Hamzanama

The ''Hamzanama'' (Persian/Urduary exploits of Amir Hamza, or Hamza ibn Abdul-Muttalib, an uncle of Muhammad. Most of the stories are extremely fanciful, "a continuous series of romantic interludes, threatening events, narrow escapes, and violent acts". The ''Hamzanama'' chronicles the fantastic adventures of Hamza as he and his band of heroes fight against the enemies of Islam.

The stories, from a long-established oral tradition, were written down in Persian, the language of the courts of Persianate societies, in multiple volumes presumably in the era of Mahmud of Ghazni. In the West, the work is best known for the enormous illustrated manuscript commissioned by the Mughal emperor Akbar about 1562. The text augmented the story, as traditionally told in dastan performances. The dastan (storytelling tradition) about Amir Hamza persists far and wide up to Bengal and Arakan, as the Mughal Empire controlled those territories. The longest version of the ''Hamzanama'' exists in Urdu and contains 46 volumes in approximately over 45,000 pages.

History: versions and translations

Iranian origins

''Dastan'' and ''qissa'' in Persian both mean “story,” and the narrative genre they refer to goes back to medieval Iran. William L. Hanaway, who has made a close study of Persian dastans, describes them as “popular romances” that were “created, elaborated, and transmitted” by professional storytellers. At least as early as the ninth century, it was a widely popular form of story-telling. Dastan-narrators told tales of heroic romance and adventure- stories about gallant princes and their encounters with evil kings, enemy champions, demons, magicians, ''jinns'', divine emissaries, tricky secret agents called ''ayyars'', and beautiful princesses who might be human or of the ''Pari'' (“fairy”) race. Their ultimate subject matter was always simple: “''razm o bazm'',” the battlefield and the elegant courtly life, war and love. Hanaway mentions five principal dastans surviving from the pre-Safavid (i.e., fifteenth century and earlier) period: those that grew up around the adventures of the world-conqueror Alexander, the great Persian king Darius, the Prophet Muhammad’s uncle Hamza, the legendary king Firoz Shah, and a trickster-hero named Samak the Ayyar. Of all the early dastans, the Hamza romance is thought to be the oldest.

The romance of Hamza goes back – or at least claims to go back – to the life of its hero, Hamza ibn Abdul-Muttalib, the paternal uncle of the Prophet, who was slain in the Battle of Uhud (625 CE) by a slave instigated by a woman named Hind bint Utbah, whose relatives Hamzah had killed at Badr. Hind bint Utbah then went to the battlefield and mutilated the dead Hamzah's body, cutting off his ears and nose, cutting out his liver and chewing it to fulfill the vow of vengeance she had made. Later, when the Prophet conquered Mecca, Hind bint Utbah accepted Islam, and was pardoned.

It has been argued that the romance of Hamza may actually have begun with the adventures of a Persian namesake of the original Hamza: Hamza ibn Abdullah, a member of a radical Islamic sect called the Kharijites, who was the leader of a rebel movement against the caliph Harun al-Rashid and his successors. This Persian Hamzah lived in the early ninth century, and seems to have been a dashing rebel whose colorful exploits gave rise to many stories. He was known to have fought against the Abbasid caliph-monarch and the local warriors from Sistan, Makran, Sindh and Khorasan are said to have joined him in the battle, which lasted till the Caliph died. After which Hamza left, inexplicably, for Sarandip (Ceylon) and China, leaving behind 5000 warriors to protect the powerless against the powerful. His disciples wrote the account of his travels and expeditions in a book ''Maghazi-e-Amir Hamza'', which was the original source of ''Dastan-e-Amir Hamza''. As these stories circulated, they eventually transferred to the earlier Hamza, who was an orthodox Muslim champion acceptable to all.

The seventeenth-century ''Zubdat ur-rumuz'' actually gives two conflicting origin-stories. The first is that after Hamza's death, ladies living near the Prophet's house told praising anecdotes to get the Prophet's attention—and that one Masud Makki then produced the first written version of these stories to divert the Meccans from their hostility to the Prophet. The second was that wise courtiers devised the romance to cure a brain fever suffered by one of the Abbasid caliphs. The 1909 Indo-Persian version also gives two conflicting sources. The first is that the dastan was invented by Abbas, who used to tell it to the Prophet, his nephew, to cheer him up with stories of his other uncle's glory. The second is that the dastan was invented during the reign of Muawiyah I (661-79) to keep loyalty to the Prophet's family alive among the people, despite official hostility and vilification.

