Experiencing India: A Personal History

Abstract

This article is concerned with questions about cultural experience and how that experience is engaged in attempting to make sense of the world - making sense of the world is quite a good definition of storytelling. Stories may be told in the oral tradition or through more recent technologies such as writing and audiovisual media. There are powerful and complex relationships between these forms and as the stories are retold from one form to the other they acquire specific localised narrational characteristics. This process of adaptation, translation and transformation comes under the broader analytical category of intertextuality, which applies as much to cultural as to textual interaction. I will attempt to deal with both these linkages.