Dastan-e Karn Az Mahabharat by Mahmood Farooqui is a unique and unprecedented effort at many levels. Unlike the Ramayana, oral recitations and performance of the Mahabharata are rare and they are rarer still in Urdu, the base language of this performance. The script is interwoven with substantial usage of Sanskrit, Hindi, Farsi and Arabic. It draws upon a very wide variety of transcontinental texts, which are rarely presented together.
It draws upon the original Sanskrit Mahabharata, its Persian translation called the Ramznama commissioned by Emperor Akbar and supervised by Faizi and Abdur Rahim Khan-e-Khanan, its 200-year-old Urdu translation by Tota Ram Shayan, an Urdu translation done by Kamran Aslam, a Gita translation done again in by Khalifa Abdul Hakim, and another translation by the Indian Urdu poet Anwar Jalalpuri, Hindi poet Ramdhari Singh Dinkar’s magnum opus on Karna, Rashmi Rathi, Marathi writer Shivaji Sawant’s great novel on Karna called Mrityunjay, Tagore’s poem on Kunri and Karna, and on Irawati Karve’s bestselling essay on the Mahabharata.