You might wake up in the morning and brew a cup of coffee while a Spotify podcast hums in the background. As you step out and slide into a cab, there’s an RJ on the radio narrating a conventional tale. Then, a remembrance ceremony is held at your college to honor a past legend. When you come back home, you find your mother watching a dramatic TV serial with dhoom-tana-dhoom playing on loop in the background and then finally you fall asleep with your favourite novel in your hands. Do you see it? We are all surrounded by stories: some virtual, some woven into the small gestures of daily life.
And yet people still sit at desks and declare stories irrelevant or impractical. They call them mere sources of entertainment. But it would not be wrong to say that storytelling is a subject. Unlike any other, it is both a science and an art.
If you look it up in your nearest dictionary, it will provide you with a simple definition of stories. Something like, “At their simplest, stories are structured accounts of real or imagined events woven through character, time, conflict, and change.” But in my opinion, they are so much more than that. Stories carry lessons, customs, and knowledge across generations in the most gentle and beautiful way. They connect people. They build bonds. They construct a universal language of feeling and meaning.
You can test this in under a minute. Take up a challenge. Ask someone, “Have you heard the tale of the rabbit and the tortoise?” Step out and then ask a few acquaintances. Yes. I can almost already hear their answer. Almost everyone has.
Not from a single source, but in a thousand versions, each draped in local colour and modest alterations. How many generations ago does this story date back to?
It makes you wonder whether storytellers from long ago – perhaps those homo-sapiens who gathered around the first of the fires in the Paleolithic age – did the same: shaping their memory into tales and sharing such stories with each other. How magical it feels to imagine that first circle and that first exchange of wonder, how poetic.
Talking about the craft of Indian storytelling: our stories are rooted in ‘artha’ or ‘meaning’. Though plots, characters, themes, and endings vary wildly, many stories share stylistic elements – metaphors that carry moral weight; rhythms that echo rituals; and images that act as symbols. Funny how we also indigenize foreign tales – Romeo becomes our Majnu, Juliet becomes a saree-clad Laila, and the sequence of longing and reunion remains familiar across names and garments.
Across India, folk narratives wear different names and forms. In Tamil Nadu, oral forms such as Villu Paatu or Sangam-era ballads preserve local myths and ethical tales. In mountain villages the night may be filled with stories of Bhoot (ghosts) and mountain spirits while in Bengal, Kavigaan and Panchali keep communal memories alive. During festivals, the act of recitation or ‘the katha’ remains central as a mandatory ritual. Epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata date back thousands of years. All primary school kids have heard about the stories of Gautam Buddha’s teachings or the gospels during Christmas. It is wonderful how ‘The nights of Arabia’ or Peter Pan never discriminate between their listeners. They are made for everyone.
Stories cross boundaries of religion, class, and language.
They are what separate us from other animals – the capacity to tell, to imagine the other, and to record consequences. They awaken imagination and offer reasons to live with purpose.
It would technically not be an exaggeration to claim that the roots of our modern civilization lies in such stories.
Even in the hustle and bustle of our messy lives, Sherlock Holmes and Premchand stand beside modern popular reads from Chacha Chaudhary comics to small magazines that are sold at railway stalls.
The traditional Indian storyteller does not merely narrate because they perform memory. Voice modulation, pauses, repetition, symbolic gestures, and audience interaction are central to the telling. A good Katha Vaachak learns to master this art. To give you an example, our grandmothers were the OG podcasters. They knew how to pause for suspense, how to change tone for a villain, and how a single repeated line can make a child lean forward. Therefore it can be said that storytelling runs naturally in our Indian blood. So, it comes to us naturally. Whether gossiping with our best friend on video calls for hours or reading such kinds of articles. We all have a profound love for sentences that give us meanings.
As American writer by the name of Joan Didion once said,
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
In the Indian context, I shall say that we tell stories not only to live, but to remember who we are. So the next time you hear a tale whether on a screen, from a speaker, or in the hush of a kitchen… stop for a moment. Pause and think about the ‘Story’ of stories: where it came from, what it asks of you, and what it leaves behind.