Hamza-nama painted cloths

The Hamza-nama painted cloths are a large group of sixteenth-century narrative paintings in the Chamchawala art collection at Scandal Point. They depict the adventures of a hero who may or may not be the same Hamza as the famous figure, the uncle of the Prophet, whose liver Hind ate after he fell at Uhud. Their significance lies not only in what they portray, but in how their collaborative making and public telling embody a hybrid artistic tradition.

Collection and Form

The cloths brought together artists summoned by the Mughals from across India. Rather than preserve each maker’s identity as distinct, their work formed what the narrative calls a many-headed, many-brushed artist who was, in effect, Indian painting itself: one hand rendered mosaic floors, another painted figures, and a third supplied Chinese-looking cloudy skies. The images combine Persian miniature with Kannada and Keralan painting styles, while their stories reflect a late-Mughal synthesis of Hindu and Muslim philosophies.

The cloths were also designed to be encountered as a sequence of images and narration. Stories accompanying the scenes appeared on their backs; the paintings could be held up one by one as someone read aloud the hero’s tale, giving the display the movement of a movie. Their form thus joined visual composition to spoken storytelling, making the cloths at once artworks and vehicles for a shared narrative.

Preservation, Ownership, and Conflict

The cloths are also at the center of Changez Chamchawala’s struggle over what will happen to the collection after him. He says he has offered the entire collection to the government free, provided it will house the works properly and build a place for them, but the offer has brought no interest. Meanwhile, buyers in the United States make large offers every month. Changez names other works he believes have already been taken from India—Ravi Varma paintings, Chandela bronzes, and Jaisalmer lattices—and imagines Nandi bulls ending up as ornaments in a Texas gazebo. For him, the Hamza-nama cloths are not simply valuable possessions: their possible removal figures a broader loss of cultural inheritance.

His position turns sharply inward when he tells Zeeny Vakil that he may eventually accept the American money, not for its value but for the abasement of selling what he could not persuade his own country to preserve. He fears that after his death he will amount to “A pair of emptied shoes,” with nobody to inherit what he has made. He blames Saladin Chamcha, whom he calls an imitator, for depriving him of posterity. The collection’s fate and the father’s grievance become entangled: preserving the cloths would safeguard a shared inheritance, while Changez’s complaint is also about the rupture between generations.

The scene makes the cloths a point of competing responses. Saladin calls the violent images barbaric, focusing on their spears, wounds, and spilling blood; Changez ignores his son and addresses Zeeny instead. After confiding his complaint, he leaves the judgment to her, and she answers by approaching him and kissing him. The collection therefore binds together artistic hybridity, national ownership, and a family conflict over inheritance, without resolving whether its future will be secured at home or surrendered abroad.

Heroism and Failure

Changez Chamchawala values the cloths because their hero is allowed to fail and repeatedly needs rescuing. That emphasis makes heroism a sequence of vulnerability and recovery rather than uninterrupted mastery, and gives the images a counterpoint to their scenes of spectacular violence. Saladin Chamcha instead sees those scenes as evidence of a barbaric appetite for pain; the contrast between father and son turns their different responses into a dispute over what the art asks its viewers to recognize.

Conservation and Public Custody

Changez Chamchawala’s concern is not only who owns the Hamza-nama painted cloths but whether they will be properly housed: he acknowledges that their condition is “not A-1,” and says his offer to give the collection to the government depends on its providing a suitable place for them. The paintings’ fragile state makes the question of custody practical as well as symbolic. Without a home equipped to preserve and display them, the heritage Changez wants to keep in India remains vulnerable even while it stays in his collection.