Urdunama Special: Do You Know the Real Dastaan-e-Gandhi?

On this special edition of Urdunama, we bring you Dastaan-e-Gandhi, the story of Mahatma Gandhi’s return to India and his journey from being an ordinary man to the man India calls ‘Mahatma’.

(Image: Altered by The Quint)

Have you heard the Dastaan-e-Gandhi?

‘Dastaan’ means ‘story’. Gandhi means....well...Mahatma Gandhi. The '-e-' in ‘Dastan-e-Gandhi’ means ‘of’, that’s used to join these two words.

On this special edition of Urdunama, we bring you Dastaan-e-Gandhi, the story of Mahatma Gandhi’s return to India and his journey from being an ordinary man to the man India calls ‘Mahatma’.

To the uninitiated, a dastaan is a verbally recited epic that has its origins in dastangoi – a 13th century storytelling artform performed by a skilled dastango (storyteller).

Dastaan-e-Gandhi was performed by dastango Firoz Khan and written by Danish Iqbal.

We spoke to Danish Iqbal on this podcast.

(This podcast was first published on 1 October 2019. It has been reposted from The Quint’s archives on the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary.)