BEGUM Shahnaz Aijazuddin appears to be a strange bird. She is an Anglicized lady with no taste for Urdu. She has been writing in English, never caring to read or write in Urdu. And yet she has developed a passion for Tilism-i-Hoshruba, the famous dastan running into eight big volumes. Enamoured of this tale, she now has plans to prepare an abridged version in English.
I chanced to meet Begum Shahnaz at a dinner at the residence of Begum Farrukh Nigar Aziz. With a bit of amazement, I listened to her talking about her deep interest in Tilism-i-Hoshruba and her plan to convert it into English. I only half believed her when she told me that she has done enough of her translation work already. But soon after this meeting, I received from her a full chapter of the dastan as abridged by her in English. That has made me curious about this craze of hers.
I asked her if she has some interest in Urdu fiction.
“No,” she replied
“But you seem to have some interest in Urdu dastans. Which dastans other than this have you read?”
“No, I haven’t read any Urdu dastan other than this.”
“Then how did you develop an interest in Tilism-i-Hoshruba?”
She told me about her family background. She grew up in a family with a Persian background. It was spoken in the house. Her elders took much care to see that their children should learn Persian. It was presumed that one initiated in Persian would automatically know Urdu. Brought up in this atmosphere, she somehow got hold of Tilism-i-Hoshruba.
The book fascinated her with her Persian background. She had no difficulty in getting familiar with the kind of Urdu written in this dastan.
“I have been reading this book since childhood.” She added, “In recent years, an idea struck me that I should tell my children what a fascinating tale we have in Urdu. In fact, I had planned to re-write this tale in simple Urdu. But my son suggested that if I really meant to communicate this tale to the younger generation, then it should be re-written in English. The idea was convincing. So I started re-writing it in English.”
By the way, Tilism-i-Hoshruba is not an independent tale. It is, in fact, part of a longer tale known as Dastan-i-Amir Hamza, which runs in 47 big volumes. However, the part titled Tilism-i-Hoshruba had the quality to attract more attention and was eventually treated as an independent dastan. This whole series of dastans is, in fact, the product of an extinct, rich oral tradition in Urdu known as Dastan goi. It flourished more particularly in Delhi and Lucknow in the past. Special arrangements were made for nocturnal meetings where the storytellers or the Dastan-gos narrated these tales in their own style. With their captivating style, they could keep their audiences spellbound for long hours. In their hands, this style had developed into an art-form and storytelling had come to stay as a tradition well rooted in the Indo-Islamic culture popular both with elites and commoners.
The debacle of 1857 came as a setback to this tradition. Though it lingered on even after that, it became a vanishing tradition. The newly emerged literary trends dismissed it as something decadent and outdated. However, in the late decades of the 19th century, these oral dastans were recorded and published mostly by the Nawal Kishore Press of Lucknow. Out of the long series of volumes, those published under the title Tilism-i-Hoshruba earned better recognition and was singled out as an independent dastan.
The reformists of Sir Syed’s times and the modernists and progressives of later periods were all one in condemning these dastans. So, for long they were ignored. It was only after Partition that they once again attracted the attention of researchers and critics who had a taste for classics. It was during the 1950s that Mohammad Hasan Ashari came out with a volume containing selections from Tilism-i-Hoshruba. During those years, Maulana Chiragh Hasan Hasrat was seen putting a question to every young writer who met him: “Have you read Tilism-i-Hoshruba?” Finding the reply invariably in the negative, he would sigh and say: “If you haven’t read that book, you have read nothing.”
I wonder how he would have reacted when told that an Anglicised lady from the Faqir family of Lahore planned to rewrite this dastan in English.
However, prior to the present attempts by Begum Shahnaz, we have a volume from Francis Pritchett of the Columbia University bearing the title The Romance Tradition in Urdu — Adventures from the Dastan of Amir Hamza. And she has presented this work, asserting: “The dastan world has proved to be the ultimate tilism; its wonders keep changing, but they never diminish.”
The latest is the critical work of Shamsurrahman Farooqi, an exhaustive study of Dastan-i-Amir Hamza. The work is still in progress, as he plans to make a separate study of each volume of this stupendous dastan.
BEGUM Shahnaz Aijazuddin appears to be a strange bird. She is an Anglicized lady with no taste for Urdu. She has been writing in English, never caring to read or write in Urdu. And yet she has developed a passion for Tilism-i-Hoshruba, the famous dastan running into eight big volumes. Enamoured of this tale, she now has plans to prepare an abridged version in English.
