Word: persiane
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...hangs at Nasar's gallery in a show by NCA graduate Khadim Ali. Raised in Quetta, the son of Afghan refugees, Ali taught himself to draw using charcoal scavenged from bakeries. His artistic inspiration was his family's only book: an illustrated copy of the Shahnameh, a 10th century Persian epic revered in Afghanistan. The Taliban co-opted the poem's hero, Rustam, as a propaganda figure, telling Afghans that they, like him, were winged heroes endowed with arrows to defeat evil. Ali's phantasmagoric show, "Rustam," features a devil-figure with horns, wings and the unmistakably Pashtun features...
...hypnotic depth of these fables is partly due to the fact that they are the product of more than one brain. Indeed, Adventures belongs to an ancient Persian canon of oral literature known as the dastan, which includes popular stories generated, modified and passed down by village elders and royal poets alike. Dastan fables were subject to endless revision, shimmering and shifting depending on who was telling them and who was listening. When a few unnamed storytellers recited their dastan of Amir Hamza to an Indian publisher in 1883, the transcription yielded 46 volumes, each some 1,500 pages...
...element, that has ensured its longevity. Though Amir Hamza is cast as a slayer of infidels and a servant of the "true faith," the work is far from being a collection of Islamic parables. Amir Hamza in fact campaigns in the service of an infidel - Naushervan, the fire-worshipping Persian Emperor. A Merlin-like sage, Buzurjmehr, sends Amir Hamza on quests and expeditions that are sometimes far from chivalrous. And while our hero's love for Naushervan's half-Chinese daughter, Mehr-Nigar, is enduring, the story is punctuated by his frequent dalliances, including a romp with an otherworldly fairy...
...most notable devotee of Adventures was probably the Mughal Emperor Akbar, whose court in the 16th century became the epicenter of Persian literary culture. Akbar was so enchanted by these swashbuckling accounts of derring-do that he commissioned 1,400 exquisite canvas folios depicting scenes from them (five of the paintings accompany this article). According to C.M. Naim, professor of Urdu studies at the University of Chicago, the illustrated Hamzanama (as the collected works are known) is "the Taj Mahal of medieval painting...
...edition and added various flourishes and refrains to restore its original bardic character. Even so, Farooqi's translation is almost a thousand pages in total. It was a Herculean labor. "When I looked at the first page," Farooqi confesses, "I thought 'What the hell is this?'" Translating the heavily Persian form of classical Urdu required seven years, which Farooqi spent shuttling between archives in South Asia and libraries the West, poring over manuscripts and microfilm...