The Repertoire
Razm o bazm, tilism o ayyari: battles and elegant gatherings, enchantments and trickery. From the ancient Hamza cycle to a new canon of modern tales.
The Source Epic
The Urdu dastan, or romance, tradition is often said to consist of stories of razm o bazm, tilism o ayyari - battles and elegant gatherings, enchantments and trickery. In India, one dastan always dominated the field: the story of Amir Hamza.
Elaborate tales about this hero were recorded and illustrated in the emperor Akbar's famous Hamza-nama; it seems that Akbar also enjoyed personally telling the stories to the ladies of the harem. The cycle survives today in two forms you can read in full.
The Original
As the stories moved from Indo-Persian into Urdu, their popularity grew; by the later 1800s oral dastan-goi was enjoyed by aristocrats and commoners alike. The famous Naval Kishor Press of Lucknow called in the leading reciters of the day and set their Hamza stories down in print.
The cycle eventually ran to an astonishing 46 very large volumes, the crown jewels of Urdu narrative fiction, reprinted by the Khuda Bakhsh Library in 1998.
Read the full Dastan on RekhtaIn Translation
Dastans had no official religious or social purpose, and therefore no prescribed form. They existed for the sheer pleasure of the telling, sustained by the listener's perpetual question, "Then what happened?"
Drawing on the Shah-namah, the Book of Kings, and folk traditions of every kind, their subject was always simple: the battlefield and the courtly life, war and love.
Read the complete textTranslated by Frances W. Pritchett, hosted by Columbia University.
The New Canon
“Here are wondrous traditional stories which I edited and compiled for performance under SR Faruqi's guidance, as well as numerous modern narratives I have written, improvised or adapted for the Dastangoi format.”
No dastans in this category yet.
The trickster Amar Ayyar and the sorceress Mahtab Jadu.
Karn's tale, drawn from the Mahabharata.
Dissent, conscience and the law.
The life of Saadat Hasan Manto, master of the Urdu short story.
The many Ramayanas, after A.K. Ramanujan's essay.
Lewis Carroll's Alice, reimagined in Urdu.
Saint-Exupery's fable, told as a Dastan.
The loves and trials of Raja Vikram.
Nationalism and conscience, after Rabindranath Tagore.
Sorcerers sent to capture Amar Ayyar, from Tilism-e-Hoshruba.
The Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
Stories of the Partition of India.
After Shrilal Shukla's celebrated satirical novel.
The life and awakening of the Buddha.
A Rajasthani folk tale, after Vijaydan Detha.
The enchanted realm at the heart of the Hamza cycle.
Mir Taqi Mir, on his three hundredth birth anniversary.
Prithviraj and Raj Kapoor, and the cinema they made.
The life and long argument of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar.
Gandhi on foot through Noakhali, Bihar, Calcutta, Delhi.
Beyond the martyrdom, to the writing and the thought.
Ismat Chughtai, in her own heat and honesty.
The painter S. H. Raza, from a village to Paris.
Naina Devi and the purab-ang thumri of Banaras.
Fahmida Riaz, who belonged to both India and Pakistan.
The dargah, the Mughals, and Delhi's Sufi inheritance.
The Sun, from Ra and Amaterasu to solar energy.
After Geetanjali Shree's novel of memory and return.
Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories.
Cats, across the Jatakas, the Hadith, Mir and Ghalib.
Clever thieves and cleverer jesters, after Vijay Dan Detha.
Bring one of these tales to your stage, or watch the tellers at work.