Hamza's Heroes Fight in Support of Qasim and Badi'uzzaman
| Support Type: | Paper |
| Paint Type: | Gouache |
| Current Location: | Department of Islamic Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA. |
| Location History: | Lockwood de Forest (American), New York (until 1918) then sold to MMA, Credit Line: Rogers Fund, 1918 |
“Hamza’s Heroes Fight in Support of Qasim and Badi’uzzaman” is a folio from the Hamzanama attributed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to Shravana with further hands attributed to Dasavanta and Tara and dated to about 1564 to 1569. It is catalogued as ink and opaque watercolour with gold on cloth later mounted on paper and measures some twenty seven by twenty one and a quarter inches. The sheet entered the Museum through the Rogers Fund in 1918 after passing through the hands of a New York collector and it is held today in the Department of Islamic Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York although it is not currently on view. The cloth ground is the first clue to its purpose. The Hamzanama was commissioned by the emperor Akbar in 1562 as a manuscript of some fourteen hundred illustrations made over about fifteen years by nearly a hundred artists and its pages were large enough to be raised before a gathering while a storyteller recited the tale. Every figure had to read across a room and this folio meets that demand with an almost physical force. The art is a riot arranged inside a frame of perfect order. A tall pavilion fills the sheet with its tiered canopy banded in blue and orange and green and with a scalloped white valance hanging from slender red poles. At its heart stands an empty throne with a floral cushion behind a low red railing and it is the single calm object in the entire picture. Around it the court has torn itself apart. Two warriors in red and green lock arms at the centre and the dagger raised above them cuts the diagonal of the whole design. On the left a giant in orange swings a curved blade. At the lower centre a heavy man in orange throws himself against his opponent in a tangle of beards and turbans and flailing limbs. A mace lies forgotten on the floor beside a box of arrows while onlookers at the right lift their hands in alarm. The ground beneath them is a field of blue star tiles and the carpet patterns press upward until every inch is occupied. Persian habits of jewelled surface and patterned architecture meet here an Indian appetite for weighty bodies and individual faces and twisting gesture. The result feels less like an illustration than a stage on which each actor has been given a part. The attribution deserves care. No folio of the Hamzanama bears a signature and the Museum offers three names for this one which suggests a collaboration of the kind the workshop is known to have practised where one hand set the design and others painted faces and finished passages. Daswanth is the painter among them whose life reached the written record. The imperial chronicler Abu’l Fazl described him as the son of a palanquin bearer who covered walls with drawings until the emperor noticed his gift and placed him in the royal workshop. He rose to be counted among its foremost masters and his death in 1584 is recorded as a suicide after a bout of madness. Seen against that story the packed and agitated crowd of this folio seems fitting even if the link can never be proved. The episode itself belongs to the endless adventures of Hamza the uncle of the Prophet and a defender of the faith. Here his son Badi’uzzaman has been drawn into a quarrel with Malik Qasim the king of the west and the Museum notes that the brawl erupts for reasons unknown. That uncertainty is the point. The text offers no motive and the painter supplies none. What the picture records is the sudden collapse of courtesy as allies and rivals alike are swept into a fight that no one seems able to stop. Philosophically the folio turns on the empty throne. Sovereignty is present as a structure and absent as a person and the violence surges around it without ever touching it. A court audience watching this page held aloft would have felt the thrill of the spectacle but also a quieter lesson about how thin the surface of order can be and how much depends on the authority that sits at the centre of the room. The story promises that loyalty and valour will finally restore that order and the painter lets the viewer feel the cost of its loss first. In this way the folio joins entertainment to reflection and shows why a manuscript made to amuse an emperor became one of the most searching works of its age.
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