storytelling and history

G'day, I would like to start up a discussion on the history of storytelling and Pakistan's contribution to this art. I will tell you why.

I am an Australian who first visited Pakistan in 1979 and most recently in 2002. My interest in Pakistan developed as a child in Sydney when my best friend was from Lahore. Some of my most cherished childhood memories are of going to Zia's house and being given delicious food and hearing music that mesmerised my impressionable mind. Zia's mother also told me stories and I remember hearing of the love between Neer and Ranjha. Years later I heard a similar story and was told it was written by William Shakespeare. But I knew that he could not take all the credit for thinking up this story.

Since that time I learnt of the mysterious Indus river civilisations and then of the Aryan migrations. It seems to me that these great societies must have been pre-literate and thus used storytelling techniques to teach and instruct. In Australia we have aboriginal culture which is rich in stories that communicate complex knowledges of the environment and social structures. I imagine the great animal herders who migrated down from the Iranian plateau onto the fertile flood plains of the Punjab must have wonderful stories. And I wonder whether any of the stories we still hear today have their roots from these migrants. I wonder whether Waris Shah was simply retelling, and reinterpreting, stories he had heard.

I would like to hear people's opinions about these views.

It is indeed a nice gesture,positive complements & a friendly way to express your feeling about Pakistan & Pakistanis.There are lot of missconceptions,missleading,wrongly portraying & projecting of Pakistani society by the western media,so ther4 I always tell to the people here to go visit,interract & findout your self the truth about Pakistani culture.We should never forget we all are humanbeing in the ffirst row & we are social animals to live with each others.You should read Pakistan regional & national literature (May be some of our forum mates will give you internet pages) you will findout more & more about this rich culture,their history & stories.I can only mention in my city Peshawar there is one of tthe oldest street known as "Qissa Khwani bazaar"(Street of the story tellers).in the olden times the carravans of traveller coming there for business & other purpposes used to stay their in "Saray,s (Inns) like hotels,there were proffesional story tellers & also exhange of the stories of their experiences to one another.If you are interested in literature please do read about "Abdul latif Bhittai,Warras Shah,Bhulle Shah,Khusaal Khan Khattak etc representing different regions of Pakistan.You are welcome to this forum & hope to get interesting informations through foum mates posts in reply to your topic.

you are welcome in pakistan,nice to meet you.

you have to go in your city to PAKISTAN embassy they will help you. thanks.

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Last edited by jumakhan abdulkhaliq on Thu Aug 21, 2008 2:35 pm; edited 1 time in total

wordsonasia,,,wellcome to Pakistan and to forum aswell,,,its indeed a very good post by u, there r always goods and bads in every society but believe me Pakistan has much more goods than bads,,,and a person like u will definetly identify them easily,,,

thank you for your kind replies.

I have read some Warras Shah, and in fact it was after reading the love story of Neer and Ranjha that I began to think about the importance of storytelling from Pakistan. It seems to me that Warras, like Shakespeare, retold common stories. You can not say Shakespeare's stories are original, but what was original was his brilliant way he used words and contemporary issues to retell and age-old yarn. Similarly with Warras Shah, he used ancient tales as the structure to tell his listeners something that was happening at the time. It is as if he was a social and political commentator.

And it seems to me that this use of storytelling is ancient and that in Pakistan you may still have the thread from when we first told stories. I will try to explain my thesis.

Conventional history says that there people started to live in settled communities along the Indus river about 7000 years ago. These communities learnt to fire regular sized bricks and use these to build canals and channel water, thus demonstrating these people had a highly sophisticated understanding of numbers and process. But we know virtually nothing about what these people thought about: because we have no record we do not know how these people saw the world around them. Then, mysteriously these cities died around 3000 years ago. Again, we have no idea why but we speculate that it is because of water availability, or lack of. There may have been some kind of climate change event and rivers dried and were diverted. Some time after these cities died new people came into the plains from the Iranian plateau. These people were cattle herders and spoke a language which has remnants in every modern language across South Asia to Europe. We know these people as the Aryans.

And this is where storytelling becomes important. Wandering people invariably tell stories to their children. Such people store their collected knowledge in stories which are organised according to age and status-based rituals. As a child you hear a story, then as you grow older you learn different details and you gradually build up your knowledge base of the story as you develop the wisdom of age and experience. In societies without the written word, the spoken word and how it is organised must be the repository of all knowledge. From a simple children's story about seasons, it becomes a complex lesson on resource management. Stories are never just entertainment: they give the listener a sense of belonging. A very strong sense of identity comes fro knowing and understanding the intricacies of a shared story.

Sometime around two and a half or three thousand years ago, iron became widely used and this radically change the world. Farmers could grow surpluses and armies could use stirrups and fight with swords. This meant that human societies fundamentally changed and people became associated without necessarily knowing each other - tribes morphed into states as those with force were able to centralise resources. These societies needed record keeping and written languages became standardised, and the kings and priests wrote down rules for society.

It was in this process that the age old spoken stories were requisited by those in power. This is when the Vedas were written as a set of rules and incorporated elements from those pre-literate societies. It is pure speculation that Indus Valley era stories were incorporated here, but we do know that Aryan stories were. The mainstream stories changed: the vedic societies developed and waned, the Buddhist societies and msot recently the Islamic society.

This big stories framed the narrative, but there always remain a storytelling tradition outside the mainstream, especially when the mainstream was never inclusive. The tides of history have washed over the Punjab but the storytellers have remained, retelling ancient tales and adding their contemporary commentaries.

And this is my interest. I would love to hear your comments on my thesis. Am I completely wrong or are some of my insights into your world valid?

inayat khan qazi wrote:

It is indeed a nice gesture,positive complements & a friendly way to express your feeling about Pakistan & Pakistanis.There are lot of missconceptions,missleading,wrongly portraying & projecting of Pakistani society by the western media,so ther4 I always tell to the people here to go visit,interract & findout your self the truth about Pakistani culture.We should never forget we all are humanbeing in the ffirst row & we are social animals to live with each others.You should read Pakistan regional & national literature (May be some of our forum mates will give you internet pages) you will findout more & more about this rich culture,their history & stories.I can only mention in my city Peshawar there is one of tthe oldest street known as "Qissa Khwani bazaar"(Street of the story tellers).in the olden times the carravans of traveller coming there for business & other purpposes used to stay their in "Saray,s (Inns) like hotels,there were proffesional story tellers & also exhange of the stories of their experiences to one another.If you are interested in literature please do read about "Abdul latif Bhittai,Warras Shah,Bhulle Shah,Khusaal Khan Khattak etc representing different regions of Pakistan.You are welcome to this forum & hope to get interesting informations through foum mates posts in reply to your topic.