Open Book Publishers

Chapter Title: A Handbook for Storytellers: The Ṭirā z al-akhbā r and the Qissa Genre
Chapter Author(s): Pasha M. Khan

Book Title: Tellings and Texts

Book Subtitle: Music, Literature and Performance in North India
Book Editor(s): Francesca Orsini and Katherine Butler Schofield
Published by: Open Book Publishers

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt17rw4vj.14

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY
4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Open Book Publishers is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Tellings and Texts

This content downloaded from

103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 6. A Handbook for Storytellers: The
Ṭirāz al-akhbār and the Qissa Genre 1

Pasha M. Khan

The rise of the Urdu novel in the late nineteenth century and the growing
celebration of the “natural” at the expense of the marvellous in the
twentieth century pushed the Urdu and Indo-Persian romance genre—
the qissa or dastan—into relative obscurity. When it has been studied by
modern critics, there has been an unfortunate tendency to treat it as a
primitive and imperfect ancestor of the novel. In order to recover a sense
of what the qissa genre may have been before this recent period, we must
examine the concept of genre itself as well as the concept of the qissa as a
genre. As it turns out, the particular genre of the qissa sheds much light
on questions of genre in general. One of the keys to understanding the

1 I must acknowledge my debts to four people without whom this contribution would
never have existed. First of all, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, who first mentioned Fakhr
al-Zamani to me in New York in September 2008, and who has already written about
him at some length. Secondly, my friend and colleague Azfar Moin of the University
of Michigan, who regaled me with his tales and ideas about Indian history over tea
at the British Library that same Autumn, and who reminded me of Fakhr al-Zamani
and gave me access to Mahjub’s article—I am especially in his debt. Soon thereafter
Francesca Orsini graciously invited me to the SOAS conference on orality despite my
misgivings about my lack of access to the MS of the Ṭirāz al-akhbār. Finally, in Chicago
in March 2009, Paul Losensky introduced me to Shafi‘i-Kadkani’s description of
the same MS, thereby enabling me to make a historical argument regarding the
multiplicity of generic strands running through the qissa. Thanks are also due to
Maria Subtelny for providing helpful comments on the penultimate draft. Research
was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Doctoral Fellowship.

© Pasha M. Khan, CC BY http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0062.06

This content downloaded from

103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
186  Tellings and Texts

qissa as it may have been understood in its heyday is that it was an oral
genre, and indeed a fully performative one, as I will show.
The text I examine in this paper, ‘Abd al-Nabi Fakhr al-Zamani’s
manual for storytellers, is sui generis itself, but it gives us a uniquely clear
window onto the process of qissa performance, shows us one manner in
which the qissa was defined or “encoded”, and, most importantly, lays
before us the materials with which the qissas that it describes could
be built. In doing us this last-mentioned service, it also in a sense
undermines the very idea of monolithic genres, in a way that this study
will explain. Connected to the fragmentation of the genre is the way in
which the qissa’s prescribed use or purpose ought to be approached.
The understandable aversion in some quarters to instrumentalising
texts and spoken words should not blind us to the fact that they were
meant to have certain effects, which were sometimes announced by the
discourse itself, but more often implied within the discourse’s genre
as a result of its genre code.2 A volume on oral performance has the
advantage of highlighting the worldliness of the performed discourse—
the music that is sung before the emperor or the tale that is told in the
bazaar—making it difficult to ignore its relation to the world and its
effects on its listeners. The healing properties of music discussed by
Katherine Schofield, for instance, are as purposive as the disciplinary,
“adabi” properties of the qissa. How the purposive nature of the qissa
genre in particular relates to its fragmentation is a problem that will be
considered at the end of the paper.
Given that this study will look at a particular conception of the
qissa genre from the seventeenth century, it is legitimate to ask why
this definition of the qissa is important and whether it was not a dead
end. Indeed, one of the fascinating things about this very specific qissa
“genre code“, which has been discussed by only one Urdu critic so far, is
that it appears to have survived well into the nineteenth century before
falling into oblivion. To begin with, let us consider the most interesting
later expression of this definition.

2 I will use the term “discourse” rather than “text” in order to signal my inclusion of
non-written language; it is to be understood as approximating sukhan or kalam (see
also d’Hubert in this volume).

This content downloaded from

103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 A Handbook for Storytellers  187

Traces of Continuity and Influence

One of the most successful versions of the story of the Prophet’s uncle
Amir Hamza was published in 1855 in Calcutta. This is the source of
the version that Musharraf Ali Farooqi has recently translated as The
Adventures of Amir Hamza, and the basis of the translation written
by Frances Pritchett in The Romance Tradition in Urdu. The 1855 text,
entitled Tarjuma-i dāstān-i Ṣāḥib-qirān (Translation of the Story of the Lord
of the Auspicious Conjunction), was written by Mirza Aman ‘Ali Khan
“Ghalib” Lakhnawi (not to be confused with his more famous Delhite
contemporary, the Urdu poet Mirza Asad Allah Khan Ghalib). In his
preface, Ghalib Lakhnawi is found making the customary self-effacing
remarks about being a blithering know-nothing,3 and claiming in the
next breath that he is married to the granddaughter of no less than Tipu
Sultan, the late ruler of Mysore. Beyond these remarks, we know little
about Ghalib Lakhnawi aside from what ‘Abd al-Ghafur Nassakh tells
us in his prosopography (tazkira) about ten years after the Tarjuma’s
publication, which is that Ghalib was a Deputy Tax Collector, the
disciple of a poet named Qatil, and a Hindu convert to Islam. He had
lived in Patna as well as Lucknow and had at last settled in Calcutta.4
Whoever he was, he appears to have been coaxed into writing the dastan
by a friend, a physician of Calcutta named Hakim Imdad ‘Ali b. Hakim
Shaikh Dilawar ‘Ali, who then printed the book using what seems to
have been his own personal press.5 It appears that the Hakim wished
to translate the dastan himself (from a deliciously withheld Persian

3 That is, “hec ma-dān-i kaj-maj zabān”, ‘Abd al-Ghafur Nassakh, Sukhan-i shu‘arā’ (Speech
of Poets, Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Urdu Academy, 1982), p. 3. All translations are mine
unless otherwise indicated.
4 Nassakh was himself Deputy Collector and Deputy Magistrate for Rajshahi (now in
Bangladesh), making it likely that he met Ghalib while on the job; Nassakh (1982), p.
349 cited in Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, Sāḥirī, shāhī, sāḥib-qirānī: Dāstān-i Amīr Ḥamza
kā mutāla‘a (New Delhi: Qaumi Council bara’e furugh-i Urdu zaban, 1999), Vol. 1, p.
209. Here is my translation of Nassakh’s entry on Ghalib (1982, p. 149):
Pennamed Ghalib: Mirza Aman ‘Ali Khan ‘Azimabadi [‘Azimabad = Patna]. Author
of the Urdu Qiṣṣa-i Amīr Ḥamza. Disciple of Qatil. For a time he was Deputy Collector.
For a long while he has chosen to reside in Calcutta. He also composes verses in
Persian. He was formerly a Hindu, but was then graced with Islam. I met him in
Chandannagar, popularly known as Fransidanga. I have seen his Qiṣṣa-i Amīr Ḥamza.
[A selection of verses by Ghalib follows.]
5 The Matba‘-i Hakim or Matba‘-i Imdadiyya.

