In one of his multi-volume studies on Dastangoi (an epic or dastan in itself), Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, the scholar nonpareil whose writings inspired me to revive Dastangoi, mentions how Ahmed Husain Qamar, one of the great dastangos of 19th century Lucknow, prepared these oral stories for printing. Qamar would dictate several stories at once, with no less than nine different scribes simultaneously furiously writing down different episodes and stories from the saga of Amir Hamza and his descendants, without faltering or stumbling even once. Qamar, and his peers like the genius Mohammed Husain Jah, never had a problem creating a new work, or a new chapter in the old story. They could just think it up – oh, the thinks they could think up when they thought! They lived in an oral culture where people could memorise hundreds of books and thousands of verses, and anyway, they were masters of the art of improvisation and extempore composition.
Alas, I don’t have even zero point one percent of the learning and ability of the old Masters, not just because I have not had the training, but also because I don’t have their kind of informed and learned audience either. So I have to commit the sin, as the great Albanian writer Ismael Kadare pointed out, of murdering the oral by putting it on paper first, much in the way they prepare a script in theatre or films.
I have been working on a new dastan on the painter SH Raza, whose centenary falls this year. His life is the story of modern art in India, and of the Progressive Artists Group, of course, but also of his beautiful French wife, Janine Mongillat, a famous artist herself, their summer house in Gorbio, in the south of France, his extended family in Pakistan, where his brother Ali Imam emerged as an influential artist, of his high life in Paris, where Cartier-Bresson photographed him and Pandit Ravi Shankar and Ustad Amir Khan performed at his home, of his love for the Narmada and the forests of Satpura where he grew up, his deep interest in Hindu philosophy, Urdu poetry and French existential literature, and his ruminations on art, poetry, life. It is all too much to present in an hour, but my bigger challenge is to present it as a story. I have to bring theatricality into it, without being theatrical. I work in a popular medium so my second big challenge is to tell it in a popular way but at the same time to be able to say something new to connoisseurs too. I aspire to emulate the poet Mir when he said,
Sher Mere Hain Go Khawas Pasand
Par Mujhe Guftugu Awam Se Hai
Although it is the elite who appreciate my verses
My audience is with the everyman everywhere
At its best, Dastangoi is the perfect fusion of literature and performance. Sometimes, therefore, a literary topic lends itself well to the humour and narrative grandeur that have been the hallmark of Dastangoi since the first day of its revival. This is chiefly because traditional dastangos have left behind tales which are unsurpassable in their richness and in their libertarian imagination. As Marina Warner says in her recent study of the Arabian Nights, Stranger Magic, “the genre of farfetched preposterous tale spinning that the Nights (or in this case, the Dastan-e Amir Hamza) represents, created a perfect forum for another kind of liberty — of the imagination. The fantasy allowed the tellers to conduct thought experiments — to take off on flights of reason. There is a kind of psychological nonconformism at work here where different regimes of authority, emancipated erotics, and prophetic technological innovations operate.” This unreconstructed pre-colonial imagination, combined with a breathtaking mastery over words, allowed them to create narratives and stories that are beyond our modern capability. But we, a pale shadow of a pale shadow, try. It is easier to treat a subject like Partition — surreal, absurd, phantasmagoric — in the Dastangoi format, or the Dastan-e Sedition (woven around the sedition case against Dr Binayak Sen), or folk stories, a universal hit.
Unlike modern theatre in India, Dastangoi’s appeal is not restricted merely to the bourgeois and therefore, since it bridges the intractable class divides in India, one must construct stories that speak to the uneducated too. Folk is a great unifier. Dastan-e Chaboli, which I wove around the great Rajasthani writer and folklorist Vijay Dan Detha’s story, itself a reworking of folk stories found in such collections as Betal Pacheesi, has been in performance for 11 years now, and has seen hundreds of outings in places as diverse as Hong Kong, Jabalpur, Michigan, US, and Gorakhpur, and always entertains no matter who performs it, nor if the audience is rich expatriates or first time visitors to a performance.
