Even with the stress of Engineering Projects hanging over my head, I decided to take an hour and a half long break at 7:00 pm on a Monday night to go to North Quad and hear a traditional Urdu storyteller tell me his stories. And I am really glad I did.

What with our literary tradition having become so strong, there are very few stories that continue to be simply passed down orally from generation to generation without having been written down. In English, that has manifested in storytelling transforming into things like movies or reading bedtime stories to children. In Urdu, oral storytelling is more similar to a Benshi performance (See Don’t Enjoy the Silence: Translating Silent Film), except instead of translating a silent movie into words and emotions, the Urdu storytellers translate silent words into speech, emotions, and hand gestures. People will go to shows of storytelling, like people used to do to go see bards and troubadours when the oral tradition was still strong, and people can become famous through pure oral storytelling.

The storyteller that I saw that night, Mahmood Farooqui, was one of those people, who can make a living off of telling his stories. He had translated one of my professor’s translations of a Rajasthani folk tale back into the oral tradition. He wasn’t necessarily charismatic when I first saw him, but then he started telling his story, and I was captivated. Despite not understanding the language he was speaking, the lilting sounds of the Urdu danced around my ears, and I could hear the poetry he had worked into the first lines of the story. It was beautiful to hear, and on top of that, he was fun to watch! He made hand gestures along with the story to help translate the events that were happening in the narrative, and some of them were incredibly comical, like making the motions of grinding wheat in the basement as the star-crossed suitors lived out their payment for trying to win the hand of the princess. Just by the faces and hand gestures he made, I could tell how sad they were, and how they continued to be captivated by the princess’s beauty, even when they couldn’t see her. A lot of the people in the audience actually spoke Urdu, so they could actually understand him, but nonetheless, there were times when I was laughing right along with them, because he was so good at conveying the story through more than just words.

This beautiful display of storytelling prowess made me think about how powerful hand gestures are as a method of translation. Not being able to understand the language somebody is speaking forces you to take a step back and look at all the other media people are using to convey their meaning to you. Body language, tone of voice, hand gestures, and I’m sure a number of others I haven’t even thought of yet, are all ways people show what they’re thinking without expressly stating it. I had noticed body language and tone of voice before, but the hand gestures he used were really powerful for me. Without them, I would never have understood the story he was telling me. Whether it’s shooting an arrow through a nose ring or grinding the wheat in the basement for the rest of your days, hand gestures are really important in the translation of that event into the oral tradition.