A story ends, many more being told

Vandana Shukla in Chandigarh

It is not exactly a story about a convicted storyteller, but a story nonetheless, of how raconteurs like him told their tales, sometimes into the night, and how they gave birth to an art known as dastangoi. First, the dastan of a protagonist: Mahmood Farooqui, a Rhodes Scholar, who studied history at Oxford University, is credited with reviving the lost art in India. Farooqui was accused of raping a research scholar from Columbia University on April 18. On August 5, he became the first in the country to get a sentence of seven-year rigorous imprisonment for forcing oral sex on a victim by a fast-track court which held him guilty of rape. 

Before films and television, datangos or kissagos, were the verbal entertainers, spread across Asia and Middle East, around 16th century. Their audiences would sit through the night enraptured; entangled into the tales of aiyyari and tilism (trickery and suspense), narrated with an overflow of lyrical Urdu vocabulary. Emperor Akbar is said to be an accomplished dastango himself, who had commissioned an illustrated version of the Hamzanama, which consisted of 1,200 folios, with text inscribed at the back, a kind of proto-television used for audio-visual narration. The art proliferated in Lucknow post 1857 epic battle against the British, and vanished gradually. The last well-known Indian dastango, Mir Baqar Ali, died in 1918. For reviving the Indo-Islamic extemporaneous storytelling art, Farooqui enjoyed popularity since 2005, when he first staged dastangoi shows. He was also the co-director of Peepli Live, a much acclaimed film. 

The more important issue is: would dastangoi survive after the fall of its hero? Among those who ‘dared’ to leave was Fauzia, the first woman dastango in India, who walked out for ‘lack of ethics and professionalism.’ The risk of leaving a well-established dastango, whose name was enough to bag the prime culture shows, didn’t deter her. Daughter of a scooter mechanic, Fauzia comes from the Jama Masjid area of Old Delhi, who received all her education in Urdu medium. “I never got due recognition because I was a stickler to ethics,” she says without regret. 

Work and support, both came from friends and well wishers like Sadia Dehlvi, Suhail Hashmi and Rakhshanda Jalil, who suggested she pick the themes of dastan which carry the flavour of the struggles of her life. “Dastangoi is an excellent medium to sensitize people about feminist issues – without offending or hurting. I have adapted ‘Ghummi Kababi’ by Ashraf Subuhi Dehlvi, ‘Nanhi Ki Naani’ by Ismat Chughtai and ‘Akeela Khala’ by Intizar Hussain. The tales reflect my personality.” Fauzia has made a name for herself as a dastango, by performing at places like Bhopal and Lucknow. She has trained Fazal Rashid, to be her partner dasnango. 

Nadeem Shah, assistant professor of medieval history, Delhi University, and Shankar Hussain, an educationist, working for Unesco, left Farooqui, because they felt they didn’t have either creative freedom to grow or recognition to earn. “An art form is bigger than even its best proponents,” says Danish Hussain, Farooqui’s partner in dastangoi shows since 2005, and also a witness in the infamous rape case.