Storytelling has changed, but the allure of escaping into a story remains the same, mental and physical health concerns be damned.
I write every day.
But unless you have an imposter syndrome bigger than your body of work and a constant feeling that you’re losing out on the best opportunities when you look at other writers, you truly aren’t a writer.
With the rise of OTT apps, screenwriting has taken massive leaps and writers have more opportunities than ever to present their opinions and tell a well-crafted story to a global audience.
I could tell a good story, but I didn’t have screenplay writing experience. To that end, I began to binge-watch every series and movie people had been fawning over endlessly and found as many scripts as I could online to study the art of screenwriting.
A good script was all I needed, right? But the more shows I binge-watched in an attempt to write the ‘next big thing’, the more I was convinced I could never create stellar content.
That’s because I had succumbed to a binge-watching spiral that can’t be classified as anything but a health concern.
Binge watching is a social phenomenon I am very guilty of, as are most of you who are reading this. More than just making your body weak with all the hours you spend just slothfully lying about, it also contributes to massive social anxiety – trust me, I’ve felt it often enough.
It is human nature to want to be part of groups and communities. In an internet-less world, in the cultural sphere, it was book clubs, philately and history societies, sport clubs etc.
Today, it is nerding together on shows and movie franchises like Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, Westworld, Harry Potter, BoJack Horseman and countless others.
In fact, almost every few days, a new show drops that’s really “amazing and popular” that everyone’s watching. And it’s hard not to feel left out in a conversation if you haven’t given it a watch already.
Binge-watching among millennials and Gen Z has become a way of staying relevant while keeping a distance from everyone. Research says that most people binge-watch alone, contributing to mental health issues, isolation and a sedentary lifestyle that leads to cardiovascular issues and muscular degeneration, and many other health issues.
But no streaming service will issue a health advisory for young adults glued to watching every season of Narcos over a single weekend or howling over This Is Us the way CBFC aggressively issues ‘smoking is dangerous’ ads every time a cigarette, lit or unlit, appears on the screen in a movie hall.
It is an incredible sign of the dissonance of our times where we hate sitting at one place, constantly needing to do something – mostly fidgeting with our phones – but spend hours sitting in front of a screen watching a story play out.
Most of us already struggle with getting adequate sleep today. Then, you start watching something because it’s too early to sleep only to end up scarfing down the sixth episode at 3 am, only to suddenly find it impossible to fall asleep thanks to the blue light from the laptop messing with your eyes in a dark room.
It’s a never-ending loop of self sabotage. Science says that not getting enough sleep is bad for our minds, but the idea of YOLO pushes us into indulging in such behaviour time and again.
Among the many things binge-watching took away from us is the ability to read books. I don’t mean a tome like War and Peace, but simpler novels that were easy to gulp down in what now seems like simpler times.
Before binge-watching swallowed our weekends, people went to the park, caught the sunset at the beach, hung out with friends and even picked up new hobbies. What was once supposed to be the centre of our week to discover new facets about the self is now a crutch of our drawn out, insipid and overwhelming existence.
I don’t lay the blame on us entirely: between a crumbling economy, dwindling savings, frustrating society, incredible political upheavals and a lack of real relationships, binge watching is a safe space.
We curate the reality we are in and we decide who we love and hate. We live like gangsters and warrior princesses and die like heroes – even if just for a little while.
Storytelling has changed, but the allure of escaping into a story remains the same, mental and physical health concerns be damned.
Charmi Trevadia is a consulting branded content strategist with special love for pop culture from Mumbai, India.
“I think now more than ever it is important for storytellers to continue. This is what has always kept human beings going.”
You were invited to discuss the art of writing at the Berlin International Literature Festival. You personally started reading and writing at a very early age: What were the stories you wanted to tell?
When I started writing, I was maybe 5, and I was writing the stories that I was reading – mostly children’s books from England. I lived in a small town in Nigeria, in a university community. I had never seen snow, I did not know what an apple was, but I was writing stories in which children were playing in the snow and eating apples, because that’s what happened in the books I read. So it actually took a while before I started writing about my own experiences and my own world. I think I was maybe a teenager when I finally started to tell the stories that were familiar to me. Stories about my world.
After writing novels set in Nigeria, dealing with the history of the country, you changed your focus with Americanah. As an African author you then wrote about US society. How did Americanah change you?
It’s a good question. I think it freed me. Americanah is a book that I wanted to write, and I didn’t want to follow conventions. And in some ways I haven’t seen anything like it, which is to say: The story of immigrants from Africa, but who are not escaping war or poverty. Who simply want more. Who have dreams in a way that human beings have had for centuries.
And I wanted to tell that story, because it is a story I know. That’s the kind of immigration that I am familiar with. And it does not mean that the other kinds of African stories are not important, but simply to say that we can have a wider range of African stories that are told.
As a student, when you went to the US, you had to face many stereotypes, which you also discuss through your main protagonist in Americanah. That was during the rise of Obama. Now we are in the middle of the Trump government, and the situation is even more difficult for many people. Do you see a light at the end of the tunnel, a post-Trump America?
No. The reason I am now kind of weary about any kind of speculation is because I could not have imagined Trump five years ago. And now it is happening and there is a part of me that is really reluctant to project anything in the future. I think there is a possibility that he will be reelected. I think that Trump is as much America as Obama is America. And obviously I think of myself as a person almost in grief for the idea of America that I used to have.
There is something about the present state of discourse in America that makes it almost impossible to think about hope. For me it is actually more about day by day. Every day I am a bit worried about reading the news, because I am thinking: “What now?!” There is a sense of uncertainty, because you have somebody in a position of power who has no level of predictability.
The Black Lives Matters movement seems to have led to changes on a cultural level. The stories of African-Americans are more visible in literature and Hollywood movies. Do you see a real fundamental change?
I don’t know. It’s just really hard for me to celebrate this sort of thing, because it is a reaction to something terrible. It would have been nice to see more visibility of black people without having a racist president.
If we can measure success in terms of what stories have become visible, then yes, it is a sign of success, but I am not sure about fundamental change, because there is a lot of work to do in the US. It seems to me that the US still hasn’t fully acknowledged its past. And I don’t mean slavery — but after slavery. There is a part of me that wonders if America will be fortunate enough to have as a next president somebody who is not racist, for example. I wonder what that would do to African-American stories.
Last year at the Frankfurt Book Fair, you highlighted the importance of literature in times of darkness. What is the role of a writer? What makes you believe that stories matter?
Because I don’t think I would want to live if I couldn’t read. I think now more than ever it is important for storytellers to continue. This is what has always kept human beings going. We have gone from sitting around that camp fire, and now we are writing books. It is fundamentally the same thing. It is the idea of remembering that you are not alone, that human emotions are universal.
Now, in a world that is not just about that American president being unusual, but also there is this vote shift to the right in Europe and the world just feels very unsteady, I think it is just so important to tell human stories; not necessarily stories about politics. I find myself reading poetry a lot, because it’s important for me after reading the news to just remember simple things. The sacrifices that a parent makes for a child; what it means to experience heartbreak. That kind of things. Hope, love.
You are known as a writer in Nigeria, but also now as an activist, a feminist; you are fighting for LGBT rights. How is the reaction in Nigeria?
Not good. I don’t actually think of myself as an activist. I think of myself as just somebody who has opinions and sometimes people ask me and I share my opinions. I think activism is very noble and I’m really just a writer. You know I want to stay home and write poetry and dream. But there are things about the world that make me so angry that I then want to try and make a difference.
In Nigeria, to be gay is a crime. To write about being gay and to talk about being gay is a crime. I think that’s inhumane. I don’t think that citizens should be punished for being who they are.
