The Story And The Storyteller

How does one start a story about a storyteller? In my imagination this is the closest description of the man and his work. Balkrishna V. Doshi is the storyteller of his architectural generation, an intellectual wanderer, minstrel if you like, gathering and sharing as he moves.

- Riyaz Tayyibji

Settlement itself is momentary, as he speaks of past experiences, his own and those of his world, he speaks of futures possible, gathering in the present, diverse people: their ideas, and their dreams. He seems to have been there; at the intersection of so many lives, at the crossroads, the ‘char-rasta’, from where he tells his stories. He draws in passers-by, characters un-thought of until then. If you are close enough at hand, you are never quite sure whether you are a listener or a character in the play of things. You are drawn in and, at least for that moment, the story becomes yours. This of course is the old form of story; oral, dramatized, and never the same in its re-telling. We gather around, and the story is the centre of our socialisation.

Salman Rushdie speaks of stories as initiatory devices required of kinship. He talks about how we are assimilated into family and truly belong only once we know our family stories. With Doshi it is much the same as he has created a ‘Gharana’ around him. A ‘Gharana’ with all its implications of rules and exploration, of structure and play but most of all of domesticity. Whether his own home and family, his professional office, or the Institution he was instrumental in setting up, the story is the glue with which he holds these various ‘gatherings’ together. As he traverses the landscape of them all, it is the story that also guides him. Without the story, the gatherer has no home.