Danish Husain and Mahmood Farooqui are back in Mumbai with Dastan Goi, the lost art of storytelling in Urdu

In a city where the inability to use the Hindi in its pure form has given rise to a publicly acknowledged Bambaiyya dialect, chaste Urdu is but a distant dream. But the duo of Danish Husain and Mahmood Farooqui is determined to raise Mumbai from its slumber of indifference towards this prized language.

On October 19, Husain and Farooqui, after a year’s gap, yet again bring Dastan Goi—the lost art of storytelling in Urdu—to Mumbai’s Bhavan’s Cultural Centre at Andheri.

Dastan Goi is the art of storytelling with roots in medieval Iran. According to the tradition, the narrators, also known as dastan-gohs, would recite fantasy tales of fearless warrior kings around camp fires, in coffee houses and palaces. The stories narrated through Dastan goi usually revolve around the ordeals of these kings and their encounters with the enemy.

“The traditional art spoke about demons, magicians and djinns. Though that’s magnificent in itself, we have adapted Dastan goi to present times and the stories that we can relate to,” says Husain. The duo has planned two performances, The Talking Birds and Partition Dastans on the Multiple Tragedies of 1947. While the first is a romance epic and an adaptation of a famous tale, Talisme Hoshruba (literally meaning ‘magical word that blows your senses away’), the latter, as the name suggests, speaks about the tragedies of the partition.

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