Persian prose meets pulp fiction: How an 18th-century fairy tale became a multilingual phenomenon

A magical flower that cures blindness. A brave prince. A blind king – and a fantastical adventure.

The 18th-century Dastan-e-Gul-e Bakavali is an over-the-top tale of Prince Tajulmulk who sets off on a convoluted quest to a fairy kingdom in search of the bakavali flower, guarded by the fairy princess also called Bakavali, to cure his father’s blindness – which Tajulmulk inadvertently caused when the king laid eyes on him despite him being banished at birth on the advice of a court astrologer.

First narrated in lurid Persian prose by a resident of Murshidabad, Izzatullah Bengali (c 1700), the Dastan-e-Gul-e Bakavali features elaborate plot twists, dramatic flourishes and romance.

The origin of this story, now less remembered but once a staple of the fantastical “qissa” literature – or orally transmitted folk romance from the sub-continent – is as entertaining and convoluted as the tale itself. It involves fascinating and unusual interactions across languages, cultures and civilisations.

So bizarre and fanciful was the story in its blend of influences that its publisher John Gilchrist had to note:

“The fiction, taken in its literal sense breaks into all that wildness and exuberance of imagination, which characterises Oriental fable. And the situation of the author, as a Moosulman, born and educated amongst Hindoos, has naturally lead to a mixture, somewhat incongruous of the machinery proper to the Arabic and Persian tales, with…. the Hindoo system. Thus, we see purees [fairies] and demons, with Persian and Arabic names… acting in conjunction with the god Indur and his train.”

Despite its original composition in Persian, Dastan-e-Gul-e Bakavali is a very Indian story. Pakistani scholar Farman Fatehpuri noted that, “This tale on a foundational level, is not related to the Persian qisse, or to the land of Iran, but originated at some point from the sub-continent.”

Some scholars have suggested that it originated as an old oral, folk narrative in Bengal or Assam, but the general consensus is that it is from Rewa, or the larger Bagelkhand region in modern-day Madhya Pradesh.

What is certain is that the story’s earliest version was written in Persian in 1722 by Izzatullah Bengali “Imami” from Murshidabad. The writer only says in the introduction that during his years as a student, he narrated this story to a friend, Nazr Mohammed, who asked him to tell him a tale because he was unable to sleep. Seeing his friend’s delight in this fantastical tale, Bengali bedecked it in the jewelry of chaste Persian prose to make it palatable for a more “respectable” audience.

This original source text was never published, but made its way into the hands of Scottish surgeon and philologist, John Borthwick Gilchrist, at the East India Company’s Fort William College in Calcutta.

Gilchrist, a man of enormous learning, ran the “Gilchrist ka madrasa”, later Fort William College, for the training of Company officers in “Hindustanee”. He also oversaw a literary project to produce useful Hindustani texts for reading there.

Around that time, Gilchrist’s friend Captain David Robertson introduced him to a Hindu munshi, Nihal Chand Lahori (fl 1813), who was tasked with translating Bengali’s text into Hindustani. Lahori produced a version, Mazhab-e Ishq, which Gilchrist found “very entertaining” but lacking in literary finesse and style.

Fort William College’s officials themselves were so displeased with the insipid quality of the end result that they allegedly recommended that Lahori’s remuneration be reduced from Rs 150 to Rs 100 for errors.

Lahori’s inferior version led to a series of retellings, the most famous being the Urdu longform verse poem, Gulzar-e Naseem, written in the 1830s by Pandit Daya Shankar Nasim, a Kashmiri from Lucknow. The Gulzar-e Naseem quickly became a widely read and admired part of the Urdu canon.

Pulp fiction meets ‘Bakavali’

With its account of a prince setting off on a world of adventure to find a magical cure for his father, the Bakavali story fits into a classic archetype of folktales dealing with improbable quests. Similar stories are found across Indo-European languages and this is a recurrent motif across cultures.

As mass publishing, including in vernacular language, exploded in mid-19th-century India, the emergence of pulp fiction saw old folktales and longform epic verse poems being rewritten in more accessible, and often more titillating, fantastical and lurid ways.

For most of the second half of the 19th century, versions of the Bakavali story proliferated across North India and Bengal in Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi aimed at non-literary readers. These versions competed with popular folk tales in literary garb, like Baital Pachisi, Qissa-e Chahar Darvesh and the story of Hatim Tai.

The story’s origins in Izzatullah Bengali’s Persian were forgotten, and in an era that saw the loss of Persian fluency among the general public, the original Dastan-e-Gul-e Bakavali never saw print until the end of the 19th century.

An unknown folk-tale from Baghelkhand, rendered into Persian prose by a Bengali and then into Hindustani by a munshi from Delhi, at the behest of a British officer, and then reworked into an Urdu romance by a Kashmiri Pandit so captured the imagination of writers and pulp fiction purveyors everywhere that versions appeared in Gujarati, Punjabi, Bengali and even Nepali and Tamil.

By the 1880s, there was even a version – Hikayat Gul-e Bakavali – that was published in classical Malay by writers in Singapore and Penang.

In the early 20th-century, the qissa genre itself, once promoted by professional storytellers, was all but beginning to vanish, with educated readers preferring modern genres like the novel and theatrical plays.

But like all great adventures, the journey of the Dastan-e-Gul-e Bakavali continued.

Silver screen

Kanjibhai Rathod, a 20th-century Gujarati filmmaker, was known for devotional biopics such as Mirabai and Tulsidas and patriotic films like Bhakta Vidur – on Mohandas Gandhi. Then, in 1924, Rathod released what went on to become one of the first pan-Indian hits of the nascent silent movie industry: Gul-e Bakavali based on a Gujarati script written by Mohanlal Dave.

The enormous success of this version led to a steady stream of copy-cat retellings for the next three decades. At least seven other movie versions of Gul-e Bakavali were produced in Hindi alone and went on to become hits.

The “hero in search of miraculous potion” narrative played out well in cinema, a diversion from the pious, mythological genre. It also translated exceptionally well, and buoyed by the success in Hindi, retellings were produced in Bengali, Telugu and Tamil.

In 1955, actor MG Ramachandran played the role of Tajulmulk in the Tamil Gulebakavali and 1965 saw a Telugu version featuring actor, and later politician, NT Rama Rao in Gul-e Bakavali Katha. There is a Malay-language version as well.

As is common with retellings of folk-tales and romances, the stories are reimagined, inspiring newer twists and characters, the origins lost in time. Three hundred years of retelling have done just that and today, nobody remembers the origins of this Baghelkhandi folktale written in Persian by a Bengali.

Adhiraj Parthasarathy is based out of Hyderabad, and has written on literature. Mohammed Abdul Aleem is a student of Persian and calligraphy.