The New Nation - Internet Edition

William Dalrymple

Magic and adventure made the Hamzanama the most popular oral epic of the Islamic world. WILLIAM DALRYMPLE tracks its mad energy in its first-ever compilation in English

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 , 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 , 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 'novices have become masters'. One of these, Daswanta, 'was 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.' There was, however, a sad ending to this prodigy: 'Insanity shrouded the brilliance of his mind and he died a suicide.'

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.

(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)