What Is Dastangoi

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The word Dastangoi refers to the art of storytelling, it is a many of two Persian words "Dastan "and "goi" which handle to tell a Dastan. Dastans were epics, repeatedly accepted in nature, which were recited or read aloud and in essence were like medieval romances someplace. Recitation tales of escapade, fabulous and fighting, Dastans mapped new worlds and horizons, encountered the intangible and put up collateral the hero depressed assorted travails and lovers as he encouraged on his quest. The hero's adventures may perhaps sometimes comparable the mystic quest, at extreme times the story narrated a faultlessly mocking tale. In the manner of telling the story the narrators in competition borrowed tropes and themes from extreme stories, consequently it was that Rumi's "Masnavi" and Arabian Nights both came to accept assorted stories from the Panchtantra habit. Seeing as Dastans had assorted principals and assorted stories, the story of Hamza began to stand out antediluvian on. Depart with an mysterious Arabic description the Persian versions of the story narrated the life and adventures of Amir Hamza, allegedly an uncle of the Judge Mohammed. Marked out by fairies, djinns and prophecies, Hamza engagements to just starting out lands in his early years and up front as a young lad shows great physical prowess and bold. His impressiveness spreads far and wide and he is called by the prime pastor of the Emperor of Persia to aid the subsequent in his troubles, encountering assorted adventures, beings, class and realms Hamza stiff delighted and unvanquished, right to the end.

HAMZA Report IN INDIA

By the sixteenth century, versions of the Hamza story had begun to spread out in India. Mentioned first in the Deccan magistrates, the story reached its enlightening acme in the trial of Queen Akbar. By after that, exact tellers of the story, called Dastangos had emerged. Present-day is very blue information on what the ingredients of their art were, but they were adequate evident to profit a delineate type for themselves. Akbar himself was identical fanatical of the make note of and used to deliver it himself. One of the first enlightening projects commissioned under him was an illustrated description of the Hamza story which became acclaimed to posterity as Hamzanama. It was a very big enlightening vow which consisted of over 1200 folios, each at token a bury and a shared by a bury in size, making it an choice view project, with the detail inscribed at the back. Symbols of that size, ambition or speed was ever attempted again by the Mughal decree, attesting to the hobby of the Hamza story in the medieval forethought. A few scholars suffer conjectured that the large size of the panels indicates their use as a type of an audio-visual story telling, the narrators would stand considering the panels and divulge the story from the detail and the panels would be dissimilar as the story progressed, envisaging it as a form of proto-television. For the adjacent two centuries, just starting out Persian versions of the Hamza story disseminated in India, with occasional advise of the Dastangos who performed them.

Present-day were at the exceedingly time extreme Dastans, group tropes and conventions of the Hamza make note of which, in their emphases, begin to differ from the Persian versions of the make note of. "Bostan-e Khyal", organized at the end of the eighteenth century enhances violently the role of fabulous in its telling of a fantastical tale. Given primacy too is the art of "aiyyari," charmed, a moderately ruined hearsay in Persian storytelling.

Hamza make note of in Urdu

The first Urdu description of the Hamza make note of was published at the flinch of the nineteenth century under the aegis of the Castle William School, an school lay down by the East India Kit out at Calcutta which was the first to edit and publish some of the key texts of the North Indian educational habit. Degree the 'Dastan-e Amir Hamza,' extreme Dastans were after that published by the School, which included Mir Amman's "Bagh-o Bahar", a tale that was reprinted over twenty times in the nineteenth century and one which is educated to this day in the syllabi of Urdu text. Bagh-o Bahar was pulled out by the colonial administrators as a detail which, with fetching emendations, was used to learn the inhabitant languages, a status that was not accorded to the Hamza story.

As dint came to North India in the core of the nineteenth century, stories, fables and Dastans proved to be the utmost crucial motor for the dint set, consume side priestly text. Tales such as Nal Damyanti and qissas such as Qissa-e Meherafroz-o Dilbar were imprinted assorted times over. Until the core of the nineteenth century, allay, the Hamza habit in Urdu was brim supervisor as an accepted performance habit impartially than as a successful dint commodity. Seeing as Dastangos at Rampur, assorted of them migrants from Lucknow, were committing the make note of to paper, it remained in paper form. But sooner than, the stories were expanding, after very few Persian versions exceeded a single bulkiness the Urdu manuscripts had begun to protrude to various volumes. Acquiring primacy too were new areas in the story, the tricksters and the conjuring and wondrous worlds shaped by sorcerers, pretenders to deity assorted of them, which in their colorfulness, imagery and fancifulness were like trifle seen in Persian text.

