Umro Ayyar

[1][2] Modern Urdu authors like Zaheer Ahmed,[3] Mazhar Kaleem,[4] Safdar Shaheen and Akhter Rizvi[5] have written various different stories about the character.

Umro Ayyar is a thief and the most famous character of the Hamzanama after Amir Hamza, the titular hero of the epic.

The dastan also influenced Munshi Premchand (1880-1936) who was fascinated and later on inspired by the stories of Tilism-e Hoshruba that he heard at the tobacconist shop in his childhood days.

The conventions of the dastan narrative also conditioned Urdu theatre: the trickster Ayyar, permanent friend of Hamza provided the convention of the hero's [comic] sidekick that achieved culmination in the Hindi cinema of the sixties.

The story is also performed in Indonesian puppet theatre, where it is called Wayang Menak.