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The Broken Spell - Indian Storytelling and the Romance Genre in Persian and Urdu (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,831
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The Broken Spell - Indian Storytelling and the Romance Genre in Persian and Urdu (Hardcover)
Series: Series in Fairy-Tale Studies
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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The Broken Spell: Indian Storytelling and the Romance Genre in
Persian and Urdu is a monograph on the rise and fall in popularity
of ""romances"" (qissah)-tales of wonder and magic told by
storytellers at princely courts and in public spaces in India from
the sixteenth century to the twentieth. Using literary genre
theory, author Pasha M. Khan points to the worldviews underlying
the popularity of Urdu and Persian romances, before pre-existing
Islamicate rationalist traditions gained traction and Western
colonialism came to prominence in India. In the introduction, Khan
explains that it was around the end of the nineteenth century that
these marvelous tales became devalued by Orientalists and
intellectually colonized Indian elites, while at the same time a
new genre, the novel, gained legitimacy. Khan goes on to narrate
the life histories of professional storytellers, many of them
emigres from Iran to Mughal-ruled India, and considers how they
raised their own worth and that of the romance in the face of
changes in the economics, culture, and patronage of India. Khan
shows the methods whereby such storytellers performed and how they
promoted themselves and their art. The dividing line between
marvelous tales and history is examined, showing how and why the
boundary was porous. The study historicizes the Western
understanding of the qissah as a local manifestation of a worldwide
romance genre, showing that this genre equation had profound
ideological effects. The book's appendix contains a translation of
an important text for understanding Iranian and Indian storytelling
methods: the unpublished introductory portions to Fakhr al-Zamani's
manual for storytellers. The Broken Spell will appeal to scholars
of folklore and fairy-tale studies, comparative literature, South
Asian studies, and any reader with an interest in India and
Pakistan.
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