By the core of the nineteenth century the practice of Dastangoi was adequate fixed in utmost parts of Northern India. In Sir Syed Ahmed Khan's ethnographic criticize of Delhi "Asar-us-Sanadid", Dastangos are mentioned remarkably. Completely thursday, they are understood to send for at the steps of the Jama Masjid everywhere they deliver their tales. It is attention-grabbing that a mosque requisite suffer been the site for a mocking storytelling for the Quran definitely mentions poets and storytellers and asks the believers to be heedful of them for they scam with the fabulous of their words. Mirza Ghalib, the tricks Urdu poet was identical fanatical of the Hamza Dastan and for a simultaneous of two kick used to describe weekly performance sessions at his house in Delhi. He organized a long poem using characters and tropes from the Hamza story and considering wrote in a letter to a friend that it was raining and he had just acquired, 'six chapters of the Hamza dastan and sixteen casks of wine, what supervisor do I want from life.'

THE Summit OF DASTANGOI-THE HAMZA Report IN LUCKNOW

The riot of 1857 turned out to be a added to for Lucknow as thousands of artists, poets and writers migrated dowry from Delhi, and this included various Dastangos. The first historian of Lucknow, Abdul Halim Sharar wrote in "Guzishta Lucknow" about the multiplication of the art of Dastangoi in the city whilst the mutineer. Completely nobleman, he understood, had made it a practice to mistreat a Dastango in his retinue as chowks or city squares became a number one site for performance of the art. Sharar defined it as the art of 'extemporaneous assembly,' and understood that it rested on imagery of four phenomena, war, romance, charmed and conjuring artifices. The Dastangos in Sharar's time, so, were not reciting a story learnt from memory, they were improvising on the unveil structures which had been handed down to them.

In sync, whilst the mutineer, the Hamza story began to exhibit great hard cash in dint. Seeing as the Castle William description had sooner than been reprinted various times, Munshi Nawal Kishore, the prominently publisher from Lucknow commissioned assorted edition of the story one which, with not enough changes, continued to be imprinted for an great century and was ending published in the 1960s. Persian versions of the story were after that being imprinted at the exceedingly time.

By that time, conventions of the Dastans were flinch to influence productions of manufacturing copy works in Urdu. "Fasana-e Azad", the first exotic in Urdu, is prearranged like a Dastan as the picaresque make note of meanders from confusion to confusion. At the exceedingly time the grow success of the Parsi booming productions, in Hindi and Urdu, interspersed as it was with song and dance, like the Dastans, after that had a give and dig relationship with Dastans. Both were together to the thing dint set too, as songbooks of stage performances came to be imprinted, harsh as Dastans shaped in accepted performances came to find a life in the dint form.

In 1881, buoyed by the success of the Hamza story, Nawal Kishore embarked on a agreeably single-minded educational dint project. He assembled some of the leading Dastangos of Lucknow and commissioned them to produce the great Hamza make note of as it existed in accepted and on paper documentation. The equip of three writers Mohammed Husain Jah, Ahmed Husain Qamar and Sheikh Tasadduq Husain, coupled future by others, started work on reproducing in dint the virtual whole of the Hamza habit. The slash, by the end of a lumber of twenty five kick, was a row consisting of 46 untold volumes, each about a thousand pages long. Both of the volumes may perhaps be read as an single entity, or one may perhaps read it as part of the ecologically aware.

We suffer very small information about the exact mode of imitation, or perform, followed by these narrator-authors. Despite the fact that they habitually require to be basing their recitation on preexisting texts, repeatedly in Persian, and clip authorship to distinguished statistics of antiquity, none of the prior vacant versions they quote can be generate. It is a reasonable premonition that the wake up of the story from a single bulkiness to this very big row was a institution outstandingly of the performative habit, they were circulating in the accepted homeland, which may suffer rested on on paper documentation in the form of key or guide books which outlined the necessary characters and the run of the project but the body was sated by the narrator as he recited the story. We don't up front report whether these Dastangos dictated the stories, and they came to be on paper by scribes, or whether they seemingly wrote it in their hands.

Seeing as the Hamza story was performed and recited in assorted extreme parts of the Islamicate world, in places as far old hat as Morocco and Indonesia, in utmost extreme places it was a part of a melodious storytelling habit. Alfred Lady and Milman Retort, in the effect of their check of the Homeric bardic habit, difficult the Hamza singers of Bosnia and produced a groundbreaking work called 'The Comedian of Tales' on the accepted habit. But the narrators they worked with after that used melodious instruments. The Indian Dastangos, by contrast relied faultlessly on words and their art of performance to tell the story, aligning it more rapidly to educational performance.

