Writing Fictive Histories

Vayu Naidu (author 'Sita’s Ascent' and 'The Subaltern Sari')

How do we create fiction based on oral imaginations and history; how do we read fiction from historical texts? Storyteller and novelist Vayu Naidu will talk about her working methods, guiding ideas, and current project. She says:

“As a Storyteller, researching story for performance has covered interviews with individuals, and occasionally their interpretation of known and orally performed texts such as Ramayana, across rural and urban contexts in India and Nepal. As a novelist my interest is in inhabiting a local context that is straddling between tradition and change. My current project is with the Iralu, one of the diverse tribal communities living in southern India. While I visited two areas - Aanaikatti between the borders of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka, and Shaloor which is deep in the southern part of Tamil Nadu, I found a terrain rich with story, and the challenge is recording it - orally and in writing. My interest is not function as a recorder, but in creating an experiential process for the participants, of expressing their emotions and notions of time.”

Vayu Naidu is author of Sita’s Ascent , nominated for Commonwealth Book award, India (Penguin 2013), and author of the forthcoming The Subaltern Sari .

This seminar will be followed by the CCLPS Christmas Party.