The second year of working with the Laman Banjara people, some of the students from Anandshala came to stay at Harali temporarily while their parents were away during the sugarcane harvest season. Hematai was working on creating an English-Gormati bilingual picture book with them. She had worked with students at Harali School before to create an English storybook with visuals. The students themselves came up with the story and had hand-drawn visuals. Similar to the previous project, we started with storytelling sessions. Students were asked to narrate Gormati stories that could inspire a narrative for the book.

We sat in a big circle. There was a lot of excitement and a buzz of students talking amongst themselves to figure out which story was worth sharing. A few students came forward to stand in the middle and tell a story. All of them chose to tell the story in Marathi. Most of the stories could be readily identified as the ones read or narrated in Anandshala. Hematai wanted to get to the traditional stories, that they heard from their grandparents. Stories that were specific to their people.

The next instruction was to write stories with an emphasis again on Gormati stories. The next session started with some more stories in Marathi, again mostly from the Anandshala repertoire. Hematai asked if anybody had a Gormati story. A cheeky student got up and started reading from his notebook. I had seen his writing before, so seemed like he was reading his story written in Marathi and translating in Gormati on the spot. The point of getting to the ‘traditional stories’ was lost.

Next session was about seeing different storybooks for inspiration and telling/writing new stories they had never heard of. Something that they created themselves. One student came forward with a story of a mother elephant and a baby elephant. The story was a reflection of his home life combined with the story books he looked at for inspiration – animals in the forest. The story started with the mother elephant going to work leaving the baby elephant alone, the dangers involved, the hunger, the loneliness, animals tht helped and animals who wanted to ause harm. It took myriad paths settling down at some point on how with all the money that the mother earned, they were able to build a 3 storey house full of all the amenities. In short the reality of his life, the inner struggle, and his aspirations described through the elephant family.

Being part of these storytelling sessions was instructive. There was a specific expectation in the objective of getting to the Gormati stories. The expectation was that it will extract the ‘traditional’ stories. The assumptions about traditional stories probably coming from the discourse of a grandma telling stories specific to the community; or the Panchatantra as the proxy for the oral tradition of fables, stories told in guise of interactions of animals, to teach moral lessons; or the mythological stories of Ramayan, Mahabharat, or Puranas.

Is that an assumption based in specific space (urban-rural, home-school) and people? Did these children grew up listening to bedtime stories from their parents or grandparents? Or did they read a story in this particular format only in school?
In regular interactions or even in purposeful interactions like interviews, I have heard both children and adults express their opinions, experiences and such in a narrative form rather than a statements. What does that say about storytelling in this community?
What about the songs for various occasions? They are mostly stories of past and future anxieties or aspirations. For example, a women’s (mother’s??) song after a wedding describes in detail how the mother-son relationship was before and how it will change after the wife is part of the picture.
What other interactions are we missing, that we need to see? What questions can we ask, what spaces can we inhabit to see these practices?

If we are trying to acknowledge / bring in the stories of the student’s specific communities in an effort for inclusion, or to make space, can we bring in these practices and help students express their stories in the formats ingrained in their regular practice, in addition to introducing the formats and ethos of the Panchatantra stories?