This content downloaded from

103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
188  Tellings and Texts

text), but did not do so, on the grounds that his medical practice would
suffer. Ghalib’s account tells of Hakim Imdad ‘Ali’s distraction and his
reluctant delegation of the task in the Hakim’s own words:

I receive no respite from the clinic, for which reason it is difficult for me
to finish [the dastan]; and if I abandon the clinic I am helpless to cure the
servants of the Absolute Sage (Ḥakīm).6

Imagine the scandal had Imdad ‘Ali sidelined his practice: perhaps he
might have been busy scribbling scurrilous accounts of the artistic flair
with which the trickster ‘Amar ‘Ayyar painted polka-dots on the hapless
King Nausherwan, while his patients clamoured to consult him about
their venereal diseases.7 (Colonial records of the famous ailments of
Lucknow were not kept until the passage of the Contagious Diseases
Act nine years later.8)
In response to Hakim Imdad ‘Ali’s appeal to Ghalib’s “regard for
an old friend [liḥāż-i muḥibb-i qadīm]” caught up in his medical work,
Ghalib Lakhnawi took on the task of writing the dastan, and the Hakim
published it himself. Alas, Ghalib’s fame quickly faded thanks to
the dastan’s superb plagiarism by ‘Abd Allah Bilgrami, who stuffed,
padded, and ornamented his version, which ultimately eclipsed Ghalib
Lakhnawi’s work.9 The dastan became very popular in this puffed-up
form and was thenceforth famous as Bilgrami’s child.10 The Bilgrami

6 Ghalib Lakhnawi, Tarjuma-i dāstān-i Ṣāḥib-qirān (Calcutta: Matba‘-i Imdadiyya, 1855),

p. 2.
7 My speculations on the nature of the illnesses distracting Hakim Imdad ‘Ali are
admittedly the products of my fancy. However, ‘Amar ‘Ayyar does indeed apply a
pointillé pattern to the royal cheek that I have mentioned, along with other pranks
of a gross nature: “Nausherwān kī dāṛhī mūṅcheṅ peshāb se mūnḍ ke hama tan barahna
kar ke hāth pāṅw to nīl se range aur mūṅh kālā kar ke cūne ke ṭīke diye”; Ghalib Lakhnawi
(1855), p. 358. In Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s translation, “He lathered up Nausherwan’s
beard and whiskers with his urine and shaved them all off. Amar then stripped
Naushervan naked, dyed his hands and feet with indigo, and after blackening his
face, made spots all over it with lime”; ‘Abdullah Husain Bilgrami and Mirza Aman
Allah Ghalib Lakhnawi, The Adventures of Amir Hamza: Lord of the Auspicious Planetary
Conjunction, trans. by Musharraf Ali Farooqi (New York: Modern Library, 2007), p.
663.
8 See Veena Talwar Oldenburg, ‘Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of
Lucknow, India’, Feminist Studies 16, 2 (1990), 260.
9 See Frances Pritchett, ‘Introduction’, The Romance Tradition in Urdu: Adventures from
the Dastan of Amir Hamza (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 30.
10 In the Summer of 1985 Frances Pritchett and Shamsur Rahman Faruqi unearthed a rare
copy of the 1855 edition. Pritchett subsequently made a copy of the Ghalib Lakhnawi text
available to the Library of Congress in microfiche form (call number LOC Microfiche
85/61479 (P) So Asia). I am obliged to her for allowing me to peruse her copy of the dastan.

This content downloaded from

103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 A Handbook for Storytellers  189

editions naturally omitted Ghalib Lakhnawi’s telltale preface with its

concern for Hakim Imdad ‘Ali’s patients and its important throwaway
remark on the four pillars of the dastan—a remark which appears to be
a reformulation of a statement about the genre made more than two
centuries previously.
It is to this remark that I now turn. “There are four things”, Ghalib
wrote, “in this dastan: battle, courtly assemblies, enchanted worlds and
trickery” (is dāstān meṉ cār cīzeṉ haiṉ razm bazm ṭilism aur ‘ayyārī).11 Later
in the nineteenth century, the Lakhnawi intellectual ‘Abd al-Halim
Sharar echoed Ghalib’s assertion, with one difference: according to him
the four elements were “razm, bazm, ḥusn o ‘ishq” (love and beauty) and
“‘ayyārī”.12 Whence this substitution of Ghalib’s third pillar of the dastan
genre, the tilism, for Sharar’s husn o ‘ishq? Shamsur Rahman Faruqi
suggests that Sharar may have chosen husn o ‘ishq rather than tilism
due to the influence of an Iranian style of storytelling.13 But Faruqi’s
hypothesis that the category of husn o ‘ishq might be from Iran is not
based on a notion that Iranians are incurable romantics. Rather, it stems
from the striking fact that the same four elements recounted by Sharar—
razm, bazm, husn o ‘ishq, ‘ayyari—are enumerated in the early seventeenth
century by ‘Abd al-Nabi Fakhr al-Zamani, who was a storyteller in
Jahangir’s India, but who was born in Iran and professed to know a
good deal about the Iranian tradition of storytelling.

Genre Codes and Purposes

Before we broach the subject of Fakhr al-Zamani’s work, which
evidently inaugurated or at least accorded with a long-lasting definition
of the qissa/dastan genre, there is a word or two to be said about the
idea of genre.14 Many literary critics have noted that genres (or their
codifications—a concept to be explained shortly) tend to specify expected

11 Ghalib Lakhnawi (1855), p. 2. For a lengthy discussion of these elements, see S.R.
Faruqi (1999), Vol. 1, p. 197ff.
12 ‘Abd al-Halim Sharar, Guẕashta Lakhnau, ed. by Rashid Hasan Khan (Delhi: Maktaba-i
Jami‘a, 2000), p. 149.
13 S.R. Faruqi (1999), Vol. 1, p. 410.
14 The words qissa and dastan, which I will use interchangeably, are generally used to
denote a narrative account, especially a fictive one. The line between the two is fine
almost to the point of non-existence: see Pritchett (1991), p. 5; however, see Faruqi’s
insistence that narratives such as Mir Amman’s Bāgh o Bahār and Rajab ‘Ali Beg Surur’s
Fasāna-e ‘ajā’ib do not qualify as dastans; S.R. Faruqi (1999), Vol. 1, pp. 29, 194-95.