A Dastangoi performance like Mantoiyat, in contrast, will appeal only to those who know Manto, or Bombay or Urdu literature. But because the subject itself led such a tumultuous life, was so given to wit and humour and pranks, and was so outspoken and self referential, and explicit about his times, it was easier to tell his story in this form. Humour, therefore, helps transgress the strangeness of the subject and of language.
The curious case with Urdu in India is that one man’s Urdu is another man’s Hindi and one man’s Urdu is another man’s Persian. There is no single standard of what constitutes difficult Urdu, and sometimes elderly people, or people who have never been to school, are more familiar with Urdu than the educated. People who have truck with the performing arts also have more familiarity with Urdu, because of their deep roots in our common Islamicate cultural past. The great French philosopher Walter Benjamin’s observation that uneducated elderly women are the greatest repository of culture in a society holds particular valence for us. You can’t take that elderly woman to a Vijay Tendulkar or Girish Karnad play, but you can profitably bring her to Dastangoi.
Above all, Dastangoi is unique in India because our work, I should say my work, has allowed for a new narrative form to emerge, which others are now emulating, sometimes poorly. Dastangoi is a performative essay, a story, and an oral sketch or portrait, all rolled into one. In a storytelling performance, the teller can take the audience in any direction she likes, and as long as the audience is enraptured it doesn’t matter whether she recounts abstruse mathematical theorems, or jokes. Asides, even long ones, are welcome. Since we don’t pretend to be creating an alternative reality there is no third wall and we can directly converse with the audience, like a singer does. We can stop the performance where we like.
Dastangoi has allowed for a new dimension on stage. Earlier, if one wanted to say something about, say, Kabir from the stage, one would have to deliver a lecture, or stage a (musical) play, or write a biography. Now, you can do all three, and more, in a single performance. And having two performers, an innovation I have brought into modern Dastangoi, brings in jugalbandi, hence theatricality, and allows for easy switching and the covering of narrative gaps. Modern Dastangoi has also brought in a new language of narration, which partakes sumptuously of poetry, which is more spoken Hindustani than ornate Urdu, but still sufficiently lyrical. When Poonam Girdhani of the Dastangoi Collective writes and performs the Dastan-e Budhha, or when Ainie Farooqui writes and performs, with Nusrat Ansari, Dastan-e Bhagat Singh or Jallianwala Bagh, they are not only telling an old familiar story but creating a new presentation, a new narrative arc to retell the old. That is to say, they are telling these stories in a way they have never been told before. And style or form, as we should know by now, is itself content, just as words and thoughts are action too. So what we have is a new form, in a new narrative, in a new linguistic style, generating new contents and thoughts.
When I pick up a pre-existing text like Rag Darbari, a cult classic, or Tagore’s Ghare Baire, my endeavour is to convert a text meant for reading (orally dead) into an oral story, which obviously means retelling, but a retelling which is much more than providing a precis of the story. I have to bring a dastanic flavour to it, and that can only come with poetry, and by creating a sticky text. In classical music, a singer sometimes leaves the landscape of a raga or a ghazal and brings in something cognate but new, which they call girah lagana. Dastangoi texts are also collages, full of different kinds of annexations. If I speak of politics, it makes eminent sense to rope in the great Ibn-e Khaldun, the pioneer of modern sociology, or Plato’s Republic, or Machiavelli. Tagore’s novel, set in the throes of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, automatically invites folk songs about 1857. Learning and research is a prerequisite for Dastangoi but it is their deployment for pleasurable consumption which makes it useful.
