Q: Your journey with dastangoi, and specifically the Hamzanama – when and how did it begin, and who showed you the way?
A. I don't actully work with the Hamzanama. The Hamzanama is the name of the illustrations, really big ones and some 1200 in number which had been commissioned by Emperor Akbar because of his fondness for the Hamza dastan. Some of the images, about a hundred or so, survive but we have not been able to trace the actual text or oral version of the Hamza dastan they were based on.
I got interested in the Dastan-e Amir Hamza only because of the sterling work done by the great Urdu critic S. R. Faruqi. He has painstakingly collected all the forty six volumes of the tradition, perhaps the only such collection in the world now, and after a twenty year study has produced a three volume study of it, the fourth is in progress. He drew my attention to somebody, Osama Khalidi he is called, who wanted to make a documentary about it. thats when I read his book and learnt about the tradition. But it took five years of talking, thinking, freelancing before I got a fellowship at Sarai to research and document the tradition and really it was the encouragement I received there, on the Sarai reader list and otherwise, which enthused me greatly. Then by chance I met the then director of the IIC through his wife Binoo Sen. I had known them long and they have been very distinguished bureaucrats and very encouraging of my artistic awaragardi over the years and they suggested a lectuure demonstration. So I had a space, I had a text and when I actually read the Dastan, the Tilism-e Hoshruba (which is one long chapter, in 8 volumes, of the longer Dastan-e Amir Hamza) I felt that the best way to put it across was to actually read or recite it.
Over a couple of months then I roped in another actor and an old friend, Himanshu Tyagi, to present two stories from the tradition, under the guidance of Faruqi Saheb. We were then doing it for a lark. But the first show, at IIC on 5th May 2005, was so successful and the stories seemed so alive, so current and so laden with the ability to entertain people in the contemporary moment that it would have been stupid not to go for more wah wahs. After all what else does a performer want.
I have been involved with theatre at school, college and after that too, I was keenly interested in modern Indian history and Urdu literature in general and Dastans brought it all together at the same time as taking away all dependence on producers/money/space/audience which is the bane of amateur and serious theatre practice in India.
Q: Could you elaborate on the oral/performative history and, later, the print history, of dastangoi? What is its current status in India/northern India?
Dastan-e Amir Hamza is the name of a tradition, a tradition of telling the stories around the life and adventures of this Arab warrior called Amir Hamza. It becomes a kind of an uber text into which obviously all sorts of other stories begin to flow. The tradition, roughly, goes back to the eighth century, or perhaps even earlier depending on who you belive, but it began to flower only when it was transferred from Arabic to Persian. For about five centuries Persian was a classic, comsmopolitan language all over the Asiatic world, like Arabic or latin before it, so it had reach, it had universality and it had a great tradiition of poetry, epics and stories.
From about the twelfty century onwards the tales of this Arab warrior begin to spread in other parts of the world, Georgia, Indonesia, Bosnia, Bengal although it is difficult for us to today trace its exact genealogy and textual history.
It is noted to be present in India, in a Deccan court, brought here by an Irani storyteller called Haji Qissakhvan Hamadani. Qissakhvan means storyteller so already, in the sixteenth century, storytellers are a separate artists/writers/performers and are given patronage and a high position in the court. Then there is the Hamzanama by Akbar in the sixteenth century. We know he was very fond of listening to these stories and narrated it himself sometimes.
So the story is current and it is travelling.
It is only in the eighteenth century that we begin to get versions, aspects or elements of it in Urdu. By then there are native Dastangos who are writing/performing newer Dastans, different from the Hamza tradition althgough the Hamza tradition is still the most popular and the most dominant. Mir Taqi Khyal in Delhi writes an eighteen volume Dastan called BOSTAN-e KHYAL. This and the Hamza story is by then already acquiring very distinctly Indic colours. The relatively simpler Hamza story, a tale of adventures, supernatural beings, battles is still mainly restricted to warfare and romance in its broader themes. Razm and Bazm, war and poetry/romance/drinking, this is the staple of most epics, poetic or otherwise, Odyssey, Shahnamah, medieval Hindavi/Sufi romances like Jayasi's Padmavat...