This content downloaded from

103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
190  Tellings and Texts

uses for the texts through which they flow;15 it seems probable that
codifications of the qissa genre do something similar. In fact, as we will
see, Fakhr al-Zamani’s formulation responds quite appropriately to the
question, “what is the purpose of the qissa genre?”16
I concur with the view that no genre inheres essentially and
irrevocably in a written or oral discourse as a fact of its nature. Genres
are socially instituted laws, whose institution may be recorded. Tvetzan
Todorov’s bipartite model of the constitution of genres is useful: any
given genre is marked by (1) a trait or a series of traits, but in order for
those traits to be recognised as signals of a discourse’s participation in a
genre, they must be (2) encoded as traits of that genre by way of another
discourse.17 Such a genre code, if recorded, might take the form of a
critical or metadiscursive text which explicitly describes or prescribes a
genre. At least this is the most obvious form of the genre code, of which
we have examples in the above statements on the qissa genre by ‘Abd
al-Halim Sharar and Ghalib Lakhnawi. These codes, as I have hinted,
have a much more extensive antecedent in a text by ‘Abd al-Nabi Fakhr
al-Zamani, which will be the focus of this study. I will examine the traits
of the genre as Fakhr al-Zamani presents them in his own codification.
The information that we possess regarding Fakhr al-Zamani’s activities
and ideas with regard to the qissa genre comes from a singular book of
his: the Ṭirāz al-akhbār (The Embroidery of Tales), a manual for storytellers,
to which we now turn.18 Three manuscripts of the never-printed Ṭirāz

15 For instance, Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic
Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 106.
16 I am grateful to my friend and colleague Abhishek Kaicker for initially posing this
question.
17 Tzvetan Todorov, Genres in Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
p. 198. This other discourse might be within the discourse whose genre it encodes.
18 The title is polyvalent. Tiraz or taraz means “embroidery”, with secondary meanings
including “workshop, factory”—a particularly apt metaphor for the productive
function of Fakhr al-Zamani’s manual. The additional meaning “form, kind, type”
seems the most appropriate one when we consider the division of the book into
twelve sections, each called a tiraz. Finally, the word may also be read as tarraz,
meaning an “embroiderer”. The most complete MS is in the library of the Majlis-i
Sina-yi sabiq, no. 358. Two others exist in Tehran University’s Central Library and the
Ayat Allah Mar‘ashi Library in Qom; see Shafi‘i-Kadkani, ‘Nigāhī ba Ṭirāz al-akhbār’,
Nāma-yi bahāristān 1.5 (138), 109. This made it difficult, at the time of writing this essay,
to access the text itself, though I was subsequently able to obtain and read it. My
translation of the opening portions will appear in a forthcoming Festschrift. Therefore
it is necessary to stress the strictly provisional nature of this study, which does not
make use of the manuscripts.

This content downloaded from

103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 A Handbook for Storytellers  191

al-akhbār are extant, not in South Asia but in Tehran and Qom in Iran;
therefore for this chapter I have had to rely on two descriptive articles
by the Iranian scholars Muhammad Ja‘far Mahjub and Muhammad Riza
Shafi‘i-Kadkani. The former describes and quotes large swathes of the
Ṭirāz’s fascinating muqaddama or Foreword, while the latter outlines the
body of the text. It is possible that this distance from the source text
means that my paper is not far from being a collection of bald lies. If this
is so, at least it has the interesting quality of surreptitiously reflecting
the genre it purports to describe.

Fakhr al-Zamani and the Ṭirāz al-akhbār

Given the unwarranted obscurity of the Ṭirāz al-akhbār, it seems proper
to say a few words about its author and his life. We may deduce from
what he writes of himself in the Mai-khāna that familial networks played
an important role in his working life, and we may also see the usefulness
of storytelling in gaining patronage. ‘Abd al-Nabi Fakhr al-Zamani was
born in the city of Qazwin in Iran in the late sixteenth century, a time
when Iranian emigration to India was not infrequent. He writes that
his father Khalaf Beg was a retiring man of a sufistic bent who had the
prescience to foretell the hour of his own demise, predicting that he
would die on such-and-such a day during the Friday prayer.19 However,
‘Abd al-Nabi recognised the atavism of his own poetic skill, and changed
his sobriquet from ‘Izzati’ to ‘Fakhr al-Zamani’ in honour of his more
learned and famed paternal grandfather Fakhr al-Zaman. He claims that
in his youth his memory was so powerful that when “out of youthful
desire he sought knowledge of qissas, […] by the absorptive force of his
memory he retained the entire qissa of Amir Hamza ‘Abd al-Mutallib in
his mind after hearing it only once”.20 At the age of nineteen he made
a pilgrimage to the shrine of Imam Riza in Mashhad, where he was
enthralled by merchants’ and travellers’ accounts of India. As a result,
he found himself trekking through Qandahar and on to Lahore, where
he made his entrance in 1609.
He stayed in Lahore for four months before moving on to Jahangir’s
capital at Agra. Fakhr al-Zamani’s account makes this move appear

19 ‘Abd al-Nabi Fakhr al-Zamani Qazwini, Taẕkira-i maikhāna, ed. by Ahmad Gulcin-i
Ma‘ani, 3rd edn (Tehran: Iqbal, 1983), p. 758.
20 Fakhr al-Zamani (1983), p. 760.

This content downloaded from

103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
192  Tellings and Texts

more or less fortuitous, but it is telling that in Agra he met a relative

named Mirza Nizami Qazwini, who was at the time a royal waqi‘a-
nawis or chronicler (and later the divan of Bihar). In all likelihood Fakhr
al-Zamani knew of his kinsman’s presence in the Mughal capital and
exploited it as a way to gain employment. Given this probability, it is
likely that his apparent drifting off to India was quite purposeful and
that he had been captivated by accounts not simply of India’s beauty,
but also of the opportunities it afforded of self-promotion.
It seems that Mirza Nizami was fond of hearing the qissa of Amir
Hamza, and it was at his urging that Fakhr al-Zamani honed the
skills that he had acquired in his youth and properly learned the art
of storytelling.21 When Mirza Nizami moved with the royal court to
Ajmer, Fakhr al-Zamani tagged along, and there he met another of his
compatriots, named Masih Beg, who was in the employ of the amir
Zamana Beg Mahabat Khan “Susani”. With Masih Beg’s help, Fakhr
al-Zamani gained an audience with Mahabat Khan’s son Mirza Aman
Allah “Amani”, who appears to have been a fan of qissas as well. Fakhr
al-Zamani writes of this meeting:

After I had been at his service for a little while, as per his command I
presented a section of the qissa before that Issue of Lords. After he had
given ear to this speech, that Master of Speech became, to some degree,
desirous of this beggar.22

After all, the “youthful desire” which had led Fakhr al-Zamani to
memorise the qissa and to become a storyteller—beginning perhaps at
home, outdoors, or in the coffee-house—proved to be the making of
a skill that could be used to secure patronage, not imperial, perhaps,
but certainly courtly. The possibility of this process highlights the
difficulties involved in drawing a bold line between courtly and popular
qissas, especially before the age of print, when evidence is relatively
sparse. If Fakhr al-Zamani’s progress is any indication, qissas that began
at the “popular” level could, given a chance and perhaps with some
stylistic alterations, eventually be performed in the courts of nobles and
preserved as manuscripts in their libraries. Fakhr al-Zamani was far
from oblivious to the success of storytellers like Zain al-‘Abidin Takaltu
Khan at the court of the Safavid ruler Shah Isma‘il, and ‘Inayat Allah

21 Ibid., p. 762.
22 Ibid., p. 763.

This content downloaded from

103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 A Handbook for Storytellers  193

