[Reader-list] dastangoi

[Yousuf]

Dear Mehmood
Happy to know that someone is working on dastaans this
time at Sarai. I saw your write-up on Mid Day and have
a few comments about that (not about your first Sarai
abstract).

I doubt whether one should begin to assume that the
epic Tilism Hoshruba/Amir Hamza is religious or
'Islamic' in any way. Dastans were meant for wholesome
entertainment which may include some devotional
element too, but that probably should not limit them
to be interpreted as religious. I suppose every story
needs a hero and a villain, and the two also have to
have some kind of ideologies or agenda to fight for.
Since the dastangoe and his audience/readers are
probably ‘Muslim’, the good guys of the story are
simply using Islam to fight their war against the bad
guys. But whether this makes the story ‘Islamic’ is
open to debate. Of course, the religious folklore and
the prophets are being used, since they are part of
the popular imagination, in the same spirit as
Mahabharata or other folk kathas. In the past, there
was a lot of gray area between people’s religiosity,
entertainment and cultural expression, which is what
the narratives like the dastaans reflect. One probably
cannot use today’s standards to classify tilism
hoshruba into ‘religious’, ‘historical’ or any one
kind of literature.

As for the flowing of the wine etc., there is no
dearth of such descriptions in Urdu/Persian medieval
literature - not simply the symbolic/poetic use of
wine and intoxication, but the fact of its practical
use in the so-called ‘Muslim’ world. Of course one can
also find plenty of other ‘perversions’ in
Persian/Urdu literature, such as the same-sex love,
eroticism, vulgarity, or idolatry – often in a book
that starts by invoking the name of God and the
Prophet and so on. But that does not make them
Islamic. 

I doubt whether we can judge the ‘liberalism’ of
Muslims of that era by reading only an epic like
tilism. Today, the moment we see something in
Perso-Arabic script, we assume that its coming from
the Muslim world, and therefore must be ‘Islamic’ in
nature. Hence even the ‘perversions’ such as wine or
eroticism seem like ‘justified’ in Islam, or reflect a
liberal Muslim society, because they are written in
Perso-Arabic script. But how do we know that in the
past, when Perso-Arabic was the mainstream script in
Indo-Persian world, there didn’t exist an equally
vehement rejection of the liberal literature such as
tilism hoshruba. I guess one has to read it in context
of the other literatures being produced at that time
to judge its ‘status’ in the society.

Looking forward to your postings at Sarai.

Yousuf Saeed



--- mahmood farooqui <mahmoodfarooqui at yahoo.com>
wrote:


http://ww1.mid-day.com/columns/mahmood_farooqui/2005/january/101012.htm


		
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