The New Nation - Internet Edition

Hamzanama most popular Muslim oral epic

William Dalrymple

IN JUNE 2002, as Pentagon strategists were making their plans for the invasion of Iraq, a short distance away down Washington's National Mall, the Freer- Sackler Galleries at the Smithsonian were showing one of the most interesting exhibitions of Islamic art seen in the US for years. Ironically, the show was made up of illustrations of a story largely set in the very Iraqi cities which were shortly to find themselves as targets for the Pentagon's munitions. The Sackler show was unusual in that it displayed just one single painted manuscript â€" the Hamzanama: a spectacular, illustrated book commissioned by the Emperor Akbar (1542-1605). For art historians, the show was fascinating for it brought together the long-dispersed pages of what was the most ambitious single artistic commission ever undertaken by the atelier of an Islamic court: no fewer than 1,400 huge illustrations were produced.

Before commissioning the Hamzanama, the Mughal miniature painting atelier seems to have contained only two artists, Mir Sayyid Ali and Abdus Samad, whom Akbar's father, the emperor Humayun, had lured from Persia and who had, between them, produced only a handful of pictures since their arrival in India. Akbar changed that for ever by commissioning no fewer than 1,400 huge illustrations to the Hamzanama â€" the largest single commission in Mughal history. The project forced the atelier to train more than 100 Indian artists (many of them apparently Hindu painters from Gujarat) in the Persian miniature style, as well as troops of poets, gilders, bookbinders and calligraphers.

The resulting volumes took more than 15 years to produce and in the process, effectively gave birth to an independent Mughal miniature tradition, a wonderful combination of Persian, central Asian and Indian styles, and a revolutionary leap forward from all the artistic currents that preceded it; one in which you can see the two artistic worlds of Hindu India and of Persianate Islamic Central Asia fusing to create something new and distinctively Mughal.

Some of the illustrations are very Persian in style: flat linear forms remarkable for their precise, angular, geometric perfection. Other pages are pure Indian in spirit: there are Indian clothes and Indian gestures; the palette is brighter and more dramatic than is common in Persian art, and there is a love of the natural world that is very specific to the subcontinent. The playful elephants that charge across the canvases seem to have arrived straight off the walls of the Hindu rock sculptures of Mahabalipuram. But already in the canvases of the Hamzanama you see the two worlds beginning to fuse, hear the soft ripping of gossamer as wholly Mughal images emerge fully formed from the chrysalis of Akbar's atelier.

Akbar's hagiographer, Abu'l Faizal, recorded extensive details about individual artists, and was especially proud of the way that the Persian masters of the atelier had trained up ordinary Indians so that â€œnovices have become mastersâ€. One of these, Daswanta, â€œwas the son of a palanquin- bearer who was in the service of the court. Urged by natural desire, he used to draw images and designs on the walls. One day the far-reaching glance of His Majesty [Akbar] fell on those things and, in its penetrating manner, discerned the spirit of a master working in them. Consequently, His Majesty entrusted Daswanta to the master of the atelier. In just a short time, he became matchless in his skills.â€ There was, however, a sad ending to this prodigy: â€œInsanity shrouded the brilliance of his mind and he died a suicide.â€

Over the centuries, the different volumes of the great Hamzanama manuscript were dispersed and became detached from each other: indeed, most were apparently stolen from the Mughal library in the Delhi Red Fort by the Persian emperor Nadir Shah at the same time as he removed the Koh-i- Noor and the Peacock Throne. From Persia, a large number found their way to Austria, where they are currently in the MAK, the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, while others drifted around the Middle East and the subcontinent. The beautiful leaves now in the Victoria and Albert Museum were found 100 years ago, being used to line the window of a junk shop in Kashmir. The Freer exhibition brought the surviving images back together for the first time in 250 years.

Although few recognised this at the time, the Freer Hamza exhibition was of great literary importance too, and started a process that resulted in the translation of the wonderful book under review, The Adventures of Amir Hamza.

The Hamzanama was an illustrated edition of what was once the most popular oral epic of the Indo-Islamic world. The Adventures of Hamza is the Iliad and Odyssey of the mediaeval Persianate world: a rollicking, magic-filled heroic saga, full of myth and imagination. It was originally composed in Iraq around the 9th century, but contained material gathered from the wider culture-compost of the pre- Islamic Middle East. Such was the popularity of the story that it soon spread across the Islamic world absorbing folk tales as it went, and before long, was translated into Arabic, Turkish, Georgian, Malay and even Indonesian.