Darbar Khan at the Mughal Emperor Akbar’s court.23 He also shows

that he was aware of his own contemporary, the storyteller Mulla Asad,
who was lavished with gifts by Jahangir and given a mansab of two
hundred.24 Perhaps Fakhr al-Zamani desired similar emoluments for his
storytelling skills. He claims to have become highly intimate with Mirza
Aman Allah “Amani” but was later forced to leave his service under
ignominious circumstances, and eventually wound up in the employ of
Sardar Khan Khwaja “Yadgar” in Bihar.
It was to Yadgar that Fakhr al-Zamani dedicated his most famous
work, the Mai-khāna (Wine Tavern), a prosopography of poets who wrote
saqi-namas (poems addressed to the saqi or cup-bearer). In the Mai-
khāna, Fakhr al-Zamani mentions a book that he wrote in Kashmir as
a guide for storytellers, and particularly for the tellers of the story of
Amir Hamza. This book, entitled Dastūr al-fuṣaḥā’ (Rules for the Eloquent),
was probably finished around 1616 or 1617 according to Muhammad
Shafi‘.25 Whenever it may have been written, it appears to have vanished
without a trace, perhaps reduced to cinders when Fakhr al-Zamani’s
house in Patna caught fire in 1620.26 Surviving the Dastūr, we have a
book entitled Ṭirāz al-akhbār, a creature halfway between a professional
storyteller’s handbook and a glorified bayaz or commonplace book. If
the chronogram (“zebā Ṭirāz-i akhbār”) is correct, it was finished in 1041
AH (1631/2 CE), and the colophon of the most complete manuscript tells
us that the scribe Sayyid Muhammad b. Mas‘ud Ahmad Husaini Bihari
finished copying it two years later on 27 Safar 1043 AH (1 September
1633), not 7 Safar 1043 AH in Patna (“dar balda-i Ṭayyiba-i Patna itmām
yāft”).27 The perplexing question is how it came about that manuscripts

23 See Muhammad Ja‘far Mahjub, ‘Tahawwul-i naqqali wa qissa-khwani’, Irannama 9

(1991), 191.
24 Fakhr al-Zamani Qazwini (1983), pp. 458ff., for example; for the reward, see Nur
al-Din Muhammad Jahangir, Jahāngīrnāmah (Tūzuk-i Jahāngīrī), ed. by Muhammad
Hashim (Tehran: Bunyad-i Farhang-i Iran, 1359 AH), p. 215.
25 In fact the Mai-khāna provides a chronogram for the Dastūr al-fuṣaḥā’ (“dastūr ba-anjām
rasīda”) that yields 1046 AH (1636/37 CE); Fakhr al-Zamani Qazwini (1983), p. 770.
However Shafi‘, in trying to square this date with the period of Fakhr al-Zamani’s
Kashmiri sojourn, concludes that if the Dastūr al-fuṣaḥā’ was finished in Kashmir as
Fakhr al-Zamani claims, it would have to have been completed between the years
1025-1026 AH (about 1616-1117 CE); Shafi‘ (1983), p. xiv. The Mai-khāna itself was
not completed until 1028 (1618/19 CE); Fakhr al-Zamani Qazwini (1983), p. 924. The
chronogram appears, therefore, to be erroneous.
26 Fakhr al-Zamani Qazwini (1983), p. 886.
27 For the 1633 colophon, see the facsimile in Shafi‘i-Kadkani (1381 AH), 122.

This content downloaded from

103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
194  Tellings and Texts

of this work are now non-existent in India and Pakistan. The only other
extant work by Fakhr al-Zamani is a now-rare collection of tales called
Nawādir al-ḥikāyāt (Rare Tales), supposedly consisting of five volumes,
only the first of which remains in the British Library. This volume was
composed in 1041 AH (1631/2 CE).28
The Ṭirāz al-akhbār is divided into a muqaddama (foreword) and a main
body, which I am comparing to a well-organised bayaz (a commonplace
book for snatches of poetry). It is in the muqaddama that the genre code
is most evident, and in the discussion that follows I will focus at first
upon Fakhr al-Zamani’s descriptions in this section of the book. The
muqaddama itself is divided into five sections (fasl) according to Mahjub:
(1) Regarding various accounts of the origin of the Dastan-i Amir Hamza,
(2) On the attributes of the dastan, (3) On the storyteller’s superiority to
the poet, (4) On the storyteller’s religious leanings and moral conduct,
and (5) On the performance of the dastan.

Avicennian Mimesis
Elsewhere I have examined the post-Enlightenment identification of the
qissa genre with the newly re-encoded English “romance” genre, the
identity of which was often thrown into relief in the eighteenth century
by setting it against its sister genre, the novel.29 A particularly strong
classificatory force was the text’s mode of imitation which, focused
through Enlightenment empiricism and rationalism, allowed for the sharp
disambiguation of history from fiction, and worked within the genre of
prose fiction to separate probable fictions (novels) from improbable ones
(romances). Duncan Forbes’ preface to The Adventures of Hatim Tai: A
Romance—his translation of the Indo-Persian qissa, the Haft sair-i Ḥātim—is
one of a number of nineteenth-century writings that take for granted the
sameness of the improbable romance genre and the genre that Indians
called the qissa or dastan. Forbes makes an apology for the improbability of
the story of Hatim Ta’i, begging the reader to remember that the Eastern

28 Charles Rieu, Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the British Museum (London:
Gilbert and Rivington, 1883), Vol. 3, p. 1004.
29 Pasha M. Khan, ‘Genre Identifications: Hatim-namas as Romance and Qissa’, paper
presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies (Chicago, 28
March 2009).

This content downloaded from

103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 A Handbook for Storytellers  195

mind remained in thrall to a credulous belief in things whose existence was,

for the English, irrational or unempirical.30
Leaving aside the Orientalist valuation that might be perceptible in
Forbes’ comments, is it possible that there were epistemologies prevalent
in India that would have caused qissa to be received as statements of truth?
After all, magical arts such as geomancy (raml) and the creation of tilisms
(talismans and, in qissas, enchanted worlds) were not always perceived as
charlatanry, and the existence of creatures such as the jinn is attested to by
the Qur’an. Fakhr al-Zamani weighs in significantly on this question, but
before getting back to his muqaddama, it will be useful to better historicise
the categories we are dealing with when we refer to literary truth and lies.
Commenting on the Arabic version of Aristotle’s Poetics (Kitāb al-shi‘r),
the philosopher Abu ‘Ali al-Husain Ibn Sina spoke of two somewhat
opposed modes of representation: sidq or veraciousness, and muhaka or
mimesis. Its opposition to veracious representation does not mean that
mimesis is simply false representation. But at least in part, mimesis is
defined by its being mendacious (kadhib), a mendacity that, particularly
when involved in takhyil (incitement of the imagination), has the ability to
make the mimetic discourse more effective in certain ways than veracious
discourse. Following the Arabic Aristotle, Ibn Sina speaks of poetry as the
prime example of mimetic discourse.
It is important to note that for Ibn Sina, as for Al-Farabi before him,
poetry must be mimetic and therefore mendacious. As an illustration: In
the Autumn of 2008 at the Lahore Museum, I came across a manuscript of a
versified Urdu tract on medicine (hikmat), in masnavi form, describing cures
for two of the most grievous ailments of the day, faqr-i sahl and ihtilam—
constipation and nocturnal emission. In the Avicennian scheme of things,
such scientific treatises (as well as versified grammars and so on), however
they may tickle us, are not mimetic but veracious, and therefore are not
classifiable as poetry even if they are in verse.

