The qissa is a marvellous genre that encompasses every imaginable form of storytelling, from adventures to travelogues to healing narratives to picaresque tales, in both prose and verse. And what I would call this omninarrous, omnifabulous quality of the genre — subsuming multitudes of narrative types — presents one of the biggest challenges in describing the qissa.

If one begins explaining the properties of a qissa about a hero’s adventures in a fantastic land, such as the Qissa Azar Shah o Saman Rukh Bano [The Qissa of Azar Shah and Saman Rukh Bano], someone else may offer a completely different set of properties from the very earthy adventures of the protagonist of Qissa Sipahizada [Adventures of a Soldier] in which the comeuppance of thugs is the central theme.

The predicament of describing the qissa is analogous to the famous parable about blind men describing the elephant, from the c. 500 BCE Buddhist text Tittha Sutta:

“A group of blind men heard that a strange creature called an elephant had arrived in town, but none of them knew what it looked like. Driven by curiosity, they said, “Let’s go examine it by touch.” They approached the elephant, and each began feeling a different part of its body.

“The first man, touching the trunk, said, ‘This creature is like a thick snake.’ Another, whose hand reached the ear, thought it resembled a fan. A third, feeling its leg, declared, ‘The elephant is like a tree trunk.’ The one who touched its side said, ‘It feels like a wall.’ Another, handling the tail, described it as a rope. And the last, who felt the tusk, said, ‘It’s smooth, hard and sharp — like a spear.’”

In some versions of the story, the blind men argue over their differing experiences, each convinced that his version is correct, and soon come to blows.

The impulse to understand and document a genre is not an exercise in futility. But the method employed in describing it must first take into account its manifest nature. Without a deeper appreciation of the genre and its scope, attempts to describe or “sum it up” are liable to fail.

These matters recently occupied my mind because of a query received the other day from a young scholar studying the qissa and the ways in which it was influenced by its contemporaneous society. Because the qissa’s adaptability to different narrative needs has already been commented upon, it should not be surprising that sometimes the qissa was employed as a vehicle for society’s preoccupations.

In the tragic and brutal Qissa Chahabili Bhattiari [Chhabili the Innkeeper], the prerogative of a prince was undermined by a lowly innkeeper, for which she was punished. The two different versions of the qissa make it quite clear that it was written as a cautionary tale for women, especially those from a lower station in life, to never forget their place.

Predominantly, however, the qissa dealt with myths, legends and fantasies. And finding the causal chain behind the creation of such works is not always possible. There may be an easily explained reason for composing a qissa about a pilgrimage, for the purpose of commemoration etc. But it is not so easy to provide a plausible reason for composing a qissa about a prince’s fantastic journey to Mount Qaf, beyond the fundamental human need to create and enjoy works that provide certain aesthetic pleasures.

One may even say that the academic impulse to find out why a work of art is created and appreciated is misdirected, because it disregards the centrality of the need for entertainment in human life.

There are also material reasons why such queries are misdirected. Take for example, a fantasy which is not written in the society which adopts it, like countless stories from Alf Laila, and hundreds of qissas that have no known or approximate region of origin. These stories circulated freely between the lands of Central and South Asia and the Middle East, and were adopted by Urdu as its own. Beyond changing culinary and vestimentary details at times, to make the story more relatable, very little in the original was changed during the adoption. There is no way to describe this phenomenon, except as proof of society’s openness to literary works from other cultures to serve its entertainment needs.

Perhaps academia would benefit if it held in check a lazy impulse to frame literary genres solely as material for sociological project queries. A more useful approach would be deep immersion in qissas that exist for aesthetic joy alone, through which these texts will reveal their mysteries to the readers. Rather than forcing the genre into a pre-existing academic frame, it may be more fruitful to let the qissa suggest the framework in which it may be studied.

For that to happen, young scholars must be given more freedom to read and discover aspects of the qissa which they find intriguing, rather than finding endorsement for a framework in the existing Western narratological themes. Let them develop theories of narrative based on what our narratives actually tell us, rather than find in them an endorsement of theories built on the Western canon.

Because we have moved from a mostly oral culture to Persian, Urdu and English, we do not have a clear view of the knowledge-base lost or dispersed in material archives, in which we may find how our literary narratives were perceived by artists and scholars who were their audience. But even if their work is non-existent or lost, it is important to build our own theory of narrative through engagement with texts rather than impose the structures of Western canon on these works to see if it fits.

Students of our classics must be conscious that they are beginning in blindness, and this consciousness will allow them, by slow degrees, to discover the qissa elephant.

The columnist is a novelist, author and translator.

He can be reached via his website: micromaf.com

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, April 6th, 2025