For the last seven years, two dastangos have been weaving their magic. Their tales have evolved with contemporary themes.
The stage is bare, but for the floor cushions. Two men walk in. They are dressed in white — white kurta and a traditional white cap. No spotlights follow them; no audio effects herald their entry. They sit down without fanfare and begin to tell a story. The audience listens, although many don’t fully understand the nuances of the Urdu being spoken. As the performance progresses, the two men with no props and special effects create a fantasy world full of magicians, genies, fairies and demons. Every time their audience sighs in sympathy, laughs at a risqué joke or smiles with delight, it breathes fresh life into this 16th century form of Urdu storytelling — Dastangoi, which had fallen into dusty oblivion for almost a century. Today, this forgotten art is enjoying a minor revival of sorts because of the efforts of a young film maker couple, Mahmood Farooqui and Anusha Rizwi (their last film was Peepli Live), and Danish Hussain, an actor, performer and poet.
Dastangoi (in Persian dastan means story and goi, the act of storytelling) is a rare example of a centuries’ old oral tradition which made literature and folklore accessible to the common people. In India, it became wildly popular in the court of Emperor Akbar.
Legend has it that Akbar enjoyed Dastangoi so much that he used to recite it himself! But Dastangoi wasn’t just a rich man’s evening entertainment — in the marketplaces of Lucknow, Delhi, Rampur and Hyderabad, dastangos spun yarns to adoring audiences. However, Urdu literature that developed in the 1900s felt Dastangoi was too bazaaru, lowbrow. The British also found it obscene.
So as twilight engulfed the nawabs and their hedonistic lifestyles, Dastangoi also began fading away.
“However, when I first heard of the dastans of Hamza through the works of noted Urdu scholar S R Faruqi,” says Farooqui, “I was elated! The stories were fascinating...” The most popular dastans of their age, the 46 volumes chronicled the adventures of Amir Hamza as he and his descendents battled demons, magicians and genies. He emerged unscathed and victorious every time, for as we all know from Hindi cinema of a certain genre, good always triumphs over evil.
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Were these stories that simple? Farooqui doesn’t think so. To him, they evoked memories of a more sophisticated audience that could separate art and entertainment from religion. “Dastangoi always began with a thanks to the wine server — he who creates the right spirit for an artistic gathering!” he says. “It addressed fun-loving listeners who were willing to suspend disbelief and had refreshingly relaxed attitudes to love, sex, morality and religion.”
When Farooqui and Hussain gave their first performance in Delhi’s India International Centre in 2005, the response was overwhelming. This egged them on to perform all over the world, including Karachi and Dubai. “We’ve had great response even in Bangalore where few people understood Urdu!” says he. Over the years, the duo has trained over fifteen new dastangos in Delhi and Mumbai. Every fortnight, they practise and perform in a Dastangoi baithak at Farooqui’s house. With all this new blood, Dastangoi is slowly evolving. “We’ve written some modern dastans, including one on Binayak Sen. I’m also going to narrate Tagore’s Ghaire Baire as a dastan,” says Farooqui. “As a performer, I’ve realised any dramatic story can be told by a dastango!”
Farooqui and Hussain are gearing up for their first ticketed performance in Delhi tomorrow. As this story goes to press, over 560 people on Dastangoi’s Facebook page have indicated that they’ll attend the performance, more than a houseful for Habitat Centre’s Stein Auditorium. It goes to show that while storytelling may have taken a backseat in the age of HD TV, digital programming and 3- D movies — it retains the power to magically return listeners to an innocent age where the suspension of disbelief is as easy as closing one’s eyes and opening one’s mind.