It was in India, however, that the epic took on a life of its own. Here it grew to an unprecedented size, absorbing endless Indian myths and legends. In this form it began to be regularly performed in public spaces of the great Mughal cities. At fairs and at festivals, on the steps of the Jama Masjid in Delhi, or in the Qissa Khawani, the Storyteller's Street in Peshawar, the professional the story tellers, or dastango, would perform night-long recitations from memory; some of these could go on for seven or eight hours with only a short break. There was also a great tradition of the Mughal elite commissioning private performances of the epic. Ghalib was, for example, celebrated for his dastan parties at which the Hamza epic would be expertly recited.

THE ADVENTURES OF

AMIR HAMZA

Ghalib Lakhnavi and

Abdullah Bilgrami

Tr. Musharraf Ali Farooqi

Random House

984 pp; Rs 750

THE TALES of Hamza collected together a great miscellany of fireside yarns and shaggy dog stories which over time had come to gather around the story of the travels of Hamza, the historical uncle of the Prophet Muhammad. Any factual backbone the story might once have had was, over the centuries, swamped with a flood of subplots and a cast of dragons, giants, djinns, simurgh, sorcerers, princesses and, if not flying carpets, then at least flying urns, the preferred mode of travel for the magicians in Hamza.

Across the Persian-speaking world, from Tabriz to Hyderabad, people would gather around the dastango as he told story after story of the chivalrous Hamza and his beautiful Chinese princess lover; the wise and prophetic Vizier Buzurjmehr and the just Emperor Naushervan. Then there were Hamza's enemies: the ungrateful villain Bakhtak, whose life Hamza has spared, only for Bakhtak to work unceasingly for the hero's demise; and the cruel necromancer and archfiend, Zumurrud Shah. In its fullest form, the tale grew to contain a massive 360 separate stories, which would take several weeks of allnight storytelling to complete; the fullest printed version, the last volume of which was finally published in Lucknow in 1905, filled no less than forty-six volumes, each of which averaged 1000 pages each.

Today, however, the Hamza epic is more or less extinct as a living oral epic: while some children in Persia and Pakistan may still be familiar with episodes, the last of the great dastango, Mir Baqar Ali, died in 1928, a few years before sound revolutionised the nascent Indian film industry that itself had borrowed much of its style and many of its plots from the dastango's story telling tradition. If the Freer Hamzanama exhibition was the first time a Western audience was exposed to Hamza, it also acted as something of a wake-up call to specialist Urdu and Persian scholars. It was quickly realised that this epic, said to be the longest single romance cycle in the world, had been almost forgotten: barely a handful of scholars had engaged with it, no modern scholarly edition of the epic was in print in any language, and no translation of it into English had ever been made. Yet the epic had had huge influence, not least on Indian drama and cinema as well as on the development of the Urdu and Persian novel, early versions of which were often derived from the Dastans.

Hence, the importance of a remarkable new translation of the Hamza epic which has just been published by Random House India. The translation is the work of the Pakistani-Canadian scholar Musharraf Ali Farooqi, who has worked from the Urdu edition published in 1855 by Navab Mirza Ghalib Lakhnavi, and later revised by Abdullah Bilgrami in 1871. Although a fraction of the size of the 46 volume edition â€" only one complete set of which still exists â€" the translated version still weighs in at an impressively heavy 944 pages.

Even in translation, The Adventures of Amir Hamza is a wonder and a revelation â€" a real classic of epic literature available in English for the first time, and in a translation so fluent that it is not just addictive reading but a real pleasure to sit down and lose yourself in; the storyline of the epic itself is endlessly diverting and inventive, and the language and prose of the translation is beautifully rendered.

MOROEVER, THE epic gives a unique insight into a lost Indo- Islamic courtly world. Although the Hamza epic was originally a Persian production set in the Middle East, the Urdu version shows how far the epic had been reimagined into an Indian context in the course of many years of subcontinental retelling. Though the orginal Mesopotamian place names survive, the world depicted is not that of early Islamic Iraq but that of 18th century late Mughal India, with its obsession with poetic wordplay, its love of Mughal gardens, and its extreme refinement in food and dress and manners. Many of the characters have Hindu names; they make oaths â€œas Ram is my witnessâ€; and they ride on elephants with jewelled howdahs. To read The Adventures of Amir Hamza is to come as close as is now possible to the world of the Mughal campfire â€" those night gatherings of soldiers, sufis, musicians and camp-followers that one sees illustrated in Mughal miniatures: a storyteller beginning his tale in a clearing of a forest as the embers of the blaze glow red and the eager fire-lit faces crowd around.

