Hamzanama
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The Hamzanama is an artistic masterpiece created about 1558–1573 under the Mughal emperor Akbar. It originally comprised 1,400 canvas folios. On one side of most folios is a painting, about 54cm x 69cm in area, done in a fusion of Persian and Indian styles. On the other side of most folios is Arabic text in nastaliq script. The folios are ordered, and the text on the back of one folio accompanies the painting on the subsequent folio.
The Hamzanama was designed to augment a story-telling performance of the adventures of Hamza. This romance originated more than 1,000 years ago, probably in Persia, and subsequently spread throughout the Islamic world in oral and written forms. The adventures of Hamza never became defined by a canonical written text. The Hamzanama supports a broad world of possibilities for story-telling and seems to have been created to better enable diverse subjects to make sense of persons like themselves within the world of the romance.
Reference
Seyller, John (2002), The Adventures of Hamza, Painting and Storytelling in Mughal India (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution). (Contains the most complete set of reproductions of Hamzanama paintings and text translations.)
External links
- Online exhibit of The Adventures of Hamza at the Smithsonian Institution (http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/online/hamza/default.htm)
- A Masterpiece of Sensuous Communication: The Hamzanama of Akbar (http://www.galbithink.org/sense-s3.htm) (images in pdf file (http://www.galbithink.org/sense1.pdf), Section II )