In his study of the Arabian epic, Malcolm Lyons discusses ''Sirat Hamzat al-Pahlawan'', which is a parallel cycle of the nature of Amir Hamza in Arab with similarities of names and places like Anushirwan that corresponds to Nausheravan, the vizier Buzurjmihr who is synonymous to Buzurjmehr, the Persian capital Midan and also jinn of Jabal Qaf. But it is difficult to prove who has borrowed from whom.

The Hamza story soon grew, ramified, traveled and gradually spread over immense areas of the Muslim world. It was translated into Arabic; there is a twelfth-century Georgian version, and a fifteenth-century Turkish version twenty-four volumes long. It also exists in sixteenth-century Malay and Javanese versions, and in Balinese and Sudanese ones as well. Moreover, even in Iran the story continued to develop over time: by the mid-nineteenth century the Hamza romance had grown to such an extent that it was printed in a version about twelve hundred very large pages in length. By this time the dastan was often called ''Rumuz-e Hamza'' (The Subtleties of Hamza). And by this time, the Hamza romance had made itself conspicuously at home in India as well.

Evolving Indian versions: Persian

Annemarie Schimmel judges that the Hamza story “must have been popular in the Indian subcontinent from the days of Mahmud of Ghazni in the early eleventh century. The earliest solid evidence, however, seems to be a late-fifteenth-century set of paintings that illustrate the story; these were crudely executed, possibly in Jaunpur, perhaps for a not-too-affluent patron.

In 1555, Babur noted with disapproval that the leading literary figure of Khurasan had recently “wasted his time” in composing an imitation of the cycle. The great emperor Akbar (1556-1605), far from sharing his grandfather's attitude, conceived and supervised the immense task of illustrating the whole romance. As Akbar's court chronicler tells us, Hamza's adventures were “represented in twelve volumes, and clever painters made the most astonishing illustrations for no less than one thousand and four hundred passages of the story.” The illustrated manuscript thus created became the supreme achievement of Mughal art: “of all the loot carried off from Delhi by Nadir Shah in 1739 (including the Peacock Throne), it was only the ''Hamza-nama'', ‘painted with images that defy the imagination,’ that Emperor Muhammad Shah pleaded to have returned.”

The Hamza story left traces in the Deccan as well. One Persian romance-narrator, Haji Qissah-Khvan Hamadani, records his arrival in 1612 at Hyderabad, at the court of Sultan Abdullah Qutb Shah (1611-72) of Golconda. The Haji writes, “I had brought with me a number of manuscripts of the ''Rumuz-e Hamza''. When I presented them in the king’s service, I was ordered, ‘Prepare a summary of them.’ In obedience to this order this book ''Zubdat ur-rumuz'' (The Cream of the Rumuz) has been prepared.” At least two other seventeenth-century Indo-Persian Hamza manuscripts survive, dated AH 1096 684-5and AH 1099 687-8 as well as various undated and later ones.

In the course of countless retellings before faithful audiences, the Indo-Persian Hamzah story seems to have grown generally longer and more elaborate throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the eighteenth century, the Hamza story was so well-known in India that it inspired an indigenous Indo-Persian imitation, the massive ''Bostan-e Khiyal'' (Garden of “Khiyal”) by Mir Muhammad Taqi. By the nineteenth century, however, Persian as an Indian language was in a slow decline, for its political and cultural place was being taken by the rapidly developing modern languages. It is in these languages that the dastan found a hospitable environment to survive and flourish.

Evolving Indian versions: Urdu

The Hamza romance spread gradually, usually in its briefer and less elaborate forms, into a number of the modern languages of South Asia. Pashto and Sindhi were particularly hospitable to the Hamza story, and at least in Pashto it continues to flourish today, with printed pamphlet versions being produced. In Bengali it was popular among Muslims as early as the eighteenth century, in a long verse romance called ''Amirhamjar puthi'', which its authors, Fakir Garibullah and Saiyad Hamja, described as a translation from the Persian. This romance was printed repeatedly in pamphlet form in the nineteenth century, and even occasionally in the twentieth. Various Hindi versions were produced too—but above all, the story of Hamza flourished in Urdu.

