THE two-day Islamabad Literature Festival has been acknowledged as a tremendous success. It was a multi-lingual festival and along with English the literatures of different Pakistani languages were also discussed. As far as Urdu is concerned, contemporary poetry and fiction were particularly brought into focus.

With reference to fiction I would like to point out that Urdu critics and professors have been in the habit of tracing its origin to the time when we borrowed the two genres, the novel and the short story, from the western tradition. So they like researching who wrote the first short story in Urdu and who deserves to be called the first novelist in Urdu. But at one of the discussions at the festival, we were expected to take into consideration the dastan too. Perhaps the programme setters were aware of the recent revival of interest in the tradition of the Urdu dastan, which for long had been considered outdated. But now we have three English versions of Dastan-i-Amir Hamza, one of which is translated by the distinguished American scholar Frances Pritchett of Columbia University.

Other dastans are manifold, tracing their origins from three different sources, Arabic, Persian and ancient India’s tradition of Katha Kahani. They had also attracted the attention of scholars at the Fort William College where they were recast in a different mould and re-written in simple language keeping in view the economy of words. The long-winded narrative no longer in vogue, an easy prose style was introduced with the form seemingly paving the way for the novel.

While the contribution of the Katha Kahani to the dastan tradition was being discussed, a reference was made to Jatak tales. Zehra Nigah chose to read a Jatak tale from Asif Farrukhi’s collection of these tales. The listeners wanted to know more about them so I tried to explain to the best of my knowledge.

Buddha is known more to us for his sermons which carry the whole burden of his teachings. Next is Dhammapada, a collection of short and wise statements expressed in verses. These short statements or aphorisms are seen as the pearls of Buddhist wisdom and so this collection enjoys immense popularity. But Jatak kathas have not attracted as much attention as they deserve. Are we hesitant to acknowledge Buddha as a storyteller or is it that most of us take fiction as a means of pure entertainment and do not care to access the deeper meanings the tales carry?

In one of the stories, Buddha inquires from one of the bhiksus about the sensational happenings he had witnessed in a town. “Why are you so worried?” Buddha tries to calm him down. “An event very similar to this had happened in days gone by.” Buddha then narrates a story of how a crisis develops and the Raja finds himself in trouble. But his minister, with his practical wisdom, solves the problem. And do you know who that minister was? Buddha asks. “I was the minister,” he says. Seeing his bhiksus puzzled Buddha tells them, “It happened in my past janam when I was destined to act as a minister for a hotheaded Raja. I did my duty and with that came the end of that particular janam. My soul transmigrated into the body of a Raj Hans and I flew away from the mahal towards ManasarovarLake.”

In this vein Buddha narrates his experiences of transmigrating from one janam to another, from that of a monkey to a cat, a tortoise or a parrot. These separate tales taken together may be seen as the autobiography of a man claiming to have underwent a series of janams.

A Buddhist may accept it according to his belief in the transmigration of the soul. Others are free to interpret it in a symbolic way, for instance, as the story of a highly imaginative soul who identifies himself with every creature on this earth, trying to impress upon us that taken together, we form a brotherhood. So we should read these tales in the light of the philosophy of Wadhatul Wujood.