The Adventures of Amir Hamza has significance beyond mere aesthetic enjoyment. It is good to know that the book has been widely reviewed and read in the US and the UK, two countries with a growing problem of rampant Islamophobia and massive ignorance about the Islamic world. For the narrative opens in Ctesiphon, not far from Baghdad, and encompasses places now in modern Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, most of which the US and its allies regard as little more than breeding grounds for terrorism.

At this perilous moment in history, the Hamza epic, with its mixed Hindu and Muslim idiom, its tales of love and seduction, its anti-clericalism â€" mullahs are a running joke throughout the book â€" its stories of powerful and resourceful women and its mocking of male misogyny is a reminder of an Islamic world which the West seems to have forgotten: one that is syncretistic, imaginative and heterodox and as far as can be imagined from the puritanical Wahhabi Islam that the Saudis have succeeded in spreading throughout much of the modern Islamic world

(William Dalrymple's new book, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, (Penguin India) has been awarded the Duff Cooper Prize for History)

Bush says Iraq war was worth it

Terence Hunt

President Bush says he has no doubts about launching the unpopular war in Iraq despite the ``high cost in lives and treasure,'' arguing that retreat now would embolden Iran and provide al-Qaida with money for weapons of mass destruction to attack the United States.

Bush is to mark the fifth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq on Wednesday with a speech at the Pentagon. Excerpts of his address were released Tuesday night by the White House.

At least 3,990 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the war in 2003. It has cost taxpayers about $500 billion and estimates of the final tab run far higher. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglizt and Harvard University public finance expert Linda Bilmes have estimated the eventual cost at $3 trillion when all the expenses, including long-term care for veterans, are calculated.

Democrats offered a different view from Bush's.

``On this grim milestone, it is worth remembering how we got into this situation, and thinking about how best we can get out,'' said Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich. ``The tasks that remain in Iraq - to bring an end to sectarian conflict, to devise a way to share political power, and to create a functioning government that is capable of providing for the needs of the Iraqi people are tasks that only the Iraqis can complete.''

In his remarks, Bush repeated his oft-stated determination to prosecute the war into the unforeseen future.

``The successes we are seeing in Iraq are undeniable, yet some in Washington still call for retreat,'' the president said. ``War critics can no longer credibly argue that we are losing in Iraq, so now they argue the war costs too much. In recent months, we have heard exaggerated estimates of the costs of this war.

``No one would argue that this war has not come at a high cost in lives and treasure, but those costs are necessary when we consider the cost of a strategic victory for our enemies in Iraq,'' Bush said.

Bush has successfully defied efforts by the Democratic-led Congress to force troop withdrawals or set deadlines for pullouts. It is widely believed he will endorse a recommendation from Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, for no additional troop reductions, beyond those already planned, until at least September.

The U.S. now has about 158,000 troops in Iraq. That number is expected to drop to 140,000 by summer in drawdowns meant to erase all but about 8,000 troops from last year's buildup.

``If we were to allow our enemies to prevail in Iraq, the violence that is now declining would accelerate and Iraq could descend into chaos,'' Bush said. ``Al-Qaida would regain its lost sanctuaries and establish new ones fomenting violence and terror that could spread beyond Iraq's borders, with serious consequences to the world economy. ``Out of such chaos in Iraq, the terrorist movement could emerge emboldened with new recruits t new resources t and an even greater determination to dominate the region and harm America,'' Bush said in his remarks. ``An emboldened al-Qaida with access to Iraq's oil resources could pursue its ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction to attack America and other free nations. Iran could be emboldened as well with a renewed determination to develop nuclear weapons and impose its brand of hegemony across the broader Middle East. And our enemies would see an American failure in Iraq as evidence of weakness and lack of resolve.''

Looking back, Bush said, ``Five years into this battle, there is an understandable debate over whether the war was worth fighting t whether the fight is worth winning t and whether we can win it. The answers are clear to me: Removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision and this is a fight America can and must win.''

Bush said the past five years have brought ``moments of triumph and moments of tragedy,'' from free elections in Iraq to acts of brutality and violence.

``The terrorists who murder the innocent in the streets of Baghdad want to murder the innocent in the streets of American cities. Defeating this enemy in Iraq will make it less likely we will face this enemy here at home,'' Bush said.

Bush said anew that the war was faltering a little more than a year ago, prompting him in January 2007 to order a big troop buildup known as the ``surge.''

``The surge has done more than turn the situation in Iraq around; it has opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror,'' he said.

``In Iraq, we are witnessing the first large-scale Arab uprising against Osama bin Laden, his grim ideology, and his terror network. And the significance of this development cannot be overstated ,'' the president said.

