Cultural Narratives: Building an Identity Upon Fairy Tales

It was a tiny article published on one of the inner pages of the morning paper that first made me think about the idea of cultural narratives, which came to be one of the major themes underlying my second novel. The story was so inconsequential, I don’t even remember any of the details anymore. And neither, I suspect, do the people who wrote it over two years ago. Essentially, the piece talked about some kind of disagreement between India and Pakistan in the UN. (Surprise surprise)!

The details are irrelevant, since I’m not interested in talking about who was right or wrong. Quite honestly, I don’t remember enough about the incident to be able to make any sort of an objective judgment.

I do remember quite distinctly, though, that the article seemed to suggest (very strongly) that the Indian representatives at the UN had garnered a significant amount of support for their cause and that India had overall ‘won’ the dispute, whatever it had been about. This was never stated outright in so many words, but the vibe of the article was definitely celebratory.

Imagine my surprise, then, when a few hours later I came across an article about the very same incident while reading one of the most popular Pakistani newspapers on the Internet. Plot twist!!

The thing that fascinated me about the two versions of the incident is that, as far as I remember, the facts listed were almost identical. However, this article implied (very strongly, again) that it was in fact the Pakistani side that had garnered the maximum support from the international community.

Building a Narrative

As I said, my purpose here is not to pass judgment on the veracity (or lack thereof) of either version of the story. Truth is, it doesn’t even matter. The two articles weren’t contradicting each other about the facts. Stripped of the narrative direction and tone, the facts stated were almost identical.

But the narrative was very much there in both the pieces. The subtle hints in the phrasing and the set-up of the story would have been hard to miss for anyone over the age of fourteen. Which brings us to the most important question of all.

What is this elusive thing you call a narrative?

Well, for the purposes of this article, we’re going to be talking about cultural narratives. Cultural narratives aren’t good or bad. They just are. If you have a culture, you can rest assured that it has a narrative, whether you know it or not.

By its very nature, a narrative is a story. But it is also a story with elements of the truth. No civilization can stand for long upon a narrative based completely in fiction. So some truth is essential for a narrative to be successful. But at the end of the day, a cultural narrative is a story that aims to make a statement. To prove a point.

Making a Statement

What that point is will vary from culture to culture, and from time to time within cultures. But the fact that they have a point to prove is universal.

The thing is, though, bare facts usually don’t have a point. They just are.

Incidents don’t point smoothly and consistently in one direction. They just happen. The truth is confusing and contradictory and muddled up. There are no eternal heroes or eternal villains. Everybody is a hero and a villain at different points in time.

But a narrative that is confusing and contradictory and muddled up is not a very good narrative, is it? Would you buy that story book for your kid? I wouldn’t.

So a good narrative must pick and choose facts and incidents that help it prove its point; that enable it to make the statement that it wants to make.

And this is not to say that the storytellers are trying deliberately to be deceitful (though in some situations this might indeed be the case). The fact of the matter is that a good story is not necessarily an accurate record of events. And vice versa. An accurate record of events is not necessarily a good story.

So you have to decide on what the goal is that you’re trying to achieve. And if your goal is to create a compelling narrative for your people, artistic liberties need to be taken, with or without an insidious agenda.

Now, the question might arise, is it necessary to have a cultural narrative?

Well, I’d say it is, if you want to have a culture at all.

It’s human nature to build narratives around things. We just seem to be biologically wired to like stories. And it’s not just countries, cultures, and civilizations that we build narratives around. We tell ourselves stories about our own lives, about our own identities, all the time. It helps ground us; helps us make sense of the confusing, contradictory, and muddled reality that we inhabit.

The ultimate fact of the matter is, we’re teeny little transient balls of flesh in a vast universe that doesn’t give a shit. We NEED good stories to block out that reality.

So the next question might be, why do cultures need narratives?

After all, a culture is not an individual. It’s not even a thing, as such. It’s just this ambient sense of identity and common cause that a bunch of people feel or subscribe to at any given time. Culture can be hyperlocal or global in scope, though it’s certainly not bound by geography. Not in the age of the Internet.

The thing is, cultures are built on the basis of shared ideas. And ideas cannot exist without narratives. An accurate record of facts is an accurate record of facts. But you need a story, a narrative, to give any meaning to those facts. And meaning is inherently personal, so stories are inherently biased.

Too theoretical? Okay. Let me try and put this in concrete terms.

