Reconfiguring Dástán Tradition as a Commemorative Narrative of Power Structures, Charismatic Leadership, and Sainthood in North India

Abstract

This study will relocate the connection between the Dástán tradition, the Muslim Sufi tradition, and the chain of transmission of knowledge existent in the pre-colonial and the pre-partition religio-political domains in North India. It will investigate the workings of Persian, Turco-Mongolian, and Indian cultural values converging in the oral and the textual tradition of Dástán. It will also investigate the connection between communal memory, traditional forms of oral discourse, and its transcription and expression in Dástán. This analysis of Dástán tradition is different from previous studies as they primarily focused on its oral history, the shift from Persian to Urdu and South Asian settings, and the transcription and printing of Dástán in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This study will analyze Dástán through the spectacle of the transcultural tradition, the shifting social paradigms, and the power domains that preceded, coexisted with, and followed the Dástán tradition. It will reinterpret the meaning of the story of Amir Hamza within those shifting paradigms, which reflected the transition from an era of the Muslim domination (or Muslim Imperialism) to British Imperialism and colonial India. The study will explain how the storytellers in Dástán import various themes and structural devices from the wider cultural complex of the Islamic world; they also indigenized and transformed those foreign cultural themes and values according to the popular Muslim sensibility in the urban quarters of north Indian. This article will resolve some historiographical issues using the data as well as arguments from South Asian history, transcultural values, and literatures from the diverse cultural compost of the Islamic world.