And so I’ve spoken about this publicly and there’s been a lot of backlash. People say that I’m un-African… that kind of thing.
In terms of feminism, there’s also a lot of backlash because you know Nigeria’s a very interesting place. On the one hand, there are things about which people are quite progressive, but there is a very strong conservative stream there and people are very hostile to ideas that challenge fundamental things. So everybody in Nigeria will tell you, “oh, we think women should work, of course.” But the same people think that if a woman is successful, she has to first say that her husband made it possible. She has to say, “I am the CEO of a bank. But my most important role is to cook for my family.”
So I think the backlash that I get is because I’m challenging the fundamental. I’m not saying “Oh let’s let women go to school,” because women go to school or, “Let women work,” because women work. I’m challenging the fundamental idea and I’m saying women and men are equal. And people don’t like that.
One of your TED talks, “We should all be feminists,” was a huge success, and you started calling yourself a “Happy African Feminist.” What is the recipe for that?
Boiled Yams! No — I actually said that as a response to a Nigerian telling me: “Don’t call yourself a feminist because feminists are angry women who cannot find husbands.” And at that point I wanted to tell him that actually I had found a husband. But then saying “happy” was a way of trying to challenge the idea that to be a feminist meant that somehow you were incapable of joy — because that’s not true. When you’re angry, you’re angry at injustice. But you’re capable of joy, as I think I am.
And then of course they said to me, “Well you can’t be a feminist because it’s not Africa. Feminism is a foreign idea.” So then I thought, “Okay now I’m going to be an African feminist.” So I kind of invented this thing where a happy African feminist is a woman who likes lip gloss and who dresses up for herself, and not for men. But it was more a tongue-in-cheek way of reaching out to young women to join this conversation; feminism is not the starchy thing where you have to be a certain way. It’s not about being angry, and it isn’t about whether you wear makeup or not. It simply means that you believe that men and women are equal and you want to work for it.
More than ever before, studios are realising that diverse casts and stories are just as profitable – if not more so – than the traditional Western narratives that dominated Hollywood for decades.
More ‘comps’ for inclusive stories
When pitching a film to studios, writers and producers will commonly use what are called “comps.” These examples of previously released films that are similar in style or content bolster the feasibility of a film project; if a version of a pitched script has been successfully pulled off in the past, the studio might worry less about sinking money into it.
A dearth of financially successful comps with diverse lead casts has made it tough to pitch films with nonwhite main characters. And that’s one of the reasons why inclusive stories were only sporadically green-lit for major studio productions.
For years, if you were to pitch a story to a major studio with an all-Asian cast, you would have had almost no comps other than Joy Luck Club. That critically acclaimed film pulled in $32.9 million at the US box office on a $10.5 million budget. While that’s a respectable profit, it was no blockbuster, and it didn’t trigger an onslaught of movies starring Asians.
Then Crazy Rich Asians happened. The 2018 romantic comedy wildly surpassed expectations by earning $238 million around the world with a $30 million budget, making it the top-grossing romantic comedy in 10 years, surpassing both The Proposal and Sex and the City: The Movie.
Other successes have followed. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before features a Korean American teenager whose secret love letters are mailed to her crushes. Always Be My Maybe is about two Asian American childhood friends who fall for each other as adults.
The same thing is happening with films that feature African American leads.
Just in the past few years, Get Out, Us and Black Panther were blockbusters that starred black lead actors.
Now, any screenwriter who wants to pitch a horror and superhero movie starring black actors or a romantic comedy with Asian characters has a handful of highly profitable comps at their disposal.
A new definition of ‘star power’
Some claim the lack of representation on screen could be attributed to a simple fact: Movies need star power, and very few A-list movie stars were people of colour.
Aside from actors like Denzel Washington or Jennifer Lopez, it was rare for an actor of colour to be able to “carry” a film. That reasoning doesn’t hold water anymore. Today, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who identifies as black and Samoan, is the world’s highest-paid movie star.
But one of the interesting aspects of films like Crazy Rich Asians is that they were huge successes at the box office without any marquee movie stars.
This has done two things: It showed studios that star power isn’t as necessary as it was once thought to be. And it has allowed a new crop of diverse actors to emerge, with these films acting as a springboard to stardom.
Studios have since realised it’s less of a financial risk to hire unknown actors, who they can then cultivate and, if all goes well, leverage for future projects.
Netflix is doing just that with talents like Ali Wong. After two successful Netflix stand-up comedy specials, she co-wrote and starred in her first feature role in Always Be My Maybe for the studio.
The same thing happened to Daniel Kaluuya of Universal Pictures’ Get Out. Before the film, he was a relative unknown. Now he’s starring in the upcoming Queen and Slim from the same studio.
Before Get Out, actor Daniel Kaluuya wasn’t a household name. Photo: Reuters/Simon Dawson
The expanding Chinese market
But why is all of this happening now?
Ticket sales at US cineplexes are at a six-year low, while marketing costs are soaring. As a result, studios are increasingly relying on international markets to reach profitability. Films like Coco – which is set in Mexico – and Fate of the Furious – which features Hispanic and African American lead actors – have global appeal.
The most tantalising market is China.
Coco is the highest-grossing animated movie ever in China; it pulled in $189 million at the box office, which almost matched the $209 million it earned stateside. And Fate of the Furious actually made $392 million in China, easily overtaking the $226 million it earned in the US.
China is presently Hollywood’s biggest foreign market. According to projections by PricewaterhouseCoopers, this year the Chinese box office will rake in $11.05 billion, compared to ticket sales in the US of $12.11 billion. Next year, however, China is expected to surpass the US for the first time and be crowned the world’s largest film market.
Chinese audiences love superhero flicks. Avengers: Endgame, for example, earned more than $600 million in China alone. But films with modest budgets can also do well there. With a $10 million budget, the 2016 Bollywood hit Dangal made $193 million in China, almost tripling its $77 million take in India.
As for the future? Disney’s upcoming live-action Mulan, which is based on a classic Chinese folk tale with an all-Chinese cast and a budget exceeding $100 million, has the potential to shatter box office records.
For too long, doors to mainstream Hollywood have been closed off to stories set in diverse cultures and precluded inclusive lead characters in popular movies.
But now, thanks to a powerful global market, those doors are cracking open and studios are rolling out the red carpet.
The result is happy shareholders and, for audiences, refreshing stories that more accurately reflect the world we live in.
Innovative academics across North American universities are introducing students to Hinduism by tweaking the storied experience.
Ryerson University is located in the downtown hub of the world’s most diverse city, Toronto, Canada’s cultural capital. Such a distinction offers the advantage of testing cultural diversity, but it poses a challenge, too, to academicians across North American universities who are engaged in teaching religious studies to a student body coming from differing backgrounds.
Raj Balkaran, Ryerson’s first World Religions instructor, who also teaches at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies, seized this opportunity to introduce the complexities of Hinduism to his students by using storytelling as a pedagogical technique. He opened his class with a mythological tale – the story of a king from the Devi Mahatmya (the greatness of the Goddess) in the Markandeya Purana. Balkaran’s purpose was to explain how “the Goddess artfully expresses a dichotomy at the heart of the Hindu world: the opposing ideals of ascetics and kings” – what he calls “Hinduism’s dharmic double helix”.
The idea of storytelling, he says, was to first “immerse learners [in] an impactful storied experience” and then “defer to the analytic mind to decipher the storytelling they experienced…unpacking vital material along the way.” (Balkaran’s book on this topic, The Goddess and the King in Indian Myth: Ring Composition, Royal Power, and the Dharmic Double Helix, is due for publication this year.)
