Hamzanama - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Hamzanama or Dastan-e-Amir Hamza (Persian

Persian language

Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...

/Urdu: , Adventures of Amir Hamza) narrates the legendary

Legend

A legend is a narrative of human actions that are perceived both by teller and listeners to take place within human history and to possess certain qualities that give the tale verisimilitude...

exploits of Amir Hamza

Hamza ibn ‘Abd al-Muttalib

Hamza ibn ‘Abdul-Muttalib [b.568-d.625] was the paternal uncle of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, and his foster-brother. He and Muhammad were raised together as they were almost the same age. With excellence in the arts of wrestling and swordsmanship...

, the uncle of the prophet of Islam

Muhammad

Muhammad |ligature]] at U+FDF4 ;Arabic pronunciation varies regionally; the first vowel ranges from ~~; the second and the last vowel: ~~~. There are dialects which have no stress. In Egypt, it is pronounced not in religious contexts...

, though most of the story is extremely fanciful, "a continuous series of romantic interludes, threatening events, narrow escapes, and violent acts". In the West the work is best known for the enormous illustrated manuscript commissioned by the Mughal Emperor Akbar in about 1562.

The text augmented the story, as traditionally told in dastan

Dastan

The Dastan , is an ornate form of oral history from Central Asia, the most famous of which is Dede Korkut - which may have been created as early as the beginning of the 13th century....

performances. This romance

Romance (genre)

As a literary genre of high culture, romance or chivalric romance is a style of heroic prose and verse narrative that was popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a knight errant portrayed as...

originated more than 1,000 years ago, probably in Persia

Achaemenid Empire

The Achaemenid Empire , sometimes known as First Persian Empire and/or Persian Empire, was founded in the 6th century BCE by Cyrus the Great who overthrew the Median confederation...

, and subsequently spread throughout the Islam

Islam

Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...

ic world in oral and written forms. The Dastan (story telling tradition) about Amir Hamza persists far and wide up to Bengal and Arakan (Burma) due to Hamza's wide travelling in Persia, Central Asia, eastern India, Himalayan region, Bengal delta, Manipur, Burma and probably in Malaysia in his youth or before he embraced Islam in 616.

Akbar's manuscript

Though the first Mughal Emperor, Babur

Babur

Babur was a Muslim conqueror from Central Asia who, following a series of setbacks, finally succeeded in laying the basis for the Mughal dynasty of South Asia. He was a direct descendant of Timur through his father, and a descendant also of Genghis Khan through his mother...

, described the Hamzanama as "one long far-fetched lie; opposed to sense and nature", his grandson Akbar, who came to throne at the age of fourteen, greatly enjoyed it. He commissioned his court workshop to create an illustrated manuscript of the Hamzanama early in his reign (he was by then about twenty), which was conceived on such an usually large scale that it took fourteen years, from about 1562 to 1577, to complete. Apart from the text, it included 1400 full page Mughal miniatures of an unusually large size, nearly all painted on paper, which was then glued to a cloth backing. The work was bound in 14 volumes. After the early pages, where various layouts were experimented with, one side of most folios has a painting, about 69 cm x 54 cm (approx. 27 x 20 inches) in size, done in a fusion of Persian

Persian miniature

A Persian miniature is a small painting on paper, whether a book illustration or a separate work of art intended to be kept in an album of such works called a muraqqa. The techniques are broadly comparable to the Western and Byzantine traditions of miniatures in illuminated manuscripts...

and Mughal styles. On the other side is the text in Persian

Persian language

in Nasta'liq script

Nasta'liq script

' is one of the main script styles used in writing the Perso-Arabic script, and traditionally the predominant style in Persian calligraphy. It was developed in Iran in the 8th and 9th centuries...

, arranged so that the text is opposite the matching picture in most openings of the book.

The size of the commission was completely unprecedented, and stretched even the huge imperial workshop. According to contemporary accounts, about thirty main artists were used, and over a hundred men worked on the various aspects of the book in all. According to Badauni and Shahnawaz Khan the work of preparing the illustrations was supervised initially by Mir Sayyid Ali and subsequently by Abdus Samad, the former possibly being replaced as head of the workshop because the pace of production was too slow. After seven years only four volumes were completed, but the new head was able to galvanize production and complete the ten volumes in another seven years, without any loss of quality. Indeed, "the later pages are the most exciting and innovative in the work".

The colophon of this manuscript is still missing. None of the folios of this manuscript so far found is signed, though many have been attributed to different artists. Compared to Akbar's Tutinama
Tutinama
Tutinama, literal meaning "Tales of a Parrot", is a 14th-century Persian series of 52 stories. An illustrated version containing 250 miniature paintings was commissioned by the Mughal Emperor, Akbar in the later part of the 16th century...

, a smaller commission begun and completed while the Hamzanama commission was in progress, the manuscript shows a much greater fusion of the styles of Indian and Persian miniature

Persian miniature

s. Though the elegance and finish may seem closer to Persian works, the compositional style and narrative drama owe more to Indian tradition. Between them, these two manuscripts are the key works in the formation of the Mughal miniature style.

Only a little over a hundred of the paintings survive. The largest group is 61 in the Austrian Museum of Applied Art (MAK) in Vienna

Vienna

Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

, with the rest spread over many collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum

Victoria and Albert Museum

The Victoria and Albert Museum , set in the Brompton district of The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, is the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects...

, with 27 (bought in Kashmir

Kashmir

Kashmir is the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent. Until the mid-19th century, the term Kashmir geographically denoted only the valley between the Great Himalayas and the Pir Panjal mountain range...

), and the British Museum

British Museum

The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...

in London. The MAK organized in 2009 the exhibition GLOBAL:LAB, Art as a Message. Asia and Europe 1500-1700, which showed its whole holding of the Hamzanama. Other recent exhibitions dedicated to the manuscript have been at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2003 and in 2002/2003 at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. which transferred to the Brooklyn Museum

Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum is an encyclopedia art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet, the museum holds New York City's second largest art collection with roughly 1.5 million works....

in New York.

Other versions

The Dastan-e-Amir Hamza existed in several other illustrated manuscript versions. One version by Navab Mirza Aman Ali Khan Ghalib Lakhnavi was printed in 1855 and published by the Hakim Sahib Press, Calcutta, India. This version was later embellished by Abdullah Bilgrami and published from the Naval Kishore Press, Lucknow, in 1871. In 2007 Musharraf Ali Farooqui, Pakistani born, now settled in Canada -translated in English Ghalib Lakhnavi/Abdulla Bilgriami's version. This English translation is excellent as well extraordinary. It can very easily find a place among the best in English literature In Manipur tradition among Muslims, the story (folklore) is called Jangi Wari (Story of Wars and Adventures).Story telling about Hamza in Mlaysia is available in Hikayat Amir Hamzah (Jawi script), Hikayat Muhammad Ali Hanafiah and Bustan Amir Hamza. The first magazine published in Malay was Bustan Arifin in 1821.

External links

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