Hoshruba Read online

  The names of those who wrote the mnemonic text of Emperor Akbar’s illustrations, as well as those who painted them, are recorded in history. Faizi is not one of them, but a small detail like that could hardly be allowed to stand in Mir Ahmed Ali’s way. He brushed it aside royally and made Faizi the “original author” of Hoshruba. Mir Ahmed Ali would be the ghost-writer of a writer ghost.

  It is possible that Mir Ahmed Ali chose Faizi precisely because neither Emperor Akbar’s court chroniclers nor later historians ever mentioned his name in association with the illustrated Amir Hamza project. Perhaps Mir Ahmed Ali felt that one day someone would start digging for the truth and the trail of lies would lead straight to his grave. But, no matter what Mir Ahmed Ali’s twisted motivation for choosing Faizi, all the formalities were now complete and the tale was ready to be unleashed.

  I can imagine Mir Ahmed Ali narrating it for the first time for a select audience – entry by invitation only – gathered at a Lucknow nobleman’s house. Mir Ahmed Ali, his host and some close friends sit at the head of the room resting against bolsters. The audience sits before them on a carpet. The host tells the group that Mir Ahmed Ali has discovered, purely by accident, a new tale of the Amir Hamza cycle, which his great-great-great-grandfather received directly from Faizi. It lay hidden in an old family heirloom in the form of notes. For the last three months, Mir Ahmed Ali has been busy arranging and decoding the notes and now he is done with his labors.

  The audience demands that Mir Ahmed Ali share the tale with them without loss of time. Mir Ahmed Ali quickly excuses himself. He says there has been a misunderstanding. The tale, named Tilism-e Hoshruba, is not yet ready. Only one part of it is. Moreover, as he is allergic to dust, going through the old parchments gave him a sore throat. He cannot narrate that evening – a great shame because the tale is one the likes of which his audience has never heard.

  Members of the audience look at each other with open mouths. Mir Ahmed Ali has never made such an atrocious claim.

  “Such a tale! Such a tale!” Mir Ahmed Ali keeps repeating to himself.

  A faint smile appears on the host’s face. He whispers into a friend’s ear, who also smiles and nods his head. The audience becomes increasingly impatient. Mir Ahmed Ali is absolutely quiet, the audience fully disposed to riot. The host calls for calm and orders another round of refreshments, which momentarily pacifies everyone.

  Mir Ahmed Ali sits with closed eyes, softly intoning some verses from a ghazal.

  After the round of refreshments is over, the host leans toward Mir Ahmed Ali and asks if he is feeling any better. Everyone waits in anticipation. “Not so much,” says Mir Ahmed Ali.

  Could he – asks the host – perhaps, maybe, possibly find the strength to narrate a little episode from the Tilism-e Hoshruba? Just a tiny little insignificant bit of a scene?

  That he might do, Mir Ahmed Ali says after due reflection, his eyes half shut. Members of the audience look at each other gleefully. They have never felt so lucky.

  Mir Ahmed Ali clears his throat, glances around majestically, and begins in a clear, slowly rising voice: The cupbearers of nocturnal revelries… the bibbers from the cup of inspiration…pour the vermilion wine of inscription… into the paper’s goblet thus…

  God be praised, Mir Ahmed Ali has miraculously recovered. He holds forth with accompanying theatrics for a full three hours. The account of his sore throat was greatly exaggerated, but not his praise of Hoshruba. The audience sits entranced. When he stops, they clamor for more. Mir Ahmed Ali promises to tell them the rest the following night at the bazaar corner where he has an ongoing gig.

  That night, many present at the narration have dreams of the scantily clad sorceress Sandal. Some dream of Prince Badiuz Zaman, “the moon of the constellation of excellence.” We do not know if anyone dreamt of the fawn that “appeared near the river bank, cavorting and gambolling like a frolicsome beloved well-versed in coquetry.”

  Before he arrives in the bazaar the next evening, Mir Ahmed Ali sends out his disciple storytellers, Amba Prasad Rasa and Hakim Asghar Ali Khan, to bring him a report from the venue. They come back with the intelligence that a large crowd is gathered at the appointed place. They saw many new faces in the crowd.

  That is just as Mir Ahmed Ali expected. He sets out with his disciples and arrives at the venue to loud, thankful murmurs from the throng. Everyone demands that Mir Ahmed Ali begin the tale from the beginning. And he does.