Raj Balkaran The Goddess and the King in Indian Myth: Ring Composition, Royal Power, and the Dharmic Double Helix
All world religions are replete with mythology, and retellings to suit the age and clime are an integral part of them. One is familiar with the traditional arts of storytelling that devout Hindus turn to for edification – be it the Harikatha or the Upanyasa, or the informal atmosphere of the Balavihars where it is through activities like storytelling that children augment their knowledge of religion gained at home. But a structured study based on storytelling in the university classroom comes as a surprise. Sceptics may even wonder if it’s not a case of old wine in a new bottle.
Such impressions would be instantly dispelled if one were to read the latest issue of the biannual ‘Spotlight on Teaching’, in the Religious Studies News (RSN) published by the American Academy of Religion. Titled ‘Teaching Tales: Harnessing the Power of Storytelling in the Hindu Studies Classroom and Beyond’, the issue is edited by Balkaran. It presents case studies by seven academicians teaching Hindu studies who have tweaked the time-tested method of storytelling as a pedagogical tool to teach religion and philosophy courses. Balkaran’s own experiment with storytelling in the classroom is one of the seven case studies.
The students come with different perspectives they have internalised growing up in pluralistic societies, which gives the narrative technique an edge in teaching religion. It is not as if storytelling has not been handled before by generations of academicians – the reference to Patrick Olivelle’s translations, The Early Upanisads and Pancatantra: The Book of India’s Folk Wisdom among the resources listed in this study, is an eye-opener. What is heartening is that the need to innovate according to the changing dynamics of the classroom in different contexts has contributed to the continually evolving strategies of this pedagogical method.
Take Elizabeth M. Rohlman, who teaches at the University of Calgary (Canada). She applied the storytelling tool by framing her courses “with an understanding of the value of the emic and eticperspectives in the study of religion”– that is, from the subjective (insider) and objective (outsider) standpoints respectively. Her approach was inspired by Giorgio Bonazzoli’s observation in his article, ‘The Dynamic Canon of the Puranas’, that “the dynamism of this canon is the result of two conflicting impulses within the genre: the abstract mandate to preserve the original rahasya, or secret, of the puranas, and the more practical need to evolve with the religious needs of living humans.”
Patrick Olivelle Pancatantra: The Book of India’s Folk Wisdom
Jeffrey M. Brackett, who teaches at Ball State University in Indiana (US), elaborates on his reliance on ethnographic accounts and novels in his introductory courses. He points to the fact that successive batches of students have had one steady favourite, namely a translation of the Marathi writer D.B. Mokashi’s account of his journey with the Warkaris on their annual pilgrimage to Pandharpur in Maharashtra. Titled Palkhi: An Indian Pilgrimage, it reads like a novel and memoir, at once making it relatable at multiple levels.
The ethnographic dimension of religion is a pointer to the sensitivity required in any discussion centred on religion, especially in the public square, and more so when formally taught in a classroom.This is seen in the pedagogic goal of Shana Sippy who teaches at the Centre College and Carleton College in Minnesota (US): to make her students consider “how Hindus draw upon religious narratives to interpret their lives, relating to key stories for the production of political ideologies, community ties and moral bearings.”
Caleb Simmons, from the University of Arizona (US), takes recourse to multi-media presentations to immerse his students in an experiential learning that he terms “trans-media balancing”, the purpose being to resist the hegemony of the printed word. He often shows a video clip from The Chronicles of Narnia, Star Wars or Lord of the Rings before moving on to visuals of 3D sculptures, films, paintings, performances and 360-degree views of interiors of temples and palaces decorated with murals to peg the discussion. Not surprisingly, his method is very popular with students.
The epics and puranas naturally lend themselves to storytelling, but how about the Upanishads, the acme of classical Hindu philosophy? Steven E. Lindquist, who teaches at the Southern Methodist University in Texas (US), says his ‘unassuming pedagogical strategy’ is to unpack the Upanishadic narratives before advancing concepts such as atman, Brahman and moksha. This also enables the students to appreciate “the various historical horizons striving to preserve the Upanishads as hallmarks of classical Indian thought.”
For 25 years, Hillary Rodrigues introduced students to Hinduism by breaking the mould of traditional textbooks with his Hinduism – the eBook. Exploring aspects of Hinduism – its social structures, deities, scriptures, rituals, mythology and philosophies – he introduced every chapter with a narrative vignette. Its popularity with teachers and students eventually resulted in the publication of two textbooks. The main takeaway for Rodrigues, who teaches at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta (Canada), is that “Stories connect authors and readers, or tellers and listeners far more intimately than impersonal and merely informative modes of communication. Within the receptivity and focus that is induced when one is absorbed in reading or listening to a tale, learning inevitably occurs.”
Proof of the enduring appeal that classics hold for young and old alike can be seen in Roshani Chokshi’s latest book for children, Aru Shah and the End of Time: The Pandava Tale. It is the debut title in the Rick Riordan Presents series, named after the acclaimed author known as the “storyteller of the gods”. This is Roshani’s take on Hindu mythology, and Aru Shah is her ‘girl power’ protagonist, avatar of a Pandava. The story helps anchor the philosophical concepts contained in the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita and is bound to appeal to the post-millennials.
Clearly, it’s all about the storied experience.
Sudhakshina Rangaswami, The Wire’s Editor-at-large writing on philosophy and religion, is the author of The Roots of Vedanta, Penguin.
While it is important to keep speaking to your kids, it turns out kids learn a lot more when you read to them.
This article is part of a bimonthly series that will address early child development.
A pediatrician named Alastair McAlpine recently tweeted about a little project he had undertaken. He asked a bunch of his terminally ill patients what had made their lives thus far meaningful. His patients are children; they were dying and they had a lot to say. Go read the thread.
After pets, parents and ice cream, books were the top favourite. Specifically, being read to by Mom or Dad.
He tweeted:
ALL of them loved books or being told stories, especially by their parents:
‘Harry Potter made me feel brave.’
‘I love stories in space!’
‘I want to be a great detective like Sherlock Holmes when I’m better!’
I run a foundation for kids with special needs in Dehradun and we have “reading-corners” in all our centres. Children are drawn to them as if by magic – it is as if those corners possess some invisible magnetic force that draws kids in.
And if there happens to be an adult around, ready to tell them a story – all the better.
Maybe someone has been researching the science. Because the experience seems clear: storytelling with your children and reading to your children show heartening results. And this is very different from plain old talking to them.
Just talking more to young children is widely seen to be beneficial for their development and growth. There are numerous programmes in the US built upon Betty Hart and Todd Risley’s seminal research, conducted decades ago. They found that on average, children from working-class families entered pre-school having heard 30 million fewer words than children growing up in professional families. So simply talking more with their children became a standard prescription for young parents.
But is just talking enough? Dominic Massaro, a psychology professor at the University of California, doesn’t think so. Spoken language tends to be repetitive and a bit lazy, he believes. Most of us have a comfortable shorthand type of speech and a tendency to use the same words over and over again.
Written language, on the other hand, is rich and varied. The vocabulary in a simple picture book for children is usually far more sophisticated than typically employed by the parent who is reading that book out loud. And that is precisely the point. When we read out loud to children, we introduce them to words they would not hear otherwise, and in a context in which those words can be understood and adopted as their own. If the fish is ‘aghast’, and the story is compelling, ‘aghast’ jumps into a child’s toolbox, ready to be used again at the very next shocking moment.
