Storytelling in a cluttered world

Paromita Ghosh

In his book, The Emperor of All Maladies, oncologist and writer Siddhartha Mukherjee observes that “a patient, long before he becomes the subject of medical scrutiny, is, at first, simply a storyteller, a narrator of suffering.” If one has ever consulted a doctor who really listens, one would know how much of a difference it makes. Narrating the story of discomfort and pain brings ease — the crux of Freud’s “talking cure” therapeutic method. Telling and listening to stories bind people in a covenant of care.

All of us live and flourish in the world through storytelling in one way or the other. We experience reality through the stories we have heard about people and places. Since stories are the stuff of social transactions, they reflect and cultivate a culture’s fundamental assumptions, values, and aspirations. Ideas and concepts alone do not have the affective charge that stories have. Theories can explain parts of the social reality, but it is ultimately stories that help us feel and decipher the world around us.

Benedict Anderson, for instance, argued in his influential Imagined Communities, that nations are imagined into being as it is impossible for people belonging to a nation to actually know each other. However, through the propagation of narratives of patriotism, enabled by printing technology and markets, it became possible to develop a general awareness of belonging to a shared community. Even today, the strife around what kind of a nation a country is or needs to be often revolves around struggles between competing stories conjured around historical figures, events, and even mythologies. The most successful stories that Indians have told and absorbed are of “unity in diversity”.

A cultural index

In the days of mass media, communication scholars considered stories to be the lifeblood of society. One of the key projects of this approach, beginning early 1970s, was the Cultural Indicators Project in the US, where scholars tried to develop a cultural index of society, much like economic or social indices, by documenting the most pervasive and recurring representations in mass media. The idea was to capture what kind of stories were being told and the extent and nature of their uptake among the audiences.

If we were to take stories and storytelling seriously, what would the contemporary index of culture look like? Some prominent trends in the storytelling business can be gathered by observing the interplay between form, content, and, if one may be allowed to speculate, the reception of stories among audiences.

Regarding form, preoccupation with scale — from mounting high-budget spectacles to all kinds of attempts towards cracking the pan-India film code — is a major trend. Veteran director Martin Scorsese recently noted that such cinema “isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.” He likened them to theme parks, where storytelling takes a backseat to an assemblage of high-octane attractions.

Diversity is key

Storytelling is a universal experience. Some stories can resonate universally as well. But universality is not equal to similarity, much less commonality. India has been one of the few countries in the Global South that has marched to its own tune. It is one of the largest and powerful centres of cultural production in the world, that has held its own against the world. The Indian media and entertainment industry has thrived in the face of challenges primarily because of the country’s rich diversity.

However, the Indian media and entertainment industry is essentially a sum of its regional parts. There is a demand for a variety of content in different languages. Much of this production is also consumed by an affluent diaspora, even when they have access to other media and entertainment markets. If this diversity has been a strength, it must be protected. The ongoing consolidation in the Indian media and entertainment sector is strategic. In one way, it is the response of domestic producers against the heft and ambitions of the global streaming giants. As the dust settles, one hopes that the diversity of Indian storytelling traditions gets the impetus and support they deserve.

Point of saturation

Yet another dimension of scale is the sheer volume of micro-content creation and consumption on social media platforms designed to saturate and overwhelm. Convenience may be driving this trend, but the media and entertainment industry has lost these storytellers and audiences due to neglect. There are many reasons for this, but a few are worth enumerating, especially from the perspective of young people.

One, it is not exactly encouraging for prospective storytellers to hear industry leaders enthusiastically betting big on gig work models and uncritical adoption of AI. They might as well stake it out on their own. Mature cultural production centres are actually investing in training and absorbing diverse young talent.

Two, for a young country, where one often talks of demographic dividend, there is very little on offer that is genuinely and authentically produced for children, young adults, and youth. By force, they have to seek entertainment and recreation elsewhere. The immense popularity of Japanese and South Korean popular culture among young people is a symptom of this supply gap. And finally, when people are trying to catch a break, they resent being lectured.

Clever and loud?

When it comes to content, in much of cinematic and streaming fare, storytelling seems to have been eclipsed by ideological messaging. Increasingly, films that dealt with the subtle intricacies of human relationships and social dynamics have been replaced by declarative cinema, clever and loud in turns, that seeks to lecture rather than to explore and make the audiences feel something. The result is a cinematic landscape that increasingly feels disconnected from the rich, messy, complicated reality of lived human experience.