  Only an infidel would doubt that it did not happen exactly in this manner.

  From that day onward, the three storytellers narrate the Hoshruba in public and private gatherings. When they pass in the street, people look at them with terrible envy. They are the only ones who know what will happen next. People try all kinds of tricks on the storytellers to learn what they know of the next episode, but the affable storytellers become very taciturn whenever asked in the street, “What happened next?” Outside the storytelling sessions they speak not a word about Hoshruba.

  In the coming days, the crowds steadily increase in number. Amba Prasad Rasa and Hakim Asghar Ali Khan arrive an hour before Mir Ahmed Ali and summarize the preceding events of the tale for the gathering before the maestro begins his narration. It will be several years before the tale will finally end. And even then, it does not end. In fact, people wait for the end so that they can revisit their favorite episodes.

  Or perhaps it takes Mir Ahmed Ali many more years to end it because people keep demanding he narrate again some particular episodes they had previously enjoyed. He tries telling them to have patience, that an even better episode will soon follow, but nobody listens to him. Every day, Mir Ahmed Ali is assailed with requests – now this incident, now that passage. Like a beleaguered but indulgent parent, Mir Ahmed Ali feels obliged to give satisfaction. When he gets bored with reciting the same episode over and over again, he expresses his displeasure to the audience by narrating it breezily, without all its juicy details. People relent and let the storyteller have his own way for a few days, then return to their old ways. The drama continues.

  As an oral, narrative genre, dastan draws heavily on improvisation, but once the story of Hoshruba was established it turned into an elaborate chess game. The result was predestined but not the individual moves that would always be improvised. As Mir Ahmed Ali added characters and scenes and improved on the earlier descriptions, he kept adding to the subplots that must flow toward the predestined end. He and his disciples had their own favorite episodes, which they embellished in this way during storytelling sessions.

  The storytellers knew how many times a lie has to be repeated before it becomes accepted truth. They never forgot to attribute the tale to the Amir Hamza cycle of tales, and to Faizi. As far as audiences were concerned, they cared little where the tale came from as long as it was a good one and from the Amir Hamza cycle. And such an entertaining tale as Hoshruba! Why on earth wouldn’t it be a part of The Adventures of Amir Hamza cycle – the grandmother of all fine tales?

  All other stories of the Amir Hamza cycle paled in comparison with its popularity. The audience asked for Hoshruba and the storytellers complied. It was told in public and private gatherings, sometimes in long sessions that continued over many days.

  In the period around the 1840s and 1850s, Hoshruba had taken Lucknow by storm. Travelers to Lucknow returned with the tales of Hoshruba. Attending Mir Ahmed Ali’s narration was a sacred ritual for all Lucknow visitors.

  The neighboring cities started feeling jealous. Before an all-out bidding war could break out between the princely states of India to steal the storytellers from Lucknow, a group of troopers astride fleet-footed Arabian mares, arrive in Lucknow early one evening covered in dust. Their leader remains cloistered with Mir Ahmed Ali and his two disciples for many hours and leaves early the next morning with his entourage.

  The Prince of Rampur has made a pre-emptive strike. Mir Ahmed Ali has accepted the prince’s invitation to become the court storyteller of Rampur. The terms of
the offer and the perks are not disclosed.

  When Mir Ahmed Ali packed his belongings, his two disciples, Rasa and Khan, also packed theirs. They would follow him. Along with their bed and bedding, Rasa and Khan also packed their families, including sons Zamin Ali and Ghulam Raza. Both boys would also become storytellers. One of them would write another version of Hoshruba.

  When the caravan of storytellers sets out for Rampur in oxen-driven carriages, the citizens of Lucknow – men, women and children, young and old alike – accompany it on foot to the limits of the city. There is not a single dry eye in the crowd. Mir Ahmed Ali shamelessly cries loudest of all.

  He would never have left Lucknow if he had not been convinced that he was leaving Hoshruba in safe hands. He had passed on his mantle to a young storyteller named Muhammad Amir Khan, who began narrating episodes from Hoshruba in Lucknow some time earlier, with Mir Ahmed Ali’s blessings. He had a knack for creating the episodes about tricksters. Khan did not let Mir Ahmed Ali down. He continued spreading the tale among the Lucknow audience. He also wrote at least two volumes of the tale.