The first and most important criterion for creating a new dastan is that it must regale. It must evoke delight, joy, laughter. It can do so through shringar rasa or veer rasa, or hasya rasa (ideally as many as possible) but it must not be a boring performance that one respects simply because it is hoary. It is no good asking people to come to watch you just because you are involved in reviving Indian culture and heritage, so to say. People must be entertained but also must be startled. When I present Dastan-e Karn Az Mahabharata, I hope to surprise Muslims and Hindus alike by alerting them to the number of Urdu and Persian renditions of that great Indian text; but I must also shock them by highlighting the startling similarities between the Gita and the Quran, between Vedanta and Sufism. Everybody knows the story of Karna, so what good is it if I just tell the story as it is? But if I can tell of the Muslim Mewati singers of Karna from Haryana, and of the Dalit villagers of Tamil Nadu who revere him as an anti-caste rebel, and simultaneously present the story in a new ecology, in an Indo-Persian ecology, so to say, and withal hold the attention of the Pandit, and the pundits, as well as the Mullah, then I would have done something that makes Kabir proud.
And it is only the form of Dastangoi which can allow us to present the millennia of stories and wisdom contained in India’s pre-colonial traditions of singing, poetry and mythology. As we prepare to present a new edition of the Panchatantra, I am convinced that it is only this form of Dastangoi which can allow us to create resonant modern narratives about Tukaram, about the Shaiva Alwar saints, about the Sangam poets, about the Rajtarangini, about Nizamuddin Auliya and Mirza Raushan Zamir Nehi, about Kautilya and Bhashya and Nagarjuna and Abhinavgupta and Panini and Kalidasa and Mir and Ghalib. That Dastangoi is now being presented in Marathi, Gujarati, and Bengali is the greatest obeisance I could have paid to the life and writings of Shamsur Rahman Faruqi and to the glorious tradition, hundreds of years long, of Indo-Persian storytelling.
Mahmood Farooqui has been working to revive Dastangoi, the Art of Urdu storytelling for 17 years now. A recipient of the Ustad Bismillah Khan Award, he has trained dozens, compiled and written scores of modern Dastangoi texts, and has performed Dastangoi in festivals around the world, from New York and Singapore, to Bombay and Gorakhpur. He runs the Dastangoi Collective with producer Anusha Rizvi.
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In one of his multi-volume studies on Dastangoi (an epic or dastan in itself), Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, the scholar nonpareil whose writings inspired me to revive Dastangoi, mentions how Ahmed Husain Qamar, one of the great dastangos of 19th century Lucknow, prepared these oral stories for printing. Qamar would dictate several stories at once, with no less than nine different scribes simultaneously furiously writing down different episodes and stories from the saga of Amir Hamza and his descendants, without faltering or stumbling even once. Qamar, and his peers like the genius Mohammed Husain Jah, never had a problem creating a new work, or a new chapter in the old story. They could just think it up – oh, the thinks they could think up when they thought! They lived in an oral culture where people could memorise hundreds of books and thousands of verses, and anyway, they were masters of the art of improvisation and extempore composition.
Alas, I don’t have even zero point one percent of the learning and ability of the old Masters, not just because I have not had the training, but also because I don’t have their kind of informed and learned audience either. So I have to commit the sin, as the great Albanian writer Ismael Kadare pointed out, of murdering the oral by putting it on paper first, much in the way they prepare a script in theatre or films.
