A Museum of Dubious Splendors

2017 | Role-Playing

PC

a Museum of Dubious Splendors, is a storybook from the world of Somewhere.

It is an adaptation of a series of essays written by Mir UmarHassan, a Gujarati poet whose works have proven notoriously difficult to translate because of the mellifluous use of Urdu and Hindi in his compositions.

We first encountered the writings of Mir UmarHassan in the archive room of the Sanghralaya at Matsyapur. Copies of his essays were bound together in ledgers and stored there, evidently unused and unread.

Of all his writings that we have assiduously collected over the past decade, it is his chronicle of Ruhan Nissa Parkes that fascinates us the most.

These stories entitled "in Dubious Splendor", were written (in Gujarati) in nineteen sixty two for the Malwa Chronicle, but were mangled and edited without the author's permission prior to their publication in serialized form. The collection of stories, became momentarily infamous as the subject of the first court case to arbitrate authorial ownership in Independent India.

Even today, despite countless restorative efforts by scholars, it cannot be said with with any certainty that the text that we used for this adaptation was the original as written by UmarHassan.