Amman, Mir. A Tale of Four Dervishes. Translated from the Urdu with an Introduction by Mohammed Zakir. Penguin Classics (India), 1994. 158 pages.
Continuing my exploration of Penguin India’s Classics list, I have gone from Amir Khusrau’s 13th century poetry to the early 19th century Urdu prose narrative, A Tale of Four Dervishes by the otherwise little-known Mir Amman. Fortuitously, within the first few pages, Amman states the source of his Urdu retelling: A Persian original by Amir Khusrau! A very strange harmonic, that these two books I randomly selected to read in order should have this connection. (It turns out that Amman got his own source wrong–an original for this retelling exists, but it is no longer believed to have been written by Khusrau.)
How this retelling came to be written is very interesting. A prologue by Mir Amman is an encomium–not to a Sultan or rich Indian patron, but to a British colonial official named John Gilchrist. It turns out that Urdu was not much of a literary language at this point, but more of a common vernacular, a mongrel language containing elements of imperial Persian and native linguistic elements. It was “dialectical” in every sense, but “seldom employed in serious writing” (unlike courtly Persian). The poetry of Ghalib was in Urdu’s bright future, but at the time of the writing (1803), the penurious Amman found a patron in an East India Company hand. According to the translator’s introduction, “Most of the known prose literature in Urdu…from the fourteenth century onwards…consisted of tracts, treatises, and pamphlets invariably religious in character…. Use of prose in fiction…was generally the work of writers of the Fort William College, Calcutta, established in 1800 to acquaint the officers of the East India Company with the customs and traditions of the people of India.” Amman’s work, dated 1803, is at the origin of this new tradition. That dastardly British Empire was at it again–in this case, incentivizing Indians to start a whole literary tradition for one of their own vernaculars! So Urdu literature is a sort of unintended consequence of the EIC’s capitalist exploitation of India. History moves in strange ways.
This prose fiction work owes a lot in its structure–nested tales within tales, princes and princesses endlessly misadventuring into happy endings, and so on–to the native Indian narrative tradition, which includes such works as the Ocean of the Sea of Stories by Somadeva and the Tales of the Ten Princes by Dandaka. Yet saying this is not saying much; researchers of the origins of stories have traced the Arabian Nights and Aesop’s fables alike to early Indian Hindu sources. Readers of Chekhov and Updike beware: There is very little realism and ambiguity here, though many of the stories don’t involve supernatural or magical realist events. Most of the supernatural stuff shows up in the last chapter, when the king of the djinns basically grants the four dervishes and their listener, King Azad Bakht, all the lost loves they long for. Even this deus-ex-machina happy ending signals that this is pure romance. Amman’s work resembles the European prose fiction that antedates the modern novel and realism generally. It reminded me of those works of Italian and Elizabethan prose fiction from which Shakespeare often derived his plots. This is a sort of fiction more closely related to fairy tales than to contemporary realism; it is built around shipwrecks, inexplicably and implacably evil brothers, exotic locales, imprisonments, princesses who fall in love with haggard travelers (familiar to readers ever since Nausicaa), and, most charmingly of all, a dog faithful to his master through all his sufferings, eventually rewarded with a collar of rubies.
I mentioned in an earlier review how Khusrau’s poetry tested the limits of this reader’s ability to set aside sometimes mean-spirited imperialist contempt toward Indians/Hindus and keep those cultural assumptions from interrupting my immersion in his artistry. Mir Amman wrote 500 years later, after the synthesis of the two civilizations so praised by professors….yet all those centuries of coexistence seem to have made the problem worse. This book was written a full century after the reign of the Hindu-hating Emperor Aurungzeb, yet nothing much seems to have improved. There is, in Amman’s Indo-Islamic world, a consistent relegation of infidels to a subhuman status that is quite the revelation to read about–and, occasionally, unintentionally silly. “For those who go astray,” says one of the heroes to a beautiful Hindu princess, who has found him and nursed him back from his injuries, “there is hell; and for us, the true believers, there is heaven.” What happens next? “These words softened her heart, and she said with tears in her eyes, ‘Well then, teach me about your faith.’ I recited our creed which she sincerely recited after me and thus she became a Muslim.” Well, that was quick! She is the second princess he manages to convert in three pages, by the way. By morning, this princess has repented of her infidel “aberrations,” repudiated her infidel parents, and has plotted to escape with the hero by ship to Persia… There is a nurse, though, who has raised the princess since she was a child and has assisted her in treating the hero’s wounds until now. “But what about the nurse?” asks the hero. “That’s simple!” responds the princess, full of a new moral clarity. “I will give her a cup of strong poison.” And she really does it! She goes off and murders her nurse; such a thing is possible for the princess now, morally and emotionally–because the nurse is still a Hindu, and the princess isn’t anymore. In this work, whose popularity is emphasized by its translator and back cover, this is passed off as the most obvious of expedients. Such touches tell us a lot about how the original audience, the one that made this work popular, really felt about the native infidels. These attitudes were normal back then. The atrocities of Aurungzeb make sense in the cultural milieu of Mir Amman; for if even the poets and dreamy romanciers thought this little of the humanity of those outside the in-group, we can hardly expect better from the men of action.
Throughout the narrative, there are jarring bits where psychological believability breaks down entirely, which is something independent of the non-believable nature of supernatural story elements. Those two evil brothers I mentioned earlier get rescued from death and torture by the good brother, and then, as soon as they get a shower and a fresh set of clothes, try to kill him–and this exact sequence happens not once, not twice, not three times, but four times. The hero keeps giving them more chances to do him in! Wise up already! In another story, the hero fakes prostration before the “Great Idol,” succeeds in ingratiating himself and obtaining an infidel wife, and then, when she dies in childbirth after two years of marriage, what is the widower’s reaction? “I kicked the dead body of my wife and exclaimed, ‘You accursed woman, if you were to die in childbirth why did you marry and conceive at all?'”–Suspension of disbelief indeed.
As long as the reader plows through these oddities–some of which can be explained by the distance of the civilization that produced it, some by Amman’s desire to keep his story moving at all costs–A Tale of Four Dervishes offers its delights. One of the stories features a faithful dog, who doesn’t talk, unfortunately, but still engages in fine acts of bravery and gets his just reward at the end. There are plenty of gardens, shipwrecks, mysterious princesses, miraculous escapes, treasures, and changes of fortune–the stuff of old-fashioned romance, stuff that entertained and diverted people for centuries, and still does. Whatever Amman’s work may be, it certainly isn’t dull; he ricochets his heroes from adventure to adventure, and you never know when a casually encountered character will launch into his own account of his adventures. (The four dervishes of the title aren’t the only ones who tell their stories.) There is an incredible amount of storytelling packed into a mere 158 pages, and I am grateful to have been regaled and transported by it.