IN the early western literary terms, a romance was a form of fiction based on either a love story or a heroic adventure or both and western romances were in verse. Later, prose became a more favoured mode.

So, romances were medieval tales of chivalry peppered with love and meant to entertain. Hence, a romance was a long tale, packed with improbable incidents and unbelievable achievements.Is it a coincidence that dastan, a genre of narrative Urdu prose, has striking resemblance with the romances, both in history and nature? Aside from Mulla Wajahi’s Sabras (1635), many of the early Urdu dastans were composed in verse but increasingly prose was preferred to narrate a tale that had unique characters and improbable incidents. The ‘super hero’ of a dastan sometimes had to fight against genies, witches and sorcerers — not to mention the all-powerful armies of kings and fierce warriors — to rescue his lady love, and, as expected, he always emerged triumphant.

The most popular and well-known of these dastans are Dastan-i-Ameer Hamza and Tilism-i-Hoshruba. In addition to great physical strength and velour, the main character, named Ameer Hamza, is blessed with ism-i-aazam (one of the names of Allah, a kind of divine incantation) and some other divine powers.

An interesting character of these dastans is that of a buffoon, an apparent fool who is in fact a great help for the hero who at times lands himself in trouble. The character is brought in by the writer to entertain the reader with a comic relief, as too much of magic and bloodshed might desensitise the reader. There are a number of comic characters but the most artful of them is called Amar Ayyaar (usually mispronounced as Umroo Ayyaar). Blessed with a magic bag zambeel that can accommodate anything and everything, which can in turn be reproduced in the hour of need, Ayyaar and his gimmicks would come in handy when his comrades are in trouble.

But there is a difference between the western romances and Urdu dastans: Urdu dastan is almost always didactic and its writer never forgets to propagate his faith, making sure that the Muslim characters are virtuous and pious and the non-believers or infidels are an epitome of vice. The ultimate victory belongs to the ‘virtuous’, of course, as they stand on the high moral ground, though the writers of many dastans, including the versified ones, can momentarily forget that Islam does not permit even the overtures that our virtuous hero makes towards the ‘infidel’ heroine that culminate in a full-fledged love-affair. Perhaps the writer feels that the fact that she is later to embrace Islam might compensate for that lapse somehow.

Since most of the popular Urdu dastans were written in 18th and 19th centuries, one should not expect the characterisation and plot that one sees in the modern day fiction. But a dastan has certain aspects that not only make it a good reading but from a critical point of view, too, a dastan has much to offer. Oxford University Press has come up with a new edition of Dastan-i-Ameer Hamza and Tilism-i-Hoshruba in its Urdu classic series. Shams-ur-Rahman Farooqi, the series editor and one of the most accomplished critics and scholars of Urdu today, has succinctly summed up some very important facts about dastans in his intro to the first volume of Tilism-i-Hoshruba. Farooqi says: “The Naval Kishor edition of Dastan-i-Ameer Hamza has 46 volumes. Consisting of more than 42, 000 large-size pages and about 25 million words, 45 volumes of this dastan appeared between 1883 and 1909. The remaining one volume, named Gulistan-i-Bakhter, was published in 1917. Covering almost every important and unimportant aspect of human life, this dastan should rank among the world’s greatest feats of imaginative literature. When we reckon that it originated as an oral tradition at different times and difference places wide apart and was committed to writing later, we would feel no hesitation in saying that the complete version (the longer one) of Dastan-i-Ameer Hamza is the most distinguished, most unique and the longest of all the oral traditions of the world’s imaginative literature.”

Though Tilism-i-Hoshruba is a part of the longer version of Dastan-i-Ameer Hamza (as there are different versions), the volumes containing Hoshruba became so hugely popular that they somewhat eclipsed Dastan and made readers believe that the two are different dastans. But it has a long printing history. As Rafaqat Ali Shahid has mentioned in his intro to Dastan-i-Ameer Hamza, this great dastan has its origin indeed in Persian but it did not catch the fancy of readers in Persian. Its popularity in Urdu owes much to those who took the theme from Persian and transformed it into a whole new world of unbelievable events and characters.

According to Dr Shahid, the early Urdu versions of dastan are still in manuscript forms and one of them is in Paris’s National Library and the other, owned by Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu, is treasured by Karachi’s National Museum. He says that the first worthwhile Urdu version of Dastan-i-Ameer Hamza was written by Khalil Ali Khan Ashk. Penned in 1801, it was published in 1803 from Calcutta (now Kolkata). The next was Mirza Amaan Ali Ghalib Lakhnavi’s version that appeared in 1846 from Calcutta. For its certain literary and linguistic merits, Lakhnavi’s version is considered more important.

The current series published by Oxford offers a volume of Dastan-i-Ameer Hamza by Amaan Ghalib Lakhnavi and three volumes of Tilism-i-Hoshruba by Syed Muhammad Husain Jah. Ajmal Kamal’s name appears on two volumes as compiler. The work on other volumes is under way.

drraufparekh@yahoo.com