At the recently announced Kalinga Literature Festival (KLF) Book Awards, cultural historian and writer Dr Tarana Husain Khan took home the big prize—her novel, The Begum and the Dastan (Tranquebar, Westland; Rs 347), won the Book of the Year Award (2020-21). What makes this win a significant one is the extensive research that Khan put into exploring the traditionally-rich city of Rampur, UP, and the real-life characters and events, which shaped this erstwhile princely state. The result is fiction that dips into oral history, official documents preserved in the Raza Library, letters and secret diaries, to tell the story of the lives of the women of Sherpur. The book also shines light on the dastan (storytelling) tradition of Rampur—it’s this style that Khan’s character-narrators take on, while telling the story.

Khan’s window into the world of dastan first came from Abid Raza Bedar, a former librarian and scholar from Rampur, who she says, gave an evocative description of the dastan session in Rampur mohallas, which continued till the 1960s. “The durries in the common courtyard of the mohalla, the dastango [storyteller] on the takht, the men smoking hookahs, the afeem and the women secretly listening from behind the frieze. It was a weekly session people attended where the dastan would stretch on and on for months, even years,” says Khan, in an email interview.