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MUMBAI, Wednesday, June 28, 2006 |
Telling Tales Mahmood Farooqui gives Pragya Tewari a lesson in the creation and performance of the dastangoi, a form that resurrects the medieval art of telling fantastic stories How did the idea of the performance come about? | |||
| Copyright 2005 BCCL. All rights reserved. |
Two men clad in pristine white, surma-eyed, regale a slightly unsure audience with stories of warfare, trickery and sorcery. That’s ‘dastangoi’ for you – a lost form of storytelling in Urdu. Bringing it back and to Prithvi this weekend are Mahmood Farooqui and Danish Hussain.
“Dastangos were those who told ‘dastans’ (stories). Recounting tales of Amir Hamza, the Prophet Mohammed’s uncle, they told narratives of his battles with infidels, sorcerers and other pretenders to divinity,” says Farooqui.
This performance consists of portions of the best-known ‘daftar’ or chapter, of the 46 volume Dastan-e-Amir Hamza, the Tilism Hoshruba or ‘enchantment that steals away the senses’.
“Because this form died out about 120 years ago, we had nothing to draw from in terms of presentation. We’re still evolving the form to suit performance values,” says Farooqui, a self-trained actor from Delhi.
One would think that as Urdu is usually considered a language of erudition and poetry, following an entire story in the language wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea. “It is only in the beginning of the performance that people are a little hesitant,” says Hussain.
“They usually pick up a thread soon and they’re just sucked in by the magic of it all.”
The Rediscovered Art of Dastan-goi
Modern audiences captivated by ancient oral stories
By Shahnaz Aijazuddinis
On a soft autumn evening in New Delhi recently, in the back garden of the IIC, I was witness to an unusual and dramatic performance. It was an oral narration in the traditional style of Dastan-goi or Kissa Khwani - that rare art of story-telling, revived that enchanted evening by two talented young performers, Mahmood Farooqui and Himanshu Tiyagi. Sometimes separately, occasionally in unison, they recited the dramatic text in a manner that held their audience spellbound for almost two hours. They were dressed identically in white kurta pajamas with muslin caps, in stark contrast to the night-black stage drop. The two performers sat in the fore-stage, close to the audience, on a simple masnad with bolsters, and used only the minimal props of a few miniature paintings to create an old world atmosphere.
The passages they had selected for recitation that evening came from the epic dastan- Tilism-e-Hoshruba – which in its time was I suppose was the equivalent of the modern fantasy Lord of the Rings. I had read the Tilism-i-Hoshruba countless times since I was an impressionable ten-year old. I knew each phrase and every dialogue in the text almost by heart. Its oral recitation held me enthralled, for this was in fact the first time that I had heard the dastan being recited, as it was intended to be when it was first popularised.
What surprised me was how a modern audience in Delhi, many of whom were hearing the text for the first time, seemed to be equally captivated. I noticed from their reactions that they were following the devious Amr Ayyar as he looted and pillaged the fabled city of Napursan. They relished his hilarious encounter with Afrasiab Jadoo (the king of wizards). They shared the tender descriptions of the two lovers – Afrasiab’s niece Tasveer and Prince Badi uz Zaman - who like traditional lovers were consumed by the flames of love at first sight.
The Tilism-e-Hoshruba, like every grand epic, is a long narrative. In its original form, it consists of seven volumes and constitutes only one of the daftars or chronicles of the Dastan of the legendary hero Amir Hamza which itself runs into forty-six daftars. The tradition of dastan-goi goes back to medieval Iran. There, dastan-gohs or narrators, inspired by the Shahnama (the story of kings composed in verse by the celebrated poet Firdausi), recited tales around camp fires, in coffee houses or even palaces. They spoke of fearless princes who with the help of tricksters called Ayyars fought evil kings; encountered and vanquished demons, magicians and jinns and of course they courted beautiful princesses, magical enchantresses or the female parizads.
The Dastan-e-Amir Hamza is ostensibly the life of Hazrat Hamza bin Abd ul Muttalib, the paternal uncle of the Holy Prophet Mohammad. Hamza had the reputation of being the strongest man of the tribe of Banu Hashim and fiercely protected his nephew against his enemies from the tribe of Quraish. He followed the Holy Prophet after he migrated to Medina from Mecca. Hamza was killed in the Battle of Uhud by a slave who had been promised his freedom by Hind, the wife of the powerful Quraish overlord of Mecca, Abu Sufiyan. The romance of Hamza may have originated from the story of another Hamza - Hamza bin Abdullah, a Persian rebel opposed to Khalifa Haroon-ur-Rashid. His equally exciting exploits and adventures were the source of many stories that could have been grafted onto the Arab Hamza, thus creating a super-hero who for being the uncle of the Holy Prophet was more acceptable.
Not surprisingly, the tales of the Hamza spread all over the Islamic world - from Anatolia to Indonesia and were translated and narrated in many local languages. They so captivated the Mughal Emperor Akbar that he recited them himself in Persian and also commissioned his atelier of artists and calligraphers to illustrate the popular text on an imperial scale. The final manuscript consisted of over a 1000 illustrations.
