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In: Tehseel Issue 5
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Abstract
This article aims at highlighting the lost tradition of Balkanian drama of the Ottoman era, dispelling the misconception that the shadow theater was mainly confined to ‘seraglio’ where the ladies of the court and harem could watch it on special occasions. The highly evolved form of oriental shadow theater kept on dominating public life for centuries since the invasion of the Ottomans in the 16th century. In the Balkans, back in Istanbul as well, there are reports of these shows being held in coffee houses where special staging areas were dedicated to the performance on regular basis. The thrill of the shadow theater has captured all rank and file. Dragoslav Antinjovic, the most celebrated critic of the shadow theater in the Balkans, shared that these shows were performed in all the major countries of the Medieval South East Europe (the Ottoman Rumeli) all the way from Greece to Bosnia Herzegovina. There is a need to look for the causes of its failure in emerging in to a profitable product of a systematic institution and the reasons for its survival as an expression of Balkan style.Read More →

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In: Research Articles, Tehseel Issue 3
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Abstract
Great Literature is an institution and it defines relationship that it forms with the emerging possibilities of future and the never entombed past. Pasts and futures reflect in great literary works. Shakespeare and AllamaIqbal share spiritual lineage and it is most visibly evident in their verbal decorum and thematic patterns. AllamaIqbal’s construction of dialogue is similar to that of Shakespeare’s in its nature and thus it distances him from both Indian and Persian forms of dialogue composition. Dialogue is Shakespeare’s creative agency. Every time we go back to a work of Shakespeare, the dialogue formation seems, as if, rearranged and automatically situationalized as derivative form of the plight of existence and we look at the play every time as a new discovery, a newly found document about our own past. Iqbalian dialogue is of psychological and political nature, it is revelatory not just in traditional sense of speculating character’s inner world but it simultaneously involves study of historical and geographical locale. While reading ‘Siddique’, for instance, we cannot keep ourselves aloof of the atmosphere and find ourselves within the mosque fourteen centuries ago where the dialogue originally took place. The order in which internal constitution of the speeches takes place but also theatrical turn-taking, character’s having ‘access to the floor’, everything well secured. Iqbal here establishes communication in real situations and transports the readers’ imagination to the world apparently lost to us in the flood of time. Both the poets are Ishraqi in their approach towards their fundamental thematic issues and both encourage inverse reading of their texts. Iqbal’sJawab-e-Shikwa is among the best of his works to offer an inverse reading to understand the meaning of his central philosophical-poetic concern, Self (Khudi).Read More →