Mahmood Farooqui performed Dastan-e Karn Az Mahabharata, based on the life of the much-wronged son of the sun god and Kunti. Discriminated against for all the wrong reasons, Karna comes out looking like the hero even though he was not on the side that won and was also perceived to be in the wrong.
Having placed it in context, there were many things that the Dastan offered. It was a trailblazing display of Farooqui’s hold over the languages as he effortlessly slipped from Urdu to Sanskrit to Persian to Arabic and Hindi. The Dastan drew upon a variety of sources including the original Mahabharata and its Hindi translation. In Urdu, parts of the posthumous translation of the Mahabharata by the Pakistani writer Kamran Aslam as well as Tota Ram Shayan’s 200-year-old verse. In Hindi, the sources included, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar’s magnum opus on Karna and Rashmi Rathi, Dharmvir Bharti’s Andha Yug. It also featured parts of Razmnama, Emperor Akbar’s translation of the Mahabharata and Shivaji Sawant’s bestselling Marathi novel Mrityunjay.
Farooqui managed to create a rich tapestery of languages by virtue of which he sketched pictures across the stage