The 46 bulkiness Hamza point is the max out say of Urdu educational habit and the climax of a thousand kick of the Indo-Islamic storytelling habit. The clean up fruitfulness of the dastan- with thousands of fabricated names, tools, armaments, beings, with an copious vocabulary- as after that its enormous popularity had a long returning effect on extreme forms of narratives. It appropriated revered statistics of the Islamic farther than into a mocking make note of. Its treatment of themes like humor, body, gruesome, eschatology, seduction, wining and dining are all of a time being state-owned tastes and cultures in India had not been distorted under the colonial crucial. For clean up educational luminosity, for its treatment and range of linguistic tenors, its use of images, imagery and all the extreme conventions of educational and expressive conventions, the Dastan-e Amir Hamza is an outstanding feat. Seeing as it deals with the extreme, the extreme is grounded in the real and the social, so it has after that been seen as a momentous social figure of the pre-colonial order. Seeing as the educational trappings run to high brow minds, the thrilled of the stories, stuffed as they are with tales of seduction, ruthless conjuring encounters and confrontations connecting tricksters and magicians may perhaps run to arrange audiences too.

RECASTING OF URDU Intellect AND THE MARGINALISATION OF DASTANS

As S. R. Faruqi, amid others, has made known, Urdu educational world and its ideology were recast at the end of the nineteenth century by a group of reformers who looked down on the fake and boastful,' works of Urdu writers. Seeking to tie together text to social restoration and emphasizing sacredness of interest and cogency of style, Urdu's leading critics exclusive candid experience impartially than over-elaborate inventions. Jealous of mirroring western, supervisor characteristically Victorian, educational ideology they praised teaching and achievable fiction and long make note of poems. Dastans, by after that, were sooner than an affair of priestly appreciation, women characteristically were advised against reading them to the same degree it would polluted them. At the exceedingly time colonial officers repeatedly generate Dastans to be wide of the mark and obscene. Very to this was the budding derision of Urdu's own critics who generate Dastans to be litter, changeable, improbable and too soothing. The only permissible dubious form for the reformers was the exotic and the Dastan was a spot on anti-novel, not a precursor to it but fair and square a just starting out form.

Despite the fact that Dastans continued to be published into the core of the twentieth century, their popularity was fit revert. Diverse of its conventions had accepted into Films, the accepted the world of which it was a product was agile place to a educational the world and the chairs everywhere it was readily performed were being recast. In 1928, just a few kick preceding unassailable revolutionized the Indian bear industry, Mir Baqar Ali died. He was the ending tricks Dastango of India. The connection is not simply scrap. News update of his performances fix beyond suspicion that he was maybe the ending great usual singer to be inherent in this confusion.

"He never told dastans-he open vivacious, exciting pictures; or impartially you may perhaps say that he himself became a view. He was a thin, truthful built man, but after he was reciting the dastan, if a king appeared in the story, the interview felt themselves standing preceding an imperious sovereign. Sometimes, if he tease the words of some old woman, he adopted the very style of speech of lovely elderly ladies, and up front (in any case) his teeth became fair and square toothless...He knew thousands of verses by heart. He had such a influence of language that poets and writers measure Mir Saheb as an authority..."

Washed up time the type became so ruined that today the Dastan-e Amir Hamza has utterly receded from state-owned self. Few critics suffer engrossed unsympathetically with it, few Urdu students read them and in fact the ecologically aware set of the 46 volumes can today only be generate in only one pile in the world. Seeing as their leaving as text is unpardonable, they suffer after that been unadulterated obliterated from the doctrine of passing Arts. As anecdotes of Mir Baqar make sudden, their performance forced an exceptional influence over public speaking, delivery, mimicry, ventriloquism and sudden assembly. Anyway, Dastangoi was one hearsay of an oral/performative the world everywhere the state-owned ring was the first and maybe the utmost natural site of performance. Qissagos, contortionists, sooth-sayers, faqirs, magicians, madaris, unrefined fights, mushairas and discrete extreme activities give somebody the use of a prismatic context in which Dastans were organized and performed. Their skill as actors lay in energetic the send away attention at all times, an send away that in the sample of a state-owned performance was expected to waste old hat at the smallest amount drop of devotion. This demanded acting and passing skills that range from acting to dance to make a copy to performance art. Reasonably than occupying a deep place in our enlightening parentage so, they suffer been sent to total void.

Mahmood Farooqui