Reflections of Mughal art and Culture
Author: Ed. Roda Ahluwalia
Publisher: Niyogi, Rs 3000
Reflections on Indian art & culture brings to us a compendium of 13 insightful researches that touch upon some familiar and some not so familiar arts of the Mughal world, writes Mrinalini Sil
Scrolling through Instagram or Pinterest on any average day, the number of images of Mughal paintings, monuments, textiles, tent hangings, the beautifully ornate decorative and luxurious items like jade cups and turban jewels that one views creates for a phantasmagoric and aesthetic social media experience that transports us back to the opulent and lavish world of the Mughal Empire in India. In the current political environment in India where there is an incessant effort spent on subverting, dismissing and even in a way villainising the Mughal rule this overwhelming reception and consumption of the rich Mughal visual culture on an everyday basis often leaves one wondering about the nuances of the relationship between power and the arts, and also the power of the arts in Mughal India and how it manifests in today’s context. Responding to many such pointed enquiries, the newly published book of Reflections on Indian art and culture edited by Roda Ahluwalia and published by Niyogi Books in collaboration of K R Cama Oriental Institute brings to us a compendium of thirteen incredibly insightful and fresh researches that touches upon some familiar and some not so familiar arts of the Mughal world and asks some rather unfamiliar questions to a diverse range of extravagant materials thereby captivating the attention of academics, connoisseurs, purveyor or simply any lover of Indian arts.
Looking beyond just the pomp, beauty and extravagance of Mughal arts, the historical and structural complexity of art and culture of Mughal India have for decades now generated more questions than answers. The very first essay of the volume ‘Mughal Chronicles: Words, Images and Gaps in Between’ by Kavita Singh asks a series of vitally crucial questions, “Were the words and pictures in a book as companionable as their makers. Did text and images always work in tandem, the one echoing the other. If the image was at variance with the text what kind of questions should that raise for us?” Visual tropes were strategically employed by the Mughal artists to represent sophisticated and carefully considered imperial implications that go deeper than textual facts of literary sources.
Foregrounding the dissonance between text and images persistent in Indian painting traditions, Kavita Singh in her essay cites three examples from the luxury Mughal illustrated manuscripts of Akbarnmana, Jahangirnama and Padshahnama to challenge the notion of visual inaccuracies as formulaic semiotic schemes used for ‘flattery and wish fulfillment on the patron’s part’. “By reading into the gap deliberately created as a rhetorical strategy, designed to produce resonances within what is left unsaid” Singh sets the tone of the volume with this remarkable essay that highlights the very important trend of scholarship focusing on image text relations of Mughal book arts.
Mika Natif’s in her essay ‘Preliminary Thoughts on Portraits of Mughal Women in Illustrated Histories: Mahim Anaga and Hamida Banu’, discusses a few folios from the Akbarnamna and Jahangirnama to unveil the complex mediations between the public and private spheres of the Mughal empire where she highlights how the idealised but non-stock female portrays of elite Mughal women like Mahimanga (foster mother who served as Emperor Akbar’s advisor) and Hamida Banu (Emperor Humayun’s wife ) are represented as symbols of cultural prowess and legitimacy. In fact, they played a significant part in the court’s elite circle owing to their Central Asian-Timurid lineage as depicted in the Mughal illustrated histories. Albeit idealised portraits, they were much more than just stock female figures and thus Natif’s essay offers us a way to explore female representation together with the text they illustrate to explore questions of relationship between gender, dynastic power and visuality.
Looking beyond the engineering prowess and aesthetic splendour, Mughal architecture have been long acknowledged for the crucial role it played in empire building and staging of imperial and sub imperial ideologies. Every little detail from building styles, mediums of constructions, forms and motifs that could be represented were guided by highly formalised visual strategies of assertion of power and legitimacy. Catherine Asher’s essay in this volume ‘Muslim Kings, Hindu Temples: The legacy of India’s multicultural history’, discusses the construction of Hindu temples under Mughal rule, rather than the oft-mentioned destruction. Her keen observation of the construction activities of especially the Kacchwahas of Amber and the rulers of Bundelkhand and Mewar goes on to elaborate how these ‘Hindu’ constructions under the Mughal rule can be read as carefully programmed strategies of ‘staging’ power; Oscillating between celebration, adaption and at times subversion of the centralised Mughal control, Asher’s essay is a crucial read for understanding the fluid concept of authority and sovereignty reflected in the architecture of the different echelons and ranks of the Mughal empire.
