The South Asian Graduate Association, would like to invite you to a special reading of
Retelling a Rajasthani Folk Tale in Urdu: Dastan-e-Chouboli
Performed by Mahmood Farooqi
Interspersed with English translation readings by Professor Christi Merrill
Mahmood Farooqi will be performing Vijay Dan Detha’s Chouboli, a Rajasthani tale of a princess who made a vow to only marry a man who can make her speak four times in one night. Using Professor Merrill’s translation of this funny but bitter tale, Farooqi developed his own rendering of the tale called “Dastan-e-Chouboli” in Urdu, from which he will be performing.
Mahmood Farooqui is a “Visiting Scholars from the Muslim World” Fellow who is currently doing research for situating the late-nineteenth century publication and circulation of the forty-six volume Dastan-i-Amir Hamza into the cultural history of modern India. Farooqi’s formal academic training is derived from St. Stephen’s College, Oxford University (as a Rhode’s Scholar), and Cambridge University. He is famous for his critically-acclaimed film Peepli Live, an analysis of farmer suicides in India and the ensuing political and media response. Farooqi is leading a revival of the lost art of story-telling called Dastangoi.
Christi Merrill is an Associate Professor of South Asian Literatures and Postcolonial Theory in the Comparative Literature and Asian Languages & Cultures Departments. Trained from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Christi’s academic credentials include a Translation M.F.A. and a Nonfiction Writing M.F.A. along with a Ph.D in Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on, but is not limited to, critical practice and theory of translation, South Asian literary history and language politics, and postcolonial theory. She is the author of Riddles of Belonging: India in Translation and Other Tales of Possession (2009) and the translator of the fiction of Vijay Dan Detha, Chouboli and Other Stories (2010), for which she was awarded a the A. K. Ramanujan Prize for Translation in 2012.
If you have any questions please direct them to Zain Khan zaink@umich.edu.
Co-sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies and the LSA Translation Theme Semester
