Fabulous Machinery for the Curious: The Garden of Urdu Classical Literature (World Literature in Translation)

**An absorbing, joyous, and colorful collection of stories from the qissa genre.** __Fabulous Machinery for the Curious__ presents the first English translation of some of the finest texts from the qissa genre. In this book, acclaimed translator Musharraf Ali Farooqi gathers the greatest of these tales, written or transcribed in the Urdu language by master storytellers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Spreading from Persia to Arabia to South Asia over 1,500 years, the qissa appropriated verse and prose narratives to become the preeminent storytelling genre. The combined traditions of the many cultures of Indo-Islamic civilization resulted in a flowering of qissas in Urdu. This collection distills a vast body of oral and written literature, from resplendent sagas of romantic love and thrilling adventures in fairyland to picaresque stories of deception and haunting tales of nobility and viciousness. __Fabulous Machinery for the Curious__ brings these forgotten gems to a new generation of readers and reminds us of the abiding power that great stories and ancient genres have for engaging the contemporary world. "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"-- Provided by publisher Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Qissa 1: The Ingenious Farkhanda and the Two Conditions Qissa 2: The Adventures of a Soldier Qissa 3: Chhabili the Innkeeper Qissa 4: Azar Shah and Saman Rukh Bano Qissa 5: The Victim of Malice Qissa 6: A Girl Named King Agar About the authors and narrators About the translator