It's All The Same!

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The series OUR MYTHS draws upon timeless stories from popular and marginal sources to gently question stereotypes and rigid notions. Through pictures and words, the retold stories encourage different ways of seeing and understanding. They carry forward the spirit of oral storytelling and show how myths change and still endure.

Pappuram and Kojaram are kaavadiya bhaats, storytellers from Rajasthan. Each has his own favourite story about why Lord Ganesha is always worshipped first, before any other god or goddess. They open their kaavads, the beautifully painted storytelling boxes, and begin - only to realise at the end of it that the stories may be different, but are still really the same!

In this is captured the nature of myths and their telling, that there is no one story about anything, it can always be this as much as that, across cultures or within the same, as here. Typical of kaavadiyas is the flat manner of narrating even improbable situations - anything can happen, that's how it is...

Nina Sabnani is an illustrator, animator and film-maker, and is currently Associate Professor at the Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay, Mumbai. Her passion for collaborative work with folk artists led to two earlier books with Tulika - Mukand and Riyaz and Stitching Stories.

With a doctoral thesis on kaavads and a brilliantly contemporized kaavad-book, Home, behind her, Nina teams up for this book with kaavadiyas Kojaram and Pappuram, and kaavad artist Satyanarayan Suthaar, to comment on how the interpretation of myths is fused in their telling and retelling in the oral tradition.