The Romance of Raja Rasalu and Other Tales is a large, coffee table sized book which we’ll be selling at the Khayaal-Creative Network’s Festival of Arts & Literature 2013 this weekend. We’ll be selling all our publications. Details of all our publications are available on our website and we’ll be taking pre-orders. Please email nabihameher@simorgh.org.pk for pre-orders.
I’ve personally always been fascinated by the wonder of story telling and The Romance of Raja Rasalu and Other Tales is one of my personal favourites. Our heritage is rich with folklore and oral traditions. Exploring my own heritage gives me a kind of pleasure I cannot get when reading about other cultures.
There are many reasons why I use this book as a teaching resource, such as the fact that “the wonderland … blurs the differences between heroes and villains and urges the understanding of the villain. Such fluidity in these tales also confirms their egalitarianism and focus on the human” as explained by Raza Rumi in his review for The Friday Times.
Furthermore, as a review in DAWN argued, we need more Rasalus. While researching this book, the author Neelam Hussain discovered something that she felt was worth exploring: “While collecting these stories I discovered that in European folklore we find a meek and dutiful princess like Snow White working for the dwarfs or our good old Cinderella. But in one of these stories, there are two heroines who actually rescue the prince unlike the former who are at the mercy of the male patriarch. I thought that was worth an idea because all too often our desi woman is said to be without a voice.” Her full interview by The News on Sunday is available here.
This book was also reviewed by Urvashi Butalia for Libas. The pdf can be downloaded here. Do drop by our stall this weekend and take a look at this beautifully illustrated book and our other publications.
Simorgh Pakistan 