``The challenge in the period ahead is to consolidate the gains we have made and seal the extremists' defeat. We have learned through hard experience what happens when we pull our forces back too fast - the terrorists and extremists step in t fill the vacuum, establish safe havens and use them to spread chaos and carnage.''

AP White House Correspondent

Sunnis boycott bid to reconcile racial divide

BAGHDAD: The Shiite prime minister opened a national conference Tuesday aimed at reconciling the rival sects in Iraq, but the main Sunni bloc boycotted the proceedings - a sign of the deep schisms still facing this country.

The meeting began one day after a suicide bomber struck Shiite worshipers in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, killing at least 50 people. The blast was the deadliest in a series of attacks Monday that left at least 79 Iraqis dead.

In his opening statement Tuesday, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said reconciliation was not intended to harm the interests of any group but was "a boat that saves us and takes us to safety."

"From the first day, we said national reconciliation is not a political slogan, but a complete strategic vision to reconstruct Iraq," Maliki said. He acknowledged in a later briefing for reporters that much work remained to bridge divides in the country.

But underscoring the challenge, Saleem Abdullah, a spokesman for the Sunni Iraqi Accordance Front, said the group would not participate in the meetings until Shiite lawmakers recognized the front's political aims.

"How we can attend a reconciliation meeting?" he said. "There are many points that are still not fulfilled."

The Sunni front maintains that Maliki is stonewalling them by failing to meet demands that include the release of security detainees not charged with specific crimes, disbanding Shiite militias and wider inclusion in decision-making on security issues.

Iraqi leaders also have made little progress in resolving sectarian disagreements over the fate of three former officials under Saddam Hussein who have been sentenced to death for their roles in a campaign that left about 180,000 Iraqi Kurds dead in the 1980s.

Maliki has been demanding that the death sentence against the three be carried out, but President Jalal Talabani, a Sunni Kurd, and one of his two deputies, Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni Arab, disagree. They say that one of the three, former Defense Minister Sultan Hashim al-Taie, should not be executed because he was a military member carrying out orders.

Last month, the presidential council said it had ratified the death sentence on another one of the three, Saddam's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, also known as Chemical Ali.

Maliki stood his ground Tuesday. A statement by his office said all three, who are being held in a U.S.-run detention facility, must be handed over to have their sentences carried out.

In his address at the conference, Maliki noted that many in the government continued to doubt the success of reconciliation, but he urged lawmakers to view differences in opinion as political progress, not disagreement that threatened to unravel national unity.

A heated debate over differences, Maliki said, could open the door to foreign influence and compromise constitutional principles.

American military officials and Iraqi officials have identified Iranian influence in the dozens of bombings that occur in Iraq each month, including providing bomb-making materials to Shiite militias across the country.

The suicide bomber in Karbala, a woman, struck after worshipers gathered at a sacred site about 800 meters, or half a mile, from the shrine of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad who was killed in a 7th-century battle.

The conference comes after Vice President Dick Cheney and Senator John McCain visited Iraq separately to put a spotlight on security gains and stress Washington's commitment to fighting insurgents in the country.

Cheney spent Monday night at a U.S. military base in Balad, 80 kilometers north of Baghdad.

The national conference coincided with a United Nations report that record numbers of Iraqis sought asylum in the European Union last year, despite a sharp reduction in violence that followed the so-called surge in the number of U.S. troops deployed in Iraq.

Asylum requests from Iraqis rose to 38,286 in 2007 from 19,375 the year before, according to the report, making Iraqis the single largest group seeking refuge in the European Union. Maliki said Tuesday that Iraqi officials were working to bring Iraqi refugees home.

In other violence Tuesday, the explosion of a roadside bomb near a gas station in northern Baghdad killed three people, including two police officers, security officials said. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the attack.

A suicide car bombing outside an electronics store in Mosul, 360 kilometers northwest of Baghdad, killed three people and wounded 40, the U.S. military said. And unidentified gunmen killed two Awakening Council members in Beiji, 145 kilometers south of Mosul, the local police said.

In a separate statement, the U.S. military said it had killed seven suspected members of a suicide bombing cell and captured eight others Tuesday in northern and central Iraq.

(Source: International Herald Tribune)

Market forces alone won't end digital divide

Murali Shanmugavalen

When I grew up in Madurai, the second largest city in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, there was only one private telephone line in a street of about 100 families. It took seven years for my father to get a phone thanks to a long waiting list and inadequate infrastructure. Today my parents have one landline and three mobile phones in a household of seven. India is now the world's third largest telecoms market with more than 250 million telephones for a population of 1.1 billion.