  By the time the oxen-driven carriages arrive in Rampur, Mir Ahmed Ali has stopped crying. On the way, he has thought up a fine magic war involving a magic effigy that kills a sorcerer by casting a love spell over him. When he is led to his lodgings by the prince’s attendants he tears open his bag, takes out his inkwell and paper, and starts scribbling. It was impossible to take notes during the jolting carriage ride.

  Only an infidel would doubt that it did not happen exactly in this manner.

  At the Rampur court, Mir Ahmed Ali continued his storytelling work. He also put on a lot of extra weight from eating all the good stuff from the royal kitchen. Life was kind to him. His cheeks were ruddy and he laughed easily. He composed two tales at this time, one in Persian, another in Urdu, but he did not write Hoshruba. Once he organized the different episodes of the story, he probably improvised the rest of the details just using notes.

  It fell to his disciple, Amba Prasad Rasa, to transcribe his notes. We do not know how detailed these notes were, or whether Rasa added some details to them. That manuscript is now lost; until recently even its existence and provenance were unknown.

  Later, Rasa’s son, Ghulam Raza, who adopted the pen name Raza, was commissioned by the Rampur court to compose the tale of Hoshruba. He wrote it down in fourteen volumes between 1858 and 1880. His work remained in manuscript.

  But Hoshruba began to acquire a life of its own. While Raza’s work on his manuscript was coming to an end in Rampur, Mir Ahmed Ali’s home town of Lucknow was again about to become the official headquarters of Hoshruba. Thanks to the work started by him and his disciples and carried on by Muhammad Amir Khan, Hoshruba was winning over the Lucknow audience in ever greater numbers.

  By then it was commonly accepted as part of the Amir Hamza cycle of tales. In fact, it also had a specified place in the cycle as its fifth book. In the early 1880s, the erudite and enterprising Munshi Naval Kishore, owner of the Naval Kishore Press, decided to publish the entire, longer Amir Hamza cycle of tales. The Naval Kishore Press decided to start its publication project with Hoshruba because it was an independent story and already extremely popular in oral narration.

  When Munshi Naval Kishore asked around for someone to compose the tale, he was given the name of Lucknow storyteller Muhammad Husain Jah. Kishore remembered him well. Some years previous, he had been commissioned to write a short dastan, Tilism-e Fasahat. The book was a testament to his mastery of prose. Kishore showed up at a dastan narration session and was impressed by Jah’s masterful narration of Hoshruba. Jah was engaged to write the Hoshruba tale, and that was just as it should have been. Muhammad Husain Jah’s father was a rammal or diviner, which means – why deny it – a sorcerer. The Hoshruba project was in excellent hands.

  Jah knew his Hoshruba and, as a professional storyteller, he knew its real provenance. Now that he was commissioned to write it, he decided to compose a master version using all available written versions and oral traditions of his contemporary storytellers. Amba Prasad Rasa was still alive at the time. Jah obtained the version Rasa had prepared from Mir Ahmed Ali’s notes. He also used the one written by Ghulam Raza in fourteen volumes, and the two volumes written by Muhammad Amir Khan. Besides those, he borrowed some episodes from a contemporary storyteller, Sheikh Tasadduq Husain. Then he sat down to compose his masterwork.

  Jah must have had a delightful time comparing how the several storytellers differed in their accounts of each character and his or her peculiarities. The work would not be unlike making a composite literary sketch of each character. And he did, indeed, do a fine work of compilation. The result is a complex set of characters unparalleled in literature, and a highly subversive arrangement of roles.

  That a woman, the sorceress Mahrukh Magic-Eye, should lead the camp of True Believers may seem curious now, but it was not so in the nineteenth century Indo-Islamic society where women had a vibrant social role. There are a few shy and retiring females as well; Mahjabeen Diamond-Robe and Almas Fairy-Face are two such examples. However, Queen Mahrukh Magic-Eye, trickster girl Sarsar Swordfighter, Empress Heyrat and sorceress Bahar of the Spring-Quarter are complex and powerful women entirely comfortable with their sexuality. They hold their own against male tricksters and sorcerers in intellect, physical prowess and magical powers. The strident personalities of these female characters did not emerge from the author’s fancy but from the lives of the contemporary women. The Hoshruba sorceresses appear in the dresses of Lucknow princesses and noble women, speak in their idiom and follow their social etiquette.