Laura Parodi’s essay ‘Mughal Garden Typologies Reconsidered’ is a re-examination of Mughal gardens. Generally believed to be a representation of the paradisiacal imagery depicted in the Quran, Parodi challenges the concept and design of the quadripartite Mughal ‘charbagh’. Drawing up a typology of Mughal gardens, she classifies them on the basis of their range of function rather than forms as well as location and thereby argues them as the main distinguishing characters rather than considering all Mughal gardens one and the same representation of the ‘paradise garden’ concept.
The Mughal kitabkhana or workshop was instrumental in producing huge number of copies of gorgeously illustrated manuscripts and leading scholars of the field like John Seyller and Yael Rice have shed light on the complex collaborative practices of the artists in the Mughal ateliers. Their studies have been pivotal in establishing how crucial and central a role lesser known and non-master painters played in the production of the illustrated manuscripts.
While academic efforts have been spent on retrieving the distinctive styles and recovering the artist biographies of the Master painters of the Mughal kitabkhana like Govardhan, Basawan or Manohar, Roda Ahluwalia’s essay, ‘A noteworthy Ustad in the Imperial Mughal Kitabkhane of Akbar and Jahangir’, sheds light on not a master, but a masterful painter in Akbar’s atelier: Nanha. Focusing on the period between 1590 to 1610 she maps the evolution of Nanha’s artistic career under the patronage of Akbar and Jahangir. Nanha’s forte being portraiture and real-life genres, Ahluwalia’s essay highlights his “visual language that pre-empted the quietude and realism of Jahangiri painting, veering away from the dynamism of Akbari period works, well before the end of Akbar’s reign” to reflect on the links between Akbari and Jahangari aesthetic requirements and the skillful accomplishments of artists like Nanha whose mastery have been neglected so far.
Delving deeper into the collections of the Imperial Mughal Library, Ursula Sims Williams’ essay, ‘The Imperial library of the Mughals: The British Library Collections’, focuses on the codicological study of four extremely important illustrated manuscripts of the Juki Shahnama, a 15th century Khamsa of Nizami with illustrations by the celebrated Persian artist Bihzad, a Shahnama attributed to the collection of Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khanan and a volume of poetry composed by Hijri commissioned by Akbar and belonging to the collection of his mother Hamida Banu Begum takes us through a meandering history of patronage and ownership of the these manuscripts reconstructed on the basis of the seals and fly note inscriptions. This study elaborates on the complex histories of formation and dispersal of collections of the imperial Mughal library and extends the narrative further into trajectories of colonial collecting under the aegis of the English East India Company and its many Nabobs like Richard Johnson.
The peek into the lapidary arts of agate, rock crystals and such hardstone decorative items from the royal Mughal ateliers of Jahangir and Shah Jahan brought to the fore by Susan Stronge’s essay ‘The lapidary arts in the Mughal Empire’, is a further extension of Sims-Williams’ narrative. In her essay, Stronge traces the nature of ownership and workmanship of hardstone decorative items from the high Mughal period through the 18th and early 19th century touching upon the transformations in styles and motifs as the patronage and ownership of the objects changed swiftly especially in 18th c India.
Anamika Pathak’s essay, ‘Splendid decorative art objects of Mughal India’, provides another piece in the puzzle of reconstruction of this opulent and magnificent material world of the Mughal empire as she discusses the many resplendent Mughal decorative objects from the National Museum of India’s collection.
