The word and the genre ‘dāstān’ is unrecognisable as a theoretical catergory. Even great works of the genre like the Ḥamzanāma that have been popular for centuries in Iran and the Indian Subcontinent have been relegated to the literary sidelines due to lack of patronage and critical engagement. This paper is an attempt to define the dāstān as a genre in contemporary times and open it to inquiry and debate for a larger academic audience. I argue that dāstān is a genre that exists at the religious and historical margins without being associatively reductive.
Primarily rooted in Islamic storytelling and based on venerated religious or cultural personalities and incidents, the capaciousness of the dāstān genre allowed it to be narrated by master craftsmen—the dāstāngūs or the qiṣṣa-khwāns—for whom storytelling was bread and butter. Today, storytelling within this tradition is sparse and critical engagement negligible. This paper theorises the dāstān as ahistorical and areligious. I use the words ‘areligious’ and ‘ahistorical’ as antonyms of irreligious and fictional and not as opposites of religious and historical. The implication being that the religiosity and historicity of the dāstān, though omnipresent, is held in abeyance for the duration of the story.
Storytelling and a reclamation of the dāstān as a genre in the Muslim world today can allow us to engage critically and retrospectively with the issues confronted by Islam and the Islamic. More specifically, this paper engages in two contemporary examples of storytelling and relates them to stories from the Ḥamza narrative from the Indian Subcontinent. The first of these is based on the news story of Osama-Bin-Laden’s burial at sea and the other on Salman Rushdie’s ‘plagiarism’ of stories from the Ḥamzanāma.
