Books

  Introduction The dastan of Tilism-e-Hoshruba is to Urdu literature what Homer’s epic poems were to Greek literature and what A Thousand and One Nights were to the Arabian bardic tradition. For years, it was believed that the Tilism-e-Hoshruba was translated from an original Persian version composed by Faizi to entertain the Mughal emperor Akbar. This was due to the established tradition of giving the credit for a dastan to an irreproachable source to establish its credibility as a historical document. It is now almost certain that the bulk of the Tilism dastans were composed not in the sixteenth century but later, in that unique period of aesthetic refinement and cultural decadence which distinguished Lucknow as the capital of the former kingdom of Awadh. The storyline of the Hoshruba chronicle was probably delineated by one Mir Ahmed Ali, a dastangoh or narrator from Lucknow who later moved to Rampur. The story was further embellished by his disciples like Amba Prasad Rasa and n...