KARACHI: Shahnaz and Fakir S Aijazuddin gave a riveting presentation on `The Art of Hamzanama Painting, Literature and Dastangoi in Mughal Lahore` at the Mohatta Palace Museum on Friday evening.

Mr Aijazuddin said the Hamzanama belonged to a tradition in which it was not necessary to be literate to enjoy the classics. The Mughal Emperor Akbar was illiterate but commissioned, among other epics, the gloriously illustrated Hamzanama.

`In fact, illiteracy often helped because the audience`s imagination was not clouded by the words or distracted by the image. The bardic tradition belongs to a time when days were long and nights punctuated by firelight. The bard`s modusoperandi was all about communication with an audience which he had to keep engaged and interested.

Thoughbardshavebeen denned as poets, they were free to incorporate those elements that would make their rendition more topical or relevant to local conditions,` he said.

He said like the west, in the east,too, bardic traditions survived, 1001 Nights being one of them. One of the oldest Arabic manuscripts consists of a few handwritten pages dating to the early 9th century and discovered in Syria. In it, Scheherazade narrates stories for 1,000 nights to save her life. They included historical tales, love stories, tragedies, comedies, bur-lesques and various forms of erotica.

They depicted djinns, ghouls and sorcerers, etc, who intermingled with people, not always rationally. For example, the Hamzanama has heroes who are handsome and chivalrous.

Most characters assume names that reveal their nature or their attributes.

Mr Aijazuddin said the Hamzanama originated from a poem. The elements reappear later in Firdausi`s Shahnama. The hero of the Hamzanama is Hamza ibn Abdul Mutallib, the uncle of the Holy Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him).

`The first Mughal Emperor Babar was interested in poetry but he thought bardic traditions belonged to a genre of literature contrary to good taste. His grandson Akbar had different tastes. Akbar commissioned the Hamzanama which is a fusion of Persian traditions and Indian sensibility. The Hamza project was ambitious. It consisted of 1,400 folios and took 15 years to complete. It was painted on cotton.

After Mr Aijazuddin gave a detailed account of the development of the project with the emphasis on the images` fidelity to the text, Shahnaz Aijazuddin, who hastranslated Tilism-i-Hoshruba into English, took over.

She began her presentation by showing the only illustration of the Tilism-i-Hoshruba done by Master Allah Bakhsh, which she has used as the title cover of her book Tilism-iHoshruba: The Enchantment of the Senses. She said the Tilism is an Urdu magical epic that stretches over seven large volumes. `In itself it is only one part of the much larger Hamzanama, which in its totality exceeded 46 volumes. This makes the Hamzanama the longest oral magical epic. The stories go back to 9th century medieval Iran. Storytellers or the dastangos narrated scenes from the Hamzanama to crowds in teahouse, courtyards and street fares etc.

She said by the 18th century the dastan had become an essential entertainment in courts and palaces in India. The court language was Persian. In the 19th century the dastan got indigenised. The story of Hoshruba in the Urdu language evolved in the Muslim kingdom of Awadh, central India. Its capital, Lucknow, was the epicentre of artistic excellence. A comparatively simpler magic of the original Hamzastory was replaced by Tilism, a complex magical world.

`The dastan evolved like a miniature painting and the structure of the dastan is like Indian classical music it has given parameters and you improvise on that. It is created by collective imagination... Though no longer in our public realm, these stories have left their imprint on our subconscious, on our literature and our performing arts,` she said.

Once the talks were over, the couple eloquently read out excerpts from Urdu and English versions of the Tilism. The audience, which had turned up in a large number, thoroughly enjoyed it.

The presentation, which was part of the distinguished lecture series commemorating 25 years of the Mohatta Palace Museum, was followed by a dastangoi session participated by Meesam Naqvi and Nazrul Hasan.

Earlier, Hameed Haroon acknowledged certain individuals for their support in setting up and running the museum. They included Kamal Azfar, Naheed Azfar, Hamid Akhund, Nasreen Askari and Salman Faruqui.