Regarding the shelves in a bookshop the other day, where some of my favourite writers were displayed, I recalled the empowerment I felt reading them for the first time.

The excitement a reader feels in exploring the great texts for the first time is twofold: experiencing a work that has occupied the imaginations of generations of readers and becoming connected to the nebulous universe where stories are formed and enjoyed; and living inside a character through which the reader co-exists with the author who has created it.

While the creative feat is the author’s alone, the imaginative and empathetic feat of living inside the character is an accomplishment shared by both, bringing their existence in an overlapping union. Through sedentary reading, the reader, in a manner of speaking, “becomes” the author.

Some readers find this delightful orbit the be-all and end-all. Others, drawn by the world and beings created by an author, progress to the wholesale consumption of her or his works, assimilating everything with a certain devotion.

Over time, some readers begin to see correlation between works, which leads to a new mode of entertainment: thinking about the nature and structure of stories. Suddenly, time stands still, and one begins to see stories from the distant and recent past show a remarkable likeness in structure.

One of the best demonstrations of this is to be found in Christopher Booker’s Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (2004), a study of the nature and structure of stories, where he dissects the Old English epic poem Beowulf, written sometime between the 9th and 12th centuries, and the American thriller movie Jaws (1975), based on Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel, showing how both are essentially the same story, or narrative archetype, which Booker calls “Overcoming the Monster.” Even more entertaining was to read how the plot of Jane Eyre (1847) resembles in every detail the plot of Aladdin, a narrative archetype named by Booker as “Rags to Riches.”

As a student of Urdu classics, I have always felt that our classical literature has certain distinguishing properties which must be studied systematically, firstly to understand their poetics and learn the connection between our people and their stories through history and, secondly, to understand if and how our stories and their telling have changed in any way.

To begin with, it would be useful to understand the different character types we find in our classics, the nature of their adventures, and how these characters become involved in them, so that we can understand what the text is telling us, the implication of the character types employed to tell the story, and how the story is soliciting our participation.

Best suited for this kind of study are the vibrant qissas, the repository of the largest number of our imaginative texts of literary entertainment in prose and verse, the latter using the poetic structure of the masnavi. For the present, we will exclude the texts that merely use the qissa mode for narration, such as travelogues and histories.

It is always re-reading that reveals the secrets of a text, and once we start re-reading, even texts that appear at first of little significance can unlock important truths.

One important feature of our texts is the importance accorded to the stability of the story’s physical universe. In most qissas, we find a king longing for an heir to the throne. This is not a vain wish, but tied to a desire for public weal and prosperity.

Importantly, the desire for an heir is never the preoccupation of an ogre, but the burden of a just and kindly king. The absence of an heir means the king’s death would invite strife and civil war, resulting in pillaging, violence and killing. An heir ensures stability of the rule, peaceful transition of power and the continuation of policies.

Another important feature of the qissas is the triumph achieved, its nature, and the identity of the character who has triumphed. Because everlasting triumph belongs to the protagonist, sometimes, if it is unexpectedly apportioned to a character unsuited to the role of the protagonist, one must reassess the qissa and its underlying structure.

I recently had to do that with the Qissa Chhabili Bhattiyari (Chhabili the Innkeeper), a popular qissa which had appeared in several prose and verse editions since the mid-19th century, published as a form of musical theatre to be performed by travelling troupes, and which has one of the most violent endings of all the qissas I have ever read.

The qissa begins with King Sikandar Shah longing to have an heir to the throne, and finally being granted his wish when Prince Zaman is born. As a young man, the prince falls in love with the innkeeper Chhabili. The news of his infatuation with the innkeeper reaches the court and the king arranges for a match between a landowner’s daughter, Bichhittar Kunwari, and the prince. Chhabili learns of the impending marriage, visits Bichhittar in disguise, and is crestfallen to see her rival’s beauty.

Chhabili ensnares the prince in a deception to keep him from beholding his wife’s beauty. Bichhittar tries her best to engage the prince, but he is an insular and cowardly character, and has been properly scared by Chhabili. He avoids looking at her. To win the prince, Bichhittar must take countermeasures to foil Chhabili’s plans.

A modern reader would say that the conflict in the story lies in class structures and the privilege one woman has over another in these structures. Another might say that the conflict arises from determining to whom the prince should belong: the woman with whom he is in love, or the one he marries afterwards.

As we will see in the next column, these are not at all the qissa’s primary concerns, and its violent end is very much in keeping with these concerns.

[To be continued]

The columnist is a novelist, author and translator.

He can be reached via his website: micromaf.com

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, May 4th, 2025