Meet the Gadwali girl, Neha Bahuguna, who is taking folktales places

Neha Bahuguna aka Neha Bhai grew up in a hilly town called Rudraprayag, an important station for the pilgrims going to Kedarnath, Badrinath and Hemkund. Growing up in a quaint town like that mythological stories and folktales are a part of everyday discussions. To add to that she often heard the stories of the adventures of her ancestors in the hills.  Although, ‘life in the hills’ sounds beautiful, it is full of challenges starting from road safety, water, to schooling or learning various art forms, but challenges are a part of all lives. What came as a boon was meeting many different travellers, curious conversations, and a thousand questions about the world which is the beginning to all great ideas.

While Neha writes her own stories for performing, she purposefully borrows from social issues or mythology, and tops it with humour. She is working on her local pahadi dialect so that she can create contemporary stories in Gadwali.

She has started an event platform called BOL where various poets, writers, storytellers come together to share their work. The initiative organizes events at various places in Mumbai and Ahmedabad. BOL conducts various workshops related to storytelling and poetry for both children and adults. 

Neha graduated as a designer from National Institute of Design.  She says, whenever she took up a project, she would always make a story out of it. She has also tried her hand at writing a blog, and eventually decided to take up full time writing. There were so many topics she wanted to talk about ranging from women, sexuality to religion, but was nervous to talk about it in public.  ‘Initially I toyed with the idea of choosing something that concerns us as a society and embedding it in a light story. People found it entertaining. Saanp bhi mar jaye aur lathi bhi na toote.’, says Neha.

The journey has been really challenging for her, both economically and intellectually. It takes a lot of courage to leave behind a well-paying career, and do something completely new, especially when previous career was also very creative. There is lot of toiling to be done before getting to narrate a story on stage, there is a blank page which needs to be filled, there are ideas which need to be synced, lot of backstage practice, and ensuring that there is instant connection with the audience. 

Every day is a challenge, but she says she enjoys the end result of smiles on people’s faces and how far the story travels orally. She believes that storytelling can bring change. She remembers that one time she was conducting workshop for teens, and it reached a point where in the story had to be about a guy falling in love with another guy. One of the thirteen year old was very uncomfortable, and she said that this is against our culture. She was taken aback by the girl’s prejudice at that young age. These notions and stereotypes seep into young minds from our societal biases. She continued the workshop by narrating the story of Shikhand. 

Stories are the core of any culture, without stories, there is no culture. So reviving stories and narrating history can help us come to a peaceful resolve for many problems in the world.She is happy that there are many emerging storytellers and believes it to be a good thing. As far as her work is concerned she tries to weave real life stories interconnected with mythology in her narration keeping humour as a key ingredient.

Neha’s primary education in design taught her that it is not merely form or shape that matters but the intention and action to add value in life. Storytelling happened to her incidentally. She was writing stories for her blog, or for children’s TV show, or short animated film. She realized that she was good at making people laugh through her content. She used to go to spoken word poetry events and instead of poems decided to tell stories for which she got a positive response. This encouraged her to tell more stories and more writing followed. In her upcoming work she is focusing on building content around subjects that are considered taboo alongside creating stories in the Gadwali. She is also working on various mediums of storytelling like documentaries and graphic novel.