Delivered as both a performance and a talk, this presentation examines oral storytelling traditions of North India to map the landscape of traditional and contemporary narratives in India. The presentation identifies key elements that mark ante-modern narratives and positions these as windows to traditional and indigenous epistemologies. In addition, the informance seeks to delineate narrational faultlines that emerged during India becoming a postcolonial entity. I survey and present folk narratives from Pandavani, Dastangoi, Aalha, and Qissahs as well as modern narratives such as short stories with an emphasis on their enabling of imaginations. Ultimately, the presentation hopes to situate traditional storytelling as a valuable resource for postcolonial scholarship and to explore how its story-worlds can inform decolonized speculative thought.
https://uwmadison.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_lUp5PSMGT6OppZ_ZMSU2Fw
About the Speaker
Rahul Rastogi is a Dastangoi storyteller and Postdoctoral Research Associate in Folklore at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His work moves between oral narrative, embodied performing, and questions of historicity, with particular attention to the qissah genre of North India and Pakistan. Drawing on the rhetorical and prosodic devices of classical Urdu dastans, he explores how these forms open pathways toward speculative thought that resists both modernistic and anthropocentric frames.