Dastan-e Karn Az Mahabharata by MAHMOOD FAROOQUI was not just a tale of the character but also represented the artist’s real-life experience, says Saimi Sattar. Farooqui managed to create a rich tapestry of languages by virtue of which he sketched pictures across the stage. One moment he would be chanting a shlok from the Gita and the next with equal finesse, he would shift onto an 'aayat' from the Qur’an, without so much as missing a consonant.
Read >>It’s the lost art of Dastangoi, storytelling based on medieval Urdu tales, brought back to life by two men determined to pass this ancient art form on to future generations — and not doing badly, if the spellbound response of audiences from New Delhi to New York is a guide.
Read >>After making its foray into children’s genre with ‘Dastan Alice Ki’ last month, team Dastangoi is now ready with its first adaptation of a children’s film which will be performed at the India Habitat Centre’s Old World Theatre Festival next week. Based on Satyajit Ray’s 1969 film ‘Gupi Gayen Bagha Bayen’, the story is about two village bumpkins who are given incredible boons by bhooton ka raja (the king of ghosts). “Just think of it, bhoot, raja. Where can imagination take it,” dastango Mahmood Farooqui, who adapted the film into a dastan, said.
Read >>Dastangoi was once the thriving art of Urdu storytelling in India. Its last great practitioner died in 1928, but it has recently regained critical acclaim due to the work of distinguished scholar, filmmaker and performance artist, Mahmood Farooqui.
Read >>Alice no longer lives in a land far far away but in our very own Delhi with a studious elder sister and raven black cat, Kitty. All this and much more happens in Dastan Alice Ki, an adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. This is writer and dastango Mahmood Farooqui's attempt to draw children to dastangoi, a style of storytelling that dates back to the 16th century.
Read >>Celebrated dastango Mahmood Farooqui takes the stage to deliver a recitation of the Mahabharata — primarily in Urdu, Dastangoi style.
Read >>Farooqui was there to perform dastangoi, an age-old but dying form of story narration, which he along with his wife, has been working extensively to revive. Titled Dastan-e-Karn, he retold the tale of Mahabharata's most magnanimous character, weaving his web of words into poetry that had visible tones of as many as five languages- Hindi, Persian, Urdu, Arabic and Sanskrit. He portrayed Karn's angst against a society that judged him, belittled him and refused to recognize his achievements because he belonged to a low caste. Farooqui's narrative resonated with the prevalent caste structure, as he drew claps from the audience whenever Karn veered into a defensive argument with the upper caste Pandavas.
Read >>Dastan storytellers come from the culture that tries to seek a public space, a cultural unity that cuts across specific cultures in India despite using a very culturally rooted tool of the Dastangoi. Theirs is a format which is closer to cinema in India and hence as a theme they could handle Ghare Baire far better than what Ray did. Kudos !! Congrats !! Thanks to them I understand Ghare Baire and Tagore much better than before.
Read >>Dastangoi started by Mahmood Farooqui and Anusha Rizvi was a mind-blowing experience. Here were two young men sitting on a dais wearing white clothes with a white topi and bowls and glasses of water on the sides, as they performed Dastangoi as explained in the opening by Mahmood Farooqui, who is responsible for the light of day this ancient form of storytelling, has seen. He actually found the book Tilism-e-Hoshruba from where the fantastic tales they recite are taken. Now this is not a male domain anymore, with women and girls also becoming Dastangos.
Read >>Historian, translator and Dastango Mahmood Farooqui talks about the revival of the lost form of storytelling and why, despite its marginalisation, Urdu enjoys immense prestige even today.
Read >>Essentially an oral tradition of narrative storytelling dating back to at least 16th Century, Dastangoi (Dastan: Story. Goi: to tell a dastan) had once been hugely popular in the Indian subcontinent, with records hinting that it had been a personal favourite of someone as medieval as Emperor Akbar and someone as modern as Mirza Ghalib.
Read >>The art form originated in pre-Islamic Arabia, and was extremely popular between sixteenth and nineteenth century in India, especially among the rich elites and commoners of Delhi and Lucknow. Over the early twentieth century, with shrinking audience and even less dastangos, the art died down. The last known dastango was Mir Baqar Ali, who passed away in 1928.
Read >>Dastangoi, the art of storytelling that was a favourite pastime before the advent of radio and television, has recently seen a revival, largely reinvented by Mahmood Farooqui.
Read >>Director Mahmood Farooqui has received his fair share of bouquets and bric-a-bracs over the last decade or so. In 2005, he reinvented and revived dastangoi — an art form of Urdu oral storytelling from the 16th-century, rendered dead for a while — with his uncle Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, an Indian poet and Urdu critic. Farooqui has he spread the artform across the Indian subcontinent alongside his performances in Michigan and Berkeley, where he was a scholar.
Read >>After spending three years in Tihar Jail, co-director of Peepli Live Mahmood Farooqui is returning to theatre. Mahmood Farooqui has breathed life into the extinct art of storytelling in Urdu. He has narrated a number of dastans. This time, he has reinterpreted the Mahabharata as Daastaan-e-Karn.
Read >>Long before films and theatre, there was dastangoi, the medieval art of storytelling, which dove into the world of fantasy and sorcery.
Read >>They stand and take each other’s measure. Hands are placed over opposite heads and a delightful discovery is made: they are ‘barabar.’ Neither one is taller or shorter than the other. They might be strangers with similar tastes (both are dressed in lime green shirts), who fell into quick friendship while waiting in line in the cramped and grimy stairwell outside The Attic, New Delhi, an hour before writer and director Mahmood Farooqui was to lift the curtain on his Dastan Alice Ki. Then again, they might be old friends meeting after the passage of time – say a day or two – time enough to grow.
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