This week’s post is essentially going to be a cut and paste job, and starts with a long quote from Mahmood Farooqui, who’s doing work on Dastans [epics] -
what was handed down to me as literary heritage. One was supposed to read them to improve oneís Urdu. One heard of an assortment of names, Qissa Chahar Darvesh, Bagh-o-Bahar, Fasana-e-Ajaib that fell under the Dastani tradtition but even when I read a little bit
about their production, when studying Urdu literary tradtitions at University, I never grasped the scale of their publication.
Dastans were oral narratives, much longer than a simple tale or Qissa, that usually centered around the exploits of the fictionalized personality of an Uncle of Prophet Mohammed, Amir Hamza and his family as they battle against infidel and pretentious Gods to establish the sway of righteous faith. Popular in most parts of the Islamic world, the oral narratives relied usually on a single volume tale called Dastan-e-Amir Hamza that was compiled by a variety of people in most parts of the Islamic world.
However, as I discovered when interacting with S R Faruqi, the pre-eminent modern Urdu critic, that in India this simple, one-volume story was so embellished that it stretched to a whopping 46 volumes by the legendary Nawal Kishore Press of Lucknow in the nineteenth century. Each of those volumes is a thousand pages or more, which in its totality is certainly the longest single fictional narrative composed in Urdu and probably one of the longest in the world.
This huge body of work, volumes of which were published until the 1940s, has today so vanished from our memory that not a single library in the country today has the entire 46 volume set. Further, the syllabi of Urdu in Universities prefer to gloss over this huge corpus. In the name of Dastans what is taught there is a single volume prÈcis, Mir Amanís Bagh-o-Bahar, prepared and suitably edited and bowdlerized … at Fort William College.
Yet, this mammoth literature sprang from an oral tradition and its recitation was an important cultural practice for Indo-Islamic regimes well after the onset of colonialism. We have not only neglected their literary status, we have also ignored their unique place in our dramatic and performative tradition, for Dastangos - the narrator-composer of Dastans were
usually highly accomplished actors who combined mimicry, ventriloquism, pantomime and voice modulation to command the complete attention of their audience….
Fascinating stuff. Especially since dastangoi, this brilliant epic oral tradition seems to have died out completely in India, with the death of the last master dastango in Delhi in 1928. Mahmood Farooui’s invocation is imbued with nostalgia. Ghalib once wrote - It’s raining, I have a bottle of wine, six volumes of dastans - what else could I ask for?
But is dastangoi lost to us? Is that art of storytelling lost forever in the subcontinent? There is a bazaar in Peshawar called the QissaKhwani Bazaar, the market of Storytellers/storytelling. But a humble Qissa, a mere anecdote, is not the same as an epic Dastan. And I have the suspicion that QissaKhwani Bazaar, where the caravans just in from Central Asia and Afghanistan had many tales to tell, has less time room for fantastic stories now… So Dastangoi really doesn’t have much of a hope now, does it?
But the fantastic worlds of Dastangoi that Mahmood opens to us, with their traditions of Razm, Bazm, Tilism and Aiyyari (Battle, Romance, Enchantment, (Black) Magic; are strangely familiar to me - who grew up in modern India without any access to these traditions… I don’t even read Urdu. But as far back as I remember, I’d read the stories of the wandering, puzzle solving prince, Hatim Tai and his quest for the answers to seven puzzling statements. Like, Neki kar dariya mein daal [Do good, and throw it into the river]. This was serialised in Chanda Mama, the monthly children’s magazine in Hindi. And then of course, there was the Hatim Tai film, starring Jeetendra. And a whole host of other tacky B-Grade Bollywood costume dramas replete with Tilism and Aiyyari, which kept me pretty happy as a kid.
drawn are written at the back, mean that the Dastango would stand behind the panel-folio narrating the tale and they would be changed as the scenery and action changed. Dastangoi as practice was then perhaps a proto form of Television.
On Lucknow Doordarshan, they told the story of Hatim-Tai as a series of water colour stills, slowly dissolving from one to the other, as a single deep, and occasionally lugubrious baritone voice told the mystical, philospohical story of Hatim Tai’s quest for his Zen Koans. Neki kar dariya main daal, indeed! On Indian television in the nineteen eighties, Dastangoi had pretty much the same form of narration as it had back in the time of Akbar!
And Hatim Tai has now moved on to become a totally whacked out serial on Star TV. But the true queen of them all is Chandrakanta, an immensely popular Sunday morning serial which hit us in the early nineties. It lived up to all the traditions of dastangoi - stories within stories; and of course, razm, bazm, tilism, and aiyyari. Most notably tilism and aiyyari. Who can forget Kroor Singh? Of course, Chandrakanta the serial (directed by Neerja Guleri) was based on Chandrakanta the novel (along with its ’sequel’,the Chandrakanta Santati) by Devaki Nandan Khatri, generally agreeed upon as being the first prose work in Hindi, early in the twentieth century…
So the first prose work in Hindi (as opposed to ‘Urdu’ and the largely Islamicate tradition they are identified with; though incidentally, Hatim tai was supposedly Christian!) was essentially a bowlderized dastan, the tradition of oral narrative put into print.
Fort William College, of course, was where the differences between ‘Hindi’ and ‘Urdu’ were first cultivated (I am being reductionist here, so go read Alok Rai’s Hindi Nationalism and S R Faruqi’s Early Urdu Literary and Cultural History) so it is an interesting to think about and make stupid, airy fairy generalizations - the fixing of fluid oral narratives into print; the fixing of fluid identities into distictlve religious/linguistic communities.
But the dastans lived on, in newer forms of story telling; which I guess has something to say about the redemptive, transformative power of story telling, and the power of storytelling to survive and transcend Otherness.
As I have argued elsewhere before, the adventures of Don Quixote, a dastan in the true sense of the word, were inspired by the humble qissas of Mullah Nasruddin…
What dastan e Amirhamza has to do with prophets uncle???
About the modern Dastaans, we had “Ainak wala jinn” on PTV some years ago. What fascinated me about this dastan was that it really looked like and felt like a dastan. Like one you listen live where you are all ready not to make logic of what you hear and just allow the story to fasciante you. The characters of this modern Dastan like Nastor jinn, Hamoon jadogar and Bin Batori the churail were an instant hit among children and even grownups. Though it didn’t have a carefully crafted plot and moral lessons in the end but it was some fine storytelling.
There was also a tv serial in India based on some Mulla Nasruddin stories, which was complete entertainment. It was called “mulla nasruddin”.
black magic ke barey mein aap kiya jaantey hai?
the story enchants me, superb!!!