By the eighteenth century, dastan narrators had become an essential entertainment in courts and palaces of India where the court language was Persian, for the dastans had been originally composed in Persian. The present Urdu texts of the Hamza Nama are the legacy of the famous Munshi Naval Kishore who in the late nineteenth century commissioned and published compilations of the Hamza legend starting with the localised Tilism-e-Hoshruba
My first encounter with Tilism-e-Hoshruba was in Sialkot at the age of ten when my mother bought a version of its seven volumes, edited by the Urdu writer Raees Ahmed Jafri. The cover of that fat tome was taken from a large painting of the Tilism done by the famous Pakistani artist, Ustad Allah Bakhsh. It must have been that painting - a collage of fairies, demons, ogres, dancing girls and princes – that caught my attention. I decided to skip the florid Persianised Urdu that began each chapter and went directly into the narrative that was simpler to follow. Many years later, however, I began to appreciate the introductions that were alluring advertisements for the subsequent action. Who could resist such intriguing captions as: “The Cupbearers of the Wine of Story Telling” or the Imbibers of the Wine of Thought from the Goblet of Paper describe the narrative this way.”
I found myself ensnared by passages like: “Sharara's messenger flew to the River of Blood and standing on its banks cried out, "O King of Wizards! I have been sent by Sharara Jadoo and crave an audience with you!" It was said that so powerful a wizard was Afrasiab that if anyone called out to him from any corner of his vast empire, he would hear the call. He possessed also the magic Book of Samri, which revealed every secret to him. An army made up of clay and iron puppets carried out his commands. They could snatch anybody he needed with a swipe, like that of a hand or panja.”
For the next three months of my pre-teens, I breathed and lived within the pages of the Tilism. I followed Amir Hamza Sahib-qiran (Lord of the Auspicious Conjunction) as he followed Zamurrad Shah Bakhtri (a Persian king who claimed divinity), to the mountains of Kohistan. I went in the footsteps of Hamza’s grandson Asad Sherdil as he invaded the Tilism and came across a garden whose trellised white gateway was open “like the arms of the beloved.” I was overawed with the powers of Hamza as he breathed the Great Name on the corpse of his slain son that turned out to be made of lentil flour. I was riveted with the antics of his companion and trickster Amr who could assume any disguise and outmanoeuvre the most powerful wizards with the help of Galeem,(the cloak of invisibility) and Zambeel, (the pouch that contained a whole world); magical gifts that had been bestowed on him by the prophets.
That evening at the IIC brought the magic of the Tilism back to life. Hearing the partnership of the two modern Dastan Gohs made me realize how much our present society has been impoverished by relying on watching myths and fables of cultures other than our own into films or compressed into CDs. The whole charm of these dastans was that the audience was an active component of the narrative. By imagining the events being narrated from the stage each member of the audience was in effect picturising the action individually in his or her own mind. That night for me, as I have been translating the Tilism into English here in Lahore, the city of Delhi - the City of Djinns - became the city of Agate and Ayyars, and the IIC garden transformed into the Garden of Pleasure.
Oral fixation |  |
Lecture and performance
Introduction: Prof. S.R. Faruqui, Editor, Shabkhoon and a pre-eminent critic of Urdu and author of the best known work on Dastan-e-Amir Hamza
Followed by
By Mahmood Farooqui, actor and theatre director who was recently awarded a fellowship by Sarai to study Dastans; and Himanshu Tyagi, actor who has worked extensively with some of the leading theatre directors in India
Illustrated talk by Mahmood Farooqui
Chair: William Dalrymple
The 46 volume Dastan-e-Amir Hamza is one of the longest prose narratives anywhere in the world. Its publication followed the centuries old practice of oral recitation of the story. Today though this monumental work and the art of its recitation, Dastangoi, have become wholly marginalized.
(Collaboration: Sarai)
Review
by
Sadiqur Rahman Kidwai
Former Professor of Urdu
Two introductory lectures preceded the Dastaan-Goi. William Darymple spoke first, on the oral traditions of Rajasthan, followed by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi who spoke on the tradition of Dastaan. He particularly elaborated on the Dastane Amir Hamza, a dastaan stretching into 47 large volumes, a small part of which was retold on this particular evening. Dastaan has been one of the most popular genres in
The Dastaan Go lays a trap, woven only by words, to catch the imagination of the listeners. For different types of listeners he innovates different strategies. Famous Dastaans have been known to have continued night after night. The Arabian Nights was originally known as Alf Laila wa Laila, which means one thousand and one nights. The original Dastaan is in Arabic and is said to have been narrated continuously over one thousand and one nights.
Story telling is as old as human civilisation. Stories were passed on from generation to generation. Most of our heritage-knowledge, religions and philosophies and tales of valour of hero and heroines, social customs which have come down to us, have been preserved in memory and transmitted to later generations orally. Also, travellers, rural folk, urban elite, Kings and courtiers found a good pastime in Dastaan.
