Futures of Storytelling - Understanding the greatest epic Mahabharata

I recently delivered a lecture on "Futures of Storytelling" to a bunch of bright, young computer geeks in a Technical Symposium at BITS Pilani campus. The symposium was organised by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), BITS Pilani Chapter.

What follows is a serialised blog version of the lecture. In the first edition, I proposed a new definition for storytelling. In this second edition, I look at understanding Mahabharata through the storyteller's lens.

This post owes a lot to the excellent three-part model built by Paul Rissen to understand the ways of seeing a story.

What is storytelling?

Revelation of connected information, over time and place

How do we understand the ways of seeing a story?

Let us explore it through the greatest epic of all times, the Mahabharata. With more than one hundred thousand sanskrit stanzas in verse, eight times longer than The Iliad and The Odyssey put together, it is the longest composition of the world, narrating the greatest story ever told.

In the past few months, thanks to curious projects and curiouser rabbit holes (Thank you Raghu), I have been deeply immersed in understanding the Mahabharata and I must admit, I have been completely besotted by this grand epic tale.

Let me attempt to bring in a storyteller's perspective here with a framework I've adapted, based on Paul Rissen's Three-Part Model for Understanding Stories.

In order to appreciate a story with the pregnant possibilities it holds, agnostic of the form it has been rendered in, you need to understand the following three layers.

Bottom Layer: Story World

In the Story World Universe, we consent to peek into the world of the story happening outside ourselves. They operating word here is consent because the story experience unfolds only when the listener is willing to suspend his belief and convince himself that the person telling the story is "not me". This otherness is crucial, a social contract to let storytelling work its magic upon. 

The Story World Universe consists of all the key elements which hold the edifice of the narrative - the protagonists and the antagonists, the ambient setting, the sounds and the moods, the props and the motifs and all the dots which connect to cast an enchanting spell as we experience the story outside ourselves. Depending on the impact the story creates inside ourselves, these elements tend to settle down deep inside the dark aisles of our subconscious minds.

Remember. All that which happens in a story - including the intricate plots and its eclectic connections which evolve over time and place, finds its place in the Story World.

Whenever we talk about stories in conjunction with data, our familiar impulse is to talk about stories which can be extracted from data. But what about seeing stories as data? What about placing the elements of the story universe in relation with the connections they hold inside the universe?

What you see below is a screenshot from the BBC Mythology Engine (2010), built by Paul Rissen himself. This allows us to navigate the Story World of Doctor Who by making the characters, places and events addressable — and exploring the in-universe connections between them.

Now, take a closer look at the Generation Tree of the key characters in Mahabharata. Do you see something intriguing in this?

Did you spot the author of the tale "Vyasa" himself in the generation tree?

The most rewarding moments for me in reading the Mahabharata from a storyteller's hat has been witnessing those in which Vyasa enters and divines the narrative. In one moment, he emphasises the inevitability of certain coming events, making his heroes resign themselves to their fate. In another moment, he guides the protagonists to steer their destiny.

In other words, the author doesn't simply meander along the intricate tapestry of the narrative with his characters, but is also born in the narrative and walks along the narrative path he laid out for his characters.

Which brings us to the middle layer: Storytelling Universe

Middle Layer: Story Telling

We earlier defined Storytelling as the revelation of connected information, over time and place. In a nutshell, the telling of the story focuses on the order in which the objects in the Story World and their connections are revealed. The quest for order in controlling the story experience primarily depends on the notion that the author is in control. Is the author really in control? Let us examine this more closely.

Now, we all know that depending on how the story is rendered by the storyteller, the relationship between the storyteller and the audience adapts.

In the good old days, the bards (also called in the Indian folklore as sootas) memorised and performed epic poems. In the ancient Koothu tradition of tamil folk art, the story was narrated in an oral context which was immediate, enveloping and immersive.

Recently, I was witness to a fascinating three hour koothu performance of a key scene in Mahabharata - the de-robing of Draupadi - in the hills of Nilgiris.

