In world literature, Tilism-i-Hoshruba (1883-1897), stands as an oddity: a fantasy that starts in medias res, a Latin term that means “in the midst of things.” The term describes the narrative method of beginning a story somewhere in the middle of chronological events.

Tilism-i-Hoshruba opens where the giant Laqa and his devil, Bakhtiarak, are on the run from Amir Hamza’s armies and the tricksters led by Amar Ayyar. They seek refuge in Qila-i-Koh-i-Aqiq [Fortress of Mount Agate] whose ruler, Suleiman Ambreen-Mu [Suleiman Amber Hair] provides them refuge. When Amir Hamza’s armies arrive and are bivouacked outside the fortress, Ambreen-Mu writes to the rulers of neighbouring lands seeking assistance.

The Fortress of Mount Agate borders the land of Tilism-i-Hoshruba, which is ruled by Afrasiyab, the Emperor of Sorcerers. Hearing of Laqa’s plight, he promises his assistance, and the conflict is thus established between Amir Hamza’s armies and the sorcerers. In reality, however, the conflict is between the tricksters, led by Amar Ayyar, and the sorcerers and trickster girls deployed by Afrasiyab. Amir Hamza makes only a token appearance, and is more of a hindrance than a hero.

For those unfamiliar with this fantasy, the word Tilism-i-Hoshruba is used for three different things: the first is the physical land which adjoins the Fortress of Mount Agate, the second is the magical world that is built on that land, and the third thing is the book itself.

There are two famous literary works which begin in media res. Homer’s Iliad opens mid-way through the Trojan War, and Virgil’s Aeneid starts mid-journey, with a shipwreck. In the 20th century, we have Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which begins decades after The Hobbit, and thrusts the reader right in the middle of political tensions.

But the Iliad and Aeneid are both legends, and Tilism-i-Hoshruba predates The Lord of the Rings by at least 250 years. It stands alone as a fantasy that defied the norms for literature of magical adventures. Remarkably, it also defied the norms for the narrative method of in media res. There’s no slow revealing of the beginning, or flashbacks that reveal the beginning of the story.

One only hears, every 500 pages or so, that Afrasiyab was an usurper who had deposed Tilism-i-Hoshruba’s first emperor, Lacheen. But throughout the 8,000 or so pages of the eight-volume Tilism-i-Hoshruba, we do not get to hear that story. Two decades ago, when I began translating this fantasy, I wondered why that was so.

How long the Tilism-i-Hoshruba remained entirely in the oral tradition is still unknown. We only know that a dastaango [oral story teller] named Mir Ahmed Ali (lived 1850s) first transcribed it into a written version with macaronic text and, later, his version was used by the two authors of Tilism-i Hoshruba, Muhammad Husain Jah (d. 1891-93?) and Ahmed Husain Qamar (1845?-1901), whose version was published by the Naval Kishore Press.

The question is: who made the decision to begin the story where it does in the Naval Kishore version? Did Mir Ahmed Ali decide that, or did Muhammad Husain Jah, who wrote the first four volumes? The latter’s version was the first to appear in print from among the narrators of Hoshruba.

Another question was: why did nobody demand to know the beginning even after Tilism-i-Hoshruba reached the zenith of popularity upon its publication? Did everyone know the beginning from oral tradition and were only too happy that Muhammad Husain Jah had literally cut to the chase?

If that were so, it would be a great example of participatory storytelling, where a storyteller and his audience come together, with the former supplying fast-paced adventures and the latter intellectually supplying the background information through the story remembered from earlier oral narrations.

Of one thing I was convinced, and remain so. There’s no magical fantasy quite like Tilism-i-Hoshruba, and it remains the first one of its kind. When the translation was published, I called it ‘The World’s First Magical Fantasy Epic.’ Upon the publication of the first volume of my translation of Tilism-i-Hoshruba in 2009, titled Hoshruba: The Land and the Tilism, author and critic Anil Menon picked on this definition, and wrote something that stayed with me.

Menon wrote: “The Tilism-i-Hoshruba is indeed privileged, but not in the way Farooqi imagines it. It is not the first magical epic fantasy. It is the last of its kind, composed in the shadow of a new tilism, the British Empire’s mercantilism, and all that it entailed. Tilism-i-Hoshruba is the last of the great transcriptions of an oral narrative epic. Throughout the tale, it is possible to discern in the text, in the dim background, reified from our deep memory perhaps, the presence of a dastaango pausing, elaborating, grimacing, shifting voices…

“To modern sensibilities, the dastaango’s plot is tedious, the quests dubious, the heroes flat and perhaps even a little insane. But only to modern sensibilities. By himself, a dastaango is only the sound of one hand clapping; an audience is required to complete that sound. And the sad truth is that the dastaango’s audience has mostly disappeared. The humid night, the cramped circle of friends and relatives, the gurgle of the hookah, the cousin who is always late, the whispered catch-up questions, the delighted laughs, the still-listening kids fast asleep in their parents’ arms… that world has long disappeared.

“And with it has disappeared the Hoshruba as Mir Ahmad Ali and his friends told it, the Hoshruba as Muhammad Husain Jah wrote it, and the Hoshruba as the publisher Naval Kishore wished it read.”

I ultimately discovered the history of Hoshruba (the tilism, not the text), or what we call these days the back story of Hoshruba. And with that I realised that, in order to revive Tilism-i-Hoshruba, translation was the wrong strategy. It had to be reconstructed. And this is one of the happy labours that occupies me these days.

The columnist is a novelist, author and translator.

He can be reached via his website: micromaf.com

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 21st, 2026