Mahmood Farooqui
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Mahmood Farooqui | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, India |
| Alma mater | The Doon School St. Stephen's College, Delhi St. Peter's College, Oxford |
| Occupations | Author and storyteller |
| Spouse | Anusha Rizvi |
Mahmood Farooqui is an Indian writer, performer and director. He specializes in a type of story-telling known as Dastangoi.[1][2][3][4][5] Farooqui along with his uncle Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, noted Urdu poet and literary critic, revived Dastangoi, the ancient art of Urdu story telling.[6][7][8][9][10] He was awarded the Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar in 2010 for it.[11]
His book Besieged: voices from Delhi 1857[12] was awarded the Ramnath Goenka for the best Non-fiction book of the year.[13][14] This book is a translation of mutiny papers providing a glimpse into the lives of ordinary people who found themselves stuck during the revolt of 1857. He was also a researcher for The Last Mughal, a book by William Dalrymple.
In August 2016 he was found guilty of rape by a lower court,[15] but in September 2017 he was acquitted by the Delhi High Court.[16] The High Court judgment was later upheld by the Supreme Court.[17][18]
Farooqui completed his schooling from The Doon School and went on to read history at St. Stephen's College, Delhi.[9] He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to read history at St. Peter's College, University of Oxford.[19]
Dastangoi
Farooqui began reinventing Dastangoi, the 16th-century Urdu oral storytelling art form, in 2005. Since then, he has performed thousands of shows across the world. Apart from bringing alive the old epic of Dastan-e-Amir Hamza, he has innovated Dastangoi by using it as a medium to tell modern tales. Some of his adaptations include:
- A retelling of Vijaydan Detha's Rajasthani folktale, Chouboli;
- An allegorical take on the trial and incarceration of communist activist Dr. Binayak Sen;
- A presentation on the life and times of communist ideologue and novelist Saadat Hasan Manto;
- An adaptation of Lewis Carroll's classics 'Alice's adventures in Wonderland', and 'Through the Looking Glass';
- A collage based on AK Ramanujan's essay, '300 Ramayanas';
- A collage of stories on the partition of India;
- His latest work is Dastan-e-Karan Az Mahabharata, a retelling of the life of Karna based on Urdu, Persian, Hindi, and Sanskrit sources.
Farooqui has, over the years, built a team of dastangos trained by him, including Ankit Chadha, Darain Shahidi, Poonam Girdhani and Himanshu Bajpai.
Books
His publications include the award-winning Besieged: Voices from Delhi,1857, Habib Tanvir: Memoirs, a translation of theatre-director Habib Tanvir's memoirs from Urdu with notes and an introduction, Dastangoi, an introduction to the art of datangoi, and A Requiem for Pakistan: The world of Intizar Husain, a personal exploration of the literary and biographical world of Intizar Husain and brief history of modern Urdu Literary Culture.[20]
