The Broken Spell

Faithful to the spirit of the most alluring of tales, with breathtaking insights and cadence, Khan illuminates the world of the South Asian verbal arts. The author's skillful engagements with history and thoughtful deployment of ethnography, along with his exquisite translations of challenging sources and compelling application of theory, open up new vistas of research across disciplinary boundaries. The luminous discretion with which Khan weaves his narrative and sensitively draws from a spectrum of sources is an astonishing feat indeed.

--Syed Akbar Hyder

Khan's monograph provides a fascinating insight into Indian storytelling in Persian and Urdu, focusing not solely on the stories themselves but on the contextual, historical and narratological factors that influenced and shaped the genre.

--Victoria Leslie "Gramarye"

Pasha M. Khan introduces his audience to the fascinating world of traditional Muslim storytelling in India. Focusing on the genre of 'romance, ' its heyday in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and its decline in the nineteenth century, the author unfolds a colorful tapestry of detail concerning both practical and theoretical aspects of storytelling by situating the craft as well as the performers in a rich historical, cultural, and intellectual context. Rehabilitating traditional storytelling in India, the book also makes significant contributions to general discussions of genre, relating to both the romance and the emerging novel.

--Ulrich Marzolph "independent scholar"

This is the most comprehensive study to date of the long tradition of storytelling in the context of Persianate literary cultures. Written in an elegant style and based on a myriad of primary and secondary sources, it will be of enduring value to scholars and students of literature, folklore studies, and history.

--Sunil Sharma "Boston University"

Through their perceptive analysis of two major storytelling traditions of the Indian subcontinent, Khan and Stewart draw our attention to the modes of meaning-making that such narratives enabled in the premodern world. They show us ways in which such stories were integral to the persistence of societies. They reclaim these forms of storytelling and demonstrate how social life went hand in hand with the life of aesthetic forms. They invite us to expand our horizons by witnessing the worlds these storytellers created and shaped for their premodern listeners. Like their storytellers, they too recount the stories of faraway people and places and alert us to what language and literature can accomplish in any culture.

--Aqsa Ijaz "Marginalia: Los Angeles Review of Books"