The dastangos of Rampur

Dr Tarana Husain Khan

At the recently announced Kalinga Literature Festival (KLF) Book Awards, cultural historian and writer Dr Tarana Husain Khan took home the big prize - her novel, The Begum and the Dastan (Tranquebar, Westland; Rs 347), won the Book of the Year Award (2020-21). What makes this win a significant one is the extensive research that Khan put into exploring the traditionally-rich city of Rampur, UP, and the real-life characters and events, which shaped this erstwhile princely state. The result is fiction that dips into oral history, official documents preserved in the Raza Library, letters and secret diaries, to tell the story of the lives of the women of Sherpur. The book also shines light on the dastan (storytelling) tradition of Rampur - it's this style that Khan's character-narrators take on, while telling the story.

Khan's window into the world of dastan first came from Abid Raza Bedar, a former librarian and scholar from Rampur, who she says, gave an evocative description of the dastan session in Rampur mohallas, which continued till the 1960s. "The durries in the common courtyard of the mohalla, the dastango [storyteller] on the takht, the men smoking hookahs, the afeem and the women secretly listening from behind the frieze. It was a weekly session people attended where the dastan would stretch on and on for months, even years," says Khan, in an email interview.

The dastan tradition of Rampur, eventually, got lost in orality. "Bedar sahab aptly remarked, ‘sab sheeraza bikhar gaya' - the scattering away of a lifestyle." It was, however, preserved on brittle paper by the Nawabs, says Khan.

Incidentally, Kallan Mirza, the dastango depicted in her book, lived in Khan's father-in-law's mohalla, and held his sessions right there. "No one can point out his house anymore, but old timers remembered the names of famous dastangos of the time - Amba Prasad, Ameeruddin - who had found employment in Rampur after the destruction of Delhi and Awadh post the 1857 rebellion."

Choosing fiction, over historical non-fiction, to tell the story of Rampur, she says, was a conscious decision. "I love delving into archives and coming up with so many unknown facts about Rampur, but I'm a storyteller at heart and when I write my stories, I'm truly transported. So I do a lot of research for my stories, but I'm also engaged in research for the sake of preserving a culture."

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