The New Nation - Internet Edition

Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami

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 , only one complete set of which still exists , the translated version still weighs in at an impressively heavy 944 pages.

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 'as Ram is my witness'; 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 , 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 , mullahs are a running joke throughout the book , 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

(Translation. Musharraf Ali Farooqi Random House)