I have been working on a new dastan on the painter SH Raza, whose centenary falls this year. His life is the story of modern art in India, and of the Progressive Artists Group, of course, but also of his beautiful French wife, Janine Mongillat, a famous artist herself, their summer house in Gorbio, in the south of France, his extended family in Pakistan, where his brother Ali Imam emerged as an influential artist, of his high life in Paris, where Cartier-Bresson photographed him and Pandit Ravi Shankar and Ustad Amir Khan performed at his home, of his love for the Narmada and the forests of Satpura where he grew up, his deep interest in Hindu philosophy, Urdu poetry and French existential literature, and his ruminations on art, poetry, life. It is all too much to present in an hour, but my bigger challenge is to present it as a story. I have to bring theatricality into it, without being theatrical. I work in a popular medium so my second big challenge is to tell it in a popular way but at the same time to be able to say something new to connoisseurs too. I aspire to emulate the poet Mir when he said,
Sher Mere Hain Go Khawas Pasand
Par Mujhe Guftugu Awam Se Hai
Although it is the elite who appreciate my verses
My audience is with the everyman everywhere
At its best, Dastangoi is the perfect fusion of literature and performance. Sometimes, therefore, a literary topic lends itself well to the humour and narrative grandeur that have been the hallmark of Dastangoi since the first day of its revival. This is chiefly because traditional dastangos have left behind tales which are unsurpassable in their richness and in their libertarian imagination. As Marina Warner says in her recent study of the Arabian Nights, Stranger Magic, “the genre of farfetched preposterous tale spinning that the Nights (or in this case, the Dastan-e Amir Hamza) represents, created a perfect forum for another kind of liberty — of the imagination. The fantasy allowed the tellers to conduct thought experiments — to take off on flights of reason. There is a kind of psychological nonconformism at work here where different regimes of authority, emancipated erotics, and prophetic technological innovations operate.” This unreconstructed pre-colonial imagination, combined with a breathtaking mastery over words, allowed them to create narratives and stories that are beyond our modern capability. But we, a pale shadow of a pale shadow, try. It is easier to treat a subject like Partition — surreal, absurd, phantasmagoric — in the Dastangoi format, or the Dastan-e Sedition (woven around the sedition case against Dr Binayak Sen), or folk stories, a universal hit.
Unlike modern theatre in India, Dastangoi’s appeal is not restricted merely to the bourgeois and therefore, since it bridges the intractable class divides in India, one must construct stories that speak to the uneducated too. Folk is a great unifier. Dastan-e Chaboli, which I wove around the great Rajasthani writer and folklorist Vijay Dan Detha’s story, itself a reworking of folk stories found in such collections as Betal Pacheesi, has been in performance for 11 years now, and has seen hundreds of outings in places as diverse as Hong Kong, Jabalpur, Michigan, US, and Gorakhpur, and always entertains no matter who performs it, nor if the audience is rich expatriates or first time visitors to a performance.
A Dastangoi performance like Mantoiyat, in contrast, will appeal only to those who know Manto, or Bombay or Urdu literature. But because the subject itself led such a tumultuous life, was so given to wit and humour and pranks, and was so outspoken and self referential, and explicit about his times, it was easier to tell his story in this form. Humour, therefore, helps transgress the strangeness of the subject and of language.
The curious case with Urdu in India is that one man’s Urdu is another man’s Hindi and one man’s Urdu is another man’s Persian. There is no single standard of what constitutes difficult Urdu, and sometimes elderly people, or people who have never been to school, are more familiar with Urdu than the educated. People who have truck with the performing arts also have more familiarity with Urdu, because of their deep roots in our common Islamicate cultural past. The great French philosopher Walter Benjamin’s observation that uneducated elderly women are the greatest repository of culture in a society holds particular valence for us. You can’t take that elderly woman to a Vijay Tendulkar or Girish Karnad play, but you can profitably bring her to Dastangoi.
Above all, Dastangoi is unique in India because our work, I should say my work, has allowed for a new narrative form to emerge, which others are now emulating, sometimes poorly. Dastangoi is a performative essay, a story, and an oral sketch or portrait, all rolled into one. In a storytelling performance, the teller can take the audience in any direction she likes, and as long as the audience is enraptured it doesn’t matter whether she recounts abstruse mathematical theorems, or jokes. Asides, even long ones, are welcome. Since we don’t pretend to be creating an alternative reality there is no third wall and we can directly converse with the audience, like a singer does. We can stop the performance where we like.