[Image Credits: Naveen Kumar who shot during the Koothu performance]

Can you observe in this picture the deliberate disregard of demarcation of the space delineating where the audience are seated and where the performers are playing?

The impact of a story performance in which the audience were not just viewers, but also partakers in the story that was unfolding, was so visceral and bone-chilling that at times, I had to disengage myself intermittently because I couldn't take it all. I had to shut my senses down briefly to collect myself together so that I don't end up exploding in the heat of emotions at play.

As our cultures became (seemingly!) modern and moved on from the oral to the visual-textual culture of storytelling, we also moved on from a strong indeterminate story context to a determinate one with clear demarcation and distance between the experiencer witnessing the story and the experienced object of the story unfolding itself.

Today, with the advent of emojis, memes, GIFs and infinite scrolling, it feels as if we are re-entering the oral culture in a more visceral, raw form, where events happening around us alter the climate of how we experience ourselves online.

If you pay close attention, every event unfolding in the social web, alters how you experience the social Web.

Today, as I write this, my timeline is filled with Sonu Nigam and Kangana Ranaut hogging the limelight for their views on their Azaan controversy. Walking around my timeline feels as if I had walked into a noisy neighbourhood. I cannot disengage from this social noise unless I pull the plug from the Internet itself.

This wasn't the case before, if you cared to look back.

In an earlier era, I had to go and get the newspaper to read about it, and engage with the object of newspaper outside me, if I wished to.

Today, the orality of the news is happening around me, even though I may have zero interest to engage with it. I can hear it and smell it, even when I choose to shut it from my attention radar.

In the case of Mahabharata, the orality of the narrative was so powerful enough that the epic changed its name from Jaya (its original name) to Bharata, when Vysampayana, who had listened to the original narrative from Vyasa himself, narrated the epic to an assembly of listeners in the court of Janamejaya.

The impact is clearly visible with every rendition, as we see the number of stanzas in the composition adding up. Incidentally, the retelling of this rendition also sets the ground for another epic, The Bhagavatam, to unfold.

What does all of this mean for storytellers in this new digitoral culture filled with ideographic memes and emojis?

Let go of your need for determinate awareness and control.

You can manage the story happening outside only from the inside and not anywhere else.

Which brings me to the third and perhaps the most exciting layer in the Story Universe.

Top Layer: Story Tech

This exploration owes deeply to Raghu Ananthanarayanan whose pioneering work on exploring inner dynamics through Theatre has enriched me immensely.

If the bottom layer and the middle layer are about the story happening outside ourselves, the Story Tech layer invites us to pay attention on the other side: Inside. It is about the mirroring story happening inside ourselves.

Depending on how deeply I feel evoked in my relationship with the archetype portrayed by the character in the story, the Story Tech layer invites me to embody the archetype and explore the inner dynamics of my self operating through the archetype.

It is in this pristine moment we get in touch with the essence of the quintessential Indian purana - pura api navam - that which is ancient and also the nascent.

How can something which is ancient and old written several million years ago also be nascent?

Let us look at this through one of my favourite characters Karna.

When I read the Mahabharata and get in touch with the anguish and the pathos of Karna, I get in touch with many parts of myself. Here is a brief glimpse of the process in which the ancient story becomes nascent.

I am Karna. I have immense heroic potential. But, I have been wrongfully denied, discriminated against and deprived of my rightful share. I have to fight against heavy odds to get the opportunities that I deserve.

No wonder, I have developed a strong armour which has protected me since my birth. I tend to be compulsive about giving to others. Perhaps, I am desperately craving for the affirmation which I earnestly hope the society will give back to me.

As you can imagine, Story Tech Layer is teeming with possibilities.

Right from exploring simple API questions such as "What happens next in my story?" to profound questions of self-reflection which transform my understanding of the self, I can play along in this layer to my heart's content to negotiate the boundaries of the storyteller and the story listener and explore unchartered worlds which transform my understanding of the story.

How did mankind build technologies to tell stories about himself and the world?

What about the politics of stories in the digital age which have made data into a spectacle?

We shall explore further the world of stories. Stay Tuned for Part-III in Futures of Storytelling.