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

So hungry you could eat an elephant

 

Source: British Museum

This Indian musical instrument (a sarinda - like a small violin) caught my eye in the British Museum. Made of ivory in the early 18th century, the main body is carved with images of flowers and angels, while the scroll-end depicts a monster devouring an elephant and clutching another in its claws (above right). The artist had a macabre sense of humour, because the sarinda is played in an upright position, so the musician would have the monster staring straight at him! On the other hand, I wonder if this was a decorative piece only, as ivory surely wouldn't produce good resonance for a stringed instrument.

By showing the poor elephant sliding into the monster’s maw, the artist persuades us that the monster must be enormous. It’s a neat trick that is also seen for example at Gangaikonda Cholapuram, the magnificent South Indian temple built in the 11th century by Rajendra Chola I. In this case, the image is carved beside a doorway to act as a threat to trespassers.

The elephant’s size makes it a good snack for monstrous appetites. This occurs in another popular image in Indian art: the god Vishnu rescuing an elephant from the makara, a crocodile-like monster. As told in the Bhagavata Purana, the king of the elephants was having a quiet drink from the river when it was seized by the makara and held in a death struggle. The elephant prayed to Vishnu, who swooped down and killed the monster with his deadly sudarshana chakra (a sharp-edged spinning disc). In artistic renderings, Vishnu is often portrayed as the handsome dark-skinned young avatar Krishna, accompanied by his flying companion Garuda who seems to be a kind of parakeet in the example below. You can also see the chakra embedded in the makara's neck. The scene is known collectively as Gajendra Moksha, the Liberation of the Elephant King.

Source: Victoria & Albert Museum

It’s not hard to see where the idea of the makara came from: India is home to three large species of crocodile, two of which (the saltwater and the mugger) regularly attack humans, while the gharial is harmless but grows to over 5 metres. Their presence was noted by the armies of Alexander the Great when he reached the Indus River in the 4^th century BC. He thought he’d reached a section of the Nile because it was the only other place where they had seen crocodiles.

And crocodiles do actually attack elephants, as shown in this photograph taken in Zambia in 2010 (see also this article). A Google search turns up at least three recorded incidents in the past 10 years. In all these cases the elephant survived, so clearly Vishnu is still standing by when needed. But if you ask me, it’s never really safe to go back in the water. 

Source: Scientific American