Reclaiming, Story 2: Journey Through Generations

In this episode, the 2nd in our Reclaiming What's Been Lost series, Aru Nair goes on a journey to India to understand how oral tradition preserves cultures. But when a surprise trip to her father's home town shows her a side if him she's never seen, she emerges with a new understanding of how the stories we tell shape the people we become.

Transcript for Reclaiming, Story 2: Journey Through Generations

This is State of the Human, the podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

Each episode, we take a common human experience, like teaching or breathing or joking, and bring you stories that deepen our understanding of that experience.

My name is Alex Strong, and in the next few episodes, we're looking at the theme of reclaiming.

Live long enough and everyone has this experience.

Something that you love changes, and your relationship with the things or place or person becomes more complicated, maybe even problematic.

But true love rarely disappears without a trace.

Today's episode is the second in a series of episodes about reclaiming what's been lost.

This series will feature stories about reclaiming neighborhoods, music venues, childhood obsessions, sports teams, languages, and ways of seeing ourselves.

It's about holding the tension between what we were and who we've become.

It's about returning to our origins, but this time with a more nuanced perspective.

The story you're about to hear comes from Aru Nair, one of our 2022 Braden Grantees.

The Braden Storytelling Grant is a big part of what we do here at the Stanford Storytelling Project.

Every year, we award a group of students funding to complete research and interviews for an oral documentary.

From March to December, they get ongoing teaching, training, and mentorship as they develop their research and complete their final project, a podcast episode that explores their research through story.

Aru's Braden Grant focuses on the role of oral tradition in preserving our cultures, and also how the stories we tell shape the people we become.

From a 16,000 year old Lascaux cave painting to the rich oral tradition of communicating Indian epics through art, music, and story, we as humans have always been storytellers.

When Aru started her research, she thought her story was going to be about what happens when oral traditions start to disappear.

She also thought that she would travel alone to the place in India where her family was from to complete her research.

Going into the trip, she was a young college student trying to understand who she was outside of her family, and so she wanted to make the trip alone.

But ultimately, she ended up traveling back to India with her dad, which turned out to be key to unlocking a story that explores not just what happens when oral traditions are modified as they pass through generations, but how we can keep those parts of ourselves and our cultures alive by becoming storytellers ourselves.

Here's Aru with that story.

I want you to take a moment to close your eyes and reach backwards in time.

Think back to a story from your childhood, one that you remember hearing from your grandpa or from your mom growing up, a story that for some reason you still think of from time to time, despite the years that weigh it down.

Ask yourself why?

Why do you find yourself coming back to it every once in a while?

Why does it still linger in your mind?

For me, it's the Kannada folk song I would wait for my dad to tell me every night, despite having heard it dozens of times before.

It's the story of a cow named Punyakoti who believes that truth is God.

I can still remember closing my eyes as my dad set the scene.

After singing the first verse, he would translate for me, In the center of the world, there is a land known as Karnataka.

As the scene unfolds, I see Kalinga, the cow herder, under the mango tree with his flute, calling his cows by name to come back home.

Thank you.

No one really knows the quote unquote original story.

Everyone has their own originals at this point, the story having been passed down from generation to generation for hundreds of years.

As a kid growing up in the middle of nowhere Wyoming, the whole world was told to me in stories.

Starting with Punyakoti, my dad shared more of these stories with me that he'd collected from his own father while growing up in Karnataka.

And we learned to communicate through our shared passion for words and art.

But what if that never happened?

What if the threat of these changing times prevented me from learning about this integral part of my life?

India is home to hundreds if not thousands of languages, each with their own oral tradition.

This past summer, I wanted to go to India on a journey through generations with my dad to learn more about the history of these stories, which brought us together.

I wanted to travel specifically to a town called Trishur, located in the South Indian state of Kerala.

Trishur is the culture capital of Kerala and has a rich history of folklore, folk poems, songs, and art.

Even the dialect of Malayalam spoken in Trishur has a noticeable melodious rhythm to it.

And it also just so happens to be the setting for my family's own origin story.

Getting off the plane in Queiroa, the warm air flooded my lungs, and I felt at home in a way that I can't quite explain.

As we reached our final destination, the sound of the cicadas grounded me.

Their lulling started soft, just a whisper.

But they grew louder and louder, and suddenly, it was a symphony of cicadas hidden in plain sight.

Their music itself is an oral tradition that was heard by countless before my time, and it will continue to entrench those after me.

I wanted to learn of the other stories of this region, so my journey started with meeting Demish Kuttam, a traditional folk singer who has been helping to keep the stories of this region alive.

Just as a note, many of the interviews I did were originally in Malayalam, so for those, you'll be hearing a translated version read in English.

I learned these songs from my grandmother and the other elders in our family because I heard them singing these songs when I was growing up.

I had asked him to sing one of the songs that he would typically hear from his grandmother during his childhood.

As soon as he started singing, my dad looked up at me and our eyes met, twinkling with recognition.

I remember hearing a variation of the same lullaby, perhaps a more unique version, that my mom sang to me growing up.

