Shehnaz Kausar’s book ‘Urdu Daastanoun Kay Manfi Kirdar’ deals with anti-heroes, scoundrels, rogues, rascals, crooks, bad guys of Urdu stories. She has tried to explain why Urdu storytelling has been a powerful means of communication and explains how writers made their stories mesmerizing.
In every Urdu story, there is a villain along with the hero. The conflict between good and evil has been going on since ages. It is also one of the most common conventional themes in literature. One variation is the inner struggle between good and evil in characters; and by extension, humans in reality.
From Mulla Wajhi’s “Sub Ras” (1635) to Fort William College up to the year 1810 many stories were written wherein negative characters create amazing worlds which portray a central character’s triumph in the face of adversity, as he/she overcomes some seemingly insurmountable obstacle or challenge. The obstacle itself can be any number of things i.e. difficult circumstances, a threatening villain etc. but the key element is that the protagonist rises up to achieve something that appeared impossible. These stories narrate the thrilling world of endless pleasures, dreams, desires, rivalries, wars, secrecies, jealousies, resentments, enmities etc.
Evil has been a capital-letter theme in Urdu literature. It’s right up there with love, death, beauty, friendship and fate. Maybe that’s because evil, like death, catches us off guard. Sooner or later, we’re all assured a chance encounter with evil, but we can’t predict when it’s coming for us, and we can only guess what painful form it will take.
Shehnaz Kausar’s book has a lot to tell us about evil’s stimulus and approach and the strong character of the hero. In some stories the villain is shown the error of his ways and redeems himself over the course of the story, demonstrating that everyone has the capacity to change for the better.
In most of the stories the main character sets out to defeat a powerful baddie or evil force (human, animal, invisible) that is threatening his or her home. Often it will seem that the odds are stacked against the hero, but their courage and resourcefulness will help them overcome the threat.
The stories talk about success despite the odds being stacked against, discuss the life lessons that an encounter with a monster teaches and demonstrate how someone becomes stronger through adversity.
Some story-writers make the villain appear as if it exists solely to thwart or endanger the story’s central characters. They also show the history behind a villain’s behaviour; a complex product of the story, the societal values and norms that contribute to or enable his/her behaviour are often revealed. Villains are not only shown the bad guy as though they were born for hatching plots, but also there is a hint at the villain’s evolution.
If you have a hero, you need a villain. And in the annals of Urdu stories, there have been some downright scoundrels, to put it mildly. No act is too gloomy, no deed too shameful for these wrongdoers. At least one feels happy that these reprehensible characters are limited to the pages of the stories that contain them.
In short, ‘Urdu Daastanoun Kay Manfi Kirdar’ is the kind of book that keeps you up at night, and it shows vile villains to compete the good. Shehnaz Kausar has picked her favourite good and evil characters so as to show how the writers of the stories created certain characters and gave them a living, breathing personality.