  The most complex and interesting character in all of Hoshruba is Emperor of Hoshruba, sorcerer Afrasiyab. In any heroic tale it is the hero who faces the greatest number of threats and challenges. In Hoshruba, it is not the Conqueror of the Tilism or the trickster Amar Ayyar who face the greatest number of odds. It is Afrasiyab. He must keep the increasingly demanding false god Laqa safe from Amir Hamza, take care of the menacing rebel sorcerers led by Mahrukh Magic-Eye, watch out for the rampaging tricksters and, finally, contend with the rival emperor of the neighboring tilism. In setting him up against all these challenges, Mir Ahmed Ali and succeeding storytellers probably wished to show Afrasiyab’s power and resourcefulness. In the process, they also made him into a heroic character.

  At a personal, human level too, Afrasiyab is very likable. Even his unbridled sexual appetite makes him a far more interesting character than the asexual Amar Ayyar and the frigid, battle-hardened Amir Hamza. Afrasiyab shows great sensitivity toward his beloved Princess Bahar, who has joined his enemies. He is magnanimous toward a couple whose only son has died in his cause. When he boastfully fulminates against the god of sorcerers to assert his grandeur, he sounds entirely believable. And the scene where he sacrifices his beautiful male lover to a vampire monster to save his empire is one of the most tragic and memorable in all his personal history.

  The tale of Hoshruba is a contest between sorcerers and tricksters more than it is a war between sorcerers. Against the endlessly powerful sorcerers, the tricksters rely on their cunning, talent and wits. This is a fundamental departure in storytelling from The Adventures of Amir Hamza legend where holy figures of all stripes made frequent appearances to offer aid and counsel to Amir Hamza, and sometimes even did his work for him. In Hoshruba, it is hard to find a holy personage. When Amir Hamza and his camp are faced with dire situations, it is the tricksters who save the day.

  The tricksters’ mastery of the art of disguise plays a crucial role in their success. Sometimes their change of disguise from one person to another occurs so rapidly and in such complex mixes that it seems the creators of Hoshruba are playing a literary thimble-rig with the reader. Perhaps this was the contribution of the storyteller Muhammad Amir Khan, who was the trickster expert.

  It is true that magic does not have any effect on Amar Ayyar’s holy gifts – an inheritance from The Adventures of Amir Hamza legend – but e
qually, Amar Ayyar is also proscribed by a code of tricksters against using holy gifts to kill sorcerers. Even when Amar Ayyar uses his holy gifts, he employs them to aid his tricks or in self defense. This is another symbolic way in which Hoshruba neutralizes the influences from the Adventures of Amir Hamza legend where these devices were used directly. It can be said that throughout the fantasy, the focus has shifted from divine help to human resourcefulness.

  Mir Ahmed Ali and other Indian storytellers had brought about a fundamental shift in the approach to storytelling. They made the Indo-Islamic dastan a completely new strain within the dastan genre. This dazzling uniqueness was one of the reasons for Hoshruba’s widespread appeal and popularity.

  The second volume of Hoshruba came out in 1884. There was a delay of four years before the third volume was published in 1888–89. Considering the popularity of Hoshruba, the Naval Kishore Press hurried Jah, demanding that he finish the subsequent volumes speedily.

  But Jah was in deep trouble. Merging the three accounts of the different storytellers and simultaneously composing his own version was difficult enough. At the same time, he was devastated by the deaths of his young son and daughter, which happened while he wrote the third volume. For a while he even stopped writing. He resumed at the encouragement of his publisher. He shares his trauma with his readers by duly incorporating the entire episode in verse in the Hoshruba narrative.

  After he finished the fourth volume in 1890, or perhaps a little before that, the publisher informed Jah that he would be relieved of the responsibility of writing the three remaining volumes. Someone else had been hired to finish the project more quickly.

  The fourth volume has no last words by the author, which was customary. Jah had surrendered the manuscript on an unhappy note, and it was little wonder. His replacement for the Hoshruba project was his rival storyteller, Ahmed Husain Qamar.

  Here was a man with a nicely checkered past. According to his own account, his family participated in the 1857 Mutiny against the East India Company forces. Two of his brothers died in the fighting. Qamar survived and was cleared of the charge of mutineering but because he was not yet of age, he could not lay claim to his estate, which was confiscated by the government. He studied law and became an agent at one of the local courts but when he appeared for the confirmation examination, the old charge of participating in the mutiny was dug up and quoted as a reason for his disqualification. Around that time, Qamar became interested in storytelling and took it up as a profession.