It is when Khyal and other Indian storytellers bring sorcerers and the magnificent worlds they create through their magical effect and affect, the Tilisms and the tricksters who are shrewd/crafty/jokers. etc that these two Indian peculiarities begin to dominate over most other aspects in Indian tellings of the Hamza epic.
So the Dastan-e Amir Hamza finally takes shape in the early nineteenth centuries. But it is still a mainly oral tradition, people tell stories which they have heard from others or embellish them...Some, notably at Rampur court, have begun to write and carve newer and more elaborate versions too. So there are people writing and people telling. Whether the audience is growing or diminishing is something we do not know. We also don't know how the performance is changing due to that.
It is the Indian print revolution of the nineteenth century, beginning with Fort William College Calcutta in the early nineteenth century, which then provides a new commercial platform to the D-A-H(Dastan-e Amir Hamza). The Nawal Kishore Press, one of the largest, most successful printing ventures in human history (recently chronicled as "The Empire of Books' by the German scholar Ulrich Starke) is simultaneously printing stories in Hindi, Urdu, Farsi, Bengali, Sanskrit and other languages. Religious texts, poetry, text books, stories, epics, Parsi theatre song books everything is accepted as long as it sells.
And so it is that between 1880 and 1910 roughly, a group of six or seven Dastangos, mainly Jah, Qamar and Tasadduq Husain, create this magnificent epic in forty six volumes, drawing on older traditions and their own experience as professional tellers.
Before that the one volume Hamza story, with affinities to the Persian version known in parts outside India, has already sold in multiple editions since the 1850s...
And those forty six volumes are an amazing print success story, reprinted several times till as late as the 30s. It is an amazing instance of an oral form of performance finding such huge success as a printed form.
There are no known Dastangos left in India. Our work is the only thing that there is and really it is too poor compared to the wizardry of the ancients.
Q: What is the Dastan-e Amir Hamza, which you say is the longest fictional narrative of modern India, comprised of? Are there stories that interweave and spin off from others as in the Mahabharata, are there recurring characters, or is it a linear narrative with a single hero, Hamza? Could you briefly tell us one of the (presumably thousands of) Hamza stories, either a mystical or a profane one, just to give us a flavour?
A. It is a cylical formulaic story with very similar episodes, encounters, instances with changing principals but which each receive a new twist, a new colour every time they are retold. It is upto the inegenuity of the teller, the Dastango to create new out of the old therefore they improvised freely, even as they were telling those stories. Hamza fights Laqa, Laqa is helped by Afrasiab, Amar goes to his kingdom the Tilism-e Hoshruba to curb him and now you have the basic line ready...Socerers will come and go, they will be seduced or killed or imprisoned. New ones will come, new things will happen and the story will go on and on, potentially forever, there are millions of Ayyaars, there are millions of sorcerers, there are grocers, merchants, sepoys, soldiers, menial workers, wives, daughters, anything that you can tell of... The bad must sufffer the good must prosper and in between that you can slip in anything, it is really like our Cinema, the way it was till the nineties before these faux realist/advertising kind of filmmakers came along.
Sorry I can't tell you a Hamza story here, I perform them from the stage, but you can read English translations in Shahnaz Aijazuddin's version, published by Penguin, or Musharraf Faruqi's versions brought out by Random House.
Q: Imagine one of Mir Baqar Ali’s performances, imagine the setting, the audience, the arena, the atmosphere, imagine him wielding his skills “of rhetoric, delivery, mimicry, ventriloquism and spontaneous composition” (as you put it) through dance and drama. Would you be able to paint this scene for us?
A. NOT through dance and drama. It has been well described in Ashraf Suboohi's marvelous memoirs of the people and personalities of pre partition Delhi. The book is called DEHLI KI CHAND AJEEB HASTIYAN. Baqar Ali's performance was imaginatively recrafted by Suboohi and I would need to translate the whole chapter for you. But you can catch a glimpse of that in Ambrish Satwik's Perineum, a Penguin book where he describes Baqar.