Years ago, a Boston paediatrician named Barry Zuckerman started a programme called Read Out and Read. He had a hunch that if parents would read to their children, those children would do better in school. They would be emotionally more stable, they would have better vocabularies and they would have stronger problem-solving skills.
So he created a programme in which paediatricians gave children books along with growth charts and vitamins. He taught parents the importance of holding their kids in their laps and reading them stories.
Dr Zuckerman, go to the head of the class.
I know it’s presumptuous to commend someone as senior as Zuckerman, but I can’t help it – he was right. He had zeroed in on something so basic, so fundamental, most people don’t even notice it. Most parents tell their children stories. Many of us read out loud to them. We don’t think about it, we don’t tick it off on our “to do” list. We just do it because that’s what we do.
Both of my parents read to us. So did my grandparents. There’s a long line. It’s a tradition. I don’t think they knew about the science. They didn’t have to. They could see the results for themselves. Nothing can calm restless kids or excite quiet ones like a story.
My Mom had a special gift for stories. “Give me three things,” she would say and we would shout out our suggestions: “An elf, a magic carpet and a bag of oranges!” or “A boat, a fire and a mountain!” Mom would then weave a story which contained those three elements and we would melt into it, certain that the world was full of magic and logic and whatever else we required.
She and Dad read to us and told us stories, and watched as our vocabularies grew and our imaginations took flight. We were textbook cases. We are all, every one of us, evidence of the importance of reading to kids. We all became readers ourselves. We all love to write and all of us read to our own kids. My three grew up on stories – now that they are adults, Anand and Cathleen read the way they breathe: it’s essential to them.
Moy Moy reading. Credit: Jo McGowan Chopra
My third child, Moy Moy, is 29 now. She has severe disabilities and I still read to her every night. Does any of it register? Does she understand my voice? Can she make sense of the plot lines, the stories, the narratives? Does it matter?
I don’t think so. I think the important thing here is what’s important for any child being read to: she hears my voice and she knows that I love her. We sit together on the couch and I show her the pictures and read her the words. She feels safe and secure, and ready to learn whatever she is capable of learning. Every child’s capacity is different. The important thing, as a parent, is to create the opportunity.
When I read to her, Moy Moy hears my voice. She listens to the story and she catches the meaning beneath the words: “You matter. You are important. This story – every story – belongs to you.”
Jo McGowan Chopra is American by birth and a writer by profession. A mother of three, she has lived in India for the past 34 years with her Indian husband. She is co-founder and director of the Latika Roy Foundation, a voluntary organisation for children with disability in Dehradun. She blogs at www.latikaroy.org/jo
Story-telling manages to achieve coordination in social behaviour as well as promote cooperation, thereby performing an important adaptive role in human societies.
Story-telling manages to achieve coordination in social behaviour as well as promote cooperation, thereby performing an important adaptive role in human societies.
The Sun and the Moon: An Agta story about cooperation and equality between men and women. Credit: The Conversation/Paulo Sayeg/author provided
From gathering around the campfire sharing tales to binge watching the latest Netflix series, humans are, and have always been, inveterate producers and consumers of stories.
But why do we spend hours listening to and telling stories, often of exploits that never even happened? Clearly, from an evolutionary standpoint, this is time and effort that could be better spent foraging, reproducing or simply doing nothing to save energy.
Perhaps the human proclivity for storytelling is merely a byproduct of our evolved psychology– a series of inputs which manipulate and titillate our cognitive machinery. Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker fittingly refers to this as “evolutionary cheesecake”. But given the ubiquity of storytelling, it may perform an important adaptive role in human societies.
In a new study on hunter-gatherer societies, published in Nature Communications, my colleagues and I propose that storytelling may function as a mechanism to disseminate knowledge by broadcasting social norms to coordinate social behaviour and promote cooperation.
The type of knowledge in question is “meta-knowledge”– information about other people’s knowledge. This is, in fact, required for any society to function. For instance, it is not enough for people to know that they should drive on a certain side of the road, they also need to know that others possess that same knowledge. Stories may therefore act to ensure that all members of the group know, and consequently abide by, the “rules of the game” in a given society.
Moralising gods and organised religion may perform a similar function in post-agricultural populations by organising behaviour and promoting cooperation. However, these are often absent in hunter-gatherer societies, despite these groups being highly cooperative. We therefore proposed that hunter-gatherer storytelling may perform a comparable function to moralising gods in such societies.
Moral tales
To explore this idea, in collaboration with Agta Aid, we collected four stories among the Agta, a Filipino hunter-gatherer population with a high level of social and gender egalitarianism. Each story was aimed at regulating social behaviour by broadcasting how to act in different social situations.
One story, ‘The sun and the moon’, clearly communicated norms of sex equality and cooperation. “There is a dispute between the sun (male) and the moon (female) to illuminate the sky. After a fight, where the moon proves to be as strong as the sun, they agree in sharing the duty – one during the day and the other during the night.”
We also looked at narratives from other hunter-gatherer societies from Southeast Asia and Africa, and discovered similar themes. Of 89 stories, around 70% concerned social behaviour, in terms of food-sharing, marriage, hunting and interactions with in-laws or members of other groups.
These stories also possessed a moral dimension, by either rewarding norm-followers or punishing norm-breakers. This is clearly evident in an Andamanese story demonstrating the consequences of not sharing food.
Boost to cooperation
Camp elder telling stories. Credit: The Conversation/Author provided
Given that hunter-gatherer stories overwhelmingly contain social content, we next explored whether storytelling does in fact promote cooperation. Nearly 300 Agta, from 18 separate camps, were asked to name the best storytellers. To assess cooperation, individuals were also asked to play a simple resource allocation game where players were given a number of tokens (representing rice) and asked to distribute these between themselves and their camp mates.
Overall, levels of cooperation were higher in camps with a greater proportion of skilled storytellers, consistent with storytellers coordinating social behaviour and in turn promoting cooperation. This suggests that storytelling may perform a beneficial group-level function, but it does not explain why individuals would invest so much time and energy in becoming a skilled storyteller. If there is no benefit to being a storyteller, then why not invest this effort in other fitness-enhancing activities?
However, storytellers appear to be rewarded for their services to the community. Skilled storytellers were preferred social partners, both in terms of being selected as a future camp mate and receiving resources from others in the cooperative game. Despite the fact that food-sharing is an everyday occurrence in Agta society, skilled storytellers were even more preferred than skilled foragers.
Consistent with this increased social support, skilled Agta storytellers were found to have increased reproductive success relative to unskilled storytellers, with an average additional 0.5 living offspring.
Even in modern, Western society skilled storytellers – ranging from novelists and artists to actors and stand-up comicshave a high social status. There is even some evidence that successful male visual artists (a form of modern-day storyteller) have more sexual partners than unsuccessful visual artists.
Humans have evolved the capacity to create and believe in stories. Narratives can also transcend the “here and now” by introducing individuals to situations beyond their everyday experience, which may increase empathy and perspective-taking towards others, including strangers. These features may have evolved in hunter-gatherer societies as precursors to more elaborate forms of narrative fiction.
Such narratives include moralising gods, organised religion, nation states and other ideologies found in post-agricultural societies. Some are crucial parts of societies today, functioning to bond individuals into cohesive and cooperative communities. It’s fascinating to think that they could have all started with a humble story around the campfire.
Daniel Smith is a PhD candidate in Anthropology, UCL.
Stories have always had an important place in human history, but in our present times, we are losing systems that wove and passed on these stories, and even tongues that held them.
Stories have always had an important place in human history, but in our present times, we are losing systems that wove and passed on these stories, and even tongues that held them.