The earliest Hamza retelling in Urdu exists in a late Dakhani prose version called ''Qissa-e jang-e amir Hamza'' (Qissa of the War of Amir Hamza) (1784). Very little is known about this work's background. It was probably translated from a Persian text. In 1801, Khalil Ali Khan Ashk, a member of the Hindustani department of the famous Fort William College in Calcutta, composed the earliest printed version of the dastan in Urdu: the 500-page ''Dastan-e amir Hamza'', consisting of twenty-two dastans, or chapters, grouped into four “volumes.”

Ashk claims that the story he is telling goes back to the time of Mahmud of Ghazni, in the early eleventh century; he implies that his present text is a translation, or at least a rendering, of the written, presumably Persian text that the distinguished dastan-narrators of Mahmud's court first set down. Ashk also claims that his sources, the narrators of Mahmud's court, compiled fourteen volumes of Hamza's adventures. However, we have no evidence that Mahmud of Ghazni ever sponsored the production of such a work. Gyan Chand Jain thinks that in fact Ashk based his version on the Dakhani ''Qissa-e jang-e amir Hamza'' because his plot agrees in many important particulars with the early Persian ''Qissa-e Hamza'', though it disagrees in many others.

However, the most popular version of the dastan in Urdu was that of Aman Ali Khan Bahadur Ghalib Lakhnavi published by Hakim Mohtasham Elaih Press, Calcutta in 1855. In 1860s, one of the early publications of Munshi Nawal Kishore, the legendary publisher from Lucknow, was Ashk's ''Dastan-e amir Hamza''. Nawal Kishore eventually replaced Ashk's version with a revised and improved ''Dastan-e amir Hamza'' (1871), explaining to the public that the Ashk version was marred by its “archaic idioms and convoluted style.” Munshi Nawal Kishore commissioned Maulvi Syed Abdullah Bilgrami to revise Ali Khan Bahadur Ghalib's translation and published it in 1871. This version proved extraordinarily successful. The Bilgrami version has almost certainly been more often reprinted, and more widely read, than any other in Urdu. In 1887 Syed Tasadduq Husain, a proof reader at Nawal Kishore Press, revised and embellished this edition. In the twentieth century, Abdul Bari Aasi rearranged this version by removing all the couplets from it and toning down the melodramatic scenes.

Owing to the popularity of the Ashk and Bilgrami versions in Urdu, Nawal Kishore also brought out in 1879 a counterpart work in Hindi called ''Amir Hamza ki dastan'', by Pandits Kalicharan and Maheshdatt. This work was quite an undertaking in its own right: 520 large pages of typeset Devanagari script, in a prose adorned not with elegant Persian expressions but with exactly comparable Sanskritisms, and interspersed not with Persian verse forms but with Indic ones like ''kavitt'', ''soratha'', and ''chaupai''. The ''Amir Hamza ki dastan'', with its assimilation of a highly Islamic content into a self-consciously Sanskritized form, offers a fascinating early glimpse of the development of Hindi. The heirs of Nawal Kishore apparently published a 662-page Hindi version of the dastan as late as 1939.

During this same period Nawal Kishore added a third version of the Hamza story: a verse rendering of the romance, a new masnavi by Tota Ram Shayan called ''Tilism-e shayan ma ruf bah dastan-e amir Hamza'' published in 1862. At 30,000 lines, it was the longest Urdu masnavi ever written in North India, with the exception of versions of the Arabian Nights. Yet Shayan is said to have composed it in only six months. This version too apparently found a good sale, for by 1893 Nawal Kishore was printing it for the sixth time.

