Riding into battle on a rhinoceros

In Vienna recently, I had hoped to see the pages of the Hamzanama owned by the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK). Sadly they are not available to the public but the curator kindly referred me to the Google Arts page containing high-definition images of the full collection. In some ways these are better than the real thing as they can be enlarged for poor aging eyes like mine, whereas original folios can only be viewed in low light. Check out the page here.

You may recall that the Hamzanama is a collection of fantastical stories about Amir Hamza, uncle of the Prophet Muhammad (earlier posts here). Derived from medieval Persian legends, these tales of warriors, demons and giants were hugely popular in Mughal India. The young emperor Akbar commissioned a full set of illustrations which are now recognised as one of the greatest works of Mughal art. I like to think that Akbar, still in his late teens, saw this as his personal superhero comic-book. After the decline of the Mughal dynasty, the 12 bound volumes were lost, probably broken up and sold piecemeal. Fewer than 200 of the original 1400 pages or folios are known to exist today, of which the MAK’s collection of 60 is the largest single holding.

Thinking about the similarity with superhero comics, I was taken by the image above, depicting the warrior Qasim fighting with the evil Kayhur, who is mounted on a rhinoceros. A few of you may have watched the film Black Panther, set in a fictional African country where armoured rhinos are used as mounts in battle (see below). There was some excitement on the internet about “war rhinos”, which someone pointed out had already been used in the film 300 a decade earlier. But as far as I know, no-one in this debate mentioned their appearance in a 16^th century imperial Mughal manuscript.

The artists of the Hamzanama show Qasim rather gruesomely decapitating the poor rhino with such force that even Kayhur’s white shield is sliced neatly in half (detail below). The animal appears to be an Indian one-horned rhino, with its trademark big floppy ears. Whatever the artistic merits of the Hamzanama, I’m happier with the film where the rhino is portrayed as a kind of gigantic family pet. It seems to be modelled on an African white rhino, which is also said to be less bad-tempered than the black rhino, though you wouldn’t really want to test this.

Rhinos have never been tamed for riding, of course, but I’m sure the MAK knew this when it purchased the 60 folios at the Vienna World Fair in 1873, describing them as ‘treasure troves of costumes, architecture, devices, vessels, weapons etc, all richly and neatly ornamented’. The seller seems to have been an Iranian prince, though details are sketchy, and in this climate of resentment at Western museums' ownership of Asian art, I don't expect much further clarification. Pages of the Hamzanama have turned up in the oddest places: those owned by the Victoria & Albert Museum were found stuffed into broken window-panes in a Kashmir antique shop. Each page would now be worth over half a million pounds.

I can’t leave without sharing another fabulous and funny image (see below) which supports the ‘superhero’ hypothesis. Two brothers, fighting for the infidel enemy, attempt to frighten the troops by lifting an elephant and tossing it aside. Farrukhnizhad – one of the good guys – sees this and snorts: “Two men to lift one elephant?”. He then picks up the poor elephant himself (the animals really don’t do well here), whereupon the awestruck brothers immediately agree to convert to Islam and join the good side. The name Farrukhnizhad doesn’t have the same ring as Hulk or Iron Man, but for Akbar it probably sounded Marvel-lous.

Reference material: The Adventures of Hamza: Painting and Storytelling in Mughal India, John Seyller and Wheeler Thackston, Smithsonian Institute