Stepping off an empty Bandra by-lane into a chaotic world of flying sorcerers and audacious thieves requires, at the very least, a surreal shift in perception. And that is one illusion of many, a tilism, as a Dastangoi performer would put it. Over four days, ace dastangohs Mahmood Farooqui and Danish Husain, with their brood of storytellers-in-training, presented tales from the Tilism-e-Hoshruba and other texts at the National Centre for Performing Arts, Mumbai, as part of the first-ever Dastangoi festival.
The dastangos, dressed in white, kept the audience riveted as their voices soared above the persistent sea wind, bringing to life remorseless tricksters who behead everything in sight and spunky empresses who command an army of sorcerers.
Excerpts from a conversation with Farooqui and Husain, who have trained other people in the art for the past year.
How did the festival come about?
Mahmood: I have been working with people in Mumbai and Delhi for a year. Part of the idea behind the festival was to showcase all these new tellers. Also, all the stories have different flavours — we were able to present more stories than we ordinarily perform in a single show.
This experience has shown us how stories can be given different nuances by tellers with different styles. The festival represents the work we have done over five-and-a-half years in a concentrated form. We're lucky India Foundation for the Arts allowed us to do this, because it has never been my intention to book a theatre hall and go to the entertainment tax office to get exemption, sell tickets, get sponsors — that is a trap I've been in before and I don't want to do it again. This is a journey — taking Dastangoi to many varied spaces, and hopefully, in the near future, out of the proscenium.
Which you are doing already...
Mahmood: Recently, a woman invited us to perform at her mother's death anniversary because her mother was fond of stories. We have performed at a great variety of places, venues and occasions; we hope, eventually, to be able to leave behind the restrictions of a bourgeois audience and mode of performance. I don't mean to sound disparaging, but there is a certain class and education factor, a recognition of decorum in the discipline of ‘going' to a performance. In the long run, we want to take these stories to the people; a cross-dressed man having a seductive exchange is something that the office goers at Churchgate might take delight in. Who knows?
India is a big country, with fast-disappearing cultural assets. But then, this is also a country where lives are getting lost every day. My hunch is that dastans have that range, that register, the ability to reach out – that is why we need more people to do this.
What were the spaces in which dastangoi was performed earlier?
Mahmood: The salons and courts were the most ubiquitous settings for dastangoi. We came across one description of a performance in the early years of the 20th Century. The storyteller sat on a takht, drank his tea and recited a story. We presume dastangoi was not very formal… lighting was of little importance. Our work, on the other hand, needs that because it is based on facial expression. Our performances are probably more formal; we separate the stage and the audience, we sit on cushions and dress up to perform.
We recently acquired a 1928 recording of a performance by Mir Baqar Ali. We realise our work is perforce going to be different – the older dastangohs were operating in an atmosphere where everyone knew the language, the story and the conventions. We are living in a much more ignorant time; a culturally regressive atmosphere. So we must illustrate meaning through our gestures, our voice, our pauses and our intonation. Maybe our stories will become familiar with time.
How did you start working with new people?
Mahmood: We conducted workshops in Delhi and Mumbai. Before that, Naseer (Naseeruddin Shah) wanted to work with us; we did five or six shows together. After this festival, I might travel to Hyderabad for a workshop. At the moment, we don't have a programmatic training method. And learning Urdu is the first step towards performing dastangoi. If the audience only understands a part of what we say, so be it…. The Urdu is crucial here; who am I to change the language in which dastangoi was created?
And how have audiences responded so far?
Danish: We have had very accepting and enthusiastic audiences at all our performances, people who are ready to suspend their disbelief for a brief period. When we performed in Aligarh, all the mullahs from the Arabic and Urdu departments were in the first row. We were doing a subversive tale; it could be construed as blasphemous. But the ones with the longest beards laughed the hardest!
Mahmood: There is a lingering sentiment — that if our stories were about the present, they might be more enjoyable.
People have told you that?
Mahmood: Progress is difficult to define in art, literature and poetry because we can never say that what is modern is better. And then, India is a country that simultaneously lives in five centuries. We may feel we live in cities and cannot derive any value from folk tales, but a well-told story is always contemporary. If you're laughing at a 200-year-old story told in a language that's almost 200 years old, then the form is contemporary enough!
