The lost art of storytelling

There are vivid accounts of thousands of people gathering every Thursday 
at the steps of the Jama Masjid in Delhi, listening to a dastango, which 
developed into an exquisite art form during the 19th century

"It is raining; a volume of the Dastan-i-Amir Hamza has come — about 600 pages of it — and there are 17 bottles of good wine in the pantry. So I read all day and drink all night. What else can one want from life?
The man who wins such bliss can only wonder:
What more had Jamshed? What more Alexander?"

— Mirza Ghalib, in a letter to a friend, 1861

OVER the last year or so, I seemed to have developed the unhappy knack of missing their performances: the dastangos of today. Once, I was returning from a short trip overseas and learnt that a dastangoi session in Delhi had concluded just a day before; another performance I missed in Bangalore by a whisker; and then, when I was in Mumbai last December, lecturing, I discovered that at the same sprawling premises — the National Centre of Performing Arts — a dastangoi performance was on at exactly the same time as my lecture was to begin. No luck there, either.

Fortunately, however, things turned for me just a few weeks back when I learnt that, as part of the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya memorial celebrations at the Centre for Cultural Resources in Delhi, a dastangoi session was going to be part of the programme. I made certain that I was there for it that evening: sheer enchantment.

Dastans — going back to the Persian tradition, and still further to the Arabic, but enthusiastically adapted in our own land, using Urdu — were long epic stories in which merge, seamlessly, sorcery and heroism, cruelty and passion, trickery and one-upmanship, and sudden leaps into worlds and terrains that can exist only in imagination. But more than reading, they need telling, a very special way of telling, in fact. And the tellers — reciters, if you so like, or, even more, performers — were spoken of as dastangos.

In the 19th century, dastangoi had, in fact, developed into an exquisite art form, and there are vivid accounts of thousands of people gathering every Thursday at the steps of the Jama Masjid in Delhi, listening to a dastango even though everyone knew that profane storytelling was looked upon with disfavour in the holy Koran. Accounts of great dastangos have come down, some from Lucknow, some from Rampur, others from Delhi.

Though other dastans were known and recited, a perennial favourite was the endlessly long Dastan-i Amir Hamza, based, as most people believed, on the adventures of an uncle of the Prophet Muhammad, who set out to establish the True Faith and subdued with valour and stratagem legions of djinns and fairies and unsavoury characters inhabiting impossible lands.

This, one recalls, is the same dastan on which one of the greatest series of paintings in India, the Hamza Nama, was based, commissioned by the young emperor Akbar soon after he came to the throne.

On this series, extending as it did — as the long dastan merited perhaps — to 14 volumes consisting of 100 paintings each, worked some of the greatest Mughal masters, who conjured up a dream-like world of fire-breathing dragons and heroes driving lances through sturdy tree-trunks, of demons with eyes that had lashes like serrated shutters and women who could fly through the air at will. The story was one thing but the telling of it another, and it is in the telling of it that the magic lay.

With time, Urdu versions of the dastan appeared in print, the most famous being the one published in 1881 by the celebrated Munshi Nawal Kishore Press of Lucknow under the title: Tilism-i Hoshruba. It was a highly ambitious project — 46 volumes, each about a 1000 pages long — in realising which the Munshi brought together some of the leading dastangos of the time. And they, among them the gifted Muhammad Husain Jah, captured the exquisite lyricism, both of the written and the oral versions of the story then current. There is incredible expanse in their narration and lilt in their prose.

There are no staccato passages, no unadorned descriptions: even the most prosaic or routine of happenings is so embellished that words sing and soar as it were.

Consider this passage — (it comes from a brilliantly rendered English translation by Musharraf Farooqi) — that occurs at almost the very beginning of Book One of the work, just after God has been praised:

Whatever anyone’s reservations about it might be, this, for me, is delicious, delectable prose, especially when read in Urdu, which has seductive rhythms of its own. And this is that ‘Sea of Eloquence’ — bahr-i fasahat — which was on the point of being lost when a new generation of dastangos, among them, Mahmood Farooqi and Danish Hussain, recovered it, saving it from virtual oblivion under the tutelage of Shams-ur Rahman Farooqi. They, and together with them celebrities like Naseeruddin Shah and Anusha Rizvi, have been taking dastans to different parts of the country. That evening, at the CCRT in Delhi, the twosome appeared on the bare stage, established the context of dastangoi in chiselled, flawless Urdu, and then quickly returned, dressed in pristine white with Lakhnavi topis on their heads, took their seats on a large low couch, and began conjuring up for their awestruck audience a lost and mysterious world. Through their words, and their superbly restrained gestures and shifts in intones, one could see the devilish sorcerer Afrasiyab, Master of the Tilism, the clever trickster ‘Umar Ayyaar, an army of djinns, a tall mountain, a dense forest, a magical palace, all but take form in front of one’s own eyes as one listened. The Sea of Eloquence was roaring again.

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