It suddenly took me back to her rocking me in her lap, trying to put me to sleep.

Sense, I realized it was a different version of a song that many of you would probably recognize.

The song translates essentially to, Rain, please go away, Only when you leave can we go down to the pond so we can catch a fish, fry it, and eat it.

The English nursery rhyme we learned as preschoolers obviously went a bit differently, but it came as a surprise to me that preschoolers here in Trishort have likely been singing the same folk song for generations through the rainy seasons.

How were rain rain go away and this local lullaby able to span the distance of time and space to travel all the way to me?

In this place thousands of miles away from where I grew up, I felt my heartstrings tug at my home, and I realized that's the power of stories.

I couldn't help but wonder why oral tradition in particular out of all the ways of storytelling was so ubiquitous.

I reckoned the best way to figure it out was to go back to the roots to learn its history.

He's a professor of folklore studies here in Trishore.

In this transition from oral tradition to print, we've lost how oral tradition changes over time.

We've lost the fluidity or the ability to cater to differing perspectives.

And we've lost the women's perspectives.

Originally, much of the oral tradition was created and passed down by women.

Since the switch to print media, men have been the dominant voice.

Even with this interview, I've had to translate it from the original Malayalam to English.

And with that standardization, the diversity of interpretations has been lost.

Oral tradition by its very nature changes as it passes from one generation to.

But they don't just change from place to place.

Oral storytelling's ephemeral nature and temporality allows stories to grow, evolve, and adapt over time as well.

Only in oral tradition could one hear the same story told by a hundred people and hear it a hundred different ways with different details and interpretations, a multiplicity that's unique to the medium.

It demands active engagement from the storyteller and from the people listening, because with folk stories, the artist isn't just a special kind of person, but rather every person is a special kind of artist.

When I eventually learned the Kaneda words for Punyukoti, I soon became a storyteller too.

Sharing my own version of it with my friends allowed me to partake in the oral tradition of the poem's journey through generations.

Oral tradition is how we understand cultures, community, our values and morals, and how we pass on the knowledge over generations.

These stories are the thread that links us to everything.

It reminds us that we're a part of a bigger system, and they're how we make sense of the world.

So what happens when they start disappearing?

Oral tradition was always able to exist because of the communication between younger and older generations.

Because of the decrease in intergenerational communication, the older folks are no longer able to pass down their knowledge, poems or songs to the newer generations.

In order to understand what's making it difficult for older generations to pass down these traditions in the stay in age, I met with Vinod Nambiar.

First of all, there is a gap, and there is no platform for the younger generations to understand the kind of culture and tradition.

He leads an organization called Viley, which has been working to address these issues in their own community.

Hearing Vinod discuss this generational gap, let me think more about the distance I had with my own roots.

I was lucky enough for my dad to pass on his favorite folk songs and stories to me, but another important part of oral tradition is the personal knowledge and history of our lives, which are passed down too.

Whenever we tell a story, we are being vulnerable and showing a part of ourselves.

That was a side of my dad I never really knew, but when I had a few free days in between collecting interviews, we spontaneously decided to take the overnight train to Manipal, his hometown.

Manipal is a bustling college town, in some ways similar to the place I grew up.

Although it isn't too far away and distanced from Trissur, it was a completely different environment.

We stayed with my dad's side of the family, who I didn't know as well, but during those days in Manipal, I saw my dad from a whole new perspective.

He was a son and a brother, and in his dynamic with his siblings, I saw the same bickering my brother and I would have on family car rides, arguing over who got to be on aux.

We rode the same bus he used to take to the beach with the windows always down.

They would blast oldie hit songs from Malayalam to Hindi, which funnily enough were the same ones that also played on the same family car rides before my brother and I were even old enough to fight over the music.

I got to see the field where my dad got the scar on his eyebrow from playing cricket with his rowdy childhood friends.

We took a picture at the very spot my parents met for the first time.

There was so much of the past I never really knew about, and it made me realize that, just like our DNA, our family's histories and stories deeply influence who we are as people.

Coming back to Trichur after our excursion to Manipal had me completely rethinking the role this important tradition of oral storytelling has in our lives.

The people we grow into and the ways in which we view the world are shaped by the treasure trove of stories, parables and knowledge passed down to us by the elders in our lives and is all through the practice of oral tradition.

There are many beautiful songs that our elders know, but nobody has any regard for them anymore.

After years pass by, their memories will fade and those songs will be lost forever.

During my trip, I encountered a mupper who was a kind of tribal leader, and he was kind enough to share some of the different songs he knew.

At one point though, the reality of losing these stories really set in, as he was trying to recall how one of the other songs went.

I sat and watched as he tried to remember, but the song and the story were gone.

We are reinventing the old culture.

Oral tradition has been dying out over the past two generations, but if we started now, we could still record and collect a lot of the knowledge being lost.

But these recorded stories alone will lack proper context.

Maybe one way forward is for the younger generation to reinvent the oral tradition and keep it alive.

That's a give and take.