Why do we feel a sense of loyalty to our country (even after we have left the country), but don’t feel the same loyalty to our neighborhood, or district, or continent? All of those are geographical constructs.

Why should I be any more proud to be an Indian than I am of being a Kalikapurian (Kalikapur being the name of my neighborhood)? For that matter, why should I be more proud of being an Indian than of being a South Asian, or an Asian, or an inhabitant of the Eastern Hemisphere?

I’ll tell you why.

Because being Indian has a cultural narrative associated with it, as opposed to being a Kalikapurian or an Eastern Hemispherer.

I suppose you could say there are also some narratives associated with being Asian or South Asian, but they are certainly weaker than national narratives. There is nothing that makes the geographical construct of a country more significant than the geographical construct of a district or a continent. Nothing other than narratives and stories, that is.

The Necessity of the ‘Other’

So we need stories (a narrative) to form a cohesive identity for any group of people, just as we need them to form the identity of an individual. But there’s more to it than that.

A group is only a group if it has some members. Equally important, though, is that it is only a group if it has some non-members.

Being Indian only means anything if there are people who are not Indians. If everyone was an Indian, then Indian would just become a synonym for human. The word would lose its meaning. Similarly, being human only means anything if there are creatures that are not human. If every living creature was a human, then the word human would just be a synonym for living creature.

No matter how big or small a group is, it must have an in-group AND an out-group in order to exist. There must be people who belong to the group. And equally important, there must be those that DON’T BELONG.

A cultural narrative, therefore, provides a bedrock of common beliefs and shared ideas that identify the in-group in contrast with the out-group. The people who believe in the narrative belong; those who don’t, don’t.

And this is true for all groups, no matter how liberal or conservative. Feminism has a narrative, as does the patriarchy. Communism has a narrative, as does capitalism. You get the picture. For a culture to exist, you need a cultural narrative.

A Source of Inspiration and Unity

Another major role of cultural narratives, of course, is to provide inspiration. A good story can inspire you to do a number of things, both good and bad.

It can inspire you to go risk your life in order to defend absolute strangers who live miles and miles away. It can also inspire you to attack random strangers who live miles and miles away.

You wouldn’t go to war for your district or your neighborhood, would you? You might at best consider participating in a cricket match, but certainly nothing more dangerous than that. But you might very well consider going to war for your country.

Which doesn’t really make sense, when you think about it.

I mean, you probably know many of your neighbors and have a personal connection with a few of them. I’m pretty sure the percentage of your countrymen you know or care about on a personal level is far lower. And yet you’d be more willing to risk your life for a bunch of absolute strangers than for acquaintances whom you could at least pick out in a crowd.

This is what a cultural narrative does. It builds a sense of unity and common cause, even where there is no logical reason for a common cause to exist.

I mean, I live in Kolkata, West Bengal. My city is geographically closer to Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, than it is to Delhi, the capital of India. It is both geographically and linguistically closer to Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.

And yet, I felt the blood thrum in my veins when I watched Dangal, a movie about two Haryanvi girls representing India on the international stage. I could feel my breath catch when Geeta (one of the protagonists) won her first gold medal at the Commonwealth Games.

Makes no sense, does it though? I had nothing in common with either of the two heroines. I don’t speak Haryanvi, and I’m certainly not a wrestler. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve watched a wrestling match on TV, and still have fingers left over.

So why on earth did I feel so inordinately good about the fact that they’d won gold medals on India’s behalf at the Commonwealth Games? Why would it matter to me? Would I have been equally psyched to see them win on behalf of my district, or on behalf of the subcontinent? Maybe. I wouldn’t know. Because those movies haven’t been made. Nobody made a movie about district-level wrestling matches. That says something about our priorities, and about the power of narratives, doesn’t it?

As I said, they have the power to create a sense of unity and common cause where neither of those things have any reason to exist. Now depending on the context, that can be a good thing or a bad thing. But it definitely is a thing that we have to live with.

Whether it works for us or against us depends largely on who’s telling the stories and why.

So then, you might ask me, how do you build a narrative? What are the components that come together to create one?

How Do We Build Cultural Narratives?

Well, there are several different ways of building a cultural narrative. One of the most common (and easiest) ways is to simply repeat the same story over and over again, for years and generations, over various platforms and mediums, until people start to believe it. For best results, you should try and keep some elements of the truth in it. An easily falsifiable story won’t stand the test of time (not to mention the Internet).

