The Presence of Story
by Gauri Raje
The first Indian story I told in public was born out of laziness. For a long time, I resisted telling Indian stories anywhere. I told myself that it felt disingenuous. I was beginning a new life in the UK, a new land. The circumstances of leaving the land of my birth were sad, and I had been unready to leave. But I was not ready to stay back either. Telling stories from India felt untruthful. I lived in that limbo state or a long while.
Then at a storytelling workshop, after a good lunch, I was given two hours to prepare and tell a new story. I can’t say whether it was the effects of that nourishing lunch or just the warmth of an English afternoon, but my laziness led me to the library and to a section on stories of women. That laziness led me to stretch out my arm and pick a compilation of stories from around the world where women were the central protagonists. I picked them, not because of any idealogical fervour; laziness was seeping through my veins. I picked them because I identified myself as a woman, and so gave myself the entitlement to tell a story of a woman. Not the most auspicious of beginnings.
The story I told that afternoon was nothing like the story of the page of the book I had picked up in the library lazily. It surprised even me - where did those images arrive from? Perhaps the only link might have been that the book stated the story to be from central Maharashtra - the region of my father’s ancestry. I had never visited this place; nor had my father after his childhood and nobody in the family knew if the village still existed or was swallowed up by the urban conglomeration of Mumbai and Pune. There were no images of our ancestral region spoken about in family gupshups. The story I told resonated in my body as I told it. It’s rhythms were easy when I spoke it - and very different from the story I had read. It was a story that grew, shapeshifted and fell back into the story I had told the very first time. Something like a song; a raga - a base skeleton that was fleshed or changed form with every telling. Few stories I had told until that time had such arrivals, growing and departures while staying the same story all the time.
Of course, I was pleased and ego-boosted.
Four years later, I embarked on a journey of finding out more about my family. Most of those from my father’s generation, siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles had passed on; I had just my youngest aunt, all of 85 years young, to speak to about any memories she might have had about her parents’ village. She had been 4-5 years old when they visited the ancestral place for the last time, and remembered very little. Personal memories are a very specific reservoir; so I began to enquire about a larger pool of collective memories of the family, stories told in the village as she was growing up.
She did remember a story—something told as a story to her as a child, an anecdote that had happened to her aunt & uncle, my grand-aunt & uncle, and was perhaps a few sibling/cousin lines removed. As she began to tell the story, the contours of a very familiar story arc emerged and magnificently, so did the details of the landscape, chillingly close to my naive descriptions in the story that I had been telling for the past four years in the UK. A family story that had entered collective memory, and then egged on, no doubt by a medium of a colonial pen, found itself into an anthology of English-language stories of women.
My journey with this story raised some interesting questions regarding my relationship with this story. It is well-known that fragments of ancestral memory travel down generations. While there is enough and more literature, and studies available on the transmission of traumatic memories; there is not as much material on the movement of other memories over generations.
Over the many years of storytelling, I have begun to sense a difference between a story told because it fascinates the teller and a story that springs out of the depths of their being. The latter often takes even the teller by surprise. How did they know to say that particular detail? Why does a particular story obsess or haunt a teller, even when they may not like it? Fascination with a story may only be a tip of the memory; at times, it feels too wilful as if breaking into a horse to ride it. I am not sure how much it allows the teller to move with the story, rather than making the story do the teller’s bidding. Through the above example I look at the full circle that a story may make through personal and more historical elements, wherein a personal story enters into collective memory to return to the familial lineage down the generational line.
The story arc about outwitting dacoits is not new. It was a constant and everyday part of the life of those who lived in dacoit-infested regions. Walter Benjamin speaks about the storyteller as one that relies on a bedrock of the ability to share experiences, rather than pass information (1. Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’). In other words, a story like the one I mentioned was grounded in not just the sharing of one experience of outwitting dacoits, but multiple such moments. Whether it was multiple incidents that constellated into a story as it passed over many tongues through ages; or there was a seminal incident that created a template for a story to pass over generations is a matter of speculation. It is a matter of storyfy-ing, in a way.
Walter Benjamin also says something really prescient about the assimilation and remembering of stories by individuals and collectives. “This process of assimilation (of story), which takes place deep inside us, requires a state of relaxation....If sleep is the height of physical relaxation, then boredom is that of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that broods the egg of experience...The more self-forgetful the listener, the deeper what is heard is inscribed in him”. In a world that conditioned to ‘preparing’ and/or ‘rehearsing’, this may seem counter-intuitive. However, there is some truth that Benjamin touched upon—it is often when one is not looking for a story that a story arrives that lodges itself in one’s remembering. This state of boredom becomes the ground for remembering and recognition that is deeply intuitive.
