hamzanama

William Dalrymple's review of The Adventures of Amir Hamza, Musharraf Ali Farooqi's new translation of the Hamzanama, begins thus:

In the summer of 2002, as Pentagon strategists were planning the invasion of Iraq, a short distance away, on the National Mall in Washington, the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery was showing one of the most interesting exhibitions of Islamic art seen in the United States for years. The show illustrated a story largely set in the Iraqi cities that would shortly become the targets of the Pentagon’s munitions.

On display was a single work of art: a painted manuscript of the “Hamzanama,” a spectacular illustrated book commissioned by the sympathetic and notably tolerant Mughal emperor Akbar (1542-1605).

That exhibition was my first serious encounter with Mughal art, and I saw it almost by accident. I was in DC (also for the first time) en route to Oxford, meeting my cohort of fellow scholars, and in the three days of our pre-departure 'sailing weekend,' we visited the various national museums and galleries. While we were at the Smithsonian, I wandered into the Sackler Gallery, hoping to see some Ottoman ceramics or Arabic calligraphy. I don't remember if I saw any, because I found the Hamzanama instead. I had already established a love for Ottoman and Persian miniatures, so was primed for delight at the sight of these color-soaked folios, and peeled away from the group so I could wander slowly, following the tale. The pages were more than double the size of the miniatures I'd seen before, and strikingly distinct--both in the then-unfamiliar story of Hamza's escapades, and in the visual idiom and the portrayal of subcontinental architecture, foliage, and figures.

I had no money for the exhibition book, but I bought some of the postcards the shop was offering. Two of them (including a detail from the image above) are are framed above the desk where I write this, five years later. They coexist amiably with a Nasuh Matrakci miniature of sixteenth-century Istanbul that has accompanied me to every room I've lived in since 2001--sharing the same layered greens of foliage; the brick walls of the city of Qimar, scaled by Hamza's spies, matching the red-tiled roofs that still top the houses of Istanbul today.

You can see a series of the Hamzanama folios at the Smithsonian's website, and read the first chapter of Farooqi's translation here (in accordance with that first line, I will henceforth be calling myself a 'sweet-lipped historian'....)

And while Dalrymple's review mourns the gradual decline of the art of public storytelling, I have it on very good authority that dastangoi is alive and making a comeback on the streets and mosque steps of Delhi. (I'm reminded, rereading that post of Anand's, of the wonderful hakawati at an-Nafura cafe in Damascus, whom another dear friend finally encountered a few weeks ago). The Hamzanama seems like a fitting book to begin 2008: the year in which I shall finally be returning to India. Next winter, when I go, I hope to find my way to some spot of ground in Delhi where I can listen to the dastango reel out his tales.