[Reader-list] first posting

[mahmood farooqui]

MAHMOOD FAROOQUI- FIRST POSTING for sarai fellowship
on Dastangoi: The Culture of Story telling in Urdu. 

While I have been aware of the existence of something
called Dastans in Urdu literature, I had never
mustered courage to pick up the odd volume that I
chanced upon. A large-sized book in arcane print,
often illegible, they always occupied the fringes of
what was handed down to me as literary heritage. One
was supposed to read them to improve one’s 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 narration, much longer than a simple
tale or Qissa, that usually centred 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 narration relied
usually on a single volume tale called Dastan-e-Amir
Hamza that was written 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 précis, Mir Aman’s
Bagh-o-Bahar, prepared and suitably edited and
bowdlerized by the colonial Orientalists 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. 

Last week I went to meet a scholar of medieval
Hindi-Urdu romance traditions. He told me about an
exhibition based on the Hamzanama, the illustrated
text of the story commissioned by Akbar that was the
first major art project undertaken in the young MUghal
Empire. His guess is that the large size of the folios
in that exhibition, as well as the fact that episodes
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. 

My idea in this project is two fold. To draw attention
to this mammoth and criminally neglected part of our
artistic heritage. And to explore the possibility of
an enactment-performace that gives us a window to its
popularity. 

Before this project I have been involved with the
electronic and print media, where I have freelanced as
a columnist and have acted in a feature film. Earlier,
I did a degree in M Phil in modern Indian History. I
hope to use the material and resources thrown up by
this study to make a film about the tradition. 





	
		
__________________________________ 
Do you Yahoo!? 
Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. 
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail