Danish Husain is lifting long-forgotten languages and making a political statement. As a young boy, whenever he visited his ancestral village at Ghazipur in Uttar Pradesh and listened to the marsiyas — elegies to Imam Hussain and his martyrdom in Karbala — it would leave a profound mark on Danish Husain. Growing up as a Shia Muslim, he learned from these marsiyas to always side with the underdog, to never be gung ho about your victory. Inspired by those marsiyas, Husain brought to life a unique form of multilingual storytelling in 2016: Qissebaazi, an Urdu term coined by Husain that roughly translates to “playing with the stories.” So far Qissebaazi, an offering from Husain’s theater group Hoshruba Repertory, has performed stories in Urdu, Sanskrit, Marathi, Haryanvi, Punjabi and Bengali, supplemented with a bridge language like Hindi or English so the audience can follow along. While not overtly political, his work makes a statement in the age of Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalism — that India’s cultural, racial and linguistic diversity is worth celebrating. |