Over the last decade many developing countries have witnessed a similar expansion. Telephones, computers, the internet, and satellite have connected millions of people who previously had little contact with the outside world. The number of mobile phone connections has overtaken fixed lines, and the trend is set to continue.

Private telecom firms have played a pivotal role by reducing calling costs and revamping payment packages. The invention of 'pay-as-you-go', which allows those without a credit history to own a mobile telephone, has given people with few means a chance to take part in the information revolution.

A recent report by the consultancy firm Intelecon predicts that 90 per cent of the global market will have access to a mobile phone operator by 2010. However, between two and five per cent of the world's population (120 to 300 million people) is expected to be too unprofitable to benefit from these services. This digital underclass is likely to be concentrated in the world's poorest countries.

We are all too familiar with stories about the potential for technology to help those in developing countries, from subsistence farmers to impoverished fishermen using mobile phones to check weather forecasts and market prices. But we tend not to hear that calling tariffs remain prohibitively high in many areas and cheap calls are far from consistently available.

Research by the London School of Economics reveals wide disparity in worldwide mobile phone charges. Using figures from the International Telecommunications Union it examined mobile tariffs in 40 countries. In 2004, there were 48 mobile phone subscribers in India for every 1,000 people compared to 367 in Brazil. Yet Brazilians had to pay an average of US$18.90 a month while Indian subscribers paid just US$3.20.

This finding defies conventional market wisdom that prices fall automatically as the number of subscribers increases. Nevertheless, operators reject allegations that their tariffs are inflated and applied inconsistently across markets. And they are reluctant to elaborate on how they set their call charges, claiming that such decisions are commercially confidential. The fact is that providers charge vastly varying prices for identical services in different markets. More often than not, these high tariffs are simply the result of companies pursuing larger profit margins without sufficient protection for the consumer.

In Europe, regulators are beginning to catch up with unfair pricing practices. For example, in March 2007, the UK regulator Ofcom clamped down on wholesale termination rates - the fee mobile companies charge each other and fixed-line operators to carry calls.

The European Commission has introduced the 'Eurotariff', which sets limits on the amount mobile operators can charge for calls made or received while a user is abroad in an EU country. It has also questioned why so-called premium rate numbers should be more expensive than national calls and has ordered providers to be more transparent about their pricing policies.

What's clear is that it takes a combination of competition and regulation to drive down prices. The private sector, even when competitive, will not automatically guarantee affordable access to underserved consumers.

While the mobile revolution using phone masts paid for by private companies has increased the subscriber base, providing affordable internet services is far more complex. There are welcome technological developments in the shape of satellites and wireless networks which enable people in rural areas to make phone calls and to get online. But it remains the case that physical infrastructure such as optical fibre networks are superior and cheaper for the end-user than satellite-driven internet.

Broadband providers in Eastern Africa pay around US$1500-1700 for one mbps of satellite bandwidth per month compared to US$2.50 a month for the equivalent connectivity between North America and Europe via an undersea optical fibre link.

However, such infrastructure requires massive investment. A US$300 million project to connect a 9,900km stretch of Eastern Africa with undersea cabling - the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) - has been held up by squabbling between its 22 consortium members. Negotiations between the private companies, governments and international organisations, which require agreement across several territories, are proving far from easy.

Of course, private companies do not have a duty to roll out services to communities in remote areas or to low-income families who cannot afford connection costs. Governments, however, do bear this responsibility. Indeed, many have agreed to the principle of universal access - that everyone should be within reasonable distance of a telephone (the definition of 'reasonable' is left to each country to decide). This challenge is not unique to developing countries. The United States, the richest country in the world, is no exception: broadband penetration in urban areas is almost double that in rural. It is clear that the only way to provide affordable communication services in even the most 'connected' countries relies on hefty investment in infrastructure from both public and private sectors.

Put simply, the market alone cannot secure the 'last mile' of connectivity. Indeed, some aspects of communication provision are beyond the reach of private players. National strategies for access to communications in developing countries must therefore be smarter and linked with other initiatives. For example, planners are considering how to make use of India's extensive railway network to deliver internet connections to remote villages. Such 'hybrid infrastructures' require state intervention and coordination.

The contribution of market to the communications explosion in developing countries cannot be overstated. But it is also true that billions remain excluded from the benefits of information and communications technologies. The answer is threefold: political commitment to curbing unfair competition, investments in infrastructure in rural areas, and the establishment of strong and independent regulators.

(This feature is published by Panos Features and can be reproduced free of charge. Please credit the author and Panos Features and send a copy to External Relations, Panos Institute, 9 White Lion St, London N1 9PD, UK. Email: media@panos.org.uk)