The storyteller Ankit Chadha’s eyes possess of an innate inquisitiveness about those who surround him eager to listen in on the enchanting rendering of yet another dastan . His audiences are never quite shrouded in darkness, and he looks upon them as kindred spirits rather than the mere beholders of his ages-old yet contemporary artistry. His is an eloquence that calls for the persuasiveness of both diction and countenance. Chadha is a young dastango with the natural charm of a born raconteur and his flavourful storytelling takes place in a tongue that is often a mix of khadi boli , idiomatic Urdu and the easy colloquialisms of our time. None of the above statements need be stated in the past tense, because fragments from Chadha’s life live on for posterity — in personal memories, on paper or digitalia, and in iterations of the art form he had compellingly made his own.
One of a kind
The revival of dastangoi , dubbed the ‘lost’ art of Urdu storytelling, is still very nascent in the country. Mahmood Farooqui performed one of the earliest modern renditions in 2005. The dozen odd years since then has seen the form re-enter the cultural space as an oral tradition with staying power, despite the decades of inactivity that preceded this resurrection. Farooqui’s website now lists 25 more exponents of the form. Many were actors who have taken up the form as a sideline rather than a vocation. Which is why Chadha, as a burgeoning specialist, was arguably one of his kind. His involvement with dastangoi began in 2010 as a 23-year-old. Very early on, he offered glimpses of the flair and confidence of a future master. One of his early dastans was a satire on the cellphone culture that had gripped the nation, and Chadha gave it a Hinglish inflection that transported the vintage form straight into the digital age, without dumbing it down. While Farooqui and Danish Husain worked well with the dual-narrator format that showcased the form as a crowd-pleasing jugalbandi, Chadha was fast forging a reputation as an intrepid comer unafraid of flying solo.
The weaving anew of narrative journeys allowed Chadha to venture into the classical and the topical, and sometimes, a beguiling mix of both. He worked with the ancient tales of the Hamzanama , whose 46 volumes had fed the oeuvre of dastangos for centuries. He returned often to the life and times of Amir Khusrau and Kabir, inspired by their egalitarianism and their spiritual quests that could well be reinstated as beacons for our times. A recent fellowship at Sabarmati Ashram led to the development of a sombre introspective piece, Prarthana , on Mahatma Gandhi’s views on death, which was ironically slated to be performed in Pune over the last weekend. Among Chadha’s literary efforts was, My Gandhi Story , available in several languages, a book for children Chadha authored in collaboration with Warli artist, Rajesh Chaitya Vangad, and Amir Khusrau: The Man in Riddles , an illustrated book dedicated to quatrains by Khusrau.
A natural activist
The Chadha of recent years had acquired an edgier persona, much more aware of the reach and influence of his form. Activism sat well on his young shoulders as was amply seen when he performed Farooqui’s Dastan-e-Sedition , with fearless abandon alongside Himanshu Bajpai, at the JNU’s Admin Block during the student uprisings of 2016. His recent works were thus taking Chadha away from the apolitical domain of so-called liberal arts, often ensconced in privileged enclaves of art patrons and the literati, into one in which his conscientiousness would play a much larger role, in which his activism was to find expression in his art.
He was poised to be the brave new flagbearer of dastangoi itself after mentor Farooqui’s fall from grace as a liberal icon. An early demise seems to be a hard price to pay for living one’s life purely on the strength of one’s convictions, but it is also an unseemly metaphor for these uncertain times.