It's a balancing of, you are not totally changing it, but you are making it adaptable to your current situation.

On my journey, I also met with a family of artisans who perform shadow puppetry or Tolpavakutu.

My name is Rahul.

I am a traditional shadow puppeteer from Kerala.

I belong to a family of artists for 12 generations who is continuing this temple traditional ritualistic art form of Tolpavakutu in Kerala.

Tol means leather, pava is puppet, and kutu is the play.

Rahul is the youngest son of the oldest shadow puppeteer in Kerala, and the art form is traditionally only performed by men.

However, their family has started to establish a platform for women to also create their own stories and perform them through the art of shadow puppetry.

In the past, women were just in the background to support the men, but my sister decided to establish a platform for women to bring in our perspective into the shadow puppet plays.

The idea behind the women's plays or penpavakuttu was to say that there is no need for the women to be submissive.

They have to come forward.

This is how penpavakuttu or women's shadow puppet shows came to be included in the traditional tolpavakuttu.

The men mainly performed the epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata.

But the stories of penpavakuttu are created by women about women.

One of the stories we've created is of a girl growing up and going through childhood, adolescence, college, marriage, and the difficulties of marriage, especially dowry.

The story asks women to protest against the system of dowry.

We perform it in schools, colleges, and other places, mainly with the intention of bringing women forward.

She sings, this is the new face of women.

This is the new face of self-respect.

This is the new face of Malayalam.

This is the new song.

Although we can't keep those exact same traditions and practices, the new generation can make it their own, because one of the central tenets of folklore is that it's constantly changing.

When I went to Manipal and saw so much of my family, I realized that we have very different beliefs and perspectives, mostly because we grew up in completely different worlds.

But we can still share and exchange stories in order to understand and empathize with each other's experiences.

I want to learn the stories of my grandmother's childhood, while she shows me how she harvests tubers in our front yard.

And I want to learn the recipes for the food they ate so much growing up, because they couldn't afford anything else.

Even the curries our mothers make, the clothes I'm wearing and how they're tied, this tree next to me, it's all folklore.

If I asked my children how to make sambar, they wouldn't answer by saying you need a scale to measure out the ingredients.

They would be with their mom in the kitchen, looking, listening, learning, and then doing it themselves.

That's folklore.

Even the artisans whose craft is weaving, each thread that they intertwine is telling a story.

To some, folklore is only a vestige of the past, and maybe that's true to some extent.

But in my journey, I've continued to find its unrelenting pulse, a vital force that flows with the rhythm of social life and fluctuates invariably with the changing times.

It's only natural that a tradition defined by its constant change is inherently indefinable.

The world is becoming increasingly globalized, and we now have the incredible opportunity to hear stories from all corners of the world.

Hearing the uniqueness and similarities in different storytelling traditions makes the practice of oral tradition even more exciting, and to keep it going, we must continue telling them.

I still think my favorite part of Punyakoti that my dad would tell me is that first line, in the center of the world, there is a land known as Karnataka.

I used to think that the world was told to me in stories, but since going on this journey through generations, I've realized that these stories are in fact our worlds.

Joan Didion said that we tell ourselves stories in order to live, and the ones that we gain and share from oral tradition especially, help each of us learn more about the center of our own worlds.

We all have those stories we remember.

Punyakoti's story taught me the importance of personal integrity and being honest with myself, even if no one was watching.

But the folk song represents more than just a moral.

It brings back fond memories of my family lying together on a mattress on the floor.

All four of us would cuddle up, hanging on to my dad's every word.

Our lives are ever-changing, and so are our stories.

As I sit here reflecting on this step in my journey so far, I can't help but think about how much I've changed since experiencing it.

Even as I'm telling you this story right now, who knows if next time I tell it, that it'll be the same.

And maybe, maybe that's the point.

Thank you so much to everyone I met with in Trishul, Ramesh, Davis, Ranjit, Vinod, Rahul, Ashwati, Pulavanan family and Sridharansar.

Thank you also to everyone who helped with reading the translations, Sahir Qureshi, Krishnan Nair, Varun Madan and Dev Madgavkar.

Thank you to Blue.Sessions, freesound.org and Akash Desai for sound effects and music.

And finally, thank you so, so much to Melissa Deerdahl, Alicia Crawford, Laura Joyce Davis and Dr.

Manoj Kumar for their mentorship.

You've been listening to State of the Human, the podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

This episode was produced by Aru Nair and me, Alex Strong, with support from Laura Joyce Davis, Don Frazier, Megan Kalfass, Melissa Deerdahl and Jonah Willingans.

For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education, the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, the Office of the Vice President for the Arts and Bruce Braden.

You'll hear more stories of Reclaiming What's Been Lost in upcoming episodes.

You can learn more about the Stanford Storytelling Project and our podcasts, workshops, live events and courses at storytelling.stanford.edu.

You can find this and every episode of State of the Human on our website or anywhere you listen to podcasts.

For State of the Human and the Stanford Storytelling Project, I'm Alex Strong.