one story that is a gripping read but not easy to perform. For Ahuja, it is Sadat Hasan Manto’s short story, Naara . “It is about a wealthy seth abusing a poor man. It is an internal story. I tried but could not execute it. It is brilliantly written though,” says Ahuja, who routinely attends storytelling sessions of Naseeruddin Shah and Ashish Vidyarthi in Mumbai.
Sahil Agha says that story selection is organic process. “From a wide collection, one particular story grows on you. It tells you, ‘share me with people, I have many secrets within me, let them unravel me’.” Audi in the 1985 World Championship at the Melbourne Cricket Ground showed it belonged there.
Since then, there have been joyous trips, ignominious trips and controversial trips Down Under, but the relationship between India and cricket in the land where it looks like it truly belongs (at least on TV), has been cemented forever in the minds of those who experienced those quintessential Aussie mornings.
For newer entrants to cricket from Australia, the experience has remained not so exhilarating for four principal reasons. One, there is so much cricket these days, most of it of the slam-bang Twenty20 variety, that the joy of watching a Test match in its entirety has slowly been rendered meaningless. Two, the explosion of TV in India has made the best of entertainment – live sport or otherwise – so easily available, that we don’t have the time to engage with events, just to consume them. Three, over time cricket pitches in Australia have become different characters altogether – Perth is no longer menacing, the Gabba in Brisbane is no longer zippy in the mornings and early evenings, and a straight six at the Adelaide Oval is no longer the stuff of fairytales. Four, for those who were willing to brave through these societal changes and remain cricketing purists, at some point in the last decade, someone decided to ‘Indianise’ the cricket telecast from Australia by shipping our own commentators, removing the walking ducks, and even the ultimate travesty of re-inverting the score. (It’s akin to travelling on an exotic holiday but insisting on eating only Indian cuisine.)
So, now that another India tour of Australia is underway, I try (but don’t always manage) to wake up in the mornings and spend a couple of quilted hours, cherishing the game’s purest form, raising a toast to nostalgia. You should too, and perhaps we can celebrate our shared triumph as fellow warriors.