Benjamin’s description also brings to mind the re-membering which is part of the great myth of Osiris & Isis. The myth of Osiris is the archetypal myth of transformation and becoming. It has been known in different oral traditions that during our lifetimes, that which is important may be forgotten; but it never completely disappears. The mind may forget but body memory is not to be taken lightly. Osiris is regarded as the spirit of the soil that animates and regenerates it through creating an awareness of the body. It is through attuning into the body’s rhythms that it is possible to create space for re-membering. Dreamwork, body and art work are ways of moving from everyday rhythms and ordinary time into a deep time and imaginal space that allows tuning into to what might be called inner stories—a realm of forgetting. It allows one to be deeply in a moment rather than in the consciousness of being embodied.
In the myth of Isis & Osiris, the death and dissolution of Osiris repeats a few times. Death is not just a moment, nor is regeneration. Accompanying the passage of Osiris into the underworld is the journey of Isis—his beloved, his sister and wife. Hers is a journey from shock and abandonment into a persistent tending to the search, protection and care of the body of her love, brother and husband. She becomes the mediator between and curator of both the world of the living and the world of the dead. She journeys along the life-blood of Egypt; along the Nile river to recover the dis-membered parts of her husband’s body; and she re-members those parts along with Nephthys, her sister and the Goddess of mourning rituals. It is her labour through mourning and then embalming her husband’s body that curates his journey through to becoming the God of the Underworld. This is her service to death. In the meantime, she also brings up her and Osiris’s child to make him a worthy king of the lands of Egypt, and of the world of the living. This upbringing would have also included re-membering or curating the memory of his father, Osiris to become a young warrior taking on his uncle Seth in battle and defeating him, thereby avenging his father who had been killed by Seth. The circle is now complete, and Osiris can move into his Underworld domain to fulfil his own destiny as Lord of the Underworld.
The myth of Isis & Osiris always reminds me of an important aspect to tending to mythic journeys - the necessity to submit. Isis’s journey of re-membering plays out not only due to her determination; but equally her submission to what cannot be recovered from, literally and metaphorically, the river of time and being. Not all parts of Osiris are recoverable—his phallus is swallowed by the fish of the Nile. Isis re-members Osiris by refashioning his phallus from wood or clay (the versions differ on this). They need to be re-fashioned.
Here is the relationship between forgetting and remembering spelt out—there will be aspects that cannot be recovered with story or storied journeys. Submitting to the forgetting and/or re-fashioning is part of the life of the story.
Re-fashioning can very easily fall into the understanding of innovation in our progress and uniqueness obsessed world. As I worked as a rookie apprentice storyteller, I too cogitated and puffed up my chest in anticipation of how wonderfully I could innovate, and suffered crushing disappointments when I could not. Over time, working on my great-aunt’s story and later, the Osiris & Isis myth, another understanding of re-fashioning began to be, well, re-fashioned.
Re-fashioning is also the work of maintainance. The maintainance of ritual, like Isis, and the maintainance of the story itself, like my great-aunt’s story. For those of us who have worked with rituals, either grand rituals like marriage, death or making ceremonies or everyday rituals, like doing your yoga practice every morning will know that these are not about the exact replication of actions or processes. As is the way of time, things get lost, go missing, get broken—maintainance, even in ritual, is about finding the elements that will allow the larger sequence of events and the larger narrative to carry on. This is what Isis is doing in re-fashioning the missing phallus. A creation that is a maintainance, that is in service of. This is what happens each time I work with my great-aunt’s story.
Working on a story is, more often that not, traveling with a story as it finds different forms, different layers and facets to the characters within a story. With the story that I mentioned in this essay, it was an experience of working with the story. As the time I spent with the story grew, and the number of times I told it, there were different facets to it that became prominent. Through it, I was learning about relationships within the socio-cultural milieu of the place of the story and its ecology. Knowing that the story was from the Deccan, additionally allowed me to not only research the story but work with the fragments of memory of the place that I had gathered through my father’s and his siblings’ stories and reminiscences. Since that family was no longer living, moments of ‘doing nothing’ allowed fragmented memories to float up. Research follows that bubbling up—initially for verification; later to understand the place and a network of other stories from the place. The story then becomes a portal into meeting a place and people. It is then, as part of this research that my conversations with family about family stories and memories began.
The telling of this story and getting familiar with the potent moments in the story has been a long journey into understanding the social, ecological and cultural landscape of the story. It gave me a sense of the width and breath of the different characters that inhabited the story. Hence, it was not just about creating the character of a particular type of woman or man or bandit. That arrived as I got to know the different characters of men, women, farmer, bandits or market places that cropped up in the story. Enough to know the ecology of the relationships between characters so that a certain character of a woman or man would not be present in that particular ecological landscape. This is how the story began to arrive for me after the first telling. It then, was a delight to find it recounted as a familial story; however, in its telling it had also become a story of the many people who lived alongside bandits in these villages.
The overlaps between my description of a village I had never visited and my aunts description of our ancestral village is a mystery that continues to remind me that often a story does not have to be worked on, but let it lie within oneself to begin to reveal itself.
References:
1.Benjamin, Walter. 2019. The Storyteller Essays. New York: New York Review Books.
2. Cavalli, Thom. 2010. Embodying Osiris: The Secrets of Alchemical Transformation. Wheaton: Quest Books.
