A Tale of Four Dervishes

A Tale of Four Dervishes (Bagh-o-Bahar) is a classic of early Urdu literature. Bagh-o-Bahar, also known as Qissa-e-Chaar Darvesh, is believed to have been composed in Persian sometime in the fourteenth century. Though the first Urdu translation appeared in 1775, it was Mir Amman’s translation in colloquial Urdu, completed in 1803, that made the work popular.Structurally similar to the Arabian Nights, this book is a collection of five main stories and several sub-stories loosely strung together, with all the ingredients of a traditional oriental epic – beauty, valor, love and adventure with elements of the supernatural. The principal characters are four wandering dervishes – three princes and a rich merchant – who have renounced the world on account of their failure in love. In their journeys they meet characters more unfortunate than themselves who tell stories more fantastical than their own…Wonderfully entertaining as fiction, the stories should be of added interest because of the rich descriptive detail they provide of the customs, beliefs and people of the time.