[Reader-list] DASTANS AND THEIR “WRITERS”

[mahmood farooqui]

THE GATHERERS ARE EAGER-O JAH
DASTANS AND THEIR “WRITERS”




I have now finished reading the first volume of the
Tilism-e-Hoshruba. There is now a mere nine more
volumes to go of this series. After that some thirty
six more volumes remain of the Nawal Kishori
Dastan-e-Amir Hamza, composed in Lucknow at the turn
of the century. 
I have also read the one volume edition of the
Dastan-e-Amir Hamza, published by Nawal Kishor Press
too. There are several other published single volume
editions of this Urdu Dastan. Then there are other
Dastans too with other protagonists, other events and
other Tilisms. 

The single volume edition of the Dastan-e-Amir Hamza
that I read is ascribed to Syed Abdullah Bilgrami. The
end page declares that for the fourth edition,
published in 1887, the story was corrected and
reworked by Syed Tasadduq Husain, a writer employed by
the Press. However Abdullah Bilgrami virtually
plagiarised a version produced by Ghalib Lucknawi
which was published in Calcutta in the 1850s. The
edition today continues to be named after Abdullah
Bilgrami showing how a newly introduced print culture
can immortalise you for nothing.

The tradition of printing Dastans began at the Fort
William College, established at Calcutta at the turn
of the century to introduce the freshly arrived
Englishmen to the languages of the region they were to
administer. Khalil Ali Ashk, who claimed to belong to
a line of Royal Dastango serving the Mughalia
Sultanate, was employed at the College and translated
a brief Persian Dastan into Urdu. This same version
was then amended a little by Ghalib Lucknawi,
mentioned above, which then came to be known after
Abdullah Bilgrami and remains in print today. 

In these cases, as in the case of the 46 volume Nawal
Kishori version, the writers also happened to be
narrators. It is not entirely clear whether they first
recited these huge volumes which were simultaneously
transcribed by scribes or whether they dictated it to
writers or they themselves wrote it in hand. In most
cases they make tall and exaggerated claims about
merely conveying, with a few suitable changes and
innovations, an old and ancient tale. But then, in all
oral cultures antiquity is always attributed to any
text or utterance to make it respectable. Obviously
the Nawal Kishori writers could not have had any
predecessors in terms of the scale of their work. As
we have noted the longest version, in Persian, ran
into a few volumes while outside India it was usually
a single volume edition that remained popular. 

It is obvious that these forty six volumes emerged
from a pre-existing culture of narration, but whether
the composed works relied in their entirety on an oral
heritage is a moot question. These writers thus made
up the stories as they went along but whether the act
of composition was written or oral is indeterminate.
We do know that Mohammed Husain Jah, who wrote the
volume of the Tilism which I read and Ahmed Husain
Qamar were both Dastangos and it was perhaps clear to
them that these Dastans should be recited orally or at
least that the oral narration of the Dastans should be
based on the written text.

Ratan Nath Dhar Sarshar, one of the founders of Urdu
prose fiction says in the gloss to one of the volumes
that ‘people nowadays employ Dastangos and get them to
recite from this text.’ Sarshar himself wrote a
picaresque and huge work called Fasana-e-Azad which
some regard as Dastans. However, while retaining the
element of adventure and travel, Sarshar took out all
the supernatural elements quintessential to Dastans
[the Tilism, sorcery, trickery] thus rendering his
work as an anti-Dastan, in many ways. 

Whether these texts were original fictional
composition or transcriptions of oral narration, their
outstanding literary quality cannot be gainsaid. The
prose that I encountered in this single work ranges
from the most high-falutin Persianised idiom to the
most demotic and plebeian speech of Eastern UP and its
environs. The haute couture and the hoi-polloi mix
exceedingly fluently in the Dastani world. The
linguistic patois of courtesans, menial workers such
as Dhobis, wine-makers, gardeners, shepherds as well
as poets, Nobles and Kings finds representation in
virtually every page of this Dastan. Words, usages,
idioms and phrases that have been lost to us because
of disuse and because of the politics of linguistic
changes over the last century have survived intact in
these works. In fact the contemporary resonance of
those phrases and usages is amazing. 

Having read this supposedly most Persianised and
difficult of Urdu texts, with a reputation for arcane
terminology, to people who had very little knowledge
of Urdu I was startled to discover the ease with which
they could comprehend the text and appreciate its
simple and rustic tone. But make no mistake, great
sophistication and skill lies behind that apparent
charm and simplicity.

When W D Fallon came to compose one of modern Urdu’s
greatest dictionaries in the nineteenth
century-instructively he called it Hindustani-English
dictionary-he expressed serious lament that the high
scholars of language have consigned many common and
popularly used words, phrases and nouns-especially of
the erotic and sexual type-to extinction. He made it a
point to fill his dictionary with the commonest and
earthiest of words. However, if the prose of the
Dastans is kept in the mind the passing that Fallon
was lamenting seems to have been very much present and
thriving long afterwards. 

A fresh approach to the Tilism-e-Hoshruba may yet
succeed in creating something that the father of the
nation strove hard for without success: the
regeneration of a Hindustani idiom and usage that is
at once demotic, inclusive, democratic and colourful.
Each Dastan within a Dastan can reasonably lay claim
to playing up all the nine Rasas, but equally these
mammoth works must also be seen as a repository of
coinage, wordsmithery and popular speech that has been
lost to us because of colonial interventions into the
arena of language and everyday speech. The Dastans
have much to teach us about literature, prose,
language, fiction, invention, magic and magic-realism.
That there are forty six volumes of them makes them
one of the most outstanding artifacts of our common
and shared linguistic and cultural heritage. 









		
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