The Adventures of Hamza: Painting and Storytelling in Mughal India Book

A fantastic adventure story, based loosely on the exploits of Hamza, an uncle of the prophet Muhammad, who travelled throughout the world spreading the doctrines of Islam, The Adventure of Hamza--also known as Hamzanama--tells of encounters with giants, demons, and dragons; of abductions and hair-raising chases; and of believers, as well as those who resisted the truth. The excitement of these ancient tales was best captured in public recitations at coffeehouses from Iran to northern India. Each oration was given a particular flavor by the storyteller, who departed freely from the written text, which itself varies in composition and structure from manuscript to manuscript. An illustrated version of the Hamzanama was commissioned early in the reign of the Mughal Emperor Akbar, in the second half of the 16th century, by the teenage emperor himself. Consisting of 1400 paintings of an unusually large format, it was one of the earliest products of the royal Mughal painting atelier, and perhaps the most ambitious. The enormous size of the illustrations, which are nearly two feet high each, can be explained by their role in complementing the recitations; their sometimes broad and animated style conveys the vigor of the tales. Just over a tenth of the 1400 paintings from Akbar's commission survive today, and this publication of The Adventures of Hamza brings together 60 of the greatest of these works from collections all over the world, and places them alongside new translations of the related text passages. . . .The next day the champions and heroes of the Army of Islam set forth with thirty thousand of their relatives. When the overseer of the court had crossed, the next day the sultan of the western throne and Mundhir Shah of the Yemen crossed with two hundred thousand men. Behind them came Price Nuruddahr and Malik Qasim's men. After them the kings of the east like Jamshed Golden-Quiver and Khwarshed Golden-Quiver crossed with eighty thousand men. The next day Prince Badi'uzzman's men and the princes of Mazanderan like Shah Shams and Shah Badr crossed with eighty thousand men. The next day. . . --from The Adventures of Hamza Edited by Alison Effeny.Essays by John Seyller, Ebba Koch, Rainald Franz, Antoinette Owen and Wheeler M. Thackston. Clothbound, 320 pages, 135 color and 200 b&w AUTHOR BIO: John Seyller, curator of the exhibition The Adventures of Hamza, is Professor of Art History at the University of Vermont. He has published extensively on Indian painting, with an emphasis on Mughal manuscripts produced during Akbar's reign.Read More