Lost-and-found: an epic tale

SPEAKING VOLUMES

A few days ago, a colleague whose literary opinions I respect called in some excitement: had I heard of The Adventures of Amir Hamza? Yes, I said confidently, remembering the travails of that dashing protagonist and his beguiling trickster friend, Amar Ayyar.

My colleague was perplexed: as far as he knew, Musharraf Ali Farooqi's recent and excellent translation was the only one available in English. Farooqi had worked for years on his translation, using available Urdu texts. The Urdu versions will also be familiar to those who've been following the recent 'dastangoi' revival brought in by the performer and scholar Mahmood Farooqui, who has retold the Hamzanama at festival venues and in Old Delhi's sprawling lanes.

The Hamzanama is a gigantic collection of tales, rivalling the Arabian Nights in scope, size and imagination. The seed version was believed to have been written in the ninth century, and over the centuries, much was added on. In Persian medieval histories, you will find references to street performances of episodes from the chronicles. Over the march of time, the epic appeared to be lost and forgotten, with most Urdu condensations or rewritings dating back to the 19th century.

Aside from Urdu, though, the Hamzanama stayed alive in another language "" Bengali. Fakir Garibullah is said to have produced the first version of the Hamzanama in the mid 1770s; later, his disciple Syed Hamza would write one of the most popular versions of the epic. They employed a bastard language "" part Urdu, part Arabic, part Bangla "" that allowed the audience to connect directly with the epic and its heroes. Abdul Nabi also wrote a version of the epic ""but Nabi's version was in manuscript form, while Syed Hamza's was "written" for a more oral tradition. Syed Hamza's version was the one that caught the popular imagination, and while performances of the epic may have died down elsewhere, they were common features in West Bengal and Bangladesh until fairly recently.

Often, the epic lent itself to contemporary interpretation. In one of its more notorious and celebrated passages, the Hamzanama offers up an inspired riff on sodomy, involving several intoxicated participants. In a version of that episode a street theatre group put on at Calcutta's Maidan, the instigator of the sodomy was revealed to be the then chief minister, performing his dastardly acts on the unconscious form of the body politic. It was quite a decent metaphor, and as I recall, much appreciated by the audience.

Farooqi's translation is extraordinary, in part because of the way in which he handles the language. The Bengali "translators" "" they were in many ways co-authors bringing to life a different version of the epic "" hewed the original Urdu into the language of the common man, allowing poetic flourishes only to make a specific point. Farooqi retains the rhythms, gusto and the zest of the original, as when he introduces Amar Ayyar, Hamza's trickster friend: "This boy will be the prince of all tricksters, unsurpassed in cunning, guile, and deceit. Great and mighty kings and champions will tremble at his mention and soil their pants in fright upon hearing his name." And yet, his translation is fast-paced and refreshingly readable, taking the reader across the daunting landscape of 960 pages like a friendly, knowledgeable guide.

The other key function Farooqi performs is that of rescuer and archaeologist. Why is the Hamzanama, which ran to over 45 volumes in its full grandeur, forgotten while the Arabian Nights is remembered? I put the question to a contemporary Urdu scholar, who suggested drily that the West is "cluttered with sagas" and has room in its memory for only one Eastern epic at a time. Three, at most, allowing room for the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Arabian Nights, but not the Shahnama, the Krishnaleela, or indeed the Hamzanama.

I am still trying to understand why the amnesia that cloaked the Hamzanama for centuries escaped Bengal. Perhaps it was because the transcreations done by Fakir Garibullah and the writers who followed him were so strongly contemporary that they became as much part of the folk memory as other great story-cycles. Perhaps it was because at that particular point in history, Bengal needed the twin stories of a great hero and a great trickster "" a need that seems to have been jettisoned in this century.

Either way, I'm not alone among readers in welcoming Amir Hamza back to his place in the spotlight. How many other forgotten epics do we have in our histories? This century would be a good time to find out.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com  

The author is chief editor, Westland/ Tranquebar. The views expressed here are personal