Thinking Out of the Story Box: Creative Writing and Narrative Culture in South Asia

Abstract

How are the oral repertoires of cultures reconstituted by their acts of writing? Writing, this paper argues, is a sort of ‘box’ that serves to contain the creative productions of script cultures. Like a box, it stores and preserves the legends and stories, the quotidian speech acts of greeting, declaring, promising or ordering as well as the fundamental scientific conjectures and dreams that animate all speech communities. Unlike a run-of-the-mill box, however, writing also acts upon and redesigns the cognitive materials that it holds, formatting inchoate information into ‘knowledge packets’ that can be efficiently transmitted across time and space. In this unique characteristic lies its almost unlimited power over the human imagination. Yet it is worth noting that writing is a relatively recent linguistic invention which experts calculate is no more than eight or nine thousand years old at most. To put things in perspective, written scripts came along at least 40,000 years after humans began to talk and exchange meanings. This paper will attempt to explore some of the cognitive and cultural issues involved in using the powerful but still evolving medium of written scripts for ‘creative’ purposes in a region like Asia that comprises half the illiterate population of the world. It will do so by looking at a device commonly known as a kavad or ‘story-box’ in India. The kavad is used to illustrate and amplify oral performances of storytelling. In contrast to the metaphorical ‘writing-box’ that I have invented for the specific purposes of this paper, it is a longstanding and integral part of material culture in northern India and in particular the state of Rajasthan. It has a tangible presence and can be handled, opened, closed, broken, mended, reassembled and even carried on one’s shoulders. Most importantly, it is a shared narrative resource and a reservoir of emotional empathy. The paper seeks to show how individual acts of creative writing in South Asia, not to mention creative writing courses, can benefit enormously from paying greater attention to the sophisticated modes of oral storytelling exemplified by inventions like the kavad. This narrative heritage and the rich participative culture that it engenders is at once identifiably ‘Asian’ and indubitably universal: consequently, the relevance of the ‘story-box’ in the age of the comic-book, the graphic novel and interactive computer story-games should not be underestimated.