Surprisingly, though I found plenty of family storytelling during my short stay, it was seen as a lost art by the Academy members. Not dying, but dead. What does seem to be missing from Indian family life is storytelling for older children and between adults. But few people recalled, during interviews, many times in past generations when storytelling was a form of evening entertainment for the entire family. Rather, storytelling was and still is an activity performed by adults for the youngest members of the family, before they learn to read.
Literacy is and has been very important to middle-class families in India.
So, if anything of storytelling has been lost, it appears to have been storytelling for adults and older children. But this kind of storytelling was possibly lost with the development of the literate middle-class of India's cities, well before television. This combination of new and old is shaped by a double-edged anxiety over tradition. On one side, the tradition of storytelling itself in Indian families is lamented as a thing of the past. Combining the character of grandmother storyteller and a figure of Indian nationalism, the Academy not only revives storytelling as an important cultural resource but also reforms it.