Vivek Gupta’s impressively researched essay on the Kalamkari textile culture of sub-imperial Mughal Burhanpur, ‘Splendour of the City, Nagarshobha: Textile Culture of Mughal Burhanpur’, unveils the complexities of studying a place, especially one that had a transitory nature in Mughal India. A cosmopolitan entrepot with a bustling economy, in his essay, Gupta weaves a neat narrative by setting off a dialogue pivoted around ubiquitous motif of the poppy between textile pieces, extant architectural decorations , trading practices and poetry in both Persian and the vernacular to imagine the meaning that the place of Burhanpur held in the historical context of Mughal India. By conducting this search for the meaning of place in the objects through the textile pieces, and the literary archive Gupta knits an affective perception of the imagination of a city (Nagar) which allows one “to begin seeing traces of its shobha (beauty) as well as its surur (intoxication). “thereby distilling the very essence of a bhava or experience that was comprised of Persianate, Islamicate, European and vernacular sensibilities in Mughal India. Reflecting further on Mughal cosmopolitanism my mind wanders away to Orhan Pamuk’s masterpiece ‘My Name is Red’ where the author takes us back to 16th century Ottoman Istanbul in the royal atelier. We will remember how the Ottoman royal painters working for the Pasha constantly drew inspiration from the Safavid Master painter ‘Bihzad’, and in a moment of conflict of styles, forms and content causing murder, treason and betrayal of faith, the escape away from Ottoman Istanbul was considered to be Akbar’s Hindustan where the most luxurious and magnificent illustrated manuscripts of those times were being produced.
Exploring this intense transregional interactions which finds a captivating narrative in Pamuk’s writing, this volume also yields to this transregional exchanges which has become a major field of inquiry in the study of the arts and culture of the early modern Islamicate world. The deeply insightful essays by Gulru Necipoglu, Sheila Camby and Sunil Sharma takes us through the complex mediations and dialogues between the connected worlds of the three Islamicate empires of the Mughals, Ottomans and Safavids in the early modern world.
Gulru Necipoglu’s essay, ‘Transregional Connections: Architecture and Construction of Early modern Islamic Empires’, takes on the critical task of understanding architecture and empire building in the Ottoman, Mughal and Safavid empires and she challenges the assumption on Islamic architecture being “an unmediated and self-propelled evolution of regional forms in these empires that are treated as segregated entities”. Spreading between the Balkans and Bengal, Necipoglu charts out the typology of the iconic buildings of the three empires to further her argument that a shared common cultural semi-nomadic Turko-Mongol and a Persianate Islamic heritage was a binding force for the continuity that the three empires displayed. While, she does emphasise on the interconnectedness on the architectural forms and styles and motifs, especially of the capital cities of Istanbul, Ishfahan and Shahjanabad, she is very particular of variant local contexts which were incorporated in their “common heritage to create syntheses of local architectural traditions, each choosing particular building types with which to strengthen their claims to dynastic legitimacy”.
Exploring the theme of interconnectedness further Sheila Canby’s essay, ‘The Shahnama of Shah Tahmsp and its impact on Mughal painting’, on a particularly fantastic manuscript of Shahnama commissioned by the great Safavid connoisseur of art, emperor Shah Tahmasp nuances how with the migration of artists’ from Shah Tahmasp’s atelier to the Mughal kitabkhana there was a continuity and adaption of the Safavid visual vocabularies in the Mughal arts well into the 17th century and the Shahnama discussed in this essay had a particularly enduring rule to play in that.
Finally, the last essay in this volume by Sunil Sharma, ‘The Indian Woman in a Persiante world: Comparisons across Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman Literary and Visual cultures’, follows the representation of the idyllic Indian women of a ‘nayika’ or a generic heroine and traces her portrayal through the non-homogenous, non-monolithic Perso-Islamic and Indic literary traditions of the Persianate world. In Sharma’s essay, “the Indian woman has changed from being a self-sacrificing wife to an alluring courtesan and now to a frigid sexless creature” thereby displaying distinctive characteristics, depending on the different systems of aesthetic renderings which problematizes the general assumption of women being ‘stock figures’ in the Mughal world.
Reflections on Mughal Arts and Culture have thus brought together thirteen different studies on paintings, architectures, book arts, textiles, decorative arts, literary sources by leading scholars and curators from India and around the world whose fresh, original and sharp researches have provided a novel insight into the Mughal world.
Along with a sumptuous visual treat of the high quality images of the Mughal arts, this compendium while in a manner of speaking has filled in some of the gaps that had existed in Mughal scholarship, it has at the same time by opening up several methodological and thematic questions initiated new studies that will continue to better our understanding of the Mughal visual culture in India and the world.
The writer is PhD Visual Arts, JNU