In an earlier column, I had attempted to provide a view of the qissa’s narrative world. This column offers merely a glimpse into the far more vast and complicated world of the dastaan.

In order to have a better understanding of the two genres, we must look past the confusion caused by the interchangeability of the words qissa and dastaan in the Urdu literature and storytelling tradition, and look instead at the contents of a text.

Readers of qissa and dastaan literature must understand that the title of a text may not accurately describe the genre. For example, the Dastaan-i-Amir Hamza is also called the Qissa-i-Amir Hamza. So is it a qissa or a dastaan? The short answer is: it could be either qissa or dastaan, depending on the features of the story.

A qissa recounts the adventures of one character and, by the end of the qissa, the character has accomplished something grand. If the story is about the life and adventures of Amir Hamza, with something to accomplish or a destiny to fulfil, it is the Qissa-i-Amir Hamza. The three single-volume versions in Urdu, by Khalil Ali Khan Ashk, Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami (who used Ghalib Lakhnavi’s text as its base), may all be categorised as qissas, regardless of what it says on the title.

A qissa, with all its multifarious subjects, and the range of narrative voices and devices it employs to tell stories, does not have a ‘framework’ like a dastaan does.

If, however, the story is a continuous narrative, and introduces a ‘framework’ in which there are several protagonists, multiple realms, a history whose characters cast a shadow on the narrative, and a whole machinery of magic and supernatural life, we are looking at a dastaan.

The 46-volume Dastaan-i-Amir Hamza composed by multiple writers, including Muhammad Husain Jah, Ahmed Husain Qamar, Tassadduq Husain and others, is a grand dastaan that fits this description.

The features of Qissa-i-Amir Hamza and Dastaan-i- Amir Hamza are briefly described here:

The qissa of Amir Hamza: Amir Hamza’s birth and death are foretold. He fulfils his destiny of triumphing over the great warriors of the world, and defeating the devs in the magical land of Koh-Qaaf. His childhood companion Amar Ayyar’s life is similarly foretold. At the end of the story, Amir Hamza is killed at the behest of a woman seeking vengeance.

The dastaan of Amir Hamza: Amir Hamza’s birth and death are both foretold, as in the qissa. He fulfils his destiny of triumphing over the great warriors of the world, and defeating the devs in the magical land of Koh-Qaaf. But before Amir Hamza is killed at the end of the story, his adventures expand to magical realms, and even when Amir Hamza dies, his progeny assume his title of the “Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction”, and continue their adventures, conquering many magical realms filled with sorcerers and supernatural creatures.

Tilism-i-Hoshruba, told in eight volumes or over 8,000 pages, was just one such adventure. Hoshruba is both a geographical land and a magical domain, which is a ‘framework’ in itself. This domain has a fixed life-span and an appointed hour when it will disintegrate.

The conqueror of the tilism [magic] is named at the time of the creation of the tilism, and it is none other than Amir Hamza’s grandson, Asad. Hoshruba has a complex history and characters from its past, like Lacheen, who wield influence in the present.

There are also immortal sorcerers in Hoshruba, such as Afrasiyab, who cannot be killed without the conqueror of the tilism acquiring the magic tablet concealed in Hoshruba. And there are powerful magical gifts to which Afrasiyab has access, and of which Amir Hamza and Amar Ayyar’s companions live in dread.

Tilism-i-Hoshruba begins with a faux-hero and a faux-villain. While pursuing the giant Laqa, Amir Hamza arrives at Koh-i-Aqeeq. Soon afterwards, Amir Hamza’s son Badiuzzaman goes further and breaches the boundary of Hoshruba, and is captured by Sorceress Sharara.

Now Amir Hamza’s grandson Prince Asad sets out to conquer the tilism but is also captured and imprisoned by Afrasiyab. Finally, Amar Ayyar takes control of Amir Hamza’s armies, and the confrontation between Amar Ayyar and Afrasiyab heats up.

We can see that Amir Hamza and the giant Laqa, Badiuzzaman and Sorceress Sharara, and even Prince Asad were just catalysts, used to set up the real conflict, which takes place between Amar Ayyar and the Emperor of Sorcery, Afrasiyab.

A qissa, with all its multifarious subjects, and the range of narrative voices and devices it employs to tell stories, does not have the ‘framework’ that a dastaan has. But one must offer a few caveats with this statement. A narrative having one or more dastaan features does not make it a dastaan: it must fulfil all of the above conditions to be classified as such.

For example, Alf Laila [The Arabian Nights] employs the frame story structure, where the outer frame tells the story of Scheherzade and King Shehryar and the inner frames have hundreds of stories with multiple characters. But they are not connected to the main narrative, and Alf Laila can be called a collection of qissas, or one long qissa, but not a dastaan.

Mehr Chand Khatri Mehr’s work, Nau-Aaeen-i-Hindi, recently published in Urdu as Qissa Azar Shah o Saman Rukh Bano, features paris [fairies] and devs, supernatural phenomena, and the hero visiting multiple realms, but it does not have other features that distinguish a dastaan from a qissa.

I’m increasingly of the opinion that understanding the dastaan and studying its narratological structure, with all its delightful complexities, is fundamental to understanding the qissa. Once we can identify a narrative’s genre using the distinguishing features of the dastaan as criteria, the poetics of the qissa become easy to understand.

The columnist is a novelist, author and translator.

He can be reached via his website: micromaf.com

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 19th, 2026