In the present age of ubiquitous televisions and smartphones, families and societies have found other ways of entertaining and educating themselves. Credit: Pixabay
Once upon a time, in the mountains of Himalayas, when an old man was about to die, he beckoned his son to come closer. As the son drew near, the old man whispered, “Son, I have only one piece of advice for you, sweeten your madua before you eat it.”
Soon after that the man passed away, leaving the son slightly confused about his last message. Trying to follow the instructions, the son tried to eat madua (finger-millet, also called ragi) with different sweet additions like gud, honey and sugar. Years went by and the son forgot about his father’s curious message. One day he went to the forest to collect firewood. He worked hard and by the time his chores were over, it was evening and he was very tired and hungry. He realised that he had brought along a few stale madua rotis tied in a cloth. With relief and gratitude, he opened the cloth and started eating the rotis. He was stunned. For never had madua tasted sweeter, taking him back to the words of his father. Now he finally understood what the old man had been trying to tell him. To really be able to taste the sweetness in your food, you need to be really hungry. To be really hungry, you need to have really worked.
Hirma Devi Sumtiyal, who is known to many in the village Sarmoli in Munsiyari as thul aam or ‘elder mother’, told me this story. But she had not made it up. She had heard it during one of the countless aan katha sessions. Aan katha sessions, where often the elders teased and challenged the younger people with riddles and puzzle-stories, would start in the evening on snowy winter days and continue late into the night. Or they used to. In the present age of ubiquitous televisions and smartphones, families and societies have found other ways of entertaining and educating themselves.
All corners of India reverberate with different forms of storytelling, orally passing tales from one generation to another from time immemorial. There is a richness in their diversity of form (which may be songs, couplets, riddles or long prose) and content (romantic, funny, sad, practical, simply amusing, adventurous or even propagandist). In my own homeland of Punjab, my mother recollects summer nights of storytelling by her parents and grandparents, which was done only when the children promised to give a hunkaara i.e. say ‘hmmm’ at regular intervals to indicate that they are listening.
Stories have always had an important place in human history. According to Yuval Noah Harari, author of the book Sapiens, “Any large scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.” According to him, religion, nationalism and even belief in justice and human rights, are all on account of our ability to believe in fiction. Following his logic, it seems that in some ways, wars, invasions, conversions and even political elections are actually about a clash of stories.
In the meethamadua story that I began with, the food will be tastier if you have worked, making work as a reward unto itself. In that way, stories reflect how we rationalise life to ourselves. Stories can also reflect our value systems. In another mountain village, in Ladakh, I was told that people feel obliged to welcome wayfarers into their house and offer them shelter for the night. “Hospitality is a way of life. If a person is too possessive about their house, they will become a tortoise in their next life. Because a tortoise carries its house upon its back,” said Angmo Goba of Gangles village.
Stories can reveal to us connections. For instance, in the creation story of Santals, an indigenous people of India, the Earth rests on a tortoise. Oceans apart, in the North American story of Anishinaabeg, a turtle volunteers to have the Earth placed on its back. Such similarities could indicate either common origins of the tribe or commonalities in the historic incidences that were recorded in form of a story. In fact, there are many who assert that myths are a method of storing memories. It is said that Aboriginal Australian storytelling records sea level rise taking place between 7,000 and 18,000 years ago. That story was passed orally to the present over 300 generations of people.
Stories can also be just about wit and pleasure. For instance, the paradoxical one-lined story that grandmothers in villages of Maharashtra tell their grandchildren mischievously when they are nagging them for a story: ‘Once upon a time, there was an old lady who died when she was a child’.
But it seems like in our present times, we are losing systems that wove and passed on these stories, and even tongues that held them. In the last five decades, over 220 languages have gone extinct from India. In Australia, more than 100 Aboriginal languages have died since white settlement and 75% of the remaining are critically endangered. I know that many people would say that it is an acceptable loss, an inevitable part of ‘evolution’. But in our hearts surely we understand enough about ecology to realise the flaw in that argument. For isn’t there a link between the forces endangering wildlife and our environment, and the forces threatening our diversity of cultures and languages?
At the root of both is perhaps our rush towards economic growth and development, fast transforming and redefining our ‘needs’, social networks, landscapes and livelihoods. Our coping mechanism to this unprecedented pace of change has been to take refuge in homogeneity and conformity, to let our folk stories echo in their own silences. If someone was to study us a hundred or a thousand years from now, what would they say were the defining myths of this century. How are our stories evolving? What are our beliefs?
I am not romanticising the idea of stories. I know that like most other mediums, stories can be used by the powerful against the weak to perpetuate victimisation. Yet the capacity of evil does not make the medium and the entirety of its content as evil. I feel that in a land of diversity of cultures and landscapes, there is much wisdom and truth for us to learn from these oral mediums that were localised yet widespread, captivating imaginations and inspiring passing on of strings of words over hundreds of generations. Getting a deeper understanding of our possible pasts may help us think of different, perhaps even better, possibilities for a future.
Shiba Desor is a member of Kalpavriksh, Pune and Maati Women’s Collective, Munsiari.
An extract from Paulo Lemos Horta’s ‘Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights’, documenting how the ‘Thousand and One Nights’ came to be.
An extract from Paulo Lemos Horta’s Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights, documenting how the Thousand and One Nights came to be.
A painting depicting a scene from Thousand and One Nights by Sani ol-Molk, 19th century. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The Thousand and One Nights, or Alf Laila wa Laila, remains one of the most fascinating collection of tales in the world. Despite originally being titled Arabian Nights, the tales within the larger body of work have deep hallmarks of Persian and Indian storytelling as well. These stories, carried from word of mouth by soldiers, traders and fabulists across the vast landscape of Asia over centuries, changing as they came into contact with different cultures to the extent that, in India, the collection is referred to as Alif Laila, since the Arabic word for a thousand (Alf) makes no sense to Indian languages and Laila is merely a name, not night.
In a lovely new book, Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights, Paulo Lemos Horta documents a number of such conversations, between Europeans documenting the tales and their interlocutors. In doing so, he seeks to show what a dynamic process it was, with actors on both sides, taking part in creative storytelling. The Wire is reproducing excerpts about one such conversation.
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Galland included the tale of Aladdin and the equally famous story of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” in his French edition of the Arabian Nights, even though he did not fi nd these stories in the Arabic manuscript that he used as the principal source for his translation. Entries in Galland’s diary reveal that these “orphan tales” were told to him by a Syrian traveller named Hanna Diyab in Paris in the spring of 1709.
Scholars of the Arabian Nights have assumed that Galland drew from his own travels in the Levant to turn the outlines from these storytelling sessions with Diyab into the rich characters and elegant prose of the tales in French.3 However, Aladdin’s palace bears little resemblance to the residence of the Ottoman sultans at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. Instead, this marvel of the jinni’s magical powers appears distinctly European.
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Writing his memoir in Aleppo in 1763–1764, Diyab does not seem to have been aware of the significance of his contribution to the Arabian Nights, although by this date Galland’s version of the story collection was well known among French readers. In a single passage of his memoir, Diyab recalls that an unnamed “old man” often visited his master, Lucas, and that this man was translating the Thousand and One Nights. “The book he translated was missing some nights,” Diyab reported, “so I told him tales that I knew.” At no point does Diyab claim that the stories he told Galland belonged to the Thousand and One Nights. In fact, his wording might suggest the contrary. He simply drew on stories that he knew— either narrating from memory or creatively combining elements to create new tales in the manner of a coffee house storyteller. According to Diyab, “[The old man] then finished his book by including these stories and was happy for my assistance.”