30 Duncan Forbes, The Adventures of Hatim Taï: A Romance (London: Oriental Translation
Fund, 1830), pp. v-vi. My remark is not meant to deny the usefulness of translating
“qissa” or “dastan” as “romance”; it is only necessary to be attentive to what it meant
to perform this translation in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, and to the
kinds of assumptions that came along with such a genre equation. When speaking
of the Urdu or Indo-Persian “romance”, we must understand the previous history of
the genre code of the “romance”, we must have a sense of what the qissa was without
reducing it to this pre-existent notion of the romance, and we must alter our ideas of
what we mean by “romance” if we wish for this term to encompass the qissa.

This content downloaded from

103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
196  Tellings and Texts

However, despite the stress that he places on poetry, Ibn Sina notes that
some prose works may also be imagination-inciting (takhyili) and mimetic.31
But if we were to apply the Avicennian distinction to prose discourses,
historiographical genres (tarikh, sira, nasab, safar-nama, etc.) are not likely
to have been considered mimetic, given that mimesis involves mendacity
(kidhb), whereas historiographical genres cause the reader to expect a
veracious (sadiq) discourse.
On the other hand, is it possible that the qissa was, in Avicennian
terms, a veracious genre, similar to a history, rather than a mimetic one?
Generalising from the example of Kalīla wa Dimna, Ibn Sina insists that
such stories (“amāthil wa qiṣaṣ”), though they lack metre and do not
aim primarily at takhyil or imagination incitement, are in fact mimetic,
like poetry.32 A full investigation of this issue would, however, require
attention to borderline cases such as Indian versified histories by authors
known primarily as mimetic poets, such as Amir Khusrau’s Qirān al-sa‘dain
(Conjuction of the Two Fortunate Planets), in which Khusrau, as Sunil Sharma
reminds us, professes his preference for truthfulness (rasti) over falsehood
(durogh).33 Other examples include Keshavdas’ Jahāngīrjascandrika or
Moonlight of the Fame of Jahangir and the same author’s remarkable
Ratnabāvanī (Fifty-Two Verses in Honour of Ratnasena), about which Allison
Busch has written; the fact that the latter text has “gods weaving in and
out of the story” is only the beginning of its fascinations.34 Indeed we
have yet to come to grips with the alleged prevalence of mimetic elements
in the historiography of the post-Mongol Islamicate world, whether in
verse or in prose, which often pivot on the under-examined topos of the
kharq al-‘ada (“custom-breaking”, extraordinary), exemplified by but not
limited to ‘aja’ib (mirabilia) literature.35 Other problematic texts include

31 Abu ‘Ali al-Husain b. ‘Abd Allah Ibn Sina, ‘Fann al-shi‘r’, in Fann al-shi‘r, ed. by ‘Abd
al-Rahman Badawi, 2nd edn (Beirut: Dar al-thaqafa, 1973), pp. 168, 183
32 Ibn Sina (1973), p. 183. In Ibn Sina’s view, their aim is not takhyil, but the “diffusion of
views (ifādaṭ al-ārā’)” (ibid.). Ibn Sina also differentiates these two genres from poetry
on the basis of their “fantastic” representations, like the English romance critics of the
eighteenth century.
33 Sunil Sharma, ‘Amir Khusraw and the Genre of Historical Narratives in Verse’,
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 22.1 (2002), 113.
34 Allison Busch, ‘The Courtly Vernacular: The Transformation of Brajbhaṣa Literary
Culture (1590-1690)’ (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2003), p. 212ff. For the
Jahāngīrjascandrika, see Allison Busch, ‘The Anxiety of Innovation: The Practice of
Literary Science in the Hindi/Riti Tradition’. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa
and the Middle East 24.2 (2004), 45-59, and her essay in this volume.
35 The ongoing work of Travis Zadeh on the marvellous in Islamicate writings is useful

This content downloaded from

103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 A Handbook for Storytellers  197

qissas that present themselves as participants in historiographical genres,

such as the aforementioned Haft sair-i Ḥātim.

Falsehood and the Sin of Performance

Faced with the bewildering potential of such liminal cases, we may be
relieved to find that Fakhr al-Zamani does not compound the sin of lying
for a living by pretending in the Ṭirāz al-akhbār that he is telling the truth. In
the foreword to the Ṭirāz al-akhbār we find him confirming expectations: he
declares the qissa to be a falsehood (durogh), “devoid”, he says, “of the fine
ornament of truthfulness” (az ḥilya-i ṣidq maḥrūm).
Moreover, there was a malign aspect to this mendacity; the falsehood of
the qissa was not value-neutral, but had a negative ethico-religious valence.
This comes across most forcefully in the fourth section of the foreword,
which concerns the religious conduct of the professional storyteller. In
an exhortation worthy of an ethical manual, Fakhr al-Zamani enjoins
his storytelling colleagues to practice muruwwat (roughly, “humanity”)36
towards their fellow creatures and help them in their time of need: “The best
conduct for the speaker [i.e., the storyteller] is […] to expend in God’s path
whatsoever he acquires, and to behave with humanity towards everyone”.37
The storyteller’s incentive for behaving with muruwwat is important to note:

Perhaps in this way he will win the heart of some afflicted person, and ease
a frustrated mind—so that it might be the cause of expiation in this world
for his telling of lies, and of an honourable acquittal (surkh-ru’i) in the next.38

Virtuous conduct is valuable, according to Fakhr al-Zamani, as an antidote

to the sins that are necessarily committed by the storyteller, given that the sin
of telling lies is an insuperable part of the qissa genre. The mimesis inherent
in the genre is therefore perceived by Fakhr al-Zamani as blameworthy;
elsewhere he says that the qissa’s lies may bring disgrace (ruswa’i) upon

in this regard. See his PhD dissertation, ‘Translation, Geography, and the Divine
Word’ (Harvard University, 2007), and his recent article ‘Wiles of Creation’, in Middle
Eastern Studies 13.1 (2010), 21-48.
36 Muruwwat is an originally pre-Islamic Arabian complex of ethical virtues as changeful
and difficult to define as it is old; “humanity” is an unsatisfactory translation. See
“Murū‘a” in the Encyclopedia of Islam.
37 In Mahjub (1991), 193.
38 Ibid.

This content downloaded from

103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
198  Tellings and Texts

their teller.39 More than this, they are eschatologically harmful, as evidenced
by the need for a life of muruwwat to counter the difficulties that mendacity
will cause on the Day of Reckoning.
Fakhr al-Zamani’s comments regarding the sinfulness of the qissa lies
already present the qissa as a thoroughly oral genre, which does not stand
aloof from the context in which it is recited in the way that written texts
are sometimes imagined to do. Its production, as we read in the Ṭirāz
al-akhbār, has material, social, and soteriological effects on the storyteller
who speaks it into being. In his landmark study, Sāḥirī, shāhī, ṣāḥib-qirānī
(Sorcery, Kingship, Lordship of the Auspicious Conjunction), Shamsur Rahman
Faruqi energetically stresses the orality (zabani-pan) of the story of Amir
Hamza even when it appears in written form, for instance in the massive
Naval Kishore printed cycle, which was itself authored by storytellers. At
the outset Faruqi defends oral genres such as the dastan, qissa, and masnavi
from Orientalist belittlement and goes on to present an impressive system
of poetics based on the Dāstān-i Amīr Ḥamza’s orality.40 When we read
together Faruqi’s study of Fakhr al-Zamani and the passages from the
Ṭirāz al-akhbār that Faruqi cites, it becomes clear that “orality” is a central
and seminal element of the genre, but also that the qissa or dastan as Faruqi
describes it is not only oral, but, moreover, performative.
The Ṭirāz al-akhbār makes it clear to us that the term “qissa-khwan” does
not convey the full range and force of the storyteller’s activities. Impressive
as it seems that storytellers like Fakhr al-Zamani recited and improvised
the interminable Dāstān-i Amīr Ḥamza from memory, they did not simply
read them, but performed them. In his description of the presentation of
the qissa, Fakhr al-Zamani prescribes not only modulations of the voice,
but gestures and postures for the storyteller. The term naqqali, designating
a sort of professional acting in which a performer conveys a story with
words and actions, attempting to embody the narrative and its characters,
might be a more expressive alternative to qissa-khwani in terms of its
meaning, although naqqali was generally lower on the scale of professions
than qissa-khwani, and I do not know that Fakhr al-Zamani ever uses
the word. In the late nineteenth century Sharar described Lakhnawi
storytellers as “imaging”—becoming taswirs of—the stories that they
performed, allying the art of storytelling to the visual arts.41

