HYDERABAD : If it took a princess Dunyazad to invent the game-changing cliffhanger, it takes a dastango to spin the magic with the narrative to begin and end the tale anywhere, which is what is the beauty of dastangoi, an oral art form of storytelling which has been there for several centuries and now has been revived.
That’s how one sees dastans of Amir Hamza, Tilism-e-Hoshruba to the modern ones like Dastan Alice Ki among others. It takes excellent story-telling skills and the right pronunciation to deliver a nearly-perfect performance. And it takes exquisite research and analytical skills to write your own dastan and then perform it. For dastango Poonam Girdhani writing Daastan-e-Irfaan-e-Buddh was quite a surreal experience.
It so happened that the author, dastango-revivalist and director Mahmood Farooqui had a proposal to work on a dastan on Buddha which came from a Buddhist society. “He asked me to write it,” shares Poonam.
She began her research and went ahead to explore the Buddhist cave temples at Ajanta and Ellora. She was marvelling at the ancient rock art carved with figures of Buddha and the stories associated with his legends. Just then she realised that Thich Nhat Hanh’s bestselling biography of Buddha was in her bag.
"It was a surreal moment because I was still in two minds if I would want to go ahead with the project or not. But on finding the book with me, I was sure this assignment was for me. I had this feeling that the caves were talking to me." She came back and began writing from sources which offered so much for her to explore. “But I wanted to find Buddha not as a religious figure on a high pedestal, I wanted to study him as any other human who believed in oneness,” shares Poonam.
It was quite a challenge to write on Buddha not as a god. "At the same time writing the dastan also led me to self-discovery in a meditative way. Siddhartha was a prince after all. He was adept in Vedas, the Raj Shastra and Arth Shastra quite well. Born in a Republic he was in touch with other royals as well. But he wanted to find the truth as he began searching for Oneness. He always asked a lot of questions and encouraged his disciples to ask. I didn’t want to make him a god in my writing which is quite paradoxical to how he’s been depicted in other writings. I was determined that this will be my Buddha. I didn’t want to turn the piece into monolithic preaching."
Even after thousands of years, Buddha’s teachings are still relevant especially through BR Ambedkar’s powerful work ‘The Buddha and his Dhamma’. She also explored Edwin Arnold’s ‘The Light of Asia’, ‘The Gospel of the Buddha’ by Paul Carus, Rahul Sanskrityayan’s ‘Mahamanav Buddha’ among other collections.
"I also wanted to know about women becoming his disciples and joining him at sanghas. I studied Therigatha, one of the earliest collection of poems by Buddhist nuns," shares the Delhi-based artiste.
But these short poems have been translated from Pali whose metre doesn’t fit well in English and Hindi. Nevertheless, the verses tell you that the women felt independent away from their routine subaltern life which restricted their spiritual growth.” That’s how in her dastan she’s added words of Pali and Sanskrit.
She read Intizar Husain’s celebrated stories on the life of the Enlightened One and has added Yashodhara’s perspective as well that she wasn’t just a passive wife, she was much more. “Mentioning the role of women adds much to a dastan making it different,” she adds ruing that in earlier times also women used to perform dastans but no written records were kept.
She has 20 years of experience in cinema and theatre and the challenge was to keep it different from a play or a movie script. “It was difficult initially, but as I got more involved I felt curtains rising and falling in my mind. The story presented itself in different scenes and after nine months Dastan-e-Irfaan-e-Buddh was ready.”
Dastan-e-Irfaan-e-Buddh is directed by Mahmood Farooqui. Poonam will be presenting it with fellow dastango Rajesh Kumar at Hyderabad Literary Festival on January 26, 11 am. She will also perform at Maulana Azad National Urdu University on January 27, 5.30 pm.
The writer can be contacted at saima@newindianexpress.com
Twitter: @Sfreen