Arnie a Hindu hero? Tell me another one

Vayu Naidu's inventive stories are enthralling Birmingham's children. Chris Arnot reports

A class of 13-year-olds sits entranced while Dr Vayu Naidu tells them a story. Three stories, to be precise: Little Red Riding Hood, Rumpelstiltskin and an ancient Punjabi folk tale.

Dr Naidu, the first person to be awarded a PhD in story-telling from a British university, is very adept at adapting her fund of stories to suit her audience. The epic Indian folk tale Ramayana, for instance, has been told and retold many different ways since 400 BC. But only one version contains passing references to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Budget and the turnover of managers at Aston Villa.

Terina Dickinson, the head of performing arts at Swanshurst, a girls' comprehensive in Birmingham, is convinced of the educational value. "She can talk to a class of 13-year-olds for an hour and 10 minutes and you can hear a pin drop," she says. "Nearly 50 per cent of our pupils are Asian and, to them, she is a tremendous role model.

"She does workshops with those who are bilingual, which gives a boost to their confidence. And for all our girls, she helps to increase their awareness of different cultures and improve their confidence and verbal assurance. They're encouraged to come up with their own stories."

Dr Naidu's performances are visual as well as verbal. She brings into schools the theatrical arts she has developed as a performer, first in India and later across Europe. Her bare feet peep from beneath a gold sari as she moves gracefully about. The voice is clear yet hauntingly seductive. The dark, limpid eyes and twirling, bejewelled fingers are almost hypnotic as she draws in her audience. The rasa, the intellectual and emotional juices of the story, are beginning to flow.

Her own grounding in India's oral tradition came principally through her grandmother. "To her, Diwali (the Hindu festival of light) was not just about eating and drinking. There was a story to be told, and sometimes acted out, with her directing and us children taking part. In India we learn our moral values through stories rather than strictures."

But children in modern Britain have many conflicting pulls on their attention, not least from an increasingly visual mass media. How can simple story- telling hold their attention?

"We forget how much action there is in a story. The narrative is one long arc and the listeners travel at the same speed as the teller. A novel can be put down, but a verbal story has to carry the audience to the end. You have to touch on some spiritual core in the listeners. It's almost a chemical reaction, a deeply intense experience."

And one, incidentally, that seems to be going down extremely well with some Birmingham schoolchildren.