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Literary Review
CLASSOCS REVISITED
The simple art of story-telling
RAVI VYAS
Once upon a time and a very good time it was…
James Joyce, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
The Adventures of Amir Hamza, Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami, complete and unabridged translation by Musharraf Ali Farooqui, Random House, India, 2008. Rs. 795.
Story-telling in the oral cultures of the Eastern world is a part of life of the people — ranging all the way from the high courts of powerful kings and princes down to the inhabitants of bazaars and the winding streets and back alleys of ordin
ary people. Like the blind Homer putting all his non-literate imagination into the Iliad and Odyssey, the popular oral epics do not belong to the past alone — they are also part of contemporary consciousness and daily speech even if we don’t know where the words and ideas have come from. This is particularly true of India which has absorbed endless myths and legends, forever enriched by the wider cultural compost of different regions. The daastans and quissas are two story-telling narratives, the former being long prose narratives or a chain of linked narratives and the latter, gossip that usually tells the tragic story of a young boy and girl who fall in love that is doomed to fail. These stories were told by professional story-tellers or daastangos at fairs or festivals (they are still told on the steps of Jama Masjid or the back streets of old Delhi) or turned into song — fact and fantasy coming together to make splendid fictional narratives out of their collective historical experiences. The most widely circulated daastans was Daastan-e-Amir Hamza or Hamzanama, translated as The Adventures of Amir Hamza: Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction, the most popular oral epic of the Indo-Islamic world. It is a long interlocking prose tale of adventure, fantasy, love and war dominated by invincible heroes and women of irresistible beauty. Hamzanama was probably born in early 9th century with a bare base in historical cast but grew with the creative ego of generations of storytellers and the varied audiences they imagined for their tales till it arrived at the court of Emperor Akbar in the 17th century.
Re-imagined in Urdu
The Adventures of Amir Hamza was originally a Persian story set in West Asia but the Urdu version from which the present edition has been translated was reimagined in the Indian context through many centuries of retelling on the subcontinent. The world depicted here is not Islamic Iraq or Persia but of late Mughal India with its obsession with poetry, good food and tehzeeb (manners/ proper behaviour) plus, of course, heroic deeds and lavish banquets that marked their heroes from ordinary mortals. Daastans basically means yarns “to give credence to fantasies, to make illusions real, reality elusive, their borders porous, their kind, gentle, merciful conspiracy a blessing.” Very simply, to entertain.
Hamza is remotely based on the life of Hamza bin Abdel Mutalib, the paternal uncle of Prophet Mohammed and one of his staunchest supporters, and, as such, a major figure in making Islam a victorious religion during the life of the Prophet. The historical Hamza fought for Islam valiantly and was killed during a major battle in the Meccan nemesis of the Prophet in 625; his body was badly mutilated and his liver eaten by a woman named Hind as a kind of revenge for the death of her father at the hands of Hamza. Hind has since become an appellate for vicious and vindictive people throughout Islamic history.
Abiding metaphor
Fact or fiction? You make your choice but Hamza has become the abiding metaphor for the great warrior of Islam, a Muslim revolutionary fighting for the cause of justice. Whatever the historical roots of the Adventures, it has become a classic because it is the distillation of generations and “of constellations of cultures, histories, lives, and divergent universes” that are centred on the life and adventures of the valiant hero, Amir Hamza. It speaks of the moral imagination of peoples and worlds extending all the way from North Africa to Central Asia, from South Asia to China with versions of the stories narrated in different languages. Adventures is a kind of world literature that draws its mimetic power from its ability to mimic history: historical experiences totally transformed and performed through suspenseful story-telling and the interplay of its ordinary and outlandish plots. The cumulative effect of the intermeshing of cultures and bizarre weaving of one splendid romance after another in a narrative of seeming frivolity results in a kind of magic realism that blurs the distinction between the real and the imaginary.
The Adventures is a big book that is divided into four not-so-small books. There are stories within stories that cover the almost simultaneous pre-modern Muslim empires — the Ottoman, the Safavid and the Mughal — that have been actively identified with Ferdowski’s Persian classic, Shahnameh: An Epic of Kings, in one way of another. But from the Urdu translation, it was the fertile land of India in particular that proved most receptive to its rich and pregnant ideas. Probably this receptiveness happened because our own classical Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, too, are stories within stories that abound with tales of morality, greed, treachery and lust that create a hiatus between statecraft and ethics.
Reasons to read
What are these stories? They are love stories that reflect the Persian poet, Hafiz’s prediction that “love overcomes all problems, but only in the beginning.” Here is Hamza who loves Mehr-Nigar, the daughter of the Persian emperor, Naushervan. He is taken up the garden path by Bazurjmehr, the all-knowing who is protected by the ingenious trickster, Amar Ayyar who has the gods on his side. Of course whether he wins out or doesn’t in the end, is not what matters. You need to see it through because “love is so short and forgetting so long.” Read these stories because you could spin out one yarn after another on your own.
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