Dastangoi has allowed for a new dimension on stage. Earlier, if one wanted to say something about, say, Kabir from the stage, one would have to deliver a lecture, or stage a (musical) play, or write a biography. Now, you can do all three, and more, in a single performance. And having two performers, an innovation I have brought into modern Dastangoi, brings in jugalbandi, hence theatricality, and allows for easy switching and the covering of narrative gaps. Modern Dastangoi has also brought in a new language of narration, which partakes sumptuously of poetry, which is more spoken Hindustani than ornate Urdu, but still sufficiently lyrical. When Poonam Girdhani of the Dastangoi Collective writes and performs the Dastan-e Budhha, or when Ainie Farooqui writes and performs, with Nusrat Ansari, Dastan-e Bhagat Singh or Jallianwala Bagh, they are not only telling an old familiar story but creating a new presentation, a new narrative arc to retell the old. That is to say, they are telling these stories in a way they have never been told before. And style or form, as we should know by now, is itself content, just as words and thoughts are action too. So what we have is a new form, in a new narrative, in a new linguistic style, generating new contents and thoughts.
When I pick up a pre-existing text like Rag Darbari, a cult classic, or Tagore’s Ghare Baire, my endeavour is to convert a text meant for reading (orally dead) into an oral story, which obviously means retelling, but a retelling which is much more than providing a precis of the story. I have to bring a dastanic flavour to it, and that can only come with poetry, and by creating a sticky text. In classical music, a singer sometimes leaves the landscape of a raga or a ghazal and brings in something cognate but new, which they call girah lagana. Dastangoi texts are also collages, full of different kinds of annexations. If I speak of politics, it makes eminent sense to rope in the great Ibn-e Khaldun, the pioneer of modern sociology, or Plato’s Republic, or Machiavelli. Tagore’s novel, set in the throes of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, automatically invites folk songs about 1857. Learning and research is a prerequisite for Dastangoi but it is their deployment for pleasurable consumption which makes it useful.
The first and most important criterion for creating a new dastan is that it must regale. It must evoke delight, joy, laughter. It can do so through shringar rasa or veer rasa, or hasya rasa (ideally as many as possible) but it must not be a boring performance that one respects simply because it is hoary. It is no good asking people to come to watch you just because you are involved in reviving Indian culture and heritage, so to say. People must be entertained but also must be startled. When I present Dastan-e Karn Az Mahabharata, I hope to surprise Muslims and Hindus alike by alerting them to the number of Urdu and Persian renditions of that great Indian text; but I must also shock them by highlighting the startling similarities between the Gita and the Quran, between Vedanta and Sufism. Everybody knows the story of Karna, so what good is it if I just tell the story as it is? But if I can tell of the Muslim Mewati singers of Karna from Haryana, and of the Dalit villagers of Tamil Nadu who revere him as an anti-caste rebel, and simultaneously present the story in a new ecology, in an Indo-Persian ecology, so to say, and withal hold the attention of the Pandit, and the pundits, as well as the Mullah, then I would have done something that makes Kabir proud.
And it is only the form of Dastangoi which can allow us to present the millennia of stories and wisdom contained in India’s pre-colonial traditions of singing, poetry and mythology. As we prepare to present a new edition of the Panchatantra, I am convinced that it is only this form of Dastangoi which can allow us to create resonant modern narratives about Tukaram, about the Shaiva Alwar saints, about the Sangam poets, about the Rajtarangini, about Nizamuddin Auliya and Mirza Raushan Zamir Nehi, about Kautilya and Bhashya and Nagarjuna and Abhinavgupta and Panini and Kalidasa and Mir and Ghalib. That Dastangoi is now being presented in Marathi, Gujarati, and Bengali is the greatest obeisance I could have paid to the life and writings of Shamsur Rahman Faruqi and to the glorious tradition, hundreds of years long, of Indo-Persian storytelling.
Mahmood Farooqui has been working to revive Dastangoi, the Art of Urdu storytelling for 17 years now. A recipient of the Ustad Bismillah Khan Award, he has trained dozens, compiled and written scores of modern Dastangoi texts, and has performed Dastangoi in festivals around the world, from New York and Singapore, to Bombay and Gorakhpur. He runs the Dastangoi Collective with producer Anusha Rizvi.
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