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Paulo Lemos Horta Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights Harvard University Press, 2017
Diyab’s skill in weaving marvellous tales might be credited to the early years he spent in the rich storytelling culture of Aleppo. Situated in this regional center for trade, local storytellers had at their disposal not only Levantine folklore but also tales originating in India and China to the east and France and Italy to the west. In the city’s more than sixty coffee houses, storytellers held their audiences in thrall. Their stories were not merely narratives; they were a performance animated by the teller’s actions as much as by his words. In this environment, the storyteller’s most valuable skill was combining and adapting tales to appeal to the interests of a particular audience. In 1794, the Scottish physicians Alexander Russell and Patrick Russell famously described the ability of Aleppine storytellers to surprise their audiences by adapting familiar tales: “A variety of other story books, besides the Arabian Nights entertainment, (which, under that title, are little known at Aleppo) furnish materials for the story teller who, by combining the incidents of different tales, and varying the catastrophe of such as he has related before, gives them an air of novelty even to persons who at first imagine they are listening to tales with which they are acquainted.” At a moment of great excitement the storyteller would suddenly break off the tale and leave the coffee house, deferring the resolution of the story until the following evening and leaving the audience to debate possible endings no less hotly “than if the fate of the city depended on the decision.” To hear the rest of the suspended tale, the listeners would have to return to the coffeehouse the next night.
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Galland, immersed in his beloved world of classical Greece as he pursued his translation of the Arabian Nights, makes no comment on the riots that occurred in his own neighborhood, but Diyab shows a lively interest in the fate of ordinary Parisians caught up in the intense tensions of this period. The famine that lingered from winter into spring features prominently in his portrait of the French capital. By the order of the governor, Diyab writes, a census was taken, and the rationing of bread was strictly enforced. Each person was allotted only enough bread to survive. In some places, the police would be called in to suppress rioting and prevent looting. Peasants from the villages poured into the city to beg, but, as Diyab recalls, no one would give them alms.
Diyab would see them stretched out on the streets in the throes of starvation.
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In his memoir Diyab evocatively captures the elaborate rituals and excessive luxury that accompanied his presentation to the “sultan of France” as one of the curiosities acquired by Lucas on his travels. Even from a distance, he felt the intense presence of Louis XIV as he approached the throne. The monarch’s magnificence was such, Diyab writes, that no one could hold his gaze. The king’s interest was immediately drawn to the creatures that Diyab refers to as “savage animals,” but that were in fact jerboas, a variety of desert rodent related to the jumping mouse. Confounded by the king’s questions about the animals, Lucas directed him to Diyab, and the Syrian youth wrote the name of the animal in both Arabic and French for the king. Louis XIV seems to have been intrigued by the young man in “Oriental” garb. After examining what Diyab had written, the king asked him who he was and where he had come from— extending the curiosity originally piqued by the animals to this other Oriental marvel.
The mutual consumption of the experience of otherness is clearest in Diyab’s description of his interactions with the women of the royal court at Versailles, who proved to be even more fascinated by him than by the jerboas. Abandoning the spectacle of the “savage animals,” Diyab writes, they turned to examine his features and clothing instead. Some of the women reached out to touch him, lifting the folds of his clothing to get a better look at the garments and removing the Egyptian fur cap from his head. One princess asked why Diyab had a moustache, to which Lucas replied that it was the custom of his country. Diyab does not record what he felt when the laughing princesses treated him like a spectacle for their amusement. Was the young Diyab upset by their laughter? Was he embarrassed to be dressed in a strange ensemble of “Oriental” garments?
Or was he flattered by the intimate attention of women dressed in their own regal finery?
Paulo Lemos Horta. Credit: NYU Abu Dhabi website
Whatever the young Diyab felt at that moment, the memoir that he recorded fifty years later describes his encounter with the ladies of Versailles in the style of a fabulous tale. When he entered the apartments of Lucas’s patroness, the Duchess of Burgundy, he found the wife of the dauphin playing a game of cards with several princesses, with piles of gold coins arranged on the table in front of them. All wore dresses of precious silk embroidered with gold, but the duchess was attired with even greater extravagance and beauty than the rest. The princesses resembled stars, Diyab writes, and the servants seemed to orbit around them. Leaving the duchess’s “palace,” Diyab crossed paths with a lovely young woman wearing a diadem studded with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and other precious stones who was surrounded by sumptuously dressed servants. So ravishing was she that Diyab imagined she must have been the king’s daughter. Later, Diyab was summoned to the rooms of another princess whom he describes as beautiful, gracious, and surpassing all other women of the age. The princesses who clustered around her bed were dressed in splendid clothing heavily adorned with jewels and precious stones, and they appeared to shine with the brightness of stars.
Diyab’s descriptions of the radiant beauty and luxurious attire of the ladies of Versailles are reminiscent of the princesses in the tales like “Aladdin” and “Prince Ahmad and the Fairy Peri- Banu,” which he related to Galland in 1709. Every one of the ladies in Diyab’s account of the royal palace is beautiful and splendidly dressed, and as ravishing to the eye as the princesses in the fabulous tales of the Arabian Nights. Beyond the general hyperbole of Diyab’s description, certain details of his Versailles princesses correspond to details in the tale of Prince Ahmad. When Prince Ahmad first sees the fairy princess Peri-Banu emerging from her palace, she is adorned with the costliest of jewels. Her throne is covered with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, pearls, and other gems— a repetition of the precious ornaments of the diadem worn by the beautiful princess that Diyab assumed was the French king’s daughter. The repetition of such details in Diyab’s narration of his Versailles experience and his tale of Prince Ahmad suggests that Diyab was the author of more than just the bare outline of the orphan tale.
A successful photographer explores his way of helping scientists drive their questions forward instead of just documenting their work
A successful photographer explores his way of helping scientists drive their questions forward instead of just documenting their work
Anand Verma at work. Source: Author provided
When Anand Varma got a chance to photograph for National Geographic’s November 2014 story on mind-manipulating parasites – popularly called zombie parasites – the odds were against him. It was his first feature story and his subject was parasites, hardly a crowd-favourite.
“Most images of parasites were either abstract or revolting, or both abstract and revolting, and I knew I wouldn’t reach people who weren’t already interested in parasites with these kind of photographs. I had to speak to a non-scientific audience – that was the challenge.” So daunting was the idea of making these creatures look likeable that, at one point, Anand was told by the editor that he could do the story without photographs and focus on illustrations instead.
He wasn’t ready to give up. “Maybe not everything needs to be cute and cuddly,” he realised. He looked at some graphic novels and began to experiment with similar themes, light and shadows, to depict some of these parasitic interactions. “It was up to me to prove that photographs have a place in this story,” Anand said. He managed to do it. One of his shots even made it to the cover of the magazine.
In Bengaluru to lead an eight-day workshop hosted by the National Centre for Biological Sciences, along with fellow science photographer Prasenjeet Yadav, Anand’s was the first of two public lectures that will take place this week. His talk, titled ‘Communicating Science Through Photography’, attracted a packed auditorium. “Beauty can be a weapon against apathy and ignorance,” he said about his craft. The next one hour was a treat to lab-worn eyes. Oohs, aahs and awe-struck swearing were aplenty.
After, Nandita Jayaraj caught up with him for The Wire about the thrills and risks of the profession, his process and how much science is part of his art.
You were pursuing an undergraduate degree in biology when you got a part-time gig as a photographer’s assistant. How unconventional was your eventual move from academia to full-time photography?
