DASTAAN - பாசாங்கில்லாத பாகிஸ்தான் காதல்
Language Urdu
Country Pakistan
Originally aired in 2010
One season 23 episodes
I started watching Pakistani TV series primarily to improve my Urdu; to enrich the vocabulary and to learn the nuances of the language but I must admit that I was so impressed by the story value and the execution of the stories that I couldn’t stop with one. Unlike the saas bahu sagas of Star Plus or the two wives hungama of Sun TV, these series had strong story lines with solid values. Another important factor is that they don’t keep churning these stories for seven years, ten years and call that in itself as success. Maximum a series would be 25 episodes.
Dastaan is an epic series in its own right. Based on the events that occurred during the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. Bano is engaged to Hassan who works in the Pakistani side in Rawalpindi and she is in Ludhiana the Indian state of Punjab. Her family is destroyed completely during the riots and did she survive to reach her finance in Pakistan is the rest of the story. Human suffering is the same whatever side of the border you are in, The trials and tribulations; the tears and anguish; the longing and the separations; the torture and humiliations are all the same. The drama does not make villains out of Hindus and Sikhs but only depicts how mob culture can destroy humanity in our own neighbors and friends.
Dastaan is a heavy subject to watch, I had to give a day’s break every now and then to compose myself, and still it shakes your very being. You are left with questions like was all this necessary? For what purpose? What did we achieve by cutting of an arm of the peninsula? Couldn’t they have done it without so much bloodshed? Were our leaders careless that they did not foresee such a calamity? Or were they indifferent? There are no graphic scenes of violence in the drama still it tears you apart.
Watch Dastaan to know the bitter history of India and Pakistan, what our people endured because of the egoism and foolishness of our leaders, because Bano is not just the daughter of Pakistan, she is as much our daughter too.
Padmini Satyanarayanan
