Tale as Useful Artefact: Basavaraj Naikar’s The Thief of Nagarahalli and Other Stories

Abstract

Every real story,” Walter Benjamin declared in “The Storyteller”, his famous essay of 1936, “… contains, openly or covertly, something useful”. The great Jewish-German
critic goes on to specify: “The usefulness may, in one case, consist in a moral; in another, in some practical advice; in a third, in a proverb or maxim. In every case the
storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.”1 Benjamin was of course writing about the tradition of storytelling that may be variously called oral