From Fables to Folklore The Story Continues

When we hear the word “story,” many of us recall evenings with grand parents, listening to tales of clever animals, brave kings, magical forests, or wise travellers. These moments were more than entertainment; they carried culture, values, and history across generations. In India, stories have always grown from everyday life, long before modern media, travelling through voices, songs, and performances that shaped how people understood the world. Stories in India are closely connected with the environment and changing seasons, with festivals marking these transitions. Celebrations like Lohri and Makar Sankranti welcome longer days and harvests, Pongal honours the Sun and Earth, Baisakhi marks the wheat harvest, Holi celebrates spring, and Onam in Kerala celebrates harvests with feasts and boat races.

These occasions often become moments of shared cultural expression, where traditions and community life come together through celebration and storytelling. A significant part of this tradition lies in fables and moral tales such as the Panchatantra and the Jataka Tales. These stories use animals, simple situations, and everyday settings to communicate ideas about wisdom, ethics, and human behaviour. While they are easy to understand, they carry deeper moral lessons about values like honesty, compassion, and good judgment, making them meaningful across generations. Across regions, storytelling has developed in many different cultural forms, reflecting local traditions and ways of life.

These regional variations show how stories are shaped by communities and passed down through diverse cultural expressions. Another important aspect of story- telling is its presence in creative and material expression. Stories often appear not only in spoken or written form but also through art, design, and craft. Patterns, symbols, and imagery found in textiles, paintings, and handmade objects reflect ideas drawn from memory, imagination, and daily life, turning everyday objects into cultural expressions.

Over time, storytelling has also adapted to newer forms of communication. With changes in technology and media, stories have found new platforms such as illustrated works and visual story telling formats. These shifts have expanded how stories are shared and experienced, helping them reach wider audiences. In the present day, storytelling continues to exist in many forms, spoken, written, visual, and digital. While the mediums evolve, story- telling remains a way for people to share experiences, express ideas, and connect with one another through narratives that reflect their world. In essence, storytelling remains a living and evolving form of expression, shaped by culture, creativity, and human experience across time.

As the Schoolastic edito rial the team theme brainstormed for April, we were as always spellbound to discover the vast forms of storytelling that have evolved with humans. We had recently heard theatre artiste, storyteller Anish Victor, who was preparing for a storytelling journey. It has now transformed into a performative- storytelling for children called An Old Man and a Cat, bundled with a fun-filled workshop for the little audiences called We are all stories

We connected online for an interview. Anish’s work in the last decades has woven text, dance, sound, and song to bring forms of storytelling to a diverse audience. His work for children shares the magic of storytellers and storytelling and unfolds another way of imagining the world of the future and the power of stories. We are happy to bring to students, teachers and schools, this story with the hope that it is another learning experiences to unlock student potential. You can find out more about Anish’s workshops http://www.quietrivers.in, at and reach out to him at victoranish@quietrivers.in.

Schoolastic Team: What made you take to professional storytelling? Anish Victor: I stepped into the world of performances, more specifically Theatre, when I was 19. Around the same time, I also started teaching the guitar in a small school in Bangalore. While working there I started helping out in the performances that the students would put up.

This helped me build a love and imagination for working with children and slowly over time, I began to earn a living by creating performances and storytelling sessions. While my theatre performances are for all ages usually, I do not offer storytelling for adults. ST: How old is performative story telling? Where in India would you f ind these? AV: I think performative story telling is as old as civilization itself. It has been there from the time we began gathering around a fire or around some food after hard day’s work - to sing, dance, share our experiences, our stories. The length and breadth of India is f illed with many different forms of performative storytelling… these forms combine song, music, movement, and narration.

For example, there is the Kaniyan Koothu, a form in Tamil Nadu, which combines song, rhythm, and narration to tell stories of Sudalai Maadan, believed to be the deity who guards graveyards. Then there is the Patua the story tellers in West Bengal, who combine stories and singing along with long scrolls of paintings. These are just two examples; every State of this country has its own varied forms of performative storytelling.

While the examples above are from traditional practices that go back several hundred years, currently, there are hundreds of contemporary story tellers traveling across towns and cities sharing stories with the young and the old. ST: Stories are meant to fire your imagination, and it is personal to you when your point of reference merges and transcends the author’s and storyteller’s point of view. In your performances is there a space for this and do you see that happen with your audience? AV: Imagine your being as a three piece band comprised of body, mind, and spirit. The body feels/senses, the mind thinks/imagines, and the spirit connects/provides purpose. For a piece of beautiful music to happen, all three need to listen to each other and play together. To do that they have to be healthy and happy. A story does just that. So, it is a little more than firing up imaginations or merging and transcending points of views. I think it also provides pause, joy, and nourishment to the body, mind, and spirit.

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