The Hamzanama (Persian/Urdu: Hamzenâme, ) or Dastan-e-Amir Hamza (Persian/Urdu: , Dâstân-e Amir Hamze, ) narrates the legendary exploits of 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".Beach, 61. The Hamzanama chronicles the fantastic adventures of Hamza as he and his band of heroes fight the enemies.
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 (r. 998–1030). In the West, the work is best known for the enormous illustrated manuscript, the Akbar Hamzanama, commissioned by the Mughal emperor Akbar about 1562. The written text augmented the story as traditionally told orally 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.Although nominal similarities, they story is not about the famous Hamza, prophet Muhammad's uncle. The longest version of the Hamzanama exists in Urdu and contains 46 volumes comprising over 45,000 pages.
History: versions and translations Iranian origins In Persian and Arabic, dastan and qissa both mean "story," and the narrative genre they refer to goes back to medieval Iran. William L. Hanaway,Hanaway, William L. Classical Persian Literature. Iranian studies: Vol 31(1998). 3-4. Google Book Search. Web 16 Sep, 2014 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, the dastan 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 period (that is, from the 15th-century and earlier): those that grew up around the adventures of the world-conqueror Alexander (Alexander Romance), 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 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 noblewoman named Hind bint Utbah, whose relatives Hamza had killed at Badr. Hind bint Utbah then went to the battlefield and mutilated the dead Hamza'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 9th-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 until the Caliph died. After the battle, 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.Hamza's Stories. The News International. As these stories circulated, they eventually transferred to the earlier Hamza, who was an orthodox Muslim champion acceptable to all.D. M. Lang and G. M. Meredith-Owens (1959), "Amiran-Darejaniani: A Georgian Romance and its English Rendering", Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 22(3): 454–490.
The seventeenth-century Zubdat ur-Rumuz actually gives two conflicting origin-stories for the Hamzanama. The first is that after Hamza's death, ladies living near the Prophet's house told praising anecdotes to get the Prophet's attention; one Masud Makki then produced the first written version of these stories to divert the Meccans from their hostility to the Prophet. The second is 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 LyonsLyons, Malcom. The Arabian Epic: Heroic and oral story-telling. Vol 1. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Print. discusses Sirat Hamzat al-Pahlawan, which is a parallel cycle of tales about Amir Hamza in Arabic, with similarities of names and places to the Hamzanama: thus Anushirwan corresponds to Nausheravan, the vizier Buzurjmihr is synonymous to Buzurjmehr, and there are parallels for the Persian capital Midan and also jinn of Jabal Qaf. But it is difficult to prove who has borrowed from whom.
Spread down to the 15th century The Hamza story soon grew, ramified, traveled and gradually spread over immense areas of the Muslim world. It was translated into Arabic (Sīrat Amīr Ḥamza); there is a twelfth-century Georgian version, and a fifteenth-century Turkish version twenty-four volumes long. 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 an edition comprising about twelve hundred very large pages. By this time the dastan was often called Rumuz-e Hamza (The Subtleties of Hamza), and had also made itself conspicuously at home in India.
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 GhazniAnnemarie Schimmel, Classical Urdu Literature from the Beginning to Iqbal, p. 204. 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.Karl Khandalavala and Moti Chandra, New Documents of Indian Painting--a Reappraisal (Bombay: Board of Trustees of the Prince of Wales Museum, 1969), pp. 50-55, plates 117-126.
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.Annette S. Beveridge, trans., The Baburnāma in English (London: Luzac and Co., 1969), p. 280. The great emperor Akbar (1556–1605), far from sharing his grandfather's attitude, conceived and supervised the immense task of illustrating the whole romance, producing a manuscript now known as the Akbar Hamzanama. 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."H. Blochmann, trans., Ain-i Akbari (Lahore: Qausain, 1975; 2nd ed.), p. 115. 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."Stuart Cary Welch, Imperial Mughal Painting (New York: George Braziller, 1978), p. 44.
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."Gyān Chand Jain, Urdū kī nasrī dāstāneñ, p. 106. At least two other seventeenth-century Indo-Persian Hamza manuscripts survive, dated 1096 AH [1684–85 CE] and 1099 AH [1687–88 CE], as well as various undated and later ones.Hājī Qissah Khvān Hamadānī, Zubdat ur-rumūz, p. 2.
In the course of countless retellings before faithful audiences, the Indo-Persian Hamza 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 was in a slow decline as an Indian language, for its political and cultural place was being taken by Pashto and the Indic languages. It is in these languages that the dastan found a hospitable environment to survive and flourish.
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 18th-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."