There were a lot of anxieties. The first decision was just to take this two-week job. Then it was a question of – I really like this, I’m getting to learn a lot, I want to continue working with this photographer but I do not want to be a photographer. That was because academia felt like it was a little bit too constrained. There is a clear path to a career but it means seven years in a lab studying one thing and teaching. I didn’t know if I wanted to teach, I didn’t know what I wanted to dedicate seven years of graduate school to. I felt like there are many aspects of lab work and research that just weren’t as appealing. I really wanted to just explore, learn things about the world and I thought academia was limited in what you could do in pursuit of those activities.
At the same time photography seemed really scary because there was no guarantee, no clear path to a career. It seemed very unstable and insecure. I saw the lifestyle of my employer, the photographer I worked for, he was well established, he worked for National Geographic. He’d been doing it for 25-30 years and he was still stressed about the next job, the next assignment. There was no peace or stability and I thought, hey, I don’t wanna deal with that. I want to have it sorted, not worry about money or jobs every few weeks or months.
So what changed your mind?
It was a slow process of getting more and more opportunities and also becoming more exposed to that stress, long enough that it’s not scary anymore. It’s as uncomfortable as ever but it’s becoming a familiar stress, a familiar anxiety. It became less about money. In the early years, there was a little bit of instability, I hadn’t become established. There was a bit of uncertainty about the money but the bigger stress was how– do I make good enough work? And that generated a lot more anxiety than “how do I get paid for this?”.
Is it a smooth run from hereon?
What helped this transition was that I was getting more and more opportunities – to work for other photographers, working with my own assignments. Now, I have to turn things down. And that’s a very privileged position to be in. I’m getting to pick the stuff that is the best and I’m most interested in. There is still a little anxiety that maybe this is only a phase. I’m popular in NG right now so for the next six months or a year it’s not going to be hard for me to propose a story. But I try very hard to not take that for granted. To remind myself that a year from now I may need to struggle to get people to take my ideas seriously. I may not be as in-demand.
Did or do you plan to go back to the sciences?
I kept getting opportunities that I couldn’t turn down. I thought – OK, I can go to Ecuador now and work on this for the next two months. Am I really going to say no to that to apply to graduate school? I didn’t know where to apply, what I wanted to do, who I wanted to work with. So there is this abstract, unappealing but more defined career track or a more immediate, exciting and appealing career track. I went to the more exciting one – with the idea that if I ever fail, I have the safer option. But it kept getting farther and farther way. “How can I give up on this crazy creative independence and stimulation and venture to go back to academia?”
Queen honeybee (Apis mellifera) surrounded by her attendant worker bees. These bees are part of a US government experimental breeding program to produce parasite-resistant honeybees. Credit: Anand Varma for National Geographic Magazine
Now, what I feel like is, I don’t actually have to give this up to bring back the elements of academia that appealed to me all along, which is “how do I generate new knowledge about the world?”. I thought maybe I can do that as a photographer. I don’t know but this way of partnering with scientists to not just document their work but also help them drive their questions forward and their data forward – collect data with the camera – that’ll satisfy this little itch in me that you’re not really contributing to new knowledge and not answering questions.
So in a way, you’re still doing science…
Yeah.… I can’t really call myself a scientist now. I actually correct people when they label me as that but I can sort of see that my path is pointing more in that direction and there’s a possibility I could publish papers. But no, I’m not really a scientist now but science is still a major part of what I do.
National Geographic was already communicating science through photography when you joined. What do you think you brought to the table?
Yes, they have been documenting science for a long time, communicating scientific discoveries, scientific approaches. I brought a new sort of aesthetic approach to that. Part of that is an illustrative approach where it’s not necessarily documentary journalism – where I’m there looking over somebody’s shoulder as the experiment’s happening, but I’m trying to think about how this experiment is set up and how do I capture the core elements of that, in an accurate way so I’m not misleading anybody – but figuring out how to communicate the set-up and the elements of this experiment in as simple and compelling way as possible. I don’t think quite that approach has been done.
Your work – especially the use of music in your multimedia videos – is very emotionally charged and dramatic. Is that a style you’ve consciously adopted?
Looking back at some of my work – the bee story, the parasite story – I do see a [consistent use] of high energy. It’s something that, now, having seen this pattern, I intentionally think about moving forward. But back then it was more of a default approach, [towards] what captured my attention. You kinda have to crank the level up, get the thing to flash into your eyeballs – this is what captured my attention. That was a split from my mentor whose approach is much more subtle, elegant, beautiful, but not this sort of eyeball-grabbing.
Out of all the shots you take, do you know when you see ‘the one’ – something that gives you complete satisfaction?
Umm… [he’s thinking hard] Depends on when you measure it. I often know when it’s good enough. And for many of those images I couldn’t necessarily tell you how I’d do it better – but I don’t think there was ever a moment when I took a picture, looked at it and thought this is a 100% what I want.
Often when I load the pictures on the computer, I can’t look away. I’m just sitting there and – I just want to look at this picture. Or I close it and I go brush my teeth and then think, “No, I want to go back to this picture.” And sometimes I find myself doing that automatically and then realise I think this means that this worked. But occasionally, I do that for a while and then realise, “No, this is almost there, but no.” Many times it takes two or three days. The ladybug picture that ended up on the cover of NatGeo, I remember leaving pretty disappointed. I actually took a couple of ladybugs back with me. Maybe I’ll keep working on this at home. They published the very last frame that I took. That was as far as I could take it that day.
Is there any sort of manipulation you do with your images?
Post-processing, yeah. But no, no, you can’t move around anything like even a small [piece of] hair on the specimen. You can change contrast, exposure and sometimes some things like removing dust, dirt. I can’t do that for NatGeo but once it’s published, to put on my website, I can get rid of an ugly smudge. Moving around fundamental components or even tiny details like pixels, you can’t do that. I’m very careful about that. You’re dealing with people’s trust. You lose credibility in that sense. Part of the power of this is that it’s real. If this was an illustration generated by some 3D program, it would not have nearly the same power to capture people’s imagination. Here, this is a thing that existed in front of my camera. If you move around stuff, you’ll lose that. At some point, people won’t accept it as real.
Have you any interest in documenting the physical sciences?
Well… I plan on doing that. I don’t know how much I can tell you about a future story but I want to do that. Biology is where my expertise and education has been, so I’m naturally inclined to think about those stories, but I certainly have nothing against geology, chemistry, physics. I haven’t necessarily found the right lab, the right access. You pursue the stories that you can do something with. Then you realise – oh, look, I have really amazing access to these cool things.
Have you found something that fits?
Mmmm. I might have found something though. I’m going to pitch a story about it, my next project.
Some of Anand Varma’s work is available to view on his Instagram.
This week’s column deals with our relationships with stories. What do we expect from the fiction we read and who owns a story, the writer or the reader?
This week’s column deals with our relationships with stories. What do we expect from the fiction we read and who owns a story, the writer or the reader?
Name-Place-Animal-Thing is The Wire’s culture newsletter. If you’d like to receive regular updates from this column, please consider subscribing here.
Chetaan Bhagat. Credit: Facebook
What’s the point of fiction?
In case you somehow missed it, Chetan Bhagat’s latest book is an exploration of feminism, written in the first person from the perspective of a woman. Titled One Indian Girl, the story aims to get at the struggles of practicing feminism in a sexist society. But depending on who you ask, the book is either a true depiction of their lives or an irredeemable text that flattens the female character and her struggles into a one dimensional search for romantic love.
Bhagat is very proud of his attempt to enter the female psyche but as Nandini Nair writes in her review of the book, the “ambition and execution are not always congruent. A host of unfortunate clichés riddle the text. Such as Radhika as the ‘nerd’ girl who must find self-affirmation in men… The ‘mini-me’ (or the voice in Radhika’s head) delivers dialogues like, ‘How can a girl admit she is thinking about kissing? Isn’t that what super- sluts do?’ Such lines will compel a reader to add an exclamation mark in disbelief to the margins of the text.”