Hand in hand with the promotion of one idea goes the censorship of others. By censoring and stifling contradicting versions of the story, you can create a bubble where only one version is heard and echoed over and over again.

Totalitarian regimes have been doing this for ages. We might think fake news is a new thing, but it’s really not.

Since time immemorial, people have been convincing other people that chanting a particular sequence of words in a particular way is going to please an invisible power who shall then grant their wishes.

And if that’s not false propaganda, I don’t know what is. And yet various versions of this story have been widely and sincerely believed by millions of people across numerous cultures and time periods. Across time, people have been persuaded to do all manner of amazing and ridiculous things with the help of a compelling narrative.

The world really does belong to the articulate.

So what happens when this bubble bursts?

When we find out, surprise surprise, that the narrative we’ve always believed in is in fact not the only narrative in circulation? That the world of stories is not so much a planned meal as an eat-all-you-like buffet serving multiple cuisines?

Culture shock.

Yup. Culture shock is essentially just the shock we feel when we realize that the whole world does not in fact think like us, and act like us, and believe the same things as us.

It’s a strange thing to be surprised about, but surprised we inevitably are. And not just by the way people live and think in far-off lands. But even by the way they lived and thought just a couple of generations ago. Or the way they will live and think a couple generations later.

We are as scandalized by our parents and our children as we are by the most foreign of foreigners. The past, as they say, is a different country. They did things differently there.

The same can be said of the future too.

Wait a couple decades, and you’ll get to experience culture shock without having to spend a penny on international flight tickets.

So at the end of the day, are cultural narratives good or bad?

The truth is, there’s no easy answer to that question. A narrative can definitely be a necessity.

If you want soldiers risking their lives defending arbitrarily drawn borders on a map, you need a compelling narrative to inspire them to do so. If you want people leaving the comfort of their homes on Election Day to come out and vote for a remote leader they will never meet, endorsing policies they don’t understand, you’ll need a good story to make them want to do so. If you want people to tune in to support their country for the World Cup, well, you will need a compelling narrative for that as well.

But can a cultural narrative be used for something more nefarious than that? I’m pretty sure we all know the answer to that. Enough wars have been fought and enough corpses buried in the name of faith, patriotism, and belief systems of all kinds.

The Changing Face of Cultures and Their Narratives

In recent years, the growth of the Internet has served to dismantle and disprove many of the old narratives. Some cultures have sought to counter this onslaught by (trying to) control the Internet and other forms of communication technology, with varying degrees of success. Others have tried to leverage the technology by shouting loud enough that all other voices are drowned out.

Which is not to say that you can’t build a narrative for the greater good.

The rapid acceptance of the LGBT community in countries across the globe would never have been possible without media influencers actively working to create a cultural narrative where being gay was seen as a natural and even a desirable part of one’s identity.

As ever, the problem arises when people have conflicting ideas about what constitutes the ‘greater good’.

The Internet has also given rise to new forms of culture, and by extension, new types of cultural narratives. Online information bubbles are becoming more and more common every day. Different forums and communities have their own subcultures.

There’s a vast difference between the way you’d interact with someone on Tumblr and on Quora. Reddit, 4 Chan, Twitter, YouTube…all have their own unique cultures and subcultures.

Language and topics that are deemed acceptable on one forum may well be considered completely inappropriate on another. Even the number of emoticons you use in a message might be affected to a great degree by the ‘culture’ of the platform you’re posting on.

The Future of Cultural Narratives

So is it that we humans just need to believe in some form of narrative (no matter what it is or on what basis it is formed), in order to be happy and productive? Or is the need for cultural narratives something that we shall one day rise above as we grow and evolve as a global civilization?

I don’t know. I can’t imagine what a world without these narratives would even look like. But maybe someday our descendants will find out. And maybe they too will experience some amount of culture shock when absorbing the weird tales their ancestors had taken for the truth.

I don’t have the answers. But maybe someday, humanity will.

So let me end with a quote from the book that inspired this long-winded rant of a post in the first place:

“But that doesn’t make for a good war-narrative, does it? Not much by way of a thrilling bed-time story for the children – of the victory of good over evil. Not the sort of thing you tell Hunters before you send them off to face death fighting superhuman terrorists.”

“It’s the truth, though,” Ruban said simply.

But is the truth enough? That’s the question we need to answer over the decades and the centuries that are yet to come. But there’s no rush, is there?

It’s not like we’re going anywhere.

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