39 Ibid., 192.
40 S.R. Faruqi (1999), Vol. 1, p. 198.
41 Sharar (2000), p. 149.

This content downloaded from

103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 A Handbook for Storytellers  199

Similarly, Fakhr al-Zamani states in the Ṭirāz al-akhbār that in the Iranian
style of qissa-khwani (as opposed to the Indian and Turanian styles, which
he also describes), the storyteller must marshal his gestures and postures
in such a way that the audience members find themselves beholding the
action with the imagination’s gaze (“naẓar-i taṣawwur”). When a character in
the qissa escapes from captivity, the storyteller must speak and act in such a
way that the audience perceives him to be the one breaking out of his chains.
In other words, the storyteller, in bodying forth the qissa’s characters, must
engage in a mimesis and therefore a kind of mendacity that is not merely oral,
but fully performative, for he pretends to be what he is not.42
Fakhr al-Zamani’s wariness with regard to such imposture may be
gauged from his comments on religious performance, which are so
remarkable as to merit full translation:43

The possessor of this heart-stealing art and the master of this assembly-
adorning craft [i.e., that of storytelling] must be confined by his creed, not
by the bonds of religious prejudice, because every one of the sultans of the
day and the high-ranking nobles has a different religion and a separate law.
Some are Sunni, a few are Shi‘a. There is a group that affirms the unity of
God, and a lot that disbelieve the resurrection of the dead. The storyteller
must deal with each differing faction in each region according to need. First
of all, he must not proclaim his own creed inconsistently in order to mix
with the great men of each kingdom. For if he makes himself out to be Sunni
in one place and makes himself known as a Shi‘a in another, he will not be
able to maintain this to the end. Because it is possible that, before he shifts
locations, the reality of his religion will have been disseminated to every
corner of the kingdom where he has long resided.44

This is an odd piece of advice—it is difficult to resist the biographical

temptation, and to leave off wondering whether Fakhr al-Zamani had tried
this trick out himself. What is notable for our purposes is the way in which
the negative religious valuation of performative mimesis in the case of
the qissa performance is paralleled by the analogous mimesis of taqiyya or
religious dissimulation—the false performance of religion itself.45 It is as if the

42 Mahjub (1991), 194.

43 Azfar Moin first noted and alerted me to this section of the Ṭirāz, for which kindness
I am deeply grateful.
44 Mahjub (1991), 192-93.
45 With regard to specifically Shi‘i taqiyya, we should remember that our storytelling
émigré from Shah ‘Abbas’s Iran lived in a Mughal state whose relationship to Shi‘ism
was complexly fraught given the presence of other émigrés such as Nur Jahan on
the one hand, and, on the other hand, the Shi‘a qazi of Lahore, Nur Allah Shushtari,

This content downloaded from

103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
200  Tellings and Texts

storyteller’s predilection for performance, which should have been restricted

to storytelling situations, has burst its bonds, engendering characters that
rampage about in the real world. The parallel, while by no means complete,
is particularly strong given the chances, in each case, of prior knowledge on
the part of the audience that an act is being put on. However, we will soon
come to an important difference between the two types of performance.

What the Qissa is Good For

The storyteller, despite the sin implicit in his occupation, can redeem
himself through doing good in his life. But how is the qissa genre itself
redeemed? The Ṭirāz al-akhbār does not treat the qissa simply as “literature”
in the poststructuralist sense summed up by Derek Attridge, as a discourse
inhabited by otherness and irreducible to uses, ideologies, and the like.46
It is easy to see how such a view of literature has participated in a crisis
of genre theory, as it dissociates itself from the implicitly prescribed uses
and effects to which genre is so often tied. Jameson writes pithily that
“genres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between
a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper
use of a particular cultural artifact”.47 To take some examples of Arabo-
Persian genres, the marsiya (lament) is meant to provoke mourning, the
hajw (satire) to provoke laughter or ridicule, and the qasida (praise-poem,
in the Persianate sense of this word) to please the one who is praised,
to excite admiration, and possibly to earn a reward for the poet. Sunil
Sharma’s essay in this volume draws attention to the force that words were
understood to have in the world, even to the extent of being able to kill. In
this spirit, Fakhr al-Zamani deals with the qissa as something of the order
of adab in the classical sense of a culturing, disciplinary discourse. Just as
Indian music has curative properties, as Katherine Schofield explains in
this volume, the qissa ameliorates its audience in particular ways. Fakhr
al-Zamani very specifically spells out the genre’s beneficial effects for the

executed at Jahangir’s order in 1610; Sajid S. Alvi, ‘Religion and State During the
Reign of Mughal Emperor Jahǎngǐr (1605-1627): Nonjuristical Perspectives’, Studia
Islamica 69 (1989), 111-112.
46 Derek Attridge, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004). This is not to say that this view of
literature is incorrect—far from it—nor has genre theory’s crisis been unfruitful.
47 Jameson (1981), p. 106.

This content downloaded from

103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 A Handbook for Storytellers  201

listener, and, in doing so, offers answers to the question, “What is the
purpose of the qissa?”
Fakhr al-Zamani lists three benefits of qissa recitation for the audience
(aside from its benefits for the storyteller himself or herself, which we
have glimpsed in the biographical accounts of his ingratiation with
Mirza Nizami and Mirza Aman Allah). These may be characterised as
linguistic, practical, and moral. First, by exemplifying speech that is
eloquent (“fasih”), discursively mature (“baligh”), and current (“roz-
marra”), it improves the listener’s ability to manipulate language. Second,
it serves as a prescription for worldly and state affairs (“‘umūr-i dunyawī
wa ashghāl-i mulkī’”) and inculcates prudence (“tadbir”) in the listener.48
S.R. Faruqi reminds us that Ghalib Lakhnawi also mentions this purpose,
stating that those who hear qissas “are able to imagine plans for battle,
for subduing forts and conquering states, which is why they [i.e., qissas]
were always told to emperors”.49 Finally, it deters the listener from vain
thoughts, acting as a moral example. This last point is crucial because of
its connection with the lie. What the Ṭirāz al-akhbār says is that “despite its
own falsity, it [the qissa] casts the powerful off the rope of false thoughts”.50
The term batil and its cognate butlan can be synonymous with durogh or
kizb, for instance in the Qur’an we find the admonition “Do not clothe the
real in untruth (“lā talbasū al-ḥaqqa bi al-bāṭil”, 2.42). But batil also connotes
nullity or void-ness, as in batil al-sihr or countermagic: that which renders
enchantments null and void. The qissa is a kind of lie that has the effect
of nullifying false thoughts, a lie which is also a counter-lie, and which
therefore has a salutary moral effect despite its essential sinfulness.51
We may speculate that the anti-mendacious property of the qissa may
be enabled by its announcement of its own falsehood, either explicitly
or by virtue of its genre—note that this is quite unlike the dissimulation