The origin of a large number of theses stories is not traceable. The make- believe landscape in which these stories grow is the product of the imagination of the story teller. Flights of fantasy lift one into the land of fairies and ghosts, into the company of Saints and Divine, courts of the King. The magic would easily transform immediate settings into hell or heaven. The beauty of such stories lies in the style of the narrative. The same stories have been told and retold for centuries. Each time a story is told, one finds a certain freshness in the rendition. The story teller is fully within his rights to mix up the episodes of various stories and add any thing from his own imagination. The essential element is the effort to perpetuate mystery while the listener’s expectation has to be kept up by bringing in astonishing events one after the other.
The curiosity of the listener is never allowed to be satisfied. There were professional story tellers who carried on and perfected their craft. Some of them became as popular as poets or preachers. The story goes that once a Dastaan-Go was employed by the King. He was portraying the emotions of a separated lover waiting for his beloved, when came the news from home that some one was seriously ill. The Dastaan-Go called his son and asked him to continue till he returned. When the father came back after a month he found the son still narrating the restlessness of the lover waiting for his beloved!
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It has enchanted both the prince and the pauper. From the court of Akbar in Fatehpur Sikri, to the Qissa-Khvani Bazaar in Peshawar, to the by-lanes of old Delhi,‘dastans’— symbolising the perfect bonding of literature and performing art have not only entertained people since time immemorial,they have been an outstanding example of prose narration in Urdu. But in what might be considered as another instance of cultural neglect,this art of story telling, where the narrator used to perform the characters through voice modulation, mimicry, ventriloquism and spontaneous composition, has sunk into oblivion as today there is no expert, book or account that can shed light on this remarkable tradition.
It is the vitality of the text and the elements of creativity and improvisation in performance which attracted young theatre artist Mahmood Farooqui into the magic world of dastans and the dastangois or the narrators.
Presently working on a research project, this Rhodes scholar is trying to revive the “culture of story-telling” by ensuring that this unique form of verbal art gets its rightful place in Urdu cultural tradition. Through his project, that includes translating a few volumes of dastans, performing them at stage shows and making a film on the art form, Mahmood sets a “modest” goal for himself— revivification of interest in the craft.
Elaborating on the nature of this unique art form Mahmood says, the word dastan means a tale, but longer than a qissa. Thus, a dastangoi might carry on for days and weeks telling stories. Originally composed in Persian, versions of dastans gradually spread to all languages of the Islamic— from Indonesia to Azerbaijan, East Bengal to Constantinople.
The most famous of these purported to deal with the life and adventures of Amir Hamzah, the Prophet’s uncle. “The stories had a moral— victory of the righteous over the sinner. But even the righteous had his pitfalls showing that to err is human and there is nothing like a perfect human being,” says Mahmood.
Akbar’s patronage
Popular in India since the eleventh century, the art form acquired immense prestige because of emperor Akbar’s personal interest in it. He not only memorised great portions of the story and used to recite and perform them with élan, he also commissioned an illustrated version of it, the great Hamzanama, regarded as the crowning glory of Mughal Art.
However, the dastan came into its own in India only in the 19th century when it began to be composed in Urdu. The “Indianised” dastans had a lot of common elements and storylines with the Ramayana, Mahabharata, Jataka and the Panchatantra. For example, the story of Ram killing the demon Marich, who was in the disguise of a golden deer, had been modified in a number of dastans. In 1881, Munshi Nawal Kishore, the legendary publisher from Lucknow, decided to come out with a multi-volume edition and in 1905, the 46 volumes of the Dastan-e-Amir Hamza were published.
But more interesting than the text was its narration as the dastangoi used to recite the stories along with the sub-plots from memory and the quality of his performance used to depend on his capacity to improvise.
Their performance required exceptional command over rhetoric, delivery, mimicry, ventriloquism and spontaneous composition. Moreover, dastangoi was one aspect of an oral/performative culture where the public arena — market place, roads, chowks, was the first and perhaps the most natural site of performance.
“For example, when a dastangoi used to perform in front of a kebab shop in old Delhi, he used to select his stories according to his audience. Since there was no stage, no dazzling costume and no music, the narrator used to chose the language, words and poems in such a way that he could hold the attention of his audience for a long time,” says Mahmood. Citing the example of the last famous dastangoi of India Mir Baqr Ali, Mahmood says, “While he was reciting the dastan, if a king appeared in the story, the listeners felt themselves standing before an imperious monarch.
Sometimes, if he spoke the words of some old woman, he adopted the very style of speech of respectable elderly ladies, as if he does not have a single tooth”.
Whenever, the story had a description of a marketplace, the narrator used commoners’ language. But soon after the narration might have a court scene and the dastangoi would switch over to sophisticated Persian with equal élan.
Although dastans continued to be published till well into the 1940s their popularity, both as a printed story and as a live performance, had clearly waned. While changing times might explain the decline of the form, what is inexplicable is the way their memory has been virtually effaced from our literary and performance history, says Mahmood.
Though the main stories were based on the tours of Hamzah and his family to far off lands, ostensibly in the cause of Islam, the sub-plots also included secular activities such as wining, seducing, abducting and the amorous affairs of men and women.