This shift represents a fundamental erosion of cinematic empathy. People invest in characters and situations that resonate with them. While the characters and situations may be unreal, their emotions are very much real. Audiences revel in the emotional escape that stories provide, where they get to participate in others’ lives from a safe distance.

Noted literary critic and writer Shamsur Rahman Farooqui, in a 2013 lecture, made an arguable observation about the general tendencies of poets and writers across various literary cultures mapped to extant civilisations. While the Greek, or broadly the Western civilisation, was concerned with truth, Arabs placed importance on meaning, and the Chinese emphasised humanism.

Indian literary traditions, according to Farooqui, were occupied with exploring the effects of ideas and expressions. Farooqui went on to criticise the hegemony of Western tendency towards realism and highlighted — while conceding that he may sound like a nativist in doing so — that a deep interest in understanding the minutiae of affect or rasa remains an unparalleled feat of artistic production in India. Storytellers shy or embarrassed of exploring rasas may find it difficult to deeply engage the audience.

Does the audience have agency?

The third trend of the contemporary cultural index is the shrinking and uninviting context of media consumption. Receiving and entertaining guests remains at the heart of storytelling. However, over the last few years, the contexts of media consumption have become increasingly fraught.

India is a lower-middle-income country. Anecdotally, more and more audiences are finding it difficult to manage several subscriptions — that is after they manage to cross the digital divide — and high cinema ticket prices. It creates an inhospitable situation where large sections of society are being priced out of storytelling cultures. This requires urgent interventions where people can pay for content they like without burdening them with long-term subscription plans or supporting the multiplex giants’ food and beverage vertical aspirations.

Overall, audiences have been deprived of exercising their voice or agency in cultural production and consumption and are simply expected to spend their hard-earned money and attention, no questions asked.

Offering to tell a story is an invitation. Willingness to listen is to accept the hospitality. The word hospitality, no wonder, is etymologically related to “hospital”, a place of healing. The broader role of storytelling in any culture and society is reparative. Stories give hope and imaginative resources to fix what is broken. Among other things, the friendship between storytellers and audiences.

What stories mean and what they can do

All said and done, the past year was not all that bad. Two films in particular, among others, bucked the cultural indicators to remind audiences what stories mean, what they can do, and how they create hospitable conditions for the audiences. The first is C Prem Kumar’s Meiyazhagan, and the other is Payal Kapadia’s much-loved and celebrated All We Imagine as Light (AWIAL).

Meiyazhagan is about a middle-aged man, played by the excellent Arvind Swamy, returning to his childhood home town and rediscovering all that he loved and missed about it. Facilitating this process is an unnamed friend — actor Karthi in fine form — who shows him nothing but warm hospitality. The process of rediscovery — and perhaps even healing — takes place through storytelling. The friend, whose name Swamy cannot remember, takes him through their shared childhood in episodes and allusions like a seasoned raconteur. Shot after shot, sequence after sequence, one sees the two men navigate the proverbial no man’s land experienced in male friendship, often bookended by drinking and ghosting. The film deals with the themes of community, family, migration, friendship, hospitality and, of course, storytelling. AWIAL engages with the same themes but in a different way.

The two main protagonists, played by Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha, work as nurses in a Mumbai hospital. AWIAL tenderly narrates the intersecting stories of living, loving, and longing of the two migrant workers without making heroes or victims out of them. Kusruti dreams up the closure of her own lingering story by participating in the stories of defiance and abandon of her comrades. Kapadia deftly uses various storytelling techniques to do this, mixing, for instance, verité, melodrama, and magic realism as if it is the most natural thing to do. The director also treats her audiences respectfully, a rare trait among contemporary storytellers. From her X handle, she alerts them to new screening venues and showtimes and asks them to intervene if the film is not shown in the correct aspect ratio. Her engagement with audiences is an encouraging sign of the recognition of their stake in the storytelling business.

Made in Tamil and Malayalam, the two films also prove that pan-Indian or, for that matter, the global appeal of films need not be a race to the bottom fuelled by testosterone and pyrotechnics. Stories of a particular place or a culture, as long as they are about the human condition, will resonate everywhere. What is needed is a strong belief in the power of stories and an earnest invitation to the audiences as if they matter.

The author is a Mumbai-based media professional working across linear and streaming platforms.