48 Mahjub (1991), 191.

49 S.R. Faruqi (1999), p. 421; Ghalib Lakhnawi (1855), p. 3. The preface to the 1803 Fort
William version of the story of Amir Hamza, written by Khalil ‘Ali Khan Ashk, also
contains this assertion in words similar to Ghalib Lakhnawi’s; Khalil ‘Ali Khan Ashk,
Dāstān-i Amīr Ḥamza (Bombay: Matba‘-i Haidari, 1863̄), Vol. 1, p. 2.
50 “daulat-mandān rā az sar-rishta-i andesha-i bāṭil bā-wujūd-i buṭlān-i khẉesh mī-andāzad”,
quoted in Mahjub (1991), 191.
51 Faruqi clearly reads this generic purpose as moral, and even religiously moral, stating,
by way of example, that “in the dastan sorcerers are always defeated eventually [...] but
they are not simply defeated; indeed they die very ordinary and even commonplace
deaths, and so it is fully proven that there is no difference between them or any other
of God’s servants”; S.R. Faruqi (1999), Vol. 1, p. 421.

This content downloaded from

103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
202  Tellings and Texts

of the hypothetical religious pretender that Fakhr al-Zamani imagines

above. Let us put it simply, and refer to this announced falsehood of the
qissa as a form of fictionality. When Fakhr al-Zamani announces that the
qissa is a lie shorn of the finery of truthfulness (az ḥilya-i ṣidq ‘āṭil), he fixes
this fictionality of the genre in the genre code that he is producing. His
statement speaks to the Qur’anic phrase “lā talbasū al-ḥaqqa bi al-bāṭil”,
responding to it by inverting it: the qissa is not an untruth clothed in the
true; it presents itself as a naked untruth. And it is perhaps for this reason
that it is able to counter untruth despite its own falsehood.

The Four Repertoires

We will return to the question of purposes and particularly the multiplicity
of purposes enumerated in the Ṭirāz. But the qissa is not encoded merely
as a performative fictional genre with linguistic, practical, and moral uses.
We must not forget the four categories with which this essay began: razm,
bazm, husn o ‘ishq, and ‘ayyari (the third of which, the reader will recall, was
substituted for tilism by Ghalib Lakhnawi). A look at the organisation of the
main part of the Ṭirāz tells us that Fakhr al-Zamani conceived of these four
not simply as elements of the genre but as the discursive and, moreover,
performative bricks with which the storyteller built the edifice of the qissa,
the repertoires from which the qissa was pastiched together.
We have already analysed the foreword of the Ṭirāz al-akhbār; let us
now turn to the body. This bayaz-like portion consists of prose and verse
quotations from a variety of written sources, from the Persian poet
Zuhuri’s poems to the tales of Sindbad, from odes to the cupbearer to tales
of Alexander to animal fables. But rather than being scattered randomly
like verses in a standard bayaz, they are corralled into the four categories of
razm, bazm, husn o ‘ishq, and ‘ayyari. Each of these four chapters (each one
called a report or khabar) is subdivided into twelve sections or workshops
(tiraz), and finally there is an extra chapter, seemingly for leftover odds and
ends, subdivided into nineteen sections, for a total of forty-nine sections.
These classified quotations were meant to be memorised and recited or
reworked extempore by the storyteller during the performance of the qissa.
For example, the storyteller might be describing a battle (razm) when the
story’s focus falls upon a war-elephant. His searching memory might then
take him to the sixth section of the first chapter of the Ṭirāz, which contains

This content downloaded from

103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 A Handbook for Storytellers  203

descriptions of elephants and wolves, and it might alight on this passage

from the Taj al-ma’ās̱ir (Crown of Great Deeds):

abr-hay’ate bād-ḥarkate barq-sur‘ate ażhdahā-kharṭūme dahān-i mauhūme kih

dandān-ash go’ī sutūn-i īn bār-gāh-i mu‘allaq-i Bīstūn [or be-sutūn] ast wa
kharṭūm-i khamīda-i caugān miṡāl-ash go’ī rubāninda-i īn saqf-i gardūn…52

Cloud-shaped and moving like the wind, with a serpentine trunk and
a fantastical mouth. Its tusks: you would think that they were the pillars
of a palace [i.e., the head] attached to Mount Bistun [the body], and you
would think its trunk, curved like a polo stick, might be able to steal from
the arched vault of the heavens.

The chapter from which this quotation is taken deals with various
descriptions of battle (razm). Similarly, when describing courtly situations,
the storyteller would dip into the chapter on bazm, and the same goes for
husn o ‘ishq and ‘ayyari. The four elements of the genre were, as we can see,
codified by Fakhr al-Zamani according to the exigencies of the performance.
They were not simply there as inert facts, they were toolboxes to be selected
properly or improperly.
These four styles were not simply textual; they were fully performative.
Fakhr al-Zamani prescribes postures and modulation of the voice for each
style. During the narration of a battle, the storyteller must slowly raise his
body (sitting on one knee, rising to a standing position) as he reaches the
climax. When narrating a courtly scene, he must ease his voice, and in the
narration of love scenes, he must perform the expected naz o niyaz, the
blandishments of the beloved and the pangs of the lover.53 The Ṭirāz al-akhbār
seems, in other words, to provide a repertoire of four major performative
styles—or perhaps we might say that it provides four repertoires to be
used in the correct parts of the dastan. But these repertoires are not only
memorised collections of classified verse and prose—they are distinct
narrative situations that cue the storyteller to summon up prescribed
quotations and which demand from him a certain set of vocal and physical
shifts. It is difficult to imagine that the styles did not intermix at all, but
Fakhr al-Zamani frowns upon undue movement between two different
styles as evidence that the storyteller lacks jam‘iyyat-i hawass, which is to
say that his senses are scattered and unfocused.54

