April 12, 2003

While Western historians, such as the late Annmarie Schimmel, have done much to rescue our literary and spiritual heritage from obscurity, who would have thought that a popular Turkish novelist, Orhan Pamuk, would bring to life, so lovingly, the subculture of 15th century miniaturists?

But that’s what he does in My Name Is Red, one of the best novels published in the last few years, and one that is unlike any of Pamuk’s earlier novels, which are focused on his country’s East-West identity dilemma.

Thousands of Mughal miniature paintings may be gathering dust in Indian and Pakistani art museums, unloved and neglected, but the art form has a wide circle of its admirers in Europe and America, where hardly any major art gallery is without a few of these paintings originally produced for patrons in the courts of the Safavis, the Osmanlis, the Mughals, the Rajputs and the Deccanis.

Among these museums, the highest honour goes to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, USA, which owns and proudly displays pages from the Mughal classic, Hamzanama. The Smithsonian’s Sackler Art Gallery recently concluded its year-long exhibit of fragments from the 16th century Hamzanama in Washington and New York City.

In a rave review of Hamzanama, the Washington Post’s art critic compared the manuscript’s exuberantly illuminated pages to the Mona Lisa. Blake Gopnik wrote that the comparison wasn’t fair because “I got more out of looking at Hamzanama than from all the time I’ve spent in front of Leonardo’s lady.”

Hamzanama tells the story of the mythical exploits of the Prophet of Islam’s uncle in what probably was the Muslim answer to the Indian epic, Mahabharata. Hamzanama was prepared over two decades for Akbar Badishah. It originally consisted of about 1,400 painted pages; 200 of these pages are now owned by the Sackler Gallery.

Almost as well-loved in the subcontinent over the centuries as Hamzanama was Khamseh of Nizami, consisting of five mathnavis written in the 12th century Iran. The first is the Treasury of Mysteries, a work of mysticism. The other four are romances: Khosrow and Shirin, Layla and Majnun, the Seven Princesses, Alexander the Great.

Khamseh provided great material for innumerable miniaturists to illustrate the stories.

In Orhan Pamuk’s novel, My Name Is Red, the miniaturists frequently allude to the Khamseh story of Khosrow and Shirin, which is rather unfamiliar in minaret.

Whether such a controversy actually gripped the miniaturist community is hard to say. The many books available on this art form make no reference to it. Interestingly, the miniaturists in Pamuk’s novel make many allusions to the flourishing art market in Hindustan. One of the major characters in the book muses at one time:

Akbar Khan, the Emperor of Hindustan and the world’s richest shah, is preparing what will one day become a legendary book. To complete his project, he sent word to the four corners of Islamdom inviting the world’s greatest artists to join him. The men he’d sent to Istanbul visited me yesterday, inviting me to Hindustan...

— Usama Khalidi is a US-based free lance writer. He can be reached at: usama@sprintmail.com