Q: An intriguing observation you make is that there was a dialogue between dastangoi and Parsi theatre, and also, that dastangoi influenced mainstream Hindi cinema. Please explain.
This is a hunch, it needs research and elaboration. Both are part of the print revolution, Parsi theatre song books sell for an anna two annas and are hugely popular--this is 1870s and 80s...at the same time in places like Lucknow, Delhi, Rampur, Dastangos are reciting their stories sometimes in public spaces like the steps of the Jama Masjid or the main square of Lucknow...so they share spaces and presumably audiences...you can hear Parsi theatre like dialogue, rhyming, bombastic, in Dastans which also have a lot of poetry...so does Parsi theatre which has a lot of singing...
We know the influence of Parsi theatre in Hindi cinema, it has been well documented. Specially since the coming of talkies in the thirties...
So there are connections in contetnt, performance and personnel...we need to research and trace them...The problem is that so far we mostly have a textual history of the D-A-H, not a history of the performance or where it was embedded as a performance form...there is obviously a lot going on Indian cities in the nineteenth century...there are spectacles, tableus, bhands, krishna-life stories, Ramayana recitations, urdu poetry's mushaeras, Shia performative dirges called MARSIYAS and we must learn about them before we can speak authoritatively about the performative aspects of Dastangoi...It is a mammoth research project and I am sorry to say I have not done anything of it in the last few years...But for the moment I am happy to concentrate on performance and building an audience, when we have a good audience presumably others wil go and research this...
Q: Your ambitious project of expanding and extending the ambit of dastangoi – could you tell us about it?
a) Multiple performers instead of a single one.
b) The making of new dastangos. What have your workshops been like, and how do you train dastangos in improvised storytelling?
c) The creation of new texts. What are they like, these experimental dastans? What subjects do they tackle?
d) The creation of new audiences, linking with mushairas, etc
A. Yes this is ongoing work. I innovated on the little we know about the performance part of Dastangoi and brought in two performers, it breaks the monotony and creates more engagement and fun, for the tellers and the listeners...
The workshops have been good, i have already had about ten more people performing new shows...Our work is right now not about improvised story telling, we are working in a tradition, and with texts...we work like any other theatre exercise, take the text, memorise it, understand it andd start narrating/performing/reciting/enacting it...The rest will be worked out in rehearsal..
We have content which can entertain the high brow and the low brow...we have a form which can be moulded to any space, so long as people can hear us and see us...obviously we must take it out of the hallowed spaces of theatre (with their discipline, decorum, bourgeois conventions, mandatory silences) and put it back in the bazar and see how the present day bazars cope with this..that takes many more tellers and a much greater familiarity from the audience about our form and our tradition...
Right now we must INFORM them first as to what this is, where it comes from, what they must EXPECT...we must then inform them about our performance, how they should react...we must then EXPLAIN the content and the context of the story...once we begin to get informed, repeat audiences coming in then the whole game plan will change....meanwhile I am trying to keep a bunch of people ready...
It must transform from a show into a genre and that takes time. But it will happen. We already know that it is not important for me to perform for the story to make sense or for people to be entertained. Rana, Usman, Rajesh, Rasika, Manu, Aarti and the new trainees can regale audiences just as well...That is a huge step and a great relief for me...now the onus is also on them to take the form forward...similarly we will get more performers who can tell more stories and newer stories..
About creating new content for Dastangoi--we have a performance form, in that form we can tell anything we want, however we want..the partition of India, the history of slavery, the decline of Urdu, the Rajnikanth phenomenon...it depends on our knowledge, command of language, our ability to engage and regale the audience...The universe our language every single word we use is a narrative, possibly also a story, probably only a story...We too, our lives, our histories, our literatures, our music these are all stories which, in one viewing, end in a blip second...just like that...
It is upto the narrator to take it where she wants it to.
