6. A Handbook for Storytellers: The Ṭirāz al-akhbār and the Qissa Genre

Pasha M. Khan is Chair in Urdu Language and Culture and an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. Among other subjects, he has written about the shahr-āshob genre of Urdu poetry (in Nationalism in the Vernacular, ed. by Shobna Nijhawan, 2009), and on the line between history and romance in the Shahnamah (Indian Economic and Social History Review, 2012). At present he is working on a book tentatively entitled The Broken Spell, which deals with the the art of storytelling (dāstān-go'ī), the lives of storytellers, and the relationship between between Urdu/Persian stories and histories in India from the beginning of the Mughal era to the twentieth century.