By: Dr. Mohammad Aleem ( Chief News Editor-ICN Group )
NEW DELHI: It was a chance meeting for me with the leading Dastango of Urdu, Jawaid Danish. I had heard about his works a lot. These days, he has become synonym with the every literary festival of Urdu in India. Every year, he comes from his adopted country, Canada to India to perform his Dastan at various literary forums.
Dastan is an old literary form in Urdu of storytelling which was very popular in early eighteenth century till late nineteenth. Still, it is very popular. And it was that attraction and curiosity of that art with me that drove me to hear him while performing on the stage. And this chance came luckily through Dr. Aslam Jamshedpuri, Head of the Dept. of Urdu at Chaudhri Charan Singh University in Meerut (UP).
It was a pleasant evening of 26 March 2018 when Jawed Danish got the chance to perform in the university auditorium in his beautiful Lucknawi attire before the art and literature lover of Meerut. I was his travel companion also from Delhi to Meerut during those two days literary festival which was organized by the Urdu Department to celebrate the beauty and attraction of the short stories. Around ten writers of Urdu, Hindi and English had to read their best chosen stories before the audience.
Jawaid Danish had the responsibility to introduce and perform Dastaan which is a very popular form of literature. And he did his job in the best possible way.
His most famous Dastan is “Hijrat Ke Tamashe”, which he has penned himself and brought on stage in the beautiful style of Urdu culture. This Dastan is only a quarter to hour long, but the theme of the Dastan and its way of presentation is truly mesmerizing. Once it starts, it soon engulfs the audience in its bewitching beauty.
This Dastan is not old in content, but style. It starts and ends in the same manner as Dastan used to be in the yesteryears. But the theme is contemporary and it has picked the subject of today’s time. There are some youths and middle aged men who have migrated to Canada (and it can be anywhere in the world) and they narrate in very flowing dialogue form their own stories, their own struggle of lives, their own dreams with which they had chosen the path of migration without giving a second thought that what would happen if they did not find their place of working as an ideal one. One guy is from Mumbai who in his own unique dialects narrates his stories, his agony of life. There is one Bengali fellow who also faces the similar kind of predicament.
As the story goes ahead, we find that almost all migrated lower middle and lower class persons have the similar fate. They seem to fight a battle which they have chosen themselves in hope of a better life not only to themselves, but to their entire family. But it proves otherwise. It looks that the things which we see from afar usually have some hidden pain and troubles inside.
It is a tragedy that millions of Indians and other people of the poor countries run towards other rich countries in hope of a better livelihood and quality of life. But, in the most cases, it proves a disaster. They not only lose their native place of birth, its essence, its beauty, but also the root which gives them an identity as a human. In search of some material comforts, if one is forced to leave all other happiness behind is really a big thing to lose in life.
Jawaid Danish has so far penned a dozen books on various subjects like travelogue and dramas. But his most loving form of art is the drama and Dastangoi. He loves travelling equally. As a traveller he has amassed a lot of experience of human life and it helps him in making a good writer and performer. He is not only a good writer, but a fine actor and an accomplished director also. He runs his own theater company in Canada and performs plays in Urdu and English from time to time.
Jawaid Danish is an alumnus of Aligarh Muslim University and has passed his childhood in the city of culture, Lucknow. Then he moved to Calcutta in search of better livelihood as a writer and journalist which helped him in moving to the western part of the globe. From then on, he became an international citizen, travelling all over the globe with his literary and dramatic pursuits. And still he is doing the same with the same zeal and passion.
