The Broken Spell historicizes the Persian and Urdu qiṣṣah (story or “romance”) as a genre within the broader tradition of “verbal arts” in early modern and modern India. Pasha M. Khan's primary focus is “to examine, but also to move past, the colonial-era decline of the romance genre and to excavate the extent of its worth as well as its reception and understanding prior to the twentieth century” (pp. 2–3). What ensues is an important exploration of the composition, significance, reception, circulation, and work of this ubiquitous genre of narrative that encompassed the oral and written realms.
Chapter 1 begins with the Persian-speaking storytellers of India and asks, “What were storytellers worth?” (p. 24). Khan argues that although less valued than certain other genres, such as poetry, qiṣṣah was valued through the efforts of its producers, in interaction with its receivers. Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of Khan's analysis is the way in which he forces us to take audiences seriously, as part of a “transactional” process of creating the value of storytelling in a given time (along with its tellers and, eventually, its commemorators) and the meaning of the genre over time (p. 26). Storytelling was valued for its linguistic and political exemplarity and as a bellwether of correct language usage.
Chapter 2 focuses on Urdu storytelling in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, asking, “Why was storytelling so much alive?” (p. 54). Khan shows the ways in which storytelling maintained and even raised its worth in new but no less transactional ways in a colonial era that saw transitions from manuscript to print culture, orality to literacy, the rise of a middle class, and the decline of traditional sites of court patronage. One of this book's strengths is that it charts change as a gradient, carefully picking apart what changed and what remained rooted in earlier times. Storytellers deployed familiar forms of social and cultural capital in changing circumstances to maintain storytelling's worth, though the struggle for worth was lost after the early twentieth century, as the “worldviews” (or ideologies; p. 6) that sustained storytelling were eroded by colonial modernization and its attendant form, the novel.
Chapter 3 turns to the storytelling craft as a verbal art. Khan presents the aporias of stories, a genre containing fragments of texts (using Gérard Genette's concept of “hypotexts”) from other genres such as history, ethics, and poetry “that give it shape even as they are discernibly foreign” to the storytelling genre (p. 93). Through an in-depth look at a seventeenth-century storyteller's life and his storytelling manual, the embodied performances, spaces, and social transactions of this verbal art come to life. Khan argues for understanding the genre through the logic of its various repertoires, which the storyteller animates with appropriate textual fragments. The audience's recognition of hypotexts was critical to reception, and thus the genre's meanings. Different audiences (“communities of textual memory”; p. 121) across regions and time periods may have had access to different hypotexts, or else ideologies may have shifted so that they were ascribed other meanings. Such recognition (or its lack) acted as the genre's engine of change. These arguments are Khan's contribution to the study of literary culture, and they are of broader significance for understanding other forms of verbal art, both synchronically and diachronically.
Chapter 4 considers the story's relationship with other genres, specifically its premodern opposite, history. This was a form of opposition in which fragments of one lived in the other, which is to say, histories were laced with stories as much as the reverse. Thus, a range of relations existed between history and qiṣṣah, from an oppositional view derived from a narrowly rationalist worldview to “another system, perhaps a more prevalent one, if less familiar to us, [which] treated the qiṣṣah and history as close cousins with porous limits” (p. 134). Ultimately, the claim of sincerity, rather than empirical factuality, was the differentiating criterion between the two genres. Such analysis contributes to the broader study of premodern knowledge systems in the Islamic world and their processual encounter with modern ones.
Chapter 5 outlines the dominance of material empiricism as rationalism that underwrote the rise of the novel, with its focus on realism and naturalism, and became the standard by which the qiṣṣah genre was devalued. From the late nineteenth century, the shift in epistemology to “new rationalist thought system” did not, however, result in a total and immediate displacement of qiṣṣah. Khan traces an intermediary step by which “British intellectual dominion” mainly provided “a new authority under which precolonial epistemologies congregated in a new fashion” (p. 164). But eventually, colonial dominion won out, and the result was a dominant epistemology that was the product of a one-way transmission between a colonial thought system and “the intellectual reactions of the colonized” (pp. 164–65). This is a bit incongruous, given that Khan suggests in the conclusion that the qiṣṣah was the precursor of the novel.
Given the importance of Persian storytelling (and of migrant storytellers), the study's parameters as limited to India (while Persian was a transregional lingua franca) seems little justified beyond the blinders of area studies and does not explain the absence of relevant scholarship from the domain of Central Asian or Iranian studies.
Khan marks the recovery of precolonial genre codes as an anticolonial/de-Orientalizing project. Closer engagement with some of this scholarship might have complicated certain conceptual and analytic premises of the book, such as the unidirectional and total dominance of colonial epistemology, the polarization of culture through the association of colonial rationalism with the elite (and the romanticized “folk” masses), and the use of the term “romance” for qiṣṣah (a mistranslation by his own account) throughout the study as a whole, a move that seems to undermine the book's aspirations. Perhaps, however, these questions point to the richness of Khan's book and to directions for future scholarship.