The questions Bhagat raises in his novel are not inherently bad ones but his handling of them betrays an approach that didn’t really sink beyond the surface. For instance, instead of wondering why she’s thinking about kissing and if that would make her a ‘super-slut’, Radhika could have easily wondered “Will my sexual confidence make my love interest uncomfortable? And if it does, maybe I should find another man.”
Bhagat took societal expectations of women and wrote about them without really revealing the inner negotiation that goes into practicing theory – something that I would term an ‘authentic’ female experience and he might call ‘ultra-feminist’ which is just another of his euphemisms for ‘elitist’.
Though of course, Bhagat’s career is based on privileging one kind of Indian identity over the other. Ever since he wrote his first book, his claim to fame has been that he writes for the ‘average Indian’. Nair sets up her entire piece by acknowledging this, “Today, Bhagat is more a totem than an individual. For one (much larger) section of readers, he is an emblem of authority and affinity, he speaks to them and for them; for another, he symbolises the spread and hold of mediocrity, a populist at best, a charlatan at worst. The tragedy in India is how irreconcilable these two groups are, the snobbery and haughtiness of one pitted against the ambition and sincerity of the other.”
The difference between the two groups is not an insurmountable, divinely ordained gap – it is a carefully constructed one and not just by the haughty elite, but by Bhagat himself. He too creates two different ideas of what it means to be Indian and then justifies his books by claiming that there is no bridge between the two sides.
The real tragedy (excuse my hyperbole) is that as a novelist Bhagat is standing on that very bridge. Fiction allows us to access minds and worlds we never may otherwise, yet Bhagat’s narratives seem invested in maintaining that societal distance instead of finding ways to narrow it down. He seems to deny that a reader’s inability to empathise with his characters could emerge from his failings as a writer rather than the reader’s lack of imagination.
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Zadie Smith. Credit: David Shankbone/Flickr CC BY 2.0
The authoritative ‘I’
Bhagat’s affinity for writing in first person is starkly contrasted by Zadie Smith’s reluctance to adopt it. Swing Time, Smith’s forthcoming novel and first attempt at writing in first person is about to release next month and Jeffrey Eugenides’ profile of her raises the same questions that hound Bhagat.
At first, Smith acknowledged how going to therapy helped her overcome her misgivings about writing in first person, she told Eugenides, “I’ve always felt very cringe-y about myself. Fiction is a useful way of getting around it or disguising oneself one way or another. Not being able to write in the first person was very much about that, and self-disgust or anxiety about saying ‘I.’” In a way, she had to access her own emotional landscape to be able to deliver a believable first person narrative despite not actually writing about herself.
Contrast this with Bhagat’s approach to writing and it seems like Smith’s work focuses on exploring and understanding the world through writing fiction about other people whereas Bhagat’s takes the form of an authoritative narrative about what he thinks of the world. The gendered contrast is easy and ready for the taking.
But Eugenides was surprised when Smith linked her reluctance to adopt the authorial ‘I’ to her gender: “It did seem to me, when I was a kid and also now that I’m a grown-up writer, that a lot of male writers have a certainty that I have never been able to have. I kept on thinking I would grow into it, but I’m never sure I’m doing the right thing.”
Eugenides came up with counter examples such as women who are perfectly comfortable writing authoritatively and male writers who are not – and in my opinion forgot that the existence of counterexamples doesn’t disqualify the prevalence of a trend. Though even he acknowledged that Smith isn’t really referring to some inherent difference in gender but to the effects that emerge from being brought up in a gendered societal structure.
Bhagat, Smith, Eugenides all seem aware of the current fixation on the autobiographical. Bhagat obviously has made a career of it while Smith it turns out has consciously stayed away from it. Eugenides too didn’t provide any answers, instead inquiring, “ is there no way to mine one’s own emotional and biographical terrain for ore with which to construct other lives? Would Tolstoy or Shakespeare, alive today, only write about themselves?”
To me this question goes beyond fiction and straight to the heart of identity politics. If I think that some aspects of my identity are permanently fixed regardless of context it may give me a firmer sense of self but it also detracts from my ability to recognise some of my ‘unique’ experiences as common and so, shareable. At the end of the day, I think we all search for representation in the creative works that we consume but that search is predicated on our ability to exercise empathy because how else are we going to feel anything for a person and situation that we know doesn’t exist. But this empathy is also limited by our own criteria for what we allow ourselves. If I never pick up a book because the characters sound nothing like me and thus are of no interest to me, I’m denying myself an attempt at stretching my ability to connect with other people, other narratives.
But as Smith put it, “There is no unimpeachable identity from which you can operate in the world from a position of righteousness at all times.” Identity politics is good for diagnosing problems, such as the gendered ways of creating fiction but once you’re done recognising that problem and how it’s predicated on a particular kind of difference, the same tools don’t help you figure out how to move forward. Is it harder to empathise with other people once you’re aware of your differences or does that understanding make it easier to traverse previously unaccessible emotional terrain?
Perhaps this is where my problem with Bhagat lies – his novels create narratives that insist on diagnosing and then establishing certain differences as inherently non negotiable. Whereas my personal demand from fiction goes beyond that, I want Bhagat and Smith to give me ways to proceed forward from that difference and show me different ways of being, not further entrench me in my current identity.
As Smith says about ‘unimpeachable identity’, “How tempting it must be to grab it with both hands and be that person, the unimpeachable moral person of rightness and rectitude. But you know it’s an illusion.” It’s an illusion that not only Bhagat but also all of us buy into to varying extents.
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Woman using a virtual reality headset. Credit: Nan Palmero/Flickr, CC BY 2.0
The future of storytelling
If I’m going to be this demanding, I might as well write my own fiction right? Not really, because I’m not searching for ways to validate my own experiences and thoughts, I’m looking for ways to understand others’. A book is a one-way street with fixed points and at least for me, is marked by equally one-way conversations with an author I’ll never actually interact with.
But virtual reality and gaming is headed in a much more collaborative direction. In a piece titled, ‘Read It and Bleep: Is Virtual Reality the Future of Storytelling‘, Kate Gwynne explores the ways in which immersive video games are changing the way we experience stories. He is addressing more refined stuff but I just want you to know that I spent my weekend playing (and loving) 80 Days, a video game based on the book and the movie, which lets you inhabit the character of Passepartout and ‘live’ the adventure so to speak. There are others, like Elegy of the Dead, that require you to write fiction of your own to navigate given narratives.
As Gwynne notes, “We say we “enter the minds of characters” when we read books, but role-playing in immersive worlds, such as VR narratives or theatre, takes that sense of immediacy to a whole other level: the narrative feels like something you actually experience.”
The first thing that strikes me about this is the consumer’s control over a narrative, which could feel so invasive to an author whose carefully crafted storyline may succumb to the fan fiction-esque demands of a reader. The author explains the limited agency in such ventures, “Audiences can choose their route and tempo, but there are anchor points and the finale must deliver: “There is the illusion of agency, but they are on rails.” This nuanced approach suggests we are entering a sophisticated new era in which the exchange between author and participant creates a better outcome for both, leaving questionable author-fan collaborations of the past behind.”
If this is the future of storytelling (and I so want it to be) then authors will have to create complex, deep worlds to account for the all possibilities that readers may want to explore. Authors and readers will learn to inhabit new and different subjectivities, which to me will mean moving away from the fixed and autobiographical narratives that are predominant today.
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