52 Shafi‘i-Kadkani (1381 AH), 111.

53 Mahjub (1991), 194.
54 Ibid., 192.

This content downloaded from

103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
204  Tellings and Texts

What Ails the Qissa

But, having described the four repertoires which supposedly define the
qissa genre, I want to return to my initial caveats regarding the category
of genre, and to recall that genres, by which I mean codifications of what
constitutes various genres, are not inherent or given. They are products of
socio-historical forces: ideologies, commercial and practical exigencies, and
so on. As such they change over time, and they are objects of contention in
any given period.55 This means that it is possible that another contemporary
authority whose testimony we have lost may have defined the qissa differently,
but just as compellingly, as Fakhr al-Zamani. But Fakhr al-Zamani’s
codification of the genre, which turns out to be tied to the technicalities
of the performative production of qissas, is important. This is not only
because it presents uses for the genre beyond that of “mere entertainment”,
but also because it appears to have been re-cited and adapted by Ghalib
Lakhnawi and Sharar. It is certainly the case that the nineteenth-century
comments are sparse, and it is difficult to understand just how it is that the
genre code was perpetuated, given that the quantity and present location
of the Ṭirāz al-akhbār manuscripts with which we are now familiar do not
inspire confidence that they were circulating widely in nineteenth-century
Awadh. It is very much possible that the notion of the qissa genre that we
have discussed travelled orally, and that Fakhr al-Zamani’s genre code was
neither unique nor directly influential. Nevertheless, it is at the very least
the most well-articulated example we have of a genre code that clearly
survived, continuously or in stints, over several centuries.
What Jameson and others might call the institutionality of genres—
the fact of their being “instituted” under particular socio-historical
circumstances—is trouble enough; furthermore, we must consider
intertextuality, which obviates the possibility of there being a chaste qissa,
innocent of the crime of miscegenation. Any law of genre that implicitly
prohibits the mixing of genres must overlook or repress this miscegenetic
intertextuality.
This is not the place to elaborate a theory of genre mixing, but I will
at least rehearse my argument. Without intertextuality, genres cannot

55 My view of genre as synchronically and diachronically divided has largely developed
from Ralph Cohen and Hans Robert Jauss; Ralph Cohen, ‘History and Genre’, New
Literary History 17. 2 (1986), 203-18, particularly 207-09; Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an
Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).

This content downloaded from

103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 A Handbook for Storytellers  205

exist; the family resemblance that allows us to group discourses into

genres is intertextual. But even as intertextuality is the condition for
such a classification, it shatters the image of the pure genre by virtue
of the fact that each intertext is already marked by a genre (or genres,
rather) of its own. Therefore we might consider each qissa as something
of an intertextual tapestry that cannot be taken as a “pure” qissa and can
only be comprehended as a complex of multi-generic intertexts that fall
under the order of the master genre code of the qissa. Even as we read
or hear a discourse overall as a qissa, submitting to the social force that
encodes it as such, it is instructive to peel back the skin that gathers the
discourse together into a single genre, and to view its multigenericity
or heterogeneousness as well. Francesca Orsini first alerted me to this
possibility with her suggestion of a “dual genealogy” for the Hindi-Urdu
qissa, descended on the one hand from the dastan and on the other hand
from the shorter naql.56 To continue in this biological vein, Sunil Sharma
has written of Khusrau’s verse histories as “hybrid texts”.57 Riding on
Orsini’s and Sharma’s coattails, what I am suggesting is that all genres—
including the dastan and the naql, for instance—are already mixed and
impure. As much as we try to fix a discourse’s genre and decide that
there is only one, close observation of its bloodstream will reveal that is
infected with myriad others.
Unsurprisingly, an important formulation of the idea of heterogeneity
appears in Mikhail Bakhtin’s work, and particularly in his essay “Epic
and Novel”. Here literary history is envisioned as a conflict between
a weatherworn host of ossified classical genres led by the epic, and
the plastic, heteroglossic “novel” or, rather, roman.58 The importance
of Bakhtin’s codification of the roman lies in the fact that the roman is
defined precisely by its heteroglossia and therefore its heterogeneity.

56 Francesca Orsini, Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in
Colonial North India (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009), p. 115.
57 Sharma (2002), 114.
58 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. by Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004). The scare quotes give
voice to my uneasiness about the translation of what Bakhtin refers to as “roman” into
the English “novel”. The eighteenth-century sundering of the novel genre from its
backward sister, the romance, appears to have been expressed much less vigorously
outside of Britain, and Bakhtin often uses the word roman to designate what English
speakers would think of as medieval romances. Therefore I prefer to leave the word
untranslated.

This content downloaded from

103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
206  Tellings and Texts

Unlike Aristotle’s traditional genres (epic, lyric, tragedy),59 the roman

engulfs other genres, playing with them and parodying them—even and
especially “extraliterary” genres such as the newspaper report and the
letter.60 In effect romans are diseased bodies riddled with heterogenous
discourses of various genres, and during periods in (Western) history
when the roman genre is in the ascendant (as it was in the Greek classical
period, classical Rome, and neoclassical Europe), epidemics take place
in which romans infect other genres on a large scale. It is the effect of this
contagion that is referred to by Bakhtinians as romannost or roman-ness:
other genres are roman-ised (“novelised”)—they become like romans by
virtue of being contaminated.
Bakhtin’s idea is useful and consonant with the vision of the qissa
genre revealed by Fakhr al-Zamani. At the same time, Bakhtin’s argument
regarding the essentially sealed-off nature of “high genres” such as the
epic is unconvincing, and “romanization” arguably affects all genres;
therefore it does not seem justified to single out the roman as the originary
touchstone for this kind of heterogeneity. Finally, while Bakhtin’s account
seems to represent romanization as a fate that befalls an originally pure
genre, I wish to stress that a discourse in any genre may be regarded as
heterogeneous from the start.
Once we look at them through such a lens, it is easy to see that the
qissas whose performance Fakhr al-Zamani describes are shot through
with intertexts of many different genres. Based on the Ṭirāz al-akhbār’s list
of quotations, we know that in Fakhr al-Zamani’s qissas, excerpts from
the Shāh-nāma and Farid al-Din ‘Attar’s sufi Manṭiq al-ṭair (Speech of the
Birds) might mingle freely with epistolary specimens (insha’), saqi-namas,
and the moral fables of Kalila and Dimna.61 Most strikingly, the very
genre of truth-telling historiography to which we might oppose the lying-
mimetic qissa ends up infecting it. Mir Khvand’s history, the Rawżat al-ṣafā
(Garden of Purity): Hatifi’s Timūr-nama (Book of Timūr); the Tāj al-ma’as̱ir
(Crown of Great Deeds); the Ḥabīb al-siyār (Vademecum of Biographies); Amir

59 Bakhtin’s Manichaean vision of literary history seems wrongheaded insofar as it

appears to posit the existence of epics and so on as monoglossic non-roman genres,
unsullied by romanization, often because they are supposedly older and predate the
very appearance of the roman on the historical stage. But given the intertextuality of
all discourses and, indeed, the intertextual foundations of language itself, the myth
of a pure, pre-Babelian genre does not stand up to scrutiny.
60 Bakhtin (2004), p. 33.
61 See Shafi‘i-Kadkani (1381 AH), 111, 113, 121, 110 respectively.

This content downloaded from

103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 A Handbook for Storytellers  207

Khusrau’s Qirān al-sa‘dain; and the Tārīkh-i mu‘jam are all quoted in the
Ṭirāz al-akhbār.62 This irruption of historiographical genres into the qissa
does not make the qissa simply historiographical, but it suggests that we
cannot ignore historiographical elements when we consider the purposes
that the qissa serves.
It is important to remember that Fakhr al-Zamani mentions more than
one purpose to the qissa: it makes the hearers eloquent, it makes them
prudent, and it wards off falsehood. To the question, “What is the purpose
of the qissa?”, we must answer that there is no single purpose to the qissa
because no qissa is reducible to a single genre, as it will always incorporate
intertexts of various genres. At least, this is the view that I have attempted
to justify.

62 Shafi‘i-Kadkani (1381 AH), 113, 110.

This content downloaded from

103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 This content downloaded from
103.216.89.244 on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 05:52:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms