Fabulous Machinery for the Curious

Book excerpt: "As the present volume offers six translations from the qissa genre, it is useful to understand the nature of the qissa genre; or rather, qissa's non-genre nature. In Urdu, the word qissa is used for both short and long narrative literature. It encompasses works in both prose and verse. When looking at narratives that belong to qissa literature, one is struck by their diversity. These narratives include everything from folk literature, to historical narratives, to adventure tales, picaresque narratives, comic and tragic stories, accounts of pilgrimage, and religious texts. Their structure varies from frame and interior stories, to linear narratives, to collections of disparate tales, joined loosely together. Each such narrative enriches the possibilities of the qissa, while at the same time making it more difficult to describe the genre neatly. Stories must have played a paramount social role in a society for it to create such a profusion of narratives meant for narration and retelling. Did the qissa literature grow from an impulse to give a story-like structure to every narrative? This diversity of texts published as qissas certainly suggests that. This extraordinary engagement with stories at a social level becomes clearer when we take a closer look at the qissas and realize that a number of them have a function beyond idle entertainment. To their audience, they offered everything, from social guidance, physical well-being, and moral training. The qissas were meant to be life's finishing school. The riches of this literature can be sampled in the six qissas presented here in their first English language translation"--