Fasana-i-Ajaib, or, literally, the tale of curiosities, is an Urdu dastan. A dastan is a longish, highly imaginative tale packed with unusual events, love affairs and battles, not to mention supernatural characters --- genies, fairies, dwarfs and sorcerers. As a prose narrative, a dastan can be described as what is usually called a ‘nested story’, or a tale with many subplots and layers of stories within a main story.
The ‘hero’ of a dastan is usually a king or prince, a romantic at one moment with several beauties by his side, and the next a macho who can defeat scores of warriors at once. At the same time, he is utterly religious and usually divine help arrives for him whenever he is in trouble ---- and, alas, he is often in trouble, usually of his own making.
What makes Fasana-i-Ajaib unique is its language: ornate and laden with similes, metaphors and metonyms. Weaved in a highly decorative language, the book gave birth to a new literary style, known as Urdu’s Lucknow School of prose. Though today, we may not have a very high opinion of the book and its flowery language, when Fasana-i-Ajaib was first published in 1843 (though penned in 1824), it took the subcontinent by storm and soon it became a symbol of Lucknow’s representative literary piece, writes Rasheed Hasan Khan.
Surprisingly, many male characters of Fasana-i-Ajaib are deprived of common sense and make silly mistakes in everyday affairs. Even the hero of the tale, Prince Jaan-i-Alam, is too naive to be a prince and lacks worldly wisdom. Rasheed Hasan Khan says this is a reflection of Lucknow’s actual state of affairs as princes there totally lacked the qualities rulers must possess and most of them loved to be engaged in festivities and revelries. In fact, the elites of Lucknow in those days were notorious for their lasciviousness. On the other hand, the female characters in this dastan are much more sensible and active, which also reflects the general character of Lucknow society about two centuries ago.
But Fasana-i-Ajaib is not only a book or tale; it is neither merely a window into Lucknow’s penchant for an ornamental language. Rather, it is a mirror reflecting Lucknow’s culture that favoured embellishment in everything, be it a literary style or a general way of life. Delicacy, sophistication and elegance were the watchwords in Lucknow society where Fasana-i-Ajaib was created, albeit in the end the zest for elaborately decorating everything may betray a lack of sophistication. Fasana-i-Ajaib was not popular only in its own days, but still it is considered one of the most reprinted classical works of Urdu literature. Only Bagh-o-Bahar, the famous classical Urdu tale by Mir Amman Dehlvi, has run into more editions than Fasana-i-Ajaib.
Rajab Ali Baig Suroor Lukhnavi, the author of Fasana-i-Ajaib, claimed to have written, in the shape of Fasana-i-Ajaib, a befitting reply to Bagh-o-Bahar, the icon of lovely, flowing and comparatively simple Urdu prose that Delhi School is known for. This heightened the ongoing literary feud between Lucknow and Delhi. Delhi was hallmarking Urdu language and literature and took pride in its status as political and cultural capital, despite being almost totally rendered powerless by the British colonialists. Poets and writers who had migrated from Delhi to Lucknow in search of greener pastures could never shed their sense of superiority and would call the local intellectuals of Lucknow ‘Poorab Wallas’, a mildly pejorative term to underline Lucknow’s rustic hence uncouth tastes and gaudy standards in art, literature and language.
The Lucknow’s assertion of political independence from Delhi at the behest of the British was not new and Lucknow had declared itself a ‘kingdom’ during Nawab Ghaziuddin Hyder’s reign, but its desire to equal or surpass Delhi in every field exacerbated literary rivalries between the poets and writers of Delhi and Lucknow. And Fasana-i-Ajaib worked as a catalyst in this cultural and literary battle. Eventually, a battle of books, so to speak, broke out and a series of claims, counterclaims and rejoinders were brought about not only in poetry and discussions but full-scale books were also written from both sides.
Suroor in his preface to Fasana-i-Ajaib not only boasted of Lucknow’s grandeur, affluence and exquisite standards in every field, he scoffed at Mir Amman’s prose, which, so thought Suroor, was too simple and plain to be taken seriously.
He thought the pretentious and embellished language that he was writing was truly standard Urdu, a claim that today hardly anybody would endorse.
Rajab Ali Baig Suroor was born in Lucknow in 1785 or 1786, says Nayyar Masood and Jameel Jalibi agrees to it. Suroor’s exact date of death is not known but Haneef Naqvi has reckoned that Suroor died between March 15 and April 12, 1869.
Published in Dawn, March 28th, 2022
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