In 1881, Nawal Kishore finally began publishing his own elaborate multi-volume Hamza series. He hired Muhammad Husain Jah, Ahmad Husain Qamar, and Tasadduq Husain, the most famous Lucknow dastan-narrators, to compose the stories. This version of the ''Dastan-e amir Hamza'' was an extraordinary achievement: not only the crowning glory of the Urdu dastan tradition, but also surely the longest single romance cycle in world literature, since the forty-six volumes average 900 pages each. Publication of the cycle began with the first four volumes of ''Tilism-e hoshruba'' ("The Stunning Tilism") by Muhammad Husain Jah; these volumes were published between 1883 and 1890, after which Jah had differences with Nawal Kishore and left the Press. These four volumes by Jah proved immensely popular, and are still considered the heart of the cycle. After Jah, the two main architects of the cycle, Ahmad Husain Qamar (nineteen volumes) and Tasadduq Husain (nineteen volumes) took over the work from 1892 to its completion around 1905.

These writers were not the original creators of the tales and by the time the Nawal Kishore Press began publishing them, they had already evolved in their form and structure. As these dastans were mainly meant for oral rendition, the storytellers added local colours to these tales. Storytelling had become a popular craft in India by nineteenth century. The storytellers narrated their long winding tales of suspense, mystery, adventure, magic, fantasy, and the marvellous rolled into one to their inquisitive audiences. Each day, the session would end at a point where the curious public would be left to wonder as to what happened next. Some of the most famous storytellers of Hamza dastan were Mir Ahmad Ali (belonged to Lucknow but later moved to Rampur), Mir Qasim Ali, Hakim Sayed Asghar Ali Khan (he came to Rampur during the tenure of Nawab Mohammad Saeed Khan i.e. 1840–1855), Zamin Ali Jalal Lucknowi, Munshi Amba Prasad Rasa Lucknowi (a disciple of Mir Ahmad Ali who later converted to Islam and was rechristened Abdur Rahman), his son Ghulam Raza, Haider Mirza Tasawwur Lucknowi (a disciple of Asghar Ali), Haji Ali Ibn Mirza Makkhoo Beg, his son Syed Husain Zaidi and Murtuza Husain Visaal.

The final arrangement of the cycle was into eight ''daftars'' or sections. The first four ''daftars'' – the two-volume ''Naushervan nama'' (The Book of Naushervan); the one-volume ''Kochak bakhtar'' (The Lesser West); the one-volume ''Bala bakhtar'' (The Upper West); and the two-volume ''Iraj nama'' (The Book of Iraj) – were closer to the Persian romance, and were linked more directly to Hamza's own adventures, especially those of the earlier part of his life. Then came the fifth ''daftar'', the ''Tilism-e hoshruba'' itself, begun by Jah (four volumes) and completed by Qamar (three volumes). The remaining three ''daftars'', though they make up the bulk of the cycle in quantity, emphasize the adventures of Hamza's sons and grandsons, and are generally of less literary excellence. Though no library in the world has a full set of the forty-six volumes, a microfilm set at the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago is on the verge of completion.

This immense cycle claims itself as a translation of a (mythical) Persian original written by Faizi, one of the great literary figures of Akbar's court; this claim is made repeatedly on frontispieces, and here and there within the text. Like this purported Persian original, the Urdu version thus contains exactly eight ''daftars'' - even though as the Urdu cycle grew, the eighth ''daftar'' had to become longer and longer until it contained twenty-seven volumes.

This astonishing treasure-house of romance, which at its best contains some of the finest narrative prose ever written in Urdu, is considered the delight of its age; many of its volumes were reprinted again and again, well into the twentieth century. Although towards the end of the nineteenth century dastans had reached an extraordinary peak of popularity, the fate of dastan literature was sealed by the first quarter of the twentieth century. By the time of the great dastan-narrator Mir Baqir Ali's death in 1928, dastan volumes were being rejected by the educated elite in favor of Urdu and Hindi novels—many of which were in fact very dastan-like.

Modern translations

Two English language translations have been published based on The Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami version (1871) published by Munshi Nawal Kishore press. The first is an abridged translation called ''The Romance Tradition in Urdu'' by Frances Pritchett of Columbia University. It is available in an expanded version on the website of the translator. In 2008 Musharraf Ali Farooqi, a Pakistani-Canadian author, translated the Lakhnavi/Bilgrami version into English as ''The Adventures of Amir Hamza: Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction''. He took seven years to translate this thousand-page adventure. Farooqi has done a very close translation of the text without abridging the ornate passages.

A Pakistani author Maqbool Jahangir wrote ''Dastan-e-Amir Hamza'' for children in the Urdu

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases