Nalin Verma: Preserving Bihar’s oral traditions through storytelling

Folklore is a repository of the community’s collective belief

Wakeel Ahmad

Enriched by his vast experience as a Journalist and Storyteller, Nalin Verma portrays Bihar’s diverse folk narratives in simple yet graceful English. His writings help preserve oral traditions, while showcasing enduring cultural, ethical, and literary traditions.

Folklore is not merely an entertaining story told by elders at dusk. It is a repository of the community’s collective belief, culture, moral values, and a tool of moral pedagogy. In Bihar—a region historically known for its intellectual revival and linguistic diversity—folklore has long served as the unrecorded but essential literature of the people. Traditionally, these folktales have been transmitted orally in languages such as Bhojpuri and Maithili. In India, the tradition of oral storytelling has thrived for centuries.  Folklore holds a significant place in the cultural landscape of Bihar, where its rich linguistic diversity and vibrant oral traditions possess a unique heritage of folk narratives that remains a vital factor in shaping its social and cultural identity. Unlike the classical Sanskrit or Persian literary canons that found patronage and print, Bihari folklore often thrived in transient spaces—passed down orally among agricultural workers, domestic women, caste bards, and wandering ascetics. As a result, many tales exist in multiple versions, varying by region, caste, gender, and even performer. What unifies them is their deep embeddedness in the rhythms of everyday rural life: the monsoon, the harvest, the wedding, the lament, the struggle for justice.

Thematically, Bihari folk narratives often celebrate the cleverness of the underdog, the courage of women, the hypocrisy of power, and the hope of divine justice. Tricksters, animals, ghosts, and mythological figures populate these stories, blurring the line between the sacred and the profane, the real and the magical. They serve didactic functions—warning against greed, glorifying devotion, or ridiculing unjust rulers—while also allowing subversive critique in a society marked by hierarchical rigidity. In this way, Bihar folklore performs a double literary act: it affirms social values while subtly challenging them.

In recent years, writers like Nalin Verma have taken on the task of translating these oral traditions into written English narratives. His 2019 anthology The Greatest Folk Tales of Bihar is a significant contribution to this field, offering thirty-seven stories curated from rural storytellers across the state. By transforming oral tales into accessible prose, Verma not only preserves these narratives for future generations but also reintroduces them into India’s literary imagination. His work underscores the literary value of folklore—not merely as anthropological data or children’s entertainment, but as legitimate cultural texts worthy of analysis, interpretation, and academic engagement.

Verma’s work also challenges the tendency to place regional oral traditions at the margins of Indian literary studies.  In doing so, it aims to restore Bihari folklore to its rightful place in Indian literary studies: not as marginal, nostalgic fragments of a fading past, but as vibrant, living texts that continue to shape and reflect the moral consciousness of a people.

Folklore, as an embodiment of cultural memory, serves as both an archive of the past and a commentary on the present. In regions like Bihar—where oral traditions have long sustained the fabric of rural life—the act of recording these stories is a form of cultural preservation, intellectual resistance, and literary enrichment. In his 2019 volume The Greatest Folk Tales of Bihar, journalist and writer Nalin Verma curates thirty-seven tales from the diverse linguistic and ethnic landscape of the state. Drawing from Bhojpuri and Maithili traditions, Verma’s anthology is not merely a collection of quaint rural stories; it is a nuanced act of ethnographic mediation, attempting to bridge the divide between oral storytelling and written literary form.

Nalin Verma, known for his journalistic work on Bihar’s politics and culture, approaches folklore with the curiosity of a cultural historian and the empathy of a native observer. Unlike many academic folklorists who analyze oral traditions from a theoretical distance, Verma engages with his material as a lived inheritance. His tales are sourced from elderly storytellers, village bards, and personal recollections, lending the work an immediacy and authenticity that cannot be replicated by detached scholarship alone. As Verma himself acknowledges in the preface, these stories have “travelled through generations without the aid of paper or print,” passed down from “grandmothers to grandchildren under the open sky or by the fire during cold winters.

Oral tradition and folklore

Nalin Verma is a key character in the study of narrative storytelling traditions due to his extensive experience as a journalist and folklore researcher who has collected and narrated folk tales from northern India and the state of Bihar. His work with folklore represents a deliberate act of cultural preservation and creative reinterpretation; it goes beyond simply documentation. One aspect that distinguishes Verma’s work is the way he frames oral stories so that they retain the authenticity and cultural character of the stories while still appealing to modern audiences. His primary works, The Greatest Folk Tales of Bihar, Lores of Love, and Saint Gorakhnath, highlight his unique role in reinterpreting the legacy of Bihar and Eastern UP. These works are significant not only because they record stories that have fallen into obscurity or are little known, but also because they reflect the people’s actual experiences, recollections, and communal life.

Verma’s storytelling practice is based on his personal experiences. As a boy growing up in a small town, he was steeped in a vibrant oral culture in which stories were passed down through generations of grandparents and village elders and recounted at community gatherings. His background in a family full of myths about gods, witches, genies, fairies, and other mythical creatures influenced his tastes as a journalist and folklorist. This duality—between factual reporting and imaginative narrative—is what distinguishes his method. His narrative technique was influenced by a variety of variables, including his journalistic training in meticulousness, documentation, and analytical observation, as well as his nostalgia for simpler times, relationship with oral tellers, and appreciation of folklore as a continuing tradition. He claims that folk stories are not static antiques, but rather living cultural expressions with moral and emotional weight even in modern times.

The fact that Verma deliberately eschewed strict academic formalism is a notable aspect of his work. His documentation and interpretation are definitely based on intellectual rigor, yet he transcends academic jargon. His technique is adaptable; he combines memories from the past into present writing while preserving the clarity, cadence, and creative depth of oral tradition. He hopes to attract readers on both an emotional and intellectual level by allowing the story to unfold naturally. By doing so, he bridges the gap between traditional oral culture and contemporary literary demands, ensuring that his stories are accessible to both specialists and general readers. The stories he tells are not simply retold; rather, they are deliberately recreated to retain their cultural relevance while making them more accessible.

The Gorakhnathi worldview, which does not discriminate based on religion, caste, or morality, serves as the philosophical foundation for Verma’s works. Much like the stories Verma recounts, the Gorakhnath tradition emphasizes introspection, self-improvement, and the destruction of social hierarchies. Through his painstaking selection of folk narratives, he reveals how disadvantaged and subaltern people have used folklore as a weapon of resistance and survival throughout history. Folklore, according to this viewpoint, is more than just a source of fun; it is a cultural instrument for opposing societal injustice, reconsidering established moral standards, and providing new models of human decency and fairness. Because of the magical realism included in these stories, they hold greater philosophical and sociological value.

Verma’s works demonstrate that folklore is alive and flourishing in the present world, as opposed to being stuck in the past. His work is valuable because he ensures that future generations can read and enjoy these oral traditions. His tale honors the spirits of the narrators while introducing Indian oral history to a larger audience through a mix of memory, history, community, and philosophy. Verma becomes more than just a recorder of Bihar’s folk culture; he becomes an interpreter who draws attention to the universal principles embedded in local traditions, allowing a wider audience to understand and be inspired by them. Nalin Verma’s work reminds us that folklore is a living tradition which renewed through storytelling and reinterpretation.