Death of fairies

Originally published in Himal Southasian, July '09

Fire-side tale-telling, once prime-time after-dinner entertainment among families in Bhutan, is fast being replaced by the flashier diversions of TV and internet. In fact, some have claimed that the fairies and dragons are already dead. But emergency action is already underway.

The Center of Bhutan Studies (CBS), in association with the International Centre for Ethnographic studies in the US, organised a three-day conference in Thimpu – starting June 29 – to resuscitate the neglected princes and princesses of legend, and preserve this corner stone of their heritage. It was attended by nine foreign participants and ten Bhutanese folklorists, and Her Royal Highness Ashi Sonam Dechan Wangchuck opened proceedings. In her speech, she lamented the rise of new media and the inroads it was making into the oldest and most potent expression of individual and cultural creativity. She blamed its demise for weakening of social bonds and moral values in primarily urban areas, and urged mothers to repeat to their children the stories from their childhood.

Such a measure may seem a little desperate, even comical, as with the institutionalisation of any organic, cultural practice. You can imagine the scene: rows of bored government and press officers, listening to an enthusiastic entertainer tell the one about the monk and the squirrel. The associated, ‘optional Bon festival and village story telling tour’ will further massage cynics. But this is a country that still prizes growth in Gross National Happiness above any shallow, economic considerations, like alleviating poverty or building infrastructure. A story telling conference is simply par for the course.

The conference seeks to identify and celebrate the particular cadences of story telling, the music of the language and the often physical performance of teller. The telling of a tale in Bhutan is often an act of theatre in itself, from the symbolic gestures proscribed to the importance attached to embodying a story’s characters, the voices and all. But one of the conference’s principle aims is to capture the art on video and tape, and so integrate it into the mass media – so they hope.

Stories in the oral tradition aren’t, by definition, backed up on hard-drives; they live and die by those who tell them. The threat of loss is very real. But with preservation comes ossification: the vitality of oral story telling is its mutability, the freedom of the tale-taller to drop and add what he chooses, permitting the stories relevance for each new generation. To set the tales in stone – or rather, megabytes – might well condemn them to future irrelevance, to be discarded in favour of this week’s TV serial. They can only truly survive in the public imagination through re-telling – but this can be achieved equally through modern media. Note how the Ramayana has found a new life in Indian comic books and movies – to Indian kids it is not simply a dusty old text. Such reinventions, though often crass, are not desecrations of the original stories, but merely the natural progression of the art of story telling. To focus overly on the traditional cadences and theatrical tropes, while laudable in protecting a fragile heritage, can only restrict creative adaptation. Folktales must adapt to new media or die a slow, unmourned death.