Parry, often referred to as “the Darwin of oral literature,” died shortly afterwards, in a shooting accident, at the age of thirty-three; but his work revolutionised understanding of the Greek classics. Yet even while Parry was at work, the oral tradition was already beginning to die out in the cities of Yugoslavia. Since then, it has all but disappeared as a living institution, its end speeded by the bloody civil war that devastated the region in the 1990s.
In India, however, it seemed that an even more elaborate tradition had managed to survive relatively intact. An old anthropologist friend had told me how he once met a travelling storyteller in a village in southern India at the end of the 1970s. The bard knew the Mahabharata—India’s equivalent of the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Bible all rolled into one. The epic is the story of the rivalry of two sets of princely cousins whose enmity culminates in an Armageddonlike war on the battlefield of Kurukshetra; the Bhagavad Gita, for many Hinduism’s most profound and holy text, lies at its heart, a dialogue, on the eve of battle, between the god Krishna and one of the princely heroes about duty, illusion and reality.
With its hundred thousand slokas, the Mahabharata is fifteen times the length of the Bible. My friend had asked the bard how he could possibly remember it all. The minstrel replied that, in his mind, each stanza was written on a pebble. The pile of pebbles lay before him always; all he had to do was remember the order in which they were arranged and to “read” from one pebble after another.
India’s population may not be particularly literate—the literacy rate is officially 65 percent, compared with 77 percent in the United States—but it remains surprisingly culturally erudite. As the critic Anthony Lane noted in 2001, in the aftermath of the Islamist attacks on America, the people of New York again and again compared what had happened to them to films or TV: “It was like Independence Day”; “It was like Die Hard”; “No, Die Hard 2.” In contrast, when the great tsunami struck at the end of 2004, Indians were able to reach for a more sustaining narrative than disaster movies: the apocalyptic calamities and world-ending floods that fill the Mahabharata and Indian oral literature in general. As the great American Sanskrit scholar Wendy Doniger put it, “Myths pick up the pieces where philosophy throws up its hands. The great myths may help survivors to think through this unthinkable catastrophe, to make sense by analogy.”
While the Mahabharata is today the most famous of the Indian epics, it was originally only one of a great number. During the Mughal period, for example, the most popular was the great Muslim epic the Dastan-i Amir Hamza, or Story of Hamza. The brave and chivalrous Hamza, the father-in-law of the Prophet, journeys erratically from Iraq to Sri Lanka, via Mecca, Tangiers and Byzantium, in the service of the just Emperor Naushervan. On the way he falls in love with various beautiful Persian and Greek princesses, while avoiding the traps laid for him by his enemies: the cruel villain Bakhtak and the necromancer and arch-fiend Zumurrud Shah.
Over the centuries, as the story of Hamza was told across the Islamic world, the factual underpinning of the narrative was covered in layers of subplots and a cast of dragons, giants and sorcerers. It was in India, however, that the Hamza epic took on a life of its own. Here it grew to an unprecedented size, absorbing whole oral libraries of Indian myths and legends. In this form it began to be regularly performed in the public spaces of the great Mughal cities. At fairs and at festivals, on the steps of the Jama Masjid in Delhi or in the Qissa Khawani, the Storyteller’s Street in Peshawar, the professional storytellers, or dastan-gos, would perform night-long recitations from memory; some of these could go on for seven or eight hours with only a short break. There was also a great tradition of the Mughal elite commissioning private performances of the Hamza epic—the greatest Urdu love poet, Ghalib, for example, was celebrated for his dastan parties at which the story would be expertly recited.
In its fullest form, the tale of Hamza grew to contain a massive 360 separate stories, which would take several weeks of all-night recitation to complete; the fullest printed version, the last volume of which was published in 1905, filled no fewer than forty-six volumes, each of which averaged 1,000 pages. This Urdu version shows how far the epic had been reimagined into an Indian context in the course of many years of subcontinental retelling. Though the original Mesopotamian place names survived, the world depicted is that of Mughal India, with its obsession with poetic wordplay, its love of gardens and its extreme refinement of food and dress and manners. Many of the characters have Hindu names; they make oaths “as Ram is my witness”; and they ride on elephants with jewelled howdahs. To read it is to come as close as is now possible to the world of the Mughal campfires—those night gatherings of soldiers, Sufis, musicians and camp followers that one sees illustrated in Mughal miniatures: a storyteller beginning his tale in a clearing of a forest as the embers of the blaze glow red and the eager fire-lit faces crowd around.